The Three Marks of Delusion (Long Version)<img style="margin:auto;" height="400" width="400" src="https://i.postimg.cc/KcP5cJfY/shortcover-500r.jpg"><br><h2 style="margin:0;text-align:center;">The Three Marks of Delusion</h2><p style="text-align:center;">Written by Z.S.</p> <br><h3>contact(a): Sleep Start</h3> Half a restless night brings empty courage to fall asleep. Assisted into unconsciousness, something strikes in passing. An incomprehensible terror he foolishly hoped would leave him be. <p style="text-align:center;">* * *</p> In a blink dancing wheat and a brightly blackened sky greet his gaze from upon the ground. Their rhythmic sweeps bring an obscuring calm in their shade. He’d lie here forever to stare endlessly at the moon in this calm, bring them both to a standstill in their shared gravity, just enough to let time slip between in its meaningless flow. But though he had no recollection of where he came from in the moment, he knew he had elsewhere to be. Where was the question, however. The wheat certainly carried no answer in their stirring peace. The man only known as Captain feels around for his crumpled loose jacket amid the dirt, finding it covered in the same layer of fine dust as he. With a spry youth to his step he rises soon enough, pats the earthy particles off of his business attire, and combs his fingers through his mid-length hair before shouldering the jacket and moving through the gentle swaying stalks in their guidance. Across the endless sea of wheat a scattering of pale angles accompany Captain at a distance. They jut from the earth, a series of unspoken architecture frozen in a sense of hopeless reaching for the moon’s light. It proves hard to tell of their structures in passing, carrying a vagueness straddling an unfamiliar recollective the longer he looked. When the vagueness steers too closely to an echo of uncanniness Captain chooses not to look upon them any further. Instead, he looks ahead towards what lies across the horizon, a grand wall that stretches endlessly through the field. The stalks carry Captain closer to its bricked surface, eventually nearing the only pair of glass doors marking the entrance. A crowd of eyes across the very structure open upon his approach, small and curious in their witness except for one. High above the very entrance a grand gaze awakens. Upon its charge standing before the lone doors the polygonal iris rotates in thought. Captain counts seven angles total in their spinning, the second pointing down upon him as its eventual judgment. The grand eye closes, and the glass doors open for him to pass with a faint hiss. There’s a pause here. The eyes watch closely Captain holding his breath just before he steps through a shifting wave of sterility, into a sudden blur of white bolting across his view. It takes a few steps more to be welcomed by a quaint workplace filled with tiny moving bodies—figurines of ceramic formed in simple animal shapes. Captain towers amid the bustling crowd yet they move unimpeded by his presence, skittering through and around and every which way in their multitude of calculated tasks. They had no time to view this new stranger, only to work. Past the amusing sight of these delicate little things entertaining their office papers, it took a set of pronged horns planted between two long ears to catch his attention. Temptation beckons Captain to follow the lone jackalope lest he lose sight of it, but in his next steps the porcelain crowd begins to clatter around in a thicker flow, making the walk further awkward. Captain quickly loses his footing and catches the nearest structure of a computing machine, in his best effort to keep from falling over and crushing the busy figurines surrounding him. His very weight throws the machine off-kilter. It throws its weight into another nearby and knocks it off-balance in a repeat of his stumble, which then throws its weight over and knocks another structure off-balance, and then another. The chain of falling cabinets and equipment grows into a hail of obstacles, and with the heavy rain follows an explosive scattering of little porcelain bodies caught in the fray. Among the sudden mess Captain witnesses the jackalope weaving effortlessly through the crowd, until it’s easily knocked aside by a coworker interrupted in its path and falls into the open maw of a trash compactor. Captain runs over soon after, but by then the jackalope had disappeared into its endless depth. It seems to reach towards the lower levels. Captain frantically looks for a means to follow behind, and finds one just by another explosion of bodies. He takes to the open elevator lift in mere moments, missing the wave of white animals spilling across the floor when the doors close. With a moment to recollect himself Captain quells a lingering tension in his racing mind. It proved difficult to notice through the chaos, but he could have sworn, looking within the trash compactor, that he’d heard something in its depths. He couldn’t understand what it entailed. The