Wave Carried (Geometry Dash) - Tealy and the Crew
The recommendation had been a joke.
That was the part Tealy would have to live with. It had been a joke. He had looked at DumbDird's Nine Circles completion, looked at the trajectory of events, and thought of the most absurd possible escalation as a bit, as a funny thing to say, as a punchline to the ongoing comedy of DumbDird's relationship with a game he had been calling Geography Dash twelve hours ago.
He had typed: "Okay if you're that wave carried just go play Tidal Wave"
He had meant it the way you mean something impossible as a joke. The way you say "sure and then you can go run a marathon tomorrow" to someone who just walked to the kitchen. The way you gesture at an absurdity so large it functions as a full stop.
He had not meant it as an instruction.
DumbDird received it as an instruction.
"DURR WHATS TIDAL WAVE"
Tealy had looked at this message and made a decision that would haunt him. Instead of saying "it's a joke, don't play it, go do something else, go outside, go be in a lamp somewhere," he had explained what Tidal Wave was.
He had explained that it was the fourth hardest verified level in the history of a game with one hundred million levels.
He had explained that fewer than ten people on earth had beaten it.
He had explained that it was, essentially, an unbroken wall of wave gameplay for its entire duration, which meant it was specifically and precisely the one thing DumbDird had demonstrated inexplicable supernatural aptitude for.
He had explained all of this.
DumbDird had responded: "DURR OKAY STARTING TIDAL WAVE"
Tealy had put his phone down.
He had picked it back up.
He had typed: "DumbDird please understand that this level has destroyed some of the best players in the world for years."
DumbDird had responded: "DURR COOL TALLY THE MUSIC IS REALLY GOOD"
The updates this time were sparse.
Not because DumbDird had stopped reporting. But because the level demanded a kind of focus that even DumbDird's multitasking brain had apparently recognized as non-negotiable. What came through was less a commentary and more a series of dispatches from a very specific and grueling place.
Hour 1: "DURR TALLY THIS ONE IS DIFFERENT"
Hour 2: "DURR IT'S ALL WAVE"
Hour 3: "DURR I THINK I UNDERSTAND IT"
This one had made Tealy genuinely put his phone down and walk around his living room once before responding. DumbDird had been playing Geometry Dash for less than twenty-four hours. He had beaten two levels. The second one was a hard demon he had completed on a fluke from 50%. And now, three hours into Tidal Wave, he thought he understood it.
"You don't understand it," Tealy typed.
"DURR, I MEAN I UNDERSTAND THE VIBES OF IT TALLY"
"The vibes."
"DURR YEAH LIKE WHERE IT WANTS TO GO"
Tealy stared at this message for a long time.
Hour 5: "DURR TALLY I THINK THE WAVE AND I ARE BECOMING ONE"
Dird reacted to this with 👍
Hour 7: Nothing.
Hour 8, three minutes:
"DURR TALLY I'M AT THE DROP"
Tealy sat up straight.
The group chat erupted in the specific way the group chat erupted, which was DumbDird sending the message, Dird reacting with 👍, Blara posting chips, and Beric asking a precise technical question about what percentage the drop occurred at.
And then.
Twenty-two seconds after "DURR TALLY I'M AT THE DROP":
"DURR I DIED AT 49%"
The chat went quiet.
"DURR IT'S OKAY TALLY"
"DURR I FLUKED THE FIRST WAVE THOUGH"
Tealy read this sentence three times.
"DumbDird," he typed. "The first wave of Tidal Wave is one of the hardest individual sections in the level."
"DURR YEAH IT FELT WEIRD TALLY LIKE MY HANDS JUST KNEW"
"Your hands just knew."
"DURR YEAH"
"The hands that yesterday did not know what Geometry Dash was called."
"DURR GEOGRAPHY DASH TALLY"
"That's WORSE—"
"DURR GOING AGAIN"
Twenty-three minutes later.
The message came in at a timestamp Tealy would remember.
"DURR 83%"
He read it.
Read it again.
Typed: "83?"
"DURR YEAH NOT WAVE PART"
"I know it's not a wave part I KNOW WHAT 83% IS—"
"DURR TALLY I THINK I'M GOOD AT THIS GAME"
Tealy put his phone face down.
Picked it up.
"DumbDird. 83% of Tidal Wave makes you legally a top player."
"DURR COOL"
"I need you to understand what I just said."
"DURR I DO TALLY I'M GOING AGAIN"
The fifteen minutes that followed were the quietest fifteen minutes the group chat had ever experienced.
No ads for Dumb...Huh? No cheese. No chips. Dird had not reacted to anything because nothing had been posted. Beric was presumably watching with the focused attention of someone tracking a technical event of historical significance. Greeny had joined the chat's silent vigil, which for Greeny meant being very still and saying nothing, which was how Greeny expressed most things.
Tealy sat on his couch and held his phone and did not breathe at a normal rate.
The screenshot arrived without preamble.
No "DURR TALLY." No message before it. Just the screenshot, fired into the chat like a flare.
Tidal Wave.
Complete.
Tealy looked at the stats for a long time.
Third attempt on record. Eight hours to the drop the first run. Died at 49%. Back at the drop twenty-three minutes later. Reached 83%. Fifteen minutes after that: complete.
