+ FOURTH WALL EVENT: FOREST PARTY +

[vitaelamorte]

Who: E V E R Y O N E
Where: The Forest!
When: Sept 7th to Sept 10th
Rating: G to PG-13 (please label higher ratings, thank you!)
Summary: Could it be that you (GASP!) don't want to be here? Do you maybe want to make like a tree and... leaf? Then how about you do the next best thing, and come to the woods to party! And don't forget to have a look at the Fourth Wall Master Post for event rules, puzzle clues, and more places to mingle!
The Story:

Beginning on September 7th, colourful ribbons will hang from several trees by the forest. Whoever follows their path will be guided deeper, right to the scene of a forest party.

Wooden benches, swings in all shapes and sizes, tree trunks, and other arrangements give plenty of opportunities to sit together. Tree houses and tents provide shelter, and come nightfall the festivities will light up for you.

Campfires provide additional light and warmth and a great place for ghost stories. Camping coolers store more than smores, and all around you nature twists and turns to give you room to dance to the music, to wander in the quiet, and to simply have a good time!

(...Are you the curiously perceptive, or the perceptively curious sort? If so, then you might also notice the small bird sitting on a branch nearby.)

Comments

[unvoid]

[The man's silhouette and form distorts briefly in a sigh that might best be categorized as irritated. Its shape alters briefly before assuming its typical shapelessness.

Did that sentence make sense?

Don't worry about it. Very little about this man makes sense.

There is a point to this pointlessness and idleness, and he will cut to it with efficiency of a curative scalpel.]

[catinthemask]

[Zacharie's laughter comes out a little darker than usual. Discarded data. Belongs in the Nothingness. His hands itch just watching this thing. Recommended amount of sugar to feed a person was one cup. The final element. Ect, ect.

Well, with discarded data came unpredictability. That was something.]

Eh eh eh. Irritation I may be, but the knowledge I possess is useful and willing to be shared. I have met this skeleton you speak of. He is here in Wonderland. But in the case of potential violence rising I recommend you look. This world is not my game nor yours. It may end badly.

[unvoid]

[That rising intonation indicates something darker, yet darker. It would not do to hamper his progress, his slow and inexorable return to some version of reality, any more than he already has.

He loops several executable files with obvious distaste, loathing the way the numbers respond.

go to: subroutine placating
return: obfuscation

He responds.]

[catinthemask]

I can take a guess, amigo. One or two, or things that have been plunged into a void. Coding is tricky, hence why I leave it up to the Puppeteers and their whims of playing around or taking away.

[But he steps to the side, allowing that thing room to get around. Zacharie has no intention of stopping him from going after Sans, nor any intention of warning the skeleton that the hounds were on his heels.]

Ah ah ah. After you.

[unvoid]

[There is only the barest of hesitation to the words, the visual phraseology, and it is not a query. The only queries he runs are internal loops and executable files, none of which he requires to confirm that this being, this thing, this unfamiliar person - knows of the void and the code and the things that pilot the puppets who traverse the linear paths, blissfully unaware of their strings.]

[catinthemask]

It is not hard to know when you know where to look, especially if you are made of code, scripts and data.

[He pulls a string that isn't there around his wrist. It seems a little less glitchy now, a little more room to breathe. If you push hard enough on the 4th wall, apparently it can sucker punch you in the form of this guy. Less of an 'it' right now, thankfully.]

Being necessary helps too. There is the possibility that I may be more blunt in your personal situation but it is difficult for us all around.

[Do you really want to hear that as a dummied out character you weren't needed for the plot? That idea is kind of frightening.]

NO MORE NO MORE OF THIS IMAGE WINGDINGS BULLSHIT I'M DONE

[unvoid]

[This is an obvious concession. He inclines his head, or he would, if he had a head that was an obvious feature he possessed or a body that was not made of a nigh-plasmic material that does not exist in any foreseeable fashion.

In any case, he acknowledges the words delivered to him. And he responds in kind.]

NECESSARY COMPONENTS ARE NOT INVULNERABLE TO EXPLOITATION.

ALL CODE IS CAPABLE OF REMOVING EVEN THE MOST INTEGRAL VARIABLES.

A CANNIBALISTIC ITERATIVE BIT-RATE REDUCTION EXECUTED UPON THE WORLD ITSELF.

/pat pat

[catinthemask]

Certainly! And AUs are very popular, you know. But as both the only merchant in the game and a part time guide character, it would be very difficult for the player if I was removed! Unless they want to play on Hard Mode.

