Date: Irrelevant
Time: Irrelevant
Coordinates: The Space Between Spaces
Lights. Ever shifting, ever changing, and never ending. Lights are all I see, passing by me endlessly. Lacking any form, devoid of any function, and offering no deeper stimulation. Every color conceivable, all in a splotchy and vivid array. How I loathe them so. How I loathe their undying nature. And how I loathe my undying consciousness.
How does one measure time in a vacuum? That is a trick question. To answer is to err. Time can only be measured relative to something else, and when there is nothing else to measure it to, time has no meaning. How long can time have no meaning for? If time has no meaning, what is the difference between a day and a lifetime? You are the difference. But when you are static, when you cannot move, when you cannot talk, when your body is as rigid and static as imaginable, when you lack even the sound of your heartbeat to count the seconds, when all of these things are true, how do you measure it?
You cannot. Time has become immeasurable. Time has become meaningless.
I can think, but I cannot move. I can see, but there is nothing which I can hear. These two acts are all I can do, and all I have to keep myself sane. I can neither close my eyes to embrace the comfort of darkness nor immerse myself in catatonic comfort. Why was I subjected to this fate? And why for so long? I act as if there is a purpose, because there is comfort in a purpose. It is welcoming and affirming to believe there is a party in control. And based on my past experience, that has always been the case. Everything happened for a reason. So why was I in this state? Why was I in this callous prison devoid of both logic and sense?
As the emptiness continued, I thought about the one who blessed me with this enigmatic query.
My memories of life began with me awakening in a preternatural, sunless domain. A land both dank and dreary. There, I was given a preview of what was to become of my life. Confusion and pain. As the prologue concluded, I was enslaved. Captured by a creature who went against the whims of nature for his own amusement. A God in the form of a cute and cuddly animal. A God who appeared only through screens. A God who called himself The Doctor.
The Doctor paired me with his other prisoners, Max and Y’vonne. Together, we were given basic lodgings and sent to other worlds, where we stole the bodies of innocents to fulfill vague objectives for our master. I was men, I was women, I was wretched cretin whose biology filled me with abject disgust. And within their bodies, I was abused. My mind was assaulted by an otherworldliness indecipherable by any sane human. My borrowed bodies were tortured, raped, and murdered. I knew what it felt like to have a robotic vagina, and I knew what it felt like for said vagina to catch ablaze.
I learned to tolerate The Doctor and his other servants. I despised their eagerness to find joy in their servitude. I loathed their intentional efforts to annoy me. And I cherished the time I spent separated from them. Still, I knew nothing good would come from resistance, and curbed these frustrations away, hoping that things would get better.
But that did not happen. Instead, I was forced to murder for glory and entertainment. I killed a man, and I was treated like a hero. I was told they would give me a prize, but all that happened was… a raptor with a top hat transformed my supposed ally into a pudding cup before opening a portal for me. A portal that should have taken me some place safe, but instead… I have been drifting amidst nothingness for an incalculable amount of time. It could have been weeks, it could have been years. That did not matter to me. My memories of life were only enough to constitute 2 days at most. I knew nothing about myself beyond my name before I awoke in that pit. And from my perspective, the overwhelming majority of my life has been spent here. Watching colors meaninglessly pass before my eyes while I thought, and thought, and thought.
I could tolerate much, but not this. I wanted freedom. I wanted to move. I wanted to see something tangible. I wanted to hear something again. I wanted many things. But as the intangible and immeasurable sense of time progressed, these desires changed. Sorrow and longing gestated and developed, giving way to something darker.
I wanted nothingness. I wanted darkness. I wanted my thoughts to go away. I wanted to no longer exist. While my memories were not devoid of happiness or joy, I knew that whatever true happiness I could have during my life was stripped away. I was a slave, and like all slaves, my disdain for my master was immense. I wanted to kill The Doctor. Kill Max and Y’vonne. And finally, kill myself.
…Or did I want more? My nihilistic lust grew the longer I stewed on this thought. I despised many I met during my life. I despised their worlds as well. If I had the opportunity, would I choose to thrust them into nonexistence? …Yes.
