Undefined Behaviour [draft 0.0.6]

Chapter::GlasgowComaScale

It was one of the last times I spoke to her.

She leaned back on her chair, pushing it up on two legs so she could look at me upside down over the back. The twists of her hair caught the light of her computer screen, and the various lamps and uplighters scattered haphazardly around the room. I would have been on the sofa. Tweaking the main character rig, I’m pretty sure.

We’d often have days like that, back then: I’d go round, we’d put some music on, work quietly side by side on the game for a little while, maybe cuddle and watch some anime later but more likely get caught up talking until the last train had gone and I’d just have to stay the night. At some point I started bringing my toothbrush.

She wasn’t working on the game at this point, though. Some webtoon was on the screen, you know, the long infinite-scroll kind which all have the same blandly animesque artstyle.

…ah, that’s unfair, isn’t it? I’d hate it if someone cast that sort of judgement on the things I like. Someone called my style ‘Artstation-core’ once and I don’t think I ever recovered. But she was reading something like that, or maybe it was a web novel. I mostly just remember what she said about it.

“I fucking hate this isekai shit!”

I gave her the look. She pivoted the chair back and spun it round to face me properly, leaning forward on her knees. She looked more frustrated than usual.

“Yeah, OK.” she said. “I… OK. Come on, Indigo. Don’t look at me like that.”

“You wouldn’t read it if you weren’t getting something out of it.” I lifted the laptop off my knees, patted the cushion next to me. “Come on. Tools down. You can’t tell me that’s research. Come and tell me whats up.”

She stood, wobbled the way she does when she hasn’t been paying attention to hunger signals for several hours, and picked her way past the books to settle between me and the pile of plushies. I held her for a minute or two, stroking her hair while she figured out the words.

“It’s just…” She glances at the cold cup of tea on the desk she left and winces. “None of them get it, you know? I keep thinking, maybe this one will actually do it properly, but it’s always just… it’s just a simple version of this world in medieval cosplay, it doesn’t even try to get the weltanschauung, or–”

I couldn’t suppress my smirk. “Weltanschauung, sweetie?”

“You know, like–”

“Yeah, no, just, that’s like the most Violet way you could put it.”

She didn’t laugh like I expected. Just pushed away from me to hug her knees instead. “That’s the problem, isn’t it… Among, you know, the company, we’re like, the two weird trannies. And, well,” She smiled at me weakly. “It means the world that I’m not the only weird tranny. But among the weird trannies, I’m still like… I’m still the girl that says weltanschauung. The words that come naturally to me are like, they’re the words that make me an incomprehensible nerd.”

“You know we’re all incomprehensible nerds, right?” Even then I’m sure I knew this wasn’t bait I should be taking, but… “Like, we’re all freaky autists with our little obsessions. You don’t know what I’m on about when I talk about graphics programming. And the fact that you even humour me, most people don’t even give me that.”

She winces a little. “You’ve got all those nerds on Discord. The demoscene.”

“And in the demoscene, I’m a weird tranny. Making inscrutable things about dolls that nobody understands. If someone understands what I’m getting at with the dolls thing, they don’t know what a mesh shader is.”

This made her crack a brief smile at last. “I don’t know what a mesh shader is either, Indigo, and you’ve explained it to me like four or five times. But, yeah.” She stared into space. “I guess we are all… composites of stuff. Occupying our own strange little combinatoric worlds.”

“Right. Everyone’s got a, uh, veltanshung.”

“Yeah. And with these isekai type stories, I always hope that they’ll actually take me into a different world. Take me across the magic circle. And I suppose they do have a world they wanna explore. The same janky fucking RPG that nobody ever made, where the protag has some unbalanced power and everyone loves them.”

“And he just goes around collecting girls, yeah.”

“Not even just that.” Amused exhale. “I don’t bother reading the ones with boys, but it’s like…” She sighed, and stared at me with those wide-spaced eyes. “You know, there’s these ‘Connecticut Yankee’ style ones, where the protag is bringing the light of modern engineering to medieval times. And they’re like, wow, check it out, I invented soap. Bet you idiots never thought of that one.”

“Yeah, I mean, it’s just slop. Wish fulfilment.” We were still saying ‘slop’ back then. “This world crushes people, they want to imagine being strong and important. But honestly the whole portal fantasy thing always felt sorta goofy to me, right? You sorta have to accept that people in our world are special. The other world has to be lesser. So you’re going somewhere which the narrative has already made clear is inferior, or phony somehow.”

She frowned. “I guess when you put it that way…”

I guestured for her to come back in for more cuddles. She obliged, face still creased with thought.

“If you actually got isekaied into a game, it wouldn’t be like that, would it? I mean, you’ve played MMOs, obviously.”

“Yeah, I mean, Final Fantasy mainly…” I stretched past her, fumbled around for my plush tonberry, and dropped it in her lap.

“Well, that’s a great example.” She picked the tonberry up and fiddled with its little knife. “Did you raid and that? Or just RP?”

“I had a static back in 5.0, we used to do savage prog. Before I got this job, obviously. Not much time for raiding these days…”

“Oh yeah, that was Eden right? Well, you know what it’s like, then. There’s a whole meta. You can go on youtube and learn the mechanics. Someone works out all the gear and rotations.”

“Right.”

