[text adventure] Enter Xandra. (Book Zero, Chapter II.)

[Midtime]

> Grab the charm by its string and see if we can make it through the crack.

You crawl forward through the spreading puddle of water and seize the string of the charm. Instantly the flow of water ceases, and -

 

Another terrific bang rings in your ears as wax explodes from your clothes and skin, sizzling and smoking. But quickly you realise it has not touched you; you feel no pain. Even the sound was slightly muffled, as if heard through a thick pane of glass. You are no longer on fire. The charm is protecting you.

 

Renewed in confidence, you rise, a little shakily, and approach the door. The crack runs almost two-thirds of the way down the door. The monstrous eye stares straight ahead, both halves of its pupil missing you. But the gap is only a few centimetres in width; you can't even see what is on the other side.

 

Hoping to prise it open, you grip the two sides of the crack and pull - but the door has no hinges to hold it in place, and it topples towards you.

 

Reflexively, you push it back, and it slips out of the frame in the other direction. You see it fall away, and vanish.

 

For on the other side are a single doorway, streaming bright light, no more than a few metres distant, and - your mind shivers with the resonance of recognition - and nothing else, no walls, no floor, but instead a formless abyss that has no end, because even the maker of this door has never seen what lies beyond it.

 

When your gaze passes into the void, the void grips it and tugs; you stagger, and brace yourself on the doorway.

 

So it reaches into your eyes - through your optic nerves - wraps itself around the base of the brain and the spinal cord - gathers up the ends of your sensory neurons - and pulls you, with immeasurable force, out through the door and into unreality. The light vanishes.

 

= o =

It spreads you out like a boxful of toys and you can feel yourself coming apart: fur uprooting, skin peeling loose, muscle fibres unravelling, bone dissolving, organs detaching, everything drifting away and becoming part of the void; for gravity and electromagnetic attraction, the ropes that hold ordinary matter together, snap at its touch. You know this void, this placid emptiness. Why is it hurting you?

 

Who are you?

 

Your pain, lost. Something else's pain, now. The pain of a coat, the pain of a book, the unfelt pain of a child waiting to come into being.

 

You were so close. Who are you?

 

Your anger, lost. Your fear, lost. Your cauldron of bubbling memories is upturned, and its contents are flowing away...

 

But with the last of your determination you reach out and grasp at them. You had been thinking about them, tentatively joining one thing to another, forming connections and correlations; you cannot give up now.

 

Who are you?

 

You are hated by the fays that represent Neopia's elements, and imprisoned by them in a garden of their making. (They decorated it with yellow carnations.)

 

You are familiar with magic and with the unfathomable arts and powers of Faerie.

 

You are a Xweetok with spotted fur.

 

Who are you?

 

Clues and hints and ideas drift away as the void erodes at your brain. It is absorbing you because it does not know that you exist. You are missing the central keystone that differentiates form from formlessness, and which separates you from the void. As it destroys you, turning you into mist, this sole conviction remains: what you are missing is a name.

 

 

 

What is your name? Who are you?

 

> _

[antiaircraft]

I know this one...

 

> My name is Xandra!

[Midtime]

There is almost nothing left of you - and yet you strive. With the remains of hands you grope in the void for the answer to this last riddle, and neurons struggle to blast their messages across decaying synapses, and it comes to you - gradually - slowly - inevitably...

 

> My name is

worthless. Your mind seizes up like a ship running aground. You panic, thrashing, losing parts of yourself. What is left? Your curiosity, your habits, your love, a little of your indefatigable will. Something stops you, blinds you, turns you aside - an invisible wall barring you from the one thing you need to survive.

 

Again you reach out.

 

 

> My name is

forfeit. Something alien tries to worm its way into your head, tearing away at the grip of your reason in order to make room for itself; it loosens something, and you lose your love.

 

What can you do but try again?

 

 

> My name is

replaced.

 

But you are unyielding. Finally you pry past the mental barrier, for the perfect suitability of the answer has grown too obvious to conceal. It is in reach - you know it. You swipe at it with an insubstantial arm, and something clicks, and you lay hold.

