OSOS 0x1C

Iteratio

M( -.- )RA

With a sudden rush of countryside air, the outskirts of Elsa Myr appeared in front of Mara, still out of breath from her mad dash to escape Interrupt’s forewarned machinations. Now Debug was gone, for good this time.

Not just Debug. Mora… There was so much more to that… Interrupt really didn’t give us the time did they? Heh– Guess that’s true to form after all.

Glancing around to place her bearings as her mind swam with everything that had just happened to her. And what she’d lost. However, Mara was starting to find several things suspect about where she’d ended up.

For one, it was oddly familiar as she was standing in a very similar overgrown garden that overlooked the main route between the black-walled city and the towering trees of the Lost Wilds. However, not only was it alive and well, with no signs of ice in sight, it was as if someone had completely rearranged the layout and plant varieties.

Is this Thelma’s? How long was I gone? This feels like months have passed…

Whirling around to look at the cabin that owned the plot of land she was standing within, Mara found a very similar looking structure to Thelma's, but it felt slightly off, like it’d been rebuilt since she’d last seen it.

However, what gave her pause was the just-past-knee-height bearded woman staring at her from the porch. Without a doubt, to Mara’s eyes, she was the same gnome, the same Thelma.

Wha…

Struck between bewilderment and shock, Mara began to feel the near-immediate panic set in. What had happened? Did she save Thelma somehow? Was she going to be mad about the whole ‘garden incident’?

Without a moment to prepare, a thousand crows of anxieties had begun pecking at her as she tried to figure out what to say before her own silence dug them yet another hole. Yet, it was the gnome standing before her that broke the silence first.

“...Mara?”

Thelma was looking at her like she’d seen a ghost, and honestly, Mara was probably looking at her the same way. However, it was Thelma who seemed more shaken by her appearance, as she grabbed the nearest bannister to brace herself as she staggered towards the steps.

“Mara?? It is you, isn’t it?”

Stumbling down the steps in a rather mundane haste considering the speed she’d once demonstrated, Thelma continued to call out to Mara as she raced towards her.

“I’d heard rumors, but– To think you’d just show up in my garden? I thought you’d come from the woods, did you know I was here? What happened to your sleeve?”

Of all the things Mara could have possibly expected to come out of Thelma’s beard, from complaints about her apparently long-disappearance, to the undue havoc she’d raised, but that? That wasn’t on the list.

“I– Um. Hi? You are Thelma right? We’ve met before. When I uhh… Ice’d your garden. –On accident obviously.”

Coming to a stop at a reasonably comfortable distance away where neither was forced to strain their neck to look at each other, Thelma gave her a perplexing look.

“You ‘ice’d my garden’? It’s not even mine, but… I don’t think Madi has ever had trouble with a cold-snap here. She has wards for that kind of stuff as far as I know. What are you talking about? You are Mara right? New-Phoenix? Reclusive game developer? Ringing any bells?”

What the fuck? How does she know about me? No one here knows about me–

“Who are you? I just thought you were Celeste’s friend, but… How do you know who I am?”

“Oh. Yeah. I forget sometimes. This world makes us look different… But apparently not you. Though, without which, we’d have no idea you were even here.”

“Us? We?”

“Yeah, pretty much the whole group-chat. Took us a while to figure out, but Polymese pieced it together. To answer your first question, my old name was Tristen, but I think you only knew my screen-name, TrinitT.”

Staggered, Mara took a half-step back. This little gnome in front of her, with a beard half her length, could in no way, shape or form, be that TrinitT. It was just inconceivable. It was completely out of character for her, from stature to style. But the alternative was even more absurd, because no one else in this entire world should have known about these things.

Who the hell is Polymese? And what does she mean by… OH. THE PICTURE.

Wide-eyed, Mara found herself once more struck by a loss of words. Somehow, just by sending a picture to her friends, she’d unwittingly dragged them in with her.

