Archive of Our Own

The library was… Stupid cold.

Avery moved through the hallways silently, trying to avoid thinking too much about anything that had just happened. They needed to find D3rlord3- And focusing on anything else would be a waste of time. 

Whatever had happened in the cemetery was dead there, and the sign to move on was the only sign they needed from this place. They trudged through the library, and ignored the feeling of the planks underfoot attempting to trudge back on them. 

Ever since they had opened their laptop they had been noticing… flaws in the area around them. Like they had installed Chisels and Bits when they hadn’t been looking, or a pile of furniture mods. Everything was becoming… rendered. Things were slowly becoming more and more visually clear, and the more time they spent in-between looking at the screen felt less and less clear. Like their computer was draining their vision- like it was damaging their eyes in real time. 

‘This place sucks for real. Even my eyes hate it here. Ugly ass library.’

They wandered the hallways, peeking at the various books scattered around but only able to read some of them. A few contained references to things they had seen before, others referred to things they wouldn’t even feel confident guessing what kind of source it had. Some weren’t written in English. …In any language that was modernly spoken. 

A lectern holding a book and quill (that looked too realistic- They shouldn’t be able to tell by looking at the item that the exact kind of ink to make it was glow squid ink. …Ink wasn’t in the crafting recipe. They shouldn’t be able to see the still wet ink in the small bottle on the lectern. They let themselves pause to lean their hands on the lectern, forcing themselves to go through the book a word at a time. …Since they’d been a kid, they’ve been told by their teachers to try and work through the sounds of words piece by piece, and find their way to the word by sounding it out to themselves. It rarely worked- their brain had something going on with it where the letters would jumble around on their own- but usually in minecraft the consistency of the font kept things grounded. 

The letters looked like they had been scratched into the page with someone’s nails, and their vision swam beyond what their mind bent to upon seeing text normally. The words were barely readable when they squinted, so they squinted as the library groaned around him, the wood waving slightly in the breeze of the place. Like a skyscraper slowly losing in the age-old battle against decay, its metal supports grunting as it holds its ground during a strong breeze. 

The wood under them lost, and they fell just far enough to feel a pain in their ankle as they forced themselves not to stumble, whipping this way and that as they turned themselves around to swing at whatever was trying to keep them in this room now. 

A knight stood across from them. A pause, the adrenaline tapering off, held the air as Avery processed that they had found… him. 

In real life, his hands do not feel real. It feels like driving a car for a long time, where you have to remind yourself sometimes that you cannot turn the wheel automatically and you have to put your hands on the wheel. Like typing out an essay while half drunk with sleep and being confused when just thinking the words don’t appear on the page on their own. He presses ‘T’ and watches the cursor blink on the chat box, pressing down ‘I’ but not knowing what to say. They press ‘t’ to finish an ‘it’, considering what you say to someone you’ve never met before but have convinced yourself is a friend worth dying for. 

They knew it was him who left that message in the graveyard. They knew he had saved their life at least a few times now. …The ‘it’ sat alone in the chat, their hands unreal enough to know what to say on their own. 

D3rlord3 is the one to speak first, “You’re not a very hard guy to catch you know”.

Avery stares at the text, finding themselves speaking quietly aloud to themselves-, “It’s you.”

Something moves without them, the words slowly appear in the textbox in the clumsy slow way their hands would have done it. …Maybe they typed it. 

D3rlord3’s model shrugs, something behind them rustling slightly in the movement, “Me”

They pause, repeating themselves slightly, “I found you.” They see D3rlord3 smile through the helmet, their minecraft skin moving slightly with the motion, and force themselves to focus on what the screen really shows, seeing the unmoving minecraft skins through the fog. Their hands- At some point they picked open a wound on their thumb and had peeled open a hangnail line on their hand. They knew- in some distant, unknowing way- that their hand wasn’t supposed to be leaking a blood that looked slightly too metallic. They look back at the screen and focus on what is really real, seeing that D3rlord3 has responded “Me.”

Avery pauses and types, “I found you” and sends it, before stopping and typing “Oh my god-“ before they’re cut off by D3rlord3, “That you did.”

The players stare at each other as Avery resists the pull of the screen trying to push the vision of a minecraft that wasn’t on their screen into their eyes, “-I found you”. They stare at D3rlord3, seeing behind their own eyelids a version of the sight where the player is covered in detail, seeing his armour move slightly with each breath and small, barely visable feathers frame his face. …He has a bit of slight stubble, and he looks so unimaginably tired from this angle. “I was starting to think I’d never find you.”

