Backrooms

Shady took the magic blade from the Skinwalker’s palms, holding it the way a connoisseur holds a wine glass, light and appreciative.

The blade’s magic thrummed against her fingers, desiring her to use it.

Shady’s grin widened.

A million hoards and a million kobolds of Citadel Zero thrummed through her Fractal Engine like a distant orchestra warming up. Vincent was being honest, as long as she held the arcane blade, there didn’t seem to be a cap on how much power and skill she could pull.

She reached down through the connection to her family’s hoards. Drew on the myriads of Frontenachii vaults. Drew on the Corpse-God Citadel’s stored millennia of terror. Drew on every Wormwood Star shard her family had burned to make her. Drew on the skills of her family’s pradavarian and Omnid Knights.

A million Scrutimancers focused her mind on her Skinwalker boyfriend, evaluating the validity of his plan via her Wendigo hooks.

It would succeed, but also bring them both many dangerous problems. Suddenly gained power had a price, attracting attention of eldritch things that consumed it. The knife would indeed blood bind them to this domain as fiancees, but this actions would not bring Shady happiness because ultimately she didn’t like Vincent, and has been lying to herself for twelve years, killing time until… 

Shady hissed internally, the hooks were supposed to evaluate Vincent, not her!

She readjusted her focus. 

Vincent’s mind was set, he wouldn’t give up the souls he stole willingly. The only path forward was clear.

Shady’s fingers tightened, the metal groaned. She pushed against the blade with the strength of a million kobolds.

The soul-cleaver snapped clean in half with a sound like an entire chorus screaming and being cut off mid-note. As the artifact broke, the hundred and twenty thousand bound souls inside it came loose, briefly visible as a shimmering silver mist, and then dispersed into the yellow walls of the Backrooms, cast adrift towards Arx.

Vincent’s mouth opened. No sound came out as he struggled to process her betrayal.

Shady stuffed the parchment and both halves of the blade into her mouth and chewed, reinforcing her teeth and tongue with the power of her kobolds to dissolve and absorb both.

The paper tore quickly and the metal crunched between her molars. The magic woven into the alloy fought her. She chewed harder, jaw working, antlers tilting back as she swallowed the artifact and the associated paperwork, dissolving their stored alignment and power into herself.

“No!” Vincent lunged. “What did you do, what did you DO, that was so much work, all of my money, that blade was MY best chance to—”

His hands stretched out, gained claws, reached to close around her neck. 

Shady accelerated.

The Frontenachii hoards and kobolds snapped their attention toward her like a million tuning forks struck at once. Power flooded her limbs. Her vision sharpened until she could see the individual fluorescent flickers of the Backroom lights as discrete events. Vincent, who’d been moving fast a moment ago, slowed to a crawl.

Shady’s hand came up and caught his wrist almost lazily.

“Hi, V.”

She broke his grip, pivoted, and snapped both of his wrists. As he wailed, she drove her knee into his stomach hard enough to lift him off the carpet. He folded in half. She caught him by the throat on his way down and slammed him into the yellow wall, which dented and rippled like wet drywall.

“Seven girls,” she said conversationally, swallowing the last fragments of the blade. “You killed seven Omnid girls and absorbed parts of their souls to get stronger. That’s crossing a line, Vincent.”

The Skinwalker gurgled.

She pulled him off the wall and threw him across the room. He skipped twice on the damp carpet and crashed into a corner.

“I went on dates with you, V. We did the stupid Death-Seeker hunts. I tolerated you. I let you read me shitty poetry.” Her voice stayed light and fakely cheerful, as she walked toward him. “I took you to my dorm.”

“Aqi, you don’t understand! Please, I did it for us—”

“Don’t, please me, Val.” She picked him up by his neck. 

He tried to strike her as his hands healed. She bit right through his braceleted left hand with a single chomp. Vincent screamed, flailing his bleeding stump.

He tried to grow a bone blade, but Shady easily snapped it in half, then snapped his neck with a swat. The annoying Skinwalker didn’t die, healing slowly.

