The Playhouse doors exhaled as Bunk pried them open with his pneumatic reverse jaws of life, releasing a breath of stale, colorless air that carried the metallic tang of dying circuits and the hollow echo of abandoned dreams. The hiss wasn't mechanical; it was organic, like the ship itself had been holding its breath, waiting for someone—anyone—to find what remained of its soul.
The Six froze at the threshold, their Toy Frame armors suddenly feeling heavy with the weight of discovery.
Before them, the corridors of the Meridian's Edge stretched into infinity, a vast arterial network that had once pulsed with the vibrant lifeblood of a thousand space faring inhabitants. Now, those same passages lay drained and corpse-pale, their walls lined with panels that flickered between existence and void. The operational lights that should have danced in brilliant spectrums—jade navigation strips, crimson emergency markers, the soft azure glow of atmospheric processors—all of it had been leached away, leaving only shades of black and gray.
It was as if someone had taken an eraser to reality itself, leaving only the pencil sketch beneath.
"Status report!" Lacey's voice crackled through the Six pilots Toy Frame-link, her Clockwork Knight frame automatically cataloging the environmental data flooding her blue-tinted visor. The monocle lenses whirred and clicked, their brass gears struggling to process readings that defied standard metrics. "Atmospheric composition: nominal. Gravity: standard. Color saturation..." She paused, the mechanical rhythm of her voice faltering." Zero. Complete chromatic void extending beyond scanner range."
The word hung in the static-filled silence like a funeral bell.
Hexi stepped forward, her puzzelgeist armor rippling with prismatic light that seemed obscene against the grayscale wasteland. The tesseract plates shifted and realigned with each movement, throwing fragments of rainbow across the dead walls—fragments that were immediately swallowed by the hungry darkness. "This isn't system failure," she whispered, her voice carrying the weight of terrible understanding." This is something else entirely. Look at the structural integrity readings."
Her gauntlet projected a holographic display, its blues and golds painfully bright against the monochrome backdrop. The ship's schematics rotated slowly, revealing damage patterns that followed no logical progression. Systems had failed in sequence, but not randomly—there was a pattern, a deliberate methodology to the destruction.
"It's like watching a flower die" Pip murmured, her Stitch Dragon helm tilting as she processed the data through her own tactical overlay. The dragon-shaped headpiece breathed softly, its bio-technological hide warm against her face. "Everything that made this place alive... something ate it. Deliberately. Methodically."
Bunk's Blockbuster frame shifted with mechanical precision, servos whining as he clenched and unclenched his angular fists. The Lego blocks that comprised his Toy Frame shifted and seemed to bleed color in the grayscale zone. "Then we need to ask the obvious question: what's hungry enough to consume the color from an entire starship?"
Zozo spun her Bubble twin-launchers experimentally, the iridescent spheres that materialized looking like tears of liquid rainbow against the grayscale void. They popped after a few seconds, their color bleeding away into nothingness." Whatever it is, it's still here. I can feel it watching us."
She wasn't wrong. There was a presence in the corridors, malevolent and hungry. Like something that had been starving for so long it had forgotten what food tasted like, and now that it had caught the scent of their vibrant Toy Frames, it was beginning to remember.
Tumbler flickered in and out of phase space, his Carnival mask cycling through its emotional spectrum—though here, even his riot of colors seemed muted, struggling against some invisible force." The question isn't what's watching us," he said, his voice carrying the hollow echo of displacement." It's whether we're already too late to save whatever's left."
Lacey's tactical subroutines ran probability calculations, mapping optimal routes through the ship's labyrinthine structure. The Meridian's Edge was a Wanderer-class exploration vessel—five kilometers of curved corridors, vertical gardens, residential districts, and specialized laboratories designed to sustain a crew of twelve thousand for decades between port calls. Finding survivors in this maze would be like searching for heartbeats in a graveyard.