more he clamours for a clearer recollection of the faint echo the more mumbled the sound of it repeats, fading further with each read. Whatever it may have been, the thought scatters under the next moment of surprise that awaits him when the lift doors open. A starkly new scene greets Captain in the lower level he visits. The empty, barely lit floor proved strangely abandoned, its worn structures and scattered relics covered thoroughly in a fine layer of grey. Captain slowly steps across the floor, his mind torn between his search and a growing bout of confusion. The level resembles little of the noisy office above. Instead, on further trudging through the brittle relics littering the floor, Captain’s wandering eyes catch wind of just what this place had once been—a hospital. An unexplainable chill runs through, and he clings to his new sense of unease the further he walks. To further feed into it the shadows skitter almost uncomfortably so at the edges of his vision. One such shadow moves in a blur of grey. A momentary shock brings Captain to a standstill, but he wrestles down his unease and pushes himself to chase after, feeling it to be the jackalope he’s searching for. The encompassing dark flooding the halls keeps the skittering figure vague, its shape taking different angles in passing—long ears, whipping long tail, flitting paws, static, an open beak. A pang of misery gurgles through his gut the longer he looks. This isn’t who he’s searching for. They’d been lost here for much too long for him to remember. The gurgling brings him to cringe away from such a recollection, and weighs him down in his chasing.Captain stumbles to a stop at the ground level of an open reception area amidst multiple floors. Here the fine dust seem to float gently in the deathly quiet, amid a single light shining from the levels above. Hunching over to ride the queasiness out Captain notices it brighter than the darkened ambiance seeping through the cluttered halls, almost blindingly so. The fleeing shadow had since moved on, and with no other means to find it he looks up to see what could be letting so much of this light through from high above. A long-eared body throws itself over the highest railing, following the light and dust to the ground like snow. <br><h3>contact(b): Regret Complex</h3> Faint wakefulness yields another scattering strike. He couldn’t recall it bearing itself in such grotesqueness, but thought no further with his fleeting mind giving way once more. <p style="text-align:center;">* * *</p> In a blink the dark of a decrepit hospital returns to his sight. A strange emptiness follows in the wake of the light’s disappearance. Before Captain can grasp its meaning, nor why it had left him with such a harrowing aftertaste, a new chill runs through him. Something unseen lingers. Not the hollow stillness that once presided over the abandoned floor, but a faint squelching of something hidden beyond the faded edges. A thicker chill clings to his back in its excessive crawling. Captain moves from the noise to find the silence, and leave the uncomfortably visceral presence far behind. The squelching follows incessantly with closing distance, refusing to sink into the quiet. Its stalking pushes him into a sprint, refusing to allow it any closer. Speed works against Captain in kind. The hospital floor and its abandoned structures bend in his racing view, unable to keep up. Confusion brings the squelching presence closer. In his desperation he stumbles quicker away from its heat closing around him. The entire floor warps further until it holds no longer in his frantic retreat, stretched to the inevitable rip at its seams. Every crack and split yields to empty space. Captain keeps whatever footing he can on remaining ground, but its further dissipation leaves little to maintain pace with. The squelching presence being almost upon him in the vacuum, Captain couldn’t help but to catch a glimpse in his slowing. He recognises the flash of bright eyes staring back with searing anger. And then, in a blink, he wakes up. He lies still with his pounding heart in the bed of a small hotel room. Night hadn’t yielded yet, caught in its darker hours where moonlight once lingered. His dreaming left him numb with tension once again, to his frustration. Captain wearily slides his legs out from underneath the bedsheets to sit over the edge and catch his breath, yet feeling the ground solid and silence prevalent fails to give him any assurance. Something about the dark bothers him. It blurs the room in grimy shadow. Given he’s awake now there isn’t much that can be done about it. He may as well keep himself occupied in the remaining night, until it’s time to be where he must be. The thought of it kept Captain from viewing the clock at his bedside. Its light carries a hint of something fading quickly into obscurity, but he’d rather not know just what it was nor how long he has left. Rising with some difficulty Captain heads for the bathroom, time skewing in each hobbled step. When the