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"[color=d1fffc]No.[/color]"

Alja hadn't spoken much about the denizens; her thoughts were racing too hard about what all this could mean. And what Alex had said triggered the thoughts, catalyzed them, and brought them to the surface.

"[color=d1fffc]No,[/color]" she repeated, "[color=d1fffc]there's no way this is a glitch. I mean, the console dies, pain is on, death is a thing, magical exhaustion feels...well, exhaustin', we get hungry and thirsty, the whole denizen thing.[/color]" As she listed, she ticked them on fingers, frown on her face. "[color=d1fffc]I'm no programmer, but it feels like quite a few of those shouldn't actually be related in coding. If this is a glitch, it's the most weirdly coincidental and related glitch that's ever happened to anything. And I doubt that. Whatever's going on, it's not the code glitching.[/color]"

Her frown deepened. She'd never put much thought into how Pariah might work; she wasn't a programmer or game designer, she didn't know anything about dream theory. It had always just been an escape for her, and she never bothered learning more about its functions. Who knows, maybe they were hackable because the hardware interfaced with the dream? But that sounded wrong. "[color=d1fffc]But now the problem is...if it's not a glitch, and it's not a hack because,[/color]" she waved a hand at Benkei, "[color=d1fffc]yeah, seriously, how do you hack into a dream...[/color]" She hesitated a moment, almost afraid of saying it for fear of what the answer might be, 

"[color=d1fffc]...then what in the fuck is going on?[/color]"