I fetched a chilled vanilla ensure from the minifridge and gave it those requisite twenty-five shakes that I'd found, from testing, would properly re-homogenize it. bring the admittedly already rare likelihood of encountering any disgusting protein lumps to near-zero.

I stared at the ceiling and thought about the shape of things.

if the situation really was how I'd currently pieced it together, then I was dealing with some extraordinarily dangerous people. there is only one way I can think of to force an entire group of people off the internet: fear.

harassment, doxxing, stalking and rumour-spreading. the internet can become a living hell when the wrong people have their eye on you. is that what happened to kewpie and her crew? there were eight or nine of them. if they had all been harassed so effectively as to disappear in the same day... what was I dealing with here, really?

in spite of my worry, I did have a little confidence in my own position. I didn't have any social media of my own—or rather, none that lasted longer than the specific use I had for it. I had an avatar and a couple of names. if I wanted to attend a second life rave, I'd make an account for it. if I wanted to join a discord call, I'd make an account for it. I lived my life with disposables. I didn't want things collecting grime and age. everything has to be fresh, pulled seconds ago from its individual wrapping. I've been this way for my entire adult life. I'm not changing anytime soon. I can't.

besides, to them I was just ykwilk921, connected to their server from some ip in the netherlands—not even remotely where I actually was. I'd have to tell them who I was for them to do me any harm.

I told myself that a few times. it staved off some of the anxiety, but there was still a little sliver in there, nestled somewhere among the mucus of my stomach, that wasn't sure.

and suddenly, accidentally and absentmindedly, perhaps due to the carbs of the ensure hitting my empty stomach like a car wreck, I fell into sleep.

---

dreaming. a re-run. that's mostly how they are these days. it was either little scraps, or a teleplay from the archives.

mom, with her readers, was at the kitchen table with my report card.

"A- in masking," she commented, more to herself than to me, "that's an improvement over last term."

I was at the end of the table, in the big chair. the lines of the room pointed me toward their vanishing point, out the side window. my gaze went across the gap between the houses, and landed against the neighbour's curtains.

"B+ in sitting still."

I couldn't see behind them, but I knew what was there. I'd seen it already. I'd smelled it.

"A+ in eye contact."

I could hear it, in there. the violent sounds of the human respiratory system hitting a major malfunction. I knew everyone could. my mom, my dad, all the other neighbours. it hadn't been news to them.

"C- in compulsive behaviour, we'll have to work on that—"

she must've noticed what was happening. a little too loud to comfortably ignore. she looked at me dimly. my eyes snapped to hers, as they should.

"if you want to call 911 for him," she said flatly, "I won't stop you."

jingling of keys. front door. iron bars—they're here.

---

I clambered over to my desk. they were, indeed, there. wood stood just behind the bars at the end of the bed. its skin was wood grain, everywhere. what else could it have been?

"hey," he'd typed, "you there?"

I checked the timestamps. that was 15 seconds ago.

"yes," I replied, removing the avatar from its bed. "just woke up"

"lmao."

didn't mean it as a joke, but at least he's laughing. but, er, maybe a griefer laughing isn't such a good sign.

"what brings you to horny guild?" he asked.

hard to tell the tone. a little jovial? maybe he was doing a "good cop" routine.

"I'm looking for some people."

"I heard you were looking for me"

"I think you know these people. what can you tell me about ebbb group?"

it always impressed me what people could do when they've lived so many hours in their avatar. 7crows had deftly communicated their inner termoil through poseball body language. and just now in front of me, despite his attire, wood performed a perfect, conspiratorial look-around. leaned in, and whispered.

"who wants to know? you a fed?"

fuck. shit. I landed too far on the "mysterious capable interloper" side of the spectrum. they thought I was a spook.

"not a fed."

"prove it"

I shook my cursor in frustration. about the only expression of body language I could manage. a short, fitful spasm. "nobody in the history of the entire internet has *ever* been able to prove they're not a spook. are you one?"

"no of course fucking not lol"

"prove it."

"point taken jeez, I just need to know youre cool"

"I'll give you my exploit for information. a fair trade?"

