9- When a Brainfart Can Become a Lethal Threat

Cal wouldn't say he was shaken by what just happened. He'd say that he only now understood how much more out of the water he was than he thought.

Like, where the hell was this place? And what in the ever living fuck did he just meet? 

Of course there was no manual for getting yeeted into a pseudo-game world by a deadly cosmic ray of mountaindew. Why would there be? After all, there was no manual to life. And this was his life now.

He had the impression he'd feel tired by all those questions without answer coming back yet again to his attention. But he felt he was too tired to be tired, so he felt frustrated instead. Hold up, that wasn't quite it. He was not too tired to be tired, he was tired of being emotionally and mentally drained by all of this. So now he was frustrated, maybe a bit angry too. Yeah, that was it.

Not that being angry at the world would make a difference. But it did make him feel slightly better than otherwise.

"Okay, so there's a wall or hard limit to this place. A seemingly void with at least one big bad eldritch dumbass or something similar. And I have an very high resistance to lethal mind bamboozling." Standing up carefully because of the lingering vertigo, Cal took a deep breath and patted himself down. "Good to know. Maybe I should write my observations in a book or something." He mumbled with a frown as he placed his hand against the invisible wall one last time before turning back and walking off.

Meh, if he followed the recent trend of his changes. His memory was probably perfect anyway. Though writing it all down could have an interesting other purpose. Food for thoughts.

—————

*TAC. TAC.*

The sound of rythmically tapping fingers on wood echoed in Cal's empty house, as if replacing the frozen clocks of the domicile in their tasks of keeping time. The responsible, the golden browned haired young man himself. Was wondering exactly how to proceed from now on.

It was obvious he wouldn't keep time frozen forever, first because he wasn't sure if he even could, and second because it was quite boring and unhealthy for his sanity. But he could at least use the time he was given to do what he otherwise couldn't, like exploring his powers in peace.

Also, he was kinda afraid of proceeding with the story. Like, the whole DDLC storyline lasted like what?... 3 in game day before Sayori, well...

He stopped tapping his fingers, a quiet shudder running through him, just imagining having the scene play out in front of his own two eyes made him feel horrified, and very, very angry. He didn't even want to think about what he would do to Monica if things came to this. Intentional or not, he didn't think it'd make a difference to him at that point.

No, he's not taking the chance for now, at least until he's sure he can change that particular outcome.

But for that, he needed to dig deeper into what he could do. While yes, it may seems like he could do anything and everything by simply willing it. It evidently wasn't exactly the case, either because the changes could apparently be opposed by the world or because of his own current limits. Like the backlash that occured when changing his appearance or when attempting to pierce the wall just earlier. The former was rather light all things considered, as he could endure the pain and a nap of a few hours wasn't that bad. But he'd rather not do something like give himself infinite physical speed only to find himself in a coma for a thousand years or otherwise explode in a shower of digital blood and gore. While the second he just couldn't seem to do. The wall was too solid, his will wasn't heavy or sharp enough to break it, the end. 

This would have to be rectified.

How?

Well, Cal could only thanks his friendly neighboring outer abomination for that. As among the visions he received from the eldritch revelation. He remember having seen an eye peering out of a keyhole, only to be stared back at. Which reminded him of Monika, since that was a metaphore — that perhaps may have not been one in the end — that she used in one of her poem to the player, seemingly alluding to her awareness of being in a game. 

Now, this was relevent because Monika could see and do something she shouldn't be able to. The very code or files of the world she was in, and modify them.

Which lead to him.

If she could see them and access them, why the hell wouldn't he be able do the same? The answer was that he could. In fact, he remember very well his first sight after his hellish transfer being a world of green and black as well as himself holding a ball of shifting light in place of his heart and a character file in his core.

So the first thing he did with that train of thoughts was close his eyes, banishing an eyesight he intrissically knew hided the truth of this the world from him. He knew for a fact that the place he was in existed on code or something similar to that. Like time was deeply connected to space, the 1 and 0 that governed this reality should have been everywhere at once already. He just had to open his eyes to it.

