#tari gets codenapped au

[duckapus]

So I figured out the Hacker Arc's first three episodes

You Wouldn't Download a Meta Runner

It's a seemingly normal day in the Mushroom Kingdom, with the crew up to their usual bullshit...or at least, it would be, if something wasn't going on with Tari. She's acting a bit distant and distracted, and occasionally glitches slightly when no-one's looking. It progressively gets worse, and her friends do notice pretty quickly and try to figure out what's going on, but eventually she fades away, begging for them to find her.

Throughout the episode we also get clips of the Glitch Productions crew noticing there's something weird going on with Luke's computer, and just after the scene where Tari disappears, so does a file with her name on it...which then reappears on a different computer in an unfamiliar room.

The Tari Parable

Tari wakes up in an empty office building with no memory of how she got there, and meets a man named Stanley and a disembodied voice called The Narrator, who inform her that she's in their game, and as far as they no there's no way out. Then again, there shouldn't be a way in either, so the three of them explore every nook and cranny to figure out how she got there and see if her outside-context abilities can make them an exit. All the while, Tari is glitching in a similar way to how Theo did throughout the Meta Runner series, since she wasn't properly implemented due to her captor's experience.

Speaking of which, towards the end of the episode we see said captor, who is on the phone with someone talking about how he managed to get Tari and asking them to come over and see for themselves.

Mario's Grand Internet Adventure!

Back at Glitch Productions, everyone's freaking out about Tari's disappearance. They eventually manage to get ahold of themselves thanks to some forceful prompting from Meggy and Mario, who are extremely determined to get their best friend back. SMG4 gets in contact with the AvA crew (who they met during the Goomba arc if you remember) since they have more experience interacting with the Real World than the Super Mario 64 characters. Eventually, Melony, Yellow, Sage and the Admins manage to trace the hack, and determine that the best way to get there is to send a team through the Internet. The crew (full extended version, Shroomy, the Guards and the kids included) is obviously going, with Belle and Bowser joining them on the grounds that Tari is their friend too. While they're gone, SMG1 and 2 will be handling 3 and 4's duties, and Kaizo, Steve, the remaining Anti-cast and other side characters will do their best to keep the Kingdom safe.

Thankfully that won't be too hard, since currently Mr. L is their greatest immediate threat and he's found out about the situation and decided to follow the away team and cause problems for the hell of it.

With preparations made, it's time for a new adventure!

[duckapus]

So this one might be a little too meta but...

The Hacker Arc. One of the Viewers noticed that the "Yiga Clan takes over Glitch Productions" segments of the IRL Arc were a little too well animated and acted, and realizes that the SMG4 characters, and possibly all characters, really are alive. They try for months to make the rest of the world see the truth, but without any tangible evidence they're written off as a crazy conspiracy theorist. So, desperate for proof, they hack into Luke's computer to "borrow" one of his characters.

They end up getting Tari, and put her into a copy of The Stanley Parable to wait for an interested party who are pretty much the only ones who've heard them out, and were the ones to provide them with the resources to codenap Tari in the first place. Unfortunately for both of them, said party is a shady organization who already knows about digital beings, and is far more interested in researching a live specimen for their own ends than revealing anything to anyone.

Meanwhile, everyone back in the Mushroom Kingdom and Glitch Productions is freaking out and desperately trying to figure out where Tari is and how to reach her.