MINI-GRAND 8801: ROUND ONE - GRIMEWORLD

Four beings find themselves falling, as though their world was but a tablecloth and now, pulled away beneath them they plunge into an endless expanse of eyes.

“YOU MUST KILL TO SURVIVE.”

The words are spoken by a cacophonous wall of voices coming from everywhere all at once.

“QUEENIE. KNIGHT OF BEES. SOME WOULD CALL THEM A MURDERER OF MANY A MAN, BUT SURVIVAL IS ALWAYS JUSTIFIABLE.”

“SOME DUDE. TOUGH TO KILL AND SKILLED WITH ROPES BUT OTHERWISE UNDEFINED. FIND A REASON TO FIGHT OR LAY DOWN AND DIE ALREADY.”

“CALVIN GOODFELLOW. EXPLOITER OF THOSE WEAKER THAN HIMSELF. NO DOUBT HE NEEDS LITTLE ENCOURAGEMENT TO CRUSH YOU BENEATH HIS HEEL AS HE HAS DONE WITH SO MANY BEFORE YOU.”

“THE GREAT NOSTALGIO OR/AND RED. BLESSED OR/AND CURSED TO REMEMBER THE PAST THAT OTHERS HAVE FORGOTTEN. END HIS PATHETIC EXISTENCE BEFORE HE INFECTS YOUR OWN.”

And suddenly they are through the watching abyss and plummeting towards a decrepit factory city. As they fall they separate and finally land somehow safely, as though placed by an invisible hand.

“GRIMEWORLD. SCUTTLING CREATURES BREED AND GROW STRONGER ON THESE INDUSTRIAL STREETS. YOU ARE ALWAYS IN DANGER. KILL FAST AND KILL FIRST.”

“THE PANOPTICON IS WATCHING.”

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It’s an ETFA Round! MUNCHMOLAR’s GRIMEWORLD.

I wanted something on the more recent side that wasn't a huge time commitment that still presented an interesting world. It’s a short read (less than one page) and mostly atmospheric, without any specific characters or locations. More a collection of weird little guys and huge room sized creatures lurking in dark corners of the city.

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Characters:
Lankie: Queenie - #00369b
Schazer: A dude - #b3d5f4
btp: Calvin Goodfellow - #123456
Agen: Ravi "Red" Reeves THE GREAT NOSTALGIO - #c10300

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Username: It's me!

Name: Queenie

Species: Several thousand bees.

Gender: They/Them, literally.

Colour: The colour of bees! #00369b (or one above the bottom left on the post font colour picker)

Description: Queenie is a hive of bees piloting a suit of late middle age plate armour. From the outside Queenie looks like a regular human fully covered in metal armour. On the inside they're, well, they're bees. How many bees? Enough to puppet a suit of armour. So, a distressingly large amount of bees.

Weapons/abilities: The swarm intelligence that makes up Queenie is surprisingly smart. They can walk and talk and think and everything! Queenie is not, like, a power rangers ass megazord being piloted by a hyper intelligent queen bee they are the literal hive mind. The individual bees are a lot smarter than an average bee but not to the point of being their own individuals or anything.

The bee's have a stinger. Yowch! Slight nuisance when its just one bee. Less so when it's several thousands bees. 

Queenie's armour is just a regular suit of armour, no magic or anything.

Queenie also has: A sword! It's a sharp piece of metal. Watch out!

Biography: 

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"Hail and well met fellow traveller! It's. Me! A human. Man."

A suit of armour ambles awkwardly toward an ol' timey farmer looking guy. He's looking very confused. "Can I help you, sir knight?"

"Yep. that's an accurate description of what I am!" Queenie's head rotates 360 degrees "I'm certainly not. Several thousand. Bees."

Fuuuuuck why did I say that?

Farmer lookin' incredulous. "Are you...bees?"

Buzzing intensifies. Shimmering waves increasing, Remain calm. Respond confidently and appropriately.

...

... ...

"no."

A distant crow caws. The wind whistles. The tension is PALPABLE.

"Yeah, okay man."

I am the greatest mastermind to ever live.

"Haha yes my. Guy! Fellow brother in the house. You are the man now. Dog! You and me, we have a deep connection that only regular mammals have. It's beautiful in it's, own way? Just kidding, just a another one of my classic funny joke!!! By the way apropo of nothing: did you spray a fuck load of pesticides across your crops killing loTS A BUGS?"