For sure, he was reaching a bit blindly with it, but heh, with no manual, he had to go with what his guts and brain was telling him. And right now both told him to discard all of his senses and reach beyond with his mind. So that's what he set himself to.

And time passed like that, in fact, he wouldn't be able to tell if he had spent hours or seconds trying to achieve knickoff enlightement, for him it felt like only a moment had passed before he found himself elsewhere. His eyes wide open as dots of green and black flashed and darted all around him only to vanish into seemingky random patterns. Those same dots formed a sort of ground that appeared solid under him and seemed to vaguely follow the shape of a room similar to his kitchen, yet not identical.

Inspecting his body revealed himself as a faintly translucent humanoid shape delimited by a green and black contour. Where his heart should be was as he remembered a pretty ball of liquid blue, green and black light, the blue being the most prominent color in it. And directly in the middle of his torso was a plain and very out of place computer file with a white text floating above it saying Cal.CHA.

A thing he immediatly noticed was how the ball of light had a sort of thin tether connecting to the file, pulsing to an unknown rythm and lighting up occasionnally. The ball was also leaking some wisps of itself into his body, which were dissolved into tiny motes and gathered inside his head into a tiny glitchy dark cube construct.

Needless to say, he was very lost. But hey, at least there was plenty to investigate immediatly. Like his character file. 

He didn't know how exactly, but he managed to project his counsciousness into it. Finding three further files in a plain white background. The first named simply named Mc, the second Cal, and the third Mind.txt.

The Mc one was short, with it being further separated into Dialogs, Personality and Memories. While perusing it, he really wondered what would happen if he were to delete it. But he'd rather not find out what deleting such an integral role would do to the world, nevermind Sayori or the other characters. While it had some influence on him, it was merely annoying since he could resist almost any conpulsions it threw at him with a bit of efforts.

The Cal files was just a few dozens of various gibberish random characters and numbers files that he somehow could understand as being part of himself similar to the MC files, but with much more categories like opinions, dislikes, appearance and such. When he dared clicked on the knowledge file, he was met with a veritable unending wall of code went on and on. And he was pretty sure that if he wasn't hallucinating, he saw some bits of codes change and shift with time.

Now, that's when he went to check on the mind.txt file that shit went to a hundred real quick, as he was met with an everchanging non-eucledean mass of code that grew and rewrote itself maybe a million times a second. The uncanny part was as he said, the code did not merely remain the same quantity, no, it kept growing slowly second by second. And the even more uncanny part was that the more he stared at the abomination of a structure before his mind eyes, the more he understood it. And the more he understood, the faster it grew. Not much, but it was there.

So, after a few seconds of that. He backtracked, somehow feeling a shudder go through his physical body and of bugs crawling in his skull.

So yeah, maybe peering inside one own's mind wasn't very good for your sanity, who would've thought?

Anyhow, with this mind gazing, he got to learn that this was the exact file that was connected with a tether to the energy drink ball in his chest. And that it was influencing and changing the Cal's file in real time. 

In short, the mind file was probably the sole reason why he was self-conscious and kept changing in real time. Else he would be a shell of himself, fulfilling his predetermined role as the mc, perhaps not even aware he was doing so. It was also responsable for him being able to make his own decision and choice. But it wasn't the reason he was able to truly go through with them.

It was strange, but that part was solely the mountaindew ball's fault and the cube in his brain. It allowed him to go against the system and change the code of the world instinctually. This was what made him truly different from Monika, that and of course his memory of the game and of the real world.

Now, the next natural question would of course be why the tri-colored disco ball was even in his chest in the first place, and why was it able to do all it did? Oh, and of course what the hell the black rubic cube inside his digitalized cranium was.

His answer?

No clue.

Like, he got wrecked so hard by divine retribution that his ass got digitalized and yoinked into a visual novel game and somehow got the wish version of a holy grail in the form of radioactive steroid juice in exchange. The hell was he supposed to deduce from all this except that not touching grass for 24 hours somehow increased your chance of meeting 2D characters?