Corai sat downnext to the incorpeal HugoLuman, who looked pensive. "You want to know why my mind split?"
"Um, sorta I gue-"
"Well, it all started when I got the idea for time travel. Before the explosion, I had begun hearing voices in my mind. I didn't know what was causing them, and I made the logical conclusion that I must be cracking up, though I couldn't tell why. That's partly true; I had no clue what trauma caused the split because it hadn't happened yet. When I was brought back by the dragons, though, I saw all of time before me as I banished the Oliollifex. It was from that perspective that I saw what only someone in that situation could see; how we came to be in a Dwarf Fortress world to begin with. Saw who brought us here."
"Who... who brought us h-"
"Yes. And why as well. And it filled my mind with rage at the sheer injustice of it. I wanted revenge, wanted it so badly. But my more rational and calm side, the one that told me I am abhorred to all violence and knew that revenge was not justice, only a dangerous and inadequate substitute, that side could not seek revenge. Thus my mind was split by the 2 motivations; to remain peaceful and in control of myself, and to follow vengeance with a passion. I think that the other me wanted to get this revenge by killing and replacing whoever it was. Being so entangled with causality at that moment, the split was recursive, breaking my mind back in time to the point I first contemplated time travel, and thus becoming a stable time-loop."
Corai was very unnerved about learning there was a will, probably malign, that brought them to this world. "But... who is it?"
HugoLuman sighed. "I do not know. The part of my mind that contains that knowledge is with my other half."
The room was dark, and of indeterminable dimensions because of this. A huge wall of screens stood, with various pictures on each. One had a large image of a toad. A shadowy figure was silhouetted against the screens, operating a computer hooked up to the central one.
The figure pressed a few keys, and a program marked "Dwarf Fortress 1.0" opened. Looking at the screen, he smiled as he saw all his pawns dance. The beauty of the game had always been that though he could control the ultimate fate of the world, all the pawns had free will within their little circles; but he was always one step ahead of them, and he could turn their free will to follow the paths he wanted.
They had always irked him. Those forumites, who had always looked to carve out pieces of his domain for themselves and shape them. Those forumites, who had always been beyond his grasp, as his rule only existed within the confines of his multiverse, not in that other branch of the omniverse. Then they had made a mistake, and he took them.
And now they would dance and die and fight like all the other pawns. Sometimes he feigned to be on one side or the other. He had taken many names aside from his true one, such as Soulsmith, in order to pretend to be supporting some faction. In the end, though, it was all to make them fight each other. Nothing was better than watching them go for each others' throats.