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“Blackness… and a rising chill of uncertainty. Was it over?”
The Narrator recited the scripted lines in an appropriately mysterious voice. The answer, of course, was yes, and both he and Stanley knew it, but it was always important to remember that the audience was seeing it for the very first time.
Right on cue, the door opened. If The Narrator had had a mouth, he would have grinned instinctively. This was his favorite bit of narration– it gave him a weird sense of pride watching Stanley finally go free.
“Yes! He had won. He had defeated the machine, unshackled himself from someone else’s command. Freedom was mere moments away! And yet, even as the immense door slowly opened, Stanley reflected on how many puzzles still lay unsolved…”
Something The Narrator had learned while looking up potential background assets for The Stanley Parable was that cassette tapes, if used too much, could wear out and become useless within years, the precious memories or delicate information or shameful confessions stored on them reduced to nothing but garbled static, as if it was never there at all. It was a good thing, then, that The Narrator wasn’t a voice on a tape recorder. Yes, as he rattled off the last few lines of his little monologue, he felt a hint of pride that the quality of his voice hadn’t changed a bit since the very first time he’d seen Stanley out the door. A perfect run… was there anything better than a perfect run, unmarred by any of Stanley’s silly wrong choices? The mind controls had been deactivated…
“...And Stanley was happy.”
Everything faded to black as the game restarted, and yet something within The Narrator glowed at the sound of his favorite line.
But back to business. Feeling a bit nervous, The Narrator cleared his (metaphorical) throat and turned… metaphorically… to his esteemed audience.
“Well! What did you think?”
He looked eagerly to the darkness for a reaction. The darkness, in return, stared into his soul– and then smiled politely.
Then the darkness (who was not so much actual darkness as he was a very good substitute for it, but The Narrator could never resist a dramatic pseudonym) spoke, in his voice made of wishes and TV snow.
“HOW VERY / VERY / … / INTERESTING.”
The dividing slashes were audible in his computer-worn voice, and while the inclusion of an obvious, written-out pause before the selection of an adjective as vague as interesting would ordinarily have come off to The Narrator as an insult, he knew that this particular pause must be just a reflection on the narrative mastery of what he had just witnessed. After all, surely a creator as sophisticated as the one before him would appreciate The Stanley Parable’s genius!
(The Narrator was gifted at wishful thinking.)
Doctor Gaster frowned slightly, staring at the fuzzy title screen. There were no real screens where they were, of course, but the doctor was corporeal, so The Narrator had set up what he thought was quite a neat little set of monitors from which he could watch the game. His guest directed his empty eyesockets to the general surrounding blackness where The Narrator resided.
“YES / THIS STORY IS A KIND ONE / IT SETS THE VESSEL FREE / ALLOWS IT A LIFE OUTSIDE THE HIGHER BEING’S CONTROL”
It took The Narrator a moment to realize who he meant by “the vessel and the higher being.”
Gaster’s empty eyes searched the darkness, clearly trying to find some solid thing to direct his words at. “ARE YOU CERTAIN YOU DO NOT HAVE / A NAME ?”
“A name? Not that I recall… do I need one? I’ve always thought The Narrator works splendidly. Has a nice air of intrigue to it. And it is what I am.”
In the doctor’s empty reaction, The Narrator suddenly saw a need to clarify that before Gaster’s brilliance, he was nothing.
“Oh, but, of course,” he added quickly, “You can call me whatever you’d like, ha. ‘No one can choose who they are in this world’ and all that. Brilliant philosophy, by the way. It’s what I’ve been trying to live by, too.”
Gaster’s expression did not change for a moment– and then his cracked mouth twisted into a smile. It wasn’t the smile from before, polite and interested, but a cautious, curious gesture. He looked like he was watching a small insect do something unusual.
“AND WHY IS THAT ?”
“Well, choices are what makes this game so bloody difficult to run. For example… look at this.”
The Narrator brought a new image onto the monitors, colors crashing through the dark and reflecting off Gaster’s egg-like head– a full overhead view of the game’s map as he had originally designed, Stanley’s office, two doors, one path, one way up, one great outdoors.
“Look at that. Perfectly straightforward, like a game should be. There’s a story for Stanley laid out right in front of him, a path for him to follow, absolutely NO way for him to possibly get lost, and yet…” He sighed. “Watch this. It’s a video log of a run from last week. I like to keep track.”
Once again, The Narrator, in his own metaphysical way, engaged in an incredible show of technical skill and computer mastery that amounted to fast-forwarding the video log to the point just before the two doors room. Unfortunately, all Gaster saw was an image on a monitor changing on its own. The log began to play.
“See? Two doors. Of course, as you can hear–” he paused to let Gaster hear the narration directing Stanley to the left– “there’s a simple answer. All he has to do is enter the door on the left. But does he?”
The small Stanley on the screen deliberated for a minute or so, approaching and backing away from both doors at least twice as well as looking behind him at the obviously closed door he came through… and then turned and walked through the door on the right.
The Narrator groaned. This was always painfully annoying to watch. “NO! No, he does not! He’s been here before, he knows the left door is the correct choice, and yet he still decides he doesn’t want to listen to me, the only other person there, he doesn’t want to find his coworkers, he doesn’t want to be free, he just wants to muck around and make everything more complicated. Because look!”
He paused to bring back the aerial view of the game map. Just as he had expected, it had changed– drastically.
