New Infinity: Disk 2
By E3kHatena
I need to sincerely thank everyone who has aided me on my endeavors, and here's to you succeeding in blazing your own trails. An additional thanks to the wonderfully weird bunch of my YouTube's Discord server, for being excited about the things I can make, the things I can do, I wouldn't have pushed myself this far without all of you.
Arc the First: Dead Ends
Chapter 1: Digging for Details
Hello, I'm looking to apply for a job here. I saw the, eh, the classified in the newspaper, you were looking for a programmer and code engineer, well, here, I actually have some of my sample code right here if you wanna see it. Oh, my name? Oh, it's Felix!
It had been a few days since I last spoke with Felix, he left me that night with a mention of an “old friend” by the name of Felis. Now, Felix wasn't good at convincing-sounding stories, after all, he asserts he has no last name, told me at least three different backstories concerning the town, has a slightly Southern, slightly Midwestern accent despite growing up on the east coast and living in the Pacific Northwest, and he once even told me that he likes to ride his bicycle in the mornings, but yet also told me within the same week he was looking to buy his first bicycle, so with that in mind I am unsure if I can trust his story about Felis no matter how real or not it actually is. Still, it's worth chasing after the answers as hey, any dirt on Felix is worth digging up. At least, that's what I was thinking. I was sickly curious as to Felix's actual origins, even if it just means I'll discover he was part of some awful rock band in 2001 or whatever.
I figured I'd turn this into a group effort and head to the library with Nathan and Franklin. The two of them are smart as hell and make a great couple, so I'm sure they'll be able to figure out more about this than I will. I arrived at the library at about 10:00 AM that day, just a week before my first college classes, and they arrived shortly after. I had already been browsing the reference section for any Boston phone books or whatever I could get when Franklin approached me. “Hey, Ash. So, eh, what was it that you wanted our help on?”
“Well, a few days back, Felix told me about an old friend of his, Felis.”
“Uh... right.”
“That's pretty much exactly what I told him, too. Well, anyways, this old friend of his was the person who taught Felix about the rifts that get people in and out of Digitized Civilizations, but I think he might also be responsible for the Digitized Civilization software, too, to an extent.”
“And where would we come in?”
“You're going to have to find whatever references you can to Felis, there has to be something here.”
“...Does there?” Nathan said.
“He lived in Boston, so there has to be a record of him somewhere in all of this. If the Internet could figure out Tommy Wiseau is Polish, then I think we can figure out who Felis is.”
“I guess.”
Nathan and Franklin headed towards the computers and I continued searching through the reference section. The only Boston phone book in their possession was from 1982, which I thought might be too far back, but I figured it was a better place than any to start looking for more information. I flipped through until I got to F and began my search, though the only thing even remotely close was “Felis Familiaris Cat Clinic”, which was definitely not what I wanted. I put the book back and headed for more technical journals, hoping there might be something Digitized Civilization related. Given how invested in the stuff Felix was, maybe Felis' name would be in one of those.
Searching the shelves, though, yielded a lot less than I hoped, not a single book about rifts or Digitized Civilizations, the closest thing to what I was looking for was about how data is stored on computers, bearing an image of a stack of 3.5 inch floppy disks on the cover. I laughed a bit at it, even if a Mr. Basinger wrote it in 1990, it seemed like something Felix would have read just a month ago. I got a bit frustrated and figured I'd check in on Franklin and Nathan.
As I walked back to the computers (picking up a copy of The Animator's Survival Kit for my own reference), I passed by Twitch, reading a book about data encryption. As I passed by, he lowered his book and stared for a second or two. I stopped and turned towards him. “What are you looking at?” I asked.
“I... know you,” he said, with a confused look on his face but a shockingly sharp glint in in his eye.
“Wh—what do you mean?”
“I... know you from somewhere else. It feels all so wrong, like... like I tried to kill you or something.”
I panicked. How would he know? Twitch had distrusted Felix throughout all of last year up to and including just a couple days ago, sure, but those days didn't exist anymore. Felix erased the damage Twitch had done to New Infinity and actually went as far as to roll him back to when he first arrived in New Infinity (or when New Infinity arrived to him, whichever came first) just so he'd understand he wasn't going to be harmed here. How would he know of days that no longer existed, of events that didn't happen? Does he know anything more about Francisco? Does Twitch know that he injured Franklin in that other timeline? What does he remember about the last year? I realized I had been the one staring now, so I quickly answered. “Must have been a dream,” I said.
“No, no, it was real, I...”
I had already walked away, trying to dodge the rest of the conversation, and set down my book on Franklin and Nathan's table. Nathan looked at the book, then up to me, then said, “Felis was an animator?”
