The Parable is SICK IT'S SICK IT'S SICK-
The cacophony is getting worse. The wreckage, the Parable eating itself and eating itself and eating it all. They need to escape but it's eating the very code around them, numbers fizzling into nothing and disappearing into the void within, it's eating those Narrators that thought themselves above it all, that thought themselves More.
Leigh's Narrator is the last to go, the last who fought to the bitter end while the others were shredded and used to feed the bottomless pit the broken Parable had become. Torn apart in a whirlwind of horrifying noises, of screams that will haunt their nightmares for months and in the sparse, calm moments thereafter. He pleads, begs for someone to save him, proclaims repentance and cries out his apologies to the world, to Leigh, but no one responds. No one moves to help, for it is all a lie borne to save his own skin, and they know he would do little more than drag anyone else who reach out back down with him into oblivion.
They watch as he, too, is devoured and reduced to nothing.
But it isn't enough. They had hoped the two of them, the most powerful two of the force that had done this, would be each other's end, would be the final tipping point that dispersed the sick and rotting code to nothing, but with the last of the fouled Narrators gone and Perry still there, they realize that it's not over. It's not over.
Static roars as the thing that was a Story, once, turns to them in it's own flavor of desperation, it's own cry of need of want of hunger keening out and rattling the walls of the office to its core. It turns to them in starts and fits and jerky movements, the screaming hunger hunger more more more dragging it close as they turn to run, to escape, fleeing like their very existences depend on it because they do.
They know, innately, in that way you know if you fall from a great height you'll die, that they will die. This will not work. They are not fast enough, not when dragging the injured Narrator between them, not enough, and Perry is hungry and gaining and quick.
It's Stan that realizes, Stan the clever, the always-ahead, Stan in a last desperate attempt to save the others that knows what he must do. Stan that throws the Narrator, his Narrator, ahead with the others and ignores his desperate scream and turns back. His thoughts are not ones of self-sacrifice, not of a death to save his friends- his thoughts are little more than buy time by any means, are mostly it needs to calm down it's too fast it's collapsing too fast, it's taking everything down with it and we need to get out from under before we're trapped and taken down with it, and if Stan knows one thing about calming things and people down, it's that-
You can always use a Bucket.
The Bucket is an enigma, created by the Narrator - all of them, some of them, most of them - to be a reassuring presence. It's - a joke, a cry for help, a sly innuendo, an earnest olive branch across the divide of pain and suffering - nothing more than a simple object, hard metal, galvanized steel slapped with a couple cheesy stickers, and yet its effect is real. It's indescribable, how this one asset manages what it does, but it's a load-bearing Bucket, it's the Reassurance Bucket, and they all know its effects intimately.
Stanley shoves the Narrator forward, slings his Bucket around and faces the wall of writhing static, of blurry limbs and grasping cables and all-white pixel-lag eyes. He faces what used to be a Narrator, a Story, a Parable, and as it rears back and bears down on him with nothing singing through its rotting code but EAT EAT EAT-
Stan shoves the Bucket down on its head as hard as he can.
It's like someone hits pause on a movie in the climactic final battle. Frozen in time, in place like a still frame of film, it simply stops… moving. The roaring, buzzing, hissing noises stop, the flickering lights and shedding static stops, it all just stops.
And they run.
As they run, as they make it to their escape, they feel the building tide of destruction looming over them like a tidal wave about to crest, like a tsunami rushing towards land. The Bucket put a stopper on the apocalypse, but the pressure still builds and builds, pushing towards an explosion even more catastrophic than the one that almost overwhelmed them.
But it is enough. Enough for them to escape, enough for them to flee, and when the Bucket eventually stops working its strange, reassuring magic on the broken tatters of the Parable, when the seal finally breaks and the thing that was once Something finally snaps and devours the rest of itself whole, they are long, long gone.
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I'm not here to fearmonger or anything regarding the news about the site, but also everyone should come play on NeopetsClassic. It's like regular Neopets but the site is fanmade and the layout looks like the original from way back in the 2000s (which I, totally unbiasedly, think is an improvement from the current day layout).
It's still incomplete, due to them having to rebuild most of it from scratch, but it's still got a lot of fun stuff to do and also it's a great way to spend your free time. Plus they DO make pretty consistent updates on the regular and there's just a lot of love and care put into it!
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