Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Phil, holding a steaming cup of coffee, walked back to his desk, hopped into his trusty swivel chair, and spun around to face his desk.

He took a sip from his coffee, sighed, and set it down. He punched in his password on the lock screen, and pulled up the daily report forms to start filling out.

“BITT,” he called to his trusty Tech Bot, “give me a status update on current Zone activity.”

It was a Saturday afternoon, and it was pouring rain out. It was, effectively, the perfect combo storm for peak gaming hours. Everyone being inside meant that the store front didn’t need much attention today. However, peak gaming hours also meant peak glitch hours. So, to keep on top of them, today all Techs were specifically assigned Zones to patrol through.

BITT began his report. “Zone 1 is currently being monitored by Tech Tag ‘Iceberger’. Glitch activity has been low in this area. Zone 2 is currently being monitored by Tech Tag ‘NixScorekeeper’. As per protocol, ‘NixScorekeeper’ has spent extra time at Joystick Juniors.”

Phil tsked. “It’s pouring cats and dogs out. I can’t imagine there’s a lot of folks playing games in there. After the report, remind me to tell him to get a move on.”

“Noted. Reminder to ‘tell ‘NixScorekeeper’ to get a move on’ has been added to my alarms.” BITT paused as he loaded up more data from the Hinobi Network. “Zone 3 is currently being monitored by Tech Tags ‘Z Squared’ and ‘HanYeesh’. Glitch activity has been at medium levels.”

“I’m sure it’s nothing they can’t handle.” Phil continued typing in notes for his report.

“Zone 4 is currently being monitored by Tech Tags ‘Hi_5’ and ‘ME_KO’. Glitch activity has been at high levels.”

Phil frowned. His two newest recruits had so far proven to be exceptional techs, but a high glitch rate was a lot for any tech to handle. “Have they called for back up, yet?”

“No, sir.”

“Let me know when they do.”

“Noted, sir.” BITT paused as he processed more data. “Zone 5. Z- Z- Zone Fi- Five.” BITT’s screen fragmented for a moment.

Phil waited, but as the seconds ticked by he got a little nervous. He was used to BITT’s little hiccups, but this was starting to look not so normal.

BITT finally seemed to fix his issue. “Zone 5 is currently being monitored by no one.”

Phil raised his eyebrows. That couldn’t be right. He specifically remembered assigning Mitch to that zone.

“Where’s Mitch? Somewhere he’s not supposed to be, I’m guessing.” Phil took another sip of coffee, hoping the caffeine will help him get through this news.

“Tech Tag MitchFTW has been terminated from employment.”

Phil choked on his coffee. He coughed and sputtered in shock for a good ten seconds before finally catching his breath. “Excuse me?!”

“Tech Tag MitchFTW has been terminated from employment.” BITT repeated.

“How? Why? Wh- What happened?”

BITT processed more data. “I’m sorry, sir, but that information is classified.”

“Classified? CLASSIFIED?! You mean to tell me that one of my best Techs got axed without my authorization, and I’m not even allowed to know what he did to deserve it?”

“That is correct.”

Phil could feel his blood start to boil. “Who did it, BITT? Who fired him?” he asked coldly.

BITT processed the request. “The administrator is identified as ‘Inspector 31’.”

“Bring up this ‘Inspector 31’s’ contact details.” All of Phil’s thoughts of the daily report had been pushed aside. “We have some phone calls to make.”

Mitch finally snapped out of his trance. He blinked, trying to process what he had been doing.

He was standing in his apartment, right in front of the door, which was still currently open. He must have just walked in.

Closing the door, and locking it for good measure, he continued making his way further in. He crashed onto his tiny couch in front of the TV, and stared at the ceiling.

He was in a total daze. The room didn’t feel quite real. The battering of rain against the windows seemed far away. His thoughts, try as he might to get a solid grasp on them, kept sloshing around in the mush that felt like his brain.

Some part of him felt like he should be reeling with fury. He had just been fired, after all, and so unfairly, too! The image of the woman came back to haunt him, with her ivory and well cared for face, her wavy black locks flowing down below that ridiculous sun hat, and the icy cold eyes that undermined her beauty.

“You must understand,” the woman said, “I have a role to play. A role far more important than a grunt like you could ever understand.”

“You’re cuckoo!” Mitch retorted. “You can’t just-”

The moment in his memory had suddenly fizzled out. Mitch could remember the words he said, and the surprise and fear he felt, but for some reason couldn’t remember what he had been talking about.

“Guards,” the woman commanded, “take him away and decommission him. I don’t think he’s quite fit to work for Hinobi anymore.”

A feeling of shock and disbelief came over Mitch. “W- Wait a minute! Can’t we talk about this?!”

The guards grabbed a hold of Mitch’s arms. Instinctively, Mitch tried to wrench them off. Too bad for him, the guards were too strong.

“You can’t just FIRE me, just like that!” Mitch snapped. “That’s not how that works! You gotta talk to my boss first!”

“You really don’t get it, do you? I outrank all the store managers. I could take out your entire branch with a snap of my fingers if I wanted to.”

The memory fizzled out again. There was more to it, Mitch knew, but his head was starting to hurt. He was also feeling lightheaded and really dizzy. Was he actually sick with something?

He decided to move to a laying down position on the couch, hoping that it would help mitigate whatever this was.

However, it wasn’t long after that that he was out cold.

When Mitch finally rejoined the world of the living, the room had gotten much darker. The rain was still going, and it seemed to have gotten louder.

He attempted to sit up, only to pause when he realized that something warm and fluffy was on top of him. In the dim light, he managed to make out the sandy colored furball that was his cat, Mrs. Boosh. At his movement, she snapped out of her nap and gave him an annoyed glare.

“Hey, Mrs. Boosh,” Mitch drawled out, reaching his hand out to stroke her out of habit. Then, realization struck as he started to comprehend what time it was. “Ah, boosh! It’s way past your dinner time, isn’t it?”

Sensing what Mitch was going to do next, Mrs. Boosh hopped out of his lap and back onto the ground, just as Mitch sat back up.

“How long was I out for?” he muttered to himself. He got up and flicked a light switch, illuminating the room.

The apartment, all things considered, wasn’t very big. It wasn’t the smallest apartment out there, but it wasn’t exactly peak luxury, either. The main area was made up of two halves. On one half was a living room area, with the couch and a TV stand furnished with Mitch’s gaming set up. The other half was the kitchen area, marked by the transition from carpet to tiled floor. The main area had an opening on the wall that led to a short hallway, which contained two doors across from each other. One was for his bedroom, and the other was for the bathroom.

The furnishings weren’t much to write home about, either. Most of what didn’t come with the apartment was acquired second hand, either from family or via thrifting. When Mitch had first decided to move into his own apartment, he hadn’t realized how much getting new stuff actually costed. He had to very quickly improvise and scavenge what he could. But in the end, he had done it. It wasn’t the super idealized living space he had imagined it would be, but he had gotten it set up nearly all on his own and he was proud of that fact.