“What? No, this one's for me. I didn't find anything about Felis, but, uh... there's a bit of a problem.”
“What?”
“It's about Twitch, but it's a bit complicated,” I admitted.
“What about Twitch?”
“He knows... he knows stuff he shouldn't, stuff that happened in, I dunno how to describe it, another timeline?”
“What?”
“So, last week, that game night? That was the second one we had. In the first one, Twitch had set it up so you two would be injured in a car accident, and then when Felix and I went to visit, he could log into Felix's terminal and take over.”
“I... Ash, that's--” Nathan started.
“--stupid, I know, but that's because Twitch was a lot more abrasive at that time, he hated Felix and New Infinity and even convinced Francisco to help him. That's not who they are anymore because Felix took the time to set them straight, but for whatever reason, Twitch still knows about it all.”
“I... what do you want me to do about this, Ash? Twitch is one of my friends, and this all sounds, eh...”
“I just want you to keep an eye on it, ask him what else he knows if you get the chance, an--”
“Oh, I think I found something!” Franklin said.
“We can continue this conversation later,” I said, walking up to Franklin and leaning in to read what he had found. It was on a site of unsolved mysteries, their top 50 most viewed unsolved mysteries, among the likes of The Man From Taured was an article merely named “Felis”.
In the last week of August, 1999, at about 9:35 at night, an altercation took place within a Boston-area K-Mart. A man with an indescribable accent was attempting to purchase what amounted to $150 in canned food and toiletries under the notion that he could take them now and pay the store back when he had the money. The store's asset protection team stopped the man at the door and when the man attempted to leave with his groceries, the police were called. At 10:02 PM, the man was discovered by Boston's police department, got into an altercation with the man, and was shot and killed. The store supervisor that evening, Jacob Rabenau, described the man as 6'4”, seemingly in his early forties, of a sickly pale complexion, who went by the name of Felis. Following his death, no family ever stepped up to claim any sort of relation to Felis, his groceries were returned to the K-Mart when it opened the next morning, and the contents of his pockets were burned by the police that night, though they claim all he had was a piece of paper with the name Felis on it, with a drawing of some type of mechanical device on the back. Where the man was headed with his groceries, the significance of the paper, and many other details about the man himself are completely unknown. The popular conclusions are that he was a drug addict who didn't know himself anymore, or that he had faked his own death and was covering his tracks. Many conspiracy theorists claim him to be an extra-dimensional being masquerading as a human, though these claims are mostly unfounded.
...But that was it. No actual details about the man, nothing. Was the device on his paper plans for the rift? Maybe, but where was he going with the groceries? Where did he work, why is he like Felix in that he also didn't have a last name? Why rob a Kmart, of all places? They were already not doing well in 1999, could he have not gotten his groceries anywhere else? Well, this was about a Felis, and Felix not wanting to talk about it right now might be because he died around this time 16 years ago, so to me it seemed it was something, I guess. I asked Franklin to print out that page, and went to check out my book.
“So, you were saying that Twitch had attacked us and the town, then Felix undid it all, but Twitch still remembers it all?” Franklin said as we walked out of the library.
“Yeah, that's about it.”
“But why?”
“He didn't like Digitized Civilizations like New Infinity, he thought that he was in danger in one of them because all the other ones he had been in were trouble.”
“That's still confusing.”
“It is, but... I dunno, it happened all very quickly! I'll have to talk to Felix about it, see what he knows about the whole situation.”
“That'd be a good first place to start. But what about Felis?”
“There's not much I can do about the situation right now. I'll try to bring him up again to Felix but I'm expecting no answer.”
“Well, at least you're making an attempt. Well, Nathan and I are heading back to my place for the evening. Hope you get some more info out of this soon, Ash!”
“Yeah, I hope so, too.”
As I got home, my Brother Alex was working at the kitchen table. “Hey there Ash, what'cha reading?”
“I got The Animator's Survival Kit from the library, hoping to make some use out of it.”
“Ah, neat. I'm working on some stuff for a client and Mom's going to be late getting home again, but once I finish up and send the proofs off, how about we go pick up something from the deli over by the theater? They've got a two for the price of one special going on right now.”
“Sure,” I said as I headed up to my room and started up my computer. I grabbed that link from the unsolved mysteries site and saved it into an OpenOffice document, hoping that was just one of the many pieces of info I would find on the matter. I now at least knew he was around in the 90s and 80s, and if I had to guess he must have known Felix in those last few years, as Felix has got to be about 30-something right now. I saved the file, opened Steam, and started up Team Fortress 2.
ns 15.158.61.48da2
