Chapter Text
"For since she had not died through fate, or by a well-earned death, but wretchedly, before her time, inflamed with sudden madness, Proserpine had not yet taken a lock of golden hair from her head, or condemned her soul to Stygian Orcus." - Judy Blume
Rose sat up and picked the crust from her eyes. She’d been asleep for some time, and returned to herself in cold sweats from a dreamless sleep. She now expected to find herself, blissfully unaware of the past four months, before her friends, still living and at the moment their game began. Instead she looked at the sky and found it in ribbons of opal above her. She bit her tongue until the waves of despair left her, then straightened her hairband from its skewed post.
They had waited as long as they could. The word waited implied passivity, but that was wrong. They had waited in order to avoid stagnation, to avoid leaving the timeline to fold in on itself with Rose right in the centre of it. Together, Rose and Dave, children of Derse and doomed, doomed, doomed, they had held fast onto each other until the pile of Daves on LOHAC was more than Dave could bear. They had stayed well away from one another, following the spate of deaths. Rose had curled into herself, like an anemone, and Dave had been a perfect blank. They could feel a sheet of glass build between them and the longer they left it the less likely its demolishment. Rose had learned to deal with this pane of glass early on as her mother had taught her, with heady spirits and blatant disregard for her health. It suited Rose, and Dave managed his despair by strifing with whatever he could find. Up to, and including, the walls and doorframes of his home.
Mom, Bro and Dad had gone missing, after only a few days. They could have been anywhere. Had either of the children searched the Medium earlier, they might have found them, but as the weeks went on the possibilities became fewer, and the desire to find the adults dwindled. With that came the demise of the desire to see each other. Death stuck in the air like a miasma, and between killing imps and ogres, the desire to infect one another further led to complete isolation. Pesterchum was a filter. Words on a screen carried nothing but meaning. Their meanings grew more cryptic, too, as extended metaphor and penile allegory guarded any emotion that might overflow and drown them. It was far simpler if they kept themselves in check, and killed, and talked strategy.
And they did talk strategy. In time, a far-off future that hardly existed beyond a goal they might one day reach, Rose would fall asleep and Dave would leave her, and he would prototype himself to prevent the persistent giggles of Calsprite from ever existing. Rose would send him off with all the information he could need and so the game he returned to would be unlosable. That far-off future was never one Rose intended to exist, but one day it did come, and Rose was left alone.
She refrained from pinching herself, and instead looked to her laptop. Dave was offline. Jade and John were offline, too, but she didn’t want to think of them much. She closed the pesterchum window and focussed on her walkthrough, or an imitation of it. There was a lot to catch up on. For one thing that doomed timelines don’t necessarily self-destruct. Even those timelines where there was only one entity left. She wished more than anything that she had been able to touch Dave before he had gone, to kiss his cheek, or hold his hand. She was glad she had never had the opportunity.
??? tentacleTherapist [?TT] RIGHT NOW opened memo on board lost on lonely alternate reality.
TT: I don’t know if anyone can read this from where I am. I should think this is all accessible but I don’t even know if I lie within the meta-universe in which anything living still resides. I’d be writing my walkthrough but that server is unavailable right now, so I’m awaiting further correspondence from the Noble Circle. I’m alone on my land now aside from my consorts and the help they present to me at this conjecture is minimal at best. I’m going to take everything I can from LOLAR and continue my dialogue with the Horrorterrors. Since I’ve been left here their voices have gotten louder as though trying to get my attention. Curiously, they have predicted that soon I will hear them in sleep, and drawing on this I think that it’s a fair assumption that my dreamself is dead. The game mechanics seem to only allow one dreamself, perhaps due to it being a construct of the game, but infinite selves as I existed pre-game? Or perhaps my consciousness is no longer tangible, perhaps it never was. Baffling mysteries surround us.
TT: In addition to this, certain aspects of the game no longer exist here. There are no consorts, and my sprite is nowhere to be found. He could simply be hiding but he never struck me as the type. I don’t look forward to whatever this solitude will bring.
TT: I really hope somebody finds this memo and appreciates the title.
[?TT] closed memo.
*****
In the face of adversity it had always been Rose’s mantra to not panic and return to normal. Normal, in this case, was the routine consumption of excessive amounts of alcohol.