"what did you even do? benny said you had like a thousand accounts or something"

benny... ah, balenciaga. "no. I found a way to recycle an account without needing to pay for a new minecraft license. if you get banned, or softlocked, or whatever, you can detach the license from one account, and put it onto a new, fresh one." I had only purchased—or rather, stole via normal means—20 licenses which I repurposed for my uses.

"that doesnt seem that useful. I thought you had thousands of accounts"

"no, it only seemed that way due to the recycling. you could raid a server with this. they couldn't ever ban you, you'd just recycle the account."

he hesitated, considering. "they can ban your ip"

"not if you have a network of jumpboxes."

"what's that"

it was around now that I started to worry that nobody here actually knew anything.

another failure mode. I nuked an ant. I could've sold this exploit to mojang/microsoft for $2,000 of negotiable american currency. instead I'm here in a jail cell trying to convince pinocchio to buy it for nothing.

whatever. no half measures.

I gave up on the physicality of it all. stood still, let my avatar look off into nowhere, toward the ceiling. not a natural angle for the human head to rest at. it's just a text chat for me now. "how about this, you tell me what you know, or I keep raiding you."

"dude what the fuck"

"it's just information. information I want. tell me what you know and I'll leave. I can do worse."

I could see in the periphery, distorted by perspective, wood take out a crossbow and aim it at me. like that would do anything. "I dont beleive you. youre probably just making shit up with stupid technobabble shit"

"I see you've only ever met people who make shit up. never met the real deal?"

"no, well ban this account and youll just be stuck in the maze again"

"like I said, I can do worse. you seem to know what an IP is. need I remind you that your IP is static, and mine is not?"

if, at any point, I had somehow given the wrong impression—that I was someone with high-minded ideals, principles, or morals—then I am sincerely sorry to disappoint. I am none of those things. I am just a person who is both nosy and compulsive. simple as that.

I can grief, too.

fortunately, for them, it didn't come to that. wood lowered his bow, and told me what he knew.

unfortunately, for me—an in what seemed to be the theme of this case—I wasn't sure what to make of the information.

wood knew of ebbb crew not by way of minecraft griefing. indeed, not by way of the internet at all. he explained, in words more eloquent than I expected, that griefing is just the modern name for a more ancient art. vandalism.

"like, someone has to be the ones to burn down the library of alexandria. someone had to be the ones to smash the clay shit that had like, the epic of girugamesh on it. people have all these fucking ideas that arent even based on reality or whatever. a lot of stupid stories that arent real. you have to do a little trolling to bring people down to earth because otherwise they get stuck up there and start doing stupid shit."

and I realized, mostly due to the malapropisms, that these weren't his words at all. he must have heard this from someone, very likely someone from ebbb. he was just parroting.

I asked him where he'd heard all this.

"years and years ago. kloose and I were in high school. we used to go tagging in the woods. there were like old radio towers and abandoned rail tunnels and stuff like that. we had a crew of six of us and wed go just before night—"

"I do enjoy seeing windows into other people's lives," I interrupted, "but I also enjoy getting to the fucking point."

"fuck off im getting to the point," he punctuated by throwing a slur at me. but he continued.

one day, he said, they encountered some older people in the woods. they were lounging in an abandoned building, smoking weed and looking cool. kloose and wood and the others also wanted to smoke weed and look cool—as one does. so they engaged.

they shot the shit, talked city gossip, trounced on the reputations of various community leaders. classic antisocial banter.

eventually the coolest one, the one in a tracksuit and a black beanie and five-o-clock shadow, announced that he would love to find "a couple of cool guys with big balls" who would help him with a mission.

I personally—though I admit this might be a personality fault on my end—can't ever imagine hearing that without being skeeved out. but apparently, kloose and wood and the others were game. after all, if they succeeded, then they'd be getting weed.

and now I will elide for length wood's description of this so-called mission. even though it was "years and years ago," he still knew every detail to a tee. walked me through it like I was going to help him do it again. details, details, details. but I can describe it in one word: arson.

deep in the woods, further than they would normally go, nestled in a glade, were nine arches. they were crafted from tree branches weaved together, and sat in a long line, one after another. like a tube. the description reminded me of torii gates. same layout. likely different purpose.

but we wouldn't know its purpose. wood didn't know its purpose, neither did kloose. they didn't care. they wanted kush. all they knew is where it was, how to get there, and what to do when they found it.

