The north seems to be a popular destination for Ralphs today, for deep under the surface, another wrecker is hard at work.
Despite liking it at the ice caps better, he can’t leave the city too often, or the player goes off looking for him. Seems that he’s rather distinctive and he’s missed if he stays gone for too long. But, because of the shorter daytime hours of the arcade in the winter, he’s able to do what he likes a little more, and get back in time before the player misses him.
It doesn’t matter too much to him if the player seeks him out, the game is expected to have random automation, supposedly good AI that ‘lets the characters seem like they’re actually living’. However, the north is far away from the city the player is playing, so all the time they’re looking for him is less time that the others get to be in gameplay. While the player is exploring the rest of the ocean, everybody else is almost in standby mode, they have to keep on working and doing whatever, there’s stats that let the player know what’s going on and they can jump back to the city at any time.
So, as soon as the arcade had closed, Ralph had taken off. An idea had occurred to him, so he was going to attempt a little project.
Some of his handiwork can be found by the point the Cy-Bug Ralph has appeared, though it’s not obvious to someone outside of the game and even those in the game probably wouldn’t even notice, but some of the glaciers are sitting quite a bit lower than they normally would.
The merorca is attempting to make a nice, cozy home in the glaciers, he’s using a pointed rock and his fists to chip away at the ice to try and carve out a tunnel, but so far, he’s made some mistakes and all he’s managed to do is fill part of several of them with water or in one drastic case, accidentally knock off most of the bottom, dislodging it completely and making a new, smaller glacier as the chunk of ice floated back to the surface.
Things have been quiet today, so when he sees the seal mers fleeing to the bottom of the ocean, that’s enough to make him pause mid-strike and look around.
He waits several minutes to see if whatever they’re swimming away from is coming this way, but there’s no nets or spears that pursue them, no boats or wakes or any presence of humans.
Rock still in hand, Ralph flips his flukes and makes his way to the surface. He’s curious, a little bored, and getting frustrated with his task. He’s not afraid of dying, he’s in his own game and will regenerate. Not only that, but it’s off hours, the humans and other hunters don’t cause too much trouble while the arcade’s closed. Some of them continue hunting for fun and food, but they usually stick to the non-sentient sea creatures, though there’s a few that like the challenge. So, he’s hard-pressed to think of something that would threaten him that he couldn’t easily escape from. He knows this area well and can dodge through the glaciers.
He slows down as he gets to the surface, there’s only a quiet splash as his eyes break over the water as he glances around the area.
It doesn’t take long to find the source of the disruption, there’s a large, red, shining object resting on the ice. It looks similar to the crystals that he trades, so Ralph can’t resist taking a better look, he glides through the water around the way to see the strange thing from all angles. If the Cy-Bug glances his way, all he’d see is a mess of brown, soaking hair with two eyes that have just barely broken the surface, and a black fin several feet behind.
As he eyes the Cy-Bug, he realizes that there’s legs and arms, it’s some kind of crystal creature, was it from some kind of event that caused it to rise from the Deep?
When he finally sees the front of the visitor, all his questions vanish from his mind and they’re replaced with a new one as he looks upon what seems to be himself.
Ralph flips his tail down, bringing his head all the way above the water as he shouts at the Cy-Bug, “Who are you?”
He’s never faced a duplicate of himself and he’s not seen many visitors from around the arcade, so he has no idea that there’s any other Ralphs out there.
Though, it works in the other Ralph’s favor, the merorca has only heard of Cy-Bugs in passing, he’s never seen one for himself and doesn’t know that they can transform into the beings that they eat. To him, they’re nothing more than a boogeyman, a scary story told to spook characters on dark nights. He’s got other things to worry about than monsters from another game.
Not only that, but his hybrid nature is much like the merorca’s own, was he some mix of a person and a sea monster? But that still didn’t explain why they both had the same face. Had the player created this character, mimicking Ralph for some reason? Or was it a quirk of the game, taking someone else’s face for a new being?
Hopefully some answers would be forthcoming, though he knew that if this guy was anything like him, too many questions wouldn’t exactly be appreciated.