“If there was a broken mechanic, everyone would use it, and then the devs would patch it out. There wouldn’t be one ultra special little guy who’s better than everyone. Being good at the game is grinding up the gear ladder, a few extra GCDs for a 3% dps boost…”

“Yeah!” I tapped through the Dragoon rotation on her leg. “That’s double weaving.” This elicited a giggle. “I mean, I always thought of it like a dance I was trying to learn. But in other games, fighting games and such, there’s more room for someone to be the best player…”

“Right, but like, with fighting gamers, there’s still that community aspect! They know all the framedata and stuff, so everyone’s on five levels of prediction mindgames and you have to understand all that shit before you even have a chance.” She wiggled the tonberry around, making it lunge.

“OK, sure. But…” I was getting caught up in it. “That’s just how it is with fiction, isn’t it? I mean, it’s always ‘heroic guy fighting through dozens of people’, not ‘I got gangrene in a trench’. In sports manga, the protagonist is special too…”

She squirmed; twisted to face me again. “Sure. But, in sports manga, their special power is always just tenacity, isn’t it? They’re usually a huge idiot who’s maybe good at like one thing at most. But they keep trying and getting beat up and trying again, until eventually people respect them.”

“Heh, there’s probably a sports manga about computer games.” I glanced down at my laptop, Blender open still, a hand painted in lurid weight-paint gradients. “We can search mangadex. I bet there’s a dozen that are all about, you know, moe girls playing competitive FPSes.”

Violet flopped down into my lap, dispelling thoughts of the laptop. I stroked her cheek gently. Her mind was working on something, though, not to be distracted, like a doggirl with a bone.

“That’s not it, though…” she was saying. “I mean, it’s sort of ‘it’. Like, sports manga is usually trying to explain the sport to you, right? It’s trying to say, here’s why you should care about this. Welcome to that special interest. But it can’t get too far into the weeds with it.”

“I don’t know about that. Do you remember the one about mahjong where the girls just get bigger and bigger boobs for the entire run, so it goes from just like regular manga to full-on fetish art? But it’s still all about mahjong?”

She laughed. “Well, OK. I guess the mahjong boobs one is pretty out there. But… it’s still gotta follow the formula right? If it’s too esoteric, it won’t sell.”

“Hm.” I said. “I mean, I kinda worry our game is like that, you know. We’ve gone too deep.”

“Have some faith…” Violet rested there a moment on my lap, staring up at the broken lightbulb on her ceiling. “Do you think you could make a sports manga about graphics programming?”

I cracked up. “What, so like, the protagonist is being beaten down by Vulkan, teeth gritted, tears in her eyes?”

“No, seriously! She’s gotta go to those, you know, demoparties and stuff. SIGGRAPH tournament arc! And it’s always like, here’s an opponent of the week whose special power is path tracing or something. They reveal the number of triangles in a scene, and the protag is all, nani!?… so this is the power of Phong shading…”

“I mean, I’d read that.”

“Obviously you’d read that. It’s your special interest.”

“I mean, you’re right! It would work with the formula. You could teach people about it.”

“But… agh, that’s the whole problem. I don’t just want the same formula all the time. If I’m going to another world, I want it to actually be… different. And if I wanted to take someone into my world… I’d want them to understand it. So I guess I want that from these isekai stories. I want to be taken somewhere that I’d really have to understand.”

I didn’t really know how to answer that, so I kissed her, and we didn’t discuss games or isekai stories any more.

…no, that’s way too coy, isn’t it? We were having sex. But that’s not really germane to the point right now.

She didn’t disappear right away after that. But the next few weeks were the game launch, so nobody saw much of anyone outside of work.

It went pretty well, all things considered! We rolled out of the NextFest with a decent snowball of positive reviews. We got attention on social media that we hadn’t paid for. Marketing was, thankfully, not my department, but it seemed that Violet’s story was just the right level of obtuse, and indeed, before long there was a fan wiki, and then a second wiki that isn’t on Fandom, and fan videos where people would paraphrase the fan wiki…

My efforts got some praise as well. You know, one or two lines in the reviews saying the ‘graphics’ are ‘pretty good’. But really it’s what they didn’t say. Nobody complaining about frame drops, no crashes on unusual hardware, no motion sickness for the VR players. (All ten of them.)

Let me tell you about the game. We called it TRISMEGISTUS. It was one of those overambitious heartbreaker projects that is like a candle to the indie developer moth: an immersive RPG with a robust simulation. We used a heavily customised version of Bevy for the engine. There was networked coop, even, with proper rollback netcode. Violet was the head writer, and she cooked up this wonderful branching narrative with five different factions. You could side with the Seelie or Unseelie Courts, or the Alchemists, the Homunculi, the Jellies… or take it your own way, and whatever you did would advantage one side or another and trigger events all over the map. I’m pretty sure it was based on an old tabletop campaign she’d run. She worked like a machine. I can’t even pretend to know half the things that could happen, and I’ve kept the script on my hard drive for years since.

We were all very energised after that. Violet came round a few times, fizzing with new ideas for the game. Obviously, we got everyone in the polycule to play it.

In week three, a popular Korean vtuber called PURPLE got into the game, and that brought in a whole wave of new attention. (Purple as in the English word, so transliterated 퍼펄 in Korean.) Kind of a sketchy moment, I don’t think any of us expected that! We’d been gearing up for the first significant content patch, Violet was spinning this crazy story about a gang of alchemists working to create the Perfect Androgyne. Really on some Jodorowsky shit, but she could make it work.

