Zasu’s pregnancy is revealed as she does a Tarot reading for herself, trying capture an elusive thought that is haunting her. She realizes that her lover is unable to contact her, and resolves to search for him.
Fuming, the white disk expanded its search grid. It had caught a glimpse of the errant follower, but still couldn’t find him. Searching for him had produced so many other followers however, that the white disk really shouldn’t be angry (and yes, disks can be angry), but it was so frustratring!!! Where was he? It no longer needed him in order to be Supreme Disk of the Universe; the ridicule from the other disks had long since stopped due to the sheer mass of new followers, but still.......
As the new grid areas slowly rezzed, the white disk focused on a strange sight. Someone was holding open the jaws of a lion, but why? And what were those heads on the ground? As more things came into view, the disk grew more and more puzzled. Tombstones everywhere, bats flying around, really disgusting sounds, ghosts floating by - these were not usual sights on the grid. True, there WERE some very UNusual things to see (the white disk still had nightmares about the bowling incident), but this was new. The white disk thought back, trying to recall a similar scene. It had been roaming this grid for over 3 GY (gridyears), and nothing came to mind. It powered down for a closer look.
The man holding open the lion’s mouth had released his hold, and now had a very large toothbrush in his hand. The heads on the ground appeared to be made of composite, and had very well-defined teeth. A sign on the ground near the man said, “Dr. Sven, Veterinary Periodontist”. Now that it was closer, the white disk could see that the lion was actually sitting in an odd-shaped chair, with immobilizing straps. As Dr. Sven began brushing the lion’s teeth, the white disk rolled its eyes (did disks have eyes??) and hovered away to examine the rest of the strange scene.
The tombstones were in a cemetery, bats were rising out of the graves, body parts were lying all around, chainsaws too - it looked like a massacre. The white disk generally avoided the RP punk/grunge/combat areas as the avis were too unstable to make good followers. Looking at the name of the area it was in - Ozland NW - didn’t provide any more information. Wait, there was a sign over the cemetery - Halloween Graveyard, Enter At Your Own Risk. Scanning its search engine for the word, “Halloween”, the white disk was bombarded with data. So that’s what this was all about about, some pagan ritualistic celebration? The white disk rolled its eyes again.
Floating upwards for more privacy, the white disk settled into hover/meditation mode. It turned off all unnecessary functions - data processing, image sorting, follower attraction, persuasion tactics, tyrranical modeling. It surrounded itself in an invisibility sphere with blackout material on the inside. It needed new ideas, it needed to think outside the box, and it had found that sensory deprivation was the ideal environment for this to happen.
It waited.
***
Days later, it was still waiting. And then, an image began forming. As it came into focus, the white disk recognized its errant follower! Its pulse quickened (yes, disks can have pulses). It didn’t recognize the surroundings however; so far it had seen nothing in the grid that resembled where the follower was. And the follower looked different, too, yet it was definitely him. He looked (the white disk turned its emoticon function back on and scanned quickly)..sad. That was it, sad. Odd, that wasn’t an emotion his followers were allowed to have. Turning all of its functions back on, the white disk scanned the image it was seeing from several different angles and dumped it into the image processing center. The result was very disturbing: OFFWORLD. The follower had escaped the grid!
This was new territory! The white disk had never had a follower return to their home world. And that was only an assumption, the image processing result was not specific, it hadn’t been programmed to analyze areas other than the grid itself. Putting itself back into hover/meditation mode, the white disk began a new wait.
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