The Gum (Geometry Dash) - Tealy and the Crew

The discovery had been made during a practice session for a level that required sustained spam clicking, which DumbDird had been struggling with in a way that didn't fit the established pattern of DumbDird being inexplicably good at things.

The pattern, as everyone had come to understand it, was that DumbDird would encounter a skill, be bad at it briefly, and then through some combination of instinct and the specific chaos energy of not knowing enough to be limited by it, become unreasonably good at it. Wave. Done. Frame perfects. Done. Memory sections with no memory. Done.

Spam clicking.

Not done.

8 CPS was the ceiling. Clean, consistent, reliable 8 CPS, which was fine, which was functional, but which was not the 15 or 16 CPS that certain levels demanded, and every attempt to push past it resulted in outputs that were not just bad but structurally incoherent, like the signal between DumbDird's intention and the hardware was passing through something that was dampening it.

Which, as it turned out, it was.

---

Beric had noticed first because Beric noticed hardware things the way other people noticed changes in someone's haircut, automatically and without trying.

He had been watching DumbDird's clicking during a session and had said, not to anyone in particular:

"Something's wrong with the device."

"Durr, it feels a little sticky," DumbDird said.

Beric looked at him.

"Sticky."

"Durr, yeah, like it has some resistance, Tally said it was good for clicking actually—"

Tealy looked up immediately. "I said no such thing—"

"DURR, YOU SAID RESISTANCE COULD HELP WITH CONTROL TALLY—"

"In the context of MOUSE TENSION, not—" Tealy stopped. He looked at the SayoDevice. The SayoDevice was a dedicated clicking device, a piece of hardware that existed for the sole purpose of registering clicks efficiently and accurately, used by Geometry Dash players who took clicking seriously, which DumbDird now apparently did. "DumbDird," Tealy said carefully. "What did you put in the SayoDevice."

"Durr, just a little gum."

The room was quiet.

"Gum," said Beric.

"Durr, yeah—"

"You put gum," Beric said, with the specific cadence of someone who needed to walk through this slowly for their own processing, "in your SayoDevice."

"DURR, JUST A LITTLE—"

"Where," said Beric. "Where in the SayoDevice."

"Durr, inside the clicky part—"

"The mechanism."

"DURR, YEAH, I THOUGHT IT WOULD MAKE IT FEEL BETTER—"

"It's a precision clicking instrument," Beric said, in the tone of a doctor delivering a diagnosis. "You put gum in the mechanism."

"Durr, it was only a little bit of gum—"

"What flavor," said Tealy, because he had given up on the conversation making structural sense and had decided to collect details instead.

"Durr, watermelon."

---

Beric took the SayoDevice apart.

He did this with the focused reverence of a surgeon and the contained horror of someone discovering, layer by layer, the extent of a thing they had suspected but not fully anticipated.

Everyone watched.

DumbDird watched with the specific expression of someone who was beginning to understand that what they had done might have been, in a narrow technical sense, not ideal.

The gum was watermelon flavored.

It was also, at this point, not entirely gum anymore, in the way that gum placed inside a precision clicking mechanism and subjected to repeated high-speed impacts over an unknown period of time becomes something more architectural than consumable. It had, through a process that Beric examined with the expression of a man updating his understanding of materials science, integrated itself into the mechanism in a way that was thorough and in some respects impressive.

"How long," Beric said, not looking up.

"Durr, a few weeks," said DumbDird.

Beric set down his tool.

Picked it back up.

Continued.

"You've been clicking through gum for a few weeks," Tealy said.

"DURR, TALLY, I THOUGHT IT WAS JUST HOW IT FELT—"

"It's a SayoDevice, DumbDird, it's not supposed to feel like anything except clicking—"

"DURR, YEAH, BUT THE RESISTANCE—"

"I NEVER SAID GUM—"

"DURR, YOU SAID RESISTANCE—"

"MOUSE TENSION, DUMBD—"

"DURR, SAME THING TALLY—"

"IT IS NOT THE SAME—"

"Tealy," said Beric quietly.

Tealy stopped.

Beric held up the mechanism. There was a small, extremely committed piece of watermelon gum fused to a component in a way that had clearly been affecting the click registration for, by DumbDird's own account, several weeks.

The room looked at it.

"This," said Beric, "is why the spam was 8 CPS."

"Durr, so it wasn't me," said DumbDird, with the immediate and complete relief of someone receiving an acquittal.

"It was you," said Beric. "You put the gum in."