 

 

=X=

chapter ii. remembrance.

> My name is Xandra!

And you do exist.

 

The pathways of your being light up brilliantly, and a new solidity emerges from the nothingness like new land out of the surface of the ocean. Calling upon the deepest crannies of your memory, you reach out and begin to reclaim the many parts of yourself.

 

The vertebrae of your spine must be arranged in the correct order and fashion, and the vault of your ribs cannot be too wide or narrow; the veins and arteries must be delicately laid together, end to end, and sealed without the slightest gap or tear, before the heart can beat again and fill your cold limbs with the warmth of a newborn star. With infinite patience and care, thinking of nothing else for the insignificant aeons it takes, you bind your skeleton together with ligaments and join the muscle to it with tendons, and rebuild the fluid-filled cavities for your internal organs, and replace the optic nerves that were frayed by the eager pull of the white void. And a small breath of air inflates the hollows of your lungs, as the wind blows in caves opened to the surface; you are alive.

 

But this breath grows quickly stale, and unable to see beyond the limits of your own body, you at last begin to reshape your mind.

 

You are Xandra, a sorceress. Unsatisfied in your excellence merely to practice magic, you entered the incipient field of magic empiricism, and for twenty years you searched in vain for the foundations of a theory, no matter how basic and tentative, that would convince academia that the forces which govern the world could be studied.

 

You are Xandra, a student. Your accomplishments brought you to the attention of higher powers. Fyora, the Queen of all the fays, summoned you from Brightvale to her court one day; it was she who initiated you in the secrets of the fays, showing you what no Neopet had ever before been shown.

 

You are Xandra, a secretary. The Queen set you over one of her libraries, and into your keeping came many faerie artefacts whose magic permitted none other than you to discern their purpose. Through Fyora's confidence you discovered the meaning of many secrets, but their meaning is hidden from you once more.

 

What you remember next makes you shiver with dread, but you can only plunge on.

 

You are Xandra, a conspirator. You betrayed the trust of the Queen you had known so long, and for reasons impossible to fathom prepared to destroy the kingdom of the fays. In mad desperation you consulted with those who deal in curses and histories, purchasing from them a bag of fermenting grudges and the location of an amulet which served as a prison.

 

You are Xandra, a rebel. Within the prison was a nameless monster that had been condemned to eternal death, and its undying army. You cast a spell that turned the fays to stone and brought the faerie kingdom plummeting to the ground. You summoned your army and prepared to conquer the world. You wanted to rule.

 

Why?

 

In your mind's eye the final expression of Hubrid Nox lingers, impossible to erase.

 

You are Xandra, a villain. And you were defeated by heroes. The Ixi's last words resonate in your mind: "Someone has to stop you." What else is that but Neopolity at work?

 

Vengeance shall teach you what you have done.

 

 

 

But there is no denying your name. You are Xandra, for better or for worse.

 

You raise new arms and open new eyes. You are fully conscious of the twitch of the muscles that narrow your pupils, and perceive the brief rush of activity in your visual cortices as if it were a tangible sensation. You feel free, liberated in a way you have never been before; you have recreated yourself, and now you are whole.

 

As sections of your brain gradually flicker to life again, the thought enters your mind that nothing will happen without your beginning it.

 

The uncreated void hangs at your fingertips, docile and malleable, waiting for you to make it substance. At the same time, you are surrounded by physical vacuum, cold and empty. Your new lungs and ears and skin cry out to you in pain: life requires creation.

 

What will you do?

 

> _

 

 

 

User interface.

 

 

User interface: unlocked.

With the beginning of a new chapter come a few experimental changes to the format. The user interface has two primary purposes: to indicate the passing of notable events, and to provide a list of accomplished magical feats, for your reference. New additions are made to the list both when new spells are formulated, and when old spells are remembered. It is not an exhaustive list of what can be done; under the correct conditions, magic has no boundaries.

 

Title of adventure: discovered.

