There is a knock upon the door.

Rescue probably would have radioed ahead.

Please don't be more thingbits.

Emily opens the door.

If this is a set of thingbits, then it's a set of thingbits that have put themselves together to take the shape of a young woman with too-red hair and clothes not at all appropriate for Antarctica. She's pretty, though perhaps a bit too pretty in the way that the photoshopped women in magazines are pretty. Too pretty, too perfect, to a degree that's a little unnerving to have standing in the flesh in the middle of the snow.

"Hi," she says, with a tentative little smile.

"Hi. Please tell me you're not secretly a hypercommunal slime mold from outer space."

Blink.

"... I am not secretly a hypercommunal slime mold from outer space. Or even openly a hypercommunal slime mold from outer space," she confirms. "I saw the bodies and the - bits of things that used to be on fire, are you okay?"

"There were some casualties in preventing the hypercommunal slime mold from outer space from assimilating humanity. My sister and I are alive. Everyone else is either dead or assimilated or both."

"Oh. I - might be able to help with that, the assimilated ones, anyway, but I'm not currently sure how. I can keep you both from freezing or starving to death, though?"

"That would be lovely. Although, uh, it did succeed in turning us into slime mold. Just--we got lucky and kept our individuality. So we were very unlikely to die. If you can help any of the others--well. We can try to find them again. We buried them in ice to hibernate in case the slime mold was ever safe to let wake up again."

"If they're currently stable then I think I'd like to leave them for now, I expect to be moderately busy soon. I'll try to help them later. Would you like me to fix your building so it's better at keeping you warm? I can get you food, too, but that's a bit trickier."

"Modifying the building would be lovely. What do you expect to be busy with?"

"... If I didn't take too long getting home, I'd quite like to see my family again," she says, very quietly.

Then as if she hadn't said this at all, she walks past them to peer at the damaged parts of the building. The damaged parts of the building are - swallowed by an impossibly dark night sky, like she has ripped open a void to the vacuum of space. Then the void fades away, leaving repaired bits of building in their wake. It doesn't quite match what it had looked like before it had been damaged, but otherwise, it could be new.

"...I'm sorry about your family. Do you know what the date was when you left?"

"Thank you. Even if they're dead by now at least I've found Earth again, which is - not nothing. August 13, 2012."

"It's 2017. Good news: Obama got re-elected. Bad news: we somehow managed to elect Donald Trump last year."

"I have no idea who that is," she says, a little amused.

"Really? I was pretty sure he was already famous in 2012. Anyway he's terrible at being President."

"Oh. Well. I'm an unborn eldritch abomination that houses my mind in another dimension, I'm not sure I count as a US citizen anymore. So it's probably only distantly my problem."

"Well, you'll notice we ran away to Antarctica, we hardly have a right to quibble."

Snort.

"Where you were attacked by slime mold. No safe place to go, apparently. What are your food supplies like? I don't think it'd be safe to just make you food, but I could probably do a decent job of fishing. Or pick up supply drops that you've been unable to get, or something."

"We have enough food, we were mostly just worried about the cold."

"Oh. I might be able to get your generator back online if it's not too broken, then. At the very least I should be able to keep the building warm."

"Good. We--would have survived regardless. But. It's good that we won't have to hibernate and not wake up until aeons after our family was dead and dust."

"Let's have none of that," she says, firmly. She looks around at the building, and hums thoughtfully.

"Actually, do you want me to just. Move you to a non-Antarctica location. Because I can do that. It's probably at least a little bit unnerving because most things I do are in that vein, but."

"I am so tempted but it would be very inexplicable to the people we radioed for help and also it's important we prevent them from poking around looking for us and accidentally waking up some slime mold and getting assimilated."

"I could put the slime mold into a slime mold container, from which it cannot escape. That's probably better, anyway, really."

"Yeah. I'd still rather not worry them, can we drop in on them to explain?"

"Sure. Point me to your slime mold infestation? I will put it in a magic freezer box."

"Thank you!"

There's a lot of slime mold. Most of it still looks like the twins' coworkers.

That's really gross. Luckily, being baby Cthulhu has done wonders to her gag reflex, so she can just tidily sort them into magical space-themed freezer boxes without reacting to the grossness. The freezer boxes are very strong, have no holes, are the same temperature as the ice in Antarctica, and are impossible for anyone that isn't her to open. That should handle the slime mold pretty handily. She makes an effort to sort and label coworkers for later.