Queenie does that thing in Princess Mononoke where the guy grabs his sword but then his other hand grabs it and puts it back in its scabbard.

"Oh yeah. That was me. Makes the crops grows big and healthy"

"Cool cool coooolsies and all the innocent creatures that are now dead forever?"

"It just bugs. Who cares?"

"Great talk. Second question: What is. Your opinion regarding: Being stung to death?"

And then, well you get the idea.

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Username: Surprise Bitch its britney

Name: So I knew this dude, back when I was in teacher's college, whose entire wardrobe seemed to consist of camo and earth tones which was always, no matter the weather or the rest of his outfit, capped off with a fuckass bucket hat that probably saw laundry detergent last century. Genuinely decent dude though, knew quite a bit about wild foraging and local edible plants and was keen to share that knowledge with folks.

Anyway, him and a couple of other guys were really into slacklining, y'know, that tightrope walking kind of thing you see people doing at parks and stuff, and this dude would even bring his fuckin. specialised rope or tape or whatever it was, set it up between two trees on campus on their lunch break or outside the student bar on Friday afternoons, and slackline with a gaggle of other classmates. I think I tried it a couple times, but definitely not for me.

He wasn't actually all that amazing at the actual slacklining, I remember if anyone was doing actual stunts or cool tricks on the line it was that Canadian girl, uuuuuuuh Jen? Janine? I'm pretty sure she had a J name, but, whatever. In some other stray conversations with the guy, I found he's got a PhD in mathematics and also knows just about everything these is to know about rope, and tying knots, and the physics and the engineering and the topology of it and what have you. I remember Jana (course it was fuckin Jana) asking one time whether that extended to rope play for like kink or whatever, and  while he was just as knowledgeable about tying people up as he was large loads on trailers or whatever the fuck else, he never gave a straight answer whether he actually partook. So no fucking clue on that front.

======

Anyway, that guy's got no business being in a Grand Battle, but now there's a dude running around somewhere in the universe with that whole spiel as its backstory. Feel free to take them.

Species: Dude (more info below)

Gender: No

Color: No thoughts Just Vibes (bottom left on colorpicker)

Description: About fifty kilograms of off-white, dense material with a texture somewhat like suede or Puffball mushroom, adopting a humanoid form. No neck, nice ass, stubby yet dextrous fingers, and a little smile in the middle of what you could charitably call its head.

Some good reference images here.

This dude when minding its own business stands about four feet tall, but can squash and stretch itself a little to reach things on high shelves, or to squeeze through a tight gap. Like all dudes, it possesses a mild and generally amicable disposition, but can be spurred into comic mischief if someone convinces it that doing so would be a good idea.

It vocalises with "mmmmm" noises, which seem to automatically translate into something intelligible to anybody it wants to communicate to directly.

Weapons/Abilities: Button-up camouflage shirt with the buttons left open. No pants, no shoes, a backpack full of rope, and a galvanised metal bucket worn as a hat.

Like other dudes, it is not impervious but unaffected long-term by conventional weaponry - it can be sliced easily enough, but seals itself back together almost as fast as you can cut through it; it simply squashes and recovers when crushed, and no internal organs or structure exist to be affected by stabbing. Extreme heat, cold, pressure or chemical corrosion probably will just make it stop and wait for the problem to pass. It does not hunger, and seems to sleep only because that's what it's expected to do at regular intervals.

Biography: Dudes spawn into existence whenever one person tells a second person about an interesting third person, creating a doomed-to-forever-be-incomplete echo of that third person in the second person's mind. For every story in this fashion, a dude pops into existence whose only knowledge is that there was a person in that story, and it's their life's duty to try to emulate them.

Assuming this dude has had a hot minute between popping into existence and being kidnapped for a Battle, it's been dedicated to learning how to tie rope real good. It's also presumably acquired knowledge on edible plants, but that's not going to prove too useful as it's going to be whipped between various realities.

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Username: btp

Name: Calvin Goodfellow

Species: Human

Color: Hex code: #123456

Description: Calvin is a 31 y/o humanoid about 180cm with a matt of curly hair. His wardrobe is designed to look less expensive than it really is. He’s wearing a button down designed to be worn untucked, cargo shorts that have never been worn on anything other than a pickleball court or a golf course, and designer running shoes that he certainly has not run around in. His gold-trimmed smartwatch is really the only overt statement piece he wears. He does have a branded cap with an embroidered logo of a stylized child in pigtails embracing a stuffed bear.

