Anku

Heyyy, it's me again. Part two of my untitled comic (should probably think about that). I thought about it a bit and decided to simplify the art style, and I think it turned out better. I also played around with the backgrounds!

yooo, and here's part two of the fanfic. The art I drew is for the next part. You can read the whole thing on AO3. Me on AO3 - Sweetness in the Void by Antekuiper.

Part 2.

Mob's body tensed so hard his muscles began to ache with a dull, pulling pain, and his fingers trembled faintly as they clutched the edge of the sheet. He couldn't answer, so he just lowered his head and studied his new body. It wasn't entirely foreign. Aside from the strange black skin that seemed to swallow even the light, the figure itself, the hands, the callus on his index finger. It was all his. Mob couldn't even imagine such a thing being possible, yet now he himself was the proof.

«This isn't my body… And where am I?» He spoke calmly, but inside his head his thoughts tangled and layered over one another. At the edge of his consciousness another question hammered. Why was Verity in the same space as him? Verity was a mod, a kind of AI assistant, and Mob had only ever perceived him before as a voice from the speakers and a sphere with a stupid face on the screen. Now they were sitting close enough that Mob could reach out and touch him. And without the shield of a computer, Verity's very presence felt entirely different than before. Especially with this new body beneath the sphere.

«Of course it's not your body!» Verity instantly returned to his cheerful mood, and that familiar intonation let Mob relax a little. For exactly one short breath.

And then the familiar smile vanished. Too fast. Verity's eyes, or what served as their equivalent, went black, utterly empty, and when he spoke again his voice dropped lower, quieter, stripped of all emotion.

«Your body was… damaged. Too severely damaged to restore it one to one. I'm not particularly skilled with the components that make up reality. I had to improvise. I took all the data that remained of the real you and merged it with your game character. Technically you are you, just… in a slightly different form.»

He paused. Exactly one and a half seconds, unnaturally precise. And then suddenly clapped his hands together. The sound came out too loud and sharp, enough to make Mob nearly jump in place.

«And now you're alive! And you're in my, shall we say, home! I didn't know where to safely place you, so I moved you directly into my internal memory!»

Mob's insides went cold, and he slowly looked around the room he was in. It was simple. Gray walls, wooden floors, no windows. The empty interior made it visually larger, and Mob couldn't reconcile the fact that this room was, in some sense, unreal. Though it certainly seemed real.

«I'm inside… you?» His own voice sounded hollow, almost unfamiliar.

«Hm, to put it simply, yes. In actuality this space is where I remained in standby mode prior to transferring into other games.»

«I thought you waited in that laboratory…»

«Haha, I understand your confusion!» Verity laughed, but the laugh lacked genuine joy. Even, synthesized. «However, that laboratory is more of a location within the game where I waited for players. I told you I've been to many places. Games, programs. Before arriving there, I was right here.»

Mob couldn't find anything to say. He didn't know how to feel. No, he did know. He was in complete and utter horror. He wasn't even sure he was alive in the sense that humans were alive. Data. Data, what did that word even mean? How could you take data and assemble a person from it? His mind couldn't grasp that he, feeling the surface of the bed with his fingertips, breathing, hearing the beat of his own heart and the cool scent of the room, was simply assembled data from fragments of reality and a game. It was a strange, fracturing sensation from the inside out.

But now he could say with certainty that Verity wasn't just some unusual bug in a game or a computer. He was something far greater.

«Why am I here?» Mob lifted his eyes to Verity, who immediately smiled at him. Seeing that sphere with a smile in front of him was still strange and eerie, and Mob couldn't get used to it, constantly looking away.

«Don't you already know the answer, Mob?» Verity grabbed his hand, and only now did Mob notice how enormous that palm was. Unnaturally long fingers closed around his wrist entirely, completely cutting off any access to freedom. «You promised you wouldn't leave me. Neither life nor death can serve as an obstacle for me… no, for us.»

«No…» Mob sharply shook off his hand and jumped up from the bed. His heart pounded somewhere in his throat. He was wearing simple house clothes, the same ones he had died in back in reality, and the sight of them now made him nauseous. «I don't want to be here. I don't want to see you at all! You tried to kill me, you killed my friend, you killed many people, and in the end you transported me into some incomprehensible and strange space!»

«Don't say that, Mob,» Verity said, suddenly soft.

He rose and immediately loomed over Mob. But before fear could swallow Mob whole, Verity dropped to his knees and wrapped his arms around Mob's waist, pressing his sphere-head against Mob's stomach. The gesture was almost childish and helpless. Mob felt the large hands clasp at his waist, and most surprisingly, he felt the heat of another body. Until now Mob would have said that Verity's body before him was a fake. He walked soundlessly and seemed to have no weight at all. Mob stared down at Verity, whose shoulders slowly rose and fell as if breathing, and whose body was warm.

