Waynderfield has gone quite pale.
“You fool! Do you know what you've done?” he asks unbelievingly, looking at the shards, which have now begun to glow brightly.
Suddenly, one of Wardon's guards shouts what sounds like “Ook!” Everyone turns and looks at him. “Are we ever going to finish this, or will we keep playing for *another* five months?” He then makes a strange guttural sound, followed by “Ook” again.
“Crickey...”, says the guard, shaking himself as if awaking from a dream he did not wish to remember. “Where the 'ell did
that come from?”
“Ook.”, comes from one of the other townspeople. “Does that thing actually do anything, or should we just turn it over to Icy again? gu-Ook.” The shards of the Orb glow brighter, as things begin to get very odd indeed...
As several of the townspeople begin to stumble about, haunted by unknown visions, occasionally exclaiming something beginning and ending with “ook”, Waynderfield suddenly sees text, a message appearing in his mind's eye. It reads:
IcyMonkey wrote:
The killer is WrenDraco, and the witness is Michael the Giraffe. Mickey has used his status as a witness to secretly blackmail Wren into murdering the victims he chooses, and he's rigged it so that, if he dies, her identity as murderer will be revealed by one of his loyal cultists.
Somehow, he doesn't know how, he knows that this means Lila is the culprit. He notices her sneaking around the back of the room, and moves to block the door.
“I say, stop her, she's the killer!” But the most of the townspeople are too preoccupied with trying to make sense of the Truth which is being revealed to them to take notice. One of the guards manages to come to himself and lunges for Lila, but she slips from his grasp and runs towards the door. Waynderfield, flustered, points the end of his cane at her and squeezes the handle. Lila's mind has just enough time to register that the end is hollow, like the barrel of a gun, just before it's no longer able to register anything at all as the left half of her face is blown off. Waynderfield walks away, barely noticing Lila's body, and looks down thoughtfully at the shattered Orb as its pieces glow ever brighter. He looks up. His eyes are distant as he speaks, as the townspeople pull themselves together to listen:
“It has been said by some ancient philosophers that perhaps we are all but dreams in the mind of God. It makes one wonder, could our world, our entire reality, really be a figment in the imagination of some higher being? Or even beings? No more than dreams, or a game of some type. We would be to them just as the drawings we make on paper are to us. And perhaps they exist only in the consciousness of yet higher beings, and are unaware of it just as we are.”
He looks down at himself and sees only the word, “Waynderfield”. He moves his arm, and sees only the sentence “He moves his arm, and sees only the sentence “He moves his arm, and sees only the sentence “He moves his arm, and sees only the sentence “He moves his ar-“ “ “ “
Shaking himself free of the vision, he suddenly becomes aware of minds, great minds, hovering just out of reach. They are not a part of his world, and yet- he is a part of them somehow. He is within them. Subservient to them. And he is being controlled. As is the world.
“I see...” he says to himself, striving to make sense of it all. “So this is the price of True Knowledge. The ancient Speculation Sages were right, it is not worth-”
Suddenly, he sinks to his knees, and begins laughing. The sound of it peals from the town hall over the square. Several of the others start to join in. Soon almost everyone is laughing, as they slump to the ground, one by one, and are then silent.
Just before he collapses, Waynderfield’s thoughts become small, centered. There is a way out. A way other than the oblivion of absorption which he now knows awaits him. He has yet another self. A vision of a much younger man, dressed in an oddly long black coat and some sort of dark eye coverings disappearing as if he were a mist, appears before him. “Quantum... Certainty...” he thinks, before everything goes black.
* * * * *
Epilogue:
The young man squints in the noonday sun as he surveys the town square. Behind him, the last of the townspeople are being loaded into wagons. The only sounds are the grunts of the volunteers as they carry those who would not or could not walk, and the gibbering of those of the townspeople who were making even less sense than the others, if that were possible. He wipes his brow with his sleeve, and starts towards the nearest wagon. He’ll be glad enough to get out of the town, as it is beginning to give him the creeps. No one knew exactly what had happened. A rider who was carrying a routine message to Expatville had arrived in his hometown of R’Pingshire a few days earlier, saying that the entire town had gone mad. By the time the local officials arrived in Expatville, half the townspeople had either killed themselves or blundered into injury, and the rest were simply babbling incoherently. At times, sentence fragments about “higher realities” and such could be made out, but they were of little help in determining what had happened. There were rumors of a spate of murders in the town the week before, and sure enough several mutilated bodies had been found, including one with a gunshot wound to the head, but the only other odd finding had been in the town hall where many of the citizens had apparently been gathered. There were extremely thin shards of what looked like glass scattered about, and a complete suit of clothes, including a cape and odd silver-handled cane was found lying on the floor, with no matching body nearby.
Expatville had always been something of a den of iniquity (according to the local clergy), and the Church’s official story on the event was that the town had succumbed to the forces of darkness, and its people were now demon-possessed. There had been a new sanitarium built in R’Pingshire recently, and the remaining townsfolk were being transported there, where the priests could try their exorcisms, and the doctors their magnets and leeches. Better them than him, he thought to himself. The incoherent rambling of the louder townspeople was beginning to grate on his nerves most excessively. Reaching for the reins, he orders the horses forward, and the last of the wagons pull out of the town, leaving it silent and bare behind them.
They are barely out of town when the world shimmers and disappears, as the game ends and the inhabitants of the Kyhm forums return to their normal board personas.
Some time later the world of the forums itself becomes static and dead as the last of the forumers logs off for the night, returning to their normal life.
God stirs slightly and nearly wakes up, but then thinks better of it, and the inhabitants of Earth remain, existing in ver slumber for a little while yet.