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Things like these always happen at the worst possible moment.
A stage light snaps and smashes against the floor at the very crest of an action-movie climax; the power flickers on the final lap of Super Kart. And now — just seconds before he’s set to host the most important, most vital show of his career — Tenna’s screen goes completely haywire.
It’s a little bit cinematic, though, isn’t it? One final, devastating obstacle thrown into the paths of our beloved heroes; the audience watching from the very edge of their seats, clutching their armrests or pillows or friends, or the bowls of popcorn sat between their crossed legs. Watching breathlessly, the same incredulous line spinning around their heads and shining in their wide eyes. How are they going to fix this? How are they going to fix this?
Are they going to fix this??
Tenna crashes into his dressing room, circuits racing. His room used to be a little less conspicuous (discounting, of course, the flashy golden nameplate); he’d kept it tucked away a good stretch from the Green Room, where nobody could bother him when a show went sideways or a partnership blew up in his face. But the frequent and ill-timed breakdowns of late necessitated a closer-by landing pad, so — things got moved around a bit. He's just a twist and a turn away from the main stage, now, heaving as he slams the door behind him. He can make it back in time. He can make it back well before the introduction’s over, he’ll even be singing along.
Nobody believes in me, he thinks bitterly, gathering himself up by the mirror in a rush; this off-room wasn’t exactly built for him, so it’s a bit cramped, but if he shrinks down right now, he’s afraid— he’s concerned— he might not be able to snap back into shape. So he hunches over the vanity and curses himself, and curses the rest of them, stupid Shadowguys, stupid Ramb, stupid… whoever it was, who built this stupid closet. And stupid Pippins, especially the one who made that long face at him, backstage, just seconds ago—
His screen buzzes. The colors wriggle around by a pixel or two and go still again, unwavering. How did this happen? How? He’s a seasoned professional, he doesn’t get stage-fright; the stakes are higher than they’ve ever been, ever, ever, but he does not get stage-fright.
“Not right now, not right now,” he pleads; he might’ve been saying it since the moment he flew in here. He glares into the mirror, as close as the length of his nose allows. The color bars are a little dimmer than they’re probably meant to be, and just as nauseating. “I knew it,” he says, darkly, “I KNEW you’d mess this up, you— you—”
YOU ALRIGHT, BOSS?
Backstage was dark. People were always sneaking up on him, even if they’d been standing right there; so when his cameraman spoke up, Tenna had jumped a foot in the air, swivelling to face him with an incredulous scowl. The VHS had just started up, right on cue, thank you Mike; the light of it flickered dimly to Tenna’s left, his pre-recorded introduction-voice booming over tinny speakers.
And they were watching. Kris and the, uh, other two — they were frozen, unblinking, awestruck. Behind his screen, electrons did backflips and cartwheels and all sorts of impressive maneuvers; he’d wrapped his hands together to keep them from shaking.
But then came Shuttah, an awkward grimace sitting tight on his chest. He had the nerve to sound nervous, which was already so unlike him; he couldn’t even finish his next sentence. YOU LOOK A LITTLE…
It didn’t make any sense. It still doesn't. He was on cloud nine, he was right where he was supposed to be, he was halfway to snapping brightly back at Shuttah — I’ve never been better in my whole entire life!!! — and then he felt it. A weird little sting somewhere inside him, ominous and destructive, a hook creeping out from behind the curtains to grab him and drag him away. He caught the light of his screen reflecting off the blank face of a nearby Pippins, glowing an ugly, jumbled-up rainbow. His wires went cold.
ONE MOMENT!, he’d shouted, voice simultaneously down-pitched and high-strung as his cast stared him down, alarm painted on their unfaithful little faces. And he took off.
The tape is loud enough he can hear it from here, in all its brash, distorted glory. He thinks Mike might be slowing it down by a fraction of a fraction of a second — that Mike, he’s the only guy Tenna can count on, what a genius. He should give Mike a raise. Another raise. He’d given him one last week. No — he’d docked everyone’s pay, last week, and doesn’t that work out nicely; now the raise won’t really cost him anything.
What a genius.
“Take deep breaths,” Tenna coaches himself. If he thinks about it he’s not even sure he can breathe at all, but it’s what they say on TV, in moments like these — moments of peril. It’s what Toriel would tell Asriel when he was tiny enough that a torn plushie or a snapped action figure was a catastrophic ordeal. Oh, that kid used to cry and cry.
It’s broken, it’s broken…
He chokes on voltage. He smacks himself hard on the side of the head.
It’s the usual spot; the casing is smooth and solid and makes a loud, dense thud under his hand. It doesn’t hurt that bad. The colors rattle, but they’re stubborn sons of— nothing— anyway, they’re still there, glaring back at him in the reflection.
Somebody bangs on the door; strong enough to cut through the growing static in his head, but gratingly timid. “M— Mr. Tenna?” they stammer; a Zapper, he thinks, with the gall to sound like that, like there's anything to worry about. “You alright in there—?”
Tenna shouts something nasty and contentious, quick enough to slip out from under the censors — and then he thinks, Uh-oh!, and hisses at himself. No, no; Kris didn’t hear that, there’s no way. Nobody could have heard that! If anybody heard that, I’m ruined.
The intruder scurries off.
I can handle myself, he thinks, raising up his hand. Doesn’t anybody know that?