When Rose drank, a variety of cocktails of questionable quality, she drank with intensity. She drank with the objective of reaching the bottom of the glass. When she mixed a mojito the fresh mint stayed her stomach long enough to down the alcohol, a kick to prepare her for the burn of the throat. When she drank a Bloody Mary she thought of half-remembered mnemonics of British history to get the vodka into her blood. Her hoards of grist were useless but for alchemising supplies, which she did with growing contempt for herself.
When she drank she lay on her back, sometimes on her bed, sometimes out at sea, and felt sluggish and warm as though expiring in a bath so hot she felt light-headed. In this way she would almost hope for the sea to swallow her, for her body to stop floating and to sink to the bottom of the sea; or she would hope to become comatose, her liver withering away, black and blistered and scarred. She drank as she had with Dave, and stopped when her stomach felt heavy and cumbersome. Her head would loll by the neck and her eyes would grow heavy and she would sleep on the softest thing available to her.
By the second week, however, she stumbled regularly out of her mother’s bar into the en suite, retching, and tears falling onto the porcelain of the bowl. She drank until she was certain that she would be pulled apart into lines of code: starting with her fingers, with a dread-ache cold in her toes, she would disappear. Her thoughts would lose coherence, her thoughts would integrate into a complex matrix and she would have only the slightest effect on Skaia. She would belong to Skaia and she would be Skaia and the Rose of Earth would exist no longer. But the game was sturdy around her, and chaos did not descend upon her.
Pulling herself up from the floor, head-hazy, stomach-settled, and the sweat on her forehead cooling, she flushed the toilet and headed back to her room with a glass of water. She sat on the bed and swallowed it in three throaty gulps; it soothed her burning tongue and hoarse throat, lined her stomach mercifully. Her breathing was laboured, a comfort to her in its deep, slow inhalations, Lying on her bed lay her laptop. It was inert, unconnected for days. Hopeful, taken by the clinch of the liquor, she opened it up and tried to configure a connection. On the floor lay a green hub that was of little use within the session. On the screen the window showed a reconnection to an external source.
-- tentacleTherapist [TT] began pestering grimAuxilliatrix [GA] --
TT: You haven’t pestered me in a while, “alien”.
TT: I should say trolled, for cultural sensitivity’s sake.
TT: But you used to enjoy it.
TT: So I’m doing you a favour. Making up for all the times you clearly yearned for my purple prose.
TT: Everyone else is offline, and I’m the only living player from my session left.
TT: Maybe you know what to do?
TT: Or maybe you don’t.
TT: Or you don’t feel like telling me.
TT: ...
TT: Get in touch.
-- tentacleTherapist [TT] ceased pestering grimAuxilliatrix [GA] --
Rose shut the lid, threw an arm over her eyes, and softly moaned in pain at her cramping stomach. Soon enough, she was fast asleep.
The whispers were amicable, as far as one could describe them so; they had been telling her what she had needed to know for so long, voices more familiar now than any of her friends (whose voices were mosaics of sample snatched from mixes shared over the miles.) Most regrettably, their voices were more familiar than even her mother’s. What was not familiar was the sensation of their arms holding her to them.
They suspended her, ever-moving, catching her wrestled circumvention and nestling more arms against her to hold her still. She flinched when, softly, kind and slowly, a tentacle curled at the nape of her neck, smoothing the cropped hair that now grew back in tufts. Rose struggled to look over her shoulder, pulled her arms violently to no avail, and for her troubles she received a digit fondling her at her cheekbone.
Like quicksand, the tentacles allowed Rose, so long as she did not struggle against their own rippling passage. There was no light, so she started by teasing a hand from its grasp, then pulled a small appendage into her hand to sense it by touch. Laying there, curling languidly, she drew a finger tentatively across its surface. It was not covered in suckers, as she had vaguely expected of them, but rather fairly flat and covered in minute nodules across its surface.
“stell'bsna gof'n, phlegeth-nyth shogg-nyth. hafh'drn n'gha hlirgh 'bthnkk fm'latgh. orr'e li'hee y'hahh.”
“I shall do what I can.” She had, after all, precious little else to do.
***
She awoke in a mess of sheets tangled around her legs. Her head was foggy and a sour smell of decomposing fruit hung in the air. Her hubtop had fallen onto the floor as she’d dreamt and now, for want of something better to do, she checked it once more.
