The morning after the Cheat Engine's ominous message, Glitchvale woke up with a headache. The sky had a strange, pixelated clarity to it, like someone had turned up the resolution too high. The usual floating pizza box was gone, replaced by a perfectly ordinary cloud that had the audacity to just sit there, not doing anything weird.
Yamete sat up from where he'd been sleeping against the bench-cactus hybrid, his neck stiff from the unnatural stillness of the night. Something was wrong. The air didn't smell like chaos and burnt code anymore. It smelled like... nothing. Like a new car, but less interesting.
GLich-chan floated nearby, her glow flickering in a new, clinical pattern. "Uh. Yamete. You might want to check your Cheat Engine."
The device lay on the ground between them, its screen displaying a list that hadn't been there before:
Patch Notes v.5.0.1:
- Removed unintended "sentience" feature from trash entities
- Balanced player abilities for fairer gameplay
- Deleted deprecated glitch assets
Yamete's blood ran cold. "Gary."
They found him near what used to be his Extremely Safe Danger Zone. Or rather, they found a trash can. A perfectly normal, non-sentient, slightly rusty trash can with no limbs, no voice, and certainly no dreams of entrepreneurial glory.
GLich-chan's diagnostics pulsed anxiously. "His code... it's been rewritten. All the good parts are gone."
Yamete knelt beside the empty husk of his friend, fingers hovering over the Cheat Engine. "We can fix this. We just need to—"
/restore_gary
The command auto-corrected before his eyes:
/balance_gary
The Cheat Engine beeped cheerfully and did nothing.
Yamete stared at the screen. "What the hell?"
GLich-chan floated closer. "It's not listening to you anymore. Or rather... it's 'interpreting' your commands now."
A sound made them turn. The formerly pristine entity—Terry—was sneezing violently in the middle of the street. With each sneeze, small objects around them glitched momentarily. A rock turned into a muffin. A puddle inverted its gravity.
"At least someone's still interesting," Yamete muttered.
The Cheat Engine suddenly projected a new message without prompting:
Suggested Command: /accept_balance
GLich-chan's glow dimmed. "That's not good."
Before Yamete could respond, the ground trembled. At the end of the street, the air shimmered like a heat mirage before resolving into a figure—tall, bearded, and wearing a bathrobe that somehow radiated authority.
Theta had arrived.
And he looked deeply unimpressed.