Furry and Angel had tried to choose the least conspicuous part of the day to begin the plans, as they sat around in their house. Furry was nervously reaching out with his mind towards the structure of Webkinz World. Angel was keeping watch over Ms. Birdy, and preparing to contact Emerald and Leo the moment the duck became aware of their actions. Sam was ready to teleport himself to their location at the same time. There was no time left to reconsider things.

Now, it was simply up to Furry to begin.

The procedure began as it had in the early-stage practice he was limited to. The world was divided into particles, the particles were separated by progenitor mind, the particles of each mind had a different quality, the different qualities could be grasped, a hook in each; and he did.

Then came tearing them apart, untangling the mess of overlapping templates and pushing each one further apart, into a sort of sphere of imprints (though the sphere's physical geometry was confusing even to Furry; headache-inducing to think about even as he began forming it). It would have been moderately easier to completely release the folds in spacetime that kept them together, but doing so would also make it far harder to reconstruct them. The three of them had decided the added security when everything was done was worth the extra difficulty of execution.

Try as he might, it was obvious to Furry that he wouldn't be able to pull apart every imprint at once – there were over 300,000 impressions of meaningful contribution, and though he could group a lot of them together into similar clusters that he would move as one, this still left him with around 1,400 individual points to move. The most he could really handle at once was 60, and moving one group took him about 50 seconds.

Still, all he could do was begin to work, one by one, and hope he could manage it. So with a quick message to his two friends, he began to manipulate reality.

…and nothing interesting happened. Though he internally sighed in relief when he managed to completely dislocate the first set of clusters, he found that the world around him remained, at least visually, exactly as it was before. This much was expected – if Webkinz World couldn't tolerate losing a small fraction of its thought-base, then how could it have even begun to exist so long ago, when many fewer people were thinking about it? But the more Furry moved apart the world around him, the more surprised he became at how nothing really seemed to change. He worked through 100 clusters, and then 300, and then 1,000, and there was still practically no change. Furry began to grow concerned if he was really doing anything. Was Webkinz World really this stable?

And then, finally, when only three clusters were left, things degraded quite sharply. Even the naked eye could see what almost seemed to be a decrease in the resolution of the world around them – the particles that he was removing were spread essentially evenly throughout everything, so there weren't any obvious pieces missing, but something seemed very much off. Things felt off too, Furry's body lighting up with a stinging pain everywhere, and his physical movements seeming less responsive.

As it happened, this was also the point when everything went to hell. Furry just tried not to focus on it yet.

Ms. Birdy appeared in front of them suddenly, along with a green earth puppy and another sun lion. The next instant, Sam was beside Angel, both of them standing in front of Furry – not that their physical position would matter much, Furry thought.

"What's going on?" Ms. Birdy demanded hastily, harsher than she ever used to be – harsher than Furry thought she could be (at least before the recent mind meld, which changed her in more ways than he understood) – and her voice sounding hoarse, damaged by the broken connection between universes.

"Furry was just practicing how to improve the connection," Angel answered, at a much more leisurely pace. "So he wanted to try disassembling-"

"No. That isn't what's happening here. Cease this!" the duck barked. (Before giving him any time to comply, Furry's vision lit up with a kaleidoscopic array of multicolored, extremely bright lights. He couldn't concentrate with it there, surely Ms. Birdy's intended effect, so he closed his eyes. The next moment, he no longer had eyelids. (The pain of their removal blended in with everything else.) He made a new covering instead, a long iron drape that covered and rested on his head to stay on him. For now, that stopped the lights.)

Still the turmoil proceeded. Furry heard a new male voice, from the direction of where the sun lion had stood, tinged with some surprise. "You see that text too?" There was a silence, perhaps filled by a nod, and then the same voice continued. "We may not get a chance like this again. We have to do this."

"Hey – Leo, get back here! Think about what you're doing!" This was a female voice, probably the other newcomer (and probably Emerald).

"As she said!" cried Ms. Birdy. "You have to… help me… fight them?" She trailed off questioningly, uncertainly. Behind the metal veil, Furry couldn't tell if it was Lucky's influence, or if something else was going on.

"I can't. I'm not letting this chance go," Leo maintained – and his voice was next to them now, moved from Ms. Birdy's side.

There was a surprisingly long pause for the previous pace of the moment, and then a final, troubled statement by Emerald. "Fine. I won't fight against you. But… I can't fight against Birdy either. I… well, do your best."

Then Furry pulled the next set of imprints apart, the world became too incomplete to hold itself together, and everything but their minds became dust.

