Finally, we're getting somewhere.

You have no idea how good that feels.

"There are no mistakes, no coincidences. All events are blessings given to us to learn from." - -Elisabeth Kubler-Ross.

One.

Location: The Haunted House, Level Thirteen of Ace Lightning and the Carnival of Doom.

Date: 13/08/07

Just as the clichés always said, when he woke up, it took a few seconds for him to remember where he was and exactly what he was doing there. The second question was a lot harder to answer than the first.

The Haunted House. That was where they were. He should really be disturbed by the fact that this is more of a relief than a problem (better here than the Junkyard –if there's anything left of it– or what remained of the Harpix territory and it's not like they're prisoners here or anything… not in any intended way).

Chuck doesn't seem to be around. Mark thinks that's odd, at first, then he realises that he's the one who's not in their usual room. He's sitting on one of the winding staircases heading down to the basements and he's not entirely insane. Not yet. After all, dreams were supposed to be weird, right?

They'd been trying to rescue Sparx from Climbcrag Castle (Alone. He'd been fairly sure neither Lady Illusion nor Random would've supported making the trip –well, Random might've if he was in the right mood– but it'd still been stupid of Mark not to at least ask them), but by the time they'd gotten there she'd already been rescued by the very people Mark hadn't thought to ask for help ('idiot, no wonder Staffhead finds it so easy to get a laugh from you…') then Climbcrag had started to disintegrate around them. He and Chuck had had to make their way towards a place that Chuck had pinpointed as the only really stable location in the Game right now.

Which just happened to be the Haunted House.

The fact that Sparx and Random had turned out to be there had just been sheer good luck. Lord Fear… not so much.

Still, as useful as all this information was for confirming just what was going on around him, it didn't explain why he was sleeping on a staircase. He had never sleep walked in his life and had been surprised enough to realise they even had to sleep in this place. Sometimes, was easy to forget that they were inside of a computer game. He remembered Lady Illusion fixing his "spine" during… that mess he got himself into, back at the junkyard, which he isn't going to talk, think or even wonder about. And knowing all the while that there wasn't really even anything like a spine there anymore: just data and broken coding.

He shouldn't think about it, because he didn't want to wonder exactly what the amulet had done to his head at the same time as it was screwing up his spine and… hell, he'd been posting blog entries through his skull. (Chuck had described it with more technical language than that, but Mark basically understood it as "channelling the power right through every important bit of his brain and potentially frying them beyond their ability to repair themselves if (when, when)they got back to the real world".

Which was scary.

It'd done something.

He wasn't going to think about what. Right now, it wasn't important. What was important was…

'Ace, the plan, this mission, this… getting out alive. That's all I want. That's all any of us want… Maybe it's all we've ever wanted since the beginning and I swear that if it happens….'

'...I'll never play a videogame again in my life.'

Mark paused. That voce had come from inside of his head, and it sounded like his own thoughts, but it wasn't. It couldn't be. It was a memory of something else he'd said a long time ago.

Mark shivered. Damn that amulet...

Down in the basement, something clattered hard, like stone against metal. There was the distant sound of shrieking and cursing. 'What is that?' Mark thought.

Something (a voice, maybe) answered him. It felt similar to the odd little voice that had been talking to him in the dream. 'Random?'

'Yeah, he's down there alright,' Mark muttered. Funny, he thought, how crashes and other loud noises in this place always seemed to come back to the cyborg with the mental complex. Then again, Mark supposed that Random knew better than anyone about what it meant to have your mental coding screwed up, so maybe...

'Go on, then.' This time, the voice sounded almost like Sparx, tinged with impatience and annoyance and the restrained desire to call him "pipsqueak". Mark instinctively knew that responding coherently to voices in his head was probably a Bad Thing, but he did it anyway. It wasn't like things could get any worse.

Maybe he would just… check in on Random. Just for a moment, to see whether the cyborg was in the mood for trying to kill anyone today or not...

Location: The Haunted House Gardens, Level Twelve of Ace Lightning and the Carnival of Doom.

Date: 12/08/07

'Dude this place is getting to ya.'

He'd expected Chuck to say something like that.

He really had, but… Mark had been hoping that he could at least try to understand.

Chuck knew the Sixth Dimension and everything to do with it better than Mark did. Maybe even better than Rick. You'd have thought he'd be able to comprehend his best friend hearing voices in his head, but… apparently he couldn't. Chuck kept staring at him in confusion for a very log time before speaking, his laptop lying open on the ground in front of him with a mess of strange messages scrawling across the screen. 'I mean it. I'm gonna start sleeping at different times to you to avoid the supposed snoring incidents you get so riled up about; you really need to get eight hours.'

'Oh, really?' Mark tried not to sound as put out as he was by that.

