Chapter Text
Scarab finally looked away from the cobweb in the corner. How the Time Room had amassed cobwebs when as far as he knew, there hadn’t been any spiders that had come through recently, he had no idea. But he was to pay his dues. This largely seemed to mean being the Time Room’s makeshift janitor, but he was going to do his job. Scarab was used to cleaning up other people’s messes. As much as he hated it, maybe with hard work and diligence, his sentence would be lifted.
Maybe.
Repossessing and interfering with a canon timeline was a rather serious crime. If he had stopped once he had realized the universe had asserted itself into the greater canon, maybe he could gotten off on a lighter sentence with the excuse that it had previously been unsanctioned. However, in his anger, he had dug a deeper hole for himself.
Not to mention his neglect of checking in with the Cosmic Owl’s fraudulent schemes, or whatever was going on there. He had partially been hoping that the owl would simply come to visit Prismo for help in his schemes since he knew that the two of them met often, but he had been much more focused on incriminating Prismo and bringing to light his mess.
Prismo. The Scarab glanced back at his companion, a little disoriented in how he turned with little transition, his gaze sliding across the wall with the motion of his body. He didn’t let any of the confusion or difficulty show, though. He was a professional.
Prismo noted his movement, sitting up, or rather, moving higher up on the wall as he looked at Scarab from across the room. “You know you could take a break? We could try making another character. I know you– we got frustrated last time, but that isn’t too unusual, I think. Me and the Ice King had creative differences–no you don’t want to hear about that . But the cleaning. You know you don’t actually have to take care of that right now. If you’re tired, you can wait! Or I can deal with it later.”
“What.”
“I mean, I didn’t have anybody else cleaning up the place before, and it really isn’t that bad in here, you know?”
“Are you suggesting I don’t do my job ?”
Prismo sank down a bit, eyes flickering back to his computer, every motion telegraphed. He was too obvious. That’s what had led to his downfall. “It’s whatever, I guess. If you want to put that much effort into it, that’s on you. I’m just letting you know that I don’t mind.”
Scarab threw the broom against the crease in the wall, fed up with the whole situation. With the lack of care shown by the one who had gotten him in trouble. The one who had gotten off scot-free like he always did while the rest of them had to work their asses off to avoid making the boss angry. But no, everyone liked Prismo. “What would you suggest I do, Wishmaster ? Play fantasy when there are real things at stake? Would you have me get overly attached to mortals like you , where I won’t even be able to take care of myself when one dies ? All mortals die , Prismo.”
Prismo clicked his teeth and made a faint noise as he looked away. Slowly, the sound of typing filled the room again.
Infuriated, Scarab reached toward the wall, meaning to rip the hinges from reality and reach into the cracks to dismantle the connections and places between the timelines again. Or maybe he would finally reach the spiderweb in the corner, finally influencing a whole plane of reality refusing to bend to the will of something so above it. Anything to dig into the crevices and to feel something other than the odd compressions of corners that folded his body when he walked across them.
His hands touched nothing, flailing oddly to his sides, and crossing in front of him with an overlap that felt like bending a limb too far the wrong way. When Prismo looked like he was thinking about saying something again, Scarab marched around the room opposite of him and vanished further into the non-euclidean space that Prismo inhabited.
“Woah, man,” Prismo said, following behind him. “Where are you going?”
“None of your business,” Scarab sneered. He made sure it was reflected in his tone, aware that the expression was weaker beneath his shell, and without the third dimension to help clarify the movement. “I thought you wanted me to take five .”
“Well, I mean I guess, but where are you going?”
“Relax,” he said shortly. “I’m not going to damage anything. I’d like some personal space , not that someone as clingy as you would understand that.”
Prismo drew back, slowing down as he glided along. Finally, he vanished around a corner when they next came upon one. Scarab waited for several seconds, counting by his breathing, or at least by the intangible motions he was making as if he were still breathing, and then headed in a direction at random, never quite getting lost, but paying less attention to where he traveled.
Prismo had many rooms and many halls, ever-shifting even when he wasn’t actively manipulating them. Scarab was sure that there was some type of subconscious aspect to it, though. The further he went, the more he noticed being turned away from certain directions and paths.
It became a pattern, and Scarab was very adept at finding and utilizing patterns to his advantage.
It took some finagling through walls, and a truly embarrassing amount of time dedicated to crouching down to the floor, and sort of projecting himself across to the other side of the wall like the shadow he was to get to where he wanted. Eventually, however, he found the room that seemed to want to keep him away and saw… himself.
