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R A I S I N G ◦ A N ◦ N P C !

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▶ BOOK 1: M A K I N G ◦ A N ◦ N P C !
▶ CHAPTERS: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 |

⊹˚₊·‧Chapter 10: $: man <GAME OVER>

“He… he said it was safe…” Ragatha whispered with a hoarse voice, defeated, and wept dry. 

Zooble gently stroked her back while hugging her. “It was safe. Nobody could’ve seen that coming. She could enter the first portal just fine… I’m sure Kinger will find a way. It… it means a lot that Caine allowed him in his… motherboard room or whatever administration place they are. Don’t give up hope…”

Pomni walked back and forth like a wild, caged animal, biting her lip and fondling her fingers.

“There’s a good chance the other NPCs won’t harm her, right?” She mumbled, but more to herself than to the others.
Jax looked up to the display. It now said “FROM: POSTAPOCALYPTICA IN APPROX. 999 MINUTES”. 

“Humm… yeah. Sure.” He answered. It was clear that he didn’t think so in actuality. And Pomni knew exactly why. It wasn’t too long ago that he had helped a fudge monster NPC destroy a whole NPC kingdom.

“If you can’t reassure me, better say nothing at all!” Pomni yelled at him.

Then she saw his eyes. And the fear and guilt in them.
He was genuinely scared, too. And he was the last to have Pierrosie, after all.

“Sorry,” she said sheepishly, feeling guilty for lashing out at him.

He broke eye contact, watching a plane outside the window taking off.

“I… I hate that I feel this way.” Pomni whispered while clutching her chest. “It… it shouldn’t get to me like this.”

“I love that you feel this way.” Gangle, who was sitting next to Ragatha and Zooble, responded.

Pomni looked at her. Ragatha too.

“You guys care so much. I didn’t know parents could care like that. It… it really makes me happy to see.” Gangle explained while playing with the two parts of her broken happy mask. “It’s not important if Pierrosie is real or virtual to make you feel things. She is foremost a concept… that you both accept with all of your heart. Does… does that make sense…?”

Nobody answered as they thought about her words.

“If… if there’s something I’ve come to learn, it’s that occasionally, characters that aren’t real… like, character concepts, or fictional characters… can be just as important as real people made of flesh and blood.” Gangle added. “They can make you genuinely happy. Guide you. Give you hope. Even help you stay sane. And I feel like Pierrosie is doing exactly that.”

Pomni managed to crack the slightest smile. “That’s… that’s nice to hear, Gangle. But that wasn’t what I meant.”

Gangle’s mask formed red blushes under her eyes. “Oh. O-oh… sorry.”

“No, it’s okay. It actually helped me to calm down a bit. Maybe… maybe talking about positive things isn’t the worst idea right now. I appreciate your feelings and your words.”

“Good, because I really, really like her, and you should know that. She’s even better than any baby of you two I could’ve imagined. I enjoy spending time with her… I hope it’s not weird to you guys, but I sometimes even feel as if she were my baby, too.”

“Gangle… that’s… that’s lovely…” Ragatha managed to whisper. Pomni could hear her being genuinely touched. She was so, too.

“And I put all of my trust in her. She’s so much more amazing than I thought. I mean, she’s not just an NPC, but a whole AI system? That’s incredibly cool. And as an AI, I’m sure she will find ways to handle the situation.”
It really appeared as if Gangle believed it with all of her heart.

Ragatha took Gangle's small ribbon hand. 

The arrival board shuffled and now showed “FROM: POSTAPOCALYPTICA IN APPROX. 611 MINUTES”

Kinger and Caine seemed to make progress.

---

Pierrosie went for the level transporters. Running was so much more difficult than walking, but she managed, despite her compute overload. Even though she couldn’t hear, she could sense the erratic changes in the codes around her. 

But eventually she saw it, too: Long, stretched shapes twisting and glitching over the floors and walls in the distance, from within the mall, where some lights were still on. 

She understood the concept: They weren’t the real threat yet — they were shadows.
But shadows were always attached to something. And when they moved, it meant that the something moved, too.

She deduced from the way the shadows stretched and grew that they were coming closer.

Pierrosie tried to run even quicker, but her programming didn’t allow her. Instead, more tears dwelled and blurred her vision further.

She veered off into a corridor that she knew led to the elevators.

The hex code in this hallway was almost just zeros, with barely any contrast. It was dark. She managed to activate the brightening tool in her hand.
The tool projected a cone in front of her that turned up the color code for whatever it touched. This made seeing so much easier. She could even perceive the shiny elevator doors already. She was so close. She would make it. 

But then the light cone met something unexpected in the distance.

It was immobile. Roughly the size of the Jax. The color, texture, and shape were suspiciously different from its surroundings. What kind of asset was it?

Pierrosie didn’t recognize it as a persona model at first; Because it was lacking something that all identity entities had, no matter if NPC, external operator, or a mere image file of such: A face.

But then she remembered that she had seen this model before.

At some of the doors of the sleeping area, where the mindfile datasets lived.

Pierrosie came a bit closer.
Did that mean that this was part of her family, too?

But… no. It didn’t show any signs of her bonded node’s identity cluster. From what she could understand, the short code suggested that it wasn’t even a proper NPC. Was it just mere decoration?

She saw something in the corner of her visuals and turned around.

The shadows flickered and twitched at the beginning of the corridor, where she had just come from.
They were closing in on her. She had to get to the elevator, quickly.

As she turned back again, she flinched in panic.

The persona model had changed places. It was now way closer, almost by the elevators, where she wanted to go.

It was still completely immobile, even though its posture had changed. Had it teleported?

Pierrosie didn’t understand what was going on.

But she needed to get up to the apartments, right now.

So without averting the light cone from the entity, Pierrosie shuffled closer to the elevators.
Then the next issue presented itself: The function button was out of her reach.

There was nothing close by that she could use to climb on top. 

But… but she had the brightening tool. It extended her hitboxes. It could work!

She went on her tiptoes and stretched her arm with the object in her hand. 

Just a bit further…

Click.

It worked.

In response to this, her neural network released several lines of pleasant code: pride, delight, relief, satisfaction.

But this didn’t last for long, because right next to her, she saw the identity model motioning closer, in an unpredictable, highly erratic way.

Pierrose angled the light cone onto it again, which made it stop immediately.

It was now very close. Close enough for Pierrosie to see more of its coding. Amongst others, once it would touch her, it would trigger the function <GAME OVER>. Whatever that meant. Which game was over? And what would follow after it?

This scared her terribly for some reason.

She didn’t want to figure out what it all meant.

By observing its coding further and concluding from its behavior, Pierrosie also understood that the entity was moving closer every time it was in the dark.

That was terrifying.
But… manageable.

Without averting the light from it, Pierrosie looked over her shoulder to check where the elevator was. It said ‘11’. That meant the 11th level of the building; she knew that. And once it hit 1, it would open.

Something moved in her periphery again.

She looked at the other end of the corridor, where she had come from, and saw how at least a dozen more of the very same entities twitched into the hallway, at an alarming speed. How did they find her so quickly?

Pierrosie felt her compute nearing its limit.
She could barely think anymore. Barely process input. She knew she was close to a forced shutdown.

She didn’t know how to behave — she had only one light source, but that was occupied by the entity right next to her. Yet, more and more faceless models flocked into the hallway from the other side, rapidly.

What to do?

⊹˚₊·‧🎪‧·₊˚⊹

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