Six in One

Ch 3 - [S] Jason: Be Jackie

Your name is JACKIE ROSS! You enjoy tinkering, steampunk, and creating your own clockwork contraptions! You have also just had the life scared out of you by a mysterious THING being plopped down next to the table you were working at! You woke up recently in control of the body you're forced to share and discovered that Jason, who must have been in charge before you, left his computer open and a game running. You would normally have respected his privacy, but something about the game called to you. You walked over to it and discovered it was called "Sburb" by the name written under what was presumably part of the game's logo, plastered over a blue cloud-filled sky background. The only other items on-screen were a pair of buttons, one labelled "client" and the other labelled "server." Since the "server" button had been grayed out for some reason, you had decided to click the "client" button. That's when the screen changed to what it was now, a black background with the game's full logo emblazoned on it in green, and the word "client" written below it in block letters and the same green. You had pulled out your own laptop and was just about to look up a walkthrough to see what you were supposed to do next when this THING crashed down out of nowhere!

This mysterious THING had a large base of square shape that went up about a foot or two, then a smaller, slightly less rigid square fixed to the top of the base by what appeared to be four clamps, with a cylindrical tube coming from the top, presumably hollow as there was a hatch on the top of the tube. There was a valve control of sorts attached to the side of the tube. You stand up and attempt to turn the valve, but no such luck, it appears to be stuck. You wonder how it got here. You return to your trusty laptop to resume searching for a decent walkthrough for this game, and hope that this THING is somehow part of it. And if not, that you can salvage it for parts. You could find a use for that valve, you're sure of it. Upon looking at your computer, however, you notice a new icon that was not there previously. It appears to be a pair of purple and yellow crescent moons overlapping at the tips and is called "LunarChat." You wonder who installed this program on your precious laptop and why? You don't have anyone to talk to, so why get a chat program?

You decide to open it anyways. It automatically logs you in with the username "everlastingClockwork." You don't know why you apparently already have an account for this chat program you've never even HEARD of before, but you find the username fitting. There are no open chats, but you also apparently have five friends already? Their usernames, or "Moontags" as the program calls them, are "harmoniousMelodies," "neverendingAbyssion," "delicacyCraftsman," "awkwardlyValedictorian," and "nightmarishSeductress." You have never heard these names before but they seem oddly and uncomfortably familiar to you. They all have their own associated colors, but they're all slightly grayed out and your attempts to click on them result in nothing. Maybe they're offline? That seems to be the most likely reason to you. You decide to minimize the window rather than close the program entirely. Maybe one of them will be on sometime and you can figure out what's going on?

Speaking of what's going on, you still have no idea what this THING is or what it's for. You grab your trusty wrench, which makes an excellent weapon for when people try to mess with your projects, and attempt to turn the valve on the THING again. It groans and creaks before it surprisingly snaps off. Great, you broke it. NOW how are you supposed to open it? At least you can use the valve for something else now. You put the valve away in your sylladex. They're typically pretty expensive and you all used to have to share one, but at one point you got tired of sharing so you took it apart and figured out how to make them, so now you all have your own, with your own allocations and method of storage. You could never get used to Jason's modus, but he rarely kept things in there anyways. You did, of course, make your sylladex in classic steampunk style, with many visible gears and pipes, most of which are for aesthetic purposes only.

Either way, you're pretty sure you need to get this THING open somehow. You decide to climb up on it and smack the cover a few times with your wrench, see if you can loosen it up enough to pry off. You give the cover a hearty smack with the largest wrench in your arsenal. The cover flies open and a red cylinder of a shiny material pops out and clatters to the ground behind you, followed closely by five mysterious, circular entities. The entities just hover in place, each one a different color. You like the red one the best, though you still have no idea what's really going on. You remember that you were going to look up some Sburb walkthroughs. You go to actually complete that task this time, and find one that's at least usable. According to the walkthrough, the THING is called a "cruxtruder," the entities are called "kernelsprites," and the red cylinder is called a "cruxite totem." According to the walkthrough, however, you're only supposed to have ONE kernelsprite, not five. You look at the kernelsprites. There's the red one, which you've decided is "yours," and the other four are purple, green, black, and yellow. You guess the other four are also yours, but for some reason that doesn't feel right. That's not your problem though. According to the walkthrough, you're also supposed to have another two appliances, something called a "Totem Lathe" and something called an "Alchemiter."

You hope that they appear soon. They sound important. Either way, the walkthrough says you need to do something called "prototyping" the kernelsprite, which you apparently do by basically shoving some object into it, and it will take on the properties of that object, supposedly. Well you have just the thing! You pull a large, steampunk contraption off of the table. It was supposed to be a kind of clockwork servant, about three feet tall, but you could never get it to work for some reason. You carry it over to the five kernelsprites and touch it to the red one. It dissapears in a bright flash of light, forcing you to look away, and when you look back, there's a red clockwork robot standing in front of you. It doesn't seem to have any real intelligence of its own, but at least it seems functional. You decide to rename it "clockworksprite" for the time being, to differentiate it from the other four kernelsprites.