"DURR, YEAH BUT TALLY, THE CLICKING PROBLEM WASN'T ME, IT WAS THE GUM—"

"You are the one who put the gum—"

"DURR, BUT AFTER THE GUM WENT IN, THE CLICKING WASN'T MY FAULT—"

Tealy opened his mouth.

Closed it.

Looked at the ceiling.

This was, in its own specific way, logically coherent. DumbDird had introduced the gum. The gum had caused the problem. The clicking performance post-gum was therefore the gum's fault and not DumbDird's. The original act of placing the gum was DumbDird's fault. But the downstream consequences belonged to the gum.

It was wrong. It was completely wrong. And yet it had an internal consistency that was difficult to fully dismantle in real time.

"That's not how fault works," Greeny said from the corner, which saved Tealy from having to say it.

"DURR, GREENY—"

"You introduced the variable. The variable's consequences are your consequences."

"DURR, BUT—"

"That's how causality works," Greeny said, with the patience of someone explaining something to a wall, not unkindly but without any expectation that the wall would change.

DumbDird considered this.

"Durr," he said finally. "Okay but the gum really did feel good at first."

---

Beric cleaned the mechanism.

This took forty minutes and required tools that Beric produced from a kit he carried with him, because of course he did, because Beric was someone who had a precision cleaning kit and the knowledge of when to deploy it.

He reassembled the SayoDevice. Tested the click registration. Nodded once.

"Try it now," he said.

DumbDird picked it up.

Clicked.

His eyes went wide.

"DURR," he said.

"Yeah," said Beric.

"DURR BERIC—"

"I know."

"DURR IT FEELS LIKE—"

"Like it's supposed to feel," Beric said. "Without gum in it."

"DURR, TALLY—" DumbDird turned to Tealy with the expression of someone who had just experienced something revelatory. "DURR, TALLY, IT'S SO CLEAN—"

"That's what it always felt like," Tealy said. "That's the default. That's the normal experience of using a SayoDevice without watermelon gum in the mechanism."

"DURR, I DIDN'T KNOW TALLY—"

"Because you PUT GUM IN IT—"

"DURR, YEAH BUT NOW I KNOW WHAT IT'S SUPPOSED TO FEEL LIKE—"

"Most people know that BEFORE they put gum in it—"

"DURRR—" DumbDird was clicking rapidly, eyes bright, clearly running a live comparison between gum-era performance and current performance. "DURR TALLY HOW FAST AM I GOING—"

Tealy looked at the CPS counter.

Consistent, clean, sustained 14 CPS from a man who had been capped at 8 for several weeks because of watermelon gum.

"14," Tealy said.

"DURRRRR—"

"DumbDird—"

"DURR TALLY I'M GOING TO BE SO GOOD AT SPAM—"

"You were already—" Tealy gestured vaguely at the entire situation. "You beat Tidal Wave—"

"DURR YEAH BUT NOW I CAN SPAM TOO TALLY—"

"The levels you've been playing don't require—"

"DURR, DUH, TALLY. MORE SKILLS."

The Duh again.

Tealy looked at the CPS counter still running at 14.

Looked at Beric, who was cleaning his tools with the quiet satisfaction of someone who had fixed a thing and could now move on.

Looked at the watermelon gum, which Beric had placed on the table in a small pile with the dignity you give to evidence.

"Beric," Tealy said.

"Yeah."

"Thank you for fixing it."

"The mechanism was suffering," Beric said simply.

"DURR, SORRY SAYODEVICE," DumbDird said to the device, genuinely, with real sincerity.

The SayoDevice did not respond because it was a clicking device.

DumbDird nodded as though it had.

---

The group chat update was sent by Tealy, because someone had to document this:

"DumbDird was bad at spam because he put watermelon gum in his SayoDevice"

Dird reacted with 👍

Beric sent: "Mechanism is clean now. 14 CPS baseline without gum."

Greeny sent: "The gum had been there for several weeks."

Blara sent a photo of gum. Not eating it. Just a photo of gum. Sitting there. Making a point.

DumbDird sent: "DURR SORRY SAYODEVICE" directly into the group chat, to an audience that was not the SayoDevice.

Dird reacted with 👍

Tealy looked at Blara's gum photo for a long time.

It was the correct response.

It was the only response.

He put his phone down.

In the background, DumbDird was still clicking.

14 CPS.

Clean.

Gum-free.

The watermelon gum sat on the table in its small pile and said nothing, because it was gum, but if it could have said something, Tealy felt it would have said something about how it had genuinely been trying to help.

That was the worst part.

DumbDird had genuinely thought it would help.

And in his mind, it probably still kind of had.