Revelations Cycle Twelfth Iteration: He Too With Death Shall Dwell
Last full chapter before what would be the end of act flash if I were Andrew Hussie-- I have high hopes of having that up tomorrow, or at least before Friday. Revelations can also be found on AO3 now, but primary updates will still happen here, probably much quicker than AO3 updates.
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“So. Any ideas on what we’re supposed to be doing about this, then?” Teri asked, nudging the tip of the long pole with the steel toe of her pointed back shoe, as well as she could with the spearhead having embedded itself a good five inches into the stone. Smears of drying blood gruesomely decorated the shaft, and the stunted minotaur’s body was slowly beginning to slide down on it, nothing more now than a hunk of rancid, rotting meat and mud-matted fur. Dark eyes still gaped in the death grip of surprise, the final shock, as flies walked across the drying surface. The stink was ungodly, and Karl had to stand several feet away, Timm’s torso propped up against his knees as he covered the lower half of his face with his shirt to block out the overpowering stench.
“Leave it,” Karl growled through the oppressive cloth, his voice muffled and choked; even opening his mouth was enough to make him gag and retch. “We’ve got bigger problems right now.”
“We wouldn’t if you’d stop being a pussy about it,” Teri snapped back, extending a finger towards the lance and yanking it back instantly as a crackle of green-white lightning shot out, reverberating down her arm. Turning back towards Karl, she shook her hand out, scowling sightlessly. “You know what needs to happen. We can’t take him through the game like this, he’d just be a liability. Anyway, his quest bed is right here-- what do you think we came here for? Fruity rainbow rumpus party hour?”
Timm shivered at those words, his own eyes wide with fear, the whites showing almost completely, and Karl rested a consoling hand on his shoulder, feeling how the boy flinched away. “I already told you, I’m not doing your dirty work for you. If that’s what you want, fucking do it yourself-Alice was more than enough for me for one lifetime.”
Failure, the voice in the back of Karl’s head hissed, and he shuddered too, gingerly feeling out the new and widening crack in his psyche. Failure, failure, stupid boy, you were supposed to protect him, what are you doing, can’t let this-
“I just don’t think it’s a good idea,” he added roughly, shaking his head to clear out the voices like cobwebs, echoes upon echoes like ripples in a pond, spreading out to fill every corner of his mind. “Anyway, we don’t put people down like dogs who played too long in traffic, okay? Fuck, your dragon’s getting gangrene of the leg and I don’t see you falling all over yourself to put it out of its misery.”
For an instant, Teri’s resolute expression faltered, but then the mask was back in place again, ruthless, merciless, like a shark caught blood in the water and headed for a feeding frenzy, ready to tear some poor sucker apart. “Lemonsnout is still useful. This is why we came here in the first place! If you can’t see that this is for the best, you’ve got a lot of growing up to do. Alice was fine, Timm will be fine too.”
Timm shook again, brittle, and grabbed at Karl’s forearm, pulling as though trying to haul himself up-or drag Karl down. With a degree of worried obedience he’d never dare show for anyone but a dying man, Karl sunk onto one knee, looking Timm in the eye. The boy’s mouth was dry, lips chapped, and his free hand was opening and closing spasmodically, but he managed to croak, “Could you, um. This sounds weird, but could you please call the minotaurs?”
Karl tried to exchange glances with Teri, remembered that she had no way of picking up on the gesture, took a moment to feel incredibly stupid, and then gave thought to the request, scowling slightly. “They’re all gone, Timm,” he said softly, slowly, enunciating every word almost painfully. “They left before your runt got skewered.”
Timm nodded as Teri muttered something biting about sensitivity in the background, but Karl wasn’t listening, because Timm was going on. “His name was Tinkerbull,” he murmured, a wavering note in his voice. “I used to… I used to dream about this, sometimes. And Jadite, I think. I… I knew this…” he stopped and coughed, a spatter of scarlet coming up with frothy spit, and Karl knew his injuries had to be worse than just broken legs; something was ruptured inside of him, too. “So I know they’re still there. They’ll listen to me. I… I know how this is supposed to go.”
Karl swallowed thickly, his own hands trembling now. “And then what? I call them, and then…?”
“They’ll take me away. And the lance. It’s called… I forget what it’s called. Maybe I never knew. You could probably ask Rosace about it; she knows about a lot of game things, Kate said.” Timm paused to reboard a different train of thought, and out of the corner of his eye Karl could see the shadows creeping, reforming themselves into the hulking visages of shaggy monsters that loomed in the near distance, just out of focus. “And they’ll fix me. That’s the important part. You guys d-don’t have to do anything.”
“You sure you’ll be okay?” Karl asked, a note of worry reverberating deep in his voice, and the boy nodded, surety coloring his movements.
“It has to go this way,” he groaned, and Karl backed off a few inches, noticing that the shadows were marching steadily closer, now clearly the forms of the consorts, details filling in from the center and around the edges. The closest minotaur bent to one knee as Karl had done, scooping the broken boy up in its strong arms and pulling him tight to its chest. “Otherwise everything will be all wrong, and everyone will die.”
“Did you see that too?” Teri asked gravely, her cane clasped in front of her again, and Timm nodded, shallow and jerky but definite. “Then that’s all we need to know. Come on, Karl.” Taking his arm, she spun him back towards the ledge of the mesa, tugging insistently when he instinctively pulled back.
“What? No! This is crazy, Teri, it’s-“
“It’s not,” she barked, commanding, and the gravity of her tone stopped Karl cold. “It’s just the truth. The dreams are always right, Karl. If he saw how this goes, then we need to leave him to it.”
“I knew you would say that,” Timm piped in with a weak grin. “And now Karl will say something like ‘Why the fuck should I trust a bunch of mystical fortune reading dream nonsense over common goddamn sense’.”
“Why the fuck should I-” Karl started before the sentence was half out of Timm’s mouth and before he could stop himself, and then stood blinking stupidly as Teri and Timm both smirked-the expression looked almost comically wrong, though infinitely friendlier, on Martin. “I…” Karl started again, and floundered for words, blushing. “I’m getting a text, hold please.” And he actually was, thank god.
Just not from anyone he’d particularly wanted to hear from at the moment.
TC: HEY MOTHERFUCKIN’ BEST FRIEND.
TC: hear you and timm got into some serious biznasty shit, my fine brother.
TC: YOU BEST BE COMIN’ UP TO SEE ME SOON, YOU HEAR?
TC: got some wicked shit to share with you, gonna blow your fool mind.
AG: GODDAMN IT GARY HAVEN’T WE DISCUSSED HOW I NEVER WANT TO GET HIGH WITH YOU AGAIN? BECAUSE I THINK WE HAVE.
AG: BUT YEAH CALM DOWN WE’RE WORKING ON IT. I’VE BEEN A LITTLE BUSY MAKING SURE THAT NO ONE DOES ANY OLYMPIC FLIPS OFF THE HANDLE AND GODDAMN DIES OR ANYTHING.
TC: BITCHIN
TC: just wanted to remind you, brother.
TC: We’Re AlL cOuNtInG oN yOu To PuLl Us ThRoUgH, MoThErFuCkEr.
AG: OH THANKS FOR THAT. I FEEL SO GODDAMN REASSURED RIGHT NOW.
TC: JuSt KeEp WoRkIn’ YoUr MiRaCleS, DoG. sHiT’s GoNnA bE cHiLl As IcEd CoFfEe.
-- turnwiseClowning [TC] ceased pestering abysmalGuardian [AG] at 22:04! --
Aware that Teri was now steering him back down the mesa, carefully edging him towards the first step down and then the next, he waved goodbye to Timm half-heartedly, still distracted but hoping that it wouldn’t be the last time he ever saw his friend. Because Timm was his friend, if not a close one. All of them were, even Earl, even Eric, and he wasn’t ever going to leave another of them behind. Timm was safe, probably, with consorts that certainly could have killed him already if they’d wanted to, and Karl felt about 99% confident in leaving him there.
Which was good, because the second he even considered having second thoughts, a small chime signaled that someone else had need of him, and someone he had been getting rather concerned at not having heard from in hours, at that.
AC: :3 *the purrlayful kitten bounds up to karlkitty and paws at his leg with a worried mew* hey!
AC: :3 guess what?
AG: JESUS, WHAT NOW?
AC: :0 ct and i found the next gate!
AG: OH THANK FUCK. THAT IS ACTUALLY THE BEST NEWS I’VE HEARD IN AWHILE. THE SOONER WE CAN GET OUT OF THIS HELLHOLE, THE BETTER.
AC: :3 that’s what we thought too!
AC: :3 there’s something weird about this place, karlkitty…
AC: :3 about all these places, actually.
AG: LIKE THE FACT THAT GODDAMN EVERYTHING, INCLUDING OUR ALLIES, IS APPARENTLY TRYING TO MURDER US IN OUR SLEEP?
AC: :3 um, that wasn’t what i was thinking of, but that too.
AG: WHAT, THEN?
AC: :3 it doesn’t… smell right.
AG: NELL, BREAKING NEWS: YOU ARE NOT, NOR HAVE YOU EVER ACTUALLY BEEN, ANY SORT OF FELINE. GIVE IT THE FUCK UP AND TAKE YOUR FURRY SHIT ELSEWHERE, OKAY? THIS IS SERIOUS BUSINESS UP IN HERE.
AC: >:3 you’re not listening!
AC: >:3 or paying attention!
AC: >:3 everything smells like blood, can’t you tell? i’ve been smelling it since i got to my world, but it just keeps getting stronger. i can’t believe you haven’t noticed it.
AG: WELL, I’M NOTICING IT NOW, FOR SURE, I’M STANDING IN FRONT OF A GODDAMN CORPSE. WHAT’S YOUR POINT?
AC: :0 a corpse? is everything okay with you guys?
AG: NO. TIMM’S LEGS GOT SHATTERED, A SPEAR FELL FROM THE SKY AND SKEWERED A MINOTAUR LIKE IT WAS A GODDAMN COCKTAIL SAUSAGE ON A PLASTIC SWORD, AND NOW WE JUST GOT DONE DEBATING WHETHER TO BRUTALLY MURDER OUR FRIEND SO THAT HE COULD ASCEND TO GODHOOD OR IF WE SHOULD HAVE HANDED HIM OVER TO A BUNCH OF BEASTS AND PROSPECTIVELY AVOIDED WINDING UP IN A DOOMED TIMELINE.