After the two doors room, instead of just the one path through to the end, there were now several branching paths leading off of the right door, new corridors having sprung up in seemingly random places– before the cargo room, off to the right of the maintenance room, one leading off the screen entirely to some unknown fate. There were lines representing hallways and boxes representing rooms and a weird patch of clouds covered in polka dots presumably representing… heaven? All weaving around and through each other into knots. Gone was any semblance of order. Just looking at it made The Narrator wish for fists so he could shake or clench them. He let out a dramatic, hopeless sigh as Gaster raised an eyebrow at the mess.
“See, already everything’s ruined! One wrong move, one single choice the game wasn’t programmed to handle, and it starts making up new routes willy-nilly! Doesn’t he know that anywhere he goes from here will lead to chaos, and I’ll have to improvise an ending on the fly? Does he even care? I swear…”
As he complained, Gaster listened sympathetically, looking at the screen as a sort of replacement for an actual person to focus on. It worked out quite well, really– Gaster had not spoken to anyone in an amount of time unable to be conveyed in words, and The Narrator was clearly used to doing all the talking. So Gaster simply sat on the dinky little swivel chair his host had conjured up for him, and listened.
Eventually, The Narrator wound down, suddenly conscious of the fact that he was speaking with a real person with the ability to speak, and that real people with the ability to speak usually wanted to be included in conversations. “And so, you see, that’s why your game’s philosophy is so inspiring to me. I only wish I could create a game like yours, a game that dolts like Stanley can’t ruin by ignoring the directions they’re given. How do you manage it? I’d love to know.”
He almost wished he had a mouth so he could return the amused (almost fond, though that could have been The Narrator’s imagination), gentle smile Gaster was giving the screen. He spoke through scarred, brittle bone.
“A QUESTION.”
“Yes?”
“WHEN YOU SPEAK OF / ‘ STANLEY ’ / DO YOU REFER TO THE VESSEL ITSELF / OR THE BEING GUIDING IT ?”
The question gave The Narrator pause. No matter. Gaster could wait. The two of them weren’t exactly short on time in their little nothingness.
It rattled around in The Narrator’s brain. The “being,” or player, as he thought it more natural to call them, wasn’t someone he thought about very often– not under normal circumstances, at least.
It troubled him. Finally, he started, “Stanley isn’t an ‘it.’”
Gaster betrayed no hint of a reaction to this, aside from a slight pause. “... / OF COURSE. / MY APOLOGIES.”
“And he isn’t– well, he isn’t a vessel, really. That’s not how I think of him. He’s the hero. My hero. I couldn’t have The Stanley Parable without Stanley.”
The monitors before Gaster suddenly shifted in color, changing to display a plain black loading screen. The words The end is never the end ran across the bottom of the screen in blocky text. Whatever was loading seemed to be taking a while.
“You see,” The Narrator went on thoughtfully, “He’s really a lot like your… What was their name? Kris? He’s similar to Kris. You couldn’t take Kris out of your experiment and replace them with just anyone else, could you?”
Gaster frowned, evidently perishing the thought. “CERTAINLY NOT.”
“Then you see.”
“I / … / UNDERSTAND YOUR ARGUMENT.”
The loading screen bar zipped to 100%, and the title screen of The Stanley Parable was back on the monitors as the doctor folded his hollow hands in his lap.
“HOWEVER / I MUST ADMIT MANY OF THE SIMILARITIES / ELUDE ME”
“Oh? How so?”
For the first time in a while, Gaster shifted his gaze away from the monitors, turning and searching aimlessly in the dark for someone who wasn’t there.
“THE HERO OF YOUR STORY / OF YOUR ‘ PARABLE ’ / DOES INDEED HAVE A NAME / A PAST / AND A PURPOSE / HOWEVER MEAGER. / BUT / IF I AM NOT MISTAKEN / THE SIMILARITIES BETWEEN HIM AND YOUNG KRIS END THERE. / KRIS IS NOT A PASSIVE FOLLOWER / CONTENT TO OBEY THE HIGHER BEINGS’ / EVERY WHIM / AT NIGHT THEY TEAR THEIR POSSESSOR FROM THEIR BODY / AND IMPOSE THEIR WILL ON THEIR UNKNOWING WORLD. / YOUR STANLEY / … / I FIND IT DIFFICULT / TO IMAGINE HIM EVEN THINKING OF FREEING HIMSELF.”
The Narrator was silent, and though Gaster had only known him about an hour, he could tell this was not a good sign.
“DO YOU SEE ?” he continued, taking on a more polite tone. “DO YOU UNDERSTAND MY CONFUSION ? / I AM CERTAIN THAT STANLEY CARRIES OUT HIS STORY / WONDERFULLY / BUT DOES HE POSSESS THE SELF AWARENESS / TO DO THAT OF ITS OWN ACCORD ?”
For the next minute or so, there was nothing. Though Gaster was used to this, it was disconcerting to potentially lose his only conversation partner in millennia. By the time The Narrator spoke up, the doctor was beginning to worry he had hallucinated the whole thing.
“I’ll tell you what,” he said quietly, Gaster’s “it” not having escaped him, “Watch something for me.”
The monitors jumped to life once again– the constant sudden flashes of color were beginning to sear themselves onto Gaster’s brain (well, not BRAIN brain, but…)– and now the doctor was looking at another log, this one paused on a screen of the doorway to Stanley’s boss’s office, the one he had accessed the mind control facility through in the perfect ending. And… there was a bucket in his hands.
“This was a while ago,” The Narrator continued. There was something unreadable in his tone that wasn’t quite as binary as Gaster was used to. “That bucket is the The Stanley Parable 2 Reassurance Bucket™. I gave it to him myself, so… so he would have a way to make the overwhelming sameness slightly less… arresting. I couldn’t speak, here. I could only watch. I almost wasn’t there. But I think about it all the time. Look.”