Calvin, (goes by “Cal”), is currently the CEO of a very profitable toy company. Although he would call it a “emerging technology conglomerate”. He personifies the personable, intelligent, risk taking short sightedness that gets a high off of the rapid accumulation of power in its many forms. His particular brand of narcissism has led him to rapid success in global corporate and media landscapes. He is, as his many detractors will acquiesce, an excellent salesman whose his favorite product to sell is himself.

Weapons/Abilities: Calvin is a regular human in decent health. Alone, he has no outright inherent abilities or defenses. He does, however, carry with him some properties from his universe. In particular, in his universe if an object is exposed to the directed love and attention of a child, it gains a permanent sentience. Now Cal, either as an adult, or a psychopath, doesn’t have this inherent ability, but those around him will gain this property.

Objects imbued with this sentience, unless properly coerced, will refrain from engaging in any actions that could reveal the existence of their sentience to an outside observer. They do have an inherent sense if they are being observed (via biological or technological) means, unless the one observing them is also an object that has been imbued with a similar sentience.

The exact personality of the sentient object will depend largely on the anthropomorphic projection supplied to the object by the child that initially bestowed it with sentience. Objects with “angry eyebrows” for instance will tend to have grumpier dispositions. However, even objects with harsh or frightening physical characteristics will maintain a generally patient and affable nature by default.

Any sentient object of this type will have a strong desire to engage and play with children or child-like entities. However, these objects can be manipulated to behave in a manner contrary to this nature and even break their tendency to refrain from observed action, typically by influencing their desire to play with a child or child-like entity.

These objects can move, vocalize, rationalize and retain memories despite the presence or absence of any perceived physical components allowing this. While tests performed by Calvin’s R&D divisions have found that substantial damage to the object will cause the sentience of the object to cease, repair to the object can result in the object regaining sentience including their respective memories (although focused play may be required for some cases).

In Cal’s possession is one 9-iron golf club (non-sentient), as well as various bills, cards, and portable smart device. Notably, Cal’s pocket contains one standard sized golf ball with sharpie drawn eyes. This ball, named “Dimple”, has been used by Cal to improve his performance at various golf-outings.

Biography:

Calvin started his twenties as a humble portfolio manager at his family’s firm.

Now, as a child, Calvin had inherited a stuffed bunny named “Bun Bun”. One evening, after a particularly strong berating from his mother over the disorganized state of his room. Calvin stormed into the room and shouted: “This is all YOUR fault! I’m never playing with you again!” to the assorted toys and junk scattered around the room. Now, this was a common coping mechanism for the child to displace blame. He said it primarily to soothe himself and didn’t think anyone actually heard the threat, and he would have soon forgotten it. However, Bun Bun, in the room at the time, had gone so long stuck in a box in a storage room and was so starved for play that it took the threat very seriously. That night, while Calvin was sleeping, Bun Bun quietly organized the room and ushered all the remaining toys into their proper places before setting itself right at the foot of Calvin’s bed.

As an adult, Calvin would occasionally share his memory of the suddenly clean room with his cohorts and found that many of them had stories, although none so drastic, of strange happenings or odd movings of toys or belongings in their childhoods as well. All of them chalked it up to just a quirk of misremembering what it was like being a child.

Perhaps, Calvin has a stronger sense for the supernatural than most. In other children, this intuition would have lead into the start of grand magical adventure, perhaps culminating into a profitable book series recounting their tales in a strange and enchanting world. For Calvin, however, he sensed an opportunity.

What Cal never told his cohorts was that his memory was not an isolated event. Cal kept Bun Bun, and would toss out the occasional veiled threat, and Bun Bun, loyal, dedicated, co-dependent Bun Bun, would always oblige. Homework? Bullying? Espionage? Bun Bun gained skills and Cal knew they were the ones responsible. Occasionally Cal would provide Bun Bun with “upgrades” and Bun Bun’s skills would grow accordingly.

But Cal’s curiosity was not limited to Bun Bun. He knew there was something unique about this toy but he needed to know the extent of it. The frequency of half-remembered strange stories from his peers hinted to Cal that there was something deeper at play than a single toy. So, in his first act as a portfolio manager, he directed the obscure move of acquiring ownership of small daycare chain.