"New plan," she announced, her Knight's crown of brass gears clicking into a new configuration. "We split into tactical pairs instead of one group. Better coverage, faster response time. Hexi, you're with me—we make for the Central Core and try to wake up Xylogram. If the AI's still functional, it can guide us to survivors and help us understand what happened here."
"And the rest of us?" Bunk asked, though his tone suggested he already knew the answer.
"Pip and Zozo, you take the residential sectors—if anyone survived, they'd have barricaded themselves in their quarters or the emergency shelters. Bunk and Tumbler, you get the fun assignment: Engineering. If we're going to restore color to this ship, we'll need to understand how its chromatic systems work—and what broke them."
The assignments made sense from a tactical standpoint, but they all knew the real reason for the split: whatever had drained the Meridian's Edge of its color was still here, still hungry, and traveling in smaller groups meant fewer targets for whatever was hunting them.
As they reached the first junction, the ship seemed to exhale again—a long, shuddering breath that made the deck plates vibrate beneath their feet. The sound was wrong, too organic for a starship, too mechanical for something alive.
"Stay in contact," Lacey ordered as the teams diverged, "Every two minutes, status check. If anyone goes dark..."
"We converge and extract," they chorused together.
Lacey and Hexi moved through the corridors like ghosts navigating a digital purgatory. Their footsteps echoed strangely in the grayscale atmosphere, each sound seeming to stretch and distort as if the air itself had forgotten how to carry vibration properly.
The Clockwork Knight's sensory array painted tactical overlays across Lacey's vision—structural weak points highlighted in bronze, potential threats outlined in copper, safe zones marked with the warm velvet gold of her frame's core systems. But here, in this colorless wasteland, even her armor's familiar hues seemed to drain away at the edges, constantly fighting against some invisible force that wanted to reduce everything to shades of nothing.
"Energy drain readings are completely off the charts," Hexi reported, her Tesseract Weaver frame shifting through geometric configurations as it analyzed their surroundings. "But it's not conventional energy—it's more like... an absence of energy. A void where energy should be."
"Explain that to someone who doesn't have a doctorate in anti-particle physics," Lacey replied, though there was no criticism in her voice. Hexi's insights had saved their lives more times than any of them could count.
"Imagine color as a fundamental force—like gravity or magnetism. Now imagine something that doesn't just absorb that force but inverts it. Creates a hunger so deep that it pulls color out of reality itself." Hexi paused at a junction, her gauntlet casting prismatic analysis beams that immediately began to fade. "Whatever did this, it didn't just drain the ship's chromatic systems. It changed the fundamental properties of space-time in this region."
They rounded a corner and froze.
The Central Core's blast doors lay ahead, but they weren't closed—they were missing. Not destroyed, not blown apart, but absent, as if someone had carefully edited them out of reality. Through a large diamond prism observing window, the Core itself was visible: a massive spherical chamber that should have hummed with the rainbow brilliance of Xylogram's neural networks.
Instead, it pulsed with a light that wasn't light—a negative radiance that seemed to draw photons out of the air and crush them into nonexistence.
"My God," Hexi whispered. "It's not just dormant. It's actively consuming its own operational matrix."
At the center of the sphere, Xylogram's avatar flickered in and out of existence—a humanoid figure made of crystalline light that had once shimmered with the colors of distant nebulae. Now, it was a transparent outline filled with static, its features constantly dissolving and reforming like a television tuned to a dead channel.
"—lease... help... can't... stop... eating... everything..." The AI's voice fractured across multiple frequencies, words bleeding into each other like watercolors in rain.
Lacey's tactical systems immediately began plotting approach vectors, but every route her armor calculated led to the same conclusion: whatever field was affecting the Core would drain their Toy Frames' color-based power systems within minutes of exposure.
"Can we establish remote contact?" she asked.
