Editing Chuubostuck/Book One (section)

== Chapter Three: The War For Town (Posts #291-412) ==

Riley, after naming her spear Star Splitter, recovers a mysterious black box from the meteor wreckage, messages Lilith and makes arrangements to enter the game with Lily. She returns home and starts helping Ayumu, who she can see on her screen. Lilith, for her part, makes her way to the Watanabe Shrine, to meet up with Matt and Lily and get started on getting Riley into the game properly. She then goes to study the previous Watanabe Shrine, mysterious destroyed by a meteor when Lily was young. While she does this, Matt runs interference with Lily's grandfather by stocking up on candy for Lily's birthday. Lily, overcome with emotion, ends up kissing Donny, inadvertently convincing him to stick around for a while while she searches for a MYSTERIOUS LETTER from her mother. 

Within the Medium, Ayumu explores the fog-shrouded world now surrounding his home. He discovers that he now has a game sylladex, and that his butler seems to have entered the game as well. He then gets into a fight with a dangerous SPARKLE IMP, an Underling that exists to fight players. Riley provides assistance, while becoming distracted by her mysterious box. 

At School, Fitzwilliam and Richard are having their own problems. Richard is recruited by Principal Entropy to help him with a problem, and vanishes in his company. Fitz runs interference with Anya Drago, giving her access to Lilith's giant laser for meteor-destroying purposes. As a result, a game store is not destroyed as promised. This frees Fitz to join Lilith. 

David returns home from the sewers, promising to install the game he recovered from Felicia Wu, a member of the SEED Program. He is never heard from again, and is presumed killed by falling meteors. 

Lilith announces to the others that there are two SBURB games running (at least), and sets about plotting a cunning heist to recover the last needed SBURB copy for her group of friends. She is joined by Fitz, Riley and Matt. The heist involves clown suits, defense grids, packing tape, and wild success, and ends with the acquisition of an SBURB Skaianet Ultimate Edition, containing game discs, a strategy guide, a rare DREAM MODUS, and a statue of a copper lich signed by her grandfather, Pavel Ivanov! This causes a minor Lilith breakdown, which Riley helps to resolve with a long hug. Riley and Lilith depart for her lab.

Back in the Medium, Ayumu successfully kills his imp, inadvertently prototyping it into his Sparklesword. The now-speaking sword shares information about the game - how to create objects, the need to prototype kernels, the backstory of the Medium and the path to start the game properly. He shares all of this information with Riley and Lilith, while also giving Lilith a bit of a teasing hard time (Lilith takes this badly.) Riley tells Lilith that she thinks Ayumu has a crush on her. 

Lily uses Donny as a distraction for her grandfather, which works VERY WELL. She then sneaks off to Horizon to meet up with Riley and Lilith, to join them in searching for the hub of the SBURB sessions in the hope of saving town. They find a mysterious underground tunnel linking Lilith's lab to an underground computer hub, which is protected by hungry ogres. Ogres who are in the middle of a fight with a Rider! Lily promptly tries to attack the Rider for stealing her mother, and Riley and Lilith have to hold her back. 

After a brief conversation, the Rider tells Lily that her mother was killed by "the King", not by the Riders, and that his goal is the end of Town. He and Riley end up fighting the ogres, and then after doing so they turn on each other. The Rider is stronger, although he suggests that Riley will one day be stronger still. He takes her mysterious box, opens it, and is very surprised when a squirrel leaps out and attacks his face. Lily, Lilith and Riley take the chance to escape. 

Fitz goes back to the roof to meet with Anya, and is called down to speak with Principal Entropy. Anya informs him that the Riders are trying to destroy the world again, and that SBURB is directly involved. 

Matt, meanwhile, goes home to get set up so that Ayumu can bring him into the game, leaving Fitz to return to School. He carefully stuffs all of his sports gear in his closet to avoid prototyping it, selects his baseball bat as a weapon, and starts running his program. Ayumu accidentally wrecks his room, and is attacking by imps before he can fix it, resulting in all of Matt's rugby gear falling into the kernelsprite. He manages to use a baseball to break his entry item, a balloon, entering the Medium just as it pops, and moments before a quite large meteor takes out several blocks of Arcadia. Matt arrives safely in the Land of Mud and Frogs.