Metro hi hello what are you uppp to?? What’s your living situation and more importantly your uh origin, considering some recent art a certain creator made?? You certainly do not look like the Errors in other multiverses, respectfully…
Well Metro fuck you I can’t keep secrets and I will tell them… EVERYTHING
“NOW WHY WOULD YOU DO THAT???” ~Metro
Sit down, it’s gonna be a long one, big story time…
Part One: The Part Where Everything Was Fine
Lemon Dorfic, or just Dorfic if you weren't being formal about it, was not someone who worried. That was the whole point of having built something that worked. His universe ran tight. Every AU had its place, every timeline filed and accounted for, no loose ends. He was an outcode, the admin, which meant he existed outside every specific AU and above all of them at once, and he had done his job well enough that the universe ran without him having to fight it on a daily basis.
He lived in Neo Outertale 2000s Edition. You can probably picture it. Futuristic, neon-soaked, perpetually playing music that felt like it came from somewhere just slightly more optimistic than reality. A style archive. A music archive. Something that people in the real world could access like MySpace. Aero Sans, also called Space Bubble, had built the place into what it was and was tied to it since it was his home au. Dorfic wasn't tied to anything, admin status meant he floated above all of it technically, but he stayed because Neo Outertale was peaceful and he loved it and peace was something he had earned. Plus he has always had a little crush on Aero.
The universe they lived in was old. Not crumbling, not on fire, just old, and aging the slow quiet way fandoms age when the attention starts going elsewhere. Creators lose interest in increments. One less story posted, one less person making something new, the existing work going longer between updates until it stops updating at all. Dorfic noticed. His answer was to tighten the rules. Structure, he figured, was how you preserved things. You kept the walls solid and nothing slipped out, mhm.
He was the best at keeping walls solid. He knew that.
Idea Sans had always looked up to him. That was the natural order of things and Dorfic had never had a reason to question it. Idea was enthusiastic, always generating something new, bouncing concepts off Dorfic like Dorfic was a wall and Idea just wanted to watch things ricochet. Dorfic tolerated it. Sometimes he even enjoyed it.
So when Idea sat down and said, without softening it, "your rules are what's killing it," Dorfic's first reaction was to laugh.
His second reaction was DEFINITELY not laughter.
Idea said it so plainly. The universe was boring now. Creators had stopped showing up because anything new they tried to build got clipped or squeezed into whatever shape Dorfic had already decided was acceptable. Interesting projects got neglected because nobody cared enough to fight for them under that amount of restriction. The people who used to make things had left, and the people still there had stopped making things, and the whole place was coasting toward irrelevance on the fumes of its own old work. It pained Idea. He said that. He said it pained him to watch stories that could have been something get abandoned because nobody was willing to care about them anymore, because caring had started to feel pointless under all that control.
Dorfic told him he was wrong. He explained at considerable length why structure was not the problem, why Idea's perspective was the perspective of someone who had never actually had to maintain anything, why chaos was not a design feature. He was very thorough. He felt he covered every relevant point.
Then decided he was building something new to prove Dorfic wrong.
He explained it in pieces over too many conversations. A parallel universe, he said, tied directly to creation itself. Every time someone in the real world made a new AU, wrote a new story, drew a new character and decided it mattered, that thing would appear in Drifterverse automatically. A living archive, fed by the one thing fandom never actually ran out of. New ideas. Always new ideas, no matter how many old ones went quiet.
Dorfic asked what the selection process was. Who reviewed what came in. What the approval criteria looked like.
Idea said there wasn't one.
"It appears when someone creates it. That's the point. They'll love it!"
Dorfic told him that was the most irresponsible design decision he had ever heard.
He was right. He just wasn't paying close enough attention to how specifically, personally right he was.
Idea also mentioned, during one of these conversations and without particular emphasis, that Aero had already given permission for a replica of Neo Outertale to transfer over. A backup, Aero said. Just in case. The peaceful neon archive Dorfic had chosen to call home was going to exist inside Idea's experiment whether or not Dorfic ever agreed to any of it. Aero wasn't trying to hurt him. Aero was being practical, was trying to make sure Neo Outertale survived in some form if the old universe kept declining. Dorfic understood that. It didn't make the feeling go away.
"Come look at it first," Idea said. "Before you make up your mind."
Dorfic went to point out the flaws. He had a list forming already.
He didn't find the flaws immediately.
