Chapter Text
TT: Have you been getting any sleep?
TG: wy woudyou thnk tat thas crayz
TT: Strider, you've been messaging me at least every half hour.
TG: ist tha ao leika grl alwas tal talk but wen yo tal
TG:theyr alll
TT: I'm blocking you for the next few hours. I hope this removes the temptation to stay up badgering me about your projected guilt.
TG: don b suh abich abut thi
-- tentacleTherapist [TT] blocked turntechGodhead [TG] --
TG: fuck
He slumped back against the wall. Great. Fucking great. He wasn't that tired. She didn't have any idea what she was talking about. He'd slept yesterday, not like it was something you had to do all the time. Obviously. Because he wasn't even that tired.
"Glub?"
He slashed in the direction of the sound before his eyes had even opened. It was some retarded orange salamander thing, with a crumpled oil stained hat perched on the top of its head. The broken tip of his sword had passed less than an inch from its face.
They stared at each other.
"What the fuck are you?" Dave said. His heard was hammering against his ribs and he didn't know why but he felt furious, this stupid thing, he'd almost killed it and what the hell was it doing here and why was it that fucking orange color?
"Glub glub! Glub!"
"Fuck," he said again. He put the sword away. Should've known better than to expect any sort of conversation here. At least glub was a step up from Calsprite's screaming laugh. And it didn't seem to look like one of the imp monsters, probably wouldn't drop anything if he killed it even. He rubbed his eyes behind his glasses. When he closed them the world started to wobble and spin.
"Knight of Time, glub!" it squeaked.
"What?" His head jerked back up to stare at it again. He pointed his broken sword at it. "What are you talking about? Is that the boss monster? Do you work for it?"
"Glub no glub!" It fell backward onto its tail. "You glub! The Knight!"
TG: somethigs teling me im the night of tiem
TG: rose dos yuor spte no abot tht
No response. Right, she'd blocked him hadn't she. Right.
"Fuck." He put the broken sword back again in his strife specibi, then sat down shakily. "Okay, talk. What do you mean? I'm the knight?"
"Of Time, glub!"
"Right." He should have known better than to expect anything useful in this place.
"One of the four destined heroes," it continued, "who will defeat the denizens and save their consorts."
"Okay wait stop there," Dave interrupted. "I do not have a consort."
"Each hero has consorts glub!"
"Look I know I'm a pretty cool guy but I do not have consorts. The fuck are consorts? Where are they?"
"Glub, I'm the consort of the Heir of Breath!"
Dave stared at it. "That's fucked up. When I find Egbert we are going to have a talk. When - I ...you - do you know where he is?"
"You're looking for the Heir?"
"Sure, that guy, I guess." Every time he blinked the ground under his feet gave way and he was sucked down into a whirlpool. He tried to stop blinking. There wasn't any time for this. "Have you seen him? Has he been around?"
"He fought many underlings and saved our village from the basilisks!"
"Oh. Cool." Dave blinked again and rubbed at his eyes. They felt like they were coated in glue. "Where's that - that thing you said. I think I've got important hero business to do. There."
"Glub!" it said. "It isn't far from here!"
"Great that's, that's great just lead the way little guy."
"I'm a girl glub!"
"But - " Dave swayed a bit. " - you're not wearing any clothes."
"I am!" It pointed to its crumpled hat.
"Oh. Yeah. Okay." He followed it.
88
"Jesus Egbert." The place was trashed, with scorched marks all over the buildings. "This is saved? Fucking - fucking Vietnam bullshit Egbert god."
Sarcasm was lost on Egbert's wife-lizard. Jesus she was tiny, had he married a kid. Oh they were going to have so many words when this was done. "We could never have stopped the basilisks ourselves! The Heir shattered them with his mighty hammer and then summoned the Breeze to blow out the fire and save the buildings!"
"The Breeze," another orange salamander agreed worshipfully. What the fuck was with orange, seriously.
"Wow I can see how Egbert wouldn't have any trouble, I mean, man, he's got breeze summoning skills."
The salamanders nodded happily.
Dave was starting to wonder if he'd nodded back off there after all. He'd closed his eyes and then the first trippy salamander had shown up. Shit, he was probably sleepwalking or something, right into one of those nasty tar rivers or something. "You guys have beds or anything?"
"We sleep in pools," Wife-salamander said.
Dave facepalmed. "That - that's great. I'm just gonna lie down now. Wake me up if Egbert gets back little hallucination buddies. Or basilisks. Egbert or basilisks. Either one."
88
It wasn't fair. Cal had been cut in half and then a sprite - not his smoothest of moves, Dave would cop to that - and back at the house, stuck behind a spirograph gate and god how grateful he'd been when that feathery puppet asshole hadn't followed him through. Should have been stuck. But wasn't because if he was he couldn't have been staring at him dead eyes drilling into his skull and Dave kept staring straight ahead like if he just didn't look directly at it it couldn't do anything, it had to make him notice it first focusing pretending he couldn't see the goddamn puppet dancing in and out of his vision and staring at him always staring with dead eyes and John was bleeding to death somewhere and all he was doing was staring at his computer screen working on a shitty waste of pixels around Cal's dangling legs staring -
The salamanders were staring at him.
"Hey, uh, salamanders," Dave said.
"What are those things?" one of the smaller ones asked.
"The results of shitty planning," Dave told it, getting up from the smuppet pile. "Shitty, shitty planning." He rubbed his eyes and blinked muzzily, trying to remember how the last conversation had ended. "Kinda thought I'd just imagined you guys. Where's Egbert's, uh, consort?"
"We're his consorts," said a salamander.
"Okay uh then what do you mean by consort. I think Bro may have been fucking with me again, he's a cool dude he does that shit, man Egbert has no idea really."
And off they went. Videogame exposition nonsense at last. He plunged his head into the nonsense baptismal and tried to soak it up.
"So Egbert's destined to save you all?" he asked finally.
"He's the prophesied Heir of Breath!"
"No, I mean - this is important - is he destined to actually do it? Succeed? Not like, destined to try, but to succeed?"
"He's the Heir," one of them said. "Of course he'll succeed."
"Okay thanks. Is that true for everybody? Me, for example? Everybody with a title?"
"The four heroes," corrected one of the salamanders. "They will challenge the denizens and free their consorts from oppression. The Heir of Breath, Seer of Light, Knight of Time and Witch of Space."
"So they're destined too? Jade, I mean the Seer, she has to beat her denizen too?"
"That's the destiny of all the heroes," said a salamander.
"So she's got to come here? And John, he, John can't die? He - if he attacked the denizen now he'd survive somehow?"
"Everyone can die," the salamander said.
After a minute Dave said, "Yeah. Yeah, I guess you aren't much of a hero if you can't die."
"But that could never happen, glub!" One of the salamanders patted his shoulder. "Before the Heir can meet the denizen he must go through many trials and climb much higher on his echeladder!"
Dave opened his mouth but what came out was, "Yeah. Yeah, you're right. No worries."
TG: rose
TG: im sorry