“How is this possible? You’re TrinitT?? The super-tall, hyper-sexualized dark elf? How the hell did you end up like that?”

More concerned with trying not to laugh than concerned with trying not to be rude, Mara didn’t realize she might have said the wrong thing until after the words had left her mouth.

However, Mara’s genuine disbelief at the absurdity of her situation struck a chord deep within Thelma, and it ended up being her who laughed first before both could be heard across the fields, descending into hysterical giggling.

“Oh my god. I haven’t thought about that character in ages. Decades at least… You’re right, I did have a type.”

Palming away the tears built up in the corners of her eyes, Mara gazed down at the figure before her. There was no way that she was looking at TrinitT, but there was also no way that wasn’t TrinitT’s laugh.

“So, because I sent a photo of that weird pink door into our group chat, everyone ended up here?”

“That’s the running theory, but we were missing both you and Merl… Though it looks like it’s more than a theory at this point.”

“Yeah… I’d say so… Did y’all also end up on the ship?”

Perplexed at her question, Thelma tried to remember what she knew of Madison and Polymese. While they’d all started in different countries, she was pretty sure none of them had begun life here on a ship, let alone ‘the ship’– Whatever that was.

“A ship? I don’t think anyone else started out at sea. I woke up in a field, Madison got to start life as a princess, and Polymese grew up as an orphan here. What do you mean by ‘the ship’? Where’d you end up?”

So they didn’t end up on the ship too? That was just me? I guess Pinkie went about them a little differently…

“Uh… No. But it’s also a very long story, and tangentially, I’ve had a very long day. On top of that, finding out that you’re TrinitT? Fuck. You better get us something strong to drink.”

“Well, come in then, I’ve got some local mead we can break into, and maybe I can find something to deal with your sweatshirt.”

Already starting to head back to her house as she mentioned the mead, Thelma motioned over her shoulder for Mara to follow as she made her way up the steps.

Deal with my… Oh. Right, the missing sleeve.

Glancing down to her side, the torn edges that remained of her sleeve had adopted a scarlet undertone to the matte black. Testament to her ‘final stand’ in the Lost Wilds last night, and up till now, a complete write-off for her hoodie.

“You can fix this? I don’t really have any excess material, the rest of it got swallowed, is there magic for this kind of thing?”

Thelma, opening the front door to usher them inside, put a finger to her lower lip as she pondered for a moment.

“Yeah, I think it’s in ‘Annabelle’s Mends and Maintenance’, which should be buried somewhere in Madi’s ever-growing hoard.”

Reaching the proffered open door, Mara looked down at Thelma, a sudden curiosity striking her.

“Who’s Madi? Is she also one of us?”

A slight twist of a grin played beneath Thelma’s beard as she returned Mara’s gaze.

“You’ll never guess. She was born as a princess in the lands bordering us, formerly known as the country Teine, but she now prefers Madi, and she’s currently working on her dissertation to become Arch Mage.”

“So she is? But even with that, I won’t be able to guess?”

Shaking her head in response, Thelma headed inside to the kitchen, intent on finding the aforementioned mead.

Okay, so off the bat, it’s not TrinitT, and she also mentioned they haven’t found Merl either. So that leaves Gamit and Milo… Neither of which strike me as either studious, or holding the patience for royal games…

Walking in behind Thelma, Mara tried to pick between the two. Gamit was a decent strategist, and could potentially mesh into life in a royal court, but him and books got along about as well as inked parchment in the ocean would. Conversely, while Milo didn’t necessarily strike her as the right fit, the more she thought about it, the more sure she became. He was always into the meta-game, optimizing the craziest combinations of things to absolutely devastate the objective, and he did have a penchant for picking out things she could definitely classify as ‘princess vibes’ in hindsight.

“So she’s Milo?”

*WHABONK*

A deep reverberation echoed out of the cellar as Thelma immediately howled with laughter.

