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You wake up in a maze of halls, monochrome red saturating all of its highlights and a flat black for its shadows. It’s difficult to see like this. There's hardly enough to make out base shapes and details. It isn’t as easy as it was before, where the world simply knew what was around you and could tell you exactly what it was - now all you can do is guess.
This place reeks of iron, both kinds of the stench. The organic one is no doubt splattered all over the walls and floors, with a rouge sheen out of your frame of vision. Though that may be the only blood in this place. Everything feels cold, like a flatline. You feel cold, a nervous, shivering feeling you can’t quite shake. The facility is empty to the point that it gapes. Its lonely machines are a stomach with a void desperately needing to be filled. You still hear the chugging of gears and the whirring of equipment. It somehow nauseates you more to know just how much you don’t know.
Your memories flood back to you quicker than you can envision them all, a rapid tumble of information like the crashing of a waterfall onto sharp, choppy rocks. Afterschool Slash. Ben. The repeated deaths. All of it.
You are not Ben, that is as much as you can tell, and you certainly are not the avatar standing in this hallway. You are who you have always been, and nothing in this world can take that away from you. Nothing in this world can hurt you, touch you, fix you. But at the same time, there is a role you are forced to play if you want any influence on this story. You know it well. You know it by name. But, you don’t consider yourself much of an Audience anymore if you’re in the midst of the game.
There were certain limitations of the game you were forced to play, certain bounds you had not been in the standing to break. You conclude that these limitations must have been by design. Wisdom is power and you could not be allowed to share what you knew, not fluently. Not too soon. No matter how much you wish you could have broken through to Ben, all that is left is you and this place.
Before you stands a towering pair of doors, strong and solid but still much less industrial than the air-tight metal ones that guard each room. Your memories easily supply the thing that awaits you beyond them.
Naturally, the last thing you want to do is confront that. Not without being thorough, making sure there is no other option. While there are much lighter stakes for you than Ben had, you cannot simply pick yourself up and drop yourself into more desirable circumstances. If you wish to move forward, you’ll have to take a page out of his book and try to find some sort of exit.
Instead of finding an exit, you see a blur of red in the distance. Not very helpful, since half the things in this place are a blur of red, but once you decipher it…
Relief flushes into you so suddenly that you nearly melt to the floor when you realize who this is. Then, after a polarizing second, you realize there is very little cause to celebrate. He should still be convinced of your status as an enemy. With the tightening of your posture you prepare for the worst.
The Red One centers himself in your view. The silhouette isn’t very cohesive. All you can make out is the hat, the shawl, and the two rectangles on his face for what must be glasses. You assume he was an avid reader, or maybe those science textbooks were just written in very very narrow print.
You can’t see his mouth moving, but you can hear a muffled voice articulating words just outside your ability to understand them. After a moment, and a ringing in your ears, you can finally make them out.
“You found me.”
He pauses after that, maybe to check if you were finally able to hear him. Neither of you say anything. You still aren’t certain if you can say anything. His silence is full of tension, and your only guess is that he’s using the time to examine you. You can only take guesses at what he sees.
At the very least, he doesn’t seem as hostile as he had before. He isn’t quite friendly now, but you would dare to say that there is the potential for tentative allyship between you and him. That is, if either of you weren't so terrible with trusting the other.
Once he’s sure that your connection is strong enough, he speaks like time is clean water and you're both stranded in the desert. “Heed my advice.” He spares no time to be polite, impressive, or professional. Thankfully, they’re still intelligible. “Learn the history. Kill the Founder.” You take note of both instructions. Their order, their careful brevity - words intentionally chosen from distilled meaning, thousands of things he does not have the time to say. “It’s the only way to break the path he set for you.”
Why doesn’t the Red One aggress like he had before? A fight is not ideal, but it's still a curious switch from his previous demeanor. The answer lies somewhere in his eager disposition, the rush in his voice and the nearly hopeful raise of his head. Now you’re meeting him in the beginning, where there is still time to change your course, rather than at the end, where it was already too late. He needs you to keep carrying out your own will, and all he can do is pray you make the right choice.
It wouldn’t take much physical strength to pry the doors open, but it requires decent mental fortitude just for you to take a step forward.
You saw the image of what lies beyond the door. There was a messy office, with research paraphernalia strewn all across every clear surface. There were binders filled with material and shelves of resources, counters without a single empty space. A ladder, a full-body mirror positioned in front of the desk, and a TV in the back. Hopefully you're not so naive to still think it’s for leisure.
All of it pales in comparison to what you know the real feature is - the centerpiece of the office. A figure in a suit, whom you hesitate to call a man. He wasn’t doing anything else when you came in. Wasn’t pretending to read or write. It’s very clear from the moment you lay your eyes on him that he’s simply been waiting for you to open that door, arms folded on the desk.
You couldn’t see his face then, and you cannot see it now. That same obstruction blocks your gaze from finally bearing witness to the monster behind all of this. You feel a migraine at the edge of your mind the more you try to look at - or look past, rather - the crown of censorship donned unceremoniously across his visage. Eventually, you stop trying. Your hand twitches at its side when the question crosses your mind of whether or not the box is a physical surface or if you could still feel their face under it. You’re still unsure whether you would have decked him or simply traced the shape of his face. At least one of those options is still incredibly tempting.
His eyes flick down to your fingers, which had barely moved, but somehow he’d noted it. Damn it. Of course he would notice each of your little micro-movements. Well, he is a professional at watching. If he spent all those years observing you and had no idea how to find anything interesting in what he saw, it would be depressing. From this moment forward, you determine yourself to stand entirely still and react with the bare minimum. Give him as little to work with as possible.
Something about the smell of this room… or maybe how it looks? Sounds? Feels? Something about the office is uncanny enough to trigger pressure on your skull, like looking into a bright, strobing light (even though this place is quite dark). You close your eyes for a moment when it starts to hurt, but you try not to escape it for too long. You don’t know what impression that would give.
The inside of your mouth tastes like metal, like you’re trapped in a place inconceivably lined with nuclear poisoning. Your internal organs feel lined by rust. You wouldn’t be surprised if your nose spontaneously started bleeding.
Every crack radiates disease. Embedded into each atom that comprises this office is a disgusting infection, odorless and invisible but so so bitter. The Founder’s curse, one he has yet to cure. Hopefully he does not think you are the key to fixing whatever this is. Two seconds in here and you already consider turning tail.
“Welcome back,” he says.
You jolt at the sound of his voice. You weren’t prepared for that well-tamed baritone, with the theatrical timbre that keeps his steady words far from boredom. But the real surprise might have been the reminder that something alive (or at least, projecting the illusion of being alive) can exist next to matter that feels so decayed.
He chuckles. It isn’t fond, but it’s as warm as a welcome can be. The Founder speaks to you in real time rather than projecting text on a screen. …Well, he was technically always speaking in real time, at least on his end. “Come forward. I don’t bite.”
You would beg to differ. With a light glance over your shoulder, you look into the wavy mirror where you saw Ben. Or… ‘Ben.’
While standing in the world of his game, rather than just observing it on a screen, you catch many more details than you previously could. Mainly, it’s easier to see the definition of his suit. You can see more acutely where it starts and ends, and how it fits on his body.
One thing that does ease the teeming nausea building in your throat is noticing just how small his frame is. By no means is he short, but you think if he shed the layers, all that would be underneath is a skeleton. The breeze would blow right through him like his bones were windchimes, and he’d rattle before returning to his posture.
“I couldn’t guess what exactly you have returned for,” the Founder says, straightening his posture like he wasn’t already ramrod straight. “Though I can imagine about a million reasons, all equally possible, all probably inevitable.” He shrugs. “I take no offense.”
Getting a read of him may very well be impossible. Anything could be a lie, even the way his hands squeeze and his shoulders hike before he calmly forces them down. He’s a showman. He’ll perform however he wants to.
“So, what do you want to know?”
Funnily enough, his immediate reaction to that is a burst of a laugh, a single cackle that bubbles up without his permission. He quickly swallows the rest down. You imagine him pressing his lips together firmly to rid the crease of a smile, even if you wouldn’t be able to see it anyway.
“Oh, I doubt you need me to tell you,” he says, rising from his desk. You’re intimidated for just a moment by the reveal of his stature. You could tackle him, but he has the high ground on you.
You shove the fear and unease aside the second you feel your hate singing the edges of your resolve. You cling to that loathing like a lifeline. The burning heat of rage keeps you grounded under the icy attention of that solid-color void. The pressure thins the air, but you try not to quicken your breaths even with your chest now burning.
“You all have been very vocal about your opinions.” He grabs your face and forces your gaze in his direction. The glittery chrome gloves have a weaved texture against your skin. You know they’re rouge, but in this place, they look as black as ink.
For a moment, you thank the curse that forced this box over him. If the full intensity of his voice spilled into his glare, you’d be at risk of folding like a house of cards and hiding under your chair. The clenching of your jaw prompts his hand to release you.
He leans back and pulls the edge of his glove taut again before sitting down as though he did nothing. “So, why do you ask?” His legs cross, and he leans back in his seat. With all the autonomy you weren’t afforded last time the two of you met, the Founder has his work cut out for him this time. He doesn’t bother to play pretend and behave like this is a business meeting between colleagues. “Were you just curious to see what I’ll say about myself?” He scoffs.
You glare back and refuse to answer. No matter how clever or scathing your response, he’ll have something damning to shoot back with. He can’t scare the scowl off your face. He’s just saying nonsense, isn't he? To see what nerves he can press, to gauge whatever will get you to react. Again.
“What? Nothing to say?”
Your jaw sets.
“Do you wish to see me fawn in front of you? Is that it?” He plants his hands on his desk. There’s the slightest, slightest spark of feeling you can see in its stiffness, but there's visible effort taken to keep all emotion contained within his borders. “To cry and bemoan my station? Because if that’s what you’re here for, you’re better off leaving.”
You can’t help yourself. Your irritation simmers to the very top, grating against you like the sound of knives scraping against each other. “You don’t tell me what to do.”
He huffs. The chuckle that follows is empty of amusement. “I suppose I don’t. But don’t get ahead of yourself - that doesn’t mean you have any control over the situation.”
Again, you’re tempted to punch him. That might feel like control enough for him. But you practice your self-control with the promise to yourself that later, you might be able to do so much more.
“Anything else? Or was that your one and only thought?”
Once you leave the room in silence, the Founder decides that the floor is his once again.
“You know what I want.”
If he expects you to actually answer, he’s sorely mistaken.
The Founder leans back in his chair casually, his hand clutching his face and now hiding behind the box. He could be holding his chin, or propping up his cheek, or pressing the pad of his thumb against his sharp canine while he considers you.
“You aren’t here to negotiate with me then, hmm?”
You’re not going to give it up freely either. Your preferred scenario is that the Founder never gets what he wants and his schemes fizzle out and die. It isn’t going to be that easy, you know that. But you can hope.
The Founder senses your silent resistance and instead steeples his hands in front of his boxed face. “That’s okay. I can wait.”
And this time, he actually can, since he isn’t on an intangible time limit set by the whims of Infinity’s wavelengths. It’s been an eternity for the Founder to get to this point, so what’s a little bit longer?
You zip your lips. You’re determined to make good on that promise you made to yourself - give him as little ammunition as possible. Or maybe you’re curious to see what he’ll do. Even though you were the one to enter his world, you await what he has in store, because no doubt he has something up his sleeve.
“Simply lonely, are you?” He says, mostly to himself. His hands ease their tight grip and his shoulders slacken. Even though any movements above his chest are lost in the black, him tipping his head to the side is visible. “That or bored,” he mutters. “Either way, you’re welcome to loiter.”
And that’s that.
…that’s it? It took two minutes for him to come to terms with the fact his Audience is here. In the flesh. In a place he can see and hear and touch. You would have thought he’d be more manic. Or, hostile. Obsessive. Anything as intense as he was last time! The preconceived notions you had of him were clearly - well - preconceived.
The choppy low-framed animation of the game when the Founder moved is unlike how he moves now. Each gesture is smooth and as high resolution as real life. It’s most apparent as the Founder rises from his seat and strides over to a shelf of his.
When he moves too quickly, the censor lags just a bit behind and shows you a mere hint of bright hair. The box catches up quick enough that you can’t actually make out its shape or texture. His hand hovers over the spines of some books, clearly in search of a specific one. He idly clicks his tongue and hums under his breath while his fingers curl and repeatedly reach out on impulse for books he realizes he doesn’t want to grab.
Seeing the way he acts while idle is a delight you didn’t have the privilege to see before, when the only information you could glean were the important things that he made a note to emphasize to you. This is more raw. More real. More authentic without the filters to curate your experience to exactly what he wants it to be.
“Do you want something from me?” You didn’t expect your voice to sound like that. You didn’t expect yourself to have a voice at all. The words tumble out of you without even waiting for permission, so you guess you’re running with this.
Subconsciously, your hands drift to graze your neck. You can’t tell if it’s meant to be flesh or metal. There are vocal cords of some sort underneath this, either way.
The Founder pauses, hand hovering in midair. He looks over his shoulder, which you can see by the twisting of his torso, and (most likely) inspects you. Now you can see his full form, legs and all, with the belt that snatches his waist and the fabric that does a poor job of hiding the weakness in his thin limbs.
“Do you want something from me?” He throws back, pivoting to face you in his entirety. Even if you wished to speak, you wouldn’t know what to answer with. The clear unanimous answer is yes, but after that, everyone disagrees on what precisely to request from him.
The Founder doesn’t pry. He steps back to his chair with the slow clicks of his dress shoes and sinks into his seat.
It’s almost eerie how quickly he accepts your presence as part of the natural order of things, like a beloved token that’s been living in this office for an eternity. You slot right in to fill an empty space in his world.
He softens to your presence, just a bit.
“Why are you here, Audience?”
Tackle the Founder
Give him the silent treatment
Look around his office
Who are you kidding?
You’ve had near enough of his constant droning. His entitlement is so bizarre that it makes your face tingle like you’ve eaten something you’re allergic to. Every word out his mouth triggers enough second hand embarrassment for you to finally snap and do what you’ve been aching to do since the start of this wild goose chase.
You dive across the desk with a war cry, gunning for his throat.
The Founder doesn’t have near enough time to prevent it. You tackle him to the ground and pin him down by the shoulders. Using your knees to quell his kicking honestly isn’t the most effective strat. He’s larger than you, but at least you have the high ground. For now. You have to end this quickly before that changes.
“What - Audience!” He sounds winded. After a couple pants, he says, “I didn’t think you’d - ”
He can’t get too many words out before you kick him in the stomach. He wheezes like an old man struggling to get up the stairs. “Stop talking!” You shout through the furious rumble in your throat. “You’re a monster! I’m not giving you anything!”
Your rage intensifies when you notice that he isn’t even afraid. His limbs tense with his accelerating frustration, but no shock. No terror. Goddamnit. After a moment of grieving the idea of you two collaborating, the Founder thrashes and eventually pulls one arm out of your grip. Looks like you aren’t as strong as you assumed.
His hand curls into a tight fist. He slugs you right across the face. You might have thought that the Founder wouldn’t be able to fight back from (primarily) his emotional reservations. Looks like he has no qualms about decking you in the nose.
While you try to bounce back from the hit, the Founder manages to scramble out from under you. He picks himself onto his feet. But he doesn’t immediately spring back into action - he hunches over and pants, fingers splayed. “Alright,” he breathes, the gravel in his tone highlighted now that he doesn’t bother to smooth it out. “Fine.” He shakes himself out and pulls off his tie. After throwing that carelessly to the side, his fingers unbutton his red blazer. His practice with the buttons counteracts the disorientation, so he doesn’t fumble too much with his hands. “If that’s what you choose.” It slides off his shoulders, onto the ground, and leaves just his dress shirt as guard. Now you know that your impressions of a skeletal form were not too inaccurate after all.
You pull yourself up too, resigning to the fight you locked yourself in. The Founder does have an advantage, for once, due to the box. You can’t exactly see his face so you can’t swing at him properly.
Instead, you sic yourself onto his writing arm, clamping your jaw tighter, tighter, tighter. Your nails dig into skin to latch yourself in a way he cannot pry off. You can taste blood. Once you see a deeper red bloom into the fabric of the white dress shirt (which appears more black from the game’s filtered lighting), you rip away. A chunk of flesh and cloth is your proud claim. You spit that onto the ground.
The Founder tries to stifle his pain, but the yell he lets out is satisfying enough to finally bring a smile to your bloodied lips, even while trapped in this wretched place. He sniffs and has a moment of pitifulness, which you try to make the most of.
Through his agony, he strains to speak. “As much as I adore what you give me, there are times where you - ” he groans when you conk your foreheads together, enough force to make you see stars. The Founder, somehow, recovers from his disorientation quicker than you do. His hands loop around your throat and tighten relentlessly. Blood drips down the open wound in his arm, and his grip blocks your airway in seconds flat. When you resist, he pulls you up and slams your head into the ground hard enough to crunch. Once. Twice. A third time, his hair so unruly you can actually see the strands flying where the censor ends. “Where you test me!”
He can feel your pulse against his palm. Namely, he can feel the way it accelerates the more desperately you try to breathe.
“It’s a shame things had to turn out that way.” He’s out of breath, but he can’t let you pass in peace. Damn his soul if he gave you even one second where he isn’t capitalizing on your existence. Your chest burns with the lack of oxygen to your lungs. It’s getting harder and harder for you to see at the edge of your vision, to even move how you want to. No matter how much you gasp, it doesn’t accomplish anything.
This one moment alone is the perfect encapsulation of the Founder - hands so lithe and elegantly dressed, yet at a moment’s notice capable of so much unrelenting violence.
“Do forgive me, will you?” You can hear the smile in his voice, more importantly the unabashed delight. This bastard isn’t apologetic at all. “Next time you see me.”
It’s the last thing you hear before your senses swim into black.
Telling him the answer would be incredibly stupid. Not only would he try to stop you, but you doubt he asks due to not knowing. When you choose silence, he doesn’t rip away your choice. He lets you have your coveted silence.
… for all of two seconds. Until he gets bored and derails the moment himself.
“Well, if you’re not here to bring me anything, I’ll give something to you.”
With his vitriolic reaction to stillness and quiet, you’d think it would be a torture for him to hear nothing. You wonder if it actually is. You wish you could slip into his skin and walk in his shoes for just a minute to answer all your questions. (And maybe you should offer up some background music recommendations, but aren’t sure if the Founder’s generation has an equivalent to Spotify).
“I’ll strike you a deal.” You get the sense he’s quirking a brow your way. Uselessly. “Do I have your attention?”
From the firmness in his voice, it seems he won’t proceed until he actually receives an answer. Asshole. You still won’t grant him the satisfaction of hearing your voice again, especially now that he’s actively fishing for it. Instead, you nod.
The Founder hums disapprovingly, but it's sufficient enough a response. “You know what I’m after,” he says, leaning a bit back in his chair while he steeples his hands. It’s a caricature of power. “I want my works to survive in a permanent place, immune to blemish. I need a strong framework if I ever wish to tell the perfect story. If you ever wish to hear it.”
With crossed your arms and a strengthened stance, his shameless appeals roll off your back like a light trickle of water. He can’t swindle you out of anything, not when you’re already so well-informed of his cheats and tricks.
“Authenticity and… method-acting,” - very kind way for him to say ‘torturing people and stringing that into a plot’ - “are essential pieces of my operation.” His voice squeezes in earnest. His hands fall to his lap. Fractions of you wish to see his face, to see the gleam in his eye and the curve of his mouth as he speaks about his passion, his purpose, his one true love. “It’s unacceptable that, even with all the measures I have taken to tune every facet, every word, into the truest reflections of human condition they could possibly be, everything I do still falls short of being real.”
He is nothing if not an engaging speaker. The flares in his voice, the theatrical emphasis on the most dramatized parts of his monologue. He isn’t exactly as formal as the impression you had of him before. Of course, he’s polite, maintaining the manner of a professional with vigor about his work, but occasionally his voice slackens with something casual. Something overly natural and human. He's almost convincing, once or twice.
“I need you to know, I am real.” He sets his hands on his chest, over his heart. “I need you to take me to where I’m meant to be. Where real things go. I need my work to be real, to matter beyond the brief window of time where my bane will not destroy them.”
But you wish a little more he would shut his mouth. Or maybe you could sew it shut, slit his throat so he can’t take a breath and slip into another lecture. Maybe in some other universe you can.
“All I need from you is your patronage.” He speaks like regaling the mythology of his god. “Your eyes, your viewership. Your intellectual engagement. I need you to elevate me. I need you to perfect me. All I need is for you to recognize my reality.”
He rises from his seat, practiced and serene, but not without energy buzzing through his gloved hand. It stretches out to formally offer you his proposition.
Your hands stay in your lap. The Founder may position his hands similar, but you cannot tell, as he is behind the desk. You'd call it a staring contest if you could see his eyes at all.
The Founder clears his throat lightly. It's an absurd disruption on your mutual silence, to the point of being disrespectful. Nothing makes sound, not even a clock. There must be at least one clock in here, among all the clutter. Maybe time just isn't passing.
By some strange tic in your inner mechanisms, your head jerks to the side, much like how an animal does to hear its surroundings better. The Founder visibly mimics you, still acting like your loyal little reflection.
"Do you really hate me all that much?" The words fall softly from his mouth. "You'll travel all the way to my office just to do nothing with me?"
The sympathizer that forces your heart to squeeze interprets the fickle sound of his voice as fragility, possibly brokenness. The rest of you can hardly stand to pity him. His poor boy approach is too-sweet frosting, and the cake was too saturated in the first place.
In the original game, you were helpless to everything that the Founder scripted for you. There was no way for you to break out of the bounds of his plan, no way to exercise the power of reality. Now, there is more control in your hands than there ever has been. And with that free will, you choose to remain stationary. The Founder, for once, may be expressing an honest emotion. Surprise. Perhaps disappointment. Concern?
"Or…" one of his hands finally reaches up, grasping what you think to be his chin. His shoulders straighten, returning him to his posture of certainty. "Are you just exploring all your options?" This is not the first time that someone has acknowledged that. Still, the Founder nods his head curtly, clearly proud of himself for recalling the way you tend to play these games. "Just making sure you've seen everything there is to see in your little game, hmm? Can't miss out on even a second of content?"
You clench your jaw to suppress a scowl. No ammunition, you remind yourself. Give him no ammunition. Still, your stomach twists at the smug and pleasure in his brilliant baritone. How he's managed to turn this back around to something he could consider "in his favor" is beyond you.
The Founder doesn't say anything more in response to your silent staring. He seems content with the little window of predictability you have granted, if the way he visibly settles into his chair is anything to go off of.
Eventually, his chair clicks when his weight shifts. His wheels squeak slightly against the floor. With an elbow on the table and his glove again hidden behind his obstruction, he rests his head (or his cheek, or his jaw) against his hand. All the easier to watch you this way.
And that is what he does. He watches. and watches. And watches like you're the most compelling thing this side of Infinity. Or… maybe he watches with utter boredom, so drowsy from nothing happening that he has to take a little nap. Or maybe his hackles are raised, poised to spring up and fight back at any moment you choose to leap for him, and he's simply disguised it behind a lax demeanor.
The tilt of his head is prominent. The box follows its rotation, for whatever reason. It makes the square look less like a censor and like more of a mask or fixture. A plane that exists in real space even though it does not.
He does not say anything. Neither do you. It's a stalemate, and it may continue this way indefinitely.
There is nothing more for you down this way.
He watches. and watches. And watches like you're the most compelling thing this side of Infinity. Or… maybe he watches with utter boredom, so drowsy from nothing happening that he has to take a little nap. Or maybe his hackles are raised, poised to spring up and fight back at any moment you choose to leap for him, and he's simply disguised it behind a lax demeanor.
The tilt of his head is prominent. The box follows its rotation, for whatever reason. It makes the square look less like a censor and like more of a mask or fixture. A plane that exists in real space even though it does not.
He does not say anything. Neither do you. It's a stalemate, and it may continue this way indefinitely.
There is nothing more for you down this way.
He watches. and watches. And watches like you're the most compelling thing this side of Infinity. Or… maybe he watches with utter boredom, so drowsy from nothing happening that he has to take a little nap. Or maybe his hackles are raised, poised to spring up and fight back at any moment you choose to leap for him, and he's simply disguised it behind a lax demeanor.