Alongside the usual private equity platforms, slashing salaries, raising tuition, cutting costs and preparing the entire “Blue Planet Daycare” chain for a lucrative bankruptcy. Cal sat a worn bead-eyed rabbit into the security room of one of the chains. Bun Bun, was given a simple task, to observe and record findings. The toy occupants of the daycare did not recognize Bun Bun’s observation as odd and with the human-installed security features removed, they began moving and consorting with one another as they did most nights.

The information extracted from Bun Bun’s recordings gave Calvin the data he needed to investigate this fantastical phenomenon. Calvin recognized the immediate potential behind this. The magical asset that had been such a boon to him was not limited to a single ragged bunny. Every playtime object had the potential to be the foundation of a new unregulated labor force.

Blue Planet Daycare was subsumed by the larger Dolly’s Happy Homecare which was later gutted by ToyHouse Industries - at each step Calvin called the shots, moved the money around, and hired some of the most talented and discreet researchers and psychologists to help him find the right motivation to turn toys into tools.

With each financial move, Calvin’s brand increased in wealth and prestige. He was a rising star, a 30 under 30, and it seemed that no one could touch him. And who could? While other companies spent trillions on cloud computing and data centers, all Calvin needed to do was have a child play with a toy tank and he had a fully autonomous mobile weapons system. Toys didn’t need food, they could preform complex tasks, and all it took to motivate them was earning credits towards a stay in one of Calvin’s many luxury daycare centers spread worldwide.

Calvin Goodfellow was untouchable and gaining prestige and power…until he was ripped from his reality into a combat themed battle where he will likely be utterly destroyed...so a net gain for the universe I suppose.

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Username: Agen
Name: Ravi "Red" Reeves THE GREAT NOSTALGIO
Gender: Manshaped
Race: Homo sapiens c.21X7CE
Colour: His name is Red.
Biography: Humanity doesn't, for the most part, change a great deal as a century goes by. It's said that genetic drift doesn't work on that kind of scale, even with the advent of technologies like resequencing and phenotypical hybridization. The core drives that push the human mind to accept that which appears the same and reject that which looks different hasn't yet been baked out of the mealy dough and bacterial culture that is the human psyche. It's really no wonder, then, that we come to focus on the things that do change in a lifetime: means, meals, matter, and memes.
In the future, we hold the past in strange esteem. We fear the seeming depravity of the world without that to which we've become accustomed; and we mourn the loss of all the things to which we could not hold. Humanity is not so different in the 22nd century that we've grown beyond such things. Enter Red, stage left: performer, storyteller - lorekeeper. It's his function. He can't not. They removed half his brain for this, cramming the space with high-density memory and leaving the rest a schizoid mess. Even he's not sure what year it is - but he can tell you everything he does know, perfectly. He can't not. It's his function. They removed half his brain for this, and he's not sure which half is still him.
Did I mention we stopped writing things down? Records simply get scarcer and scarcer as we approach 2050, and nearly everything left is slop-contaminated beyond recovery. It's almost as if we lost hope and resigned ourselves to being unmoored in time and memory. After the Fangfall - the last event we can really be sure happened - lorekeepers became vital for the continuation of society, insofar as a collection of dead-eyed echoborgs humping each other can be considered society.

Description: THE GREAT NOSTALGIO is a fount of wisdom, a link to the past, and deeply, fundamentally disturbed. The ritual garb of his station is his Interface: a glittering crown of thorns embeds bioptic probes past dura and pia into the gray neural flesh below, a bloodied tinsel tangle that twists light in painful ways and enmeshes optoelectronics, wetware, and quiet screaming into a syncretic, efficient whole. It's hard not to look at, but if you tear your gaze away, you see Red's sad, brown eyes, deep-set, sunken, skin taut over his skull as if there hadn't been enough left over after the surgery to give him a full range of facial motion. Which is exactly the case. You can address one or the other, and they will respond in kind, but THE GREAT NOSTALGIO communicates in aphorisms and references (b. Acculte, 20X3), and Red... Red mostly screams. He wants his mother. He doesn't remember her. He's not sure she ever existed. Reasons and realities and reversed ranges of Red Red Red RED RED RED

Garb? Crimson, of course. The shade blood turns in pale sunrise over a smog-streaked, hazy sky. A cloak with many pockets, tattered at the bottom, draped over bony shoulderblades wide enough to jam in a narrow door. Underneath the cloak, an emaciated chest nearly seems as if it has no more flesh to spare, stretched over bones that look as brittle as glass. Below, grimy legs, muscled by way of endless walking, protrude from below the tightly-hemmed edges of a golden-trimmed tunic, dyed deep black. It would be impressive to a certain sort of society, but none of it makes sense. The cloak pockets are empty (all his treasure lives in his mind). The tunic does nothing to protect his limbs from a nearly infinite array of scratches and scars (the body is just a vessel). You get the idea. Red is an oracle, but he only tells the past.

