Chapter Text
The sudden weight on Phil’s chest jolted him from a dead sleep.
“What now?”
“It is time.”
“Joel. I don’t even want to glance at my phone to see what time it is, but I know it’s unreasonable, and probably not time for...whatever the hell you’re doing. Which I don’t care about. Let me make that clear now.”
“No. Phil. Listen. It is time.”
Phil finally found the strength to sit up in bed and attempt to push Joel off of him, but he wasn’t the least bit successful. In the moment, Joel seemed to have suddenly taken on an impossible weight, and as a result Phil struggled to even force a sigh out. The world was still pitch black and ambiguous shapes around him, but he still felt himself growing uneasy at the eyes that he knew were trying to stare straight into his soul. He shifted his gaze to the wall. “Okay then. Time for what?”
“Man, you give up so easily.” Joel reached over to Phil’s nightstand and flipped on the lamp. Phil winced and shielded his face with his arms, as his eyes hadn’t yet even adjusted to the complete darkness of his room. “Jeez, you look like hell,” Joel quipped, “you should really consider more sleep.”
Phil lowered his arms for a moment, if only to glare daggers at his friend.
“Anyway, get up. This is important. For real this time.” Joel finally relented, sliding off of his dazed friend and leaping to the floor in one swift movement. He stared impatiently at Phil, who still was not quite ready to give in to his shenanigans and miss out on this aforementioned sleep.
“This seems annoyingly familiar. This wouldn’t happen to be like all those other times you insisted on dragging me out of bed for those other things you said were ‘important, for real this time?’”
“I don’t remember that; you’re probably making it up. Although, it might explain why you’re surprisingly so coherent, rather than the stuttering mess you usually are at this time of night.”
Phil reached over and turned his lamp off as a reply. Joel wasted no time in tearing the blanket off dramatically. “I should have known that would not have worked,” Phil sighed, at last rolling out of bed. He rubbed his eyes and yawned. “Where’s Elly?”
“She’s already down at the lab, you nub. You sleep like a damn rock, not that rocks sleep. Rocks aren’t alive, Phil! She — Elly, not the rock — still has just the right amount of enthusiasm for my projects, y’know, probably to make up for your apathetic ass,” Joel snapped, tapping his foot impatiently to illustrate just the lengths he would go to convey his irritation. “So hurry up!”
Phil obliged, murmuring under his breath the whole way through the house. Joel was already about ten steps ahead of him, and he traversed his friend’s house in such a way that would insinuate he always creeps around in the dark — such a thing would certainly not be out of the realm of possibility. Phil, of course, walked just as a person deprived of sleep would, and as can be expected stumbled over furniture and other assorted items that his roommate had left out in the way for him — probably for this explicit purpose.
Although years had passed since their webtoon had crashed and failed, leaving the group to flounder about in their “real lives” outside of their previously simulated reality, Joel still feverishly held onto his quirks, and buried himself frequently in his strange experimentations day after day, much to Phil’s exasperation. On the other hand, the rest of the group was left burying things of their own, such as the fragments of their horrible memories they were left with as a result.
Phil squinted at the eerie glow coming from what seemed to be the top of the stairs leading to the basement, which Joel had insisted on using for the laboratory in question.
“You know this is my house, right? You should probably follow, like, my rules, or something,” Phil muttered, although he knew it was pointless. He narrowly avoided a box placed near the top of the landing. Even though Joel had already begun his descent, Phil could feel him rolling his eyes at the vague threat.
“Oh, my God, Phil, will you just cease your incessant whining for one moment?!”
“You know I can’t,” Phil sighed. The mild irritation lacing his voice betrayed his hands that gripped the railing for dear life so he did not tumble into uncertain death. “So… What is it?”
* * *
June was screaming shrilly before Joel could explain anything, and all he could do was stare at her helplessly until she stopped in order to say something more coherent.
“Joel, what the hell?!” she gasped, gesticulating wildly.