the only name they had for it came from the "big balls" guy. he called it a "bridge." and it didn't last very long. they pulled the branches out of the ground the very next night. threw them on a big pile. set them alight. took photos with an ipod touch, as proof.

that was their first mission. they'd do others like this, but never as labourious. always rewarded with weed by the cool guy. they often talked together while they smoked. cool guy would go on and on about the uselessness of fiction. how it's all a trick. he had binders of photocopied book pages in his backpack. "manifesto type shit" from "his friends who went to school."

cool guy would talk about ebbb. the organization behind these ideas. it stood for something—the acronym. but it was german and wood couldn't remember. kloose might. something to do with bridges and fractures. organization for stopping... something like that... something...

the worst thing to happen to an internet sleuth is for the case to leave the internet. the best I could hope for is getting the full name of this strange vandal group. maybe, just maybe—and I was really holding out hope on this one, they'd be online.

but I suppose the world can tell that this particular internet sleuth can take more torture.

I was on a bus heading into the city, to the university library, to look at microfiches loaned from overseas—expedited at great expense to my person. all because this stupid fucking case had left the internet.

I hated the smells. I hated the sounds. I hated being looked at. my room was clean, my room was quiet. I treat every surface every month with a mixture of detergent and isopropyl alcohol. a perfect smell. now I'm getting diesel to the face. and shit. and vomit and pollen and bugs.

fuck this. I hate this. I closed my eyes at the back of the bus. tried to imagine where each of my polygons would start and end. tried to forget the dire reality that I was made of quadrillions of little particles, held together by absurd forces. the mental exercise worked just well enough to get me through, and no more.

I had worried that I had left horny guild with bad blood. but, as it happens, these types like it when they're overpowered. their biggest fears are responsibility. so when someone else can be held responsible for their own failure—in this case, the failure to keep a secret—then being able to cast blame paradoxically makes them feel better. they saw me a bit like a force of nature. and that suited me just fine.

before I logged out, I had given wood an email address to pass along to kloose. a couple hours later, while I was sleeping, he sent the name.

"einsatzgruppe zur begrenzung von brücken und bruchstellen"

ebbb.

blissfully the library was quiet, and whatever smells somehow got by my n95 were roughly pleasant. I navigated to special collections, met with the librarian. gave my name, reminded her of why I was there. we'd spoken before, over email.

she returned from the back with a formed plastic tray. inside were six small cardboard boxes with the fujifilm logo on each. "have you ever used microfilm before?" she asked.

I shook my head.

"I'll show you, then." she squinted at me. odd.

we went to a machine booth and she gave a tutorial. she spooled the roll into the machine, used her bare fingers to guide the film into the reader. it disturbed me somewhat. wouldn't that make fingerprints?

I asked about that. she squinted at me again. "oh, no, it's fine. you'll only be touching the blank area."

"why are you squinting?"

"oh," laughter, "I'm smiling. you can't see because of the mask."

I blushed, embarassed. at least she was graceful about it.

the microfilm machine was not difficult. it reminded me very strongly of navigating a PDF, only with strange controls. the difficult part was finding what I needed to find within a bunch of student magazines written in a language I didn't know.

but like I said many times before, this is not my first case. tables of contents are present in nearly every language. for the sake of pace, I assumed that the title of any relevant article would include one of my key words.

and so I began. fell into a nice rhythm. I hit what I'd hoped was paydirt here and there. there were several articles whose bodies contained the full, expanded phrase that acroynmizes to ebbb. but translating would come later. the machine had been aftermarket modified so its print function spat a djvu file onto a usb key. I'd be able to synthesize from the comfort of my own room.

I did very much want to go home. room is best. but I must admit, for a home away from home, the microfilm booth was pretty comfortable.

by the third roll I had become quite the old hand. reminded me of using a roller iron, when I worked housekeeping in high school. my mind wandered. there were many mysteries of the case to pick at, but one particularly inconsequential one stuck.

how did I wake up at precisely the right time to talk to wood?

I'd been facing the wall when I woke. my computer doesn't have speakers, and I keep the minecraft client muted, anyway. screen was sleeping, too.

but... that last moment in my dream. the thing that derailed the teleplay's script. jangling of keys, iron bars...

that would have been the precise moment he was typing.