lights prove unresponsive he plants his focus on the brittle faucet of the sink, and prolongs a look in the mirror with a quick rinse of his face. The dark allows him little view upon his reflection, making the mirror appear as if it had rusted over. The grime blurs his youth with an addition of wrinkles he hadn’t noticed before. Perhaps a mere illusion from his tiredness. He leans in closer and the wrinkles deepen into his skin with further clarity. A startle brings Captain to pull away from the inexplicable change. In stepping back he catches glimpse of a mass in the bathtub. He whips around in its direction and finds himself facing the rotted remains of a familiar body, much like his, resting there. Captain awakens in a panic that jostles him out of bed. Moonlight returns the hotel room to normal, as he had left it. The dark may very well have just been a memory, gone as the seconds within it. Yet in recollecting his surroundings his ears catch wind of clattering and clicking just beyond the hotel room door. The mysterious monotony draws Captain up on his feet, straightening his casual attire of shirt and trousers before approaching. With a cautious turn of the doorknob unfiltered light and sound immediately seeps through the cracks and greets him to a strange factory view. In the level’s grand automation everything his eyes fell upon bent the wrong way. Nonsensical machines constructed shapes and colours together in a perplexing manner, and passed them along in undecipherable directions. Captain steps out onto grated flooring in his wonder. The factory stretched into forever, upways and down, with a multitude of walkways suspended between the countless clusters of machinery. He spots hands maintaining the inner workings at a distance, yet not a single worker around. Rather, every pair of hands and slender arms attached to the same long, blocky body slithering about. It ends in an elusive feline head that sees him from far off through its waves of hair. It twists its neck upright in interruption of its work, and bears its teeth in a wide grin. Captain meant to smile back, recognizing such a lovely face until it hit him immediately. The long body twirls and skitters haphazardly between suspended gratings, adding a cacophony of ringing metal that signaled a haunting fate in its arrival. He backs away from the edge of his platform and runs quickly for the closed door to his room. The knob refuses to budge in continuous tugging and turning, forcing him to flee with the crawling growing louder by the second. The connecting walkway loops Captain around active machines, too locked in his rush to slow down among them. He ducks under a mechanism swinging overhead, stumbles with another nearly catching him across his face, and trips clumsily past the cluster, somehow unscathed, to continue bolting onwards. The blocky centipede, having abandoned its duties in its manic chase, merely barrels through and rips the assembly line to shreds. The broken machinery interjects their neighbors, throwing their timing askew in a starting chain of self-destruction. Captain chances a glance in his tumbling retreat to see the spreading carnage and the feline head following behind, its many hands clawing towards him. The hauntingly manic excitement in its grin still remained pronounced. In a long stretch of narrow walkway Captain and the centipede sprint with little thought for the ripping machinery all around and the endless pitfall just below. Through the endless, unbearable noise Captain kept his focus only to the open doors of an elevator lift at the very end that promised an escape. The railings start to groan with the frantic flight, yet the large centipede refuses to abate, its one-tracked mind bringing the far end of the walkway to snap from the lift’s platform. Captain leaps the gap in time, his feet barely landing on solid grating and launching him into a roll with his remaining momentum. He sits back up inside the lift, the centipede looming just outside. Before it can reach in for its prize, in the growing explosion of screeching gears its head splits in twain. Captain presses his back further into the far wall of the lift, witnessing the last moments of the centipede’s consequence. It collapses onto the platform, twitching underneath broken machinery that pierce and bury it. The lift doors close before a single hand can reach in, nor his out, embracing Captain in bittersweet nothingness. <br><h3>contact(c): Molting of I</h3> Teeth gnash through a gap of lucidity, a jolt to inject its venomous mire. He begs not to live this sorrow once more, yet the waves of consciousness part. He sinks lower into its inevitable end. <p style="text-align:center;">* * *</p> His thoughts stew upon coming to in the elevator lift. The uncomfortable squirming feeds his aimless nervousness, ticking in time with his yet unfinished journey. Captain still cannot comprehend the before and after of his fleeting time. Just mere silhouettes blurred through the frosted glass he peers into. Only