Then, all of a sudden, we needed to get the Korean language localisation out the door already. To get it tested. We were convinced we wouldn’t get a chance like this again. One of my colleagues, Yeong-Mi, was actually Korean, so she ended up handling pretty much all the communications with the Korean publisher and localisation team, which was really not her department but it was a small company and she was an actual native speaker so… you know. I feel bad about it in retrospect, it’s not the netcode stuff she was hired to do, but she seemed pretty stoked about all the attention it was getting at home.

So, it was chaos for a while. But it really seemed like we’d pulled it off. There was decent activity on the multiplayer, word was spreading in indie gaming circles, and the times I actually got to see her, Violet was as excited as I’d ever seen. More so, even. I’m not sure how much she even slept. She was at the top of her game writing-wise, though, so I don’t think anyone was too keen to tell her to slow down.

That was the point she disappeared.

She didn’t leave a suicide note or anything. But, you know how it goes with trans girls. The longer it went on, the harder it became to think she’d just skipped town without telling anyone.

After a week, I went round her flat. All her shit was still there, the milk going off in the fridge… Her coat and shoes were gone, but everything else was there.

We found an ex who got us in touch with her parents, but of course none of them knew anything. After a couple months the landlord got pissy about rent not being paid and, as the girlfriend with the key, it was my job to get her stuff into storage.

For all that time, I never found out. Dead, kidnapped by some weird cult, some other mad thing. Never. We put out word, but there’s a lot of trans girls called Violet. I think someone put her on the TDOR list. We never held a real funeral or anything because, well, I think we all kind of hoped she’d show up one day and by the time we got resigned to it, it the moment had passed.

At work, well, they never officially fired her, but that’s because the company went bust six few months later. With Violet gone, it was like there was something fundamental missing. We made updates still, worked through the backlog of writing she left or did our best to build on the skeleton she’d put together, but we’d lost some sort of spark. PURPLE moved on to another game, and so did our other players. I wish I could say it went out with a bang, some big social media storm or something, but no.

That was ten years ago.

And I mean, you know how much has happened since. The AI crash. All the mad shit with the government. The second pandemic.

At some point in all that geopolitical chaos, the game got covered by one of those Youtube video essay people. I believe she titled it, ‘the insane MMORPG whose writer DISAPPEARED’, and it wasn’t even an MMO! We wanted it to be, at one point, but it was just not feasible with a team of this size. One of the only times we thought about scope.

Still, it was nice that someone remembered it. I can’t really say that about any of my other games. I got in touch with the girl that made the video, another trans girl, went by Rose Reviews. We talked on Discord now and again, but at some point, we drifted, one or other of us got cold feet, we stopped messaging as much. But in response to that, I decided I’d opensource it. I don’t think I know who actually had the rights, but I had the whole repo, so why not?

As a result, it got a second wind. Niche cult indie game, trannies love that kind of thing. Actually, some speedrunners picked it up. I don’t think it was a major speed game, but it actually got a couple of GDC runs. The WR was held for years by a girl called Fandango. By that point I was pretty burned out. I put in a big donation during her GDC run saying I was a dev, and they read it out; that was about the extent of what I said to Fandango.

I’ll be honest, for my part, those ten years were hideous. Work was whatever. I bounced from studio to studio. Made assets and shaders for this and that. Mobile games and such, some of them were even released.

But as I’m sure you know, the law got worse. More of my friends died, in rather less ambiguous ways. Suicide, mostly. Some of them got got. Maggie, Fuchsia, Amaranth, Finn, even fucking Heliotrope… some people I knew very well, others I did not but still called friends. One who I’d never managed to reconcile with, and that hurt in its own way.

Each time, I helped hold the funeral, and it all started feeling more and more absurd. I’d be looking at the faces. Trying to guess who’d be next. Meeting the gaze of others who were doing the same.

On top of all that, I kinda had to soft-detrans. They don’t know I’m a woman at work. Frankly, I’m not entirely sure if I can really count as a woman outside of work, even with bottom surgery. I don’t go to trans events anymore. I switched to DIY after the whole thing with the NHS, but it got a lot harder to get that stuff in through the cracks. There’d be months without hormones, and they’d suck. Casually microdosing menopause!

At some point I just couldn’t handle it anymore.

I stopped going to protests, stopped travelling to demoparties and film festivals and all that, stopped going to synagogue even the few times a year I had. Stopped going out at all. Younger people could keep up the fight. I was fucking done.

Let’s not mope too hard, right? It was wretched, but I managed. Weren’t there good times? I loved people, while they were alive. And I’m not dead, somehow. I didn’t get sent to prison. I wouldn’t let them get rid of me that easily. Or was I just too much of a coward to risk my shitty life? One way or another, I stuck around.

The graphics stuff was my escape. I made a few films, here and there, but nobody paid them much attention. Made a couple indie games. And of course, every year, I’d do a run of TRISMEGISTUS. Sometimes alone, sometimes with Yeong-Mi. It was our little yortseyt ritual to say, hey, Violet, I’m coming to visit you. That’s how I kept her alive.