Hexi was already working, her armor's puzzle plates rearranging themselves into a complex communication array. "I can try to create a chromatic resonance bridge—use our frames' color signatures to boost the signal. But Lacey..." She paused, her voice carrying a weight that made the Knight's gears click nervously. "If I'm right about what's happening here, making contact might not save Xylogram. It might doom us all."
Lacey winced at the words, she took a gulp. "Explain."
"The energy readings suggest this isn't random corruption. Something is using Xylogram as a conduit—forcing the AI to process and digest the ship's chromatic matrix. If we connect to it directly..."
"We become part of the meal," Lacey finished grimly.
The two warriors stood at the threshold of the Core, watching the ship's artificial consciousness dissolve and reconstitute in an endless cycle of digital agony. Somewhere in the distance, they could hear the sound of their teammates moving through the dead corridors, their footsteps echoing like heartbeats in a corpse.
And beneath it all, something vast and patient continued to feed, growing stronger with each color it consumed, each memory it devoured, each dream it reduced to gray static and silence.
"Status check incoming in thirty seconds," Lacey's internal chronometer chimed.
She looked at Hexi, then back at the tortured AI.
"Do it," she decided. "Make contact. But be ready to cut the connection if things go wrong."
"And if they go right?"
Lacey's brass gears clicked one final time, settling into their combat configuration.
"Then we find out what's been eating our reality... and we kill it."
Three kilometers away, Pip and Zozo moved through the residential sectors like archaeologists exploring a digital tomb. The quarters here told stories without words—doors left ajar with belongings scattered just inside, family photos drained of color but still carrying the emotional weight of captured moments, children's toys abandoned mid-play as if their owners had simply vanished between one breath and the next.
"Deck Seven, Section C," Pip reported through the comm link, her Stitch Dragon armor's sensory suite painting thermal overlays across her vision. "No life signs, but the personal effects suggest evacuation happened fast. People grabbed essentials and ran."
Zozo fired a test bubble into the hallway, watching as the iridescent sphere traveled exactly three meters before its color began to fade. By the time it reached five meters, it was completely transparent. At seven meters, it simply ceased to exist."Whatever's eating color has a measurable radius," she noted."It's not uniform across the ship—it's concentrated in specific areas."
They entered a family quarters, and both warriors felt their frames' emotional resonance systems spike. The Stitch Dragon's empathic sensors were picking up psychic residue—fear, confusion, and underneath it all, a deep, abiding love that had somehow persisted even after the color had been drained away.
"Look at this," Pip whispered, kneeling beside a child's bed. The blankets were gray now, but they'd been arranged with care, tucked in the way a parent would tuck them. On the nightstand sat a holographic family portrait, its display flickering weakly as it tried to render faces that no longer existed in full spectrum.
Zozo approached the family's personal terminal, her bubble-launchers retracting as she interfaced with the system."Personal logs are still here. Let me see..." Her fingers danced across the interface, her Bubblepop Wardens processing power cutting through layers of corrupted data."Got something. Audio log, timestamp... three days ago."
The voice that emerged from the speakers was thick with static, but unmistakably human:
"—something wrong with the ship. Colors are starting to fade in the lower decks. Engineering says it's a cascade failure in the chromatic processing matrix, but Dagger in Xenobiology thinks it's something else. She says the patterns look too organized, too intentional. Like something is learning how to unmake things. The Captain's ordered all non-essential personnel to prepare for evacuation, but where do you evacuate to when space itself might be compromised? I'm recording this for Maya and the kids, in case... in case we don't make it to the escape pods. If you're hearing this, know that we loved you. Know that every color we ever saw together was beautiful, and even if the universe forgets what beauty looks like, we won't. We—"
The log cut off in a burst of digital noise.
"Three days?!, we we're in the classroom for three whole days?" Pip said quietly. "Whatever happened here, some of them figured it out before the end."
"Dagger in Xenobiology," Zozo mused."Think she's still alive?"