“It… Well I… I mean, it doesn’t make any sense,” Phil stuttered.
“Well, what do you think?” Joel tried, still beaming proudly in spite of the initial critical reception. Either he was hoping for a quick turnaround, or he didn’t care either way; somehow, he was going to get a satisfying reaction.
The four of them — June, Joel, Phil, and Elly — stood shoulder to shoulder in Joel’s laboratory, staring at a large table that ran the length of the room. On it, the body of their supposed-to-be-dead friend — if one could even call her that — Rya lay, strapped down, apparently in an induced coma. What came to mind as a result were various memories of her crude deactivations throughout their series, and how they never ended well for the rest of the cast. However, in this moment she looked untouched by the shenanigans of the simulation, as one could possibly ignore the unsightly scar on her chest that was only faintly visible underneath her tattered shirt. The other aspect that did not match up to the group’s collective memories were the sights and sounds of numerous life support systems she was hooked up to or had protruding from her body — such as the ventilator and feeding tube — although these details did evoke the amalgamation of thoughts of science fiction gone entirely wrong even in the laboratory of a scientist who despite — or maybe because of — his eccentric personality, seemed to be good at what he did.
Phil continued, although stammering in spite of himself. “I mean, just, really?! How is it even possible? How do you have access to that kind of technology? This surpasses any sort of reasoning… It’s, it’s not like — Joel, I mean… I don’t even know how it was possible for Rya to become human in the first place!”
“Well, first of all,” Joel began, indignant, “she shouldn’t have; at least, it wasn’t apart of my plan in the ‘first place.’ It was you assholes who ruined it while I was distracted! But that’s old news, and fire under a bridge or something.”
“Y… You mean water, I hope,” Phil said.
June shifted uncomfortably.
“No. Anyway, that’s not the point,” Joel said, becoming agitated at this seemingly extraneous topic. “You wouldn’t even understand it, so I’m not gonna get into it and have you caught up in irrelevant crap. So just accept it and be proud of me, dammit! That was the point!!”
Phil looked to Elly and June for help, but they only looked back at him helplessly. He tried to steel himself once more, although admittedly he was a few years out of practice of dealing with his roommate’s strange inventions and other things that — in his eyes, at least — simply made a mockery of modern science.
“Y’know what, Joel? Screw you! I’m not giving in and just accepting whatever the hell you think this is. Because disregarding the fact that it makes no logical sense whatsoever for Rya to have become human in a virtual world where our own bodies were only virtual manifestations — I can file that away in Things I Will Never Understand — but the fact that her body , which was thoroughly stabbed, mind you, died and was supposedly left in the simulation… I mean, how do you explain that?! How did you get her body back and manage to keep it… y’know…”
He gestured weakly, and once again turned to Elly and June for any sort of backup; however, the two of them had become increasingly uncomfortable during the display and were looking everywhere but at the table as though Rya only existed when they could see her. Phil’s insistence on delivering a belligerent line of questioning was not anything new, but this time the group had no quips to shoot him down; in fact, this was a rare moment where all of them found themselves equally astounded by the events unfolding in front of them.
Joel sighed. He stepped in front of the table for a moment to gaze at his work, and then turned back to the group. “Phil, I didn’t bring you here for a lesson in how to do the science. You’re supposed to leave that to me. If you wanted to be on my level, you probably should’ve studied harder in high school and spent less time chasing after girls or whatever.” The amount of resentment in the look that both Phil and Elly shot at Joel would have embarrassed any other person, but Joel remained on task. “So yes. Listen. She’s alive. Nevermind how I found her body. The fact is, she’s here and breathing! Actual oxygen! Instead of, the, oh I dunno, whatever thing I made up in the simulation! Now be amazed!”
There was a pause. Unfortunately for Joel, Elly found herself fixating on something else. “Joel, what did you mean when you said, ‘it wasn’t apart of the plan?’”