Walking towards him feels like common sense- They’re trying to avoid rendering any more of the nonsense that is loading into their eyes, but seeing better what D3rlord3 looks like after all this time is too tempting. D3rlord3’s model has this casual, almost weary in a way that doesn’t reach his eyes kind of vibe around him. He’s calm, and his hand stays near his weapons, but his shoulders sit in a way that Avery can tell they’ve been lowered upon seeing them. …He’s the anxious type, and seems to have been sitting in this dark hole in the library waiting for them for some time now. He laughs slightly as he talks, “What can I say?”

Avery types multiple things in quick succession, “Are you okay??”, “What happened”, “Why did you leave that in my world”. Their brain is running the motions of asking before their brain can run the motions of why they are saying the things they are saying, their words flowing out onto the keys like a stream freshly broken of it’s dam. He’s alive. How is he alive if I’m holding his laptop? 

They can hear D3rlord3 speak, in the way you can hear your memories when you smell something from home, “I’ll be honest, I wasn’t in the best state of mind when I left that message.” His quality of voice is as difficult to pick apart as the meaning, and Avery distantly realizes there is something tying being able to hear him to understanding him. Like knowing of him was tantamount to being linked to him. Like some grand connection could be ebbed into existence just knowing he was there. 

Practiced hands type out a “WDYM”, and they can see D3rlord3 look up slightly in a way that might be his minecraft model and might be Avery’s rapidly gaining second sight showing a man in his peripheral sight half slumped near a computer. …He looks cold. The knight interrupts their thoughts swirling the drain, “Did you read the book?”

…Yes? That’s why they were here? Or- Did he mean one in the library? “What book?”

Derlord (Dear Lord? D-three? Fuck- they were going to have to come up with a nickname for this guy-) responds, “The book in the lectern right about us.” Avery sees him swear a bit, and the after image of someone who had been typing with one hand to soothe a pain in their temple forcing the second hand to type overlaid their sight as they saw Derlord type in real time, “*Above.”

Avery looks up and turns to D3rlord3, “Well, you kinda cut me off, lol”. They pause, seeing D3rlord3 look skittish under his helmet, and smile slightly in a way that their hands translate to “:p” on their own.

Derlord smiles with slightly less skittishness, “My bad”, he says, “You should read it.”

Avery walks forward and is almost- just so, so close to mumbling out ‘alright’ or ‘okay’ in that way that their hands respond to so quickly when they consider something about their newly gained second sight, staring at Derlord in a way that they know betrays what they’re meant to be able to see with their real vision. 

“…Do you have wings?” It’s a quiet sort of mumble, one they don’t mean to type out in the chat. Derlord half jumps at the comment, looking around their room in a way that Avery can tell is him becoming aware of some level of Sight being present. They know- in the same sort of way they know being able to see him- that they’ve gone off script. They see D3rlord3 pause in real time, and take a shaky breath in.

They stare at each other quietly. Avery watches D3rlord3’s wings twitch as they lay against the side of his body, twitching ever so slightly as he scans the area around them. He seems to doubt something, looking at Avery confused before a look of mild terror fills his voice, “…You went off script.”

Avery blinks, wondering if D3rlord3 was the type to focus on social scripts that heavily, “Sorry- I shouldn’t have brought it up-“

“You shouldn’t be able to change your dialogue like that.”

Avery turns, looking at Derlord curiously, “…What do you mean?”

They watch the knight stare into nothingness for a moment before breaking the blocks above him, shifting a few times in a mild greeting dance before pillaring up. Avery follows, breaking into the upper layer of the library. Derlord considers the book on the podium and picks it up before walking forward, Avery following. They continue their way through the library, Avery confused as ever, as they are slowly led to a section of the hallways of books that they had not seen before. It was one of the many staircases they eventually sat down on, D3rlord3’s head on a swivel the entire process of sitting down. 

Avery waited, as patiently as they could, for D3rlord to speak. His hands hovered over the ‘t’ key the entire time, wondering if this was some level of emergency where spending time pressing letter keys that weren’t the WASD needed to run would be a time loss. He sat through it, waiting for D3rlord to speak. 

They were rewarded with him eventually typing into the chat, “You’ve been exposed. How.”

Avery stops and considers that, opening the chat to respond confusedly, “Exposed?”

They watch D3rlord3 go still as he opens the chat, though it takes him a while to decide what to say, “…Not too exposed, I suppose.” Before typing , “If you had been fully exposed, you would be very aware of what you’d seen.”

D3rlord hands them the book (they try to ignore the understanding that they had felt D3rlord3’s hands pass it to them, that he hadn’t dropped it on the ground but instead physically pressed it into his hands to give him the book and quill) and types out, “Read this. It should… help some. Though clearly you’re already much more involved than I wanted you to be.”