“Hahaha, I knew you’d get it wrong!”

If you stumble upon this narrative on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen from Royal Road. Please report it.

“What!? Madi is Gamit?? There’s no way. His whole style was edgy and punk, and you’re telling me he became a princess here??”

*FWOOMP*

Without warning, a wooden keg the size of Thelma was tossed up onto the floor next to the open cellar hatch as the accompanying gnome climbed up behind it.

“Hahaha– Yup! Noticed the pattern yet?”

“Pattern?”

Mara looked at Thelma, unsure what she was implying, but as the seconds silently elapsed, and the gears in her head turned, the neurons finally clicked.

“You’re all opposites.”

“Bingo. That’s why we were so surprised to hear about you. Rumors about a ghost of some girl in strange attire, wandering about the Lost Wilds. Madi stumbled across records of you first, just some off-hand correlations in attire and description she called ‘The Lost Girl’, in reference to the dungeon. However, everything changed when we actually found a painting of this ‘mystery ghost’, and all of us instantly knew it was you.”

‘The Lost Girl’? Maybe all my past lives? So this is the same place? What the hell happened to the garden then? And Celeste?

“Oh fuck. My head is killing me. That mead is alcoholic, right?”

“You bet. Might actually trend on the strong side– What’s your tolerance like?”

Blinking and eyeing both Thelma, then the keg in question, Mara bit her lip.

“Well. We’re gunna find out. Mugs?”

“Already on it.”

Seeing Thelma turn around and literally dive into a cabinet, Mara tried not to crack up at the sudden absurdity and instead tried to shift back on topic.

“So those were the rumors you mentioned?”

“Mhm! It’s actually why I built this cabin. Madi calculated a rough window we might expect you, but a twenty year gap was a bit too long for an extended campout.”

Wiggling back out of the cabinet and plopping two mugs on the counter, Thelma turned around, and without missing a beat, heaved the keg up from the floor and plopped it next to their empty flaggons.

“That’s… That’s a lot to take in. Just fill my mug to the brim please.”

“Of course–”

Pouring Mara’s first and passing it over, then herself, Thelma wandered over to a stool and clambored on up, indicating for Mara to take the other.

Joining her at the little breakfast-nook of a dining table, Mara gazed out the window as she sampled her drink. However, her face instantly soured as the spice and tang hit her tongue like a cross between a tangerine and a ghost pepper.

“Oof, you’ve never had Firemead? It’ll grow on you, I promise, give it a minute.”

Side eyeing Thelma with tears in the corners of her eyes, Mara took a second swig, baffled that this could ever possibly be palatable. Yet, the more she drank, the more energized she felt. The inebriation was certainly setting in, but rather than an undertone of bloating discomfort, her core was warming up and she could swear she was starting to feel lighter.

“What is this stuff?”

Smiling behind her own flagon, Thelma was pleased to see Mara was at least giving it a chance.

“It’s your basic mead, brewed from local Firewheat. One of my neighbors turned his cellar into a brewery a few years back, though obviously, what’s mundane here isn’t the same kind of ‘mundane’ from back home.”

“Truer words…”

Muttering in agreement as she sipped away at her questionably consumable drink, Mara silently thanked that the drink was at least as strong as its flavor. She’d really not had a second to breathe since she ‘restarted’ post-obelisk, and even then, it was a dissonant pleasure to find herself having a drink with one of her friends. If it wasn’t for the unprecedented levels of detail in every corner of Thelma’s house, she’d have sworn they were back in one of their full-dive games.

“Heh– It’s like we’re back in Peripéteia.”

Cocking an eyebrow over the rim of her mug, Thelma set her drink back down. Sure, she remembered all the times they’d spent in that game, cumulative years if she had to guess, but with those memories came one a little closer to home.

“You know… That’s actually how I ended up here. A pink slime ambushed me one night, then I woke up here. To be honest, I thought I got isekai’d into the game, but obviously the reality of it all was a bit stranger than I’d imagined.”