This, of course, included their sensory organs. They had planned for this, too, training their ability to sense things about the world with only their control of the Thought Plane and output it directly into their minds. It still took Furry a few dozen seconds to adjust, however – a delay Ms. Birdy was too experienced to need.

When he managed to feel out the world around him, he found nothing but six minds – seven, depending on how you counted it. In a vague cluster near him were himself and his three allies, too similar in this form to distinguish their identities with his untrained eye; across from them was what must have been Ms. Birdy; and in the distance, removed from it all, was Emerald, simply watching.

All of them were crackling with the blue currents, shaped into five human brains and Ms. Birdy. She, in the center, showed up as one regular human brain, and something else attached throughout it, filling the gaps and immersed in the structure, that seemed almost fluid. The whole mind's blue light looked erratic, increasingly unstable.

He saw that one of the minds around him seemed to be slightly less bright with electrical activity – and another of them was almost stopped, and dimming by the second. There was nothing he could do to help them, though – that would have to be their own responsibility. All he could do was throw his perception into the mess of forces inside Ms. Birdy's brain.

Furry chose a region that seemed less affected than the others, and started to grab onto what was happening. He wanted to take hold of every particle, and apply a force inwards, pulling all of them towards their own central location. It was a bit easier to control all these particles when the general instruction was the same – far more feasible than trying to individually determine and counteract the motion of each one.

He started to pull, and very shortly afterwards, he felt an oppressive pull on himself in return. A quick "glance" in his perception revealed that the nearly-stopped mind had become completely shut down, and Ms. Birdy must have moved on to him.

He tried to enact the defenses Angel had taught him – (sense the force, find the pattern (there had to be one, Ms. Birdy was far too young to control that many particles without applying the same pattern to them all), apply an opposite pattern of your own) – but he hadn't had much time to practice, and Ms. Birdy seemed skilled at adjusting her attack so as to render irrelevant his own manipulations, and even turn them against himself.

He could only keep pulling on the mind, remain focused on his goal.

(His thoughts were slowing, he could feel it, the sluggishness, the fatigue that began setting in.)

He had to keep pulling, keep attacking, keep going… keep going…

(His awareness was slipping now, his efforts frequently pausing and restarting as he lost focus.)

He couldn't stop… because things… couldn't… go… on…

(His attack was useless now, his mind too close to complete stillness. As it slowed, the world around him seemed to speed up, events happening faster as he watched at the reaches of his consciousness. Two of the minds were still fighting, but Ms. Birdy was too intact, her mind not nearly slow enough, and his side was only decreasing in numbers…

As his last threads of awareness departed, Furry was reminded of what it was like to live with succ so long ago, before his Awakening.)


In a subjective instant, Furry's mind returned almost immediately to full function. The three other minds around him were all back to normal, too. Emerald remained unaffected in the distance.

And in front of him was a cloud of fragmented brain-parts, the torn-apart remains of Ms. Birdy and Lucky alike, suspended where they had been left by the destroyer.

Light appeared in front of him, not moving towards any eyes now, but simply held in place for him to observe. [A to F – We're done.]

As they had agreed, it was now Furry's task to pull together the imprints and re-form Webkinz World. So he did, not wanting to think about the scene he had woken up to – and, as always, thinking about it anyway. (Putting the world back together was the matter of less than a minute with how he had set things up – by far the greatest difficulty in separating the pieces of the world was picking apart individual impressions to move separately.)

When everything was realigned, they all found themselves already in their reconstructed bodies – all of them who still had minds to put in them, anyway. Ms. Birdy, in front of them, was an empty husk, immediately falling to the ground.

"What happened?" Furry asked, the dread still taking hold in his mind. He should have been overjoyed – they had done it, Webkinz would finally be free of the hunger, permanently. Some parts of him were. Not most.

"The fight was going poorly for us," Angel answered apologetically. "Birdy was more resistant than we had expected. She had made a token attempt to attack me at the beginning, but after you shut down, she started seriously working on me. I couldn't risk that she would shut me down before we had finished her, and so I dissolved her mind. It was much easier than freezing it."

"Lucky – Lucky was in there, too. He… we're not going to be able to put him back together for thousands of years, are we?" Furry stated.

"Likely not," Angel admitted sadly. "But if there was even a small chance of failure if I did not do as I did, multiplied by hundreds of years more suffering by the hunger, then it was too great a risk."

Sam was staring down at the ground silently, but had an air of grudging acceptance.

Furry, on the other hand, began to cry. "He – He was our friend," he sobbed.

Angel looked at him for a few moments, then turned her gaze away into the empty distance.

"Yes," she sighed. "He was."