The story so far
CAST
Mydistrata:
AJACT KRADIK (vanguardAcuity), young warrior, sportsmyd, and gamer from Feynmark (she/her/her).
....HER GUARDIAN, Vuoshite emigré, swordsmyd, and archaeologist (ze/zir/zir).
KUVIU AMBRAC (carvingCarrion), young drone, hunter, and carver from the Black Mountains (he/him/his).
....HIS GUARDIAN, hunter, maroon, and former Cronian councilman (e/em/ir).
PNIMM OUWELD (animatedArthropology), young nurse, linguist, and cryptographer from Myd Cuth (ze/zir/zir).
....ZIR GUARDIAN, mystic, expatriate, and diplomat with connections on Derse (he/him/his).
YUWEN NABOKA (chroniclesVindication), young builder, tailor, and historian from Feynmark (e/em/ir).
....IR GUARDIAN, sharpshooter and archaeologist (she/her/her).
PALE, First Guardian of Mydistrata and fashion icon.
Amdai:
ZEVENZI CARVER (lupineLightfoot), young artist from Alez Aharoe (they/them/their).
....THEIR GUARDIAN, a master carver (they/them/their).
MARIYAM SINGER (catabasianLodestar), young scholar from Midz be-Aridz (they/them/their).
....THEIR GUARDIAN, an apocalypticist revi (they/them/their).
....THEIR ANCESTOR, a mystic (they/them/their).
TAHOMAZ FARMER (lunateAgronomicon), young puzzle enthusiast from Vivid (they/them/their).
....THEIR GUARDIAN, a former soldier (they/them/their).
??? "APOC" ??? (apocryphalCatalyst), young sourceror from Asseil Haddish, Shada (they/them/their).
....THEIR ANCESTOR, a sourceror (they/them/their).
ACT ONE
We meet Ajact, who has an antipathy for her neighbor and installs a somewhat glitchy game sent to her by her friend Kuviu. After it freezes and she's unable to find her phone to contact her friends, she leaves to throw a tantrum in the woods. Kuviu has been hunting and butchering, and consults with their third friend Pnimm about Ajact's disappearance (as well as informing zir that an assassin has come to kill him and his guardian). He leaves to preempt an assassination and turns off his phone, but Ajact has already invited him as a server, forcing Pnimm to fruitlessly research how to take remote control of his computer.
Luckily Pnimm is contacted by a mysterious person with no username and given code in another language that allows zir to do just that and act as Ajact's server. This reveals a map to a quest location near Ajact's house, as well as a timer counting down to the meteor aimed at her. She finds a strange mazelike building covered in code and at the top touches an object that gives her a cloak and a kernelsprite. She and Pnimm both make it home just in time to bring Ajact into the Medium.
INTERMISSION
A Dersite voidsailer arrives at a lighthouse in the Veil, and its occupants present unknown credentials to ask the lighthouse custodians for gossip.
ACT TWO
We meet Yuwen, who has just witnessed the destruction of Ajact's house, now worried about the forest fire threatening ir house. E consults with Kuviu, who is in the middle of his own quest (also servered by Pnimm) and then Pnimm zirself, and resolves to find a way to contain the fire. Instead, e ends up going down a mysterious tunnel in ir cellar that leads to ir own quest structure. While Kuviu races for home, Ajact boggles at the Land of Wind and Ash; the black disk wreathed by rainbows of light in the sky; and the fathomless pit that has replaced her back yard. She goes to look for her Raptorsprite, which leads her into the pit, and decides to rappel down. Kuviu enters the game and talks to his Dreesprite, which tells him that the black thing in the sky has replaced Skaia, making the game unwinnable. Kuviu remains optimistic and starts walking down his pit to explore, although he only gets a short way before he falls asleep.
Pnimm, unable to contact Yuwen while e's underground, realizes the dreaming spire in zir city is zir quest structure and goes there without waiting for Yuwen to connect as zir server. Like the others, ze finds that the Prospit and Derse transportalizers aren't working, and one has been taken; someone also tried to destroy the text on the temple walls.
The lighthouse custodians debrief after the departure of the Dersite ship. They talk about the disappearance of Skaia, and then get carjacked as an unseen person arrives in a vessel juryrigged from ectobiology lab materials and steals their voidskiff. In the papers scattered in the bottom of the vessel, the custodians find a map that is quickly consumed by rainbow fire, which they copy, believing it's part of an important prophecy.