-- tentacleTherapist [TT] began pestering grimAuxilliatrix [GA] --
TT: You still seem to be online.
TT: I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt and continue.
TT: Even if I’m only talking to myself...
TT: Ignoring the questions arising regarding my sanity.
TT: Which up to this point is surviving relatively intact, given the circumstances.
TT: I’m rambling.
TT: Anyway, I’ve gathered a large amount of information so far which as yet remains unpublished due to the inexplicably selective internet access here on LOLAR.
TT: I won’t spoil the surprise though.
TT: What I mean is I don’t remember I’m residually inebriated.
TT: Don’t be a stranger.
-- tentacleTherapist [TT] ceased pestering grimAuxilliatrix [GA] --
Rose had slept long enough that she was now hungry; her mouth was cotton-sticky and she had drank the glass of water last night. She drew the curtains, and squinted against the bright light of the land. Making her way through to the kitchen, she found a can of beans in a cupboard and alchemized them with a drawing of some bread and a hunk of cheese that had lay beneath a kitchen counter for longer than Rose cared to consider. The resulting meal was edible and more than the sum of its humble origins thanks to Rose’s grist stash. Impatiently she pulled her computer from her captchalogue, where she found her pesterlog was active:
-- tentacleTherapist [TT] began pestering tentacleTherapist [TT] --
TT: Rose?
TT: Kanaya is away from her computer right now but I will happily pass on a message.
TT: This isn’t Kanaya in case you’re wondering.
TT: Although I honestly am disappointed. I thought we’d left our skepticism behind when Shit Got Real.
TT: But there we go.
TT: This is weird for me, too.
TT: Especially as I can’t see you on a viewport. In fact I’m putting an enormous amount of trust into this right now. It would be all sorts of embarrassing if Dave was trolling me.
TT: Whatever that word even means now.
TT: I wouldn’t put it past him, the tasteless varmint.
TT: I don’t remember this conversation happening, if it is you.
TT: Or me?
TT: Or have I happened across, mirabile dictu, a future self?
TT: You’re giving yourself a little more credit than is perhaps custom, given that it is I who happened across you.
TT: She speaks!
TT: Indeed I do.
TT: I’ll type in a different colour, to stave off any confusion.
TT: Does it suit me?
TT: Is the Kanaya alien there? I think this elephant in the room would be much better acknowledged by someone other than ourselves.
TT: That would be advisable. I’ll make myself scarce, too, before she gets any auspicitudinal ideas.
-- tentacleTherapist [TT] ceased pestering tentacleTherapist [TT] --
??? tentacleTherapist [?TT] RIGHT NOW opened memo on board ELEPHANT IN THE ROOM.
??? grimAuxilliatrix [?GA] ?:??HOURS FROM NOW responded to memo.
CURRENT tentacleTherapist [CTT] AT ?:?? responded to memo.
?GA: Where Did This Other Rose Come From
CTT: It’s a pleasure to finally speak with you again, too. You’re Kanaya, then?
?GA: Yes That Is Who You Are Speaking To
?GA: Seeing As Rose Revealed My True Other Worldly Nature
?GA: But You Are Not Rose
CTT: Glaring questions are rearing their ugly heads. Starting with how Your Rose became Your Rose.
CTT: Do I smell romance?
CTT: Have the dread rivals put their differences aside and ventured well beyond the Friendship that was once proposed?
?GA: Perhaps
?GA: Perhaps It Is None Of Your Concern Fake Rose
CTT: Seemingly not. I was trying to illicit a rendez-vous regarding information which could be of use.
CTT: I’d go to my dark-spectacled friend in most circumstances, but he has left me alone in a barren universe so I am not especially endeared towards him at this present point.
?GA: Oh I See How It Is
?GA: Past Rose
?GA: Or Should I Say
?GA: Rose Human
CTT: That is indeed my name. Try not to erode it.
CTT: Wait that didn’t work so well.
CTT: Forget I said that.
?GA: Rose Human Are You Okay
CTT: I said forget I said it, I know it wasn’t funny.
[CTT] banned herself from responding to memo.
