Strawberry's Descent

Unbeknownst to Arista, Bram had clipped the exact moment the notification appeared, her stunned expression, the system's visible "error" before generating an entirely new title, the specific, disbelieving "...Doing a Strawberry?", and posted it within the hour, captioned with the flat, deadpan humor he'd apparently absorbed from a year of proximity to her chaos.

[Clip: "when you refuse to play the game as intended"]847k views · 62k likes

It spread the way everything involving her name eventually seemed to spread, fast, then faster, forum threads splitting off within hours to dissect the exact mechanics of what she'd apparently done.

[Thread: the game LITERALLY generated a new title because no one else has ever hoarded 1000+ stat points]11.4k replies

"I checked my own unallocated points after seeing this. I have 40. FORTY. She has TWENTY-FIVE TIMES as many as me and she's on ULTIMATE MODE"

"this isn't even the craziest part, scroll down, apparently the system also just handed her a mandatory hydra fight because of it"

"WAIT WHAT"

[Thread: Strawberry has to fight a level 250 hydra with ZERO combat stats or she gets PERMANENTLY DELETED]pinned, 24.8k replies and climbing

The tone of the conversation shifted almost immediately once that second detail properly registered: the initial amusement at "doing a strawberry" becoming a meme in its own right giving way to something considerably more invested, considerably more anxious on her behalf.

"okay this stopped being funny the second I read 'permadeath.' she's been playing Ultimate this ENTIRE TIME? through the tunnel? the metro? ALL of it?"

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"she never told anyone. she just kept building things like a normal difficulty player the whole time"

"I need her to survive this. I have genuinely never cared this much about a stranger's video game character"

Nettle found the thread first, scrolling through it with growing, horrified fascination before all but sprinting to Arista's workshop, tablet in hand.

"...You need to see this."

Arista, deep in barrel-joint calculations, glanced up distractedly. "See what?"

"Bram posted the title clip. It's everywhere. And now the entire server knows about the hydra quest, the permadeath clause, all of it." Nettle set the tablet down, letting Arista scroll through the accumulating thread herself. "You've got several hundred thousand people currently panicking on your behalf."

Arista stared at the numbers, the sheer scale of unexpected public attention landing somewhere she hadn't braced for at all, not the usual thrill of a viral achievement, but something considerably heavier, considerably more personal.

"...Oh." She scrolled further, reading comment after comment, strangers she'd never met expressing genuine, unguarded worry over a fight she'd been trying to solve quietly, methodically, mostly alone. "I didn't want this to be a whole thing. I wanted to just... build my way through it, the way I do everything else, and tell people afterward once it actually worked."

"I don't think that's an option anymore." Nettle sat down beside her, more gently than usual. "For what it's worth, and I say this as someone who's watched you talk your way out of a war quest, build a continental railway, and negotiate with an actual Lord of Hell, I think you're going to be fine."

"You don't know that."

"No," Nettle admitted. "But apparently neither do a few hundred thousand strangers, and they're rooting for you anyway."

Arista sat with that for a long moment, the barrel calculations forgotten beside her, the sheer, accumulating weight of public attention settling into something that felt less like pressure and more, oddly, like company.

"...Bram is never living this down," she said finally, a small, tired grin creeping back in despite everything. "He posted the clip. He's the one who's going to get so much grief once people realize he was standing right there for the whole thing."

Nettle's own grin matched hers exactly. "Oh, I already sent it to him with about fifteen exclamation points. He's not answering his messages anymore."

"Good," Arista said, already reaching back for her notebook, the fear still present but somehow, now, considerably more bearable. "Back to work, then. Several hundred thousand strangers are apparently rooting for me now."

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