It was really just a few months ago that I finally accepted I couldn’t bear to live in the UK anymore. Got my papers in order (big fat M on the passport), a ticket to Germany, and a job lined up at a studio making games about cars.

I will be honest, I hate cars. But I mean who gives a shit? It’s the only offer I got. That’s my role in this system, right? The ones who have some sort of tech skill are like siphons to pull money out for the rest of the community. Doesn’t matter how I feel about it. At least it’s not fintech!

I’d been living with Yeong-Mi the last few years. She hadn’t transitioned back when we were working on the game, but she did a couple years after. Unlike me, she had some sense, so she left the game industry… actually, she was supplying a whole load of people with HRT. We’d dated for a few years, and then sorta broke up but actually stayed friends. I know, living with your ex… well, to be honest, it was kind of ambiguous whether we were still together, but for the last few years our relationship mostly consisted of watching bad movies once a week.

Anyway.

She got arrested on some political demo, trans shit or anti-war shit, I can’t tell you. She told me to hand out the rest of her stash to whoever asked, and I did, for want of a better idea. It lasted about two months. She left me a darkweb address to get more, but it was already taken down by that point…

So, when I got a knock on my door, 1am the night before my plane? Well, frankly, I thought this is it, they’re finally gonna put me in a camp.

You know where this is going, don’t you?

Violet looked different, the wheelchair especially, different hair. But even my faceblind ass could tell it was her.

How can I describe what I was feeling in this moment? It was like I broke on a rock. In movies, they have pithy ways to express it like, how could you, I thought you were dead, I could kill you. I didn’t have anything like that to say.

I felt… I felt like a monster, to be honest. I hadn’t shaved. Wearing what they used to call a boymoder hoodie. I was a fair bit heavier than I had been, and well, normally I try to be proud of that, I’m always telling other trans girls to eat more, but in that moment all the politics went out of my head.

I felt the last decade coming down on top of me. Everything I’d done and, more importantly, hadn’t done.

I am pretty sure I made some sort of weird squeak and gestured for her to come inside. At least my flat was actually accessible! More accessible than ever with all the furniture gone.

Violet was not alone. There was someone behind her, a tall East Asian woman in a heavy coat who I can best describe as ‘pointy’. She kept furtively looking back along the street, her breath misting.

I got them inside. No kitchen table, so me and Violet’s mysterious friend ended up sitting on my air mattress, Violet of course in her wheelchair. I still had my kettle so I set it to boil, sat incongruously in the middle of the carpet I’d spent the day cleaning.

“Violet, I… hey.” I managed. “Hi… Long time no see.”

Violet looked at me with… I suppose I can say with affection and pain. That’s what I wanted to imagine in her face. Honestly, more than anything she looked exhausted.

“You were going to say ‘久しぶりですね’, weren’t you, you fucking weeb.” said Violet. Then she coughed. “I mean, um. Hey, Indigo. God, I am so fucking sorry.”

I swallowed, and I was definitely tearing up. My throat was sore. I was going to end up absolutely bawling at this rate. That would be no good, would it?

“Where the fuck were you? Literally, like…” I couldn’t figure out how to finish the sentence. It made no sense. “I honestly thought you were dead. We put you on the fucking TDOR list. Violet… do you get it? Every year…” I laughed hollowly. “Every year, I logged into TRISMEGISTUS, I went to the place in the second area where the candle people are and did the ‘blessed flame’ quest. Do you remember that one?”

Violet was tearing up too, now. Her friend awkwardly inspected my freshly-repainted wall. I went over to her, and wrapped my arms around her, and we cried together for a while. She was so light.

“I couldn’t tell you.” she said. “I’m sorry, Indigo. You were my other half, I would have done anything to tell you I was still there. But I couldn’t.”

“You’re alive.” I held onto her. “I mean, I don’t know, a decade is a long time. I don’t know what we are now. But I’m fucking glad you’re alive, Violet. I’m fucking glad…”

“Yeah.” Violet said. We didn’t say anything else for a while.

Eventually, the other woman coughed. “I don’t wanna interrupt this, but we’re kind of on a clock.”

I let Violet go, and settled down by the wall. “This has got to be a story.”

“It is.” Violet said. “It really is, Indigo. But right now, I’ve got to offer you a job.”

I couldn’t contain it. All the tears gave way to laughter. “No. You’re actually fucking with me.”

“I mean it. Please, Indigo. Don’t go to Germany.” Violet glanced awkwardly at the other woman.

“How did you—you know what, nevermind. You have seen what it’s like here, now, Violet?”

“I have. And that’s why I need you here. Why we all do.”

“Yeong-Mi—oh, you would have known her as–”

“Don’t worry, I know about Yeong-Mi.”

“Right. You know fucking everything, huh. Well, she’s the one who knows where to buy estrogen and all that. And I’m afraid you’re too late, she’s in fucking prison.”

Now Violet actually smiled, and tilted her head forward. The shark-like look she used to have whenever she knew she was just about to beat me at a game. Which was, to be clear, quite often.

“No, Indigo, she’s not. She’s in the car.”

Here’s what Violet told me.

She had, in fact, been hit by a truck. Obviously I made the truck-kun joke. But she was not, as dramatic convention would have it, transported away to a fantastical world where she could gather a harem of monstergirls and level up to become the demon lord. She was just in a coma.

