As the full moon hangs in the night sky.

The waterfall crashes against the rocks below.

The sound of a sword peeling away from flesh.

As Game Girl looks into her best friend’s eyes.

A flash of remorse fades as quick as it comes. The slightest quiver of his lip is bit upon as Game Boy watches her fall over the edge into the river below.

And he is alone.

A ragged breath exits him as he falls to a knee and pushes a hand to his mouth stopping the vomit from exiting. He shakes; holding back a tear before wiping the blade into the grass to erase the blood.

He looks down at the crimson scar he left on the earth, his hands trembling before he tries to compose himself.

After some time.

He steps back to his feet and returns quietly to the camp, placing his sword in its sheathe and laying down by the fire. His wide eyes reflecting the embers dancing above the crackling wood until the sky fills with the sun.

His eyes, tired. Bloodshot.

He finally blinks when he hears Princess yawn and move out of her tent. “Good morning.” she says with a smile to her compatriots.

Gretchin grumbles as she moves to the fire hoisting a cauldron above it to prepare breakfast, while Pepe the Mouse Knight hops down from his cot.

Game Boy feigns a yawn while he stretches before rubbing his eyes. “Morning.” he replies.

Gretchin looks at him, peering behind a veil of darkness, the brim of her hat barely concealing the yellow pricks of light glaring at him.

“You seem tired.” She says turning back to the cauldron. “Busy night?”

Game Boy scratches at his pale neck with a weak cough. “I think I’m coming down with something. Couldn’t sleep.”

“Hm.”

Silence lingers for a moment.

“Where’s Paige?” Princess questions looking around the camp. “Don’t tell me she’s gone back to Urf while we’re on a mission!”

With a croaked groan GB replies, “I- …She went to get some firewood last night, but I fell asleep soon after.”

Gretchin stares a hole through him. “She probably got caught up in something else.” She adds, her eyes unmoving from Game Boy. “Away with the fairies, that one, probably got distracted with some other shenanigans.”

“Great!” Princess throws her hands up with a sigh before her fists dig into her hips. “Guess we’ll carry on and hope she can catch up.”

“Oh you know her, Princess.” Gretchin finally moves her glance from Game Boy. “No matter what happens she’ll always come back.”

You couldn’t see Gretchin’s smile under her cloak.

But Game Boy could hear it.

A wiry, lip splitting, malicious smile.

A slight eye flick.

A sickening, knowing look.

His heart thuds against his chest as the hot swell of bile inched up his throat, with a spluttered cough he beats it down before standing up and grabbing his belongings. “Yep.” His hand rasping around his sheath as he ropes it over his shoulder before turning to the two with a forced smile. “She always comes back.”

---

Scoops McGee groans as he kneels down in the hay, lifting the horse’s leg and scraping the muck from its hoof. Game Girl, our hero, stands at the horse’s mouth holding a bucket in her hand which the horse greedily eats from. Paige has a slight smile on her face watching the creature methodically dip in and out, chewing with muffled grunts.

“You’re quiet.” Scoops mumbles.

“Hm?” GG glances over briefly meeting Scoops' eyes before going back to the horse.

“I said you’re quiet. Usually chewing my ear off by now.”

Paige doesn’t respond, simply giving a shrug. Scoops sighs, dropping the hoof and standing up, wiping the blunt knife with a rag.

“Listen, I know last week was rough. For all of us. Kicking ya self ain’t gonna fix shit. Hell, if I cried every time I lost a match there wouldn’t be enough water in my body for me to piss ever again.”

Scoops gives a slight smile as GG snorts a laugh before placing the bucket down and stroking the horse’s snout.

“I just feel like I let Amber down.”

“Don’t you say that.” Scoops moves a little closer to her. “She’s a grown woman, she can take accountability. You tried! You got knocked down, you got back up! Hell you put up a fight! And I know you, you always do your best after getting knocked down. Puts the wind back in ya.”

Scoops shuffles slightly awkwardly as Game Girl’s wide eyes fix on him with a smile.

“Thanks, Scoops.”

“Yeah, yeah.” Scoops flips the knife around and offers it to her. “Let’s switch places, my back is killing me.”

GG delicately takes the knife, thumbing the blunt edge as she moves to the rear of the horse. Giving a pat on its side the horse raises its back hoof and GG kneels to clear out any debris.

“Maybe I do try harder after getting some reality knocked into me. But if that's the case.” Her eyes flick to Scoops. “Why did I not return to Narfinex after what happened with Game Boy?”

Scoops scratches at the horse's mane, picking some dirt and flicking it away. “You mean for revenge?”