He knew that he had been put to sleep at some point and that his body was contained in the same space that he was, but he hadn’t put much thought into the logistics of it. He was a rule-follower and had no plans to commandeer his body, at least at the moment, knowing that it would only get him in hot water. Maybe if he were to wait a couple of decades…
But knowing and seeing were different.
Scarab stared at his body, slumbering on a platform in the middle of the room, pressed against a wall. He looked less comfortable than Prismo’s body did across from his own, curled into thick blankets and a soft mattress, with an empty glass sitting to the side. Scarab was confined to what could be described as a slab with a mattress cover pulled over it, rather than a bed.
He wondered, idly, how he was sleeping before he dismissed the notion as being idiotic.
Scarab was hardly surprised when he felt Prismo snake up next to him, grimacing and sucking at his teeth.
“There you are,” he said, strained.
“You could have found me at any point.”
“You seemed to uh, not want company.”
“And yet,” Scarab gave him a pointed look.
Prismo had the decency to look ashamed, though it obviously wasn’t enough to make him actually back off. Instead, he drew himself off to the side of the room and peered down at their slumbering forms.
“That isn’t your original body,” Scarab noted, with something vaguely like horror. A mortal might not have noticed the difference, because he looked the same on the outside, but Scarab had been around much, much longer than any mortal.
Suddenly, a recent false alarm finally made sense. There had been a cosmic-level crime reported, and Primo had been reported as dead. Murdered by a Lich.
Scarab had been too busy with the direct aftermath—an escape from the Crystal Citadel–and had only heard about the actual check-in with Prismo secondhand and long after the fact.
But seeing the proof in front of him, he could imagine Primo’s hemming and hawing, and everyone else's lack of conviction to get to the truth because Primo was just such a nice guy that they essentially let everything he did slide.
“That’s the, uh, mortal I got attached to,” Prismo offered, tone somewhat pleading and plaintive. “Sort of. I’m upset about Jake.”
Scarab gave him a look, but he was concerned that it came across as something more curious than condemning.
“I… it was unsanctioned, you wouldn’t like it.”
“I don’t doubt that,” Scarab said, watching him thoughtfully. He looked between their bodies, and slowly neared Prismo’s host, noting how the other entity tensed. “But do go on.”
“I sort of croaked for a bit there, when the Lich woke my host body, but I had this plan where I left a message for Jake. He…”
“You tricked the mortal into becoming part of you,” Scarab said disapprovingly. “How many times have you resurrected yourself without filling out the right paperwork? Do you know what could happen if you chose the wrong mortal to try that trick with? If they didn’t come through? If they weren’t similar enough to the last host? You are comprised of dreams. It could affect wishes, the Time Room, your judgment– everything !”
“I know,” Prismo said faintly.
Scarab turned on him. “Was that the reason for the unsanctioned timeline? Faulty judgment? Was it the mortals that gave you that idea?”
Prismo shrugged. “I guess I just wanted something that I worked on to be real for once. Everyone else gets a wish. It was fun to see it come to fruition, where I could watch the stories and characters… it was nice.”
The Scarab thought about a couple of ways he could respond. He dismissed sympathy as soon as it came to mind. He wasn’t sorry and saw no use in offering empty platitudes when he hardly meant them. However, the other’s words were genuine and seemed to be from a good place.
He hated that.
Genuine or not, sorry or not, it was still incredibly immature and irresponsible of Prismo, or anyone with powers of his magnitude, and Scarab knew that he would have been better suited to the task. He always would have been. Better suited to the empty rooms. Better suited to twisting wishes. Prismo was hardly the most qualified for his position, anyway, too affected by those who traveled through his room. He was too sensitive to come into contact with mortals as often as he did.
A coworker had once mentioned, amidst Scarab’s complaining about them flocking to Prismo’s parties while he did all the work, that maybe someone with a sense of humor is what was needed for making wishes. After all, none of the rest of them were dreaming up wishes and scenarios for mortals. Nor did any of the rest of them want to.
But Scarab did.
Sort of.
Partially. He wanted into the Time Room. He wanted the power to create and to twist and to watch the mortals writhe when they got exactly what they wished for because he knew that Prismo let them alter it and gave warnings when he should have let mortals who broke holes in their realities get what they deserved.
“I see,” he said finally, as he felt Prismo’s gaze settle back on him. “I’m not going to wake you. As you can tell, I’ve had little success in interacting with the physical world so far.”
“You get used to it,” Prismo offered. “And uh, I don’t know if I should be telling you this, but I don’t have a contingency plan this time, so I think I’ll watch while you’re in here.”
“I’m not allowed to visit myself? Don’t forget that I’ve seen you interact with the third dimension.”
