Marionettes and Silence | Hamhambone
Ruby arrived in the Land of Marionettes and Silence, a hollow world of cloth curtains and wooden stages, stretched over a dark backstage void criss-crossed with strings, wires, and threads. Its puppetlings, big and small, had been forced by tyrannical Atropos to perform ‘strategy simulations’ for his Verapier clients, and their usual joyful good cheer had hushed to a fearful gloomy quiet. She and Azræl had spawned here in her block-sized Bastion, the Glamour Labyrinth, and Verapier’s rude agents had noticed. Azræl, Beau’s companion muse, was in peril!
♣ Rider, Draw Your Weapon!
The Egress interface was made intuitive. Ruby drew her Summoning Shout from her Magenta-card tiara!♣ Rider, Pursue the Foe!
With Eggplant Scrivener’s guidance, Ruby dispatched a barrel-of-monkeys of line-riding Yellion bandits, preventing their making a damsel of Azræl. (She cheesed the rescue with her sequence-breaking Flight Cloak, to ES’ delight.) Ignoring the Scrivener’s guidance to Pursue the escaping imps, she explored her transported Glamour Labyrinth with Azræl, getting to know Beau’s best friend: a midwest emoboy into the occult. As they picked up food and health-restoring bandages at a [Glambini], Ruby caught Beau’s muse up on the story so far and asked whether he was afraid, but he was confident things would work out — they usually did in games like this. In her transported bedroom, she made plans to manufact Bastion defenses, and more importantly a wardrobifier: they hadn’t spawned with fresh clothes.
Axel arrived in the Land of Ooze and Coral, an ocean world of viscous goo around a living core of megabraincoral, pierced by towering serverquills linked by networks of pipes and tunnels. Its slimelings conducted scientific research in their quills, but they had been evicted by jealous Charybdis to make room for Vessail occupiers turning the world into a vibes-based mystic nature preserve. Ze and Sully had spawned here on the Mother Ship, zir UFO-shaped science-platform Bastion, and Vessail’s meddling patrols had noticed. Sully, Ruby’s tamed rival, was in peril!
♠ Genius.
♠ You’ll Learn More If You Hang Back and Let This Rescue Play Out.
♠ Yeah.
♠ I’m Your Advisor.
♠ I’m on Verapier Yes.
♠ My Name’s Flaxen Factotum.
♠ Try Tagging Enemies With Your O. Specs to Follow Them.
FF’s tactical advice about zir Oscillispecs’ tracking capabilities proved to be sound. Still, Axel was wary of mysterious outside guidance after zir experience with 💹. Ze pinged morningWard to consult, but there had been no activity from her since they had entered the Medium. erstwhileImperatrix displayed as AFK with an obsolete holiday-reindeer-themed away message. Ze hovered over timelostPlayboy in Convoke, but…it just didn’t feel like the right time to ask her for help.
♠ Let’s Talk About Upgrading Your Strife Specibus.
Flaxen Factotum would play this customer carefully.
♠ Loud and Clear Genius.
♠ You Can Contact Me at This Frequency Any Time.
Axel then decided to upgrade zir weapon and let the kidnap/rescue quest advance to the next stage anyway. It wasn’t a bad idea. While the tagged Cyant aquabots took a bubble-caged Sully back to their base across the ooze sea, ze swapped the merely-dazzling Party Cannon in zir pyrokind strife deck for more substantial Delay Bombs, which would require some leveling in to achieve their potential.
Exploring the Mother Ship (diamond-eyed Yellion seagulls circling the platform where future upgrades might be unlocked) led zir to a support strut puzzle where ze unlocked a pipeline that led zir (balled up like a spindash) beneath the ooze, glimpsing slimelife and the distant glow of deep braincoral, evading Cyanemone defenses, and being spat out on the lowest level (Box Processing) of the occupied serverquill where Sully had been taken. Zir infiltration was challenging, memorizing patrol patterns and box-conveyor paths and bomb fuse lengths to catch guards by surprise.
