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I slammed my bedroom door shut, letting the bang echo through the air. At least the damn thing reacted to my presence with anything more than barely concealed contempt. It wasn’t like I had wanted to be born a freak. Why did it matter so much that I couldn’t do well in school, or that I wasn’t into sport, or any of the things he wanted of me? Why did my Dad have to be such an ass? It was my birthday, and he still hit me for not wanting to watch the damn football game with him. I heard the door slammed to outside, and I rushed to my window to see him and my older brother getting into the car. At least they wouldn’t be here to mess with me anymore.“Can I come in?” asked a soft voice from the other side of the door. It was my little sibling, a troll, she was rather young being only twelve to my seventeen, but she was my only comfort left in the house. She had pale gray skin, and blue eyes with yellow where the white would have been on a human, and a pair of horns that stuck out of her head, both like little spikes though with one significantly shorter than the other.“Of course,” I said. I flopped down on my bed and she hopped up onto it with me.Mom had adopted her just after Jezbel left her wriggler stage, and she had been with us for the last ten years. After Mom died in an accident, just five years later, the house hadn’t been the same since. Dad found his only solace in the bottle, and his anger had only grown since. Jason had been his perfect little stooge, somehow avoiding all of Dad’s wrath, and leaving it to Jezbel and myself. I did my best to keep Jezbel out of trouble, often taking blame for things she had done on accident, and always helping her with her chores. What was going to happen though after I left the house? I had looked into finding a way to adopt her and take her with me when I turned eighteen, but I wasn’t any closer to that than I had been five years ago. There was no way I was going to stay here, if just because Dad had already made it very clear I was to be out of the house the day of my next birthday. “Didn’t that game come out on closed beta today?” asked Jezbel. She liked to watch me play games. her hand eye coordination had always been rather poor and so I would play for her, letting her direct me.“Yeah, I have it installing now,” I said. “Alice has pulled me into a group to play with. From her messages, two of them are already into the game. But I haven’t checked my messages in a bit.”“Cool. Pull it up, please,” said Jezbel.Pulling my laptop off my nightstand, I opened it up and typed in my password. As I had expected, I had a whole list of messages waiting for me, but first I launched the game just to have it up and ready as I worked through the messages. The game had a cool spirally circle motif for its loading screen, and I watched it pulse for a few seconds. A ping of a new message broke me from my stupor, and I switched over to Discord.OdinsFart: [Fuck! Fuck! Fuck! Where the hell is Echo?]PoppyTarts: [They said they would be online soonish. I mean did any of us expect that this game would really bring down rocks from space?]OdinsFart: [Look you can act all pretty there fucking safe in the medium, but like I’m still here waiting, and that damn clock is getting awfully close to zero.]EmptyEcho: [Sorry. Got tied up with my Dad.]OdinsFart: [Thank the Creator’s Sweaty Left Armpit. Tell me you installed the game already?]EmptyEcho: [Yeah, I got both the Server and Client versions installed. I just popped up the Client version. Should I open the other one?]“Why are they so worried?” asked Jezbel. “Is OdinsFart like this all the time?”I nodded and opened the Server program. It loaded quicker than I had expected and soon I could see into a room like there was a camera in it. There were a number of little buttons on the UI, and I could move the camera around with the WASD keys. I moved upwards and found the view passing through walls into a bathroom and then a second bedroom before exiting the building and stopping at the edge of a lot.OdinsFart: [Yes. Please. For all that is holy in this world, hurry your ass up!]EmptyEcho: [I’m in. Jezzie wants to know if you are always this intense?]OdinsFart: [Tell your little snot nosed brat of a sister that no in fact, normally I am irrationally an asshole, but today there is a meteorite heading on a collision course to my head, and I really don’t have time to be dicking around with the wonderings of a little tweeb. Now hurry up and deploy the machine things from the fucking build menu. I cleared space for the objects in the living room. Also if you are wondering, yes that is why there is a couch in the kitchen and a table in the hallway.]PoppyTarts: [So focus on Farts, but like don’t freak out when things start moving around your house all willynilly. I’m gonna get started on setting you up since you have the client up already. Oh and tell Jezzie she looks cute today. PS. Tell her not to leave the house. Like probably for the best.]