They open the book, ignoring the random spew of noises that they can distantly spot in the chat as being a random pile of numbers and letters, and begin reading through the tale inside. …It doesn’t mean very much to them. They turn back to D3rlord3 who is now slightly more comfortable sitting beside them, leaning back on his elbows in a way that minecraft models can’t do without posing mods. They gesture towards the book with their hands, “What does it mean?”

D3rlord3 nods, seemingly content with Avery’s lack of understanding of the meaning of it, before pausing and biting the inside of his own mouth in a way that looks distinctly painful, “Do you know about the King in Yellow?”

Avery considered the name, “No?”

“Do you know about Hastur?”

Avery ponders the second, stranger name, “No? Is that the King in Yellow?”

The Slime recognizes D3rlord3’s expression from a grammar tutor they had in middle school from right before they had been officially declared dyslexic, “There’s no way I can put this that doesn’t sound a little insane.” He pauses, and adds a note that almost feels like an aside, “So bear with me, but tell me if anything feels too familiar here. If you feel even a little Deja Vu, I need to know.”

D3rlord3 adjusts on his seat on the stairs, making Avery aware both that something behind him was trying to push against his armour and that the stairs must be at least twice as uncomfortable for him in the heavy metallic suit than it already was for Avery. …It was like sitting on concrete, somehow. The wood fibers were too stiff and far apart. “The thing the book talks about- The King is something unknowable.” 

Avery nods, and D3rlord3 holds a hand high before lowering it, calculating something, “…Admittedly, explaining its existence is like trying to truly make someone understand the concept of inexistence. I had a plan for how to begin going about explaining it but… this place changes how fate works.”

D3rlord3 adjusts again, and Avery realizes he is uncomfortable. They move away from him slightly as D3rdlord3 continues, “The King- He is all of knowledge. He is all of understanding. Not because everything happens from him wanting it, so much as whatever does will forward existence had to name the concept of Being. The concept of Existing. The King is himself a necessary, escaped line of code defining to the universe what Knowledge is, that uses the complete lack of restrictions on how far something can be Known to try and climb out of the computer. …Whatever trapped it here seemed to understand that. That it is trying to claw through levels of existence in such a way that if they coded something right, it would crawl into this willingly.”

They raise a hand, “Are you implying that minecraft is a level of existence higher than reality?”

“…To be fully honest, the in-depth explanation of how layers of reality work would be a bit of a waste on the situation. You’ve played football for three years now on an unofficial college team hosted by your old roommate, correct? How useful is explaining the rules when attempting to show an officer that a referee kicked someone in the stadium? It’s complex, overly linguistically inefficient in our language, and overall not relevant when you get into the matter of what has happened.”

“How did you know I play football?”

It is a look like dread, perhaps more like exhaustion of something too well known to describe with a word for wanting to escape a future, that he gives Avery, “I know everything, Avery. I know your favorite color, where you live, what your childhood cat was named… Did you know that ‘Nedjem’ is actually a very historical name for cats? Not surprising that your mother chose that name, she minored in Egyptology in college. It was a much more promising career at the time but limitations on her ability to travel would have always stunted the career, her meeting your father prevented her from being on the route to visiting there during a minor technological failure in the plane which any additional weight would have triggered such as the amount of clothes she brings, due to her belief that packing more is always better-“ He cuts himself off, blinking at Avery and staring through their soul, “…I just creeped you out. Sorry.”

Avery stared at him in minor amounts of shock, “…Woah. So… The king made you… Like this?”

D3rlord3 nods, and quietly moves a hand to brush a short loc away from Avery’s eyes, “I’m… Worried it’s going to make you like this too.”

The slime considers the knight, seeing the movements within D3rlord3’s armour, “Is that why you look so… 3 dimensional in minecraft? I keep trying to look away from my screen to focus on it less, but every time I look back it’s just getting more and more detailed. It’s like I’m just getting-“

Their minecraft avatar is punched, and they can see fear in D3rlord3’s eyes, “Turn off your computer. Avery- Look at me. I am in a state I would not put my worst enemy in from having been on this computer for too long- If you keep going, you’re going to end up stuck staring at your screen like I am. Please- Turn your computer off.”

Avery pauses, and shakes their head, “I’m- I’m not going to just leave you here right when I finally found you! I’m not going to just-“

Something heavy breaks, and Avery is aware in that distant way again that something in the script has broken. An ancient kind of cursing, like the things you might find in the angry margins of a book bound in human flesh or laughing at you that you hear in your mind when you consider if humans have always done some small, odd thing can be heard rumbling through the library. D3rlord stands up, pauses to grab Avery’s arm in a way that does not make sense in regard to Minecraft mechanics, and runs as fast and hard as they can into the library. 

