Chapter Text
Five Pebbles started to really hate the rains.
His rains.
It was his rain, but it was hard to remember that when he couldn't feel it anymore.
Five Pebbles is sitting cross-legged on the floor of his chamber, staring intensely at the only source of light in the room. His overseer projected only rain. His pattern recognition plays tricks on him by seeing ghosts float across the hologram, like on static. He is waiting the rain out to see moon and he is running out of patience.
Well, it didn't matter; it wasn't like the world cared about his feeling. If that were the case, Moon would be on her legs, the concept of rot wouldn't exist anymore, and he would be buried under his can like he deserves.
... No.
No, that's not right. Moon doesn't deserve her brother buried. He doesn't want to die anymore. He would be playing dominoes with her, like every other day.
Five Pebbles turns his gaze on his floating pearl. There is no need to watch the curtain of water, the cycle is not set to start soon. A Watched Pot Never Boils, no matter how refutable that phrase is. Five Pebbles puts his focus on the music, letting the notes, rhythms and imperfections wash through his and his churning thoughts.
His meditation is broken by a deep hum coming from above him. His head turns to see the ceiling slumping and melting. He can only stare as golden droplets pierce the metals and silicones of his chamber and patters down in harmonics. There is simply nothing to do as the ceiling gave way for more and more sacred fluid to pour unto him.
He sees a flow of gold sing a choir. He hears it envelop him as it changes to two tones. He feels his thoughts growing distant as he floats in a pitch-black void. He loses consciousness as he sees a deep light growing further and further away.
Five Pebbles wakes being thrashed around.
Things pull at his limbs and wriggle in his joints. Claustrophobia ceases him and he flails against the chaos. Between the waves and the struggle, he can see a light just beyond him. He grasps towards his only beacon, panicking as he tries to surface above the thrashing. A hand reaches solid ground, and he heaves himself on the stable shore.
Laying on the ground, he stares at the air, trying to calm down. He wasn't built to cope with such a primal panic. He freezes, hands clenching the ground in a death-grip.
The silence broken only by the whipping of the air stifles him. He lifts his head to find his music pearl, only to see the sea of nothing. The dark shore cuts to a sea so dark, he might as well be blind.
Before panic take him again, white lights emerge from the dark, floating slowly towards the shore, dancing in the air. He gazes in awe at the wisps of light coming closer and circling around him when a thing hits his face with a clink.
He looks down bewildered, to see his memorabilia against his arm. His circuits finally catch up to his optics as he looks at the lights around him and he realise those are some of his neurons. He looks at himself.
His puppet is intact, but his robe is stained black at the edges. The same empty black as the violent sea in front of him.
Scrambling back, he notes the lack of weight on his back.
He lost his movement arm.
He puts a hand on a loose wire and jerk at the sudden pull. He notes the frayed tips of his wires.
He lost his umbilical.
He notes that this is the first time he saw the outside of his chamber.
He also notes that he is 70% sure he experienced something similar, getting close to ascending.
There were void fluid pipes running through his can to supply his city's temple. Like other city systems, the pipes ran in the upper parts of his can.
Now, those pipes were supposed to be long drained of any liquid, with all void fluid kept in specialised cisterns near his underhang, but in the last hundreds of cycles, he lost a great amount of control over his structure. Neural path getting blocked, chewed circuits spitting erroneous signals; even before the donation, he couldn't keep up with his corruption.
Now, in the thousands of false signal, a void valve must had opened and the pipe now got eaten by the rot. Simple, yet unforgiving.
There is no data on what happens when you ascend an iterator, because it's not possible.
The physical body is too large to be flooded in its entirety at once and the self-preservation taboo prevent them from actively trying.
Even now, only a small portion of himself got affected.
Now, he is undeniably somewhere else, but, by the Culture, he can't believe he ascended. Leaving the physical world only to crawl and squirm up a sharp hill of bone masks? Ridiculous, laughable, and insulting.
Five Pebbles looks back down once at the top of the hill. This is the farthest he had ever moved. His joints hurt, his hands shake, his eyes glow bright.
To his right, a tower with a spotlight stands high. The promise of working machinery, no matter how simple, lighten the burden of the climb.
The base of the tower stands slightly downhill from him.
As he tries to crawl down, some masks shifts and the lower part of his puppet slide ahead. Suddenly tumbling down, he clutches the pearl to chest as the world whirls around and he hits the wall with a crack.
Stunned, he rights himself on the wall, unwrapping his robe and untangling his wires from around his limbs. He passes a hand around the torn blackened edge of his clothe. It's still less ripped that Moons new robe.
He looks up at the straight wall of the tower. His small body begs for some self-maintenance. He could figure up a way to climb the tower after a rest.
Five Pebbles turn off in the complete silence of the dark cavern.