However, that only accounted for the first five years or so. The rest, well, I confess I’m not sure I really believed her. She said that she came back from the coma but not as herself. That, for years, she was convinced she was another person, a guy even, and that ‘Violet’ was something like a character in a story. That she’d been taken to some kind of rehab centre, that they did experiments on her or something. I didn’t want to press her for details there. But it was right here in Glasgow. She’d never even left the damn city. Whoever these fuckers were, they hadn’t bothered to contact her legally registered next of kin (me).

“So you escaped?” I’d asked her. And she’d shaken her head, and said, it’s a bit more complicated than that, and she’d explain everything if I took the job.

“Cancel your flight, and the taxi.” she’d told me. “We’ll pay you back for all of it. And shipping your stuff back from Germany.”

“What’s the job, then?” I mean, frankly, the very second she’d asked I knew I would take it. But I couldn’t just say that.

“Finish TRISMEGISTUS. But… more than that.”

I’d frowned. “Finish it? We already shipped it. There’s people speedrunning it.”

“Yeah, well.” Violet said. “That was a good first draft. But… it’s hard to explain. It has to be a whole lot more, this time.”

“Who’s funding this?”

Violet looked over at the other woman, who’d been very quiet through the whole explanation. Back to me.

“That is, uh, something of a secret. But they’re good for it. Much bigger budget.”

“Come on, Violet. Give me something.”

She watched me, forlorn. “I thought you’d…”

“No, let me be clear, I’m going to take it. I’m going to take the job.” I watched the tension leave her, and even the other woman looked a little relieved. “But please, tell me who I’m going to be working for. Like… who the hell pays real money to remake a forgotten ten-year-old RPG that’s only played by autistic trans women in their forties?” Something of an ungenerous description, but… no, that is really about the sum of it.

“I do.” said Violet’s friend, rather sternly. I stared at her. Trying to figure her out. She gulped down the rest of the tea I’d given her, which by then must have been lukewarm. “And that’s exactly why, Ms. Indigo. I’ll explain everything. Read this, sign it if there isn’t a problem, the address is on there, we can sort out the details tomorrow.”

She swept out of the room.

Violet smiled plaintively. “I promise,” she said. “It isn’t anything evil. This will actually matter, Indigo. This might be the only thing that matters.”

Before I could ask what she was talking about, Violet swivelled her wheelchair and made for the door. I followed, if only to make sure she could handle the latch. There was indeed a car waiting, a plain grey one of a type which I’d surely know a lot more about after a few months on that job in Germany. The window rolled down as Violet approached, and sure enough, it really was Yeong-Mi. She stuck her tongue out at me.

What the fuck was going on here?

The contract was boilerplate. It felt like a statistical average of every game industry contract I’d signed. You shall use your best endeavours to promote our interests, and unless prevented by ill health or accident, devote sufficient time to carrying out the following services for us. The list of possible duties was pretty extensive. But the pay made my eyes widen. The other benefits made a point that I’d get free HRT. Might get them in legal hot water…

My name was listed as Indigo, as well. Could I even sign a contract with that name anymore? I hesitated. I’d sort it out tomorrow.

I applied to cancel my flight by phone. No refund, obviously. Wrote an email to the German company to apologise, and report a family emergency of some suitably vague sort. The rest… the rest could wait, it would have to. I was still trying to comprehend Violet being alive.

A whole decade had gone by. I’d had other relationships of course, most recently with Yeong-Mi. And I’d had a lot of time to process what Violet and I were. The sense of betrayal I’d felt, however cruel and unjustified. Wondering why she hadn’t told me, if she was struggling that bad. Or if she had told me, and I’d been too oblivious to pick up the signals. Seeing Violet now could only bring to mind gothic metaphors, ghosts and hauntings. I’d gone over every conversation we’d had in my head, searching it for clues, and none of it was right.

She’d been hit by a damn truck. Comical. Unless, of course, she was lying for some reason. So much of this mysterious job seemed sketchy. Like, why show up at my flat at 1am? Why not tell me more?

I remembered a piece of concept art I’d once rendered. It had shown a magician working a magic circle, and a lopsided little homunculus peering around the corner. I’d composed it to hide what the magician was doing, limit it to a tantalising glimpse of the intricate circle. A nice bit of visual storytelling, and also saved me the trouble of modelling some kind of demon or monster.

Tomorrow, I would walk around that corner, and see Violet’s monster.

So, the next morning, I found myself cycling across the bridge, past the Riverside Museum, and towards the city centre. It was my first time going out in… frankly, I don’t want to think about how long. Since my last trip to the doctors, maybe. I watched the people going up and down the bridge warily, but none of them seemed to be in a hurry to hatecrime me. (Ha, to imagine that tranny bashing would still be a hate crime. They’d probably give them a medal.)

I was definitely not in good shape to cycle. I’d left a lot of time, which meant very little sleep, and so it was hard to appreciate the frost glittering on the railings and wires of the bridge, the wintery Clyde, that old ship they have… bit by bit, though, I inched my way along the river, past the science centre and all that, stopping for breath whenever I had to.

I won’t tell you the exact address. Probably too much to say it was central already…

The receptionist waved me through, directing me towards the basement. The words forcefemme dungeon flashed through my head and made me crack a weird smile, but he didn’t seem too put off. Must get all sorts coming through here. A short ride in the lift, and I emerged in a space that resembled a hacker event more than a game studio. Low ceiling, wires running this way and that in metal cradles, colourful LED strips. I half expected a smoke machine to run. No sign of Violet, but her mysterious friend was waiting for me.