The wooden planks were not wood. They were meant to break away under them from the very beginning, and Avery felt a sense of dread at the realization that Something knew better about where they were upon them realizing this information. Upon them Understanding.

But this King thing was up against something else. It had lived a long life, Avery was sure, but they doubted it had faced something like Avery. Forged from years of elementary schooling being refused attention by teachers for having annoyed them too many times earlier in the school year. Molten potential cast in a mould of having been the only party king to ever get that rank at 15, young enough to get out of any of the gross parts and just old enough to know they were doing it because they didn’t know any of the other high school expectations. The eons spent trying to become someone smarter than themselves in college. 

Avery knew how to idiot out and understand nothing about a situation. 

They don’t know where or how they get to where D3rlord takes them, or any of the circumstances they face as they get there. Avery is very proud of themselves for this, though they’re beginning to become worried about the amount of information they had passively learned about D3rlord3 on the way there. (The shapes on his back that kept pressing against the metal were actually more wings. It seemed that he had two sets on his face and two on his back. …Avery wasn’t sure what kind of mods he had installed to give that effect, if he had installed any at all.)

Avery slumped next to where D3rlord3 was sitting all curled in on himself, looking at his hands emptily. Avery considered the sight and placed their own hand onto D3rlord3’s, watching his lack of reaction as his green palm overlaid the armoured hand. 

They didn’t know when in the run they had physically begun running, or how long they had been more in the game than they were in real life. They could feel their hands pressing the keys every time they spoke, the practiced motions from their time practicing parkour in every movement even as the fidgeting in their feet that they knew was them subtly switching between the A and D keys to rock back and forth made their calves ache. 

The armoured hand slowly curled around their comforting palm, and they did their best to be the calm rock to lean on as they smiled softly at the knight, brushing their thumb across his hand in slow motions, “…Where are we?”

D3rlord3 shakes his head, “Knowing invites It.”

Avery nods, “I kinda… Figured. I could feel It lock onto me when I realized It could tell where I was based on knowing what It was doing. …It’s really fucking creepy feeling.”

D3rlord3 pauses, looking at Avery horrified, “You felt what.”

They feel like they just admitted to being bitten in a zombie movie, “I mean! I just-“

D3rlord3’s palms are soft on Avery’s face, “You. Felt. What. Avery?”

They place their hands on Derlord’s face carefully, “…I could feel it’s attention… Shifting to me? I guess? It felt… confused about me knowing that the planks weren’t real. …Well- I guess none of this is real? It’s Minecraft.”

They feel the knight still, and it feels so strange seeing beyond the minecraft avatar to see some other level they hadn’t been seeing before where they could see Derlord laughing in a way that could only be explained as his very mind’s mental eye reflecting his emotion, “Avery. Avery, what do you mean?”

Avery places their hands on either side of D3rlord3’s face and just… Thinks of showing him. They run the idea of how to explain the concept they would even attempt to process. They see something give in D3rlord3’s expression despite the chat not changing, and his hands slowly back off Avery’s head. It’s quiet between them as he mumbles under his breath, “How did you do that.”

The Slime backs away and looks at D3rlord3’s face panickedly. (Please don’t tell me I did something embarrassing please this guy is so cool-) and watches D3rlord3 wince slightly before reaching for Avery’s hand, placing it onto his temples and sighing like it was a relief tantamount to lifting a boulder off his bones. They sit in Somewhere for a small while, the relative dark and Avery’s palm taking some level of stress off of his face. 

D3rlord3 speaks quietly, “…You’re… changing. I don’t know how. You- You haven’t seen him. He would have informed me if you had. He wouldn’t- He wouldn’t still be here if he could have you that easily. He would have run off with you as far as he could- He’s been luring you in here, I know he has. I don’t know why, but I know he wants you. …Wants something that isn’t me, atleast.”

They consider the situation quietly, “What exactly… Am I doing?”

Derlord sighs heavily, in a way that deserves Avery using the petnamed variant of their user for how human and unmodel-like their motion is, “Giving me one hell of a break from my migraine, for starters,” he hums, “And notably digging into my brain a bit. I felt the concept of your words a bit too close to my amygdala for comfort, frankly, but it was also noticeably your own words.”

“…What is an amygdala?” They ask

He shrugs, “A small almond shaped piece of the brain that processes specific signals from the rest of the body for information processing that turns it into emotional responses. Brain chemical stuff.”

Avery nods, “Cool. …Can you feel that I couldn’t understand most of that?”

He smiles slightly and nods, “…Very faintly, when your hand is on my head like this. I think it’s… helping somehow.”

