Re: DEATHGAME 9000 [S!3] Round One: Gamexus X99
04-30-2012, 08:12 PM
Originally posted on MSPA by Adenreagen.
Eris shrugged off the feeling she had right before she heard the yell. It had almost felt like she was being controlled…not controlled exactly, but… stopped. She knew how control felt, she’d spent years being told and enforced in what she was and wasn’t able to do, and this wasn’t the same. She turned to look at who thought they could tell her what to do. Now that she was out she hated the idea of being controlled, even what she did wasn’t control. It was boring, it was dull and what she did was fun. She finally found them three…jokers. In a way she approved of the ragtag group. One was a big duck, one was carrying a shield and the other, who was pointing a giant key at her like he thought he would actually stop her with it, had clown shoes and crazy hair. As they started running towards her, she felt a wrench in her gut.
No…no, not here, they can’t be here! She looked around and saw them. The jerks, those boring assholes who kept telling her what to do. Them and their stupid pack of stupid summons. Heading right for her.
“How did you even find me?”
“Maduin, we’ve found you! Rejoin us, you never should have been able to leave.”
“HEY! Fuck off, I’m not yours, so get out of here.
Both groups had reached her at this point, the one with the key swinging at her and missing, she grabbed the shield and ripped it from the tall one’s hands, ready to throw it back in his face when she saw a light coming at her. They were trying to summon her, Maduin… whatever. She wasn’t going to have it. “NO!” She threw her hands up and a brick wall appeared between her and light. She didn’t actually know if it would stop it, but the aura as the light hit it and burst made her think it would hold for a moment. Eris turned back in time to see the one with the key swinging it while his two partners backed off, a ball of light growing on the end of the key until eventually a full grown, brightly-colored lion grew out of it.
“Huh. Is that how summons work for him? That’s not so bad…certainly looks less painful.” She saw the light out of her eye began running towards the newly-summoned lion.
“Hi, I’m Eris, what’s your name?”
“It’s Sim-“
“Don’t care. You’re now escape attempt #37. Congratulations, it’s my tenth favorite number. And now,” she said as the summon-light enveloped her, “you’re coming with me.”
She slammed the shield handle-first into #37’s teeth and grabbed on to his tail as the light lifted her away. She’d been summoned several dozen times before she’d managed to – temporarily – escape and knew the drill. She’d be brought up several hundred feet in the air and come crashing down about five feet away from the group summoner. That was her potential way out, she figured, but she’d only get one shot. The rules changed in this world, she’d managed to kill things before in this contest by not having it on the “same side” as her, it just took her this long to figure out how to bend it around to her way. She began twisting the light around her, originally it was fun having the explosions and lights all around her, but now she needed them for purpose.
“C’mon, faster, faster. Go, go, higher!” She waved her hand and the lights clustered behind her, each burst of light pushing her just a little bit further, a little bit faster. She reached the apex of her flight and looked down, hanging in the air for a moment. There was nothing outside the arena, not even the ground she should see through the gaps in the columns. So. Noot was right. We’re in some kind of game video game.
She remembered an arcade she saw once. It was actually a hideout for her until her presence caused the games to injure the patrons by spitting quarters out at them. The Unity corporation actually had a hard time finding her there. It was the largest arcade in the system, the size of a small city, and she had felt home there. Loud noises, bright lights, people running (kids screaming to stay, parents trying to chase them down), it had made her feel good, but even she had never imagined that she would be inside one of those contraptions the building was full of. She had thought about going back various times, but it wasn’t like the arcade was there anymore anyway. It had been burnt down in order to flush her out.
She snapped out of her daydream and noticed the ground was a lot closer than it used to be. “OKAY THIRTY SEVEN,” she yelled over the wind, “GET READY TO DO YOUR JOB.” Fifty feet from the ground she swung the tail as hard as she could and let go. The lion landed on the summoner (Eris never cared to learn her name), several hundred pounds of muscle behind a giant shield. It was like a giant, lion-sized hammer. Even though the lion was caught up in the pull of the summon, was still an opponent’s attack on her team, which meant that they would take damage that Eris herself couldn’t actually deal. The resulting impact caused the summoner to burst like a grape, killing her beyond the repair of potions and phoenix down. Eris felt her bond to obey break. The other summons, their only tie to that world gone, began tearing into everything around them.
She nodded to everyone around her, “Thanks all, it’s been a real blast, if you know what I mean and I mean it hasn’t, but I’m out of here.”
She grabbed the shield from thirty seven’s mouth and tossed it back to the person she had gotten it from with a nod. As she started walking away she could hear them talking behind her.