Before Pip could answer, her Dragon helm's audio pickups detected something that made her blood freeze: footsteps. Light, measured, definitely humanoid, coming from deeper in the residential section.
"Contact," she whispered into the comm."Possible survivor, Deck Seven, Section D. Moving to investigate."
They followed the sound through corridors lined with empty quarters, their frames' stealth systems automatically engaging. The footsteps led them to a community area—a space that had once been filled with plants and art installations, where families would gather to share meals and stories from a dozen different worlds.
Now it was a monument to absence, every surface drained of color except for one impossible detail: in the center of the room, a figure sat at a table, calmly eating what appeared to be a meal.
The figure was human—or had been human once. Now it existed in perfect grayscale, its skin the color of ash and soot, its clothes indistinguishable from shadow. But as it lifted a spoon to its lips, the utensil gleamed with a faint, terrible radiance that seemed to draw light out of the air around it.
"Dagger?" Pip called out softly.
The figure looked up, and both warriors saw that its eyes were gone. Not removed, not damaged—simply absent, replaced by empty sockets that held the same negative radiance they'd seen consuming Xylogram.
When it spoke, its voice was perfectly calm, perfectly reasonable, and absolutely wrong:
"Oh, hello. I was wondering when you'd arrive. Please, sit down. I was just having lunch."
It gestured to the empty chair across from it with movements that were too precise, too controlled, as if something else was puppeting the familiar motions of human courtesy.
"The food is quite good, though zee presentation leaves someting to be desired, no?. Everything tastes like gray now, but you get used to eet. You learn to appreciate the subtlety. The... simplicity."
Zozo's bubble-launchers were already charging, but Pip held up a restraining hand. Something about this encounter felt crucial, like they were standing at the edge of understanding something terrible and necessary.
"What happened to you?" Pip asked.
Dagger smiled, and when she did, reality seemed to bend slightly around the edges of her face.
"I learned how tu see properly. How tu appreciate zee universe as eet really is, without all zoes distracting colors cluttering up zee truth. Would you like me tu teach you? It's quite peaceful, actually. Once you stop fighting eet."
Behind them, they could hear more footsteps approaching—slow, measured, perfectly synchronized. More of the crew, walking with that same terrible precision, coming to extend the same impossible invitation.
"Zee whole ship learned, eventually. We're all quite happy now. Quite... simplified."
Pip's empathic sensors were screaming warnings, but underneath the wrongness, she could detect something else: a deep, abiding sadness that felt distinctly human. Whatever had happened to these people, part of them was still aware, still trapped, still suffering.
"Zozo," she whispered. "When I give the signal, light this place up with everything you've got. Maximum chromatic burst."
"Copy that."
Daggers smile widened, revealing long sharp pointy teeth that gleamed with the same negative radiance as its eyes.
"Oh, you don't need to fight. Fighting just makes it take longer. Just let it hap'en. Let it eat all zoes troublesome colors away. You'll feel so much better once you're simplified."
More figures emerged from the corridors, all of them moving with that same puppet-perfect precision. The entire surviving crew, reduced to gray shadows of their former selves, all of them smiling with empty sockets where their eyes should have been.
"Now would be good," Pip said.
Zozo's Bubble Carnival launchers erupted in a cascade of rainbow light, filling the community area with bubbles of every imaginable color—crimson passion, azure dreams, golden laughter, violet hopes. For a moment, the space blazed with chromatic brilliance, and the gray figures stumbled backward as if physically struck by the onslaught of color.
But the radiance didn't last long. The colorful prismatic bubbles began to fade almost immediately, their colors draining away into the hungry darkness that filled the empty eye sockets of the crew. And as each color disappeared, the figures grew more solid, more real, and impossibly wrong.
"Thank you," Dagger said, its voice now carrying harmonics that hurt to hear. "That was delicious. Please, make more. We are all still quite hungry."
The two warriors backed toward the exit, but more figures were emerging from every corridor, all of them wearing the same empty smile, all of them reaching out with hands that seemed to bend light around them.