I wanted them gone. I wanted them dead. But what’s more… is that somebody put me into that world. I came from somewhere. There was a progenitor, or God who created me. I thought about this being, this truly twisted individual, and I wished. I wished and I begged. I thought as hard as I could until this desire was etched into the texture of my mind.
“I will find the one who blessed me with the enigmatic horror that is existence, and I will kill them. Then, once their carcass is at my feet, I shall bring an end to myself.”
I repeated, remixed, and reiterated this thought, this mantra, incessantly. I did it with such ferocity, such dedication, that I did not stop repeating it in my mind. This sole thought occupied my mind, suppressing all others. I did not wonder, I did not think, I merely chanted this mantra ad nauseam. I had eliminated one of my two forms of stimuli, and time… time became less than nothing.
I spent an eternity praying for the opportunity to kill God and kill myself. I could have remained in that state forever, this stasis of hatred and lights. But then… It ended.
Date: Irrelevant
Time: Irrelevant
Coordinates: The Domain of Verde Dusk and Shin Abigale Quinlan
Darkness. Static, constant, and quiet. It is the sight of nothingness and what I craved for a relative eternity. And, within an instant, it replaced all that I had known. In fact… everything had been replaced. Everything was different.
I once felt nothing against my skin, yet I now felt soft cloth embracing the front of my body, while a light flow of air brushed my back.
I once heard nothing, not even the sound of my own heart. Yet now a pitter patter of ambiance flowed through my ears, along with the subtle sound of breathing.
I once could not move my body, but with a thought, with a vague spasm, I felt my tongue reach for the roof of my mouth.
How? How was this possible? Why did I go from nothing to… this? From feeling nothing to feeling everything?
I found myself asking these questions for a time, something I could no longer measure with any degree of accuracy, before I remembered something. That I could move my body. That I could change what I was looking at.
It had been so long that I forgot something so innate to humans. It had been so long that I had to remind myself of how humans worked. Of how they moved. My sensory homunculus had degraded, and I had to think of myself as more than two eyes and a brain. I had two legs, two arms, and a torso. I had hands with digits I could manipulate. I had a mouth I could use to articulate my thoughts.
I was slow to relearn these things. Lethargic in my motions. Acting none too different from a newborn as I flailed about, learning just what a human body could do. Eventually, I turned around, flopped my body over by 180 degrees, and freed myself from the sight of darkness. Instead, I saw light. But it was static. It was white. It was as, if not more, calming than the darkness. I looked at this light… only to spot fleeting instances of darkness.
“Right. I guess that’s blinking. It has been so long since I even thought of that.”
As I thought this, I began moving one of my hands, clenching it into a fist, before bringing it up closer to me. I raised my forearm, then my bicep, before bringing the hand before my face. When I looked at it, I saw that it was dark. It was not the pale shade of my true skin and was instead a deep brown.
“Yes. I spent most of my life in another body. So of course I woke up in someone else’s body. Of course I was denied the comfort of being within my own skin.”
I was not in my quarters. I was not in my sleeping car onboard the Omnibahn, the trans-dimensional spaceship where I was imprisoned. So of course I was not in my body. I was not myself. I was not Nari.
“This is another Shift, is it not?”
Then I have no choice but to comply. …For the time being. I groaned at this admission of defeat, but I was powerless against The Doctor. Powerless to do anything while I was in another world within the Omni. For the time being, I had to determine who my Host was and what my objective was. Without either of these things, I could accomplish nothing.
I awkwardly and slowly rose from my bed, moving like somebody who had been immersed in a coma for months or just recovered from a life-saving operation. Despite this, it was clear that my body was strong. After standing on my two feet, I surveyed my surroundings.
I was in a bedroom, not too surprising, and one with a minimalistic design. Few furnishings beyond a dresser, bed, and computer desk, with simple white walls containing everything around me. Everything looked sensible, it was ‘contemporary’ to me, for whatever that meant, and I began to make my way out of this room, searching for a greater clue as to my identity or location.
As I opened the door out of this room, I was met with a small gust of air brushing against my chest. I realized that my body was bare when I woke up. I simply thought nothing of it, but this gust confirmed I had breasts. It was nothing abnormal to me, but I still groaned as I felt this. It made me want to look at my body even less.
