12/10/20: Rock Bottom

"So where are we going?"

Sandy and Steven had been shoved into the back of Soos' pickup truck as it drove up the windy cliffside road, the ocean to their right. Soos and Connie were in the front, the former keeping his eyes on the road.

"Well, after the insurance company money came through, E3 moved to a new house," replied Soos. "It's just up this road here."

"So he didn't go on a journey of self-discovery or anything?" asked Steven.

"No?" replied Soos. "Why would he do that?"

"Well, it just seems like what you do when bad things happen to you," said Steven, shrugging.

"Nah, he's just been up here," said Soos. "I mean, unless you count playing sixty-three hours a week of video games self-discovery, heh heh heh!"

"I don't."

"Yeah, me neither. Ooh, here it is!"

The house wasn't bad at all – it sat on the cliffside, with a little brick driveway running up to the garage. There was a little wall preventing people from falling off into the ocean, and a little front garden. It didn't look nearly as wacky as they might have expected.

"Well, this doesn't look bad," said Connie.

"So why does he want us here?" asked Sandy. "What's his plan? How're we gonna deal with that Bus Driver?"

"Uh, yeah, about that…"

Soos swallowed as he climbed out of the car.

"You've all watched Avengers: Endgame, right?" asked Soos.

"Everybody has," said Connie.

"Right, and you know how when Captain America goes off and finds everybody," added Soos, "and they go to where Thor is…"

"Soos, did you bring us here to help you with an intervention?" asked Sandy flatly.

"…nnnnooo… well, yes."

He opened the front door.

The living room was covered in empty cans – Coca-Cola and lemonade, mostly. There were empty bags from fast food outlets, and dusty Funko Pops on every surface. And there, on the couch, fast asleep and holding a PlayStation controller – I am not at all proud to admit it – was me.

It's worth going back a few pages and explaining this.

On paper, I made it out of the whole angry-Bus-Driver-burning-down-my-house-and-murdering-everyone thing pretty well, in the grand scheme of things. It made the national news, which meant that the insurance company and the bank had to pay handsomely or look bad on TV. So I got a new house. Moved far enough out of town that there were no neighbours to worry about the noise.

It would have been pretty sweet except for the whole crippling depression thing.

See, and I don't know how many psychologists have said this, having the majority of your friends die before your eyes tends be a bit of a bummer.

So I withdrew from everything. It seemed like a good idea at the time. For the better part of a year, I spent my days laying on the couch eating chips and playing Forza. There are worse ways to spend a slump, but it wasn't ideal.

The worst part was reading the news. About two months after the incident, I started seeing spates of crimes committed across the world by mysteriously familiar people. Nothing serious, not murders or terrorism, but bank robberies, thefts, things like that. And that's when it really hit me.

It wasn't enough to kill my friends physically, he had to destroy them as a fundamental idea. Corrupt them into villainous caricatures, destroy their reputations, make them despised at all – all the while, I'd be sitting there knowing that this was my fault.

So I stopped checking the news.

When Soos came to me with his plan to rescue Sandy, I didn't even know she'd been sentenced yet or what prison she had moved to, and if I'm devastatingly honest, I found it hard to care. I gave him a sort of grunt that could be taken as either approval or disapproval and expected him to go away and get nothing done.

It appears I greatly underestimated him.

"Oh heeeeey!" I said, once Soos had shaken me awake, "you're out of prison! I honestly didn't expect that."

"Yeah, I'm out," nodded Sandy. "And I'm hankerin' to get revenge."

"And clear your name," added Soos.

"Yeah, that… that too," said Sandy. "If I'm honest, you're not lookin' like you're gonna be much help right now."

"What makes you think that?" I asked.

"You're covered in Cheeto dust and you haven't shaved in a week," replied Sandy.

"Don't tell me how to live my life," I muttered.

I sat up.

"Besides, what exactly do you hope to achieve?" I asked. "He's won! We're done! Hey, that rhymes…"

"Come on, dood, we can't give up!" said Soos. "We still gotta save Amethyst and Peridot!"

"What, you want me to break into ASIO or something and pick them up?" I demanded.

"A year ago, that'd be the first thing you'd do," replied Connie. "It'd be up to Sandy to tell you no."

"Yeah, and a year ago, I was an idiot," I replied.

"That's not true!" exclaimed Steven.

Connie, Sandy and Soos all stared at him.

"Okay, it's true, but it's not bad!"

I sighed.

"If you came here expecting me to go galivanting off on another goofy adventure, you've got another thing coming," I said. "Goofy adventures and madcap schemes are what landed us all in this mess. If Insano hadn't decided to do something outlandish and weird, the Bus Driver would still have his job and none of this would have happened."

I got up out of the chair and walked over to the window overlooking the sea.

"It's time to grow up," I continued. "It's time to accept that the only way to get by in this world is to keep your head down and live normally. We need to stop fooling ourselves into thinking we matter, or that we can escape the crushing grind. We just have to accept that we live in a cruel, joyless world."

I closed my eyes pensively.

"We need to be serious now."

There was a long silence.

"You know, I'd accept that," replied Sandy. "I really would. But I reckon you don't believe any of that. I reckon you want out of this prison just as much as I wanted out of mine."

"What makes you say that?"

"Because you've labelled that window 'the brooding window.'"

I looked up at the little wooden nameplate above the window.

"You say you wanna live normally, but you live in a cliff house!" exclaimed Sandy. "You still wear a tie when all you do is sit on a couch playing video games! And-and… do you still have that weird Bentley thing?"

"It's a 1931 Rolls-Royce Phantom II."

"I don't care!" shouted Sandy. "Y'all wanted to live normal, you'd drive a dang Golf or somethin'! You think you're a normal person actin' weird – that's why you wrote that thing about bein' a fraud or whatever. But you're not!"

She walked up and jabbed my chest with her finger.

"Y'all are a weird person actin' weird, who thinks he's normal and has imposter syndrome," she said. "And the only way any of us are gettin' out of this mess is if you embrace that you ain't! So have a shower, have a shave, and then come up with the dumbest plan you can think of!"

For a long time, we looked into each other's eyes.

"Sandy?" I said at last.

"Yeah?"

"The Anti-Magic Tommy Gun is still in an evidence locker in a police station," I said. "They thought it was one of your 'murder weapons.'"

"And?"

"And I'm gonna need it. I'm gonna need that, I'm gonna need something that can seat five people and fly very fast, and I'm gonna need a programmer. We're going to steal the biggest computing device in the multiverse, and we're going to use it to hack into our friends' souls and uncorrupt them."

"That sounds absolutely insane," said Sandy. "I'm in."