The other thing of note was the pile of Hinobi boxes at the end of the hallway. In them were various things he had managed to acquire with XP or with his employee discount: different styles of Hinobi hats and shoes that he either kept as backup or sold for extra cash in his off time; Honiibo figurines that gave him bonuses in applicable games; backup gaming equipment for when his siblings broke their gear (though thankfully after their near encounter with perma-banning that had been happening less often).

Mitch looked at the clock in the kitchen, which displayed the time of 11:24 PM. He tried to remember when he had gotten home. It was sometime in the afternoon, but he was fuzzy on the precise hour. That was probably because of that freak sickness that came over him.

He still wasn’t sure where that had come from, but at the same time it seemed like it was gone? He felt a lot more clear headed now. Huh. That long nap must have been what he needed.

Shifting gears back to feeding his cat, he went over to the food bowl. However, as he bent down to grab it for cleaning, he noticed something unexpected. The canned cat food remains looked rather fresh, fresher than if it had been there since this morning.

He turned back to Mrs. Boosh, who was currently clawing at a scratching post. She didn’t look all that hungry. “Did you get fed already?” he asked her.

Mrs. Boosh paused in her scratching, blinked at him, then went back to it.

Mitch was puzzled for a minute, but then he realized he must have fed her already. She must have woken him up at her proper feeding time, and he must have groggily obliged before passing back out on the couch, still sick. He didn’t actually remember doing that, but that must have been what happened.

Satisfied that his cat’s needs had been met for the time being, he moved out of the kitchen, and went to his bedroom, completely missing the handwritten note on the counter top behind him.

He flicked the switch on in his room, then slid to his full length mirror and struck a fancy pose for an audience of no one.

“Mitch, offline edition,” he began. “Status update: the fools at corporate thought it would be a good idea to get rid of yours truly.” He scoffed.

It wasn’t until this moment, when Mitch started to talk to his own reflection, that he realized he was still wearing his Hinobi uniform. His surprised face stared back at him for a second. And then he laughed.

“Those morons forgot to take their clothes back. Couldn’t even fire me right. Can’t believe it.” Though… something was missing. “Hmm, but it looks like they nabbed my, uh-” He snapped his fingers, trying to stir up the name of- “My smart watch! They took my… smart watch.” He rolled his eyes. “Care more about their tech... Well, no sense in wearing the mark of those traitors anymore.”

As he stepped away from the mirror, and began changing into more casual wear (and of course combing his hair back to perfection), he continued his monologue. “Who needs them, anyway. Don’t they realize who I am? I’m Mitch Williams! The best gamer in this city. I’ve got loads of other jobs I could do.

“I could go back to making online content again. The great return of For the Win! Who wouldn’t want to see that? And I could do more with it. Maybe branch into other gaming consoles to really stick it to them, like DOBA’s stuff.

“Ooo. I got an even better idea. DOBA needs tech support, too, right? I’d bet they’d just love to take in one of the best Techs Hinobi ever had! I’ll trade in my blue and white Hinobi stripes for the DOBA rainbow, baby! No one can stop me!”

“Mrao,” Mrs. Boosh mewled. Apparently she had snuck into the room and onto his bed without him noticing.

Mitch, now fully changed, sat on the bed and scratched her cheeks. Mrs. Boosh purred, and lashed her tail side to side. “You’ve got a point,” Mitch admitted. “It’s, what, almost midnight? I can’t do a whole lot right this minute.”

This was normally the time most sane people would be fast asleep. Too bad for Mitch, he had just gotten a full night’s worth and was wide awake.

The rain continued to thrum against the window as Mitch tried to figure out what to do next. And as he was turning over things in his mind, he couldn’t help but feel like something was off.

A part of him, the seemingly dominant part, wanted him to move on already, and not think about Hinobi anymore. But there was the other part of him that was nagging at him, a part that insisted he was missing something important.

Unbidden, the feelings of the events that led to his termination came back to him. The woman, who he had thought was just a random office worker at the time, was tinkering around on the Hinobi Network. He found out about it after she had unwittingly caused a Hinobi Five to malfunction, and he traced it back to her.

Naturally, he confronted her about it. Then she pulled out her badge, which proved that she was Irene, Inspector 31 of Hinobi Technologies. Mitch thought the situation made even less sense after that. Why would one of Hinobi’s own deliberately be trying to sabotage the Network?

He got mad, and snapped at her. The ensuing outage that her plans would lead to would impact the entire city. Corrupted game files would-

Would- would-

Games would become… unplayable. Gamers would be put in- ...a place where they couldn’t play games? They’d be sad? Maybe go outside and touch grass instead of enjoying Hinobi products?

The answer sounded plausible, but it also didn’t feel right. Why would he freak out over a Network outage? Freak out to the point where it cost him his job?

The only real danger from that was possible boredom and lost revenue. That was bad for business, and bad for Hinobi’s reputation, which he had cared about quite a lot because he was such a loyal employee.

That dizzy feeling from earlier was starting creep up on him again. He pushed his hands down on the mattress to steady himself.

And that’s when he felt it.

There was something hard and blocky underneath his comforter. He raised an eyebrow in suspicion, but his curiosity got the better of him.

He pulled back his covers, and revealed a rather unassuming black journal. Carefully, he picked it up and examined it.

The journal was very worn and well used. Poking out from the top and side were several brightly colored bits of paper, presumably marking various pages. Written on the bottom right corner of the journal’s cover, in faded white marker, were the letters “FTW”.

Mitch was… puzzled. He did not remember owning this journal, and half of him expected that this was put here as a practical joke on him. But at the same time, he was feeling a wave of deja-vu. The various crevices of the spine felt familiar to him in a way that he had a hard time putting into words.

Those letters. F. T. W. For. The. Win. They’ve been his way of tagging things as his ever since he was a kid.

He looked around the room. No one else was around. It was just him, Mrs. Boosh, and the relentless rain. He glanced at his desk. His computer was off, and the old webcam above it currently had no power.

He turned back to the journal in his hands. After a moment of hesitation, he opened it to the first page.

Hey! MitchFTW here! Writing a message from the past to my future self.

If you’re reading this, then you probably don’t remember this journal, or writing this message, but I promise there’s a good reason for that.

A few days ago something incredible happened. I won the Nobi Smash Tournament and got a job at Hinobi as a Glitch Tech!

But what I thought was a tech support job with the best gaming company ever, turned out to be way more than I imagined.

Hinobi has a big secret. It’s so big, that only Hinobi’s employees (like me!) can know about it. And you know what else? They have the power to erase memories. They call it resetting.

I don’t want to EVER forget all the cool things I’ve learned here, but if I ever get fired, they’re going to reset me, like they reset everyone else. Their secret is that important to them.