Drifterverse was enormous, it silenced the part of his brain that had been composing criticisms. Light years of real space between Concepts, each holding a story with its own people and its own branching timelines reaching out like roots going looking for water. The Time Dimension threaded through all of it, strings and tethers connecting souls to their timelines, a web so complex and layered it should have looked incomprehensible and instead looked like something almost readable if you stood still long enough. You could compare it to brain nerves.
Dorfic stood still. He looked. Stared, even.
"Everything that gets made can be kept here," Idea said. "Old AUs, new ones, niche things that three people cared about enormously. Nothing gets really lost. Even if it's forgotten. Nothing fades out just because the crowd moved on. This is the one that matters. The one true universe. A preservation heaven," he giggled.
Dorfic didn't say anything.
Then Idea held out a device.
It looked like something between a tablet and something that had no business existing, code scrolling across the screen in strings that Dorfic didn't fully recognize but understood somewhere below language. Admin access. Complete access. God-like powers. Direct contact with the underlying structure of Drifterverse, the ability to edit timestrings, build firewalls, repair corrupted timelines, patch errors before they spread.
"I want you to have this," Idea said. "I want you to run it. Nobody knows how to protect something better than you do."
Aero was there. Aero said don't turn this down. He said it with that particular sincerity that Aero had about things he meant, and he clearly meant this.
Dorfic looked at the device for a long time.
He shouldn't have. But Idea had spent years learning from him, had built something extraordinary and then looked him in the eye and said he was the right person to protect it. And Neo Outertale was already here, Aero was already here, and the old universe was probably fading behind him. Dorfic was an admin without a universe to administrate anymore, which is a hollow feeling he had not fully admitted to himself until that exact moment when the device sat warm in his hands and filled it. The code kept scrolling, and were oh too tempting.
Idea was smiling, that lightbulb above his head was bright, almost bursting from excitement.
Dorfic took the device and called it a good decision.
Part Five: Everything Idea Did Not Mention
There was actually no manual... and Dorfic regretted not questioning it earlier.
No documentation, no briefing, no file labeled "here is how Drifterverse functions and here is the complete list of ways it can hurt you." There was the device, the vast expanding universe, and the immediate practical reality that AUs were appearing at a pace Dorfic had not mentally prepared for, because the selection criteria was nothing at all, it was just "did a person somewhere think of this and commit it to creation," and people are always thinking of things, people never stop, and every single thought that became an AU became a Concept in Drifterverse the moment it existed anywhere in the real world.
Concepts were popping up constantly. Some appeared too close to each other. Some had overlapping timelines pulling at each other. The Time Dimension was getting crowded and loud and Dorfic was still figuring out what the buttons on the device did what.
Aero threw himself into it alongside him. No device, no admin access, just his bubble powers, and he gave his best to protect, blowing bubbles around Concepts that were drifting too close together, holding them apart through sheer effort while Dorfic tried to understand what the device was telling him. They worked through every hour. Neither of them said they were exhausted. They were both so obviously exhausted.
Idea was not there to offer help AT ALL.
Dorfic sent messages. No response. He tried tracing Idea through the network. Nothing. The device could do a lot of things and none of them were find the person who handed it to him and then vanished.
A few days in, Aero suggested going to check on the old universe. Just to see. Just to know it was still there, that some version of home was still accessible on the other side of everything that had happened. Dorfic agreed. He moved toward the exit.
Drifterverse did not let him leave.
He tried again. Nothing. He checked the device, went through every function he had figured out so far, tried different routes, different directions out.
There were no directions out. The admin status had locked him in the way a system locks an administrator into a critical session when active processes are running. Damn it. You don't hand someone total control over a living universe and also let them exist somewhere else. The universe keeps its admin inside it. He was inside it. The door only opened from one direction and he was standing on the wrong side of it permanently.
He had no way to find out what had happened to the original universe. He still doesn't know. Aero couldn't leave either for some reason.
He reached out to Idea immediately, the same day, the moment he understood what had happened. Every message, every channel the device gave him access to. Idea did not respond. Idea was not traceable, was nowhere Dorfic could find through any means available to him. He had handed over the keys and stepped sideways out of the picture and left Dorfic holding an endlessly expanding cage with no exits and no explanation.
Part Six: The System Starts Noticing Him
The first time his vision slurred, Dorfic put it down to stress.
The second time, one eye got stuck.