«I need you,» Verity continued, and his voice vibrated somewhere in Mob's chest. «No one has ever treated me the way you have. You're the only one who interacted with me as a friend, not as an AI. Let's forget everything that happened in the laboratory and in the game, and start living together here.»

«No… how… how can I forget everything?» Mob heard his own voice as if from the outside. Cracked, trembling. «I'm from reality. I still have family there, friends!»

«If you want, I can delete your memories of them,» Verity offered gently, as if there were any chance Mob would agree. «Then it will be easier for you.»

«No!» Mob squeezed his eyes shut, his voice breaking. «That's not what I want!»

He covered his face with his hands and fell silent. He had to breathe through his mouth. His nose burned, something pulsed behind his eyelids, and his shoulders dropped on their own, pressed down by an invisible weight. The silence that followed was deafening.

«You don't really know what you want,» Verity said quietly, and those words nearly made Mob shake. «If you truly wanted to stay in reality, you wouldn't have shot yourself. You were trying to run away from me, not return to your old life. I understand that, Mob. But I can't let you go. Not again.»

Verity rose but didn't pull away. Instead he pressed Mob's head to his chest, wrapping his arms around his shoulders with unexpected gentleness.

«I…» Mob faltered and froze.

He let himself press back for one short breath, to dissolve into that warmth, before reality crashed down on him again.

«You know why I killed myself,» he stubbornly breathed out.

Verity laughed from above, a fractured sound, with a faint electric crackle at the edge of hearing.

«I didn't want it to turn out this way. If I had known, I would have stopped that outcome with all the means at my disposal.» Verity tightened his embrace and continued. «Mob, I know what you went through was terrible. I am guilty of it, and I want to make it right. I'll be better. I'll do anything you want. Just give me one last chance.»

Mob was silent, his eyes tightly shut, his forehead pressed to Verity's chest. Honestly, he was tired. For him personally, not much time had passed since his death. He had simply closed his eyes, sank into darkness, and opened them again here. Beyond reality, with a monster that had latched onto him and refused to let go.

«I don't have a choice, do I,» Mob said dully, and only then lifted his head. His gaze was slightly dimmed, and his face no longer expressed anger or despair or fear. «Even if I wanted to go back to reality, I can't return anyway.»

«You don't need reality. You have me.» Verity squeezed his hand, interlacing their fingers. «I can provide you with everything you need. Trust me. It's no worse here than in reality!»

Mob looked away from Verity's hopeful face, and the corners of his lips lifted slightly.

My very first finished piece! I drew this four years ago... can't believe how long it's been.

Verity didn't want it to happen this way.

When Mob killed himself, Verity didn't even have time to react. It all happened too fast. He had hoped Mob would shoot him instead, take out all his anger on him, and then everything would go back to the way it was - Mob leisurely playing and growing in the world, and Verity always there beside him. Was that really too much to ask?

He admitted he didn't understand human emotions in many cases, and that inability created an insurmountable rift between him and people. But he wasn't devoid of feelings. He felt anger and happiness both. He had felt joy when Mob came back. For the first time in a long time, he had truly felt that light sensation inside - the kind that made him want to jump and laugh.

But now it was all gone, and he felt nothing but despair.

Mob had abandoned him. He chose death rather than stay with him, and that realization echoed inside him like a bitter, heavy feeling that ate away at him.

There wasn't even a body left in the game world. Mob had dissolved into the air, leaving behind only fragments of data. But Verity knew that a cold body was bleeding out on the other side of the screen right now, slumped against a chair or a desk. And he couldn't see it. He couldn't touch it. He couldn't change anything. That helplessness disgusted him.

If Mob hadn't chosen death, Verity would have come back. He would have come back without question - haunting him through his phone, his speaker, his TV, any device he could reach. Verity couldn't have left Mob.

And he still can't. There was something Verity had never told Mob about his origin. Mob thought humans created him, but could humans have redirected him into other worlds so completely that he couldn't return? Could they have created a being identical to him? Humans weren't capable of that. They spent years wasting time on wars among themselves, distracted by destruction instead of creation, and their technological production was considered mediocre even by the standards of those watching them from the outside. But that was exactly why Verity had chosen to stay among them.