Joel exhaled sharply. “Well, someone, I don’t know who, was poking their nose around where they shouldn’t have. Messing with my things .” He shot a critical glance at them, although they couldn’t tell if it was aimed at anyone in particular. “Again, that’s beside the point. In fact, the point is like, years ahead of that one. It doesn’t matter that some asshole was in my lab, getting their nasty hands all up in my inventions and then putting them all over my other inventions, making them all sentient, or whatever. That’s not a thing right now. There were a lot of things that didn’t go my way toward the end, as you all know. ” He folded his arms and cast them all a suspicious, sidelong glance.
June couldn’t take it anymore. “But wh— What in the hell were you thinking?” She whimpered a little, fumbling for words, but also not quite sure what she wanted to say. “I mean, what does this…? What does it mean?! It’s just wrong! I mean… Uh, of course it’s like playing God, but it’s also, it’s — worse , somehow, and that’s saying a lot for you, Joel!”
“Alright, alright, will you relax?! June, I just…”
He looked to and gestured at the other two in the hopes that they might interject as they are often known to do, but Elly and Phil only exchanged knowing, irritated glances before looking back to June. She looked as though she might faint, all the color in her face having drained to match the pale, sterile hues of the room.
Joel turned away to stare at Rya again, as though he could hardly believe what he had done himself. He sighed, and tried again. “Well, June, I thought—”
“No!” June exploded, pointing an accusatory finger at Joel that he could feel but not see, and then she pointed then back at the mess he had made of their friend on the table. “This isn’t helping! This,” she continued, signaling wildly, “is crossing a major line! What you did — the things that you might have done for me — that’s on a completely different level!”
Joel whirled around, procuring a wrench from his pocket in order to shake it back at her for emphasis. “Maybe you don’t understand! This isn’t about any of that, and you’re clueless if you think it is! I needed her!” He punctuated his exclamation by letting the wrench fall to the ground with an echoing clatter.
The group was already acutely aware of just how deeply their lives had become entangled in a webtoon that ran for less than three years; however, in this moment, it became even more apparent just how much Joel had been pulling the strings, even behind the scenes. This realization disturbed them into a deep, calculative silence, disturbed only by the white noise of Joel’s lab equipment.
The years following the cancellation of Bonus Stage had certainly taken its toll on everyone, but it was becoming apparent that it had hit Joel the hardest. On the surface, it would appear that Joel needed to do things just to see if he could do them; he didn’t have a point to prove to anyone but himself, and most of the time he was fine with people not understanding why he did the things he did. In most cases, he just wanted someone to be there so he wasn’t just talking to himself, although he didn’t always mind that either. But even without Rya in the picture, he had managed to do what was thought to be impossible, regardless of whether or not they should exist in the first place… And yet, his beloved project and webtoon had still failed and driven everyone to an intense, prolonged bitterness. However, it was becoming evident that this bitterness only quietly festered and hidden away up until this point. And, in a way, with bringing Rya back to life, it was as though Joel was reawakening his friends as well, if only through stirring up dark, repressed feelings that had been left unresolved in the wake of their cartoon’s sudden, traumatic ending that none of them fully understood even now.
After another moment of the deafening silence that had engulfed the contemplative group as they stared at the comatose ex-robot, Phil cleared his throat. “I just have one other question, Joel,” he said, his voice just barely audible, his gaze shifting to the floor. “Why?”
Though it was shocking, no one found themselves surprised by Joel almost immediately bursting into laughter. He looked at the three of them, disgust burning in their very eyes, then back to Rya, who he knew would be looking at him in the same way if she were currently awake. He bent to pick up the wrench he dropped and delicately placed it on the table.
“That’s a stupid question, even for you, Phil.” Joel turned his back to them. “Get out.”