Congratulations.

 

Magic.

 

You have:

 

New. Ignited Neovian fire.

• One of the magical items you obtained from the dealers in curses and histories was a large pouch of cursed trinkets. These had been left, like bean curds, to ferment, until the grudges they embodied were ripe and potent. Though it was recommended to you as a gift for an unpleasant relative, you instead found a way to employ their unquenchable hatred as a more direct and practical weapon. Neovian fire is green, cold, and purely destructive; it needs only oxygen and hope to burn.
• You have opened the bag, setting the curses free. A small part of them still lingers in the objects themselves, but it is reasonable to assume that the rest has gone elsewhere. The amount of hatred that remains is not sufficient to create fire with on its own.

New. Created yourself.

• The void of uncreation always bewildered you. The fays were able to pluck objects out of the mist, things of their wildest fancies, without the slightest effort. By use of a name, your own, you have for the first time succeeded in engendering substance from the void's ineffable potential.
• Following your success, you feel you have grasped the essence of the void at last. New acts of creation and alteration are possible.

 

 

 

Author's notes.

 

 

[[ I have been waiting for this post since the day I started the adventure. I only have two readers, and I am deeply grateful to both of them for their patience and participation. (Though if there are others, I would be every bit as glad to hear from you!) It has been a pleasure so far, and I hope it will be for some time to come.

 

Thank you for reading the first chapter of Enter Xandra. It's time to begin the second. ]]

 

[antiaircraft]

Hmm... So how does this void work, exactly?

[Midtime]

Hmm... So how does this void work, exactly?

You cannot say exactly. But with your new understanding, you perceive that it is not emptiness, as you first thought; it is something like...

 

A weightless cloud of supercooled vapour, prepared to solidify at the first crystallisation point?

 

Thread stretched over a frame that passes back and forth under your hands, changing colour and shape?

 

Whatever definition you can think of is only an imperfect analogy, for you don't perfectly understand its workings.

 

Perhaps this metaphor will serve best: it is a three-dimensional elastic membrane, perfectly motionless, stretched taut with possibility. Sufficiently sensitive fingers can pluck at it in just the right way to produce - a vibration, a harmony of ten trillion waveforms, a physical object.

 

The void is full of this potential. It is all bound up in a constant chaotic static sound, but the energy, as it were, is present, and you believe you can create anything out of it that you can imagine without an extraordinary effort, to the exact level of detail you imagine it at.

 

You have less confidence in your ability to maintain something whose definite shape is beyond your mental grasp. It would be wisest to begin with something simple - or something that you understand well.

 

Something in your head pops.

 

The pain of decompression and the biting cold of vacuum are making it difficult to concentrate.

 

You must set boundaries to protect yourself. But what will you make?

 

A ship? A room? A planet?

 

> _

 

 

 

User interface.

 

 

Time: passed.

Your remaining lifespan is currently in a state of superposition. In the one possibility, you have four updates remaining. There are several others, but avoiding collapse into this particular future is currently a defined priority.

 

Magic.

 

You have:

 

Ignited Neovian fire.

• One of the magical items you obtained from the dealers in curses and histories was a large pouch of cursed trinkets. These had been left, like bean curds, to ferment, until the grudges they embodied were ripe and potent. Though it was recommended to you as a gift for an unpleasant relative, you instead found a way to employ their unquenchable hatred as a more direct and practical weapon. Neovian fire is green, cold, and purely destructive; it needs only oxygen and hope to burn.
• You have opened the bag, setting the curses free. A small part of them still lingers in the objects themselves, but it is reasonable to assume that the rest has gone elsewhere. The amount of hatred that remains is not sufficient to create fire with on its own.

Created yourself.

• The void of uncreation always bewildered you. The fays were able to pluck objects out of its intangible mist, things of their wildest fancies, without the slightest effort. By use of a name, your own, you have for the first time succeeded in engendering substance from the void's ineffable potential.
• Following your success, you feel you have grasped the essence of the void at last. New acts of creation and alteration are possible.