The distant speakers buzz; a wayward blip of high-pitched feedback scrapes against his sensors. “THE KING OF ONLY—” booms from the main stage, his recorded voice ringing over sharp, compacted brass. “He’s GROOVY…”
Tenna hisses again, the garbled voice-over reverberating in his case. He’s aware of the glitches in the tape, alright? He’s aware of them. They’re charming. They’re being dealt with. The glitches are all being dealt with; he’s dealing with one right now.
The strike lands in the same place — the flat of his palm against hard, lightly-scratched plastic. Again, the bars rattle, but persist in their garish, unwarranted existence. And that little line of dead pixels on the side of his face stands out even worse against the strip of bright red. It’s repulsive, it physically hurts to look at. “Come on,” he urges. “Come on, come on, you piece of junk!”
He hits himself again, again, harder and harder; the colors rattle, the mirror rattles, the entire dressing room rattles and flickers until he realizes it's just him, shaking around in his own dusty casing. He can feel things jostle slightly in their places — coils, cables, grids — but it’s not enough. It’s not working.
Desperate, he grabs at the corners of his face and yanks — trying, somehow, to shove himself back into shape; and then he feels a little sort of click somewhere inside his neck, some plug or joint pulled just barely out of place. His screen blinks. It turns blue.
He shrieks. He jumps up from the vanity, stumbling backwards into the couch, away from the mirror as if he’d been burned. He can’t tear his vision from that vacant box of color staring back at him. It’s nightmarish; bright and dark at the same time, cold, unrelenting. You idiot! That’s worse! This is worse!
Blue is what happens now and then ever since his family got that terrible, overcomplicated new system a few years back, in some attempt to get a better use out of him; they never quite mastered it, on account of its terrible-ness and overcomplicated-ness, and if anything it only scared them further away, and it sits like bile somewhere in his stomach. It’s what happens when someone forgets to hit OFF on both remotes or can’t figure out the right input, or when some cable comes loose inside the tangle of wires he’s connected to. It bounces off an empty room at night, when it’s silent and chilled; when someone doesn’t even bother to check on him before turning out the lights.
Blue screen of death, Dess said, once, in this spooky, dramatic voice, and then Asriel had gone on about I think that’s just computers, but regardless — it rings like a siren in Tenna’s memory, an emergency signal, a disaster warning.
He shudders, holding himself on the couch, circuits pounding. I’m not dead! I’m not dead, I’m not dead! I’m never gonna die—
“Just stop!” he begs aloud, clutching his head, the whole world screeching. This is horrible. This doesn’t feel cinematic at all. The VHS is going to end soon; it’s probably ended already, and he can’t even tell. They’re just gonna be standing there by themselves, Kris and those two drama queens— how humiliating, to open a show with an absent host, it’s ruined— he’s ruined— “Just stop it! Stop it now!”
He punches himself with the side of his fist, right on the top-left corner of his head, holding nothing back. The force of it throws him sideways by the neck, sends his thoughts into static; the whole world skips and freezes and goes dark for a full second as everything gone bad inside him slips neatly back into place.
A white screen gazes back at him in the mirror, bright and mostly unblemished. At least from this distance.
“Oh,” he says. The tape is still playing overhead, miraculously. He yelps. “Oh!”
He scrambles up from the couch and out the dressing room door; he twists and turns towards the stage room, undeterred by the familiar headache building on the side of his case. Everything is fine. Everything is fantastic. Everything is coming up TV TIME! and it will never not be TV TIME! ever again.
“The show that makes you SCREAM…!”
In the dark, he trips on a wire.
“Mike!” he squawks, furious, crashing to the floor. No — Tenna doesn't crash; computers crash, all those newfangled technologies just crumple under the weight of their own grandiosity, Tenna doesn’t go out unless the entire city’s going out with him in some kind of nuclear event — he only lands on the floor, rough, head swimming. And at that, he thinks, for the second time: Uh-oh!
His vision jitters as he lifts himself up; his vents groan and stutter. His good-for-sometimes employees are just standing there, gasping; a Pippins, somewhere, is laughing at him. No, please, not again, he thinks, bars of colors flashing in his frantic memory, not AGAIN, that’s not good television. We already went through this!
See — he’s waited his entire life for this moment. It’s only grown more urgent as everyone slipped further away, one by one by one, even if he hadn’t ever fully known that it was coming; and maybe it’s been tinged with a tiny little itty bitty-bit shade of resentment, but, but, that doesn’t matter, that could only possibly matter if things went sideways and they’re not gonna go sideways, not anymore. It’s only up from here. It’s a fairy-tale— uh, beginning— it’s a dream come to life, it’s a chance. He’s going to make everybody so so so so SO happy and they’ll never leave him in the dark ever again, and maybe they’ll even feel a little bit sorry about having done so in the first place, and he’d forgive them, he already forgives them, he was never even angry.
So he clutches at his head and prays — he actually prays! — to everything he’s ever heard of, or at least the versions he’s allowed to repeat. He prays to Gosh and he prays to Heck and he prays to that mysterious rune-thingie Toriel and Noelle used to practice their songs about in the living room, and he prays to the ROARING KNIGHT and he even prays to Mike; all in the space of a single flicker, he prays — PLEASE, PLEASE, WE HAVEN’T EVEN STARTED YET…!!
And his screen is still white as it bounces off his gloves.
Yes, yes, yes, wonderful, thank you, he beams, clambering up from the floor in a noisy clatter of movement, smoothing at his suit jacket and bounding over the steps. And he lands at his mark just in time to sing along.