AG: …ACTUALLY COMPARED TO SOME OF THE STUFF I’VE DONE LATELY, THAT ALMOST IS OKAY, YEAH.
AC: :( oh no…
AC: :( well that makes my purroblems seem pawsitively pale in comparison!
AC: :( that’s just clawful, karlkitty. i hope at is okay.
AG: NELL I KNOW THAT PUNS ARE YOUR COPING MECHANISM, BUT CAN YOU PLEASE TRY TO TONE IT DOWN A LITTLE? SOME OF US ARE TRYING TO HAVE A LEGITIMATE DISCUSSION ABOUT CURRENT EVENTS THAT ARE AFFECTING OUR LIVES, HERE.
AC: :| i know!!
AC: :3 i’m just concerned for my furiends, gosh.
AC: :3 anyway, you should try to get here soon. ct and i hunted a bunch of imps on the way over here, so everything should be purrfectly safe for travel!
AG: IMPS? THOSE THINGS ARE SHOWING UP AGAIN? AS THOUGH WE DON’T HAVE LIKE NINETY PROBLEMS HAPPENING ALL AT ONCE ALREADY.
AC: :3 it’s not that bad, really! you should kill some too if you find any on the way over.
AC: :3 ct and i are halfway up our echeladders already, and you’re not even ten rungs up! that’s just sad, karlkitty, no wonder at ended up hurt.
Karl bristled, glowering at the phone while the voice in his head shouted triumphant the truth of her statement; it had been his fault. He was weak, and the few steps of the echeladder he’d taken in his own world and by assisting Alice in her ascension wouldn’t be enough to get them much farther.
AG: YOU’RE RIGHT; I’LL WORK ON THAT AS SOON AS I CAN TAKE A FIVE SECOND BREAK FROM BABYSITTING TERI TO GO GALLIVANTING OFF TO THE KILLING FIELDS. SHALL I BRING BACK SOME SCALPS FOR YOU, CATGIRL?
AC: :3 hehe! that’s the spirit! it’s fun, you’ll see. anyway, i drew you a map!
-- artfulCleopatra [AC] has sent you maptocandymountain.jpg! --
AC: :3 sorry in advance if you can’t read it, the picture quality on my phone is kind of pawful.
AG: YES. YES, THIS IS ENTIRELY YOUR SHITTY PHONE’S FAULT, AND HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH THE FACT THAT THIS WAS APPARENTLY DRAWN BY A FIVE YEAR OLD WITH POOR MOTOR COORDINATION. I DO NOT HOLD THAT FACT AGAINST YOU AT ALL.
AG: ALSO, WHAT THE FUCK IS THIS THAT THE GATE IS SUPPOSED TO BE ON TOP OF? ARE WE BRAVING AN ACTIVE VOLCANO HERE, OR WHAT?
AC: :3 no, silly! it’s… a staircase. a golden staircase.
AG: I AM JUST GOING TO PUT IN HERE THAT THAT WAS IN NO WAY CLEAR FROM CONTEXT.
AC: :| don’t be mean, karlkitty!
AC: :3 and start walking!! i know the good senator there can’t bear your weight right now, so you’re going to have to jog fast!
AG: DID YOU ACTUALLY JUST INSINUATE THAT I AM FAT, NELL?
AG: I AM HURT. HURT AND ALSO OFFENDED AND ALSO HURT.
AG: HOW WILL I EVER SURVIVE IN A WORLD WHERE YOU DO NOT HUNGER FOR MY LEAN AND MUSCULAR FLESH AT ALL HOURS OF THE DAY, STARING OFF INTO THE MOORS WHILE YOU SIGH WISTFULLY AT THE THOUGHT OF MY MASCULINE FIGURE.
AC: ;3 oh, i wouldn’t worry about that!
AC: ;3 hunk rump has nothing on you~
AG: WELL NOW THAT I’VE GOT MY QUOTA OF AWKWARD SEXUAL ADVANCES IN FOR THE DAY, I’LL GO COLLECT TERI AND GET THIS PITY PARTY ON THE ROAD.
AC: ;3 it must be hard to fill those when gt isn’t around!
AG: YEAH HITTING ON ME IS KIND OF HIS JOB. IF THE POLE-VAULT-INTO-KARL’S-PANTS WERE AN ACTUAL EVENT, HE WOULD GO HOME WITH THE GOLD EVERY TIME.
AG: …JESUS WHY DOES EVERY CONVERSATION I HAVE WITH ANYONE LATELY ALWAYS END UP COMING BACK AROUND TO EGBERT. IT’S LIKE A DOUBLE-REACHAROUND WHERE I’M THE ONLY ONE GETTING FUCKED OVER.
AC: ;3 ooh mister egbert, oooh~
AC: :3 well, stop daydreaming about trolls and get your behind in gear, mister! gary will be getting lonely all by himself!
AG: ON IT.
---
Timm Martin watched his friends depart, the dragon’s scales shining in the sunlight, and sighed, leaning further into the minotaur’s furry chest. They weren’t so bad, really-to be honest, most things people were frightened of weren’t, once you took a moment to calm down and exercise some logic and understanding. Animals made sense, in a feral sort of way; they did what they did to survive, and protect the gene pool, and pass along their DNA to the next generation. For the most part they didn’t maim without purpose, didn’t kill when they weren’t hungry or threatened, and weren’t cruel.
The minotaurs certainly weren’t. This one bent its head to huff warm breath in his face, blowing back the hair of his Mohawk that had flopped forward onto his forehead, slick with sweat and plastered there. His whole body ached, felt grimy, but his bones had been pushed back into place and set with a snap, and now there was but an ache as they healed. He would probably never walk straight again, but that was alright. Sooner or later, he would have a new body, and the minotaurs would watch him until then.
GG: i have to admit, i’m a little bit impressed.
GG: and terezi didn’t figure out that you knew?
GG: what are you up to, i wonder.
AT: uM, nOTHING, nOTHING BAD, i MEAN,
AT: bUT HE TOLD ME NOT TO SAY ANYTHING TO THEM, iS ALL,
AT: aFTER i, yOU KNOW, wOKE UP,
GG: so you’re not mad at me? :0
AT: wELL IT IS KIND OF, oNLY FAIR,
AT: i KILLED YOUR LUSUS ONCE, tOO,
GG: but you’re mad.
AT: uM, A LITTLE BIT,
AT: iT WAS STILL KIND OF UNCALLED FOR,
GG: good!
GG: hold onto that feeling.
GG: it’s good for you to be mad at me!!!
GG: i’ve been awful to you all session.
AT: i DON’T THINK i CAN, uH, sTILL DO BLACKROM, jADE,
GG: that’s okay. honestly, i think all those guys are being a little silly!
GG: cute, but silly.
GG: there will be time for sloppy interspecies make-outs after everything is over.
AT: oVER?
GG: really over. look forward to it.
GG: and get going, already! tg will get mad if the timing is off and he has to clean up our mess.
Timm Martin, staring out over his land as his consort lay him onto the smooth rock of the mesa, suddenly felt that he was looking forward to a lot of things. Smiling dreamily, he closed his phone, watching the sky-surely, Jade could still see him, wherever she was. “See you soon,” he murmured as the monster raised the lance, hardly feeling the blow as the dull tip punched through his ribcage like a knife through cardboard.
With a sigh, Tavros Nitram went to meet his destiny.
---
The staircase was, as promised, made of gold, though it had taken significantly less time to locate it than Karl would have assumed, even with Nell’s hastily drawn map as their only guide going forward. It was also huge, as delicately built as a sculpture made of glass, and indeed looked nearly translucent in places, sparkling the same color as Lemonsnout’s plated scales in the sunlight. The dragon was drawn to it instantly, putting its snout up close to the nearest step and extending a leg forward; the structure groaned ominously under its weight, but Lemonsnout paid it no mind, instead tarnishing the design with putrid dragon spit that corroded the gilded metal before their very eyes. Karl whistled and the dragon came back, swishing its tail and sulking.
“I think he likes you better than me,” Teri commented with a pouting air, and thwapped the dragon across the nose again, upon which time it took up a persecuted look of unjust punishment, and Teri cackled.
“That thing is like a damn dog, I swear,” Karl muttered, scuffing his shoes against the ground before cupping his hands around his mouth impatiently and calling out, “Fuck, Nell, we don’t have all day! Where the hell are you guys?”
“Right here!” came a cheerful shout from behind him and then suddenly Karl was on the ground again, coughing and spitting out dust as Nell straddled his back again, kneading at his shoulder blades like a cat. Having half expected this, Karl could only grumble and roll over to throw her off, staggering to his feet with a pained scowl. “We were just doing a last-minute sweep for imps while we waited,” the girl explained, primly dusting off the front of her longcoat with poise that Karl would never have believed for a second that she possessed, if he hadn’t seen it firsthand. “Did you run into any on the way here?”
“A few,” Teri told her, grinning widely and patting Lemonsnout’s flank; if dragons could smile, it was certainly doing so, and the bubblegum pink tongue darted out again to swab black oil stains off its maw. “We took a couple levels in dragon handling.”
“Animal husbandry is always a useful skill to hone,” Earl rumbled, coming up behind Nell and securing his bow over his shoulder once more, “but if you will permit me to say so, we have dallied here for long enough.”
Karl mounted the staircase with one foot, itching to be off and away from this place. Already it seemed dull, fading at the seams like the minotaurs had, save for the staircase which gleamed like a beacon, and that made him considerably uneasy. “Agreed,” he growled, ascending a few more steps and motioning for the others to follow. “Let’s go, then. And the dragon goes last-if it’s going to break this thing, I’d like to not be fifty feet up when it happens.”
Lemonsnout hissed but sat back on its haunches, steam rising from its nostrils as it craned its neck around to eye the far horizon warily; Karl couldn’t deny that having a serpentine bodyguard for their mission was coming in handy, even if Lemonsnout’s injury was becoming more and more pronounced. So was Teri’s sprained ankle, he thought, watching her limp her way up the steps to join him where he’d paused, aided with judicious use of her cane, and Karl extended a hand to her, which she batted away instantly. “I don’t need your help, Karl,” she huffed, quietly enough that neither Nell nor Earl could hear, as though either of them would have cared beyond concern for her health. “I’m not a baby.”