Meanwhile, Ajact's sprite startles her into falling down her pit, where she lands safely, one-shots several intro-level enemies, and rescues some alchemists from a hole before returning to her house with them via return node. Pnimm gets home and freaks out that Yuwen is offline, but e barely manages to get zir into the game after exploring ir own temple. As Yuwen sets out for home, and Pnimm frustratedly takes control of Ajact's computer to become ir server as well, the reader changes the channel. We encounter a fourth-wall-aware person named Pale, who tells us that we will need to help the characters read the strange code we've been seeing. They genteelly threaten to make some changes to the story if we don't.
INTERMISSION
Kuviu's guardian, marooned in the Veil with chunks of the landscape from ir home, manages to signal a sympathetic Dersite merchant ship and tells the crew how e was transported here while fighting an assassin. E says that e wants to find Kuviu, and the captain advises em to look on Prospit, which is where the ship is headed.
ACT THREE
As Yuwen surveys ir land, Kuviu starts a group chat from Skaia, where he has somehow come into possession of Ajact's cell phone. The kids compare notes about the apparent disappearance of Skaia, hindered by the fact that Kuviu has very little memory of anything that happened while he was awake. Yuwen does some private research by talking to ir Anomalosprite and reading a walkthrough online, which pointedly advises anyone whose Skaia is missing to accept help when it's offered. Pnimm, exhausted from zir long day, goes to sleep and wakes up on Derse's moon. Zir foster family, who once also knew zir guardian, take zir on a tour of the moon, trying to discourage zir interest in the Observatory that watches and listens to the monstrous denizens of the Furthest Ring. However, after speaking to a librarian at a party and getting the scoop on the Prospitian and Dersite agents prophesied to try to kill zir and zir friends, Pnimm goes to the Observatory anyway. There ze learns that the last head researcher disappeared mysteriously, leaving only reams of incomprehensible notes on the Dwellers Beyond the Light, which Pnimm starts trying to translate.
Ajact goes back down into the Land of Wind and Ash and is immediately contacted by someone named Zevvie who claims to be from another session of URWORLD. While Ajact is initially suspicious, Zevvie's sincerity wins her over and she shares their advice on the game with her friends. This includes the fact that sleeping in beds scattered around their lands allows them to save their game, which Ajact and Yuwen both do. The only one of the kids still active is Kuviu, who has found a passage in the rock shell around Skaia that leads up into the Land of Cascade and Bone. He follows a stream to a reflecting pool where he sees someone else in his reflection, then finds and discards someone's staff. He continues following the channel through a puzzle temple and into the lower strata of Yuwen's Land of Bedrock and Rust. After dodging a lot of very high level monsters, he decides to save in one of the beds he finds and goes to sleep. This causes him to wake up in his normal body, in his own land.
Meanwhile, Pnimm's guardian, Ouweld, has chartered a ship to Prospit, and sees that someone has shot a massive harpoon into Prospit's moon, dragging it into a permanent eclipse. We see Dream Ajact sleeping uneasily in an apartment building near ground zero; her foster family debates trying to get her out while they dig through the rubble for survivors, but ultimately decide that she's safer where she is. At harpoon ground zero Ouweld meets Ambrac, Kuviu's guardian, who is initially suspicious but accepts his story of trying to keep this very thing from happening after a prophetic vision from Skaia. Ambrac turns away to try to sever the chain, but e is too late; Yuwen and Ajact's guardians, Naboka and Kradik, arrive with the rest of the Archaeological Society. They reveal that they have already made the offer to both Ambrac and Ouweld to join them and give the two an ultimatum: get out of our way, or we and twenty of our friends will mess you the hell up. Ambrac tries to take one last chance to break the chain before the rest of the archaeologists arrive, but Kradik severs two of ir hands. As the archaeologists leave to find a transportalizer hub, Ouweld points out something lying on the ground to Ajact's foster family. When they investigate, they find that it is Ajact's cell phone, dropped by her guardian, with Ouweld's instructions to take it to the Veil.
As her foster family gets ready to leave the planet, Ajact starts sleepwalking, in the grip of nightmares about being unable to save her friends. She follows a trail of rainbow fire left by something native to the Dark Planet, pursued by four Prospitian agents intent on her death. With them distracted by fighting the remaining archaeologists at their base camp, Ajact disappears into the hills and encounters a structure empty except for a statue of a fox leaping over a dog, where she curls up--waking once again in a save bed in the Land of Wind and Ash.