“Maybe?” She shrugs. “I dunno. Just why did I run like a coward?”

“Y’know girlie, escaping ain’t a bad thing. Running away is simply the best option you have.”

“But you seemed proud of me for picking myself up and fighting back! For trying!”

Scoops hesitates. “Yeah I am. But there’s a huge difference between a fight on a show and what you had to deal with.” He scoffs a laugh. “Why do you think I ain’t angry with ya? Or myself? Or Dickie or Amber! Sometimes ya lose fights, it ain’t the end of the world. You’ll come back. You always come back.”

Paige nods with the words before taking in a deep breath and finishing up on the hoof.

“You’re right, Scoops.” She smiles kindly. “Sorry for being so melodramatic, not sure what's got into me.”

“I’d be sad too if I was kneeling in shit.” He points down with a smirk as GG who steps up with a look of disgust before cracking a giggle.

“Lol. I should go wash up.”

“Go ahead, I’ll finish up here.”

“You sure?”

“Yeah.” Scoops thumbs his nose as he walks over and puts his hand out for the knife. “Grab some firewood on your way back to the house, gonna be cold tonight.”

GG smiles, placing the knife in Scoops' palm. “You got it.”

She leaves the barn. Tapping the threshold of the door as she does.

Scoops drums the handle of the knife in his palm, watching as she walks over the hard dirt, her breath visible in the air. Wrapping around her cheeks and whispering into the wind.

Grabbing some logs of wood from the shed nearby, she heads over to the house.

Noah’s silhouette walks past the windows as music faintly falls into the dimming sky. Game Girl runs a thumb along the bark in her arms, feeling the grooves and rubbing away the thinnest layer of ice clinging on.

A long exhale comes from her.

The sky turned black as the void, as sound and the earth beneath her leaves, letting her slowly tumble into a vacuum. The ends of her blue hair flow as she floats.

Her face barely lit by dots of stars.

A slow inhale.

And out.

“I’ve dealt with repetition more times than most.”

Her words echo softly into space.

“Exiting a world I knew to be thrown back into another with the same memories, same people around me and the same outcome.”

“Over and over.”

“Watching those I love get hurt. Die. Betray me.”

“Over and over.”

“But I always came back.”

“The same, but different.”

“I tried and yeah, I failed a lot. Failure is to be human. Something I want to be.”

“But I tried.”

“Vaas said, “the definition of insanity is doing the exact same thing over and over again and expecting different results.””

“I don’t think that’s insanity. I think that’s hope.”

“It’s determination!”

“It’s wanting to break the cycle!”

“And that’s exactly what I plan to do, Jenny.”

The logs of wood she carried fall from her arms, creating steps that she gracefully hops between going further up into a starry sky.

“You’re like me, in a way. You come and go at random and you try the same things over and over again to the same result.”

“Soul-crushing failure.”

“And when you finally have the chance to escape the cycle of mediocrity you made, you simply run somewhere else and become the same champion you were last time, with the same 2017 look, with the same soulless promos and use the same terrible graphic designer. Or use AI to make them look like crud which I feel as a person of code that’s cultural appropriation or something” :P

“Do you not bore yourself?”

“Do you not look at yourself in the mirror and realize you need to change? Improve? To actually BE something?”

“Do you not feel insignificant when Samael Dyson does everything you and Chris Chaos tried to be but actually makes it work? Actually can be seen as a threat?”

“Do you not feel embarrassed when Jennie Nickles did a better impression of you your entire career in a month?”

“Heck, I feel embarrassed that I lost to you once! My own fault for not taking you seriously, shame on me. Fool me once blah blah.”

“What do you feel when you have been a wrestler since 2017 who loves to lord over others with their wins and title reigns but has had more losses than most anyone, with title reigns that end in disappointment, how many X-Treme titles have you won only for them to be taken away with a carefree pin from the likes of John Black days before you go on a show?”

“Is the repetition gonna carry on here? Can’t wait to find out!”

“What do you feel when you, a wrestler since 2017, with so many titles calls herself a queen but has never EVER come anywhere close to winning a crown?”

“What do you feel when you’re mocked endlessly? When people make pictures of you being bald? When you’re still the butt of the joke years after you left the XWF? When people laugh about how well you used to do in matches only for them to end in an abrupt and disappointing loss?”

“What do you feel when everything you hold important in your life means nothing to anyone else?”

“And I know what you’re going to say; “Oh GG, *insert childish curse-filled line* you’ve been here LONGER than me! *content of a graphic nature* And you’ve done less! *eats dog food for the shock value?*”

“And yeah! You’re right! I’ve only held the one title here who I beat Sebastian Duke for. I’ve been in the XWF waaaay longer with not that many matches to show for it. My win/loss record isn’t stellar, honestly kinda mid.”