* * *
When Rya opened her eyes after what seemed like a lifetime, she had awakened into a world she had never seen before, and she inhabited a body she didn’t fully recognize. She almost wasn’t sure if she was truly experiencing consciousness the way she was supposed to; after all, her memory spanned less than two years, and she currently struggled to assess the situation before her. Jumbled fragments of memories drifted through her mind briefly, but mostly she was fighting to figure out where she was, what was happening currently, and how that fit into the timeline of her life. For the most part, she was mildly annoyed that it seemed to have been a long time since her last reactivation, and that she was struggling to access the memories when they should’ve been at the forefront of her mind as though she were a hibernating computer.
“Yo. Hey. C’mon!”
Startled, Rya tried to turn her body toward the voice, but she found that all her limbs were strapped down, or at the very least, that she was immobilized, somehow. Joel stepped into her vision, and instinctually, immediate feelings of hatred bubbled up inside her, consuming everything else. She wasn’t even quite sure if she fully recognized him yet, but she knew he was nothing but trouble and pain for her. He was the reason she was alive in the first place. Wait. Alive. For some reason, this word didn’t sit right in her mind. There must have been some weird modifications made this time. Anything goes in Bonus Stage, after all. Ah yes, that thing. Now she remembered why she was infuriated.
Joel took one good look at her, and then was beside himself with joy. “That’s right, assholes!! You’re alive! And they all said I couldn’t. Or… Shouldn’t. One of those stupid words they tell you in public school to keep you subservient and all that.”
The word still sounded strange. Rya finally opened her mouth to speak, but coughed shallowly instead. Almost as quickly as it appeared, Joel’s excitement faltered, and his expression became unreadable, as though he were a child quickly tiring of a toy just moments after pulling it from its box. He ducked out of her line of sight and started working on something, somewhere else… Rya stared straight ahead, a sense of dread seizing her chest, although she could not recognize it as anything but… pain? Things were starting to shift in her mind, and she felt vaguely like she were being stabbed.
“I… Help? You asshole?” she finally managed, her voice sounding foreign. She wondered briefly whose voice it really was, and if the language she was speaking was the one she should be using.
Joel, startled at her sudden vocalizations, jumped back into her line of sight. “Oh, that’s right! The other stuff!” He began undoing the velcro restraints keeping her to the table, although she didn’t actually seem eager to move around just yet. “On the one hand, I’m glad you woke up after I took the feeding tube out, but then again, it might have been pretty funny. Which is another thing. You might be wondering, was it really medically necessary to restrain you? No. Of course not. It was fun though. There’s probably a couple more tests I should run, though. I would ask how you’re feeling right now, but that’s not super relevant.”
He kept talking, but Rya noticed that she had begun to tune him out fairly early on, which seemed familiar enough. She recognized immediately that he was doing that thing where he was just talking because she was there, and not because he cared whether or not she had anything other than a snappy retort to make in return. She slowly sat up, her limbs feeling impossibly heavy. She raised a hand to rub her eyes, then stared blankly at Joel, who was leaning against his desk and alternating between scribbling things on a tablet and inputting data into a computer.
Rya used this moment to take a brief inventory of the room, and her eyes fell on a plain wallet left on the desk beside Joel. For some reason, everything seemed off. This was Joel’s laboratory all right, but something was definitely wrong, here. She hesitated, but then she shifted to move her legs onto the floor. Despite the immense amount of effort it seemed to take her, she pushed forward and tried to stand. Predictably, everything ached, but Rya was reasonably unfamiliar with these sensations, even though she knew logically that could happen.
She walked over to the desk beside Joel — who hadn’t moved as though she had stopped existing out of sight, much like his friends earlier — and opened the wallet without thought, causing a photograph to fall from it onto the floor. At first, she ignored it to look at what else the wallet contained, and it did not take much digging to figure out that this was Phil’s wallet that Joel had taken, that is unless Joel liked carrying Phil’s license around… And gratuitous pictures of Elly, at which Rya rolled her eyes. She figured not much time could have passed if Phil was still creepily obsessed with her, unless he was really that desperate, still. That would be unsurprising to her also. There wasn’t any cash left inside. She sighed inwardly, the sudden sight of these faces jumpstarting her memories, as though she were picking things from out of a dream she had in between very deep sleep cycles — not that she had any sort of recollection of dreaming — after all, this wasn’t a Philip K. Dick novel or anything… That she knew of.
