Omake:
Inspired by
@Rossum waxing philosophical on Coil.
"T-TAYLOR! TAYYY-
UURP-LOR, YOU GOTTA WAKE UP!"
As I jerked awake from what I was coming to recognize as Rick's belch-filled cadence, sensory information from my bugs flooded into my consciousness just in time for our gestalt vision to see a wrinkly hand slap my groggy face.
Despite the stinging pain in my cheek, I immediately cast my awareness outward, looking for threats. "What's the situation?" I demanded as I fumbled blindly underneath the bed for my armor and mask. Simultaneously, teams of swarms combed the house, the garage, and the surrounding blocks. "Where's the threat? Are we under attack? -
gah!"
Despite my ever-present swarm, Rick had somehow gotten inside my guard and slapped me again, this time the other side of my face. I yelped in pain, but the blue-haired man ignored it in favor of grasping me by the collar and shaking me.
I was starting to understand some of what Morty went through.
"N-No, Taylor! Forget about all of that! This is-is more important! At first, I thought it was those idiot Sigerian scammers again," Rick ranted. "T-They couldn't hope to simulate my genius for my c-concentrated dark matter, so t-they-they kept drawing me into these stupid simulations that
only Jerry couldn't figure his way out of even at minimal capacity! I b-blew them up a few years back and I-I knew there was always the chance that they c-cobbled together another shitcan to get at me, but this is different!"
I hopped frantically around the room, checking the armor plating of my silk undersuit, asking "Wait, what do you mean I'm not real?" I was getting used to parsing Rick's drunken ranting, but this was a bit too fast. "Also, Rick, it's - " I had a trio of dragonflies peer at a clock. "- almost three in the morning! Slow down, and explain what's happening!"
Rick held up a piece of technology; it had a small screen that fuzzed with static as he turned various knobs and dials, and every so often he would fiddle with two or three of the antennae and satellite-dish looking extensions on it. It looked like he'd cobbled it together from household appliances...
my household appliances.
"... Is that my TV? And is that my blender!? Give them back!" I demanded.
"None of that matters!" he raved. "None of this matters! You're not real!
I-I-I'M not
-belch- real!"
Finally hitting upon what must have been the correct combination of fiddling, Rick made a satisfied noise before thrusting the contraption at me. "See!?" he said, eyes crazed and triumphant.
I went vaguely cross-eyed as I stared at the screen: there were
two dots on the screen, one of which was colored green, and the other one was red. There was an arrow underneath the red dot, pointing to it.
"... There are two dots on the screen," I said flatly. "You woke me up in the middle of the night to show me green and red dots?"
"Don't be
Rick-diculous," he slurred, chortling as I tried to sting him with a wasp, but as always, it died instantly after getting within an inch of him. I settled for glaring at him, instead saying, "So what?"
"So what?
SO WHAT!?" Rick repeated, his smile dying as he turned incredulous. "I modified one of my timeline fracture scanners after the Sigerian scammer incident - now this little baby shows any external waveforms trying to hack my brain, and outputs their origins such that any
real realities are green, and any
fake realities are red! And the arrow's pointing to
red!"
"So... because your scanner thing is pointing to red," I said slowly. "It means that we're in a fake reality? We're in a simulation?" I pinched myself. Hard. "But I feel real," I protested.
"O-Of course
-belch- you do, you ding-dong!" he shouted. "You're in a simulation, and of course you're going to feel real! You-you gotta t-trust me, Taylor!"
"But what about you!?" I shouted right back. "How can you be sure that
that's what's actually happening?"
Rick set the machine down, and paced back and forth. "Normally, I'd be immune to this sort of thing because of Morty's brain waves - that's a long story - but if this is happening, and I-I'm
sure it's happening because I'm a
genius, it means Morty's missing after I sent him out on that grocery run."
He stopped, and clenched a fist. "And this simulation's pretty fan-fucking-tastic. None of that nanobotic rendering crap the Sigerians had, so I can't crash the system. That mean's only one thing. Some motherfucker's got an
elllll-belch-dritch - eldritch computer-god doing some fucked up shit, and they got Morty involved in all this.
They're gonna pay," he swore, crazed eyes narrowing in vengeful contemplation.
I stood still. And then said, "Let me get the rest of my armor and some bugs."
And then, despite the mood, Rick smiled. "Atta girl, kiddo! But, since we're in a simulation, there's no reason why we can't make this fun for ourselves. My real self probably knows what I'm going to do - he's me, after all!
If-if-if it's satisfaction we're after, I think I might have an idea."
---
Timeline A:
Coil felt a sudden displacement of air behind him, and a peculiar combination sound of
schwoop and
squelch. He turned around just in time to see a note fall out of a green portal.
He picked it up, and read, "Check your other timeline,
biiiiiitch. -R"
Timeline B:
Coil felt a sudden displacement of air behind him, and a peculiar combination sound of
schwoop and
squelch. He turned around just in time to see Rick, the rather eccentric blue-haired Tinker, step out of a green portal with the bug-controlling girl, Skitter.
Both of them were heavily muscled.
Incredibly muscled. Their muscles had muscles.
Coil reached for his sidearm, but before he'd even gotten a finger on it, Rick was suddenly inside his guard, an enormous, meaty fist slamming into his head. The impact jarred Coil, even through the trauma plate and kinetic impact gel in his costume, and it was enough to send him flying backwards.
"S-Stupid motherfucker," Rick said sneeringly, his arms raised.
As he spun in mid flight, Skitter's muscle-bound form launched another punch to his neck, cracking something in there and causing him to catapult back towards Rick, who threw him painfully back at Skitter.
"S-stupid bitch!" Skitter growled, her leg raising up.
She planted a foot solidly into his diaphragm, and as he folded around her leg, she lifted Coil into the air by pinning his arms into his side, and then viciously knee-ed him in the spine. Something else cracked inside, and Coil felt another hot spike of pain. As he struggled to breathe, Rick stepped up, sinking his fists into Coil's stomach, each punch landed with a wet, bruising
thwacks. Skitter dropped him, and on his way down, Rick crashed two hammer-fisted blows into his back. Before he could even hit the ground, though, Skitter caught him by the head with one large hand.
"
How do you like -" Skitter came up, grabbed Coil's ears through his costume, and then slammed her knee into Coil's nose, shattering it into fragments. "How do you like that?" Rick asked gloatingly as Coil finally slammed into the ground.
Coil couldn't say anything; his nose, throat, and spine were broken, and the sinking feeling in his gut was less likely due to the situation and more about the internal hemorrhaging he was no doubt having.
He heard Skitter hock loudly behind him, and then felt a wet
sploosh on his face as she spat on him.
Rick leaned down, the mad Tinker's eyes shadowed by the man's blue hair. "Listen, snake-face - give me back Morty, unharmed, and I won't have to pull out your spleen. D-do the right thing, eh?"
With one last belch, Rick brought a fist down -
---
Coil collapsed Timeline B, and then pressed the intercom button on his desk. "Mr. Pitter," he said, trembling slightly. "Please bring our guest, Mortimer, to the corner of Market and 8th. See to it that he is...
unharmed."
"
Jeez," Coil said shakily, pulling out a bottle of whiskey. "Oh my god. W-what the hell? What a life."