“But I’ve also been on the winning team of War Games three out of four times and through that I’ve made amazing friends that I love dearly.”

“People seem to really enjoy having me around, which is lovely.”

“I do my best in matches, I put on a show!”

“In my last fight, one of the commentators had a genuine, nice reaction to seeing me.”

Paige smiles sweetly, lost in thought for a moment. Her grin fades and a look of concern and worry grows.

“When has that ever happened to you?”

“I’m here to help people and beat up bad guys. I want to make people smile. I want to have a positive effect!”

“I don’t need titles. I don’t need to win.”

“I just want to try my best.”

“And in a world of Samael Dyson's, Wicked Witches and Micheal Graves’s. I think that’s a pretty good cause.”

“And kicking your flat butt and stripping you off the Xtreme Championship to deflate your ego is just the cherry on top.” :P

She gives a quiet giggle making her way up the logs until the nebulas expel blaring lights of color around her. The constellations resemble eerie figures.

“You live in your loop, hearing the things you want to hear, believing the things you want to believe. Doing the same things you always do with a smug sense of satisfaction. I want to untie that loop.”

“I don't want to beat you because I want to win, I want to beat you to get rid of you for good. I want to break a cycle that keeps repeating, one of senseless repetition with no room to grow, one of teenage angst clinging onto a fully grown adult, one of a mediocre wrestler refusing to adapt.”

“Instead of trying, you latch on to others in the hope of making yourself somewhat relevant. Lording around a title you never won that gets passed around more than-”

A voice shoots through the void.

GG blinks following the voice.

“Thank you, Amber.”

“And change the title to resemble your meme of the moment to a thunderous groan of eye-rolling. Same with Meat Clowns. Same with anything about CHAOS. Same as always, Jenny.”

“Repetition.”

Game Girl taps her head with a wink. With her next words a star in the distance glows brightly before imploding into an empty hole in space, drawing pricks of light near.

“And like a collapsing star, you draw in these people around you like a black hole of anti-charisma and crush them under the immense weight of being not only a cruddy wrestler, but a boring and uninspiring, lifeless homunculus. Recycling the same lines since 2017 and plagiarizing yourself to the point it becomes parody.”

As the stars shoot into the expanding black hole in the far distance, the void grows larger and larger. Game Girl hops closer and closer to a range of colors and a familiar shape in the constellations.

“You are a stagnant cancer, Jenny. One that consumes but doesn't have the mercy to kill the host. It stays and infects before subsiding only to return and remind people of the pain and misery that is your existence. You're something I want to rid, a corruption that leeches from others but can't do a darn thing themselves, something that causes headaches and fatigue. I want to erase you for good.”

“I want you gone forever.”

Game Girl sees the form in the stars, a young man with a sword on his back throwing out a hand to her.

“But sadly, a cancer…”

She reaches out a hand for it.

“...Can always come back.”

Her hand hits the doorknob to Scoops’ house.

She freezes for a moment, jostling the wood under her arm and looking around at the farmland. The music behind the door comes to an end as she opens and a new one plays; Noah looks up with a smile from behind his laptop and Game Girl gives a hearty wave with her free hand before nudging the door close with her foot.

“Hey!” She says sweetly heading over to the fireplace and dropping the logs.

“Hey , Paige.” Noah responds, returning to his screen. The acoustic guitar plays from Noah’s laptop accompanied by the tapping of keys before he sniffs up with an eyebrow. “Can you smell shit?”

“Oh.” GG looks down at her ruined jeans, the brief thought of her going through space and talking to Jenny with horse poop on her knee crosses her mind. “That’s embarrassing.”

Noah snickers with a shake of his head, continuing his work as GG moves into the kitchen and hops on the counter, turning a tap on the sink and grabbing an already stained cloth. She begins scrubbing her pants with a wrinkled nose and upturned lip, all the while listening to the song playing in the back.

---

“This song is sad.” Paige turns to Noah who looks up briefly.

---

“Yeah, I guess.” He responds. “I dunno, kinda endearing I think.”

---

---

“How?” Paige stops the flow of water and is just listening at this point.

“Well, he’s alive to sing it.” Noah says matter-of-factly.

---

---

Game Girl bops her head slowly as the melody plays out. Noah looks at her squinting and chews his lip before lowering the screen of the laptop slightly and paying full attention to her.