He called DumbDird.
One ring.
"DURR TALLY—"
"You beat Tidal Wave."
"DURR YEAH, TALLY, THIRD LEVEL IS PRETTY GOOD RIGHT—"
"Third level," Tealy said. The words came out flat because his brain was allocating all available resources to processing and had nothing left for tone. "You beat Tidal Wave as your third level."
"DURR YEAH FROM NINE CIRCLES—"
"Which was your second level."
"DURR YEAH FROM STEREO MADNESS—"
"Which was your first level."
"DURR YEAH I'M PRETTY WAVE CARRIED TALLY—"
"DumbDird less than ten people have ever beaten that level—"
"DURR COOL NOW IT'S LESS THAN TEN PLUS ME—"
"That makes it less than ten INCLUDING you—"
"DURR OH YEAH DURR"*
Tealy submitted the record.
He did it because it was real and it had happened and the Geometry Dash community had a record system and DumbDird had beaten Tidal Wave and those were facts that existed and needed to be documented regardless of how they made Tealy feel, which was a complicated mixture of pride, bewilderment, and the specific exhaustion of someone who had made a joke twenty hours ago and was now filing paperwork about it.
He uploaded the footage. He included the attempt count. He included the context, because the context was inseparable from the record.
Third level. From Nine Circles. From Stereo Madness.
He submitted it and put his phone down and waited.
The community response took forty minutes to begin and approximately eleven minutes to achieve full combustion.
The thread went from zero to several hundred replies with the velocity of something that had been waiting for a surface to ignite on. Tealy watched it from the outside with the calm detachment of a person who had caused a fire and was now simply observing it from a safe distance.
The replies were varied in their specific content but unified in their essential energy, which was complete and total incomprehension delivered at maximum volume.
"This is not real."
"Third level."
"FROM STEREO MADNESS."
"He went Stereo Madness → Nine Circles → Tidal Wave. Someone explain this to me like I'm a child."
"The wave sections. The WAVE SECTIONS. Has he played wave before? Any wave? Ever?"
"He called it Geography Dash."
This last one had gotten out into the thread because Tealy had mentioned it in the submission notes because it was relevant context and also because he felt the community deserved to know the full picture of what had happened.
"Geography Dash" became a thing people were saying. Tealy watched it spread through the thread with the detachment of someone observing a natural phenomenon.
"This guy is so wave carried he beat Tidal Wave as his third level, from Nine Circles, that was from Stereo Madness, and he called the game Geography Dash."
This sentence, or variations of it, appeared in the thread seventeen times in the first hour.
Zoink reacted to it on stream.
Tealy found out because four people sent him the clip simultaneously, which was how you found out about things now.
He watched it.
Zoink, the best player, had been mid-stream when someone in chat had linked the record. He had stopped what he was doing. Read it. Read it again. Looked at the camera with the expression of a person whose entire framework for a thing they were very good at had just been gently picked up and turned over.
"Third level," Zoink said to his stream.
His chat exploded.
"From Nine Circles," Zoink said.
More explosion.
"From Stereo Madness." A pause. "He called it Geography Dash."
Zoink looked at the camera for a moment in silence.
And then he started talking.
What followed was five minutes of Zoink reacting to the Tidal Wave record while simultaneously deploying what could only be described as a comprehensive brainrot vocabulary at full speed and volume. Terms were used. Phrases were constructed. References were made to concepts that existed exclusively in a particular stratum of online gaming culture and which Tealy understood maybe sixty percent of, and he was being generous with himself.
The stream chat was running so fast the text was unreadable.
At the four minute forty second mark, Zoink stopped, looked directly at the camera, and said with absolute seriousness:
"Find this man. Put him in a lab. Do not let him play anything else. Whatever is in his hands is not supposed to be in human hands."
His chat produced, in unison, a response that Tealy could not fully read due to scroll speed but which contained the word "wave" approximately once every three messages.
At the five minute mark Zoink clicked away from the record, shook his head once, and said:
"Geography Dash."
And went back to his stream.
Tealy sent one message to the group chat.
"Zoink reacted to it."
DumbDird: "DURR WHO'S ZOINK"
Tealy: "The best player in the game."
DumbDird: "DURR COOL!! DURR TALLY WHAT SHOULD I PLAY NEXT"
Tealy looked at this message.
Looked at the thread, which was now approaching a thousand replies.
Looked at the Zoink clip, which was being cut into shorter clips and distributed at a rate that suggested it was going to be a thing people watched for a while.
Looked at DumbDird's question.
"Nothing," he typed. "You should play nothing. You should put the game down. You should go outside. You should touch grass. You should under no circumstances play another level."
"DURR OKAY TALLY"
A pause.
"DURR WHAT'S BLOODBATH"
Tealy turned his phone off.
He sat in his living room in complete silence for a moment.
Somewhere, DumbDird was looking up Bloodbath.
Somewhere, the Geometry Dash community was still on fire.
Somewhere, Zoink was still streaming, and his chat was still saying Geography Dash.
Tealy turned his phone back on.
He had fourteen new notifications.
He put it face down.
Left it there.
Went to get a Banana Nacho gummy because it was that kind of night.
It was always that kind of night.
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