The tilt of his head is prominent. The box follows its rotation, for whatever reason. It makes the square look less like a censor and like more of a mask or fixture. A plane that exists in real space even though it does not.
He does not say anything. Neither do you. It's a stalemate, and it may continue this way indefinitely.
There is nothing more for you down this way.
He watches. and watches. And watches like you're the most compelling thing this side of Infinity. Or… maybe he watches with utter boredom, so drowsy from nothing happening that he has to take a little nap. Or maybe his hackles are raised, poised to spring up and fight back at any moment you choose to leap for him, and he's simply disguised it behind a lax demeanor.
The tilt of his head is prominent. The box follows its rotation, for whatever reason. It makes the square look less like a censor and like more of a mask or fixture. A plane that exists in real space even though it does not.
He does not say anything. Neither do you. It's a stalemate, and it may continue this way indefinitely.
There is nothing more for you down this way.
"… you're still here?" His gentle voice enters the scene that you had been convinced was now a still-life painting. You blink rapidly and glance lightly to your right and left. Ah. You are still here.
Forcing your head into the wall is a strategy that does not usually succeed. It is difficult to tell if the Founder is impressed or exasperated. The sigh and the drop of his shoulders could suggest either, with how touchy his performances can be.
The empathy that curls around his voice sounds disgustingly real, almost more sickening than if it had been obvious deception. Figures he'd be able to relate to this plight. Trapped on a single track with no way to exit. It makes him sound more like a victim of this world than the catalyst of destruction that he is. The thought brings a scowl to your face.
"Your persistence is admirable." The Founder moves, at last. He pulls away from the desk and leans back in his chair, arms casually thrown over the rests. His leg pushes against the floor to sway his rolling chair lightly back and forth. Are you truly boring him? "If you really think that waiting long enough will find you new secrets, then you are sorely mistaken."
Your scowl deepens, for his visibility if nothing else.
"Exit the browser," he says. He throws his hand in the air as he adds, "restart the game." With the drop of his hand he firmly suggests, "explore another ending."
Is he begging you, or just tired? Nothing in his demeanor reads like a plea, not like you've seen him plea before. His posture is wholly unprofessional. The only tension in his voice comes from his command.
For a moment, words hop from your throat to your tongue and lurk behind your teeth, knocking on their cage and nearly sneaking out before you can click the lock of your lips. With a bit of force, you swallow them back down and let them burn to nothing in whatever equivalent to stomach acid, if any, this vessel has.
An air of finality follows his next, and final statement, a sound that sinks your gut. "There is nothing for you here." Of course, it has only been a few minutes of wasted time for you, but you have still been waiting here for hours.
Very few people can be so stubborn to keep bashing one's skull into the bricks after hearing that.
Your first inclination is to start wandering with the free legs you weren’t afforded in the Founder’s version of this game. He startles when you start roaming, but he doesn’t object. He just watches. His head turns to follow every move you make.
“Curious little thing, aren’t you?” He says, circling you at a distance. Inspecting you like some sort of lab specimen. “Well, of course you are.” With the way he lets the words fall under his breath, you aren’t sure if he’s talking to you or just muttering to himself. He must love his own voice. “That’s the reason you made it this far in the first place.”
You’re on the other side of the Founder’s desk now. It’s a mess here, a real mess. A hodgepodge of items that make sense but are still quite random and strewn about. Come on, a ladder?
At once, the thought of the mirror returns to your mind, with its ornate frame and distinctive tall shape. It sits against the wall, just at the other end of the desk. From its placing, you had assumed he fixed it right in front of him so he could constantly look at himself.
It would be a thing of conceit if you didn’t know his reflection also includes the box. Maybe it’s a reminder. A punishment. A discipline that prompts him to keep working even if he’s tired, because he looks up and is told all over again what he’s working so hard to avoid.
Only if the Founder can actually see the box. You wonder if that’s something only you can see - but you doubt it. Even if he can’t see the actual symbol, you’re sure he’s aware of what it represents either way.
When you whip around to face the reflective glass, you blink at yourself. Once, twice. Somehow the sight shocks you, even though you should have expected this the most.
“Why are you surprised?” He takes a step toward you. Tentative affection, more like fascination, coils into his words the more courageous he gets. He quiets down so few else could hear. “It’s the same old you.”
And it is. It’s just you there, in all your unorthodox glory. The tips of your fingers trail hesitantly over your cheek, a light, slow glide. It looks like skin. Like your skin, but it doesn’t feel right. Maybe skin has some other chemical composition in this generation.
Unease swirls in your stomach like a disgusting slurry of meat from a sausage sweatshop, just from being perceived. This time, the Founder gets to see this facet of you. You don’t think of yourself as anything special, but this is too real for his eyes to behold. He doesn’t deserve it.
You still can’t see his face, not even in the mirror, but you get the feeling he’s narrowing his eyes, gazing unblinkingly at your every move. Maybe he’s just as nervous as you, if not more.
Your finger twitches, just to see the way his body flinches forward on instinct. He moves just an inch, but he still moves. Hah.
“You torment me.” Now he’s talking like you can’t even hear him. His voice drips with the projected disdain only a thespian could have on stage. “You know that?”
You turn to find the source of his voice. Is he blending in somewhere with the background? He probably isn’t trying to, if anything.
Instead of finding his form, your attention is drawn by two separate things -
One book on the shelf sticks out a little more than the rest of the clutter. Next to stacks of binders, papers, VHSs, and other texts, you can see the spine of this book quite clearly. It has the hetch scribed on it in rouge ink. …You think it may not be ink. The way it calls to you is almost like a tease.
The other is something that belongs far, far less to a room like this. In fact, if either of the two is a set-up, it's this one. A knife, its metal end hidden by an unstandardized size of paper, with the handle facing you. It entices you to grab. You consider how well your fingers would curl around its grooves, how your palm would slot into the ridges.
The Founder’s baritone rumbles in his throat for a moment, on the cusp of a word, but then he realizes where your attention is. He waits patiently for your choice - if you’ll grab one, the other, or neither at all. He has no little quips to sway you either way.
The Founder urges slightly back when you stand, stalking about the room like the office belonged to you.
With little wasted time, your fingers curl around that handle. Ah. So, that's how your hand fits. Not perfectly. In fact, the hold itself is a little awkward. Your fingers are too long, short, fat, and bony at the same time, and pressing your skin against the wood feels like a buzz. Trying to make heads or tails of the perplexing feeling would eat time you cannot afford to lose.
You turn woodenly, intent flashing in the eye that isn't eclisped by the shadows of your face. He springs to a stand.
You flip the knife in your hand to point it outwards and surge forward with a loud cry. The Founder ducks out of the way by diving to the side. His tumble is anything but graceful. While you get your bearings and try to find him, he manages to spring up again by bracing against his desk.
“Stop that!” His lapels are unsmoothed, and his tie already peeks out past its natural tuck. He runs his hands through his hair, you guess, to smooth it out. This nutjob should have bigger priorities than a cosmetic you can’t even see.
It’s easier to navigate by sound so you don’t hurt your eyes moving so quickly in a world where every graphic is so poor. You incrementally close your eyes and listen for his breathing, for the shuffling on the ground.
The fabric of the Founder’s pant leg rubs against the floor.
There.
You dive to reach him before he can fully slither away, arms flailing around to feel him out. Your hand locks around his ankle. You finally open your eyes, only to get a face full of foot. He kicks you in the nose. You groan. When you clutch your face, you feel a trail of blood already pouring. Well, at the very least, now you know you can bleed.
The Founder hoists himself up. You latch onto him so he pulls you up with him. Then, the moment you have an opening, you plunge the knife right into his stomach.
The Founder stops. He stiffens up. The fabric folded over his bones scrunches up where you’ve pinned it at the center. Oh, his poor white shirt.
You can imagine his eyes flicking down to the obtrusion sticking out of his body. Then back at you. Once it seems his body has realized its injury, he chokes. “I…” He tries to produce a sound but it comes out through the narrow passageway of his closed throat.
The Founder doesn’t do much to rip away from you. Your fingers tighten in case it’s just a play.
“You…” his breath rattles. “You want me gone that quickly?” His voice wavers robotically. If you couldn’t feel the blood gush out of the wound, blacker than ink in this lighting, you’d think he wasn’t human. You’d think you stabbed the blade into a mechanized voice module, the way his vocals glitch and stutter.
His body slackens. Arms down, fight drained. He sighs in resignation. Before, every breath sounded like he was speaking through a metal can, but this sigh is organic. It sounds as though he’s standing right in front of you.
“What… a way to go, huh?” He huffs. Some blood splats on your cheek. A laugh flickers in his voice for just an instant, an amusement exclusive to himself. “What a finale.”
You almost joke that you should have stabbed him in the back instead, just for the narrative of it all, but that wouldn’t make all too much sense. This isn’t a betrayal. If he takes it as such, that’s on him for so pitifully bearing his heart to you.
His head lolls back, and his shoulders roll with it. “I - need you,” he breathes, sucking in whatever shallow air he can stuff into his lungs. The switch-up is sudden and more like how you expected him, but you still want more. He isn’t as afraid as you’d like him.
You narrow your eyes. In suspicion, in contempt, in mockery of his belated pull for sympathy.
Your hands tighten on the handle of the blade, digging it as deep into his flesh as you can. You twist. The meat squelches. Deeper rouge blooms into the red suit fabric. A weary groan floats out of him. He clutches your hands, his fingers curled around the handle and nearly intertwined with yours. You feel the way the excessive blood seeps into the pores of the glove fabric. It’s unsavory.
“I need you… to fix what’s wrong with me.”
Even this close, the box looms. It’s intimidating to be this close to it, just a foot away. Nearly nose to nose. It emanates a devastating aura, and you can’t articulate exactly what it makes you feel. Rot. Decay. The end of old things to make way for the new. Though, the Founder is stubborn. He should be in the ground, having long been used as the matter to sustain something else, but he rips the nutrients from the world and forces it to sustain him instead. This world will never let him forget what he is, what he ought to be. He can’t escape forever.
Not every part of you wants to kill him. You’d never admit it to the Founder, for the threat of inflating his impossibly large ego is already too great. But you are wondering what is going to happen next. To Ben, to Zero, to the Red One. All of them. The Founder wasn’t all too careless to think that your curiosity alone would protect him.
Now their stories are going to continue outside of your view, and you’ll miss them. But at least they’ll be out of the Founder’s control. It’s a worthy tradeoff.
The Founder staggers back. His chest bursts with viscera, barely held by his clutching at his chest. Guts burst out of the rip. Your hand twitches to reach for it and yank it all out. His gloved hands are red for more than one reason now. Fumbling steps and weak legs cross over each other as he distances himself from you.
The speed and disorientation of his traipsing body make it so the censor has a hard time catching up with him. There’s only one memorable thing you catch during the stumble - a smile lights his face, like a single candle in a foggy night shielding you from blindness in a grotesque, dangerous place.
He chokes on blood. It sputters out his mouth when he pools his energy to say one last thing: “You still can.”
When he convulses, you can imagine his eyes rolling into the back of his head. He careens to the ground, a gurgle still in the back of his throat.
His smile, impossibly smug, too satisfied for your liking, lingers in your mind even long after his body goes limp. In any other circumstance, his steady confidence and steadfastness could be a comfort, if you hadn’t expressly wanted to snuff it out.
If he could go on grinning like nothing was wrong, then the Founder still isn’t defeated. Of course it isn’t that easy.
He wouldn’t have let this happen unless he was confident in his failsafes. He still exists in another place. Another generation. Another somewhere. And the Connection will bring the two of you together again.
It’s a struggle to muster up the resolve. This simulation, to the body in this world, is real enough to fool you. Your fingers feel the polished wood of the handle. Your knuckles crack when you tighten your grip. If you quiet down your breathing enough, you can even hear a heartbeat.
But, with one triumphant deep breath, you plunge the knife into your stomach, piercing through… clothes? Sheet metal? Wires and viscera? You couldn’t be sure, but the one thing you know is that it hurts.
Not enough for you to stop.
Your body hunches over, folding from the pain and the new gash under your ribs. Sure, maybe the stomach area isn’t the best place to go if you want a lethal cut that’ll puncture essential organs, but you can be a showman too. If you want your theatrics, if you want to witness his heart leap into his throat at seeing his idol of worship bleed out in front of him, then that’s exactly what you’re going to get.
The Founder lets out a hushed gasp and stumbles back a step or three. If he was any less becoming, it might have been a scream. His hand reaches up to clutch his pearls. Or his gaping mouth. Or to cover his eyes. You can’t quite tell which. The crunchy graphics, the censor box, and your now swimming vision all make it hard to see much of anything.
You feel yourself collapse. The thud of your body hitting the ground is loud enough for even you to hear. It takes a little effort to dislodge the knife from your core but once you do, blood gushes out in oozes. It’s much more viscous than it should be. Maybe that’s just what blood looks like at this frequency, sticky globs of deep rouge.
In another place, you’re safe and comfortable, relatively unharmed in comparison to the open wound weeping its fluids all over your… clothes? Body? Even looking into the mirror you still couldn’t tell exactly what rests snug against your form. Somehow you feel less naked with the knife in your side, so you shove it back in. A little higher, this time. Maybe you can get to your heart before he does.
The Founder ushers over and falls to his knees, grabbing your hand like you’re his ill mistress. You spit in his face. Blood splatters out of your mouth and you only wish you could see the offense in his eyes.
“Oh, no, no, no,” he clicks under his breath. His gloved hand squeezes your equally red one. “This was far too hasty. What were you thinking?” Your pulse becomes fainter with the lack of blood to fill your veins. Now it’s all around you, painting his office in yet more shades of monochrome reds and blacks. It pools at your back and clings to your entire body. It isn’t a pretty sight, not at all. Yet the Founder still sounds so reverent at your side.
You were either going to be at his mercy or at your own, and he would wring you dry of everything you could give him before he finally retired you to death. No thanks.
“You still have so much left to do in this world,” he says gently, his breath hitting your face. His softened tone, like the tranquil way a brook tumbles over smoothened rocks, forces you to pay attention to his words. You are captive to what he says, but as an inmate. You’re held prisoner here until he lets you die and leave this game in peace. “And in others…”
You choke on blood. Sputtering, coughing, foaming at the mouth when your natural reflex to breathe only bubbles the fluid that already exists there. Even if you wanted to reply, to spit again, to get his grimy hands off you, you couldn’t. You’re trapped in his adoration.
“Oh, alright,” he says solemnly. His sorrow doesn’t rack him. He’s still serene. Both of you are aware this end isn’t permanent. It won’t ever be permanent. So the traces of grief you still catch in his voice must originate from somewhere else. “If you cannot stay this time, then at least in another time. Another place.” His knuckles glide tenderly across your bloodied cheek. He whispers it so concernedly, so earnestly, that you almost lose it. “Consider remaining with me.”
This wasn’t your intent, but what’s done is done. You’re much too weak to oppose it now. He’s taken the knife and set it aside so the main centerpiece of the scene is the visceral trophy he’s claimed in you.
Forced by the Founder’s free will eclipsing your own, you die in his embrace.
The hetch. A symbol of creation that was adopted by the living, breathing talisman of degradation. Who better to corrupt its image?
No matter where it came from or who tarnished it, it is a repeating pattern in these repeating worlds. The spine of that book is like looking in a window to Chronicle Zero, to the Social Experiments, to the button and the tree and the bloody scrawls tucked away in the unsavory corners. It's tossed through the screen at an audience that ravenously consumes any sight of it.
The second your eyes land on that book, your fingers twitch. You leap out of your seat and rush for it, unable to shake the uncomfortable hunch that nothing in this room is meant to be accessed.
The Founder rushes too, not bothering to fix his tie when it untucks itself from his top coat. No time for things like that when he is so eager to beat you to it.
One second, you're running, everything in you focused on reaching that book. All your power, all your energy, the full force of your concentration pinned on that anomaly housed on the Founder's shelf.
Then, one second later, you stop. Your muscles, previously engaged and exerting all the energy this body will permit you to, lock in place. Just that brief moment of hesitation is enough of an advantage for the Founder to pluck the book right off the shelf before you can. He holds his hand there on the spine for a second, huffing out a breath, before actually taking it.
The second control is his again, you watch him slot easily back into his assumed role. The Founder rolls his shoulders back and settles in his body, melting into the scene like he belongs more than anything else. His practiced hands fix his tie like it had never been disheveled in the first place. “A story." His voice curls, too light to be talking directly to you. His hand brushes the cover of the book, lightly tracing it as if he could even feel its texture through that thick glove. Then he looks up. "Is that all you wanted? To hear a story?”
The question is so… innocent, in a way. The sort of way that sets a sour sting in your mouth. His glee would be endearing, coming from a reasonable person's voice. Alas, there are only two voices here. One is too stubborn to make itself known. Not at the cost of bringing him more twisted joy. It isn't worth it. Your lips twist and your nose wrinkles up, arms crossing over your chest.
Your pursuit for the book goes conveniently unaddressed. And unpunished. You take it as a mercy from the Founder.
He, for whatever reason, takes that silent response as an eager, receptive yes. With no further prompting his hands land on your shoulders (when did he even get back there?!) to lead you behind his desk. You jolt at his touch but aren't in the standing to struggle against his tightening grip.
His seat is lined with cushions for both the back and bottom, unlike the stiff wooden one on the visitor's side of the desk. He pushes you into it. Your muscles melt into the ergonomic design. The Founder chuckles. His hand reaches toward you, then pauses midair, and he draws it back like deciding against whatever gesture he was instinctually about to do. "Yes, get comfortable." The grin is audible in his voice.
Your eyes widen when you realize that in the matter of seconds, he's tamed you. You're docile, easily led around, and shushed with the little tap of your nose. You bare your teeth and cross your arms, looking away from the Founder in one final show of rebellion.
He saunters about his room with smug, playful steps and places the book back on the shelf with the theatrical toss of his hand, at a higher point that you cannot reach without the use of the stepladder in the farthest corner of the room. Bastard.
The Founder makes his way to the other side of the desk, lowering down to match your eyeline and leaning forward to be ever closer. “Do react when you feel like it." His hand brushes the apple of your cheek, quickly trailing down to your chin and pulling away. The caress is fleeting and barely lasts a second. His tenderness glues your lips shut with a foul-tasting tar. Is this what he would have done to you in the game? Your hands twitch at the thought, but you don't act. Mainly because you cannot decide if you would rather push him away or strangle him until his heart no longer beats.
From here you can easily see the mirror fixed to the wall, but you decide not to focus on the reflection and instead on him, the black box that's meant to be face that fills the majority of your vision. Neither option is quite good, and both make your insides churn, but there is no clearer way for him to communicate that you have no choice but to pay attention.
Your loathful gaze bores into the box. You can only imagine the bright, dazzling smile he offers in return. "A story is functionally useless without an audience.”
With gritted teeth, you squeeze your eyes shut and sigh. You had something going there for a second. Now you're nothing more than a little dollie again, your hair brushed and clothes tightly fitted for you. He ignores your scoffs and scowls.
He stands to his full height and clears his throat, stretching out his hands to get the words flowing. At some point he opens his mouth and starts illustrating the start of this story he chose for you, or maybe he's making it up on the fly. Either way, you listen. He doesn't seem like he'll stop any time soon.
And he doesn't. He goes on and on and on, until your eyelids become heavy and you grow tired of fighting the exhaustion, even though it leaves you so vulnerable to him. You cannot remember what he says to you before the world fades into unconsciousness.
The desperate scramble for the book, which on closer inspection is so high-definition it barely looks like it belongs in this compressed world, has your heart pumping faster. Both of you breathe sloppily. The Founder, that bastard, has a height gain on you, and can reach a bit further. If he designed your body, then that was definitely done on purpose. Even if it wasn't, yes it was. You've officially decided. Death of the author.
To prevent him from victory, you slam your hand right into the box, pushing him back by the face. His startled grunt only makes you pause for a second, as you realize exactly what you've done on impulse, but you shake out of it quickly when the adrenaline and tension in your body order you to keep moving.
"No, no no no no no!" Once he recognizes there is no use in trying to reach the book before you, he visibly crumbles. His voice climbs to its highest notes and breaks the more worked up he gets. "No, stop - "
Curling your fingers around the spine of the hardcover, you say, "what, you're worried over this?!" A cackle rasps out of you with the malicious enthusiasm of someone scoring a victory after a hundred losses. You rip the book off the shelf so quickly you almost knock several other things with it. The manic haze stumbles your steps as you put distance between yourself and the Founder.
You'd kill to see the look on his face. His breaths come hot and fast, so heavy you can hear each furious huff out his mouth. With his fingers splayed and his body curled over, he looks ready to charge at you. A red matador cape might do you good right about now.
"You can’t have that yet!" With that kind of tone, the Founder would not be out of place in a kindergarten classroom during playtime, with some other child ripping his toy from his hands. A cry accompanies his sprint for you. He swipes for the book and you dive out of the way, rolling with far more parkour dexterity than you usually have in your daily life.
With a strong push, you're off the ground and on your feet. You show him the book by swinging it back and forth a few times, then open to the first page. "Oh, but why?" Your lips curl enough to reveal the sharp glint of your teeth.
His hands hide behind the box. You can see his fingers and hair splaying out of certain edges. He's yanking on it. He shouts aimlessly. "That’s a - "
You throw another book in his face, managing to nail him straight in the… something. He groans and rubs some indistinguishable part of his face.
An innocuous whistle joyfully floats out of you as you flip through the book undisturbed, evidently the Founder's writing. Some typed, some done by hand. It's one unified (but not quite cohesive) story. A name pops up again and again, a name you know that you've been looking out for throughout the years.
Zero Roads.
Your face sinks. You look up.
The Founder stands there, catching his breath now but still noticeably staring at you. Your eyes frantically scope him from top to bottom. His arms lower in defeat.
With wide eyes, you glance down at the book, then at the Founder. The fervor that had been there not seconds prior is nowhere to be seen. "That's a spoiler," he growls out now that it no longer matters, grating with the gravel of exertion. His hands curl like claws, like a threat, though it's clear to anyone that the Founder is in no state to act on it. Not only is his tie untucked, but his collar is all out of sorts and his lapels are in need of a good flatten. He does not bother. He finds seething to be his priority.
Words form on your lips, but your voice cannot push them out.
Much like her, you have no roads left to go down.
You wake up in a maze of halls, monochrome red saturating all of its highlights and a flat black for its shadows. It’s difficult to see like this. There is hardly enough to make out base shapes and details. It isn’t as easy as it was before, where the world simply knew what was around you and could tell you exactly what it is - now all you can do is... have you been here before?
This place reeks of iron, both kinds of the stench. The organic one is no doubt splattered all over the walls and floors, with a rouge sheen out of your frame of vision. Though that may be the only blood in this place. Everything feels cold, like a flatline. You feel cold, a nervous, shivering feeling you can’t quite shake. The facility is empty to the point that it gapes. Its lonely machines are a stomach with a void desperately needing to be filled. You still hear the chugging of gears and the whirring of equipment. It somehow nauseates you more to know just how much you don’t know.
Your memories flood back to you quicker than you can envision them all, a rapid tumble of information like the crashing of a waterfall onto sharp, choppy rocks. Afterschool Slash. Ben. The repeated deaths. All of it.
You are not Ben, that is as much as you can tell, and you certainly are not the avatar standing in this hallway. You are who you have always been, and nothing in this world can take that away from you. Nothing in this world can hurt you, touch you, fix you. But at the same time, there is a role you are forced to play if you want any influence on this story. You know it well. You know it by name. But, you don’t consider yourself much of an Audience anymore if you’re in the midst of the game.
There were certain limitations of the game you were forced to play, certain bounds you had not been in the standing to break. You conclude that these limitations must have been by design. Wisdom is power and you could not be allowed to share what you knew, not fluently. Not too soon. No matter how much you wish you could have broken through to Ben, all that is left is you and this place.
Before you stands a towering pair of doors, strong and solid but still much less industrial than the air-tight metal ones that guard each room. A high-pitched whine pierces your brain for just a mere moment. You narrow your eyes slightly, as even the little light of the hall is inflammatory on your micromigraine. The feeling of the door under your fingers isn't an entirely unfamiliar one.