“He lived through trauma, through bad times. But he’s on the other side now and he can share his story in a way that’s natural to him. It’s sad, yeah, but he-”

“He came back.” GG interrupts looking at the tiled floor beneath her.

Noah gives a side smile with a nod. “He came back.”

The song continues quietly. Game Girl throws her head up with a sniffle, blinking rapidly before brushing a finger under her eyelid. Noah watches her, fingers scratch the table once as he shuffles in his seat to move up but GG turns to him with a warm smile.

“It’s a nice song.” She says, a slight croak in her voice.

She puts her foot in the sink and continues scrubbing away at the muck on her jeans, removing the mess but leaving a smear. With a sigh she throws the cloth back in the sink and hops down, beginning to clean the cloth and then her hands with soap. Noah watches her, his hands drumming the table.

“Hey…” His voice breaks. “Is everything okay?”

“No.” Paige responds, softly and plainly. She turns her head to him with a sweet grin. “But it will be, eventually.”

Paige whips her hands dry and heads off to her room, humming the song under her breath as Noah watches her and gives a shake of his head opening the laptop back up.

“What are you working on by the way?” She shouts from the other room.

Noah lifts his head, his eyes focused on the screen. “Editing. Scoops has a big match at Snow Pain Snow Gain.”

A giggle is heard that drones off with a giddy sigh, “Love that name, so silly.”

“Yeah.” Noah responds with a laugh. “Good ol’ XWF… Hey, do you need me to work on your stuff? … Do… Do you actually need editing at all?”

Paige returns in an over-sized shirt and comfy pants, her hair mussed up. “Erm, nah, don’t think so anyway. Things just tend to happen.” She places the kettle on the stove, “You want some tea?”

“Yeah, thanks.” Noah looks back to the laptop and double takes. “What do you mean it just happens?”

GG shrugs, “I dunno what to tell you, dude. I do things and people see them… Kinda creepy if I think about it.” She looks up to the ceiling as the kettle begins to boil.

“Hm.” Noah nods his head to the side. “You nervous about your match at all?”

“Kinda, yeah.” She nods. “I mean, first it's pretty cathartic letting go of some anger on someone who really deserves it. But it’s been a long time since a title has been on the line for me, I know they’re important to people and if I win I want to be a good champion. Someone to look up to. Someone that is remembered for doing a good job.”

“You’d be great, Paige.”

“Thank you, Noah, that’s kind.” GG smiles going back to the whistling kettle lifting it off the stove.

She grabs two mugs and places them on the table, returning to the kettle and heading over.

“I want to say, with everything that’s happened… I’m glad I landed here with you and Scoops.”

Noah smiles widely, “We’re glad you came here too.”

With a twinkle in her eye, she pours the tea into the cup as we focus on the liquid hitting it.

A gauntleted hand grabs the cup.

And Game Boy feverishly brings it to his mouth.

He looks to Princess neatly packing her things in cases and ordering her guards to take them to the horses. Game Boy’s tired eyes flick between the ongoings before landing on Gretchin beside him who stirs the cauldron over the dying fire.

He leans in and whispers. “What do you know?”

Gretchin scoffs at the question, her eyes focused on the brew. “What ever could you mean, my dear?”

“You-...” Game Boy bites his tongue, looking around before lowering his tone, “You know Paige isn’t coming back.”

Gretchin turns her head slowly and methodically to meet Game Boy’s gaze.

“I never said that.”

“It doesn’t matter what you said.” He hisses. “You know! I don’t know how you know but you know!”

“Cycles are funny things.” She murmurs, going back to the cauldron. “They don’t care about guilt. Or fear. Or regret. They just… turn.”

The brew swirls with Gretchin’s movements.

“She said it herself, Game Boy, she’s lived countless lives seeing the same things over and over again, the same things, the same outcomes but… Different.”

The logs crackle under the dying red embers, Game Boy jumps at the noise before looking back to Gretchin her head turned to him.

Those tiny slits of yellow glaring at him.

“You did what you always do,” she whispers. “And she’ll do what she always does.”

GB’s pupils move side to side rapidly before he stands up with a gruff sigh. His fist clenched he storms off from the camp; Princess jolts as he walks away.

“The heck is up with him? Where’s he going?”

Gretchin gives the faintest of laughs.

A dry, old cackle.

“He’ll be back.” She responds, almost in a song. “He always comes back.”










The universe is no narrow thing and the order within it is not constrained by any latitude in its conception to repeat what exists in one part in any other part. Even in this world more things exist without our knowledge than with it and the order in creation which you see is that which you have put there, like a string in a maze, so that you shall not lose your way. For existence has its own order and that no man's mind can compass, that mind itself being but a fact among others

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