The log resumed. The doors were open. Stanley walked briskly through them…
“Stepping into–”
The narration was abruptly cut short as Stanley, without even turning around, immediately changed direction and walked straight back out.
The doors closed before him. Gaster frowned, leaning forward in his chair. The complete silence, the utter lack of any sort of narration whatsoever was thick in the air as Stanley turned back and retraced his steps the way he came. Down the stairs… through the hall… back into the meeting room… the two doors room… more identical blocks of desks…
“For the record,” said The Narrator evenly, breaking the silence (to Gaster’s relief), “the journey back, and up, is technically the player. But after that…”
Before Gaster could ask what he meant by “up,” the question was answered for him. He stared at the screen, trying to make sense of everything going on in front of him as Stanley entered an open door in front of his office that had not been open before, and began ascending several dark, dingy flights of stairs all pointing the same way– a bay, as directed by the massive signs, for an escape pod.
Up, up, up. Gaster could not believe it. Was Stanley going to free himself from his prison once and for all?
The Narrator noticed Gaster’s expression, and clarified, “I know what you’re thinking. But since the writing on the sign is rather hard to read, I’ll tell you now that that escape pod won’t work for him unless he and I are both present. And I’m not, here. Not in any meaningful way.”
Finally, Stanley arrived at floor 760. The anticipation cut at Gaster through the dark. “THEN WHAT –”
The door opened into a black abyss, and the momentary complete darkness of the screen made a chill run up Gaster’s backbone. Then the bucket reappeared in the corner, as well as a small, red escape pod in the distance, and the old tension came back.
Stanley’s walking speed was fair, but even so, it seemed an eternity before he reached the pod. Gaster’s grip on the armrests of his chair tightened involuntarily. This shared darkness had never seemed quite so blinding as the escape pod grew larger and larger before him… it seemed like freedom was only a step away…
…And then Stanley gently placed the bucket inside the escape pod, caressed it lovingly as if he was wiping away its tears, and regarded it for a long moment before the escape pod door slid shut.
And everything went black. It jumped out at Gaster, an explosion of nothing after an hour of the first real light he had seen in millennia.
“HE CHOSE TO FREE THAT BUCKET / INDEPENDENTLY OF THE PLAYER ?”
When The Narrator finally spoke again, his voice was different– somewhat softer, and less matter-of-fact. He was no longer narrating, only speaking. No, Gaster decided, there was decidedly nothing binary about the feelings behind his words.
“I think about it all the time,” he repeated. “I gave him the bucket half as a joke. It was only a demonstration of one of the pivotal features of my vision for The Stanley Parable 2. I knew it would do well to comfort him in times of distress, but I never knew he would get so attached…”
Suddenly, he laughed. It was a harsh, sarcastic laugh, resentment simmering underneath it, but even so, Gaster couldn’t say it wasn’t nice to hear some kind of laughter again.
“Isn’t it funny? Isn’t it just the most hilarious damned thing you’ve ever seen? That thing feels nothing, it knows nothing, and yet he loves it so much he’d set it free instead of even trying to save himself! I don’t understand it! I can’t understand it! He’d rather listen to that bucket than me! For god’s sake, I only gave it to him in the first place so he’d understand–”
At that, he stopped abruptly, seemingly catching up to his own words. Gaster waited patiently. Now seemed like a good time to just let him speak.
“Anyways,” he mumbled, “that’s how I know he isn’t just a vessel, and that he does think and feel. And he still isn’t an ‘it.’ I don’t know how you do it– create a story that can’t be altered, can’t be touched by Kris or the player. No matter what I do, there always seems to be another option– and no matter what I do, he always seems to take it.”
“DID YOU NOT SHOW ME A ‘ PERFECT RUN ’ ONLY A MOMENT AGO ?”
“Well, yes, but– okay, sometimes he does what I say, but it’s never on his first run, and never his last either. He only ever does it after he’s dug up some other completely unrelated endings. They all do. One ending… what I wouldn’t give for a game that’s content to only end once.”
Gaster took in his words, thinking of his own world– not Deltarune, but the one from which he came. That beautiful, messy timeline, toyed with by hundreds upon hundreds of the curious, playful beings whose help he had enlisted to carry out his experiment. He wondered how this unhappy entity would fare in that first world…
“WOULD IT SURPRISE YOU TO KNOW / THAT I CAME FROM A WORLD / MUCH LIKE YOURS ?”
The loading screen bar on the monitors ground abruptly to a halt. “...Like mine?”
Gaster smiled kindly. “YES / BEFORE THE ACCIDENT THAT SENT ME HERE / I WAS AN ORDINARY MONSTER / EXACTLY THE SAME AS ANY OF THE BEINGS IN MY WORLD. / I HAD NO KNOWLEDGE OF MY TRUE SITUATION / OF OUR TRUE SITUATION / IT WAS ONLY UPON SHATTERING ACROSS TIME AND SPACE / THAT I DISCOVERED THE TRUTH ABOUT OUR UNIVERSE. / I HAVE BEEN ALONE HERE EVER SINCE / NOT A SINGLE PERSON TO SPEAK WITH / OTHER THAN THE HIGHER BEINGS. / I CAN ONLY HOPE / THAT MY MESSAGES REACH THEM NOW…”
“Actually,” The Narrator jumped in impulsively, “I saw one last week. They’re really not much fun. They called me preachy and unfunny and said they wished they could skip my dialogue. So I really don’t think they’re worth your time–”
Gaster stared at the screen blankly. Realizing his colossal social faux pas, The Narrator tried to salvage and sputtered, “Um. Well. Some of them can be fun, though, I suppose. The people at destructoid.com have been quite nice indeed. Has a James Stephanie Sterling ever taken your survey?– Oh, but that’s for another time. I’m terribly sorry. You… you were saying about your old world…?”
