Thinking Space II (Geometry Dash) - Tealy and the Crew

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The completion happened at 2:47 AM.

Nobody had been awake to watch it happen except DumbDird, who had been awake because DumbDird's relationship with sleep had always been flexible in the way that people who feel things very strongly sometimes have a flexible relationship with sleep, and because he had been close, genuinely close, the kind of close that makes sleep feel like a betrayal of the moment.

Tealy found out the way he found out about everything, which was his phone going off at 2:47 AM with a frequency and volume that communicated, even through sleep, that something had happened.

He looked at the screen.

The group chat had forty-seven notifications.

All of them were from DumbDird.

None of them were words.

The first message was:

"DUUUUUUUUUURUURRUURUURUURUURURUURURUURURUURURRRRRRRR"

Followed immediately, in a separate message, by:

"YEEEEEEEAEAEAEAEAAAAEAAEAAEEAAEAEAAS"

Tealy stared at YEEEEEEEAEAEAEAEAAAAEAAEAAEEAAEAEAAS for a long moment.

It was not a word. It had started as a word, or the intention of a word, yes written with conviction and forward momentum, but somewhere around the fourth or fifth vowel it had left the territory of language entirely and become something more like a direct transcription of a feeling that did not have an existing word, which fair enough, because the feeling was DumbDird having just beaten Thinking Space II.

Tealy sat up.

He was awake now.

He was very awake.

Thinking Space II.

The top 1. The current top 1. The level that had been built to occupy the position that Durr Circles had briefly held before Zoink had beaten it in two weeks and called it Tidal Wave difficulty lowkey, the level that sat above everything else in the game at this moment, the level that had been beaten by exactly two people before tonight.

Zoink, who was Zoink.

wPopoff, who was wPopoff, who was one of the best players in the world, whose completion had been celebrated extensively and whose record stood as evidence that Thinking Space II was hard but not untouchable.

And now DumbDird.

Who had called the game Geography Dash.

Who had put watermelon gum in his SayoDevice.

Who had beaten Tidal Wave as his third level from Stereo Madness.

Who had just beaten the current top 1 and was communicating this fact through a sequence of sounds that had never previously been spelled out in the history of human written language.

The rest of the notifications were a timeline.

"I DID IT"

"DURR I DID IT TALLY"

"TALLY"

"TALLY TALLY TALLY"

"DURR"

Then a gap of approximately four minutes, which Tealy would later learn was the jumping into the couch portion of the evening.

Then:

"DURR I JUMPED INTO THE COUCH"

Then a gap of two minutes.

"DURR I'M SCREAMING"

This one was accompanied by, somehow, a voice memo, which Tealy played, which was in fact screaming, sustained, joyful, the specific screaming of a person whose entire body had decided that sound was the only adequate output for what was happening internally.

Then:

"DURR I'M DANCING"

Then, and this was the one that made Tealy sit fully upright:

"DURR I JUMPED INTO A SANDWICH"

Tealy read this.

"DURR TALLY I LANDED ON A SANDWICH"

"DURR IT WAS ON THE COUCH"

"DURR IT WAS A GOOD SANDWICH TOO"

"DURR I'M A LITTLE SAD ABOUT THE SANDWICH BUT ALSO DURR"

Tealy called him.

It rang once.

"DURR—"

"Thinking Space II."

"DURR TALLY—"

"You beat Thinking Space II."

"DURR TALLY I DID—"

"The top 1."

"DURR THE TOP ONE TALLY YES—"

"DumbDird." Tealy paused. He was sitting in his dark bedroom at 2:52 AM and he needed to say this correctly. "You are the third person in the world to beat Thinking Space II. Counting the verifier. You and Zoink and wPopoff."

"DURR AND THE VERIFIER—"

"And the verifier, yes—"

"DURR TALLY—"

"You called this game Geography Dash."

"DURR TALLY I KNOW—"

"You put gum in your SayoDevice."

"DURR WATERMELON—"

"You beat the top 1."

"DURR," said DumbDird, and then stopped, because even DumbDird, at 2:52 AM after beating Thinking Space II, had a moment where the weight of a thing settled on him and the normal output channels were briefly insufficient for it.

A pause.