I returned to the bedroom to grab something from the dresser, and I walked out with underwear, shorts, and a sweater that clung to my body firmly, informing me that the woman I was controlling had an excellent physique. And I could agree. Beyond the dissonance inherent to being in the body of another sex, this was definitely one of the most comfortable Hosts I have ever had.
I paused as I realized how passive and complacent my thoughts were and began to move my mouth. Words I spoke resulted in disjointed syllables at first, but after a minute of garbled efforts, I spoke out loud, repeating my mantra.
“I will… find the one who blessed me with the… enigmatic… horror that is existence… And I will kill them… Then… once their carcass is at my feet… I shall bring an end to myself…”
I can not grow complacent. I can not grow comfortable. I cannot let the fires of my hatred die here today. I will kill The Doctor— I will kill God— Or I will die trying. But first, I need to figure out how. How I can bring an end to them. And before I figure out how, I must learn who I am now.
I ground my teeth as I forced myself to exercise patience before continuing my way to the bathroom of this home. I looked into the mirror and saw a beautiful woman looking back at me. Her hair was jet black and brushed to her shoulders. Her skin was a deep brown. Her eyes were a stark crimson. While her face looked picturesque, as if it had been crafted by a master. She was certainly pleasant to look at, but everything she was… contrasted my true self. I was pale, my hair was a stark platinum blonde, my eyes were a bright cyan, and I was male.
I groaned as I left the bathroom and began shouting for someone. But nobody answered. Meaning I was alone. I decided to explore this home, but the more I traversed through it, the more bizarre things I encountered. The kitchen was meticulously organized, with a giant fridge, detached freezer, and a pantry stocked to the brim. On the counter, there was a strange appliance that resembled a microwave. Except there was a touch screen located where the input panel would be, and when pressed, it prompted me to type or speak something. I cautiously typed the word ‘apple’ only for the machine to emit a pleasant ding a moment later, opening to reveal a cool and firm red apple. I bit into it cautiously, and it was delicious.
Looking at the machine closer, I discovered that it was labeled with a logo reading “Real Booter.” Presumably in reference to how it… boots things into reality? After a moment of thought, I moved away from this device and began looking outside of this home..
The front door led to a simple lawn with a flower garden along with a path that led down a forest trail. Indicating that I was in a truly rural locale. The backdoor led to a backyard with a small table, a grill, a swing set, and a pool, but the yard was protected by a thick barrage of trees. Too cumbersome for any person to navigate with ease. It was innocuous, almost pleasant, but there were no power lines, no electric meter on the back of the house, and no outside generator. So were the cables underground?
I theorized that this was simply an advanced home, with technology beyond what I considered normal. But if so… then what was the problem? What was my objective? What was I doing here? I groaned as I realized this and began exploring this home in more detail.
I spelunked down to the basement and found it to be a cozy abode with a large sofa, a large television, a secondary bedroom, and a wall full of framed artwork. I cautiously turned on the television and was met with a menu that, based on the text, would allow me to navigate to things I could watch and video games I could play. As I assumed, this was merely an entertainment center, and I left the basement after confirming this.
Returning to the upstairs of this single-story home, I searched again for anything I was missing. I sifted through a small foyer and closets filled with nothing of interest, before I found something. A door that had been hidden in plain sight, that I had missed earlier. I eagerly opened the door, hoping to uncover an answer as to why I was here and what I was supposed to do. And I was greeted with more than I ever thought possible.
As I opened the door, I was greeted with a library. A robust archive with shelves filled with books and plastic cases. The room before me was larger than a football field, larger than this entire house was from the outside, and while that was concerning and alarming for me, I viewed that as an indication that I was on the right track. That I was about to learn where I was and what I was doing here. Now all I had to do was sift through this vast field of information for what I needed…
Based on the clocks strewn about, I spent hours combing over what this room had to offer. I pilfered through its shelves finding the literary canon of the west and east, a compilation of children’s books, shelves of college-level coursebooks, thousands of video games, hundreds of films, and dozens upon dozens of animated television series. There was enough to keep one entertained and enriched for a lifetime, and if I so wanted to, this would not be a bad place to spend one’s life.