I’ve come up with a counter strategy. I’ll write it all down in this journal, and I won’t tell anyone about it. If something ever happens, my future self will find it.

If you really are my future self, and you’ve read this far, then my plan must have worked. Or you’re a creep snooping through my stuff, which means, dude, not cool, this is my private journal, not yours. I’ll be resetting you soon and finding a better hiding place so this doesn’t happen again.

But if you’re not a creep...

This must be confusing for you, future self, but I promise it’ll be worth it. If you keep going, you’ll soon remember what really happens when a video game starts to glitch.

This felt surreal. Mitch stared at the first page, and read through it again.

Most of it didn’t make a lot of sense. Hinobi Technologies was a company with a lot of power, sure, and they were on the cutting edge of technology… but erasing memories? That sounded like something out of a sci-fi movie, not something out of real life.

And yet… The handwriting was unmistakably his. His past self had anticipated that he would be confused, and wrote in reassurances with such confidence. ...And that last sentence, at the end, for reasons he couldn’t explain, struck at his core.

He flipped through the rest of the pages to get a better idea of what was in the journal. Most of it was handwritten notes, though he did spot a few hand-drawn diagrams, as well as a handful of photographs taped in.

Whatever was in this journal, there was a lot of it.

He couldn’t be sure of how seriously he should take what was written here. There was a part of him nagging at him to put it aside and stop wasting his time. His interest was piqued, though, and his instinct was telling him this was the opposite of a time waster.

If nothing else, it’s not like he had anything better to do at the moment. So he pushed the nagging thoughts back, and began reading his mysterious notes more thoroughly.

Chapter Text

The journal was loaded. Whether it was loaded with forbidden knowledge, or notes for an ARG was not exactly clear. It was, however, proving to be engaging.

If the information was to be believed, then Hinobi’s big secret was that sometimes their video games enter the real world. These video game beings are called glitches, or, if you wanted to be technical, Plixel constructs gone rogue.

To combat this problem, Hinobi picks the best gamers around to become Glitch Techs. The job of a Glitch Tech is to capture these glitches, then reset any witnesses so they don’t remember it happened, and fix any property damage. Bonus points if they manage to fix the console that glitched in the first place.

Mitch remembered repairing many consoles. He did not remember fighting literal video game monsters in the real world. But he had to admit, the idea sounded pretty cool. Getting paid to protect the populace with video game skills would be the perfect job for him.

The journal went on to detail the specifics of how the job was done. The main tool for the Glitch Tech was the gauntlet: a high tech glove with a touch screen and the power to summon almost anything from the palm. When not in use it was disguised as a smart watch.

He was reminded of the familiar weight of his own smart watch. Its absence felt sharper than before.

The journal then went on to detail the people he had worked with. It was strange. His younger self seemed to be convinced that he wouldn’t remember any of them, but he did.

There were the Techs that were working there when he first joined, whom he hadn’t thought about in ages. Benji, the Tech who was his mentor in his first few missions; Liz, the cool big sis of the crew; Rex…

Rex was a bad memory that Mitch did not want to dwell on.

He stared at the photo of his original crew. His younger self stood in front of the group, his hair nowhere near as stylized as his modern counterpart, but still grinning widely at the camera with a sparkle in his eye.

It was… nostalgic. But also kind of haunting. All of those people no longer worked at that store, for one reason or another.

And now, neither did he.

He pushed back the feeling of loss (or at least tried to) and forced his hand to turn the page so he could move on.

After the first big section of information, the entries became a lot more sporadic. It seemed he had kept writing in it whenever something important happened, like when he completed a noteworthy mission, or when he came up with a new strategy, all the way up until very recently.

This part was still valid, and definitely intriguing, but he also couldn’t completely shake this weird feeling that was starting to build up.

It was like the journal was detailing a life that was like his, but also wasn’t, like it was some alternate reality version of his life. His memories told him he spent his time fixing broken hardware. The journal told him he spent most of his time fighting the monsters that came from broken hardware.

An idea burbled forth from some unknown part of his mind to quell the dissonance. He didn’t like it, but he couldn’t ignore it either. What if, perhaps, he made it up? What if he wrote down embellished versions of his daily life to make himself feel cool?

But as soon as he started to seriously consider it, the idea fell apart. That was insane. He’s got some good ideas, sure, but he sure as heck couldn’t come up with this much detail on his own. And if he did make it up, why would he then completely forget the journal’s very existence afterward?

Well, it would be plausible if he had finally snapped and gone mad.

No. He was pretty sure he wasn’t that far gone. (...Yet.)

He was starting to get that dizzy feeling again, though.

He laid back down on the bed and stared at the ceiling, feeling very muddled. The journal seemed simultaneously both real and unreal to him. No matter how hard he tried he couldn’t figure out how to resolve this.

He wished he could just ask someone about it. Too bad that would be incredibly problematic. If he showed up at the store and asked his former coworkers, well… If this wasn’t real, they’d look at him like he’d lost his mind. If it was real, they’d probably freak out because he’s not supposed to know about this stuff anymore. Then he’d probably get mind wiped again, or, worse, they’d do something real bad because clearly mind wiping him the first time didn’t work.

If only he knew someone who was supposedly in on the secret but didn’t actively work for Hinobi.

Wait.

He did know someone like that.

He sat back up and flipped through the journal. There. Near the end was a rather recent entry.

Today I met someone interesting, and potentially useful.

Those two blueberries brought in a kid from the street, and somehow managed to convince Phil to let her join as a proper Glitch Techs recruit.

I didn’t think much of her at first. But after I snagged the noob team’s dino glitch, she somehow managed to get enough XP to top ME on the leaderboard!

Unbelievable! And that new twerp even had the audacity to tell me TO MY FACE that it was a clean win. (It most certainly was not.)

I went back to the locker room, and the next thing I know, the whole place goes into lock down. The new guy apparently created a Plixel breach in the store’s containment core and nearly caused a glitchpocalypse!

Mitch paused at that word. A glitchpocalypse? It wasn’t hard to figure out that a word like that meant bad news, but he was struggling to remember how one comes about.

It felt… important… to remember…

But he couldn’t. At least, not right this moment. Resolved to putting a pin in that for now, he kept reading.

She broke into the locker room and asked me to back her up.

I know what you’re probably thinking. Me? Mitch Williams, #1 gamer, back up a noob?! That’s what I was thinking too.

But this kid insisted that she was no noob with the confidence of a pro. Then she offered to show me how she got her team to the top in a matter of hours. That was an offer I couldn’t refuse.

She stuck a thumb drive into my gauntlet, and called it Ridley Flair. It modified my blast emitter, increasing the output to a level I didn’t think was possible without overclocking.

We charged in and took care of the problem. Of course, trying to blow up HQ has consequences. Ridley was let go. I volunteered to reset her memory and took her outside.

