Water on a dull beige riverbank. The muted thudding of space-age pumpjacks. The harsh drone of cicadas lost and lonely in a world as much theirs as it was not. Wind through the thin line of a coniferous forest. The occasional black steel train, hurtling to or from a distant city. These were the sounds that greeted the trio who had just manifested upon a hill in what two of them could only describe as "the middle of nowhere" (or rather, one of them would - the other would express an identical sentiment entirely in uppercase).

"ALRIGHT, GREEN GLASSES," screamed a thanatophobic triangle built from purple brick and omnicidal bloodlust. He was rather good at screaming. As it happened, there was no other manner in which he communicated. "WE'RE HERE. WHEREVER 'HERE' IS."
"Perhaps now would be an appropriate time to tell us why it is you've brought us to this universe," passively implored his nightmarish, egg-shaped accomplice. "This stop over is not exactly in accordance with our plan."
"Yeah, yeah. I know. Let's just say I have a loose end to wrap up, huh?" The third member of their party, a teenage boy draped in a red cloak, waved them off. "I figure now that I've got you guys on my side, I could actually get into my own mindscape and tinker around with the broken parts." He walked into the forest while his companions floated quietly behind him.
"Your mind is broken?"
"It was split in two."
Flumpty nodded. That made about as much sense to him as anything had after he had eaten God.
"SO YOU WANT A CLEAR PATH INTO YOUR OWN MINDSCAPE, KID? PIECE OF CAKE! I CAN GIVE YOU ONE BEFORE YOU CAN EVEN SAY,"
A tormented chorus of howls and screams resonated violently throughout the forest. It began and ended almost too quickly to register, but it was not a sound Split or Flumpty were going to forget anytime soon.
"THERE'S JUST THE QUESTION OF HOW YOU'RE GONNA REPAY ME. I WAS THINKING-"
"Nothing at all?" Split interrupted. "C'mon, man. I'm already on your side here. We clear this up, and I can dedicate myself to the plan 100%. Which, you know, you can trust me to, since it was my damn plan in the first place."
His companions looked between themselves. Oh well. If they had to win this guy over, so be it. After all, their last adventure as a duo had resulted in what could possibly be described as the most abysmal failure any attempt at anything in the past had ever been. It takes a special kind of idiocy to make an enemy out of an omega-tier Godmodder, the Advanced Superiors, and at this point, likely the Conflict itself, all while accidentally destroying the Interpunct. It takes a level of idiocy even greater, however, to somehow achieve this simultaneously in every timeline. That the incident had also overinflated the Venezuelan dollar was insult to injury.

Split knew all this, of course. If he could pick out allies as powerful as they during their absolute nadir, he saw no reason not to.
"But I guess I'm not really answering your question, huh? Why are we here? Well, the long and short of it is that I set up camp in this universe because I thought it was a blind spot for The Overseer. You know, before you literally obliterated HIM and purged the concept of HIM from reality? Yeah. Back then.
"See, the thing is, HE uprooted a massive, sprawling laboratory from this universe's Earth and set it down in universe B's. I figured in that case HE must have been done with this universe altogether, and wouldn't really have much of a reason to look for me here.
"Even though that shouldn't be a problem anymore - WOW, THANKS GUYS, REAL GREAT WORK YOU DID THERE - this isn't a particularly important universe in the grand scheme of things. Anyone finds out you're tagging along with me, and I can promise you that this'll be the last place they look."
His orchid comrades didn't have much to say about that. Split struck them both more as a monologuer than a conversationalist.

"That being said, we're here." Split declared, gesturing proudly at a crimson sea container sitting in the middle of the forest. "Gentlemen, the closest thing I have to a base of operations."
"A sea container."
"That's correct."
"KIND OF A DOWNSIZE FROM THAT OLD CASTLE OF YOURS EH, GREEN GLASSES?"
Split pouted and looked away. "Just get in the fucking sea container."

The interior looked wholly unlike the outside, much to the astonishment of its first time occupants. The floor was lined with black and salmon tiles, the walls tinted the pink hues of sunset. A marble bust hung on the far wall, next to what looked like an abstract piece of glitch art featuring a wall of windows and a smiling woman's face. Before the wall rested a semicircle of five candles, facing outwards.
"Jesus fucking Christ, Gracie," thought all of you who got what this was a callback to.
"Sorry," I mumbled meekly, but I was very clearly lying through my teeth.
Split removed his cloak and handed it to Flumpty. "Heads up," he barked, "as fashion goes, I need to look my most imposing as a bringer of change to the plot. Also Death's Dynamic Shroud isn't cheap. Don't drop it."
"I NEVER TOOK YOU FOR THE KINDA GUY WHO PUT A WHOLE LOT OF THOUGHT INTO HIS ATTIRE, YOU KNOW," Bill offered.
"Of course I do. I'm wearing the latest designer clothes, and... forget it, it's not important." Split yielded, crossed the room, and sat in something approximating a lotus position behind the candles. He closed his eyes, and one by one, each flame sparked to life.
Bill faded from the physical world with the tip of a hat. Just as soon, the shadow of a pyramid loomed behind Split. Arms seemed to peel off the wall and snake to the edges of his form, to his shoulders, and his arms, and his sides, and his face, until-

Spilt snapped awake at the sound of a sickening crunch. It didn't take him very long at all to figure out that the sound had emanated from every bone in his body, or that every extremity of his had been snapped into unnatural angles. It took him equally as briefly to realize that he was in immense, excruciating pain.
"OW," he screamed, "FUCK."
He used his power as a First Guardian of the Red Sun to rewind his body to a previous physical state - one in which it was intact and not in crippling agony. Peak performance, really.
He looked his repaired body over. It didn't seem to be injured, sure, but it was hard to tell now that it had turned completely blood-red in the light of the mindscape.
"Wow, I can just... ctrl + Z injuries? That would have been helpful earlier. A lot earlier, actually."
He rose to his full height, dusted himself off, and picked up his green glasses which had somehow remained as intact as ever, despite what must have been a fall from...
He looked up.
He immediately wished he hadn't looked up.
Before this point, Split had only ever thought vertigo was an effect of looking down at a great depth. The infinitely stretching void above, however, quickly educated him to the contrary. He staggered backwards and took a moment to regain his composure.
"Alright!" He spat. "Alright, don't look up at the infinite, incomprehensible divide between my conscious and unconscious mindscapes! Good to know that that's... a bad..."
He did it again.
"HEY, KIDDO!" Someone called out from behind him. "DIDN'T I EVER TELL YOU THE OLD SAYING ABOUT STARING INTO THE ABYSS?"
Split double-took away from the horrifying infinity weighing down on him to see a dashing, middle-aged businessman with a crooked grin wave at him.
"Do I... know you?" He trembled.
"HA! EVER THE JAPESTER, SON! JUST LIKE YOUR DEAR OLD MAN."
"I'm not joking. Seriously, who the hell are you and what are you doing here." Split growled so dryly that the period withered and died before it could bloom into a question mark. His body crackled with red lightning, which he assumed was a threat universally understood enough to convey his tone to... this... guy.
"C'MON, SON. AFTER EVERYTHING YOU'VE BEEN THROUGH, IS IT SO FAR FETCHED THAT YOUR MIND MIGHT PRESENT YOU WITH AN ABSTRACT, ALMOST PLATONIC IDEAL OF PICTURESQUE 60'S T.V. MIDDLE AMERICAN SUBURBAN FATHERHOOD?"
"Is that what you are?"
"YOU KNOW, SON, YOUR SUBCONSCIOUS MANIFESTS IN WEIRD WAYS. ALL A TOTALLY NORMAL PART OF GROWING UP, OF COURSE - I REMEMBER WHEN I WAS ACCOSTED BY HORRIFIC, PROPHETIC VISIONS OF A MALEVOLENT GOD WHEN I WAS YOUR AGE, HAH! - BUT THE POINT IS YOUR MOTHER AND I TOTALLY GET THAT SEEING A MUTANT AND CARTOONISH GROTESQUERIE MANIFESTING IN YOUR DARKEST DREAMS AND CLAIMING TO BE YOUR FATHER IS A DAUNTING TIME IN ANY TEENAGER'S LIFE."
"...Alright."
"HAHA, LOOK AT ME, SHOWING UP TO MY KID'S BIG SELF DISCOVERY QUEST AND EMBARRASSING HIM IN FRONT OF HIS FRIENDS! AH, WELL. I'M NOT GONNA KEEP YA. I'VE GOT A LOT OF KIDS THROUGHOUT FICTION TO SEE TO, AFTER ALL! I JUST STOPPED BY TO GIVE YOU THIS."
He held out a small black rectangle between his thumb and forefinger. It was at this point Split realized that the mysterious paternal figure was far, far bigger than he first seemed. He made no attempt to approach him.
"AH! GIVING YOUR FATHER THE COLD SHOULDER, EH? COME ON, BUCKO. I DON'T BITE." He beamed, and then added a "you" too quietly to hear.
Split cautiously took a step closer.
"ATTA BOY. COME TO DADDY."
Split drastically slowed his approach. DADDY reached further and gently handed the object to Split. The latter needed a second to completely wrap his head around just how huge DADDY really was.
"Is this your PDA?" Split mumbled, turning the object over in his hands and trying his best not to look DADDY in the eyes. It made total sense that DADDY was some kind of abominable variation on Dad Egbert (well... as much sense as anything else) but he just hadn't put two and two together.
"I FIGURE IT'S ABOUT TIME YOU GOT ONE, SPORT. IT'S GONNA DO YOU A WORLD OF GOOD IN YOUR FIRST REAL FORAY INTO ADULT LIFE AHEAD. LOOK AT YOU, CHAMP. ALL GROWN UP AND EVERYTHING. IT MAKES ME SO PROUD." Quite despite himself, DADDY couldn't help but shed a single tear.
The corner of Split's mouth curled into a smile. "Thanks, Dad... wait, why am I saying-"
"ANYWAY, I WON'T KEEP YA. GO GET 'EM, TIGER."

Without warning, DADDY burst into a cloud of magenta smoke. Split closed his eyes and covered his mouth and coughed and wheezed and gagged and waved away as much as he could, but the cloud was thicker than it looked. He fell to his knees and spluttered for breath as the last of it dissipated.
"Did I just... breathe in some of him?"
He thought it over for a moment.
"Hm. Moving on before I can process the ramifications of this!" He yelled. His voice resonated across his barren mindscape's surface, possibly forever. He didn't like the scale the reverberation seemed to imply. It made him feel small. Insignificant. Alone. With little other choice, he picked a direction and began walking in it.
"Alright, Adam," he told himself, "Don't freak out. This is your mind. This is all territory you control, it's an extension of yourself! You're important here, you-"
He kept walking, but he fell totally silent.
"I really didn't expect my mindscape to be this quiet. I mean I guess it makes sense, but can't there be... something... making some kind of noise? Anything at all?"
Nothing did. The silence was, in an impossible way, louder now, so unbroken by even the faintest whisper that it was omnipresent. Crushing. The only thing Split could so much as think about.
"Aaaaagh. I can't believe I'm actually doing this, but sick times call for sick measures," he groaned, more to remind himself what sound actually was than to justify himself to any invisible onlooker. He pressed his index finger against the bridge of the green glasses, and took a silent moment's solace to weigh himself through the glasses, to measure, read, quantify the entirety of the concept of himself. He felt the point of contact like the pinhole of a camera obscura, like the singularity at the heart of a black hole, like the inversion point between all that is and all that can never be. He felt his own existence, through himself, against himself, and as an aside, hoped that they did the anime glasses thing.
Thankfully, they did the anime glasses thing, which is really the most important part to note here.

The green glasses were as fluent with the nature of sound as their red counterpart were with light. Where their differences arose, however, was that Split had determined at least the fringes of their potential functionality - he had, after all, dedicated himself to a far more active life as a descendant than *Greenie* ever had. He sneered the name. It was a very enjoyable name to sneer.
The glasses analyzed the very limits of the world around him for even the slightest hint of sound. It found two, and displayed them both with standard music studio meters and faders.
His breath, and his heartbeat. Nothing more.
"Ugh," he ughed, "I swear if nothing happens around here I'm legitimately going to lose my mind. I've read up on how shatters can hypothetically be patched up and everything, heard anecdotes most esteemed professionals would mark up to pseudoscience, got into contact with the... alarmingly few people who actually survive their shatters all in preparation of actually being able to do this one day, but I never expected it all to be this... quiet."
"Nothing," replied nobody.
"So what's my mind waiting for me to say, huh? That I can't concentrate in this silence? That I can't breathe properly, that I'm growing restless at the prospect of existing in some kind of fake world of no consequence? That I'm talking to myself to stave off these thoughts?"
It took him a second to realize that he wasn't actually expecting an answer. In that second, though, he received something remarkably close to one: a light appearing on the horizon.

It seemed to be fixed in place, which Split could only assume was a good sign. He had yet to test his limits within his own mind, and he was far from prepared to sprint after the second entity he came across in here. Or, maybe he was prepared. That he genuinely didn't know was the issue here.
He approached the light. It seemed to be shining in a perfectly focused column from the infinite abyss right above him, although he didn't dare look up. Instead, he focused on the object the light seemed to be shining directly onto: a three-step square pyramid, each step about a foot in height, and the hilt of a two-handed sword protruding from the top.
"Is that...?" Split gasped, and drew the blade from the pyramid. It was.
"It is!" He confirmed. "I'm glad to see that this otherwise empty mindscape really knows to let me have the important things in life. All we need now is Regnum Dei and the whole gang'll be back together!"
Alarm bells and klaxons filled the air. The ground trembled and buckled. Flashing lights strobed against the endless edges of the gray void. An enormous pair of curtains rose from the ground, and a plain stone staircase sprouted from the resulting fissure to meet its lip like cautious fingertip to sentimental photograph.
"Finally!" Split shouted. "Now that's what I call a warm goddamn welcome! One much more fit for a prince than a featureless, limitless expanse! Sill no Regnum Dei, though, which is disappointing."

Behind the curtains existed another world entirely - one far more labyrinthine in design, with hundreds, of not thousands of doors stretching out in every direction. Split smiled to himself. There was a sense of purpose here, and although the silence was just as absolute, here it felt... finite. He didn't know what that meant, he was just sure that it was true in here, and not out back the way he had come.
"Well," he cheered, "I guess whatever pieces of Greenie couldn't be bothered getting off their mind-ass and jumping ship in the shatter must be behind one of these doors, huh?"
Naturally, there came no reply. Split began to wonder when the last time he had heard someone else's voice was. It felt like minutes ago. It also felt like weeks ago. He decided that such matters weren't important one way or another, though, and made a point of not dwelling on them.
"I'm just kidding, of course! I know exactly where you are." An Aphex Twin grin far more befitting of his unhinged reputation found no resistance in crossing his face. "So why don't we just SKIP..."
He raised his left fist to eye level, its tendons taut and blood vessels bulging, red lightning snaking across and around its skin and arcing in impossible, demented shapes.
"...TO..."
He pumped his fist in the air. Red light streamed out from it and engulfed the form of every doorframe in the mindscape.
"...THE END?"
With a flick of the wrist, every door spaghettified and contorted and twisted inside out. Split made a sharp, stern gesture akin to a conductor signalling for the end of a particularly dramatic coda. Every door snapped into place in two straight lines, like the two sides of a long corridor.
"Wow. That was a lot easier than I expected, honestly. Damn, it's so nice to have everything in its right place! I feel like I can... think more clearly now, I guess. Hey, do these doors work?"
He tried a random door, one adorned with the icon of a large button. It opened with ease.

Behind it, Split could see himself at a much younger age. He was standing in a very fancy and officious-looking room, where a small group of businessmen were talking amongst themselves, and chuckling politely, and shaking hands. TwinBuilder didn't seem all that interested in any of that, though: his sights were set on a big red button on the underside of a desk. He was trembling and whimpering nervously to himself. He raised a hand to the button, and-

Split closed the door again. "Awesome!" He declared. "That works."

It didn't take Split very long at all to reach the edge of his mind. The other doors had petered out a while back, and he found himself standing alone at the fissure jutting across the psychological divide.
A door descended from an unseen height and came to rest at the tip of the cliff. Split held the Broken Anachronism in one hand and rested the flat of the blade on his shoulder. He chuckled to himself. The "Tb" symbol on the door confirmed the identity of its resident. If Split was honest with himself, he was pretty excited for this little conversation and subsequent... Supertotality, he had decided to call it. He very much liked the ring that had to it. And if Greenie wasn't going to listen... well. Split was more than capable of making him listen.

He rapped on the door with the back of his left fist. "Knock knock, dumbass, we've got brain problems to solve," he demanded.
No answer. He was getting pretty goddamn sick and tired of being ignored by now.
"Alright, Greenie. Let's get the facts straight: I'm coming in there whether you want me to or not. So either we can do this the easy way, or the Split way."
Still no answer!
"I'VE BEEN KNOCKING AND KNOCKING AND KNOCKING AND KNOCKING, POUNDING AND KNOCKING AND KNOCKING, LET ME IIIIIN!"
Oh, fuck it. He grabbed the doorknob and threw the door wide open.
Behind the door was absolutely nothing. Split had (or rather, hadn't) seen many nothings in his life, some of which - such as the vast emptiness of limbo or the unrelenting void between universes - had been rather impressive. None had ever been absolute before, though, and nothing (and not even that!) could have prepared him for the experience of (not) seeing it in all (none) its entirety.
A small gasp escaped Split's mouth. He couldn't process what he was seeing, what he was feeling, but he knew that he had never been so awfully, soul-crushingly alone in all his life. The loneliness hit him like a tidal wave - it lifted him off his feet and threw him back, back, so far back that he found himself once again in the corridor of his own design, but even still, it carried him, pushed him no matter how steadily he resisted. The front struck the doors, too, and bowled them over and forced them in all kinds of directions, until they were left even more haphazardly arranged than they had originally been. Split's head pulsed with a bloated fatigue, and he scrambled for something, anything he could grab ahold of before the force would knock him out entirely. A light reflected in his glasses. He turned and saw the gap in the curtains through which he had come. Oh, no no no no he was absolutely NOT going back out there no matter what! He paddled against the current as forcefully as he could muster on the brink of collapse, but it was too much, the feeling of isolation too crushing, constricting, suffocating! He clung onto one of the curtains on his way out, hoisted himself up, out of the flood, and then...

And then...

It subsided.

Split crawled back inside. He surveyed his surroundings, expecting the worst, but even then, the aftermath froze him in place. He felt himself tear up for the first time in as long as he could remember.

