Glitch Production: Meta Runner

S2 Episode 6: Hack and Slash

Summary: Tari makes her big Meta Runner debut in one of the most action packed games she's played yet.

(Plot)

The episode begins with Tari and Evelyn arriving on stage for their game performance. As the latter blabs off to the audience before the competition starts, MD-5 get ready to put their plan into action: Lamar and Masa will swap the game consoles in disguise of Tascorp suits and help Tari in the game while Sophia will help from afar with her hacking. With her hacking the lights in front of Tari, she sends her hidden message to Sophia by making it seem as if she's talking to the audience. Masa and Lamar quickly make their way to the stage along with other Tascorp employees, where Lamar is almost busted by a droid if not for Tari tampering with the stage lights, which gives Masa the chance to switch the game consoles. After they leave, Sophia states that with the cartridge running, it'll connect with her phone, which is in Belle's possesion, and download the data to itself. After that, they take the cartridge with the data. With the plan briefed down, the boys get ready to game on.

Back at the abandoned lab in Tascorp, Belle sees the news over the small light malfunction. Realizing that the plan is being put into action, she places Sophia's phone down and the data begins to become encrypted within it. Now to hold off her part of the deal with Tari, she readies to play the corrupted cartridge of Ultra Jump Mania that holds a terrified Theo inside of it and running from glitched out enemies. Theo isn't happy at first to hear from Belle at first after she ditched him to be caught by Tacorp, but Belle says she's here to help him escape; To do that, they need to beat the game. Theo ultimately decides to bury the hatchet as Belle again uses her controller to move him around, but the glitches cause random things to spawn out of place and ruin parkour techniques, which causes Belle to realize this won't be as easy as she though of it to be.

Back at the stage, Tari and Evelyn ready to play Hidden Heroes for the audience. Lucks, wanting to showoff his employee's abilities, makes them fight 50 enemies instead of just 10. Sophia then explains to Masa and Lamar that once they help the two girls, mostly Tari, they'll get past the firewall and download the Tascorp data into her phone, which will take 20 minutes at most. With that, the download starts and Tari is imported into the game universe of Hidden Heroes.

Once inside, Tari, who's counterpart of this game looks a lot like her beta design, is almost killed by an enemy player, but is saved by Evelyn, who isn't all happy to do so. She then again talks down Tari, which almost causes the both of them to get eliminated. Since this drew too much attention to them, they are forced to retreat. They continue to kill other opponents as they play, but Evelyn refuses to help or slow down for Tari, which makes things more difficult and causes frustration from the latter, again. Meanwhile, Masa and Lamar help out in stealth from the sidelines by killing the other players, which causes some backlash from their "teammates".

As Tari and Evelyn hide for a little while for the former to recover some health, Evelyn again berates Tari, this time for taking to long. However, she then accuses her of ruining "everything else" for her. When asked what she meant and why she hates her, Evelyn reluctantly reveals that she's worked hard and has been violated of personal space to get where she is now and to earn Luck's approval, and apparently Tari just needed to show up to do just that. She then calls Tari many names that revolve around freak. Tari, fed up with Evelyn's remarks and cruelty, angrily tells her that she would leave on her own terms if she could and that her life at Tascorp is horrible. She then lashes out at Evelyn by saying she's played a big role in that and she wishes that people like her would let her be. This surprisingly hurts Evelyn, as she is nowhere to be seen once Tari turns around. As Tari ventures out to find her, she is ambushed and surrounded by many other opponents as the episode ends on a cliffhanger.