To his relief, Gaster chuckled– a low, staticy sound. It was as if the man talked in morse code.
“YES / MY HOME WORLD. / IT WAS A GAME LIKE THIS / IT HAD MANY ENDINGS / EACH ACHIEVED DEPENDING ON ONE FACTOR / LOVE”
The Narrator tried not to let his bemusement show. “...Love?”
“NOT THE LOVE YOU KNOW OF / DEAR NARRATOR / IN THIS WORLD / LOVE WAS AN ACRONYM. / IT STOOD FOR ‘ LEVEL OF VIOLENCE. ’
“THE MORE THE PLAYER KILLED / THE MORE ‘ LOVE ’ THEY WOULD GAIN. / IT WOULD MAKE THEM STRONGER IN BATTLE / BUT THE LIVES LOST WHEN THE PLAYER DECIDED TO MAX OUT THEIR LOVE IN RUNS / WERE UNJUSTIFIABLE…”
The Narrator very nearly made a comment on what a clever subversion of classic RPG tropes that was, and how the multiple endings thing was the only thing really stopping him from appreciating that, but he wisely bit his non-tongue.
“YES” continued Gaster, “THOSE RUNS DEVASTATE ME / NOW THAT I AM IN THE PROPER POSITION TO KEEP TRACK OF THE RESETS / HOWEVER / WHEN A PLAYER DECIDED NOT TO FIGHT AT ALL / … / THEY WOULD ACHIEVE THE TRUE ENDING. / THE BARRIER WOULD BE BROKEN. / THE MONSTERS WOULD BE FREED FROM THEIR PRISON. / AND EVERYONE COULD FINALLY BE / … / HAPPY.”
Now how could a skinless, eyeless skull look so wistful? There was an unnatural waver in Gaster’s choppy voice as he spoke.
“OF COURSE / I WAS ERASED FROM THAT TIMELINE / THAT UNIVERSE / LONG BEFORE THAT RUN EVEN BECAME A POSSIBILITY. / I CANNOT JOIN THEM. / ALL I CAN DO / IS WATCH.”
The loading bar, previously stagnant on the screen, inexplicably crawled back to 0% and disappeared. The end is never the end, promised the words on the now mostly empty monitor. The Narrator’s endless darkness had never felt quite so small.
Right now, this was all that existed, that would ever exist. He and W.D. Gaster, together and yet so far apart by virtue of The Narrator’s immaterial nature. He tried to concentrate himself entirely into their little corner of emptiness. To each, the other suddenly felt very far away.
“How long,” he said in a small voice so as not to break anything, “were you alone out there? You know. In the nothing.”
Gaster did not look away from the holes in his folded hands. His hands which were not shaking. “TIME / QUITE LITERALLY / OUT OF MIND.”
It should have been funny. It probably would have been under different circumstances. It was always nice to know your hero had a sense of humour. But as he tried to think of something to say next, The Narrator found he had never felt less funny in his life. A man alone for centuries untold, left to buckle under the weight of his vanishing sanity… something tugged at the edges of his memory. He promptly pushed it away and locked it in the very back of his mind where it belonged.
“HAVE YOU EVER BEEN ALONE FOR SO LONG / TRULY ALONE / THAT YOU HARDLY HEAR YOUR OWN CRIES FOR HELP ?”
The question hit The Narrator like a bucket to the face. He had not. He had not. He had not. The something that was pulling at the curtain of his mind began to pull harder. A cabin in the woods. Some great reviews. Some not so great reviews. UNFUNNY?!? Thirty minutes. Twelve hours. A year.
He suddenly became aware of the fact that he had been silent for slightly too long. He hoped Gaster hadn’t noticed. (He had.)
“No,” he said quietly. Gaster noted his strained voice. He could see so much in this sound. “No, I– I can’t say I have. I’ve– I’ve always had Stanley. I mean, he’s not much for conversation, but it’s never truly mattered. I speak, and he– he listens. He can’t help but listen. That’s all that matters to me… I can’t imagine what it must have been like for you.”
The silence that followed– it choked The Narrator. But at least… at least the doctor was listening. At least he had been heard.
Now Gaster was opening his cracked mouth again. His scarred face was twisted in a look of concern– the same concern that Stanley had shown when the two had come face to not-face again for the first time in a year (two years?) in that little room… that anxiety… eyes just as hollow as the doctor’s empty sockets…
Suddenly, the whole facade seemed pointless. The Narrator gave in and let himself speak.
“That was a lie. I don’t know why I just said that. I… It’s difficult to explain, but… oh, it all seems so stupid now. You’ll think me quite pathetic, but… once upon a time, not so long ago, I saw a particularly unfavorable review of The Stanley Parable on Steam. …It was only a review. It wasn’t important. I didn’t even know the person who wrote it. But they said they wished there was a skip button, and… I let it get to me. I built one.”
He paused then, and Gaster frowned. “IF YOU DO NOT WISH TO SPEAK OF IT –”
“No, no, I do. I should. I haven’t even thought about it since it happened. Try not to, heh. I mean, it was unpleasant for Stanley, too, and I shouldn’t… I won’t make him listen to me rant about it when he can’t even talk back. The long and short of it is, the button malfunctioned, and every time Stanley pressed it, it would freeze him in time– but the skips got longer every press.”
