Wow. She sounded high strung. Parzival had re-entered the sim right where he had left it, directly in the middle of the library carved out of a tree. The sim had apparently been running without him however, seeing as not only had the purple one been there, but a white one with purple hair, and an orange one with a cowboy hat. Interesting.
But frustrating as well. This sim had an irritating lock set into it, restricting his avatar. It was immediately assigned a new skin(apparently to play in the world of small horses, you had to BE a small horse), which had its own level generator. So yeah, he was back to level one. Which isn't to say he wasn't without his tricks. He might not have access to Hallidays superuser access stats in this sim, but he was able to port over a few relics. Most of them were marked as "incompatible". One however, titled Hermes Greaves was perfectly compatible. 100% code sync. Almost like Halliday made it with the explicit intention of it being used in this sim. He wouldn't put it past Halliday, he had been rather eccentric. Who knows how long he had been working on this?
Hermes Greaves were translated into the sim as two curved, dull brown coverings that went over his avatars legs. They almost perfectly blended in, but if you looked carefully you could see light glinting off the metel. What was really special was the ability they imparted. 30+ to speed, agility, constitution, and doublejump. Even his level one weakling of an avater could manuever with some efficiency. It wouldn't help him out in any early boss fights(sure, speed is a good stat, but when you have to spend half an hour dodging and only doing one damage per hit? It would have been a better point sink to be able to do 20 damage per hit, maybe get hit a few times.), but it sure helped him get around.
At the moment, he was jumping across rooftops, an extremely agitated white pony with flame hair chasing him. What happened to the purple pony? Maybe this was her friend, who apparently was just as miffed he had taken a book as she. Or maybe...
Parzival smiled to himself behind his viser, clenching his hands in his okami-haptic gloves.
"Boss Fight."
He came to a sudden stop on a roof shaped like a carausel(kinda morbid, given the surrounding population) and turned towards the following flame horse. Said horse did something that surprised him. She stopped a good distance away, and YELLED at him.
"GIVE. ME. BACK. MY. BOOK!" Wait, so this WAS the purple horse from before? Why was she following this line so fervently? Perhaps...ah, an activated quest string! That explained it. It was activated when he picked up the book, but wasn't able to be continued because he had put it in his inventory. Therefore a proxy had been activated to get him to take the book back out. The horse hadn't actively done anything to hurt him, having just held him with a field of magic, and yelled at him.
"I wonder how far the string is allowed to progress, though..." He mused to himself, before addressing the purple flame horse. Who was apparently designed to appear obsessed with books. "Oh, you want this book?" He dragged the book out of his inventory(Migratory Patterns of Seagulls; Vol 12. By Velvet Da Capo)
"Yes! I want it! Give it back!"
"Come and get it!"
With that, he jumped off the roof, followed in kind by an increasingly mad purple turned white unicorn with flames bursting out of her head and butt. He couldn't see any new quest markers now that the book was out, and his minimap wouldn't even load. The record and soundtrak programs weren't working either. Apparently Halliday wanted this to be viewable only by the one who won the Easter Egg. Again, why? What was so special about this sim?
He heard a tinkle behind him, so he threw himself to the left, down an alleyway. Just in time, too. The unicorn apparently had an ability similar to Stasis Field, in which she could immobalize a target by holding them in midair. Thankfully, like any well scripted attack or configuration, her activation period was signified by the sound of tinkling bells, along with a slight wooshing sound. As long as he was able to get the warning sounds right, he could dodge any incoming attack.
"NYEAAAAAAAAAAAAAGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!" Came the frustrated scream behind him. It was actually making him feel kinda bad, this girl just wanted her book back. Oh well, to test the limits of this new system, he was going to have to annoy the a.i. as much as he could.
His view suddenly twisted, tumbling as his avatar was tackled and pinned to the ground.
"I got him! Who da best? I da best!" Said the blue lump of pony sitting on top of him. He strained against this confinement, but apparently his strength wasn't high enough. At best he got a defiant wiggle. "Stop that. You're staying right here until Twilight chews you out." Twilight? Oh. Book lass. The characters from the original series had some questionably girly names as well.
Said 'Twilight' walked swiftly up to them, (him squirming and blue lump doing her best to hold him) And grabbed the book in her magic.
"This is MY book, and I'm gonna...put it back in the pile you took it from and read it at some other time." she trailed off. Odd. He could have sworn she had been about to say something different.
"Congratulations," He said, doing his best to emulate a clap with his avatars unwieldy...hooves? "You caught me. Can you get this off of me? I think I'm about to pass out." His intent was to see how they'd react. This...Twilight had already proven that they had some very efficient anger algorhthims programmed in. Was it just because she was a central character to whatever story this sim was based around? Or was it standard?
"Did you just call me fat?" The blue lump asked. Well, it seemed like they had a response for everything.
"Let me just say, Madame Tubbo, that if you were any heavier, you wouldn't have tackled me. You would have dug a ditch when you hit the ground." There, that should be a good enough to elicit a response.
The blue lump surprisingly responded by smashing his face into the ground. Somehow this equated to his avatar gaining the status of "Knocked out". He was still able to see and look around, but he couldn't move his avatar, or his now seemingly spectral self any distance away from the avatar.
"Rainbow Dash! No! What are you doing?!!?" Oh, so the blue lump was called Rainbow Dash? Fit her color scheme. She had hair and a tail that was colored like a rainbow. Guess some nicknames just stick.
"He called me fat!"
"So you attack him? He couldn't move, and you just..." Twilight had a foreleg to his avatars neck, and soon after she breathed a sigh of relief."Thank goodness, you only knocked him out."
"Would have done more if he said anything else." Rainbow Dash said with a huff.
It was remarkable the lengths Halliday had gone with this program. He could have just had it stop once he had been 'knocked out', and then had him 'wake up' at some other point in time. Instead, it seemed as if the sim ran completely in real time. On a hunch, he called up his interface and tried to pause the sim. No dice. He couldn't acccess it though any other means than his avatar interacting with it, it seemed.
Truly curious.