Not Alone

Approaching Darkness

Brown sat on the edge of the Strider's toilet seat, looking up at the giant sickly face in its welding mask.

His life seemed to have turned into a strange and terrible nightmare from which he had no hope of waking.

The Strider was ranting bitterly, his various long limbs sprawled around him in defeat.

"I'm in trouble. A lot of trouble. You saw me fail my mission."

Brown nodded. You didn't have a chance against my Titan. Don't blame yourself. I bet even if you stabbed him in the core he could have tanked it.

"That wasn't the first time..."

He sighed like the last hope was leaving his body.

"I was supposed to kill the TV Boss. It's what I was made for. These swords and welding mask were designed as a counter to him. I was meant to be a TV-killing machine. And yet—"

Brown cringed. The idea of him coming near his beloved TV Woman made any sympathy for the Strider evaporate.

"And yet I've never killed a single TV Man. There was a trap for the TV Boss— I was supposed to stab him in the screen. G-Man used himself as bait. Everything went to plan. Everything... except me."

The Strider stared into the distance.

"I was late to that battle. By the time I got there the TV Boss was already teleporting away. I was too slow and—"

He paused to cough.

"The TV Boss is still alive because of me. And he's out there, and he's injured but he's not dead, and one day he'll come back to kill us all, and I could have stopped him. I could have ended this whole war, and I didn't, because I was late."

Wow.

Brown was surprised the Skibidis had even let him live after a mistake like that.

"And I couldn't kill TV Woman."

Brown jolted upright at the sound of that name.

"She teleported away too fast for me. Late again."

Wait.

Brown remembered now.

The day he met her. She had saved him, holding him and carrying them both away as an army closed in on them. He had heard giant footsteps that day, stomping ever closer...

His hands clenched when he realised that the Strider had nearly killed him and didn't even know.

He would have crushed me like I was nothing.

Who knows how many Cameramen he's killed?

Hundreds?

"They told me if I failed again," the Strider continued, not noticing the effect his words had on Brown, "I would be executed, and my upgrades would be stripped from my corpse and given to someone..."

He stopped. He was crying.

"This is what he said: to someone intelligent enough to use them."

Brown looked at the Strider.

He's a failure who never got anything right in his life.

Just...

Just... like me.

The Strider's head lolled down and he was quiet for a long time. Brown began to wonder if he had died.

But he twitched, turned and looked right at him, eyes full of misery.