Realmshift: code of the fallen

Kai had barely walked five steps outside the glitching remains of Emberwatch when the sky started whispering again.

It wasn't words, exactly. More like someone mumbling a patch log into a megaphone underwater. The kind of sound that made your ears itch and your soul consider early retirement.

Crumble, now sitting comfortably on Kai's shoulder in a hammock made of UI string errors, twitched.

"I'm getting patch vibes," the little plush abomination announced. "Big ones. Smells like hotfix with a side of panic."

Kai squinted at the horizon. The landscape was... different. Not again-different, but worryingly consistent different. As if the terrain finally settled on a version of itself and then deeply regretted it. Trees were upright but pixelated. A nearby boulder floated one foot above the ground, vibrating like it had caffeine dependencies. And the clouds looked like they were made in Microsoft Paint.

Then he saw her.

She stood perfectly still in the center of a clearing that hadn't existed until about six seconds ago. A girl dressed in what could only be described as haute couture patchwork, literally. Her robe was stitched from glowing lines of malformed code and update notes, with scrolling changelogs embedded like magical runes. Her eyes flickered between neon blue and terminal green. Her hair floated sideways as though affected by a physics engine that had no idea what gravity was supposed to be.

And she was talking.

"Kai of Build v1.03-beta," she intoned, her voice cool and emotionless. "You carry unresolved flags. Memory loss: [Fruit Type: Tropical]. Probability of narrative implosion: recalculating..."

Kai blinked. "Uh. Hi?"

She tilted her head. "New player interaction detected. Processing social protocol... Patch 6.22 notes: 'Reduced awkward silences by 15%.' Hello."

Crumble peered at her, whispering theatrically. "She's either a prophet, a corrupted AI, or one of those lore-obsessed players who speaks exclusively in riddles and Reddit posts."

Kai stepped closer. "Who are you?"

She raised her hands, and floating system glyphs appeared around her. They flickered and rewrote themselves with every passing second, like identity itself was a buffer overflow.

Designation: ???
Title: Patchnote Oracle
Also Known As: Bug, Feature, or Prophecy

"I speak in the tongue of updates," she said serenely. "The changelogs. The hotfixes. The regrets."

Kai pinched the bridge of his nose. "You're a walking developer blog."

"Incorrect. Developer blogs contain typos."

Crumble raised a tiny hand. "She's got you there."

Kai groaned. "Fine. Just... explain. Please. The sky is flickering. The tutorial zone was replaced with ghost therapy. I lost all memory of... some fruit. And this—" he pointed at Crumble "—won't stop making puns."

"Reality is under rollback," she explained. "Stability protocols deprecated. Cause: patch conflict. Players: displaced. Lore: unstable."

Kai raised an eyebrow. "So all of this is because someone messed up an update?"

She shrugged. "Possibly. Or this is an emergent narrative loop disguised as gameplay. Both are valid interpretations."

"Are you a quest-giver?" Kai asked.

"Kind of," Crumble mumbled. "She gave me a quest once. 'Don't die in the prologue.' I failed."

The girl stepped closer, staring at Kai as if trying to read his data. "You carry anomaly flags. One death. One corrupted memory. A companion unit with a sarcasm modifier set to excessive."