the now exists in full clarity. But the holes in between have grown too wide to ignore, yet too deep to look upon. Something still keeps him from doing so. He knows there’s somewhere he must be, and he’d rather focus on that. A chime cuts the conundrum short, allowing him to bury it once more. The doors open to a new floor, musty and wet, a shallow marsh within the white walls of a pristine laboratory. Swallowing hesitation Captain cautiously wades through the shade until dim light grows softly full in a new room. But he’s met with a morbid sight in return. In a corner a grand machine stands just above the waters. Its edges are lined with the remains of an aged body shredded to a pile of old flesh clinging to pale bone. Captain averts his gaze, sickened to the pit of his stomach, but finds more of these machines lining the edges across from it, each housing their cracked, rotted effigies lying forever in twisted agony. He covers his nose under an open palm and seeks an elsewhere uncluttered by such dreadful idols. Looking upon them summoned a sense of vague recollection he dare not seek, in their pained reaching. Passing in his stark ignorance of the rest he misses a gap somewhere in between, yet to be occupied. A dead end hallway brings a halt to Captain’s wandering. At the end stands one lone machine, similar to the others before aside from the cleanliness of its structure. An untouched ceramic sculpture stands tall from its open maw in near incredible height, enfolded in slumber. A temptation pulls Captain closer to the peaceful sight, before he recognises the pronged horns affixed between two long ears. Another pit weighs in his stomach. The familiar effigy trembles in each step, and adds to that weight when it opens its empty eye. With a chorus of cracking skin it unwinds in elegant stutters, bends low, and crawls on its arms towards Captain. There’s an erratic gracefulness to its glitching, within the murky waters the effigy drags itself through. In its wake pieces of its shedded porcelain sink in little trails of red. Seeing the sculpture mindlessly defacing itself pains Captain so, but an icy chill of fear keeps him from acting. He slowly backs further past sprawled lab equipment littering the hall, refusing to run yet uncertain of staying. He can’t understand why it wants him, specifically. It babbles away in its spurts of noise that could very well have been anything other than words, and continues to claw closer through the marsh. In his helplessness Captain trips against a panel embedded into the wall. He clings to something sticking out from it, but it gives way under his weight with a heavy clunk and sends him on the way down. The machinery housing the live sculpture whirs to life, and with its cycling teeth it pulls the effigy back in with a sickening crunch. Captain falls into the waters. He sits up and finds horror forcing him to watch the sculpture ground further and further through indifferent gears, still desperately clawing for him and loudly babbling in its terror. The gooey mess within the machine eventually sticks the gears solidly together. Half of its body minced into bloody pieces, shattered beyond recognition, the sculpture collapses and finally lies still in a mix of murk and blood, left to dry out and rot as the others have. Captain crawls frantically away from the creeping red still after him in death. He shuts his eyes in a painful pang of guilt, trying his hardest to ignore what had transpired and picture a different outcome from nothingness. It couldn’t have ended this way so quickly. Anything other than this. When his eyes open he’s in a new shade of dark, the pristine lab and its repulsive displays having all but disappeared. Only an etching of the felled sculpture is left in the forefront of his mind, still fresh in his present. With this newly adamant refusal to leave, something is bridged between the holes in his thoughts. Reaching around himself Captain feels a new combination of wall and ground free of clutter and moisture. He rises with some difficulty, pushing through the aching of his joints back on his feet. In his weight he almost doesn’t recognise that of his own body, the one thing that has slowly changed amidst everything. He leans against a wall in pause, a twinge of tired, dreadful realisation faintly reaching him. He’d been knowingly pushing it all aside in his habit, but this has all happened before. No matter where he turns there is no escape from this shifting of places and moments. Though this string of events struck him in terrifying newness it has all happened exactly, like the felled statue etched forever within him, doomed to repeat with each visit. In every night of sleep he will always have somewhere to be, and every step will only ever take him one way through. Finally coming to grasp this, he knows where he must be is close by. Captain can hear blood under his continuing footsteps, by now having grown numb to it. The dark yields to an aged wooden hallway decorated in the dusty textiles of