“Yeah, but you’re-“ Karl started before he could stop himself, and then grit his teeth until his jaw bones buzzed and ached to prevent himself from going on. “I just thought you might appreciate it,” he finished after a moment, looking away, and she snorted and punched him lightly in the shoulder, but said nothing else of it. After another few seconds, Nell bounded up on all fours to join them, the ears of her cap flapping in the wind.
“This sure is a nice thing that Gary built!” she commented, pitching her voice unnaturally high, a cat’s mew. “I wouldn’t have expected it of him, but it’s a lot prettier than the tower I had.”
“I wouldn’t have pictured this, either,” Teri put in, stopping a moment to run her fingertips down the smooth, golden railing before going on. The whole thing seemed to be one piece, Karl noticed, like a sculpture hewn from a single brick of marble, and unlike Nell’s drawing (that had obviously been subject to certain “artistic liberties”), it curved as it went up, a spiral held up by no structure that Karl could see, as though suspended in thin air by wires of smoke. “It must have cost him a lot of grist. Do you have any idea how many imps I had to have Lemonsnout eat before I could even afford this cane?”
“Yes, please tell us more about how your dragon is the coolest thing since canned ham,” Karl drawled, entirely unamused and somewhat shaken. “That’s surely a fun topic of conversation that hasn’t at all been rehashed a thousand times already.” The top of the staircase was slowly approaching, and Karl was suddenly completely unsure that he wanted to meet it. Every time he went through a gate it got worse, the voices in his head kicking up louder and louder, an unholy cacophonous din like all of Dis come to roost in the confines of his braincase. There were demon claws rooted deeply in the folds of his gray matter, every synapse infected, and like a virus-ridden computer with no firewall, one could not stop it-only hope to contain it, and avoid pressing any buttons that may conceivably trigger it. As the gate approached, a growing pressure built beneath his temples, an imagined swelling, something expanding, trying to get free. Karl bit his tongue to distract himself, hard enough that a splash of tangy iron answered him, but it did little to deter his anguish, and he snarled under his breath, a mean and wild noise that sent shivers down his spine at the force of it.
“Just… everyone stop talking, for a minute, okay?” he demanded in response to Nell’s worried look, a desperate plea buried somewhere in his gravelly tone. “I’m trying to concentrate.” Behind him, he could hear his companions whispering as he approached the gate, a swirling, contracting mass of organized chaos bundled into a circular form, but that suddenly seemed fairly immaterial. Everything did. A pulse of energy flowed out from the gate, hovering but two inches above his head, and Karl tipped his eyes back to observe it. A corona of red and blue surrounded the gate, fading to white-green light at the very edge of the circumference, seeming at once warm and welcoming, cold and distant, and a memory stirred, roused, of Solomon hissing in his ear during a particularly boring Psychology lecture.
“Have you ever heard of Schrödinger’s cat?” he’d asked, voice low and monotonous, absently sketching a box in the margins of Karl’s notebook. “It’s a thought experiment, perhaps one of the most famous with laypeople. It works like this. Say you have a box, an ordinary cardboard box like this one. Maybe not airtight, but certainly secure. Now, say there is a cat in this box, as well as an unstable isotope and a vial of poisonous gas with a Geiger counter attached. The gas is rigged so that when the Geiger counter detects radiation, a hammer will fall and break the vial, thus killing the cat. Then the box is sealed, and left for an unspecified length of time, during which the atom may or may not decay. Now, here is a question: is the cat alive or dead?”
Karl had rolled his eyes derisively and leaned back in his chair, arms folded across his chest; “It’s dead, obviously. You sealed it in a goddamn box with no air holes and no food, of course it’s fucking dead. Is this one of those basic intelligence questions, or what?”
Solomon laughed, but it was not a nice sound, and something in Karl’s stomach had flinched away, shrinking and receding, scorned. “You’re thinking too literally, Karl,” he chided. “In truth, by this paradigm of quantum mechanical thinking, the cat is neither alive or dead to an outside observer-it is both. The experiment was meant to show a fundamental flaw in the earlier systems of mechanics.” For the first time in what had seemed like months, Solomon had smiled, if thinly. “But they’re wrong, you know. The cat is both alive and dead. The conclusion is inevitable.”
Now, standing before the gate, Karl shivered, a reaction electrical and bone-deep, and felt his heart race as he extended an arm upward towards the gate, knowing exactly what Solomon had meant. Alive and dead, one contradictory thing and another. He could feel the voice, the alien presence, pouring into him from a thousand cracks in his mental dam, filling him up like water fills a glass, flowing around the parts of him that were already there and filling in any crack it could.
“Time to go back in the box,” he told no one in particular, and could have sworn that in the distance, someone was laughing at him.
---
This time, it’s different. That’s what you notice as soon as static stops crackling around you like a poorly tuned radio, fading into dim white noise in the background and nothing more. Everything is dark, as always, but there is a distinct sensation of standing, of being on firm mental ground. Looking down at yourself, you panic; your hands are gray as stone, your nails black and sharp. Cursory examination of the inside of your mouth with a tongue suddenly gone rough like a cat’s reveals teeth like broken arrow heads, tossed into your gums seemingly every which way, a jumble of deadly machinery ready to rip and tear and maul.
Your blood runs cold. This is not your body, but it is your soul, trapped somewhere else, in an exiled plane.
“Are you alive or dead, then?” a bright but biting voice asks from behind you, and you turn with a cry, hands bent to claws and held before your chest, defensively tensed until you notice that your otherworldly visitor is actually someone you’ve longed to see. Before you stands Solomon, pasty, pale, human Solomon with his horn-rimmed glasses and his “hip” Snakes on a Plane promotional t-shirt, the one he always wears when he’s coding. Then he laughs, shallow and frail, and goes on without being prompted as you stare, slack-jawed. “I’d say dead. This is where they send you, you know. When you’re not needed anymore. When they come back. We’re parasites, in every sense of the word. But it’s not really our fault.”
You blink dumbly. “It’s not?
“No,” Solomon says, and his voice is grim. “It’s his. And you don’t belong here.”
There is a sucking sensation, like all your marrow being siphoned out your feet, and then darkness again, painless and complete.
You are really getting tired of this nonsense.
---
Karl was on his back again, breathing deeply as Teri hovers over him, her lips flushed red. His arms and legs ached, a dull pain in his chest and stomach, and Teri’s hands were resting hard over his abdomen, applying pressure as she bent in again, her ear next to his chest. His mouth tasted like dust, he thought dimly as Teri exhaled a sigh of relief and fell backwards, sitting sprawled out on the almost supernaturally flat ground.
Immediately, Karl became aware that at some point during his black out, someone’s tongue had been in his mouth. “I’m not sure I’m very fucking okay with this,” he said to the sky, which was cloudy and dark, a deep shade of purple. Indigo, something in the back of his mind supplied, and what was troubling was that he could no longer tell if it was his own consciousness or something else, something more malicious. He shushed it, on principal.
“We weren’t either!” Nell exclaimed, suddenly at his side, wringing her hands worriedly. “Are you okay, Karl? You collapsed and started thrashing as soon as we got here! Earl held you down but there was this… gee, what was it?”
“It was some sort of force field,” Earl intoned stoically, making no comment on the logic of such phenomena existing much less affecting one of his friends. “It burned me when I got too close to you.” He held up his arm as an example, but the burn wasn’t too bad, looking more like a mild chemical peel on his forearm than anything.
“So, not a strong force field, then?” Karl scoffed venomously, trying to sit up and failing, finding it to be too painful.
“It tasted like apple-berry blast gushers,” Teri giggled, and then fell backwards as well.
“She’s a little woozy,” Nell explained in a stage whisper, bending in close to Karl’s ear. “She had to get right in the middle of it to give you the breath of life after you, um, passed out.” Squeezing her eyes shut tight, Nell wrapped her arms around his shoulders and nuzzled into his neck, holding on tight. “We really thought you were dead, Karlkat.”
“And you can’t be dead,” Teri admonished him, slurring her words slightly. “We haven’t found your quest bed, yet!”
“I don’t want to be dead even for that,” Karl moaned, pushing Nell gently off and taking a moment to examine himself. Alright, all joints seemed to be working properly, no tendons torn, nothing too broken or out of place, just a strange, full-body ache as though he’d been hitting the weights too hard the day before and wound up hurting all over. There was an odd sense of violation, too, of something rummaging through his thoughts and memories like a child through a candy drawer, throwing out things it didn’t like. There were still more holes now, though nearly everything recent seemed intact
Poking around in his own head was an introspective nightmare, and Karl shook himself out, sitting up enough to notice that his head was pounding, even though his equilibrium had returned and the pressure on the inside of his skull was gone, and that his phone was buzzing again. “Hold on, I gotta take this,” he muttered, waving off Nell’s continued look of concern and Earl’s stern frown. “Why don’t you guys go find Gary? I’ll watch Teri and the dragon.”
Teri sat up as well, standing on trembling legs, and tossed her head, clearly disagreeing with that plan. “You can watch Lemonsnout. I’m going to go get a start on locating your quest bed, Karl. Your little epileptic fits are getting worse; you might need it sooner than later.
Nell and Earl exchanged glances, a difficult task when they were standing beside each other and there was an over two-foot height difference between them. “I think we should all stick together this time,” Nell suggested. “We end up losing more people when we’re split up. Timm-“
“Is fine,” Karl grumbled, his phone vibrating again and his stomach flipping sickly. Lemonsnout rumbled deep in its throat, obviously also concerned, and sat down behind him so that Karl could lean against its warm flank for support. “And so am I. Look, Solomon needs something, I guess-I’ll see you later.”
“I don’t like this,” Nell complained, but Earl steered her off with a wave in Karl’s direction and she seemed happy enough again. Teri offered him a mocking salute and disappeared off after them, and Karl removed his phone from his pocket, suddenly filled with trepidation.
--twinArmageddons [TA] began pestering abysmalGuardian [AG] at 23:23!-
TA: kk, are you there?
TA: thii2 ii2 iimportant. extremely iimportant.
TA: ii am not kiidiing you u2ele22 bulgeliicker, je2u2, piick up your damn phone.
AG: SORRY SOLOMON, I WAS KIND OF BUSY HAVING A GODDAMN SEIZURE OR SOMETHING OVER HERE. FULL ON FOAMING AT THE MOUTH, SWALLOWING YOUR OWN TONGUE BRAIN MELTDOWN, OKAY?