“Good morning, Ms. Indigo.” she said, with a wry smile. No longer wearing her coat, now she was dressed in… honestly, I think I would describe it as some flavour of military lolita fashion? Absolutely insanely over the top. It looked like she was in cosplay. White embroidered jacket and skirt, long purple cape over one shoulder. She had a subtle accent, now I was paying attention. Her enunciation felt almost mathematically precise, but having lived with Yeong-Mi all those years, I was fairly sure it was Korean.

“Um, hello!” I managed after slightly too long a pause. “I don’t think we got introduced yesterday. I, uh, had some questions about the contract?”

“Indeed. The name on it?” Of course she knew.

“Yes, uh, I do appreciate the gesture, but with the Real Names Act and all that…”

“This may not be entirely reassuring to hear, Ms. Indigo, but if the government ever finds out what we’re doing here, the Real Names Act will be the least of our worries. Consider this contract more a statement of good faith intent. We will honour it regardless, of course.”

She was right. This was not reassuring.

Yeong-Mi sauntered in, flashed me a smile. “Hey Indie!” She loved to call me that. Especially when I released a new game. “Funny being back in gamedev after all this time.”

“I’m, uh, glad you’re out of prison.” I said. “Daring prison break? Should I check the news?”

Her grin got wider. “Apparently rich bitches can pull a lot of strings.” She pointed to the other woman with an ostentatious flourish. “You should tell her who you are. She’s gonna shit.”

“Right…” I said, peering at my new boss. Trying to figure out if I could place her. And to stop my brain playing the ‘cis or trans’ game.

“You will not recognise me.” she said, seemingly unperturbed by Yeong-Mi’s tone. “But… 하지만 제 스트림을 보셨죠?” She suddenly made an incongruous V-pose as my brain worked to process the Korean.

“Your stream? Wait… no fucking way. PURPLE? The fucking, vtuber with, the, uh, shell thingy?”

PURPLE relaxed back, her expression if anything, kind of forlorn. “Just Su-ni these days. I graduated years ago.”

Yeong-Mi cackled. “Definitely not the person I expected to bust me out of prison.”

“Yeah, I’ll bet.” I looked between them both. “Wait, you’re telling me being a vtuber actually pays?”

“It did back then. More importantly, my parents are rich.” PURPLE said this completely offhandedly, without pride or shame. “But you might gather from the fact I’m in Glasgow…”

“Yeah, no, this only makes it more confusing. Though I guess with the war and everything… I wouldn’t want to stay either. Still. Glasgow?”

She nodded. “Yes, Glasgow. It’s not because of the war. Family drama.”

Silently, I cursed myself for the insensitive speculation. I was saved further embarassment by a quiet whine, announcing Violet’s wheelchair entering the… well, not so much room as corridor. She looked about as tired as the day before.

“Su-ni’s family own the rehab centre.” she said, as if that explained everything.

“Right.” I said. “Ach. Hey, Violet. I can’t believe this is real…” I looked at her, and it seemed the air was sliced by an array of transparent years, small differences accumulating with each one. I knew a Violet, the Violet of ten years ago, or the version that my imagination had built during her absence. But who was this Violet? I contemplated, for a moment, the space of all possible Violets.

This Violet peered back at me, very seriously.

“Indigo. It is real. Or, well, that’s what we’re here to do. To make it real.”

“Right.” Right… “We’re remaking TRISMEGISTUS. Honestly, I have so many questions. Like, what is even your business model? I don’t think anyone’s buying this kind of RPG in 203X. And why are you acting like this is some super-illegal top secret that nobody can know about?”

“Indigo.” Violet says.

“Yeah?”

“Are you ready to step across the magic circle?”

I watched the bright array of screens on my new desk. There was a VR headset nearby, but it didn’t seem to be plugged in.

At this point, I have to say I was pretty much emotionally sandblasted to nothing. A polished desert. But I could do ‘technically knowledgeable’. I was here to make a game. Let’s talk about games.

“This is a pretty early build.” Yeong-Mi said. “But the architecture is solid. Rust. I love getting to write Rust.”

“This is a custom engine?”

“Bevy fork, actually! SpacetimeDB backend. But there’s a ton of custom stuff, yeah.”

“Wow, takes me back. Good for all these NPCs… I know it’s placeholder assets, but someone’s done some really nice work on the movement.” I meant it. The screen showed a bustling area, a village of bulbous huts tangled in bridges, all supported by these giant upside-down mushrooms. A lot of it was still greyboxed, but I could see what was intended—a much expanded version of the Scurriers’ Market area in the original game, with the original assets jutting out here and there. Tiny figures ran about, jumping gaps between the bridges, bumping into each other, conversing, using tools…

“About that…” Yeong-Mi said.

“Right.” Violet spoke up. “Those aren’t NPCs.”

I gave her a look. “But there’s hundreds of them.”

“We had to be sure it would work before we started recruiting everyone.” Yeong-Mi said. “But it does.”

“What am I looking at? Are these some sort of like, actual AIs? AGIs, whatever. Is that why this is a secret?” I didn’t want it to be that. But my dalliances with certain online cults had done a number on my imagination, here.