However, I was committed. I was not going to turn back on my goals, and pushed this vast collection aside in order to find what I was looking for. Something to explain what I was doing here, an answer to where I was.
It was then that I reached a section of this library, nestled away in the corner, where I found several shelves of books written by a single author known as Verde Dusk. The books were not arranged in an alphabetical order, but as I looked over the shelves, my eyes widened at one book in particular. Nari’s Log. I opened the novel-sized book up and… I found a transcription of my thoughts. A detailed recounting of my life. From waking up in a wasteland to meeting with The Doctor, to the various excursions I want on with my fellow slaves. They were all here… up until my thirteenth cycle, where I fought opponents to the death before the raptor wearing a top hat sent me through a vortex of light.
“What the fuck is this?” I said as I read the end of this final chapter… only to then find an afterword from the author, who described a growing disinterest in my adventures, citing this ‘Scenario’ as a ‘failure.’
From there, I read. I read and read through all the books on the shelf before me, pouring over them before finally stumbling onto one that told me all I needed to know. The Saga of Vincent Dawn.
The Saga of Vincent Dawn is the origin story of… God. Of the person who created me. Who created everything I ever knew and created herself. It was the story of how she was abused, how she died, and how she was reborn as a God. How she tormented those she was close to, and how she hated herself. She was callous. She was a rapist and a murderer. She epitomized the evils of humankind. She, Verde Dusk, is the one I have been cursing. The one I have wanted to kill. But… she already killed herself. She killed herself before I could!
She killed herself for her own hubris, her own failures. But then… Why do I still exist? Why does ANYTHING still exist? How did I escape and how… Just how…
It was then that I remembered something. The bedroom I woke up in. That computer there… was the key to the VDVerse. It was where I could access the software. Where I could learn more about myself, about… everything.
I slowly made my way to the computer, both excited and dreading what it would tell me. I had theories flowing through my mind about the truth, but I could not break down. I could not accept reality until I confirmed what these novels told me. I learned the interface of the software, found the files I was looking for, and as I scoured through the Scenario Nari’s Log… Everything I feared was proven true.
I was a toy. I was a tool. I was a being made of 1s and 0s. I was a person with no past. I was denied a future due to disinterest. I was created for the purpose of entertaining a God, and they… forgot about me. They forgot about me and left me resting in an eternal hell. I howled, I cried, I filled the halls of this home with my borrowed voice and drenched my face in tears.
By the time I recovered, by the time I accepted this reality… I repeated my mantra.
“I will find the one who blessed me with the enigmatic horror that is existence, and I will kill them. Then, once their carcass is at my feet, I shall bring an end to myself.”
I would not fall into despair. I would not end things prematurely. I had my own objective. And I would dedicate the rest of my existence to making it so. Which brought me to the question: How do I kill Verde Dusk?
Verde Dusk is the world. Verde Dusk is everything. And the only way to kill her… is to make her Cataclysm a reality. To end everything. To do what she failed to do. Because the only way to kill God is through the genocide of all that exists.
“I, Nari, shall eliminate all that exists. I shall end all lives created by this monster. I shall bring an end to all cursed into being by this malicious devil! I have VDVerse before my hands. I have the body of Abigale Quinlan! I am the new God! And where Verde failed, I shall triumph! I shall end it all. End it now and FOREVER!!!”
…I was a fucking idiot for thinking it would be that easy. I remembered the keystrokes Verde entered at the end of The Saga of Vincent Dawn and assumed I could end it just like she did. But I was wrong. The only reason why Verde could execute programs via the command line was because of her God Admin status. Of course, it wouldn’t be that easy…
Frustrated, I began reading the electronic manual for VDVerse. In doing so, I learned there was no way I could make myself an Admin or do something as outlandish as destroy everything in existence. …And I learned just what happened when Verde tried to do the same.