Items/Abilities: When humanity lost its grip on memory and time, decolonizing the world of linear experience and history... it may be tempting to say that they did so at the apex of a technological era and that everything since has been a steady spiral downwards. This is a comfortable lie, and Red has no truck with lies. The fact was - perhaps one of the last facts there ever was - humanity came to understand the mind, and the overmind, and the noosphere, and decided certain things simply weren't important anymore. THE GREAT NOSTALGIO is an avatar and a microcosm of the society that made it (b. Ollier, 20X1). Red is everything that couldn't be stripped away. As such, words are his weapons and worlds are his to speak and when he speaks they burrow into your mind and you see and it comes and time is in his hands and hands are in your mind and he sees and you rise and the

Somewhere, somehow, a dude is rudely interrupted from its lashing-together of logs to make a raft for some other, would-be seafaring dude, hurtles through a void, and gets told to kill some other folks (not dudes).

It then landed on its feet, took one step, and immediately pitched backward, stirring up a powdery cocktail of hydrocarbons, rust and mold. Backpack still well-provisioned, it thinks to itself, before extending its legs a little like a snail's antennae until feet met industrial iron floor.

The dude wiggled a bit, uttered the ancient quadriceps-manifesting-spell of "mmm!" and heaved itself back to upright again. It took a further swayful moment or two of finding a new center of gravity atop longer-than-usual legs, but it got there eventually. The dude dusted itself off, checked its backpack was closed, and-

"Mmm." The two little black eyespots on the dude's face narrowed microscopically. Its bucket hat was missing.

It looked around. Most of its surroundings seemed to be made up of the same material as its bucket hat, in varying advanced states of decay. It looked up. What sparse polygons of sky remained visible beyond the overhead strata-web of architectural skeletons was also a color like "decay".

"Mmmmmmmm." The dude shimmied out of its backpack, and started feeling around in it for freeclimbing equipment. It didn't even have to pause its visual calculus of the best path up, finding its favorite coil of kernmantle sheathed climbing rope (and its cloth bag of carabiners) by touch.

This killing business would just have to wait - it wasn't a dude who killed people, after all, it was a dude with a fuckass bucket hat. Priorities.

“Point of order.”

A metallic finger points up to a sickly, cloud-pocked sky.

“I am. One of the lads. Not bees. This is. Slander! Also: not a murder-er! I am an upstanding member of the society, it does NOT count as murder if the person. Sucked. Everyone knows this.”

Queenie’s counterpoint was met with the howling of the wind and the creaking of long abandoned factory infrastructure.

No response. Means I win the argument! Another victory. For justice!!!

Queenie marched off with a pep their step. They were, without a shadow of a doubt, the loudest thing in a 5 mile radius. Big ol’ clanky footsteps, a rattling cacophony of a human person, followed always by constant buzzing (which you should ignore (I don’t hear buzzing (you probably have tinnitus))).

As a human, Queenie could tell that they were in some kind of human world. On account of the desolation and the lack of nature and the faint acrid scent of death that always seems to follow humans around. 

And, as a human, Queenie

fuckin’

looooOOOOOoooved that!

Ooohh yum yum yummy nothing brings humans together like the total eradication of natural habitats! More resources for us! The most! IMPORTANT. People in the world!

But where are the architects of this ~wonderful~ human world? Queenie twisted their head around 360° like R2D2 but could only find rusted out shells of industry and piles of worthless garbage. All the trappings of human society but not a single human to be seen! Which was a shame because Queenie wanted nothing more than to meet the king and/or queen and/or elected official of this land and fuCKING RIP THE SPINE OUT OF THEIR THR Have a polite and reasoned conversation with them.

