Star Knight Office Warriors

By the power of Open Source!

"Aaaand got it!" Milky Way Million slapped the Enter key on her device - she'd called it a cyberdeck, but once the Star Knights transformation took hold, it was more like a Prettydeck, covered as it was in lace and gingham - and watched as Darkness Manifestation TLR-99 ceased fire, fell to its knees, and collapsed. She blew an air-kiss at the cobbled-together machine in front of her. "Mwah! Thank you, Universal Friend!" The pink-bezeled monitor appeared to take a bow in front of her.

Candy Stripe stopped cowering behind the highway divider. "Milly, how in hell did you do that? It's darkness incarnate, not the work server!"

Camellia Rose, until recently clinging to the back of the giant mechanized Manifestation's armored head, let her hands free from their handholds and flicked her fingers out. "Universal Friend?"

Million packed up the Prettydeck - it folded into a clean pink box, just a bit larger than her fist - and hopped down the hill towards the highway. "You remember that work memo from yesterday? About all the banned software?"

Rose stood up on top of the Manifestation's head. "Yeah, the one about how any software not approved by the IT desk will be flagged and the offending user disconnected from the network?"

"I got curious about the ban list and managed to download the whole thing from Chester's machine. Lot of stuff in there with familiar sounding names, so I did a bit of homework and they're all licensed open source."

"What, like GPL, or something with a non-proprietary-use clause?" asked Candy, brushing off her pleated battle skirt.

"These were all under something called the SUF license. Society of Universal Friends."

"The Quaker evangelists from the 1700s?" asked Rose.

"Maybe they were inspired, I'm not sure. Had some really interesting terms of use behind it - the usual share-alike and non-commercial clauses, a bit in there about not using the software to control nuclear power plants or air traffic control systems - but there were some interesting bits in there about fighting Evil in All of its Forms, which sounded awful familiar."

Candy thought about it for a second. "That's quite the coincidence. That's literally part of our oath with Polaris."

"But I started looking into it a bit more, and I kept finding references to the North Star in the code, and a few comments, and I figured out where the author hangs out, and they're really cool and they go by they/them and--" Million happily bounced on the tips of her toes. "I don't know if they're from around here, but they're really carving out a niche in the open-source world. I loaded up this thing" -- she gestured with the Prettydeck -- "with as much of the SUF-licensed software as I could, and that stuff came in real handy tonight! I think The Friend might be a Star Knight like us!"

Rose and Candy looked at each other; neither had any idea why Million thought this Universal Friend was another Star Knight, but they both remembered what the Great Observer Polaris had said: that they are but a few among a greater whole. And nobody could argue with the results of the Friend's software.