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Chapter 1: A Great Monster
Summary:
'Lotus time capsule,' your sprite knowledge tells you. 'Stores its occupants outside of time until their delivery point in the future. Can be used to transport people or materials from an Sburb session to the planet of its players.'
Great. Okay. Nice chat, Sburb, even if it was more of a digitelepathic expositionvasion into your mind. You guess you can conclude you're taking a trip to Earth, or the troll planet, or something.
Davesprite: Update Objectives
Your name is DAVESPRITE, and you're pretty sure Typheus is the worst denizen in the history of ever. You're also wondering why the fuck you let John convince you to visit his denizen when that flaccid nightmare worm is the reason your timeline went doomed the first time. He'd been asleep since you went through the window; you thought he'd still be asleep and maybe you'd draw on his grumpy, friend-killing face or something. You still should have known better.
It's too late now for self-recriminations; John is opening his mouth to make the Choice, and you know what he's going to say with all the sickening fatalism you've armed yourself with since being demoted from alpha Dave. His expression is unusually focused, seriousness and determination outlining his features like he was inked in a goddamned comic book, but no one is going to read this issue but you.
You wonder if this is how John looked in your timeline. Was he given a similar bullshit "die or everyone's screwed" Choice, or did he fling himself hammer-first at this railroading jackass and ask questions never? The mental image of that second option might be more satisfying if you hadn't been spoiled for the ending.
How are you going to explain this to Jade?
"I don't really want to die…" It's an odd sort of shock to hear John speak out loud, without using a spritelog or Pesterchum as a medium, but that's kind of a weird thought and you chalk it up to having only met the kid in person recently. "…but if I have to in order for everyone to be okay in the alpha timeline, then I guess that's what I'll do."
"Are you certain of this Choice?" John is kind enough to translate the hissing of his denizen. It's ridiculous that Typheus actually asks this, like he's a confirmation prompt before John deletes his save data or fucks up his profile preferences.
'Are you sure you want to exit the menu with "life" unchecked? Your changes will be applied immediately.'
"I am." John turns to you. "Could you tell Jade I'm sorry I'm not going to be able to keep her company on the ship after all? And also that there will be another me coming to help out later, I guess."
"The sprite has another role to play," Typheus intones, John dubbing his voice in a much less dramatic English replay. Also... wait, what? You do?
"You do?" John echoes your thoughts curiously.
Your objectives list gets an update, and, oh, apparently you do.
"You know me," you deadpan. "Places to go, people to—well. Actually, I just have a series of directions and some config settings, so who even knows." You need to distance yourself. You're trying to think of John the same way you would another doomed Dave, but you've never been good at dealing with them either, so you settle for not facing the problems you're having with this situation.
'This is bullshit, don't do this,' you want to say, but what do you want him to do instead? If he chooses to live now, the timeline will only end up a doomed branch, and everyone will end up dying anyway. The least you should do is stay here with him, not let him die alone again, but if your game objectives aren't met you'll probably doom the timeline anyway, and what would the point of that be? Good job, Strider, way to sacrifice your best bro's heroism on the altar of your squishy sentimentality.
Floating here and staring at him awkwardly probably isn't helping either.
John laughs nervously and one arm rises to scratch the back of his head.
"Well, I guess this is goodbye. Erm, thanks for saving my life earlier. I think you also probably saved the other me who's coming here too? Or would there be another Dave Sprite who saved him… Man, I can't keep up with this stuff."
You're still floating and staring. It's still not helping, but since you've registered that the game needs you elsewhere, you've figured out that Typheus isn't going to take out LOWAS while you're still here. Your departure is literally the event that will trigger John's death and you'd be incapable of taking that first step even if you still had legs.
John's smile fades, and though you know your expression hasn't changed, his eyes go soft with understanding anyway. He pulls his arm forward again and curls his fingers inward.
"Fist bunp for the road?"
You fist bunp. It leaves you without the excuse of paralysis, so afterward you turn around and fly away. John is left alone with his denizen behind you, and you can feel his eyes burning into your back.
You head for the transportalizer your sprite knowledge tells you is your first checkpoint. You don't hesitate as you float over it, and when you appear on the other side, the white noise hum of an active hub cuts out almost instantaneously.
There's a moment that feels like masochism wherein you contemplate the silence. Against your better judgment, you test whether you can still return. The pad is definitely inactive. No going back now.
'Sorry, Jade,' you think, because you have police tape and Davesprite-orange cones blockading your thoughts about John right now. Nothing to see here, folks. Only authorized Davesprites past the barricades, and—whoops—no one handed out authorizations. Guess this area's locked down forever.
Yeah, you wish.
As you head to an open area that will let you fly off to your next destination, you check out your surroundings. You're surprised to find that you're on Derse. Further study reveals that it's definitely not your session's Derse, or if it is, it's in a different temporal reference point than where you'd come from. The moon is still attached, and there's a healthy population of pawns bein' all not massacred in the area.