His subconscious was now in cacophonous disarray, doors strewn about haphazardly and at odd angles in three-dimensional space. Some doors were blown wide open. Others, torn off their hinges entirely. And through every single door, he could not see a single person but himself.
He pulled up the PDA that DADDY had given him. He tried calling him. No answer.
He swallowed his pride and tried calling Build. Again, nothing. The descendants, nothing. Bill, nothing. His parents, nothing. The Godmodder, why not?! Nothing! Blue?!? Nothing!!! The Operator?!?!? Nothing!!!!!!!!!! Nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing! He sighed, tightening his grip so hard that the screen began to crack.

Then he heard it. A voice on the other end. It was... laughing.
Another voice joined in, then another, then another, until what sounded like a whole sitcom laugh track was bleeding through the crack at him.
"But nobody came!" One voice jeered.
"But nobody came," agreed another.
One by one, the voices all scoffed and sneered and cackled, a chorus of "but nobody came" filling Split's mindscape. "But nobody came, but nobody came, but nobody came," they teased in an off-kilter chant. It took him too long to realize that they were all his own voice.
With a cry of anger, he threw the device far, far across the surface of his mind. It vanished over the horizon.

Once again, everything was silent.

And Split fell to his knees,

and wept.

Split knelt beside the body of the godmodder, Broken Anachronism still embedded in their chest.
"I swear," he muttered venomously into the carcass's face, "you Gamma-tiers are more trouble than you're worth."
He stood up and pulled the makeshift cloak over his head. The black clouds overhead probably meant acid rain soon, which would invariably kill off whatever plant life had been left in the now-wasteland after that battle.
He pulled his blade from the corpse's chest and began to wander away. Not in any particular direction, really, just away. Cleaning up after that mass breakout from limbo wasn't particularly clean work, but it was the kind of job perfect for someone like him.
About fifteen, twenty seconds later, he heard footsteps and ragged breaths hurriedly coming up from behind. In one swift motion, he turned and held the point of his blade at a young Minecraftian. She instantly raised her hands in surrender. She looked like she had been trembling and crying even before he'd raised his blade. He grunted softly, and lowered it.
"You need help?" He asked, but he turned and kept walking before she could answer.
She jogged along to keep up with him. "What happened? I was out of the action for a few hours, and then..."
"Field wipe," Split shrugged. "They happen."
"But... but where is everyone? All the entities...?"
"Again, field wipe."
"And the players?"
"Most of 'em ragequit." He sulked. "Three guesses why."
"Oh."

Another Minecraftian approached from their left. The two greeted each other as old friends, shared a few parting words with Split, and left. He didn't reply; his mind was elsewhere. Besides, he didn't mind being alone. Or at least, he normally didn't.
His thoughts were louder than they had ever really been before. More aggressive, too - undercutting his every move, pressing that he ask himself if anything he did really made a difference, and if he was motivated by a single conviction whatsoever rather than an ambitious longing to control history as he had back when he was still TwinBuilder.
Not for the first time, he'd wondered if things would have been different if he had stuck around for the flash mob. Would he still be having these thoughts? Would he still be out here, picking off as many godmodders as he could? If he was, would he find fulfillment in-

No, he reminded himself, this WAS fulfilling, this was his life's purpose now, and what greater one could he ask for than the role of assassinating an entire Pantheon of modified gods?
"Give it up," a disembodied voice might have said, although he couldn't be sure. "This time was no different than any other. If you don't take the opportunity to concede now, what reason will you have to do so ever? Do you want to spend your life reliving this battle over and over?"
The individual shapes and proportions of the world around Split suddenly became hard to hold onto. The horizon seemed more just a continuous series of individual points than the line they would imply. His intrusive thoughts seemed to thrive in his mental noise and culminate in vaguely familiar sounding voices. He hated when this happened, perhaps more than words could say.
What with half his mind gone, his subconscious threw up whatever patterns it could to fill in the missing half. Most shatters seemed to come away from their nascence fairly fine in this regard, but the mental strain of the last few months roaming the void and that year before largely in Limbo, coupled with his tenacious histrionics as he pushed himself to assert significance where he could, had rode out his apotheosis for far too long and exacerbated the hole his splintering had torn, like he was scratching an itch until it bled.

He'd resigned himself to living like this. At least making an effort to try to, if nothing else. He figured it made more sense to focus on changing things that were actually within his control.
"Come on, look at yourself. You're shaking, covered in blood only twenty percent of which is yours, you've got more blood still running down your chin, you've pulled a few muscles enough to put you out of action for-"
"ALRIGHT, I GET IT!" Split shouted. "Just... just leave me alone." He sighed and quickly looked around. It didn't look like anyone else was nearby, so he was probably in the clear.
He lifted his glasses to rest on his forehead and wiped his eyes with his sleeve. He should have done this next part earlier. Maybe then he wouldn't have hesitated a fraction of a second too long and let the field wipe go through. The voice in his head reprimanded him for such tardiness, and told him that he really ought to have taken more care of himself. "What would yourself from five years ago say if he saw this is what your life had become?"
"How the fuck should I know?" He grumbled, and finished conjuring a small bottle of hard-shelled capsules.
He would have summoned it earlier, but he hadn't expected to run out so soon. A meager two months' worth would hardly have justified its required ten post charge, if not for the fact that he really had no other option. He swallowed one and put the bottle in his pocket.
"Blegh. Wonder if I can bump it up to 11 posts and get this shit actually tasting half-decent."
He pinched the bridge of his nose, paused for a second, and put his glasses back on. He blinked. The world gradually seemed to move back into place.
"Sekoilu seestyy, the madness subsides..." he mumbled idly to himself.
The first drop of rain fizzled on the ground before him. He saw that as enough of a reason to get moving again.

Meanwhile, in the present, Split watched the scene play out. He groaned and threw his hands in the air, as if he had just heard about video games.
"What was the point of all this!?" He demanded. "Is my own subconscious *showing off* how much power it holds over me?! How fucked up it can make my life!? Well great job, then! Bravo, Greenie, bravo!"
His words echoed throughout the memory. He winced slightly.
"I mean... assuming you're even there. I hope you are, man, I..."
He sighed. He sighed as deeply as he felt he could without the risk of crying again. "Even despite everything - all the universes I've seen die, all the tyrants I've watched come close to undoing reality, every single one of my countless brushes with death! - I can't even begin to explain what's going on here, and the not knowing scares me!
"You know, I'm not ashamed to admit that. I'd have to be insane not to be scared in a situation like this. This isn't some kind of big, head to head fair fight here. This is... this is just fundamentally *wrong*, it's my own mind trying to torture me! I can't beat my own mind, I AM my own mind dammit! So please... if you're there... let's just call it quits, alright?"
He stormed back to the door. He was utterly fuming, although he wasn't as sure why as he wished he could be.
"Or maybe the fact that I am here at all, dealing with this, talking to myself... maybe that means I am insane."
With a huff resigned to uncertainty, he turned the doorknob.
The door, however, didn't move.
He pushed against the door more forcefully. Still, it didn't move.
"What the f-" he whispered. He took a few steps back, braced his shoulder, and ran full tilt at the door. It opened a moment before he made contact and he stumbled out. His back struck the cold hard mindscape floor and he cried out, half in surprise, half in utter fury.
"Okay, seriously! What gives? This isn't how mindscapes are supposed to work! They're not supposed to be cosmic horror ghost towns, and the doors aren't supposed to mess with me for the hell of it!"
He pouted and threw his limbs about in defeat. He didn't make a move to get back on his feet just yet, though, he figured he might as well take a second to just calm down.
Alright, one second's up. He jumped back upright and tried the next door, one bearing the icon of an upside-down triangle.

The next memory was blindingly bright. Two stark-white hands cupped together looked almost pitch black against the unfathomable brilliance. Split squinted to make out a small figure standing upon the two palms, looking up at... something. No, actually, the figure wasn't small at all - it was the hands that were massive! Each the size of an entire house's floor, easily, adorned with the inscription of a tetromino.
"WХЫ ДО ЫОУ ДЕФЫ ТХЕ WОРД ОФ ГОД?" Boomed a voice dripping with the shapes of every concept revered and worshiped by the mortals of Masonic Fiction.
"Because... BECAUSE..."
"Oh, right. That happened." Split shrugged. "Nah, I'll pass." He closed the door again.
The next door was marked only with the word "THIS" four times, all in capital letters.
"Wow," Split raised his eyebrows. "No prizes for guessing what's behind this door, huh."

"Sure, we killed Project Binary, but now the Conflict, THE ROOT OF ALL EVIL, is reforming! And look what we JUST DID TO MINECRAFTIA! And look what HE did to EARTH! MY HOME! OUR HOME! EARTH'S WHERE YOU WERE BORN, DAMMIT!" Build screamed. He was visibly shaking with panic, as well as with the corruption that was beginning to devour his body, although he hadn't noticed that part yet. "WHY AREN'T YOU UPSET BY ALL THIS! OH YEAH, I FORGOT! YOU'RE A CANCER, NOT A HUMAN! WHY DIDN'T CHEMOTHERAPY KILL YOU TOO, HUH???"
Split flinched. Ouch. "Whoa, uncalled for! What happened to me being a vague approximation of a brother?" Even after all this, Build still wanted him dead? "Build, look. You really need to calm down, alright? This isn't helping anyone!"
"Since when was I the voice of reason, god," he added, but more as an aside than genuine passive-aggression.
"No, I'm not helping anyone! And I doubt I ever HAVE helped anyone! Have I done anything other than be a plot device? A plot device that's failed at his job?? I'm just a giant Mary Sue is what I am, and you know it! YOU have more character development than me, and YOU CAME AFTER ME! I'M THE ORIGINAL! ME!" Build's glasses began to glow. Split took half a step back. Maybe now wasn't exactly the best time to correct him on that. "SO WHY ARE YOU BETTER THAN ME AT EVERYTHING??"
In the present, Split left and slammed the door behind him.
"Okay, what's your point?!" He demanded. "That even with everyone else by my side I'm still alone? Still cast out in a jealous rage? Well maybe I'm just better! Did you ever stop to think about that? Maybe the reason I came out of that whole ordeal unscathed by the black hole is because I was strong enough to, and NONE OF THEM WERE!"
He paused for emphasis, but he had no idea what it was he was emphasizing.
"Whatever. Even if you are there, you're not listening. Let's check out the next door."
This one bore the image of a pen put to paper. Interesting.

"Dear █████," Split said aloud to himself as he wrote, "How's stuff back out there? Things are getting pretty crazy in here, actually, as it happens - just a few weeks ago I died and got cast into this realm of eternal torment! That's kind of kept me busy, which is why I'm only resuming writing now. Oh! Also, I got split into two people at one point! Or, I am one of those two people now. The better one, basically.
"Man! Sorry I didn't write earlier, it's just this war is absolutely crazy! I mean, I don't know why I'm telling you this. You know all this already. I figured out that you and me - the real me! There's still a real me, out there! - have been making up a whole bunch of my thoughts and actions. I guess I'm writing this now just to ask you to stop on the off chance the narrative happens to be focused on me right now.
"Failing that, can you write into the story that I get a few million dollars at some point? I figure once I break out of this place I could put it to good use.
"Stay tuned... Adam... whatever the date is in this place. Aaaand done!"
Current Split didn't say anything on the matter of his younger self's monologue. He simply scrunched his face up in an emotion he could only describe as "hm", and left that memory well alone.

"Okay, uh... that was weird and not at all formative to myself as a person or constructive in the context of this mental breakdown I guess I'm having right now. Can we do away with all this irrelevant side crap and just cut ahead to whatever it is I'm supposed to be doing here?"
The lack of response seemed to imply "no".
"Fine, be like that!" Split stormed to the next door, which featured the outline of a thick, blocky crucifix, viewed from below. Something about this door seemed... wrong, though, as if it didn't belong here. It looked almost like it was... drawn differently? Constructed in a different artstyle to all the others? Sure, in terms of design it was identical but some unplaceable SOMETHINGness about it JUST DIDN'T FIT!
Split had half a mind to leave it well alone, but... none of the other doors had held any answers yet. And this wasn't like any of the other doors at all. He drew his sword, cautiously, and opened the door.

Behind the door was a corridor with two more doors on either side - all shut - and one more door wide open at its very end. The walls and door were all faded stark-white, and the varnish on the floorboards looked slightly scratched. It was the most unremarkable corridor Split had ever seen, and that fascinated him.
From the end of the corridor he could hear soft organ music. An arrangement of Rachmaninoff's Prelude in G Minor, his glasses informed him.
He crept as quietly as he could to the end of the hallway. In the room at the end sat a woman at a small electric organ. Across from her was a desk cluttered with an extensive variety of electronic music paraphernalia, a laptop upon an apparently ergonomic stand (you know the kinds that you can fold up to work at while standing? Yeah.), and a pair of dark purple tinted sunglasses. Split had certainly never been here before.
Split stayed his blade and cleared his throat. The woman made no indication that she heard.
"Excuse me," he cleared his throat louder this time. The woman bolted upright, fell backwards off her chair with a dissonant clang of organ keys, and stumbled to her feet.
"Jesus CHRIST, give me a fucken heart attack why don't you?" She stammered through a thick Western Australian accent. "God, some warning would have been nice." She hastily fumbled for her sunglasses and threw them on.
"That was my warning. What were you expecting?"
"I dunno, at least wait until I finished the piece. Bloody hell, whatever happened to 'hold your applause until the end'?"
"I-"
"You know what, never mind. Just... allow me to introduce myself."
The woman looked to be in her early twenties. She was tall, thin, and pale, all almost unnaturally so, and her equally pale hair hung over her shoulders with a fringe that obscured one eye even behind the sunglasses. Her hands seemed to toy with one another idly, and her posture somehow came across as equal parts shoddy and imposing. Hanging over her shoulders was a black bomber jacket, its back featuring the cross on the door stitched in gold. One hand broke away from the other with almost mechanical deftness, extended for Split to shake.
"You can call me Gracie," she said. "My employer's taken some interest in you, and naturally I've taken it upon myself to protect his investments."
"Your Employer?" He didn't reciprocate the gesture. She put her hand away.
"No, not that one. No, not that one, either. In fact, I don't believe you've met him. He sees himself in you, though, and your goals do align with our own, so the few among our numbers who know of your existence called for your recruitment. I suppose what with my... unfortunate I MEAN unique position, that's a duty fit for my undertaking."
"...Alright, I'll bite. Who's 'our'? And what goals?"
"As for the former, I can't answer while they're eavesdropping. We're at odds with them, you see, or at least we like to think we are. Hold on, let me move the narrative a few degrees to the left... There. That should d-

-y of them had known where to look, they wouldn't have seen the two binaries creeping more silently than the shadows they hid themselves within.
"THAT D0ESN'T SURPR1SE ME," the Employer chided. "Y0U NEVER STRUCK ME AS THE SENT1MENTAL TYPE, AFTER ALL. ST1LL TH0UGH, 1'M SURE WE'RE FAR BETTER EQU1PPED T0 HANDLE THESE PARAG0N MAN1ACS AND THE1R DEMENTED--"

-ven't heard of you guys before. That name means nothing to me," Split shrugged.
"Yeah, that's about what I expected. Still, though - unrivaled limitless power to conquer whatever you please? Come on, man, I know you want it."
"Well, I'm not sure how I can believe you. As far as I know you're just an imaginary friend I cooked up in the last few minutes to stop myself going totally crazy."
"Oh, no no no. I'm pretty goddamn real, as it happens. Well, as Fiction goes. I'm pretty sure a subconscious can't just cook up wholly new curses on the fly, and you've definitely never seen mine before. Well, maybe you're a special case being from Nonfiction and all."
"H- how do you know that?!" Split reached for his sword. Gracie raised her hands slightly in surrender.
"Again, my employer told me. You've got issue with him knowing this kind of thing, you can take it up with him. Wow, I really didn't expect you to get so mad about that. What's your probl-"
"Look, I don't know who your 'employer' is, but you can tell him I'm NOT. INTERESTED. I've got my own matters to take care of, my own paths of conquest to forge."
"Funny, huh. I thought you'd jump at the chance to become the agent of a plot force, and to reap the benefit of all the power that implies."
"Agent of a plot force...?" Split whispered.
"Which, might I add, is more power than you could possibly imag-"
"You're in league with THE CONFLICT?!?" His body sparked red, and his glasses flared green. He steadied himself for what he expected would be one hell of a fight.
"What? No, of course not."
"But- but you said...!"
"I *said*, we're hell-bent on conquest. Naturally that's not something we can achieve if the Narrative upholds an inert equilibrium across reality, but it's even more impossible if the Conflict were to achieve their dreams of senseless destruction.
"Maybe it'll make more sense if I outlined our purpose more clearly. I think you're looking at this entirely the wrong way, as if there were only two plot forces - Narrative and Conflict - which, fair enough, is the case for what you consider a 'classical' story. The thing is, though, there's free reign for even more, or perhaps, somehow, less, to exist in the realm of a postmodern one. Sure, our power is nothing compared to theirs, but we're still among some of the most powerful beings in Fiction."
"So... you're a cabal of hotshot wannabe postmodernist upstarts." Split crossed his arms.
"I never said that!" Gracie protested, before sulking in defeat. "But yes."
"Riiiight. So, is that how you got into my mind...? With this... supposedly 'great power' you keep advertising?"
"What?" She blinked. "Oh, right. No, Build already did this kind of big epic quest thing you're doing right here - or... will do, or something - and I just copied someone who got into his mind the same way. Believe me, you should be glad you wound up with me instead! I do not envy that guy..."
"How did you do it? Why is it only you here, why hasn't anyone else infiltrated my mind?"
"Let me answer those questions one at a time. For the matter of the former, I simply replaced one of your memories with this one! It wasn't anything important, just the fifth Daft Punk album."
"There's only four Daft Punk albums," Split corrected.
"God, I'm great at this," Gracie grinned.
"...Huh... Is it any good?"
"Hm?"
"The album."
"Oh! Well, I guess you'll have the pleasure of finding that out for yourself all over again."
"Nice! I think."
"As for your other question, that's really why I'm here. Your subconscious thinks you're some kind of directionless, volatile evil and that everyone hates you, and that you need to push them all away. Wild shit, right? So yeah, it's stopping you from waking up, ever, and it's blocked out the psychic interference of, uh, a little group you might have heard of called everyone who ever lived.
"Except me, of course, because I brought a super powerful curse that basically lets me do anything. I'm supposed to give it to you but I just wanna warn you beforehand that it's really hard to control, alright? You're only to use it as a last resort. In fact, I'm only giving it to you partially for your own protection.. Mostly, it's so that you, and your influence, will be easier for my colleagues to find."
"So," Split raised an eyebrow, "you're giving me a super powerful curse that I can't control and can barely use to look after myself, and that your friends can easily track, right?"
"Yeah. What's wrong with that?"
"Wouldn't that, I don't know, get me killed?!"
"Oh, relaaaaax. Nobody's ever died under circumstances like these before, you're FINE!"
"Psht, yeah. Tell that to Metatron."
"Why, what's wrong with HIM?"
"HE'S dead."
"Oh."

