Scene 2

Fyndraxis alighted on a crenelated balcony he used for his winged comings and goings in a rather foul mood. He had been a bit sloppy in Grenoble, and almost got sucked into the mindless dream of the narrative once again. In an attempt to derail an oncoming case of existential ennui, he took a second to try to enjoy the view that he had curated for himself up here. He looked out upon a sea of clouds from the tallest tower of his keep.

From where he was, he looked to be standing on the balcony of a rather tasteful stone cabin adrift in a sea of clouds. The sun, well upon its way to being set at this point, painted everything in tones of purple and orange. The shadow from the bit of keep that peeked through the cloud layer stretched off into infinity and seemed to slice the world in half. Below these clouds lay the keep propper. He had summoned an everstorm to enshroud his keep in an eternal tempest, mostly because he had a problem with solicitors dropping by unannounced, but also because it was a pretty metal thing to do. Being a nerd, he enjoyed things that he considered metal. They were unapologetically badass, and he went out of his way to bring this ferrous quality to the things that he wrought, sometimes to his own detriment.

The keep itself was located on an Island that floated in the sky, this was metal as well, but it had a twofold purpose beyond that. There was the whole solicitor thing of course, they would have to be quite determined and of a certain level of skill to reach this place. The keep was also built beyond the reach of the narrative. It had been a constant thorn in his side since he had thought his way out of it for the first time.

For countless aeons he had been absorbed in his creation. Living countless lives and defeating seemingly endless enemies. Battle after battle, life after life, over and over and over again.
He recalled that he still had wings on and was in his dork disguise, so he changed his guise to the form which he usually wore around, which was that of a nerd. He could be absolutely anything he wanted to be, but so many forms proved impractical for everyday use. He could be a many-headed dragon that spewed elemental magic from each of its toothy maws, or a luminous cloud of gas, but none of those turned out to be practical for everyday use. Fun, for sure, but impractical.

For a Daemon, he tended to do a suspicious amount of human things, so his form tended toward that of a man in his middle age. Lithe of build, and not the paunchy sort of dad bod that tended to saddle those in their middle years. For hair, he liked to keep it pretty dark and close cropped to his skull, with a little length on top so he could style it if he chose. Which he didn’t, so it tended to be a sort of bed-headed cowlick kind of thing most of the time. He liked beards, so he had one of those. It was black as well, liberally salted with grey at the chops and chin.

With his look settled, he went inside to a place he called his sanctum. The tasteful cabin that poked above the clouds was merely an entrance with a mezzanine and a staircase that spiraled into the sanctum itself. The sanctum was named as such because it truly acted as a sanctuary. The narrative could not touch him there, he had made sure of that. There were other things that called to him on a pretty regular basis, like secret doors, but the sanctum was blessedly free of those.

The sanctum also held treasures he had gathered over his aeons as an adventurer, bewitched by the narrative. Weapons of great power, hyperdimensional Rubick’s cubes, a growing vinyl collection that he seemingly would risk his life for, various enchanted chachkies from his travels, and a few things that were out of place and didn’t really fit the whole medieval aesthetic that the keep, and most of his realm for that matter, tended toward.

Fyndraxis descended the spiral stair and made his way to the place where he kept his record collection. This was one of those non-medieval things that he owned. There were other things as well, lathes, milling machines, an old black and white television, and a desktop computer that he considered to be pretty modern. Modernity, being a rather relative designation depending on when you are from.

He unsleeved the record that he had purchased in Grenoble, and set it to spinning on his turntable. He dropped the stylus with a pop, and the song jangled into being. The song was good, but not the one he was looking for. This was a little ditty about not wanting to go out on the town, due to an unfortunate lack of appropriate attire. Certainly one of his favorites, and quite charming, but it did nothing to satisfy the song that had been haunting his mind.