“Pink slime?...”

Half spoken, half thought, Mara was only idly muttering in mime as thoughts of Pinkie found themselves crashing upon the shores of her consciousness.

It has to be Pinkie… But why abduct my friends too? Just because I sent them a photo?

However, Thelma, seeing the recognition written all over Mara’s face, slammed her hand on the table in excitement.

“See! I knew I wasn’t imagining things! You do know something about the pink slime! See, neither Madi nor Polymese could corroborate my account, but it’s the same thing you took a photo of, isn’t it?”

“Well, I don’t– I don’t know. Without a photo I can’t be–”

“No. You knew as soon as I mentioned it. So spill. What happened to you? What happened to us?”

…What did?

Pounding the remainder of her Firemead in a single, dedicated effort, Mara leveled a serious look at Thelma.

“Get me another one of these, and I’ll tell you how my life has been going for the last four months of hell, and then maybe we can figure out some answers to your questions.”

“Hmh– Deal. Told you it’d grow on you.”

Letting Thelma swipe the empty mug from her, Mara watched the barely-knee-height gnome skitter back to fetch more from the keg.

“I wouldn’t exactly go that far, but I can’t knock the edge it takes off.”

Nodding in agreement, Thelma slid the now-filled mug back onto the table and clambored back up to her stool.

“Honestly, I feel like most of the stuff here has a weird palette, but it grows on you. Some of it quite literally– ‘Athletes foot’ is actually more of a problem here than you might think.”

Blinking as she processed the implications of Thelma’s off-hand comment, Mara shuddered.

A weird world indeed…

“So what’s this place called?”

Tilting her head as she found herself caught off guard by the question, Thelma asked for clarification.

“The country or the plane?”

Now it was Mara’s turn to be confused, she’d just been looking for a simple answer.

“The plane?”

“Yeah, Polymese said it was more correct than calling Somniantes a planet. It looks like we’re all inside a planet, but no amount of digging has yielded a ‘bottom’, or more accurately, an outer crust– And there’s been some pretty deep delves in just this country’s history. Which, for the record, is known as Redonia.”

“Huh…”

Somniantes and Redonia… Good to finally have names at least.

Seeing Mara was still only half-way through her second mug, Thelma hopped back down from her stool to refill her own as she shifted topics.

“So what’s with this pink thing? It was in your apartment, then it showed up in a video game, and now we’ve all ended up in this magical limbo. I’m pretty sure the other two don’t believe me, but it’s been eating at me for the last four hundred years.”

*PFFNT*

Sputtering back into her drink, Mara instinctively asked for confirmation she’d heard her correctly.

“Four hundred years?...”

Nodding almost dismissively as she made her way back to their table, Thelma climbed back up before verbally confirming she hadn’t misspoken.

“Yup. The beard’s not just for show. Fun fact, the average life-span of a gnome is about five-hundred, but that’s only because of adventurers bringing down the average. Apparently we just ‘raisin’ over time, and there actually isn’t a hard, biological, limit for my race.”

She’s been living here for four hundred years?? That’s an insane amount of time! And she still remembers me??? What-the-fuuuuuuuuck.

For a moment, every skeptic bone in Mara wanted to swear up and down that something wasn’t adding up, but there wasn’t a hint of deceit in Thelma’s words, nor did she have any reason to lie in the first place.

Yet, if there was one thing that truly hammered home the truth, it was the look in Thelma’s eyes that spoke of centuries of toil and turmoil, but also years of growth, peace, and healing. In her absence, the gaze of her old friend had aged far beyond the years of mortal humans, but she was still just that, her friend. It didn’t matter what world they were in, virtual or magical, she was still someone Mara could trust.

“Alright. Let’s talk about ‘Pinkie’...”

