Broken - Part 1 (Commission for RenaSpikes)

TAGS: Actually SFW, Worldbuilding/Backstory Development, Renaaaaaa, Glitch TF (?)

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Sleeping didn’t help. Despite the best of intentions, Tim’s suggestion that Spikes try the closest he had to switching off and on again didn’t go anywhere, with the damage done to their body remaining exactly the same; even going so far as rebooting the Digivice controlling the Rena did very little, if anything to curtail the glitches, leaving the two of them bereft of any options and lacking in any clue on how to proceed. Even worse, with the one responsible for it having gotten away, the couple couldn’t even pretend to have any sense of closure; the cheetah’s laughter as they put away the weapon responsible and sprinted into the distance would haunt the two of them for years to come, even if they did catch the bastard and bring him to justice. It was so sudden as well, inexplicable really: one moment the couple was enjoying a nice warm day at the park, not really doing anything so much as just appreciating one another’s company, and the next they were listening to someone cackling in the distance before the monologuing began; something about perfecting the ultimate life form or some such, it sounded so much like it had come from a movie that both Tim and Spikes zoned out halfway through, being more concerned with the fact that the mad cat in front of them was waving what looked to be a gun in their face… albeit one that was built out of a bunch of ramshackle pieces of scrap haphazardly welded together. Neither of them believed it was capable of firing properly, but they weren’t about to gamble on maybes; unfortunately for them, this ended up biting them, hard, because as soon as the cheetah was done delivering their raison d’être in soliloquy form, they promptly pointed the “gun” at Spikes and pulled the trigger. There was no sound, nor a laser beam or even the faintest traces of a physical projectile, but the Renamon was still projected backwards by some kind of phantom impact, rolling around on the grass for several feet before skidding to a half; the cheetah, for his part, had his eyes glued on the device he was holding, his lips curling into a manic grin before he broke into hysterical cackling, declaring that the experiment had been a success before turning around, promising to “see them soon”, and vanishing into the nearest treeline. Behind him, the cheetah left an intensely confused Tim and an apparently injured Spikes, who struggled to get back onto his feet after the invisible force knocked all the air out of his lungs; he hadn’t noticed what happened to his body, but the lynx did when they turned around to help their partner, having to stifle a yelp by placing both hands over their mouth. The Rena’s body had been… altered, though perhaps a better choice of words would be “carved up”: it was still the same shape as before, but random patches of it had turned into confusing patches of static and glitched graphics, looking as if Spikes’ body had lost its associated textures and had been replaced with whatever their digital form perceived as the “default” one, before promptly going tits-up and just ceasing to function properly altogether. There was no pattern to it as well; it was as if the weapon the cheetah wielded had randomly erased parts of the Rena’s body with no rhyme or reason, leaving him looking… unfinished. Perhaps the worst of it was that one of Spikes’ eyes had its sclera go completely black, occasionally having small graphical glitches blitz through it; it gave the poor guy an aura of threatening menace that was entirely undeserved, like someone had drawn up their idea of a “big scary monster” and superimposed it on someone who wouldn’t hurt a fly even if it had been annoying them for hours on end. Tragically, Spikes himself seemed entirely unaware of what had happened, at least judging from their outward confusion at Tim’s expression and the shocked scream that escaped from his lips once he looked down to inspect what he assumed to be either a bullet hole or a serious burn wound; that he would discover his body was missing parts of it in the most esoteric way possible was not something he expected, which only added to the ensuing panic attack, one that followed Spikes all the way home. Only time could fix that problem; the Rena needed to see that his physical avatar was still capable of functioning, even with chunks of it glitched out, and while he slowly became aware that he had completely lost sensitivity in the parts of them that were gone, the rest of him seemed to work as intended. Internally, there seemed to be no damage, something all-but confirmed fully when Tim made some tea for the both of them; for all intents and purposes, the damage done had been fully superficial… but the words spoken before it was inflicted left the two of them wondering just how true that might be. Assuming they hadn’t just been assaulted by a complete lunatic with a modified Digivice, all the talk about creating life could lend credence to the idea that they had effectively stolen data from Spikes, to use in whatever demented project they were working on; that would certainly explain why nothing either of the housemates did seemed to work, from fiddling with the Renamon’s personal digital controller, to rebooting it, to just having him try and sleep it off. It seemed that, against all odds, the missing parts of Spikes’ body were truly missing, not just deleted, leaving behind a hole that couldn’t be fixed on account of the data fuckery required for something of that caliber. It wasn’t so much a case of the data being gone so much as it had been ripped out forcefully without any kind of preparation, leaving the Rena’s physical avatar as corrupted as the digital self that it was the projection of; seeing as both Spikes and Tim’s understanding of digital biology was somewhat lacking, this left them in the unenviable position of trying to make sense out of something they literally lacked the knowledge required to even grasp the basics of. This hit Spikes especially badly, as he felt that, being his body, then naturally he should be capable of understanding what was wrong with it, only for every attempt at introspection or physical analysis to end up being a perfect analogue to him smashing his forehead against a wall for several hours on end; nothing he tried worked, which made some sense given that he had no method, no understanding of the theory behind it, and, perhaps most importantly, no idea what the weapon that caused it even was. Maybe if he could get his hands on it, then perhaps there’d be a breakthrough, but in the absence of the device, all they could do was throw random thoughts at the wall and see what stuck. This was especially important for Tim, who had taken it upon themselves to uncover the truth of what had happened, even if it meant going half-mad in the process; while they had no clue how anything about digital data corruption worked, what they did have was an internet connection, an ample supply of caffeine, and a body that they could manipulate at will, all ingredients that