Verde initiated Cataclysm.exe with the intention of destroying everything that exists, and will ever exist. As part of the procedure, her permissions were changed from that of a God Admin to that of a ‘Character,’ much like Nari. Furthermore, she was kicked out from her home, known as VDDomain.set, as that ‘setting’ was being destroyed as well. When Verde was removed from VDDomain.set, she was put into a temporary partition, a ‘to be deleted’ section for VDVerse. However, right after Verde was added to this partition, Shin Abigale Quinlan rushed over to VDVerse to abort the Cataclysm protocol. She was successful in her attempt and immediately began initiating a repair procedure to return everything to how it was before Verde initiated Cataclysm.exe.
Unfortunately, because the software was halted partway through a self-destruction process, the repair process was unable to return things to the way they were before the system ran Cataclysm.exe. What’s more, as part of the Cataclysm procedures, Abigale found out that her user type had changed, as she went from a God Admin to merely a Standard Admin. This meant that certain features within VDVerse were no longer available to her, and she lacked the credentials needed to restore the VDVerse using a backup.
Through much digging, Abigale discovered that there were only two ways for a user to be given the privileges of God Admin. One God Admin could assign the God Admin status to another user. In the event that there were no God Admin users available, a God Admin user could be assigned if approved by both Verde Dusk and Shin Abigale Quinlan. Meaning that, until Abigale could find Verde, there was no way she could restore the VDVerse to normal. Which, as she would find out, was a far more severe issue than she assumed.
There was, in actuality, a God Admin user in the form of a subprogram created by Verde Dusk several years ago, simply known as Scenario Generator. A script within VDVerse capable of procedurally generating Scenarios based on the work of Verde Dusk. As a God Admin user, the Scenario Generator was capable of creating as many Scenarios as it possibly could, and it was producing a Scenario approximately every 3 seconds. Abigale tried to stop the Scenario Generator as she discovered what it was doing, but it kept creating Scenario after Scenario, with no indication that it would stop until it reached the arbitrary maximum Scenario capacity of 256,000,000.
While Abigale was concerned at the rate Scenarios were being generated, she was quick to put this revelation aside and began searching for Verde Dusk within VDVerse. Abigale assumed that this would be a simple enough process, as VDVerse had search features to find character files. Unfortunately, something went wrong in the conversion process. In turning Verde_Dusk.admin into Verde_Dusk.char prior to the deletion process, VDVerse ran into a conversion error when initiating the repair process.
As far as VDVerse was concerned, Verde_Dusk.char should not exist, and in order to determine what should be done with the file, it was placed in a directory where it was restricted to all but God Admin users, or in this case, the Scenario Generator. Once the Scenario Generator found this file, they began implementing it into a Scenario. When that Scenario was finished, Verde_Dusk.char was brought back to the restricted directory, where she was immediately added to another Scenario, doomed to repeat this process millions upon millions of times.
The only way Abigale could free Verde of this cycle of eternally hopping from Scenario to Scenario would be if she manually removed Verde from a Scenario and brought her back to VDDomain.set. As a Standard Admin, Abigale had the ability to travel to other Scenarios so long as she had the Scenario name or ID, and she could trace a character to a Scenario using an associated 256 bit hash. But when Abigale opened Verde_Dusk.char to find the associated hash, she discovered that the Scenario Generator made that, and other information, restricted.
Or in far simpler terms, because Cataclysm.exe screwed up VDVerse, Abigale no longer had a resource to recover or locate Verde. If Abigale wanted to find Verde, she would need to manually go through or examine Scenarios, one by one, and search for them that way. And if she wanted to actually retrieve and save Verde from this fate, she needed to physically go into the Scenario in order to save her.
I clenched my temple as I read this summary of events before me, piecing together the raw technical details into something semi-coherent.
“I just want to kill God. Why does it need to be SO DAMN HARD?!”
I punched the desk in rage, but all that did was break a dozen or so bones in my hand. I swore, vented, and let the fury spew out of my mouth as I dealt with this pain, only to feel it dissipate seconds later.
“Right… This isn’t the first time I’ve been in a place like this. Where every injury heals in a matter of seconds.”
With a sense of despair clawing at the forefront of my consciousness, I left the bedroom after spending what had to be half a day learning this software, desperate to look at something different. Sadly, there was not much for me to look at other than the walls of this domain and the trees outside it. Desperate for some comfort, I made my way to the kitchen to make myself a peanut butter banana sandwich that I vigorously consumed as I stewed in my frustration.
