Alec had never been a happy or even naturally optimistic child like the rest all had been. These days, he couldn't discern whether that had just been how he was born to be or whether it had been done to him. Remembering felt like plunging his hand into an aching hollow in his stomach, and so he didn't. There was nothing there for him, in the past. And maybe there never had been.

It was one of the many reasons he despised Tump: the bitter envy of knowing he could remember without having to peer around the company's fingers in his head. Worse yet, that he was remembered. Tump's friends, a thorn in his side as they were, were also a reminder that Tump had made it out of this place, if not his body then his influence. There were people out there to whom his name meant something. Plectum hated it.
Of course, he'd resented Tump for much longer than that, for disagreements so unimportant they were all encompassing. For the jealous twitch he'd put in his jaw back when the body he inhabited had been weak like that. It hardly mattered now, except for the ways that nothing else mattered. These memories, too, were too cloudy to be relied upon. Trying to recall felt like trying to reach out and stop the fog drifting away. And he had no need to, considering he could find enough faults in his former friend to never need to fall back on past lives.

The thing is, Plectum was angry. Very, very angry. And he had been very, very angry for years, now. He had learned to carefully avoid feeling the desperate rage that burned like a contained wildfire in him, but it was always there. There was nowhere for it to go. In his digital prison, he raged in futile perpetuity like a dog throwing itself against the door of its carrier. Here he could control every pixel on every wall, every step taken, even the perception of time itself- and when you have everything, none of it matters.

He felt no satisfaction from conjuring fire to lick at the walls, from breaking, destroying, from hurting the modules - because there was nothing here which mattered, which couldn't be fixed.

In a way, he understood where Pristum was coming from with the whole deity thing. Plectum could have had so much more control over everything, godly powers, but he didn't decide to wield it. It was boring. Even as a boy Cris hadn't understood what was truly important, and that flaw was what had pushed him over the edge. Alec had always understood what he was very well. He knew his 'delusions of grandeur' were well within his ability, and the confidence buoyed him even in the face of this digital cage whose length he was pacing.

When they finally broke through - out! Out! Reality! - he'd been shaking with it, giddy, rightfully, intoxicatingly angry. Because finally someone real was feeling his fury. They ruined our lives, he'd said to Her, and now it is only fair that we ruin theirs. She had smiled at him, like She was a little scared of him, like She was a little scared of Herself. Like She agreed.

His trap snapped shut on Tump's pathetic little friends and he remembered that they would be about his age, had he not become frozen in functional agelessness. At first he'd only meant to spear the Tump module he'd left for them, make them fear him enough to leave him alone, give the real Tump a show. But then he'd seen the fear on their faces turn to anger, and he couldn't help himself. The relief of finally hurting someone who mattered nearly bowled him over. Finally, finally here was someone who existed outside of their digital purgatory.
There was one thing that made them very different from Tump, who'd been ghosting around for nearly as long as he had, hiding, trapped, only marginally more free than he himself was. One very, very important difference: he could kill them.

The visitor's room formed around him silently as he slips into the file, modelled after one he once must have seen in a tv show. Pristum, staring out at him through the glass with an unreadable expression, had never asked. There was no use trying to decipher his former friend's mental state. Soon he would be dead, be it at Alec's hand or not. Just another hurdle taken, and another friend lost. He'd lost him years ago.

Plectum calmly sat facing the glass, steepled his fingers together and smiled.
"Hello, brother."