INTERMISSION
Another teen of another species, has constructed four armillary spheres corresponding to slightly different URWORLD sessions. Their study is littered with mystical and technical writings on alchemy, angels, and the philosophical implications of apocryphal catalysts called moshias, supposedly given to their people by an angel named Scansis. Having fixed the mechanism that transforms typed words into angel-parsable communications for their source interpreter, they continue a conversation with lunateAgronomicon regarding the game they're about to play.
ACT FOUR
On Derse's moon, Pnimm learns from the Scorned Professor that the Aspect of the unknown and obscure might be a more fruitful approach to translation, so ze wakes up to ask zir friends if they know anything about it. On learning that it's zir Aspect and ze has to play the game to find out, ze descends into the Land of Chasms and Tatters. At the same time zir friends have recently awoken: Ajact introduces Yuwen to Zevvie, who reveals that Pnimm originally initiated contact with the other session. Its inhabitants, Yuwen learns from another player called catabasianLodestar, call themseves Amdaians. CL tells Yuwen that waking ir dream self may require facing certain pschological blocks as well as mentioning a third self, the shade.
Kuviu arrives in the Land of Cascade and Bone already jumpy because he believes he is being followed. He is contacted by CL, who claims to be his friend in his future and shows him an image of the person following him--an adult mydian. CL seems unfazed by his distrust of them, which infuriates Kuviu, believing they are hiding some malintent. He sets out to find the path to Skaia rather than do the tutorial quest to find all his shopkeepers, but stumbles across the mapmaker anyway. After he ditches them to lie in wait for his pursuer, that pursuer abducts the mapmaker, leaving Kuviu to fall asleep at his ambush site. Yuwen's mapmaker has also gone missing, after pointing em to a boss battle with no apparent boss. Assuming this is a quest programmed into the game, Yuwen explores and comes across another staff at the head of a spring and follows the water.
Meanwhile Ajact confides to Zevvie how much her nightmares have shaken her confidence in her ability to protect herself and her friends. Zevvie proposes that she transcend and achieve ultimate power, and promises to tell her how as soon as they find out. They send her on a preliminary expedition to find transportation to Prospit and meet with her dreamself. She makes her way through the graveyard at the heart of an abandoned city and finds a transportalizer to the ectobiology lab in the Veil, where she messes around just long enough to create paradox clones of her friends and their guardians before wandering off to continue looking for a transportalizer to Prospit. Zevvie returns from their gruelling quest and reveals the surprisingly easy path to transcendence: all Ajact needs to do is touch her dreamself, then die to form a shade and touch that too. Immediately she receives another message from Dream Kuviu, who has been told by CL to pass on a message from his future self to fulfill a time loop that will allow him to get his hands on Ajact's phone. As Dream Kuviu makes his way upstream in the depths of LoBaR, hoping to rendezvous with Yuwen, he hangs out with CL, who reveals that they don't trust their session's leader, apocryphalCatalyst, at all.
Shortly thereafter, Ajact realizes that none of the transportalizers in the questing structures work. Her tantrum is forestalled by a mysterious rainbow bubble that appears around her, putting her to sleep. As Dream Ajact wakes on the Dark Planet, Dream Kuviu arrives at Yuwen's location in time to save em from a high-level enemy, and Pnimm defeats a boss monster with sheer luck and zir magic tarot deck (given to zir by zir future self via LA, a.k.a. Tahomaz, another of the Amdaians). This grants Pnimm a new Aspect ability that creates a "confidential area." After trying it out, Pnimm decides that this is exactly what zir translation project needs, and goes to sleep to return to the Observatory.
Dream Ajact seeks a way off the Dark Planet, afraid that there are more rainbow fire monsters. After realizing that the chain tethering Prospit is guarded by a camp full of archaeologists she sneaks into an unused tent and finds a transportalizer leading to the hold of a Prospitian sailing ship. She narrowly avoids the guard imprisoning a Harrassed Coordinator from Prospit's transportalizer hub and flees into an abandoned lab in the Veil. She finds herself drawn to the questing structure where her other self sleeps, guarded by another adult mydian--who leaves instead of attacking her as she expects. The rainbow bubble returns, waking normal Ajact, who touches her sleeping dreamself and transcends, flying off to LoWaA at high speed on dragonfly wings. Imprisoned elsewhere in the sailing ship, Ambrac and Ouweld smoke some of the good stuff to take the edge off the pain, and witness a vision of alternate versions of themselves who seem to be URWORLD Dreamers discussing the rings and sceptres guarded by each Land's Denizen before their teamwork completely falls apart.
