“Why is everything so… blocky?” I asked.

“The term you’re looking for is voxel graphics,” Greg said, with a nod of his head. “It’s just to keep memory usage at a manageable level.” He snickered. “Heh. Memory usage. It’s literal now,” he muttered. “With sufficiently high resolution,” he said, raising his volume back to normal, “you wouldn’t be able to tell the difference between this and the real world unless you had an electron microscope. My first time, I tried to make everything life-like. Boy, was that a mistake! I blacked out and woke up in the real world with the godfather of all headaches. Worst hangover I ever had, let me tell you.”

“Will it… always look like this?” I asked.

“Oh no, not at all.” The caterpanda waved three limbs in a dismissive gesture. “It’s just a matter of accruing enough processing power. It’s been increasing exponentially as my changes have progressed. It won’t be long before I’m operating at full omnipotence. I can’t wait to find out whether or not I can make a boulder too heavy for myself to lift!” Grinning, he fluttered his ears before lowering himself to the ground.

“I’m pretty sure you and all the others should be able to do this—and, if not now, then soon. Dr. Rathpalla’s got an art studio in his head like you wouldn’t believe—and I know, because I got to see it after we linked up when he asked if he could touch my tail. That’s how I figured out the whole flesh-fusion thing.”

If I had to hazard a guess, I’d assume Greg’s mental realm had something to do with the fact that, as Andalon put it, the afterlife was inside wyrms’ minds. Still, that left me with a ton of questions.

“Wyrmeh!” Andalon squealed, happily burying herself in Greg’s voxelated fluff. “Greggy is such a good wyrmeh!” Andalon buried herself in Greg’s caterpanda fluff all over again. “Andalon is so happy!”

First things first, though…

“Umm, Greg…?” I asked

“Yeah, Dr. Hero?”

“Could… you could keep all this stuff about Andalon under wraps, at least for the time being?” I asked.

“Sure,” he said, “but you have to tell me why.”

Andalon jumped to her non-existent feet. “Yeah, Mr. Genneth, you gotta tell us why! You know I want to talk to the other wyrmehs!”

“I already told you why, Andalon.” I sighed. (This was becoming a habit of mine, wasn’t it?) “I don’t know enough about this quest of yours, and neither do you. I’m still not sure what it entails, whether or not it’s a hope worth believing in, and I don’t want to rock the boat with revelations of sacred quests to vanquish darkness.” I lowered my voice to a whisper. “I don’t know if I’m even cut out for any of that, let alone prepared to face it head on.”

Greg nodded. “Fair enough.”

“But you can do it, Mr. Genenth!” Andalon said.

I looked off into the distance. “Maybe… maybe not.”

Suddenly, Greg thumped his hindpart on the ground, sending out a shockwave which flung Andalon and myself up two blocks’ height into the air.

“This is a Fun Zone,” Greg said. “Pensiveness is only allowed in cut-scenes, and this is not a cut-scene.” He looked down at me. “That being said, you owe me, and as for payment”—he undulated his accordion forelegs at either side of his body, “you will assist me with”—he paused dramatically—“…debugging.”

He pointed at each of us with one of his forelegs. “Now: what’s your favorite animal?”

“Wyrmeh!” Andalon said, without a moment’s hesitation.

I, on the other hand, needed more time. “Uh…” my voice trailed off.

“Think hard,” Greg said.

I thought hard.

Hmm…

“Pangolin,” I answered.

Pangolins were small, scale-armored anteaters, and they could walk on their hind legs. They tucked their forearms close to their chest when they did, and it made them look like the sort of impish, servile, hunchbacked minion you’d find working in a mad scientist’s secret evil mountain lair.

What’s not to love about that?

Unfortunately, they were endangered—oftentimes critically so—due to their popularity in traditional Tchwangan medicine. Supposedly, their scales were aphrodisiacs. This made them the most heavily trafficked animals in the world.