“What is she? You think she’s some kind of heartless?”
“Gawrsh, I don’t know Sora, but wouldn’t she have gone after you’n the keyblade if she was? She doesn’t act like anyone else here, maybe she’s from another world.”
“Still, she looks like trouble. I just figured since she was starting to attack people, maybe she was… We should follow her and stop her if she’s going to try anything else. Simba!”
The lion faded away as the trio started following Eris at a distance while she tried to maneuver away from the ever-widening path of destruction the summons were leaving behind her.
For all the power Gamexus X99 had over its programs, it was having trouble locating the source of another disturbance. In one area, there was a large scale…shift. Certain NPC’s were no longer acting as they should and sub-plots played out in unexpected ways even though the scripts they were supposed to follow remained unchanged, but that could be ignored as a new patch that altered code for a better, more efficient program. In another, though, was something else entirely. Programs behaving in unexpected ways could, again, be a new system patch, but they were going completely against what the Gamexus expected them to. A storyline change, such as a wife going against her abusive husband, made sense, characters changing their abilities and attacking other programs was not. And that was another thing, when the programs were killed in-game, rather than respawning the program was deleted beyond the dead-character image.
No one had ever made a virus before, but its substantial data banks informed it that there was, in fact, an antivirus program in case someone decided to create a virus in the unknowable future. Its files on viruses showed that this anomaly fit under the category of “program virus”: it appeared from an unknown location, moved through the programs quickly and altered them as it went. The changed files were either altered in a way that negatively impacted the program or deleted entirely. There was only one logical way to stop the virus from spreading further: update the sweeper and run it. It would begin with the core essential files and work out from there, isolate this one anomaly and, pending administrator permission, delete it.
Eris kept pushing her way through the arena, heading back towards where the others had split up. She realized that an arena was actually a terrible place for her to play in because there was either a giant amount of spectators or a single fighting pair in the center. Neither would provide the entertainment and variety for her that inhabited areas would. She snagged a single cloud from the sky overhead, causing a glitchy area that seemed to resemble part of a grimy city in the otherwise untarnished blue-and-white backdrop, and dragged it down to where she was. With a touch, she turned it lime green and it began to rain several kinds of candy. She glanced back at the trail of blood the summons had left behind them after tearing through their former masters and a large portion of the audience in that part of the stadium and heaved a sigh. There's almost nothing for me to do here.
Eris shrugged off the feeling she had right before she heard the yell. It had almost felt like she was being controlled…not controlled exactly, but… stopped. She knew how control felt, she’d spent years being told and enforced in what she was and wasn’t able to do, and this wasn’t the same. She turned to look at who thought they could tell her what to do. Now that she was out she hated the idea of being controlled, even what she did wasn’t control. It was boring, it was dull and what she did was fun. She finally found them three…jokers. In a way she approved of the ragtag group. One was a big duck, one was carrying a shield and the other, who was pointing a giant key at her like he thought he would actually stop her with it, had clown shoes and crazy hair. As they started running towards her, she felt a wrench in her gut.
No…no, not here, they can’t be here! She looked around and saw them. The jerks, those boring assholes who kept telling her what to do. Them and their stupid pack of stupid summons. Heading right for her.
“How did you even find me?”
“Maduin, we’ve found you! Rejoin us, you never should have been able to leave.”
“HEY! Fuck off, I’m not yours, so get out of here.
Both groups had reached her at this point, the one with the key swinging at her and missing, she grabbed the shield and ripped it from the tall one’s hands, ready to throw it back in his face when she saw a light coming at her. They were trying to summon her, Maduin… whatever. She wasn’t going to have it. “NO!” She threw her hands up and a brick wall appeared between her and light. She didn’t actually know if it would stop it, but the aura as the light hit it and burst made her think it would hold for a moment. Eris turned back in time to see the one with the key swinging it while his two partners backed off, a ball of light growing on the end of the key until eventually a full grown, brightly-colored lion grew out of it.
“Huh. Is that how summons work for him? That’s not so bad…certainly looks less painful.” She saw the light out of her eye began running towards the newly-summoned lion.
“Hi, I’m Eris, what’s your name?”
“It’s Sim-“
“Don’t care. You’re now escape attempt #37. Congratulations, it’s my tenth favorite number. And now,” she said as the summon-light enveloped her, “you’re coming with me.”