{ √Δ }

In a flurry of pinks, whites, and oranges, a man in blue robes appeared at the edge of a large, perfectly circular, lake, his long white beard calming from its erratic whipping as the whirlwind dissipated as the lightshow faded.

Stroking his beard smooth and straightening his robes, Merlin began taking in his surroundings with a neurotic level of scrutiny and suspicion, no leaf nor droplet of water was safe from his analysis.

He had no reason to trust her, much less believe she could do what she claimed, but he’d taken the deal regardless. Yet, no matter how he looked at it, she had clearly been more than just talk.

“Well I’ll be damned…”

Initially focussed on verifying the minutia, Merlin only began to realize where he’d ended up as his eyes followed the coast of the suspiciously circular lake. Nestled within in the hilly treeside to his left, just off the shore, was the unmistakable tip of a nearly-destroyed obelisk.

“So she actually did send me back… Uuuughck. Thanks for redefining the laws of magic girl, now I’ve gotta redesign the whole framework.”

Beginning to trudge across the soft pebbles of the fresh-water shore, Merlin continued to mutter to himself as he made his way towards the remnants of his ‘kill’.

“That really was a bloody magic trick… How’d she even pull this off?”

Kicking one of the rounded pebbles into the lake as he began to get close enough to really see the damage he’d done, Merlin could only wonder how they manufactured such a ridiculously sturdy material. By all rights, everything should have been consumed in his blast, but somehow, somehow, their ships could even survive Nullachadh.

“Uuuuuuuuuuuughhhck. Well, at least I destroyed most of it…”

Approaching the breached square end of the diamond-shaped tip, Merlin paused in his steps as he saw inside, for it was not as empty as he thought it would be. Rather, inside was a single resident, holed up against the back wall and bundled in blankets.

Bracing himself for an ambush or some other form of foul play, Merlin activated several wards and primed a few spells before calling out to the figure.

“Oye– You alive in there?”

Not receiving a response, nor seeing any sort of movement either, Merlin hesitantly resumed his approach, only pausing once more as he reached the crumbling ledge of the outer-hull of the ship.

“You’re not alive, are you?”

Realizing he was, perhaps, a little too on edge, but he was always one to advocate for caution over folly. Still, he hadn’t seen the body move in the slightest, and so he hopped up into what remained of the former space-ship and headed over to verify his assumption.

“Oh-wha… It can’t be…”

Half-way across the room, his eyes began to adjust to the deep shade and what he saw made him freeze in his tracks before immediately dashing the remaining distance.

“Arthur? Arthur?!”

The coat was his coat. The hairs, while gray, and spotting on the skeleton, were unmistakable.

“No. No. No-no… The crest! The crest. Where’s the crest?”

Pulling apart the ornate purple cloak, and tearing through the deteriorating undergarments beneath, Merlin hastily exposed the rib-cage, and felt his heart drop through the floor as the gold-shimmer of a royal crest reflected from the sternum.

Hands shaking, Merlin barely felt the cloak slip from his fingers as he stood up, unwilling to accept the evidence on full display before his very own eyes. There was no possible way that Arthur could be dead. It was unacceptable. Inconceivable even. Yet there he was, deader than dead, and there wasn’t a thing Merlin could do about it.

Oh, sure, he had a whole section of books on how to ‘fix’ dead people, but kings were different. When they died, their souls were off-limits, the system wouldn’t even recognize them as valid targets, and their corpse wouldn’t even take the soul if they could find it, given the warded crest embossed upon their very bones.

Sighing heavily, as if to exhaust himself of the rage boiling within, Merlin tore his gaze from the corpse of his old friend, eyes searching the breeze-swept surface of the crystal lake until he found his answers in the volume of water that had filled the crater.

“Ah. It’s been… At least a few years…”

Turning back towards the remains of his former liege, student, and friend, Merlin knelt down and began rewrapping him with the regal cloak.

“You’ll have to forgive an old man for not seeing you on the other side.”