Avery smiles slightly at the response, and wonders to themselves if D3rlord3 can hear the difference in how they perceive the two names they have given to their minecraft appearance and the odd afterimage they are perceiving. The smile on Derlord’s face wanes, and they realize the answer was likely ‘yes, and it’s bad.’

 The knight settles into his spot in Nowhere and considers the area around them, “You’re becoming… More attuned to it. I don’t know how, but you are. Enough that you’ve slipped off script. …As a person, your capacity for responding to situations is linked enough to who you are that prior to encountering you I produced a decision tree mentally based on what would possibly happen upon meeting you. …You’ve slipped from it, meaning either you yourself have changed or your perception of the area around us has changed enough that you’re no longer perceiving the situation as I predicted and are therefore reacting differently.”

Avery nods, “…So now what? I mean- I’m already seeing you as a 3D model, so there can’t be too much more it’s going to do. …Or at least, that’s got to be enough to slip me off of your situation graph thing.”

The knight pauses, considering Avery, “…Tell me what you see, if you don’t mind. …Without beaming it into my mind, please. I am already so painfully… Aware of everything around me. Seeing how it is sneaking into your brain is like having 7 eyes and opening an 8th on your back on accident. The extra stimuli- I’m beginning to realize the pain is less from me having too much information and more from some primal part of me suddenly being aware that there is information I’m managing to miss.”

The slime removes a hand from Derlord’s temple (making him wince) and begins talking, “…It’s like I’m in the game VRChat style, I guess. I can see you in real life, but sometimes I squint and I can see it more like your model. …Your wings are all banged up terrible, by the way. It’s like- A feather pillow from what little I’m able to see past your armour. And the ones around your face are seriously fluffed out.”

Derlord nods, shaking a bit, “…Feathers respond that way when I’m… Unable to control the panic response enough. It’s like chicken bumps kind of. It’s not fear so much as… a subconscious attempt to make myself more ready to fly at any given moment. …Odd that it reflects my physical state though. What kinds of feathers are they?”

Avery ponders the question, “…Small black and gold ones? Wouldn’t you know this better than me?”

They see the knight wince, ruffling his feathers, “On my end it’s a minecraft avatar. I know that you’re referring to the fact that when I made this skin I drew the armour onto an already existing skin template of a griffin themed skin, hence the bird theme, but I regret to inform you that I can only see what you’re seeing when you tell me about it.”

They force themselves to squint, seeing the figure before them with their actual skin and forcing themselves to breathe in as they process the sight, “…oh, yeah. I guess you are just… using a minecraft skin, Huh?” They laugh, letting their Sight level back down onto a layer that felt more natural to how they were currently, “…I guess I’m just… kind of panicking about it and forgetting to worry now! Which is probably for the best, since if I focus on it too much I’ll probably freak out!” They laugh nervously to themselves, considering admitting that they were scared. 

A hand placed on their shoulder breaks them from their swirling of the drain, “Hey. You’re alright here, yeah? I’ve got you.”

You’re special. You matter. 

They force themselves out of the headspace they had slipped into again, tearing the concept of what had pulled them into that out of their mind, “Yeah. I’m here. You’ve got me. I’ve… I’ve got you too.” Avery reaches forward and places a hand on D3rlord3’s forehead and tries to project the concept of being safe into his hands, “I’ve got you. You’re safe h- You Matter.”

They watch in some afterimage level as DerLord’s shoulders settle from where they are and an awareness of something takes hold of him. He freezes slightly and places a hand on Avery’s arm, his eyes going slack in a very slight way that Avery realizes is him looking away from his monitor, “…Could you hold that for like- 10 minutes?”

Avery nods before realizing they would need to speak, “Yeah?”

A distant rummaging through a monitor, and they realize in the reflection of D3rlord3’s eyes they can see something moving around a room that isn’t the one they’re in. They hear in a distant sort of way someone moving around and rummaging through things, cursing, and generally sounding like someone on the other end of a discord call realizing they had left something in another room. 

Avery settles near DerLord, and begins thumbing through the feathers under his helmet. The material is cold, and they wonder what he is thinking as they listen quietly to the sound of something being poured and a refrigerator being opened. Annoyingly, they can hear a microwave kick somewhere distant. Lunch, really?

His eyes return to light and he startles slightly, staring at Avery confusedly, “…You have posing mods installed?”

Avery shakes their head no, “It’s whatever is happening. What were you doing out there? I could hear you moving around. …Did you get food or something?”

A sharp nod from their knight, “Yeah. I haven’t been able to move from my monitor in days,” Avery winces, “When you’re holding my face it feels like how the monitor makes it- Less strongly painful- and so I used the chance to get up and just… not be chair-bound. Let me tell you, clean clothes and hot food are a freaking miracle when you’ve been in one place for 2 months.”