"Durr, Tally," he said, quieter than usual. Just slightly quieter. "Durr. I actually did it."

"Yeah," said Tealy. "You did."

"Durr." Another pause. "Durr, I jumped into a sandwich."

"I know."

"Durr, it was on the couch—"

"I know—"

"Durr, I didn't see it—"

"DumbDird—"

"DURR, TALLY, I'M GOING TO GO SCREAM AGAIN—"

"Okay—"

"DURRRRR—"

The call ended because DumbDird had apparently started screaming again mid-conversation and the screaming had taken priority over the phone, which was correct, which was the right call, which Tealy sat with for a moment in his dark bedroom at 2:53 AM.

The group chat had come alive by 3 AM, which meant people had been woken up by the initial notification flood and had assessed the situation and determined it warranted consciousness.

Dird had reacted to the "DUUUUUUUUUURUURRUURUURUURUURURUURURUURURUURURRRRRRRR" message with 👍, which was the 👍 of the century, the 👍 that all previous 👍s had been building toward, the 👍 applied to a string of characters that wasn't a word and was also the most important message in the chat's history.

Beric had sent: "Thinking Space II. Third completion. Noted." which was Beric's version of losing his mind.

Greeny had sent: "Statistically this should not have happened. Congratulations." Both sentences carried equal weight.

Blara had sent: "okay"

Which from Blara, at 3 AM, for a top 1 completion, was a standing ovation, a ticker tape parade, and a full emotional breakdown compressed into two words and no punctuation.

SuperDumbDird had sent: "DURR COUSIN!!!!!" followed by seventeen exclamation points that were clearly the result of holding the button down.

UltraDumbDird had sent: "is the sandwich okay"

This was the correct question. This was the question that needed to be asked. Everyone had been thinking about the sandwich and UltraDumbDird had been the one to say it.

DumbDird responded: "DURR THE SANDWICH IS OKAY IT'S MOSTLY FLAT NOW"

"Can you still eat it," Tealy typed, because now he needed to know.

"DURR I ATE SOME OF IT TALLY"

"Before or after jumping on it."

"DURR, AFTER"

"DumbDird."

"DURR IT WAS STILL GOOD TALLY"

The community found out in the morning.

The record had been submitted at 3:15 AM, which meant DumbDird had taken twenty-eight minutes between completion and submission, during which he had presumably been jumping into furniture and eating a compromised sandwich and screaming and dancing and all the other items in the sequence, and had only then remembered to submit.

The community response was, by now, a known quantity in its broad shape. It would be large. It would be loud. It would involve the word Geography Dash within the first twenty minutes. It would eventually reach Zoink, who would react on stream and say something that was not quite admiration and not quite alarm and lived in the specific space between those things.

All of that happened.

But the part that Tealy saved, that he screenshotted and kept without telling anyone, was one comment in the record thread that had appeared within the first hour.

It said:

"Third completion of Thinking Space II. Second after Zoink and wPopoff. This is the same person who called it Geography Dash, put gum in his SayoDevice, beat Tidal Wave as his third level from Stereo Madness, verified Durr Circles in 45,532 attempts, and apparently celebrated by jumping into a sandwich."

"I don't know what's in this man's hands but it was put there by something I don't understand."

Below it, someone had replied:

"He's wave carried."

Below that:

"By what at this point. What is carrying him. Name the thing that is carrying him."

No reply.

Just the question, sitting there.

Unanswered.

Tealy looked at it for a long time.

He didn't have an answer either.

He sent DumbDird a message.

"Congrats."

One word. No exclamation point. Just the word.

DumbDird's response came in twelve seconds.

"DURR TALLY"

"DURR THANK YOU"

"DURR"

"DURR THE SANDWICH WAS REALLY GOOD BY THE WAY"

"DURR TALLY"

"DURR I'M HAPPY"

Tealy looked at DURR I'M HAPPY for a moment.

Typed back: "Yeah. I know."

Put his phone down.

Picked it back up.

Added one more word.

"Good."

Sent it.

Went back to sleep.

Outside somewhere, DumbDird was probably still dancing.

The sandwich was flat but had been eaten.

The SayoDevice was clean.

The top 1 had been beaten.

Geography Dash was real.

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