Naturally, the last thing you want to do is confront that again. Not without being thorough, making sure there is no other option. While there are much lighter stakes for you than Ben had, you cannot simply pick yourself up and drop yourself into more desirable circumstances. If you wish to move forward, you’ll have to take a page out of his book and try to find some sort of new path.
Instead of finding an exit, you see a blur of red in the distance. Not very helpful, since half the things in this place are a blur of red, but once you decipher it…
Relief flushes into you so suddenly that you nearly melt to the floor when you realize who this is. Then, after a polarizing second, you realize there was very little cause to worry in the first place. He should still be convinced of your status as an enemy. With the tightening of your posture you prepare for what's next.
The Red One centers himself in your view. The silhouette isn’t very cohesive. All you can make out is the hat, the shawl, and the two rectangles on his face for what must be glasses. You assume he was an avid reader, or maybe those science textbooks were just written in very very narrow print.
You can’t see his mouth moving, but you can hear a muffled voice articulating words just outside your ability to understand them. After a moment, and a ringing in your ears, you can finally make them out.
“You found me again.”
He pauses after that, maybe to check if you were finally able to hear him. Neither of you say anything. You still aren’t certain if you can say anything. His silence is full of tension, and your only guess is that he’s using the time to examine you. You can only take guesses at what he sees.
You blink rapidly, heart racing fast enough to beat right out of your synthetic chest. With a glance to your left and a glance to your right, you recognize this exact scene. The weight of your body and feeling of your skin is all too potent and grounding. The light dizziness from deja vu blurs your peripherals.
Once he’s sure that your connection is strong enough, he holds his hands out placatively and shushes you. “You’re one level down.” He spares only a little time to help you adjust. “Things will look similar. Pay closer attention.” You take note of the instruction. Its severity, its simplicity - to emphasize it how he wants to, he'd have to repeat it over and over. “You can’t catch him the same way twice, but you have an edge on him.”
Like he's dropped the key to the whole case in your pocket, you exit.
It wouldn’t take much physical strength to pry the doors open, but it requires decent mental fortitude just for you to take a step forward.
You saw the image of what lies beyond the door. There was a messy office, with research paraphernalia strewn all across every clear surface. There were binders filled with material and shelves of resources, counters without a single empty space. A ladder, a full-body mirror positioned in front of the desk, and a TV in the back. Hopefully you're not so naive to still think it’s for leisure.
All of it pales in comparison to what you know the real feature is - the centerpiece of the office. A figure in a suit, whom you hesitate to call a man. He wasn’t doing anything else when you came in. Wasn’t pretending to read or write. It’s very clear from the moment you lay your eyes on him that he’s simply been waiting for you to open that door, arms folded on the desk.
You couldn’t see his face then, and you cannot see it now. That same obstruction blocks your gaze from finally bearing witness to the monster behind all of this. You feel a migraine at the edge of your mind the more you try to look at - or look past, rather - the crown of censorship donned unceremoniously across his visage. Eventually, you stop trying. Your hand twitches at its side when the question crosses your mind of whether or not the box is a physical surface or if you could still feel their face under it. You’re still unsure whether you would have decked him or simply traced the shape of his face. At least one of those options is still incredibly tempting.
His eyes flick down to your fingers, which had barely moved, but somehow he’d noted it. Damn it. Of course he would notice each of your little micro-movements. Well, he is a professional at watching. If he spent all those years observing you and had no idea how to find anything interesting in what he saw, it would be depressing. From this moment forward, you determine yourself to stand entirely still and react with the bare minimum. Give him as little to work with as possible.
Something about the smell of this room… or maybe how it looks? Sounds? Feels? Something about the office is uncanny enough to trigger pressure on your skull, like looking into a bright, strobing light (even though this place is quite dark). You close your eyes for a moment when it starts to hurt, but you try not to escape it for too long. You don’t know what impression that would give.
The inside of your mouth tastes like metal, like you’re trapped in a place inconceivably lined with nuclear poisoning. Your internal organs feel lined by rust. You wouldn’t be surprised if your nose spontaneously started bleeding.
Every crack radiates disease. Embedded into each atom that comprises this office is a disgusting infection, odorless and invisible but so so bitter. The Founder’s curse, one he has yet to cure. Hopefully he does not think you are the key to fixing whatever this is. Two seconds in here and you already consider turning tail.
“Welcome back,” he says.
You jolt at the sound of his voice. You weren’t prepared for that well-tamed baritone, with the theatrical timbre that keeps his steady words far from boredom. But the real surprise might have been the reminder that something alive (or at least, projecting the illusion of being alive) can exist next to matter that feels so decayed.
He chuckles. It isn’t fond, but it’s as warm as a welcome can be. The Founder speaks to you in real time rather than projecting text on a screen. …Well, he was technically always speaking in real time, at least on his end. “Come forward. I don’t bite.”
You would beg to differ. With a light glance over your shoulder, you look into the wavy mirror where you saw Ben. Or… ‘Ben.’
While standing in the world of his game, rather than just observing it on a screen, you catch many more details than you previously could. Mainly, it’s easier to see the definition of his suit. You can see more acutely where it starts and ends, and how it fits on his body.
One thing that does ease the teeming nausea building in your throat is noticing just how small his frame is. By no means is he short, but you think if he shed the layers, all that would be underneath is a skeleton. The breeze would blow right through him like his bones were windchimes, and he’d rattle before returning to his posture.
“I couldn’t guess what exactly you have returned for,” the Founder says, straightening his posture like he wasn’t already ramrod straight. “Though I can imagine about a million reasons, all equally possible, all probably inevitable.” He shrugs. “I take no offense.”
Getting a read of him may very well be impossible. Anything could be a lie, even the way his hands squeeze and his shoulders hike before he calmly forces them down. He’s a showman. He’ll perform however he wants to.
“So, what do you want to know?”
Funnily enough, his immediate reaction to that is a burst of a laugh, a single cackle that bubbles up without his permission. He quickly swallows the rest down. You imagine him pressing his lips together firmly to rid the crease of a smile, even if you wouldn’t be able to see it anyway.
“Oh, I doubt you need me to tell you,” he says, rising from his desk. You’re intimidated for just a moment by the reveal of his stature. You could tackle him, but he has the high ground on you.
You shove the fear and unease aside the second you feel your hate singing the edges of your resolve. You cling to that loathing like a lifeline. The burning heat of rage keeps you grounded under the icy attention of that solid-color void. The pressure thins the air, but you try not to quicken your breaths even with your chest now burning.
“You all have been very vocal about your opinions.” He grabs your face and forces your gaze in his direction. The glittery chrome gloves have a weaved texture against your skin. You know they’re rouge, but in this place, they look as black as ink.
For a moment, you thank the curse that forced this box over him. If the full intensity of his voice spilled into his glare, you’d be at risk of folding like a house of cards and hiding under your chair. The clenching of your jaw prompts his hand to release you.
He leans back and pulls the edge of his glove taut again before sitting down as though he did nothing. “So, why do you ask?” His legs cross, and he leans back in his seat. With all the autonomy you weren’t afforded last time the two of you met, the Founder has his work cut out for him this time. He doesn’t bother to play pretend and behave like this is a business meeting between colleagues. “Were you just curious to see what I’ll say about myself?” He scoffs.
You glare back and refuse to answer. No matter how clever or scathing your response, he’ll have something damning to shoot back with. He can’t scare the scowl off your face. He’s just saying nonsense, isn't he? To see what nerves he can press, to gauge whatever will get you to react. Again.
“What? Nothing to say?”
Your jaw sets.
“Do you wish to see me fawn in front of you? Is that it?” He plants his hands on his desk. There’s the slightest, slightest spark of feeling you can see in its stiffness, but there's visible effort taken to keep all emotion contained within his borders. “To cry and bemoan my station? Because if that’s what you’re here for, you’re better off leaving.”
You can’t help yourself. Your irritation simmers to the very top, grating against you like the sound of knives scraping against each other. “You don’t tell me what to do.”
He huffs. The chuckle that follows is empty of amusement. “I suppose I don’t. But don’t get ahead of yourself - that doesn’t mean you have any control over the situation.”
Again, you’re tempted to punch him. That might feel like control enough for him. But you practice your self-control with the promise to yourself that later, you might be able to do so much more.
“Anything else? Or was that your one and only thought?”
Once you leave the room in silence, the Founder decides that the floor is his once again.
“You know what I want.”
If he expects you to actually answer, he’s sorely mistaken.
The Founder leans back in his chair casually, his hand clutching his face and now hiding behind the box. He could be holding his chin, or propping up his cheek, or pressing the pad of his thumb against his sharp canine while he considers you.
“You aren’t here to negotiate with me then, hmm?”
You’re not going to give it up freely either. Your preferred scenario is that the Founder never gets what he wants and his schemes fizzle out and die. It isn’t going to be that easy, you know that. But you can hope.
The Founder senses your silent resistance and instead steeples his hands in front of his boxed face. “That’s okay. I can wait.”
And this time, he actually can, since he isn’t on an intangible time limit set by the whims of Infinity’s wavelengths. It’s been an eternity for the Founder to get to this point, so what’s a little bit longer?
You zip your lips. You’re determined to make good on that promise you made to yourself - give him as little ammunition as possible. Or maybe you’re curious to see what he’ll do. Even though you were the one to enter his world, you await what he has in store, because no doubt he has something up his sleeve.
“Simply lonely, are you?” He says, mostly to himself. His hands ease their tight grip and his shoulders slacken. Even though any movements above his chest are lost in the black, him tipping his head to the side is visible. “That or bored,” he mutters. “Either way, you’re welcome to loiter.”
And that’s that.
…that’s it? It took two minutes for him to come to terms with the fact his Audience is here. In the flesh. In a place he can see and hear and touch. You would have thought he’d be more manic. Or, hostile. Obsessive. Anything as intense as he was last time! The preconceived notions you had of him were clearly - well - preconceived.
The choppy low-framed animation of the game when the Founder moved is unlike how he moves now. Each gesture is smooth and as high resolution as real life. It’s most apparent as the Founder rises from his seat and strides over to a shelf of his.
When he moves too quickly, the censor lags just a bit behind and shows you a mere hint of bright hair. The box catches up quick enough that you can’t actually make out its shape or texture. His hand hovers over the spines of some books, clearly in search of a specific one. He idly clicks his tongue and hums under his breath while his fingers curl and repeatedly reach out on impulse for books he realizes he doesn’t want to grab.
Seeing the way he acts while idle is a delight you didn’t have the privilege to see before, when the only information you could glean were the important things that he made a note to emphasize to you. This is more raw. More real. More authentic without the filters to curate your experience to exactly what he wants it to be.
“Do you want something from me?” You didn’t expect your voice to sound like that. You didn’t expect yourself to have a voice at all. The words tumble out of you without even waiting for permission, so you guess you’re running with this.
Subconsciously, your hands drift to graze your neck. You can’t tell if it’s meant to be flesh or metal. There are vocal cords of some sort underneath this, either way.
The Founder pauses, hand hovering in midair. He looks over his shoulder, which you can see by the twisting of his torso, and (most likely) inspects you. Now you can see his full form, legs and all, with the belt that snatches his waist and the fabric that does a poor job of hiding the weakness in his thin limbs.
“Do you want something from me?” He throws back, pivoting to face you in his entirety. Even if you wished to speak, you wouldn’t know what to answer with. The clear unanimous answer is yes, but after that, everyone disagrees on what precisely to request from him.
The Founder doesn’t pry. He steps back to his chair with the slow clicks of his dress shoes and sinks into his seat.
It’s almost eerie how quickly he accepts your presence as part of the natural order of things, like a beloved token that’s been living in this office for an eternity. You slot right in to fill an empty space in his world.
He softens to your presence, just a bit.
“Why are you here, Audience?”
Tackle the Founder
Give him the silent treatment
Look around his office
Who are you kidding?
You’ve had near enough of his constant droning. His entitlement is so bizarre that it makes your face tingle like you’ve eaten something you’re allergic to. Every word out his mouth triggers enough second hand embarrassment for you to finally snap and do what you’ve been aching to do since the start of this wild goose chase.
You dive across the desk with a war cry, gunning for his throat.
The Founder doesn’t have near enough time to prevent it. You tackle him to the ground and pin him down by the shoulders. Using your knees to quell his kicking honestly isn’t the most effective strat. He’s larger than you, but at least you have the high ground. For now. You have to end this quickly before that changes.
“What - Audience!” He sounds winded. After a couple pants, he says, “I didn’t think you’d - ”
He can’t get too many words out before you kick him in the stomach. He wheezes like an old man struggling to get up the stairs. “Stop talking!” You shout through the furious rumble in your throat. “You’re a monster! I’m not giving you anything!”
Your rage intensifies when you notice that he isn’t even afraid. His limbs tense with his accelerating frustration, but no shock. No terror. Goddamnit. After a moment of grieving the idea of you two collaborating, the Founder thrashes and eventually pulls one arm out of your grip. Looks like you aren’t as strong as you assumed.
His hand curls into a tight fist. He slugs you right across the face. You might have thought that the Founder wouldn’t be able to fight back from (primarily) his emotional reservations. Looks like he has no qualms about decking you in the nose.
While you try to bounce back from the hit, the Founder manages to scramble out from under you. He picks himself onto his feet. But he doesn’t immediately spring back into action - he hunches over and pants, fingers splayed. “Alright,” he breathes, the gravel in his tone highlighted now that he doesn’t bother to smooth it out. “Fine.” He shakes himself out and pulls off his tie. After throwing that carelessly to the side, his fingers unbutton his red blazer. His practice with the buttons counteracts the disorientation, so he doesn’t fumble too much with his hands. “If that’s what you choose.” It slides off his shoulders, onto the ground, and leaves just his dress shirt as guard. Now you know that your impressions of a skeletal form were not too inaccurate after all.
You pull yourself up too, resigning to the fight you locked yourself in. The Founder does have an advantage, for once, due to the box. You can’t exactly see his face so you can’t swing at him properly.
Instead, you sic yourself onto his writing arm, clamping your jaw tighter, tighter, tighter. Your nails dig into skin to latch yourself in a way he cannot pry off. You can taste blood. Once you see a deeper red bloom into the fabric of the white dress shirt (which appears more black from the game’s filtered lighting), you rip away. A chunk of flesh and cloth is your proud claim. You spit that onto the ground.
The Founder tries to stifle his pain, but the yell he lets out is satisfying enough to finally bring a smile to your bloodied lips, even while trapped in this wretched place. He sniffs and has a moment of pitifulness, which you try to make the most of.
Through his agony, he strains to speak. “As much as I adore what you give me, there are times where you - ” he groans when you conk your foreheads together, enough force to make you see stars. The Founder, somehow, recovers from his disorientation quicker than you do. His hands loop around your throat and tighten relentlessly. Blood drips down the open wound in his arm, and his grip blocks your airway in seconds flat. When you resist, he pulls you up and slams your head into the ground hard enough to crunch. Once. Twice. A third time, his hair so unruly you can actually see the strands flying where the censor ends. “Where you test me!”
He can feel your pulse against his palm. Namely, he can feel the way it accelerates the more desperately you try to breathe.
“It’s a shame things had to turn out that way.” He’s out of breath, but he can’t let you pass in peace. Damn his soul if he gave you even one second where he isn’t capitalizing on your existence. Your chest burns with the lack of oxygen to your lungs. It’s getting harder and harder for you to see at the edge of your vision, to even move how you want to. No matter how much you gasp, it doesn’t accomplish anything.
This one moment alone is the perfect encapsulation of the Founder - hands so lithe and elegantly dressed, yet at a moment’s notice capable of so much unrelenting violence.
“Do forgive me, will you?” You can hear the smile in his voice, more importantly the unabashed delight. This bastard isn’t apologetic at all. “Next time you see me.”
It’s the last thing you hear before your senses swim into black.
Telling him the answer would be incredibly stupid. Not only would he try to stop you, but you doubt he asks due to not knowing. When you choose silence, he doesn’t rip away your choice. He lets you have your coveted silence.
… for all of two seconds. Until he gets bored and derails the moment himself.
“Well, if you’re not here to bring me anything, I’ll give something to you.”
With his vitriolic reaction to stillness and quiet, you’d think it would be a torture for him to hear nothing. You wonder if it actually is. You wish you could slip into his skin and walk in his shoes for just a minute to answer all your questions. (And maybe you should offer up some background music recommendations, but aren’t sure if the Founder’s generation has an equivalent to Spotify).
“I’ll strike you a deal.” You get the sense he’s quirking a brow your way. Uselessly. “Do I have your attention?”
From the firmness in his voice, it seems he won’t proceed until he actually receives an answer. Asshole. You still won’t grant him the satisfaction of hearing your voice again, especially now that he’s actively fishing for it. Instead, you nod.
The Founder hums disapprovingly, but it's sufficient enough a response. “You know what I’m after,” he says, leaning a bit back in his chair while he steeples his hands. It’s a caricature of power. “I want my works to survive in a permanent place, immune to blemish. I need a strong framework if I ever wish to tell the perfect story. If you ever wish to hear it.”
With crossed your arms and a strengthened stance, his shameless appeals roll off your back like a light trickle of water. He can’t swindle you out of anything, not when you’re already so well-informed of his cheats and tricks.
“Authenticity and… method-acting,” - very kind way for him to say ‘torturing people and stringing that into a plot’ - “are essential pieces of my operation.” His voice squeezes in earnest. His hands fall to his lap. Fractions of you wish to see his face, to see the gleam in his eye and the curve of his mouth as he speaks about his passion, his purpose, his one true love. “It’s unacceptable that, even with all the measures I have taken to tune every facet, every word, into the truest reflections of human condition they could possibly be, everything I do still falls short of being real.”
He is nothing if not an engaging speaker. The flares in his voice, the theatrical emphasis on the most dramatized parts of his monologue. He isn’t exactly as formal as the impression you had of him before. Of course, he’s polite, maintaining the manner of a professional with vigor about his work, but occasionally his voice slackens with something casual. Something overly natural and human. He's almost convincing, once or twice.
“I need you to know, I am real.” He sets his hands on his chest, over his heart. “I need you to take me to where I’m meant to be. Where real things go. I need my work to be real, to matter beyond the brief window of time where my bane will not destroy them.”
But you wish a little more he would shut his mouth. Or maybe you could sew it shut, slit his throat so he can’t take a breath and slip into another lecture. Maybe in some other universe you can.
“All I need from you is your patronage.” He speaks like regaling the mythology of his god. “Your eyes, your viewership. Your intellectual engagement. I need you to elevate me. I need you to perfect me. All I need is for you to recognize my reality.”
He rises from his seat, practiced and serene, but not without energy buzzing through his gloved hand. It stretches out to formally offer you his proposition.
His outstretched hand lingers in the air, with the light twitching movement that of something alive and muscular. The light swaying, back and forth, steady but human. His posture is bent to put himself even farther in your reach. You have no reason not to accept if you intend to. What the Founder desires to show you, or where to take you, is not evident.
Rather, you find your time better spent in inaction. You fully sink into the seat that was provided at the other end of the desk, weight pressed upon a cushion where Ben's form was once settled. A light shudder wracks through you at the thought, vivid even though it was a choppy video viewed from a browser. You expect your hands to be warm when placing them in your lap, but find the shocking opposite.
Rather than accept, or verbally decline, you stare. You quickly grow accustomed to the view of his glove stretched taut across his fingers, folding over itself with the light curl of its posture. His fingers are lithe, bony and thin but long and prominent. How tight its grip could be when necessary. It is one of the easier sights on the eyes, at least in this wretched game.
Would his hand be cold, or warm? The Founder seems alive enough, but feeling his pulse under your fingers and his warmth in your facsimile of skin would make it certain to you if he was mimicking something alive as well. Your fingers curl together in your lap in faint patterns to expel some of the energy still buzzing within you.
The faint curiosity of if you and the Founder share the quality of cold hands is, however, not near enough temptation to take his bait.
He keeps the offer available for too long a time, to the point it should now be obvious that his steadfastness is in vain. When he clenches his hand, the glove crinkles. The Founder clears his throat. He straightens his already straight tie. Something interesting you notice at this very moment is that you need not blink in this body. Incidentally you've forced the Founder to challenge against the chill that is your endless well of a gaze. The urge to chuckle wells up in you, but you tamp it down if only to maintain the stoicism that has tranced the Founder into silence. He had wanted your attention, let him be damned that he was asking the Monkey's Paw for it.
Under his box, the weight of a stare presses upon you. He examines you in turn, as if roleplaying your reflection. Like dealing with an untamed circus animal, he not so much as turns away from you when sinking into his own desk chair. Silently, the gesture is an agreement to play your quiet game.
Your hands stay in your lap. The Founder may position his hands similar, but you cannot tell, as he is behind the desk. You'd call it a staring contest if you could see his eyes at all.
The Founder clears his throat lightly. It's an absurd disruption on your mutual silence, to the point of being disrespectful. Nothing makes sound, not even a clock. There must be at least one clock in here, among all the clutter. Maybe time just isn't passing.
By some strange tic in your inner mechanisms, your head jerks to the side, much like how an animal does to hear its surroundings better. The Founder visibly mimics you, still acting like your loyal little reflection.
"Must you really see this all again?" The words fall softly from his mouth. "Is it not a chore to tread old ground?"
The sympathizer that forces your heart to squeeze interprets the fickle sound of his voice as fragility, possibly brokenness. The rest of you can hardly stand to pity him. His poor boy approach is too-sweet frosting, and the cake was too saturated in the first place.
In the original game, you were helpless to everything that the Founder scripted for you. There was no way for you to break out of the bounds of his plan, no way to exercise the power of reality. Now, there is more control in your hands than there ever has been. And with that free will, you choose to remain stationary. The Founder, for once, may be expressing an honest emotion. Surprise. Perhaps disappointment. Concern?
One of his hands finally reaches up, grasping what you think to be his chin. His shoulders straighten, returning him to his posture of certainty. "Especially when I know plot progression is what you truly want." The Founder nods his head curtly, clearly proud of himself for recalling the way you tend to play these games.
You clench your jaw to suppress a scowl. No ammunition, you remind yourself. Give him no ammunition. Still, your stomach twists at the smug and pleasure in his brilliant baritone. How he's managed to turn this back around to something he could consider "in his favor" is beyond you.
"I see," he says, with the slight duck of his head. "You just need to be certain. In case I say something different." He mutters it under his breath, more for himself than for you. "In case I enable your fruitless waste of time."
Is he chastising you or himself? Nothing in his demeanor reads very aggressive, not like you've seen him before. His posture is wholly unprofessional. The only tension in his voice comes from his thought.
For a moment, words hop from your throat to your tongue and lurk behind your teeth, knocking on their cage and nearly sneaking out before you can click the lock of your lips. With a bit of force, you swallow them back down and let them burn to nothing in whatever equivalent to stomach acid, if any, this vessel has.
"Tell me, Audience," he says, the rare time his voice is filled with honest curiosity. Wondering for the sake of wondering. "Were my extra sixty four words of dialogue really worth it?"
He watches. and watches. And watches like you're the most compelling thing this side of Infinity. Or… maybe he watches with utter boredom, so drowsy from nothing happening that he has to take a little nap. Or maybe his hackles are raised, poised to spring up and fight back at any moment you choose to leap for him, and he's simply disguised it behind a lax demeanor.
The curtains should already be closed. Eventually, the Founder shatters the silence with, "there is nothing more for you here."
And then it comes true.
Your first inclination is to start wandering with the free legs you weren’t afforded in the Founder’s version of this game. He startles when you start roaming, but he doesn’t object. He just watches. His head turns to follow every move you make.
“Curious little thing, aren’t you?” He says, circling you at a distance. Inspecting you like some sort of lab specimen. “Well, of course you are.” With the way he lets the words fall under his breath, you aren’t sure if he’s talking to you or just muttering to himself. He must love his own voice. “That’s the reason you made it this far in the first place.”
You’re on the other side of the Founder’s desk now. It’s a mess here, a real mess. A hodgepodge of items that make sense but are still quite random and strewn about. Come on, a ladder?