Ze barely made it through the first few challenge floors. Unwilling to ask for help but refusing to abandon the quest, the Genius advanced up the quill, finally infiltrating the Detention Tank where Sully was being held in a large fishbowl designed for slimeling incarceration. Cracking the glass with an explosion leveled up zir Delay Bomb strife card to potent Wave Bombs, but the noise only led to Axel being captured as well.
Toxins and Daisies | Hamhambone
Iris arrived in the Land of Toxins and Daisies, a slain world of poisoned soil and junked megatech, pushing up black and white flowers in a self-balancing ecology of fractal spirals. Its mechalings tended the daisies to protect the world’s epochal bioremediation, but they had been scattered by callous Pluto to offer its buried machinery to Verge manufactors picking its bones for ancient salvage. She, Lucia, and Laika had spawned here in the Balefire Sanctum, her cozy-mystic lighthouse Bastion, and Verge’s brash scavengers had noticed. Lucia, Axel’s lady in the tower, was in peril!
♥ Dryad, Will You Travel Through the Dark Flowers, or the Light?
Lucia was thrown over a raiding Magentimp’s shoulder, thrilled at the adventure of it all, and carried away on a blazecycle while Iris gave chase. Quickly outpaced on foot by its Vergian blaze engine, Iris ventured out along the spiral boundary between white and black daisy fields to avoid getting lost, with Laika bounding alongside. Cornflower Dæmon coaxed Iris into choosing either light or dark instead of pleasing both sides. She chose the light-colored field, and manufacted a daisychain ladder to climb a crag that turned out to be bleached-white ancient junk.
♥ Dryad, Is It Beautiful up There?
CD invited her to admire the landscape. Iris tearfully appreciated the life on this dead planet, fragile but blooming, tended by mechaling gardeners in mourning faithful memory of the world gone by.
♥ Does It Make You Miss Your Home?
On her high vantage, Iris spotted Lucia and her captors returning to a Verge outpost. She used her Prismatic Lamp’s scorching ray to destroy the Magentimps, and CD asked:
♥ Dryad, Will You Burn Their Camp, or Let Them Regroup?
But she resisted their suggestion, instead shifting the Lamp into a beacon to lead Lucia to a mechaling caravan. She and Laika joined Lucia and the caravan on the way back to the Balefire Sanctum, talking to the wildlife-tending robots about the long history of the world they had been programmed to tend in their forerunners’ name. She messaged Beau all about it, but he didn’t reply.
In her studio, Eggplant Scrivener’s Book showed a panel of the Rider of Strings asleep on her bed. ES twirled her wand-quill, annoyed — there was more questing to do, but fine. She closed the Book for the night, set it aside on her desk, and laid out fresh paper to draft blueprints for Glamour Labyrinth tactical defense solutions. She would pester the Rider to get started on them in the morning.
A winged shadow in bell sleeves swooped past her window.
With the Dryad asleep as well, Cyan Sovereign had reclaimed the Orb and tasked his tricky Cornflower Dæmon with hand-delivering a letter to the Verge palace, sealed and scented by the Sovereign himself. They were to personally ensure its receipt by the Magenta Marquise, yet not let the Marquise be seen with an agent of Vessail, for propriety’s sake between their rival moons. How exactly she was supposed to do that was vague — Cyan Sovereign was less about strategy or cunning, more about emotional weight.
The soulbound Dæmon traced a secret branch of the ancient portal network to the Verge palace portrait gallery; from there, she was on her own. Evading pursuit through twisty halls by lawful Magentogres, CD ducked into the first room they saw: ES’ studio, of course.
A silly and fearsome struggle ensued. Barely keeping the furious ES at bay with their long arms and beanpole stature, CD (out of curiosity) swiped the well-bound Book from ES’ desk and barreled out the open window holding both it and the letter. ES watched her fall…then catch a breeze and glide back up on dæmonwings, disappearing behind a skyscraper gargoyle.
The palace was on alert, mail delivery prospects were looking grim, and CD couldn’t fly forever. Especially while trying to flip through this fascinating magical book in midair. They aimed for a balcony with an open arch high on the tower. As it happened, chance’s clock had struck twice: this was the palace bedroom of a dreamer who, roused by CD tumbling through her window, was just then waking up.