AG: MANY APOLOGIES FOR PRIORITIZING THAT OVER TENDING TO YOUR PICKY ASS.
TA: ii know you won’t beliieve me, but thii2 ii2 actually a good thing. kiind of a reliief for me, even.
TA: but that’2 not what’2 iimportant riight now. you have two get me iinto the game, kk. quiickly, tiime ii2 runniing out.
AG: SHIT, THAT’S RIGHT. WASN’T I SUPPOSED TO BE YOUR SERVER PLAYER?
TA: ye2. the tiimer ii2 runniing out fa2t now.
AG: …FUCK. FUCK!
AG: SOLOMON, I… SHIT, I DON’T KNOW HOW TO SAY THIS.
AG: I DON’T HAVE A COMPUTER. I DIDN’T BRING MY LAPTOP, AND I DON’T KNOW WHERE THE ALCHEMITER IS, SO I CAN’T JUST MAKE ONE. NOT TO MENTION THE BETA YOU GAVE ME…
Karl shivered, something hot and wet pricking at the corners of his eyes. He’d been stupid. Stupid and useless and negligent and now Solomon was going to suffer for it. What would happen to him? He couldn’t get into the game, even if he was someone else’s server player. Did that mean he would die, rent apart in a fiery explosion or crushed by fallen buildings or vaporized by cleansing holy flames? Would he perish alone, forsaken by all the friends he had tried to save from the incoming apocalypse, betrayed by his best comrade who was too goddamn braindead to remember that he needed to bring a computer on this little joy ride?
There was no time for crying, Karl reminded himself, even if no one was around to see and he could break down sobbing with impunity. He had to do something, had to figure out a way, had to-
TA: kk, calm your 2hiit, man.
TA: don’t you thiink ii planned for thii2? ii have friiend2 iin hiigh place2.
TA: or, at lea2t, alliie2 commiitted to endiing thii2 damn game.
AG: GODDAMN IT SOLOMON THIS IS NOT A TIME FOR ENDLESS LINES OF CRYPTIC, CIRCULAR BULLSHIT THAT LEAVE YOU FEELING SMUG AND ME CONFUSED ABOUT EVERYTHING.
AG: YES I KNOW THAT YOU ARE A SUPER GENIUS AND PROBABLY THE NEXT BILL GATES OR SOMETHING, CAN WE MOVE ON? WHY DOES EVERYONE HAVE A HARD-ON FOR NOT GIVING ME STRAIGHT ANSWERS THESE DAYS?
TA: you’re riight, ii’m wa2tiing tiime. for once you’re not the one off on some wiildly iirelevant, profaniity-laden tangent.
AG: DAMN STRAIGHT. SO WHAT THE FUCK AM I SUPPOSED TO DO ABOUT THIS, GODDAMN IT? I CAN’T JUST LET YOU DIE.
AG: YOU’RE MY BEST FRIEND, YOU STUPID MOTHERFUCKER. WHAT THE HELL AM I SUPPOSED TO DO WITHOUT YOU?
TA: kk, 2eriiou2ly, you have to keep calm. everythiing wiill go much 2moother.
TA: fiirst, check your jacket pocket.
Grumbling and flushing, Karl set aside the phone and unzipped the deep pockets of his bomber jacket, fishing around in them for a long moment, as thoroughly as he could, and came up with nothing.
AG: I’M TELLING YOU, I DON’T HAVE THE DAMN BETA.
TA: you’re not thiinkiing clearly, kk. try agaiin. And 2eriiou2ly, plea2e hurry.
AG: WAY TO CALM ME DOWN, JESUS. OKAY HANG ON.
Taking several deep breaths, Karl closed his eyes and tried to be calm. He thought of peaceful fields and cool valleys, icy mountain streams winding through hills, of the comforting darkness of true sleep. He thought, unbidden, of a human face, thick square glasses and buck teeth and shaggy black hair that spilled over his forehead, and in the moment before he caught and berated himself, Karl was calm.
And, more than that, happy.
With that thought, he plunged his hand back into his pocket and, this time, managed to close his fingers around a thin, rectangular package, drawing it out.
AG: FUCK. WHAT KIND OF BLACK DEVIL MAGIC IS THIS?
TA: iit’2 called, ‘you put iit iin your pocket to begiin wiith, you colo22ally unob2ervant nook2taiin’.
TA: now, for the biigger problem.
AG: YOU MEAN THE FACT THAT I DON’T HAVE ANYTHING TO RUN THIS DEMON DISC ON? YEAH, THAT IS KIND OF STILL AN ISSUE.
AG: THAT DIDN’T STOP BEING A THING OR ANYTHING.
TA: no, but iit ii2 pretty ea2iily fiixed.
TA: iif you’ll get off your a22 for two 2econd2 and walk forward about two hundred feet, you’ll fiind a rock wiith a trea2ure che2t under iit.
AG: YOU HAVE GOT TO BE GODDAMN KIDDING ME.
But he wasn’t. Scrabbling to his feet, Karl staggered forward, barely noticing his surroundings beyond the fact that the ground was flat, shiny, and slippery, some sort of gemstone that seemed almost organic in nature, shot through beneath the hard surface with a network of veins in the rock that could have been pulsing purple blood vessels. The stone was vaguely luminescent, too, as the staircase had been, providing light in the stead of stars or suns. Everything had a purple (indigo, goddamn it, indigo, don’t you ever listen you musclebeast fucker, am I always this retarded?) hue, tinted darkly, but the rock stood out like a sore thumb for being the only structure in the near distance not composed of white-purple gemstone. “Lemonsnout, I need you,” he growled, throwing his shoulder against the rock and finding that, stubbornly, it refused to budge.
Still leaking smoke from its nose and mouth, Lemonsnout dragged itself over and sniffed at the rock once before swatting it with its paw, bowling it over and then batting it between its two front feet, rumbling deeply like a big cat. Karl had no time to find this funny, or even strange, instead getting down to fish the also surprisingly heavy treasure chest out of the hole. It was large, about the size of Karl’s bedside table back home, and after he’d lifted it he had to rotate his right shoulder a few times until it popped, clicking back into the proper place. The chest was, of course, locked, with a computer input terminal set incongruously into the ancient oaken front.
AG: YOU SEEM TO HAVE YOUR GAMESHARK OPERATING PERFECTLY OVER THERE, WHAT’S THE CODE FOR THIS THING?
TA: up, up, down, down, left, riight, left, riight, b, a.
AG: FUCKING SERIOUSLY?
TA: ye2. would ii joke about thii2?
AG: YES.
TA: okay good poiint. but that’2 defiiniitely the code.
Grumbling at the almost visceral stupidity of this, Karl punched in the code and gave a triumphant shout that startled Lemonsnout out of its rock-related meditations when the lid popped open with a slow hiss of dead and stale air. There was definitely a computer in there, and a shiny, new model, too, and Karl lifted it out with both hands, reverently, setting it on his crossed legs and turning it on.
TA: all 2et?
AG: YEAH. LET’S FUCKING DO THIS.
TA: let’2 make thii2 happen.
---
Teri Penelope (“the last ‘e’ is silent”) did not like a lot of things about this game. She didn’t like not being able to see, or properly taste. She didn’t like being human, soft and squishy and breakable. She didn’t really like having to leave Timm (for he was still Timm, as she was, sadly, Teri) with his consorts, though Strider would probably have been proud of her for it given that it left him and Aradia (who was certainly Aradia again now, and probably partying it up with Dave in another dimension even as they spoke) with fewer messes to clean up.
And she didn’t like this world. There was something bad about it, something so insidiously sinister that it was nothing more than a lurking presence squatting on the edge of her consciousness like an unwanted houseguest overstaying its welcome, drinking all her mental orange juice and forgetting to flush the mental toilet. It invaded everything, every innocent and harmless click of her cane against the hard and treacherously smooth ground, coloring everything a dangerous red in her mind. Nell seemed happily oblivious-Teri could hear her humming cheerfully as she skipped on ahead-but Earl had fallen back too, restringing his bow and holding it at his side, ready for action.
“Nell found a cave,” he narrated for her dutifully, and indeed Nell’s happy shouts and purrs and exclamations had taken on a hollow, echoing tone now, reverberating off stalactites and close, closed walls. “She’s going into it. Oh dear. Do you think I should-“
“Stop her? Yeah, probably, but this is more interesting. Anyway, Gary might be in there.” Might definitely be in there, Teri amended, knocking the tip of her cane against an empty pill bottle, which clattered away and rolled to a stop near what she judged to be the mouth of the cave. It really was hard to tell, when she was both smell-blind and blind-blind. “You first, big boy.”
“As the lady requests,” Earl told her humbly, and Teri had a quiet snicker to herself over the thought that chivalry in western civilization might not be dead just quite yet before following him.
Teri, in fact, rather liked caves. They were dark, and even catgirl Nell couldn’t see properly in the dark, which put everyone on roughly the same footing. In fact, she was probably better at navigating caves than most people, especially at triangulating distances around the echoes. She’d had years of practice, after all. So it was that she let herself fall back and enjoy the cave at a leisurely pace, running her hand along the smooth and slightly damp wall of the cave. The path sloped downward gently, then steeply, then gently again, carrying them down into the heart of the planet, the corridors sometimes narrowing or widening, the ceiling now ten feet high, now inches above their heads. Nell was better than any light, a constant stream of inane commentary guiding her through the tunnels; all she had to watch out for were Earl’s heavy footsteps so she didn’t run into him, and she was golden.
Which she managed, until Nell’s “Woooooow!” exhaled with bated breath and Earl’s huff of surprised breath, combined with the sudden open-air feeling and the poor sound quality of the echoes told her that they had come out into a large cavern. “I wish you could see this, Teri,” Nell breathed thoughtlessly from what seemed like far away, and Earl went to join her, leaving Teri standing alone by the cavern mouth. “It’s so pretty! The walls are all shiny and glittery-like rainbows! Lots of rainbows! And there’s a big slab in the middle; is that a quest bed, do you think? Here, it looks like there’s a symbol-three teardrops! What do you think that is?”
“It’s blood,” Teri told her firmly, thinking of Karl, left back by the entrance. What a wasted opportunity!
“You got that right, motherfucking best friends,” a voice behind her intoned, low and deep as the sea, dense as the heart of a star, and before Teri knew it there was a thin but steel-strong arm around her waist, pulling her up against a solid chest, something sharp and metallic pressed up against her throat. She hadn’t even had time to cry out. “Now, where the fuck is Vantas?”