Prismo reared back, shape fuzzing out around the edges and becoming more angular in others. “I wouldn’t kill you, Scarab. I’m not that kind of guy.”
Scarab harrumped. “It wouldn’t kill me, regardless of your intentions. Mine is a temporary punishment, while yours of eternal.”
“Way to lighten the mood,” Prismo huffed nonsensically. “You’re right, I guess you haven’t touched the physical world yet. I’ll be–”
“-With your pickles, yes, I know. Or back in the Time Room writing that ridiculous nonsense. I’ll come back to clean, later.”
When Scarab finally turned back, Prismo was gone. He checked the corners of the room for eyes, or little impressions of the Wishmaster that might have stuck around to keep an eye on him, but found none.
Once he confirmed that he was alone, Scarab crept closer to the other’s body, watching the old man curl tighter away from him, as if sensing his presence. Something dark oozed about in the man's mouth when his lips parted slightly, but it stayed inside when he shut his jaw again, nestling further into his pillow.
He stayed for another while, taking advantage of his relative privacy by moving away from their bodies and attempting to stretch across the room as Prismo did. Unfortunately, the Wishmaster made it look easier than it really was. Scarab was much smaller than the other and found it difficult to stretch his shape when he had been confined to his stiff carapace for so long. Folding himself over the creases in the floors and corners was still uncomfortable to linger in for more than a few seconds, and sprawling himself across the floor seemed undignified. He hadn’t even attempted to reach the roof yet.
Finally, exhausted of his options and with no further progress in his ability to manipulate his shape or surroundings, trapped in a flat hell against the walls, Scarab returned to Prismo’s Time Room to glower at the dust and cobwebs.
Except, when he got back, Prismo was delicately moving a broom around the much cleaner floor. He paused when Scarab neared him, and gave a weak smile as he dropped the broom back down.
Scarab took the time to note the lack of webbing anywhere on the walls, and the absence of dirt or water tracked around his tub. He let the fury wash over him as he stalked across the walls to Prismo.
“Hey, Scarab, I thought you might actually pay attention to some character creators if you weren’t so busy–”
“-Does it look like I can’t do my job?” Scarab snapped, leaning into the being's space.
Unlike in the physical world, where Prismo was for the most part intangible to those in other dimensional planes, even if Prismo himself acted like he could be touched if they walked over him, Scarab could already feel an energy between their forms as he got closer to the Wishmaster. It was like brushing against one of the older TV’s of timelines or universes that hadn’t had any type of world-ending war yet. It was like pressing the opposite poles of two magnets together.
“Why would you take my job?” Scarab snapped, refinding his anger amidst his curiosity. “Are you trying to undermine me? Are you careless , or just cruel ?”
When he shoved his arm into what constituted Prismo's side, ignoring how the other being shrank himself smaller and smaller against the wall, babbling all the while, it felt like the pins and needles of a limb waking up.
At the contact, Prismo cut off his words immediately, stretching around Scarab in jagged lines like lightning, before he came back together and stretched out across the room through the floor at the speed of light until he was safely up towards the ceiling and wall on the side opposite to the Scarab.
“What was that?” Prismo asked, voice high.
Scarab hesitated, distracted from his anger momentarily at the first thing he had really been able to feel since his punishment. The broom he had left lying around melded into his shape, into his color. There hadn’t been anything like true sensation.
The answer seemed obvious. That was what must have passed as contact in the two-dimensional plane. A strange overlapping of their outlines, rather than a physical barrier.
“ What was that ?” Prismo repeated, form rippling.
“Have you not touched anyone before?” Scarab asked, bewildered. Then he realized, that no . Prismo wouldn’t have. Not when he was the only Wishmaster still around, with the corrupted shadows swallowed down his host's throat being the only things around that might have offered the same type of overlap.
Prismo did not need to answer to confirm Scarab’s thoughts. However, the way he immediately raised his trapdoor and vanished into it was answer enough.
Scarab was not the type to follow unless he was after a target, and running after Prismo while the other sulked would hardly be productive. Instead, he looked around the room, taking in the new cleanliness with a sort of reluctant satisfaction. It was clean.
But it should have been him cleaning it. That was his punishment, after all, and unlike some , Scarab took no satisfaction in shirking his duties.
With renewed confidence, Scarab picked up his broom and continued his efforts to make it touch something in the real world, even if he had no true goal this time.
It would give Prismo a chance to cool off, looking at his pickles or whatever nonsense he had picked up from mortals. And if Scarab peered at Prismo’s computer as he passed by it, glancing at a half-made character from a distance, that was nobody's business but his own.