“You have brought the unraveling to my sacred hall.” Emperor Hawijimi stepped off his throne and walked across the air toward our stage.
“Never our intent, I assure you,” Alex explained. He floated from behind his drumkit and came up beside me. “But I must apologize, nonetheless. Rivulon the Unraveler has altered my companion’s power-set in an attempt to sabotage our efforts to perform honorably and with distinction during the most revered Emperor Hawijimi’s Sonic Gauntlet for the Reward of Great Fortune—”
“I greatly prefer you call it The Cacophony,” the Emperor interrupted.
I snorted a laugh and my sinus cavity started to come apart and collapse into my throat. I gagged and choked and finally coughed up a rubbery piece of something that should never have left the inside of my head. “Harflefurf.”
Handsome Alex ignored my undignified face-noises and continued to address the Emperor.
“Thank you, Lord Hawijimi, for correcting my mistake. As I was saying, the Old God Rivulon—”
“So, Rivulon’s in there?” He cocked his head and squinted at me like he was checking to see if the R-word was hiding behind my lone unruptured eye.
“No, not precisely. During transit through the voidscape, my partner Ossick’s vessel was given a legendary trait which allows him to sing with the voice of Rivulon, but it is not a standard possession situation. No. Ossick is a soul alchemist and defiler, so it is strictly impossible to possess him.”
“Still,” Hawijimi began, slowly floating closer to me in a way I knew could only lead to trouble, “there is a trace of the Unraveler’s essence which persists within this vessel.”
He held up two fingers, like a peace sign, and then he just barely flicked them in my direction and I felt what he’d done. Deep within me, in my borrowed soul within my borrowed vessel’s body, the legendary essence which R-word had stuffed in there still contained a single molecule of his power. Hawijimi had somehow used that speck of the Old God to summon him. I felt him\s influence growing within the vessel. I felt him crowding into the soul I was already occupying and suppressing.
And then I felt his True Voice:
….Hawijimi…. ….Why have you brought me here?....
The true voice of an Old God was way too much for my vessel to endure. My face straight up fucking melted and then my lungs ejected up my throat-tunnel and were strained through my skull, not breaking any face-bones but pushing through the eye and mouth and nostril-openings, instead, like a kid making pasta with play-doh.
In the process, my vessel’s brain was irreparably damaged. Kirby Dufresne’s memories began to invade my own. As an immortal seed of evil I didn’t precisely require a brain—let alone a body—to survive, but it sure made it easier to operate on Earth. Things were getting more complicated in a hurry.
At the top of the List of Fucked-Up Shit Happening Right Now, was the fact that I was suddenly sharing a soul-space with R-word the Unraveler, an Old God whose purpose was to ensure nothing could last forever. He’d been replaced by the New God, Entropy, a few billion years back, I’d heard, and he never really got over it.
The Emperor stroked his mustache and sat cross-legged, levitating about eight feet up in the air. I could still see all this because Handsome Alex was somehow sharing his vision with me. It was freaky as fuck, looking at myself from the back and learning precisely how huge this vessel’s ass had been this whole time.
Thicc Kirby: Thanks, Bud, for not leaving me in the dark. Is this all going to your plan?
Handsome Alex: Quite.
Hawijimi drifted down at a glacial pace. His expression was a mix of amused and ponderous; he was clearly deciding how to handle the half-melted nerd with the Old God trapped inside his soul.
“You ask why I’ve brought you here,” the Emperor began, “when it is I who should be asking why you have decided to meddle in my ascension trials.”
….Insolent mage…. ….My grudge is with the one known as Handsome Alex…. ….Your petty trials are meaningless…. ….The Unraveling is all that matters in the end….
The very fabric of my vessel began to unspool. I watched it happen through Alex’s eyes. Each word uttered by the R-word sent both physical and metaphysical matter spinning off the body in viciously-twisting double-helixes. I was struck by the beauty of it and how sad it made me feel.
I blamed the fleeting sentimentality on whatever link I currently had going on with Handsome Alex. For a guy with zero biological tissues he had always been awfully squishy.
Speaking of Handsome Alex — he was up to something. Our party interface gave it away:
>Handsome Alex is preparing a [Compelling Narrative]
>Stage 1 of 7 is 3% complete….