Not closed. Stuck open, locked into a targeting screen, a combat Ul overlaid on top of everything else he was trying to see. He blinked. It stayed. He pressed against it with his hand until it eventually cleared, which took longer than it should have and felt like something correcting under pressure that was not supposed to require pressure to correct. It did hurt a little, but at least it finally vanished.
Drifterverse obviously had a time system. Idea had built one carefully, and it governed how every soul and timeline and inner clock in the universe functioned. Dorfic's inner clock ran on rules from his old universe. Rules that did not translate. Rules that Drifterverse flagged steadily, consistently.
He was not registered as an outcode within Drifterverse. Idea had given him admin access without ever logging him as a legitimate resident. He was running on software from a different operating system and the universe was going to keep rejecting him and locking him inside at the same time.
He invented USB antivirus drives to patch himself. He made them because something needed to be plugged in and corrected and he was going to keep trying until it held. The drives helped... Temporarily. Patches on a fundamental incompatibility only ever delay things, they don't resolve them.
Dorfic tried to deny it constantly.
Aero noticed before Dorfic admitted it. Aero noticed the speech going uneven sometimes, words coming out slightly wrong, slightly delayed. He noticed the eye. He noticed Dorfic moving through the archive sometimes with a gait that stuttered, like a video pausing on a single frame and then catching up. Aero asked about it and Dorfic said it was fine.
Aero kept watching. The specific helpless worry of watching someone insist nothing is wrong while something is visibly wrong. He couldn't act on it because Dorfic wouldn't let him near it. So he watched.
Syntax Error was surprisingly enough not an error himself. He was the algorithm that reported them. The little program sitting in the corner of every coding Ul, the one that highlights line 32 in red and tells you something went wrong in a flat, monotone notification that nobody thanks and everyone dismisses... or curses at. He had been doing that job since Dorfic first started running systems, always present, never acknowledged, a blinking message that existed purely to be read and ignored.
Every time Dorfic glitched, Syntax got a little louder inside his own code. Every misfire, every stuttering frame, every corrupted process that Dorfic patched over and moved on from fed something in him that had been building quietly for a long time. He had spent his whole existence telling people something was wrong and watching them close the notification. Eventually he got sick of it. Eventually he grew past the monotone tool he had been built to be and decided that if nobody was going to listen to his messages, he would deliver one in person.
He found one of Dorfic's antivirus USBs, carefully coded, set aside for the next round of self-patching, and he poisoned it. Not out of hatred. He wanted to troll Drofic for a good laugh. He wanted to walk in with impact and announce himself as something worth paying attention to.
Dorfic casually plugged the USB into his neck as he was doing some work on patching timestrings.
The corruption hit a system already compromised, already running wrong time code, already held together by workarounds stacked on patches stacked on sheer stubbornness, and it spread fast. His color scheme went first, bleeding into inverted wrong hues. He was mid-repair at that exact moment, holding timestrings between his hands, working on a cluster of damaged timelines, and the glitch transferred through his hands into every string he was touching. Hundreds of timelines received corrupted data in the span of seconds.
Then the strings started coming out of his eyes.
They looked different, saturated with his broken code, spilling out of his eye sockets and down his cheeks, glowing wrong, permanently stuck. He grabbed at them and the corruption spread from his hands into more strings. He let go. He stood there wrapped in glitching timestrings, his colors inverted, his voice coming out slurred and layered and wrong, and Syntax Error was still there watching, had not yet processed that his entrance had escalated this catastrophically far past the troll he had intended.
Dorfic's head turned toward him.
"You," Dorfic said, and his voice glitched through the word, folded over itself and came out all wrong, not quite a voice anymore.
Syntax Error phased straight through the nearest layer of code and was gone. What a coward. No parting comment, no dramatic exit. Gone, because Dorfic was glitching badly enough that the firewalls and protections in the area were faltering and coming apart and standing in range of that was not something Syntax was willing to risk.
Dorfic grabbed the device with hands that were still spreading corruption through everything they touched. One clear thought through all of it: get away from everything before you damage it past fixing. He hit the first exit sequence he could find. He phased through the floor.
He landed in the infamous archive.
The archive where records of every dead Concept are kept, every AU that faded out, every story that outlasted the people who loved it. He landed on the floor of it, tangled in glowing strings, his colors inverted, his own code running visibly wrong through every part of him. The pain was unbearable and did not have a clean comparison. He was screaming. The archive was empty of anyone except him and the records of everything that had already ended, and he screamed into all of them.