2… months…. “You’ve been stuck there… how long?”

The knight looked back down at his hands, “…You can’t get stuck here like I did. You just… Can’t.”

They sat in Nowhere for a bit longer, as DerLord quietly ate whatever he had thrown into the microwave in the 5 minutes he had and Avery wondered so many things to themselves. In the end, they wrapped a hand a bit closer to DerLord’s feathers and preened slightly at the odd few that flicked out of the small wings on the side of his face, “We’ll get out of this together. Just… Let me know if you need me to buy you more time, yeah? I mean- I don’t know if I can do anything about you sneaking off to a New Years Eve party or anything, but I doubt running around when you haven’t showered in 2 months is any pleasant.”

D3rlord3 shook a bit, “Not the primary focus right now. Primary focus is getting you out of here. …No amount of bought time is going to get me out of here, but every second inside is pulling you further in. You should- You should have just turned off your computer. I really shouldn’t be letting you attempt to rescue me like this.”

Avery shook their head, “You saved me first! This is just- Me repaying the favor. I want to repay you somehow, and I’m not going to just let you run yourself into the ground like this. You matter too, You know. …You matter enough to deserve better than being locked to a monitor for 2 months while you suffer in a chair somewhere.”

The knight shook their head, “I’m going to be stuck like this, Avery. There is no fixing… whatever has happened to me. I just want to keep as many other people as I can from being locked in here. I’m… content making sure I am the only victim.”

“WELL I’M NOT,” They yell, “YOU’RE IMPORTANT TO ME, AND-“ 

“-And you’re not going to let me throw my life away, you yell at me and punch my minecraft avatar, the floor under us is destroyed using the mechanism under the stairs and we access the next layer. I’m aware, Avery, we have this argument in every version of us I could foresee.”

Avery stares at him, heart breaking, “…Then why don’t you-“

“Because you being too nice to let me die is why saving you is worth dying for, Avery. I apologize, but you are a self contained loop,” He winces, and turns away, “…Sorry I… never expected you to ask that. I didn’t prepare a softer way of saying…” his voice goes so, so worried, “I shouldn’t have phrased it like that.” They watch D3rlord3 as D3rlord3 watches the bookcase a few yards off, “That was rude. …I’m sorry.”

The slime-themed player pulls Derlord into their arms, reaching a hand under Derlord’s armour to pet his feathers. They hear Derlord jump- Some level of the contact reaching the real world- but hold on tighter as they feel Derlord begin holding them back. 

They sit like this for some time, Avery slowly picking the feathers from Derlord’s loose and untidy wings as he rests against them in the temporary and unstable containment of the Unknown. …So long as they weren’t known, then what was Knowledge would leave them be. …For now. Always for now, but For Now was enough to buy D3rlord3 some time. Some time to rest, come up with a plan and… Find a way to use their new handy ability to see things a bit better in this shitshow. 

Hey, they bet they could parkour their way through things better now that they didn’t have to calculate for lag as much. Their shitty laptop had nothing on in-brain graphics. …Sure, they weren’t very accurate graphics, but it was hard not to appreciate being able to fully hug your minecraft buddies. 

A soft noise comes from where they were holding D3rlord3 to their chest, “…Warn me next time you do that. You startled me.”

They nod, “Sorry. Didn’t know I was grabbing you until I felt you panic. Just kinda… still feeling out what is Real and what is graphics, you know?” 

D3rlord3 nods, and in a moment that confuses them on how it would even be possible in game, removes his helmet. …His eyes are a soft, amber yellow color and he has soft, tiny little feathers that ring around his eyes in a beautiful shade of black. They run a hand along his temples, and they can sense in that after-image that D3rlord3 is leaning into the touch slightly. They smile, petting at the feathers on the side of his face. 

A concept, more than a presence, mumbles something into his brain, ‘…you are doting. This existence- it knows cruelty.’ 

Confused by the sentiment, they hum to themselves and begin working the wings on the side of D3rlord3’s face into a single order, ‘Hard to know cruelty when someone is sweet beside you.’

A horrible, sickening crunch in their mind illuminates the concepts of how they very well could be cruel at that very moment. A second concept, of something being thrown off something very tall into the beyond is all that is given as a ‘why’ they would do something, the Knight atop the hill just as scared as the one falling. They shake the image out of their mind, ignoring the stifled laughing of something sickening besides them. The voice rumbles towards them in their mind as D3rlord3 leans his head to the left to settle into the petting, his eyes closing for the first time in two months without pain, ‘He’s half convinced you’re me.’

They preen at the soft feathers, wondering who ‘me’ is before a pit opens in their stomach. A laugh, and something not quite them wanders into Nowhere. 