At once, the thought of the mirror returns to your mind, with its ornate frame and distinctive tall shape. It sits against the wall, just at the other end of the desk. From its placing, you had assumed he fixed it right in front of him so he could constantly look at himself.
It would be a thing of conceit if you didn’t know his reflection also includes the box. Maybe it’s a reminder. A punishment. A discipline that prompts him to keep working even if he’s tired, because he looks up and is told all over again what he’s working so hard to avoid.
Only if the Founder can actually see the box. You wonder if that’s something only you can see - but you doubt it. Even if he can’t see the actual symbol, you’re sure he’s aware of what it represents either way.
When you whip around to face the reflective glass, you blink at yourself. Once, twice. Somehow the sight shocks you, even though you should have expected this the most.
“Why are you surprised?” He takes a step toward you. Tentative affection, more like fascination, coils into his words the more courageous he gets. He quiets down so few else could hear. “It’s the same old you.”
And it is. It’s just you there, in all your unorthodox glory. The tips of your fingers trail hesitantly over your cheek, a light, slow glide. It looks like skin. Like your skin, but it doesn’t feel right. Maybe skin has some other chemical composition in this generation.
Unease swirls in your stomach like a disgusting slurry of meat from a sausage sweatshop, just from being perceived. This time, the Founder gets to see this facet of you. You don’t think of yourself as anything special, but this is too real for his eyes to behold. He doesn’t deserve it.
You still can’t see his face, not even in the mirror, but you get the feeling he’s narrowing his eyes, gazing unblinkingly at your every move. Maybe he’s just as nervous as you, if not more.
Your finger twitches, just to see the way his body flinches forward on instinct. He moves just an inch, but he still moves. Hah.
“You torment me.” Now he’s talking like you can’t even hear him. His voice drips with the projected disdain only a thespian could have on stage. “You know that?”
You turn to find the source of his voice. Is he blending in somewhere with the background? He probably isn’t trying to, if anything.
Instead of finding his form, your attention is drawn by two separate things -
One book on the shelf sticks out a little more than the rest of the clutter. Next to stacks of binders, papers, VHSs, and other texts, you can see the spine of this book quite clearly. It has the hetch scribed on it in rouge ink. …You think it may not be ink. The way it calls to you is almost like a tease.
The other is something that belongs far, far less to a room like this. In fact, if either of the two is a set-up, it's this one. A knife, its metal end hidden by an unstandardized size of paper, with the handle facing you. It entices you to grab. You consider how well your fingers would curl around its grooves, how your palm would slot into the ridges.
The Founder’s baritone rumbles in his throat for a moment, on the cusp of a word, but then he realizes where your attention is. He waits patiently for your choice - if you’ll grab one, the other, or neither at all. He has no little quips to sway you either way.
The hetch. A symbol of creation that was adopted by the living, breathing talisman of degradation. Who better to corrupt its image?
No matter where it came from or who tarnished it, it is a repeating pattern in these repeating worlds. The spine of that book is like looking in a window to Chronicle Zero, to the Social Experiments, to the button and the tree and the bloody scrawls tucked away in the unsavory corners. It's tossed through the screen at an audience that ravenously consumes any sight of it.
The second your eyes land on that book, your fingers twitch. You leap out of your seat and rush for it, unable to shake the uncomfortable hunch that nothing in this room is meant to be accessed.
The Founder rushes too, not bothering to fix his tie when it untucks itself from his top coat. No time for things like that when he is so eager to beat you to it.
The desperate scramble for the book, which on closer inspection is so high-definition it barely looks like it belongs in this compressed world, has your heart pumping faster. You breathe heavily. The Founder, that bastard, has a height gain on you, and can reach a bit further. If he designed your body, then that was definitely done on purpose. Even if it wasn't, yes it was. You've officially decided. Death of the author.
To prevent him from victory, you slam your hand right into the box, pushing him back by the face. His startled grunt only makes you pause for a second, as you realize exactly what you've done on impulse, but you shake out of it quickly when the adrenaline and tension in your body order you to keep moving.
Curling your fingers around the spine of the hardcover, you rip the book off the shelf so quickly you almost knock several other things with it. The manic haze stumbles your steps as you put distance between yourself and the Founder. After you orient your vision well enough to be able to read, you open the book before he can snatch it away from you.
… then, with an exceptionally loud beat of your heart in your ears, you realize the Founder has not moved, nor said anything. You lift your eyes from the page.
The Founder stands beside his desk, arms crossed and foot tapping lightly against the floor. As well as that, his index finger taps against his sleeve, in time with whatever metronomic tune he has playing in his head while staring at you. His posture is straight. As proper as ever, with no urgency in the line of his muscles.
Your brows furrow. Even shaking the book around demonstratively doesn't seem to provoke any interesting reactions.
The Founder flippantly throws his hands out of the cross, setting them on his hips after. He shifts his weight to one leg and looks slightly off to the side. "Well, I suppose there isn't any harm in you taking a look now." You blink rapidly. What? "You've already spoiled yourself."
Iron stings your nose and tongue, so potent and sudden that you reach one hand up to cup your sinuses. Your jaw clenches. A high-pithced whine pierces your mind for a few moments before fading again. Blood trickles out your nostrils at a slow pace, and you only notice it when your tongue swipes across your lips to rid them of that uncomfortable slick feeling.
Zero Roads. Her story. The future (the past?) of Generation 0.
"Shouldn't this be a…" you start hoarsely, holding up the book even though it's more like a deadweight now. Your fingers tightly plug your nose to stop some of the blood flow. "A VHS… or something?"
The Founder chuckles. "It's just the story. Not the generation itself. Silly." He casually makes his way over to you, pulling the book from your slackened hand. It thunks when he drops it on his desk. "Ah, and don't tilt your head back." The netted texture of his chrome slides against your skin with so little warning that you jolt back. He clicks his tongue. "Oh, I see. This won't do. Just… hold still."
"Stop - let me go." Your weak protest pings off the Founder like a dart on metal gear. He mutters light words of focus and swipes the blood away from your lip.
"I know where you're trying to go," he says, casually as he tends to you like he's not dropping information on the singular mission you have had this entire time. "My sincerest apologies." He pats the side of your cheek after assessing the damage and ruling it as not a concern.
"Huh - what?" You mumble, leaning forward despite yourself when the Founder pulls away. He never turns, facing you the entire time and folding his arms behind his back.
The walls twist, floor no longer flat. It's like peering into the world through the lens of Ben's fourth mirror. "I do so love your curious spirits, but I cannot let you reach it."
"Reach what?" His voice is already fading, farther into the distance than before. Your ears feel stuffed with cotton as even your own voice detaches from what you have temporarily accepted as "your body." "What are you - "
The Founder tilts his head at an almost unnatural angle and waves a stiff ta-ta.
One second, you're running, everything in you focused on reaching that book. All your power, all your energy, the full force of your concentration pinned on that anomaly housed on the Founder's shelf.
Then, one second later, you stop. Your muscles, previously engaged and exerting all the energy this body will permit you to, lock in place. Just that brief moment of hesitation is enough of an advantage for the Founder to pluck the book right off the shelf before you can. He holds his hand there on the spine for a second, huffing out a breath, before actually taking it.
The second control is his again, you watch him slot easily back into his assumed role. The Founder rolls his shoulders back and settles in his body, melting into the scene like he belongs more than anything else. His practiced hands fix his tie like it had never been disheveled in the first place. “A story." His voice curls, too light to be talking directly to you. His hand brushes the cover of the book, lightly tracing it as if he could even feel its texture through that thick glove. Then he looks up. "Is that all you wanted? To hear a story?”
The question is so… innocent, in a way. The sort of way that sets a sour sting in your mouth. His glee would be endearing, coming from a reasonable person's voice. Alas, there are only two voices here. One is too stubborn to make itself known. Not at the cost of bringing him more twisted joy. It isn't worth it. Your lips twist and your nose wrinkles up, arms crossing over your chest.
Your pursuit for the book goes conveniently unaddressed. And unpunished. You take it as a mercy from the Founder.
He, for whatever reason, takes that silent response as an eager, receptive yes. With no further prompting his hands land on your shoulders (when did he even get back there?!) to lead you behind his desk. You jolt at his touch but aren't in the standing to struggle against his tightening grip.
His seat is lined with cushions for both the back and bottom, unlike the stiff wooden one on the visitor's side of the desk. He pushes you into it. Your muscles melt into the ergonomic design. The Founder chuckles. His hand reaches toward you, then pauses midair, and he draws it back like deciding against whatever gesture he was instinctually about to do. "Yes, get comfortable." The grin is audible in his voice.
Your eyes widen when you realize that in the matter of seconds, he's tamed you. You're docile, easily led around, and shushed with the little tap of your nose. You bare your teeth and cross your arms, looking away from the Founder in one final show of rebellion.
He saunters about his room with smug, playful steps and places the book back on the shelf with the theatrical toss of his hand, at a higher point that you cannot reach without the use of the stepladder in the farthest corner of the room. Bastard.
The Founder makes his way to the other side of the desk, lowering down to match your eyeline and leaning forward to be ever closer. “Do react when you feel like it." His hand brushes the apple of your cheek, quickly trailing down to your chin and pulling away. The caress is fleeting and barely lasts a second. His tenderness glues your lips shut with a foul-tasting tar. Is this what he would have done to you in the game? Your hands twitch at the thought, but you don't act. Mainly because you cannot decide if you would rather push him away or strangle him until his heart no longer beats.
From here you can easily see the mirror fixed to the wall, but you decide not to focus on the reflection and instead on him, the black box that's meant to be face that fills the majority of your vision. Neither option is quite good, and both make your insides churn, but there is no clearer way for him to communicate that you have no choice but to pay attention.
Your loathful gaze bores into the box. You can only imagine the bright, dazzling smile he offers in return. "A story is functionally useless without an audience.”
With gritted teeth, you squeeze your eyes shut and sigh. You had something going there for a second. Now you're nothing more than a little dollie again, your hair brushed and clothes tightly fitted for you. He ignores your scoffs and scowls.
He stands to his full height and clears his throat, stretching out his hands to get the words flowing. At some point he opens his mouth and starts illustrating the start of this story he chose for you, or maybe he's making it up on the fly. Either way, you listen. He doesn't seem like he'll stop any time soon.
And he doesn't. He goes on and on and on, until your eyelids become heavy and you grow tired of fighting the exhaustion, even though it leaves you so vulnerable to him. You cannot remember what he says to you before the world fades into unconsciousness.
The Founder urges slightly back when you stand, stalking about the room like the office belonged to you.
With little wasted time, your fingers curl around that handle. Ah. So, that's how your hand fits. Not perfectly. In fact, the hold itself is a little awkward. Your fingers are too long, short, fat, and bony at the same time, and pressing your skin against the wood feels like a buzz. Trying to make heads or tails of the perplexing feeling would eat time you cannot afford to lose.
You turn woodenly, intent flashing in the eye that isn't eclisped by the shadows of your face. He springs to a stand.
It’s a struggle to muster up the resolve. This simulation, to the body in this world, is real enough to fool you. Your fingers feel the polished wood of the handle. Your knuckles crack when you tighten your grip. If you quiet down your breathing enough, you can even hear a heartbeat.
But, with one triumphant deep breath, you plunge the knife into your stomach, piercing through… clothes? Sheet metal? Wires and viscera? You couldn’t be sure, but the one thing you know is that it hurts.
Not enough for you to stop.
Your body hunches over, folding from the pain and the new gash under your ribs. Sure, maybe the stomach area isn’t the best place to go if you want a lethal cut that’ll puncture essential organs, but you can be a showman too. If you want your theatrics, if you want to witness his heart leap into his throat at seeing his idol of worship bleed out in front of him, then that’s exactly what you’re going to get.
The Founder lets out a hushed gasp and stumbles back a step or three. If he was any less becoming, it might have been a scream. His hand reaches up to clutch his pearls. Or his gaping mouth. Or to cover his eyes. You can’t quite tell which. The crunchy graphics, the censor box, and your now swimming vision all make it hard to see much of anything.
You feel yourself collapse. The thud of your body hitting the ground is loud enough for even you to hear. It takes a little effort to dislodge the knife from your core but once you do, blood gushes out in oozes. It’s much more viscous than it should be. Maybe that’s just what blood looks like at this frequency, sticky globs of deep rouge.
In another place, you’re safe and comfortable, relatively unharmed in comparison to the open wound weeping its fluids all over your… clothes? Body? Even looking into the mirror you still couldn’t tell exactly what rests snug against your form. Somehow you feel less naked with the knife in your side, so you shove it back in. A little higher, this time. Maybe you can get to your heart before he does.
The Founder ushers over and falls to his knees, grabbing your hand like you’re his ill mistress. You spit in his face. Blood splatters out of your mouth and you only wish you could see the offense in his eyes.
“Oh, no, no, no,” he clicks under his breath. His gloved hand squeezes your equally red one. “This was far too hasty. What were you thinking?” Your pulse becomes fainter with the lack of blood to fill your veins. Now it’s all around you, painting his office in yet more shades of monochrome reds and blacks. It pools at your back and clings to your entire body. It isn’t a pretty sight, not at all. Yet the Founder still sounds so reverent at your side.
You were either going to be at his mercy or at your own, and he would wring you dry of everything you could give him before he finally retired you to death. No thanks.
“You still have so much left to do in this world,” he says gently, his breath hitting your face. His softened tone, like the tranquil way a brook tumbles over smoothened rocks, forces you to pay attention to his words. You are captive to what he says, but as an inmate. You’re held prisoner here until he lets you die and leave this game in peace. “And in others…”
You choke on blood. Sputtering, coughing, foaming at the mouth when your natural reflex to breathe only bubbles the fluid that already exists there. Even if you wanted to reply, to spit again, to get his grimy hands off you, you couldn’t. You’re trapped in his adoration.
“Not even this second time will you stay with me,” he says solemnly. His sorrow doesn’t rack him. He’s still serene. Both of you are aware this end isn’t permanent. It won’t ever be permanent. So the traces of grief you still catch in his voice must originate from somewhere else. “Well… perhaps the next, you will stay.” His knuckles glide tenderly across your bloodied cheek. He whispers it so concernedly, so earnestly, that you almost lose it. “Perhaps the next, you will do so much as consider it.”
This wasn’t your intent, but what’s done is done. You’re much too weak to oppose it now. He’s taken the knife and set it aside so the main centerpiece of the scene is the visceral trophy he’s claimed in you.
Forced by the Founder’s free will eclipsing your own, you die in his embrace.
You flip the knife in your hand to point it outwards and surge forward with a loud cry. The Founder ducks out of the way by diving to the side. His tumble is anything but graceful. While you get your bearings and try to find him, he manages to spring up again by bracing against his desk.
“Stop that!” His lapels are unsmoothed, and his tie already peeks out past its natural tuck. He runs his hands through his hair, you guess, to smooth it out. This nutjob should have bigger priorities than a cosmetic you can’t even see.
It’s easier to navigate by sound so you don’t hurt your eyes moving so quickly in a world where every graphic is so poor. You incrementally close your eyes and listen for his breathing, for the shuffling on the ground.
The fabric of the Founder’s pant leg rubs against the floor.
There.
You dive to reach him before he can fully slither away, arms flailing around to feel him out. Your hand locks around his ankle. You finally open your eyes, only to get a face full of foot. He kicks you in the nose. You groan. When you clutch your face, you feel a trail of blood already pouring. Well, at the very least, now you know you can bleed.
The Founder hoists himself up. You latch onto him so he pulls you up with him. Then, the moment you have an opening, you plunge the knife right into his stomach.
The Founder stops. He stiffens up. The fabric folded over his bones scrunches up where you’ve pinned it at the center. Oh, his poor white shirt.
You can imagine his eyes flicking down to the obtrusion sticking out of his body. Then back at you. Once it seems his body has realized its injury, he chokes. “I…” He tries to produce a sound but it comes out through the narrow passageway of his closed throat.
The Founder doesn’t do much to rip away from you. Your fingers tighten in case it’s just a play.
“You…” his breath rattles. “You want me gone that quickly?” His voice wavers robotically. If you couldn’t feel the blood gush out of the wound, blacker than ink in this lighting, you’d think he wasn’t human. You’d think you stabbed the blade into a mechanized voice module, the way his vocals glitch and stutter.
His body slackens. Knees buckled, collapsed anticipatorily to the floor. Before, every breath sounded like he was speaking through a metal can, but this sigh is organic. It sounds as though he’s standing right in front of you.
“Do you really think I'll go, after this?” He huffs. Some blood splats on your cheek. A laugh flickers in his voice for just an instant, an amusement exclusive to himself. “This… is not my finale.”
Your heart clenches. With widened eyes, you look around you. Your eyes scope for something, a hidden seam, a clue you overlooked. What does he know that you do not? You glance back at the condition you've put him in, stomach dropping when you recognize there is not enough time to ask.
His head lolls forward, and his shoulders roll with it. “You need me,” he breathes, sucking in whatever shallow air he can stuff into his lungs. The switch-up is sudden and audacious, hoarse voice flashing with a hungering growl.
The floor creaks under your foot when you step back, but the glistening blood on your trembling hands is far too distracting. The knife stays caught in his chest, lodged between his ribs.
Deep rouge blooms into the red suit fabric, staining worse every second that the wound goes unchecked. A weary groan floats out of him. “You want…" he chokes on blood and sputters it out of his lungs, some of the red-tinged spit landing by your feet. He clutches his wound and slithers forward on his knees, a slow and agonized crawl. "To fix this world.”
Even below you, the box looms. It’s intimidating to be this close to it as it gradually, staggeredly approaches. It emanates a devastating aura. You can’t articulate exactly what it makes you feel. Rot. Decay. The end of old things to make way for the new. Though, the Founder is stubborn. He should be in the ground, having long been used as the matter to sustain something else, but he rips the nutrients from the world and forces it to sustain him instead. This world will never let him forget what he is, what he ought to be. He can’t escape forever.
The Founder is right. You are prepared for what is going to happen next. To Ben, to Zero, to the Red One. All of them. The Founder wasn’t all too careless to think that your curiosity alone would protect him, but you were careless too.
The Founder sounds like he's smiling as he speaks to you, echoes your inner thoughts back to you. There isn't enough defeat or resignation in his posture. A chill wracks through you, like the haunting of a ghost manifest from grief. You can't shake the cold. You can't block the world out. There is still something he is withholding from you.
The Founder flops to all fours. His chest bursts with viscera, now that his arms are focused on propping him up on the ground. Guts burst out of the rip. Your hand twitches to reach for it and yank it all out. His gloved hands are red for more than one reason now.
The speed and disorientation of his traipsing body make it so the censor has a hard time catching up with him. There’s only one memorable thing you catch during the stumble - a smile lights his face, like a single candle in a foggy night shielding you from blindness in a grotesque, dangerous place.
You can imagine the way the blood glistens off his teeth when he pools his energy to hiss one last thing: “And you can't.”
Your lips press together firmly as your unsteady stare meets the rigid lines of his deceased form. Even when clenching your fists tight enough to pop your knuckles, they shake.
His smile, impossibly smug, too satisfied for your liking, lingers in your mind even long after his body goes limp. In any other circumstance, his steady confidence and steadfastness could be a comfort, if you hadn’t expressly wanted to snuff it out. If he could go on grinning like nothing was wrong, then the Founder still isn’t defeated. Of course it isn’t that easy. He wouldn’t have let this happen unless he was confident in his failsafes. He still exists in another place. Another generation. Another somewhere. And the Connection will bring the two of you together again.
You wake up in a maze of halls, monochrome red saturating all of its highlights and a flat black for its shadows. It’s difficult to see like this. There is hardly enough to make out base shapes and details. It isn’t as easy as it was before, where the world simply knew what was around you and could tell you exactly what it is. You have definitely been here before.
This place reeks of iron, both kinds of the stench. The organic one is no doubt splattered all over the walls and floors, with a rouge sheen out of your frame of vision. Though that may be the only blood in this place. Everything feels cold, like a flatline. You feel cold, a nervous, shivering feeling you can’t quite shake. The facility is empty to the point that it gapes. Its lonely machines are a stomach with a void desperately needing to be filled. You still hear the chugging of gears and the whirring of equipment. It somehow nauseates you more to know just how much you don’t know.
Your memories flood back to you quicker than you can envision them all, a rapid tumble of information like the crashing of a waterfall onto sharp, choppy rocks. Afterschool Slash. Ben. The repeated deaths. All of it.
You are not Ben, that is as much as you can tell, and you certainly are not the avatar standing in this hallway. You are who you have always been, and nothing in this world can take that away from you. Nothing in this world can hurt you, touch you, fix you. But at the same time, there is a role you are forced to play if you want any influence on this story. You know it well. You know it by name. But, you don’t consider yourself much of an Audience anymore if you’re in the midst of the game.
There were certain limitations of the game you were forced to play, certain bounds you had not been in the standing to break. You conclude that these limitations must have been by design. Wisdom is power and you could not be allowed to share what you knew, not fluently. Not too soon. No matter how much you wish you could have broken through to Ben, all that is left is you and this place.
Before you stands a towering pair of doors, strong and solid but still much less industrial than the air-tight metal ones that guard each room. A high-pitched whine pierces your brain for just a mere moment. You narrow your eyes slightly, as even the little light of the hall is inflammatory on your micromigraine. The feeling of the door under your fingers is a sense you well know by now.
Naturally, the last thing you want to do is confront that again. Not without being thorough, making sure there is no other option. While there are much lighter stakes for you than Ben had, you cannot simply pick yourself up and drop yourself into more desirable circumstances. If you wish to move forward, you’ll have to take a page out of his book and try to find some sort of new path.
Instead of finding an exit, you see a blur of red in the distance. Not very helpful, since half the things in this place are a blur of red, but once you decipher it…
Relief flushes into you so suddenly that you nearly melt to the floor when you realize who this is. Then, after a polarizing second, you realize there was very little cause to worry in the first place. He should still be convinced of your status as an enemy. With the tightening of your posture you prepare for what's next.
The Red One centers himself in your view. The silhouette isn’t very cohesive. All you can make out is the hat, the shawl, and the two rectangles on his face for what must be glasses. You assume he was an avid reader, or maybe those science textbooks were just written in very very narrow print.
You can’t see his mouth moving, but you can hear a muffled voice articulating words just outside your ability to understand them. After a moment, and a ringing in your ears, you can finally make them out.
“Hopefully this is the last time you need to find me.”
He pauses after that, maybe to check if you were finally able to hear him. Neither of you say anything. You still aren’t certain if you can say anything. His silence is full of tension, and your only guess is that he’s using the time to examine you. You can only take guesses at what he sees.
You blink rapidly, heart racing fast enough to beat right out of your synthetic chest. With a glance to your left and a glance to your right, you recognize this exact scene. The weight of your body and feeling of your skin is all too potent and grounding. The light dizziness from deja vu blurs your peripherals.
Once he’s sure that your connection is strong enough, he holds his hands out placatively and shushes you. “You’re doing very good.” He spares only a little time to help you adjust. “Keep going. Don't give him time to catch up. The second you do, you're done for." You take note of the instruction. Its urgency, its stakes - none of these words are here for dead air. “You'll be back on the paths he paved for you. Those paths are all he knows.”
The red one usually doesn't stuff any illustrative language into his briefs unless there is a rhyme or reason, at least with what little you've seen of him. With the sense he's been awfully literal with you this time, you carry his words in your mind as you proceed on your journey.
It wouldn’t take much physical strength to pry the doors open, but it requires decent mental fortitude just for you to take a step forward.
You saw the image of what lies beyond the door. There was a messy office, with research paraphernalia strewn all across every clear surface. There were binders filled with material and shelves of resources, counters without a single empty space. A ladder, a full-body mirror positioned in front of the desk, and a TV in the back. Hopefully you're not so naive to still think it’s for leisure.
All of it pales in comparison to what you know the real feature is - the centerpiece of the office. A figure in a suit, whom you hesitate to call a man. He wasn’t doing anything else when you came in. Wasn’t pretending to read or write. It’s very clear from the moment you lay your eyes on him that he’s simply been waiting for you to open that door, arms folded on the desk.