She slammed the shield handle-first into #37’s teeth and grabbed on to his tail as the light lifted her away. She’d been summoned several dozen times before she’d managed to – temporarily – escape and knew the drill. She’d be brought up several hundred feet in the air and come crashing down about five feet away from the group summoner. That was her potential way out, she figured, but she’d only get one shot. The rules changed in this world, she’d managed to kill things before in this contest by not having it on the “same side” as her, it just took her this long to figure out how to bend it around to her way. She began twisting the light around her, originally it was fun having the explosions and lights all around her, but now she needed them for purpose.
“C’mon, faster, faster. Go, go, higher!” She waved her hand and the lights clustered behind her, each burst of light pushing her just a little bit further, a little bit faster. She reached the apex of her flight and looked down, hanging in the air for a moment. There was nothing outside the arena, not even the ground she should see through the gaps in the columns. So. Noot was right. We’re in some kind of game video game.
She remembered an arcade she saw once. It was actually a hideout for her until her presence caused the games to injure the patrons by spitting quarters out at them. The Unity corporation actually had a hard time finding her there. It was the largest arcade in the system, the size of a small city, and she had felt home there. Loud noises, bright lights, people running (kids screaming to stay, parents trying to chase them down), it had made her feel good, but even she had never imagined that she would be inside one of those contraptions the building was full of. She had thought about going back various times, but it wasn’t like the arcade was there anymore anyway. It had been burnt down in order to flush her out.
She snapped out of her daydream and noticed the ground was a lot closer than it used to be. “OKAY THIRTY SEVEN,” she yelled over the wind, “GET READY TO DO YOUR JOB.” Fifty feet from the ground she swung the tail as hard as she could and let go. The lion landed on the summoner (Eris never cared to learn her name), several hundred pounds of muscle behind a giant shield. It was like a giant, lion-sized hammer. Even though the lion was caught up in the pull of the summon, was still an opponent’s attack on her team, which meant that they would take damage that Eris herself couldn’t actually deal. The resulting impact caused the summoner to burst like a grape, killing her beyond the repair of potions and phoenix down. Eris felt her bond to obey break. The other summons, their only tie to that world gone, began tearing into everything around them.
She nodded to everyone around her, “Thanks all, it’s been a real blast, if you know what I mean and I mean it hasn’t, but I’m out of here.”
She grabbed the shield from thirty seven’s mouth and tossed it back to the person she had gotten it from with a nod. As she started walking away she could hear them talking behind her.
“What is she? You think she’s some kind of heartless?”
“Gawrsh, I don’t know Sora, but wouldn’t she have gone after you’n the keyblade if she was? She doesn’t act like anyone else here, maybe she’s from another world.”
“Still, she looks like trouble. I just figured since she was starting to attack people, maybe she was… We should follow her and stop her if she’s going to try anything else. Simba!”
The lion faded away as the trio started following Eris at a distance while she tried to maneuver away from the ever-widening path of destruction the summons were leaving behind her.
For all the power Gamexus X99 had over its programs, it was having trouble locating the source of another disturbance. In one area, there was a large scale…shift. Certain NPC’s were no longer acting as they should and sub-plots played out in unexpected ways even though the scripts they were supposed to follow remained unchanged, but that could be ignored as a new patch that altered code for a better, more efficient program. In another, though, was something else entirely. Programs behaving in unexpected ways could, again, be a new system patch, but they were going completely against what the Gamexus expected them to. A storyline change, such as a wife going against her abusive husband, made sense, characters changing their abilities and attacking other programs was not. And that was another thing, when the programs were killed in-game, rather than respawning the program was deleted beyond the dead-character image.
No one had ever made a virus before, but its substantial data banks informed it that there was, in fact, an antivirus program in case someone decided to create a virus in the unknowable future. Its files on viruses showed that this anomaly fit under the category of “program virus”: it appeared from an unknown location, moved through the programs quickly and altered them as it went. The changed files were either altered in a way that negatively impacted the program or deleted entirely. There was only one logical way to stop the virus from spreading further: update the sweeper and run it. It would begin with the core essential files and work out from there, isolate this one anomaly and, pending administrator permission, delete it.
Eris kept pushing her way through the arena, heading back towards where the others had split up. She realized that an arena was actually a terrible place for her to play in because there was either a giant amount of spectators or a single fighting pair in the center. Neither would provide the entertainment and variety for her that inhabited areas would. She snagged a single cloud from the sky overhead, causing a glitchy area that seemed to resemble part of a grimy city in the otherwise untarnished blue-and-white backdrop, and dragged it down to where she was. With a touch, she turned it lime green and it began to rain several kinds of candy. She glanced back at the trail of blood the summons had left behind them after tearing through their former masters and a large portion of the audience in that part of the stadium and heaved a sigh. There's almost nothing for me to do here.
Spoiler