"Dark Messiah Cross!!"

Triese wasn't sure what she was going to get out of watching the Luminous Revival finals for the fifteenth time, but some part of her deep down hoped that she would manage an absurd breakthrough by catching the tiniest of details. Lan had been feeling horrible lately, and she refused to elaborate on why, other than that she needed to prove that she wasn't a monster. Try as she might to reassure her, Triese knew that Lan wanted answers more than comfort. Some explanation about why things ended up the way they did, about why her and her Navi siphoned so much power off of an inexplicable element like bug fragments.

Bugs were something even her dad, who was obviously way smarter than her, couldn't figure out, so part of her wondered why she was even trying, but she refused to let Lan's plight slip away from her, especially when it worried Iris so much. So she and Lurerre ventured into the Undernet, farmed as many bug fragments as they could, and built a test environment for Triese to mess around with them in; Lurerre was nervous about the whole ordeal, but she relented after Triese insisted that she would perform experiments in the absolute safest way possible. Her makeshift laboratory was condemned to a separate server, which she only ever connected to with her PET to get Lurerre inside. Nothing bad was going to get out of here if she could help it.

And so began the trial and error. Triese had messed around with programming in her off-time, but she hadn't really tried to make something custom before; part of that was because making something like a Battle Chip seemed to be above her paygrade (and also cheating!!). But this was for Lan, and she really needed to do something to repay Lan!

She kept thinking back to how the viruses in Reg's world had happily accepted the bug fragments they'd brought. If viruses still liked them, and they were different enough now to just... substantiate in the real world, then there had to be some sort of connection, right?! Especially because Lan's eyes kept turning red and stuff! And all the other weird things! There was some bizarre magic throughline going on here, and she was going to figure it out by jamming a million random things together until something weird happened!! Put a Mystery Data in there! Light the BugFrags on fire! Stick them together! Bind them with rope! Electrocute them! Teleport them and drop them from a million pixels above her homepage! Edit random values she didn't know the meaning of in a hex editor!

"I cannot help but wonder," Iris had mused to her. "If there is some sort of 'humanity' to these bug fragments. After all, in the coding sense, bugs typically only exist because of human error..."

It was now the weekend, and Triese had spent the past hour lounging on her bed scrolling through the chatroom. There wasn't even a conversation going on at the moment - she was just backreading, perhaps out of the same vain hope that kept her rewatching Luminous Revival. Maybe she should just ask around. Surely there had to be someone who came from some world where bugs were all solved and super well documented. But even Reg, who had a whole 400 years of extra knowledge under his belt, seemed to not know anything...

"Lady Triese?" Lurerre interjected, after a particularly lengthy stare at an old conversation surrounding the incident on the train that Lan didn't like talking about. "You've been quiet. May I recommend doing something else today?" She paused. "I hate to admit it, but I don't believe that further BugFrag research will bare any fruit, for now. I am worried that if you resort to more volatile substances-"

A red square flashed on Triese's PET for a second, though she didn't notice it.

"Yeah, yeah, I knoooow," Triese sighed. "I mean, there's only so many inanimate objects that have meaningful differences to test, and I'm, like... I'm not going to throw things that are sentient at the bugs, that's just wrong!" She slammed her hand on the bedsheet in frustration, tilting her head back. "Are we really going to have to do something crazy to find an X-factor? I just feel like a kid glueing her toys together! The bugs aren't reacting at all!"

Another red square flashed in the bottom right. Triese always carried bugs in her PET, of course. She needed them to feed viruses. They never did anything when they were just being stored there, anyways.

"Lady Triese, there's no need to..." Lurerre began to protest, before giving up and trying to change the subject. "Why not... er... call Iris? Or something like that? I'm certain that she would like to, uh... hang out..."

Location Data Location History
ACDC Town Electopia 123928x1740y150076z
ACDC Town Electopia 1239608x1730y132035z
ACDC Town Electopia 123001x1759y191205z
ACDC Town Electopia 122789x1730y110689z
XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

The data scuttled around like a bug, having festered ever since it connected to that broken, empty Net with not a single Navi left. It was filled with unrecognizeable data, only compatible with Triese's PET through some miracle of fate, it was truly a miracle that it didn't kill Lurerre on the spot just for existing there Fatal error at access0x000000

Before Triese could respond, a harsh noise emitted from her PET's speakers, startling her so badly that she launched backward into her headrest. The noise kept going, and in desperation, she slapped her PET face-down to muffle the noise. "Wh-what the-?! What is that?!" she shouted. "Lurerre?!"

"I-is there an error-?" Lurerre's muffled voice wondered. The noise changed pitch just as Lurerre dived deeper into the PET's internals; it wasn't often that she needed to manifest inside of the system memory rather than the homepage, but she hadn't noticed anything there, and they weren't connected to any network, so there was no other explanation for oh my God what the hell is that. "Wh-what is this...?!" Lurerre shouted, stunned when she materialized inside of the small, dark room only to find a jittery, flickering red mist covering everything. "Lady Triese, there appears to be a serious technical problem with the PET-"

Any attempt at problem solving was interjected by a buzzing noise coming from behind Triese in real life. She turned her head only to just barely catch a chatroom portal closing right behind her. "What-" was all she could get out before the same sound buzzed to her right, and then just in front of her, and all around her... "Why are portals opening?!"

She hesitated for a little too long. It wasn't like anything could have prepared her for a situation like this, and it all happened too quickly to really process, but maybe if she hadn't locked up out of some inexplicable fear, some irrational idea that she was going to fall asleep and find herself strapped at a table ~~again~~ because she wanted to know too much, then she could've bought herself a few more seconds. Instead, a portal opened up directly underneath her, right on top of her bed, that scooped her and her PET up and closed right behind her.

After the first few seconds of shock passed and Triese came to, she found herself hidden away in the trees just next to a park that she'd never seen before. Her pupils dilated from how much light was immediately beamed into her eyes. Not just natural light - neon lights as well, shimmering in the air to mimic a water fountain, or form a plaque on a nearby statue, or as part of the outer facade of some store named "BIG WAVE"-

"L-Lurerre?" Triese muttered to herself, rubbing the side of her head. Her PET was right next to her, no longer emitting the harsh noise but having had its display completely consumed by static. In a panic, Triese scooped up her PET, holding it close to her face. "Lurerre?! Are you there?! Please tell me you're there!" she whispered harshly.

"- - - -her- - - int- - - -re - - n- -," an incredibly distorted voice, still barely recognizable as Lurerre, said. "L-a- - - - j-a-c- - - - s-o-m- - - -e-r-e-"

She needed to find some place where she could actually talk to her Navi. Right! She could do that. Definitely! As soon as she... figured out where she was.

Slowly, she managed to right herself and dust herself off, jumping out of the trees once she was ready. She was lucky that there was no one else around, given that she probably looked like a horribly lost child right about now. She really... really had no idea where she was. At least it was pretty... and very well-kept. She got the distinct sense that this park had probably been renovated fairly recently, with how modern it looked.

snoruntpyro