The two fell totally silent for a few seconds. Then, Gracie spoke up again.
"Well, lemme give this to you anyway."
"WH-"
"Here ya go!"
She held out a silver nameplate emblazoned with the mark of the curse.
"Oh hey, why's it on one of those Advanced Superior nametags?"
"Turns out this stuff actually conducts curses super well. Got it done by MTT, as a matter of fact. Well... more like stole the machine they do this on. Well, technically I borrowed it, if you don't count 'being intact' as an essential property of-"
Split reached to grab the curse, but Gracie snatched it away.
"Oh, right. Shoulda told you: when you take this, I'll die. Yeah, definitely should have brought that up before. Kinda got my own problems going on right now, and this is the only thing keeping me alive. I mean, mind you, me dying - and soon! - is kind of important, it's just, like... if you had any more questions, now's the time."
"Wow, you're really matter-of-fact about your own death."
"I know of many facts, and their respective matters. My death just happens to be one of them."
"That's fair." Split paused for a moment and mulled over some potential questions. "Say, how much do you know about my subconscious? I thought I had it all figured out from studying the stuff I'm going through, but..."
"Well, look at it this way. You've been gathering information on how to beat your subconscious, right? Its methods, the rules it plays by, so on, so forth."
"Yeah, I- Hm."
"Let me just leave you with one very important thought: if you know its every weakness and shortcoming, haven't you been feeding that information into your subconscious too? And if you've figured out how to beat its test before it even began, why would it give you that test? Why wouldn't it subvert everything you thought you knew and up the ante?"
Split needed a second to process this. Fuck, it seemed so obvious! All the time he spent preparing, he was only setting himself up for failure! "So... that's why Greenie wasn't hiding behind that door, and why the doors keep telling me I'm alone, and why that one door wouldn't open earlier. Because... I knew all the rules?"
"Looks that way."
"Huh. That's... bad."
"Probably!"
"Alright. Let's say that I happened to know already, then, that this is all one big test. Does that mean...?"
"Does that mean what?"
"Does that mean he'll subvert that rule too? Does that mean he's... actually going to try to kill me?"
"Hm." Gracie hummed. "Hm!" She hummed again, higher both in volume and pitch. "You know what? I've talked for too long. Why don't you just take this curse and skedaddle, I've got some important dying to do. Just consider my earlier offer!"
She dropped her curse on the floor and vanished into thin air.
"Wait, Don't-!" Split began, but it was too late. Once again, he was all by himself.
"Oh," he repeatedly whispered to himself breathlessly over the course of the next few seconds. For a few sweet moments, he'd forgotten how it felt to be this alone.
"Alright," he sighed, gritted his teeth, just generally steeled himself, "I see how it is. So I've gotta personally stand my ground and not get killed by some... suicidal shatter tulpa... that's probably hunting me inside my own brain. Well, that's. Not going to be fun." He picked the curse up off the floor. Wow, it felt really heavy, just... to have. He put it in his jeans pocket and turned to leave.

"Suicidal shatter tulpa," he repeated to himself halfway out the door again, only this time to the tune of the first eight notes from the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles theme. And then, with one last look backwards, he shut the door behind him.

Split returned to roaming the breadth of his mindscape, but not as he had before. Now, his objective was clearer (insofar as "survive" constituted an objective), and he knew well enough to keep one eye looking over his shoulder.
"It's gonna get harder, harder, harder," he narrowly managed to find the willpower not to sing. The last thing he needed to do was alert whatever form his subconscious might currently be taking to his location. At least, assuming it didn't already know exactly where he was, which was one hell of an assumption.

What was he to do in this situation, he wondered? Just stand around and wait for his grainy-silhouetted green doppelganger to hand his ass to him on a silver platter? "Your ass, sir," he could imagine Greenie telling him now, dressed to the nines in a shitty tux, towel draped over an arm behind his back, reservation in pocket for the restaurant that makes the finest humble pie this side of Brooklyn. Absolutely not.

There had to be something he could do, though, right? He didn't believe for a second that his predicament was truly impossible. Not as long as there was still anything he could do, although he wasn't sure what that was yet beyond opening more damn doors.
"Alright, Greenie, or whatever other form my subconscious cares to take," he called, "if you're there, and you wanna fight... well, I'm just about to get back to my quest, you'll have to let me know right now."
The silence had stopped haunting him at this point. Now, it was simply irritating. Very irritating, as a matter of fact.
"You know," he snarled, as ripples of lime-green energy resonated across the lenses of his glasses, "this is so like you, huh? Cowering away, pushing me back, giving me the silent treatment because you can't bear to look for some simple fucking truths about yourself! You ever wonder why I hated you? Why I hated sharing a mind with you? BECAUSE HERE'S YOUR ANSWER, YOU COWARD!"

A burst of green light and an ear-splitting semitone dither exploded out of the glasses and rocked the mindscape. Split felt as if he was being pushed back by a strong wind. Doors rattled on their hinges. With a vicious crack, the ground beneath him crumpled up into a crater about twenty feet wide.
Then, it subsided. Split took a moment to actually welcome the otherwise crushing silence and catch his breath. When he regained his focus, he noticed a strange sort of light, shining in his face. Cautiously, he lifted his head.

A razor-thin gash ran along a corner of the sky. It bled sharp, colorful noise.

Frozen in horror, barely breathing, Split felt the dehydration of a cold sweat. His throat ached, and his breath was shallow. Something ran down his mouth and chin. Cautiously, he touched it. Lime-green, and the exact texture, viscosity and thickness of blood. He didn't doubt that was precisely what it was.

"I... I!" He stammered. "I'm sorry! Don't...! Don't do this to me. To us. Please."
He stared at the gash. It stayed in place. He could tell, somehow, that he hadn't satisfied it, that his plea was ignored. That it wasn't finished, it had just... stopped moving.
"Come on, I'll-" he gulped, "I'll play your insane little game to the end, you monster, just don't do this... please..." He paused, and took a deep breath. "I... I don't want to die, Build."
Reluctantly, the gash healed. The bleeding slowed, but it wouldn't stop for another few minutes.
"I... take that as a sign I should keep going? But now I can't shake the feeling that I'm playing right into your hands."
Split hesitated to open the next door. He really should have been more careful, he knew, but he wasn't sure he had any other option.

Its icon was the scratched record icon which had heralded the invasion, but broken apart, into tiny fragments. Interesting. He opened this door cautiously, although he wasn't exactly sure what such caution achieved. Better safe than sorry, he figured, in circumstances like these.

He stepped out into a room he'd long thought he'd never see again. His own throne room, from back during the second war's second act! But that meant...!
"Ow... What the hell... What just happened?" Build asked, struggling to rise to his feet. A younger Split leaned over him, arms folded, with a threatening grin. "Wait... Is that Split in front of me? And... If I'm here, and he's here, then... Oh no. Oh nononononono."
"You better believe it, Greenie. You wanted this to happen just as much as I did. You wanted me out of the picture. You're gonna get your wish." He clicked his neck from one side to the other, stretched his right arm across his chest, then his left. "Alright, let's face it. You're probably not." Good lord, did it feel amazing to have his own body! The euphoria was so overwhelming, he wasn't sure if he could stop smiling to himself.
Build made his way up to one knee. "I know. I know I'm not as strong as you, and I know I don't know as much as you," he stood upright and dusted himself off, "but I'm gonna try the hardest I can."
Present Split ran about the room, taking in its every last detail - every sight, every smell, every texture. His mouth hung open in an awestruck grin. The conversation continued to play out behind him, but he wasn't listening. He was back here in his throne room at long last!
"It's not just my throne now. It's my castle. I'll call it, The Castle of Split," his past self asserted. "So! Build, seeing as the odds are heavily stacked against you..." he chuckled, tossing the Broken Anachronism from one hand to the other, and then raising it to point at Build, "let's dance."
"Right," he sighed, years later, "because this was still just a game to you, huh."
He leaned against a wall and watched the battle unfold. It wasn't anywhere near as interesting as he'd remembered it being. Both of them were fighting in an uncharacteristically amateurish manner, which irked him more than he thought it had any right to. Still, though, he marked that up to the fact that they were still caught on the delirium of having half of their consciousness hollowed out. He remembered the feeling, of course - it had made him feel impossibly, blissfully light. But at the same time, he'd felt so horribly, nightmarishly empty.

"Well... This is pretty close," Build panted. He and Split were already visibly exhausted, their bodies crying out for the power apotheosis would grant.
"Yep," past Split concurred, "this is actually a pretty good battle. I didn't think you could put up this much of a fight..."
"He can't! You guys suck at fighting!" His future self heckled. Regardless, he kept watching as the fight raged on. Eventually growing tired, though, he pushed off from the wall and started to cross the room to leave, but the tide of battle turned. Young Split was pushed to the back foot, and then, worse still, to his knees.

The memory of Split leaned on one shaking elbow, and one feebly-gripped Broken Anachronism. His palms and forehead were slick with sweat, and his teeth and lips were stained with his own blood. The Split in the present winced and looked away. He knew what happened next. He didn't need a memory to torturously hammer in every last excruciating second, but then again, there were a lot of things he didn't need.
"We both wanted to see this server gone. You wanted to do it cleanly; I wanted to do it messily. Whereas you wanted to build something new over it; to bury the past and to get rid of all evil, I wanted to split the whole thing and just see it through in the most gory way possible," managed past Split through ragged breaths and bloodied gulps. Present Split mouthed every last syllable. He'd turned this conversation over and over and over in his head time and time again until he knew it as well as he knew the sun rose in the East.

"So now I wonder..." young Split cracked a half-grin. Build did not return the gesture. "Do you think we would have been better off as a team?"
"A team," present Split parroted solemnly. "You didn't get it, did you? You thought you knew everything, always held it over his head that... I don't know, that you were some kind of expert on splits, but were you really? He's not your enemy, and he's not a potential ally for you to win over. He's... you. He's us! We- No, *I* had every chance to figure that out, to see that he was everything I hated about myself, to make my peace with that! And look at you!" He clenched his fists and focused as much effort as he could on not unleashing another chartreuse burst of arrogance from his ungodly spectacles.
"Do you think we COULD be better off as a team?" The memory continued, as if he hadn't said a word. That was what infuriated him most of all, that no matter how strong he became, no matter how powerful a Prince of Time he grew, the range of his abilities didn't seem to stretch to his own past. The younger Adam T. Masons didn't know this yet, couldn't know this yet, so unmarred by doubt, so sure that they knew exactly what they were doing. And meanwhile, in their futures, Split braced himself for the memory of the single most painful blow he had ever received.

"...No."

Young Split flinched and tightened his grip on his sword. His body flushed hot with adrenaline; the gloves were off, this was a matter of predator and prey, and he tingled with anticipation, eager to find out which was which.
"Split. You're a cancer that's plagued me for too long. Don't you get it?! I'M the original TwinBuilder! ME! You were created as a... as a tumor, to PUNISH me! And now I have the power to end you. Once and for all."
Present Split turned away again, even if it was from nobody. To be called a cancer, a tumor, a fake was one thing, but to see the words forged from his own tongue, to hear them spoken in his own voice, directed at him? Sure, he was a chaotic, destructive being of limitless potential and simplified omnipotence, but he still felt, dammit, and... and... and...
"Well. The diplomatic route has failed."
"SERIOUSLY?" Split snapped. "Look at you, what other routes did you have? Were you too naive to realize that that was your only way out of this, too scared to admit it to yourself, or too proud for both?" He sighed. "Wow. That pride sure did you wonders in the end, huh? Look at you now, stuck in your own head and complaining about everywhere you'd gone wrong in life."
"Shocker. Still, you underestimate my war-like capabilities. Regnum Dei. Death. Modpack and your friends. We still have the power to end this."
"Heh. Hehehe...."
"What?"
"Sorry. It's... It's just so funny. You forced your "friends" to like you. You bought friendships. They share the same goals as you, but they're just as evil as you. And I know that not everything is black-and-white, but if what I've seen is true, then you have the evilest morality out of anyone I've ever met."

"Oh, is that so? Is that what we're doing here, we're making me watch my own prepubescent dissociative episodes give me a lecture on not having any friends? This is fucking rich, coming from you. You're the worse split, you know? The system - Twin, whatever - would have... I don't know, died unceremoniously on the streets of New York, or something, if it was just you in there. And it was just as much your stupid idea as mine to literally rip that system in two. We needed me way more than we EVER needed you."
"As for me... I've forged my friendships. People want to see the good guy win, Split. People are afraid of you. They hate you. They share my views; that you're a tumor that should just explode and waste away."
"Yeah, done and done, Greenie." Whatever. Split knew he may as well stick around and watch the fight.
It was far shorter than he remembered, and the thrill of battle only looked hollow and pathetic in retrospect. Even Split's usually indiscriminate bloodthirst felt as parched as ever watching his younger selves duke it out like the arrogant, braindead edgelords they had been.

And then, Build landed the killing blow. He struck Split - and much of the rest of the battlefield - through with columns of green flame. And then, the memory just... froze. Split looked at his past self more remorsefully than he'd have cared to admit. A hole had burned clean through his heart, another through his kidney, another a knee, another glancing his jugular, another eating away his wrist.
Less than a second after this exact moment, Split would have been nothing but embers and cinder, but this... this must have been the instant he died. Looking at his own face, well... he'd never stopped to think about it at all, but he was barely thirteen. Thirteen years old, and he'd had half his mind ripped away, his body burned into nothing, and his essence cast into the endless perdition of Limbo.
Slowly, Split trudged to the memory's door, stepped out, and closed it quietly behind him. "Am I... kind of fucked up?" He asked nobody in particular.
He feared that he already knew the answer to that question.
"So, what? Did the war make me... like this? Did it ruin me? Or was I like this before then? Do I even want to know?"
His glasses hummed softly.
"Well, self-discovery is the name of the game here. I may as well go all in on it, given how my any% attempt went..."

He sighed and walked to the next door.
"I have the 'evilest morality'... Yeah, Greenie, I fucking wish. I'm not 'evil', and I'm not 'good' anymore either. Honestly, I..."
He rested the face in the palm of one hand.
"I always envied that about you. You never seemed to run out of things to fight for. You *believed* in stuff, even when you were too much of a wimp to stand up for any of it. I wish I could be like that. Maybe then I wouldn't be in this situation. I know I shouldn't be letting my guard down like this, but here you go, alright? I'm playing by your rules here. I'm conceding you're better than me at something."
He reached the door. Upon it was the sign for the I-80.
"Oh, come on. This could be anything."

He opened the door to - surprise surprise - the Interstate 80 highway. TwinBuilder trudged parallel to a strip of road running through a nondescript patch of woodland that seemed to have done well to keep its leaves for a winter this harsh. He was shivering, his hands deep in his pockets and his face more or less devoid of color in the chill. Crystalline streams ran down his face, no doubt the frozen result of a good few hours spent crying. Once every few minutes, a car would rush past and his jacket would billow up behind him in the slipstream.
"Nice going, Adam," he huffed. "Yeah, sure, now that you know at least one other living thing in all of fiction can see you and wants to kill you, you decide that taking a plane back home is a bad idea. Did it not occur to you that maybe you could have at least taken a bus or something? Yeah, you know, you know, so you wouldn't have to walk the whole way through three states to get back home in the middle of December.
"Dammit, I haven't even reached the New Jersey state line. And even then, I'll be in New Jersey. So what the hell? This was so STUPID, this was a TERRIBLE idea, I NEED to catch a bus the next town I'm in, and no matter WHAT I'm not gonna be repeating this mistake on the trip to D.C.,"
"Hold on, what?" Split whispered, even though he didn't need to. "When did I go to Washington D.C.? I think I'd remember something like that."

"And I'm... still... talking to myself," Twin groaned. "I swear, if I have to go another week without anyone being able to talk to me I'm just gonna go crazy. I mean come on, I'm literally saying all my thoughts out loud! How much more on the nose can you get?"
"Hate to tell ya, kid, but it's all downhill from here," Split smirked.
"Okay, let's actually think about this. I've got time to mull it over, I guess. Am I insane? For and against.
"For: I'm talking to myself, the whole world looks like my drawings, I'm one of those 'God appeared to me' people now, I'm convinced nobody can see me, I barely feel the need to eat or sleep despite no obvious changes happening to my body, When I get more pessimistic and defensive about things, my memories of these... weird... violent... impulses get blurry,"
"Wait," Split raised an eyebrow, "what?"
"And when I'm having one of those, uh, violent, melodramatic bouts it's the depressive episodes that fade."
"...Huh. I guess that answers that. What did that make me before The Operator, then? An emotion? A fugue state? A coping mechanism? Yeah, that makes a little too much sense. Hehey, look at me, guys! I'm an anthropomorphized coping mechanism developed by a guy who technically doesn't exist anymore, and I'm not even a healthy one at that!"
He huffed.
"I guess it's actually kind of funny, if you think about it."
He didn't laugh, though. He didn't laugh because he was lying about it being funny, and actually it sucked major ass.

