A/N Some slight format changes. I can't do some symbols, but... Anyway, if it affects anything, for good or ill, let me know.
Chapter four: And in My Bones I Feel the Warmth
Your name is AXIMILI-ESGARROUTH-ISTHILL and you are, perhaps surprisingly, the one person here who is actually playing Sburb just as well as anybody can. If anybody asked you the reason, you'd probably reel off some stuff about Sburb having an intuitive Z-Space interface and picking up weird things from myths of the Time Matrix that have proven surprisingly relevant.
But to be honest, you have no idea what you're doing. You're pretty sure that this has so little to do with any of the myths of your people that there is really absolutely nothing in them at all about Sburb.
The game should not exist. This is worse than the Time Matrix. Worse than anything that the Ellimist has shown or done or told you about. Nothing here seems to work like you expect it to, and the whole mechanism of the game— a game, a computer disk!— defies your every understanding of the universe. Why, just Tirith's Laws alone—
=== AX: Spare the lecture.
Alright. There's the bigger issue here, anyway— you're doing pretty well, all things considered. You witnessed the destruction of a world, but it wasn't your world. Your world, your people, are safe.
You didn't know what you were getting yourself into, and it's clear that the Ellimist intended to say whatever he had to in order to get you to play the game. It isn't your fault. But it wasn't your world that was broken, so of course you don't feel the sorrow and the agony that begs for a scapegoat and can find only these few survivors.
So yes, you're acting as if you know what's going on, because that's the only way that you can be the rock that your friends need. They're counting on you to know all the answers about this strange other universe and the game that sent you here, because that's who you've always been. The TOKEN ALIEN TEAMMATE who KNOWS ALIEN STUFF.
You're sure that you don't know what's going on, and you're glad that the questions have been few and simple and you've been able to give answers that at least sounded plausible. Because you're even surer that admitting that you didn't have any answers would just about destroy your friends.
(The supreme irony, of course, is that your friends are busy destroying or being destroyed by each other at this very moment, and you haven't the faintest clue about it. It's actually pretty hilarious, at least for any psychopaths lucky enough to catch a view of what's going on.)
You probably won't ever realize it, but that's exactly why you're doing the best job out of anyone here.
=== AX: Talk to your friend.
Oh. Of course.
You got a little distracted there, didn't you? There's something important you need to take care of, apparently.
Sorry, Rachel. What was that?
Very important, she says. There's something that she needs to show to you.
You walk together, past the MIDNIGHT BLUE CHEETAHS populating this world. They like ARCHITECTURE.
(AR-KI-TEK-SHUR. ARK-I-TEKT-SURE. ARK. ARK. ARRRRK.)
There is something beautiful about the knife in her hand, you decide. Her grip is experienced, worn, knowing, as if it had been with her since she had been born. And its sharpness is like the sharpness of a tail blade.
It is not like other knives that you have seen on Earth. But there are many strange things that can be made here, by means of a machine called an alchemiter. All of you received one. Marco said that it was like being able to put peanut butter and chocolate together, but out of anything.
You wonder if she's doing better than the rest of your friends. If the challenges she is encountering are helping her to focus on something else.
She had been the first to cry when Earth's fate became clear to you. Even before Cassie.
(She will never bring up, and you will never put it together on your own, that she had a younger sister.)
Rachel mutters something. It sounds like "TICK tock."
What did you say?
"Heh? Nothing." She sighs. "Cassie messed up with her kernelsprite. I think."
Ah. KERNELSPRITES.
(KERRRR-NEL-SPRITE)
You had a kernelsprite (all of you did). It was a FLASHING SWIRLING BLACK AND WHITE SPHERE THING that appeared soon after you started playing Sburb. Then one thing led to another and you put TELEVISION in it and it… was a television. With a tail. That spoke to you with much clipping and rearranging of moments of television shows.
(You very much like when it uses FOOD NETWORK CLIPS)
You were told that this is called PROTOTYPING.
How did she mess up?
Rachel seems to mull over what to say. Eventually she settles on nothing. "Let me worry about it, okay? You haven't woken up yet, have you?"
Ah. Waking up. Rachel has told you about DREAMSELVES. Other versions of yourselves. Sleeping on the moons of other planets. She says that Marco has "woken up."
Tobias has woken up as well. You wonder what his dreamself is like.
You have tried very hard to learn things while pretending that you knew them all along. You must do this. To keep your friends stable.
"TICK tock."
Why are you making clock noises?
"I… I'm tired of counting down. But it's… there. All there."
"Counting down to what?"
"Forget it. I'm not crazy," she says firmly. "I am not some kind of nut."
No. But if you are under some kind of stress, then I would like to help.
Something begins to take shape in the distance. A stone slab. There is a small pillar at each corner.
"Forget it, I said." And then she mutters something else. It sounds very much like "I'm sorry," but you decide not to press the issue.
Rachel removes her gloves and puts them in a pocket.
It is a stone slab you tell her.
"Yes," she replies.
The slab looks almost like a human bed, you think.
"You know that thing they say, about how a single butterfly beating its wings in China can make some tiny change that turns into a bigger change that maybe turns into a tornado?"
No.
"Right. Of course not. Well, it's like… The world isn't math, you know? It's not one plus one equals two. It's more complicated than that."
Actually, the world is math. It is simply very highly complicated math. You see—
Rachel shushes you. "So… All that power, right? And the butterfly doesn't even really know how it's going to turn out. It just flaps its wings and… maybe there's a tornado. Maybe not. Maybe it never even finds out. Maybe it does… How does it deal with that, do you think?"
I am unaware of butterflies having sufficiently complex thought proc—
"Pretend it did."
Then I suppose that it would just beat its wings the best it can and hope that it will all work out. It's a butterfly. It just does what butterflies do. And hopes for the best.
You're examining the slab when the pain comes.
Agony. Moving, feeling, like lightning.
You turn without thinking. Your response is reflex. You strike with your tail blade.
Your tail blade.
The first conscious thought you have is that your tail is gone. It is on the ground. It is gone.
Rachel's knife, her strange, lovely knife, is bloody.
So are her clothes.
And there is pain again. Pain in your hearts, and confusion. Then pain of a physical kind, slashing through your belly.
She moves too quickly for you to do anything. She is here, and then she is there. You process the movement, and she is gone again.
You find yourself lying on the slab, on your side. Your blood is in your fur, running on the stone, soaking her clothes. It flows off the stone and collects around her shoes.
"TICK tock," she mutters. "I can't… keep delaying. I already took too long. Butterflies, what am I thinking?"
=== AX: Morph.
You can't morph. You aren't morphing.
Your vision starts to blur. Whether she leaves or your eyes are failing you, Rachel vanishes.
You are alone.
Your name is AXIMILI-ESGARROUTH-ISTHILL and you are dying.
You were the KNIGHT OF BREATH, KNIGHT to your PRINCE and sworn to protect the LAND OF SPICES AND LIGHTNING. And you are a failure.
You don't know what you did wrong, but this… You can't begin to comprehend it.
The only thought that gives you any peace, as sick as it might be, is that this is your fault. That, as bad as she may have sometimes gotten, the seeds of this were never in her.
=== AX: It's okay. You were as good as any of them.
=== AX: You were as good as you could have been.
You want to believe that. So very much.
Where are these thoughts coming from?
It's been so strange, ever since you entered the Medium. So strange…
=== AX: Rest.
But...
=== AX: Be Rachel. Kill somebody else.