Ok. So the plan Alex and I had discussed earlier involving Compelling Narrative was for me to distract Lady Gates after we finished our set so that he could implant a new background story in Mina’s mind, one that would incorporate the raven which had become the old billionaire’s new head. So the fact that he was initiating the process now, while we were in the presence of not only an Old God but also the Earth’s most powerful reality mage, had me a little baffled.
Thicc Kirby: Uh, what the fuck you doin, Bud?
He didn’t reply in the chat.
When Mina had collapsed on stage after I’d stupidly spoken the R-word’s name, she’d started puking up this black foam that crackled with itty-bitty silver explosions. It was frozen in time now, just like everything else.
Except it wasn’t quite like everything else, I realized. The silver flashes had initially paused entirely, same as the rest of our surroundings, but now they were slowly starting to strobe again within the ominous black barf.
“The unraveling is not welcome here,” I heard Hawijimi say to the rapidly disintegrating vessel I’d been calling home. Big frumpy Kirby Dufresne. He loved his dog. And pancakes.
And his stupid nerd memories were seeping into mine. I fucking hated dogs. Pancakes were cool, though.
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Thicc Kirby: Alright Bud, whatever you’re up to I hope you know what you’re doing. I think my vessel is probably about to wink out of existence so I guess I’ll just see you whenever you can find me a new one. No rush, I’ll just be kicking it in Purgatory with the other boys and ghouls, you know how I do.
Again, Alex ignored me. And this time I was really being dramatic and needy — usually he couldn’t resist putting me in my place when I acted like that.
….The Unraveling cares not where it is welcomed…. ….Release me from this vessel so that I may show you true power, puny mage….
Hawijimi and R-word seemed like they must have shared a history of some sort. There was obviously bad blood there and I had to wonder if Handsome Alex had known about it; I was betting he had.
The two of them were completely fixated on one another, as if the rest of the grotesque masterpiece I’d made of the concert hall didn’t even exist. It was always like this with super-powerful fuckers. Gods and the like. They didn’t get together very often, and when they did it always had all the tension of an old west showdown.
But this was something different. Something about their demeanors toward one another felt like legit animus. It felt personal. There was almost certainly about to be violence, likely on a cosmic scale.
Then Handsome Alex’s party interface said something completely fucking crazy:
>Handsome Alex is preparing a [Compelling Narrative]
>Stage 6 of 7 is 62% complete….
How had he progressed the story so fast? He had always told me that pacing was one of the most important aspects of creating a Compelling Narrative, and I was struggling to imagine how such an accelerated implantation could preserve his precious pacing.
But more importantly: whose fucking mind was he planning to rewrite?
Mine? He’d promised he would never, and there wasn’t much point anyway if Kirby’s soul was about to be annihilated. If that happened it’d reset me back to good ol’ factory-specs Ossick Meldrath.
Thicc Kirby: Dude, you need to let me in on the fucking plan. Are you thinking of trying to flip the narrative on Hawijimi? You said he’d be immune to my charms despite rocking a 105 Presence attribute — what the fuck makes you think your non-legendary spell is going to work on him?
Speaking of Hawijimi, his turban had become an enormous python made of sparkling jade glass. It was slithering through the air, looking hungrily at what was about to become my former vessel; poor, half-melted Kirby Dufresne.
R-word was struggling to unleash his powers at all. He was inhabiting the soul of a mortal; dragged there against his will. I knew what it was like. You had to relearn how to walk again, let alone unravel reality.
Handsome Alex still wasn’t responding to me, but it sure looked like he was about to win his ages-long fight against the Old God without even needing to lift a bony finger.
Suddenly I got a notification that stage six of the narrative had completed. That was it; someone was about to get their whole world rewritten.
It all had something to do with Mina’s black foam barf, I realized. I rode along as Handsome Alex levitated forward, now in his incorporeal form. He was headed straight into the middle of the two ultra-powerful beings, putting himself in between their brewing ultra-violence. Over on stage-right, the black barf rippled with tiny explosions as it formed into twin tendrils, each of which began to rise from the stage in slow-motion, looking like the thick smoke-trains left by rockets launching into space. Except black.
“Do please forgive my intrusion, Lord Hawijimi.”