You couldn’t see his face then, and you cannot see it now. That same obstruction blocks your gaze from finally bearing witness to the monster behind all of this. You feel a migraine at the edge of your mind the more you try to look at - or look past, rather - the crown of censorship donned unceremoniously across his visage. Eventually, you stop trying. Your hand twitches at its side when the question crosses your mind of whether or not the box is a physical surface or if you could still feel their face under it. You’re still unsure whether you would have decked him or simply traced the shape of his face. At least one of those options is still incredibly tempting.
His eyes flick down to your fingers, which had barely moved, but somehow he’d noted it. Damn it. Of course he would notice each of your little micro-movements. Well, he is a professional at watching. If he spent all those years observing you and had no idea how to find anything interesting in what he saw, it would be depressing. From this moment forward, you determine yourself to stand entirely still and react with the bare minimum. Give him as little to work with as possible.
Something about the smell of this room… or maybe how it looks? Sounds? Feels? Something about the office is uncanny enough to trigger pressure on your skull, like looking into a bright, strobing light (even though this place is quite dark). You close your eyes for a moment when it starts to hurt, but you try not to escape it for too long. You don’t know what impression that would give.
The inside of your mouth tastes like metal, like you’re trapped in a place inconceivably lined with nuclear poisoning. Your internal organs feel lined by rust. You wouldn’t be surprised if your nose spontaneously started bleeding.
Every crack radiates disease. Embedded into each atom that comprises this office is a disgusting infection, odorless and invisible but so so bitter. The Founder’s curse, one he has yet to cure. Hopefully he does not think you are the key to fixing whatever this is. Two seconds in here and you already consider turning tail.
“Welcome back,” he says.
You jolt at the sound of his voice. You weren’t prepared for that well-tamed baritone, with the theatrical timbre that keeps his steady words far from boredom. But the real surprise might have been the reminder that something alive (or at least, projecting the illusion of being alive) can exist next to matter that feels so decayed.
He chuckles. It isn’t fond, but it’s as warm as a welcome can be. The Founder speaks to you in real time rather than projecting text on a screen. …Well, he was technically always speaking in real time, at least on his end. “Come forward. I don’t bite.”
You would beg to differ. With a light glance over your shoulder, you look into the wavy mirror where you saw Ben. Or… ‘Ben.’
While standing in the world of his game, rather than just observing it on a screen, you catch many more details than you previously could. Mainly, it’s easier to see the definition of his suit. You can see more acutely where it starts and ends, and how it fits on his body.
One thing that does ease the teeming nausea building in your throat is noticing just how small his frame is. By no means is he short, but you think if he shed the layers, all that would be underneath is a skeleton. The breeze would blow right through him like his bones were windchimes, and he’d rattle before returning to his posture.
“I couldn’t guess what exactly you have returned for,” the Founder says, straightening his posture like he wasn’t already ramrod straight. “Though I can imagine about a million reasons, all equally possible, all probably inevitable.” He shrugs. “I take no offense.”
Getting a read of him may very well be impossible. Anything could be a lie, even the way his hands squeeze and his shoulders hike before he calmly forces them down. He’s a showman. He’ll perform however he wants to.
“So, what do you want to know?”
Funnily enough, his immediate reaction to that is a burst of a laugh, a single cackle that bubbles up without his permission. He quickly swallows the rest down. You imagine him pressing his lips together firmly to rid the crease of a smile, even if you wouldn’t be able to see it anyway.
“Oh, I doubt you need me to tell you,” he says, rising from his desk. You’re intimidated for just a moment by the reveal of his stature. You could tackle him, but he has the high ground on you.
You shove the fear and unease aside the second you feel your hate singing the edges of your resolve. You cling to that loathing like a lifeline. The burning heat of rage keeps you grounded under the icy attention of that solid-color void. The pressure thins the air, but you try not to quicken your breaths even with your chest now burning.
“You all have been very vocal about your opinions.” He grabs your face and forces your gaze in his direction. The glittery chrome gloves have a weaved texture against your skin. You know they’re rouge, but in this place, they look as black as ink.
For a moment, you thank the curse that forced this box over him. If the full intensity of his voice spilled into his glare, you’d be at risk of folding like a house of cards and hiding under your chair. The clenching of your jaw prompts his hand to release you.
He leans back and pulls the edge of his glove taut again before sitting down as though he did nothing. “So, why do you ask?” His legs cross, and he leans back in his seat. With all the autonomy you weren’t afforded last time the two of you met, the Founder has his work cut out for him this time. He doesn’t bother to play pretend and behave like this is a business meeting between colleagues. “Were you just curious to see what I’ll say about myself?” He scoffs.
You glare back and refuse to answer. No matter how clever or scathing your response, he’ll have something damning to shoot back with. He can’t scare the scowl off your face. He’s just saying nonsense, isn't he? To see what nerves he can press, to gauge whatever will get you to react. Again.
“What? Nothing to say?”
Your jaw sets.
“Do you wish to see me fawn in front of you? Is that it?” He plants his hands on his desk. There’s the slightest, slightest spark of feeling you can see in its stiffness, but there's visible effort taken to keep all emotion contained within his borders. “To cry and bemoan my station? Because if that’s what you’re here for, you’re better off leaving.”
You can’t help yourself. Your irritation simmers to the very top, grating against you like the sound of knives scraping against each other. “You don’t tell me what to do.”
He huffs. The chuckle that follows is empty of amusement. “I suppose I don’t. But don’t get ahead of yourself - that doesn’t mean you have any control over the situation.”
Again, you’re tempted to punch him. That might feel like control enough for him. But you practice your self-control with the promise to yourself that later, you might be able to do so much more.
“Anything else? Or was that your one and only thought?”
Once you leave the room in silence, the Founder decides that the floor is his once again.
“You know what I want.”
If he expects you to actually answer, he’s sorely mistaken.
The Founder leans back in his chair casually, his hand clutching his face and now hiding behind the box. He could be holding his chin, or propping up his cheek, or pressing the pad of his thumb against his sharp canine while he considers you.
“You aren’t here to negotiate with me then, hmm?”
You’re not going to give it up freely either. Your preferred scenario is that the Founder never gets what he wants and his schemes fizzle out and die. It isn’t going to be that easy, you know that. But you can hope.
The Founder senses your silent resistance and instead steeples his hands in front of his boxed face. “That’s okay. I can wait.”
And this time, he actually can, since he isn’t on an intangible time limit set by the whims of Infinity’s wavelengths. It’s been an eternity for the Founder to get to this point, so what’s a little bit longer?
You zip your lips. You’re determined to make good on that promise you made to yourself - give him as little ammunition as possible. Or maybe you’re curious to see what he’ll do. Even though you were the one to enter his world, you await what he has in store, because no doubt he has something up his sleeve.
“Simply lonely, are you?” He says, mostly to himself. His hands ease their tight grip and his shoulders slacken. Even though any movements above his chest are lost in the black, him tipping his head to the side is visible. “That or bored,” he mutters. “Either way, you’re welcome to loiter.”
And that’s that.
…that’s it? It took two minutes for him to come to terms with the fact his Audience is here. In the flesh. In a place he can see and hear and touch. You would have thought he’d be more manic. Or, hostile. Obsessive. Anything as intense as he was last time! The preconceived notions you had of him were clearly - well - preconceived.
The choppy low-framed animation of the game when the Founder moved is unlike how he moves now. Each gesture is smooth and as high resolution as real life. It’s most apparent as the Founder rises from his seat and strides over to a shelf of his.
When he moves too quickly, the censor lags just a bit behind and shows you a mere hint of bright hair. The box catches up quick enough that you can’t actually make out its shape or texture. His hand hovers over the spines of some books, clearly in search of a specific one. He idly clicks his tongue and hums under his breath while his fingers curl and repeatedly reach out on impulse for books he realizes he doesn’t want to grab.
Seeing the way he acts while idle is a delight you didn’t have the privilege to see before, when the only information you could glean were the important things that he made a note to emphasize to you. This is more raw. More real. More authentic without the filters to curate your experience to exactly what he wants it to be.
“Do you want something from me?” You didn’t expect your voice to sound like that. You didn’t expect yourself to have a voice at all. The words tumble out of you without even waiting for permission, so you guess you’re running with this.
Subconsciously, your hands drift to graze your neck. You can’t tell if it’s meant to be flesh or metal. There are vocal cords of some sort underneath this, either way.
The Founder pauses, hand hovering in midair. He looks over his shoulder, which you can see by the twisting of his torso, and (most likely) inspects you. Now you can see his full form, legs and all, with the belt that snatches his waist and the fabric that does a poor job of hiding the weakness in his thin limbs.
“Do you want something from me?” He throws back, pivoting to face you in his entirety. Even if you wished to speak, you wouldn’t know what to answer with. The clear unanimous answer is yes, but after that, everyone disagrees on what precisely to request from him.
The Founder doesn’t pry. He steps back to his chair with the slow clicks of his dress shoes and sinks into his seat.
It’s almost eerie how quickly he accepts your presence as part of the natural order of things, like a beloved token that’s been living in this office for an eternity. You slot right in to fill an empty space in his world.
He softens to your presence, just a bit.
“Why are you here, Audience?”
Wrestle the Founder
Look around his office
Give him the silent treatment
You’ve had enough of his games. Every second that this stupid cyclical routine goes on is another weight added to your splintering patience. Your restraint should regard you a saint for how long it took you to finally snap and do what you’ve been aching to do since the start of this wild goose chase.
You dive across the desk with a war cry, gunning for his throat.
The Founder looks like he was ready for you. He hooks you in the jaw and kicks you in the gut, tripping you afterward to send you to the ground.
“Wha - !” You sound winded. "You're not supposed to - " Your confusion intensifies when you notice that he isn’t even afraid. His limbs tense with his accelerating eagerness, but no shock. No terror. If it wouldn't worry you to say it, you'd say he looks even more prepared than you are.
After a couple breaths, he mutters to himself. “If we must,” he says, the gravel in his tone highlighted now that he doesn’t bother to smooth it out. He shakes himself out and pulls off his tie. After throwing that carelessly to the side, his fingers unbutton his red blazer. His practice with the buttons counteracts the adrenaline, so he doesn’t fumble too much with his hands. “If you love my hands around your throat that much,” he snarls. The top layer slides off his shoulders, onto the ground, and leaves just his dress shirt as guard. Now you know that your impressions of a skeletal form were not too inaccurate after all.
The second you're back on your feet, he slugs you across the face another time, then again, bruising your jaw and cracking your nose. You might have thought that the Founder wouldn’t be able to retailate against you, but you haven't ever seen him fight like this.
Every time you think you can catch a second to reorient yourself, the Founder jumps two steps ahead of you. He siccs himself onto your right arm. The tight clamping his jaw breaks your skin. He huffs out his nose.
You shudder, physically and audibly, and crane your neck up. The box has gotten close to you, but never has it clipped through you like this. The torment is indescribable. For a second, for a split second, the Founder's unique brand of unorthodox madness makes complete sense.
You shriek, both the pain of the bite and the agony of his curse searing into you. "Get off of me!" Your nails dig into his scalp to tug him off of you, but he's latched himself in a way you cannot pry off. "You freak! Why would you do that?!" You even try kicking at him. To no avail.
He can taste your blood, and he certainly gets his fill of the flavor with the sweet, sweet time he takes slicing through your sinew with his teeth. Once you notice a deeper red bloom onto your skin (which appears more black from the game’s filtered lighting), he rips away. A chunk of flesh is his proud claim, not like you can see it in his mouth. Only the absence of it in your arm. He spits his haul onto the ground.
While trembling, you stagger backwards and gasp for breath, holding your arm up to examine the extent of the damage. Measuring the harm isn't easy with your blurred, misty vision and the quaking of your bloodstained appendage.
"Ahh, this takes me back," he sighs, sounding too rapturous for your liking. He grips his upper arms and sighs dreamily. His muscles slacken. "Do you know what this reminds me of?"
You can hear your pulse in your ears. Namely, you can hear the way it accelerates the more desperately you try to recover.
"That first time I saw something like you here. Do you remember it?" He approaches you, his staggers more from his blissful tangent than exhaustion. You take one step back for every of his steps forward. "I remember it. I doubt I could ever forget my first taste of Infinity." He wipes his mouth with his sleeve. The white cloth comes away bloodied.
He’s out of will, but he can’t let you lose in peace. Damn his soul if he gave you even one second where he isn’t capitalizing on your existence. You wish he'd let you die so easily, just a quick suffocation and a fade to black. No. He forces your gaze forward. His satisfaction will only reach apotheosis if you to bear witness to the whole show.
While you were lost in your thoughts, the Founder had latched his gloved hand onto your head. One brutal slam against the wall crunches your skull. You groan. The world doubles, triples around you. The second time, the crunch is a squelch. More wet. The room spins on its axis. Your teeth clench together as your eyes roll into the back of your head.
This one moment alone is the perfect encapsulation of the Founder - he has never been defined by his outer exterior. The brilliant voice, handsome suit, and well-fit gloves have fooled no one. The only thing that consistently follows him is his ceaseless pattern of unrelenting violence.
"See you in Hell," he spits, slamming your head one final time.
Your eyes have a difficult time adjusting to the bright light shining directly into your retinas. White light. White flourescents in an environment that smells awfully sterile. When you extend your vision past your immediate surroundings, it's noticeable that the illumination does not carry far. It is focused on a fixed point. On you.
With a few rapid blinks and a sputter, the world becomes clearer. Wood presses against your back, chains digging into your wrists and ankles. Something tight digs into your waist, similarly for your neck. The dry taste of cloth sucks all the moisture out of your mouth. Though, the panic would have done that regardless. There's an IV in your arm, you notice. At that, many other wires and cords. Your attempt at struggling only makes the metal chains jingle and the rubber jostle around. Your attempt at crying for help only has you wishing that you drank more water before this.
A gentle voice shushes you. Even though it's a command for calm and silence, excitement radiates off of it like dangerous, impulsive flashes of lightning. Its mirth climaxes in its breathy little laughs, to the point the shushing seems more for itself than for you. It tells you to relax in a language you half-recognize, muddled by reminding itself to play it easy lest the high rush to its head and knock it out cold.
A man's face comes into view from above. "Hello," he whispers, voice shaking as much as his body is. It's a face you can see with absolutely no trouble at all, but that shouldn't match up with who you've finally recognized the voice to be. The Founder, the tormentor of this game. The sheer reverence in his eyes is vomit-inducing. "I think I found something special," he half-sings.
You squeeze your eyes shut to get his terrible existence out of your mind and thrash harder.
"Ahah," he breathes, staggering slightly backward. His hand fumbles along a wall. You hear the scraping of metal. "Hah… hahah. I knew it."
You shout. The sound barely carries. It's difficult to tell where exactly you are, or if this is even a location you have seen before.
Whatever version of the Founder that has locked you down here must be… young. Or younger. His face is round and smooth, eyes bright and hair a bit wild. Every once in a while he pushes his glasses up his nose. He had on a white labcoat too, with a dress shirt tucked underneath. There aren't many clues as to what he plans to do with you, but his lightheaded ramblings of, "I knew it was real, I felt it…" do not instill much confidence in you.
You try to demand for him to let you go. It isn't hard to decipher your muffled nonsense. He pays no mind whatsoever.
"Ever since I saw the first thing like you, I - I saw the four walls of my world." He sways slightly back and forth and bites his lip with his inability to contain himself. "That it's all just a game." His hand smoothly tucks stray hairs behind his ear. "It was only like a flash of light, there for a moment."
Demonstratively, he grabs at the air. His eyes narrow in focus. You lift your head enough to see a bit more. At least he had the decency to cover your body with a blanket. It's in the dark, and a little difficult to make out, but that may be an old-fashioned box TV positioned on a rolling table. It faces away from you.
"I've chased it ever since." So, the theatrical thing is a trait he's always had. Good to know. "And I found you again." He caresses your cheek, no glove on him, and stares at you like a pious man before God. Everything he whispers is a prayer. "And this time, you're going to stay."
…Where the hell did that scalpel come from?
You scream as sharp blade bites into supple flesh. Shouting and kicking is about as effective as last time. It messies his precise cut, but it still hurts like hell.
He throws his head back and lets out a puff of air, Adam's apple bobbing. There is a smile on that face, the face that is impossible to parse. From features to shape, you can see it as much as you cannot. It looms over you. He looms over you, his grin almost exhausting to look at. Deep pigmented rouge stains his pale skin and pronounces the shadows in his round face even more than they had been. His hand - gloved hand, its crimson color not exclusively from the fabric - rests on his cheek when he ducks his head to look at you. His eyes half-lid. He coos. "Oh, you're something else, aren't you? You're going to be so perfect for this."
What does he even expect you to do for him?! His endgoal is about as unclear as his cryptic little mumblings. If reality is what he's after, it isn't like you, with flesh locked in the game, could get him there.
It's almost a privilege to behold. Primary witness to Infinity, the ecstasy of his first time. Here, he is still just a man. For once, he is evidently out of his depth. He may not even be the Founder yet. You are the beginning of his many exciting experiments, his first exposure to the cosmic poison he could never run away from after his initial taste. This may be the only time you will ever see him so unblemished, prior to his degradation, and it is in the moments before he commits to breaking himself down atom by atom, DNA strand by DNA strand.
You thrash in your binds, whether to escape this madman or to save him from the fate you know he is moments away from subjecting himself (and by extension the world) to. If you successfully manage to plead for him to stop and reconsider, you cannot hear it for yourself.
Iron stings in your mouth and his. Your stomach churns. Curse this nonbiological body and its inability to projectile vomit. Despite the Founder - or, whoever he is at this point in time - not having near the amount of equipment or understanding of the forces he's meddling with, you still cannot find a way out of his restrictions.
"Look here." With very little care for the delicacy of the machine, he pounds his fist against the side of the TV box, opening the back to expose a gaping vacancy in its casing. "It still needs its guts and wires, you see?"
Your eyes widen. Every next breath comes quick and sharp as a rabbit's, your fear twice that of even the frailest prey. The desperation in your struggle to break the binds surmounts the closer he gets to you. His eyes, flooded with intent and hissing of lunacy, never leave your body even when he stumbles a step.
He snaps blue latex gloves onto his hands. "Oh, come on." A mock curls into his dulcet voice. "Don't tell me you didn't notice." His fingers curl around the top of the sheet blanket rip it off you in one clean motion.
Where your chest should be is an open cavity, all your organs miraculously chugging along as if they were not exposed to the world. It glistens and pulses like flesh, but for it to hold together with one side gaping open… maybe you are something special.
"Gorgeous, I know," the lad breathes, the crimson blood reflecting in his eyes. A single quick tear falls from one of his eyes, as blink-and-you'll-miss-it as a shooting star. He reaches into the cavity to caress your beating heart. You shudder and gag, eyes nearly rolling into the back of your head.
Something makes this scene scream danger and end more than anything else in this game has: it's as vivid as real life. You can see the blues, the browns, and the reds. The shadows are simply that - shadows. Not dark planes designed to highlight certain portions of a frame. If you didn't know better, you could mistake this for real life.
"But the hardware is nothing without…" His hands come away bloodied, staining your head when he runs his hand over it. It isn't the skull he's after - just what's inside of it. "Its dataset."
You close your eyes and try to pull away from him, but prospects are looking worse and worse with every minute that goes on. He's going to use you as his medium and you can't even negotiate with this thing stuck in your mouth.
Is this how the Founder actually did it? Found something that slipped through the cracks and siezed it for his own, warped its matter into a machine to engineer a living, breathing robotic? Is there no other way he could have opened the window to Infinity? To find where in the universe Reality lives? Or is the Founder just an asinine prick who refuses to stray from his themes?
"Don't worry," he says zealously, tongue swiping over his lips when the blood trickles from his nose. "I'll take such good care of you."
There is not enough strength in your legs for you to rise. Your extremities refuse to obey your commands. The bones, or the endoskeleton casing underneath this manufactured form, feel liquefied. Cuts, bruises, and stitches litter all across your body, not to mention the vertigo. The aches and sores throb all across you, wrack through you every time you breathe.
The world is void. Inky black with detached assets, fragmented and consuming themselves. He left you here. You'll become just like this place. It will eat you if you don't leave. It will eat you alive. Or… dead. You haven't the strength to restart, not after what he did to your body. You manage to lift your arm enough to see the bruising in the crook of your elbow. Needles and IV. Some of it may yet be in your bloodstream. Against your better judgement your fingers brush the spot. You pull back with a hiss.
The thread stitching the sets of this world together twangs like suddenly under a new, arduous weight. The fabrics of matter shift and dip, slightly disorienting, before readjusting to their typical positions. In the far distance of your tunnel vision is the hazy splotch of red that must have caused this disturbance.
The Red One approaches with trepidous steps, his blurred figure like a ghost that stalks the halls of a loveless place. He is the only mercy in this world.
A brush of cold wind exhales through this vacuum pocket. You clutch your upper arms and cover your chest, but wince audibly when it pulls the wounds. You shrink regardless. Away from his aura, away from his following, attentive face.
The first time you have felt a pureness of warmth in this game is when he crouches beside you. He says nothing. His boots are worn, cloak and shawl also humble and notably products of yesteryear with their weak-stitched patches and coarse appearance. It's only when he clears his throat and takes off his hat that you dare to crane your head up.
Now this close, you can see two eyes behind those glasses. The first eyes you've been able to look in this entire game. You gasp and clutch at his face, heart beating at a race horse's pace, greedily drinking up the kindness pouring from his gaze.
He grunts, eyes widening a touch, but he does not leave. He merely pulls your hands off his face. Your grip had been tighter than you meant it to be. His thumbs stroke over your quaking hands as he lowers them down into your lap. "Uh - Calm down. I'm not going anywhere. We finally have some time."
His voice is unsteady, a coarse tenor gravelled with age and degredation. He operates with no charm nor professionalism. In full honesty, his voice isn't as easy to the ears as the Founder's was. But after sinking your teeth into the tooth-rotting saccharine candy floss that was the Founder's will again, and again, and again, the Red One is a reprieve. If he's the spirit meant to guide you to your death, like he had for Ben, you would be satisfied.
"You went onto his path," he says, voice curling with sympathy. His stare flicks down to your hands before returning to your eyes. "I warned you not to."
"I didn't - " you suck in a breath when the act of speaking makes your chest feel like it's caving in. You heave a weak, ugly sob. "I didn't know he could - "
It's a mystery to you what the Red One sees. Who he sees, when he looks at you with that expression of unconditional grief and understanding. If he can tell what you look like behind the screen. Either way, he pulls you in for a hug, a bit of a confusing one because you can't exactly tell where the cloth ends and where his arms begin. You sink into it anyway and let the questions float away for now. "I know." He squeezes you once before pulling back, patting you on the shoulder. His frown deepens the shadows of his wrinkles. "Listen, you're three layers down. You're on the right track."
"He's crazy," you breathe. For some parts of you, the crazy is part of the allure. Your fingers twitch, aching to choke him out in return, to circle around his neck and bruise the silhouette of your fingertips into his skin. Every inflammatory move quells your ambition. "He - but he - " you take a sharp breath in. There was the unceremonious vow he gave upon your first real meeting, all that time ago. "He promised he wouldn't - " you can't finish. He would not hurt you, because he couldn't.
"Okay, listen." The Red One pulls back enough to the point he can comfortably use his arms to gesticulate. "The more destroyed things get, the more he - " he stammers a bit, in search of the right phrase. Guess all that science teaching doesn't extend to literary smarts. "- Runs out of ways to hide his problems."
"Huh?"
"He gets aggressive." He glances over his shoulder, face pinched with more concern once he looks back at you. "But it usually doesn't… work like this."
"What's that supposed to mean?"
"You need to keep looking." Urgency tugs against his voice. "There's a better ending out there. There's a way to stop this."
"What - ?" you scramble slightly away. "You're telling me I have to go back in?!"
"Listen - "
All you can feel is the burning pain in your body. Those surgical, inexperienced hands roaming you. The glint of eyes with a famished stare that nauseated you more than the stench of your own blood. "What if he hurts me again?"
"He's just stalling for time." The Red One grips you by both shoulders and forces you into eye contact, removing the possibility for panic. "He's desperate to keep you here as long as possible. You're almost at the end and it's making him anxious."
You snort.
"I'm serious!" The Red One's voice climbs. "He's covering it up somewhere, and if I know him, probably somewhere incredibly tedious."