an old hotel. Every door in passing remains closed, some hanging partway into nothingness, some rotted completely shut. Captain only finds one that appears occupied up ahead, leaking a haunting bluish glow. Several labored steps more and he pushes the door open to a rather dull scene. Past the glow the walls of the room fade away under endless dust. Housed in its center is an old squared television set tuned to a flickering broadcast, music playing from its old fuzzy speakers. Captain enters in silence, ignoring the long gone song of yesteryear with his attention to the other prominent sight in the room. A tall man sits erect at the edge of his bed before the screen. The man’s winged arms cling tightly to his chest, unresponsive to the visit. Joining him at his side Captain finds him masked with a porcelain bird’s face. A moment passes in trying to see just what lies beyond the dark holes of its eyes, finding nothing as he always does. Without thinking, once more compelled by morbid temptation, Captain slowly reaches to remove the man’s mask. Out of all he had seen, in every visit made, he’d never had the privilege to know what lies underneath. The music broadcast cuts to loud incomprehensible noise. Captain blinks, drawn into glimpsing the flashing images. He recoils and moves to back away from the screeching, the anger, anguish, and unspeakable pain it carried. A cold hand clamps around his arm, keeping him frozen in place. He sees the winged man holding him from where he sits. The bird’s head turns just barely in a silent series of cracks growing across his neck. Captain blinks, still unable to see beyond the holes of the porcelain mask. Between the wordless bid to stay and the growing volume of static gnashing at his ears he finds himself unable to act anymore. The tumultuous static creeps into the edges of Captain’s sense. The wallpaper and wood of the room peel away in the growing rumble of a coming storm. The floor itself gives way for him to sink through. More feathers grasp him upon slipping. Captain looks one more time into the hollow stare of the bird mask, finding aging, knowing eyes that have waited for him all this time. Captain blinks, and within the creeping rain of static reflected in the porcelain he sees his young self, carrying years lost and years to come. Captain blinks, and through snowy teeth wrapping around him sinuous hands grip the yoke that leads him and his onward towards inevitable agony. Captain blinks, and through their eyes is witnessed a great collapse in a brilliance of colours. The hollow structures of the dream and its bodies within fall apart, crumbling in the arrival of a deafening tempest. Captain blinks, and he flies through a recursive eternity. Their bodies fall where they always have, through his stretched fingers meant to hold them. He remembers each and every face in their last moments. Captain blinks, and in losing himself once more dark feathers let him go. Before the dawn of awakening, in the wake of endless tears, he falls backwards into the gaping maw of an empty machine. No matter its form, nor its order, that’s how it all came to be, how it always will, and that can never change.Chapter 12: Night Terrors"I'm not surprised you would come all this way for the little kid." Stitches said. "I remember seeing how devastated you looked when they said good-bye." "That's because I never got to say good-bye." Grey sighed. "We just... let Puzzleman take them to Fate knows where." Stitches sighed. "Young Princess... it wasn't our fault, and certainly not yours, that he took those two out from our realm." Oaken quietly held and tightened his friend's hand in comfort, as the monster king spoke. "We didn't let him take them. Neither of us could have known, not even you." Grey nodded and made it seem like she felt better, but she was still hurting. A few minutes later, Mr. Stitches lead the two kids turn after turn, and the duo wondered what was down the other corridors. "So, princess, bitten any king's fingers lately?" "You're still upset about that?!" Grey asked. "You had me locked in a cage and poked me! You were being very annoying!" "Why is there so many branching paths?" Oaken asked. "To trap trespassers, and send them back to the start. Very convenient portal system." The stitched monster said. "T and I made all these branching paths to make sure we don't be disturbed when one comes across this place." "How do you know where to go?" Grey asked. "Follow a set path with special paint, and soon, the paint isn't needed and it's as simple as walking in your home." Stitches smiled. The trio soon heard the sound of keys loudly clacking and machines whirring. "How goes the search, hun?" Mr. Stitches asked as he leaned against the door frame. "65% close to Masked Kid 745 and Elizabeth." T. bur replied, not taking his eyes off the screen. "I'll stop soon, and let the machine continue the search on it's own while I sleep. I'll need to feed it more of 745's DNA to keep the search going." "I almost lost them once, I'm