“Would you mind if I turned you into a pangolin, then?” Greg asked. “I need to test how the software interacts with other wyrms.”

I thought about it for a moment, and then nodded. “No, go ahead.”

I glanced at Andalon. “See, Andalon? Greg asked me before going ahead and changing me into something else.”

Andalon lowered her head in shame. “Andalon is sorry…”

The caterpanda closed his eyes. For a moment, it seemed like nothing was happening, but then my body started rearranging itself on the spot. An art supply store’s worth of shapes, sizes, textures, and colors appeared as new blocks germinated all over me. For a moment, I felt like a garden, but then an unseen hand swept in and trimmed me down to size. My head block sculpted itself into a long, slender snout that jutted out into the middle of my vision. Tough, keratinous plates erupted everywhere except on my belly, which was now covered in a low-resolution rendering of fur. The sensation of the lengthy chain of small blocks growing out from behind me—a tail—was strangely familiar, even if its prehensility was completely alien to me.

Imagine that.

I looked upon the caterpanda with new eyes, and spied what looked like a grin spreading across the head and snout blocks.

“Ta-dah! You’re a pangolin now! A blocky one, but still… a pangolin!” He pointed to Andalon beside me. “And, Andalon, she’s—”

“—ANDALON IS WYRMEH!!”

She positively shrieked with glee. I turned my pangolin head.

She was definitely wyrmy, though more like something out of a high fantasy novel than the horrors Greg, myself, and the others were slowly becoming. Her body was composed of a torso block adorned with three-clawed hands at the end of her arms and a slender, flexible neck-block, topped in a draconic head with ears, horns, slit-pupil eyes and an ever-sniffing snout. Her torso had no waist. Instead, it merged seamlessly with a long block of matching thickness, just as flexible as her neck-block. It did not taper smoothly to a point, but instead joined up with increasingly narrow lengths of block until it reached its end. Andalon’s color scheme hadn’t changed. Her previous form’s hair had lent its light-blue hue to her fresh new scales, while her scute-textured underbelly bore her nightgown’s pallid grays.

“This is the best day ever!” Andalon said, feeling out the contours of her head with her claws.

Also, she was floating mid-air.

“Isn’t it neat?” Greg said, wriggling his long black back-end in nerdsome approval.

Instead of nodding, Andalon twirled around in the air, coiling her long tail so that she could poke at it with her claws.

You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.

“Well,” I said, looking up to Greg, “I think you might be going mad with power,” I said. “And that’s my professional opinion as a neuropsychiatrist.”

“At least in here, I can choose what kind of monster I want to be.” He cocked his head to the side. “Wait. No, that’s also true out in the real world.”

I curled around, chasing my block-chain tail with my long digging claws, and then looked up at him once more.

“Okay,” I said, “I will admit… this is pretty cool.”

“You want any extra arms?” Greg asked. “I can give you extra arms, you know.”

I shook myself out, ruffling my keratinous plate-armor. “No—no, thank you. I’m good.”

Andalon pointed a claw-tip at one of her eyes. “Andalon would like more these things, please,” she said. Instantly, another pair of eyes opened up not far behind Andalon’s current pair, making her squeal with delight.

Meanwhile, I’d rolled onto my back, idling my claws through the air.

“Did Dr. Horosha teach you how to do this?” I asked.

Greg laughed. “Nah, he’s just as puzzled as the rest of us. I’ve had to figure it all out on my own, so, it’s been touch-and-go at times—but, I’m used to that. I’ve been trying to get the others to join in the fun, but they’re either like Tira and don’t know jack about video game design for RPGs, or they’re just not interested, or they think this all too distressing for them to handle.”

The caterpanda made air-quote gestures with his forelimbs.

On a whim, I started digging a hole. My pangolin claws were perfectly up to the task. The dirt-block I was scratching at suddenly shrank and popped free and fell to the side, leaving a cubic void in its place.

Andalon hovered over to me. “Ooh! Do it again, Mr. Genneth! Do it again!”