Sollux Captor: Burn the world.
<==
~~~
“So. Any ideas on what we’re supposed to be doing about this, then?” Teri asked, nudging the tip of the long pole with the steel toe of her pointed back shoe, as well as she could with the spearhead having embedded itself a good five inches into the stone. Smears of drying blood gruesomely decorated the shaft, and the stunted minotaur’s body was slowly beginning to slide down on it, nothing more now than a hunk of rancid, rotting meat and mud-matted fur. Dark eyes still gaped in the death grip of surprise, the final shock, as flies walked across the drying surface. The stink was ungodly, and Karl had to stand several feet away, Timm’s torso propped up against his knees as he covered the lower half of his face with his shirt to block out the overpowering stench.
“Leave it,” Karl growled through the oppressive cloth, his voice muffled and choked; even opening his mouth was enough to make him gag and retch. “We’ve got bigger problems right now.”
“We wouldn’t if you’d stop being a pussy about it,” Teri snapped back, extending a finger towards the lance and yanking it back instantly as a crackle of green-white lightning shot out, reverberating down her arm. Turning back towards Karl, she shook her hand out, scowling sightlessly. “You know what needs to happen. We can’t take him through the game like this, he’d just be a liability. Anyway, his quest bed is right here-- what do you think we came here for? Fruity rainbow rumpus party hour?”
Timm shivered at those words, his own eyes wide with fear, the whites showing almost completely, and Karl rested a consoling hand on his shoulder, feeling how the boy flinched away. “I already told you, I’m not doing your dirty work for you. If that’s what you want, fucking do it yourself-Alice was more than enough for me for one lifetime.”
Failure, the voice in the back of Karl’s head hissed, and he shuddered too, gingerly feeling out the new and widening crack in his psyche. Failure, failure, stupid boy, you were supposed to protect him, what are you doing, can’t let this-
“I just don’t think it’s a good idea,” he added roughly, shaking his head to clear out the voices like cobwebs, echoes upon echoes like ripples in a pond, spreading out to fill every corner of his mind. “Anyway, we don’t put people down like dogs who played too long in traffic, okay? Fuck, your dragon’s getting gangrene of the leg and I don’t see you falling all over yourself to put it out of its misery.”
For an instant, Teri’s resolute expression faltered, but then the mask was back in place again, ruthless, merciless, like a shark caught blood in the water and headed for a feeding frenzy, ready to tear some poor sucker apart. “Lemonsnout is still useful. This is why we came here in the first place! If you can’t see that this is for the best, you’ve got a lot of growing up to do. Alice was fine, Timm will be fine too.”
Timm shook again, brittle, and grabbed at Karl’s forearm, pulling as though trying to haul himself up-or drag Karl down. With a degree of worried obedience he’d never dare show for anyone but a dying man, Karl sunk onto one knee, looking Timm in the eye. The boy’s mouth was dry, lips chapped, and his free hand was opening and closing spasmodically, but he managed to croak, “Could you, um. This sounds weird, but could you please call the minotaurs?”
Karl tried to exchange glances with Teri, remembered that she had no way of picking up on the gesture, took a moment to feel incredibly stupid, and then gave thought to the request, scowling slightly. “They’re all gone, Timm,” he said softly, slowly, enunciating every word almost painfully. “They left before your runt got skewered.”
Timm nodded as Teri muttered something biting about sensitivity in the background, but Karl wasn’t listening, because Timm was going on. “His name was Tinkerbull,” he murmured, a wavering note in his voice. “I used to… I used to dream about this, sometimes. And Jadite, I think. I… I knew this…” he stopped and coughed, a spatter of scarlet coming up with frothy spit, and Karl knew his injuries had to be worse than just broken legs; something was ruptured inside of him, too. “So I know they’re still there. They’ll listen to me. I… I know how this is supposed to go.”
Karl swallowed thickly, his own hands trembling now. “And then what? I call them, and then…?”
“They’ll take me away. And the lance. It’s called… I forget what it’s called. Maybe I never knew. You could probably ask Rosace about it; she knows about a lot of game things, Kate said.” Timm paused to reboard a different train of thought, and out of the corner of his eye Karl could see the shadows creeping, reforming themselves into the hulking visages of shaggy monsters that loomed in the near distance, just out of focus. “And they’ll fix me. That’s the important part. You guys d-don’t have to do anything.”
“You sure you’ll be okay?” Karl asked, a note of worry reverberating deep in his voice, and the boy nodded, surety coloring his movements.
“It has to go this way,” he groaned, and Karl backed off a few inches, noticing that the shadows were marching steadily closer, now clearly the forms of the consorts, details filling in from the center and around the edges. The closest minotaur bent to one knee as Karl had done, scooping the broken boy up in its strong arms and pulling him tight to its chest. “Otherwise everything will be all wrong, and everyone will die.”
“Did you see that too?” Teri asked gravely, her cane clasped in front of her again, and Timm nodded, shallow and jerky but definite. “Then that’s all we need to know. Come on, Karl.” Taking his arm, she spun him back towards the ledge of the mesa, tugging insistently when he instinctively pulled back.
“What? No! This is crazy, Teri, it’s-“
“It’s not,” she barked, commanding, and the gravity of her tone stopped Karl cold. “It’s just the truth. The dreams are always right, Karl. If he saw how this goes, then we need to leave him to it.”
“I knew you would say that,” Timm piped in with a weak grin. “And now Karl will say something like ‘Why the fuck should I trust a bunch of mystical fortune reading dream nonsense over common goddamn sense’.”
“Why the fuck should I-” Karl started before the sentence was half out of Timm’s mouth and before he could stop himself, and then stood blinking stupidly as Teri and Timm both smirked-the expression looked almost comically wrong, though infinitely friendlier, on Martin. “I…” Karl started again, and floundered for words, blushing. “I’m getting a text, hold please.” And he actually was, thank god.
Just not from anyone he’d particularly wanted to hear from at the moment.
TC: HEY MOTHERFUCKIN’ BEST FRIEND.
TC: hear you and timm got into some serious biznasty shit, my fine brother.
TC: YOU BEST BE COMIN’ UP TO SEE ME SOON, YOU HEAR?
TC: got some wicked shit to share with you, gonna blow your fool mind.
AG: GODDAMN IT GARY HAVEN’T WE DISCUSSED HOW I NEVER WANT TO GET HIGH WITH YOU AGAIN? BECAUSE I THINK WE HAVE.
AG: BUT YEAH CALM DOWN WE’RE WORKING ON IT. I’VE BEEN A LITTLE BUSY MAKING SURE THAT NO ONE DOES ANY OLYMPIC FLIPS OFF THE HANDLE AND GODDAMN DIES OR ANYTHING.
TC: BITCHIN
TC: just wanted to remind you, brother.
TC: We’Re AlL cOuNtInG oN yOu To PuLl Us ThRoUgH, MoThErFuCkEr.
AG: OH THANKS FOR THAT. I FEEL SO GODDAMN REASSURED RIGHT NOW.
TC: JuSt KeEp WoRkIn’ YoUr MiRaCleS, DoG. sHiT’s GoNnA bE cHiLl As IcEd CoFfEe.
-- turnwiseClowning [TC] ceased pestering abysmalGuardian [AG] at 22:04! --
Aware that Teri was now steering him back down the mesa, carefully edging him towards the first step down and then the next, he waved goodbye to Timm half-heartedly, still distracted but hoping that it wouldn’t be the last time he ever saw his friend. Because Timm was his friend, if not a close one. All of them were, even Earl, even Eric, and he wasn’t ever going to leave another of them behind. Timm was safe, probably, with consorts that certainly could have killed him already if they’d wanted to, and Karl felt about 99% confident in leaving him there.
Which was good, because the second he even considered having second thoughts, a small chime signaled that someone else had need of him, and someone he had been getting rather concerned at not having heard from in hours, at that.
AC: :3 *the purrlayful kitten bounds up to karlkitty and paws at his leg with a worried mew* hey!
AC: :3 guess what?
AG: JESUS, WHAT NOW?
AC: :0 ct and i found the next gate!
AG: OH THANK FUCK. THAT IS ACTUALLY THE BEST NEWS I’VE HEARD IN AWHILE. THE SOONER WE CAN GET OUT OF THIS HELLHOLE, THE BETTER.
AC: :3 that’s what we thought too!
AC: :3 there’s something weird about this place, karlkitty…
AC: :3 about all these places, actually.
AG: LIKE THE FACT THAT GODDAMN EVERYTHING, INCLUDING OUR ALLIES, IS APPARENTLY TRYING TO MURDER US IN OUR SLEEP?
AC: :3 um, that wasn’t what i was thinking of, but that too.
AG: WHAT, THEN?
AC: :3 it doesn’t… smell right.
AG: NELL, BREAKING NEWS: YOU ARE NOT, NOR HAVE YOU EVER ACTUALLY BEEN, ANY SORT OF FELINE. GIVE IT THE FUCK UP AND TAKE YOUR FURRY SHIT ELSEWHERE, OKAY? THIS IS SERIOUS BUSINESS UP IN HERE.
AC: >:3 you’re not listening!
AC: >:3 or paying attention!
AC: >:3 everything smells like blood, can’t you tell? i’ve been smelling it since i got to my world, but it just keeps getting stronger. i can’t believe you haven’t noticed it.
AG: WELL, I’M NOTICING IT NOW, FOR SURE, I’M STANDING IN FRONT OF A GODDAMN CORPSE. WHAT’S YOUR POINT?
AC: :0 a corpse? is everything okay with you guys?
AG: NO. TIMM’S LEGS GOT SHATTERED, A SPEAR FELL FROM THE SKY AND SKEWERED A MINOTAUR LIKE IT WAS A GODDAMN COCKTAIL SAUSAGE ON A PLASTIC SWORD, AND NOW WE JUST GOT DONE DEBATING WHETHER TO BRUTALLY MURDER OUR FRIEND SO THAT HE COULD ASCEND TO GODHOOD OR IF WE SHOULD HAVE HANDED HIM OVER TO A BUNCH OF BEASTS AND PROSPECTIVELY AVOIDED WINDING UP IN A DOOMED TIMELINE.
AG: …ACTUALLY COMPARED TO SOME OF THE STUFF I’VE DONE LATELY, THAT ALMOST IS OKAY, YEAH.