I pushed it from my mind. nothing can be gleaned from coincidence.

I thought also about the timeline. about how I had been both lucky and unlucky to miss their final party—the "sovereignty party"—by just six days. lucky, in that I had found the case while it was still hot. unlucky, because I had missed the party.

when I had asked, 7crows couldn't actually tell me precisely what the "sovereignty party" was. just a guess. that it was probably a celebration of kewpie—er, princess dana's ascent to the throne. i.e., the anniversary of the mush's establishment.

but it could've been something else. who knows. we missed the party. and anyone we could ever ask is indisposed. possibly indefinitely.

no justice in this world.

I'd finished my labours around 10:00 p.m. the librarian had gone home already, but she had come around earlier to tell me where I ought to return the film reels.

transit home was easier. world was quieter. still dispreferred it.

my usb stick was filled with 38 pages of untranslated german. I sniffed around online for some automated way to translate it. but the two-column layout choked up all the open source options I'd tried. eventually I found that my phone's translate app, with its camera, was unfortunately the best option. I built a mount out of k'nex to keep it pointed at my screen.

scrolled on the screen, read on my phone. felt like I had constructed a weird, distorted, dream version of the microfilm machine I just come home from using. but this did the job well enough.

I cannot ever claim that my brain is normal. I'm a traumatized, nosy, compulsive, distractable, and dissociated person. you've just seen how I experience the real world. and you've seen how I experience the fake. I'm a threshold type. I need fantasy for me to survive, but I can't quite go all the way.

so you'd think, with me being a centrist on the spectrum between reality and fantasy, I'd be in a good position to understand the ebbb perspective. but let me tell you, they are so far off-scale that they are but a smudge on the horizon.

imagine this: someone speaking in the most paranormal language, talking about portals to other worlds, ghosts and spirits, holes in reality and rips and dimensions... now imagine all that spoken with a level of self-denial, a way of speaking so oblique as to simultaneously pretend nothing is happening. all is metaphor, but the monomanicial focus on certain metaphors are raising quite a number of questions about what these people actually believe.

that is what ebbb is. only things that are real are real, and those that aren't must be denied.

I'd hate to have to meet one at a party.

made me wonder how they tolerate the internet at all. some of them must be online in *some* capacity. the defacement of eQualia fit their modus operandi, and they had signed their damn work. so where on earth were they?

I took a break from reading. it was quite late. I had managed to get a little over halfway through my haul.

maybe just one more. I flipped to the next page. this was from the start of roll #4. this newspaper had much higher standards for typesetting. it had figures that the text wrapped around. it had proportional text and pull quotes. one such pull quote grabbed the attention of the translator app. it refused to translate anything else on the page—font was too big, I guessed. I glanced at it.

"fiction is too convincing, it makes you make poor decisions."

familiar sentiment. I'd heard it before in the earlier articles, multiple times with different phrasing.

wait.

I said it before, I'll say it again. and again, and again, and again. not my first case. people will lie. people must lie. truth is pain, and we must live in little fantasies to survive.

but that won't stop me from taking such lies to task, when it's needed. I sent 7crows a message.

"tell me about einsatzgruppe zur begrenzung von brücken und bruchstellen. ebbb."

and I didn't get a response. not that evening, not the next. I tried pulling all the other little loose threads that had accumulated. I learned next to nothing—with the sole exception of kewpie's phone number. by way of a friend of a friend (who I now owe a favour) I had learned that the number had gone out of service just a little bit after the sovereignty party. plus or minus a day.

but the case was going ice cold, fast. barring divine intervention, 7crows was my final lead.

had the teleplay dream again that night. mom with the report card, my eyes on the curtains in the other house. but this time it wasn't my neighbour lurking behind. not him choking on his own vomit after a bender. not my experience of going in unannounced at 15-years-old, finding him, thanklessly saving his life. those memories, usually hidden in the other house, were eerily absent.

no, this time it was very different. on the other side was princess dana and her citizens. I couldn't see them, I couldn't hear them, and I didn't have any idea what was happening to them. but they were there. and that unknowledge, the known unknown, was more terrifying than anything.

A- in masking. C- in compulsive behaviour. C+ in dissociative symptoms. D- in solving your cases.

mom looked at me. I didn't.