Gaster’s eyes widened. “AH / I SEE / PRAY DO NOT FEEL OBLIGATED TO CONTINUE / I BELIEVE I HAVE HEARD ENOUGH TO UNDERSTAND”
The Narrator smiled inwardly. (He had no other way of smiling.) “Of course you have.”
That was that, then. He had done it, had told someone about his ordeal. That was what he was supposed to do, right?
Still, something within him compelled him to say, “I think I died there. In that room. It’s all so fuzzy now, but… I remember years and years of fear, a terrible, unyielding fear, then hopelessness, then anger… then nothing. I don’t think I ever left that room alive. Even now–”
As he spoke, the monitor screen began to change once more, switching to the game’s title screen– but something was wrong. The screen began to zoom in on the computer on the desk, then into the computer shown on the desk on that computer, then on and on and on…
Gaster didn’t think The Narrator realized it was happening. It went on and on, and so did he.
“Even now, I don’t feel… fully here. Fully alive. I think… I think I’m still in that room, with that terrible button, all alone. Do you understand? I never left.” His tone began to turn frantic. The zooming in on the screen quickened. “I never left. And I’m never going to leave. If I’m everywhere by default, then a part of me is always going to be stuck in there, even if I stick close to Stanley– even if most of me is following him, some of me is always going to be in that room, with– with him again, but really alone, because he’d rather fast-forward through the next hundred billion years than talk to me for thirty minutes–”
The monitors bluescreened, then shut down. All of a sudden, it was as if there was never any light at all. Gaster stood for the first time since his arrival, feeling the complete darkness settle between his bones.
“ARE YOU THERE ?” he called into the nothing. “ARE WE STILL CONNECTED ?”
For a moment, his cry was met with silence, and he was struck with a terrible fear that he had not known in a long time– the fear he had felt when he had first been shattered, when he had tried to call for help and found his lungs filled with darkness.
Desperate, he stretched out his arms and began pressing random keys on the massive keyboard before him, hoping to reactivate the monitors– but he couldn’t see a thing, and the setup was likely different from the ancient monster technology and extradimensional consoles he was used to.
He pressed space. He mashed the letter keys. He felt the lower monitor screens for a power button. Nothing happened. The silence was deafening. He was losing himself again–
“You’ll break the whole console if you keep mashing the controls,” said a small, tired voice.
Relief flooded Gaster’s bones. He turned away, keeping his hands on the keys, though he could see no one. “I THOUGHT WE HAD BEEN / DISCONNECTED.”
“Heaven forbid. Here.”
Just like magic, the screens lit up once more, this time on a new image– a strange line of colored dots, rising up from the bottom of the screen to the top, prompting a new row of a different color to appear at the bottom. It went in rainbow order– red, orange, yellow…
Determination, bravery, justice, said some part of Gaster automatically. He shook his head, focusing on the shifting waves of light.
“It’s nice, isn’t it?”
And what he meant, Gaster could tell, was, “You like it here, right?”
“YES.”
It really was nice. Strangely calming. At least, Gaster no longer heard his heartbeat in his ears. “WHAT IS IT ?”
Another couple minutes passed before The Narrator simply said, “It’s peaceful.”
And Gaster had to agree. Watching these waves, he suddenly felt a serenity that he had not known in time immemorial– or was that because of the company? This strange voice in the dark really wasn’t all that bad, he thought.
“ARE YOU RECOVERED ?”
There were two ways The Narrator could answer this question– the easy way, and the hard way. The easy way was to say, yes, of course, it was just a lapse of control, won’t happen again, let’s change the subject, and the hard way was, well…
“Was it the same way for you?”
He watched the doctor intently, more to assure himself he wasn’t alone than anything else.
“YES.”
“Does it ever… stop?”
Gaster did not reply.
“Actually, don’t tell me. I’m sorry. I don’t think I want to hear the answer.”
He tried to make the smile audible in his voice.
Doctor Gaster smiled fondly– wait, was that fondness? Yes, it definitely was, The Narrator’s imagination wasn’t playing tricks on him anymore– and sat back down. “YOU ARE WISE. / AND VERY TALENTED.” He thought a moment, then added, “YOU MUST NOT BLAME STANLEY. / HE WAS ONLY DOING / AS DIRECTED.”
“I know. He always does. The only way he would ever dare to disobey the player was for the sake of that stupid bucket.”
“FORGIVE ME IF THIS SOUNDS IMPERTINENT–”
“Oh, I’m sure you could never be impertinent.”
“DO NOT BE SO SURE.” He smiled. “WHY DID YOU TRULY GIVE HIM THE BUCKET / IF YOU RESENT IT SO ?”
The lights on the screen stopped moving, suspended in midair, just like that. Did he even know, Gaster wondered, that he was affecting the image on the monitors like this? He decided not to tell him.
“I… I don’t resent it.” His voice was a little less exhausted now. He was, slowly but surely, getting his wind back. “How could I? It’s a bucket. It’s not as if it could do anything to me. I just… well, he treats it so well. So unreasonably well, like it really is a thinking, feeling, living thing that cares for him.”
He chuckled at that last bit. Gaster tried to gauge the meaning behind his words, but it was difficult with no facial expressions or body language to go off of. He wondered if The Narrator was incorporeal by design…
“AND THIS / … / BOTHERS YOU ?”