The thing is, I didn’t actually reset her. The kid, this Ridleycraft, has impressive tricks. She’s not ready to be a Tech yet, but with her potential, it would be a waste to take her out of the game completely.

Definitely going to keep an eye on her.

Bonus: Her power ups might come in handy for me later.

The entry confirmed his suspicions, though once again his actual memory of what happened didn’t line up. He sort of vaguely remembered there being an electrical problem in the store, and teaming up with her to fix it. He also remembered being impressed with her hacking abilities. But the more he tried to clear up the memories, the fuzzier they became.

He turned his attention back to the journal. He flipped forward a bit until he spotted another entry that mentioned Ridley.

Finally decided to pay Ridley a visit.

I’ve already known where the kid lived for awhile. Not exactly hard to look up her gamer tag in the database. But I didn’t wanna spook her by showing up at her house right off the bat.

So instead I’ve been keeping an eye out for her during patrols, seeing if I can catch her out in public and reach out with a bit more tact.

Today I finally managed to find her purple chomp kitty by some vending machines in an empty alley way. The kitty’s texturing was disabled, making it invisible to the stooges, but not invisible to my visor.

It wasn’t there for long. It zapped the machine, ate the cans that came out, then ‘ported away.

Definitely a neat trick. In and out so fast that most wouldn’t have caught it, especially with that texture mod. Not good enough to get by me, of course, not when catching these things is literally my job.

I got a lock on the glitch signature, managed to locate her, and ‘ported over.

A sudden wave of dizziness walloped him. The words on the page blurred as the journal slipped through his fingers. He clutched at his head, trying to will the world to stop spinning.

Then something clicked. His pupils flickered in bright colors for the briefest of moments. The memory rushed forth.

The portal opened in a thicket of trees bordering a road. It closed as soon as he stepped out of it.

Ridley had yet to notice him, too preoccupied in receiving her loot from the kitty.

She had her hood up, and was wearing a pair of strange looking goggles instead of glasses, but it was definitely her.

He started to close the distance a few steps, but stopped when he stepped on a twig.

She snapped her head in his direction and finally noticed him. Her eyebrows rose in shock. Horn tilted his head in curiosity, letting out a soft ‘mrow’ of confusion.

Mitch smirked. “Hello stranger.”

“M- Mitch?! What are you doing here?”

“Thought I’d pay the little prodigy a visit.”

“A visit, huh?”

“You didn’t think I’d go to all the trouble of letting you off the hook without wanting to at least check in with you now and then, did you?”

Ridley sighed, and took a moment to process. “What do you want?” she finally replied.

“I was thinking we could become contacts.”

“Contacts? Like, exchange phone numbers and friend codes?”

“That’s a good place to start.”

“You could’ve just asked me that before, you know.” Ridley deadpanned.

“You mean in a back alley behind my boss’s office when I’m supposed to be wiping your memory?”

“...Ok, you have a point there. But still, you said that’s just the start.”

“Right. I have a proposition for you. And I think you’ll like it. It’ll be mutually beneficial.”

“A proposition? Or a demand?”

“Well, I could finish the job I was supposed to do...”

Ridley dropped the cans, and put her hands in her hoodie pockets. She took a step back. “You should be careful, ol’ sport. Wouldn’t want to do something you’ll regret,” she warned.

He remained casual, and put his hands up in the air as a gesture of non-violence. “I don’t want it to come to that. Look, just hear me out.”

The flashback suddenly shifted to an entirely different scene.

He was on a concrete floor, surrounded by mobs of glowing green blocky minions from the roguelite game Bloxrox. But he wouldn’t be surrounded for long.

In one hand he held a sort of rod, with his thumb resting on a dial. He pushed the dial in like a button, and from the tip of the rod grew a long energy whip.

With a flick of his wrist he made it crack and slash at the nearest minion, which broke into two pieces and disintegrated.

He used it to lasso onto another minion, then swung the captured minion around in a large circle, knocking all the other minions down and causing them to crumble.

He despawned the whip, releasing the now dazed minion. He spun the dial a few ticks and with another press what looked like the nozzle of a ray gun spawned from the tip. He then used it to shoot lasers at the minion, making it evaporate.

Another wave of minions was approaching. He despawned the nozzle and this time spawned a…

A fork?

That certainly wasn’t what he was going for, but he shrugged and decided to roll with it. It wasn’t like these guys were hard to take out anyway.

He rushed forward and stabbed one of the minions with it. As it faded to dust he spun around and slashed at a group of them.

More of them were closing in. He tried to toggle to another mode, but when he pressed down the dial, instead of despawning, the fork fizzed in multiple colors in classic glitchy fashion.

He stood there, surprised. He pressed the dial down, again, and again. The fork refused to budge.

He sighed, before opting to switch back to his trusty gauntlet and take them out the tried and true way. He made quick work of them with his emitter.

Ridley, who had been watching from afar, and taking notes on her tablet, paused the simulation.

“Your multi-tool has potential,” Mitch said, “But it’s also got some bugs to work out.”

“Sorry about that,” Ridley said, “I’m trying to figure out what happened there.” She paused as she finished her notes. “The results seem promising, though.”

“I could find a use for something like this, once it’s a bit more ready. There isn’t anything quite like it in the XP shop.”

“Oh no,” Ridley said. “You’ve got enough toys already. Don’t you forget that you’re only borrowing it for a trial run.”

“I know, I know.”

Mitch walked over and placed the multi-tool on a desk that housed a keyboard and a few monitors. He glanced at the monitors idly, and a sprite of a purple dragon on one of the windows caught his eye.

Ridley looked over some code on her tablet, presumably for said multi-tool he was testing. “A hah! I think I get it now. You were swapping through the tools so fast that the internal memory buffer overloaded.” She frowned. “I must have a memory leak in there.”

Mitch hummed in agreement, like he understood more than just the gist of what the little hacker was saying (he didn’t).

“You know, I was a little hesitant about this at first, but you had a good point. Having them be tested by someone experienced in combat gives off way more data. I wouldn’t have been able to push it like that if I was the only one using it.”

Mitch smirked. “Told ya this would be a mutually beneficial arrangement.” Mitch summoned his gauntlet and did a quick check of the mission board. Nope, still empty. Still a slow day. “Got anything else you need testing? Like, say, maybe a dragon?”

“No, I don’t have anything- Wait. What about a dragon?”

“I’m talking about the purple one you seem to be working on.” He gestured to the sprite.

“You mean Horn 3.0! He’s not ready yet. Still reworking his AI, and let me tell you, reworking AI is not easy.”

“You mean to tell me you’re building a new Horn from scratch?”

“Not from scratch. I’m modifying existing game code. Big difference.”

“Because I thought you were working on a power up that transforms Horn into a dragon.”

Ridley froze in her tablet tapping, and her eyes widened.

