#justadirtyhacker

Feeling their body compile in a new place... Ah. Not Undertale. Not that PLAYER was particularly searching for one of those at the moment. They needed to clear their head a bit so they could come back at it with a fresh mind. 

Taking in their surroundings, they took a careful breath. Natural environment. Fresh air. They were somewhere outside in nature. Location unknown as nothing proved immediately recognizable. Holding up a hand, they opened one of their data windows, feeding environmental data into it. Building a profile for new locations as was habit for them.

@justadirtyhacker

The war ragged on, dust blood and even human bodies rest on the ground most to be forgotten at such a trying time. Alyssa swung down her sword to end the life of her fellow man and in the blink of an eye the world around her switched and her blade found its way into a tree rather than a body.

Another jump, another timeline. Already PLAYER can feel it in the air however. This isn’t a standard timeline.  With a swipe of their hand they pull up one of their command prompt-like screens, gathering information on their surroundings as quickly as possible.

Not that survival was something PLAYER had to actually be all that concerned about. Their avatar served as a physical body but destroying it wasn’t going to do anything lasting. Add to that that they could create something of a ‘botnet’ of avatar bodies to work with and well... that made things interesting. They tried to keep them to 2 or 3 at max though because it really gave them a hell of a headache.

PLAYER sat in a cross legged posture, a near 10 foot column of display screens surrounding them in a circle. Several other of their avatars stood around, sorting through the screens as well. They rapidly processed the information gathered as they held the central avatar’s soul fragment in their hands.

This avatar was their oldest. They’d say if was the closest thing they had to an original body in this state. Honestly they had barely any idea what happened to their physical body. 

Their attention was diverted however from the information they were processing for their next stage of their plan by a strange surge in data approaching this space they had created for themselves to reside when not jumping timelines.

With a flicker and a snap, Asriel dropped into a new timeline once more using a ‘reset jump’, for lack of a better word. PLAYER would probably have a more technical term which suited it better, but from what little they could understand of it, it worked the way it did because they were both a monster and not the ‘player’ of a timeline.

So... in essence exploiting a glitch for his own benefit. He was quietly thankful for that glitch. Otherwise he would have just thrown himself right back into the endless ouroboros cycle of death, flower, momentary rebirth, with no future. Simply for the sake of wiping away his anguish.

He took in his new surroundings as he gently dusted his red and black striped outfit. He was dimly aware that a little bit of PLAYER had probably rubbed off on him when they revived him. 

Extending his feelings, he reached out to seek the one he wished to see again... With a soft sigh he slumped after a moment. Nothing. Not this timeline. Damn.

However he did feel something strange in the process. Rather, the strange absence of something. The dull hum of the barrier’s magic was not filling the air here. But... what did that mean? This was a timeline where...?

Gently PLAYER brought a hand to their forehead and rubbed their brow, back in their body. Their actual body. Several wires hang limply from various parts of them into the array of systems they had set up. A comprehensive and advanced hacker’s suite from which they had accidentally stumbled into a wondrous world. However once again that world had rejected them...

Gently moving a hand, they opened a a window in augmented space, and flitted through a few web pages before pausing, settling on the forum post which had partly sparked all of this. On a somewhat reputable game hacker and data miner’s forum was a post simply titles ‘Beyond the underground.’ where the OP had claimed to have discovered that there was far more to the game ‘Undertale’ than everyone thought. A world beyond ‘the end’ waiting for those who dared.

Not many new posts... However one person who was using the forum as well caught PLAYER’s curiosity. One of the neat things about the forum was that someone had hacked together a neat program that allowed for VR chat rooms among users.

Not bad for someone from a dimension without the level of advanced tech that PLAYER had access to. A detail which PLAYER would be happy to keep under wraps. Player decided to go out on a limb and send a request to open a chat room with the user in question. Perhaps they could relieve some frustration and stress by bouncing ideas off this fellow player.

Air shimmered and distorted as PLAYER darted around the timeline they were in, gathering intel as they went. Their ‘endgame’ was approaching rather rapidly. They couldn’t afford to fail this time. There wasn’t a terrible lot of time before they were forced out of this timeline. By their calculations, the better part of 30 days before they were forced out if they were lucky. 10 was probably closer.

That door had to appear at some point within that time span... In the meantime variables had to be accounted for and... perhaps it was best if they enjoyed a bit of that time. PLAYER wasn’t... exactly in a rush to confront HIM. The forgotten man and his room still deeply unsettled them.

If they wanted a future however... they had to confront him. He was the only candidate left for a possible source of the forced resets, and timeline ejections. After everything they’d given up for a future here... So deep in their planning was PLAYER that as they floated along, they nearly ran headlong into a monster.