'Yeah, really,' Chuck said. 'Explain it once more for me. Make sure I get this, okay because I'm just… I'm not understanding, Mark, and not understanding confuses the hell out of me more than the actual… not understanding does.'

'Right…' Mark raised an eyebrow. 'I didn't get a word of that, just so you know.'

'I know. So, anyway, you were saying?'

Mark thought about it. The voices in his head were silent. 'You know how… sometimes you think about something… in words?'

'Uh…huh,' Chuck nodded slowly and untruthfully. 'That uh… would tend to be how thinking words, Mark.'

'But that's it, isn't it? It isn't how thinking works,' Mark said. 'People don't think in words at all, Chuck, they just… we say what we're thinking out loud in words, but when the thoughts are inside of our head they're just… thoughts. Impressions, you know?'

'...I know that I'm right about the eight hours.'

'Will you just listen?' Mark snapped, running out of patience. 'Just go with me on this one for a while, okay?'

Chuck gave him a look which plainly said "you're my best friend and I totally sympathise with you right now, but you're still pretty damn insane". 'Oh-kay, sure. I'll go with it. So what is it about the thoughts that's bothering you?'

'That's what I meant. I'm thinking in words. And they don't feel like they're my words, either. They don't feel like they belong to me. I mean, they do at the same time, but…'

'They're not telling you to do crazy things like kill me in my sleep, are they?'

Mark glanced at him irritably. 'No, but that's starting to become an option anyway, it might stop you snoring.'

'I do not snore.'

'Tell that to the cockroaches who think you're trying to serenade them,' Mark smiled.

'What the… I… oh, ha ha. You know the cockroaches are going for you, dude... which I still haven't been able to explain, by the way. he frowned, concentrating on the screen of his laptop and the mess of signals Mark suspected even Chuck was having trouble understanding.

A laptop inside of a computer world... it was kind of a paradox, really. 'Well, maybe the bugs here just don't like humans. or anything which looks like a Knight.'

'Consider yourself lucky,' Chuck muttered. 'You get the little screaming bugs. I get the Harpix and the zombies, dude!' he looked up from the laptop screen (which was showing more and more garbled data every time they opened it, apparently). '…Hey, you think Rotgut told them about me?'

'For your sake I hope not.'

There was a pause which seemed to last longer than it actually did. Mark figured it was the amulet residue, but he kept... phasing out a bit. Losing track of what was going on around him.

He supposed Chuck must feel the same way. After all they were normal human beings who had somehow gotten pulled inside of a videogame which was disintegrating more and more with every passing day. It was impossible to tell how long a day in here was outside there... if it was as long as he thought it was, then their parents must have been going frantic by now.

Mark sighed, trying to work out, again in his mind, exactly how they'd ended up in this situation. Nothing came to him, bar one word.

'Damn Kilobyte, Mark rubbed his hands together even though it wasn't really all that cold. 'You still don't know how to get us out of here, do you.'

There was a long moment, and this time mark was sure it lasted as long as it felt. Chuck was always reluctant to admit when he was out of ideas. 'Sorry, dude,' he shrugged eventually. 'I've got nothin'.'

They sat on the rough, coarse "grass" – brownish green in colour – around the left side of the haunted house which dominated the landscape. It was impossible for them to see what was going on on the other side of that massive golden-orange wall, but Mark was pretty sure they didn't want to see what was happening out there anyway. If the game world was really breaking into pieces like chuck said, and the Haunted House was one of the few remaining stable areas of the game, held up by Lord fear's power...

Mark shuddered. There was another thing he knew he shouldn't really think about. 'You mean really, lord Fear's got everything he ever wanted here.'

'Technically, yeah,' Chuck said, seriously, focussing on the shield. 'Almost like he's a God... god of whatever's left of the sixth dimension. He owns it all now.. .every blade of digitally crafted grass.'

'God? Is what?' The strange voice in Mark's head asked, questioningly, and aloud he said. 'He doesn't own us.'

'Depends on how you look at it,' Chuck shrugged.

There was a yell from somewhere. It sounded like Sparx was getting riled up at one of the Zombies. Then there was a noisy crash which also sounded like Sparx – punching a wall.

Times like this, he really missed Ace. 'They're alright out there, aren't they? Ace, and... Well, Ace?'

'Beats me,' Chuck shrugged. 'As you can probably tell I'm not exactly receiving email here... but I'd worry more about us than about him.'

'Given the choice between being stuck in here with fear or out there with Kilobyte...' mark started, then trailed off as he realised he couldn't actually work out which of those two options was worse. It felt rather like an "out of the frying pan, into the fire" situation.

'Frying... pan... what?' The voice seemed confused. Mark shook his head hard, forcing himself to ignore it.

'...When god frowns surf the furrows.'

Mark looked up, blinking. '…Sorry, Chuck?'