Mitch’s smirk grew. “You haven’t thought of that, have you?”

“I… Well...”

“Sounds like that would be much easier than building a new one. Talk about a bonus tip from good ol’ Mitch.”

The flashback shifted again to another scene.

He and Ridley were in a store aisle, surrounded by shelves filled with bags of snack food.

Down the aisle were two other people, a guy and a girl. The guy was wearing a visor, though this visor was made of clear plastic rather than being a pure Plixel construct like a Tech’s visor was. He was holding a motion controller and using it to gesture around the store. With the animated way he was talking, it was clear he was trying to show off.

“Check it. With this baby, I can live life the cool way! It can show me where the best deals are, and I can score points by finding the daily scavenger hunt items.” He suddenly pointed to a bag of limited edition pizza-flavored tortilla chips with an image of a monster on it, which seemed to be highlighted through his visor. “And it just recommended something based on my profile! It knows I love pizza!”

“Would you look at that?” Mitch muttered. “Guy’s a real ARG nut.”

“He comes to the BRB Mart fairly regularly to grind for points,” Ridley said. “He’ll be useful for a demo of that thing you’ve asked for.”

“I can’t wait to see it,” Mitch said.

Ridley glanced around to make sure no normies were watching, then pulled out her tablet and spawned Horn. “Time to make a delivery,” Ridley told him. She pulled out a red flash drive and handed it to her pet, who took it in his mouth but didn’t swallow it.

Horn glitched and disappeared from view. Further down the aisle, where the visor guy was chatting, a floating red flash drive with no cat attached reappeared. Mitch didn’t need his own visor to guess that it was Horn who had now gone invisible.

Unbeknownst to the two, the flash drive was placed into a slot on the guy’s visor.

The guy’s demeanor suddenly changed to one of amazement. He looked around the store in awe, like he was in another world. “Woah! I think I just stumbled into a secret bonus level!” he exclaimed excitedly.

“What’s he seeing?” asked Mitch.

“Right now I have it set to the space arena from Nobi Beats.”

“Oooo. Good choice. That one’s a classic.”

“Thanks. Of course I have good taste. But anyway, I can change it with my Ridley Gear.” She tapped her tablet.

“Wow!” the guy cried out. “Now I’m in Cloud City from the Zoom Kazoom series!” The girl he’d been talking to looked a little weirded out, and was starting to back away.

“Once I put on the finishing touches, you should be able to do the same from your gauntlet. But it doesn’t just transport them to another world.”

“Oh man!” the guy shouted. “This level has enemies! Look! Look! It’s the monster mascot from the pizza chips!” He aimed his motion controller at the pizza chip bag and pressed a button. The tip of the controller let out a blast of energy that shot forward at the bag, causing it to explode into a cloud of cheesy dust.

Mitch’s eyes widened. Ridley gave a look of concern. “That wasn’t supposed to happen,” Ridley said.

“You’re telling me!”

“I was gonna say that it let them see glitches and fight them, but-”

“That wasn’t a glitch, Ridley. It was a bag of chips.”

“You don’t say.”

The guy looked around for more enemies. He poked his head out of the aisle and spotted a whole stack of shelves full of the limited edition snacks at the end of another aisle. “This must be my lucky day! I’m gonna score so many points.” He rushed off to blast more “monsters”.

“Turn it off,” hissed Mitch.

“What do you think I’ve been doing?!” Ridley replied bitterly, frantically tapping on her tablet. “It’s not responding!”

Explosions could be heard as the guy went to virtual town on the monsters. The cheese dust could be seen floating above the shelves.

“Ugh! Alright, fine. I’ll handle this myself.” Mitch activated his gear, and rushed off into the debris cloud.

In a few moments, the place had become an absolute disaster. Not only were the bags now reduced to scraps, but their “shrapnel” had hit other nearby objects as well. A 2-liter of Buzzcore Cola lay on the ground, torn open and leaking into a puddle. An entire display of movies had completely fallen over, scattering various titles about. One of the florescent lights was now dangling from the ceiling, flickering as the wires struggled to maintain a connection.

The guy turned to look at Mitch. “Oh! Are you another player?”

“Sorry, but game time’s over.” Mitch flashed a timed freeze on the guy, forcing him to stand still. He then walked over and took the visor off.

“What is going on around here?!” Mitch turned around to meet the gaze of an angry store manager. “Just look at this mess! You two are going to clean this up or so help me I’ll-”

The manager’s tirade was interrupted as Mitch raised his gauntlet with his palm open and facing toward the manager. “Don’t worry about it. We’ll clean up so well, it’ll be like it never happened.”

There was a flash of light-

The flashback ended, as the bright flash from the memory blurred into the light from his bedroom.

The journal bounced on the carpet, and Mitch came back to reality almost as soon as he left it.

“What the-?”

Mitch sat on his bed and stared dumbly at his window for a moment. His brain felt like a low end computer trying to run the latest game on the highest graphics settings.

The memories felt fragmented and jumbled. Then they felt less like memories and more like a weird dream he just had.

Yet the dream was so… vivid? It didn’t make a lot of sense, but at the same time it made so much sense. It was more in line with the journal (and his own feelings) than anything else in his head.

The familiar dizzy feeling started to creep up again. He grew annoyed.

There was a veil between him and the truth, a veil that seemed to distort the truth every time he tried to look through it. He wanted so badly to tear it down to shreds, but he couldn’t. No matter how hard he tried he just could not.

“I am sick of this!”

He stood up from the bed, and had to take a moment to steady himself. “I need a break,” he continued, exasperated, “Because I don’t know how much more of this I can take.”

He needed to get out of his head for a bit, and a good way to to do that was to dive into some gaming.

He marched out of his room, past Mrs. Boosh who paused mid tussle with a toy mouse to look at him, and to his TV.

He skimmed his shelf of games. It didn’t really matter to him right now what he played, he just needed to play something. He picked one at random. Chomp Kitty’s Epic Yarn Ball the cover read.

This title was a well received entry in the Chomp Kitty franchise. He hadn’t actually played it yet, but its popularity enticed him enough for him to buy it.

Now was as good as a time as any to start it. He turned on his Hinobi Five, inserted the cartridge, and launched the game from the start menu.

The intro cutscene was a cutesy cartoon of Chomp Kitty knocking over a basket of yarn balls. One of the yarn balls glowed, which naturally enticed him to play with it. He batted it around, which caused it to unravel. Before he knew it, the glowing yarn started to stretch and grow, quickly covering the surrounding area. Chomp Kitty panicked, and attempted to escape. A tendril of yarn grabbed onto his tail, though, and he was yanked into yarn-y oblivion.

Level 1 loaded in. A Chomp Kitty made out of green and purple yarn landed onto the grass-like patchwork ground. And just like that, the game began.