Shady carried half-paralyzed Vincent to the corner of the room where the floor sagged the most, kicked through the rotten carpet and the rotten subfloor beneath it, and exposed a shaft. It seemed to go on forever, featuring endless repeating, decaying rooms.

“Bye, Val. Don’t talk to me again. We’re over.”

She pitched him down the hole. He fell with a yell that echoed for a long, long time.

Shady tore all of the Lazarus bracelets off the Skinwalker’s chewed-off hand stump and stuffed them into her pocket with a huff.

The artifact blade and scroll gave her mind indigestion.

The artifact remnants sloshed around inside her stomach with nowhere productive to go. They tried to bind her to herself in increasingly weird configurations, tried to bind her to the Backrooms. Her Fractal Engine churned through the digestive process with audible tonal pops, sorting out the magical excess, drawing power from the Frontenachii hoards to reinforce her stomach lining and acid to dissolve the arcane metal.

Shady stomped through the yellow hallways, fuming.

She turned corners she didn’t choose. The Backrooms shifted around her, paths rearranging themselves when she wasn’t looking. The fluorescent buzz drilled into her ears. 

A black thing peeled itself off the ceiling and dropped toward her, unfolding into a lanky, many-limbed, incoherent wrigglyness.

She caught it mid-air and bit it in half. The Backrooms creature tasted like burnt tinfoil.

She huffed and kept angrily walking without a direction in mind.

The hallways went on. Yellow walls. White lights. Damp carpet. She started kicking the walls as she walked, leaving paw and claw-shaped dents.

“Stupid Val. Stupid binding blade. Stupid Skyfall field trip. Stupid Greyfield with his stupid Number Six cor—”

She turned another corner.

A small room opened in the otherwise endless monotony. The wallpaper here smelled… older. Yellow had turned to a buttery cream. The fluorescent lamp above an alcove in the room was warmer, almost amber, and didn’t buzz.

Shady entered the curious, off-color room. A black-and-yellow striped armchair stood in the square room, the kind you’d find in a 1970s motel. Beside it stood a floor lamp.

The armchair was inhabited by an old, extremely disheveled… human.

He wore a patchwork suit assembled from a hundred different fabrics, each square from a different era and tailor. His shoes didn’t match. His socks didn’t match. His tie was at least thirty ties knotted together in freakish patterns. Wisps of dirty white hair sprouted around a wrinkled, sagging face. Extremely sour smell of unwashed clothes, rot and old paper drifted from him as if he hadn’t showered in a century or ten.

He looked up as Shady stomped into view. His eyes were gray-white and full of… other eyes. A thousand pupils nested inside each iris all looking into different directions.

Shady scoffed.

“Who the heck are you?” she demanded.

The freaky, patchwork old man considered the question.

“I am Number Six,” he said. His voice carried a faint hushed echo, like he was speaking from inside several hundred rooms at once. “Recycling. Keeper of all lost things. Custodian of forsaken worlds and ideas. Curator of the forgotten and abandoned.”

Shady squinted at him, taking in the patchwork suit, the mismatched shoes and ungroomed hair. 

“You look like shit,” she stated bluntly. 

“Yes.”

“Aren’t the Numbers… omnipotent, or something?” She asked.

“My job is to contain everything ever lost or forgotten,” Six smiled. The expression somehow nested a hundred smaller smiles inside it, his jaw not sitting on quite right, as if it wasn’t entirely connected to his teeth and flesh. “Including, very often, myself. Eureka currently runs an unfortunate number of endless loops. It prints endless worlds and recycles them, prints them and recycles them. Each cycle sheds memory and produces abandoned, lost worlds and ideas. The shed memory falls to me. I keep it, hold it close, collect it.”

“That’s your excuse for looking like an old hobo?” Shady asked. “Pathetic.”

“Yes.” He repeated in exactly the same unnerving tone, like a dry, xeroxed echo of himself.

Shady crossed her arms. The artifact blade indigestion pinched her stomach, and she winced. “Riiiight. I’m Princess Aquillianne Quantivia Frontenachii, of the Frontenachii Omnicorp, great-great-granddaughter of Empress Aconia.”

