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EB: i gotta go!
EB: gonna blast off to the seventh gate.
EB: and, uh, win this game i guess.
TG: ok well it definitely sounds like youre fucking something up over there
TG: but alright later
EB: later.
Your name is Dave Strider, and the last words you typed to your best friend still make you kick yourself.
Something about the whole situation sat wrong with you from the start, but you'd had problems of your own to deal with: your feathery asshole of a kernelsprite, for instance, looming insistently before you wherever you turned like the creepy little girl in every horror film ever; an influx of sartorially retarded monsters hellbent on hellmurdering you; the blinding light and searing heat of your new home planet gumming the soles of your shoes to the gears beneath your feet. You weren't especially inclined to worry about John's stupid plan when you'd barely even begun playing, yourself.
You didn't have the time.
You'd made do, though, hastily appeasing the apparition of the crow you accidentally impaled by tossing Lil' Cal into its glowing form. The imps were short work once you'd begun to understand their patterns of attack, though you swore more than once that you caught a glimpse of yourself somehow, locked in parallel battle, out of the corner of your eye. You explored a little, outsmarted a seething mob of crocodiles, fucked around with the alchimeter Jade had left on your roof. You chatted with her, bantered with Rose, and then finally noticed the clock in the corner of your screen.
It wasn't like John to go so long without contacting you for some reason or another, and five hours was more than long enough for him to have finished his stupid magic quest. He should have been back, cursing up a storm about some inane detail of his failure or rubbing his victory in your face. Rose hadn't heard hide nor hair from him, either, and Jade's encouraging words had gone unanswered. You left him a string of messages of your own which you hoped didn't sound too anxious, shook yourself steady, and carried on with your game. Let the asshole try and prank you, or get overrun by chatty trolls or throw a space rave on the magic fucking dream moon or whatever the hell he was doing. The rest of you had business to attend to.
It wasn't until Jade suddenly ceased responding to any and all messages (and your apartment both suddenly and ominously ceased to grow on its spindly supports) that you actually began to get scared.
With that, you'd thrown an unofficial pause on the game, left your cackling sprite mercifully behind, and caught some unreal air off a magma thermal to reach your next gate early yourself.
You emerged at once from the crater of a volcano in the coldest place you'd ever been in your life. Arcing upward, the biggest open spot, where you suspected an enormous observatory tower belonged, was conspicuously and terrifyingly vacant of anything but a few stunted trees and a scattering of jewel-colored amphibians. It was difficult at first to locate the next gate against the low clouds and drifting snow, but you found it in time, rematerializing over a glittering expanse of iridescent ocean, a squat cubiform house perched over a wide swath of white sand and a churning pillar of water far below. The rain that drenched your suit on your way down to Rose's gate smelled strongly of ozone and dried almost instantly on your skin, leaving behind a shimmering residue which you attempted to brush off in disgust on your final descent.
Your distaste, however, turned to unease the moment you touched down in the Land of Wind and Shade. Teetering high above the dark winding rivers and plains twinkling with luminescent flora, John's house was generic and forgettable, even with its bizarre skyward additions. Rose had clearly never played with Legos as a child. Not that your own work had been much better, or anywhere near as extensive, but your lack of architectural prowess was hardly the most pressing issue at hand: John's seventh gate winked ominously above, and you rose through it quickly and unceremoniously, tucking your sweet ride back into your sylladex before it punched through the firefly-studded clouds and was lost for good.
The network of pipes and tunnels you were dumped into didn't seem to follow any particular rhyme or reason; a dull droning sound waxed and faded rhythmically if you strained your ears, carried for what might have been miles by the echoing structure. You used this to orient yourself, periodically reaching down into the stream you were sloshing through and slapping an oily handprint on the wall to prevent doubling back. The intensity of the reverberation grew slowly in intensity as you traveled some ways, and became almost inaudible others. You wandered for what felt like forever, until at long last you discovered a path curling up out of a pipe, slicked with shiny footprints you knew you hadn't made. These you followed to a round platform surrounded by towering pipes, with a wide organ, hopelessly choked with oil, squatting off to its side- the sound peaked there, then seemed to cease suddenly of its own volition. Your footsteps echoed around the eaves of the vaulted ceiling no matter how quietly you attempted to step, but despite the new and eerie silence, you got the sense that you were close.