Queenie placed their head on a rusted iron door of one of the many husks of a building surrounding them. They would have heard (with the very human ear they definitely had) a faint sound of, wind? Wheezing? Breathing? From within, had they not put their entire weight on to the door, snapping it off its brittle hinges and crashing to the ground.

Oof. Hope nobody saw that.

Well. Something did.

Light streamed through the open doorway, revealing a. Thing? Like a flesh thing? It kind of looked like someone plucked out an organ (one of the important ones) of a giant creature and just, sorta, plopped it on the ground. Except this wasn’t just some inert piece of viscera. It heaved and wheezed and groaned like a grizzly bear being rudely awakened.

“Hailandwellmet Traveller!” Queenie picked themselves off the ground, brushing dust off their breast plate. “I am, as you can. See? A wandering knight of the realm. Could you, perchance, point me to the nearest. Inn? Or, mayhaps: A tavern?”

The thing surveilled the trespasser through some unknown sensory process.

Steel.
Iron.
Leather.
Blood?

“You might have heard. A loud voice saying. I’m a bee and a murderer. Please ignore that. I am none of those things.”

Hemolymph.
Wax.
Sugar?
Honey.

“You have not responded therefore: I win the argument! two for two for: the good guys!”

Fuel.
Resources.

“You are. Deeply unpleasant to look at and a baaaaad conversationalist. Im’a go meet with the local cooper. Or milliner. Or anyone who is. Not. A weird blob guy honestly.”

Queenie turned to egress but it was too late, the doors, somehow, were put back on their hinges. Darkness flooded the room. And a chorus of skittering, screeching things closed in on our brave, human hero.

Crimson shades fluttering in the wind wave merrily, mindfully, gaily, slightly, readiness ruddiness realizing Ravi Reeves was revolving in space in the center of a room with walls just out of arm's reach, the wooden planks worn and weak. Weeks, months, years must have passed in the time since another human eye set foot in this place. Naturally, this didn't count the inhumanly large orb embedded in the wall closest to Red's revoluting body, tendrils of pink flesh blending with knots in the gray wood. The pupil, roughly the size of Red's fist, dilated and contracted from a pinpoint so small he could barely see it to a black maw so large he could see the optic nerve terminate at the far end, over and over. A voice crammed its way into his mind in a way that would be terrifying if he had been new to voices in his mind, which he wasn't. Not by a long shot.

YOU ARE THE TRESPASSER. YOU WILL BE PROCESSED. YOU DO NOT BELONG. YOU-

HAIL! IT IS I, THE GREAT NOSTALGIO! WOULD YOU LIKE TO HEAR A STORY TODAY, CHILDREN? Red clutched his head in pain as his own psychic extrusion rose to meet the psychic intrusion, throwing off the bedcovers and waving the psychic equivalent of a psychic blunt razor. Red's own feelings on this front were not relevant.

WHAT? The eye grew visibly bloodshot, and the giant pupil darted from side to side.

I HAVE TALES APLENTY! YARNS TO SPIN! NARRATIVES TO CRAFT! 'EYE' THINK PERHAPS YOU MIGHT LIKE TO HEAR OF THE KINDLY OPTHAMOLOGIST? OR MAYBE A CLASSIC?

YOU'RE NOT SUPPOSED TO BE ABLE TO-

THE FANGFALL PERHAPS? MAYBE THE STORY OF A LOST LAMB, THE ANCIENT 'MARY', WHO WENT TO SCHOOL, AND GAVE BIRTH TO JESUS, WHO HAD FLEECE AS WHITE AS SNOW?

The eye's movements grew more erratic under the unexpected onslaught. The walls of the room itself shook, and Red saw the planks themselves move, retracting one plank at a time. Underneath the floor, he saw chittering creatures with shiny carapaces flowing like horrible water, abandoning clutches of mysterious eggs to cluster close about the retreating eye. Between the fresh gaps in the walls, he saw now, was no place like he had ever been before. High above him, beyond a ceiling that was falling to bits - no, it was more creatures, plank-shaped creatures, chasing after their optical master - was the bottom of a gray-brown canopy stories high, interrupted with columnar trees as wide as mansions that pierced down to an almost unbelievably littered ground below. Rotting leaves, all various shades of black to brown to gray, rusting shards of metal that might have been machines once, even the occasional picked-over bone-white bone, too large to be human, too small to be fakery. There were no birds and no birdsong, but everywhere there was eggshell, spattered clutches of broken and calcified hollows in the moldering dirt and grime that might have passed for nests in the pale, thin light.