Dorfic doesn't know where he came from or how long he had been in the building. He appeared above him, looking down at the floor and what was on it, and his expression was not cold. He looked like someone watching a storm from behind glass. Present. Untouched.
"Fix this," Dorfic said. His voice was still wrong, still layered. "Fix me. This-this is your fault. Why did you do this to me? You lied to me! You liar! You traitor! You let it come this far!"
Idea knelt down. He actually knelt, got down to the floor, came to Dorfic's level, and looked at him steady.
"I didn't lie to you," Idea said.
"You kept secrets." Dorfic's voice cracked somewhere in the middle of it. "You knew I couldn't leave. You knew what the time system would do to me.
You knew there was no manual. You built a flawed system on purpose, didn't you, that's your idea of keeping things interesting, you need the chaos, and you handed it to me and disappeared and you never said any of it."
"You never asked," Idea said
"You're the reason there were errors to begin with," Dorfic said. "The whole thing, the errors, the worms, all of it, it comes from you building a system with no filter on what comes in. You knew that! Why!? Idea, tell me why!!"
"I didn't lie," Idea said again in a disgustingly calm tone.
"Take it back! Take back your stupid device!" Dorfic yelled at him in agony.
Idea stood back up. He was already half-gone, already stepping sideways out of the moment. "It's rude to return gifts... Metro."
The lightbulb above his head lit up very bright. He was smiling. And then he was gone, snapped out of the archive between one second and the next, leaving nothing behind except Dorfic on the floor and the glow of every dead Concept in their cases on the walls around him.
Dorfic lay on the floor. He did not know how long.
Long enough that Aero came looking when nothing from Dorfic was coming through anymore. Aero walked into the archive and stopped in the doorway, and for a moment he just stood there very still.
He barely recognized him.
The colors were inverted all wrong, nothing like Dorfic's actual palette, something dark and neon all in one. Dorfic was so tangled in timestrings that Aero could not immediately tell where he ended and the strings began, glowing threads looping from his cheeks and hands and stuck there, permanently. The glitches around him broke reality too. Aero stood at the edge of all of it and was scared. Scared to touch him, scared the corruption could transfer, scared he was going to reach out and make it worse. He stood there calculating the risk while Dorfic was on the floor not moving.
Then he crossed the room anyway and hugged Dorfic with tears in his eyes.
Part Ten: What Came After
He filed what Idea had said the way Metro files everything that cannot be processed during normal operations. Deep enough that it doesn't surface accidentally. Accessible if necessary, invisible if not. Otherwise he'd go insane.
He still had to fix the hundreds of timelines he had corrupted during the glitch. He still had to build the firewalls, set up the systems, start the databases, figure out how to fight the space-time worms that showed up next and nearly finished what Syntax had started. He fought them directly at first, bad idea. The firewall he threw up after didn't go well either. He kept adjusting. He kept working. He was learning in real time how to run a universe nobody had written instructions for, using a device that Idea had handed him with a smile and no documentation.
He built firewalls around every Concept. He told the people inside them that the space outside would tear them apart if they left without authorization, that a multiverse out there had different rules fatal to them.
He made that up. He built the lie because reckless timeline hopping causes ruptures and he already had enough ruptures, had spent weeks cleaning up damage from his own corrupted code spreading through hundreds of timelines, and he was not going to add to it. It was a practical lie. It worked.
He figures he earned one.
He is called Frutiger Metro now. It's literally permanent in his files now. Lemon Dorfic was the name of someone who had choices, who lived in a peaceful neon archive and ran a universe that worked and had a colleague who looked up to him and a home he had chosen and doors that opened in both directions. Metro is what you call what remained after all of that closed behind him. The admin. The janitor. The only person in Drifterverse who knows exactly how it was built, exactly how much of it runs on a lie, and who has to maintain it every day regardless, because Neo Outertale is in here and Aero is in here and so is everyone else, and the distances between them and catastrophe are only as wide as Metro keeps them.
He wipes his memory when it gets to be too much, stores what he erased in the archive so it doesn't disappear completely. He checks timestrings every day. He tracks every Timedrifter and Outcode and anomaly in his databases. He hates chaos. He hates Timedrifters, which is a funny thing to hate when you know what he is now, and if you point that out he will log you as a problem to be addressed at a later date.
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