"you can call 911 for them, I won't stop you."

but there was no 911 for this. no missing persons bureau for the internet. there were just weird, compulsive, nosy people. and when they failed...

---

that morning I woke to a message from 7crows.

"I'll be at my aptmt." in second life. the upside-down sim.

from a far distance I had noticed the change. different player model. but it was only after I got close did I understand the symbolism.

it was fairly rare, in second life, to meet someone with a completely non-human body plan. probably because it's so much easier to conform to the default, even in cyberspace. but 7crows had gone very non-default. its model was a number of individual, life-size crows, perched on the ground.

"new model." I commented.

"old. just updated it, slightly."

I counted. six, not seven. one had died.

it was only a few days ago, on this very perch, that 7crows had said "fantasy is too compelling. it makes me make bad decisions." an ebbb talking point, almost verbatim from those student newspapers. it had known, this whole time, what ebbb was. it had lied. I wanted to know why.

"the only reason you know ebbb exists at all," it typed, "is because I called them to eQualia in the first place."

so, not witness, but perpetrator. I felt a dismal emptiness in me. that I could really be this bad at judging character.

I instructed my avatar to place her head in her hands. I have no authority. I'm not a fucking cop. there's not much I can do to hold perpetrators accountable. I mean, what's the point of any of this at all? my own closure?

I considered quitting just there. but I've always been compulsive.

"please," I typed, "tell me what happened."

it had been lies all the way down with 7crows. it was only now bleeding bare for me. it not only knew what exactly the sovereignty party was, it had attended on the day.

but it had to back up. more context.

princess dana tiffany butenblatter had been feeling something happening within the walls of eQualia. a deepening. a sharpening. she had been wandering through the rooms the last six months, making microadjustments to the descriptions of scenery. suggesting changes her citizens could make to their own bios to get closer to the truth. the real truth.

7crows could feel it too. but for it, the changes were like the floor melting. like a whirlpool opening up in the center of the room, pulling everything down. this is when it started feeling too much like itself-in-the-mush, and less like 7crows.

a week before the sovereignty party, they had a moment together, in eQualia. dana reached out a hand to pet 7crows's head. and it felt it. every little touch. every stroke along the scalp. it was just text, and yet... unexplainable.

7crows lost itself for a while. but one of its birds woke up. alerted the flock. they logged out. terrified. confused. the six other crows didn't want that to happen. that detail, at least, had been a truth shared with me since the beginning.

but the seventh crow had a deep and abiding love for dana. it couldn't bear to stay away for long—preferring non-existence to distance.

a state that couldn't last. it would wake up eventually, that seventh crow. and they'd be back in eQualia. so the others hatched a plan while it slept. an escape contingency. an exfiltration team.

7crows was a threshold person, like me. susceptible to fantasy. it needed people who weren't. and those people, generally, weren't online.

they had found ebbb, not because they were some global conspiracy, but simply because they were local. the hesse flavour of anti-fantasy materialists. people are still writing ebbb articles in student newspapers to this day. student newspapers with big warning signs printed on the inside cover, declaring it illegal to scan. can't put something online if you can't scan it. there's a dark matter cloud of culture that will never go online, often simply because it would be a faux pas.

according to 7crows, had I looked in my own backyard, I would probably find my own local version of ebbb. I put that fact in my back pocket. who knows, might help me on a later case.

a few days before the sovereignty party, dana had divulged what it would really be about to her citizens.

her plan, her mission, her mandate, was to make eQualia real. to turn the map into territory. she felt in her heart that it could happen. that all the little pieces were in place, and all that was needed was to flick a switch somewhere.

get everyone together, affirm the truth, and declare sovereignty. hence the name.

it was an announcement that existed only in eQualia. princess dana wouldn't dare share such a proclamation to the wider internet. they would have burned her alive. the internet hates the chuuni.

but I do not. nonetheless, where I stood in the center, I did feel again like staring off into the horizon, in the other direction. at a smudge.

it was all just a little too incredulous. all a little too convenient. this was just how those ebbb weirdos spoke in those student newspapers, except not couched in metaphor. in the language of ebbb, princess dana had definitely created a bridge. a bridge into fantasy—metaphorically speaking.

if 7crows's testimony is to be believed, then it seems that we threshold people don't take it as metaphor. we experience the bridge as a very real phenomenon. maybe because we are metaphors, too.

but who knows. I'm not sure I believed this, first of all. I needed to prod for the truth.