The Dersites eye you strangely, but no one challenges your presence for the moment. You guess that, as just another NPC construct, sprites aren't really that interesting to carapacians.
Your next checkpoint is one of the meteors in the Veil, close enough to Derse that you can fly straight to it. It's some weird-looking frog temple, so you suppose it must be related to Jade's planet somehow.
Inside is a stand with what you guess is a lotus flower on top of it, violet and open. On the stand beneath the flower is a timer, but it's flashing blankly at you for the moment.
'Lotus time capsule,' your sprite knowledge tells you. 'Stores its occupants outside of time until their delivery point in the future. Can be used to transport people or materials from an Sburb session to the planet of its players.' Additional information is emptied into your mind, such as the total storage capacity vs. the number of used slots within the time capsule, the countdown statuses for the occupied slots, and other details you couldn't give a pirouetting fuck about on a good day.
Great. Okay. Nice chat, Sburb, even if it was more of a digitelepathic expositionvasion into your mind. You guess you can conclude you're taking a trip to Earth, or the troll planet, or something.
The stand has a hidden panel that you slide open, configuring countdown timers according to your objective instructions before sliding it closed again. With nothing to lose, you float yourself up into the flower and watch impassively as it closes around you.
There's an overwhelming sensation of loss for precisely zero moments that disorients you, but then the flower is opening again and you find yourself underwater.
"What the fuck," you try to say, but the incursion of water into your orifices causes that venture to fail in some nightmarishly awful ways. You flail around in an ironic interpretation of panic until you remember you don't need to breathe, then use your luminescence as a light source to orient yourself toward the exit.
That's when you realize you've truly arrived at the "regret everything" portion of your existence. Shadows flicker with movement in every corner; pale tendrils drift in and out of sight. A sensation of claustrophobia begins to choke you, and its origin is all around the room, clustered and writhing at the door. Your vision resolves the shudder-inducing images into monstrously-sized tentacles. No amount of spamming B will prevent that knowledge from evolving into the realization that you are up close and personal with one of Rose's freakish horrorterror monsterbuddies.
In the doorway is a beak filled with teeth, and a wriggling wall of tangled hentai co-stars are sliding over to push you into it. You give a full-bodied shudder as your squick meter caps out and taps out, shattering into sharp-edged shards of denial and disgust that lodge into feathered skin and make themselves at home.
'Screw corporeality,' you decide as you shoot yourself straight up through the ceiling, leaving only an ectoplasmic smear in your wake. That shit is for schlubs and squares, and right now you are the Knight of Never Needing to Touch Anything Ever Fuck You No.
You dodge around more tentacles above the ceiling and rise up past the frog at the top of the temple. The surface of the water is just beyond that, and you break through it with a sense of relief that you know is all mental but still feels physical. You cough and snort out the water that you'd inhaled and heave in a few breaths just to prove that's still a thing you can do.
Upward remains a goal that you pursue with giddy desperation but, despite knowing better, you look down as you rise up. That… thing… is larger than you realized. Larger than you care to contemplate, so you focus on getting the fuck out of dodge and start heading to your next checkpoint.
Hours pass. You wonder if orange sprite-skin can get sunburned.
The mental minimap shows a waterlogged planet of nearly unrelieved blue, with only a few unrecognizable land masses dotted here and there. There's no landmass where you're headed, but who are you to argue with arbitrary denizen-bequeathed objectives? This quest shit had barely made sense when you were an actual player, why would the game hold your hand now?
At this point you're certain you're not on your Earth, unless your sprite-knowledge map is fucking with you. Even if it was, you're pretty sure Jade's temple and volcano had been on an island, and anyway, she'd taken her volcano with her when she entered the game. Probably.
Wait, was LOFAF's volcano forge a different volcano than Hellmurder Island's volcano? It might be, why would the game take her whole damn mountain.
Man, this flight is boring.
More time passes, slow molasses and stretched out taffy, and you've had the repeated epiphany about how comparatively small player planets are about a dozen times. Whoever decided sprites didn't rank a quick-travel option can double-die choking on the world's most massive—oh, hey, look, a distraction.
A floating checkerboard city appears in the distance, and you stare at it as you fly overhead, expression never changing. You pass it by without comment, though if there were someone on Pesterchum right now you'd probably be speculating in a deluge of barely relevant text.
Wow, what a show. You figure there's no pressing need to see where you're going and open up Hephaestus on your iShades. Surprisingly, you connect to live servers, and the sites you knew from Earth are still up and running. You browse through forums and social media sites, trying to see if anything's active. It's difficult to say whether people are still using them, since the most recent activity is from years after what you considered the present.