Greg crept up close to us.

By the Angel, his head is bigger than my whole body…

“I’ve got a better idea,” he said, with a whisper. He stared at the two of us with sparkling eyes. “Do you two wanna fly?”

The answer was “yes”—obviously—but I didn’t want to give it to him that easily.

“Does it even matter what I say?” I said.

“Nope!”

Greg the caterpanda crawled off to the side and then tensed his body. “Time for this caterpanda to spread his wings!”

Volume and color churned through Greg’s body. Rubescent blocks split and shrank or swelled. The caterpanda’s caterpillarsome back end drastically thinned, tapered to a top as displaced mass migrated across his body in search of new places to settle. Greg’s body reabsorbed all but two pairs of his accordion legs. The remaining limbs spread apart from one another, thickening and straightening as they pulsed with size and strength. The panda’s neck collapsed into a lithe form while his snout stretched and narrowed. Textures of serrated fangs showed themselves as Greg clacked his newly savage jaws in sync with the beats of his broad wings as his new limbs flowed out from his back. Thickening wing-fingers trickled into being, forming frames that held the wing’s membranes tense.

The red dragon Greg had become snorted out a puff of pixelated flames. Then, raising his neck skyward, he spread his wings wide and soared, taking the two of us with him. He didn’t even touch us or reach for us. We floated next to him, riding the empty air. There wasn’t any wind to wick through my pangolin claws, but still, my tail whipped behind me as we flew, as did Andalon’s.

It took only a couple of seconds for us to pass beyond the edge of the landmass. A void of endless sky stretched out in every direction. Other islands like the one we’d left behind floated in the expanse, sailing in a sea of voxel debris.

I gasped.

The depths below us were filled with layered lattices of these floating landmasses. They continued on and on until they were subsumed by the soupy gray fog that perfused all through the motionless distance.

Greg must have caught me staring.

“You can move,” he said, craning his head toward me. “Just will yourself to move, and that’s how you’ll move. If it helps, try visualizing little arrows on the sides of your body, and make them glow when you want to move.”

“Are you sure?” I asked.

Whatever it was, Andalon had clearly gotten the hang of it before I had. She flew happy circles around me, laughing into the wind.

“In here, I’m literally god,” Greg said, “so, yes, I’m sure!” The red dragon flicked his tail at me in annoyance.

I tried, and, my god, it worked—and I only used the arrows a little bit. I plunged down toward the gray fog, which parted as I descended, revealing more land in the distant, dreamy skies, only for the fog to rush back over them and hide their geometry within itself as I rose back up to rejoin Greg.

Andalon followed me all the way down and back. She did a corkscrew as we rose, and then I did one, too, because, well… because I could.

“There aren’t any g-forces,” I told him.

“G for Genneth?” Andalon asked.

“No, G for gravity,” I said.

The wyrm (well, technically, lindwurm) blinked at me, smiling blankly.

She has no idea what I’m talking about, does she?

“Yeah, g-forces are on the to-do list,” Greg replied, “the long, long, very very long to-do list. Case in point,” He pointed a claw at his wings. “See these wings?”

“Andalon sees the wings!”

“Yeah?” I asked.

“They’re not actually doing anything. They’re just for show. I haven’t gotten around to implementing realistic flight mechanics.”

To prove his point, Greg wildly flailed his wings. It did absolutely nothing to alter his flight.

“How did you even begin to figure this out?” I asked.

“Well, I’d been wondering about where our ghostly stowaways go when they’re not busy strutting across our perceptions. I was meditating on the matter, when… hmm… how to describe it?” The dragon twisted his neck. His ear-fins pressed flush against his head, beneath the shadows of his horns. “It was like a door opened inside my head, near the back, that led to a bunch of secret rooms. When I went through the door, I… doubled. I could still feel my body, out there in the real world, but there was another me”—he gestured toward himself with a forearm—“This me—well, it didn’t look quite like this at the time—and I could walk through those secret rooms like they were real. The ghosts were in one, but all the others were empty.”