'It's a proverb, dude. Means you've just gotta ride with whatever the world throws out at you,' Chuck looked up from the laptop screen. Mark didn't know all that much about programming, but he was pretty sure that what was on the screen right now wasn't anything Chuck could make sense of, either. 'Right now, we're just... playing the game, right? The same we would be if we were outside.'

'Right,' mark said slowly, not really understanding. 'And what does that mean.'

'It means that... we have to deal with it in a way that's as close to how we would've dealt with it outside the game as possible,' Chuck said carefully. 'I mean.. .that maybe to get out of here, we have to beat the game... course I don't know where we'd end up after that, and I'm not even all that sure it's possible to beat this game right now... i don't know if there's enough left of it to know when the game is being played...' Chuck groaned, infuriated, shutting the laptop. 'Man, like I said: I've got nothing, 'scept for that.'

'So we have to take out a god,' Mark muttered uneasily, standing up to look upwards at the shield. Referring to Lord Fear as a god, however technically accurate that might be, was a disturbing thing. 'And I don't know about you, Chuck, but that doesn't sound like a good idea right now.'

'Yeah well he is keeping us alive right now.. .and anyway... there's Sparx.'

Sparx, Mark nodded to himself. Really, Sparx was the only reason that neither party had killed the other yet. She was keeping all of them alive, even Lady Illusion. Not that he would've actually tried to kill Fear right now... not that...

Mark's thoughts did a back step as he realised the truth of what he was thinking.

There was more at stake here, he realised than some skeleton trying to take over the world. So much more for them to worry about than the black and white of it all.

It was confusing as hell.

Chuck opened his laptop again. 'Hey, do you mind if I run a quick check on the shield out there?'

'A check?' Mark looked at him, 'why?'

'Just a thought. I mean it'd help if I could use the amulet,' he signalled at the piece of... metal or whatever it was, and mark felt himself reaching a hand to it, instinctively, wondering what Chuck was up to.

It had nearly killed him, true, but then again, if the amulet wasn't in his hand right now, then it could've been just about anywhere. Mark really preferred to have the thing which could kill then quite easily within his reach.

And maybe it had always made him feel better, but that had never changed what it was. The amulet had always made him a target.

So really, they're all right to wonder then they ask why the hell haven't I been killed yet?

'Sure. Why not?'

He sat down again, and waited as chuck began to type some messages into his computer. The amulet tingled slightly and Mark flinched, but there was nothing more.

'One day I'd like an explanation.' Chuck said, in the voice he normally used when they were discussing their middle school days, or trying to find some corner of the carnival where they could prepare an assault on the Haunted House without being sniffed out (literally) by Pigface. 'For the Ace Lightning thing, you know. How Rick made the program condense into a three-d physiological form. How they were able to develop cognitive thought… that kinda stuff.'

'I've already told you, Chuck,' Mark sighed. 'I gave you a total up-to-this-point review when you first worked this whole thing out. Rick programmed the game funny, I played the game, lightning struck my house –boom, Ace was real. That's it.'

'Yeah but it still doesn't make total sense,' Chuck pointed out. 'For one thing a bolt of lightning carries a charge of twenty-five-thousand volts of electricity. The entire house's energy supply should've failed when it hit. And if you were actually touching the computer when the lightning struck, you should've been totally fried, too.' He paused, leaning back on his hands and staring up at the glittering golden shield surrounding them.

'What do you mean?' Mark frowned.

'Well I'm pretty sure when Rick designed your copy of the game the way he did, he couldn't have made it so it safely siphoned off such a huge amount of energy.' Chuck said. 'Just remember all the technology he had in the Fortress of Solitude. All his protective shielding… and that coolant system. And all you had was one ordinary home computer system. I did the maths, Mark. Channelling all that power through your computer was kind of like expecting an MP3 player to handle all the dialling codes for a NASA supercomputer. Or expecting a human to absorb fifty times their own body weight in water. It just should've have worked man. Even if it had, you should've been turned into an overdone French fry by the time that game finished transforming.'

'Uh… right.' Mark swallowed.

He still remembered the familiar tingle of lightning as the computer joystick had been literally wrenched out of his control –but that was all it had been. Just a mild tingle, nothing more, then Ace Lightning had been there. Alive. Fighting Lord Fear and Lady Illusion in the Hollanders new back garden.

And now here was Chuck, casually pointing out that Mark really should've been barbequed in the process. '…Thanks for the visual, Chuck. I'll remember that the next time I play videogames in a lightning storm.'

Chuck grinned. 'Man you haven't actually ever played a videogame since this whole thing started, have you? And I bet you even turn the computer off whenever you hear thunder.'

'Well, yeah… wouldn't you?'

'What are you serious? No way, man, nothing's gonna put me off of finishing the last level of ARMAGEDDON AZARATH.'