not going to lose them now!" The shark said. "What do you mean by that?" Grey asked. T. Bur looked at the princess in disguise, and shook his head. "It's time you and Oaken got some sleep, Princess." He puts a fin on her shoulder as he passed her. "You'll need all you're energy tomorrow morning." "What it because of the accident...?" Grey asked. "That's a discussion we want to have, when we find the kid and Elizabeth." Stitches said, following the shark. That night, Grey and Oaken slept in sleeping bags in a spare room. However, Grey's dreams were less than hopeful. She opened her eyes and found herself in a vast white wasteland. Nothing but floating appearing and disappearing blocks and a massive stary void could be seen ahead of her. As she started walking, she could hear whispers all around her. "Hello...?" The princess turned, only to find no one. As she resumes to walk, she smacks into an invisible wall. "Ow..." Grey groans as she rubs her nose. "Guess I can't go this way, anymore." She places her hands on the invisible wall, pressing on it, and banged her fist as hard as she can. No dent. "If I can't get passed this glass wall, maybe I could find the end." Grey decided aloud. Keeping her hand on the wall, Grey walked along the wall to the end. Despite being a sturdy wall, she could hear a shrill scream clear as day! She looked in the direction of the scream, and she felt her heart drop to her stomach... It was Mouse and Elizabeth facing off against what she assumed was a more demented version of Puzzleman. Her blood felt like it froze when she saw her friend's own streaming out their wounds, leaving dark indigo puddles as they stepped. "Green Boots! Green Boots- I mean, Mouse, I'll be right there!" Grey shouted. She turned to run, but slammed into another invisible wall. "Ow..." Grey whimpered, covering her nose. But as she turns to the left, she jumped as her hand met another wall. "You gotta be kidding me..." Turning again, and the same thing. The princess started breathing heavier as her heartbeat quickened. In a panic, Grey started slamming against the walls from all directions. Grey felt powerless watching Mouse get weaker and weaker. And the Puzzleman set a blast of energy through the poor kid's chest. "MOUSE!" The disguised princess shrieked at the top of her lungs. "NO!" Grey woke up in a cold sweat, waking Oaken with her shout. "Huh?! What's happening?! A-are we in danger?!" But when the former hero say his friend, his expression softened. Slowly and quietly, Oaken scooted closer to Grey, and remained there until Grey calmed down. When her heart stopped racing, she sniffled, and rubbed her watery eyes. Meanwhile, Mr. Stitches found himself back at his crumbling castle, kneeling before the masked kid who bested him. "Oh, who am I kidding?" Stitches sighed. "End it, child." He's accepted his fate. "The responsibility... is now yours." This kid will be the new evil leader. "At least I can finally... rest." But to his surprise, the kid dropped the hilt, and they too, fell to their feet, and cried. "No..." Mouse sobbed. Elizabeth looked at her substitute hero with remorse. "It's alright, kid. It's over..." She sighs. "I'm sorry I made you got hrough this." "W-what?! NO!" Mr. Stitches stammered. "NO! NO! NO! YOU HAVE TO!" He could feel the blood drain from his face. "You will doom us all!" The hilt rolled her eyes. "Come on, dude! Give it a rest. Don't you think the world would have ended by now?" "...You do not... understand..." Stitches's heart was beating out of his chest. "You useless fools." A familiar voice growled. That voice shook the monster king to his core. "Who the-" Before Elizabeth could finish, Puzzleman appeared before everyone! "Do you have ANY idea of what you have caused?!" He growled. "The unbalance YOU have brought to this world!" "Y-YOU?!" Elizabeth exclaimed. "You are behind all this?!" "OF COURSE I WAS!" The dice head snapped. "I've been trying to guide you all this time, and you do exactly the opposite! YOU ARE WORTHLESS!" Realization hit T. Bur like an out of control carriage. "You must be the one that has been poisoning Stitches's mind for all these years! I KNEW he wasn't mad!" "So the hero cycles are your doing!" Princess Cereza glared through her mask. "The destruction of the world..." Elizabeth thought aloud. "That was just a lie, wasn't it?" "A... lie?" The not-so mad king felt like he was going to vomit from this realization. "This runt has ruined everything! Hundreds of years of harmony, gone..." There was a collective gasp as he teleported between Mouse and Stitches. "Just so you could feel like a little HERO?!" Puzzleman grabbed Elizabeth, summoning the blade, "THIS IS ALL YOUR FAULT, KIDDO." And plunged it right into Mouse's heart. Silence... The demented game host pulled the sword out, and everyone watched as the child fell to the floor, surrounded by their pooling blood. "Look at what you've done, Salle... All this, because you couldn't finish them off." Puzzleman sneered at Stitches. "Th-they weren't