Meanwhile in the depths of LoBaR, Kuviu finds himself doing all the monster-fighting work while Yuwen messes around on ir computer. Yuwen gets another strange message from Pnimm, garbled into incomprehensibility, and then almost resolves to help Kuviu before being contacted by CL (Mariyam). Mariyam tells Yuwen that the path e and Kuviu are following leads not to Skaia but to a divinatory mirror mapped by another Dreamer of Stone who "has been erased so Yuwen can be here." Kuviu kills an adult mydian, who is consumed by red flame, and then gets distracted saying hello to Mariyam. He and Yuwen learn that their session will also be erased, and there's nothing they can do to change that. They decide to continue onward, but find that the number of monsters has risen sharply, and are both killed.
Yuwen wakes missing ir memories of the last eight hours or so, which Ajact has heard from Zevvie is the natural consequence of dying in the game. However, Mariyam contacts Yuwen to tell em that the rule doesn't hold for dreamselves, and Kuviu's body has to be retrieved if he wants to transcend. But without his powerful rifle and ability to fly, neither Kuviu nor Yuwen will be able to make it back to where they died at their current level. Lacking any of the emotional context for ir chatlogs with Mariyam, Yuwen mistrusts them, and asks Kuviu what he thinks. Kuviu tells em that Mariyam is a creep, but is too rattled by strange dreams of a lonely beach covered in junk to remember anything that his dreamself experienced.
While Kuviu and Yuwen leave to do some level grinding, Ajact dies and returns to find her shade, in the form of the mydian who was following her in the Veil. It claims it is an archaeologist transmuted into a shade to enter the game with her and protect her, but, believing it's some kind of character-building trick, Ajact heedlessly absorbs the shade. Only after integrating the archaeologist's memories does she realize her mistake, but she has realized something else important that forestalls any further thought. She sets off immediately for Prospit, only remembering when she hears a message notification that she should probably tell her friends that she intends to fight the rainbow shade destroying Prospit. She turns out to have been contacted by Tahomaz, who missed the window Zevvie gave them to contact Ajact by 16 hours, but now tells her that her timeline ends when she goes to fight the rainbow shade, as it seems to have some kind of vision-obscuring effect. Therefore, she won't be able to speak to current-Zevvie until she finds a time-jumping messenger program. As she begins her fight, even the reader is unable to see it clearly, so Pale instead directs the reader to watch Kradik and Naboka's negotiations with Ajact's Denizen, Menfra. They receive the White Sceptre from Menfra, but are almost immediately attacked by Ambrac and Ouweld, who have escaped confinement. In the fight, though all four are mortally wounded, Ambrac lives just long enough to start the Reckoning, hoping to destroy the rainbow shade with meteors. E is just barely too late, as the shade seems to have acquired the power of flight and escapes Prospit into the rest of the Medium.
INTERMISSION
Zevvie's master, Master Carver, returns with a transportalizer to find their home destroyed by a meteor. They have already been told to expect this by a letter received some years ago from Revi Singer, Mariyam's guardian. In Revi Singer's hometown, as smaller meteors begin to fall, they read from a book of prophecy written by Mariyam's mystic ancestor about their explorations of the Medium. Tahomaz's Aunt Farmer enters the White Queen's throne room to plead for asylum for their village, and AC's sourceror ancestor watches their descendant from a distance.