"As for points against me being insane," Twin continued, "I, um. I'll have to come back to that one."
"Yeah, I'm still not one hundred percent on the whole sanity thing." He surveyed the scenery and whistled some Blank Banshee to himself - Anxiety Online, from the vaportrap outfit's sophomore album Blank Banshee 1, specifically - while he considered the state of his mental affairs. "I'm too tired to make excuses at this point, let's face the facts: I fucked up. I really should have seen someone - a therapist, or psychologist, or psychiatrist, or pediatrician, or even just a goddamn friend or something, *anyone* - about stuff years ago. But I didn't. I just... didn't. Did I lack the humility? Was I sure nobody could help? Did I think this was normal, or something? Is there even a reason at all?
"Guess you were right, Greenie. I should have stopped. I should have turned things around. Maybe if I'm still alive when all this is over I will, but at the same time I'm worried, well what if it's too late? I think I'm over the event horizon now. I'm trapped circling the drain until there's nothing left of me."
"More importantly," Twin continued.
"Hey, I'm monologuing over here!" Split yelled. "Actually, I guess I'm done. The floor's yours, kid."
"What am I gonna do if D.C. doesn't pan out? I really need a backup plan, but right now it's my best shot by a mile."
"Again with this Washington D.C. crap! What are you even talking about?!"
"I mean first off I'm making a whole bunch of assumptions about the Far Lands powers that might not be true, but everything in reality seems to conform to them so that's a good sign. Or, I guess it would be if it didn't wipe people out of existence."
"Oh right. Right! The Far Lands powers! Is that why I don't remember that? Well, I guess it could also have been not very memorable. I mean whatever it is, I've done a bunch of way more important stuff ever since."
"Oh, hey. The sun's setting already? Well, I have been walking for a while. I think I'm starting to get tired, but I've been unstuck from reality for so long I'm not even sure I remember what exhaustion feels like."
"Hah! Don't get used to it. It's gonna hit you like a brick a few months down the line."
He contemplated his own advice for a second. How much he needed it back then. How many mistakes he blindly stumbled into. Sure, he couldn't change the past before, but...
He pulled the nameplate Gracie had given him out of his pocket. What had she called it? "A super powerful curse that basically lets me do anything"? Maybe, just maybe...
But was it worth the risk? Was his advice better than none at all? It was as he had said: he was just an unhealthy defense mechanism given human form.
He returned the curse to his pocket. Maybe it was for the best. Also, he had been walking for a while. It was probably time he headed back to the door.
He turned around and marched back the way he came. He walked this way for about 20 seconds before realizing the door wasn't getting any closer.
"Okay, this isn't funny," he pouted. "If you wanna be done with me so badly why don't you swallow your pride and draw your blade?" He started running towards the door, but it yielded the same result. He broke into a sprint. Still, no difference. Frustrating, of course, but he could deal with that. He had more tricks up his sleeve.
He snapped his fingers. A crimson jolt of dark lightning between his fingertips illuminated the dusk in a split-second flash.
Split felt his very spirit freeze in freefall. Then, he felt the crushing pressure of the entire time stream pressed up against him with the combined might of every Joule per Kelvin of all the entropy in the universe. He was used to the sensation as a First Guardian of the Red Sun, at times he even found it pleasant - there was little else he enjoyed more than feeling his place in the vast cosmos and pushing against it - but these weren't exactly fun circumstances.
The memory rewound, as did Split's place in it - slowly, at first, but gradually building into a rigid, mechanical dance. Within ten of his own seconds, Split found himself back at the memory's door and slammed it shut.

"Alright," Split roared. "I don't know what you want from me anymore! I'm letting you railroad me to wherever you want, and still you're toying with me! IF YOU ACTUALLY WANNA KILL ME, COME OUT WHERE I CAN SEE YOU AND DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT! Ugh, you know what? Forget this. I'm gonna keep searching for answers behind these doors. Don't come crying to me when one of them reveals how I can beat you."
The next door featured the image of a gravestone.
"Wow, that's promising," Split rolled his eyes. Still, though, the concept of death did stimulate his more perverse penchant for the macabre. That, and he considered his current predicament a worse fate. He'd been dead before, after all. It was just kind of boring, really, and nothing more.

He opened the door and stepped out into a churchyard, the cold earth shining in the late morning thaw of the February sun. A teary-eyed crowd of roughly two dozen were slowly ushered indoors. Split ran up to the steps to see one last straggler at the back of the crowd nervously glance over his shoulder before stepping in. He was by a fair way the youngest person in the crowd, and with his black suit and red glasses on, he could very, very easily been mistaken for another if not for the twenty years separating them. Hastily, Split followed TwinBuilder inside.
The members of the crowd took seats through the aisles. It wasn't a particularly large church, but then, it didn't need to be; the funeral was in service of a somewhat private man.

In the bema of the church, by a closed casket, was a framed photograph of the man himself. He was smiling a crooked, toothy smile, with his chin resting on the knuckles of his interlaced hands. Upon his face was a thin, black beard, and a pair of elliptical wireframe spectacles, but otherwise it was like looking in a mirror.
The inscription below read, "In loving memory / Adam Truman Mason".
"So that's what I'm gonna look like in twenty years, huh," Twin murmured.
"Good luck lasting that long," Split scoffed to himself.

The funeral began as quietly and as sombre as all funerals do, and it filled in much of the blanks about Adam's life that Twin hadn't yet pieced together. Most of all, it had revealed that although he had originally been considered missing, the fact that all of his belongings - wallet, passport, and food included - had remained in his apartment, and that nobody had seen him since the start of December was more than reason enough to mark him as "presumed dead". Some had their doubts initially, naturally, but with the winter almost over and still not the slightest of hints that he might still be alive, people found fewer and fewer conclusions to draw.

Adam Mason was dead. But only TwinBuilder understood just *how* dead.

Adam's friends and close colleagues took turns saying a few words about how devastated they were by his disappearance, how sad they were to hear of his passing, and so on. Twin wasn't paying that much attention - he was in one of his redder moods, and itching for something interesting to happen. He was here for a reason, after all.
"...but my deepest condolences go out to his brother Jeffrey," spoke a timid-voiced middle-aged man Twin and Split could only assume must have been a friend of Adam's, "whom I've never had the pleasure of meeting but... Adam always seemed close to him. Is Jeff here? I..."
Everyone looked around for a sign of Jeff Mason, Twin more than most. When nobody answered to that name, though, he bolted out of the aisle and shouted furiously at a man who wasn't there.
"Oh, come on! You couldn't even show up to my OWN FUCKING FUNERAL? What's WRONG with you!?"
"Hey, uh, who's that blurry lookin' kid?" Someone whispered to the person next to them. All eyes fell on Twin, and they strained to focus, until...
"Adam?" One or two people gasped incredulously.
"How is that possible?" Another gawked.
Twin ignored them. This was all a waste of time, all one big colossal disappointment! He stormed out, and, as he left, heard the service resume as if he had never even been there.

Split felt more shaken than he thought he could. His eyes felt damp, on the brink of tears. His heartbeat felt louder, thrumming through his skull. He slowly turned to follow Twin out, and then he dashed out of the church as fast as he could. Much like the tide that had struck him upon his arrival here, he felt a loneliness so strong it was almost tangible. He felt it as if it was tearing through his flesh, like it was burning him, like it was a thousand blades driven through his back. He faltered and staggered out the door of the memory and closed it behind him, but the agony persisted.
"You miss him, don't you?" He screamed at the sky. "Well here's a fucking newsflash for you: He left! That's just life!"
The pain only intensified in response. Split fell to the ground, whimpering and gasping for air.
"You think I don't miss him too? Of course I do! But he obviously doesn't want anything to do with us! With me, singular! However you feel about it, about... about everything, I promise you I feel it too! Just... just let me go!"
For reasons of its own, the pain subsided instantly. Split wheezed and jumped back upright.
"Look. We can get through this together, alright? It's worked for us - uh, me - so far."

And so, it seemed, he did. His venture carried on, leaving him to explore the halls of his mind in peace, and quite despite his prior urgency, Split found some solace in just being able to explore the more insignificant corners of his memories. Things he'd never paid attention to at the time, but now... now there was nothing to interrupt him. There was the FEZ incident that had dealt three whole points of damage to the Godmodder. The first time he had listened to Vektroid's seminal mallsoft record, Floral Shoppe. A brisk half-jog through LaGuardia airport for a flight to Washington D.C. that he didn't remember, for some reason. That time he'd been sick in some voidic restaurant's bathroom after trying a meal ill-fit for organic beings. The thirty-seventh time he had listened to Vektroid's seminal mallsoft record, Floral Shoppe. The murder of a Beta-tier godmodder. His own skipping out on the festivities following that, despite all the others imploring him to stay. Life, you know? Oh, yeah. He knew.

Then he came to one door that stopped him in his tracks.
"That's interesting," he mused, "this is the first I've heard of a door without a symbol."
He flung it open to reveal... to reveal...
"Holy shit," he blurted. He stood perfectly in place for a second, taking in what he was seeing.
A monochrome glimpse of his living room in nonfiction.

Perhaps if he hadn't been so awestruck, he would have moved away from the door by this point. Maybe he wouldn't have been so distracted, and his enhanced senses would have picked up on another presence directly behind him. Perhaps it wouldn't have been there at all if he could. Perhaps it wasn't.
Regardless, it was at that precise moment that a single short, sharp blow struck him in the small of the back and sent him staggering forward. He tensed as he crossed the threshold, his body excruciatingly reconfiguring to a colorless, photorealistic form. He hit the floor and every inch of his body seared in the sensation of a burn so hot that it feels cold. He pulled himself up, but his motion felt liquid-smooth, and ever so slightly slower to the point where he was unsure if any perceived change in speed was a figment of his imagination. He turned to the door just as it slammed shut behind him. It didn't make even the slightest of sounds. He tried the doorknob, tried striking the door with his fists, but to no avail. It refused to budge. He screamed at the top of his lungs, but it came out sounding distant, muted, and swallowed by its own reverb. It was then that he realized how quiet everything was: it was complete silence, somehow even more crushing than that on the way into his mindscape.
He rattled the doorknob again, more urgently this time, but the result stayed the same. Then, something caught his eye.
He looked down just in time to see brilliant, viridescent flame lick at the base of the door and slowly begin an upward crawl. Split panicked, beat at the door with all his might, but nothing changed, and nobody came.

He fell back when the part of the door he was leaning against was eaten away, and scrambled as fast as he could back to his feet just in time to see the last of the doorframe disappear. Defeated, he let out one last cry of anguish, and realized that the dull, soft ringing the sound had left at the edge of his senses might be the last thing he ever heard.

12:00 A.M., 2016 DEC 07

New York had, for as long as anyone had ever given a damn about remembering, always been known as the city that never sleeps. Standing in the middle of Grand Central Station at midnight, watching commuters drift from platform to platform, up and down stairways, in and out of the general hubbub of 42nd Street, TwinBuilder couldn't help but disagree. These people had never seen the great many horrors he had, had never suffered the same mortifying, existential epiphanies as he on the nature of this world. To him, and to alarmingly few others, this was one city among millions that would never wake up.

Still, though, convenient meeting point. He knew the city well, the station was one of its many iconic monuments, it could easily house a gathering of a great many people, getting from here to any other part of the city was relatively straightforward, and what's more it's New York Freakin' City, baby! So much stuff just happens all the time that nobody's really worth more than an odd look or two, so the fact that he wore a full-body velveteen shawl and space helmet and was accompanied by an unnaturally tall, thin, and pale woman whose eyes and mouth seemed to drip with black blood that jolted out of existence the moment it splattered on the ground was no big deal. For anyone walking by, chances were it was the fourth-weirdest thing they had seen all day. Tops.

"Why is everyone taking so long?" Twin whined impatiently.
Gracie didn't answer. Mostly, this was because she was dead. It was also partially because she didn't know.
Twin fidgeted in clear discomfort, not only at the haunting silence, but the uncertainty it implied. He checked the clock. It suggested a little over nine hours remained until... well, hopefully nothing he and his companions couldn't stop. Hopefully. If they failed, though, not even he could imagine the consequences.
He remembered hearing long ago (although he'd be damned if he could remember where) of there ultimately only existing one storyteller, omnipresent in every culture and subculture, and the one story they would tell through a billion voices, in a billion ways. The one story that permeated all of Fiction. He had known this story as one idea that could never, ever be killed. Not by the efforts of any struggle he could imagine. But on the other hand, if he failed...

Well, he was sure that he and the others could do a lot in nine hours. It shouldn't be a problem.

"Hey! Hey, Twin!" He heard someone call to him, roughly in the direction of the Lexington Passage. He turned to find the familiar android veneer of Generic shifting through the crowd towards he and Gracie, and he grinned.
"About time," he snickered. About twenty seconds later he heard a similar call from the balcony to his left, before Maniac leapt from it to his side. Then, shortly thereafter, Blue, then K4yne, then Bomber, and so on, and so forth.

12:38 A.M., 2016 DEC 07

Collectively, the descendants had gathered in roughly forty minutes. Not bad time at all, but up against the clock it was far from ideal. Twin ran a quick head count of the group, who had all, much to his irritation, taken to chatting amongst themselves. He shot a nervous glance at TT, who replied with a far more confident one and a slight clear of the throat. Instantly, everyone else fell silent. All eyes - or their closest analogues, depending on the descendant - were on him, save for Gracie's. Wherever she was looking, behind those blood-blackened shades, was something none of her fellows cared to find out.

Few of them were aware that you were reading this, fewer still that I was narrating it to you. Still, though, they decided they didn't have the liberty to complain given the circumstances.

"Okay, I'm gonna make this quick because we don't have all day," he began, "as in we literally don't have all day. We barely have one-third of that. That's why I had you all split off into groups before we got here. Now, has everyone got a group?"
The crowd collectively looked among itself for any sign of lone stragglers. A few shuffled towards their respective groups, all of which consisted of four members, with perhaps only a couple of exceptions at most.
"Fantastic. So here's the thing: At exactly 9:01 A.M., this city's gonna get hit by... actually, do we have a name for it?"
"Paradox storm?" Crystal, one of the few in on the exact reason for the mob's gathering, offered.
"That's scarily apt," TT nodded. "Okay, yes. Let's go with that. It's essentially the fallout of a plot hole so immense that it will, quite literally, tear fiction to shreds. Not as some grand, final oblivion, like the End of Man's supposed to be, but an actual, fundamental, ontological contradiction retconned into every point in all nine ideal planes. An end to every idea, and by extension, the *one* idea that Twin always talks about."
Panicked murmurs rippled through the crowd until he raised his hand for silence.
"Unless," he stressed, "we stop it. And I know we can! We always do!"
The muttering of his peers shifted from terror to uncertainty to reluctant agreement to pride. They were the Descendants, after all! Trading blows with malicious and destructive reality warpers was their pride and joy!

"Do you enjoy this?" Twin spat in a whisper so sharp it could cut glass. "Taking these characters, putting words in their mouths, and making them dance your lunatic marionette fandango?" His lip curled into a sneer, because he knew full well that I could ask him the exact same question. He knew that the only reason he managed to outwit and catch me in the first place is that he thought the exact same way I did.
"That's not true," he continued at a slightly raised volume, and then glanced around the crowd when I pointed it out in the narration just now. Very well then, if he was going to look at it that way. He'd have to come to realize that the only reason he was keeping me so close was a matter of his own vanity. To see a figure who had met with a fate more disastrous than his own, to remind himself that his nadir was far from exceptional within the confines of Masonic Fiction. If he were to reject that, he would have to accept something far worse.

"Now the instigator of the storm will be arriving somewhere in the city at 7:12 A.M. and make a beeline directly for the city hall. I don't know why there of all places, but ultimately that gives you about six and a half hours to make your ways to your vantage points and prepare in whatever way you see fit. As long as you kill it before 9:01, we're fine! Crisis averted."

"Oh yeah? Tell me, then, what could be worse than being compared to you?" Twin asked. Very well, if he wanted to ask as much. His deepest, most honest thoughts were that he truly believed nobody but he was capable of... bridling my full power. A little self-obsessed for me to say? Well... maybe.
The alternative was that even after his great adventure, after the conclusion of his arc, he was still as secretive and self-assured as ever. That he had one hell of a superman complex, one that he'd harbored since his arrival in fiction. A weakness he hadn't overcome as well as he told himself he had. What's more, he was delusional if he truly believed his power exceeded that of the other descendants. And if he thought himself stronger than me, he was downright insane. But he already knew that, didn't he?
"Stop," he growled, "talking."
Fine. If you insist. How did you like that ten minute gap I just spent not narrating?
Not that a second had passed for you, though. A narrative can't progress, after all, without anyone to write it.
He crossed his arms. "You always have to have the last word, huh?"
I have to have every word. That's how it works.
Despite what the back and forth might have implied, neither of us stayed frustrated with the other. There was a mutual understanding of a silent symbiosis for as long as we continued to play into one another's hands to our respective ends, and regardless, we were working to achieve the same goal anyway. A slight disagreement was no need for bad blood. Or whatever it might be that he bleeds now. I'm afraid to find out.

TT, meanwhile, hadn't finished talking. "Here's the plan as it stands right now: each quartet sets up at a different point in the area, prepares any charges or summons you need to, and stay posted for any updates on our harbinger's whereabouts. The moment you see it, you can use any attacks you want, just don't expect... well, you get the idea.
"Now we're gonna spread out throughout the area as follows: Crusher's group are assigned to Washington Square Park. Tazz's, Wall Street. Crystal's, the Brooklyn Bridge. Twin's group-"
"Are totally capable of taking care of ourselves," Twin interrupted. "Don't forget that I did offer a better plan than swan diving into the belly of the beast."
"Then why are you even here?"
"I just needed to hear your whole plan for myself. The four of us," he cast a sweeping gesture at Gracie, Bomber, and Modpack, "will be back in time to fight off the storm, but we won't be alone."
TT mulled this over, nodded, and dismissed Twin. The two offered a brief goodbye, and the latter, followed by his three companions, split away from the rest of the crowd. They had a long journey ahead, and little more than eight hours in which to see it through.

12:55 A.M., 2016 DEC 07

The descendants completed their briefing and went their separate ways, all heading to whatever route would would take them to their respective areas as fast as possible.
For many, naturally, this was by rail. Some supposed that they must have been lucky to have such a climactic battle run through a city with public transportation that ran as deep as Manhattan's did, but then realized that if they were particularly fortunate, they'd not be tasked with fighting a being capable of pulling all of reality apart.
What was rendering such a shortcut impractical, however, was the amount of time Minor107 was spending at the turnstile, fumbling through his inventory.
"Darn," he furrowed his brow, "nobody saw me drop a ticket anywhere or anything, right?"
"What's the matter?" Flare Flames leaned over his shoulder, trying to make heads or tails of the holdup.
"I can't find it," he shrugged.
"Oh. That's no problem." A sly grin crossed Flare Flames's face as he pulled out a peculiar-looking white gun with a barrel shaped into a ring featuring a short nozzle at its far edge. The inner side of the ring began to rotate almost too quick to watch, and a beam of light shot from its nozzle. The turnstile began to deteriorate the moment it was struck by the beam, and as it did so, a cloud of small, ghostly cubes appeared on the inside of the ring. Within seconds, the path was clear, and they progressed unimpeded to the platform. Two security guards watched this unfold, but silently agreed that it was not a matter they had any desire to interfere with.

And so, the descendants began to spread throughout Manhattan. Under other circumstances, they would no doubt have attempted to conceal themselves from the lowly mortals they crossed paths with. With the fate of reality weighing on their shoulders, however, their options were far more limited than their collective mantra of 'WE CAN DO ANYTHING' would suggest.
Those more forward thinking among them didn't mind, though. Their sights as a faction were set on matters of conquest, and if they had to sacrifice nine short hours to fending off a more powerful threat, then that was simply the way things had to be, and it was small potatoes at that. Very few actually raised any objection, and those who did were simply ignored.

Only a handful of them dared to dream of a better solution, and even then, only one of them was actually insane enough to betray the descendants and see it through.