'Right. Of course not,' Mark actually, did smile at that. Sometimes where Chuck was involved it was really all you could do. Mark was surprised that either of them had ever so much as touched a computer in their lives since that day.

It was really kind of amazing how calm and casual Chuck was being, considering that they were seemingly waiting patiently for the end of the world (which just happened to be right on their metaphorical digitized doorstep). In fact, scratch that. It wasn't just amazing –it was downright insane. The end of an entire reality was hovering less than ten feet in front of them, and Chuck probably knew better than anyone exactly what that "end of the world" was going to entail. And yet here he was, looking as calm as if this were just another Tech class, or a day at the beach.

It did look a little like a beach, actually. In a weird, warp-at-the-end-of-reality kind of way. They were stood at the very edge of what Mark figured was all that remained of the Sixth Dimension. The large protective shield that Lord Fear had created, and which now surrounded the entire Haunted House, was warped and bent where it touched the ground, leaking in towards them every now and then like a tide. A solid wall of green-gold-red water. The edges seemed ragged, like the edges of a bank or an incomplete painting. Mark was fairly sure there wasn't anything really like water out there, but it certainly looked that way from here.

Something twinged in Mark's stomach. Or where he figured his stomach would have been if they had currently had any real flesh and blood. It was a familiar sensation that he couldn't honestly recognize as a feeling, sound, smell or anything like that. He didn't know what it was, he just knew it was there.

He had heard stories (probably from Chuck) that the human brain "warped unrecognizable visual inputs into whatever it could closest match it to in its memory". They called it "Sensory Displacement", or something. Explosions became balls of light and movement, hot air became steam, the smell of death became a taste on your tongue. Howling winds turned into voices and the voices turned into sensations that burned and screamed, warning you of things you couldn't prevent and terrified the children that still remained.

Not that any of the people left in this world could really be called children anyway. Most of them weren't. Most were barely even alive at all, but they had known enough to know they were in danger and had all made their way to the Haunted House. Mark watched as they shivered in fear: the freaks, monsters and evils that remained, all gathered together in the Haunted World, waiting, like everybody else, for the end to come. Or else for things to reset themselves and go back to the way they had always been. Waiting for someone to press a button, to open a door, waiting for the realm with a lucky number… Zombies, Harpix, Rodents, Mutants, nothing more than that, really, small pieces, small creatures, things Lightning Knights were made to kill but which could never truly die unless deleted and—

Wait.

Stop.

Mark felt a shiver run up his spine as he pulled himself back to reality. He clutched at the amulet piece around his neck, trying to recognize where all those thoughts had just come from. That was…

What was that?

'Hey, dude? Earth to… uh, well Sixth Dimension to Mark Hollander? Feel free to come back for a recharge any time now.'

Mark blinked a few times, and found his tongue, still trying to work out just what he had seen. '…What?'

'You spaced out. Can we try and stay focussed here, please? That amulet is still going weird around you and I'd really rather you were, you know, paying attention while I was using it. I don't want to be sucked out into that… mess.' Chuck pointed up at the bubbling wall of multicoloured water and Mark suddenly remembered what they were doing out here –they were reinforcing the wall, using his amulet piece's power. Fear had… well, he'd told them that someone had to do it, and Mark still wouldn't let anyone else touch the final piece of the amulet. So basically it had to be him.

That was why Chuck was now sitting in front of him, trying very hard to deal with all this as if it were just another simple computer problem and nothing more complicated than that. But Chuck was frowning slightly now, so this must have been a difficult problem. 'Still trying to get to grips with this, man… there's so much data flying around. Most of it's been dumped in the recycle bins, I can't keep track of any of the realms anymore and it I don't even know how to begin processing the power flow in that goddamn wall. Uh, not that I'm complaining about the wall,' he added talking slightly louder as if afraid the wall might hear him and take offence. Or else Lord Fear would. 'The wall is good. Wall equals life, life is good. No complaints about the wall here.'

Mark stood up, feeling the amulet prickle with cool static as he did so, and walked a few steps towards the wall. He stood as close to it as he dared, (which was about three feet away). If he reached out, he could probably touch it, but he had no idea what that would've felt like and really had no desire to find out. 'You know what this reminds me of?' he said. 'Googler.'

'What, the wall?' Chuck pushed his spectacles up his nose.

'Yeah… well, his puppets anyway. That energy-leaking power of theirs. The venom bite. It looks just like that when you see it on your skin.'

'Man, now who's coming out with creepy visuals?' Chuck stamped at a button on his keyboard way too hard. 'I don't get it. There's nothing more I can do, just… can you hold position there for a moment? I think the amulet likes the proximity, or something.'

Yeah. Mark had noticed that. The amulet had been cold for weeks, but closer to the wall it seemed to act up, shimmering slightly against his chest.

Or maybe that was just more of that "sensory displacement" stuff.