Chapter Text
I open my eyes once again to a bright, white world.
When I had first awoken in the Memverse a few months before, during the time Order had taken control, I had found the place unsettling. Now that it was safely back under Marina's supervision, however, the Order Sector of the Memverse was becoming like a second home to me. It also helped that I, along with Marina, Pearl, and Acht had worked for hours on end to clean the place up after all of the palettes had been reconfigured. Our work had paid off.
With towering buildings on either side, the Order Sector is a near-exact replica of Inkopolis Square. The only noticeable differences are the looming Spire of Order before me, rising much higher than Inkopolis' own Deca Tower, and of course, the near absence of color from the entire world. Aside from the peachy-colored sky and the occasional blue or pink creature wandering quietly about, everything in the Order Sector is colored an even off-white.
I get to my feet, stretching, brushing off my suit as I habitually do, and then I begin crossing the whitewashed Square in the direction of the Deca Tower. I don't hurry; I don't have to. I enjoy taking in the increasingly comfortable atmosphere of the place.
These streets, which had once been covered in a thick layer of white ash, had finally been swept clean after Marina put an end to Smollusk's memory burning. The bleached coral that had originally been growing like weeds all over the Order Sector had been trimmed back to manageable patches. The replica shops and other buildings surrounding the Square had been fixed up, too. Cipher, one of the Memverse's AIs, had taken up residence in what would have been Inkopolis News Studio in the real world. Their strange wares were displayed behind the studio's large glass wall on a shelf Marina had created for it, though I was pretty sure I was the prawn's only customer. The rest of the Square's buildings remained empty, but at least they looked nice on the outside. The Spire of Order was the only thing that didn't seem to have changed at all; It still towered high above the simulated city, a magnet for attention.
I was a bit surprised that Smollusk had endured so many changes to its world without complaint, but I supposed it might reason that a nice, clean city is more orderly than what the Order Sector had once been. Most of the time, Smollusk’s reasoning for anything it thought or did was beyond me.
I finally reach the base of the Spire, where Pearl and Marina had been sitting in wait on one of the newly installed benches. They seemed to have been deep in conversation when I arrived, but they put a hold on it upon seeing me.
"Hey, Eight!" Marina says, smiling.
Pearl gives me a "Yo!" of greeting, a fist bump, and room to sit on the bench as she scoots over.
"Hello," I say with a small smile, taking my seat. "I hope I did not interrupt anything."
"You're all good," Pearl says, waving a hand dismissively.
"It wasn't anything important," Marina agrees.
I nod. The two did seem to have unimportant conversations quite often.
"Will Acht be with us today?" I ask.
"They said they were going to," Marina says.
"Ah, nice."
No one said it outright, but we all understood: they would be late. Whether Acht found it fashionable or simply had a horrible sense of time, they always seemed to arrive late when they chose to join us at all. Though I was sure Acht cared about the Memverse just as much as the rest of us, they had recently become too busy to join us every day. No one blamed them for it; they had a lot of stolen years of their life they needed to catch up on. Either way, we'd get started without them.
"So what's the plan for today, 'Rina?" Pearl asks.
"Not much, really," Marina says, grabbing her laptop from the bench beside her and opening it on her lap. "I just have to run diagnostics and do a general check-up on the state of Order Sector before we move on, so you two are free for now. I'll let you know if I find anything interesting."
"Sweet!" Pearl grins and jumps off the bench, transforming into her drone form with a burst of golden polygons. Pearl was strangely fond of her drone body; Marina and I both theorized that it was because, with it, she could reach heights she was unable to in the real world.
"Would you like to practice in the Foyer while we wait?" I ask, getting to my feet despite only having just sat down.
"Heck yeah," Pearl replies, doing a little flip in the air. The squid took every chance to use her drone abilities, and practicing in the ground level was the next best thing to climbing the Spire's higher floors.
"Have fun," Marina says, giving us another smile before turning her eyes to her screen.
And so the two of us make our way into the Spire of Order, leaving Marina to her laptop. The Foyer, which had at one time been dark and empty, was now full to the brim with training equipment. Lights danced in the air as Pearl and I practiced against the training dummies. Somehow, the lights and music only served to enhance my focus, the lighthearted ambiance of the place allowing me to let go of my worries for a while.
I'm not sure how long it had been before Marina came to get us. I had been practicing with the Charger against the ∞-ball, a combination that had frustrated me on several floors in the past. Pearl hovered by my side, occasionally spouting out a suggestion or a new idea. She was the first to notice Marina walk in.
"Hey!" she called to her, lightly bumping into my shoulder to get my attention. I turn toward Marina, letting go of my charger. Instead of dropping to the ground as a normal weapon would have, it simply dissolves into thin air.
Marina seems confused. Though she continues walking in our direction, her eyes remain locked on the laptop held out in front of her.
"Looks like you found something interesting, huh?" Pearl says, zipping over to the octoling. Marina stops, pointing to something on the screen just as I make it to her side.
"Interesting is a good way to put it," she says. "I'm not sure what to make of this."
"I have no idea what you're pointing at," Pearl admits, and I nod in agreement. Her laptop displayed several boxes of code that I'm sure only Marina could possibly understand. She seemed to be indicating a set of numbers that were increasing and decreasing in real-time. To Pearl and me, those numbers meant absolutely nothing.
"Oh! Right. Sorry," Marina says sheepishly. "Basically, I was checking up on the positions of entities throughout the Memverse, and—"
"I'm not following," Pearl says.
"Oh, uh... By entities, I mean the characters, sort of. All the users, like you and me, and all of the AIs. I track their positions just to make sure no one goes out of bounds or gets stuck. The last thing I want is for someone to fall through the floor and be lost forever!"
"That can happen?!"
"Technically yes, but I've done everything in my power to make sure it doesn't."
"Maybe you should just tell us what the problem is," I cut in, "It will take too much time to explain the workings behind it to us."
"Good idea," Marina sighs. "Long story short, there's an entity signal coming from beneath the Spire of Order. One that is definitely not supposed to be there."