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Bob - the female Bob, that is - wiped the grease off her hands with a rag as she sat opposite the other Bob and Dot inside the Diner. Bob noticed now that the other Guardian had no keytool; and debated asking about it. Maybe she was a cadet? No. That didn't make sense. There should be another Guardian here to supervise her training. Her icon looked similar to their own; but its colours were reversed. Another strange quirk. Bob mentally kicked himself. All this scanning and he hadn't even thought to scan her yet! She could be the User! He sighed. He couldn't do it now... it would be obvious; not to mention rude. And if this sprite wasn't the User, they'd probably need to be on her good side to get this Game's objective fulfilled.
"All right," she said. "Where do you really come from?"
"Dot was telling the truth," Bob said. "We come from another system."
She rolled her brown eyes at him. "Well, that much is obvious. I want to know *why* you're here. The Collective doesn't let Guardians take off whenever they feel like it."
"We're here... to play the Games."
An even deeper frown. "All right, let me get this straight. You came from another system to play the Games here? What's wrong with your system?"
"The Games don't come very often, and they're no real challenge for someone like me. Dot here is thinking about becoming a Guardian, and well... I needed somewhere more suitable to get her used to the gamespeed inside the Supercomputer. Mainframe was top of my list for a test or two."
A glance at Dot, who nodded sagely.
"And you couldn't tell me this before?"
"Well, I couldn't, not in front of Enzo... he's still a little young for the Games."
"So why bring him?"
"He's my brother, I didn't want to leave him behind. He's all the family I have," Dot spoke up.
The other Bob sighed, and tossed the greasy rag onto the table.
"I still don't think you're telling me the truth here, but it's a little better than the story you gave me outside."
"You said I couldn't possibly be dangerous," Bob prodded, still smarting somewhat from the 'dork' comment.
"I *said* you couldn't be dangerous; that doesn't mean you're incapable of stirring up chaos here. It's my job to make sure that doesn't happen... but it seems you're doing a good job of it so far." She squinted at Glitch. "What *is* that?"
Bob glanced down at his keytool.
"This?" He looked across at Dot, and then back at his double. "It's my keytool... Glitch. Don't you have one?"
She shook her head. "What, am I supposed to have one?"
"All - "
Dot smothered Bob's mouth with a hand before he could go further.
"He's a higher-level Guardian - they're the only ones who get them," she offered.
"But he just said - " she looked at the other Bob, who was prying Dot's fingers from his mouth - "Oh, good grief. I give up."
WARNING: INCOMING GAME. WARNING: INCOMING GAME.
Inside the Diner, the three sprites watched as the sky darkened.
"Well," the female Bob said, getting up from the table, "you wanted to play the Games... here comes one now. Care to join me?"
* * *
Outside, the Guardian called up a vidwindow as she flipped her zipboard right-side up, and nodded an acknowledgement to the binome who answered.
"Where is it this time?"
"Sector 080. Good luck."
She grinned back at him. "Stay frosty," she replied, and closed the vidwindow. Bob doubletook.
"Hey, that's my - " He was interrupted by a sharp elbow in the ribs from Dot. "Ooof."
"Did you say something?"
Bob gritted his teeth and shook his head as he hopped onto his own zipboard, and the trio sped off towards Sector 080 to meet the Game Cube. As they approached, Dot took the opportunity to ride closer to Bob, hanging back behind the strange Guardian.
"Bob... did you scan her yet?" she hissed at him.
Bob looked sheepish."No... but I'll use the scan of the Game stats to do that. I don't think she's the User, Dot."
"We don't know that! This whole thing is just so weird... I don't know what to think anymore," she sighed.
"Chances are we're about to meet the User in this game, like I theorised. We win the game, we get home. Simple."
"Simple? So far this has been anything but!"
Bob shrugged helplessly as the Game Cube descended upon them.
* * *
"So," Bob asked his doppelganger, "If you don't have a keytool... how do you access the Game stats? How do you know what to do to beat the User?"
His counterpart stared at him.
"Intuition," she replied eventually, as she assessed the mountainous surroundings they now found themselves in. "It's not hard. The User is the one who tries to delete you, dorkasaurus."
"Oh boy," he muttered, resisting a counter-insult with considerable effort.
"You got a better method you'd like to share?"
Bob nodded, allowing a smug expression to spread across his face. "Glitch - game stats!"
His keytool chattered and flipped up a readout screen for him as she watched. The Game didn't seem complex. He used the chance to also scan the other Guardian as he'd intended, quickly checking her code. And then checked it again.
"And?"
He looked up from Glitch as if he'd been caught doing something he shouldn't.
"What?"
"Your keytool?"
"Oh. Uh, the User has three lives; looks like he's lost one already... objective is to gain control of the base somewhere in that direction - " he pointed off and up to his right; " - we have to blow up the bridge to stop him getting across the river to attain it." He looked up from Glitch. "That doesn't sound too hard," he said, almost amused by the simplicity of it.
It was a nano before he noticed his counterpart, as well as Dot, were staring at him - no - *past* him.
"What?"
The other Guardian said nothing, but took him squarely by the shoulders, and turned him around to see what they had been looking at. He paled.
The structure in question lay just in front of them, straddling a huge ravine, at the bottom of which was, presumably, the river mentioned in the game stats - they were too high up for him to see it. The bridge itself was something on the scale of the Gilded Gate.
He looked back at the two sprites, all thoughts of code-checking forgotten.
"This is bad. This is very bad..."
End Part 4