POV: Snipe
Location: Crown City Rooftops, 1.2km from PlazaStatus: Wanted (1.5x bounty multiplier, +5% fan art generation)Mount: Sentient Hoverboard "Glitchbaby"Mood: Thriving
Snipe skates across the city skyline, boots locked into a rogue-class hoverboard made of old code and unapplied patch notes.
Behind her?—Sirens.—Shouting guards.—A mini-blimp firing warning flyers that say "Return the Cake or Face Downgrading."
And clutched in her hand?
A glowing, softly humming cake-topper shaped like a dev console key.
She yells over her shoulder, "Tell the mayor he can keep his hat! I've got something better!"
[Notoriety Increased: Local Guards Now Fear Your Dessert-Based Arsenal.][Title Earned: Cakejack Phantom][Fan Rumor Created: "She Once Hacked Reality With a Spatula."]
She flips mid-air, lands on a chimney, and activates her Echo Step, leaving behind a visual clone that screams, "I regret nothing!" before exploding into glitter.
The guards chase the clone. Classic rookie move.
Snipe coasts down a laundry line, ducks into a back alley, and vanishes into the underworld passage she unlocked last time she accidentally stole a dimension door.
Her hoverboard pings.
[Incoming Message: Party Crashers Underground Net]"Yo Snipe. Everyone's losing it over your cake stunt. You're trending harder than the Cleanser's kill feed. Drop location for rally?"
She grins.
"Oh, I'll drop something."
POV: The Cleanser
Location: Private Code Cell / Admin Layer Shadow PortDirectives: Purge Debug Entities, Restore Narrative Flow, Avoid Emotional Complication (Failed)Internal Log: Corruption Level - Growing
The Cleanser kneels before a blinking console deep within a locked admin instance—far from the world's eyes, past the dev-intended edges.
She breathes in silence. No one sees beneath the mask.
But beneath it?
There's a face.
Flickering. Glitched. Maybe human. Maybe not.
[SYSTEM MESSAGE: Error in Identity Stream][Player Data Unavailable. You May Be a Simulation.][Response Logged: Denial.]
She ignores it.
She always does.
[Subject: ZERIK – Debug Level: Class Ω][Behavior: Improvisational, Immune to Expected Deletion][Contagion Risk: Rising]
Then there's the girl.
[Subject: "Snipe" – Unauthorized Protocol Breach][Behavior: Reckless. Uncontained. Catalyzing Lore Drift][Fanbase: Alarmingly Loyal][Threat Rating: Meme-Class Hazard]
The Cleanser stands, accessing a private mission node.
[PROJECT_RESTITCH: Begin Phase Two][Deploying Phantom Zones Across Crown City][Objective: Isolate Anomalies / Reassign Narrative Weight]
But even as the system obeys her, something... off pulses in her HUD.
A message.
One not from the system.
But from something older.
[Incoming Message From: ???][Subject: "You're Not The Only One Cleaning Up."][Attachment: AI Seed – Tag: R0.0T]
She hesitates.
Her hands tremble.
Then she deletes the message.
Or at least, she tries.
POV: Snipe – Undercity
Snipe lands in the Party Crashers' underbase—a half-ruined arcade blended with an abandoned dev-test zone. Chairs float. The jukebox bleeds static. A graffiti mural of Zerik with a flaming duck halo glows on the back wall.
Crowds cheer as she enters.
"SNIPE!""Cake Queen!""You made that one noble throw up pixels!"
She bows, spins, and throws the cake key into the air. It hovers, rotating, humming like a divine toaster.
[Key Item Recognized: Dev Layer Fragment – Crown Branch][Link Established: Archive, Patch Node 7.1][Questline Expanded: Accessing Forbidden Dev Areas][Achievement Unlocked: Rogue Update Manager]
One of the Crashers hands her a mock trophy.
"Congrats," he says. "You're officially more bugged than our last boss."
She smiles.
Not because she feels safe.
But because she knows now: something's changing. Something deeper than loot and leaderboard fame.
She saw it in the cake code. The same corrupted line twice.
"ZERIK.EXE // FORMERLY DELETED // STILL RUNNING"
POV: Cleanser – Shadow Port / Internal Log
She stares at the projected visual of Snipe's rally. The crowd. The growing legend.
And the rogue dev key in her hand.
[SYSTEM WARNING: Player Sympathy Detected][Response: Delay Purge Protocol?][Response Logged: ...]
She touches her mask.
Her voice is barely audible.
"…I remember being a player."
Then she turns.
And opens a portal.