AC: :( oh no…
AC: :( well that makes my purroblems seem pawsitively pale in comparison!
AC: :( that’s just clawful, karlkitty. i hope at is okay.
AG: NELL I KNOW THAT PUNS ARE YOUR COPING MECHANISM, BUT CAN YOU PLEASE TRY TO TONE IT DOWN A LITTLE? SOME OF US ARE TRYING TO HAVE A LEGITIMATE DISCUSSION ABOUT CURRENT EVENTS THAT ARE AFFECTING OUR LIVES, HERE.
AC: :| i know!!
AC: :3 i’m just concerned for my furiends, gosh.
AC: :3 anyway, you should try to get here soon. ct and i hunted a bunch of imps on the way over here, so everything should be purrfectly safe for travel!
AG: IMPS? THOSE THINGS ARE SHOWING UP AGAIN? AS THOUGH WE DON’T HAVE LIKE NINETY PROBLEMS HAPPENING ALL AT ONCE ALREADY.
AC: :3 it’s not that bad, really! you should kill some too if you find any on the way over.
AC: :3 ct and i are halfway up our echeladders already, and you’re not even ten rungs up! that’s just sad, karlkitty, no wonder at ended up hurt.
Karl bristled, glowering at the phone while the voice in his head shouted triumphant the truth of her statement; it had been his fault. He was weak, and the few steps of the echeladder he’d taken in his own world and by assisting Alice in her ascension wouldn’t be enough to get them much farther.
AG: YOU’RE RIGHT; I’LL WORK ON THAT AS SOON AS I CAN TAKE A FIVE SECOND BREAK FROM BABYSITTING TERI TO GO GALLIVANTING OFF TO THE KILLING FIELDS. SHALL I BRING BACK SOME SCALPS FOR YOU, CATGIRL?
AC: :3 hehe! that’s the spirit! it’s fun, you’ll see. anyway, i drew you a map!
-- artfulCleopatra [AC] has sent you maptocandymountain.jpg! --
AC: :3 sorry in advance if you can’t read it, the picture quality on my phone is kind of pawful.
AG: YES. YES, THIS IS ENTIRELY YOUR SHITTY PHONE’S FAULT, AND HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH THE FACT THAT THIS WAS APPARENTLY DRAWN BY A FIVE YEAR OLD WITH POOR MOTOR COORDINATION. I DO NOT HOLD THAT FACT AGAINST YOU AT ALL.
AG: ALSO, WHAT THE FUCK IS THIS THAT THE GATE IS SUPPOSED TO BE ON TOP OF? ARE WE BRAVING AN ACTIVE VOLCANO HERE, OR WHAT?
AC: :3 no, silly! it’s… a staircase. a golden staircase.
AG: I AM JUST GOING TO PUT IN HERE THAT THAT WAS IN NO WAY CLEAR FROM CONTEXT.
AC: :| don’t be mean, karlkitty!
AC: :3 and start walking!! i know the good senator there can’t bear your weight right now, so you’re going to have to jog fast!
AG: DID YOU ACTUALLY JUST INSINUATE THAT I AM FAT, NELL?
AG: I AM HURT. HURT AND ALSO OFFENDED AND ALSO HURT.
AG: HOW WILL I EVER SURVIVE IN A WORLD WHERE YOU DO NOT HUNGER FOR MY LEAN AND MUSCULAR FLESH AT ALL HOURS OF THE DAY, STARING OFF INTO THE MOORS WHILE YOU SIGH WISTFULLY AT THE THOUGHT OF MY MASCULINE FIGURE.
AC: ;3 oh, i wouldn’t worry about that!
AC: ;3 hunk rump has nothing on you~
AG: WELL NOW THAT I’VE GOT MY QUOTA OF AWKWARD SEXUAL ADVANCES IN FOR THE DAY, I’LL GO COLLECT TERI AND GET THIS PITY PARTY ON THE ROAD.
AC: ;3 it must be hard to fill those when gt isn’t around!
AG: YEAH HITTING ON ME IS KIND OF HIS JOB. IF THE POLE-VAULT-INTO-KARL’S-PANTS WERE AN ACTUAL EVENT, HE WOULD GO HOME WITH THE GOLD EVERY TIME.
AG: …JESUS WHY DOES EVERY CONVERSATION I HAVE WITH ANYONE LATELY ALWAYS END UP COMING BACK AROUND TO EGBERT. IT’S LIKE A DOUBLE-REACHAROUND WHERE I’M THE ONLY ONE GETTING FUCKED OVER.
AC: ;3 ooh mister egbert, oooh~
AC: :3 well, stop daydreaming about trolls and get your behind in gear, mister! gary will be getting lonely all by himself!
AG: ON IT.
---
Timm Martin watched his friends depart, the dragon’s scales shining in the sunlight, and sighed, leaning further into the minotaur’s furry chest. They weren’t so bad, really-to be honest, most things people were frightened of weren’t, once you took a moment to calm down and exercise some logic and understanding. Animals made sense, in a feral sort of way; they did what they did to survive, and protect the gene pool, and pass along their DNA to the next generation. For the most part they didn’t maim without purpose, didn’t kill when they weren’t hungry or threatened, and weren’t cruel.
The minotaurs certainly weren’t. This one bent its head to huff warm breath in his face, blowing back the hair of his Mohawk that had flopped forward onto his forehead, slick with sweat and plastered there. His whole body ached, felt grimy, but his bones had been pushed back into place and set with a snap, and now there was but an ache as they healed. He would probably never walk straight again, but that was alright. Sooner or later, he would have a new body, and the minotaurs would watch him until then.
GG: i have to admit, i’m a little bit impressed.
GG: and terezi didn’t figure out that you knew?
GG: what are you up to, i wonder.
AT: uM, nOTHING, nOTHING BAD, i MEAN,
AT: bUT HE TOLD ME NOT TO SAY ANYTHING TO THEM, iS ALL,
AT: aFTER i, yOU KNOW, wOKE UP,
GG: so you’re not mad at me? :0
AT: wELL IT IS KIND OF, oNLY FAIR,
AT: i KILLED YOUR LUSUS ONCE, tOO,
GG: but you’re mad.
AT: uM, A LITTLE BIT,
AT: iT WAS STILL KIND OF UNCALLED FOR,
GG: good!
GG: hold onto that feeling.
GG: it’s good for you to be mad at me!!!
GG: i’ve been awful to you all session.
AT: i DON’T THINK i CAN, uH, sTILL DO BLACKROM, jADE,
GG: that’s okay. honestly, i think all those guys are being a little silly!
GG: cute, but silly.
GG: there will be time for sloppy interspecies make-outs after everything is over.
AT: oVER?
GG: really over. look forward to it.
GG: and get going, already! tg will get mad if the timing is off and he has to clean up our mess.
Timm Martin, staring out over his land as his consort lay him onto the smooth rock of the mesa, suddenly felt that he was looking forward to a lot of things. Smiling dreamily, he closed his phone, watching the sky-surely, Jade could still see him, wherever she was. “See you soon,” he murmured as the monster raised the lance, hardly feeling the blow as the dull tip punched through his ribcage like a knife through cardboard.
With a sigh, Tavros Nitram went to meet his destiny.
---
The staircase was, as promised, made of gold, though it had taken significantly less time to locate it than Karl would have assumed, even with Nell’s hastily drawn map as their only guide going forward. It was also huge, as delicately built as a sculpture made of glass, and indeed looked nearly translucent in places, sparkling the same color as Lemonsnout’s plated scales in the sunlight. The dragon was drawn to it instantly, putting its snout up close to the nearest step and extending a leg forward; the structure groaned ominously under its weight, but Lemonsnout paid it no mind, instead tarnishing the design with putrid dragon spit that corroded the gilded metal before their very eyes. Karl whistled and the dragon came back, swishing its tail and sulking.
“I think he likes you better than me,” Teri commented with a pouting air, and thwapped the dragon across the nose again, upon which time it took up a persecuted look of unjust punishment, and Teri cackled.
“That thing is like a damn dog, I swear,” Karl muttered, scuffing his shoes against the ground before cupping his hands around his mouth impatiently and calling out, “Fuck, Nell, we don’t have all day! Where the hell are you guys?”
“Right here!” came a cheerful shout from behind him and then suddenly Karl was on the ground again, coughing and spitting out dust as Nell straddled his back again, kneading at his shoulder blades like a cat. Having half expected this, Karl could only grumble and roll over to throw her off, staggering to his feet with a pained scowl. “We were just doing a last-minute sweep for imps while we waited,” the girl explained, primly dusting off the front of her longcoat with poise that Karl would never have believed for a second that she possessed, if he hadn’t seen it firsthand. “Did you run into any on the way here?”
“A few,” Teri told her, grinning widely and patting Lemonsnout’s flank; if dragons could smile, it was certainly doing so, and the bubblegum pink tongue darted out again to swab black oil stains off its maw. “We took a couple levels in dragon handling.”
“Animal husbandry is always a useful skill to hone,” Earl rumbled, coming up behind Nell and securing his bow over his shoulder once more, “but if you will permit me to say so, we have dallied here for long enough.”
Karl mounted the staircase with one foot, itching to be off and away from this place. Already it seemed dull, fading at the seams like the minotaurs had, save for the staircase which gleamed like a beacon, and that made him considerably uneasy. “Agreed,” he growled, ascending a few more steps and motioning for the others to follow. “Let’s go, then. And the dragon goes last-if it’s going to break this thing, I’d like to not be fifty feet up when it happens.”
Lemonsnout hissed but sat back on its haunches, steam rising from its nostrils as it craned its neck around to eye the far horizon warily; Karl couldn’t deny that having a serpentine bodyguard for their mission was coming in handy, even if Lemonsnout’s injury was becoming more and more pronounced. So was Teri’s sprained ankle, he thought, watching her limp her way up the steps to join him where he’d paused, aided with judicious use of her cane, and Karl extended a hand to her, which she batted away instantly. “I don’t need your help, Karl,” she huffed, quietly enough that neither Nell nor Earl could hear, as though either of them would have cared beyond concern for her health. “I’m not a baby.”
“Yeah, but you’re-“ Karl started before he could stop himself, and then grit his teeth until his jaw bones buzzed and ached to prevent himself from going on. “I just thought you might appreciate it,” he finished after a moment, looking away, and she snorted and punched him lightly in the shoulder, but said nothing else of it. After another few seconds, Nell bounded up on all fours to join them, the ears of her cap flapping in the wind.