“You read that?” I asked.She nodded as I heard a number of thuds and other loud noises from downstairs. Yet I had to be working on getting Farts out of her house and into the medium, what ever that was. They had told me to read the wiki but I hadn’t the time yet so I stumbled with the UI, eventually I found the cruxtruder, a totem lathe, and punch designator, which following Farts instructions were combine to make a single machine for him. There was a long period of time as he fiddled with the darn thing trying to get it to make his object as I started to squish imp like creatures that had cat ears and an assortment of other clothes, often dresses and pigtails. Farts opened the Cruxtruder with a crowbar, and I watched as she fumbled with an action figure, throwing it into the orb that had been released but also causing another doll to fall into the orb as well. It shifted turning into a hammer wielding half armored bunny person. Farts sat crying for a bit till the sprite hugged her tightly, and she returned to her panicked frenzy.PoppyTarts: [Hey Echo get your butt downstairs. I got everything set up, and your countdown is looking really low. Like too low. Farts can take care of herself.]Flipping my computer into tablet mode I left the room with Jezbel right behind me. As I came to the top of the stairs the mess of the living room was almost comical. Alice had piled all the furniture up into one corner with an improbably balance and a dangerous wobble to it. The Alchemiter had been fully upgraded but there was a separate Cruxtruder left off to the side and a handy crowbar waiting for me. Jezbel sat on the stairs while I went to pick up the crowbar and pry the damn lid off the machine. It was a whole lot harder than I had expected, and when I finally managed to pop the lid off, it bounced off the ceiling before smashing into a package Dad had gotten that morning. A lilac orb floated up into the air and I looked around for something to shove into it. Alice had been really insistent that one had to prototype, apparently it was in the guide.There wasn’t anything in this room that had even the slightest attachment to me. It was just a bunch of Dad’s bullshit, his signed footballs that he had ordered off the internet, or the jersey of one pro I couldn’t be moved to learn the name of even if Dad had try to beat it into me. There wasn’t even a picture of Mom left in the mess of Dad’s ego and hobbies and I really would have liked lighting it all on fire. But it didn’t mater, I would be out of this hell hole in just a bit and then things would be better. Jezbel and I would be safe from him. But something nagged at me, my eyes landing on the package. I crept over to it pulling the fallen lid of the Cruxtruder away and looked at the label. It was addressed to Trever Wells, me. There wasn’t a return address or even any postage marks and I pulled the box open. I jumped backwards but it was too late as the alarm clock ticked down to zero.“Duck,” I shouted the moment before a fireball engulfed me.
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Really Dave, did we have to wait till he got blown up?” asked John. “Like I really didn’t think our ticket into this new session was going to be by prototyping the, uh, chunky salsa.”“This is the right way to do this,” said Dave. “A Doomed Dave spilled some beans, and like the kid woke up on Prospit so like no foul. Besides we saved the kids sister.”The two of them looked over at the young troll being held by Jade. The place was a mess with burnt marks all over the place and far far too much gore for any of their liking. Even Karkat didn’t have any snarky remarks to say, and he had only barely mellowed over the last seven years. This had been someones treasured place and now it was wrecked and should have been more of one in just a few moments if Jade hadn’t dealt with the Meteor before they had arrived. Dave set about working through the process of completing entry while she sat with the sobs of the youngster.“Hey asshole, I don’t really want to rip you a new one in front of the kid but you clearly know something that your fucking noise-hole isn’t sharing. So spill, what do you fucking know?” asked Karkat. He kicked the only shelf that had survived without too much damage. A bust fell from the top shelf landing on the trolls head before being tossed in anger across the room. “Rose said this was just a new session nothing like ours a normal one, one that just needed a slight push from us. So what the fuck are we doing standing in the smeared red of this human? What in your small brained head made you think to not fucking intervene?”“Look man, I’m not in the mood,” said Dave. “Gonna just say that a different Dave tried to intervene and that ended up with a bunch of dead Daves. So we are doing this the hard way.”“Karkat, if you don’t want to spend the rest of the day in my pocket, while being the size of an ant, you won’t start on him,” said Jade. “Honey, don’t worry your brother is still alive just in a different body, and in a bit we are going to go take you there. Everything is going to be fine. Now lets go upstairs, don’t look at it okay.”Jade helped the girl up the stairs before glaring back down at Karkat. It wasn’t necessary though, he didn’t have the energy to fight it this time. None of this sat well with him, and there was a stunning lack of information. Did Rose know about all of this and lied to them? Were they really needed to finish this session and what did it matter if the session failed? There was something that someone wasn’t telling him and he hated it.“Hey there, so sorry about the whole dying thing. It happens to all of us,” said John. He was talking to the new sprite that had been formed. The lilac sprite looked like the human kid, young though not as much as they had been, and hurt. “Look, so I gotta give you a second prototyping to make you stable or like things are going to go screwy at some point. So any requests, you are gonna be stuck with it for probably forever.”“What?” asked the sprite. “Sorry I am having a hard time thinking at the moment.”