Talking to people, Rose had found in three conversations, was more exhausting than she remembered. Even when Dave had been around (but countable weeks since), they had spoken with less and less frequency. She worked hard, pillaging her land until she knew everything she could glean: the Green Sun lay in the centre of the Furthest Ring, it was the source of the First Guardian’s powers- this cryptic piece of information was yet to be framed by Rose- and its effigy was lying on a vast captchalogue card on the rubble of what was the turtle temple. In four months there she had learnt to take pleasure in ripping the planet asunder, and making Skaia pay for what it had done to her, and to her friends, and to how many others. I had torn her world apart, first, and she was only finishing off the fight which it had initiated. It had killed off her mother and the human race, one by one, for the fleeting and abstract ideal of Creation. Another Creation to be shredded in turn. What was Skaia if not merciful?
Her land nonetheless left her nothing to learn, and the Horrorterrors had told her all she needed to know, and much of that was so obscure that she could not understand their meaning. She was their Servant of Darkness, a Child of Information, a myriad of titles with obvious implication unbeknownst to Rose.
They did, on occasion, make themselves useful. They told her that Death came to them and slew them in droves, they told her that Death would come, too, for her. Rose did not pay much mind to that at first as death would come sooner rather than later in countless and inevitable ways: she might drink her juvenile liver to destruction, her grist collection might eventually exhaust itself (despite being expansive it was not enough to feed her forever), or, most likely, she would find herself going insane (this frightened her most, so she paid little heed to it.) When she asked who the First Guardians were, they told her that they were many, and hers was Death; Death, apparently, was inescapable.
****
TT: You’re one of two “chums” online.
TT: And one of one “chums” whom I have never seen before.
TT: Why is that?
Why indeed. The multiverse works in mysterious ways.
TT: So you don’t know?
Allow me to introduce myself.
I am omniscient, extremely powerful, and very charming, and in another universe you call me Doc Scratch. Though it is not my real name it will serve well enough so that you may cross-reference with your alternate self and her sweetheart.
TT: Doc Scratch you have proven yourself to be a source of knowledge and questionable reliability. Congratulations.
TT: You mention a multiverse?
A multiverse housing your alternate self.
TT: And regarding this alternate self.
TT: Do standard rules apply as they do to Time players, regarding alternate selves?
You mean is one of you doomed to die?
Because, at the risk of sounding too gloomy to one of such unadvanced years, we are all doomed to death. Myself included.
TT: You speak of yourself as though you are in some way exempt from other instances I might take for granted?
That is because I am.
TT: And you want me to ask how?
You’re no stranger, I believe, to beings which eschew other rules.
TT: So I am meant to accept that you are on of them despite there being no suggestion that any one of the Old and Noble is able to use a keyboard?
No, of course not. I wouldn’t do a young lady a disservice.
TT: You aren’t doing anything to make yourself seem any more credible. My mother’s warned me about men like you.
I’m not a man; how would a man survive the apocalypse which destroyed your world?
TT: Point taken. What are you then if not a man?
TT: A boy?
TT: An ordinary boy?
TT: A wonderful boy?
TT: Am I going to get a response at all?
TT: If you don’t mind I am surrounded by oblivion and kind of freaking out about it.
I know.
And I’m now asking what you intend to do about it.
TT: I’d say curl up in a ball and cry until it goes away.
TT: But after spending several days doing just that all I have for it is a hangover so bad I have cramp in places I didn’t know got cramp.
TT: Maybe I don’t mind oblivion, comparatively.
No, it’s terrifying you. I know this because I am omniscient.
There’s only one thing to do.
TT: …
TT: …
TT: Yes?
But now is not the time.
***
Following this Rose’s connection failed. With the sudden interruption came a nostalgia for a time before the game. Connection had been bad then, the weather of upstate New York and the location of her home at odds with Earth’s technology. In the days where she could not connect to her friends Rose would amuse herself by knitting more items with which she would decorate her floor, or with tawdry one-ups on her mother. Her mother, who Rose had not seen for months. She might have searched for her, but she had been distracted for too long and she was scared of what she might find.
The worst nights were the ones when her mind wandered from her bed to the turtle temples. These were already inhabited by the remains of her consorts, and rumbled softly with the song of Cetus, restlessly pacing LOLAR’s ocean. It was here, in these imaginary temples where her body oscillated like a soprano’s glass, that she found her mother’s bones. Her mother’s bones curled fetal, kept warm by only a scarf. It reminded Rose of a picture she had seen of Pompeii, of a dog contorted in the pain it had felt in its last moments.