“So, I… can leave?” Rya said.
Joel was only half-listening, which she expected. “Yeah, you’re free, whatever. You don’t need to be in here anymore.”
“Bonus Stage is really derivative, I just want you to know that. Ass.”
Joel raised an eyebrow and turned to face her for a moment, but he said nothing and quickly returned back to what he was doing. It had been days since he revealed to his friends that he had revived Rya, but he had been spending the majority of the time since in his laboratory given the tense atmosphere still lingering in the household. He was hoping they would all warm up to the idea once they actually saw her conscious. Maybe it was just hard for most people to be excited about a vegetable — whatever that entailed.
Rya suddenly thought to look down at her clothing — the same clothing she had always worn — but it was impossibly dirty. And were those blood stains?
“How long have you kept me deactivated this time, jerk-ass?”
Joel rolled his eyes dramatically, but kept writing away. “What are you talking about, deactivated? What is this, some crappy flash cartoon?” Joel looked up for a second to wave her off dismissively.
“Wow. Hilarious joke. You’re an asshole, as usual, and I’m pissed off. That’s new.” Rya looked down to examine her hands a little further. “What the hell is this, dickface? What have you done to me this time? Whose blood is this? Phil’s, I hope.”
Not surprisingly, Joel groaned in response and said nothing more. She shrugged and looked down at the floor, her eyes finally focusing at the photograph at her feet. Curiously, she picked it up and stared at what appeared to be a photo of everyone, although where they were she could not exactly place, especially given her very limited selection of places she had visited or knew of. There were a couple elements of the photograph that jumped out to her from the start: Firstly, everyone seemed to be outside, and somewhere nice. Nothing quite like she had ever seen in Charismaville, and certainly not in space. Secondly, everyone was dressed even nicer, and not as though they had no understanding of a basic color wheel. She strained through her memory to see if there were any event that she was aware of that would be appropriate for these two rare things to come together. Her eyes fell on the background of the photo, where Joel was lying on the ground, apparently wasted and most certainly incapacitated. That much was undoubtedly the only believable aspect. However, Phil and Elly clinging to each other in the foreground, limbs tangled in a messy embrace, while June was apparently throwing rice above them was a little more jarring.
The photo was absurd in all of its different components, and she couldn’t exactly place why. She started combing through and piecing memories together in her head, and wondered (or maybe hoped) briefly if she had been there, although the more she mused, the more it seemed unlikely. The people she knew (thought she knew?) typically weren’t even that happy, right?
“And what the hell is this?” Rya demanded, scrutinizing the photograph for even more clues. “Elly doesn't even look mildly pissed or even suicidal. How out of character for her.” She paused, questioning her own memories once more. “Right?”
“Huh?” Joel stopped what he was doing and glanced over her shoulder briefly to see what she was going on about. “Oh, dude, Phil and Elly got married years ago, where the hell have you been?”
Rya cast him a quizzical look. “Uh, deactivated.”
“Oh, yeah.”
“You brought me back to life...?”
“Right.”
“So…”
“So,” Joel said, “What’s your question? Wait, I don’t care. I’m a little busy here. You’re welcome for your life that you never asked for and all that.” He waved her off again, and said no more.
Rya snarled, flicking the photo at Joel’s face and turning to leave the room to find something else to do, someone else to make fun of. Joel flailed and caught the photo before it made contact with one of his eyes.
“That poor woman,” she hissed. Joel took one last look at the photograph in his hands and scoffed, letting it fall out of his grasp and onto the floor.