Mitch hadn’t been expecting anything too deep, but the way it transitioned to this new world like nothing had happened was a tad unnerving.

Whatever. He wasn’t here to question the story telling, he was here to press buttons and blast through the levels to clear out his head.

The game wasn’t terribly difficult, and, as usual, he picked up on the control scheme lightning fast.

As he got into a rhythm of platform hopping and wool rat bashing, he drifted into autopilot, and his mind started to wander.

Before him was presented a big mystery. Just what was the journal, anyway? Was it really the key he needed to unravel Hinobi’s secrets?

The game’s camera switched to top down mode, revealing a scrambled set of jigsaw pieces. It wasn’t a hard puzzle, and before long he had Chomp Kitty spitting out the last piece into place, causing the nearby bridge to lower for crossing.

Sometimes he wished the real world was like a game. Things would be so much simpler if all he had to do to solve his problems was perform the correct moves at just the right time.

Well… If the journal was right, the world technically was one big game: One big sandbox RPG with glitches to fight.

But he didn’t know whether the journal was right or not. Every time he tried to think on it-

He hissed. He screwed up the timing on one of his jumps and Chomp Kitty was now falling into a pit.

Chomp Kitty disappeared off screen, and then respawned at the last checkpoint.

Mitch tried to pushed those thoughts to the side and moved Chomp Kitty onward.

Chomp Kitty continued to slash, bash, and dash his way through the level.

Then he came across another puzzle area. The trick this time was that some of the platforms where made up of purple ghost yarn. In order to step on them Chomp needed to use a ghost power up that turned him into ghost yarn temporarily.

As Chomp ran around in his purple glory, something about it tickled in the back of Mitch’s mind. It reminded him of-

A sudden image of Horn standing by his master, Ridley, flashed through his mind.

What was it about that cat, anyway? Wasn’t Horn a robot Ridley built? No, that didn’t sound quite right.

Actually, there was something about his memories surrounding the two that felt off to him.

He had spent so much time reading the journal, and not once did he get any kind of flashbacks, or sudden recollections.

Not until he thought to look up her specifically.

Why was that? What was so special about Ridley?

Then he remembered why he had thought to look her up. She was a full blown rogue. She knew about the (supposed) secret but wasn’t operating under any jurisdiction other than her own.

His relationship with her had definitely been off the books, and would have been frowned upon if corporate ever got wind of it.

But since when did he care about playing by the rules? The mutually beneficial agreement had definitely come in handy on a few occasions, and would probably continue to do so.

The purple ghosty Chomp Kitty made it to the end of the level. He rose on his hind legs and pawed at the air in a short victory dance before running off screen to the next area.

Mitch idly watched the level clear screen count up his points as ideas started to form in his head.

Maybe the journal wasn’t the key he needed. Maybe it was that little hacker weirdo, instead.

He could go to her and see if she can confirm if the secret was true or not, if the journal was right or if it was a reflection of his madness, if his strange dreams about their time together were just that or something more.

There was also Irene, the Inspector. What was she up to? Surely it couldn’t just be a power outage. Or perhaps that’s all it was. Either way, she had to be stopped. If he could figure out what her angle was, he could put an end to it, and whatever bad thing he was fearing.

And if he managed that, he might just get his job back.

He looked at the time, and only just now realized that the sunrise was starting to peak in through his kitchen window. He’d been playing for a lot longer than he’d thought.

He checked back on his stats in the hub world. He was at 67% completion. He had really chewed through most of the game.

He didn’t feel like playing anymore, though. He saved, closed the game, shut off the console, and left to go change into street clothes. He had a big day to get ready for.

Chapter Text

Contrary to popular belief, Mitch did, in fact, own a car.

He didn’t use it terribly often. He lived close enough to the Hinobi store that he could walk to it, and from there he normally drove his van everywhere else.

Sometimes, though, Mitch would have business to attend to outside of work hours, be it doing favors for his landlord or traveling to Hinobi stores in other towns when the exclusive loot in Bailley was sold out. It was handy to have a car, especially now that driving his van was no longer an option.

It was a small, two-seat red convertible that was kept in decent condition. He had won it a long time ago at the Nobilympics, a semi-National gaming competition hosted by Hinobi. At the time he was too young to have a driver’s license, let alone own a car, so it had been kept by his family until he was old enough to handle it himself.

Definitely the biggest thing he had ever managed to win, and also the most useful.

He stood before it in his apartment complex’s parking garage. Before entering, he double checked that he had his journal securely in his inner jacket pocket. It was there. He hadn’t forgotten it. He wasn’t entirely sure if bringing it with him was a good idea. Yet he hadn’t finished reading it (even if he had skimmed through most of it), and there might be information in there that could come in handy later.

Doubt about this crazy plan of his was continuing to nag at him, but he shook it off. He got in the car and drove away.

It was still raining outside, though it had lessened from a downpour to a light drizzle. His windshield wipers swished against the glass as he drove through the suburban neighborhood in the morning light.

He had the address written down in his journal, and once he found it, he was confident that was all he needed. Mitch had spent a lot of time learning his way around Bailley and its neighboring suburban towns from all the patrolling he had done. He took pride in the fact that he didn’t need to rely on GPS maps the same way other Techs did.

Of course, that meant that right now he had to squint through the drizzle to hunt for street signs and house numbers. Even so, he finally managed to spot the familiar yellow house down the road.

He pulled over, parked on the side of the road a few houses away from his destination, and turned the engine off.

He paused for a moment. The rain lightly tapped against his car as doubt once again crept up.

What was he gonna do, exactly? Knock on the door, and ask her if glitches were real? What if they weren’t? She’d think he was-

No. They had to be real. Those visions had to come from somewhere.

Yeah, like maybe too many hours of video games. He’d go and ask her and then she’d look at him like he had lost his mind.

The dizziness was coming back, and now that he was out in public, having it overwhelm him again would be bad.

He took a deep breath to steady his nerves. He would have to just get out there and do it. It wasn’t like him to be having second thoughts like this, but even so, he had come too far to back out now.

Besides, what else was he gonna do? Give up on this and go back home?

Absolutely not. He was Mitch Williams, for crying out loud! He wasn’t one to quit easily. If anyone could figure this out, it was gonna be him.

With newfound resolve, he got out of the car, and made it to the front door.

He pressed the door bell, and waited with baited breath as the chime rang.

After a moment or two, the door burst open, and out launched the bespectacled little weirdo, wielding a giant laser gun the size of a watermelon. “Who dares encroach upon my lair?!” she cried out dramatically. Then, recognition struck her, and her demeanor shifted to pleasant surprise. “Mitch!”

Once again, something clicked. Mitch was suddenly feeling very confident in his decision, as their normal greeting routine came back to him. He gave her a smirk. “Ridleycraft.”

Their hands reached out for a handshake, but just when they were about to touch, both of them immediately jerked their hands back and instead used them to slick their own respective hair back.