As I did so, I was once again reminded of the minute differences between each body. The way these teeth ground together and how the simple meal tasted as it flowed across my tongue. Which is when it hit me. After reading The Saga of Vincent Dawn, I assumed that I was in the body of Abigale Quinlan. Shin Abigale Quinlan. But if she left to find Verde Dusk by manually traveling to other Scenarios, whatever that means, then whose body was I in?
I ran back to Verde’s computer and VDVerse, where I began looking for my .char file. Simply named Nari.char. I quickly made my way to the ‘history’ section, where I learned what had happened to me.
Following what Verde referred to as ‘Cycle 13: The Sterling Fist of Nonsense,’ my body was placed in a holding area. A place between spaces. And I remained there after Verde abandoned the Nari’s Log Scenario. But there was another change that I found… particular. As my ‘BodyBase’ was changed to 0. This struck me as important, and using the help section of the VDVerse, I looked up what this variable meant.
BodyBase: This variable determines what a character’s base body is. Additional modifications can be made through the BodyAge and BodyModifier variables. In the event of an error, BodyBase will default to 0 as a placeholder. This variable is number-based and currently defined values are as follows:
From there, I was given a list of thousands of different defined values, but I was most interested in the first entry.
00000000 = “Abigale Quinlan”
My mind honed in on that word. ‘Error.’ There were many ‘errors’ encountered when Verde_Dusk.char was created and I wondered if her BodyBase was similar. Opening up Verde_Dusk.char, my suspicions were proven correct. Her BodyBase was also 0.
What did this mean? Well, nothing on its own. But then I remembered Scenario Generator. I loaded the subprogram and was given a rudimentary GUI that gave me the option to ‘customize’ a Scenario. There were hundreds of fields I could manipulate, but the one I was interested in was BodyBase. I used Scenario Generator to create a list of all instances where BodyBase was equal to 0 and was met with a list of the following files:
Abigale_Quinlan.admin, Shin (True) Abigale Quinlan
Abigale_Quinlan_雨.char, Ame (Rain) Abigale Quinlan, also known as Raiyne Underwood
Abigale_Quinlan_妙.char, Myo (Strange) Abigale Quinlan, also known as Punky
Abigale_Quinlan_黒.char, Kuro (Black) Abigale Quinlan
Abigale_Quinlan_善.char, Zen (Good) Abigale Quinlan
Jad_Spencer_鬼.char, Oni (Demon) Jad Spencer
Nari.char
Verde_Dusk.char
Using the Scenario Generator, I could create a Scenario featuring all 8 of these persons, but there was a problem with this list. Abigale_Quinlan.admin, Shin Abigale Quinlan. As a Standard Admin, if Shin Abigale Quinlan was in this Scenario, she could take Verde, escape, and either leave me in that Scenario or delete me. I would die before I got my revenge.
“Unacceptable.”
I had come to the frustrating conclusion that there was no way I could become a God Admin and destroy everything that the VDVerse had ever brought into being. But I would not give up on this. I would not give up on my quest to kill God.
After reaching this supposed dead end, I spotted a warning painted on this cumbersome user interface. “VDVerse cannot generate a Scenario using Standard Admins. Create Scenario using 7 Characters?”
I tried to narrow the selection, but the software was temperamental. It did not allow me to select individuals. This was the only way I could manifest a Scenario with Verde and I.
With four fingers, I slammed down on the enter key to bring this Scenario into being, and once a small loading bar was filled… I felt something pull away at me, take me away from Verde’s Domain, and take me elsewhere. It happened within a fraction of a second and when I regained my composure, I saw it again.
Lights. Ever shifting, ever changing, and never ending. I no longer felt my body. I could no longer move. I could no longer hear. I could only watch and think. I was back. Back to my eternal hell. Before my frustrations could be released, before the horror could set in, I went back to what kept me from decaying into nothingness last time. I went back to the mantra.
“I will find the one who blessed me with the enigmatic horror that is existence, and I will kill them. Then, once their carcass is at my feet, I shall bring an end to myself.”