As Alex entered the space between the Emperor and R-word, he rotated in place to face the Old God. The twin tendrils made from Mina’s barf suddenly insinuated themselves into my old vessel, melding with the metaphysical rainbow-colored helixes spiraling off as the presence of R-word was on the verge of completely erasing the vessel known as Kirby Dufresne from existence.
I could only see through Alex’s eyes, and Hawijimi was behind us, but I heard him laugh then, clearly impressed.
And Handsome Alex started to tell the rapidly-degrading vessel a story. It wasn’t for me, I realized, though I featured heavily in it.
The story was for Rivulon. I could finally safely say his name, because now he thought I was his uncle, Kirby M. Dufresne.
The M stood for Motherfuckin’ awesome. Or at least that’s how I was feeling all of a sudden.
Because what Handsome Alex was doing here was fucking genius. It was the type of nasty, corruptive maneuver that made him the absolute worst; a top-five necromancer in the entire galaxy.
The black foam barf was all that was left of the Compelling Narrative he’d fed Mina. When I had said Rivulon’s name it unraveled it from her mind. It was actually just dumb luck that she had barfed it out – oftentimes a broken narrative came out the other end.
But having the barf of that narrative on-hand allowed Handsome Alex to repurpose it in a hurry for use on Rivulon. Instead of needing to build a new story from scratch, he could simply perform some minor edits to make it fit the Old God instead of the young guitarist.
And it would work because Rivulon was distracted by Hawijimi and especially because he was still dealing with how to operate my vessel. There was no telling how many millions or even billions of years it had been since he’d last driven a skin-suit. And he was being forced to work everything through a flesh-brain that was bruised and swollen. Dude was fucked; he was going to be our slave and I loved it.
And so did Hawijimi. “A bold, bold display, Handsome Alex. Do you not fear the Unraveler’s eventual reprisal?”
>Handsome Alex has completed a [Compelling Narrative]
>Rivulon the Unraveler accepts the story(97.82%)
“It is he who shall learn to fear mine,” my best friend replied. I was still seeing through his eyes, and when they flared triumphantly it was seriously rad from this vantage.
“You’ve made quite an impression today, and it’s still only the first stop of the tour.” The Emperor finally took a moment to survey the glamorous carnage around him. “But this won’t do, will it?”
Once again he held up two fingers, but this time he swirled them nonchalantly in the air above his head. And then he just vanished with the sound of a great ancient sphincter blinking. Rivulon had fallen unconscious in the half-melted Kirby vessel as he fully integrated Alex’s narrative, but everything else remained frozen in the middle of enthusiastic self-mutilation.
Thicc Kirby: Well that was weird. I thought for sure he was about to rewind time or something so that all these rich freaks would come back to life. Who’s going to watch the skew-offs now? Who’s going to cheer our name and throw panties at us?
Handsome Alex: The Emperor’s sudden exit does come as a surprise. Perhaps he intends to keep his distance while repairing the damage done by Rivulon’s intrusion. He likely does not wish to reveal himself to the revelers at this time, and working at a remove would prevent such an event from occurring.
Thicc Kirby: Yeah, I guess that could be it. Anyway, I need to get something off my chest before we go any further.
Handsome Alex: I know.
Thicc Kirby: I get it that you were concentrating real hard and shit but man you gotta let me in on your plans when stuff like this is going down.
Handsome Alex: It was you who asked not to have the surprise ruined.
Thicc Kirby: Semantic bullshit, motherfucker.
I felt us both grinning.
Thicc Kirby: You are so evil. Seriously man I am extremely fucking impressed. You just made an Old God your bitch.
Handsome Alex: It is more accurate to say I made him your nephew.
Thicc Kirby: Damn, you’ve got jokes, too! So is he going to be keeping the Kirby vessel going forward? What am I supposed to do? And what about Mina and Lady Gates? Are they salvageable after this?
Handsome Alex: That will all largely be determined by how Hawijimi chooses to respond to the damage Rivulon has done here. But we likely have a great deal of work ahead of us to be ready in time for the next stop.
Thicc Kirby: So what now? We just wait to see what he comes up with?
Just then we got a notification on Alex’s interface and it became clear what Hawijimi had decided:
>All nearby corpses have been cured of [Death].
>[Detect Undead] has registered 682 new entities within range.