“So,” Ridley began, “what brings you to my humble abode?”

“I’ve got caught up in quite a Mitchuation. It’s a long story. Love to tell you more about it when I’m not standing in the rain.”

“Oh, right. Come on in, then. My folks are out for the day, so we’ve got the place to ourselves.”

She led him inside and up to her room.

“Engage workshop mode,” Ridley said, and as the room once again reformatted itself into revealing Ridley’s various tech and gadgets, Ridley casually pulled out her tablet and held it out. A spark of energy leaped from the screen and formed into a purple Chomp Kitty with blue stripes and a weird metal thing on its tail.

It was Horn, the kitty from his weird vision/dream thing he had earlier.

Horn jumped up on to the bed and let out an electronic mrow. Mitch reached out and put a hand on top of Horn’s head, feeling the soft and tingly fur on top of it.

“I see you’re robot’s still in good working order.”

Ridley, who had taken a seat at her desk chair and spun it around to face him, gave him a weird look. “My… what? You mean Horn?” She thought for a minute. “...I guess you could call him that. Mesobots are technically robots when you think about it.”

Now Mitch started to feel a little weird. “Isn’t that what you call him, though? I know you built him yourself.”

This is when Ridley started to suspect that something was off. She looked Mitch up and down, trying to figure out what was up with him. And that’s when she noticed what was missing.

“Where’s your gauntlet?”

“My… gauntlet?” It took Mitch a second to process. “Oh! You mean my smart watch. That’s part of the problem. I sort of…” He winced. He didn’t want to say this next part, but he kind of had to. “Lost it,” he finished.

“You lost it? You lost it?!” Ridley was in shock. “But didn’t you say losing it could get you fired?”

“Flip those two around, and you got a good gist of my problem.”

“So what you’re saying is… You got fired, and they took your gauntlet, er, smart watch, away?”

“That sums it up.”

The two went quiet. Mitch tried to figure out what he was going to say next, while Ridley processed the implications of what that meant.

“There’s more to it, though. I think I accidentally stumbled across one of Hinobi’s big secrets, and they tried to get rid of me as part of a cover up.”

Ridley didn’t think her eyebrows could go any higher. “Ok. I need to know the sitch, Mitch. You need to tell me everything.”

Mitch leaned back against the wall and sighed. “Alright. Here’s what happened. Yesterday was a busy day for everyone. There was a high rate of, uh, malfunctioning hardware. Phil had us all patrolling the city.

“So there I was, driving down the road, when the van picks up a… a damaged console. Naturally, I go to check it out. Turns out some kid’s Hinobi Five had an overheated HCU. I fixed it, of course, but the way it overheated didn’t make sense to me. The console was brand new, and the vents had plenty of room to do their job.

“So I decided to look into the system logs, and found something crazy. Someone had remotely logged into it and overclocked it while it was running a game.”

“Hold up,” Ridley interrupted, “That’s insane. Hinobi Fives are hard to hack into remotely like that.”

“You’ve done it,” Mitch pointed out.

“Well, yeah, obvi. I’m one of the best hackers around. But the Hinobi Five has some serious protections against changing the hardware settings from the software side. Granted, it’s probably not impossible… but I’ve always found it easier to physically mod the hardware. I’ve also never had a reason to try and force it to overclock to the point of overheating. That would just break the console and cause it to glitch.”

“Cause it to… glitch,” Mitch mumbled thoughtfully. Then he went back on track. “Right, well. As you can see, it’s a problem. The person responsible wasn’t very clean with it, and the logs had the IP address of the culprit.

“I looked up where it came from. Turns out she was operating from an office building a few blocks away. I drove up, charged in, and confronted her. At the time I thought it was just some office worker mucking about with things they didn’t understand. I thought if I explained to her the consequences of her actions, she’d see reason.”

His face darkened.

“...Then she flashed a badge on me. Turns out she was Irene, Inspector 31 of Hinobi Technologies.” Bitterness laced his voice. “She’s so smug and arrogant. She’s the kind of person who thinks they can get away with anything.”

“Sounds like someone else I know,” Ridley said.

Mitch glared at Ridley, but continued. “As it turned out, I had stumbled across a test run. I got the idea that she was planning to do this on a much wider scale, and sometime soon, too. I freaked, and called her crazy. Then she told me that she didn’t think I was fit to work at Hinobi anymore.”

The mood grew a little more somber after that.

“So she fired you?” Ridley asked. “Right there and then? And now nothing is stopping her from enacting this plan to purposefully create glitches all over the city?”

“Glitches all over the city,” Mitch repeated. “That’s gotta be what she’s after. That’s why her plan is so bad,” he said to himself.

“Yeah,” Ridley said. She thought for a moment. “There’s something else you’re missing.”

“Oh?” Mitch asked, intrigued.

“Your mind’s been reset.”

“You mean to say my memories have been tampered with.” Mitch felt a little relieved. “I’ve been suspecting that for the last few hours, but for you to confirm it-”

“There’s more to it, though. I thought getting mind wiped meant you would just forget everything, but you clearly didn’t. You remember me, and this inspector, and what happened… You even remembered Horn! But what you didn’t remember, is that Horn is a glitch. Instead, you called him a robot. You weren’t reset the same way other normies are when they come across a glitch. It’s more like your memories were rewritten, not erased.”

“That’s… Hmm.” Mitch put a hand to his chin in thought. “So glitches… are real. They really do come out of broken gaming hardware.”

“Wait, you remember that part too?”

“Uh, well. Sort of.”

“Sort of…?” Ridley raised an eyebrow at him, a little suspicious. She wasn’t entirely wrong to suspect something, as Mitch really didn’t remember fighting glitches. But he did remember reading about it, and now that he had some confirmation, he could fill in the gaps.

“I know that glitches are Plixel constructs gone rogue,” Mitch said, regaining his confidence, “and that it’s the job of a Tech to capture them.”

Ridley blinked. “Are you sure you- No. I know you’ve been reset. It’s not like you to be off your game like this.”

“I may have been a little jumbled, but there’s just some things I’ll never forget.” Mitch smirked. “They can take the player out of the game, but they’ll never take the game out of the player.”

At this point Ridley had figured out that Mitch was using some trick up his sleeve. There was just no way he should be able to remember what glitches were if he really had been wiped. He probably wasn’t going to tell her what the trick was (and at the moment he certainly wasn’t planning to), but that wouldn’t stop her from trying to puzzle out what he was up to.

An idea came to her, and it was just too delicious to pass up.

“Ok, hot shot,” she began, idling tapping on her tablet, “If you think you remember your stuff, then surely you’ll be able to tell me why it’s so important to capture glitches.”

Mitch’s younger self had been pretty thorough about this in the early entries of the journal, so this question wasn’t hard for Mitch’s present self to answer. “To protect other gamers, of course. And to keep down the damage glitches cause.”