"you sure you felt her touch you, that one time? really sure?" I asked.

"yeah. yeah. it really happened. I mean, it's not the first time I've felt an uncanny connection to my avatar. felt like I was really there."

I thought back to waking up to wood's message. an uncanny connection. I squirmed inside. very, very uncomfortable. 7crows continued.

masking as itself, masking as having its missing bird, 7crows convinced dana to give it the admin password. convinced her that it could feel the deepening, too. could feel what needed to change. it had succeeded.

I remember, after the rave, I had intuited they were not-so-close friends, but it seems I was mistaken. that 7th crow was doing a *lot* of work.

with the keys to the kingdom, the six crows felt safe enough in the exfiltration plan. worst case scenario, they'd have their team teleport them to a featureless room, as detox. 7crows had already created one, disconnected from everything, for that purpose.

then came the day of the party.

"she had a big lever, like a scissor switch from fucking frankenstein. it was on a pedestal"

its crows played an animation. huddling together. for warmth, or out of fear.

"we had a feast prepared, the tables encircling the fucking lever. the description of everything was so long. she did a toast. told us she loved us all. and pulled the lever."

they should've planned for a worser-case scenario. the lever worked. completely, unutterably. eQualia had become real in that instant. they'd punched a hole through reality. now, on the other side of the bridge, fiction had inverted. their lives before were now roleplay. earth just a complicated worldbuild.

the map had become the territory. or maybe the map finally led to the territory. point is, 7crows was on the wrong side of the threshold. its seventh bird woke up. overtook the others completely. lost itself again.

but that's when the ebbb freaks logged on. grabbed 7crows by the scruff of the neck, and dragged it kicking and sobbing back to our side.

7crows, due to a combination of identity fuckery and metafictional decompression sickness, went catatonic. the einsatzgruppe took matters into their own hands. they had to close the bridge—metaphorically speaking. they had to repair the fracture in reality—metaphorically speaking. they razed the place. literally.

by the time they were done, the map was destroyed. the territory unreachable. who could possibly say what happened to those who were still on the other side.

what was left of them here, if this was all to be believed, was that they stopped existing.

and I really couldn't believe it. indeed, I felt rather aghast at being *expected* to believe it. it was too fantastical for my sensibilities. too fantastical to give me closure.

I said as much, grimly. 7crows shrugged—not with its body, just a gesture through text, surrounded by asterisks.

I could maybe doxx them—the princess and her citizens. I tried, actually, for a few of them. no luck, but there were nine total. maybe I could crack at least one. go to their house, wellness check... sanity check...

bu then the case will have left the internet again—and it's not like I had money for arbitrary plane tickets.

I was so tired. I just wanted answers.

but these were all the answers 7crows could give. it leaped off the balcony ledge and flew. and with that, the birds began a new animation. murmuration. forming random shapes from their crowding, from their relative positions. I watched them shrink into the distance, flying under an office park. the cloud of six crows, together, alone.

---

no more dreams. just quiet days. malaise.

I solved most of my cases. maybe not in the way that I'd like all the time, but at least I could say they were solved. leaving one unsolved felt like a wound. it would heal eventually, but healing takes time. and I hate waiting.

I was drafting a responsible disclosure for the minecraft license exploit I'd found, hoping that they wouldn't notice that I had actually used it maliciously. I could really use the money. overnight shipping for interlibrary microfilm was so expensive.

I was in the middle of describing the sequence of required taps, how one needs to cancel out of a half-finished form in the depths of the google play store, when it struck me.

ebbb had razed everything they could find. but, had they found...

I opened my IM window with 7crows. I'd need the password—

I stopped myself.

no. no. I got this. it would probably take a while. would need to spelunk through the code of the mush software it's forked from, but I could do this. better than waiting for 7crows's response. if I get stuck, only then will I ask.

I connected, for the second time, to eQualia.

I can't say I ever knew princess dana. hell, I never ever knew her as that. only as the rather unserious kewpie_faygo. modest dragon girl. sensitive about her wings.