allowed them to fully dedicate themselves to the single-minded pursuit of whatever scraps of information could be remotely useful in their current predicament. More than one sleepless night was spent pouring through technical manuals, most of the contents of which went right over the lynx’s head, or crawling through specialist internet forums in the hopes of finding anyone who might’ve encountered any similar phenomena; when that turned out dry, the focus shifted on attempting to identify, or at the very least find the slightest hint of who their assailant might be. Ultimately, Tim knew that neither them nor Spikes would be able to fix the glitch problem without getting a good look at what caused it, and without direct access to whatever that weapon was, it was doubtful they’d ever find the root cause; unfortunately, given the lack of any actual information on who the cheetah was, trying to use vague descriptors led down a series of entirely pointless rabbit holes relating to police arrests and raids that, while initially promising, always ended up in nothing… at least, until Tim randomly stumbled onto something they didn’t even remember searching for. It had become a habit by that point, what with them being trigger-happy with opening new tabs, to end up with most of their browser filled with entirely extraneous windows that the cat just happened to click for whatever reason, and while nearly all of them were ultimately worthless, one turned out to contain just the right amount of keywords for the lynx’s brain to think about looking into it deeper. At face value, it looked to be an entirely ordinary piece of news about a series of minor thefts from local workshops and repair garages, notable only because whoever was responsible always left a note thanking the proprietor for their “contribution to the advancement of science”; the main reason why no one had given this much thought, and why it was relegated to the back page of a local newspaper, was precisely because the “thefts” were so minor that those affected felt it wasn’t worth the trouble of contacting the police. In fact, as far as Tim could ascertain, these incidents stretched back far before the article came out, with its author being the first to think about collating them into a news piece thanks to its novelty value, using it as a springboard to muse about the existence of a “budding supervillain” in an almost unbearably tongue-in-cheek tone. The article itself was mostly garbage as far as the lynx was concerned, but it did offer a series of names of those affected by the phantom thief, one that Tim was convinced had to be the cheetah that had attacked the two of them in the park; it would be far too much of a coincidence for someone to be stealing random mechanical parts from multiple different locations, only for a second, unrelated individual to show up with a weapon looking like scrap metal bolted together and monologuing in much the same tone as the mysterious notes. No, it had to be the cheetah, and seeing as they were polite enough to thank their victims, that meant he left a trail, and trails could be followed; from there on, the lynx’s attention was focused entirely on attempting to find a pattern to the thefts, and within a couple of short days their room had turned into a parody of a conspiracy theorist’s den. In all honesty, the red string was entirely unnecessary, but Tim figured that if they were going to go deep, they might as well buy into the aesthetic, even if it did leave Spikes worried that his partner was losing their mind; in reality however, the cat had never been more awake, their mind never more sharpened, as they painstakingly tracked every single person that had ever been stolen from by way of the original news article, anything it linked, phone calls to those affected and even deep dives into the local police archives in search of the few people who did call in to report their missing property. Soon enough, when the map of the city was unfurled and pinned on a corkboard, and the various locations connected by string, the truth became obvious: it was a circle. Or rather, the locations hit by the cheetah all fit within a roughly two-mile-wide circle, centered in one of the outlying suburbs to the east; while the actual thefts themselves seemed to have no pattern to them, every location that the lynx could dig up inevitably ended up somewhere in those twelve and a half square miles, presumably because the cheetah was walking there on foot to avoid drawing too much attention to himself. It made far too much sense, at least in Tim’s mind, for it to not be true… and given that the circle’s center was a relatively small neighborhood, it should be easy to scout the location out and find where their quarry lived. It was a fantastic victory for the investigation, and really, it had only come at the cost of the lynx nearly losing their minds from lack of sleep and an excess caffeine overdose, both of which left Spikes so worried that the Rena occasionally forgot that they had their body glitching out at all. Granted, it was surprisingly easy for it to slip from his mind, on account of it not really feeling like anything; apart from the lack of sensations in the affected areas, the Renamon’s body kept functioning like it always had, creating an odd sense of unbalance where he knew something was wrong with him, and yet nothing wrong actually happened no matter how bad the situation looked. The worst aspect of it was, honestly, his inability to head outside without some extremely concealing clothing, which was a slight issue in the middle of the summer; the moment he revealed any of his glitches to the world, he was guaranteed to have someone scream in shock and claim that he was a monster of some kind, creating a whole scene that he had to defuse, then waste time explaining what happened for the upteenth time in a row. In a sense, Spikes almost wanted the data corruption to do something to him, since at least then he’d have an excuse to hop onto bed and not leave until things were fixed; instead, he was left in an odd limbo where it was bad enough to negatively affect him, but not nearly enough for it to be crippling, hence his fixation on the lynx’s problems and how much their lack of care for their own body was slowly destroying it.

Thankfully, with the potential discovery of their assailant’s home, they could finally formulate a plan of action. It wasn’t much to go on, but it was something, and they could work with something; neither of the two were very much willing to engage in some home invasion, but what they could do was locate the house and gather as much information about it as possible, maybe even spot the cheetah if they were lucky. What would happen after that, they didn’t know; with Spikes’ condition being what it was, both the Rena and the lynx were content with taking things one step at a time so as to avoid any surprises. Plus, they didn’t know whether their attacker was going to make good on their promise of “seeing them” again; the whole situation had just turned into one big game of cat-and-mouse.

And with Tim and the cheetah both being felines, Spikes didn’t like where that left him.