…Where a King cannot go, it sends the concept of what is already there. Behind D3rlord3, visible in the after-image of their mind where he has come close to sleeping behind his monitor, a face they can only explain as their own but warped to a sickening, twisted conception stands behind him. It’s unexplainable in creation, and they know the moment they see it that it was forged not of forgetfulness or seeking love, but of Sheer Knowing that it existed. 

Avery stares at it, and it becomes annoyed rapidly that Avery is Perceiving it so much, “…humans usually get annoyed around now. He did.’

D3rlord3 sits up so hard his head smacks Avery in the chin, and he shoves his helmet on with the same force he whips around the room. He stares at the empty space where the falsity was, and turns back to Avery horrified. They look at each other quietly as the new voice in their head grows annoyed with their lack of new Knowledge upon seeing something they weren’t meant to see. 

Honestly, Avery was beginning to suspect after all of this that they just couldn’t wrap their head around the thing, and it was sliding off them as a result. 

An anger tempers the room as something D3rlord3 is loath to look at makes itself known, and Avery is shoved into his shoulder to blind him from monsters that crawl through gates but never salt to find their Witness. His shoulder is warm, and looking the small amount they can up they can spy into a room that isn’t their own, can smell the old fabric softener on someone who was only willing to spare themselves 5 minutes to change but not a second longer. Their head is pushed back to the safety of blindness, and they already know the image of the figure behind them cracks in ways they fear will break the one holding them. 

A voice that swears it isn’t scared cracks, “Get away. Don’t. Don’t touch them.”

Their own voice, distorted and twisted until it bent, rumbles behind them like the soft laughter you imagine when you think of humans' past considering the future, “Give It the vessel you moron. ...This is easier if you just let the Vessel Become. You spare its heart.”

Sloppy, disgusting footsteps that ring like slop in a bucket stumble forward as Derlord physically rolled away from the computer, pulling them limp without form but with weight as their minecraft avatar sat still without the keys to pull them, Avery slumped over something unconnected to their computer. 

The handle of D3rlord3’s sword was bound in scraps of leather, they found. It drew quickly from a metal sheath, forged by someone who didn’t know at the time when imagining a self to become in a game that metal broke metal with enough time. The blade and their body moved in a single movement, by metric of belonging to someone they needed to repay in their safety, and they were swinging at the thing before them. 

Distantly, they heard Derlord yell for them to not look, but the entity before them was no more impressive than the version they had seen before. Green, clone, ugly. A few qualities here and there filled their mind with concepts beyond them, things so unknown to humanity that it shouldn’t have existed, but the thing was more focused on screaming as Avery smacked it with the sword. 

The sense that some kind of censor had been lifted over the clone’s corpse upon it settling to the ground burned in their chest, but they turned back to Derlord to focus on him first. He looked terrified, reaching forward to the keys to grab at anything he could of Avery. They shift danced and dropped his sword to his feet, pausing to feel through the new concepts in their head as they wrapped their brain around a thing or two, “…Alright this is gonna sound crazy, but I think clone for nuts was yelling a name. Do you know who ‘Derick’ is and why my ugly twin sister over here was yelling about him?”

Hands quietly scanned over them, tears were flowing down Derlord’s face, “…What did it… Show you.”

The slime-player blinked, “Uh- A lot of random facts about some guy named Derek. I’m gonna be honest, I think it was just spewing random-“

Derlord’s palms slide down his face, and Avery feels what they are anxious to admit feels like a kiss to their forehead gently wobble itself into feeling, “-Thank god. Thank every fucking denomination. Please- Please don’t go looking at what is in your brain. Please, let it just be the random bullshit knowledge that thing was provided with.” He is sobbing, holding Avery’s head between his hands like he’s a vase he’s dropped before. 

They want to ask, but Derlord begins laughing to himself and pressing on the top of Avery’s head, “You’re going to log off now. Goodbye Avery. Please disconnect. Please.”

They grab onto him tight, “I’m not going anywhere. You can’t make me-“

And they feel the floor fall out from under them, and the two watch the world around them float into an endless sea of what should have been stars. Avery realizes too late that Knowing of Derick Hutchins, and whatever that thing had been, was enough Knowing of it to allow it to linger. 

They stare up at the endlessness, and feel a deep, rumbling annoyance pour into the world around them like wine into a purposeless chalice. 

From unknowability, a perfect replication of the entity from before is pulled, and the sight of the endless sleeves of the monarch nearly rips their mind from its hinge upon the realm it is in. A red cape, like in those renaissance paintings with the princesses, covers their eyes with shaking, scared hands. The amalgam of what the thing before them thought they looked like is sneered at like discardable rot, 

An enormous… digit of some sort leans forward to flick them both, but the hand attached to it waves instead, 

And for the first time in a good few hours they see the real world, their real keyboard, and their real hands in the few seconds before their face smacks down face first into the fizzling, igniting laptop in their hands.