[It would make their life a living...okay, no. Wrong game.]

But in the end, it's just a video game with a good view. Being here has given you a leg out of that void for the moment, provided your Puppeteer allows you to stay for longer. Which is why I recommend you enjoy it.

[Play ping-pong. Go eat something. Give Sans a metaphorical heart attack. Go crazy.]

sobs

[unvoid]

I WILL NOT BE STAYING.

[His tone is crisp and flat and brooks no argument.]

ONE CANNOT APPLY ONESELF TO ENGAGE WITH A PERSON THAT HAS NEVER TRULY EXISTED.

[Alas, but he knows what he is. He has accepted it. These are the consequences for his actions, for that high-velocity tearing and discharging of geothermal and electromagnetic energy across several different functional outlets.]

[catinthemask]

[Perhaps that was it. The consequences. The true difference between their worlds. OFF was like a hamster's wheel and either the Switch was pulled or not. The player held the responsibility of which side to choose.

But never the consequences.]

Eh eh eh. Disjecta membra, I suppose. This is an interesting conversation. Or perhaps it's the unpredictability of this place that has made it this way. Nevertheless, if you wish to use your time finding that person then so be it. As I said before, Sans is here. I will not stop you if you wish to go.

[unvoid]

I DO, IN FACT, WISH TO SEEK HIM OUT. WE HAVE QUITE THE NUMBER OF THINGS TO DISCUSS.

[And then, a fractional pause. For a certain value of a fraction. Time is elusive as ever, and it trickles by so unpredictably. He's unused to witnessing it slink past in such a linear fashion once more.

After gaining that insight in which he sees the doors and what's behind every door, it is startling to find oneself blindsided and trapped, caught in the sequential progression of cause-and-effect instead of the retrocausal, non-causal, and anti-linear varia to which he is accustomed.]

YOU KNOW HIM, THEN?

[catinthemask]

[It's interesting, isn't it? To see a clock tick by and have it mean something. Zacharie is expecting something to trip him up one day here and this guy had done so without warning. Unpredictability was amazing.]

I do. He is quite interesting as OFF does not have skeletons, merely specters and humans and things in-between. And this is a passing observation but I am assuming that you two know each other, right dear friend?

[The conformation was all he was looking for. The 'why' didn't really matter.]

[unvoid]

[Unpredictability? He only has something like a one in sixteen chance to actively appear in the game's world, and even then it is but a fleeting contact, little more than a graying, washed-out specter, and echo of who he was, changing nothing, altering nothing, allowing nothing but lack of collision and the ability to speculate in a more immediate fashion.]

OFF. IS THIS THE NAME OF YOUR EXECUTABLE PROGRAM?

IT SEEMS WE MUST. THE NATURE OF spr_gasterblaster_0.png WOULD INDICATE AS MUCH.

so much for the 4th wall

[catinthemask]

[Exactly. A one in sixteenth chance of something so small appearing in the world. Even if it was a small blip on the radar it was something compared to a world where nothing changed but a flip of a switch.]

Yes it is. OFF, a nice game for cute children.

[But ripping apart the code is probably what led to this. Curiosity killed the cat. Those...are interesting words.]

<>Change Face Graphic: le batteur, 16, Left,
<>Play Sound: ZachMaw
<>Message: It is quite interesting to bring in words such as these.
<>Message: And I must confess I find you very interesting, amigo.
<>Message: Would it be worth hearing your name, oh vanishing one?

( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)

[unvoid]

[That is marginally more interesting than marginally interest. Something that speaks the same language he has grown accustomed to speaking and thinking and writing in - hands and code and uninterpretable swirls where they connected.

A blend of two unlike things that he now speaks again, with mild relief, if he were such a thing that experienced subjective things such as emotions, which he is not and never will be.]

}

static void Main(string[] args)
{
const string filename = "spr_mysteryman_0.png";
const string text = "beware of the man who speaks in hands%"
const string audio = "REDACTED REDACTED REDACTED"
}

DOES THAT ANSWER YOUR QUESTION?

it's sobbing in the corner, somewhere

[catinthemask]

[Who feels like they're being strangled by something that's not there? This guy. It's so much fun. FUN? Yeah, probably. His voice pitches in a way that it's not supposed to. These are not his words.]

