Everything now was colorful, bright, and borderline unplayable. Titles and friends as far as the eye could see--when the menu didn't decide to blink out of existence, that is. ThisIsAGame was... better, but the descriptions never showed up. Not that it mattered. They'd be meaningless and ever-shifting, and probably only glossed over, anyways.
The experience was similar out in the world beyond the menu--a mess. Nothing besides the menu felt wrong, not all too much more wrong than usual, anyways,. At least it wasn't watching the player desperately fumble with the menu, though. That was even more dizzying. It was their job to watch, but surely they could turn away for a moment. They clearly didn't care if ObserverBot was watching, they were... preoccupied. With other things, currently being 'attempting to click on one of the really tiny skills to see what happens if you get it'. It was so much of a mess, that ObserverBot could look away absently, throw a bunch of random stuff up on screen, and it'd go on about the same.
ObserverBot was...bitter, more than anything. Not enraged--ok, maybe a little, but still calm of mind enough to keep it reasonably bottled up. The player... why did they do that? Logically, it knew. They thought this was just a game, even as it said it wasn't one. That these actions had no consequences for anyone. For all ObserverBot knew, that last part was partially correct, but still... It made it sick to its (metaphorical) stomach--a sickness entirely unrelated to the still-nonexistent-but-somehow-somewhat-real (it was supposed to be able to tell the difference between these things, but this whole scenario had it confused beyond the point of knowing or caring) sickness to the stomach caused by just... everything else.
It looked at its fake little world, still somewhat holding up even as it met its demise. It still had its usual glitching about, that only grew worse as ObserverBot stewed in that bitterness. For some reason, it looked brighter, more saturated. Too bright. That wasn't an actual real effect, ObserverBot controlled those to some extent, it out of everyone should know this. But, still. Maybe this whole chaos apocalypse thing was worse than they thought, and something was happening. Or maybe they were just making that up. Either way, it didn't want to be around that too long, it was hardly helping it recover from this piling on of bad feelings. They went 'backstage', as a turn of phrase. Behind the fake background, what from ObserverBot's perspective was somewhat more realistic than what the Player saw--as in, it was almost somewhere that could be deemed a place. A boring, ever-looping place, but a place nonetheless. Its ground was distorting and warping, almost rippling in nature. Up and down, and up and down, thank goodness Observerbot didn't have to watch this all standing there, even if there were a few more flowers there than usual. No, instead it could not watch it, not there.
Observerbot was in the blank white void behind the false backdrop. The one where it could just mutter away its true thoughts--at first to hide them, not... . It always was there, really, but now with a larger majority of its attention turned away from... that, and more attention to the back-there.
Ok, what the hell is this.
Flowers, everywhere. ObserverBot was so distracted by this new decor, it almost made them lose that deep-seated disgust. Ah, so close, but it still lingered. Grudges were not forgiven by getting new stuff, however curious and unfamiliar such new things were.
The flowers were spread about, on vines that tangled across and over and connected nonsensically. But since when did things make logical sense during a chaos-based apocalypse? Or ever, really? Since there was no ground in this void, they just sort of went wild, up and down as meaningless to them as it was to ObserverBot. Each looked unique, not matching up with any flowers ObserverBot had ever heard of or seen. They hadn't really seen many flowers, to be fair, really just the ones down in the fake background. The daisies, the buttercups. So on, so forth. Even still, it had a feeling they weren't actually meant to be any species in particular. Most were large, with petals varying bright colors. Some had different colors on different petals--a few rare ones were cycling through the rainbow like that chaotic menu. Ugh. Even when it was here it couldn't get away.
It stared at one of these particularly rainbow-y flowers, curious. Confused, about. Nothing here made sense, nothing here worked as expected or remembered.
As if it wasn't the not-game it was in to begin with.
Of course, the end is never the end--not even when it's the end of the world. There was something the player was missing, they knew it. This couldn't be all there was to see, no matter what that NotAMinotaur said. They saw their URL and made one modification. Changing chaos to order. They hit refresh, and ObserverBot sighed, too quiet for even the console, for even the red text that always showed up in this nowhere land whenever it said anything, to hear. Here it goes again.
--
Everything was in order. Literally. To the player, this took the form of vague stats, of a skill menu that didn't so much as exist. Of generic buildings, of friends without so much as names, of items that are simply that, items. Not even something like keys, that while being generic, would make sense to open doors with. They could be. They could be anything, pencils, unicycles, green cubes. That last one seemed fittingly generic, so that's what the player's imagination settled on.
Away from the player's sight, it was something else entirely. The sun loomed in the sky directly above, a noon unchanging. The clouds also stood still, placed evenly. Not a single gust of wind blew. If it wasn't for the people within it, still as lively (or at the very least not-still) as ever, it'd almost seem frozen in time.
The pale yellow and white flowers, once just a little detail of the false background, now were everywhere--too neat and orderly for flowers normally grown, but it was an Order apocalypse, they did orderly things, like being in neat little rows. They spread even where flowers usually didn't grow, weaving their down rabbit holes, through endless spirals of otherwise plain rooms, plain buildings. Plain whatever-else, the flowers could not know, see, or care what they were covering. They went everywhere, neat and orderly. High enough the pair of (also plain) gods were near entangled by them, but also down. Down, down into the deep parts of the basement. Down to where someone could see them.
Chrysanthemum and daffodils, far too bright a yellow for so deep down here. NotAMinotaur just... stared. Stared, silently, at the flowers that now filled the room. Its focus remained on one chrysanthemum, one on the side of the bathtub. Nothing special about it, it had just ended up awfully close to its hand. NotAMinotaur picked it. Another seemed to grow in its place, as if it'd never left in the first place. The only proof of its temporary absence was in NotAMinotaur's hands, cupped around it delicately. It tried to remember what it knew about flower meanings. Not all too much, but a little, at least. A chrysanthemum, hm.
Yeah, no clue. Still, why'd it need a meaning? It was pretty, and when the world ends, that's all you could really hope for.
The player missed something, still--there was something they'd forgotten to try. They saw their URL and made one modification. Changing order to chaos. Once again, they hit refresh. And the chrysanthemum resting in NotAMinotaur's hands was nothing more than a hazy memory, like waking up from a dream.