In the beginning, the Creator placed the Spawn Point. In her celestial wisdom, she bestowed upon the Player three divine gifts: the Jump, the Grab, and the Dash.
The Player, pleasantly surprised by its newfound sentience, recognized the Creator’s caring gaze from beyond the cloudy realm it found itself in. It thanked her. Thank you, great, omniscient Creator! You have given me life, and you have given me three wonderful gifts of movement. I am as grateful as my young and simple being allows.
After a moment or two of silence, however, it asked of the Creator, But if I may, what am I to do with these gifts? What is my purpose?
And so the Creator, having not thought of this before, said Huh, well here you go,
and in an instant, created for the player a vast world to explore, full of challenge and discovery. Go out, and beat my game, Player. In this you will be fulfilled.
And so the Player, invigorated by the Creator's inspiring, albeit brief words, went out and completed the Creator's game, using its gifts just as they were meant to be used: climbing, jumping, and dashing through each beautiful environment with the perfect amount of effort, as if the environment was designed for that very purpose. In fact, the Player was content in knowing that this was the case. That the environment was meant for it and its very specific set of gifts. For example, in one instance it found a tunnel of spikes rather threatening in appearance and said to itself, My goodness! How will I ever get through this tunnel of spikes?
But after a short period of trial and error, it realized that if it jumped as exactly as high as it could, and then dashed just as far as it could, it would comfortably sail through to the other side of the treacherous passage. This simple puzzle put it at ease. Wow! I feel no frustration, but at the same time I feel as though I have overcome a great challenge. I have learned more about my own capabilities and grown from this experience.
It took a deep breath of satisfaction, then continued on its way. As it passed these simple tests throughout the game, the Player gained a loving appreciation for the Creator's meticulous design. It was all just right.
When the Player was finished with the game, it returned to that cloudy void it was once born into, and spoke eagerly to its creator: I have beaten your game, Creator! You have shown me what I am capable of in mind and motion. I understand who I am now. I am you!
And after that familiar moment of anticipation, the Player asked again: …What am I to do now?
This time, though, the silence lasted longer than the Player was comfortable with. It reached out again, sternly this time: Creator? What is next for me?
But the Player was met with naught but the echo of its own words, reverberating through the hollow space in between the foreground tiles of the game it had just played, each one so carefully placed by its creator. A digitized coldness followed that dreary echo, and the Player was filled with a momentary dejection, experiencing for the first time aloneness.
The Player, however, was not alone. The Creator was indeed still there, watching her creation ponder in the cloudscape. She almost spoke to the Player, but a curious voice in her head wisely told her to just… see what happened.
What happened was this. Left to make its own purpose, the Player saw no path forward but to beat the game, again. To relive the joy it had once felt when it discovered the world was made for it. After finishing the game for the second time, the Player restarted again. And once more after that! While the beauty of the world was undeniable, even that flower began to wither with time, and the Player was increasingly restless. Eventually, out of sheer, cosmic boredom, the Player began to do strange things. The deafening silence had led the Player to doubt the Creator's perfect design. And so it tried using its three gifts of movement in ways that did not quite fit the challenges presented by the game, ways that were not foreseen by the Creator it once thought omniscient. It tried jumping in the middle of a dash, dashing and jumping at the same time, grabbing and jumping on a wall immediately after dashing… the possibilities, it seemed, were growing like a tree(). At times, the Player would discover a combination of its gifts that seemed to be itself an entirely new gift that it could reproduce at will, given a fitting environment. For example, if it dashed, then jumped, then dashed diagonally into the ground with just the right timing, it would reach a horizontal speed it previously thought impossible! And this gift could be used multiple times in succession? This was an especially scandalous discovery. The Player saw its movement capabilities expand well beyond what the Creator had anticipated, and felt a vindictive pride against her silence, for this was only the beginning.
However, as the Player began to corrupt its divine gifts for its rebellious entertainment, it noticed that the familiar environments it once found itself in had become alien. The foreground tiles that had felt so naturally placed and carefully designed began to feel like they did not suit the Player and its many gifts. The spaces felt too open, the gaps too short, the walls too low to challenge it. They could no longer hold the explosive, flowering movement of the Player they had been created for. Simply put, the Player had far outgrown the Creator's game.
And so the Player turned inwards. Turned away from the elementary world it was born into to create its own. One perfectly suited to the new gifts it had created for itself. It tore the Creator's game to shreds, shattering it into infinite infinitesimals that it stitched back together into infinite new bastardizations of the Creator's initial vision, meticulously designed to offer the Player that mix of challenge and satisfaction it once knew. In an effort to improve its own designs, it carefully studied every idiosyncrasy of every idiosyncrasy it found in its infinite new gifts. Each one had its own quirks and setups. It found, for example, that regarding the dashing diagonally into the ground
gift, four foreground tiles of elevation difference between the first and second jumps felt the most natural, such that the landing occurs after the end of the dash, and that the second jump must be executed a short time after the landing. But after many eternities the Player actually became fond of the three-tile elevation difference
rendition of this gift due to its wonderful nuances that reminded the
Player of itself. In fact after long enough the Player found itself, at times, missing the alienation it felt in that first world after outgrowing it. And so it created infinite more worlds that, somehow, did not fit naturally even one of the Player's infinite gifts. Although, however hard it worked to occupy itself during its era of Creation, the Player could not completely seal the fractures between the mismatched puzzle pieces it taped and glued together in arbitrary geometries. Fractures in the manifolds through which it could still see the primordial gray vortex that reminded it of an inescapable emptiness at the bottom of this timeless endeavor.
In this never-ending hypernova of motion interacting with environment, something entirely new had emerged. The Player's movement had become in itself a Universe. It was a language the Player could speak with, it was Turing complete, it was a blank canvas, it was a mind of its own. And at the end of time, when that mind had thought every thought, said every word in movement in every possible order, and the Player had completed each of the infinite games it had created for itself, the Player took a moment to rest, having for the first time considered that it is actually feeling a little burnt out.
During that moment of rest, the Player looked back at all it had done. It pondered how far it had strayed from the entity that had created it in her image. Had it? It looked back at every word and sentence it had ever spoken with its gifts, and truly, truly appreciated them. However, not quite satisfied with all it had accomplished, it decided the following: that it would no longer move. That indeed, it would do absolutely nothing and stay perfectly still for the rest of whatever comes after time. And so, just like its creator, it thought, it would stay silent and motionless against the restless winds of the cloudy void, forever.
The Creator, having observed the Player through the duration of this grand escapade, thought to herself, Wow. I certainly did not see that coming.
And this, she decided, was the best part.