“This sure is a nice thing that Gary built!” she commented, pitching her voice unnaturally high, a cat’s mew. “I wouldn’t have expected it of him, but it’s a lot prettier than the tower I had.”
“I wouldn’t have pictured this, either,” Teri put in, stopping a moment to run her fingertips down the smooth, golden railing before going on. The whole thing seemed to be one piece, Karl noticed, like a sculpture hewn from a single brick of marble, and unlike Nell’s drawing (that had obviously been subject to certain “artistic liberties”), it curved as it went up, a spiral held up by no structure that Karl could see, as though suspended in thin air by wires of smoke. “It must have cost him a lot of grist. Do you have any idea how many imps I had to have Lemonsnout eat before I could even afford this cane?”
“Yes, please tell us more about how your dragon is the coolest thing since canned ham,” Karl drawled, entirely unamused and somewhat shaken. “That’s surely a fun topic of conversation that hasn’t at all been rehashed a thousand times already.” The top of the staircase was slowly approaching, and Karl was suddenly completely unsure that he wanted to meet it. Every time he went through a gate it got worse, the voices in his head kicking up louder and louder, an unholy cacophonous din like all of Dis come to roost in the confines of his braincase. There were demon claws rooted deeply in the folds of his gray matter, every synapse infected, and like a virus-ridden computer with no firewall, one could not stop it-only hope to contain it, and avoid pressing any buttons that may conceivably trigger it. As the gate approached, a growing pressure built beneath his temples, an imagined swelling, something expanding, trying to get free. Karl bit his tongue to distract himself, hard enough that a splash of tangy iron answered him, but it did little to deter his anguish, and he snarled under his breath, a mean and wild noise that sent shivers down his spine at the force of it.
“Just… everyone stop talking, for a minute, okay?” he demanded in response to Nell’s worried look, a desperate plea buried somewhere in his gravelly tone. “I’m trying to concentrate.” Behind him, he could hear his companions whispering as he approached the gate, a swirling, contracting mass of organized chaos bundled into a circular form, but that suddenly seemed fairly immaterial. Everything did. A pulse of energy flowed out from the gate, hovering but two inches above his head, and Karl tipped his eyes back to observe it. A corona of red and blue surrounded the gate, fading to white-green light at the very edge of the circumference, seeming at once warm and welcoming, cold and distant, and a memory stirred, roused, of Solomon hissing in his ear during a particularly boring Psychology lecture.
“Have you ever heard of Schrödinger’s cat?” he’d asked, voice low and monotonous, absently sketching a box in the margins of Karl’s notebook. “It’s a thought experiment, perhaps one of the most famous with laypeople. It works like this. Say you have a box, an ordinary cardboard box like this one. Maybe not airtight, but certainly secure. Now, say there is a cat in this box, as well as an unstable isotope and a vial of poisonous gas with a Geiger counter attached. The gas is rigged so that when the Geiger counter detects radiation, a hammer will fall and break the vial, thus killing the cat. Then the box is sealed, and left for an unspecified length of time, during which the atom may or may not decay. Now, here is a question: is the cat alive or dead?”
Karl had rolled his eyes derisively and leaned back in his chair, arms folded across his chest; “It’s dead, obviously. You sealed it in a goddamn box with no air holes and no food, of course it’s fucking dead. Is this one of those basic intelligence questions, or what?”
Solomon laughed, but it was not a nice sound, and something in Karl’s stomach had flinched away, shrinking and receding, scorned. “You’re thinking too literally, Karl,” he chided. “In truth, by this paradigm of quantum mechanical thinking, the cat is neither alive or dead to an outside observer-it is both. The experiment was meant to show a fundamental flaw in the earlier systems of mechanics.” For the first time in what had seemed like months, Solomon had smiled, if thinly. “But they’re wrong, you know. The cat is both alive and dead. The conclusion is inevitable.”
Now, standing before the gate, Karl shivered, a reaction electrical and bone-deep, and felt his heart race as he extended an arm upward towards the gate, knowing exactly what Solomon had meant. Alive and dead, one contradictory thing and another. He could feel the voice, the alien presence, pouring into him from a thousand cracks in his mental dam, filling him up like water fills a glass, flowing around the parts of him that were already there and filling in any crack it could.
“Time to go back in the box,” he told no one in particular, and could have sworn that in the distance, someone was laughing at him.
---
This time, it’s different. That’s what you notice as soon as static stops crackling around you like a poorly tuned radio, fading into dim white noise in the background and nothing more. Everything is dark, as always, but there is a distinct sensation of standing, of being on firm mental ground. Looking down at yourself, you panic; your hands are gray as stone, your nails black and sharp. Cursory examination of the inside of your mouth with a tongue suddenly gone rough like a cat’s reveals teeth like broken arrow heads, tossed into your gums seemingly every which way, a jumble of deadly machinery ready to rip and tear and maul.
Your blood runs cold. This is not your body, but it is your soul, trapped somewhere else, in an exiled plane.
“Are you alive or dead, then?” a bright but biting voice asks from behind you, and you turn with a cry, hands bent to claws and held before your chest, defensively tensed until you notice that your otherworldly visitor is actually someone you’ve longed to see. Before you stands Solomon, pasty, pale, human Solomon with his horn-rimmed glasses and his “hip” Snakes on a Plane promotional t-shirt, the one he always wears when he’s coding. Then he laughs, shallow and frail, and goes on without being prompted as you stare, slack-jawed. “I’d say dead. This is where they send you, you know. When you’re not needed anymore. When they come back. We’re parasites, in every sense of the word. But it’s not really our fault.”
You blink dumbly. “It’s not?
“No,” Solomon says, and his voice is grim. “It’s his. And you don’t belong here.”
There is a sucking sensation, like all your marrow being siphoned out your feet, and then darkness again, painless and complete.
You are really getting tired of this nonsense.
---
Karl was on his back again, breathing deeply as Teri hovers over him, her lips flushed red. His arms and legs ached, a dull pain in his chest and stomach, and Teri’s hands were resting hard over his abdomen, applying pressure as she bent in again, her ear next to his chest. His mouth tasted like dust, he thought dimly as Teri exhaled a sigh of relief and fell backwards, sitting sprawled out on the almost supernaturally flat ground.
Immediately, Karl became aware that at some point during his black out, someone’s tongue had been in his mouth. “I’m not sure I’m very fucking okay with this,” he said to the sky, which was cloudy and dark, a deep shade of purple. Indigo, something in the back of his mind supplied, and what was troubling was that he could no longer tell if it was his own consciousness or something else, something more malicious. He shushed it, on principal.
“We weren’t either!” Nell exclaimed, suddenly at his side, wringing her hands worriedly. “Are you okay, Karl? You collapsed and started thrashing as soon as we got here! Earl held you down but there was this… gee, what was it?”
“It was some sort of force field,” Earl intoned stoically, making no comment on the logic of such phenomena existing much less affecting one of his friends. “It burned me when I got too close to you.” He held up his arm as an example, but the burn wasn’t too bad, looking more like a mild chemical peel on his forearm than anything.
“So, not a strong force field, then?” Karl scoffed venomously, trying to sit up and failing, finding it to be too painful.
“It tasted like apple-berry blast gushers,” Teri giggled, and then fell backwards as well.
“She’s a little woozy,” Nell explained in a stage whisper, bending in close to Karl’s ear. “She had to get right in the middle of it to give you the breath of life after you, um, passed out.” Squeezing her eyes shut tight, Nell wrapped her arms around his shoulders and nuzzled into his neck, holding on tight. “We really thought you were dead, Karlkat.”
“And you can’t be dead,” Teri admonished him, slurring her words slightly. “We haven’t found your quest bed, yet!”
“I don’t want to be dead even for that,” Karl moaned, pushing Nell gently off and taking a moment to examine himself. Alright, all joints seemed to be working properly, no tendons torn, nothing too broken or out of place, just a strange, full-body ache as though he’d been hitting the weights too hard the day before and wound up hurting all over. There was an odd sense of violation, too, of something rummaging through his thoughts and memories like a child through a candy drawer, throwing out things it didn’t like. There were still more holes now, though nearly everything recent seemed intact
Poking around in his own head was an introspective nightmare, and Karl shook himself out, sitting up enough to notice that his head was pounding, even though his equilibrium had returned and the pressure on the inside of his skull was gone, and that his phone was buzzing again. “Hold on, I gotta take this,” he muttered, waving off Nell’s continued look of concern and Earl’s stern frown. “Why don’t you guys go find Gary? I’ll watch Teri and the dragon.”
Teri sat up as well, standing on trembling legs, and tossed her head, clearly disagreeing with that plan. “You can watch Lemonsnout. I’m going to go get a start on locating your quest bed, Karl. Your little epileptic fits are getting worse; you might need it sooner than later.
Nell and Earl exchanged glances, a difficult task when they were standing beside each other and there was an over two-foot height difference between them. “I think we should all stick together this time,” Nell suggested. “We end up losing more people when we’re split up. Timm-“
“Is fine,” Karl grumbled, his phone vibrating again and his stomach flipping sickly. Lemonsnout rumbled deep in its throat, obviously also concerned, and sat down behind him so that Karl could lean against its warm flank for support. “And so am I. Look, Solomon needs something, I guess-I’ll see you later.”
“I don’t like this,” Nell complained, but Earl steered her off with a wave in Karl’s direction and she seemed happy enough again. Teri offered him a mocking salute and disappeared off after them, and Karl removed his phone from his pocket, suddenly filled with trepidation.
--twinArmageddons [TA] began pestering abysmalGuardian [AG] at 23:23!-
TA: kk, are you there?
TA: thii2 ii2 iimportant. extremely iimportant.
TA: ii am not kiidiing you u2ele22 bulgeliicker, je2u2, piick up your damn phone.
AG: SORRY SOLOMON, I WAS KIND OF BUSY HAVING A GODDAMN SEIZURE OR SOMETHING OVER HERE. FULL ON FOAMING AT THE MOUTH, SWALLOWING YOUR OWN TONGUE BRAIN MELTDOWN, OKAY?
AG: MANY APOLOGIES FOR PRIORITIZING THAT OVER TENDING TO YOUR PICKY ASS.