“Yeah, getting blown up does that to you,” said John. “So uh maybe an animal or something, Jade doesn’t seem to mind being part dog. Dogs are nice. Dave, do you have a dog somewhen?”“Here you go,” said a second Dave as he deposited a corgi next to John. “Look kinda busy so like no more asking me to teleport you stuff.”“Sorry Dave,” said John. “Well, here, hug the dog. That will make you feel better right?”The sprite nodded and reached down to hug the dog. The two of them merged leaving a single person with a dog ears and a tail that shimmered between being a part of their wispy body and not. John turned to see how Dave was doing and the sprite floated over to the pile of furniture sitting on top of it. Tears ran down their face as they looked down at the mess that had their body. It still didn’t feel right to them, or even real. Why had any of this happened?
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ComingOblivion: [Fuck. This game is going so slow.]TwistedPulsar: [Yeah. I hear you. I was hoping these enemies were more challenging. I bet it is Echo’s fault. Like that little twerp probably prototyped something weak and easy to beat.]PoppyTarts: [Pulsar, do you not pay attention to general? Like shit went down at Echo’s. They fucking died.]TwistedPulsar: [The fuck are you talking about Tart? Like this shit has been pretty newbcake so far how the hell did that ass find a way to kill himself? Did he fail to get in on time?]PoppyTarts: [I’m not going to retype it here go look in General.]TwistedPulsar: [I can’t believe he got blown up. God I wish I could have watched. Do you think Tart recorded it?]ComingOblivion: [Fuck man. You are a bit too twisted form my likes. Fuck off. I’m gonna go smash some imps or something I don’t want to deal with your assholery right now. The fuck was Farts thinking when she invited you along.]~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~Alice sat crying as her sprite patted her back. The strange hybrid of her doll and her favorite plant had turned out to be very loving much to her surprise. Her best friend had died in front of her face and the asshole that Farts had invited to fill their last spot was just that. Alice just couldn’t deal with it right now and yet she didn’t really get much chance to linger. Not with the annoying imp things trying and failing to sneak up on her. She had found a place to sit in a tree, there were more of them than Alive had ever seen before in the Land of Woods and Charm but so far all Alice had found living in the forest was imps and ogres. Thankfully most of them couldn’t climb trees. That didn’t mean the biggest couldn’t reach her though and so she had to take up her knives and jump into the fray again. They were almost meaningless now.She landed on the head of one of the ogres stabbing into its neck and twisted the knives. The damn thing work a winged hat and carried a huge hammer but it died all the same, in a poof of grist. Alice had found she took to weaving and ducking a lot more than she had any right to and she quickly dispatched the rest of the imps by dashing between them and over their claws and hammers. There was a second ogre this one with a large skull for a helmet and two massive hammers. She rolled under its legs and jumped up behind it slamming her knives into its back. She threw herself up to stand on the knives before equipping a new pair that she stabbed into the bumbering ogres neck causing it to poof. It was a nice distraction but they were getting less and less of one as she killed more and more of them. There must have been something that would distract her more thoroughly. Right?Alice retrieved her other knives and let SuzzySprite pick up the grist. The woods were quiet again and it weighed heavily on her. She hadn’t checked her Wristtop, an alchemitized combination between her watch, laptop, and a toy hologram, since she told off Pulsar and there were a few new messages beeping at her. She just didn’t want to deal with them though. Not if it was more of the asshats doing their usual. But what if it was Lulvia or Alliaq? There was three private messages and a some amount of chatter on their group Discord channel. Alliaq, Odinsfart on Discord, had messaged her and so had GlimmerShimmer, Lulvia, but the third message was from someone she didn’t recognize. Some CarcinoGeneticist.CarcinoGeneticist: [Hello suffering human. This is I one of your creators, in that I am literally one of the fucking creators of the damned world you and your friends so thoughtfully tried to fucking destroy through your ignorance. Fear not my three underlings and fellow creators have decided to fucking make sure that you are successful in completing the fucking task task you fucks have unknowingly set out on. Our expertise far outstrips your own and it would behoove you to pay heed to my words, or at least as well as the pink jelly shit that lies between your ears is capable of. First off I must instruct you that you should not fight the Denizens of your Land, which is likely filled with some sort of pillows and marshmallows or some other soft and squishy shit much like that which fucking resides in your skull hallow. Though beyond that I should tell you that your shitastic friend is not dead, that despite them being fucking blown into a bunch of little bits, their Dream self has awoken on one of either Prospit or Derse, and has become a copy of with fucking exacting shitty details of all of their snot filled thoughts and assholery induced emotions. We have also prototyped them from their head which