I never knew her as queen, so I know I'm extrapolating. but that's part of the process. I'm going to have to assume some things about queens. in particular I can't imagine one without an omnipotent understanding of her realm.

I just can't imagine her never finding 7crows's featureless room. these mushes have edit logs. she must have seen it. must have seen who had made it.

I also couldn't imagine ebbb crew thinking to deface it. it was just a featureless room, nothing fantastical.

I had to get inside.

mushes aren't like normal games. so the exploits are different, weirder. it's not like I could clip out of bounds using a physics glitch, and send myself rocketing toward this distant, hidden room. it's all graph theory with mushes and muds. either something is connected to another thing, or it isn't. and good luck when it isn't.

good luck *is* what I needed. as 7crows had described, the detox room was completely disconnected from everything. the only way I could possibly get in was either by modifying my player character's location, or somehow connecting it to someplace else.

both options on the surface seemed impossible. I did not have the admin password. I'd have to hack. thankfully there was nobody around to get upset with me. I could take my time.

so I worked at the problem. as I worked at any problem.

during one of my early cases, I had encountered someone who laughed uncontrollably about my situation. a security researcher turned a private investigator. funded by hacker one bounties, solving online mysteries no one asked for. it was all so funny to them. tickled them.

I admit, it is funny. I'm very good with computers, and only kind-of good with people. but the fact is, computers can be as fickle as people. I really didn't like my odds of getting in, I was going to try.

try. trying. tried. it was hour five and I was still almost nowhere with it.

started thinking about my emotions. you know it's bad when you start thinking about your emotions.

what did I even really want out of this? I keep saying closure, but I don't even know what closure looks like.

...I was constructing some weird "quality applicator machine." I'd found 257 nestable objects and put each inside the other, like a matryoshka doll. every time I unshucked the stack, the innermost object came out weird. unpredicably gaining a quality like "wetness" or "tackyness..."

maybe closure is just knowing you did a good job. that you'd helped the general effort in some way. maybe all I want is for someone to agree that my empathy helped the situation. that caring mattered.

...seemed that the behaviour changes depending on which room my machine was in. some of them seemed to add semi-random characters to specific property fields. I checked the c structure that defined those. maybe there was a pattern...

I'm probably just fucked up. traumatized, as per usual. what I consider my first case, the episode with my neighbour at 15, hadn't ended with closure. my dad had told me I shouldn't have gotten involved. not a single person had told me that I'd done the right thing. implicitly, they were saying I should have let him die.

...I put one of the cluttering NPCs inside. when I unshucked, it was gone. troubling, but promising. I went off to collect more test subjects...

I don't know what I was doing. just following my own fixations, I guess. I'd been working on this case for the last week. maybe I just can't disengage.

...seems like this might work. I put myself in the machine using the soap trick I'd found. once inside the innermost sock I reorganized my inventory to rename myself with that structure exploit...

whatever. whatever. if I can't figure this out by sunrise—

I typed "go out fast" and triggered the chain of workarounds and exploits. after about 30 lines of incoherent gobbledygook, there it was.

FEATURELESS ROOM

empty test place with white walls.

there is a letter here.

>

I looked down at the letter. it was folded into the thirds. it sat limply in the corner of the room. I squatted above it, took it in my hands. the paper was yellowed. medieval. felt a bit like fine-grit sandpaper. smelled like the university library. I tilted open the upper third, and peeked at the message.

in red ink, in swooping cursive: "hey theure my favourite seven birds!! ^w^"

not meant for me. I closed it back up. my hunch was correct. I'd have to bring this back to—

blinked. once. twice.

FEATURELESS ROOM

empty test place with white walls.

there is a letter here.

>

I typed "examine letter"

"letter for 7crows" it said.

I typed "read letter"

in monospace font, white on black, the letter began: "hey theure my favourite seven birds!! ^w^"

the rest dumped unceremoniously out onto my terminal. roughly three paragraphs. I chose not to read them. not meant for me. I copied it to a text file. disconnected.

I opened my IMs with 7crows. attached the text file. better than copying it directly into a message. an attachment better maintains the true fiction that I hadn't read it.

I suppose this is enough. maybe closure is knowing you did something nobody else could have. or maybe that's selfishness. either way, I felt good.

tapped enter.

sending... sending... sending...

sent.