Curses, Felix! || Merlin & Fix-it Felix
Felix listened carefully with attentive blue eyes, taking in the details of the old wizard’s emergency.
"So you’ve been caught in a boss battle without your wand," he murmured, furrowing his brows in concern. But as Merlin held the sputtering wand out between them, the handyman looked it over in some astonishment.
"Jiminy… It looks more sick than broken,” Felix said, “but I can fix it!” Rolling up into a kneeling position, Felix held his hammer out just above the handle of the afflicted wand. With a gentle tap, his father’s magic hammer glowed with a glittering golden magic — and then sparked and spat with wobbled with a glitch not unlike Vanellope’s. Felix’s eyes widened in clear surprise as the golden glitch shuddered almost violently.
"Um… Merlin…?" Felix asked, with a startled urgency in his tone. He pulled his golden hammer back, clutching it close to stop whatever was happening —
But it was already too late.
The wand began falling apart, pixel by pixel. Then, all the game's assets became a jumble. Corners of windows became doors. Letters and numbers on black background replaced much of the walls. Felix himself lost any distinguishable features. His nose blurred and turned green and his hat flickered to the right of his head.
Merlin had seen glitches before, here and there. They were an unsettling reminder that the world they resided in was an ephemeral human creation. But this, this was what some called a "game breaking" glitch. He had no idea what would happen to a digitized human body. Maybe he would be booted out. Maybe worse.
He felt himself being pulled away violently, as if by a storm. His hands were no longer his hands. His body no longer in his control at all. If there was a way to weather this storm, to control a glitch, he had not the knowledge or abilities to do it. All he could do, then, was let the chaos take him until the game ceased functioning or reset itself.
Aside from pieces of the Nicelanders and the building from the Fix It Felix Jr. game, other unfamiliar assets began popping up. High-res characters and distorted 3D images. At the center of the maelstrom, he almost thought he saw his wand and tried to reach out to it. But then Pac-Man floated past, munching glitches and leaving other glitches behind.
"Pac-Man. Can you help me get to my wand?" Merlin reached out what could have been a hand or could have been a rifle barrel. He touched the iconic yellow ball and everything went black for a moment.
* * *
He and Felix were sitting in a hallway with white dots and blue walls.
"Where are we?" he asked. "Another game?"
Merlin's question was soon answered when around the corner came a red pixelated ghost and the ever-growing sound of "wakka wakka wakka."
"Felix, run. Run!"