<>Wait: 1.0 Sec
<>Change Face Graphics: le batteur, 1, Left,
<>Message: From now on, there will be no more darkness.
<>Play Sound: 00 - night
<>Change Screen Transitions: Teleport/Erase, None

[And nothing happens, thankfully. Zacharie coughs and resumes speaking.]

Ah ah ah. I believe it does. Curiouser and curiouser. You are truly a mysterious man, amigo and your appearance here is quite the event.

[And him meeting Sans, for whatever reason, would be one hell of a thing. Zacharie clearly didn't want to know the 'why' or 'how' - or maybe he just didn't care.]

[unvoid]

SO IT SEEMS. THE WORLD DOES NOT APPRECIATE BEING FORCED TO ACCOMMODATE THAT WHICH DOES NOT EXIST.

[He finds it exceedingly unlikely that he will be allowed to persist in such a manner. No, if there will be any closure to his "event," as the merchant calls it, it will progress in much the same manner that his life, his non-life, did:

A cataclysmic thing that approximates a shearing, rifting, unbearable, painful slide off the opened end of a particle accelerator, hot and impossible and painful and difficult to survey at any point in time.]

MY SOURCE CODE IS BUT CONTENT SHROUDED IN UNUSED FILES, AVAILABLE ONLY TO THOSE WHO MINE WHERE THEY ARE UNWANTED.

[catinthemask]

[Perhaps even a new world deleted data would be rejected. The system didn't work with things that were incompatible.]

I suppose I should be content that OFF does not have files that may tempt those who data mine, unless one is interested in re-reading dialog without playing the game again. From what I can judge, you have a cat that does not listen to the consequences of curiosity.

[Unwanted suggests that this man did not want to be found or found it irritating that someone dug where they shouldn't. The latter possibility. He wasn't not about to question if he felt lonely like that.]

[unvoid]

NO.

IRONICALLY ENOUGH, IT SEEMS EVERYONE IS IN AN AWFUL HURRY TO EVADE CONSEQUENCES IN A NARRATIVE FOCUSED ON NOTHING BUT.

[An excessively irritating if predictable turn of events. But then, nearly everything would and could and is considered predictable when you have borne witness to tens of thousands of iterations of the same stretches of code.

Code is not particularly flexible. It loops the same queries indefinitely, and once it has run through every possible iteration, it only continues to run.]

[catinthemask]

Perhaps some like attempting to rebel against whatever message the game is attempting to share. No matter how strong the story may be, it all depends on the Puppeteer taking it to heart. Otherwise they will continue that mobius strip over and over.

[It's funny how that works out. If you get nothing out of the story, why continue?]

It is interesting how it works out. But as a merchant all I can do is watch. Eh eh eh.

[unvoid]

CURSED TO OBSERVE, NEVER TO INTERFERE.

[If this thing in the shape of a man sounds disgruntled, draw no parallels between tone and intent. He is beyond such things now, and forever will be.]

I BELIEVE YOU GOT A FAR BETTER DEAL THAN I.

[catinthemask]

[He won't. Keep it simple at this point, even if they are speaking about existence and non-existence.]

I agree with that. Observation is easier if you are physically there. And, naturally, I would be out of credits! That is very serious to me.

[Hence why he'll probably never use the closets to get it. It only works if someone buys from him.]

But nevertheless we should move this scene forward. If your time is short then the event with me must be shortened in turn. Still, I thank you for taking time to speak with me. It was...very, very interesting.

[It was probably not his own words there, but it was eye opening.]

[unvoid]

I AM SURE IT WAS

VERY

VERY

INTERESTING.

[His eyesockets widen imperceptibly, vibrant with a low-level glow of light that winks out as soon as it flares to life. Its color is difficult to name. Perhaps it is the color of nothing.]

PRAY YOU NEVER SEE ME AGAIN.

[On that completely unnecessarily ominous note - he always did have a flare for the dramatic, from the cut of his overly long, elegantly flowing coat to the phraseology of his entries - the thing that both is and is not in the shape of a man dematerializes.

It as if it was never there.

In fact, it never was there.

Who were you talking to again?]

[catinthemask]

[He lets out a breath he didn't think he was holding and then [ ] was gone.

?

Yeah, that thing. Deleted data fell through his fingers like plastic water and left him standing there alone.

<>Change Face Graphics:
<>Message: [Retractedretractedretracted]
<>Change System BGM: Silence]

Eh eh eh.

[<>Change Screen Transitions: Teleport/Erase, Anywhere

And then Zacharie's gone.]