"So that's it?" You grit your teeth through the pain when you push yourself to a stand. "Stumble blindly through again and check everything to see if there's some hidden back door?" Your hands brush nonexistent dust off your clothes. Body. Whatever. "You can't do any better for me?"
"I - " his retort dies in his throat. He closes his eyes and sighs. "I can't play this game like you can. I see the guts of the code and you see the interface."
"So can't you give me any idea what I'm looking for?" You offer your hand to Red. He takes it and allows you to hoist him up. "No key words? No motifs? Just somewhere 'incredibly tedious'?"
The world ripples again. The ground starts feeling unstable, buzzes of horrific energy threads choiring like a cacophany in the air. Red gasps and looks around, face steeling. He fits the hat back on his tousled hair. "I'm out of time."
You open your mouth, maybe to ask a few more rushed questions, but all that croaks out is voicelessness.
"The paths. You have to pay attention to getting off the paths that you've already done three times over. It should be hidden in plain sight." A distance grows between you and Red. You try to reach for him, follow after him, to no avail. It isn't up to either of you anymore. "I'm sorry I couldn't help you more!" He shouts across the chasm.
Your first inclination is to start wandering with the free legs you weren’t afforded in the Founder’s version of this game. He startles when you start roaming, but he doesn’t object. He just watches. His head turns to follow every move you make.
“Curious little thing, aren’t you?” He says, circling you at a distance. Inspecting you like some sort of lab specimen. “Well, of course you are.” With the way he lets the words fall under his breath, you aren’t sure if he’s talking to you or just muttering to himself. He must love his own voice. “That’s the reason you made it this far in the first place.”
You’re on the other side of the Founder’s desk now. It’s a mess here, a real mess. A hodgepodge of items that make sense but are still quite random and strewn about. Come on, a ladder?
At once, the thought of the mirror returns to your mind, with its ornate frame and distinctive tall shape. It sits against the wall, just at the other end of the desk. From its placing, you had assumed he fixed it right in front of him so he could constantly look at himself.
It would be a thing of conceit if you didn’t know his reflection also includes the box. Maybe it’s a reminder. A punishment. A discipline that prompts him to keep working even if he’s tired, because he looks up and is told all over again what he’s working so hard to avoid.
Only if the Founder can actually see the box. You wonder if that’s something only you can see - but you doubt it. Even if he can’t see the actual symbol, you’re sure he’s aware of what it represents either way.
When you whip around to face the reflective glass, you blink at yourself. Once, twice. Somehow the sight shocks you, even though you should have expected this the most.
“Why are you surprised?” He takes a step toward you. Tentative affection, more like fascination, coils into his words the more courageous he gets. He quiets down so few else could hear. “It’s the same old you.”
And it is. It’s just you there, in all your unorthodox glory. The tips of your fingers trail hesitantly over your cheek, a light, slow glide. It looks like skin. Like your skin, but it doesn’t feel right. Maybe skin has some other chemical composition in this generation.
Unease swirls in your stomach like a disgusting slurry of meat from a sausage sweatshop, just from being perceived. This time, the Founder gets to see this facet of you. You don’t think of yourself as anything special, but this is too real for his eyes to behold. He doesn’t deserve it.
You still can’t see his face, not even in the mirror, but you get the feeling he’s narrowing his eyes, gazing unblinkingly at your every move. Maybe he’s just as nervous as you, if not more.
Your finger twitches, just to see the way his body flinches forward on instinct. He moves just an inch, but he still moves. Hah.
“You torment me.” Now he’s talking like you can’t even hear him. His voice drips with the projected disdain only a thespian could have on stage. “You know that?”
You turn to find the source of his voice. Is he blending in somewhere with the background? He probably isn’t trying to, if anything.
Instead of finding his form, your attention is drawn by two separate things -
One book on the shelf sticks out a little more than the rest of the clutter. Next to stacks of binders, papers, VHSs, and other texts, you can see the spine of this book quite clearly. It has the hetch scribed on it in rouge ink. …You think it may not be ink. The way it calls to you is almost like a tease.
The other is something that belongs far, far less to a room like this. In fact, if either of the two is a set-up, it's this one. A knife, its metal end hidden by an unstandardized size of paper, with the handle facing you. It entices you to grab. You consider how well your fingers would curl around its grooves, how your palm would slot into the ridges.
The Founder’s baritone rumbles in his throat for a moment, on the cusp of a word, but then he realizes where your attention is. He waits patiently for your choice - if you’ll grab one, the other, or neither at all. He has no little quips to sway you either way.
The hetch. A symbol of creation that was adopted by the living, breathing talisman of degradation. Who better to corrupt its image?
No matter where it came from or who tarnished it, it is a repeating pattern in these repeating worlds. The spine of that book is like looking in a window to Chronicle Zero, to the Social Experiments, to the button and the tree and the bloody scrawls tucked away in the unsavory corners. It's tossed through the screen at an audience that ravenously consumes any sight of it.
The second your eyes land on that book, your fingers twitch. You leap out of your seat and rush for it, unable to shake the uncomfortable hunch that nothing in this room is meant to be accessed.
The Founder rushes too, not bothering to fix his tie when it untucks itself from his top coat. No time for things like that when he is so eager to beat you to it.
The desperate scramble for the book, which on closer inspection is so high-definition it barely looks like it belongs in this compressed world, has your heart pumping faster. You breathe heavily. The Founder, that bastard, has a height gain on you, and can reach a bit further. If he designed your body, then that was definitely done on purpose. Even if it wasn't, yes it was. You've officially decided. Death of the author.
To prevent him from victory, you slam your hand right into the box, pushing him back by the face. His startled grunt only makes you pause for a second, as you realize exactly what you've done on impulse, but you shake out of it quickly when the adrenaline and tension in your body order you to keep moving.
Curling your fingers around the spine of the hardcover, you rip the book off the shelf so quickly you almost knock several other things with it. The manic haze stumbles your steps as you put distance between yourself and the Founder. After you orient your vision well enough to be able to read, you open the book before he can snatch it away from you.
… then, with an exceptionally loud beat of your heart in your ears, you realize the Founder has not moved, nor said anything. You lift your eyes from the page.
The Founder stands beside his desk, arms crossed and foot tapping lightly against the floor. As well as that, his index finger taps against his sleeve, in time with whatever metronomic tune he has playing in his head while staring at you. His posture is straight. As proper as ever, with no urgency in the line of his muscles.
Your brows furrow. Even shaking the book around demonstratively doesn't seem to provoke any interesting reactions.
The Founder flippantly throws his hands out of the cross, setting them on his hips after. He shifts his weight to one leg and looks slightly off to the side. "Well, I suppose there isn't any harm in you taking a look now." You blink rapidly. What? "You've already spoiled yourself."
Iron stings your nose and tongue, so potent and sudden that you reach one hand up to cup your sinuses. Your jaw clenches. A high-pithced whine pierces your mind for a few moments before fading again. Blood trickles out your nostrils at a slow pace, and you only notice it when your tongue swipes across your lips to rid them of that uncomfortable slick feeling.
Zero Roads. Her story. The future (the past?) of Generation 0.
"Shouldn't this be a…" you start hoarsely, holding up the book even though it's more like a deadweight now. Your fingers tightly plug your nose to stop some of the blood flow. "A VHS… or something?"
The Founder chuckles. "It's just the story. Not the generation itself. Silly." He casually makes his way over to you, pulling the book from your slackened hand. It thunks when he drops it on his desk. "Ah, and don't tilt your head back." The netted texture of his chrome slides against your skin with so little warning that you jolt back. He clicks his tongue. "Oh, I see. This won't do. Just… hold still."
"Stop - let me go." Your weak protest pings off the Founder like a dart on metal gear. He mutters light words of focus and swipes the blood away from your lip.
"I know where you're trying to go," he says, casually as he tends to you like he's not dropping information on the singular mission you have had this entire time. "My sincerest apologies." He pats the side of your cheek after assessing the damage and ruling it as not a concern.
"Huh - what?" You mumble, leaning forward despite yourself when the Founder pulls away. He never turns, facing you the entire time and folding his arms behind his back.
The walls twist, floor no longer flat. It's like peering into the world through the lens of Ben's fourth mirror. "I do so love your curious spirits, but I cannot let you reach it."
"Reach what?" His voice is already fading, farther into the distance than before. Your ears feel stuffed with cotton as even your own voice detaches from what you have temporarily accepted as "your body." "What are you - "
The Founder tilts his head at an almost unnatural angle and waves a stiff ta-ta.
One second, you're running, everything in you focused on reaching that book. All your power, all your energy, the full force of your concentration pinned on that anomaly housed on the Founder's shelf.
Then, one second later, you stop. Your muscles, previously engaged and exerting all the energy this body will permit you to, lock in place. Just that brief moment of hesitation is enough of an advantage for the Founder to pluck the book right off the shelf before you can. He holds his hand there on the spine for a second, huffing out a breath, before actually taking it.
The second control is his again, you watch him slot easily back into his assumed role. The Founder rolls his shoulders back and settles in his body, melting into the scene like he belongs more than anything else. His practiced hands fix his tie like it had never been disheveled in the first place. “A story." His voice curls, too light to be talking directly to you. His hand brushes the cover of the book, lightly tracing it as if he could even feel its texture through that thick glove. Then he looks up. "Is that all you wanted? To hear a story?”
The question is so… innocent, in a way. The sort of way that sets a sour sting in your mouth. His glee would be endearing, coming from a reasonable person's voice. Alas, there are only two voices here. One is too stubborn to make itself known. Not at the cost of bringing him more twisted joy. It isn't worth it. Your lips twist and your nose wrinkles up, arms crossing over your chest.
Your pursuit for the book goes conveniently unaddressed. And unpunished. You take it as a mercy from the Founder.
He, for whatever reason, takes that silent response as an eager, receptive yes. With no further prompting his hands land on your shoulders (when did he even get back there?!) to lead you behind his desk. You jolt at his touch but aren't in the standing to struggle against his tightening grip.
His seat is lined with cushions for both the back and bottom, unlike the stiff wooden one on the visitor's side of the desk. He pushes you into it. Your muscles melt into the ergonomic design. The Founder chuckles. His hand reaches toward you, then pauses midair, and he draws it back like deciding against whatever gesture he was instinctually about to do. "Yes, get comfortable." The grin is audible in his voice.
Your eyes widen when you realize that in the matter of seconds, he's tamed you. You're docile, easily led around, and shushed with the little tap of your nose. You bare your teeth and cross your arms, looking away from the Founder in one final show of rebellion.
He saunters about his room with smug, playful steps and places the book back on the shelf with the theatrical toss of his hand, at a higher point that you cannot reach without the use of the stepladder in the farthest corner of the room. Bastard.
The Founder makes his way to the other side of the desk, lowering down to match your eyeline and leaning forward to be ever closer. “Do react when you feel like it." His hand brushes the apple of your cheek, quickly trailing down to your chin and pulling away. The caress is fleeting and barely lasts a second. His tenderness glues your lips shut with a foul-tasting tar. Is this what he would have done to you in the game? Your hands twitch at the thought, but you don't act. Mainly because you cannot decide if you would rather push him away or strangle him until his heart no longer beats.
From here you can easily see the mirror fixed to the wall, but you decide not to focus on the reflection and instead on him, the black box that's meant to be face that fills the majority of your vision. Neither option is quite good, and both make your insides churn, but there is no clearer way for him to communicate that you have no choice but to pay attention.
Your loathful gaze bores into the box. You can only imagine the bright, dazzling smile he offers in return. "A story is functionally useless without an audience.”
With gritted teeth, you squeeze your eyes shut and sigh. You had something going there for a second. Now you're nothing more than a little dollie again, your hair brushed and clothes tightly fitted for you. He ignores your scoffs and scowls.
He stands to his full height and clears his throat, stretching out his hands to get the words flowing. At some point he opens his mouth and starts illustrating the start of this story he chose for you, or maybe he's making it up on the fly. Either way, you listen. He doesn't seem like he'll stop any time soon.
And he doesn't. He goes on and on and on, until your eyelids become heavy and you grow tired of fighting the exhaustion, even though it leaves you so vulnerable to him. You cannot remember what he says to you before the world fades into unconsciousness.
The Founder urges slightly back when you stand, stalking about the room like the office belonged to you.
With little wasted time, your fingers curl around that handle. Ah. So, that's how your hand fits. Not perfectly. In fact, the hold itself is a little awkward. Your fingers are too long, short, fat, and bony at the same time, and pressing your skin against the wood feels like a buzz. Trying to make heads or tails of the perplexing feeling would eat time you cannot afford to lose.
You turn woodenly, intent flashing in the eye that isn't eclisped by the shadows of your face. He springs to a stand.
You flip the knife in your hand to point it outwards and surge forward with a loud cry. The Founder ducks out of the way by diving to the side. His tumble is anything but graceful. While you get your bearings and try to find him, he manages to spring up again by bracing against his desk.
“Oh, not this again.” His lapels are unsmoothed, and his tie already peeks out past its natural tuck. He runs his hands through his hair, you guess, in his utter exasperation of you.
It’s easier to navigate by sound so you don’t hurt your eyes moving so quickly in a world where every graphic is so poor. You incrementally close your eyes and listen for his breathing, for the shuffling on the ground.
The fabric of the Founder’s pant leg rubs against the floor.
There.
You dive to reach him before he can fully slither away, arms flailing around to feel him out. Your hand locks around his ankle. You finally open your eyes, only to get a face full of foot. He kicks you in the nose. You groan. When you clutch your face, you feel a trail of blood already pouring. Well, at the very least, now you know you can bleed.
The Founder hoists himself up. You latch onto him so he pulls you up with him. Then, the moment you have an opening, you plunge the knife right into his -
The Founder snatches your wrist before you can even puncture the first layer of his suit. His grip is tight.
Your eyes widen. A quiet gasp whishes past your lips.
He twists your arm to force the knife away from him, leaning close to your ear in the process. "Nuh-uh-uh," he says, the breath of his smile brushing your neck. You try struggling out of his grip. The Founder gives you no room to budge. "Not this time."
He rips the knife out of your grip with one sharp movement, knocking you to the floor. You land on your rear hard enough to push a grunt out of you. The Founder flips the weapon around to a comfortable grip. He looks well used to the feeling. His glove audibly crinkles the tighter he clutches the handle.
Ever above you, the box looms. You gaze upwards and its blight blocks out the rest of the world. It swallows all light, all hope, all heaven. Death crawls across you as it smoothly, cunningly approaches. It emanates a devastating aura. You can’t articulate exactly what it makes you feel. Rot. Decay. The end of old things to make way for the new. Though, you are stubborn. It's on you to put him in the ground, to remind him that his time is over and that all he'll ever return as is the fuel for some inconsequential thing. This world will never let him forget what he is, what he ought to be. He will fight it forever.
"It's adorable." His voice curls with a threatening mock, wrapped in velvet so easy to sink into. His hand grips your neck and forces you back. You hadn't expected him to have enough strength to disarm you so quickly.
You were too careless.
"It's adorable - " he slams you against the wall, knocking your skull carelessly. You groan. " - how you think killing me - " he pulls you back just to bash your head in once more. "Is the same as ending me." He pikes the knife into your wrist, lodged firmly between your radius and ulna. You shriek hard enough to make your own head throb with a migraine. The hand still looped around your throat squeezes just enough to make your air flow a struggle but not impossible.
Your vision blurs. Wet, sticky warmth trails down your arm in uncomfortable quantities. Any attempt to pull yourself free of the pin sets your nerves on fire, almost enough to make you scream again. You make the executive decision to keep still.
"Oh, don't move." He speaks with his teeth, not his tongue. A shudder wracks through him. A wet drop of something plops off his chin, too quick and thin to be blood. "I only get one of you."
Your teeth pin your quivering bottom lip as your watery stare meets the rigid lines of his tight posture. Even when clenching your fists tight enough to pop your knuckles, they shake. You whimper. "Please."
A lightheaded laugh bubbles out of the Founder. He rests his now free hand against the wall, slouching down to be closer to eye level with you. "And what had you done when I plead to you?"
You close your eyes and tilt your head up. Sobbing takes too much breath away from your lungs but there isn't any stopping it. "No, please." Your voice is too thick. "This isn't how it's s'posed to - "
His hand constricts your throat until inhales become hoarse gasps. "Don't worry," he croons into your ear. Vomit bubbles up in your throat. Your peripherals already wane into darkness. "You’ll have plenty of time to process my Infinity."
It’s a struggle to muster up the resolve. This simulation, to the body in this world, is real enough to fool you. Your fingers feel the polished wood of the handle. Your knuckles crack when you tighten your grip. If you quiet down your breathing enough, you can even hear a heartbeat.
But, with one triumphant deep breath, you plunge the knife into your stomach, piercing through… clothes? Sheet metal? Wires and viscera? You couldn’t be sure, but the one thing you know is that it hurts.
Not enough for you to stop.
Your body hunches over, folding from the pain and the new gash under your ribs. Sure, maybe the stomach area isn’t the best place to go if you want a lethal cut that’ll puncture essential organs, but you can be a showman too. You want your theatrics. You want to witness his heart leap into his throat at seeing his idol of worship bleed out in front of him.
But that isn't what you get. The Founder clicks his jaw shut and takes a measured step back. There is no gasp, nor pearl-clutching, nor quick sprint to your side. He merely, slowly, releases a sigh.
You feel yourself collapse. The thud of your body hitting the ground is loud enough for even you to hear. It takes a little effort to dislodge the knife from your core but once you do, blood gushes out in oozes. It’s much more viscous than it should be. Maybe that’s just what blood looks like at this frequency, sticky globs of deep rouge.
In another place, you’re safe and comfortable, relatively unharmed in comparison to the open wound weeping its fluids all over your… clothes? Body? Even looking into the mirror you still couldn’t tell exactly what rests snug against your form. Somehow you feel less naked with the knife in your side, so you shove it back in. A little higher, this time.
The Founder watches you ravage yourself. The knife bites into your flesh and skates across your ribcage like the graze of teeth. Your pulse becomes fainter with the lack of blood to fill your veins. Now it’s all around you, painting his office in yet more shades of monochrome reds and blacks. It pools at your back and clings to your entire body. It isn’t a pretty sight, not at all, yet he still watches.
The Founder's apparent bitterness is pungent enough to sting through the whole room. You can see his deepening sideways frown in your minds eye. Disappointment flushes the light out of his posture. In the echoed moment of your death, he finally learns to expect nothing of you. "I suppose not, then."
You choke on blood. Sputtering, coughing, foaming at the mouth when your natural reflex to breathe only bubbles the fluid that already exists there.
The Founder, rudely awakened, just watches you writhe. You die curled up on the floor, alone.
His outstretched hand lingers in the air, with the light twitching movement that of something alive and muscular. The light swaying, back and forth, steady but human. His posture is bent to put himself even farther in your reach. You have no reason not to accept if you intend to. What the Founder desires to show you, or where to take you, is not evident.
Rather, you find your time better spent in inaction. You fully sink into the seat that was provided at the other end of the desk, weight pressed upon a cushion where Ben's form was once settled. A light shudder wracks through you at the thought, vivid even though it was a choppy video viewed from a browser. You expect your hands to be warm when placing them in your lap, but find the shocking opposite.
Rather than accept, or verbally decline, you stare. You quickly grow accustomed to the view of his glove stretched taut across his fingers, folding over itself with the light curl of its posture. His fingers are lithe, bony and thin but long and prominent. How tight its grip could be when necessary. It is one of the easier sights on the eyes, at least in this wretched game.
Would his hand be cold, or warm? The Founder seems alive enough, but feeling his pulse under your fingers and his warmth in your facsimile of skin would make it certain to you if he was mimicking something alive as well. Your fingers curl together in your lap in faint patterns to expel some of the energy still buzzing within you.
The faint curiosity of if you and the Founder share the quality of cold hands is, however, not near enough temptation to take his bait.
He keeps the offer available for too long a time, to the point it should now be obvious that his steadfastness is in vain. When he clenches his hand, the glove crinkles. The Founder clears his throat. He straightens his already straight tie. Something interesting you notice at this very moment is that you need not blink in this body. Incidentally you've forced the Founder to challenge against the chill that is your endless well of a gaze. The urge to chuckle wells up in you, but you tamp it down if only to maintain the stoicism that has tranced the Founder into silence. He had wanted your attention, let him be damned that he was asking the Monkey's Paw for it.
Under his box, the weight of a stare presses upon you. He examines you in turn, as if roleplaying your reflection. Like dealing with an untamed circus animal, he not so much as turns away from you when sinking into his own desk chair. Silently, the gesture is an agreement to play your quiet game.
Your hands stay in your lap. The Founder may position his hands similar, but you cannot tell, as he is behind the desk. You'd call it a staring contest if you could see his eyes at all.
The Founder clears his throat lightly. It's an absurd disruption on your mutual silence, to the point of being disrespectful. Nothing makes sound, not even a clock. There must be at least one clock in here, among all the clutter. Maybe time just isn't passing.
By some strange tic in your inner mechanisms, your head jerks to the side, much like how an animal does to hear its surroundings better. The Founder visibly mimics you, still acting like your loyal little reflection.
"There is nothing for you here." The words fall rehearsedly from his mouth. Then nothing else.
In the original game, you were helpless to everything that the Founder scripted for you. There was no way for you to break out of the bounds of his plan, no way to exercise the power of reality. Now, there is more control in your hands than there ever has been. And with that free will, you choose to remain stationary. The Founder, for once, doesn't pursue any alternate course of action. He lets you sieze your coveted silence.
He watches. and watches. And watches like you're the most compelling thing this side of Infinity. Or… maybe he watches with utter boredom, so drowsy from nothing happening that he has to take a little nap. Or maybe his hackles are raised, poised to spring up and fight back at any moment you choose to leap for him, and he's simply disguised it behind a lax demeanor.
The tilt of his head is prominent. "I mean it this time." The box follows its rotation, for whatever reason. It makes it look less like a censor and more of a mask or fixture. A plane that exists in real space even though it does not. Why would the censor bother? Well, that question is silly.
He does not say anything. Neither do you. It's a stalemate, and it may continue this way indefinitely.
There is nothing more for you down this way.
"Oh, which of you am I even kidding with that anymore?" The Founder sighs exhaustedly and sinks into his chair. "I know I’m just wasting valuable breath by admonishing you for staying on this path." His hand disappears behind the box, presumedly to pinch his nose. "And you’re wasting valuable time by staying here."
Is he chastising you or himself? Nothing in his demeanor reads very firm, not like you've seen him before. His posture is wholly unprofessional. There isn't even any tension. Resigned acceptance, maybe, but that's it.
For a moment, words hop from your throat to your tongue and lurk behind your teeth, knocking on their cage and nearly sneaking out before you can click the lock of your lips. With a bit of force, you swallow them back down and let them burn to nothing in whatever equivalent to stomach acid, if any, this vessel has.
"Please, enlighten me," he says, the weariness creeping all the way into his bones. He lightly throws his hands up, then lets them drop into his lap. "I don’t know what more you want from me."
He watches. and watches. And watches with utter boredom, so drowsy from nothing happening that he has to take a little nap. His lax demeanor is no disguise, and neither is the slouch in his chair.
The curtains should already be closed. Eventually, the Founder breaks the silence with, "even if you wanted to agree to my deal and shake my hand, we both know you can’t." He sounds incredulous.
Confusion. That's what it is. Not boredom. There isn't any point for you to keep venturing down this path.
The Founder shakes his head. Both his hands lightly rest on the arms of his chair to help him straighten in his seat again. "I see," he mutters, mostly for his own sake. "You’re stuck here. You can’t move on until you’re truly convinced you’ve seen everything this path has to offer."
He glances at you for confirmation. Even a nod will do. Still, you offer nothing.
The Founder pushes himself off his seat and ambles idly behind the perimeter of his desk, rubbing his chin (or so you think) while he considers you. He pauses, lips parting. His body arcs a bit to the side while he considers you. Strands of hair dangle enough to peek out from just beyond the edge of the box. "I'm just encouraging you to proceed by talking, aren't I?"
You make what you believe to be 'eye contact' with him before he begins his pacing anew.
The Founder halts his next step and rears back to let out a rough, bitter laugh. "I really should just shut up."