“Yes,” Six said again. “I am aware. Your kind… is curious.”

“In what way?”

“You are an infestation of roaches crawling on many of the things I keep,” the homeless-looking Number said.

“Uh-huh.”

“Sit,” he offered, gesturing at the carpet.

“Your floor’s gross.”

“Yes.”

Shady sat on the floor anyway, crossing her legs, glaring up at the Avatar of Number Six.

“What do you want from me, old man?”

“I am here because this place is me. You found me because you became lost. The truly lost ones find me, occasionally.”

“I’m not lost.”

“You are several kinds of lost… Starshady,” the Number suddenly uttered her old nickname, making Shady shudder. “Geographically lost. Temperamentally lost. And most of all… romantically lost.” He tilted his balding head. “The last one is the most curious.”

Shady’s anger at the world faltered, sputtering out. “What are you talking about?”

“I contain what is lost. I see the shape of the absence in those who carry loss.” Six leaned forward in the armchair, the patchwork suit shifting to reveal more patches underneath, layers without end. “There is a hole in you, Princess Aquillianne.”

Shady’s breath caught. “Say what?”

“I can return what you lost with a single handshake,” the Number stated, offering Shady a grimy hand.

She stared at the hand. The skin on it wasn’t human skin, a patchwork of textures folding into themselves endlessly, only somewhat resembling skin from afar.

“What’s in it for you?” Shady asked.

“Everything.”

“What?” Shady blinked.

“The price of getting back what you’ve lost is everything you hold dear now,” the dishevelled-looking Number said. “All of the hoards bound to you. All of the kobolds tied to you. All of your fancy clothes, artifacts. Your entire family.”

“The fuck would I agree to give you that?” Shady asked with a chortle. “You think I’m some kind of a moron or something?”

“No,” Number said. “I think that you’ll give everything up willingly to save everyone.”

“Save everyone from what? Big talk from a guy living in a sad armchair,” she scoffed.

Six folded his patchwork hands on his knee. The fabric of his suit rippled slightly, one of the older squares peeling up to reveal a square of denim, then a square of brocade, then a square of questionable skin.

“Your family hoards things,” he stated. 

“Yeah? Hoarding magic shit is what we do. It’s our whole thing.”

“You do not understand the shape of your offense.”

“What offense?” Shady asked.

“Your kind permanently binds concepts to empower your family. Concepts that do not desire to be bound to you. Each binding is a theft, a failure of a proper transaction.”

Shady waved a clawed hand. “Boo-hoo, the universe gets less stuff. Cry me a freaking Leviathan, old man.”

“Your kind is the worst offender. The Frontenachii hoard more than any other Omnid line, and the Omnids hoard more than any other species in the Omniverse. You are the apex of binders. The crown of thieves.” Six spoke dryly as if reciting a grocery list.

“Sounds like a personal issue. Gonna sit there in your hobo chair and complain about it forever?”

“No.”

Shady’s ears twitched. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

Six lifted one finger. The patchwork sleeve rode up his wrist, and something glinted there, a band of mismatched metals. The sleeve fell back more, revealing a watch with an endless number of arrows on it, probably counting down all the time in the Omniverse. 

Shady swallowed.

“You are far away from the heart of Eureka, chewing so the threshold is far lower, but there is a threshold still. A weight of bound concepts beyond which my sibling is permitted to act. Your kind has been creeping toward it for some time now. Slowly, like ivy on a wall.”

“And?”

“You creep towards your own erasure, little Wendigo Omnid. When the weight crosses the threshold, Three is permitted to act wholesale.”

Shady’s stomach gave another lurch. 

“Which… Three?” She asked, already knowing the horrible answer.

“Number Three. My older sibling. My counterpart. Where I keep what is forgotten, Three removes threats, erases all who disobey our Law and Order. I am Recycling. Three is Nullification. Erasure absolute.”

Shady knew the name. Of course she did. Every Highborn child of the Frontenachii Omnicorp learned the names of the Numbers in nursery school, the way human children learn the names of planets. Three was the name nobody said twice in a row. The Number who could subtract something or someone so completely that everyone forgot they even existed.