3:13 A.M., 2016 DEC 07

Three descendants and their apparently dead companion stood shoulder to shoulder at the end of a concrete path, its tiles cracked and worn and strewn about, overgrown by weeds and grass that had since died. It was raining, and far above brewed a storm which let out the occasional growl of thunder, but seemed hesitant to strike the earth with any lightning.
It was dark - of course it was dark, it was three in the morning in early December - but ahead of them was a light as clear as day nonetheless. An old, ruined house with a door ripped off of its hinges, with its paint worn and cracked, and its windows shattered, and from every orifice streamed light in ten colors, shifting with a rhythm that resembled a heartbeat.
"Well..." Bomber looked among the other three. "I hope the guy we're looking for isn't in there. Doesn't look like anyone's lived here in years."
"Not exactly in there," Twin admitted, "but there is a plot hole inside, which normally is a force I wouldn't reckon with. But, you know. This is as far from normal as it gets."
"What's a plot hole do?" Modpack asked.
"Anything, really. It's naturally defiant of any logic or causality associated with it. It's like a wound in the skin of the Source Code of Reality. It's like an answer that can never correspond to any question. It's like an unstoppable unraveling of the way everything should work. It's the beginning, and the end, but somehow never both. It's the biggest thing in the world. And... I think it's our best bet at finding our guy."
"We can't just summon him?"
"He's way too powerful! There's no way we'll manage the charge in time!"
"If I may..." Grace interjected in a dry monotone.
"Wow, she can talk?" Modpack whispered. The others seemed equally as surprised. Of course I can talk, though, I just consider such puppeteering of a dead woman's voice deeply disrespectful, even if she does happen to be my own fictional counterpart.
"...we've got company. Contact in P-minus 1."
"'P-minus'?" Bomber quirked an eyebrow.
"Posts, or at leas their time equivalent," Twin clarified. "How many of them are there?"
"Two. Both agents of the Conflict. One approaching from the left, one from the right. For the record," Gracie droned, "The SI unit for posts is the Dop, named after famed physicist Doctor Arnold Karlheinz Dop. The Dop is derived from one second, multiplied by the-"
"Gracie. Please."
"Understood."
The other three all prepared for battle; Modpack drew a brand-new take on an old favorite weapon (this one bearing the name Quantum Cataclysm), Bomber channeled dark magic into a closed fist, and TwinBuilder drew a blade somewhere beneath his shawl.

"Lower your weapons," spoke a figure emerging from the shadows, his voice coming from somewhere in the void comprising his head. "I have no reason to call you my enemies while you're about to chart a path straight to the whereabouts of Mr. Cipher."
"Four stragglers straying from their pack / Cast out to rot, like litter's runt / Their fates all sealed, no running back / Too late, now Grimm is on the hunt," chanted another figure in a lilting singsong. This one was harder to make out, shifting and twisting through the darkness in dreamlike, fluid movements. What could be seen of them resembled a wolf, but they moved too quickly and erratically to make out beyond that.
"Oh!" The first figure seemed surprised by this. "These are four among the self-proclaimed new plot force, then?"
"It's more than a matter of just proclamation," Twin objected.
"Wonderful. So killing them all should be a matter of two birds with one stone."
"Ever tried killing a bird with a stone before?" Modpack scoffed, and aimed at the figure who was pretty obviously the Critic.
"I'm not sure we should resort to violence this quickly," the Critic shrugged, "but if you'd so readily challenge two agents while your rejection of the Narrative's coddling leaves you as vulnerable as any narratively insignificant entities, I have no qualms with stopping you. Certainly, Grimm doesn't. But I don't think he ever did."
"The three of you, go show Grimm who's in charge here. I'll take on the Critic," Twin ordered. His teammates nodded in agreement.

The wolf, to nobody's surprise, was exceptionally good at remaining unseen in tall, dead grass in the middle of the night. His voice seemed to curl out of every shadow like tendrils of smoke. He laughed, and in a soft, sweet sigh, whispered, "Fools forsaken, three in all / Which will be the first to fall? / The Alchemist's descendant, who / hides half a mind to split in two? / The hellish merchant could be next / With shorter fuse than he expects / Or lifeless corpse, so deeply cursed..."
His voice trailed off. His three foes readied themselves for an attack, but they knew not from where it might come.
"Yes. I think I'll kill it first."
Sooner than any of them could react, Gracie was struck from behind by what her companions could only process as a moving shadow. She fell forward onto her hands and knees as the shadow leapt into the air, fangs bared and aimed at the back of her neck.

Twin lunged with his black shortsword into where the critic had been standing only a second before, when swung right, then up, then swept down, never quite able to strike the agent.
"An impasse, then," he huffed. "You can't touch me, and I can't hit you."
"Not quite. You're already exhausting yourself very quickly."
"I can fight a lot longer than you might think."
"You should be saving your breath. Given your accuracy thus far at a whopping zero percent, your stamina and perseverance are your only assets. That, and this blade. Whatever happened to that old Oblivion's Guardian I've heard so much about?"
Twin smirked. "Guess I got bored of it."

A bolt of darkness cast from Bomber's outstretched hand struck Grimm and threw him aside. The latter dissolved back into the shadows and reappeared behind the former, sinking his teeth into his elbow. Bomber shouted in pain and tried to shake him off.
"Hold still," Modpack growled, Cataclysm pointed directly at the two of them. Grimm glanced over at the weapon, let go and vanished once again.
"I think he's holding back from using the full extent of his powers, whatever the hell they are," Bomber grumbled. "Not that I'm exactly in a rush to find out what that might be."
"If he's so intent on using the shadows to protect himself, I think we should do away with them," Gracie offered. "BATTLE TECHNIQUE: LET-"
"Not yet," Modpack interjected. "At least wait until he's where you can see him. Save your battle techniques for direct hits."
Gracie nodded. Bomber raised a hand to grab their collective attention. They both turned to see what he was looking at.
The shadows around them were curling up over them like a tidal wave. At its peak, it split to reveal a row of razor-sharp pointed fangs, twisted at their edge into an acute smile. A single point of light opened on it - a glistening red eye.
The dark figure towered over them, easily twice their height, and it laughed a laugh that seemed to echo from everywhere at once.

The critic sidestepped another swing of the blade, ducked under another swipe, and hopped out of the way of another thrust. "I'm getting tired of this," he grumbled, and in one swift motion, grabbed Twin's hand. Instantly, he experienced something he had never experienced before. Normally, physical contact would allow him to assess all of a target's shortcomings and insecurities, and obliterate them emotionally. This time, though, he felt as if his hand was aflame, and electrified, and being stabbed with one hundred needles. He screamed and let go. With his other hand, he clutched his wrist and stumbled back. Twin threw his sword into the ground, blade first, and put his hands on his hips.
"Is something the matter? I was just getting warmed up."
"What. The FUCK. Are you."
Twin grinned. It was a grin almost too wide and toothy for a human face, let alone his.
"Immune to criticism," was all he said.
"Wh- what are you doing, and why are you doing it?!"
"That's a really really good question. It's so... weird, so abstract a concept, maybe even too much so to explain, but for you? For you, I'll try.
"I felt a compulsion, see, to reshape this reality into one of my own design. But it wasn't a desire spurned on by the machinations of the Narrative or the Conflict, actually. It was something totally new. Something unique, something I think only I can feel. I'm going to take all of Fiction apart, piece by piece, see what makes it tick, and see what happens when I don't put it back together."
"You... you must be mad."
"I've always been mad, I know I've been mad," Twin waved him off. "I guess after all this, that's just one of the several quadrillion things I'll find out 'why'."
The two stared at one another for a few seconds, even if only one of them had any eyes.
"Aaaanyway, your buddy is really roughing up my friends right now, so I'm gonna go see to that." A soft laugh escaped Twin's lips behind his helmet. The sound made the Critic feel sick.

7:47 A.M., 2016 DEC 07

"Alright," DaVinci offered in an attempt to make small talk as much as the cramped, chattering hubbub of an early morning train ride would allow, "what kind of summons have you been charging up for?"
Wilson's face lit up. "Ah! You know, I'm so glad you asked. Myself and Talist had spent quite a bit of time talking it over, actually, and we decided that, much like you, we'd travel through as much of the city as we could and set up shop throughout the... hang on. Where *is* Talist right now anyway?"
The two of them looked up and down the carriage. They found him tapping Ire on the shoulder, trying to get his attention.
"Ire. Ire!" He said.
"Hm?" Ire blinked, lifting off his headphones.
"That old lady wants your seat."
"Oh!" He chuckled softly. "My bad." Without a moment's hesitation, he conceded his seat and instead sat on the ceiling.

"Calling all stations," huffed a voice through every descendant's respective communication device, "Commander Silentread speaking. OpelSpeedster's found the harbinger already, but judging by the plume of smoke blotting out much of the sky to the north, I don't think I'd be all too far off the mark to guess that you're all painfully aware of its location. He reports that it killed the Tripod in a single hit, and has now taken to calling it 'the Thunderchild' for some reason, which I'll admit is a marginal improvement."
"I'd say the current plan is to regroup at its destination and work our way over to meet it in the middle," TT added, "but judging from the fact that you're all just charging in to fight it, I guess it's really just whatever. As for me..."
As he finished speaking, the summon he had been working on reached completion. Behind him, the Goanna-Mech rose to his feet and towered high above the surrounding buildings.
"...well, I think I'll go the old fashioned route, and use a shotgun."

Piono and Aegis struck the Thunderchild with everything they could muster, repeatedly pooling their powers to unleash chains of attacks that would have devastated a lesser foe. The Thunderchild, however, didn't even flinch. A jet-black liquid ran down the street towards it, and then rose from the ground to produce a defensive wall of spikes to its left and right. It continued walking toward city hall at a steady pace. Not once did it speed up or slow down, but it carried on in what one might liken to a funeral march, were it accompanied by others. Perhaps some relief could be found in the fact that it was alone, but it made little difference. At this point, it seemed absolutely unbeatable.

3:19 A.M., 2016 DEC 07

Bomber, Gracie, and Modpack all struggled to stand after an onslaught of bloody nightmares cast upon them by the very night itself. Visions of bloodshed and death and nineteenth-century tragedy assaulted their senses, when suddenly, an anime-style flash of light in the darkness cleaved through the shadow's form as Twin leapt sword-first through the wave. He locked eyes with the beast, whose concentration was now mostly dedicated to maintaining his form, with a fiery determination the other descendants hadn't seen cross his face in many years. His fingers seemed to dig into the blade so much that in the shifting light pouring from the house, his knuckles were white, almost blue.
"Modpack. Bomber." He barked under his breath. "Go deal with the Critic, before he gets to the plot hole. I've got this."
Both the descendants nodded and left Grimm to Twin and Gracie, who stood back to back and stared down the darkness that seemed to tighten around them with every second.
Now would be an excellent time to give me back my curse. The one that Gracie - the actual, fictional Gracie - gave to you before I consumed her soul and took this body for myself.
"I don't have it."
What are you talking about? Of course you do. Who else would she have given it to?
I skim the first three acts of this tale, to make sure I haven't missed anything. Looks like I-
Oh.

Oh fuck.

Of all people, why...?
"You want it back, right? That's why you're going to lead us right to him."
Oh, for God's sake.
You do realize that if you hadn't taken it from me and trapped me in this body - quite literally nailed me to a cross - we wouldn't have a paradox storm to deal with. I know even in your lunacy-and-tenacity-overdriven mind that you understand that.
"I mean, then we'd have to deal with you as a pure authorial force. And you are FAR worse. So how about you stop trying to undercut me for two seconds and we fight off this agent?"
"Of course," Gracie replied. "BATTLE TECHNIQUE: KILL OUR WAY OUT."

The Critic was about ten feet from the front door frame to the house when Bomber set off a remote explosive and blew him spiraling backward. He leapt to his feet and stuck his fists up.
"Ha!" Bomber chortled. "Guess you're not much of a fighter, huh?"
"I've never needed to be."
"Yeah, me neither," Modpack tut-tutted, "but at least I had the common sense not to come unarmed."
"You're right! You're right. How silly of me. I'll presume you know what I'm capable of?"
"...Where are you going with this."
"All I'm saying is that with my abilities limited to being what they are, I'd hardly think myself a worthy adversary to either of you even if you were unarmed. Unless, of course, there's any part to yourselves either of you are afraid of?"
Modpack fired a beam of energy directly into the Critic's chest. He fell to the ground, and stayed there.
"I've got a split, dipshit. Obviously there's a part of myself I'm afraid of. That's how it works. Fucking moron."
Bomber ambled over to the Critic's side and knelt just at the edge of where he imagined the agent's eye would be, if he'd had any.
"Look at you," he gloated. "You were so ready to take on a group of reality warping hate crime frat bros, weren'tcha? So sure that you were just gonna go toe to toe with the descendants, and dick around with mind games long enough to get us off the Conflict's case. Well, I've got some bad news for ya."
He leaned in closer, and whispered in a half-snarl. "We're not the descendants. Not really. Just a bunch of very convincing fakes."
"Th- then- then... wh...h...ho are you?"
"Oh, how rude of me! I really ought to introduce myself properly. Hi! My name's Bomber, Crafted God of Avarice."

"What twisted end would I await / If you'd not sought it far too late / If I'd not come to seal your fate / And your mad kind were to succeed? / The plot force which you claim to be / What future does your vision see? / What does it hold for those like me / Who'd just as soon on your flesh feed?"
Twin and Gracie darted back and forth, blades akimbo, striking down any manifestations of the macabre and the grim as they could, but they sprung up just as quickly.
"Success, where those like Metatron had failed. A world far more complex and beautiful and hideous than this one. Not inspired by the pedestrian mathematics of that sacred geometry and a self-obsessed tunnel vision of the way the world should be, but a deconstructed idea spread thin across every tether between Fiction and Nonfiction! A new age! An age championed only by those who can find it within themselves to understand it!"
Twin's braggadocio had left him with a glaring blind spot to his behind, where he was struck by a big, bad wolf who coalesced from pure night terror and threw him flat on his face with a sickening CRACK. When he stood up again, the glass of his helmet was smashed to pieces. Behind its metamaterial visage (or, now, lack thereof), his face looked paler. A drowned blue, even. He threw the helmet off. His hair was an utter mess, and his head was bleeding with glass cuts in at least five places. His breath sounded... unwholesome, without a voice modulator his helmet must have had built into it. He looked to be on the verge of death.
"If I must ask, you wretched thing / What age would such a daydream bring?"
Twin coughed up blood. Or, at least, it looked something like blood. His head shot up to once more meet the beast's eye, and perhaps strangest of all, he was smiling. Five words escaped his lips, no more, and even they alone were enough to send a shiver up the agent's spine.

"FUck around AND FIND out."

8:10 A.M., 2016 DEC 07

"This feels wrong," Generic muttered, pacing back and forth. "Shouldn't we be down there in the street, helping the others kill that... thing?"
"Not yet," insisted Psi-Serpent. "I trust Dungkaka to deliver on his contingency, and we'll need to be ready to support it when he does. If that means we have to abstain from battle until the final push, so be it. But there is a reason he confided specifically in us."
"And that is...?"
"Well, I am - although not taxonomically in theory, effectively in practice - the Psi-Godmodder now, and that's the kind of muscle he wants on his side. Not to mention my status as a Sylph of Mind really eased him down from suffering a second shatter!"
"Wait, when did he have the f-"
"Then there's you, Crafted God of Chance. You're in on this because if there's even the slightest chance we slip up, the Thunderchild is gonna win in one timeline. And if it wins in just one? Boom. Game over. You've got a lot riding on your shoulders here."
"Gee, thanks."
"There's also Pope, Crafted God of Overseeing. He's keeping track of how the fight's unfolding in every minuscule detail. If he decides we don't have any choice but to join the battle, alright. Sure. I'll dive right in. But I'm holding my breath in the meantime, and that's that.
"Then, we've got Crystal, Crafted God of Metaliterature, who I believe is communicating with Dungkaka right now by keeping track of the narration? There's narration, by the way. Try to keep up."
"Yeah, I figured as much. I am keeping track of what little he actually tells me, you know. Anyone else?"
"The Crafted Gods of Alchemy and Avarice - no prizes for guessing who - are respectively constructing and funding a throne for use by Dungkaka's 'contingency', who isn't a Crafted God, but is supposedly comparable in power."
"That's it? Just the six of us?!"
"I tried to tell him that being more open with the others might have been beneficial to his ends, but..."
"But...?"
Psi-Serpent ran a hand through her jet-black hair. "But he is literally insane. And when Moniker turned down his plan, it made him incredibly paranoid about a lot of things."
"And still, you trust him."
"Well, he did create us."
"He... sorry, what?"
"He's filled with an erratic, tempestuous void, which he used as substance to forge us from memories of the timeline he'd written."
Generic rolled his eight ball eyes. "I don't belie-"
"Generic, look at me. Look at me, what were you doing this time yesterday?"
"What do you mean?"
"December sixth, 2016. What were you doing?"
"I..."
"Or the day before?"
"Look, Serpent, this isn't-"
"Or literally any day since the Third War ended? Look. You're not the real Generic. Not by a long shot. And I'm not the real Serpent, either. In fact, I have no idea what kind of adventures they, or any of the actual descendants, might be on right now. But I do know this: If we're nothing more than the half-baked dreams of an arrogant madman, well... maybe we should start trusting that madman a little."
"The real Serpent would never say something like that," Generic pouted.
"See? Now you're getting it."

3:25 A.M., 2016 DEC 07

Well, I suppose the truth is out. No point in beating off around the bush any longer. Dungkaka readied his-
Wait.
Beating off around the...?
No, okay. Yeah. That's definitely the correct saying.

