Project Verify ========================================== 37/42 (I don't need no friends, I don't need no phone.) +3 from Bomber.
Project Light ============================================================================= 37/77 (The first key piece.)
I +3 Bomber57.
Bill investigates the Undying Titan. ONE MILLION HP, INSTANT DEATH ATTACKS... THIS THING NEEDS TO BE KILLED AND IT NEEDS TO BE KILLED FAST. I GOTTA MAKE SURE MY COUSIN GETS HERE SAFE, YOU KNOW WHAT I MEAN? Bill pulls out a red landline phone from nowhere. It rings intensely, and he goes to pick it up. Bill speaks into into the phone. HEY, YOU THERE? YEAH... DEPLOY AN ALEPH ONE-CLASS CREATIVITY/CONFORMITY SIMULATOR AT MY EXACT CO-ORDINATES. THANKS, ROY, YOU'RE THE BEST. Bill glares at the Undying Titan, cracking his knuckles as he floats away.
The sky flickers out of its blue hue, settling into an unhealthy green, and then a sea of missing textures. The world unloads around the Undying Titan, horrible screams of the tortured wailing away at his ears. Film crews organize props and equipments, trapping the Undying Titan in a world of utter horror. The flailing arms of a million inanimate objects all reach out to grab the Undying Titan simultaneously, but he rejects their advances. Don't hug him, he's scared. And then-
--the Undying Titan is in a new world. A better world. One free from the control of any crystalline feline or nonexistent tazz. In this world, it is June 19th all day, every day. In this world, you are a happy puppet sitting in your home completely unaware of the harsh exterior awaiting you outside your walls. In this world, it is your job to sit back and learn.
The Undying Titan is now a cold and miniature felt rendition of his normal self. He is a puppet with beady eyes, stringy hair, and flailing noodle arms that could fall off at a moment's notice. He tries to speak, but cotton fills his mouth. The Undying Titan looks around and sees a notebook on the table in front of him. As he watches, the notebook opens on its own, looking at him with a happy expression. "What's your favorite idea? Mine is being creative," the notebook tells the Undying Titan. Music streams from nowhere.
The Undying Titan wills every fiber of his being to crush this notebook into pulp, but the only thing he can do is spasm his puppet body and pour cotton out of his mouth. He feels a voice wrench out of his soul. "How do you get the idea?" he asks. The sketchbook is delighted at this response. "I just try to think creatively! Now when you look at this orange," the sketchbook says, pointing to a frothing orange ball descending rapidly onto the Undying Titan. "Tell me please, what do you see?"
The orange ball slams into the Undying Titan, who quickly realizes it is an extremely small and condensed star that strips his skin, muscle, and bones away, vaporizing his body and melting the room into ashes. All the Undying Titan knew for a few horrible instants was pain, until the room rematerialized around him, with the sketchbook still staring at him. "Maybe to you, but not to me!" it said. "I see a silly face!" The sketchbook is decorated with a picture of a smiling orange. "Walking along and smiling at me," the sketchbook continues.
The vivid memories of death fresh in his mind, the Undying Titan furiously replies. "I don't see what you mean," he says. The sketchbook's form flickers and becomes a sea of destruction for a split second. "Because you're not thinking creatively! So take a look at my hair." The sketchbook suddenly grows thick ropes of keratin that resemble a world tree of hair, ensnaring and tangling the Undying Titan in a web of constricting emptiness. He can still hear the sketchbook's voice whispering from the abyss. "I use my hair to express myself." The Undying Titan hears himself saying, "That sounds really boring." The hair pulls the life out of the Undying Titan's body, pulverizing him as the sketchbook insists, in a demonic chorus: "I use my hair to express myself."
The Titan jumps back into his seat at the table, where the room is good as new. "Now when you stare at the clouds in the sky, don't you find them exciting?" The Titan cranes his puppet neck to look at the sky, which is full of fluffy white clouds that lazily drift along, doing nothing. His reply is instantaneous. "No." The sketchbook snaps the Titan's neck, forcing him to look at the sky. "Come on, take another look!" The Titan's connection to his normal mind severed, his neural pathways are forced to literally take another look, streaming themselves into an infinite consciousness of creativity. The Titan can see everything, and the clouds rearrange themselves accordingly.
"Oh wait," he shouts. "I can see an eye! I can see it die! I can see a broken moon streaking through the sky! I can see a cell! I can see some gel! I can see a scientist descending into hell!" The clouds shift and churn like the eclipsing prophecies of Skaia, forming a black hole engineered by a god of chaos that destroys an entire universe. And the Titan is destroyed along with it, collapsing into the apocalypse he just saw. But then he is spit back out, and everything is fine. The sketchbook congratulates the Titan, ecstatic at his progress. "I think you're getting the hang of it now! Using your mind to have a good time." The Titan's brain, now hardwired to accept creativity, tries furiously to think of something creative to do. In less than a second, he creates his magnum opus, a beautiful portrait of the Dark Carnival and all its inhabitant. Horrific purple energy coagulates from within, and the Sketchbook's smile widens.
The Titan turns and grins. "I might paint a picture of a clown!" he shouts, pointing to his masterpiece. But the Sketchbook flops into darkness, silencing his hopes with one sentence. "Hold there, friend. You might need to slow down." He smiles eternally as black liquid - ink of the darkest concentration - pours by the gallon over his painting, silencing in the paradoxical machinations contained inside. The ink rushes from all points in the room like a waterfall of darkness, and the Titan is swept up by the waves, drowning in curses. The Sketchbook's pages dissolve, ripped apart by the maelstrom, the music silenced. The Titan sinks into the abyss, held tight by the grip of abominations, until the room reconstitutes.
