#the war.

RUN!!!! HIDE!!!!!!

Percy.exe has stopped working.

His eyes go wide—no, wider than wide, cartoonishly wide, like saucers at a ghost convention. His teacup clatters to the floor. Somewhere, a dramatic string quartet begins to play. He gasps.

“I—w–WHAT?”

His hands are trembling. He clutches a biscuit like it’s a grenade and he’s unsure whether to eat it or disarm it. “No—no, no, surely not me. I—I’m fragile! I have conditions! Multiple! Probably! I—I can’t even hold a rifle without—without apologizing to it!”

He starts pacing. Then stops. Then spins. Then gasps again.

“What if they make me run?! I can’t run! I can barely skip! And they have mud. Have you seen war-mud? That’s the worst kind of mud. It gets in your socks and your soul—”

He pauses, utterly horrified. “What if I die in a ditch? What if I get trench foot? What even is trench foot?! Do feet explode?!”

He's spiraling now—clutching the curtains, trying to disappear into the wallpaper. “They’ll shave my head, and I’ll look like a hard-boiled egg, and then I’ll surely die, and not even heroically! I’ll trip over my own shoelace and perish in the middle of some field named after a cheese.”

He turns sharply, grasping his sleeves with both hands.

“You must hide me. Quick. Stuff me in the piano! No—under the floorboards! Like a tragic poem!”

His voice lowers to a dramatic whisper.

“I’ll live among the dust bunnies. Raise them as my children. We’ll form a humble society. We’ll only come out for jam.”

A pause. His eyes fill with tears—real ones.

“…I haven’t even kissed properly yet. (THE ONE TIME I DID I GRABBED LUCA BY THE TIE...SANCALOUS I TELL YOU!) What if I die awkward?! —I cannot perish as a little freak! That’s so embarrassing!”

Suddenly, the window creaks. Percy screams, launches himself behind the fainting couch, and wails from the floor:

“I’M TOO EMOTIONAL FOR BULLETS!!!”

D-16

sunny and zac started dating in college, sunny being a journalism student with a minor in photography and zac also being a journalism student with a minor in archaeology, getting married shortly after graduation.

tw. death (specifically by gunshot). let me know if i should put this under a read more

the war started as a rebellion, with betrayus and (initially) spheria wanting to overthrow the corrupt ruler of pacworld, with sir c serving as their strategist/weapons guy and stratos acting as a mediator and trying to convince the ruler to surrender peacefully. over the next two and a half years in, betrayus and spheria began to argue abt what to due if they managed to win the war, with betrayus wanting to just execute them all and become the new ruler with spheria by his side and spheria not wanting to just become another dictator.

this ever-increasing wedge between them came to a head when they managed to storm the round house and take the president hostage. the pacworld government responded by sending a small army of police to surround the rebels, leading to a twelve-hour-long standoff.

now, here was where things got...complicated.