Tony and Elli's adventures in SBURB

Tony and Elli's shenanigans began when Elli returned to her treehouse after searching the surrounding woods for her missing sister, just as Tony booted up his copy of the game years in the future. Seeing Elli standing in her room, he began moving things around her house, scaring the daylights out of her, and he even almost accidentally decapitated her with a sword. Elli, not one to throw a fit about things, instead sort of blanked out in a state of fear-induced shock.

Tony eventually grew bored with Elli's unresponsiveness, and began messing looking around the house and exploring SBURB's interface. He started deploying some of the free devices the game came with, but each disconnected room in Elli's treehouse was so small, only one device could go in each. He placed the cruxtruder in Elli's kitchen, the punch designix in a storage room, the totem lather in a room full of weird Japanese board games, and the alchemiter in a room full of paint supplies.

Meanwhile, Elli finally shook herself out of her trance and began following the sound of activity as Tony continued messing with things around her house. Tony found that he could not interact with the devices directly, so he started just throwing random crap at them. At one point, he bumped the cruxtruder with a cabinet he had inadvertently ripped out of a wall, and from it spawned an off-white kernelsprite, as well as a similarly colored cruxite dowel. A timer booted up on the cruxtruder notifying them that they had little over 15 minutes until... something happened.

Tony, apparently being rather clever, deduced that the items spawned from the cruxtruder must interact with the other game-supplied devices in some way. He picked up the dowel, and Elli followed it as he carried it into the room with the totem lathe. The sprite stayed close behind Elli, which unnerved her just a bit, but at this point, she was beginning to get used to these strange things floating around. Tony put the dowel into the lathe, and generated the pre-punched card. He tried putting the card into the slot in the lathe, but SBURB's controls were too clunky, and the best he could do was try to prompt Elli to do it for him. After a few minutes of throwing the card at the slot, Elli finally picked up on Tony's hints, and slid the card into the slot. The machine wet to work, and carved the dowel into a totem.

Tony took a wild guess as to what to do with the totem, and started carrying it to the paint room, where the alchemiter sat. Elli followed, and on her way out, she noticed the forest around her was almost entirely ungulfed in flames. With a sudden sense of urgency, she sprinted into the room after the floating totem. Upon entering, due to a combination of being in a rather panicked state, and the cramped nature of a small room with something large in the middle of it, she bumped into a wall that supported a shelf. On the shelf were several containers of different colored paints. The containers fell over, and the paint spilled out and into the kernelsprite, which was hovering nearby Elli at the time. The sprite transformed, becoming a splattersprite. Though most of the sprite still appeared off-white, it constantly dripped multicolored paint onto the floor, making an absolute mess of things.

Tony decided to investigate the sprite after his business with the totem was finished, and placed the totem onto its corresponding spot on the alchemiter. The alchemiter was activated, and it materialized a small, white, furry creature, which Elli recognized right away. It's cute, nubby little nose, its beady eyes, and its bushy tail immediately gave it away. It was... a squirrel, of course! What other animal would it be? After a brief stare-off between the squirrel and Elli, the squirrel took off. It leaped out of a window and scurried higher up the tree.

Elli wasn't sure what to make of anything, but she decided that the squirrel had to be important somehow. Perhaps it was a spirit, come to save her from the fire that was slowly closing in on her house. She went ouside, and spotted the squirrel on a branch slightly higher than where she was now. She began climbing the tree after the squirrel, and splattersprite followed behind her, much to the chagrin of Tony. Tony was trying to combine more things with the sprite to see what would happen, but the sprite was too fast, the game's interface too clunky and awkward. The paint trail the sprite was leaving behind did give him an idea of how to communicate with Elli a little better, though.

Elli continued to chase the squirrel for several more minutes, with Tony eventually deciding to help her by herding the squirrel with large objects. Eventually, the two cornered the squirrel on the end of a branch, and Elli slowly crawled out to grab it. The countdown, forgotten by both kids at this point was at around 15 seconds, and the fire had reached the base of Elli's tree. Elli finally reached the squirrel and grabbed it seconds before the countdown ended. She, along with her house and the tree supporting it, vanished. It became suspended in the transitional area between Earth and the Medium, although neither kid knew this. The squirrel had disappeared as Elli held it, though she did not dwell on it for long, suddenly bewildered by her blank surroundings. She was not scared, but relieved, having escaped the fire.

Finally free from a time limit, Tony moved the view to the paint room, and picked up a brush. He swiped it through the puddle of paint on the floor, and brought the brush back to Elli. Elli watched as he wrote the word "Hello" on the branch she was sitting on. Ignoring the obvious language barrier that should probably be present when crossing both nations and time periods, Elli responded with a wave and a spoken "Hello" of her own. Tony wrote the word "Follow" in paint as well, and proceeded to make a trail of paint that led to the paint room. Elli, being quite impressionable, complied without question.

Several times, Tony had to go back to the paint room to re-color the brush, which was incredibly annoying, so he began thinking of even more ways to make communicating easier. He figured if he could somehow give her a computer, they could talk directly. The alchemiter seemed good for making stuff based on a totem, and the lathe carved totems based on a punched card. They still had not used the punch designix yet, so he told Elli to grab a container of paint, and guided her up to the designix.

After looking at it for a small while, he noticed another card slot similar to the one on the lathe. He drew out a card on the floor and and arrow pointing to the designix. Elli got the hint after pondering it for a bit, and took out a card containing a rice cake from her sylladex. From his vantage, Tony saw that the card had a captcha code on the back of it, and he suddenly realized what those must be for. Elli put the card into the slot, while Tony captchalogued his computer on the other side. He noted the code, and redeployed it. He spelled out the code in crude letters/numbers/symbols on Elli's floor, thankful he had her bring the extra paint so he didn't have to go back to the paint room to get more. Elli took another minute to find out what he must have meant with the code, and she typed the number into the designix's keyboard once she figured it out.

The card was punched, and Elli was prompted to remove it. Tony then guided her to the cruxtruder to make another dowel, and then back to the lathe to carve it. The new totem they made certainly looked different than the one that made the squirrel, which was promising. The kids brought the totem to the alchemiter. However, they found that the computer required build grist to make, and they did not have very much of it. It was too expensive, and the two were left to ponder what to do next as the house floated in the strange transitional space.