The puppet body of the Titan is now severely damaged. It is boiling from the sun yet soaking wet with the darkness of the ink. Its mind and form is fractured from the knowledge of future's past, yet strangled and constricted by dead cells. So with great effort, the Titan's head beckons towards the Sketchbook, eager to hear more of the song which just now restarted. "Here's another good tip on how to be a creative wizkid! Go and collect some leaves and sticks, and arrange them into your favorite color!" The Titan's arms stretch across the boundaries of space, disemboweling the most potent of fires to collect the wood they use as fuel and condensing them into the name of a color not yet recognized by the eyes of humanity.
The Sketchbook judges it like it did to the Titan's painting, uttering a single commandment: "///// is not a creative color." This launches the Titan into a deep depression from which it cannot escape, wondering if there is even a point to satisfying the sketchbook's insane desires if it will just crush his dreams. He buys an entire room's worth of pills and eats them all at once, also purchasing a rope for good measure, sending himself into an eternity of nothingness which passes in a second as the Titan is snapped back to the "reality" of the normal room.
The sketchbook gives the Titan one last message, staring deep into his eyes. "There's one more thing that you need to know, before you let your creativity flow," he says in a commanding tone. "Listen to your heart," and the sketchbook points to the Titan's chest, hearing the irregular beats of an organ that tries to pump cursed blood across the confines of cotton. "Listen to the rain," and the sketchbook points outside, to the pounding and pulsing sounds of red rain that pools into streams and into rivers and into an unstoppable coursing red sea of oblivion. "Listen to the voices in your brain," and the sketchbook points at the Titan's head, at the miasma of thoughts and experiences leaking out of him, manifesting into afterimages of parallel timelines enduring similar treatments of horror, all yelling messages at one another to try to escape this mess.
"Come on, guys! Let's get creative!"
And then the world unloads around the Undying Titan and all of his parallel selves and the sketchbook and the red sea and his cursed heart and the mess of hair and the boiling sun and the blackened carnival and the inky abyss and the color he made and the future's past, and the Undying Titan and all the entities in his mind see the horror of the constructed reality around them, and he sees the set on which his pitiful existence is being created, and he sees the props and the settings and the script that dictates the punishment that he is receiving, and he sees the triangle orchestrating it all and laughing at every piece of pain he has experienced, and then he forgets it because his mind is suddenly forced to once more bathe in a sea of creativity, and then the music reaches a sweltering crescendo of horror as the pace of reality increases to an unsettling conclusion, and then the world reloads and all of his memories are here and they're real people and his body is bloated to the point where a man, an actor, is inside of him and wearing his skin as a shell, and then all of the bodies and all of the people dance in a singular goal to get creative and cause as much chaos and happiness and entropy and joy as possible, and then they decorate the expanse they're in as an outlet, showing off glitter colored in the blood of the fallen and decorated with the fears of civilizations long forgotten, paper snowflakes depicting wars and battles three universes long, and then they arrange the paper they use in letters, one at a time, bit by bit, one by zero, forming an entire planet and universe and reality out of source code set in a fabricated existence, and then they danced harder than they ever had, dancing mad in an attempt to burn out the lives that they now realize have no physical meaning and only exist as conduits of creative energy, so why don't they become souls of creativity free from this mortal plane, and then they realized in their current states their bodies wouldn't be enough to handle their creativity, and then they realized they needed other bodies, and then they conducted sacrifices, and then the sketchbook laughed in the shadows as organs and detritus was sucked into the mouse holes and floorboards and cupboards and drawers and stored to be used for unadulterated red creativity, and then they made a beautiful cake out of their victims and carved up their bodies and ate them with joy, and then they made beautiful imagery out of their own cursed hearts, and then the word they spelled out with their code was decorated with blood and horror and its name was death, the destroyer of worlds, for that is what they had become, the titans, the harbingers, the horsemen, the destruction incarnate, and then they needed to die, and then their heads spun and spasmed and frothed for what they could not comprehend, and then the cameras documenting their deaths seized up and corrupted in a whirlwind of nothingness, and the music reached its conclusion as the only thing it could hear was the screams from an infinite amount of realities in an infinite amount of days repeating over and over, and then they slid their hands over the true masterpiece they had created until they all collapsed of exhaustion and burned themselves out, and then everything returned to normal.
The room is perfectly fine, and everything is happy again. There are no more parallel instances of anything, all the decorations are nice and orderly, and the sketchbook is gleaming happily at the emaciated puppet corpse dying across from him. "Now, let's all agree to never be creative again." The sketchbook's life leaves its eyes as he falls over, his pages fluttering away, lost in the wind. The Undying Titan's body sags out of the chair and collapses onto the ground, his limbs splattering as very real organs and blood - not cotton - seeps out from them. The lights in the sky go dark, and the props hurtle out of existence. The only thing that exists is the floor and the ink seeping out of the mouse hole, drowning the Titan's spirit in a stench of death, but before he can realize it--
-a computer screen away, Bill Cipher and Roy stare at the truth. And they laugh, despite not having mouths to emote with.
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