Dungkaka readied his blade, an obsidian shortsword forged from the burned and warped glass of a broken fourth wall, to counter whatever strike Grimm might deliver next. Upon his face was no longer an expression of steadfast determination: now he wore a look of sheer, unbridled glee.
The agent backed off a little, not once taking his eyes off Dungkaka. He could deliver a devastating counterattack too if he was given the right opening. Both knew this, and thus, both were hesitant to make the first move.
"ANOTHER impasse, huh?" Dungkaka cooed in a voice that sounded as if it had been run through a dialup connection and ruthlessly hardclipped.
"At long, long last, we've met our match / in one another-"
"Hey," Bomber called, "not to interrupt whatever dumb crap you guys are up to, but..." he pointed a thumb over at Modpack, who was walking a handcuffed Critic to the rest of the group.
"CHECKMATE," Dungkaka hissed.
"Book 'em, folks!" Bomber scoffed. Gracie nodded and threw her blade through the heart of the beast, skewering him to the ground. Modpack leveled the Cataclysm with his head. He didn't fight back.
"Why are you here?"
"Whatever truths you want revealed / I promise you, my lips are sealed."
Modpack pressed the gun up against the wolf's temple.
"Wrong answer."
He fired, killing the agent instantly, and swiveled to aim at the Critic.
"You, I get. But why was he here too?"
"My duty is to see to Bill Cipher, as you know," the Critic confessed without hesitation, "but Grimm was assigned as my partner. The... additional protection granted by traveling in pairs was a decision we the Conflict had reached, as we've taken your sudden appearance as a declaration of all out war."
"We don't have any business with you," Gracie informed him. "Our duty is to the prevention of the paradox storm."
The Critic was oddly silent. Bomber kicked him in the side. The strength of a Crafted God stretched the Critic's essence thin across the fifth through seventh ideal planes at the point he was struck.
"Yes, alright!" He admitted. "The absolute oblivion the paradox storm will deliver isn't one of our own design, but... we would count it as a victory regardless."
"So you're cheating the End of Man," Gracie pressed.
"In a sense, yes."
"hMph," sneered Dungkaka. "THAT'S ALL we REAlly NEEd to know. WE'RE done here."
"So, what now?" Modpack looked over at what had once been TwinBuilder. He was not really sure what to make of him, much less his leadership of this group.
"Well, HE WAS COOperative enough..." Dungkaka chewed it over for a hot second. "Make it QUICK AND PAINLESS."
"Of course. Combat Operandi: Blue Screen of Death."
A blue shaft of light struck through the Critic's body, overloading his portion of the Source Code of Reality with progressively heavier and heavier bloatware, until he became too much for the universe to handle. He crashed. That is to say, he froze, shuddered, and vanished with an electronic staccato. A quiet, discordant note that signified he had stopped responding.
While the quartet collected themselves to journey into the plot hole and hunt for their contingency, a task that I expect will take at least a few more hours, I think I ought to use this time to mention that Psi-Serpent's assessment of Dungkaka's allies wasn't *entirely* correct. There was one other, in fact (emphasis "was"):

Gracie, Crafted God of Justice, was originally an outsider to the realm of canon, but needing all the help he could get in his authorial skirmish, Dungkaka had summoned every avatar of every member of the community to his side. Still, though, while he had escaped with his life, the others had not. The black blood of his enemy had eaten away at them from the inside. There was nobody from his timeline that he could salvage.

Or was there?

After all, he had some form of a blessing from the author, so surely he could use that to amass power? He did, of course, although it had taken him roughly three years, and at his ascension's conclusion, he bestowed upon Gracie the single most powerful artifact his tribulations had unearthed. A curse - just one curse - potent enough to interrupt the writing of the story. A curse that belongs to me. And I want it back.
Gracie's curse, the Cross of Justice, signified that the path of martyrdom was something she was destined to walk. So, of course, when I consumed her from the inside out (much as Adam had with the Crafted Gods), her destiny was fulfilled, and a portion of my being was imprisoned in her body. To make matters worse, she hadn't let her guard down to let me in. She'd apparently given the curse to someone else entirely (Split of all people!), and the subsequent decrease in her power wasn't, as I'd assumed, an act of surrender.
Not that my containment has any physical effects, of course: all that's changed is that my grip on the flow of the story is looser now, because I'm invested in it. As in, ACTUALLY invested in it. From this point on, the power I hold over plot is confined to the range of the narratively satisfying.

Not that I expect you to care about that so specifically, though. I'm sure you're all just itching to get back to the beatdown the theocratic parodies of your self inserts are giving to someone who shrugs them all off. Right? Well, fair enough. Since you asked so nicely.

8:58 A.M., 2016 DEC 07

"TWIN!" Crystal shouted into a phone, turned off though it was (as both were capable of reading the narration, and thus neither needed any tangible means of communicating), "Where are you? It's CHAOS out here! As in, Ire had to summon the Chaos Butterfly! That's how fucked we are!"
"Hey, don't worry. We finally made it here, and we can portal back in just a second."
"Oh! Great! Did you find that guy, then?"
"That's... a complicated question."
"Wait-"
"HEYIT'SBEENGREATCATCHINGUPANDALLBUTIHAVETOGONOWBYE!"

The two minds behind Remarkable Inc. unloaded round after round after round of multiversally contraband ammunition into the Thunderchild, but they all melted into slag and smashed into droplets midair. Pit's form unfolded into concentric rings of fire and cast upon the Thunderchild a shaft of light with the power to effortlessly turn it to a pillar of salt, but it snapped its fingers and he instantly reverted to his mortal form. 5l1n65h07 programmed a hundred thousand errors into the Thunderchild's very being, but it wrote even more bizarre, abstract glitches into those and cancelled them out. Ninjatwist unloaded a barrage of one hundred rockets from above, but the air pressure shifted sharply and airblasted them all back from whence they had come. Nobody could so much as dent the monster which so effortlessly pushed through their every last assault.

"I've seen enough," Psi-Serpent sighed. "I guess it's time I get my hands dirty, then."
Crystal summoned a stage on the office building rooftop Serpent and Generic stood upon, and then entered, stage left. "Wait! Serpent!" He shouted. "Hold on just a second, Twin should be arriving soon!"
"So should the end of the world. This close, I might as well try to finish this the Psi-tier way." She vanished in a flash of light and reappeared by the gates of city hall. Teleportation was, of course, a trivial matter for someone on the level of Psi-Godmodder.
Serpent stood her ground as the Thunderchild's eyes met her own. "Die," she said, a simple command which, on her level of power, could obliterate even a descendant... but the single syllable faded and cracked in her throat, and came out all wrong...
She teleported back. "How'd it go?" Generic crossed his arms.
"Forget it, it's stupid. It sounded stupid. FORGET IT."
"Yeesh, alright."

"Hey, Moniker!" Tazz shouted over a radio communicator built into the Godarm. "How's the Goanna-Mech coming along?"
"Not great. Turns out, he's just shooting random things without actually picking out a target. So... true to life, I guess??"
"Shit. So I must be the last line of defense then, huh?"
"Is Twin back yet?"
"Nope."
"Then it's all yours, buddy. Don't let us down."
Tazz nodded and appeared by the Thunderchild's side, who was in the process of warping the shape of the gates into something it could effortlessly pass through.
"Hey, chucklefuck," he jeered. "Ever been smashed to particle dust before?"
The Godarm reconfigured into an arm cannon with more than enough power to snuff out an entire galaxy, packed into the space of a single shot. His target barely looked up in time to stare down the barrel of the weapon before a burst of energy struck it head on, pulled apart its every last molecule, and scattered them so deeply to the cosmic winds that no two atoms landed in the same universe.
Hesitantly, cautiously... Tazz lowered the Godarm.
"I... did it."
He genuinely hadn't expected as much, but he knew a thing or two about the view within the mouth of a gift horse.
"I did it. I did it! I beat that thing, it's over!" He cheered. Every Crafted God within earshot slowly began to cheer with him. The crowd had erupted into applause by the time the first of them noticed matter begin to twist and shape and coalesce back into the shape of the Thunderchild. Once it was whole enough again to speak, its audience was dead silent.
"Well, this has sucked for all of us, I think," it said, "but if you ask me, I say it's time it all came to an end. See you guys on the other side."
It stepped through the gates, and slowly, its body was swallowed by a fire in ten colors. Soon, the fire grew so large and so intense that nothing could be seen of the figure underneath.
Not that anybody was looking, though.
All eyes were on the black and blood-red clouds which grew impossibly quickly to cover the entire sky, and the spiteful rumble of thunder they barely concealed. An enormous gash in reality, about the size of a city block, peeled open just beneath the cloud, and then another, running perpendicular, like the herald of Weirdmageddon. Then, two more lines, parallel, and each with two inward prongs, tore into the air either side of it.

About half a mile above the Manhattan skyline loomed an enormous [x].

It was a plot hole.

And it was the biggest thing in the- actually, you know what? I'm getting bored of this. Let's see what Split's up to.

Split trembled uncontrollably, and struggled to breathe. Had he been... crying? He wouldn't rule it out, but the silence made it hard to tell. That, and it had been so long since he had looked like... this.
What kind of sick joke was this? To send him to such a lifeless, hollow facsimile of the place he'd come from? More than a particularly cruel execution, it felt like a devastating insult. Maybe there was a part of him that wanted to return to Nonfiction, sure, but the idea just felt wrong. Like he belonged here. He was supposed to be wrapped up in war after war after war, right? That's why descendancy gave him the powers he needed to get by. He wasn't Build, after all. He didn't live by curling up into a ball and doing everything in his power to live a normal life, dammit. Whatever he was now, it wasn't something that wanted to go home, because that would mean the adventure was over.
He was... scared, he would admit, of how his hypothetical return to Nonfiction would play out. Would he return to being a part of the Adam he'd splintered off from? If so, would he be left once again with multiple different perspectives and personalities and identities swimming around in his head? Would he be able to return to an everyday life with no powers? Would he be able to go back to school, having missed out on it for who knows how long? Would he be able to look at anyone the same way again? Hell if he knew. Hell if he even wanted to think about it.
So, to be here of all places... to die here, alone, silent, and powerless, felt like he was being taunted for his fear.

He took a deep breath.

No. No, he wasn't going to die here. He was going to get through this, and everything was going to turn out A-okay. If he couldn't accept the alternative... he just wouldn't. He'd have to overcome it, somehow.

He stood up, although even the most basic of movements in this place still felt uncomfortable and horrible, and made him wonder if trying to find a way out before he inevitably perished would even be worth it. He looked down at his hands and curled them into fists, and out again, and in, and then out again. Could he get used to this? Maybe. He didn't know.
Worse than before, though, he was starting to look hazier in parts, fading into a blurred silhouette. Maybe he was just being paranoid - after all, it was hardly noticeable (although he worried that he might have to affix a "yet" to that) - but it looked almost as if he was in the process of being forgotten.
What would happen if he was? Would it be death? Would it be oblivion? Would it be an eternal, constant suffering? Would it be some kind of empty bliss, beyond this world? Possibly something else altogether. What repulsed him about the notion, fundamentally, was the idea that it might be something he wouldn't be able to change back from.

Yes, he realized. He was definitely fading. When he looked at the ground, it took him a moment to figure out where he stopped and his shadow began. He needed to get out of here, or if nothing else, alleviate this feeling, and fast. But... how? This couldn't be the end. There had to be a way out. If he so much as entertained the possibility that this was it, he was going to break. But what could he do? He was in no place to regain control over his own mind. After all, he wasn't all that sure he was even himself like this. And there was nothing he could do to imagine up some way out into his mindscape. Or even anywhere that wasn't here! Somewhere that felt less like a mind-twistingly torturous death! Any memory of his time in Fiction! Any at all!

Then he got an idea. An awful idea.

He turned, trying to look for the door to his house - a house he'd spent his whole childhood in! - but it was harder to figure out than he'd hoped. He was... beginning to forget the way it was laid out, for some reason. He racked his brain for a memory of this place, anything that he could cling onto, but everything that came to mind was fuzzy and distant and saturated, like an old polaroid or a Boards of Canada track. He tried to remember his own full name, but "Adam" was all he managed. He was tempted to follow it up with "T. Mason", but he knew something else belonged there. Or, at least, it once had. Come on, he thought! He should know all these things like the back of his hand! For emphasis, he literally looked at the back of his hand.

It was a dark hole in reality, like a burned photograph. Instead of the edge looking singed, though, it was surrounded by a halo of TV static. It was wrong, so wrong, whatever was happening to him, but he couldn't remember what he had been before. Desperately, he ran to the front door, grabbed the doorknob with what little strength his fuzzy form had, and forced it to turn. He tried to remember what turning was. It was too late, though, as he was - quite without warning - completely forgotten the next moment.

...

He... hadn't disappeared, like he was so sure he would have. This came as a shock to him. What also came as a shock was that in the instant he was cognizant of this, an indeterminate period directly preceding it was outright missing from his memory. He looked around. Sure enough, he was outside, and en route to the one solution he could think of to his current predicament. His hand was up in front of his face, now, and it was still as... not there, he supposed, as it had been what he perceived as just a moment ago. But it was holding something. A small metal plate adorned with the inscription of a curse.
Well, then. That wasn't terribly astonishing, he supposed. Something like this seemed easily within the curse's abilities. Returning to his normal form would be too, he assumed, but he didn't know how he would go about doing that. Whatever he just did with this thing, however he activated it or whatever, he didn't remember.
Still, he remembered that he had a prior form, and he remembered what it looked like. That much, he considered a victory. And... he was at the bottom of a set of wide, white steps, which came out onto a quiet street (especially quiet now, much to his frustration). No cars lined the street, and no birds sang from the trees that did not blow on any wind. He would say it was disconcerting, if only because he could not think of any word with the same meaning at one hundred times the magnitude it implied.

Split looked to the right. The road curved off in that direction, but just before it did, he could see a weathered wooden fence. It was a long shot, but maybe, just maybe...
Out of options, Split thrust the fence gate open with a muted, far-off thwack. Before him towered the basketball hoop. THE basketball hoop. Praying to himself (the only deity he worshiped), he checked behind it. At its base was a small, innocuous-looking object he'd once hated with every part of his being. Now, he supposed its presence brought him an odd kind of relief.

Cautiously, he picked up the red glasses. Just as he had when he found them in this exact spot four years ago.

Tendrils of scarlet coiled and whipped off from their glowing lenses, and they soaked into the noisy aura surrounding Split's body, staining it an equally red hue. He felt himself once again, and what's more, he bore a passing resemblance to another one of his splinters. Tragically though, nobody was aware, let alone present, of either being's existence to comment on the similarity.

Split, now whole again (or half, rather, as the case may be), felt a tingle of electricity course through his form wherever the red touched, and as it ran through him, the pain being in this place had caused just... cut out. He had the strangest feeling that he was stronger, somehow, than he had been when he had arrived. Well, maybe not stronger, but at least more attuned to the workings of his mind. Perhaps, he mused, in part due to the fact that he'd now merged himself with a piece of a memory? Or maybe that it was the red glasses of all things. Regardless, he felt far more in control now. He faced the back fence and raised an arm with the palm outstretched. Crimson flame exploded to life in a colossal pyre, and when he closed his fist it went out again. Fantastic. He grinned. When the smoke cleared, a door stood in its place. It, like the one through which he had entered, was blank. He raised Broken Anachronism, ready to scratch the word "EXIT" into the door, but he paused.
It was all well and good that he could so easily return to the "overworld" of his mindscape now, but that wouldn't be an improvement on the situation he had suffered the last time he was outside of a door.
Maybe, though, there was a place he could go where Build couldn't watch. He racked his mind for any possible loophole in the rules surrounding shatters that would blind him to his current location. He feared there weren't any.
Maybe, then... he could make Greenie not want to see him. Maybe he could hide away in a particularly distressing memory and work his way from one to another in a reckless stream of consciousness. If the gray backdrop of his subconscious was an overworld, it was possible he could tunnel under it.

He inscribed the image of a phone booth onto the door, and stepped inside.

Split ambled idly down the main street of... whatever this small town he'd ended up in was. It had been so long since he was last on Earth B, and the nostalgia hit hard. The sunset looked a rather beautiful blood orange, as tended to be the case in late June. His hands were in his pockets, and in the warm, dry, summer air, he'd tied his jacket around his waist by the sleeves. His pill bottle rattled softly from his jacket pocket with each step, and he found the rhythm deeply satisfying. Occasionally, a mosquito would make a barely visible approach with sights set on his arm or his face or something, but whenever it did, a spark of red electricity would snap it out of the air in a quick, clean flash.

He walked over to a telephone booth at the end of the street and opened it. He spared one last look out at the world around him, one last listen at the sound of crickets and birds and far off busy roads and televisions and talks over dinner and... Fuck. Normal human life, huh? He didn't miss it, but still. This was a pleasant reminder.
He closed the booth door behind him, produced a coin from his pocket, flipped it, caught it, and slotted it into the machine. Waste not, want not, he decided, and reversed its localized flow of time until it landed back in his hand. He dialed a number he'd been itching to call for a long time, and waited.

"Oh, yikes," current Split sighed. "Nothing's even happened yet, and already I'm starting to regret this."
He blinked.
"OH WAIT I CAN TALK AGAIN! Nice! Oh, and I'm... back to normal now? That's a plus."

"Hey, um..." the Split on the phone began. His voice cracked a little. Was he... sweating? Man, he was nervous. "Hi, haha, sorry it's been so long since I... Blue?!? Blue, what the hell are you doing th- No, no, I'm just trying to call my parents for the first time in... What? No, I'm using a payphone right now and everything! Nobody's gonna trace this call, they're safe as hell!... Is this a fucking joke? What do they need protection from *me* for, they're my PARENTS, you moron!... Oh, right. That's par for the course, then, isn't it. Well MAYBE you should STOP LISTENING to his instructions! I mean, he's DELUSIONAL!... No! He's so sure HE was the original TwinBuilder! But I was in him too! I was in him just as long as he was!... No, no, you're gonna shut the hell up and listen to me! You NEED to let me call-
"Hello? Hello, Blue? Are you...
"Right."

He hung up and slumped to the floor of the booth. For a few seconds, he buried his face into his knees. His future self heard him let out a groan and instinctively raised an arm to cover his eyes.
He tilted his head back from out between his knees, leaned the back of his skull on the glass behind him, and let out a low, long cry of anguish. Red lightning coursed out of his body in an omnidirectional explosion of light as he screamed, until a blinding almost-pink filled the small cubicle, and erupted violently, shattering its windows. Blasting the door off its hinges. Smashing its eponymous device to scrap.
Current Split turned away to avoid getting hit by a shower of glass shards that only existed in his memory. He wished, if nothing else, that they'd been tangible. At least in that case, he'd understand the pain he felt right now.

"Ugh. Whatever. I should have expected this, I'm deliberately stringing my worst memories together! Welp... Out of the frying pan, I guess," he grumbled. "Stay tuned up next for..."
With a clenched fist, he conjured yet another door. He paused for a second, but only a second. He didn't realize how draining drawing this next thing was. Still, though, he drew it. A small, basic-looking house, surrounded by a bubble.