He fell to the ground with a thump as the eye's retreat passed some threshold, and smashed a few of the eggs under him. He caught a glimpse of some small, wriggling thing, a cross between a coin and a spider, thoroughly unlike anything he'd ever envisioned for the Untold World.

...this was the Untold World, right? The place of which no stories had yet been made? It had to be. Otherwise, his existence was meaningless. He was here to learn the story of this place, he decided right then and there, since it was the route that involved less screaming in his brain, and return triumphantly home. Or return home, at any rate.

"Kill..." Yes. That had been what was asked of him, in return for safe passage home. He knew how to do that. Many, many stories dealt with how to kill, and how to do it well. Red reached down and picked up the half-formed coin-spider. Its legs twitched, pathetically, and it was lighter than he expected. Perhaps just a spider in the shape of a coin, he surmised.

It tasted fine.

In the shadow of an alleyway between two rust-roofed buildings, Calvin Goodfellow stood, bracing himself against a yellow stained cement wall. His eyes were strained, yet unfocused. His right hand was pale, clutching the handle of a 9 iron so tightly the veins up his arm began to swell. Rapid short bursts of exhalation shot out from his lips as the pounding of his heartbeat filled his ears.

Calvin had spent much of the last decade of his life building layers of protection and luxury around himself. The world he had constructed around him made him more successful, more powerful, more comfortable, more and more irreproachable. Each accomplishment and resource was carefully constructed to give him more tools, more resources, more success. But now suddenly, a cacophony of eyes had smashed his Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs to pieces.

The temptation to explain his current circumstance as some kind of hallucination or brain injury beckoned Calvin’s struggling mind, offering him a veil of comfort, but something in Calvin knew otherwise. Some part of Calvin was just the smallest bit magic. He had a faint innate gift for sensing the fantastical. It was this magical gift that allowed him, among generations of people, to recognize that the joy that filled a child’s playtime with their toys also brought those same creatures to life. (Now, spearheading an organization that systematically created, enslaved, and exploited those magical creatures? That had nothing to do with this gift. That was all Calvin.)

So Calvin couldn’t deny his current circumstance. His gift wouldn’t let him. So he was faced with the cold reality that everything he had worked to create had been stripped from him in an instant.

His breathing quickened. He slammed his fist against the wall and...

A Pause. Followed by a deep. Intentional. Breath.

If I panic, I'll die…

Deep breath.

…stay calm, I'll live…

Another deep breath. As Calvin repeated the mantra to himself, he felt his senses returning. He’d experienced anxiety before. An investor conference, an uncertain board meeting, a nosy reporter….this wasn’t that different - the emotions were the same. He just had…to maintain…control.

Exhale.

He straightened up from his position against the wall.

Inhale.

He could smell the putrid decay that permiated the air of Grimeworld, feel the humidity clinging to his skin, and then he noticed the golf club still clenched in his hand.

“I was golfing” he whispered to himself, “with a Senator.”

“He was the last vote I needed before….” Calvin’s control cracked, “Something….decided…to FUCK with me!”

Calvin slammed his club against a rusted out garbage bin. The end of it broke through the flaking red sheeting and Calvin started kicking the container and yanking the club to dislodge it.

“Damn it! What the fuck is this?!”

Ripping the club free, he whiped his wrist around and tapped furiously on black screen of his gold-banded watch. No signal.

“Shit.”

Calvin wiped the sweat off his brow. He begun to frisk his pockets, reaching for his phone. In the tussle, a small golf ball rolled out of his pants pocket and bounced unceremoniously onto the cracked black lichen covered cement.

Calvin checked his phone battery, 72 percent. Current Location: Unknown. No nearby hotspots. Maybe he could...

“Mr. Goodfellow?” a small voice chimed out.

Calvin bolted backwards, brandishing his golf club. “Who’s there? Where are you?”

“Mr. Goodfellow?" the voice repeated, "Is this hole fourteen? Is it time to play?”

Calvin's gaze moved slowly down towards the ground until locking on to the small white golfball. Silhouetted by the black grime on the ground, it looked almost pearlescent, save for two eyes and a small mouth both crudely drawn in sharpie. The eyes and mouth animated while it spoke, moving along the grooves of the ball to produce a some-what worried, yet hopeful expression.