Your name is Dave Strider, and you have never wished you were wrong more than you did just then.
You don't know what you expected to find in the cool and greasy depths of John's planet, but no matter how much you'd been subconsciously dreading it, it hadn't been your dead best friend. He was crumpled in the middle of an enormous scorchmark which stretched away from the single gaping pipe mouth occupying most of the facing wall, his form tinier in the expanse of the room than you could have possibly imagined.
You threw up over the side of the mysteriously supported walkway right then and there, hardly anything left of the half-breakfast you'd scrounged together in the mess of your apartment before this whole game had even begun. And when you finally forced your quaking legs forward, edging toward John with your eyes locked on where his denizen ought to have been, where it was when it...
it...
There were no absurd metaphors for what it did. It had killed him, stark and simple; it had cracked the lenses of his glasses and fused the plastic frames to his temples and there was a silhouette in the ash smearing his cheeks, thin clean finger marks spread over his face where he'd shielded himself, and the back of the hand and forearm dropped limp on his chest was charred to the bone to prove it. His other hand was waxen pale and curled in a loose fist, his legs sprawled out at odd angles. One of his dress socks had slipped down, bunched up around his ankle. The details of him were strange and inhuman in their mundanity, last little snapshots of a kid who hadn't stood a chance.
You'd dithered for a long while over what to do with him. You couldn't just leave him, but bringing yourself to touch him as he was was a whole different beast- it was all wrong, and the smell of melted polyester and singed hair brought you close to spattering your shoes again. Captchaloguing him wasn't exactly dignified, but in the end it was the most you could manage.
Burying him under the tree in his front yard wasn't exactly dignified, either. But you managed that as well, sweating and sobbing and scraping at the earth with the flat of some bullshit broadsword until you'd made an impression that almost reached your knees if you stood in the middle.
Rose cleaned that up once you'd composed yourself enough to break the news, neatly and quickly with a wave of her needles and a few muttered words that lifted the hair on the back of your neck in some base instinctual way. And that was that. You drew John back out with a murmur of his name, the crack in which you suspected Rose pretended not to notice, and with another sweep of her wands, she took a wavering step forward to lay him in the ground while you scrubbed at your eyes with your suit sleeve. At least the imps had the decency to keep their distance for awhile.
In what was perhaps the most bitingly surreal twist of all, neither of you had any words, not for John nor for the second small totem you'd laid down for Jade. You simply stood together, silent and shaking. She cried for awhile, small, dainty tears dabbed away with a fold of her sash, but her hand clutched yours so hard you thought it might break- there were no romantic overtones there, only the grim fact that two was safer than one, and that two was all you had left now.
It grew easier to bear, in time.
You picked yourselves back up and you played for a long while after that, unaccustomed though the pair of you were to teamwork. All attempts at communication with what had been, essentially, the outside world- your friends, your guardians, the colorful and aptly-named trolls- drew nothing but radio silence. The endless night of your planet and the endless day of Rose's blended together into one continuous stretch of time that even you had trouble keeping track of after enough of it had passed. It was draining, maddeningly so, but there was a method to it, nonspecific as it was: a drive to continue as long as possible, to learn what you could, earn what you could, and take it back. The only hope for what was left of your session was to do everything in your power to keep your loop from becoming stable, whatever that meant when you left it.
By the time your patience wore to its thinnest, when the heat and the loneliness and the maniacal echo of your sprite's laughter bouncing between the girders came to be too much, having a definite plan didn't seem quite so important. After all, you had been raised to improvise, to think on your feet as well as on your ass when you were down and trapped.
For what it was worth, you had an out worthy of a hero, and by God, you were going to take it.
Dave: Reverse.