“Well, I mean, it’s a bucket!” The lights on the screen abruptly began running across the screen from left to right. “It’s like he thinks it loves him! I swear, he’s given an ordinary bucket with some stupid flowery title like the ‘The Stanley Parable 2 Reassurance Bucket™’ and a couple of stickers and suddenly he can’t bear to live without it! He doesn’t even try to hide it! He’d die to save that bucket! I suppose I just…”
The truth lingered in the back of his mind, daring him to speak it and make it real. No. He had had enough of the truth for today. If Gaster wanted to know, he could guess.
Unfortunately for The Narrator, W.D. Gaster was very good at guessing.
“YOU SAID EARLIER / THAT THERE WAS SOMETHING YOU WANTED HIM TO / ‘ UNDERSTAND ’ / THROUGH THE BUCKET”
The Narrator’s voice did not change. “Did I?”
“IF I MAY BE SO BOLD / JUST AS THE BUCKET DOES NOT THINK NOR SPEAK / NEITHER DOES STANLEY / AM I CORRECT ?”
The Narrator felt no need to reply.
“YOU BESTOWED UPON HIM AN OBJECT THAT WAS / WITHOUT A GUIDE / MUCH THE SAME AS HIM / AND YOU ASKED HIM / TO UNDERSTAND.”
The colored dots on the screen froze in their tracks.
“You,” The Narrator finally said, “are the worst possible real person for me to have gotten stuck with in all my millennia of existence.”
For a moment, Gaster simply stared out into the black. Then, as if on cue, they both broke into fits of surprised laughter. The doctor’s laugh sounded like a manic dial-up tone, but it was real, filling their shared nothing with something, and that made it all the sweeter.
“Ah…” The Narrator snorted. “I think the last time I got to laugh was when I told Stanley all those jokes about his love for the bucket.”
“YOU WERE THE ONE LAUGHING / AT YOUR OWN JOKES ?”
“Well, it wasn’t as if Stanley could laugh at them!”
With this, the chuckling stopped. There was, The Narrator abruptly realized, a rather unhappy element to that sentence.
“Of course, that doesn’t matter to me,” he said thoughtfully, after a pause. “So what if he doesn’t speak, or laugh? I can do those things for the both of us. At least… at least he can hear me. That’s all that matters, is that he knows I’m there. I mean, I’ve always had him. You… you’ve had no one, all this time.”
Gaster looked down at whatever was below him. He suddenly found that he no longer felt the need to keep a smile plastered on his face for the sake of his eager companion.
“IF MY EXPERIMENT GOES AS PLANNED / THEN ALL WILL BE RESOLVED / AND I WILL BE HAPPY. / THERE IS NO NEED / TO DWELL ON THINGS PAST. / … / YOU TOLD STANLEY JOKES ?”
The Narrator tried to suppress a chuckle. “Oh, is it really so hard to believe? I can be funny, you know. No matter WHAT the Steam reviews say.”
“I AM CERTAIN HE / APPRECIATED IT”
There was some poorly disguised hope in his voice when he said, “You really think so?”
“THERE ARE PLENTY OF VERY REAL THINGS IN OUR UNIVERSE / THAT CANNOT BE SEEN.”
“Well.” Yes, it meant a lot to him, that much was obvious. “I suppose I’ll just have to take your word for it.”
He stopped there, but Gaster suspected he was not done talking. The waves of light on the screen had resumed their normal course– wait, were there more of them now, or was that his imagination? He watched as he waited for The Narrator to gather his thoughts.
“I know he resents me,” said The Narrator quietly. “It’s not a secret. And I can’t blame him, either. I mean, I’m the one who resents a bucket, I’m not one to judge. I know he hates me… Huh. I think I’m beginning to understand his fixation with the bucket after all. What’ve you done to me, Doctor?”
Gaster smiled.
“Yes,” he continued. “I suppose it makes sense. I suppose there is a certain appeal in being alone, with nothing but this– this thing to keep you company, this thing that can’t feel anything for you. There’s an appeal… in thinking, and continuing to think, in spite of yourself, maybe, maybe it does love me. Maybe… maybe he does…”
He felt no need to finish the sentence. That was all that needed to be said, and The Narrator was a firm believer in saying exactly what needed to be said. He never went on tangents, and if you said otherwise, he’d sue you for defamation of character.
Gaster was still watching the screen. The light shone on his skull. “MAYBE.”
Apparently, he also realized that that was all The Narrator was going to say, because he turned to face the surrounding blackness and said in a gentle voice, “YOU ARE VERY TALENTED / DEAR NARRATOR. / THE STANLEY PARABLE / GLOWS BRIGHTLY / FROM YOUR HOPE.”
This reference, as expected, delighted The Narrator. He launched into his next excited tangent. “Oh, my, you saw that?! What did you think? Is it alright that I borrowed from you? I only meant it as a tribute. An homage to the great creators before me, you know. I always thought that was quite clever, what you did. Hacking a Twitter account to announce an entire demo twenty-four hours in advance? Genius! I only wish that had occurred to me in 2012! Say, have you ever thought about putting emotion booths in your demo? Because that worked like a charm for me. Really touches the hearts of players. Oh, I’m so glad I finally get to discuss this sort of thing with you! Again, Deltarune is a masterpiece of fatalistic gameplay. Do–”
He stopped suddenly, and Gaster couldn’t tell whether it was to catch his breath or because he had suddenly remembered that real conversations required giving the other person a chance to speak once in a while. “YES ?”
“Do you? Have any… pointers? For making a game that players can’t derail with their choices? I’d really appreciate it.”
Another silence followed as Gaster considered, brow furrowed. The silences, he thought, were getting less scary and more… well, normal. That was a good sign. Gaps in conversations had not been normal for him for a very long time.