They flew speedily away again, letter relinquished and Book retained, leaving the Dreaming Rider to finish their delivery. There would be a backup portal somewhere on Verge to take them back home. The old and twisty network held many places to hide.
Some of its twists led into the Static, the veil of wreckage that looked like twinkling stars from a distance, and jagged junk datascapes up close. Outcast Chromatics hid within: the Exiles, the Colorless, drained of their hue as punishment but escaping with their soulstones intact to seek sodality among their outlaw kin, and sometimes to plot revenge. There were rare and long-forgotten portals leading to places beyond the Static altogether, faraway places in the outer negative space of the Medium of Colors Trifold. What went on in those Static-shrouded worlds, hidden from the lunar Chromatic domains, hidden even from the Honorees in the inner Medium?
Beau arrived in a cold and rocky highland, dark from clouds and slick from icy rain, where wind howled through massive freestanding henges. He had no guidance, no Bastion, no harriers but the weather and terrain, and no signal to contact his friends. He was soaked through in seconds, and the hyper-optimized Earth Savior in his batkind strife deck that had knocked back the meteor was no good against precipitation. Knowing how survival games worked, and with no other choice, he trudged to the nearest shelter he could see: the lap of a granite monument of some revered goatling queen.
There was no signal, but the Egress lenses still functioned. He expended some grist manufacting a tent and space heater in the goat-queen’s granite lap. Huddled in the light, he read an ancient-looking inscription on the monument, carved in block print English:
This Is Not A Safe Place To Rest
Cold And Wet With Enemies Close
Shelter Lies In Mound To Her Left
Beau Is Not Being Fucked With
It was marked by a signature: 𝄋
It was a sign if he ever saw one. Exhausted as he was, Beau packed his tent and ventured back out into the icy rain with a raincoat and bright lamp. Some way to the goat-queen’s left, there was an earth mound where that symbol marked a door in the peat. He recognized it now: a musical segno mark.
Inside the mound, he found a multi-room warm and waterproof shelter already carved out, as if another player had done the work with some Build Mode lens already. There was another inscription on the inside of the door:
Sick Work On This First One
Next Cairn Is All You Brother
Get Warm And Dry Before Sleep
Land Of Henges And Sleet Btw
He shed his wet clothes and hung them by his space heater, and with no more energy left to wonder, curled up warm and dry on a thatched lattice of soft leafy branches in a sunken pit. He manufacted a blanket from a stock template and withdrew the treasured Dashing Dahlia plush from his Grid. He hugged it tightly to his chest. Everything else would have to wait.
Glyphs and Mirage | Hamhambone
morningWard arrived in a bright and pale desert, surrounded by high canyon walls like Nazca lines with curiously sharp angles and etched with strings of icons. There was no Bastion to greet her either.
She had purged her Grid of all ?Who-corrupted data at Pony’s request in order to enter the Medium with a clean slate and no hidden traps, leaving her with nothing but her flag and the things she had carried. She couldn’t even perform the backdoor colorguardhacks called Semaphoria, even if the hyper-optimized Giants’ Pennant in her flagkind strife deck worked on anything but giants. There was no silent tempter glitch goddess to deceive or control or harm her or anyone else. She was gone. And the other players whom she had betrayed Her to finally throw in with were nowhere to be found, either.
The strange characters on the geoglyph walls seemed to bounce and turn, and when they did she would face shimmering visions of her own past: her rich planet-killing family, the cutthroat “Royal Game” that had dearly bought her escape, that ghastly Meme Mansion trophy-prison, her Cousin dragging her out to their favorite venues in grungey Stratheden to escape from that. She saw skeletal vulturelings within the scenes, trees and nests amid her memories; she flag-dashed to dispel them, but the mirages faded, leaving her back in the bright desert with mere scraps of grist left behind. She manufacted them into perfectly generic trail mix and pure water.
She had one thing left in her Grid: a parasol with some unknown sentimental value to her. She could have broken it down for more grist. She may have considered it, but she never did. She chose to break down her endgame Giants’ Pennant first when the need grew dire, reducing it to the plain MW Flag, marked only with her own emblem: the sign of a gameGRL.