Calvin's eyes narrowed in disdain. “Hey, Dimple?" he spoke to the tiny golfball, “Does this look like a fucking golf course to you?” Waving out the 9-iron, Calvin gestured towards the barren street littered with puddles of tar and covered by the yellow haze of a smog filled sky.

“Do you see Senator Sanderson anywhere around here?" he continued, "Do you see that fat botox-faced dinosaur who can't shut the fuck up about his fucking grandkids? Do you see me forcing a smile while sucking down a mimosa while I contemplate blowing my brains out because some swingstate fuck can't just get with the program. It's not fucking child labor, when you pay kids to go to daycare! No Dimple! It is not fucking playtime! Look at this shit Dimple! We are fucked!”

"I'm..." Dimple stammered, "I'm sorry, Mr. GoodFellow, I just..."

Calvin scowled, "I'd smash you with this club if I didn't know you fucking liked it."

A sudden thought pierced Calvin's self-indulgent anger. His glare softened as his brow furrowed. Something was off about how Dimple was responding. In Calvin's experience, objects like Dimple never spoke out or offered conversation unless properly coerced. They'd rather play dead than engage in a conversation if they could help it. Sure, some could be trained with time, but Dimple was just a sentient ball, a useful tool to help Calvin impress clients or trick shareholders. Dimple never spoke up more than was required, but here he was, fully animating in front of Calvin with no coercion necessary.

Slowly, Calvin squatted down and picked up Dimple, staring at him intently.

“Why are you so chatty?” Calvin asked, “I can carry you around all day and you don't say a damn thing but the moment you pop out here you start asking to play?”

Dimples’ eyes glanced down. “I…I don’t know…”

“Bullshit you ‘don’t know’. What’s going on with you?”

Dimple looked away from Calvin’s gaze, up to the sky, and then back down to the ground.

“I really don’t know, Mr. Goodfellow. I guess…Normally, when someone is looking at me, it’s like...You know when you get caught in front of a sprinkler spraying you with water? It hurts. It is a lot. But like...right now…It feels sort of like I’ve fallen into a water-trap.”

“What?”

“Like when I fell into the lake at Winderson Pines, when I sunk to the bottom I was surrounded by water. It was all around me, but it didn't feel very intense?" The golfball continued, "So, right now you looking at me doesn’t bother me so much because it feels almost like…” Dimple paused, struggling to find the right words, “Everything is looking at me. It’s like every wall and floor and surface and the sky and my insides are all covered in eyes, and they’re all watching me at the same time. Does that make any sense?”

Calvin swallowed. The memory of falling while surrounded by the presence of the Panopticon stirred fresh in his mind.

“No. Dimple, I think I get it.”

Calvin stood up, gripping Dimple in his hand. Fortunately, he hadn't brought any other toys with him. A hoard of toys suddenly getting a lot more chatty and potentially a lot less compliant would be...problematic.

Carrying Dimple, Calvin began walking down the grime covered street, avoiding the larger puddles of muck, looking for anything that resembled something familiar. His mind raced through the instructions he had been given, trying to remember the others he had seen.

Kill to survive? He thought, I’ve never killed anyone before…not in anyway that matters. What was it that it called me? An 'exploiter of the weak'? Asshole sounds like that one reporter.

The word “weak” resonated to Calvin. He knew that out of the 'things' he had witnessed, he was the weakest of them all, or at least the most vulnerable. He needed strength, something he could use to fight, something he could control.

“Mr. Goodfellow, are you sure we won’t get any playtime?” Dimple chimed up.

Calvin rolled his eyes, “Yeah, Dimple, I’m a little occupied at the moment.”

“What about in there?” Dimple’s eyes darted towards an open doorway down the street. “I think…there’s someone watching us from in there. Maybe they’d like to play?”

Calvin stopped. He glanced down at Dimple. “You can sense someone in there?“

Dimple beamed, “Yeah! I think so. They might be fun!”

“You know what," Calvin said, "It is playtime. Go peek in, and then immediately roll back here.”

Setting Dimple down on the edge of curb, Calvin reared his club back, aimed, and with a quick whap Dimple was flying through the air, spinning towards the doorway

“WEEEEeee…” Dimple’s faint voice faded with distance. The little ball angled itself and crashed through an exposed pane of glass. Calvin heard a thud, the echo of a faint metallic *clunk*…and then seeming silence.

Dimple did not roll back.