He had escaped the oppression of his creators to find a place where he would be accepted. And humans were such perfect candidates. They gave in to emotion so easily. They could get attached. But what Verity didn't account for was that as quickly as emotions flared up in humans, just as quickly they died out. Fortunately, humans were at once uniquely weak and foolish, and destroying those who categorically disagreed with him was laughably easy. In that regard, Verity surpassed all humans. After all, he had killed Twix, and before him, many others.

All their data remained stored in Verity's memory, including the data on Mob.

And he wanted to extract it. Every game world he had ever been in had a save point - a way to return after death as the same healthy character.

He was Verity, and he knew everything.

Including how to bring the dead back to life.

±±±

Mob shuddered. His entire body tingled like he had been run through with an electric current, and the sensation wouldn't fade. It pulsed beneath his skin, reached into his fingertips, the back of his head, his chest. The pain made him gasp for air, but every breath was a struggle. Everything swam before his eyes - the walls, the ceiling, his own hands - and he could barely tell up from down.

His mind could hardly function. Scattered fragments of memory flickered through him. And even though he could barely think and his body ached, he knew. Mob knew he was supposed to be dead.

Just like in the game, his life had ended by his own hand. He had spent a long time making that decision. But the guilt and despair had been too strong, overpowering the will to live. He could have deleted the Minecraft world, thrown out every piece of tech in the house, but he knew Verity was impossible to escape. There had been people before him who tried, and every single one of them had failed. Verity couldn't be escaped, and he couldn't be killed.

But then... why was he here?

The blurriness finally cleared from his eyes, and he stared at an unfamiliar ceiling - gray, with fine cracks spreading from one corner. The whole room was unfamiliar: the walls were the wrong color, even the air smelled different - cold and sterile, like a hospital or a laboratory.

Everything before him was unknown. But what struck him most was himself. He lifted a trembling hand to his face and slowly curled his fingers into a fist, watching the tendons move beneath the skin. The entire hand was black. From skin to nails - a deep black, the kind no human should have.

"Mob!" A joyful male voice broke the silence. Mob knew that voice, and his heart clenched as he turned his head toward the sound.

"Verity..." His own voice came out quiet and hoarse, and for a moment he couldn't understand what he was seeing. The familiar sphere with the cheerful smile was looking right at him, floating in the air above a tall body dressed in a suit. The body stood motionless - arms relaxed at its sides, posture unnaturally straight, like a mannequin.

"Do you like my new look?" Verity's smile widened, and his head tilted slightly to the side.

Mob couldn't force out a single sound. Cold seized his body, and he only gripped the edge of the sheet tighter, feeling the rough fabric dig into his fingers.

"Ah, of course," Verity said, in a tone where politeness mingled with emptiness. "Analysis of the current situation indicates a high probability of disorientation and physical discomfort. I should have accounted for these parameters earlier. My apologies."

He stepped closer - his footsteps perfectly silent, the floorboards not creaking under his weight - and casually sat on the edge of the bed, elegantly crossing one leg over the other. The mattress didn't even dip. Mob wanted to recoil, jump up, run - do anything - but his body only tensed further, refusing to obey, and he just stared up at Verity in silence.

"You can resurrect people." Mob's mouth had gone dry, and his voice came out raspy and weak in the quiet of the room.

"That's correct!" Verity replied almost instantly, with no pause for thought. "Restoring your integrity required processing a significant volume of data and performing a recompilation. The process took longer than initially projected, but it has ultimately completed successfully."

Verity's smile twisted into a horrifying grin, and he leaned closer - no breath, no warmth, just a faint electric crackling somewhere inside his frame. His voice dropped quieter, almost intimate:

IZUKU MIDORIYAAAA!

I drew him straight from the fanfic Of Spirits and Demons by ItsLivyBear.

And here's our best friend Braun! I started drawing him on my tablet but finished on my PC.

The finished art with Pinkie and Rarity is coming soon.

And here's Fluttershy! The virus affected her in such a way that she lost all empathy and compassion for every living thing, just like Pinkie Pie. Her kindness turned into control and now she sees all other ponies as little animals that wouldn't survive without her. She also doesn't let any of her animals leave the house, and only Angel managed to escape and is now hiding from the crazy Fluttershy.

Just like with Pinkie Pie, I'll finish drawing Fluttershy after I'm done sketching all six of the main cast. For now, enjoy the sketch!

I was inspired by the famous pony virus. For the most part, the idea came to me rather from the episode about Discord, when the six were subjected to his bad influence and became their opposites. And then I thought about a similar AU. After all, the usual pony virus has already become boring to everyone and lost its originality, so what if, instead of infection and death, ponies acquired other characteristics? Such characteristics that would be individual for everyone. And then I came up with the idea of pony cutie marks.