Root of Star
> Ask them if it's 7:45
One day you're here, baby / And then you're gone.....
Always open to sharing avatars. And chatting too
>Ask Tre if you can hug him.
feelin' keen
> Go inside the lab
Honestly, it’s more of a messy studio apartment than anything else. Roland has all manner of junk strewn about — old MP3 players and camcorders, computer monitors and cases, circuit boards, speakers, headphones, cables with various different kinds of endings, you name it — on his counters and the coffee table next to his bed and easy chair.
He motions to let you sit in the comfy chair while his doppelgänger Tre sits criss-cross on the bed. “What brings you and your blocky friend to my humble abode, Trevor?”
“Got kicked out of TVT. I need a way back,” Tre says. “You’re our best bet.”
“Why don’t you just use that Chrome your bud’s got in their hand?” Roland says, pointing to the multi-colored browser you're still holding.
“They sent the Cleaners on us, Ro,” Tre goes. “I have many things, but a death wish ain’t one of ‘em.”
“Oh.” His duplicate rubs the back of his head. “Well, that complicates things, but I think I might know how to fix this.”
Roland gets up and turns to look at you. “Got a name, kid?”
“Felix Stella,” you say.
“I like it. Felix, you’re gonna do the damn thing, okay? Everything’s gonna be fine. You’re gonna save your friend, get back into the city, and find that other Cookie.”
“How did you know all that?”
“Oh, dang it, I forgot to even tell you! I’ve got a bit of a way with the technological things in life. Yourself included. Check it,” he says.
He holds both arms out, and the palms of his hands start to glow with a faint cyan light. You hear a humming sound, and the television turns on, displaying a couple of weird cactuses entwined with each other and playing an electro-rap song
. One of the cell phones in the middle of his coffee table vibrates and shows a white light, which ripples out across the screens of the other devices scattered on the table.
“Whoa,” you say.
“Eh. You’ve done better before,” Tre goes.
“Yeah, whatever. Call me back when you can do all that, Trevor,” Roland says. “We’ll have to tweak your data a bit and maybe get some encryption goin’ to get you two back in, but Felix here is perfectly equipped to do just that. It’s risky, but I think we can pull it off.”
You turn to the television again and listen to one of the verses in the song for a bit.
I ain't scared of six feet
'Cause I ain't scared to be free
All I seen while on this earth
Know that hearse can't be too worse
The morbid subject matter is a bit off-putting, but it makes you ask an odd question.
> Ask them if it's 7:45
Roland holds out a hand and a cyan digital clock appears, with the exact time listed right there — “7:45 AM”.
“Lucky guess?” he says.
“Just a hunch,” you reply, turning to the window nearby. The sky still has shades of dark oranges and blues cascading into each other.
You remember your friends, and the weird folks you encountered at the arcade, and turn to Tre. He’s the only remotely familiar thing around right now. Your head starts to hurt a bit.
> Ask Tre if you can hug him.
You don’t even bother asking, you just hop onto the bed and do it. He’s taken aback for a second, but lets his arms down after that.
“Why is this whole thing so confusing?” you say. “I don’t understand anything that’s going on, and it’s scary and weird.”
“I don’t think I’ve EVER understood what’s going on, dude,” he says. “Life’s just kinda... Like That, I guess. But we’ll figure something out. Ro can help us.”
“Whenever you’re ready,” Ro goes, taking a glance at a laptop on his desk with a rudimentary user interface on it, popping up with command line windows and several ASCII graphical images without anyone typing at the keyboard.
Edited by Thunderbean on Oct 27th 2020 at 4:16:11 AM
Braids From S286 Not Included
> Play a text adventure
"Rarity, are you okay? We gotta get you and your friends outta here soon!"
Root of Star
> Ask Hi-Top Guy where your friend went.
"Where's Fitz?!" you say, more than a bit frazzled as you hold both hands to your antennae with your mind scrambling for answers as to what the heck just happened.
"Calm down, Felix, he's fine. The Cleaners don't need a regular user like him. They set a trap, probably lured you in with an attack of some kind."
You feel the edge of your antenna again and confirm his suspicions. "Typical."
The two of you look upward at the white void and hear a distant motor, vibrating with a medium pitch around a distant, multicolored dot in the sky. “Ah, okay. Now we’re cookin’ with gas,” he says, sticking a leg out before putting it down on what appears to be an invisible white wall within the void. With another step, he’s perpendicular from you, and motions for you to do the same, as if the vertigo were nothing to worry about. Despite your best judgment, you join him on the wall, and start walking toward the dot above.
It develops into the shape of a bike, with two shapes, one green and one orange, coming into focus with a gradual fade.
> Make small talk
“Tre, right?”
“Allegedly. Sometimes I’m Lyle. Or Trevor Whatevr.” You look at him with a stare as if to say ‘really?’ before he relents. “But usually Tre, yeah.”
“What’d they kick you out for?”
“Oh, you know. Saw some things under the hood that weren’t meant for the public to see,” he says. “The city’s held together by duct tape and spit, y’know. Real hack job with the code.”
“But it’s home, isn’t it?”
“Yeah. For better or worse.”
The two of you discover that the dot is actually a pair of beings, one resembling a pickle and the other a peanut, riding a moped.
A poorly-made synthesizer tune is playing on a tinny speaker attached to the handlebars. The two of them are frozen in motion, eyes firmly set on a nonexistent road ahead.
“Never been happier to see these two,” he says. “Nothing like a good landmark to point you in the right direction.”
He turns to match their forward gaze, and as you do the same, you see a tall, monolithic black bar, sectioned into individual segments with one glyph, a red, yellow, blue and green circle, glowing with a familiar shine.
“Take it,” he says. Your eyes do the glowwy thing before you blink, and find the circle in your hands. A holographic bar pops up from it, and the word “Granger
” writes itself into it.
Tre locks one of his arms into one of your elbows, and he says, “Hold tight,” before the two of you seem to squeeze together, and the space around you fades from a white void into a hallway with several doors, with the two of you opening back up in front of one marked “539.”
He knocks on the door. No one answers at first, but the second time he tries, a voice on the other side goes, “Hang on a sec!”
“Roland! Answer the damn door!”
When it finally opens up, you see another fellow with a hi-top fade, but this one didn't have glasses, his hair actually looked like it'd been tended to recently, and he was dressed in a pair of camo pajamas and a ratty shirt with a dodecahedron on it. “This couldn’t wait for an hour, Trevor?”
“No. My friend and I need a favor.”
Roland looks at you and blinks, then asks, “Did you just meet this dude?”
“A couple hours ago,” you say.
“Gadzooks, I’m sorry,” he says. “Step into my lab, my verdant acquaintance.”
Edited by Thunderbean on Jun 18th 2020 at 4:06:26 AM