from what I have been told will allow them some level of further redundancy in case being exploded is a fucking hobby of theirs.]PoppyTarts:: [Look I don’t know if you are being truthful but if this is some sort of prank I am going to rip your fucking eyes out and shove them so far up your ass that they end up back in their sockets. So maybe you should learn how to be a bit less of a fuckwad if you want to try to be helpful.]CarcinoGeneticist: [I will admit that my tongue is sharper than most feeble mortals can handle but that doesn’t make my vast knowledge any less fucking impressive to your meager experiences. It would be prudent of you to toughen your shit so that your fragile heart doesn’t break by being in the fucking presence of my glory, which is surely causing you to swoon with feminine energy. Do not let your thought gear spin wildly at the thought of my amazing body for as Strider would say I am his bitch and while I do not condone his presumption of owning my ass, even I have to admit to finding his mastery scratching all of the pleasure nodes in my cold dark lump of a fucking heart to be his fucking best bit of shit about the shitbag. Some day you may come to know but a shred of my burning passion and then you will be truly fucking humbled by the experience as it explodes the meager walnut that you call your brain.]PoppyTarts: [Okay so you are just an asshole, cool got it. So like I don’t have time for this so like get to the FUCKING POINT or shove off.]CarcinoGeneticist: [As you are fucking incapably of understanding the genius of my words I have decided to bring the fucking leader of our group, though only because he drew the fucking short straw, into this shit that we are calling a conversation. He in his simple minded way will translate my words into fucking dribble that you shit of a brain will comprehend. His name is John Fucking Egbert and while I find him infuriating to the point that even my fucking huge amount of tolerance has reached its limit I do concede that his brand of shit seems to be best for the simple shits that are humans.]EctoBiologist: [Hi. So I bet all of this seems pretty weird and I mean it is pretty weird even to me and I’ve lived through all of this or well I guess something similar because none of my friends exploded before they even managed to get into the medium. Man I wish that Rose was here she is really good at the whole helping people with mind stuff. She is really good at it. So anyway since Karkat is yelling at me to get to the point I just want to extend my condolences. Dave says they had to explode or we would be wading through a sea of Dead Daves but we are on our way to Prospit to retrieve your friend and return him to his house in the medium so that your game can go as unimpeded as possible. I guess though things may get complicated by the fact that we are mucking around in everything but you guys didn’t manage to prototype any god beings so that is a good start.]PoppyTarts: [Thank you for at least being polite unlike this asshole you are friends with? What is this Prospit?]EctoBiologist: [I’m surprised none of you have woken up on Prospit or Derse yet. I guess it happens after all I didn’t wake up my dream self till much later in the game and even then it was mostly pointless but it did prove really important for Jade to wake up. She says hi by the way. So yeah just follow the path on your planet and we will get back in touch with you later. Good luck and if you need anything just send us a message Dave should be able to just pop up next to you when needed. Even if he doesn’t like having to fiddle with so many time loops. Man I wish Terezi was here. She would be all over this and getting him to jump all over the place. Oh well.]PoppyTarts: [Somehow you are just about as useless as the last guy. So like what ever the fuck you all are doing I’m just gonna go smash the face of more of this trash mobs and maybe find a boss so like yeah fuck off.]Alice turned off her Wristtop preferring to just rush off to find some imps to smash before trying to talk to her two friends. Both of them didn’t need her yelling at them and as it was Alice knew she wasn’t going to be able to keep her emotions in check. Not after that asshole and the sycophantic friend of his. Fuck the both of them. Thankfully there were plenty of imps to murderize and that kept Alice’s mind off of things. It was just as much of a useless endeavor as before and she didn’t really understand why they were all so easy to deal with. Maybe it just had to do with her knives they were pretty rad and apparently magical apparently combining them with her Dungeon Force action posed collectibles had done something more than make them look fucking sick. They even had this blue aura to them and she could summon them back to her if she threw them. It made for stopping fleeing imps all the easier.The forest seemed to go on forever as Alice walked through it occasionally dealing with the ambushes of imps and ogres. There hadn’t even been much other life than the trees themselves and it felt quite and empty on her lonely planet. Coming up to a pad with a set of crossed stars her walk came to an end. SuzzySprite had explained that they were teleporter pads and that if they found one it would take her back to her house and unlock the next gate for her. Still it would require Oblivion to actually help her out and who knew where she was and if the asshole had enough time to help out. Still a nap would be nice if nothing else but first she had to talk to her friends.Her house was a