“I’m afraid we haven’t cracked the secret of AGI in a basement in Glasgow.”

“Well, what have you done in a basement in Glasgow? So much theatrics!”

“I have to show you that it works. Show you that we’re not mad.” Violet says. “Before I show you the next part.”

“OK. Go on…”

It was, at first glance, a storeroom.

At least, that’s what my mind went to. Hundreds of crates, stacked four high on shelves. But then I saw that each crate was wired into the wall, multiple colours of cable all carefully tied in thick braids, and each box bore a small screen showing some numbers. A server room, then..?

Violet rolled her wheelchair up to one of the racks. Yeong-Mi found some handle and rolled one of the crates out on built-in rails. There was a glass panel on the top, and she stepped aside so I could look in.

“Violet, that’s a person.”

Under the glass, eyes closed serenely, was recognisably the face and upper body of… someone. Not anyone I knew. Their hair was shaved, and I saw with a mix of fascination and alarm that the wires went to some kind of interface on the scalp, that there were other wires running around their body, connecting up to other interfaces or electrode pads. A respirator covered the mouth. I was looking at a piece of cyberpunk concept art, surely. One of my inscrutable little animations with the dolls.

From here, I could see that the numbers included medical information: heart rate, blood pressure, sugar levels, and a great deal of other data I could only speculate about. The window showed the face and clavicles, and I couldn’t make out much else. But it did not look like there was enough space in the box to fit this person. The inside seemed to be padded, at least, but… I couldn’t help but think about bed sores.

A quick look around the room gave me an estimate. Four people per rack, maybe a couple dozen racks in this room, and a door at the end suggested there might be others…

“I told you she wouldn’t freak out.” said Violet, incongruously. “She’s crazy horny for this kind of thing.”

“Hold on, I might.” I managed to say. Turned my gaze back to the person in the box, legs feeling week. “What the fuck, Violet, your players are, what, the actual fucking Sybil system?”

Yeong-Mi shot Violet a questioning glance. “Old anime.” she said. Then, to me: “Not exactly. It’s basically impossible to sustain a brain outside a human body with today’s technology.”

“I don’t know what is or isn’t possible after seeing this!”

“I can’t explain, y’know, the science.” says Violet, clearly very keen to try. “But it’s neurosurgery. They hijack the nerves coming in and out of the brain. Replace their senses.”

“Replace their senses with TRISMEGISTUS!?”

“Exactly. It’s like the VR mode. Only, you know, a bit more immersive. And you don’t have to wear a brick on your face.”

I looked at the ‘player’. “I think I’d prefer the brick, honestly.”

Yeong-Mi laughed, way too loud in the room. “Brick jokes…” she said, after a moment. The incongruity of it was a bit much, and I started to laugh, too. Staring up and down the room and shaking my head.

“So who are they?” I said, once I’d calmed down. “Coma patients? From the, uh, rehab place?”

“To start with.” Violet said. “But we found volunteers, too. People from the community who were considering, uh, the other way out.”

“You don’t mean…”

“I think there are some friends of yours in here, in fact. But there’s quite a queue. Not everyone’s wired up, yet. We keep them sleepy until the surgical team can get to them.”

Some of my friends. She said it so casually I almost didn’t register it. It was too much to take in what that would mean, that somewhere in this morgue-like room, someone else I’d mourned might be sleeping quietly in a cradle of wires. Technical questions… Ask technical questions. If I understood what I was seeing, I could figure out how to feel about it.

“You’re taking people who’d kill themselves and signing them up to experimental neurosurgeries? Should I ask the success rate?”

“You shouldn’t.” Yeong-Mi said, abruptly serious. “I asked that too, and they promised they’re working on it.”

“Oh…”

“But don’t you see?” Violet stared at me, eyes as fierce as I’d ever seen them. “We can be free. An actual, genuine, other world to escape to. A world where you can be embodied however the fuck you want.”

“You’ve had this surgery?”

“Yeah. I was the first patient.”

“First patient who lived.” Yeong-Mi said, severely.

“First patient who lived…” Violet winced. “That’s why I’m up and talking to you. That’s why I know we have to succeed.”

The story she’d told me, the whole saga of recovery, was starting to feel both more and less incredible.

“If you’re the first patient, why aren’t you in a box?” It felt crass to say it, but I had to ask. Something was missing.

“They did other stuff to me! Riskier stuff.” She did not seem offended. More excited, and nervous too. “The box is step one. Step three was supposed to involve robots, but it didn’t quite work out.” She swallowed, and broke eye contact. “I can’t really talk about that.”

“OK.” I was starting to feel like an inquisitor at this point. “Fine. This is insane, but fine. Just one more question.” I reached out, placed my hand on her shoulder. She met my gaze again… “Why TRISMEGISTUS? Shouldn’t it be some kind of heaven? The game’s kind of, you know, dark, Violet…”

“Because it has to feel like a place that means something to inhabit. Because I’m the one making it. And this is just, you know, the proof of concept. There can be other worlds. But we have to make this one, first.” Violet didn’t break eye contact this time. She looked up at me, almost pleading.

“Well.” I let her go. “In for a penny, in for a pound.”

No, I could never say no to Violet.

