What the Shells Were Holding
The Royal Court drives down through the fifth and fourth floors of the apartment building, Carl's Find Traps skill flagging a decoy gate rigged as a freeze trap on the way. The fourth-floor what-if belongs to Archie Mu — a wedding that was never dissolved, a wife named Mackenzie whose eyes are crossed out in the photographs, and a son named Oliver whose eyes are not, which Carl reads as the System's way of marking who is already dead. Apartment 310 on the third floor is Imani's family, arranged around a relative in mid-seizure while nobody calls for help, and Carl warns Elle before she drops in on it. When the loops break the shells claw their stitches open, Imani's mother is relabelled a Ruptured Feast Hive, and Sacred Feaster Scarab Beetles pour out of her face. The floor's designer breaks in to explain that the bugs came off Khepri's feast table in Club Vanquisher, were meant to gather on the roof as a hundred-foot gate boss called the Sacred Guardian of the Immortal Tem, and are instead permanently invulnerable, thoroughly hostile, and capable of flight.
First appearances (6)
- Archie Mu (Character) — Crawler · the ladybug guy · gone to the Cabaret
- Mackenzie (Character) — Human shell · the wife Archie Mu no longer has
- Ruptured Feast Hive (Creature) — What a human shell is relabelled once its loop breaks
- Gucci (Creature) — Imani's Maltese · the one face in the room with its eyes
- Sacred Guardian of the Immortal Tem (Creature) — The hundred-foot gate boss that never assembled
- Sacred Feaster Scarab Beetle (Creature) — Level 50 · invulnerable · a boss's building blocks
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