supposed to be the-" "And yet, you allowed them to do it, anyway." Puzzleman snaps his fingers, and everyone in the arena was slain with a crack of thunder. Stitches felt frozen and helpless. "Now, I'm going to have to start all over..." Stitches heard one last thunderclap as he woke up. He panted as he looked around. His shark husband turned to face him. "Another nightmare, dear...?" T. Bur said in a groggy tone. Stitches nodded. "Felt just as real as the others." The shark put a fin on the burlap king's back. "Wanna talk about it?" "Puzzleman murdered Mouse... right in front of us..." Stitches murmured. "He used Elizabeth to pierce their heart... I couldn't... I couldn't do anything! I just... watched..." He sobbed. "I feel like we failed the-" T. Bur stopped Stitches and held his hands. "That is enough!" The shark said sternly. "We've come too far to feel like failures." Stitches held his husband close. "We will find 745 and Elizabeth... and we will find them alive." "You're right, babe." The burlap king smiled, and nods. "I'm really glad you didn't listen to me."Chapter 1: The CullNimble phalanges skillfully weave several threads thinner than silk into a series of complex yet delicate-looking patterns and images. A lovely teal trench coat with a realistic silver, gold, and black apple tree adorned on its back is slowly being woven into existence as the threads dance. The trench coat is a superbly made piece that reaches just below the knees, with sleeves embroidered with silver ivy, and a small crest of a black apple with a silver moon circlet embellishing the left lapel quite beautifully. The one creating such an exquisite piece of garment had a soft yet focused look in his gaze as he worked. Soon, the trench coat was finished with a barely noticeable gleam of magic. A soft hum could be heard from the one inspecting their work with a satisfied sparkle in their eyelights before they carefully wrapped the article of clothing in black muslin and stored it away in their inventory. Threads were then summoned once again as he went about using them to clean up his little space and store away his collection of books and grimoires that he had collected over the eons back into his inventory, along with a variety of collections and miscellaneous items. Cleaning relaxes him, keeps him calm, and grounded as it preoccupies his broken mind away from his worries, his anxiety, his responsibilities, the voices, and... the pain. "Meow~" A small white ball of fluff bounded towards him, purring and rubbing against his dusty pants, covering its lovely, pristine white fur with a hint of gray. "Tsk tsk, Nieve, look at what you've done! You got yourself dirty again. I know you want cuddles, but this isn't the time for that, you silly gatita," Error said with a sigh passing through his teeth as he picked up the kitten into his arms and proceeded to clean her up with pet wipes. "I wish we were at Nightmare's castle. I would have been able to give you a proper bath there," he said, feeling disappointed in himself for not being able to provide better for his little companion, who had brought him comfort when he was at his lowest in recent months. "Don't try to rub against me yet, I'm just going to get cleaned up and change into something cleaner, okay?" He says as he finishes cleaning up the monster dust off the kitten's fur. He then removed the rags that were once his clothes from his body before using some wet wipes to clean his bones. It was the best he had to clean himself with when he wasn't at either Nightmare's castle or Swap's home. The antivoid is nothing but an empty white space with no resources after all. He could only make do with whatever he collected over the years from the AUs he destroyed in the past. Soon, he put on a fresh pair of clothes that he had made the other day. Truthfully, it was only recently that Error even bothered to create new clothes for himself. He usually only repaired and wore the same pair of clothes for eons. It was only after he found Nieve when she was only a day old beside her dead mother that he tried to improve his own living conditions. After all, one can only take care of another life when one can take care of oneself first. Life from Reapertale helped him in that regard. The only thing that bothered him was Reaper's intense stare full of longing. Reaper had been trying to get close to Error for a past that he could never remember. A past before he became the God of Destruction. "Meow," Nieve pawed at Error's toes, bringing Error out of his thoughts as he gave the kitten some attention. "Okay, okay, let's give you those cuddles you want. Geez, you're one greedy little gatita, you know that right?" Laughing wholeheartedly, Error picked up the kitten into his arms before kissing her forehead softly. The kitten purred loudly at the affection while curling up comfortably in his arms. Kitten and skeleton bonded with each other in a comfortable silence for a bit. It wasn't long before Error felt a stabbing pain in his soul as his vision