strange tower of mismatched bits and pieces of what had been her house. She took a quick jaunt down almost a kilometer to the original house that somehow hadn’t collapsed despite the weight above it. They had expanded the base floor so as to have a new bit of home for her, with a couple of couches a super sized bed and her hamsters. George and Martin were such cute little ones and they seemed to love her. Hopping on her bed she pulled up her The Softest Blanket Ever up over her knees.GlimmerShimmer: [Hey love. That is absolutely horrible to hear. I bet you are feeling pretty down right now so message me when you are done taking out your anger on the ruffians that fill this game. We will get through this together.]Odinsfart: [Fuck. I can’t believe that happened. I’m stuck aren’t I? I got into the medium but I’m pretty fucking stuck right now. Look I didn’t know Echo all that well but like I care about you and no one deserves what happened. Message me when you can, or when you feel like it.]Pulling up a new channel, Alice pinged her two friends. Hopefully this wouldn’t get her into another crying fit, she didn’t really need that anymore. The tears wouldn’t change a damn thing and maybe those assholes were right and by some miracle Trever was still alive. The thought of that brought more tears to her eyes and she quickly focused back on her Wristtop.PoppyTarts: [So you both wanted to talk to me and I just don’t feel like repeating what will end up being pretty similar conversations. So yeah if we could just talk in here that would be great. There are some things I need to ask you two about as well. I got contacted by two people claiming to be the Creators and they made some rather absurd claims, one of which was being the Creators. There is no way that group of assholes are actually the Creators.]OdinsFart: [I got contacted by one ‘turntechGodhead’ who made a rather convincing argument that they were in fact the creators. In part by zipping through time to my house. Though I am not quite certain how I know that is what he fucking did. Like the fucker scared the shit out of me. But he was a pretty chill do so I guess I can’t hold that against him.]EmptyEcho: [Uh this is Jezbel, Trever’s sister. Uh do you mind if I join in on this conversation? I would have made my own account but I don’t know how and sorry this is probably just a very bad idea.]PoppyTarts: [Jezzie you’re welcome here. If I can find my way over to your house I’ll set you up your own account and computer. So like I stopped watching after the explosion. Did four people show up and try to help?]EmptyEcho: [Yeah. There is a really nice lady who has dog ears and her name is Jade. And then there is a guy who flew off and he wore all red and his name is Dave Strider. Plus there is this kinda funny guy whose name is John and then there is the crabby troll guy who I didn’t learn the name of…Jade is saying his name is Karkat. Uh can Jade join the conversation?]GlimmerShimmer: [My deepest apologies for my tardiness. I was busy teaching some ruffians a rather final lesson. You would think that the lot of them might start to wizen up but they keep pouring out of every nook and cranny to learn the same lesson, that I need more grist. To be fair I do. So either way. I’m so sorry Tarts. I can’t believe that happened. My apologies to you as well Jezzie.]PoppyTarts: [Yeah thanks. Uh Jezzie yeah I guess that Jade can join us in this conversation but I reserve the right to ban her from the server if she ends up being as much of an asshole as the other two were.]GardenGnostic: [Sorry about those two. They tend to be like that. John means well but he is a bit of a stinker still. Hasn’t grown up at all really. Anyway I just wanted to confirm what the two of them tried to tell you, that your friend Trever is in fact still alive and that there is also a Sprite version of him, though that one is a bit more difficult to explain. Suffice to say that your friend is alive and my friends John and Karkat are going to help him get back to him own starting location so as to make this whole thing run smoother, or as smooth as this game ever gets.]OdinsFart: [Why did you join our game? Or more accurately hijack it from us. Like why not get your own fucking version?]GardenGnostic: [We don’t really want to play again. The first time was plenty enough for us but there were a lot of rather bad things that came out of our session and we only barely managed to clean up our own mess and only because we had four sessions working together in the end. This can go sour in ways that are hard to grasp so we figured we would try to keep your game from hitting some of the same level of bad we had. So that is why we are here, though I do hope we can be friends.]GlimmerShimmer: [I would love to be friends with you. You seem like such a nice person already. I don’t know about the rest of your friends but at the very least there can be warm feelings between the two of us. Its hard to even explain the gratitude I have right now for having you here. If you weren’t we may have already failed at this game. Though calling it a game seems wrong anymore.]PoppyTarts: [Does this other version of Echo not have a computer? Why hasn’t he contacted us?]EmptyEcho: [I don’t know. I don’t think so. He didn’t like keeping stuff in his inventory manager because of the hassle of it so he may not have one with him now. We didn’t get a chance to play with the Alchemiter yet. Well okay we have but he didn’t. I hope he is alright though. Waking up on some weird planet must have been scary.]