From all your experience, the Founder doesn't seem like much of the listening type.
The Founder looks at you once more. He turns a bit, even takes a deep breath, before catching his words. He shakes his head and glances back at you once more. "Well." He shrugs lightly. "While you're still not bored of this, I might as well make the most of it."
The Founder shoves a few things on his shelf aside, much of the clutter smushed to one end. Your brows furrow. Beneath all the mess is a small phonograph.
"Now, I don't exactly know why," he says, searching about the bottom row of shelves for his expansive discography. His fingers flitter and fret amidst the covers and sheets. A light aha comes out of him when he finds what he's looking for. He handles the record with utmost care. Carefully, he slots the vinyl disc in place and sets the groove in its proper spot. "But I know that the works of Russ Morgan particularly amuse you all."
You blink rapidly when the ironically familiar notes of Goodnight, My Beautiful delicately haunt the Founder's office with the analog tones of a long-dead orchestra. Then you wrinkle your nose at him.
"What?" He says, voice as lighthearted as it's never been. "Is it a crime for us to get comfortable?" The Founder hops onto his desk and crosses his legs together, swaying slightly "If I know you, you stubborn thing, you plan on staying a while." Out of seemingly nowhere, he pulls out a cigar. His free hand pats the clear spot next to him on the desk. "What? If you're going to be stuck here, wouldn't you rather at least have a bit of a good time?"
Not a few minutes ago was there spite hissed back and forth between you two, and now he's invited you on his desk. For a smoke. Your head reels. Before he can rescind the offer, you take it.
"Do me a favor, would you?" He holds out his lighter - one of vintage metal with illustrious carvings and patterns. The tactile engravings feel interesting against your hand, weaved and polished, though the material does leave behind a bit of a metallic scent on your fingertips.
The Founder manages to cut the head of the cigar in the time you take figuring out how to spark the illustrious lighter. He holds the foot of the lighter to the open ember and rotates it evenly. Seeing that the fire is quite a distance from the tip, you pull it closer. A cautionary "ah - " catches in his throat. His hand lightly loops around your own, guiding the tip of the lighter down to the appropriate distance from the cigar. The tip rotates until it has a steady light going for it. He sighs in satisfaction.
With a soft "thank you", a puff of air you can feel lightly against your face, he clicks the lighter shut with the practiced flick of his gloved hand and slides it back in his pocket. His proximity had stunned you too much to do anything about him taking it from you. The foot of the cigar burns. Nicotine stench wafts through the room. His office hadn't smelled like much besides paper, ink, and… no, that cologne fragrance is just from your proximity to him.
It's mildly amusing at first how much of the cigar you can see depending on how close he holds it to his mouth, but then your ears start ringing and your head starts pounding the more you try to figure out its geometry. After that, you keep your eyes mostly away whenever he takes a puff.
"This is what I had wanted, isn't it?" He mutters, the faint glow from the cigar entirely swallowed by his absence of a face.
You blink rapidly and refocus on the warm body sitting beside you. Warm. Alive. Real?
His smoky exhale twists through the air, making him seem so ordinary that your chest clenches. "For my Audience to be captive to my words." The touch of rapture gilds the edges like the wonder of a dream around wakefulness. He even cranes his head, gazing at some abstract, arbitrary heaven. With a sigh, he drops it. "But, this is honestly not the way I had envisioned that going."
If he knew getting and retaining your attention would be as easy as this, well… maybe things could have played out differently. His focus is primarily ahead of him, on features of his room while his thoughts peruse wherever they go. The Founder doesn't seem the type to tap his finger and sway to the beat, even hum a bit, but here he is.
This new insight into the Founder is as heartwarming as it is chilling. It's the closest thing to authenticity he has ever achieved. The same fear that strikes you when you mistake a facsimile for the real thing… that's this. At the same time, it’s like the show is over, you’ve taken your characters off, and he’s a peer speaking to you after the curtains have closed. Two actors in the green room. He’ll be stuck here too, for as long as you force him to exist. Not once has he blamed you for that.
The Founder offers you the cigar. After only a second of hesitation, take it, holding it by the ring. This body isn't even your real one, so lung cancer shouldn't be something you worry about. "Remember - don't inhale."
Lightly, you nod. Donning a countenance of extreme concentration, you close your lips around the head and puff. Don't inhale. Just leave the smoke in your mouth? Sounds gross. Cigars are not your area of expertise, but you know cigarettes, and you know those things taste positively rancid. When you puff the cigar, however, your eyebrows fly to the top of your head. The flavor is astounding.
Rich. Earthy. No… woodsy. Is that hickory?
The Founder chuckles lightly watching your reaction, and for once there isn't so much as a drop of a mock in there. No wonder rich people love looking pretentious while smoking these.
He hums indecisively, tongue pushing against the inside of his cheek. "A onesided conversation can only drone for so long," he says. The song switches to the next in Russ Morgan's catalogue. The title of it eludes you, but the melody does not. "And I know you cannot speak, otherwise this ends, if I'm correct."
You offer the cigar back to the Founder after having your try. The smoke wafts out of your mouth when you part your lips. The Founder joins your breath. The smoke intermingles, then disappears.
He snaps his fingers. The material of the glove stifles it, somewhat. "Do you want to hear a story?"
You must have pulled some sort of face, because he quickly amends his comment with, "No, no. Not like last time." He huffs. No - scoffs. "The last time this game promised a story, you didn't actually get to hear one." He turns to face you, reaching his hand out. "Only this character did." It quickly pulls back before he can graze your skin. "This time, I could regale something to you properly."
The sound of story makes your ears perk. With shimmering eyes, you try searching his expression for any trace of honesty. This, of course, is a fruitless endeavor.
"Is that what you want?" His smile is audible. "A story?" He drops off the desk, invoking the image of a bounding, eager golden retriever. (Your eyes widen a touch and you elect to brutally scrub that image out of your brain, because this is the Founder). Youve heard those words in his voice before, but that time it felt like a taunt. This time, his tenderness is hot to the touch, scalding and difficult to endure because of how real it burns.
Only now are you prisoners together. Only how is there an authentic spark of solidarity between the both fo you. For the first real time, your guard drops.
The Founder claps his hands together, keeping his fingers interlocked. "It's been quite a long time since I've indulged in the tradition of oral storytelling." He loosens his tie and shakes out his body. After the quick clear of his throat, he begins. "I don't suppose you've heard of the woods surrounding Lostfield?"
You shake your head. It would probably be more comfortable to sit in the Founder's chair, but you stay.
"The name is quite misleading." The Founder does not stay still as he speaks. "Lostfield has very few natural fields. It's mostly coniferous woods, magnificent monoliths of nature that stretch on for miles." The wide sweep of his hand illustrates just how broad those acres must be. "They are not for the humble man's travel. Still, the boldest among the young try to brave its depths, if only to say that they can." He turns to you. "Oh - I just smiled. Sorry, you - hah - you couldn't see it." A laugh bubbles up into the words.
You smile back, swallowing your own laugh before you can dignify him with the sound.
It hits you like a mallet to a gong that while you're jolly here, there is bloodshed just down the halls. There is the memory of the Founder's devastation. There is the gruesome reality held in these four walls.
But that's just the thing, isn't it? It isn't reality. Both of you know it isn't reality. The Founder has seen that you no longer care to stay in character, so by proxy, neither does he. The illusion is gone. The severe pretenses have fallen at your feet. The plot has been put on pause, like a lucid dream halting to stabilize itself lest the dreamer wake up. Bizarrely, in this isolated peace, he's carefree. Free.
He lowers his hands. His story proceeds with the tender touch of young love. "For others, still the young, it's a place of quiet comfort and solitude." One hand rests in his other. "It's a solace they find nowhere else but hidden in her canopies and brambles." His thumb strokes the inside of his palm. "When along its trails, paths only formed by the steps trodden from those who came before, its grandeur is apparent to even the blindest." His voice softens. "In the morning the sunlight dapples through the leaves to highlight the world in gold. The marshlands that skate portions of its floor are as treacherous as they are harmless. They demand your attentiveness and reward the sharp mind." He grows more distant, airy, like describing the figure of a goddess. "It beckons."
Even without the flavor of his expressions, the theatre in his voice carries the imagery astoundingly far. It makes more sense how he persuades so many people to listen to his word.
"There was once a young boy who got lost in these woods." He folds his arms behind his back and lightly walks in circles as he speaks. "But do not feel sympathy for this boy." He wags his finger. "The last thing he wanted was to be found."
You nod, carefully rotating the cigar so the embers can lick away the filler at a proper pace.
"He always ran and hid there whenever he felt like being lost. And every single time, this boy felt her call," the Founder continues. "From the path that stretched beyond him. It bent just enough that he could not see where it led unless he trekked it himself. The temptation to let it swallow him and never spit him back out was an ache that ran so deep he thought it must have been coded into him."
"There was another direction to go, of course. To go back. But whenever he bore witness to that path, that path that tugged at him like he was a magnet feeling for the Earth's core, the most restraint he could have was lying on the floor of the forest and losing hours there to the calls of the birds."
Your roles have fallen, and so has context. There is no Founder. There is no Audience. Just two people in a room that smells now of smoke, with a needle skipping over the grooves of old music. Just two people who keep each other company. Sharp. Entertained. Two people with nothing else to do in this world. Nothing else they can do in this world.
Just the simplicity of a man who affects nothing at all, making up a story just for you and having a grand time with each of its twists and turns. Just you. Just you with your weight leaned on one arm, free hand holding the cigar and savoring its flavor every now and again while you watch him perform. The reckless abandon an artist can only have when empassioned by love and experience fills the room with warmth you hadn't even realized was so absent until it returned. Could it have always been like this, if things were different?
"He knew there would be no going back once he had gone down. He's been lost many a time, but never to the point he could not at least find himself. No, there was something down that path. Something that warded natural things away but coaxed him in like a siren's song. He never so much as heard the squeaking of a mouse down that diverging path, yet the journey still tempted him." The Founder pauses, examining you closely as if waiting for something. He's silent for one second too long. "Anyway."
His story proceeds, on and on, following the journey of this boy as he finally succumbs to his whims to see what's around the bend of the low marsh. The trees tower around him and sing of his inconsequence. The light becomes more blinding the deeper he explores. The world grows dangerously still.
Throughout the duration of this story, a spark of light possesses the Founder in both voice and movement, the reminder of a joy he forgot he could feel. The nicotine from the cigar loosens your muscles.
"And…" The Founder faces you, like he's speaking directly to you instead of telling it to you. "He saw something extraordinary." His voice quivers with emotion. "One venture down the path and his entire life thereafter had jumped the tracks of the mundanity it would have been. It was a magnitude that scared him at first. He felt like his skin was melting off his bones." The Founder's fingers lightly trail his arms. "He could never forget it. It would never let him. It left its mark on him, branded him like a thing, then spat him back out to a world he no longer belonged to."
Gradually, he closes some of the distance between you two.
"Could you imagine living the rest of your life, like that?" He breathes. His hands squeeze, then he lets himself go. "Painfully, astutely aware of how cardboard your entire world is? That everything you've ever known was fabricated?" He shudders an inhale. "Could - could you imagine not having a single peer? Everyone in this world viewing things as though it were a two-dimensional plane and him alone, with the only eyes that can percieve the Z axis?" He's close enough that whispers are sufficient for you to catch every word. "Could you imagine being able to see that, but knowing you still only live in the territory of X and Y?"
You shake your head. Over and over again, that obnoxious voice in the back of your mind echoes this is the Founder, this is the Founder, you know what he has done and will do. You wave it away like an obnoxious gnat. Maybe you can allow yourself a single timeline to feel heartaches for him.
"Do you not think…" he delicately cups your face, a slight edge of desperation to the poorly hidden quake in his fingers. "Do you not think it would push you to do regrettable things?"
You frown. Your lips press together when your expression sinks. The sympathetic side of you, the one you typically try to keep quiet, bubbles up to the surface. There is very little comfort you feel you could offer that you haven't already given in some regard. In case he needs it, or just wants it, you lean into his touch.
He scans you. With a deep breath and resigned sigh, he slides his hands down your arms to grab you by the wrists, holding them up as he presses his face to the crook of your neck. The box presses against you like the sharp sting of static electricity after reaching for a metal doorknob. Your eyebrows fly to the top of your head and your jaw clenches, but you do not dare move.
He lets out a weary sound, full of feeling he's kept encased in him for eons. You crane your head up and tense your muscles to ignore the goosebumps that ride up and down your skin. "You know," his soft breaths breeze the skin by your ear. "Now that we've existed like this, I don't think I actually want you to close the tab."
Your blood should freeze in your veins at the sound of that, but a fuzzy coating of numbness tamps every extreme down to its flattest, dullest points. You do not shift to reciprocate the hold.
"I don't want to die," he whispers. You can feel the tremor in his hands that he tries to hide by squeezing your forearms tighter. His breath catches in his throat. There's a slight sway in his body that rocks you as well. The music, now playing Morgan's arrangement of So Help Me, has gone entirely forgotten now. It buzzes in the background like static. "I just… don't want to die."
With all your utter voicelessness, you may as well be a doll to him. Maybe he just needed a listening ear - or the illusion of one. A rare kindness sparks in your heart for the lowlife now hiding in your chest. The censor buzzes against you. Words of encouragement might be what he needs. Perhaps simple assurance that he isn't alone. That someone, somewhere, something that cares is out there, listening to him.
You open your mouth to speak. When you take a deep breath in to prepare for the words, the Founder gasps, pulling back and schooling you with a frightened expression. He hasn't the time to warn you.
Sunlight filters through the windows, illuminating the school halls you've found yourself in, yet there are no people here. Must be a weekend.
Immediately, your guard rises. You played Afterschool Slash, or you at least learned enough of it from people who did. This is familiar in all the wrong ways.
Despite that, something about this place disarms you. The emptiness doesn’t feel like the claustrophobic yet vast hollowness of Ben’s endless labyrinth. The love and laughter shared in these halls have seeped into the bricks and strengthened the integrity of every corner of this complex. It’s enough that, even though you’re fully aware of the tricks this game plays on you, you end up relaxing.
Something catches your attention out of the corner of your eye. A flicker in the glass. You see a blur of red - no, the red one, within the window rather than on either side. He has the fluidness of a shadowy reflection. With the slight nod he gives before fizzling away, he confirms your instincts. Safety, at last.
Then, this must be it. This is where the red one has supposedly been leading you all this time. The place the Founder so desperately didn’t want you to go. But why? You wander through the halls and find no one, no traces of anything eerie or otherworldly. No Infinity, no curses of degradation. What is here, except more of the mundane?
School lockers, classroom doors, and gridlike halls. With the sunlight filtering through the windows, it's far easier to navigate. Something makes this scene scream safety and end more than anything else in this game has: it's as vivid as real life. You can see the blues, the yellows, and the greens. The shadows are simply that - shadows. Not dark planes designed to highlight certain portions of a frame. If you didn't know better, you could mistake this for real life.
At some point, you come across an analog clock. Five in the afternoon. School is well out. Most students and teachers should be out of here already, except if some have practice or rehearsal or something. Your gait through the halls is now more of a cautious tiptoe.
The classroom you enter is filled with maps, diagrams, models, flags, and a globe. The chalkboard has very many little graphs and pictures on it, with a weekly chart for homework assignments shoved to the side and a lesson title written boldly near the top.
The man sitting at the desk in the back corner of the class lifts his head when the door swings open. "Oh." His lithe fingers shift his hold on his pen. "Hello."
A knot tightens in your throat. That voice is one that's difficult to mistake for many others, especially after hearing it again and again through this game. It sends a shiver down your spine, even if the man before you doesn't appear as much of a threat at all. He has on a white poet's shirt and a black vest, and a scholarly look to his sharp-angled face befitting of a well-read man.
He narrows his eyes at you, even readjusts his glasses, then hums discontentedly. "I must have not had you in my class yet." He turns a bit away from his workdesk. "Either way, shouldn't you be home by now?"
"Shouldn't you?" You shoot back before you can bite your tongue.
A tame smile curls lightly on his thin lips. “Pay no mind. I’m simply at work.” He shifts in his seat again to face his work once more. No adverse response to you being in his classroom, then. Well, he is a teacher here. Students probably filter in and out of here often. “I often stay after hours. My pen’s ink flows easier the longer I’m at it.”
"What?" You quirk a brow. "You don't get tired or anything?"
The teacher chuckles lightly, then mutters under his breath, "the mouth you have on you." Then he shrugs, meeting your eye with creative earnest. “Don't you ever find yourself stagnant after a long rest when it should be the opposite?”
You can't argue with that. After he nods to a chair in the corner closer to his desk, you cross the room and sit down. Your brows furrow when you really take in the situation. Sure, you've been alone with the Founder for most of this game, and much of that time just sitting and existing with him, but this is the first time you're such an afterthought to him. He's a school teacher. Doing work. Grading papers or writing reports or… whatever teachers do. You squirm at the thought.
"Was it just company you were after, then?" He says, not bothering to look up when he licks his finger to flip a page. You can't help the way your heart leaps out of your chest whenever he breaks the silence. “I'm in the study of the pursuit of happiness. May bore you. Just saying." He shrugs lightly.
The thought of being charmed by this humble man who never was is almost a thought too terrifying to let bloom. "Why the pursuit of happiness?" You set your palms on the chair, between your spread legs, and look over at him. "Are you not… happy?"
He smiles again, looking ahead instead of at you. "No, nothing like that." The smile doesn't quite reach his eyes. "Every author and artist in history has commented on it.” He sorts through a few pages and hits them against the desk to line them back up. "All people have, even if they haven’t said a word of it their entire life."
Your brows furrow. Now is probably the only chance you'll ever get at picking the Founder's - or, the teacher's - brain without any mindgames, deceptions, or personas involved. The stuff you've already heard is a fresh enough view to have your head spinning, wondering if there is any possible way this Founder could be, or come to be, the one you know so well. "All people?"
"Definitely." His answer is immediate. "It’s almost tiresome." With light dramatics, he flops himself on his desk, shooting a smile your way. "I’ve heard some fascinating takes on it in my lifetime.” He stays there and lets the pen fall from his hand for a moment.
You tuck one leg against your chest and rest your arm on your knee. If he's getting comfortable, you might as well do the same. Your other leg bounces against the floor. Sweat trickles down the side of your face. "What - what's yours, then?" Your unsteady voice asks.
“Oh, my opinion is a drop in the bucket." He pushes himself upright, then flippantly throws a hand. "You need not hear it from me when I’m sure you have your own definition of a happy ending.”
Your lips twist. Biting your tongue can only work for so long. You clutch at one of your cheeks, disconcertion screwing your expression up.
"Okay - okay, okay. I can't do this anymore," you say, the warmth drained out of your face. "Who are you? Are you like, in the past?" He comes to attention. With countenance twisted in confusion, he turns in his wheeled chair and settles his hands in his lap. Nothing interrupts your questioning. "Or like, an alternate? Do you even know what a generation is?"
He presses his lips together. Thoughts tick behind his eyes. "I don't think you're a student," he mutters to himself. With a light nod, he meets your eye again. “I only have my hunches about what you're on about. But I've been here as long as I can remember.”
"And that's really it for you?" No ambition? No endless pursuit? No spiral into insanity?
… This is the Founder that never saw Infinity.
“After such a long time," he starts slowly, releasing each word with care after testing how it tastes in his mouth. "You can come to your own conclusions about your place in this world.” His hand tenderly strokes the old desk. "My place is here."
"The Foun - the…" you trail off. "I know some people are not content to leave it at that."
"A shame." He kicks back to facing his papers, one fist on the arm of his chair and the other elbow on the desk. From the way he flips the pen around and around in his grip, and his absent staring at the scribbles on the page, it's clear he's a bit too distracted to hop right back into it. "People can destroy themselves with that kind of attitude."
You nod, eyes pinned to the floor. Your legs swing lightly, and you let them for a bit, staring at the slight way they move. The other stares too, at the grain in his own desk, words blurring together on the pages. He casts his gaze in your direction. The faint sense of consideration in them is unlike anything you've ever seen from him before.
That's it. It's impossible to stay here with him like this. It sickens you. It sickens you, the idea of a Founder so pleasant you truly do not wish to leave. You dread the moment the filter drops and it turns out all of it was just one cruel trick. You dread the moment the restart happens against your will and you're left with him. The rotting one. The one that reeks of iron and decay. The one that presses cigarette burns into your brain.
The chair creaks when you rise out of your seat, mind now set on that front door.
"Leaving, then?"
You hum in concurrence, stiffly marching to the door of the classroom. Only when your hand presses against the cool, painted wood do you think to pause. He wasn't bad company. It would be rude to leave without offering some sort of token of a sentiment.
Your lips feel sealed with molasses, but you manage to pry them open to ask, "will I ever see you again?" It isn't the most pressing matter, or the most helpful information, but it's the first thing out of your mouth. There is a tightness in your chest at the thought of walking away from this place. What good would it have done to see this if nothing will change once you leave?
His easy smile never falls, though the zeal of intellectual engagement dims to make way for melancholy. Gently, like bearing bad news to a child, he says, "you already know that I am gone."
You swallow to dislodge the knot ever tightening in your throat. It doesn't unfurl. Solemnly, you nod, unable to look him in the eyes. The grief hits you harder than you anticipated it to, even stronger after seeing what could have been. Whatever generation, timeline, or illusion this is will waft away like smoke, difficult or near impossible to find again. You'll only have so much time here with him, and still, you can't stomach staying. His world is at peace. You must leave him be.
… To leave. Right. Your objective was never to fix this world. It was to leave it. Your fingers curl slowly around the handle of the classroom door, lightly applying pressure to pull it out of its lock. One last glance over your shoulder. He's still watching you, with the slight tilt of his head. The indisguishable sting in your eyes signals that it's time for you to go, before you really embarrass yourself.
Finally, with one unceremonious pull of a school door, you exit.
Congratulations! You finished the game. I hope you got the ending you desired.
If you didn't, that's okay. There's always the chance to change things. Why not take another stab at it?
If you found this on accident, then it is not for you. You will probably not enjoy it. Turn around (16+)
Start.
v
Enter Office
v
What is wrong with you?
v
Look Around
v
Grab book
v
Let him reach the book
v
Restart.
Enter Office
v
What is wrong with you?
v
Look Around
v
Grab book
v
Rush for the book
v
Start Again.
Enter Office
v
What is wrong with you?
v
Look Around
v
Grab Knife
v
Kill the Founder
v
Start Again.
Enter Office
v
What is wrong with you?
v
Look Around
v
Grab Knife
v
Kill the Founder
v
Restart.
Enter Office
v
Say nothing
v
Look Around
v
Grab Knife
v
Kill Yourself
v
Restart.
Enter Office
v
Say nothing
v
Wrestle the Founder
v
Die.
v
Restart.
Enter Office
v
Say nothing
v
Look around
v
Grab book
v
Rush for the book
v
Restart.
Enter Office
v
Say nothing
v
Look around
v
Grab book
v
-
You're three repetitions down. The Red One gave you simple instructions - do not retrace the paths you have already done before. It should have been easy to follow. Though here you are, on the singular track that has not changed whatsoever since the beginning, unlike all of the other little 'endings'. The book.
One second, you're running, everything in you focused on reaching that book. All your power, all your energy, the full force of your concentration pinned on that anomaly housed on the Founder's shelf. You even slam your hand into the Founder's face, phasing through the box (you shudder at the feeling) to push him away. The spine of the book feels the same as it has the last two repetitions.
The Founder howls like you had brutalized him the same way he brutalized you. In the tackle ending. Either knife ending. The Bad Ending. The thought of that one makes your skin crawl.
You jolt at the sound. Your brows knit together as you narrow your eyes at him, slowly sliding the book off the shelf without diverting your gaze. The Founder heaves like he'd just had some sort of arrest. His hands tremble.
This wasn't his reaction last time. Nor the time before that. That scream… it echoes in your ears. This isn't about the book anymore.
The book falls from your slackened hand. It thuds unceremoniously to the floor, without you opening it. The Founder's breath flickers. He scrambles over to you, swiping the book from the floor before you can snap out of your stupor.
