Being dead sucked. Being dead because you’d made a stupid mistake and, as a result, got to enjoy the silent stares of the rest of your party’s ghosts sucked even worse.

“I am so sorry,” Tessa said. “That was a total brain fart. I thought they were going to spawn [Gelatinous Spider Minions].”

“That’s the group at the end of the hall,” Lisa said, somehow still retaining a sense of humor about their horrible defeats. “Where the spider webs are.”

“Maybe we should take a break?” Lady Midnight asked. “We’ve been doing good up till the point, but we’ve been fighting for hours.”

With the [Heart Fire] in sight, Tessa breathed a sigh of relief. Still no [Hounds of Fate] bothering them.

“This kind of is a break, isn’t it?” Rip asked. “I mean, getting cut to pieces isn’t exactly fun, but once we respawn we’re back to full health and stamina. It’s like the world’s best power nap.”

“That’s true for most of us but Tessa’s built somewhat different than we are,” Lady Midnight said.

Which was true. Tessa was theoretically in her ‘human’ body, rather than her [Clothwork] one. Except it couldn’t possibly be her real human body. For one thing, she’d been obliterated enough times and reincarnated in a replica of her original form that it was questionable how ‘real’ her body was. For another, her skin, while still seemingly as supple and yielding as it had been on Earth, also appeared to be able to ignore things like ‘being hit a stick the size of a telephone pole.’ 

Oh, sure, a [Power Slam] attack could knock her back twenty or thirty feet, but even if she bounced off a stone wall she was more or less uninjured.

“I think I’ll be fine,” Tessa said. “I just thought of something to try on the spiders in the last fight and I guess I jumped ahead to thinking the fight with the [Lavataurs] was the one where we had spiders to deal with too.”

“What was ‘Disconnecting Fist’ supposed to do?” Lisa asked.

“I want it to be a specialized [Dispel],” Tessa said. “I thought if I could block their ability split themselves into reinforcements, that might be handy against the [Hungry Shadow].”

“Wait, you’re tailoring your abilities around beating that thing up in the [High Beyond]?” Rachel asked. “I thought you all said it was like a god or something?”

“It’s not a god,” Rip said. “We’ve met a god. They’re supposed to be here. The [Formless Hunger] was…it was worse.”

“Penswell called it a [Transcendent Entity],” Tessa said. “I think it became less ‘transcendent’ over time though.”

“What the hell is that supposed to mean?” Rachel asked. Despite being a physical twin to Lost Alice, Rachel inhabited her body so differently that Tessa couldn’t imagine anyone confusing the two, or possibly even noticing that they were similar.

“In this case, I think it means that it wasn’t something that was bound by any of the rules of the world,” Tessa said. “Matter? Energy? The fundamental forces? The hard and fast limits on things? None of those mattered to it. It had no definition and, at first, no name. Calling it a [Formless Hunger] was the first step in changing that.”

“Why not call it a Fluffy Bunny then?” Rachel asked.

“Two reasons,” Tessa said. “One, [Formless Hunger] only worked because it fit what the thing was. We could feel it trying to eat our minds when we so much as glanced at it. And it had so no shape, no form at all. It wasn’t a thing. It was a ‘wasn’t’. Like an emptiness where something should have been.”

“It was eating your mind? That sounds utterly horrifying. Like with tentacles and stuff?” Rachel asked.

“No. Just from looking at it. Seeing it or seeing the void where it should have been was enough to bring it into your mind,” Tessa said.

“How the hell did you beat something like that?” Rachel asked.

“We didn’t,” Obby said. “It’s still out there. And it devoured the Consortium’s fleet, turning more or less all of them into its puppets.”

“Okay, new question then, how the hell did you survive that?” Rachel asked. “Why aren’t you all puppets too?”

“We got lucky?” Tessa said. “I think it has something to do with all of us being ‘fused’ with our characters. It sort of immunizes us against the Hunger’s corruption. Or it immunizes some of us. There’s always the [Disjoined] who don’t seem to be immune exactly. More like ‘pre-devoured’ in their case.”

“I haven’t run into any of those yet,” Rachel said.

“And hopefully we won’t,” Lisa said. “We fought some in the [High Beyond], but there was an high concentration of new player plus new character combos there. There were instances of [Disjoined] down here too, but from what Cease said, it was less common than what we were seeing. Well, less common but more numerous.”

“How does that work?” Rachel asked.

“More of the people who wound up here seem to have integrated with their characters successfully, as a percentage, maybe because there was more shared history with them? But there’s also a lot more people who wanted to try the new high level content out rather than start new characters, so smaller percentage against a much bigger number and you’ve got more total [Disjoined] down here,” Lisa said.

“Okay, that makes sense. Why didn’t I see any on the [Beta Server] though?” Rachel asked.

“Don’t know, but it’s probably something that we’ll want to figure out,” Tessa said. “You said you don’t really hear the voice of Deadly Alice, your character I mean, right?”

“Not really,” Rachel said. “This whole hearing voices thing sounds kind of weird to be honest.”

“I think she’s still in there though,” Lisa said. “She comes out more in combat, but even now it feels like you’re acting a bit. I thought it was just nerves at first, but its too consistent.”

“I’m not acting!” Rachel said. “And combat is scary as hell!”