There's a flicker of disgruntlement at not simply knowing the present date, but you can fix that pretty easily. You post in a forum and check your timestamp. With that and an estimate of your timezone, you'll know when the hell you're at and also get a frame of reference for your internal clock and your iShades.
…2409. Holy shit.
Okay, well. Huh. What could you possibly need to do for the game in this timeframe? Is this where the exiles are?
It occurs to you that your world would have ended four hundred years ago, but that the internet still had people filling it with porn and wank long past its expiration date. Is this some alternate Earth or something, that didn't get destroyed by meteors? Oh. The Scratch. Okay, so in the scratched session, the players somehow managed to prevent the world from ending when the Reckoning happened. And… then it flooded instead, what the fuck.
Maybe in this world the game hasn't started yet?
You check the forums again, but can't find any that have been active in years. Since you have basically nothing to do other than flap your 1.5 wings like it'll actually help your flight time, you open Delirious Biznasty and send out a tweet. Er, you mean a sweet. Stupid crow half.
turntechGodhead at "all" hey anyone alive out there
You're surprised when you get a response soon after.
BettyCrocker at "turntechGodhead" "Mr. Strider" w) (at a surprise
BettyCrocker at "turntechGodhead" water you doin in ma neck a t) (e ocean
turntechGodhead at "BettyCrocker" okay what
turntechGodhead at "BettyCrocker" betty fucking crocker
turntechGodhead at "BettyCrocker" what even is this are you serious
The checkpoint is nearby. You close Delirious Biznasty and decide to deal with the idea of John's arch nemesis as one of the last survivors on Earth after you've taken care of business.
There are mountaintops approaching, their peaks breaking the surface of the ocean. That's something new to look at, at least. Your Pesterchum starts blinking, but your refocus on your surroundings lets you see something out of the corner of your eye that distracts you, and you minimize your remaining open applications.
A meteor is falling from the sky.
Welp.
You look around for others. There would be others if this were the Reckoning; you remember what the sky looked like before you entered the game.
It's just the one. You have a sinking feeling as you gain altitude to try and see where this thing is going to land.
It slams directly into the top of the highest peak, which sends dirt, rocks, and dust flying everywhere with a thunderous boom of impact. You're not really sure how the sweet merciful crap a baby was supposed to survive that, but at least you don't have to snag it out of the ocean.
You're not enthused about the idea of going back into the ocean any time soon. Also the baby would drown. You begin to suspect Typheus is a really shitty denizen, because whatever else has gone wrong with the world, you're still all about irony.
The mountains are closing in, but it's taking forever to actually get to them. You reopen Pesterchum to see who could possibly be messaging you right now.
- timaeusTestified [TT] began pestering turntechGodhead [TG] -
TT: Who is this?
TT: And, for good measure, how are you even alive? I didn't think there was anyone left at this point.
TT: Oh shit, hello? She didn't kill you already, right?
TG: sorry dude im not supposed to give out my personal info
TT: …
TG: cmon youve never heard of stranger danger
TG: what kind of post apocalyptic pervert are you
TT: Hang on, it seems there's a bit too much orange in this back-and-forth.
TT: How's this?
TG: ill switch
TG: oh
TG: never mind then
TG: red isnt my color anyway
TG: you should keep it
TG: it really brings out the pigment in your text
TT: Yeah, I've heard the best way to bring out the red in red is to display it as red; it's fuckin' revolutionary.
TT: All right. I'm just going to ask: is this Dave Strider?
TG: the one and only
TG: wait i can't say that with a straight face
TG: like a corner of my mouth almost edged upward a full fucking pixel i swear
TG: anyway how did you know that
TG: am i famous here or something
TG: bet i am
TG: i must be the fish world messiah
TG: see me all walking on water
TG: passin out booze to giant tentacle sea monsters
TG: youd be surprised which part of that was the impossible bit
TT: That incomprehensible mess of non sequiturs almost serves as confirmation in and of itself.
TT: Pointless bullshit aside, though, I'd appreciate it if you'd answer my questions.
TG: whatever dude youre gonna have to take a number
TG: youve been bumped down on the priority list at the dave em vee
TG: i think i found a baby
TT: Wait, what?
- turntechGodhead [TG] ceased pestering timaeusTestified [TT] -
If there'd been any doubt about whose meteor had been dropped into your latest checkpoint and put mad bang in your questbang, it was gone when you saw what came with him. Li'l Cal. That totally rad, not creepy at all, kicked your ass up and down throughout your childhood puppet. Awesome.
It's dressed in Derse pajamas for some reason you definitely never need to know. You snatch it and sling it around your shoulder before turning to the main event. He's sitting near the center of the crater and staring at you, clearly unhappy with his current circumstance and possibly also with your theft of his sole earthly possession.