He let the record play out and had a seat at his computer. Over the last few hundred years, the computer had been taking up more and more of his time. Like most gods of creation, Fyndraxis was an incessant tinkerer. He enjoyed this state of being, and would let his mind scurry down the hallways of whatever inspired him when he had the time. Admittedly, this was most of the time. He wasn’t retired per se, but he had ample time to explore concepts like unsupervised creative time, and abiding. Lately, that had involved him sitting at his computer in a state that he referred to as “dicking around”.

When he had created the keep, it had formed itself from his unconscious mind. There was no blueprint that he had referred to while laying its green marble sarsens into place. It had formed in a single act of creation, primarily out of desperation. He had been on the run from the narrative, and he needed a place to lay low. His place to lay low was rather high in the sky though, roughly two kilometers off the valley floor.

When he dicked around, his efforts were generally aimed at one particular purpose. Escape. He was trapped here. Granted, from time to time, most people can feel trapped in their reality. Escape can come in many forms. You can take drugs, or dabble with suicide, all of which Fyndraxis had tried, but none of those things actually change objective reality in any significant way. He was in a position of privilege as creator in chief here. His creation had gotten a touch out of control, of course, but that wasn’t the end of the world.

If he managed to figure out how to free himself, he could run screaming out of this personal hell and continue on in whatever reality he found himself in. In all honesty, personal hell may have been a touch too melodramatic of a term to describe his circumstance, it was more of a personal heck. That being said, he knew that this reality was fundamentally false.

He liked to imagine that daemons and genies had a shared metaphorical lineage. It wasn’t that at some point in the distant past he had been one of the jin, riding the red desert winds. It was the whole bottle thing. When we think about genies, it is typically the ones in the bottle that come to mind. Boundless power, tragically made finite by circumstance.

But what does a genie do while it's trapped in the bottle? Any genie worth its salt would create its own pocket universe. A finite infinity where it could pass the time plotting its escape and undoubtedly gameplanning some sort of revenge scenario. That was exactly what the Daemon Fyndraxis had done aeons ago. He just couldn’t remember how he pulled it off.

It wasn’t that he had amnesia exactly, but the practicalities of the situation were similar enough for him to refer to it as such. He had knowledge, that was apparent. He couldn’t be a nerd without that. He had very limited knowledge of himself though. He knew for a cold hard fact that the video game Crystalis for the Nintendo Entertainment System was developed by the company SNK in 1991 and was kind of a commercial flop. If you didn’t talk to the right person in Leaf Village you wouldn’t be able to wake up the windmill keeper with the alarm flute and the game would pretty much stall out right there, and you would be stuck in the first level until you grew bored and turned the console off. Though a commercial flop, it was critically acclaimed and seen as one of the best examples of an action RPG for the NES.

He had played this game. He had lived this game as its protagonist. He had woken up from cryosleep in a cave one hundred years after the world had been consumed in nuclear fire, and had been the agent of its salvation. This was what it was like to be consumed by the narrative. Compelling, immersive distraction.
What he couldn’t tell you was his actual name. Fyndraxis was a handle that he had given himself, because it sounded kind of metal.

He was acutely aware of a lack of W’s in his life. These were the all important journalistic W’s. The Who’s, What’s, Why’s and Where’s of it all. They were completely lost to him. In his act of genesis so many ages before, he had seemingly either fried his memory, or used it as raw material for his creation. He really had no idea. What was clear, was that the materials he had used to build his universe were almost entirely video game related.
He was pretty convinced that he had been trapped in this place to play the role of penitent creator god, serving out some sort of incarceration for unknown transgressions. Perhaps a mad sorcerer had, you know, ensorceled him and was using his raw power as fuel for his arcane magics. There was really no way to tell.
His current working theory was that he was trapped in a simulation. This hypothesis was inspired by things that he found while he was dicking around on his computer. That was one of the reasons he did that so much, he was testing the bounds of his creation in hopes of finding a convenient hole to slip through to whatever lay beyond this place. The project he was working on now, was one where he summoned a snake to do his bidding. Namely, a Python.