“What happens if a glitch doesn’t get caught right away?”

“It could go viral, and be harder to catch.”

“What could happen if a glitch goes viral for too long?”

Mitch wasn’t sure where Ridley was going with this, but he continued to play along. “Well, it gets bigger, more dangerous… more powerful, even.”

There was something he was missing here, and both of them knew it.

Now it was Ridley’s turn to be smug. “You were the one who told me this. An unchecked viral glitch can eventually lead to something you liked to call a glitchpocalypse.”

There was that word again. Just as he was starting to comb through his brain for what that word meant, the door bell rang.

“Would you look at that?” Ridley said. “Looks like we’ve got a visitor. Stay right here. I’ll go deal with ‘em.” She went to leave the room, but just as she was at the threshold, she paused and turned back around. “Don’t touch any of my stuff,” she warned, “I’ll know if you do.” Then she left.

Ridley ran down the stairs, but stopped at the last step. Pulling out her tablet again, she tapped on an icon of what looked to be a giant eyeball with bat wings sticking out of the sides. It was a sprite of an eyebat, a fodder enemy from Plants vs. Everything.

A small figurine of an eyebat that was sitting on her desk up in her room suddenly shifted a little, with its singular eye looking around the room, providing a camera feed back to Ridley’s tablet.

There was no one at the door. Ridley had long ago set it up so that she could make the door bell ring with her own tablet. Her actual goal was to get a glimpse as to how Mitch’s memory was working, and she had a feeling that she wouldn’t get to see that unless he was alone.

Was Mitch actually remembering things? Miko had once told her that Five had been able to recall the tournament after he had been reset, so it wasn’t entirely out of the question. Seeing that in action might enable her to enact her own backup plan in case she ever runs into memory problems herself.

Now that she had set him up for that challenge, surely that would motivate him to remember what she had been referring to. Very few things motivated the alpha gamer more than wanting to win at a challenge, even an unspoken one.

Ridley was about to activate the eyebat’s makeshift brain scan, but what happened next caught her off guard. Mitch pulled out a black journal from inside his jacket and began flicking through the pages.

Mitch had decided to take this opportunity to finally look up what this “glitchpocalypse” was. Ridley’s impromptu leaving seemed to be his lucky break, and he certainly wasn’t going to waste it.

He was so focused on skimming the pages that he didn’t notice the eyebat figurine quietly fly off the desk and hover over him, with its eye trained on the journal’s contents.

He eventually found the entry that explained it. It was a bit earlier than he was expecting, as it looked like it was written when he was still a new Tech.

Today I learned about another way glitches can cause havoc. Hinobi calls it a VGCE, or a Viral Glitch Cascading Effect.

I think glitchpocalypse sounds cooler, and is easier to remember, so I’m gonna call it that.

So if a glitch doesn’t get captured, it can go viral, and when it goes viral it gets stronger and can sometimes spawn other glitches. I’m sure you know that by now, but what I didn’t think about was what would happen if those spawned glitches go viral themselves. Those spawned viral glitches could then spawn more glitches. And then those glitches could go viral. And so on until you have a whole army of them running around, like a zombie apocalypse but with glitches instead of the undead.

Thankfully, glitchpocalypses are rare. Benji says it’s only ever happened once before, and even then that was only two levels of viral glitches spawning other viral glitches. Us Glitch Techs are good at stopping it from getting that bad, and it takes a lot for any glitch to go viral, let alone a glitch spawned from a viral glitch.

On the opposite page was a sketched diagram. On top was a drawing of a blob with an angry face, which was meant to represent a glitch. Surrounding it were several lightning bolts, presumably to signify the glitch’s “viral” status. Two arrows left the viral glitch and pointed at more viral glitches. These viral glitches also had more arrows pointing to more viral glitches. The entire set of all these glitches represented a loose pyramid.

It’s unlikely a single glitch will lead to a glitchpocalypse, but the chances increase if you have a bunch of glitches in close proximity. If the containment core in HQ were to break down, for example, the chances get way high. Good thing the store has a lot of security to keep that from happening, though.

The eyebat’s zoomed in view continued to stream to Ridley’s tablet.

So this is how he had done it. Mitch had written himself a set of notes, and from the looks of it, they were fairly extensive.

Her initial curiosity had been satisfied, but now she had a new side quest: to see what secrets lie within that journal.

Despite everything, Mitch really was an experienced, high level Tech. It was more than likely that he knew things most didn’t, and if he wrote that stuff down, that might be her shot at learning some of Hinobi’s deeper secrets, the stuff that she was sure Mitch wasn’t going to tell her himself any time soon.

But for now, she had to get back to the main storyline.

Mitch heard footsteps approaching the door and was quick to put his journal away. He was just in time as Ridley re-entered the room.

“Who was at the door?” Mitch asked.

“Some food delivery guy, but he got the wrong address.” Ridley shrugged. “But back to the topic at hand.”

“Right,” Mitch agreed, “I do now remember what you were getting at.”

“So a glitchpocalypse...” Ridley prompted.

“Is viral glitches spawning other viral glitches,” Mitch finished, “Snowballing until they overrun everything.” Something then clicked, and he was spooked at the realization. “If someone were to have consoles overcooking all over town… That’s a perfect recipe for a glitchpocalypse.”

There was a moment of quiet. Even Horn looked pensive as he lay on top of the bed.

Ridley stood up and started lightly stroking Horn’s head. “So we stop her,” Ridley said, “We have to. A lot of people could get hurt.”

Horn meowed in agreement.

“We’re on the same page, then,” Mitch said, “We just need to come up with a plan.”

“We need more intel,” Ridley said, “Like, how is she doing this, and more importantly, when is she planning on unleashing all these glitches.”

“And why. That’s the thing that bothers me more than anything else.”

“Plus, your memory of that encounter probably isn’t the most reliable. You’re brain was scrambled shortly after it happened.”

Mitch didn’t want to admit it, but she was probably right. “What are you suggesting we do, then? You gonna try and hack Hinobi’s servers?”

“Close. I want to get into that office building you said you found her in.”

“What?!” he asked, shocked at her boldness. “That’s risky, even for me. In case you couldn’t tell we’re not exactly gonna be welcome there.”

“We don’t have any better leads, and besides, it’s not like you don’t have plenty of experience breaking and entering.”

“That was when I had a- uh...” What was he about to say? He lost his train of thought as a wave of brain fog washed over him.

Ridley had a moment of concern as Mitch suffered his lapse, but then pushed it aside for the time being. Mitch would be fine. Probably. “Don’t worry. I’ve got my own tools for the job.”

Mitch nodded as he shook off the strange feeling.

Ridley summoned Horn back into her tablet, and with a word reverted the room back to its more casual mode. “Now come on,” she said, starting to head out, “We’ve got work to do.”