—————————————————————————————————————————————————

…Being saved by a clone of yourself you had called your ‘Ugly twin sister’ about ten hours earlier was humiliating. 

They had been dragged out of the fire by- Honestly neither of them knew what to call Ugly Avery. Ugly Avery hated their nickname and demanded to be referred to as some bullshit human tongues couldn’t pronounce, but was willing to conceded to ‘His majesty’s loyal servant and creation’ after some bargaining. Avery had shortened it to Hmlsac in the first hour, and to “Hm-Sack” about ten minutes further. Hm-sack had begun insisting a few seconds after this that Avery should have died in the laptop fire, and was allowed to experience the human novelty of being punched in the stomach for the comment. 

Truly, royal. 

Both were nervously sitting outside a house on a street far too fancy for them as they considered how to begin going about raiding the house of Derek Hutchins without alerting the neighbors, with HmSack going on about all the information they had in the universe about their existence while Avery considered the same lodged information along with their gained common sense about human capacities. 

The door was unlocked, it turned out. …It wasn’t something Derek Hutchins normally did, and so neither had expected it, but the presence of gifts from family and a few delivery services explained the exception. Hm-Sack bemused about it as they wandered around, their mind an emptiness that perpetually sought to be filled after having been All of Knowledge for so long. …They’d mumbled to themselves on the way here that they’d been shed when the King had no use for information about the two any longer, tossing out the focus on the concepts and spurring the creation to taunt and distract into living. 

Avery had held their hand gently when they explained it, watching it’s eyes rumble over a million concepts as it perceived them. …It had only ever lived once as well, and it showed in stumbling movements but eyes that had only ever known feelingless Knowledge and complete understanding of how much Derek Hutchins wanted to protect something. 

It had learned since then All about Avery, and seemed to have softened in some manner as a result. 

They ignored their copy searching Derek Hutchin’s house, walking to where they were now hyper aware was the room he had moved into as his own (forgoing the other room, which he had deemed the spare) upon finding out the sun shone just slightly into it in the morning. They waded through the piled up bottles of juice and Soylent that he had been living on for months and lifted him from the chair he had only just recently had a chance to leave, laughing quietly to themself upon seeing an extension cord they knew was part of an escape attempt to carry an entire monitor to the living room, forgetting the monitor’s connection to the box was itself a limit. 

He was alive in their arms, and asleep in the way men sleep when they haven’t been able to close their eyes in months without pain. 

They curl the body near them, and despite the smell of the room and the hunger pangs from having sat in front of their laptop all of New Years they curl around the body in return, piled onto Derek Hutchin’s dirty mattress. 

In the next three hours, they empty the house of everything they know he will miss, so few items that it is easy to pile into Avery’s shitty hatchback car. Derek Hutchins sits in the backseat next to the shitty monitor set up he had panic bought upon realizing that without the laptop his skull was going to cave in, thrown away after as many attempts to destroy it he could stand while endless knowledge had pounded in his skull. 

When he wakes up, there are two Averys in Avery’s usual apartment, which Derek knew like the back of his own palm. Like how Derek knew everything like the back of his own palm. There are twice as many voices complaining about the tv commercials that woke him up, and while only one of the Avery’s responds to him waking up normally they get two smiles in return. 

The real Derlord, it turns out, does not have full wings yet. Feathers grow in gold where the seat had given him pressure sores, but the wings themselves have yet to pile out. Fakevery says this is temporary. Avery hits them for telling Derek this as a good morning. 

Something swarms Derek Hutchin’s home, and tells the news stations in the area it was a quarantine for some kind of hazardous material. The concept of Avery rolls off their minds like water off an otter, and the world spins at 1,040 mph along the equator, per usual. …They adjust to the extra knowledge, and eventually the world is in full detail and full color. Avery’s home has too few beds, and too many roommates, but is just loud enough. 

They know, in some distant way, that there is a world out there where things are different. Sometimes, Fakevery mumbles about it when they think no one is listening. About other worlds. About wishes. 

Avery knows the king didn’t make Fakevery from scratch. …But if ‘creation of the king’ is easier than ‘vessel’ they will not take the broken heart from its home. 

In some other world, they did not see wings, or kind hands, or the warmth that saved them both. But Avery was the sort of person who would give their life to save someone who saved them. …If that Avery needs a Derek Hutchins, they suppose they can let Fakevery share theirs. 

…They would matter together, somehow.