Rose ventured outside less and less often. Instead she alchemized books: she had enough to combine with each other, then with each of those devoured she would combine them with other items- a bottle of LOLAR’s water with an encyclopedia, a dictionary with her Grimoire, a book with a questionable jacket from under her mother’s bed with a statue of a wizard.
Once upon a time Rose had enjoyed knitting, her wrists strained from repetitive movement. Once upon a time she had enjoyed writing, and had hidden a small library beneath her bed of tasteless trysts between elderly wizards. She no longer enjoyed these things. If you had asked Rose afterwards how she amused herself she would find it hard to produce an answer.
***
When all else failed Rose would trek around her land for as long as she could, sometimes on foot, sometimes by air, searching for a logic-defying hotspot. Sometimes, with providence and perseverance on her side, she might find it.
There she would huddle close, shaking in anticipation, fingertips cold with the potential of another being to talk to. She would leave her cumbersome laptop at home and use only her hubtopband, then hold herself in a ball and her teeth sinking into her soft, chapped lip.
-- tentacleTherapist [TT] began pestering grimAuxilliatrix [GA] --
TT: Am I so morally repugnant that you don’t wish to initiate conversation with me ever?
GA: Partly
GA: I Am Also Hindered By A Condition Called Not Caring
GA: We Have Enough To Worry About Here
TT: Really? I was under the impression that the only thing you were worrying over were which undergarments would most subtly invite my alternate self into them.
GA: I don’t remember being so shrewish aged 13.
TT: I’m sure you don’t remember being left alone this long, either.
GA: But would it kill you to be a little more civil. It’s embarrassing.
TT: How quaint.
GA: We’d talk to you of our own accord but you don’t appear on either of our clients unless you speak to us first.
GA: Which isn’t helped by your few surfacings.
TT: The connection here is changeable.
TT: Speaking of which I do have an agenda and the unpredictably of my internet is causing me great anxiety.
TT: Have you heard of the Handmaid?
GA: No, I haven’t. It seems Kanaya has, however.
GA: If you’re nice you can have her a moment.
TT: I won’t keep her long.
GA: How Do You Know About Her?
TT: An acquaintance gave me a lesson in Alternian mythology.
TT: Apparently she is very foxy.
TT: ;)
GA: The Handmaid Is An Alternian Personification Of Death
GA: Some Do Say She Is Foxy
GA: She Is Said By Others To Come In Your Last Moment To Carry You To The Other Side
GA: Yet More Say She Will Find You When You Are As Close To Death As You Will Ever Be
GA: And She Will Tell You A Secret Which Will Make The World Make Sense
GA: And Others Still Say She Has A Different Purpose Altogether
GA: They Say That She Is The Cause Of All Suffering
GA: And Immortal As She Is
GA: That Alternia Will Never Be Free
-- tentacleTherapist [TT] ceased pestering grimAuxilliatrix [GA] --
***
Other times, very very rarely, one of her devices would light up and she would be contacted by Doc Scratch.
You’ve thought of something to ask me.
TT: Does your omnipotence know no bounds?
Very few. Ask your question.
TT: Am I your first?
My first protege?
No. You’re one of a handful. But you’re my only human. Your friend Kanaya belongs to my race of choice, but you remind me of them.
TT: And what happened to the others?
They each received what they desired.
TT: And so I’ll get what I desire, too?
The pattern would suggest so.
TT: And what do I desire?
To prove yourself. To have a second chance at winning.
Winning had not been something Rose had considered in a while. It had seemed naive to think of winning as a word allowed for her. She had thought winning had left her world along with John, its shadow had been snuffed like Jade’s, and its ghost had retreated with Dave. Now the promise of winning revealed itself and Rose was insatiable. She paced her house, she alchemized bottles and smashed each one while laughing in unrestrained joy. Her teeth clattered together and she had no stomach to eat. Her chat client would flicker online, then offline, teasing her one hundred times a day. When it flickered once she would reconfigure her hubtop until she snapped it shut in frustration, and then she would open it once more in wait.
TT: Are you there?
I’m always here.
TT: How reassuring.
TT: Tell me how to win.