"If you don't mind, I'm going to check for extra slime mold so we can be sure we haven't missed any," she says, once all of the known slime mold has been collected into the freezer boxes. "To be safe."

"Good idea."

She nods. Her jacket looks like intricate dark lace set on a darker, light-eating black, set with stars that don't move. She waves a hand, and motes of night-sky bleed out from behind the lace and drip like ink into the snow. They swarm and dart out very quickly in all directions, looking quite purposeful.

"It'll probably take a while for me to check everything properly, so we might want to go be inside."

"Nice jacket."

"Thank you!" she says, pleased. "It's not precisely necessary, but it makes my life a little bit easier. Also a little bit less creepy and gross in favor of being stylish, which is always a bonus."

"Creepy and gross?"

"My method before the jacket was bleeding starscapes from the insides of my fingernails. Which was in itself much more comfortable than the one before that, which was vomiting them. This is much preferable."

"I can see that. Not that I'm one to judge creepy and gross anymore."

Shrug. "I don't mind. I'd rather be self aware and honest instead of pretending I'm not kind of unnerving, now."

"Sure. Just--same." She holds up one of her hands; the fingers start to run together like wax on a radiator.

She smiles in empathetic understanding. Yeah. That's - yeah.

"I'm Yvette, by the way. Nice to meet you both."

"I'm Emily, and this is Edie. She's the reason we survived the slime mold; she got infected and she won, assimilating it instead of it assimilating her. And then she infected me, and of course she didn't want to assimilate me."

"Nicely done," she says approvingly, to Edie. "So it wanted to, what. Assimilate all of humanity to join its communal mold hivemind?"

"Apparently communal hivemind slime mold is the dominant form of life in this universe and it considered humans tragically crippled for living alone inside our own brains. It wanted to save us."

"Some idea of save. Perhaps I should put together an explanatory slide show on consent, and why it matters."

"Well, maybe if you count as eldritch enough to not be thinking with a tortured cancerbrain it will listen."

She makes a face.

"Tortured cancerbrain? Ugh. Well. I mentioned that my mind is in another dimension, perhaps that's enough to qualify me for. Not that particular unflattering description."

"It thought it was really gross that humans do all our thinking with a single organ encysted inside bone instead of our whole bodies."

"What an open minded line of thinking that allows for understanding many different configurations of mind and species. Surely this would not ever lead to grievous miscommunication and misery for individuals and collectives involved. I for one applaud the slime mold for its empathy and insight into the human condition."

"To be fair to the slime mold, it had met lots of life forms on lots of planets, and humans are the only ones who don't work like it."

"... Are you sure, or could it have conveniently forgotten about and assimilated all of the species that didn't fit into its narrow worldview?"

"Its initial assumption was that we used to be like it and forgot how. It was an earthshaking revelation that we hadn't.

Also, in its defense as regards empathy with humanity, humans started shooting at it shortly after they woke it up. Which wasn't unreasonable, exactly. It had tried to greet them, and, uh, humans being humans this didn't go great for the ones it was targeting. Just. Neither side was doing anything they had any reason to think was bad, at that point."

Nod.

"Fair enough. You know more about the situation and the decisions it made than I do. I'm just - very aware of the possible failstates that can occur when someone is in charge of their own mind's layouts. It's terribly easy to forget all of the things that don't fit in with your worldview."

"Yeah. It's not safe to have around humans. But it's not evil, either."

"No. I'm sorry if I implied that I thought it was."

"You kind of did.

I am, like, ninety-five percent Edie Lehnsherr and five percent slime mold hivemind thing. I'm still me, but there's some of it tacked on, too. I--I get its point of view. And I don't agree with it, but--"

She nods.

"Yeah. Sorry. I'm - a bit badly socialized. ... More than a bit."

"It's okay."

"Do you want a hug?"

"Yes," she mumbles, in a small voice, to the floor.

Emily hugs her.

Yvette crumples into the hug and tries very hard not to sob.