“Then why is your impulse to run towards it?” Lisa asked. “You never did that on Earth.”

“I…I’m not…” Rachel paused, as her memories and her personality scrapped against each other like tectonic plates.

“You’re fine,” Obby said, placing a hand on Rachel’s shoulder for support. “You already know you’re more here than you were on Earth – the magic’s a dead giveaway of that right?”

“Uh, yeah, yeah it is,” Rachel said the wave of panic that had been swelling behind her eyes beginning to recede.

Tessa thought she’d heard a whisper of static crackling behind Rachel’s words, but it had vanished as well.

“What was the second reason?” Rachel asked, clearly trying to buy herself some distance from the thought that she wasn’t quite herself anymore.

“The second reason?” Lisa asked.

“I think she means the second reason why we couldn’t call the [Formless Hunger] as ‘Fluffy Bunny’,” Tessa said. “That one’s simple. Sort of. If I’m right and calling it the [Formless Hunger] worked because that fit what it was – helped give it an meaningful definition within the world – then calling it a ‘Fluffy Bunny’ would have potentially changed what ‘Fluffy Bunny’ meant.”

“I don’t get how words can do anything though,” Rachel said. “They’re just words.”

“Code is just words too,” Tessa said. “When I write software, I work with ‘words’, or concepts, all the time, and they change all kinds of things about the world. Like who gets paid, which days people can take off, where they can go. All sorts of stuff.”

“Yeah but those are doing things in a computer,” Rachel said. “Are you saying all this,” she gestured to the world around them, “is just some VR thing inside a computer?”

“Not exactly,” Tessa said. “It’s more like when you drill down to tiniest pieces of the world, down past the molecules, and atoms, and quarks, you’re left with everything being, essentially, information. Whatever the [Formless Hunger] was, it was the antithesis of that. A void of non-information. It wasn’t even definable by what it wasn’t since it wasn’t that either. Sort of an infinite loop of unbeing, which doesn’t make any sense, I know, but that’s what looking at it was like.”

“Tessa managed to change it because only something like a word, an imaginary concept, could bridge the gap between the real and the unreal,” Obby said. “Like she said though, only the right concept could ensnare it, and even then it came with a terrible cost.”

“What happened? Did someone die?” Rachel asked.

“Not exactly?” Tessa said.

“How does someone ‘not exactly’ die?” Rachel asked. “Did you have to respawn or something? But that’s not a ‘terrible cost’ here is it?”

“It wasn’t a respawn situation,” Tessa said. “I got a little lost?”

“Lost where?”

“I don’t know, exactly. Basically I just wasn’t here for a bit, but then I was needed, so I came back.” Tessa knew it wasn’t as simple as that but her memories didn’t seem to include anything beyond Pillowcase’s recollection of their time after they confronted the [Hungry Shadow] and a vague sense of being some place ‘other’.

“Has anything normal happened to you since you got here?” Rachel asked, turning to her sister.

“I fell in love,” Lisa said with a shrug, which elicited feigned gasps from several of the company and a fist bump between Rip and Matt.

“Oh my god! Why are you my sister!” Rachel said, groaning but apparently happy at the move into more mundane topics.

“Well, once upon an time Mom saw this really cute guy and decided that she just had to rip off his…” Lisa didn’t get to finish before Rachel clamped her hands over her mouth.

“No! Just no! Do not finish that sentence. Just….ugh!”

“Oh that note, what say we get back to getting stabbed again?” Lady Midnight asked.

“Oh hell yes!” Rachel said, jumping to her feet.

The side discussion seemed to have done the trick of giving people time to recover their wits and spirit. Everyone knew the fights would continue to be tough, but even in the face of thoughtless screwups, the whole team knew they could recover and keep going.

“We’re going to join you now,” Wrath Raven said.

“That’ll cut down our level speed a bit,” Pete said.

“A little,” Glimmerglass said. “But you’re all in the mid 50s now. With Tessa’s last level up, we’re at the point where we’d all be getting xps from the mobs, and if we can help keep you alive through the fights, you should be able to go through them faster. Probably not enough to completely balance out, but the lack of downtime will help too.”

“And you need to learn to work with stronger people too,” Wrath said.

“At the rate we’re going we’ll catch up pretty quick too,” Obby said. “The more we close the gap between us, the smaller the xp penalty will be.”

“Sounds good to me,” Lisa said. “In fact, that may let us try some new things too. Lady M, do you want to try out the [Grave Mender] offensive rotation?”

“Nope. I’m a slacker healer,” Lady Midnight said. “I just patch people up. If you’ve got an attack rotation worked out, I say go for it. Glimmerglass and I should be fine for healing duty.”

Additional discussions of a similar nature broke out among the rest of the party. Everyone had enough abilities to work with now that trying out new combinations and a variety of strategies was all too tempting when they were faced with repeating a battle they’d already beaten a dozen or more times.

By the time they made it back to the [Library of Shattered Minds], they’d worked out three different battle strategies that they wanted to try which took advantage of their new members different capabilities. They’d settled on the best of one to start with when they reached the library door, and were ready and eager to put into play.

The mobs that awaited them however were ready too.

With a white flag.

“Umm, are they surrendering?” Rip asked, and Tessa had to admit that was exactly what it looked like.