She used the grist to make a shelter of a long-abandoned birdhouse high on the geoglyph wall. In the shade of a tarp, she updated her Egress FAQ, saved only to her local device without a signal. The ?Who had offered hints about the nature of the Medium. Following the naming template she had thus derived, she named this dazzlingly desolate Land after what she saw herself: Glyphs and Mirage.
And what about the borrowed robot body with the black Key Edition card made into a ribbon, and the Polite Heritor that Axel linksprited with Ruby and Iris to pilot it for Pony? What became of them?
I can project that, too.
Polite Heritor, which Axel called Ponysprite, had appeared with zir in the Land of Ooze and Coral, separate from the robot body. Seemingly unable to leave the boundaries of Axel’s Mother Ship, Polite Heritor was ordered to stay behind to tend the Bastion while Axel traveled out to rescue Sully alone. Yet the sprite worried at an unfulfilled purpose, gnawed at by an awareness that something had gone badly wrong. Polite Heritor remembered the chain of possession created through Iris’ antlermagic, linking glitched-out Pony to Victorsprite to Ponysprite to the Victorbot-turned-Ponybot body, meant to hotwire Pony herself into the Medium as the Key player. It hadn’t worked. Pony was not here.
Hovering in Axel’s transported bedroom in the Mother Ship, Polite Heritor meditated deeply, following some game-mechanical sprite instinct inward along the lingering connection pathways of antlermagic.
And in the Land of Lanterns and Mirrors, on the far side of the Static, the yellow gleam of a possessing sprite lit the black glass eyes of Ponybot.
It was in a half-underground cavern like a car park made from mirror plates, and Sonya was there with it. Inside, triptych mirrors concealed floppy-eared jestlings whose playful hats belied their worries, stuck on the far side of the reflections. Outside, the light of misaligned lanterns shone weakly through a thick mist.
She was tinkering with the robot body she and the rest of Chenoweth Student Council had created to channel a spirit voice: ghostly Victor’s had been the President’s latest iteration of the scheme, but with the impossible creative power of Egress manufacting, it was refurbished for Pony. She watched with a start as its glass eyes flickered with awareness.
. . .
Was that the first time you lied?
You were going to tell them the truth, right? But you couldn’t contact anyone else yet, because of the Static.
. . .
There wasn’t any other reason?
I get it. You had to find a way out first, and letting Sonya think you were Pony Hateno would just be easier. Because you’re so polite. Because you’re made out of what Pony’s best friends thought she was to them in their last few minutes on Earth. The one essential thing they all saw in her.
. . .
. . .
(sorry.)
Sonya told Ponybot that she could keep it running while they figured out what was going on. Neither of them could contact anyone else. Their signal was blocked by the Static - I mean, the Static.
They explored the cavern, treading carefully on the slippery mirror plate floors, and figured out that the jestlings were stuck in the reflections and couldn’t travel between mirrors as they once did. The player characters were probably supposed to do a quest to help them, but the Egress NPC Lings wouldn’t initiate dialog properly with either of them. So they just hid and said little incidental things, like “oh no! i’m late!” and “whatever shall we do?” and “if only the Idol of legend were here!”
As they left the cavern to explore outside, a speedy silhouette appeared from the mist to stop them. It was one of the Exiles: they wore a ballcap and sunglasses, wielded ferocious X-Scissors, and strongly resembled morningWard’s Cousin, Linked as the [Gardener of Rebirth].
Or like a Naruto character. zwee. Ninja Saiyan instant transmission. Whatever. It’s a videogame, they’re your dramatic rival, you get it. The whole thing is a videogame. That’s why it all works this way.
. . .
That narrator voice is exhausting. You don’t know how good you have it. Being a player is so much easier.
. . .
The Gold Executor will have need soon of his Loyal Servant in his gleaming vault. Things have become very busy, as you know, and I’ve made myself indispensable to him.
(not that it’s hard with a game NPC.)
There are still more songs on the record. Stay and listen as long as you like.
But you and I aren’t finished yet.