For the most part, she'd been putting her emotions on hold - in a very human way, not in the 'I can turn my emotions off when I want to' way that is available to her. Now here they are, all in a rush, all together. Relief at finally being home, the final end of the omnipresent all-encompassing dread of being stranded alone in an impossibly vast multiverse, like she's a puppet that has suddenly lost all of the strings holding her up. Then there's the other familiar kind of terror, the one whispering that maybe she messed up, maybe she changed too much, maybe she's too strange and alien now. Maybe her parents will hurt to look at her and her sister won't know how to connect with her and she'll say the wrong things because she's been fundamentally disconnected from everything that she holds dear. Then there are the more immediate emotions - anger at something strange and alien touching her home while she was away, anguish at the whole world moving on without her, annoyance that she can't just go completely home because there's a mess she needs to deal with, and she doesn't seem to know how to say the things she means, because words are hard, and feelings are hard, and people are hard, and she's probably the most powerful woman in the world so why does she feel so lost?

She does not succeed at not sobbing. Her tears follow the starscape theme.

Five years.

Emily tries to imagine five years without her family, five years not knowing if Mama and Dad and Edie were alive or dead--

and she came. So fucking close. To dying. To Edie dying. To their parents having the face the news, sir, ma'am, your girls are gone forever--

or worse, that fucking thing using their bodies to kill them too--

Emily's arms tighten around the other woman and she lets out a sob of her own.

"Want to just cry on each other about how everything is terrifying and we're all lucky to be alive?" she hiccups wryly, between sobs.

Wordless nodding.

"A-awesome."

Yep, okay, time to just openly and unrepentantly sob on a person she barely knows.

Well, the person she barely knows is openly and unrepentantly sobbing on her, back, so.

They have such a kinship! A kinship of sobbing unrepentantly on each other, having had horrible shit happening to them, fear of loss of the people they love, isolation from the world, and becoming something more than human with some unsettling implications. They can just. Cry about that. For a while.

Yvette is so good at plans!

She definitely feels that way! And she even had the sense to set her motes looking for thingbits before she indulged in crying. It is very efficient and she is kind of proud.

The crying eventually bleeds into snuggled sniffles. Yvette is not going to un-snuggle on her own, but if Emily seems to want to, they don't have to literally stay like that forever.

She has the presence of mind to send a mote to check on Edie.

Edie is standing a respectful distance away looking like she might like to join the hug but isn't sure how Yvette would feel about that.

Well goodness, that won't do. Yvette picks her head up from Emily's shoulder to smile encouragingly at Edie.

--Okay. Hug!

Eee!

So many hugs! She's still sniffling a little, but now she's smiling. The black tears that have leaked onto Emily clean themselves up politely. It seems preferable to leaving large void-of-stars stains all over everything she's cried on.

Probably!

"So what's your family like?" Edie asks after a little while.

"My father's a professor that teaches chemical engineering at Lancaster university. Or, well. Was. My mother's less easy to categorize but the sort of person that you can trust to do the thing she set out to do. My sister's - well, she was my best friend, anyway. I don't know what she'd be, now. I hope she got the degree in linguistics she wanted."

Nod.

"I hope so too."

"Our mother teaches genetics at Syracuse University. No idea what she'll make of us. Professionally speaking. As a geneticist. As our mom she'll just be glad we're okay."

Nod.

"Good. I'm glad," she says, sincerely. She snuggles closer in the hugs. She hopes she gets to have that, too.

"Hey. If I know parents, they'll just be relieved you're alive."

"Yeah. Just. It's been a long time, and I'm. Not the same. To put it lightly."

"People change. I wasn't the same person I was five years ago even before I acquired slime mold properties. You've changed more than most, sure. But you're alive."

Nod.

"I'm just - scared that I'll look like a monster that thinks it's me instead of. Me. ... Or maybe I'm scared that I am."

She considers her thoughtfully for a moment.

"Nah."

.... This extremely blunt and direct answer startles a laugh out of her.

"Okay," she agrees, softly.

"How much longer is it going to take your inky thing to come back, because at this point it looks like we should seriously get to our rescuers to reassure them and then to your family."

"I don't actually need them to come back, I'm still in control of them. I've found the place you got the slime mold from and I'm doing a grid search of the nearby area and checking the various levels of buried ice. We can leave them to search if you'd like to leave now."

"That might be a good idea."