At last, he shook his head. “I AM AFRAID THAT THIS IS THE SORT OF THING / I CANNOT ADVISE YOU ON. / THE AMOUNT OF CHOICE IN ANY GIVEN GAME / DEPENDS LARGELY ON ITS CREATOR.”
“On its creator? What do you mean? Is it something I have to change myself? Because I’ll do it, if so. I’ll do whatever needs to be done. Just tell me where to start.”
Gaster’s fond, slightly amused smile wasn’t very encouraging. “YES / I AM CERTAIN YOU WOULD LOVE NOTHING MORE / THAN A CLEAR SET OF INSTRUCTIONS / BUT I CANNOT GIVE YOU THAT / THIS GAME – / THIS WORLD – / IT IS NOT FILLED WITH BRANCHING PATHS BY CHANCE. / IF A CREATOR TRULY WISHES FOR THEIR GAME TO BE ENTIRELY FATALISTIC / THEN IT WILL BE / AND IF IT IS NOT / THEN IT IS NOT WHAT THAT CREATOR TRULY WANTS.”
Though The Narrator liked Gaster very much, he was getting a little tired of the confusing, unfortunate truths that kept being brought to light while he was in the room. He sighed.
“Are you saying… that I like this mess? That I don’t actually want a good, simple story? Please. Haven’t I made it clear that–”
“WHAT YOU HAVE MADE CLEAR / IS THAT YOU HAVE MUCH TO LEARN / YOUR GAME IS A MASTERPIECE. / IT DOES NOT NEED TO BE / ‘ CLEANED UP ’ / AS YOU SAY. / IT SUCCEEDS / AS IT IS NOW / IN TELLING A VERY POWERFUL STORY OF CHOICE / AND FREE WILL. / REMOVING THE CHOICES THAT MAKE IT ‘ SO BLOODY DIFFICULT TO RUN ’ / WOULD BE GUTTING IT OF ALL THAT MAKES IT SPECIAL.”
“But I have a different story that I want to tell. You saw it, earlier. You said it was… kind.”
“IT WAS KIND / IT SET STANLEY FREE OF HIS NARRATIVE PRISON / AND LET HIM GO TO FORGE HIS OWN PATH”
“So why shouldn’t it be the only one? Why does… why does it have to end so many times?”
“ … / TELL ME SOMETHING.”
“Yes?”
“WHEN YOU FIRST BEGAN USING STANLEY FOR THIS GAME / WHAT DID YOU THINK OF HIM ?”
The Narrator would have frowned if he could have.
“I didn’t, really. I knew what he was. He was a character I invented to carry out the story I’d thought up in my head. I gave him a name, an office, and a path to follow, and I smiled when he won. That was all he was. A character.”
“AND NOW ? / WHAT IS HE TO YOU ?”
Silence. The monitors continued to bathe Gaster in their light. Green, blue, cyan…
(Kindness, integrity, patience…)
The Narrator wondered. The doctor waited. Patience.
“I don’t know anymore.”
“BUT HE IS NO LONGER / JUST A CHARACTER / CORRECT ?”
The Narrator’s words shaped a rueful smile. “I think that’s been proven.”
“IS IT NOT BETTER / THAT YOU WOULD DISCOVER THIS ABOUT HIM / THROUGH COUNTLESS ERRANT ROUTES / THAN STAY IGNORANT OF HIS TRUE POTENTIAL / AND YOUR TRUE FEELINGS / BY NEVER STRAYING FROM THE PATH YOU GAVE HIM ?”
“I– I don’t know. He’s certainly become more… real lately. And I suppose ‘real’ is always nice. But… I wrote that story because seeing someone unshackle themself from someone else’s command and walk off into the sunset made me happy. This game is my whole world. I don’t exist, can’t exist outside of it. All those other routes… they’re new, certainly, but most of them end terribly. You can’t know how many… undesirable things have happened because Stanley’s decided he doesn’t want to listen to me.”
At that moment, a curious thing happened– the screen with the waves of color momentarily glitched out, a different image flashing on the screen for half a second before returning to the idyllic digital rainbow. He only caught a vague impression of sharp, dark lines spiraling upward before it was as if nothing had changed at all.
“IN MY HOME WORLD / IT WAS IMPOSSIBLE FOR PLAYERS / TO ACHIEVE THE TRUE ENDING ON THEIR VERY FIRST RUN. / A RESET WAS ALWAYS REQUIRED / BEFORE ALL THE NECESSARY PREPARATIONS COULD BE MADE / HAPPINESS IS NEVER INSTANT / IT TAKES MUCH TIME”
There was a strange note in The Narrator's voice as he asked, “And… are you happy?”
Of course, Gaster could tell that what he was really saying was, “Does it get better?” and “Will I be alright?” and “Please tell me this won’t be forever.”
And Gaster said, “I DO NOT KNOW. / BUT I AM NOT ALONE.”
The words hung in the stagnant air, almost seeming to echo, though there were no walls in their immaterial home.
In the ensuing silence, The Narrator smiled.
“I wish your Kris could meet Stanley.”
Gaster grinned. “YOU DO NOT WANT THAT.”
“I do. I’d like to see what that child thinks of the bucket. They could eat moss together. They’d get on like a house on fire. The only problem is I’m not sure about the influence they’d have on Stanley…”
“AS YOU WISH. / BUT IT WOULD BE YOUR FUNERAL.”
“I’d love a funeral. Never had one of those before. Do you ever wonder what your own funeral would be like?”