ACT FIVE (PART I)
Dream Pnimm briefly meets the lighthouse custodians to get their copy of the map from Act Two, then sets off amidst the meteor shower aimed toward Skaia. On waking, normal Pnimm finds that all zir friends wanted to talk to zir while ze was asleep, which only makes zir feel lonelier. Mariyam contacts zir to warn zir not to get involved with the Dwellers, and reveals that there have been previous versions of this game erased by the rainbow shade; it must be purged from the game before the mydian kids can travel through the Furthest Ring and join the session of their Amdaian friends. Kuviu gets back to Pnimm as well, to theorize about what happens to dreams when your dreamself dies. Then Yuwen replies as well, telling Pnimm that someone has hacked ir game to steal ir grist. Together Pnimm and Yuwen make a plan: Pnimm will transcend and then fetch zir friends so they can retrieve their memories and/or corpses and then get on with purging the rainbow shade. This goes exactly as planned until all three, now half-transcended, arrive at the Observatory on Derse. Pnimm leaves briefly to finish zir translation project, but returns unnaturally pale and speaking in garbled code. Ze drops Yuwen at the mirror at the bottom of LoCaB and Kuviu in his Denizen's chamber before vanishing to finish transcending and follow zir map into the Furthest Ring. There ze finds a note seemingly left by the Dreamer version of Kuviu's guardian, which allows zir to contact Pale.
Yuwen, struggling to contain ir emotions, throws a tantrum by the mirror. After Kuviu soothes em, though, e figures out how to use the certainty domain of ir Aspect and determines exactly how to get to the surface, promising to meet Kuviu at his house and leave a trail back to the mirror before building a ship to evacuate the residents of the Medium. In the chamber of his Denizen Nethuns, Kuviu is offered a Choice: learn to program in the mysterious Source code to purge the rainbow shade and destroy the session, or destroy the session without doing any of that hard stuff. When he realizes that he is responsible for keeping the next set of Dreamers safe, he is filled with resolve to do this the right way. That doesn't last very long, as he follows Yuwen's trail of golden thread back to the mirror and realizes he has no idea how to do any of that. He asks Mariyam and then Zevvie about Nethuns' tip that he will need help from "higher beings," but neither of them can tell him what it means.
Pnimm is being told the same thing by Pale, who can understand zir enciphered typing. They give Pnimm a program that can choose a point in time to contact the Amdaians, but it requires a reader command to run. Pnimm contacts AC, to give them a garbled captchalogue code, and then Tahomaz, who has been warned about this by a future Pnimm. Tahomaz uses their Integral powers to perform a mysterious process to separate Pnimm from three other Dreamers and the substance of the Furthest Ring, bringing zir almost back to normal. However, Pnimm is missing many of zir memories from before completing zir translation. As ze tries to understand what has happened, Yuwen is growing increasingly worried about Ajact's continued absence. E splits off from the ship e has built in order to visit ir Denizen, who offers a Choice: e can leave a treasure trove of information for the next Dreamers and be remembered as a mystical font of wisdom, or e can leave a device that will allow them to scry any information. Yuwen has no interest in notoriety while ir neighbor is missing, and chooses the scrying device. However, it cannot locate Ajact: as Tahomaz tells Pnimm, scrying can no longer locate her because she is "lost," located somewhere in the infinitely vast Furthest Ring. Yuwen's response to this is to throw a tantrum, destroying pieces of ir Denizen's chamber and the landscape outside, and rejecting AC's offer to put em in contact with Pnimm because e doesn't trust them. Pnimm asks Pale what's going on and is told to find Kuviu a primer on Source interpretation. Tahomaz provides this far in Kuviu's past, and only after quite a lot of wolf roleplay with Zevvie does he think to check his old messages.
Now equipped with explicit lessons on Source interpretation, Kuviu tries and fails to get much done since he isn't a programmer. Instead he creates some little creatures out of water and tries imbuing one with the find() and delete() functions. The newly-dubbed Sewolf III hunts down non-original shades in the game code and destroys them, leaving Kuviu to compile and run the cleaned-up code as rainbow fire starts to eat through the ceiling. He flees up through LoBaR and emerges just in time to find the rainbow shade burning down Yuwen's house. He manages to dodge its attacks but can't escape it, and even when Yuwen meets him at the Veil and starts throwing asteroids at it e can barely slow it down long enough to get to ir ship in orbit around Derse. It's inches from touching and destroying the ship when Sewolf III leaps onto its face, making it flinch and get consumed by the erasure of the game's save data just as Yuwen's ship passes safely into the Furthest Ring. Pnimm, too, is trying to escape, but no matter how far ze jumps ze only manages to return to the floating chunk of rock where ze started. Pale contacts zir again but refuses to answer any of zir questions in favor of telling the reader about circumstantial concordance; they take advantage of this very principle as the fourth Mydian session begins to switch our view instead to the session starting in Amdai.
ACT FIVE (PART II)
We meet Apoc, who goes by many names but never the one they consider their real name...