PaddingByte::Rose

It is a grove in a forest, a splendid one at that. Warm, treacly light catches motes of dust, drapes itself over glistening moss, picks shadows from gnarled bark.

But something is off about it. Something’s off about you, for that matter. Your body feels incongruously light when you move. The sunlight fails to warm you. You go to hug yourself, but your hand seems to go right through your arm.

No, that can’t be right. You can see your arms, they are right there. Wrapped in sleeves floating an inch away from your wrist, fabric bending rigidly at the elbow…

The water is the weirdest part. It ripples when you put your hand in it, refracting the stones underneath. But… where it touches the shore, it doesn’t seem to work properly. More than that, though. Something about the way light reflects off it leaves you queasy. You stick your head in, and it certainly makes a loud splash, but you can’t feel the touch of water, your vision isn’t blurred, and your breathing is not interrupted. Under the water there is a blue-brown fog. When you lift your head out, the water seems to slide down the front of your face, like you’re looking through a camera.

So you walk through the forest. It doesn’t take long before you notice that all the trees are the same. Well, there are five or six variations. And within those, some are bigger, some are smaller. But you start spotting telltale marks on the bark.

All the trees are the same. It should be disorienting.

You know what this is, don’t you? Not just that it’s a videogame; you have played this exact game before, several times, over and over while you edited the video, and afterwards, too…

Your walk becomes more purposeful. There should be an NPC here who starts a quest. And sure enough, that’s their caravan, broken wheel and bright fabric, polygons rippling in a wind you cannot feel.

The NPC is waiting, a ‘jellylike’, the game’s nonbinary gender. Soft features and long white hair, and the patchwork robe of a journeyman Alchemist. There’s even a helpful marker over their head, which serves to remind you of their name: Hypat.

You speak to them, and your voice sounds very strange, like you’re not really hearing it through your head. And Hypat does not answer.

In the game, you’d talk to Hypat by walking up and pressing the ‘interact’ button. You try squeezing your fingers together in various combinations, hoping to bring up a menu. Nothing happens. Hypat stands there, their idle animation looping every minute or so. You try touching them, and you feel your hand meets a solid surface… they even bend a little, and spring back when you let go. Something is wrong with your sense of touch. It’s like the feeling is on the wrong side of your hand.

At some point, you slept. You must have done, though you have no memory of finding a place to lie down. When you wake up, Hypat is gone. You touch your own hands, experimentally. The movement feels correct, and the touch is close enough to the right place that you can’t really tell if it’s wrong or not. You try touching your arms, and this time, your hand does not go through, but there is yet an incongruity… you can feel it in your fingers, but not your arm. But your body is working, sort of…

Your body is working, but there is no one in the forest. You are alone.

How long did you walk in that forest? You are genuinely uncertain. There seems to be another lacuna in your memory.

You can’t enter the dungeons. An invisible barrier separates them from the world you can walk. They must not be implemented, yet. You call out, and your voice echoes from the trees.

After a minute, the word “Text” appears above you. Incongruous. It is deleted, letter by letter, and then a new message emerges.

“Sit tight.”

Hypat is back. They move oddly. No more smoothly looping canned animations. They stand as if their feet do not need to support their weight, but must instead scurry after them to get in position. Their hands will sometimes abruptly jump around.

“Hello, Rose.” says Hypat, who was never voiced in the game but surely did not sound like this. A Scottish accent, you think. “This will take some explanation…”

FanWiki::Anchoress

(redirected from Maude)

The Anchoress (sometimes called Maude by fans after the name on her model file, although this name is never used in-game) is an NPC who sometimes spawns in the Lesser Dungeons, Barrows and the Sour Undergarden.

In-game, the Anchoress is represented by a rectangular wall the exact same size, shape and texture as regular dungeon walls, except for a slight fringe at the right edge (due to slightly different UV coordinates). This makes her almost impossible to see.

Finding the Anchoress

The easiest way to find the Anchoress is by sound. Although difficult to hear over the dungeon ambience, she emits a faint breathing sound.

If the player detonates the Atlantean weapon in the quest “Her Magnificence”, the Anchoress will sometimes cough in the same way as the Catspaw Villagers. However, this locks out the third part of the Anchoress’s quest line, since the requested offering can no longer be retrieved after the Cornucopia is destroyed.

The Anchoress may spawn in a different location if the player re-enters the area without interacting with her. Once the player speaks to her, her location will no longer change, and that dungeon tile will always be a wall. (See Speedrun: Sour Undergarden).

Interactions

Although no interaction marker is shown, if the player faces the wall and presses the interact button, the Anchoress will call to them unless they are wearing the Visage of the White, initiating dialogue.

In her dialogue, the Anchoress is sometimes forlorn, sometimes gleeful. After the first conversion, she refers to the player as ‘my pretty Phantom of the mind’ and ‘o beauteous Phantom’ regardless of gender. The word Phantom is always capitalised.

At least one in-game day must pass between each conversation with the Anchoress.

To initiate the Anchoress’s quest series, the player must speak to her four times and in the fourth conversation, correctly recite the Catechism of Dudley when she asks. If the player makes a mistake, she will accuse them of being an impostor. In this case, the player has one additional chance to give the Catechism or the Anchoress will stop speaking to them altogether. The Catechism dialogue is not randomised, so the correct sequence is always 1, 3, 1, 2.