You stare back and try to see Bro in the chubby little infant in front of you. You think his facial structure might be familiar, but between his minimalist attire of a choice diaper, his pudgy baby physique, and his very visible eyes you're having trouble equating the little dude with the icon of irony who raised you.
For a bad moment you're back in a fight that had one-eightied its way from winnable to unholy curb-stomp in the time it took to blink. Your wounds are freshly bleeding while Bro is flat on his back with his own sword pinning him to the dirt while his blood pools into a symbolic butterfly wing for the occasion. You take a painful breath and blink the imagery away, and there's only the baby again.
It might be better if you don't equate the kid with Bro.
He reaches up for you. You give into the inevitable and scoop him up from the ground. He's still reaching toward your face. You lean in experimentally and he makes a swipe for your shades. You move back out of the way. He flails and you adjust, tucking him more securely into one arm, and start up a spritelog with the tyke.
"Nice try. Sorry man, I didn't bring yours. Maybe whoever I drop you off with will have a pair for you. That seems like it should have been a priority to toss in the lifeboat. 'Oh, sweetie, I know the bathtub from some hell dimension is draining its dirty swill into our oceans, but you know what we don't have enough of? Eyewear accessories.'"
There's one checkpoint left and you start out for it, hoping to finish this fetch quest before the cranky-looking creature in your arms decides to articulate his irritation.
It's bright out, but also cold, and you relocate Cal to act as a buffer between your passenger's skin and the elements. He cuddles into the thing in a gesture of innocence that sets your teeth on edge.
About halfway to your destination, he gets fussy, and you figure out that he's probably hungry. Unfortunately, your sylladex gives a shrug and flips you the bird when you peruse it for anything edible. You passed most of your old inventory on to alpha Dave when you came back, and you haven't gotten hungry since then. You're not really sure you're supposed to eat as a sprite.
You notice he's not really sporting teeth in those gums, but you're fresh out of milk, too. Like hell are you getting desperate, but he's getting pretty vocal in his critique of your hospitality, so you do another pass. This time you notice you have some AJ on hand and quickly retrieve a bottle. Juice is healthy, right?
Whatever. If this kid can survive Mr. Meteorite's Wild Ride without so much as a seatbelt, he can survive choking down the nectar of the gods as his first meal. Bottoms up.
You're not really an expert on babies, but you're pretty sure that on a not-flooded Earth this kid would be the two-headed kitten of the litter, even discounting the whole space-rock thing. He's bigger than your neighbors' newborn had been when they'd brought her home, and he was sitting up and focusing on you when you found him. That grab for your shades had been almost coordinated.
He is like, a day old. This is all kinds of early accomplishment, picture in the newspaper shit, right?
Is he just too cool for newborn newbness, or is this another ecto-headache?
The final checkpoint is closing in, and you see… something… edging up above the water in the distance. You lose some altitude and press onward. It resolves into focus as the skeleton of a skyscraper, only the top level still intact for whatever reason.
As you get closer, you note that the intact level reminds you of some of the buildings back home in Texas, and that thought causes your intuition to smack you in the face with a rolled-up newspaper.
This is totally your apartment building, isn't it.
"Augh," you try to grumble, but it comes out as a croaking caw.
All right, fine. Time to do your stork thing, swoop in and drop off this miracle package to other-other-you and disappear in a glorious sunset of orange. You kind of get why the game couldn't drop the meteor closer to this world's Dave; it would have either wrecked what was left of his pad, or required some deep sea diving expedition to recover this puppet-snuggler.
You drop down to the roof, but there's no sign of anyone going up to this level for quite some time. You have to struggle to get the door to the stairwell open, since the hinges seem like they're more rust than metal. The stairwell itself is dark; the automatic lights aren't working. You hope there's some kind of electricity in this place; it's not going to be a pleasant play-pen for this kid otherwise. You find your apartment and let yourself in.
It's both familiar and not. The dim lighting from the window on the far end does little to illuminate the interior, but it's enough. The basic set-up is the same: cinderblock furniture; utilities like the fridge in the same locations… but everything is covered in plastics that have either browned with age or are covered in some kind of gross film.
There are gadgets here you've never seen before too, unfamiliar tech that you have no hope of figuring out without removing the protective layers first. And… some of the positioning of the furniture is just that little bit off in a way that bothers you more than the new stuff. An uncanny valley of the inanimate.
There's nowhere you'd even want to set the kid down at, forget dropping him off. Whoever this kid's guardian is hasn't been here in some time, or hasn't gotten here yet. You open the door to the hallway, unequip your shirt and place it on the floor, then set your snoozing charge and Li'l Cal down on top of it. You'll have to figure out a way to clean your shirt, but you'll deal with that later.
You force open the window and draw your sword. Time to unwrap your presents.
Notes:
It is not recommended you give infants apple juice before they are 6 months of age. Fortunately for Dirk, the ecto-kids display a lot of the features of a normal human 6 months or above in development.