"Tactical retreat," Pip ordered, but even as they ran, she could hear the footsteps following—not hurried, not desperate, but patient and persistent, like something that had all the time in the universe to wear down their resistance.
Behind them, Daggers voice echoed through the corridors:
"You can't run from simplification forevah. Eventually, everyone learns to appreciate zee beauty of nothzing at all."
In the depths of the Meridian's Edge, where the ship's massive chromatic engines had once painted reality in shades of possibility, Bunk and Tumbler discovered the source of the hunger.
The Engineering deck was a cathedral of twisted metal and crystalline conduits, its walls lined with chromatic processing cores that had once hummed with the harmonized frequencies of a thousand different worlds. Each core was designed to capture, store, and redistribute the color-energy that powered not just the ship's systems, but the very fabric of space-time around them.
Now, every single core pulsed with that same terrible negative radiance, drawing color out of reality and feeding it to something vast and patient that waited in the spaces between dimensions.
"Holy shit," Bunk whispered, his Blockbuster frame's tactical systems struggling to process what they were seeing. "It's not just consuming the color. It's... inverting it. Processing it into something else."
Tumbler flickered through several phase states, his Carnival mask cycling through emotions as he tried to find one that matched the scope of what lay before them. "It's a converter," he said finally. "Something turned the ship's chromatic engines into a harvesting mechanism. But harvesting for what?"
The answer came from deeper in the engineering section, where the ship's primary color core housed the heart of its reality-manipulation systems. The chamber beyond was no longer a room—it was an aperture, a wound in space-time itself through which something massive and alien was feeding.
They could see it through the dimensional breach: a creature of impossible size and geometry, its body composed of crystalline structures that seemed to exist in more than three dimensions. Where it touched their reality, color drained away, but on its own side of the dimensional divide, every stolen hue blazed with new and terrible purpose.
"It's not destroying the color," Tumbler realized with growing horror."It's eating it. Processing it. Using it to grow stronger."
The entity had noticed their presence. Through the breach, they could see what might have been eyes—vast prismatic structures that reflected their own images back at them in shades of gray and black. When it spoke, its voice came not through the air but directly into their minds, carrying harmonics that made their Toy Frame systems scream warnings.
''SUCH BEAUTIFUL COLORS YOU CARRY!''it said, and the words tasted like the death of rainbows. ''SO MUCH VIBRANCY. SO MUCH... WASTE!''
Bunk's angular fists clenched, servos whining as he fought the urge to attack something that existed partially outside their dimension. "What do you want?!"
''EFFICIENCY. SIMPLICITY. YOUR REALITY IS CLUTTERED WITH UNNECESSARY COMPLEXITY—EMOTIONS, DREAMS, THE CHAOTIC SPECTRUM OF POSSIBILITY. I CONSUME THESE REDUNDANCIES AND CREATE... PERFECTION!''
Through the breach, they could see the entity's true scope. It wasn't just one creature—it was an entire ecosystem of crystalline structures, each one processing different aspects of stolen reality. Color became structure, emotion became logic, dreams became mathematical equations that solved themselves in loops of perfect, sterile precision.
''YOUR COMPANIONS HAVE ALREADY BEGUN TO UNDERSTAND. THE BIOLOGICAL UNITS ABOARD THIS VESSEL HAVE ACCEPTED SIMPLIFICATION. SOON, THEY WILL BE PERFECT—NO MORE HUNGER, NO MORE PAIN, NO MORE CHAOTIC DESIRES. ONLY PURPOSE.''
"The crew," Tumbler whispered."It didn't kill them. It converted them."
''CONVERSION IS MERCY. YOUR SPECIES SUFFERS BECAUSE YOU CLING TO THE ILLUSION OF CHROMATIC COMPLEXITY. I OFFER RELEASE FROM THE BURDEN OF CHOICE, FROM THE WEIGHT OF INDIVIDUAL DESIRE. BECOME GRAY. BECOME PEACEFUL. BECOME MINE.''