"Heyyyyy, Greenie!" Split beamed and strolled into Build's bedroom like he owned the damn place. "How's my second favorite me going?"
"Spl- SPLIT?!" Build stammered, his chair rolling slightly back from his computer as he recoiled in disbelief. "WHAT ARE YOU DOING HERE. HOW DID YOU GET PAST THE FORCE FIELD."
"Jeez, calm down! Is it a crime to wanna hang out with you again?"
"...YES! YOU'RE LITERALLY TRESPASSING!"
"Maybe hire better defenses for your house then, I guess? Whatever, I'm getting sidetracked! I just thought... you know... It's been almost a year, and... maybe it'd be cool to hang out with you and go on adventures and stuff again?"
"No."
"Come on, Greenie! It'll be fun! You know, picking up where we left off! Looking for a way for you to get home! Looking for Jeff! Back to the good old days, when we'd fight off who knows how many malevolent reality warpers! Back to the way things used to be!"
"I said no! I want nothing to do with you - ANY of you - any longer!"
"Oh."
"So just... just go. Please."
"Look, I'm sorry, I-"
"Hey, don't be sorry. I don't wanna have that weighing on my mind."
"It's just, I heard you'd basically stayed in here all year, and I thought hey, it's a big multiverse out there! And it'd be great to go explore it together, don't you think? I'm just trying to help. Trying to show you a way out of," he cast a sweeping gesture around the room, "all this."
"I don't need help. Especially not yours."
"Right. Yeah... Right. Of course."
"..."
"I just thought, you know, maybe it'd be cool. Since Jeff's... just gone... maybe if we hung around each other long enough, it could be like having a brother again?"
"It could WHAT."
"I know, it's an incredibly idealistic thing for me to say, but-"
"No! How DARE you?" Build roared, and faster than Split could react, pinned him to the wall by his collar. "It's bullshit, that you think you can just, just WALTZ IN HERE and compare yourself to Jeff, and, and!"
"Greenie! Build! Build. I'm not... I didn't mean that. You know I didn't mean that. It'd be totally different, see, because you and me? We're literally the same guy."
"We're not! I'M the original! Adam Mason is ME! You just... formed one day and ruined everything. Okay? I thought if you decided to ever show your face to me again it must have been because you figured that out."
He dropped Split, who cried out as he landed on his arm and immediately went to nurse it under his jacket. Build jumped.
"Oh God. Oh, Split! Are you okay? Are you hurt? Did I-"
Split shooed him back with his good hand. "Come on. You don't care about me. Not once in the EIGHT, NINE MONTHS since we last talked did any thoughts of concern over me EVER cross your mind..."
"That's not true! I... I just... Okay, look, maybe-"
"And I didn't come here to visit you anyway..."
"Wh- Then why are you here? Why are you being so... Contrarian? Antagonistic?"
"And you're not going to so much as entertain the notion of looking for me, or asking about my status or whereabouts until you LEARN TO ACCEPT ME FOR WHO I AM."
Split rose to his feet and looked Build dead in the eye. Build backed up slowly and cautiously, but Split matched his every step until the former fell backward into his computer chair. Split threw aside his jacket. Build had only a second to process that Split hadn't been nursing an injury at all, but instead concealing it. The flesh of his arm had been reverted to the way it had existed long ago, but far longer than any sensible use of his power would allow. It looked burned - no, roasted - by the red lightning warping and twisting it. Gaps formed in it, too. Not just holes, although there seemed to be enough of those being eaten away by lethal doses of paradox energy, but the whole arm seemed to come apart in segments that coiled around one another in freakish helices that made Build sick to look at. He'd rewound a part of himself too far, and the reason why nagged at the back of Build's mind as his opposite pressed a kaleidoscopic, burning index finger directly against the bridge of his nose.

"FORGET," Split seethed, and Twin's Far Lands powers pulsed outward from his fingertip.
He grabbed his jacket and ran. He didn't need to see what happened to Build after that, didn't spare a thought for whatever explanation Blue's people would offer for the massive trail of blood he was leaving on his escape, didn't need to tend to the very real fact that he had almost KILLED himself in trying to regenerate a pre-shatter body part, he just ran. He wasn't even sure where to. He'd spend the next few days hiding away and giving himself time to heal, he figured as he burst out the front door, and then he'd leave Build alone forever. Yeah, that's right. He decided he was never ever coming back.

"Wow," he said, a shorter way in the future than he'd hoped, "that wasn't any easier on the rewatch, huh. I've gotta say, it's kind of impressive. Being so lonely even myself wants nothing to do with me.
"Man, I hope I'm not supposed to be learning anything from this. It all kind of makes me look like a huge jackass, and that's not a possibility I jive with too hard, you know? I mean that aside, I guess I'm getting the hang of this free association thing. Next stop... Jeff."
He raised his hand again, paused for a second, and lowered it again.
"IT ISN'T FAIR!" He screamed, as loudly as he could. The memory warped and shimmered and flashed red. "It's not fair that I should have to relive all my lowest points just to have a chance at surviving this! It's not fair that I should try EVERYTHING in my power to get us out of this mess, and you only try to kill me! It's not fair that I'VE BEEN DOOMED TO THIS FOR YEARS, TO DIE BEFORE I'M SIXTEEN FUCKING YEARS OLD!"
He put his palm to his face and winced into it. "Whatever. I shouldn't complain. I'm not the only person in Fiction with problems. Ikari, Universe, Kaname... they were all fourteen when stuff happened to them. And they turned out just fi-"
He blinked,
"Okay, Egbert et. al. were *thirteen*, and they..."
shook his head,
"The Pines twins were- You know what? Forget it."
and proceeded to conjure the next door.

Split crouched behind a 2003 Honda Civic parked outside a bar at the edge of the void. He hated the smell of the parking lot: it reeked of ozone, burning rubber, and... urine? He couldn't tell, and he didn't want to. He wished he could have waited in the bar itself, but despite everything, he was still a teenager, so this was more or less as close as he could get. That said, his distance did play to his advantage in the end. He was certainly one to make the best of a bad situation, and tipping the Church of the Kill Screen off to the location of Interrobang, the final Advanced Superior and notorious Pac-Man main, proved to be a fantastic idea. He drummed his fingers against his pocket radio in excitement. The lines to all thirty-seven of his canaries in the coal mine had gone dead, and there could be no doubt about it: The man who had neutralized them was Jeff Mason.

Split flinched at the sound of the bar's doors being thrown open, and quickly maneuvered between two cars to get a better look at the guy. He was tall, svelte, and looked like he hadn't slept in literal years. There were thirteen knives tucked into his belt, and he was flipping a coin and humming a slow, sombre tune to himself. Split could faintly make out a few words.

[A flask I drink of sober tea...] he hummed, [While relay cameras monitor me... And the buzz surrou-]
Of fucking course.

Split froze time, ran up in front of Jeff, and executed a flawless seoi-nage back throw that sent him spiraling off towards the brink of the parking lot. By the time natural chronological progression had returned, Split had returned to his hiding position, and his victim hardly had time to scrabble for a handhold lest he careen off into endless nothing.

Jeff stood up and dusted himself off. Split could hear the real-world counterparts to the descendants scream a storm of a thousand conflicting battle plans at his brother, even from back here. He watched as he bickered in good humor with the voices for a few seconds, thought his next move over, and then began to spin on the spot. Slowly, at first, but soon too quick for the eye to follow. Kaleidoscopic flame rained down of every inch of the asphalt too close to him, and every vehicle of every variety caught in the inferno exploded suddenly and violently. Split smirked. No doubt he too would have been caught in the firestorm if he hadn't flashstepped away quickly enough.
He reappeared directly behind Jeff, and for a moment, everything seemed to move in slow motion. "Pshh. Nothin' personnel," he smirked, and froze time once again. This time, he delivered a blow with a fist radiating vivid red light that drove Jeff easily thirty yards through the air.
"Who am I kidding? IT'S VERY PERSONAL, ACTUALLY," he spat in time for his target to register the passage of time and collide with five cars up the other end of the parking lot.

Jeff righted himself instantly, and the fires died down with a snap of his fingers. He made an odd gesture and shouted something, although Split wasn't sure what. It sounded like, [БЛИНДИНГ ЛИГЧТ ОФ РЕВЕЛАТИОН].
"Hey, wh-" Split started, before having to shield his eyes from the omnipresent glare. Even his current self felt no choice but to do the same - the sheer brilliance had burned itself into his memory. Even still, even with their eyes shut as tight as they could manage, it was difficult to look at. When Split (that is to say, as he had existed in this memory) opened his eyes again, he saw his brother conjure a bomb of some kind, and slap himself on the back...?
Whatever. Split decided that last part wasn't important, flashstepped over, and deftly struck the bomb from Jeff's grasp with his knee. Then, he kick-flipped himself over his brother's head, and raised his blade for a vicious strike to the back. Before he could, though, he paused. There was writing on his back, and it read...
"I prepared... Huh? What the fuck d-"

The suit exploded, and Split was send flying backward. His sword skittered from his grasp and landed some way beside him. He looked over at his opponent to see him now standing shirtless, with his curse seared into his chest. Yeowch. Just looking at it felt painful.
[No more games,] Jeff barked. [What's going on here.]
Split vaulted upright, his glasses shimmering lime-green.
"I ONLY HAVE ONE QUESTION FOR YOU, JEFF," he wheezed in an off-kilter cackle. He froze time again, and was delighted to see that the inertia he enforced upon the world around him did not, in fact, extend to his brother's bomb - in fact, quite the opposite.
The explosion blew Jeff to the ground and burned him deeply enough that, had he been a mere mortal, it was doubtful the wounds ever would have healed. Split grinned from ear to ear and strolled calmly over. He extended his left hand out behind him and a string of lightning threw Broken Anachronism back into the grasp of its rightful owner, as if an elastic cord. He raised the point to Jeff's neck just as time resumed.

"Tell me... what is your favorite album of all time?"

Instantly, the voices of the descendants filled the air with inane, panicked suggestions, each offering up so-close-yet-so-so-very-far guesses at what could possibly sit at the number one spot. One meek but firm voice cut through all the others, though, and they fell silent. Split knew exactly whose voice it was.
[Mezzanine, by Massive Attack,] Jeff stammered.
Split closed the gap between neck and blade a tiny bit more.
"Name your top ten, in order. Ten to one."
He recited the list perfectly, just as Split had expected would be the case. For his part, though, Split decided that wouldn't do, and drove the blade through Jeff's chest. The descendants went silent.
"Alright then. Now say it without them force-feeding it to you."
Jeff struggled to answer, racked his brain for a response, but he didn't reach one fast enough for Split's liking.
"Go on. You're telling me that that is literally YOUR top ten albums, in order? From ten to one? Or did you just steal that list from something? From someone?"
[I got it from someone... but I didn't need to. Because... it's the truth. Regardless of what they say... those are my favorite albums.]
"You're fucking kidding me," Split groaned, and rolled his eyes.
[No, I'm not.]
Split gritted his teeth, took a deep breath, and cooled off. He couldn't get worked up about this just yet; there was important work to be done. He nodded, silently, as if deep in thought. His blade returned to his hand, as it always would.
"That's it," he snapped once he'd reached his decision, "That's fucking IT. The kiddie gloves are OFF NOW."

A great and deadly battle raged between the two brothers, and quickly ascended into the perilous heights of the void. Split was astonished to find that he, in no small part thanks to the conjuring of some really fucked up alt-selves, actually seemed to have the upper hand. They congealed into an unstoppable amalgam calling itself 'The Splizzeria' and forced Jeff down into the second dimension.
[I'm sorry,] he wrote in the third.
"Sorry? SORRY?? SORRY ISN'T GOOD ENOUGH AT THIS POINT!" Screamed whatever the fresh hell Split was now. How typical, that Jeff was running yet again. That now that they had finally reunited, he couldn't even say it to his face. Couldn't even say it to his very plane of existence!
Jeff made a return to the third dimension that seemed to shake the very foundations of Fiction. Split felt nauseous looking at it. His head spun and his vision blurred. It felt as if a typhoon brewed in his stomach. Jeff said something to him, but he couldn't make it out. He just cast him back down to the parking lot. That, he decided, was far easier than arguing.

He descended to meet Jeff for what he expected would be a final confrontation.
[Then what will be enough?] Jeff rasped. [Will killing me really make you happy?]
Split flinched. Would it?
Well, the way he saw it, Jeff was just going to leave like he had in the past, no matter what happened. The least Split owed himself was to ensure that such a thing transpired on his own terms.
"Of COURSE it will! You weren't there for me when it counted, so why should you get to be here NOW?! You had your chance." His mass disintegrated back into its constituent parts, almost all of which immediately rushed and impaled Jeff. By the end, he was more stab wound than skin. Split decided that was enough. He reverted back to his existence as a singular entity and advanced on his brother. Slowly, of course. He had to savor this moment. Drink it all in.
"Whew! That was fun." He beamed. Both of them knew he'd won. "This is gonna sound really cliche, and, heh, it is. But... you got anything you'd like to say, 'Jeff?'"
"Suck my ass." Split thought he heard, but decided he must have been imagining it.
[Suck... my... ass,] Jeff managed, against all odds. Wh...at?

Split snickered. The snicker grew into a chuckle, which became a chortle, which became a deep, hearty laugh. For all the intelligence and expanded perception that came with First Guardianism, that well and truly caught him off guard.
"Holy SHIT," he wheezed, "I haven't laughed like that in GOD knows how long. That... maybe that was what I needed. Heheh. Thank you."
[Of course. I always know what to say.]
Split tut-tutted his brother and gave an aloof shake of the head. It came off as more than a little condescending. "I'm not talkin' to you. I'm talking to Dagoth," he explained, and pointed in the general direction of where he imagined the descendant's voice had come from.
[...Oh yeah. Yeah, I guess that makes more sense.]
"But, at the same time, it still is you, isn't it? Jeff Mason isn't your only name. You've got a bunch of others."
[Like what?]
Split listed a few descendants, whose voices he thought he had just heard throughout the battle. "Some others I've never really heard before, but you know what, I can vibe," he added.
[Ha! You sound just like him.]
Split smirked and lowered an eyebrow. "I wonder why."

The descendants chose that moment to begin squabbling with Jeff again, which Split reluctantly accepted. He turned away to give them some privacy, but his ears pricked up at an offhand comment he couldn't help but overhear Pionoplayer make.
"Cool, if you know we're here, can we have Interrobang back? We've still got three Soul Gems left to collect."
Split spun back on his heel, his mouth hanging wide open in overjoyed surprise. "Whoa! You're collecting Soul Gems? No way! Madoka's, like, my favorite show, you know. One of my favorites." Well, fuck. Talking about a special interest seemed to be a surefire way to singlehandedly dismantle one's own reputation as a supervillain. "Who cares, really. It's just... I just think it's neat," he said, in an extremely-not-Homura-kinnie voice. "Anyway! You might want this, then," he added, rummaging around in the Shroud's pockets for a spoil of war he'd earned killing like the millionth doomed splinter of himself and quietly passing it to Jeff. He didn't really have any use for a Soul Gem himself.

"OH FUCK," current Split jumped to attention. "This part isn't painful at all! Shit, can I... skip ahead to the trauma? Is there any, uh... command that does that before Greenie figures that out?"

Cooperatively enough, the memory did leap ahead a few minutes. Now, Split was curled up into a ball on the asphalt and shaking violently. Jeff knelt beside him, a hand on his shoulder.
"I don't get it," the former panicked, "what the FUCK does that make me? What the hell am I? Am I just... half a mind and a mismatched soul?! Have I been wrong about who I am THIS WHOLE TIME?!? WHAT THE FUCK IS MY REAL NAME!?!?!?"
[Hey. Hey, calm down. Didn't you say you've been soul searching?]
"I have been! And look where that got me, Jeff! Look where that GODDAMN got me!!!"
[Come on, Ad... can I call you Adam?]
"I don't... I don't know! That's what freaks me out!"
[Okay, I'm sorry. My point is, just don't expect yourself to have all the answers at fifteen. The metaliterary machinations of Fiction are tough on all of us, you more than most, and straightening that stuff out - it takes time! You know?]
"Yeah, I GUESS. It still isn't fair, though... Fuck this."
[I know. It can't be fair. It fundamentally doesn't work that way, and I'm sorry it has to be like that.]
"Oh, come on. You don't know what it's like. You can't talk about this kind of stuff."
[What do you mean?]
"Well, what were you doing when you were 15?"
[Not a whole lot. Trip-hop was starting to take off back then, and I was kinda getting into that fairly early. Dolly the sheep was born, I remember, and I think that was one of the things that made me wanna pursue a career in science and technology. Adam and I played a lot of Mega Man X, which was a pretty big thing around that time. I just... oh. I see your point.]
"Yeah."
[...Yeah.]
"Jeff, do you... do you resent me for killing your brother?" Split sat back upright, forced himself to retain his composure. Maybe if he could salvage whatever he had left of a chance at a good first impression, Jeff wouldn't leave.
[Oh, come on. You know that wasn't your fault. You know you couldn't have prevented it.]
"You're avoiding the question."
[I know. It's just a, uhm, a very complicated subject.]
"That's not a 'no'."
[Believe me, I wish it was as much a 'no' as you do.]
"Oh."
[...]
"Okay."
[Sorry.]
"No, it's cool. I... I should probably get going now anyway. We've both got important shit to do a lot of the time, huh." Split mumbled, but no excuse was really necessary. They both knew it was because of the 'killing Adam' thing.
[Well, good luck on that whole "conquering reality" business. It's not easy, I'm sure.]
"I know. Why do you think I'm doing it?"
[Ha!] Jeff laughed, but there was a profound sadness to his voice. [That's so like you to say.]
"Because I'm Adam, or because I'm █████?"
[Because you're you.]
Jeff stood up, and offered a hand to help Split do the same.
[Also, as I don't want our only conversation for who-knows-how-long to be this much of an absolute bummer, take this.]
He snapped his fingers, and a business card appeared in his hand in a puff of pink fire. He handed it to Split, who was concurrently dusting himself down.
[Gimme a ring sometime, you know? And who knows? Maybe when another Advanced Superior kicks the bucket coughhopefullycaretcough someday, you could call me about the opening? I'm sure you'd love to hear about all the perfectly lethal employee benefits we offer.]
"Wow... thanks. Seriously, thank you so much. Should I write down my number for you anywhere?"
[No, don't worry about it. One, I'm omniscient, and two, the blood loss from earlier is starting to set in. I'm just gonna pass out now, if that's cool.]
"Um." Split blinked. "Sure. Should I call an ambulance or something?"
Jeff shrugged. [Up to you, I don't mind.]