“I know almost exactly what you mean about the doubling,” I said, amazed that someone could so precisely relate, “but… there were never any doors involved with me.”

The dragon glared at me, his jaw going slack.

“What? Was it something I said?” I asked.

“You’ve been holding out on me. You’ve got talent.”

“What?” I asked, again.

“You did the thing without doing all of the thing. You cut corners, like a boss.”

Greg reached his arm (foreleg?) out and traced his claw through the air, as if feeling the edge of a slit. And then, before our eyes, a slit opened; it took little more than a gentle tug. Sounds and images flashed by, spilling out through the opening as if it was a door to another world. I sensed memories within it, the vast majority of which weren’t Greg’s, though they were housed within him. Then Greg blew out a puff of pixelated smoke and the slit vanished.

“And that’s the ghost room,” he said, very matter-of-factly.

“So… where are we now?” I asked.

“In the room next to the ghost room. At least, that’s where our mind-selves are.”

“That’s a rather pliant treatment of the word room,” I said.

But then, an idea came to me. “Do you have control over the ghosts?” I asked. “You said you could stuff them into fridges.”

“I mean, yeah, but that was out in real life,” Greg the dragon said. “In here, though… I don’t know; haven’t tried. But I don’t see any reason why you couldn’t. Our body-selves are still in the open space by the reception desk,” Greg said, “and probably no more than a couple of seconds have passed for them. As for the ghost room, I get the feeling that it’s still under construction—not by me, of course. And that I’m supposed to do something with them—the ghosts. But not yet. Right now, I’m fine with them staying mostly asleep. I wonder what will happen if I let them roam around in here—when it’s in better shape, of course.”

If Greg had this much control over what was happening inside his head, and, assuming I had comparable powers, I might be able to finally do something about my own phantom menaces.

There was no sea beyond the lands’ edges. Not in the traditional sense, anyhow. The pattern of varied biomes floating at distance from one another was occasionally interrupted by massive formations of water voxels, shaped into amorphous blobs of hanging ocean. I caught glimpses of schools of fish swimming in them, the same sprites as in the fish-clouds overhead.

I turned to the red dragon flying beside me, the pangolin. “How did you do all this, exactly?” I asked.

“I tried doing it all by hand, at first, but that took forever,” Greg said, gesturing with his claws. “It got much easier when I made some macro instructions and procedural generation algorithms. You’d have to be a crazy person to spend your time designing each and every damn tree. It’s so inefficient…”

“In E-fish ant?” Andalon asked, coiling mid-air. “What are E-fish? Why do they ant?” She poked her snout up through her coils. “Can Andalon ant?”

Greg snorted out more pixelated smoke. “Just… think of it like computer programming. Then think more—think hard—and you’ll probably get things done. Like this room, for instance. I thought of it as the server for a single network. Letting strangers in was just a matter of willing them to have access to the server.”

He paused.

For the record, I’d barely passed my college Program-In-Computing course, though I was not about to let Greg know that. I was worried it might put me on his bad side.

“Actually,” Greg said, with a flick of his tail and a nod of his head, “let me give you some administrator privileges. You can try it out for yourself.”

A translucent green sphere appeared in front of me, about the size of my pangolin head. “Wha…?” I reached out to touch it. The instant I made contact, a fortified wall of list-riddled screens popped into being right in front of me.

“Are these menus?”

“Sure are,” Greg said. “I thought it would be easier for me to figure things out if I could manifest my abilities using a graphical user interface like this.”

I stared with subdued apprehension.

“Go on,” he said, with a wave of a claw, “Give it a try. You can do anything in here. Anything you can imagine.”

I began reading through the menus.

“But… no snuff porn,” he said, with discomfiting urgency, “I mean it. That stuff’s nasty.”

“What is snuff porn?” Andalon asked. She was the very essence of innocence.

And Greg laughed.