TA: ii know you won’t beliieve me, but thii2 ii2 actually a good thing. kiind of a reliief for me, even.
TA: but that’2 not what’2 iimportant riight now. you have two get me iinto the game, kk. quiickly, tiime ii2 runniing out.
AG: SHIT, THAT’S RIGHT. WASN’T I SUPPOSED TO BE YOUR SERVER PLAYER?
TA: ye2. the tiimer ii2 runniing out fa2t now.
AG: …FUCK. FUCK!
AG: SOLOMON, I… SHIT, I DON’T KNOW HOW TO SAY THIS.
AG: I DON’T HAVE A COMPUTER. I DIDN’T BRING MY LAPTOP, AND I DON’T KNOW WHERE THE ALCHEMITER IS, SO I CAN’T JUST MAKE ONE. NOT TO MENTION THE BETA YOU GAVE ME…
Karl shivered, something hot and wet pricking at the corners of his eyes. He’d been stupid. Stupid and useless and negligent and now Solomon was going to suffer for it. What would happen to him? He couldn’t get into the game, even if he was someone else’s server player. Did that mean he would die, rent apart in a fiery explosion or crushed by fallen buildings or vaporized by cleansing holy flames? Would he perish alone, forsaken by all the friends he had tried to save from the incoming apocalypse, betrayed by his best comrade who was too goddamn braindead to remember that he needed to bring a computer on this little joy ride?
There was no time for crying, Karl reminded himself, even if no one was around to see and he could break down sobbing with impunity. He had to do something, had to figure out a way, had to-
TA: kk, calm your 2hiit, man.
TA: don’t you thiink ii planned for thii2? ii have friiend2 iin hiigh place2.
TA: or, at lea2t, alliie2 commiitted to endiing thii2 damn game.
AG: GODDAMN IT SOLOMON THIS IS NOT A TIME FOR ENDLESS LINES OF CRYPTIC, CIRCULAR BULLSHIT THAT LEAVE YOU FEELING SMUG AND ME CONFUSED ABOUT EVERYTHING.
AG: YES I KNOW THAT YOU ARE A SUPER GENIUS AND PROBABLY THE NEXT BILL GATES OR SOMETHING, CAN WE MOVE ON? WHY DOES EVERYONE HAVE A HARD-ON FOR NOT GIVING ME STRAIGHT ANSWERS THESE DAYS?
TA: you’re riight, ii’m wa2tiing tiime. for once you’re not the one off on some wiildly iirelevant, profaniity-laden tangent.
AG: DAMN STRAIGHT. SO WHAT THE FUCK AM I SUPPOSED TO DO ABOUT THIS, GODDAMN IT? I CAN’T JUST LET YOU DIE.
AG: YOU’RE MY BEST FRIEND, YOU STUPID MOTHERFUCKER. WHAT THE HELL AM I SUPPOSED TO DO WITHOUT YOU?
TA: kk, 2eriiou2ly, you have to keep calm. everythiing wiill go much 2moother.
TA: fiirst, check your jacket pocket.
Grumbling and flushing, Karl set aside the phone and unzipped the deep pockets of his bomber jacket, fishing around in them for a long moment, as thoroughly as he could, and came up with nothing.
AG: I’M TELLING YOU, I DON’T HAVE THE DAMN BETA.
TA: you’re not thiinkiing clearly, kk. try agaiin. And 2eriiou2ly, plea2e hurry.
AG: WAY TO CALM ME DOWN, JESUS. OKAY HANG ON.
Taking several deep breaths, Karl closed his eyes and tried to be calm. He thought of peaceful fields and cool valleys, icy mountain streams winding through hills, of the comforting darkness of true sleep. He thought, unbidden, of a human face, thick square glasses and buck teeth and shaggy black hair that spilled over his forehead, and in the moment before he caught and berated himself, Karl was calm.
And, more than that, happy.
With that thought, he plunged his hand back into his pocket and, this time, managed to close his fingers around a thin, rectangular package, drawing it out.
AG: FUCK. WHAT KIND OF BLACK DEVIL MAGIC IS THIS?
TA: iit’2 called, ‘you put iit iin your pocket to begiin wiith, you colo22ally unob2ervant nook2taiin’.
TA: now, for the biigger problem.
AG: YOU MEAN THE FACT THAT I DON’T HAVE ANYTHING TO RUN THIS DEMON DISC ON? YEAH, THAT IS KIND OF STILL AN ISSUE.
AG: THAT DIDN’T STOP BEING A THING OR ANYTHING.
TA: no, but iit ii2 pretty ea2iily fiixed.
TA: iif you’ll get off your a22 for two 2econd2 and walk forward about two hundred feet, you’ll fiind a rock wiith a trea2ure che2t under iit.
AG: YOU HAVE GOT TO BE GODDAMN KIDDING ME.
But he wasn’t. Scrabbling to his feet, Karl staggered forward, barely noticing his surroundings beyond the fact that the ground was flat, shiny, and slippery, some sort of gemstone that seemed almost organic in nature, shot through beneath the hard surface with a network of veins in the rock that could have been pulsing purple blood vessels. The stone was vaguely luminescent, too, as the staircase had been, providing light in the stead of stars or suns. Everything had a purple (indigo, goddamn it, indigo, don’t you ever listen you musclebeast fucker, am I always this retarded?) hue, tinted darkly, but the rock stood out like a sore thumb for being the only structure in the near distance not composed of white-purple gemstone. “Lemonsnout, I need you,” he growled, throwing his shoulder against the rock and finding that, stubbornly, it refused to budge.
Still leaking smoke from its nose and mouth, Lemonsnout dragged itself over and sniffed at the rock once before swatting it with its paw, bowling it over and then batting it between its two front feet, rumbling deeply like a big cat. Karl had no time to find this funny, or even strange, instead getting down to fish the also surprisingly heavy treasure chest out of the hole. It was large, about the size of Karl’s bedside table back home, and after he’d lifted it he had to rotate his right shoulder a few times until it popped, clicking back into the proper place. The chest was, of course, locked, with a computer input terminal set incongruously into the ancient oaken front.
AG: YOU SEEM TO HAVE YOUR GAMESHARK OPERATING PERFECTLY OVER THERE, WHAT’S THE CODE FOR THIS THING?
TA: up, up, down, down, left, riight, left, riight, b, a.
AG: FUCKING SERIOUSLY?
TA: ye2. would ii joke about thii2?
AG: YES.
TA: okay good poiint. but that’2 defiiniitely the code.
Grumbling at the almost visceral stupidity of this, Karl punched in the code and gave a triumphant shout that startled Lemonsnout out of its rock-related meditations when the lid popped open with a slow hiss of dead and stale air. There was definitely a computer in there, and a shiny, new model, too, and Karl lifted it out with both hands, reverently, setting it on his crossed legs and turning it on.
TA: all 2et?
AG: YEAH. LET’S FUCKING DO THIS.
TA: let’2 make thii2 happen.
---
Teri Penelope (“the last ‘e’ is silent”) did not like a lot of things about this game. She didn’t like not being able to see, or properly taste. She didn’t like being human, soft and squishy and breakable. She didn’t really like having to leave Timm (for he was still Timm, as she was, sadly, Teri) with his consorts, though Strider would probably have been proud of her for it given that it left him and Aradia (who was certainly Aradia again now, and probably partying it up with Dave in another dimension even as they spoke) with fewer messes to clean up.
And she didn’t like this world. There was something bad about it, something so insidiously sinister that it was nothing more than a lurking presence squatting on the edge of her consciousness like an unwanted houseguest overstaying its welcome, drinking all her mental orange juice and forgetting to flush the mental toilet. It invaded everything, every innocent and harmless click of her cane against the hard and treacherously smooth ground, coloring everything a dangerous red in her mind. Nell seemed happily oblivious-Teri could hear her humming cheerfully as she skipped on ahead-but Earl had fallen back too, restringing his bow and holding it at his side, ready for action.
“Nell found a cave,” he narrated for her dutifully, and indeed Nell’s happy shouts and purrs and exclamations had taken on a hollow, echoing tone now, reverberating off stalactites and close, closed walls. “She’s going into it. Oh dear. Do you think I should-“
“Stop her? Yeah, probably, but this is more interesting. Anyway, Gary might be in there.” Might definitely be in there, Teri amended, knocking the tip of her cane against an empty pill bottle, which clattered away and rolled to a stop near what she judged to be the mouth of the cave. It really was hard to tell, when she was both smell-blind and blind-blind. “You first, big boy.”
“As the lady requests,” Earl told her humbly, and Teri had a quiet snicker to herself over the thought that chivalry in western civilization might not be dead just quite yet before following him.
Teri, in fact, rather liked caves. They were dark, and even catgirl Nell couldn’t see properly in the dark, which put everyone on roughly the same footing. In fact, she was probably better at navigating caves than most people, especially at triangulating distances around the echoes. She’d had years of practice, after all. So it was that she let herself fall back and enjoy the cave at a leisurely pace, running her hand along the smooth and slightly damp wall of the cave. The path sloped downward gently, then steeply, then gently again, carrying them down into the heart of the planet, the corridors sometimes narrowing or widening, the ceiling now ten feet high, now inches above their heads. Nell was better than any light, a constant stream of inane commentary guiding her through the tunnels; all she had to watch out for were Earl’s heavy footsteps so she didn’t run into him, and she was golden.
Which she managed, until Nell’s “Woooooow!” exhaled with bated breath and Earl’s huff of surprised breath, combined with the sudden open-air feeling and the poor sound quality of the echoes told her that they had come out into a large cavern. “I wish you could see this, Teri,” Nell breathed thoughtlessly from what seemed like far away, and Earl went to join her, leaving Teri standing alone by the cavern mouth. “It’s so pretty! The walls are all shiny and glittery-like rainbows! Lots of rainbows! And there’s a big slab in the middle; is that a quest bed, do you think? Here, it looks like there’s a symbol-three teardrops! What do you think that is?”
“It’s blood,” Teri told her firmly, thinking of Karl, left back by the entrance. What a wasted opportunity!
“You got that right, motherfucking best friends,” a voice behind her intoned, low and deep as the sea, dense as the heart of a star, and before Teri knew it there was a thin but steel-strong arm around her waist, pulling her up against a solid chest, something sharp and metallic pressed up against her throat. She hadn’t even had time to cry out. “Now, where the fuck is Vantas?”
Sollux Captor: Burn the world.