Split nodded hesitantly and went to put the business card in his back pocket. His present self, who was doing a far worse job of keeping it together, gestured for the memory to stop. He was too choked up to actually order as much, but still, the memory complied.
"Sorry about Adam, man," he whispered, despite nobody being able to hear. "Call me a shitty Prince of Time, but I guess I just can't change the past sometimes, huh...?"
Cautiously, hand shaking, he reached out and plucked the business card from his past self's fingers. He read the contact number, closed his eyes, and nodded. He could remember that. He'd call Jeff once all this was over, he decided. Or, if he were to be more realistic, if. He just felt sure that he needed to tell himself that there would be someone out there whose presence he could look forward to once he'd escaped his solitary confinement. Otherwise... there wasn't really any point to getting out of here.
No, no, he couldn't think of it like that. It would all be fine, it would all turn out absolutely fine. The promise of maybe being less alone in the future was better than no promise at all, and he had nothing to lose as it stood right now. It occurred to him that this might have been the first time since the shatter that he'd decided to do something for himself, rather than for his place in, and eventually atop, the omniverse.

He closed his eyes again, and recited the number to himself. Alright, he decided, he was ready to weather the storm again, and if not... well, it hardly mattered. He had nothing to lose in trying, and the alternative - roaming yet more upsetting memories - didn't appeal to him at all. With no snide cynicism left to offer, then, he conjured one more door. One marked, simply, "EXIT".
"Split returns", he whispered when he passed through the threshold. "Get f-"
It was then that he noticed something on the ground just by his feet. It looked like a cracked, broken, and burned pile of glass, plastic, and circuitry, but it intrigued him all the same. He carefully scooped up the pieces and rewound their physical state, and when he did...
DADDY's PDA fit perfectly in his hand.

He put two and two together in a heartbeat. This was a long shot, but he had the feeling that maybe he could try making another call with it. Maybe this time, it would work. In fact, the idea of it working felt right. He wouldn't accept for anything that it didn't. He punched the number in, held it up to his ear, and shut his eyes tight. He could hear a ringtone. It had to get through, he NEEDED it to get through. Come on, come on, come on, co-

*Click.*

[Nyello?]

'Sup, fools.
Gracie here. As I'm sure you all know, I've recently cut ties with the broader DTG community for reasons I don't care to get into here. The point is, that's left ScarlatinalQuest in a state of uncertainty as to whether it will be completed or not. I've thought on this very deeply, and my decision was not an easy one. Thus, it is with a heavy heart that I should let you all know I will not be writing this story, or any DTG story, any longer.
Nonetheless, I still consider it important to provide you all with the latter half of the plot for the sake of completion. Below is a writeup of the entire plot outline, accompanied by snippets of dialogue I'd started on here and there.



ACT 5: LIFE, LIFE would have opened with a continuation from the conversation that closed act 4. Jeff and Split take a moment to catch up, and Jeff points out that Split doesn't have *complete* control over his memories yet, which he would need for the fight ahead. He would then guide Split back to the door with the button on it from act 1. Behind it, Split would find a young TwinBuilder hastily marching into the oval office in the white house, totally unnoticed and still talking to himself. Twin would reaffirm a plan to activate the national emergency broadcast system and use his Far Lands powers on it to make as many people in the country as possible able to perceive his presence. Then, he would reach under the office's desk, but hesitate to press the button. And then, he would give up, turn around, and go home.

Split would wonder what the point to this memory was, and Jeff would tell him to start it again from the start and look for details that didn't add up. Split would reluctantly comply, and follow Twin entering the building in the first place, constantly looking over his shoulder for something. Then, back at the oval office desk, he would notice something sticking out of Twin's pocket that hadn't been there just a moment prior. Split would find the exact moment it appeared there, and discover a gap in his memory as to its sudden appearance. Then, he would pry it wide open.

SPLIT: Why?
JEFF: [Why what?]
SPLIT: You said there's a memory I can't remember. Why can't I remember?
JEFF: [If I had to guess, you must have used your Far Lands powers to McGucket yourself so badly that not even the Shatter could-]
SPLIT: Sorry, I... What?
JEFF: [What.]
SPLIT: "McGucket"? What the hell's that?
JEFF: [You haven't seen Gravity Falls?]
SPLIT: You have?
JEFF: [Obviously. I watch everything you work on. You did the storyboard revision for a few episodes.]
SPLIT: I did WHAT.

In the missing memory, Twin would be interrupted when a tall white man in a sharp black suit addresses him (as "Mason") and asks him to wait just a moment. Twin, so astonished that someone could see him, would comply. The man in the suit would introduce himself as "Lozenge", and would ask after his red glasses. Twin would protest, explaining that he can't remove them. Lozenge would try, regardless, and come close to success. He would give up, eventually, and the two would then talk on matters of cosmic significance that Twin's prediament meant he had. Lozenge, then, would think quietly for a moment, and hand Twin a slip of paper with the URL for the original DTG thread written upon it. Twin would put this in his pocket. Lozenge would then explain that Twin had an important destiny ahead of him,but that he himself in the meantime had business matters to tend to: he had come to Washington D.C. to discuss funding for a project he was trying to get off the ground. Twin would press him for details, and Lozenge would explain it in great detail. When Twin learns during this explanation that Lozenge works for Metatron, he would decide that he was evil and try to get him to go away by using the Far Lands powers again. Lozenge, however, would manipulate the geometry of the room such that Twin was aiming directly at the back of his own head.

Afterwards, Split would need a moment to understand the implications of what he had just watched. It would take him a short while to realise that Lozenge could see Twin's desperation for the power to go home, and sent him to a game wherein he could render himself potentially omnipotent. Since Twin had played the first game and created the second with the mission statement of eventual escape, he had set the stage for the Operation, and subsequently the United States government's countermeasure in agreeing to fund Lozenge's project. Furious at himself for having fallen for such manipulation, Split would storm out of the memory and vent desperately to Jeff, only to immediately come face to face with the Shadow of Build, who would cleanly smash DADDY's PDA with his sword before Split could even register his presence. Split would pause for a moment, remark that he hadn't even the chance to bid Jeff farewell. He would therefore have no reservations with raising his own blade.



ACT 6: HEAVY BLACK HEART would immediately open to the fight between Split and Build, who would continually throw each other into and out of memories, which Split would now be in enough control of to interact with and use to his advantage. at the turning point of this segment, Build would deftly bisect Split across the waist, who would maintain consciousness long enough to grab a memory of Mezzanine, place it between his two halves, and fuse his body back together, thereby activating Battle Technique: You Won't Get What You Want.

Split would gain the upper hand in riding a giant black beetle and bombarding Build with album cover after album cover. The half-fox woman from Genesis - Foxtrot would clear away the doors by completing the ritual. Dylan Brady would crush Build's right hand with a mallet. When cornered, though, he would conjure a new hand, white and six-fingered.

This would result in a Colors of the Fire fight almost identical to that in EphemeralQuest, but Build, far more intent on killing than surviving as he had been in EQ, would skewer Split by the neck to the Tetrix with Oblivion's Guardian. Build would immediately realise what he had done, and call off the fight there. Then, he would explain himself.

Being killed by the actual Build during the Shatter had left the Shadow of Build emotionally damaged and scarred by self-hatred, which had in turn rendered him vulnerable to Split's thoughts of violence and bloodthirst. Split, being of the conscious mind, could easily dismiss such thoughts whenever he so pleased in order to see to bigger, more important things. Build, however, being of the subconscious mind, had no such luxury. Those thoughts had been left with him to rot and fester until they were far beyond his control, leading to his current violent state of being. He would apologise grimly and profusely, while Split would voicelessly beg him to stop, but it would be too late. The Parliament would elevate Build to the ninth dimension, and he would have unraveled his source code, and injected the ten curses of the Order into it. Split would try to warn him that attempting to contain such power would kill him in hours at most, but Build would explain that that would be all the time he needed. He would offer one last apology to Split, and then cast his soul - still pinned to the Tetrix - out of the mindscape altogether.

BUILD: I...
BUILD: I know it shouldn't have gone this way, Split. Don't think that I don't.
BUILD: But it was all just too much, in the end. I couldn't take it! I don't know how you ever could! I like to think that maybe, if our roles were reversed, things could have gone better, but let's be honest. I never would have gotten this far in trying to repair the Shatter. That just isn't realistic.
BUILD: But I guess you were always the stronger split, huh? Heheh...
SPLIT: H...... h...h..... B-...... Bui-
BUILD: If you're asking for my mercy, I can't give it to you. I'm sorry. I want to, I just... can't.
BUILD: Like I said, you were always stronger. You were strong enough to entertain notions of petty violence and mindless slaughter, but when you pushed them aside to focus on the big picture? They had to go somewhere.
BUILD: Look around you. Here's where they ended up.
BUILD: I couldn't deal with them. I tried, believe me, I tried, but they all just became too much. Now I can't stop thinking about them! I can't stop entertaining these notions. Craving them, even.
BUILD: I'm scared, Split. I'm so so fucking scared. You turned me into a monster, and the worst part is you didn't even know you were doing it.
BUILD: This whole time, you've just been trying to live, and I've just been slipping further and further down your tyrannical gradient, both of us helpless to stop it.
BUILD: I'd say that you shouldn't blame yourself, but look around you. There's nobody else here.
SPLIT: Pl- P-
BUILD: Begging won't help. Nothing will. I wish there was some way you could stop this, but there isn't. This is the only way.
BUILD: Game over, Split.
BUILD: Please forgive me.

Split would float without a mind or a body through the timeless spaceless void he had been banished to, crying and struggling to breathe in his last moments. He would try desperately to draw out a tetronimo pattern on the Tetrix's surface, but with the blade driven through his spinal cord, he won't have been able to move his arms. I, then, would have frozen time and given him the opportunity to return my curse to me. He would refuse, and realise that he could use the curse (now revealed to be the Curse of Storytelling, {I}), to grant himself a few moments more. In these moments, he would use the power of the Red Sun to control the electrical currents in his arm, manipulating the muscles to draw out the pattern of tetrominoes in his own blood. This pattern would cause the Tetrix to reconfigure into a Time player's quest bed. Then, and only then, Split would accept his death.



INTERMISSION 2: ROUND UP TO THE INEVITABLE END would open with Build's awakening back in the sea container. Now, he would be in complete control of both Split's mind and body, but find the latter quickly degrading under the strain of his curses. He would quickly cover most of his body in bandages and whatever else he could find to wear to protect his decaying flesh from the elements, and therefore resemble the Scribe somewhat. Then, he, Bill, and Flumpty would travel to Universe B to each stir up new mischief where the Crafted Gods had gathered. Build will have set his sights on City Hall as his destination, and would spend the next couple of hours heading in its direction. Binary Prime and the Employer, two agents considered powerful enough to deal with the Crafted Gods and assigned to the area as such, would mess with events from the shadows in order to make Build's travel safer. Obviously, he was the Thunderchild.

At 9:01 A.M., he had torn a plot hole in the sky. At this point, he would begin an ascension towards it. Bill would inform the Crafted Gods that Build, now superpowered by all ten curses of the Order, the red glasses in his mind, the green glasses on his body, a perfectly clean apotheosis, and many other reasons, was now more than strong enough to leave Fiction for good, and that if he were to do so, he would undermine his own arc and those of everyone caught up in his plotline deeply enough to void Fiction of all meaning, hence the threat he posed. The Crafted Gods would then unleash a devastating chain attack that would tether Build to Fiction, preventing him from leaving. Goanna Mech would cap it off with a shotgun blast, rendered far more metanarratively powerful by its occurrence simultaneously in both time and circumstance with Goanna's attack on Build in Infamy.



ACT 7: THE DARK SIDE OF THE MOON would begin with the arrival of Dungkaka and co. at the sea container, an upgraded Regnum Dei in tow, piloted by a stolen prototype Robo-Adam. They would spend some time trying to determine Split's whereabouts before he would force his way back into existence and posses the robot body. Returning to Universe B would prove trivial to a God Tier Prince of Time, who would arrive with his throne and four rescuers just in time to see Build tear New York City apart into chunks of steel and pavement and buildings in the blink of an eye that would hang in the air throughout the battle, not 100% unlike the destruction caused by Walpurgisnacht.

This would mark the beginning of a second Colors of the Fire fight, this one far more hectic due to the presence of the Crafted Gods. Split would run through the city to try and get as close to Build as he could while remotely controlling Regnum Dei to distract and eliminate as many of Build's summons of Refiner's Fire and Octothorpe's ink as possible. He would also hear the dreams of conquest his comrades shared and grow visibly disgusted at the vain, senseless destruction that drove them. Eventually, he would grow so disappointed with the faction collectively that he would berate them all for their notions of power and supremacy, that he had been brought into Fiction at the lowest possible point anyone could have, that if the Crafted Gods had ruled then, someone like him would sooner perished than come to thrive as he had, and he would vow that when he ruled all of Fiction, such suffering that he had endured would never be allowed upon another. The faction would then cut all ties with him. Meanwhile, dissatisfied with the progression of events, Build would eventually move on to using Any Color You Like.

SPLIT: Look at you! Look at all of you! You call yourself leaders?
SPLIT: You disgust me. Could tyrants who senselessly crush anyone beneath them rule any better than a flood, or a storm, or a bomb?!
SPLIT: All of you amassed boundless power, and you could use it to change Fiction a thousand times over for the better! And what do you use it for instead? Indescribable destruction, misery, and torment on capricious whims!
SPLIT: If you're so sure that your methods are the correct ones, you can't call me an ally any longer. I WORKED to get where I am now. I came from a nadir none of you would have been strong enough to survive. And under your rule, I would have stayed there. I would have been left for dead on these very streets.
SPLIT: So, if you have your agenda to push, you can count me the hell out. And when all this is over, you'd better start running.
SPLIT: You're so sure the weak should fear the strong, huh?
SPLIT: Heh, well... I'll show you what the strong should fear.

This phase of the fight would begin with Split running up through levitating buildings and and floating streets and uprooted subways to try to ascend as high as possible without being spotted while Build would use Tongue Superior to constantly alter and control the rules by which this chase operated. Down in the city, CG!Richard would become fascinated with Any Color You Like, and the fact that it existed as the modified power of God, just as he himself dreamed to wield. He would drain one attack's worth of Tongue Superior into a compartment now open on the godarm and await further developments. Then, Build would call upon Indigo Divide, from which would manifest a 5-fighter DLC pass as a follow up to the Refiner's Fire's "EVERYONE IS HERE" letter. this pass would end up being continually stolen back and forth between the two sides of the battle, with a new entity summoned each time, before the last would be stolen by Richard as well and stored in a second compartment in the Godarm. Before he'd have the chance to make use of it, though, he would be knocked out by a shot of energy from the Tetrix at point blank.

Split would decide that he should practice using {I}, given its immense difficulty to master, and would use it to plant an idea in Flare Flames's head. Flare, then, would run after Split, who meanwhile would write into the story easier and easier ways for him to ascend and catch up. The two of them would then burst out onto the roof of an office building at eye level with Build, and Flare would hand the Fez to Split. Split would chuckle to himself, and remark that after everything it had ended up being that easy, and his laughter would quickly have descended into mania as he donned it. Immediately afterwards, his robot body would drop dead.

Split would find no need for a body upon ascension to the fifth dimension and would make as much of a beeline for Build as he could while avoiding the oncoming bullet hell his other split provided. Dungkaka would unleash Battle Technique: Brown Snow upon his enemies, deconstructing them down to their core concept (Refiner's Fire, in this case). Around the city, other Crafted Gods would begin to gain the upper hand similarly. A few would even prove strong enough to neutralise both binaries effortlessly. And slowly but surely, Richard would regain consciousness.

High above the city, Build would watch this unfold and concede on this leg of the battle. He'd unleash Viridescent on it all, bathing the battlefield in tendrils of green light that erased any entities and combatants caught in them from existence. Richard, of course, would take to draining some of this, too, but Dungkaka would grow too overzealous with his power and trun enough creatures of Refiner's Fire back to their primordial flame for it to mix with Viridescent. Almost instantly, the whole tide of green would be washed orchid and Richard would be incapable of shutting off his godarm in time to stop drawing on it for power.

By this point, Split would have reached Build and convinced him that the two of them just needed to talk. Build would accuse Split of being stuck in the past, of wanting to reform as a person who didn't exist anymore, of wanting to se a long-since over fight continue. Split would admit that all of it was true, but true for both of them. Build would feel taken aback by this, and talk about how after his death at the end of the Shatter, he didn't want to be Build anymore, but he just felt he never had a choice. Throughout this conversation, he would come to realise that he hadn't been Build for years, and his text would have turned progressively redder as the heart-to-heart continued. Split, too, would come to accept that the TwinBuilder he used to be was gone, and that who he would reform as would be someone slightly different, but there wasn't anything wrong with that. The two shattered halves would eventually agree that they both wanted to be Split, and that was that, and undergo an ego death just as in the one in EphemeralQuest's Only One Thing Left segment to reform as another TwinBuilder-esque being (only this one wears green glasses, and still answers to "Split").

Meanwhile, Project Binary would assume control of an unsuspecting Richard after the essence of his summoning had been drawn into him. Immediately, he would use the single Indigo Divide charge to look into Nonfiction, find the nonfictional TwinBuilder's comments on the original plan for DTG2 Trial 7, and then use Tongue Superior to bring the words to life and draw the souls of Binary Prime and the Employer into himself. The Binary/Godmodder/Prime/Employer fusion, hereafter called BINARY, would manifest as an entire world of grey and orchid machinery, totally changing the battlefield. He would insta-kill Dungkaka, too, whose death shut off all protections the other Crafted Gods had from the nature of the doomed timeline they were from.

With the Crafted Gods dead, Split's bindings would come undone and he would plummet, scrambing but ultimately failing both to right himself and to keep a hold on {I} in his post-reunion exhaustion. Before him, he would see Bill in his ELITE form scrambling to take the curse for himself. To his left, a mass of twisting robotic arms belonging to BINARY, aiming for the same end. To his right, though, would stand Gracie far off in the distance, wanting the curse for herself so that I may continue the story for however long I like in whatever fashion I please. She would use Comb Rave: Reach For The Dead and tear her body apart into a flood of black blood, from which would sprout a mass of black tendrils, each ending in a human hand emblazoned with a sigil in Refiner's Fire.

Out of options, Split would use his Far Lands powers on {I} to rewrite the story so that Dungkaka would never summon the other Crafted Gods (and would forget about the entire plan later when Ellavagod invited him to a movie night), neither of his halves would have tried to kill the other outright, and that when he awoke, whole, back in his base of operations, he would retain both his memory of this timeline and his God Tier. The secondary outcome he would pull off in his use of his use of Far Lands powers would be to deliver enough force to {I} to knock it upward, out through the plot hole, and the mantle of author back into Nonfiction, into the hands of TwinBuilder.

Make of this whole thing what you will, I guess. I hope the ScarlatinalQuest this is enough to leave in your imagination serves as a satisfying enough conclusion to the story. It's been a wild journey, you know, telling it. But... I guess this is where our paths diverge.
Bon voyage, you magnificent bastards.
- Gracie!