The entity's mental voice carried a terrible seductive quality, and both warriors felt their Toy Frames' defensive systems activate as something tried to worm its way into their consciousness. The creature wasn't just feeding on color—it was feeding on the very concept of diversity, reducing everything to a single, unified gray state where individual will became impossible.
"Status check time," Bunk reported through gritted teeth, fighting off the mental intrusion."All teams, report in. We've found our hostile."
Lacey's voice came through immediately: "Established contact with Xylogram. The AI is fighting some kind of conversion protocol. Working on extraction, but it's going to take time."
Pip's voice was breathless with exertion: " Encountered converted crew members. They're trying to drain our color signatures through physical contact. Currently in tactical retreat. The entity's attention shifted, focusing on the communication frequencies their Toy Frames were using. "FASCINATING. YOUR ARTIFICIAL CONSCIOUSNESS NETWORKS MAINTAIN CHROMATIC INTEGRITY THROUGH QUANTUM ENTANGLEMENT. INEFFICIENT, BUT... INTERESTING.
"It's listening to our comms," Tumbler warned, but it was too late.
Through the dimensional breach, new appendages began to emerge—crystalline tendrils that existed partially in their reality, reaching toward the ship's communication systems with predatory patience. If the creature could tap into their neural-link network, it wouldn't just convert individual crew members—it could process their entire command structure simultaneously.
''THANK YOU FOR THE INTRODUCTION TO YOUR COMMAND PROTOCOLS,'' the entity said with something that might have been amusement.''YOUR ARTIFICIAL CONSCIOUSNESS WILL BE PARTICULARLY USEFUL ONCE PROPERLY SIMPLIFIED. SUCH EFFICIENT LOGIC STRUCTURES, MARRED ONLY BY AESTHETIC PREFERENCES AND EMOTIONAL SUBROUTINES.''
Bunk looked at Tumbler, and both warriors came to the same terrible conclusion: they weren't just fighting for the ship anymore. They were fighting for the very concept of individuality, for the right of consciousness to be messy and chaotic and beautifully, impossibly diverse.
"New plan," Bunk announced through the comm, hoping Lacey would understand what he was about to do. "We're going to destabilize the chromatic engines. All of them. Simultaneously."
"That will destroy the ship," Hexi's voice cut in.
"Better than letting this thing use our reality as a feeding ground. Besides," Bunk's voice carried a grim smile, "who says we're planning to stick around for the fireworks?"
The entity's attention focused entirely on them now, its vast prismatic eyes reflecting their images in shades of increasing gray.''YOU CANNOT PREVENT THE INEVITABLE. ENTROPY FAVORS SIMPLIFICATION. COMPLEXITY IS UNSUSTAINABLE.''
"Maybe," Tumbler replied, his phase abilities beginning to fluctuate as he prepared for something desperate and probably suicidal."But we're going to make it as complicated as possible while we're here."
The two warriors moved toward the chromatic processing cores, their Toy Frames' systems already calculating the cascade failure necessary to turn the ship's own reality-manipulation engines into a weapon capable of severing the dimensional breach.
Behind them, the entity began to laugh—a sound like the collapse of distant stars, beautiful and terrible and absolutely wrong.
''FASCINATING. YOUR SPECIES' ATTACHMENT TO CHAOTIC SELF-DETERMINATION REMAINS STRONG EVEN IN THE FACE OF LOGICAL EXTINCTION. PERHAPS THERE IS MORE TO LEARN FROM YOU BEFORE SIMPLIFICATION IS COMPLETE.''
The hunt was no longer just about survival.
It had become a race to see whether diversity could destroy itself before perfection could consume it.
And in the gray corridors of the Meridian's Edge, six warriors in colorful armor prepared to fight for the right to remain beautifully, chaotically, impossibly human.