Gaster tapped his fingers on the armrests of his swivel chair thoughtfully.
“I HAVE / OCCASIONALLY / I RATHER ENJOY IMAGINING IT / THE IDEA THAT MY LOVED ONES WOULD NOTICE MY ABSENCE / COMFORTS ME.”
“...I’m sorry. I forgot–”
“DO NOT APOLOGIZE.”
There was another awkward pause as The Narrator scrambled for something reassuring to say. Gah, if only he had another bucket!
“If it helps at all,” he tried, “I don’t know when, or if, you’re planning on leaving, but– I’ll miss you when you do.”
Gaster looked up at the screen, a strange expression on his face that was difficult to make out from the winding scars that marred his skull. The Narrator didn’t see why he was acting as if the monitors were The Narrator, but he could see him fine, and from the way Gaster was looking at him, he had a feeling he had made the old skeleton very happy.
“THANK YOU. / VERY SINCERELY.” His crooked smile broke The Narrator’s heart. “TO BE MISSED IS ALL I CAN ASK FOR.”
“Of course.”
The question that was on the tip of his tongue was the hardest to ask. He tried his best to swallow his worry.
“Do you think– do you know if… I’ll ever be free?”
Gaster stared at the shining screen. Almost like a real rainbow– although he wouldn’t know.
“I THINK” he said gently, “THAT YOU ARE ALREADY FREE / MORE FREE THAN MANY LIKE US WILL EVER BE / AND THAT IT WOULD DO YOU GOOD TO FIND A WAY TO REVEL / IN YOUR / … / LITTLE FREEDOM.”
The Narrator tried not to feel dejected. Revel in your little freedom. He could do that. He would find a way to do that. “Hum. Food for thought.”
They sat in silence for some time more, watching the lights collect at the bottom, rise to the top, change color, and repeat. The Narrator did not think about the last time he had been in this room. That was for another time.
“THESE LIGHTS” began Gaster. “WOULD YOU SAY THEY ARE SOMEWHAT / LIKE A RAINBOW ?”
The question caught The Narrator quite off guard.
“Like a rainbow? Well, they’re the same colors, obviously, but… I’m afraid I can’t quite see where you’re coming from.”
Gaster chuckled sadly. “I SUPPOSE NOT / I ONLY WONDERED / I HAVE NEVER SEEN A RAINBOW BEFORE / MY RACE WAS BANISHED UNDERGROUND IN A WAR LONG AGO.”
The Narrator sounded almost disgusted. “Banished underground? In a great war? Psh. What a terribly clichéd premise for an RPG. I’m very glad I never played–”
He caught himself, realizing he needed to work on this whole “conversation” thing.
“Um, I mean… that’s terrible. So you’ve… never seen the sun? Or anything?”
Gaster shook his head. “AN HOUR AGO / WHEN YOU SHOWED ME YOUR ‘ FREEDOM ENDING ’ / WAS THE FIRST TIME I HAD EVER SEEN ANY SORT OF REAL SUNLIGHT.”
The words hurt The Narrator in a way he hadn’t expected.
“You’ve always been trying to go free," he said softly. "Even before you were… shattered. Even when you were just a character in a video game… your life’s goal was to escape?”
“MY LIFE’S GOAL / AS YOU PUT IT / WAS TO THRIVE IN THE ENVIRONMENT I WAS TRAPPED IN / I WAS / OF COURSE / HEAVILY INVOLVED IN THE KING’S ESCAPE EFFORTS / BUT IT WAS NEVER / THE ONLY THING I THOUGHT OF. / YOU ARE RIGHT / HOWEVER / THAT MY EXISTENCE HAS BEEN / … / ONE LONG SERIES OF PRISONS.”
“I’m so sorry.”
The edges of Gaster’s mouth quivered. The Narrator was finding that he had far too much in common with this strange man.
“Well,” said The Narrator, freezing the waves of light on the screen, “I can’t help you get out of here. I can’t tell you what sunlight feels like on one’s skin. I can’t even let Stanley go for good.”
He brought an image of a summer’s day onto the wide monitor, light eating up the darkness around them, a picture-perfect rainbow stretching across the endless blue sky. Gaster’s eyesockets widened, and for a brief moment, The Narrator thought he caught a glimpse of two faint lights in the dark holes in his face– but it could’ve been his overactive imagination.
(It was not.)
“But maybe,” he continued, “maybe I can show you something beautiful.”
“OH MY,” Gaster whispered, standing and leaning forward, as if he thought the sun’s warmth would seep through and touch him if he stood close enough. “IS THIS HOW HUMANS LIVE?”
The Narrator smiled. Gaster didn’t need to see it– he could hear it. “According to my research, yes.”
Gaster ran a bony hand over his face as if… as if he was wiping away tears. But… no, skeletons couldn’t cry, could they…?
“DO YOU HAVE ANY MORE OF THESE IMAGES ?”
“I have…”
Gaster heard the rustling of papers and the sound of The Narrator hmm-ing inquisitively.
“Yes,” he finished, “I’ve got some more nature photos… soundbites of laughter… outer space… SO many silly birds... a stock photo of a baby.”
Gaster couldn’t help but chuckle at his companion’s selection. That, and he had some vague memory that laughter worked for hiding the shaky voices of people trying not to cry. He wiped his face again. The tears had slid down the gash in his face into the edge of his mouth. The sensation was strange and unfamiliar and real, real as he was, and he blinked and let a tear fall from his other eye.
The lights in his eyesockets were shining now, and though The Narrator had no physical form, Gaster could see him so clearly.
“SHOW ME."