also since I forgot -- it's been a few months since book 3 got published, so. here's the whole first chapter!
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Play: Origin_02_Inferno.mry
Error: File corruption. Rerouting.
This wasn't how it was supposed to go.
Vektor was no stranger to loss. His parents defended their Kingdom from the Mainframe with their lives. His whole Kingdom was taken from him by that Thief. Certain memories were kept from him behind restricted access.
He used to believe those were simply his own doing. Painful truths he wished not to face; he witnessed the moment his parents were destroyed, after all.
Now, however.
There was no running from it anymore.
The Rabbit Hole was much kinder to him than it was his parents. They were deleted when struck down, yet he was spared. He belonged to two realms now, not just simply the Rabbit Hole alone. He forged bonds outside his home and became more familiar here than he ever was inside his Kingdom. He had more reason to protect this realm than he had for his home.
Change. This influence Inferno brought was simple, yet it infected all of them down to their core arguments.
Fitting for the overwhelming power he held inside him.
If Vektor was certain of one thing, it was that these restricted memories held some sort of key. Some information that they desperately needed in the wake of what happened to Inferno.
Their realms were separate. They had to be, lest they warp one another to obscurity. Yet Inferno landed himself in the Seventh Circle through his own means. Inferno defied all of Vektor's knowledge and tore through both realms as if the barriers between were mere suggestions.
Inferno was bound by shadow. It dripped from his fingers when he wasn't paying enough attention and marred his face when he grew hostile against himself. He was absolutely coated in it when they retrieved him from the Rabbit Hole and Vektor could scarcely believe what the code there told him.
There was no other way to look at it. Inferno was one of them.
Inferno was the same as Vektor.
"That should make sense, though." Jonathan said in reply to Vektor's fearful ramblings. Jonathan was the only one he could trust with such vulnerable information. Jonathan wouldn't bite his head off like Wolf or completely brush him off for thinking so hard on this, as everyone was prone to doing when it concerned Inferno. "You said he's got something like your. You called it Create, yeah? You said he's got something more powerful in him than everyone else combined, so it makes sense that he's got a hold in this system, same as you."
It did make sense, but there was still a piece that didn't quite fit. Vektor frowned at the incomplete picture it left before him. "Everything makes sense when I look at it as though Inferno helped build the Rabbit Hole. But that can't be the case." He said, pacing restlessly along the linoleum floors.
Jonathan's favourite place was this lab where his desires for experimentation were free to go wild. A free study he was allowed due to his classes and his studiousness. He and Vektor weren't usually this bold, hanging out together before the cover of night, but Vektor needed the company and Jonathan didn't mind giving it. Jonathan never minded giving it, much as he put on airs otherwise.
"Inferno said he isn't one of the Creators, that his hands don't reach that far into the system's origins. If he's not the one behind everything, then why is he so inextricably tied to it as he is?"
"It is quite the head scratcher, huh?" Jonathan said with a hum.
He pressed a hand to his chin as he thought. His dark eyes (black, like Vektoria's Void, but fading to grey around their edges) darted to his notebook, where he kept all his notes on his chemical concoctions and the like. Each formula was elegant, if a bit unrefined. Just like the man himself. Vektor slowed in his pacing just to watch him a moment, noting the way his posture and even his forefront code read as Jonathan and Jonathan alone.
When Hyde had kissed Vektor, he never expected he would grow so fond of the man. He never expected to find himself so undeniably full of adoration for another that it broke past every threshold for these values tying him to all of his friends. His friends were his friends, but Jonathan — Jonathan was his everything. Jonathan could ask for his heart and Vektor would dutifully remove it from his own chest to hand right over.
That sort of bond should have been cause for alarm. Should have made Vektor recoil from it entirely.
And yet, against logic itself, Vektor could only think of basking in it as long as he was allowed.
"Would you prefer I call you my boyfriend or my datemate?" He asked.
Jonathan startled, face going a bit darker with his embarrassment. "Uh. That came out of nowhere."
Vektor strode over, closing that distance between them to look directly into his eyes. Darkness, the antithesis to Vektor's Gold. He was creation, was light, yet this darkness drew him in. It drew him in so powerfully. "It's a rather important question to ask." He said. "Our relationship is very important to me, as is your comfort."
Jonathan ducked away, closing off that connection momentarily. "I-I don't know. Ask me later." He said in a huff. "We were talking about Dante and the game, don't distract me."
Distraction.
It was deeply interwoven through Inferno's code.
Vektor reached out to cup Jonathan's face and though the man made a show of resistance, Hyde resurfaced to lean into it. Hyde always desired touch, overriding Jonathan's own fluster when they wished to give more tactile shows of this affection glowing in their chests. "He was programmed to deflect." Vektor mumbled. "Programmed to keep attention away, to keep us guessing on less important matters."
Jonathan eyed him in confusion. "You mean. You talking about his code or whatever?"
Vektor was so close to something. He scanned through that mess of Inferno's code, knew all it held, and yet it was still such a mystery. Why program him in such a manner? Why grant him that boundless Create, that overpowering Change, yet interpret both as a curse? Vektor pulled away and said, "Perhaps. It might be cruel, but we should consider everything Inferno has ever told us to be a lie."
