"But that, that, dear gentlefolk, is not the end of it. Oh, precious life of ours, no. Soon the very land upon which this village stands will be consumed by the Great Terror, the terrible vortex that follows in the wake of Penumbra's depravities, leaving nothing, not one grain of sand but, in the stead of life, a terrible void. As it is now for thousands of leagues to the east, and as all will be when the dark finally reaches the sea to the west." Piccolo bowed his head.
"So," said Richards, "you're telling me there is a, for want of a better word, 'shadow lord', and the entire world is being eaten alive by some terrible darkness?"
"A little imprecise, but yes. Some fragments persist, here and there in the dark — those places which hold the soul of a land remain for a while dotted in the starless night, until they, too, fade."
"Hmmm," said Richards. "Tell me, do you know of an entity such as myself, one called k52?"
"That I know not, good Richards," said Piccolo regretfully. "I am a fragment of a world gone, a world where I had no more will than a blade of grass. Only the Flower King gave me form, and in truth this life is no more real. We will all die eventually from this war. Best to flee to the west, as I was attempting to do before my ship threw a wheel, costing me my crew, lost to those iron devils. Oh! They were a bitter tax levied that I may live the longer! Woe is Piccolo! Woe! It makes me wish to weep when I think of the fine day we set out across land. It was seven weeks past, I remember it well, a glorious morning full of promise…"
"Thanks," said Bear, hauling Richards upright. "I think that'll do."
"It may seem trite to you, my friend," said Piccolo, fixing Bear with a sorry eye. "But our world is dying." He seemed diminished, crumpled.
"Yeah. I know," said Bear, tapping his helm with a claw. "Helmet see? Me brave soldier, fighting armies of darkness? I understand entirely. That's why we're sooooooo out of here." He began to walk away. "If the Terror has come this far in," he confided to Richards, "we'll need to get Geoff. This place won't be here for much longer." He thought for a second, then added halfheartedly, "You should come with us, Piccolo."
"Aha!" cried Piccolo, once more a dashing figure. "I cannot, for, before the end of it all, I must chase down my arch-adversary, the Punning Pastry Chef!"
"Puh-lease," said the bear, and grabbed Richards by the shoulder.
"Who?" called Richards, as Bear dragged him away.
"He bakes pies and tells lies, with not a good rhyme between them. He will taste my steel before the world is done! I will slice his final cake with glee! Farewell, my friends!" called Piccolo through cupped hands. "Keep well, and remember, head west. Always to the west!"
And with that they turned a corner and the cavalier was lost to sight.
"Good riddance," said Bear.
Richards stopped. Bear tried to pull him on, but he resisted.
"What's he doing here?" said Richards. "Very interesting."
"What?"
"Him, there," Richards pointed to a corpse. From a distance it looked like a YamaYama, shrivelled by haemite touch, but closer they could see it had once been a man. "East Asian?" said Richards as he approached. He squatted down and poked at the woody corpse with a piece of charred lath. "Chinese. Could be, but hard to tell in here, could be anything." And then, something, something he'd not felt since he'd arrived. His head snapped round, and he practically jumped up. A stream of information, a tug of numbers, the weft of the place he was in, snagged at his mind. "Hang on a minute," he said eagerly. He scanned the village, turning his head slowly left to right: that way the flow diminished, fading back into a world of broken homes and dead toys, but this way he sensed it again, a flicker in the world, a crackle in his head. "Bingo!" said Richards. "I knew he wasn't from in here!" He set off toward the church.
"Oi! Stop!" shouted the bear. He grabbed Richards' shoulder again.
"Stop pawing at me, will you?" Richards shrugged the paw off, so Bear knocked him to the floor.
"We cannot leave the giraffe behind!" growled Bear. "He is my friend, and I won't abandon him to die. No tarrying!"
"Do you want to save this place or what?" said Richards.
The bear shuffled from foot to foot. "I suppose," he said eventually, with a sniff.
"Then let me do my job. In there — " Richards pointed a finger at the village church "- there's a way to the outside."
"But you're my prisoner," wheedled Bear. It came with no force, and Richards went on. Clasping his helmet to his head, Bear hurried to catch up.
They went into the church, stepping over a spill of shrivelled YamaYama fanned around the door. The roof ridge was broken, and there were large holes punched through the tiles. The floor was cratered and covered with shrapnel, rubble and splintered wood. YamaYama bodies were crushed and dismembered everywhere. In a pulpit at the front a YamaYama in an ecclesiastical surplice stood, pinned by a spear to the wall. A spread of ornate breads, fruit and vegetables lay on an altar before a cross, untouched but for a layer of fine debris.
Richards stopped and pointed at something on the far side of the church. "See?"
"What?"
"I'm not people, but they were." Five more corpses lay in a grotesque pile, half phased into each other and the stone wall. Richards peered closer. One of the blocks flickered. "Someone's been trying to break in. Looks like it was shut off pretty quickly, too quick for these poor idiots, but there's something still there." Richards closed his eyes. "It's slippery, but I can feel…"
"Yeah, whatever, Mr La-di-da Richards AI Level Five man," said Bear. He flapped a paw and crunched over the rubble to the food. He dusted a loaf off and sniffed it. He hit it against the altar. It made a thud; hard and stale. He put it back. "I'm going to keep watch," he said, and went to stand by the church's shattered nave windows.
There was a fountain of data rippling intermittently from the outside, a gash in the world through which Richards could taste the wider Grid. Richards positioned himself in its path, and tentatively extended part of his mind into the flow.
He hooked in.
"Got it!" His mind burrowed into the fabric of the world. He poked a sensing presence out of the shell of the construct and found himself looking at the firewall that surrounded all of the Reality Realms, living and dead. A tiny rip blinked in it, already closing. No way out there. He turned his mind back in and ran his thoughts into the reality he stood within. Creative coding wasn't his strong point, and the mass of numbers he was confronted by was nearly beyond him, but the stream of equations rushing through him were of indescribable complexity, way beyond most everything else out in the world. "This stinks of k52," he muttered. He pushed harder, trying to snag himself onto the world, to give it a tweak, make a hole from the inside out he could use to escape, send a message, anything. He pulled back frustrated. He could just about hear and feel his own Gridpipe, but the way back into the Grid remained elusive.
He pushed harder. There, another stream of data, a second layer under the first, simpler, old-fashioned, mismatched. He scanned through it quickly, and his eyebrows raised. This was the core script for the world that he was in, not the complex stuff. Still, it was not like anything he'd seen before either. It was a patchwork, what looked like scavenged bits of the four RealWorld Reality Realms broken before k52's takeover of the Realm House, stitched together with additional elements copied or stolen from all over the Grid — virtspace recreations of locations in the Real, on-Grid shopping arcades, truly ancient games, conference rooms, sense-furnished chatrooms — enough to make a world.
This lay beneath the smothering layer of the complex code Richards tentatively identified as created by k52. He took another look. k52's contained information, but it was unable to express itself. The codes were fighting one another, both attempting to occupy the same space. It was an eerie feeling. Information in the Grid came like currents in a sea, and these were two streams, isolated and competing for resources, fighting like snakes. Behind them, on the edge of his awareness, was the hum of the remaining thirty-one Realms, beyond that faint hints of the Grid, maddeningly unattainable.