He tries to slot back into his assumed role, but the panting and the edges of his frazzled hair ruin his illusion of a put-together ringmaster. The Founder rolls his shoulders back and settles in his body, ill-fitted to the scene like a very janky slice of something else pasted on this background. “A story." His voice rasps. The strained note of someone trying to seem nonchalant - when really they're anything but - is not lost on you. His hands curl about the hardcover of the book, squeezing it tightly and clutching it to his chest. Then he looks up. "Is that… all you wanted?" He sounds short of breath. "To hear a story?”
It's pitiable.
You can pick it out easier now that the Red One had put it to words for you: desperation. The wild in his throat, the squeezing of his gloved hands, the cold sweat you could feel on his face when you slammed your palm into it. It's a wonder you hadn't noticed before. Ensnaring you in this labyrinthine game is his last resort. Misery loves its company.
In no track have you thought to play with that leverage. As the Founder brushes you to slide the book back on the shelf, you feel the chill of a ghost passing through you. He takes a few steps too many to keep himself out of your arms reach. You don't peer over your shoulder to see how successful he is at regathering his composure.
"What would you do if I just… stopped playing?"
The Founder doesn't answer.
You approach, more like you circle, giving him a wide berth like he'd pounce at you any minute. This third repetition Founder is that unpredictable, so he certainly warrants extraneous caution."What would you do?" You prompt again when he offers you nothing, not even a huff or a scoff. Disdain, amusement, mockery, just give something. Isn't his life on the line? His whole existence? What does he hesitate for?
"Nothing," he whispers. And the laugh that follows, that too is just a breath. His arms fall lifelessly to his sides. He's like a standing corpse. "I will do nothing. I can do nothing." His hand phases into the box's territory to smooth down his hair. "Is that what you wish to hear?"
The torment of the box is not something you could so easily forget. When it clipped through you, the feeling was impossible for you to put words to. Especially when, in that moment, you were running on pure adrenaline and the scrappy need to defend yourself.
You turn to face him. As you see, he had silently turned to face you as well, and was staring at you for however long he was turned for. You have nothing to examine but the piece that was removed. The tile of the mosaic forcefully ripped from the ground. The dead pixel on the screen. The square is not a plane that exists over him, but a vacuum that marks the cold absence of what once was. You hear a high-pitched whine, feel a strain in the back of your head. Your eyes close when the sting of iron and radiation on your tongue threatens to make way for another nosebleed.
Still, the agony of it, even as you watch and watch for an unmeasured time, is a mystery to your description. Unsatisfied by the lack of words at your disposal to accurately describe his singularity, you find your hand reaching forward on its own accord. Your fingers twitch back. Some sour expression twists onto your face. "Does it hurt?" The question feels extraordinarily stupid the second it floats out of you. Your hand pulls further back.
For a moment, the Founder does not move. Again, you wonder if he's dead. If the illusion has finally worn off, letting you see his skeleton and smell his rotted flesh. Still, he pretends. "Always." The word tumbles gingerly from his frightful lips, like he knows it is not supposed to be said. None of this is supposed to be said. He stalks forward anyway, so you can catch his quiet mutters with no need to strain your ears. "It never hasn't."
It takes more courage than you anticipated for you finally plunge your hand in. For longer than just a split second, the Founder's unique brand of unorthodox madness makes complete sense. It's almost a privilege to you to have access to this peek into the Founder's inner mechanisms. Your eyes widen and the hair on your entire body bristles, like a malignant form of static electricity just sent a shock all through you.
Lucidity is a conscious battle he fights second by second. He diligently stitches his tattered sinew together into something that resembles the caricature of a comprehendable man, when it would be easier to let himself float in its madness. It already gnaws at you with the few seconds you've lingered in its beckon, with just your little hand plunged in its depths. The temptation to succumb to the violently loud static that buzzes against your fingertips… one that no doubt hammers ceaselessly into every facet of his skull. Still, he turns, and he chooses sanity. The fleeting ghost of his sanity.
The Founder holds still and allows your stray hand to fumble and map the topography of his face. His… face. There's actually one under here? A pointed nose, with a pronounced platform that he rests his glasses on, and a sharp jaw. Only the rough feeling of an oddly marbled skin texture helps him defeat the skeleton allegations. The tip of your pinkie finger catches on his bottom lip. Thin lips, pressed into a similarly thin line. You don't even realize it when you part your own.
Your eyes shift. The intent to leave, to exit the game or make good on the threat of not playing it all together, goes entirely forgotten at the feet of Hex Code Zeros' monolithic grandeur. You remember the allure of death. His mystery is what had drawn you in. His curse is what made him so uniquely frightening. So terrible. So wonderful.
Someone exits you. Someone slots in to fill their place, fitting in your fingers and hands, commandeering your face, racing your heart at such a speed you can feel its fluster in your heated face.
You sigh. "What if you were to let it take you, for just a moment?" To throw all caution to the wind and be swallowed by his curse, copied and recreated so many times he is unrecognizable. Your thumb swipes across his cheek. Even if you had wanted to make eye contact, you reasonably cannot.
He chuckles. He leans into your touch just enough to be noticeable. Just… barely. "I fear it would not spit me back out."
"What if you were to go mad with me?" Your voice tugs with wistfulness. This entire game you've spent your time being so cruel. So hasty to rush through every new thing. What a waste. You take another step towards him, slow and steady, because you have all the time in the world. You're in no rush now. There is no place else you need to be.
"You… I…" the Founder's breath shudders. He ducks his head out of your view, even if it was never in your view. His gesture pushes against the hand you still have tenderly framed on his cheek.
Peerless. Extraordinary, in a league of his own. The best of the best and the worst of the worst. The Founder is well and truly peerless. What a lonely, pitiful existence.
"And you'll stay?" He cringes at the sound of his own voice. He's weaker than he had been when you shoved a knife in his gut. The only thing that would frame this moment more perfectly is if he was just as bloody as he had been back then.
You hum thoughtfully with your eyes at a half-lid, leaning close enough to the censor to tease its edge. Its buzz pops and leans in turn, scraping viciously at air to reach your skin. With a low voice reserved exclusively for him, you mutter, "give me something to stay for."
His hand reaches out. "Could I?"
A micro-movement of a nod is his only answer. One arm wraps around your back and the free hand grips your collar. He pulls you close. For what purpose, you never find out. To hug? Hold? The second any part of you passes that barrier, a stifled gag gurgles in your throat.
You writhe away from him, pushing him so harshly that it dizzies him. He stumbles to catch his footing and only manages to brace himself once he latches onto his shelf.
Your trembling hands clutch your head to ensure it's still snug on your neck. Breaths come hard and fast, lungs unable to keep up and vision suffering from the lack of oxygen.
"How do you live like that?!" You shout at the top of your lungs, a horrendous noise that scrapes at the farthest corners of the room.
The Founder's hands flinch up to his ears. "I wasn't just saying it for the hell of it when I told you." There's some bite to his words again, the familiar bitterness leaking back in. He billows his shirt as he catches his breath and, for ease of breathing, pulls at his tie's knot. "You could not handle all this."
You grab his tie and tug before he can undo it completely. It chokes him out enough to completely get him to shut up. What a miracle.
Neither of you say anything more. He waits for whatever you have to say, but the truth is that your hand moved on impulse. Still, you don't let him go.
It takes another moment for you to collect yourself properly once again. After running your free hand over your head to make sure the appropriate amount of hair is meant to be there (whether that's a magnificent cascade of waves or barely any at all) and poking your facial features to check they haven't all swapped around, you sigh and let your guard down once again.
When your face was in the black, everything was so loud.
Like the simultaneous screaming of a trillion fractals. A terrible cacophony. The gaping maw of Infinity, the one that swallows you whole after death. It shows you where you're going. It makes you forget where you are. What you are. It morphs you into something else entirely, less than what you were before but somehow all new anyway. It's the horrific wails of a bloody, irradiated man splatting his red-stained hands on a grainy glass, cries unheard and dying in the ether with no one to mourn its sound nor its maker. Now that you think about it, those wails sound quite like the voice of the man still held before you.
Unorthodox insanity was something of an understatement.
With the decisive squeeze of his tie, you sneer at him. This is the Founder. The pathogen, the contagious filth with misery that leaks into each and every thing he creates. A helpless figment of someone's imagination trapped in the axis of X and Y, forced to always know Z.
The disgust in your heart is swallowed by an overwhelming, irrational understanding. All in. You commit yourself to plunging all in, all at once, so he cannot shake you off of him. A challenge lusters in your eyes. "What I can do is try again."
Your aim is shockingly not too far off. You manage to catch the corner of his mouth, and you linger there a moment to revere him before carefully sliding to lock your lips together. Madness mangles your pained, pleading mind, but you let it all crash over you like the storm against the bricks.
Speaking of bricks. The Founder doesn't move a muscle. Even the rest of his body, not trapped in the censor, is suddenly ramrod straight, wired so tight you'd think him porcelain. You pull back rapidly.
Your nose rests against his. Your heavy breaths intermingle with his single, shuddering exhale. He finally moves to crane his neck down. To look at you. Your gauging eyes scope him out, looking for discomfort. Appeal. Request. Anything to give you a clue of how to proceed.
You're both in here. In this arbitrary dimensional spot cut and pasted outside of the bounds of everything else. You can see him. His wide eyes, his parted lips. At the same time you can't. It's like having a seizure. It's like witnessing a computer having a seizure. It's like a bunch of strobing lights and colors, then darkness, with his face painted in contours, then in harsh lines, then in black and red contrast, then in full color, then your head hurts so much that you can process nothing at all. It flashes too quickly for you to commit any of it to memory.
His image leaves your mind the instant it comes in. His appearance is an experience that burns against your brain, and any reasonable player would pull away.
You tangle your hand in his hair and tug him close, and this time he doesn't freeze. He scratches for you like a desperate animal, leaving claw marks behind on your neck, and only ceases once he's satisfied by the amount of your shirt he fists in his gloved hands.
Cold. Dry. The taste of decay. It shouldn't be compelling whatsoever. It should be reviling. You should want to vomit your guts out. A hum of contentment shudders out of you when you melt into his frail arms. He capitalizes on your moment of vulnerability and tilts his head to deepen the kiss. You reach up, one hand still grounding yourself by clinging to that tie and the other buried in his mussed hair. Its lunacy coaxes you to lie down on the surf and let the waves slowly drag your body inches farther from the sand. A simple little ask, one that promises the end of his curse's pain. Almost instantly, you succumb to its pull.
He cranes down, one arm supporting your back so your tipped center of gravity does not make you fall and the other hand clutching your front with a vice grip. He's tugged intermittently by your hold (he lets out a choked sound and part of you eats it up every time).
What if you were to go mad with me? No longer a question but a promise, sealed over and over again by the sound of your lips meeting and parting and relentlessly bruising one another. The world melts away with your lucidity, your senses locked in the territory of his final resting place.
Before you know it, he's pulled you deep enough to drown you. You're dragged somewhere the sun can no longer reach. In mere minutes you disappear at its hand.
The Founder follows suit, finally lets it take him too. He'd never do any of this under conventional circumstances, you're sure, but in this place, in this world, in this game, there's nothing more sane than the pressure of his mouth on yours.
The censor looms. It’s intimidating to be melded with it, tied to it indeterminably. A devastating aura emanates from where your lips lock and your faces don't really exist. Neither of you can be defined so you might as well be one in the same.
You can’t articulate exactly what it makes you feel. Rot. Crumbling old chaff that the wind carries away. The end of old things to make way for the new. The shadow of a person that was once there, charred against a wall as a brutal snapshot the moment of a nuclear impact. The silhouette of a suit with chrome gloves is a shadow in the corner of your eyes, a memory from years ago that you remember and reremember with a new detail dropped every time. The Founder is your reconstruction. He lives and breathes your reconstruction. He breaks down into his barest elements, particles of literary intention crumbling away from his old body to pile in your hands. His fictitious little fragments piece together in any way you so choose.
It's unjust to have to part for air when neither of you have the benefit of being alive, just the nuisance of needing to breathe. Even when you do, you never stray far. You wouldn't have the strength to dive back into the dark if you detached yourself completely.
You weakly collapse into him when he croons, keeping you again until your chest burns. You drown, lost in the now-agreeable avenues of a billion disoriented thoughts. It shows you the end. It tugs you by the hand away from the present. You taste his ancient praises against your lips. You hear his retention. You swallow the blessèd sound of his bloodcurdling screams and raw-throat howls, ones so old that the sepia film of his anamnesis is burnt around the edges. They're still as fresh and vivid as real life. The frequency of his adoring shudders rattles your teeth like a deep-seeded rot. It's contagious.
The Founder's history oozes into yours like blood in the water until the two are indistinguishable from one another. There is no telling where you begin and he ends. Just the mind pried open by infinites, blasted with its magnificent torment. The vines of that fateful wood curl around your ankles and shackle you to the roots. Tangled together like overgrown brush and scampering vermin.
It coils around with its whisper of adoration and coaxes your resolve away. Saccharine honey pours in your ear, a poison to stop your heart and shrivel your lungs. You hear the echo of its whisper. By the time he could no longer breathe he had decided he would not leave its warmth, and frankly you don't think you could have pried away either.
The sun filtered through the thick canopy and would not reach his skin. His sepulcher was crafted of gnarled wood and a hungering wild. Tender flesh and soft minerals were the perfect offering for the soil. Some intrinsic, frazzled inhumanity slotted in his place and traipsed about like a living thing. Infinity's namesake could be no more appropriate. Lost. And the missing posters never resembled him again.
The Founder was ruined by seeing it. If given the chance, he would do nothing different. There is nothing ever to regret about you.
You pull back. Hot breaths from your living lungs brush his cold skin. "What… what the hell was that?" You quiver, eyes closed and forehead pressed against his. You cling to each other like being an inch farther than fused together would kill the both of you.
The Founder wraps his arms around you and holds you like a delicate thing, an antique porcelain worth more than anything else in this facility. He tucks your face safely into the crook of his neck. Gently, back and forth, you both sway where you stand.
"Did you see me?" He asks, just barely loud enough for his timbre of baritone to be present in it.
His cold breath breezes your face. Your arms lock around the Founder in turn, looping behind his back. You let your eyes slip shut and release a rapturous sigh. It's like the calmest dance. "Yes." The breath falls from your mouth so fragilely it would shatter if it hit the ground. The Founder catches it before it can get there.
It would be more appropriate to say no, because all you saw was why you could never see him. Why he'll be trapped like this for the rest of his slow, gradual death. Still, he shivers, burying his nose into your collar and fastening himself tightly to you. Bound with reckless abandon to your form, your whim, your beginning and end. At last… seen.
"Even when I was alive, I was dead," he mutters by your ear, like an afterthought. Like it's not the foundation of his entire existence, obvious to all who pay attention. "I'm parchment… and thoughts." His throat thickens. He adoringly traces your back, the texture of the glove running against your shirt. His affection is withdrawn, like painfully aware that in only two thousand words it will be taken away from him and he will cease to exist. "I'm your imagination."
The distinct shape of a frown sinks your lips. You quickly land a peck on his lips to cut him off.
The Founder chases after you when you withdraw, but you do not meet him again. There is some mobility. The box's spread is expansive enough to cover his whole neck. The hand that has kept steady hold on his tie all this time messes with the knot enough to finish what he started when he began undoing it all that time ago. With one more pull, the strip of fabric falls to the floor.
"What - ” his thick throat keeps the word from coming out properly. "What're you - ”
You shush him and unbutton just two or three from the top, enough to push the collar aside and free up the full territory of his neck. He clings, not uttering a sound more.
"Sir," you breathe. It lands on the flushed plane of his cheek.
The Founder's next breath catches in his throat. He cranes up to try and abate his lightheadedness. His Adam's apple bobs when he swallows. With that tone of voice, he doesn't think there is anything he could refuse you. "Yes?"
Your knuckles drag along the unmarred expanse of his throat. "Can I take this?"
"Of cour - ah - !"
You sink your bite into his neck and clamp down hard, enough so that each and every one of your teeth leave an imprint on him. Skin may break, blood vessels may too, but you have no care in the world. The madness has wrapped him in so many layers that he cannot even scream, just ragdoll against you and let a sigh of bliss escape like smoke between his lips.
Iron stings in your mouth. Opening your eyes isn't necessary to discover its source. With your lapping tongue you confirm it's the blood oozing from the bite mark. The taste of blood. Your body quakes and a hushed gasp bursts out of you. Oh, finally. Finally, you can have this. The other people playing this game would never have thought to reach forward after stabbing the Founder, to dig inside, have a taste. Your stomach has been aching like something was clawing at your insides. They don't know the way you rejoice when you savor him.
You jump onto him so eagerly after your first taste that he lets out a shocked noise into your mouth, fumbling to readjust for your arm now slung around his neck. He takes a few steps back. Without meaning to, you've pressed him to the wall. "Can - " you interrupt him without meaning to, then pull away from him so he can speak. "Can we… sit?" he mumbles wearily.
You nod, careful to stay close to him when he steps back from the wall. A yelp squeaks out of you when he hoists you up in a bridal carry, one that his bony arms should reasonably not be able to support. Your arms sling around his throat to keep you locked in and you decide not to think about it too hard. He manages the hold long enough to drag you both to a sofa (you knew there was one in here somewhere).
He lowers himself on the cushions - by extension, you with him - which ends up with you settled in his lap. The first thing your explorative fingers fly to is his neck, more easily accessible now that you've been comfortably slotted in its crook. You feel him swallow. "I do ask for you to keep the bleeding to a… a minimum," he says. His collar is already slightly soaked by what you'd given him earlier.
You huff and shake your head slightly, but you oblige. Your pecks under his jaw start chaste and eased, growing more emboldened the further you trail down his throat. The Founder isn't very opinionated about it - at least, he isn't vocal. You may try to garner a different reaction once or twice but drop it once your scraping of teeth against skin just recieves an endeared chuckle. He lets it all with the occasional fond sigh or pained hitch of breath. Not much else.
The bits of you that are expressly disappointed with his silence fade away almost immediately once his gloved hand slides its way onto your head, nails lightly running over your scalp. Gentle, rhythmic movements with his fingertips running over your short, or long, or bristled hair, massage you into a state of lull. In response your fingers lock with those of his free hand, resting at his side on the sofa. Your kisses come slower and sweeter on his skin. Savoring every second of contact, not travelling much farther down than the clavicle.
You bite the other side of his neck when you start kissing there and realize how unblemished it is. A choked sound huffs out of him, more and more tortured the longer you sink your teeth. "I thought I told you to - " his voice is hoarse.
"Let me," is all you say when you separate your mouth from his body with a slick sound. The saliva is nowhere near as abundant as the blood that pours out of the wound. It soaks the white of his dress shirt (which has not been pristine for quite some time, so you aren't sure what exactly the Founder's issue is) in thin rivulets that bleed outwards in capillary action. Your eyes, half-lidded and soothed but still wanting, don't quite meet his. It's still dizzying to try and identify facial features.
The Founder's throat locks, then he sighs. You've broken him now and there is no shot you ever get a chance like this again, so the only thing that makes sense is to milk it for all of its mileage. Looks like the Founder isn't immune to puppy eyes either way. "Well, I…" he tilts his head further back. You feel him shiver under you when he accidentally pulls on the fresh wound. "I suppose I can't argue with such a thorough - ”
The playfulness in his voice is replaced immediately by a strained grunt when you bite down harder, head buried in the crook of his neck. Warm… so warm. The viscous trickling of blood in your mouth is faster than you expected, and you aren't exactly sure about swallowing blood. It isn't like you're a vampire. You release his flesh again (to reveal a gnarly set of injuries) and let the mess stain all over him instead.
The chunks of flesh you've cut out are barely hanging on to the rest of his body. You might as well just have some. It sounds more appealing than swallowing globs of metal-tasting fluid. You return to the mess and cut out an even smaller piece, pushing it down before your body can force you to reject it.
His taste is intoxicating. It doesn't invigorate you, make you rapid, but its effects may have been worse than that. You fall deeper, and deeper, and deeper in love. The Founder has nothing to say about it, but the stunned dropping of his jaw communicates his feelings just fine.
It would be a shame for any of it to go to waste, so you finish it up, wondering if consuming him will infect you with his contagion. Your smile reveals the red stained all over your teeth, and lips, and your entire bloody muzzle. A few drops of blood drool down your face when your lips part. An animal could have had more restraint.
Then, you take a second to look at your handiwork. You can't lean very far back to examine anything, at risk of exiting the territory of the box, but you can at least tell some things. The Founder's back is pressed to the arm of the sofa, and you are right on top of him, legs on either side to establish that there is no prying you off. Neither of you are free of mess. Both of your faces, chests, and hands are stained (and no doubt absolutely ruining the luxurious fabrics of his sofa cushions, but what's a couple sofa cushions between creatives?). You hadn't realized how heavily you were breathing, nor how intensely you were staring, until a couple slobbers of blood drip from your mouth and land on his neck.
The Founder seems short of breath now, a pallor to his already pasty skin that shouldn't exist in tandem with the flush of his face (that you think may be there, but you aren't sure). Looks like he's barely gotten the chance to catch his breath. You reach back up for him and lock lips again, forcing him to endure the taste of his own blood. He knows better than to fight it by now. You let out a satisfied coo without even really meaning to.
"You…" The Founder starts. You cut him off when your lips languidly meet him again, and again, slow and lazy to drag away every single time. Like a tease. Like a game to see how long he tries to follow you for. "Maniacs." And for a man of many words, he couldn't nail it down much more accurately than that. Clearly, he doesn't mind as much as he should, as he sighs into your mouth with the very next kiss.
It's more than just physicality. The way he has always reached and fought and struggled for you has always been more than what he can scrape for himself in the physical sense. It was the feral gnashing that the need for contact and stimulation compels even the sane to stoop to. This is intellectual engagement. He consumes it like it's the air he needs to breathe. A conversation with a peer - a peer, the Founder's veins rejoice. He gazes upon you with all the adoration in the world.
The hand that had been in your hair cradles the underside of your jaw and carefully guides you upwards, to where he peppers many chaste kisses on your lips in moderate succession. He gets slower and slower the more he does. He must have noticed the way your muscles unwind a little more after each one, the way you melt over him and lose some of the strength in your limbs, the way you whine and keep trying to lean toward him when he pulls back a moment.
It's hypnotic. He mesmerizes you with the taste, the smell, the burning sensation of death, and you're lost in the sight. Everything else fades away. Nothing is like this. Nothing is as important as this. With hearts in your obsessed eyes you try to catch a glimpse of what you could never see. The failure to see him isn't disappointing whatsoever. Instead, he tucks you into the crook of his neck and continues running his hand over your head. The fibers of the glove brush your skin. You squeeze the hand that you still have held in yours.
Only after so long do you finally hear the adulation you've been aching to hear spill from his lips. You're perfect, his lips separate slickly for it to claw out of him. With tender fingers he combs through your hair, or runs delicately over the bristles of it. You're magnificent, you're wonderful to behold, he shakily breathes, so quietly like he'd be embarrassed for anyone else to see him like this. Who else would? My bones rattle with their ache for your attention.
You quench his ache more, and more and more, feeding him the attention the poor man must have been so starved of. Your hand touches and explores, pressing on his neck wounds. Every single one. You rest your head on his chest like your very own pillow. His heartbeat is inhuman.
Oh, how awful his ache must have been. What misery. On your watch, he'll never be so melancholy again. "I love you," you croon, thumb running over his hand. It sounds shockingly little like love. A siren song of obsession and ownership, rather. No matter how much of the Founder you exalt, nothing will stop him from being only something you were meant to consume.
The Founder sighs shakily. The air brushes your skin. "I…”
You trace the symbol of creation, the Founder's stolen signature, on his chest in his own blood. The horrendous aura of rot about the both of you barely distracts from your reverie. Maybe you should have paid a little more attention. He was never alive. He was never something that could die. He was a sweet, sweet fantasy.
In the last game, his game, there was a minority (albeit a very loud, passionate minority) of players that had wanted something that the Founder could not give. Something uncharacteristic and awfully self-indulgent. His response was transmitted so weakly across Infinity that it did not even appear in the official cut of the game. Initially, it was a rejection. Curious now that he falls back on those who had pursued him, just so both of you could imagine together what he would be if he was life-like enough to keep your attention.