Jonathan shoved Hyde back down as he watched him carefully. Still confused, but growing annoyed. "That means you were filled with lies, too." He said.
A cruel truth. One Vektor wished to reject immediately, but pushed past that instinct and really assessed it. Inferno agreed with him, after all, on the myth of his Kingdom's creation. Inferno agreed with him when he gave explanation after explanation and none of it was satisfactory enough to settle any matter. "Both of us were given the same lies." He mused darkly, looking down at his open palm.
The gold he produced was not dissimilar to Inferno's flames, but vastly inferior. There was something missing, something more than just the way their powers never added up, the way they butted heads and still couldn't deny fondness for one another.
Inferno advocated for his personhood. Vektor did his best to similarly encourage him to do the same. Allowing all his code to tie him down as he did, it made Inferno more volatile. More likely to pop.
To pop?
Such an odd phrase. As if Inferno's only purpose was to burn down his surroundings, to prove some point of the capabilities of the Rabbit Hole.
But that was ludicrous. Why would the Creators give a child like Inferno such an awful end?
Why would they write such cruelty for their—
Vektor winced and recoiled from the thought. Access denied. There it was again. It was becoming much more infuriating now than it was previously. Jonathan hopped up from his seat and rounded the desk in concern, but Vektor held up his hand to stop him.
"You forget we're somewhere completely public and in broad daylight." He reminded his (boy?) (date?) friend.
Jonathan shied away a few steps, chastised. "Right. Thanks." He mumbled in his embarrassment.
Vektor closed his eyes and allowed that pain to ebb away. He couldn't get too close to such truths. He couldn't even grasp how that thought was supposed to end. He had to distance himself from this line of thinking, had to restart from the first point in their gathered data and follow it to a more plausible explanation.
His head snapped up as a foreign scent came to him. From the way Jonathan's expression twisted from concern to disgust, he noticed it, too. "Do you. Smell smoke?" He asked.
Smoke.
Where there was smoke, there was fire.
Where there was fire, there could only be—
Vektor gasped. "Inferno."
Jonathan's expressions switched straight into a wide-eyed horror. Wordlessly, the two of them sprinted out of the room (Jonathan being much faster, of course) and into the halls. There was, indeed, a billowing fire fighting its way out of a classroom just a few doors down. It was viscous and could only read Inferno, rooting Vektor to the spot as its waves of heat lashed over him. Jonathan winced and shied away, but Vektor was frozen by the sight, by that half-formed thought of earlier.
Inferno was meant to pop.
They were all such imbeciles. Such fools.
There was no other purpose to the Rabbit Hole.
"What are you two doing?" Puppet screeched at them.
Vektor flinched, as did Jonathan, breaking the both of them from that stupor. The flames clawed their way out of the room, desperate and hungry, but couldn't find hold in the floor or the walls despite their attempts to burn everything. They were kept at the centre, kept from blasting outward, no doubt by Inferno himself in his unwillingness to show his danger for what it truly was.
Puppet was just as wide-eyed, just as breathless in her panic as they were. Her less comforting black eyes were much more similar to Vektoria's (pretending to be lifelike, an endless pit filled with their fury and hatred), but she still grabbed both of their arms and dragged them away from the stomach-turning sight. "There's a goddamn fire, we need to evacuate. Call the fire department, the police, a teacher for all I care. Get someone here so they can stop that idiot from burning this place to the ground."
Her words reached Jonathan and he fumbled his phone a moment, saying distractedly, "Right, right, we need to call someone."
Vektor was too overwhelmed by this fact presented before him. Too overwhelmed by knowledge he never desired.
Inferno was at this centre.
Inferno was trapped in his own fires.
Inferno was the only reason the Rabbit Hole existed as it did.
He pulled against Puppet's hold as those values screamed at him to take action. "We have to get him out." He said through his stressed teeth, his better judgements. "We can't just leave him. We have to get him out of there."
"Are you crazy? You'll die if you run straight into that." Puppet spat at him.
Her reason did nothing to dissuade this terrible instinct. She dragged him struggling and kicking away from his friend, those fires, and the hallway stretched before him in some trick of perception. Though they made it outside soon enough, this school was tiny in comparison to his kingdom, the length of paces separating him from his friend seemed nightmarishly exaggerated. Was it a bug in his perception? Knowledge of his own lacking Speed? Either way, she continued dragging him further and further away along the less flammable stones lining the path of this realm. He was forced to watch the building grow farther, the smoke climb higher into the dark blue of the afternoon sky.
Almost evening, but not quite. Almost supper, but without the proper rosy golds which came with sunset.
Jonathan made some call and none of it was comforting. Inferno had popped, had finally shown his hand, yet they ran away from it. Why did they always have to run from Inferno's truths?
Inferno was distraction. He was designed to keep others away from the reality they all found themselves in.
This end was always meant for him.
It was written even before Vektor knew just how much Inferno would end up meaning to him.
He let out a guttural scream, the only outlet for all this anguish available to him. Even as others gathered and steps were taken to extinguish that blaze, Vektor couldn't shake away this encompassing truth.
It was never about him and his Kingdom. It was never about getting back before the worst could occur.
It was always about Inferno.
Well played, Creators.
