Scarlatinalquest

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.