spun, his mind unfocused, and his hold on the kitten became more protective. "Sh-shit! AGH! That darn squid really doesn't know how to stop. FUCK! This pain... The AU he's making, it's fucking huge! It's tipping the balance way too much. I need to destroy it before he finishes it! Nieve... I'm sorry, girl, I can't leave you with Life this time; there's not much time." Error says through gritted teeth as he puts his little kitten inside one of his inner coat pockets. The kitten purred against her owner as she curled inside his pocket while kneading biscuits against his ribs. This brought a small smile to the destroyer's face despite the pain he was going through. Error then brought up the codes and searched for the new AU. Ones and zeros danced in front of him in a way only he could decipher as his eyelights scanned the codes at a rapid pace before landing on a set of particularly unfamiliar growing string of codes, a tattle-tale sign of a new AU being created and had not yet synced with the very fabric of the multiverse. It was large, far too large for the multiverse to handle. "DAMN IT!" Error cursed as he tore through the codes of reality, creating a rift through time and space before summoning his threads to create a tether to the new AU, which would facilitate portal creation. Nieve softly pawed at Error's ribs to calm his simmering anger. She meowed softly with concern as she peeked out of Error's pocket to look at him. Error controlled his breathing, trying to calm his raging emotions while gritting through the pain that attacked his soul in waves. Error began to focus; he needed to, or else the multiverse would collapse as the AUs would collide. "Thanks... Nieve." Error says as he steps through the newly created portal. The moment Error's sandal-clad feet stepped into the AU, something felt off to Error's senses; something was wrong with this AU; it looked normal on the surface, but his instincts were screaming out in alarm that danger was coming and that it was coming in hot and fast. Error quickly hid among the foliage, using his strings to blend with the surroundings by altering the color to match that of the flora in his vicinity. He slowed down his breathing, his soul beats became falteringly slow as he extended his senses to determine what was heading in his direction. He could sense several thousand hostiles inching closer to his location, which led him to check the codes again to assess and analyze his overall situation. He doesn't like what he sees. Both the originals and the copies alike, all of whom were a part of the council that sided with the star Sanses, were closing in from the north. This made Error realize that things were becoming quite dicey, as his analysis indicated that the situation was escalating in both difficulty and level of danger. Things were definitely not looking good. The opposition was looking around for the glitchy skeleton, but Error doesn't plan on making it easy for them. 'Those fools should have done their research on me, not like it matters since they've lost the element of surprise.' Error thought as he used his camouflaged state to his advantage by summoning more strings and letting them burrow into the earth. His mind focused on their coordinates through the codes as he controlled his strings to slowly tunnel through the dirt, to make their way to the originals' locations before using his strings as a medium to remotely open portals to send the originals back to their respective AUs inconspicuously without the copies or the star Sanses noticing. He did it quickly while also deleting the originals' communication devices as he did so. "That'll thin out the numbers a bit but not by much... I need to do something else to make the playing field go in my favor." Error whispered to himself as he stared at the codes. His eyes lit up as he recalled something from a medical book he collected in the past. He grinned unperceptively as he summoned his strings once more. "Meow." Nieve poked her head out of Error's pocket, tentatively pawing at his chest. Error looked down at the kitten with a soft gaze. "Nieve, I'll be careful. Go back to hiding in my pocket, my sweet little gatita." He said reassuringly to the little feline while using one of his strings to lightly caress her head. Nieve did as told, while purring softly, her tail flicked lightly to show her compliance. He pulled away the string he used to pet her, though it lingered on the tuft of fur in her ear for a second. Error's sockets slowly narrowed as he looked away from his little furry companion. 'Hopefully this'll put the odds in my favor.' He thought to himself as he slowly made the color of his strings disappear, turning them transparent as he maneuvered them towards the copies' souls, tying their souls up without anyone noticing. With apprehension in his own soul, he then sent the ends of his strings to painlessly penetrate the core complex of their souls, paralyzing them. "Looks like it worked. Now it's time to cull this herd of stubborn sheep."trophy