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the devil in a lime green dress
Turquoises in All Night Laundry.
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She really shouldn’t be up this late.

She rarely is - her sleep schedule is remarkably well regulated, for a college student - but she’d made the unwise decision to go to a party, and the even less wise decision to spend most of it panicking in a corner. It hadn’t been until one in the morning, when she finally managed to make her way home, that she realized she would need to go out again and get her laundry taken care of. Otherwise she’d spend the rest of tomorrow feeling gross, and feeling gross made her anxiety harder to handle, and she’d probably end up sprawled out in the middle of a classroom paralyzed and gasping for air, and everyone would privately whisper about the mute, crazy woman -

So she decides to go to the nearby laundromat.

It has a sign, up front. ‘All Night Laundry’, written in bright, neon letters.

She feels a creeping portent of dread, at the sign. This isn’t surprising. She manages to feel as many as six creeping portents of dread each day before breakfast, and they rarely amount to anything. She goes in, anyways.

Aside from the sign, the place is… dark. Quiet. Seemingly unstaffed. There’s a little bzzzz at the die of her vision - a slight flicker - but it goes away, just as she notices it.

It’s just anxiety. The buzzing goes away, once she notices it.

And her mental map of the place is impeccable. She heads straight for the light switch, and - after a moment of fumbling - flicks it on.

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There’s a man, there, standing at six-foot-something-or-other; he startles at the sudden light, and hastily nudges something into a corner.

” - uh, shit, sorry,” he says. “Didn’t think anyone would come in, didn’t hear you, thought I could take care of my own stuff since nobody ever actually comes on Wednesday nights - sorry. You’re that mute girl who comes by sometimes?”

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Amaris make an eloquent gesture, collects her laundry basket from where she set it down, and starts fiddling with a machine.

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“... right. Uh, I have some stuff to do - you can probably do your laundry unsupervised - I’m gonna go do stuff, be back super quick, don’t go into the employees only area or mess around with the cash register or anything?”

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She nods, puts her clothes in the washer, fiddles with further knobs, and turns it on.

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“M‘kay. Bye.”

He puts on a heavy coat, and leaves.

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Amaris, having fiddled with the washing machine to her heart’s content, inserted assorted currency, and otherwise done as required of her, sits down. There’s an uncomfortable little bench, off to the side, which seems well suited for the purpose.

It’s... quiet, aside from the hum of the machine. Dim. Still as a forest in winter.

She sees dark shapes, flickering in the corners of her vision. She ignores them. She’s so, so tired, and everything seems shadowed and frightening and grand, and all of it will seem ridiculous in the morning. 

But she doesn’t think that the odd man’s behavior will seem ridiculous and ordinary and plain, come morning. She thinks that it’ll seem just as suspicious as it does now. And she isn’t majoring in investigative journalism - isn’t majoring in something that seems so obviously inaccessible, for someone who can hardly speak - because of a lack of curiosity.

She gets up, stretches a little, and goes to peer in the corner, where he’d kicked something or other -

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- and the television, towards the back of the laundromat, flickers on.

It shows static.

(Perhaps the hints of green, slithering in and out of view, are solely in her imagination.)

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... no. No, she doesn’t think they are.

Temporarily distracted from the corner, she peers down at the machine - the little tendrils of green must’ve been some mechanical defect, but they seemed like more than that, more like little tendrils of something vast and incomprehensible - and weren’t they so - pretty -

She turns the television off. It isn’t doing her overactive imagination any favors.

The flickers of shadows seem... louder, now. She spins around, once, when it seems like the change dispenser has ‘meat’ written on it, instead. 

It doesn’t. (Flicker). Everything is fine. (Flicker). Everything is normal. (Flicker). She is going to be fine.

She checks out the corner, again.

 

... that sure is a shovel, lightly encrusted with splattered blood. 

She puts in back in the corner, precisely as it was.

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She spends a few moments pacing, hands in her pockets, unconsciously walking on her tiptoes. It was a habit, ordinarily suppressed, with a tendency to resurface when she was stressed.

She is very stressed.

The man who welcomed her in - Zeke, she thinks, his name is Zeke - isn’t the person who ordinarily staffed this place. He’s the brother of the owner - Randy? Sandy? Sammy?

She hasn’t seen the owner for a few days.

She’s tired. So tired. She can - stop herself from going into a spiral about whether she’s about to be murdered, he probably isn’t going after random targets, if that’s what this is, if she isn’t just hallucinating - she’ll just go to the police in the morning with a written statement, if he’s being this careless with his murder equipment he won’t last ten minutes under official scrutiny -

 

One of the washers makes a horrible, loud, gross little sloshing sound. It isn’t her’s, she can tell by the location of the sound - she didn’t think that any of the other washers were in use -

She’s tired. It was going all along, and she just didn’t notice it until now, that’s all. Her mind is playing tricks. 

She walks towards the faulty machine, still walking on the balls of her feet.

It shakes, and shakes, and shakes, like it’s struggling to detach itself from its fellows. Some thick, oozing liquid slips down from the lid. It smells like brick dust, ozone, sharp and acidic and entirely unlike detergent. 

Maybe it’s water. Maybe the shovel wasn’t really there, and she’s dreaming, and she isn’t about to be chopped into pieces by a deranged Nordic football player -

She should stop the machine.

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... it’s broken. Of course. The dial is already at zero. It should be off already.

And - there probably isn’t a body in there, why would there be a body in there, but maybe there’s some clue -

She opens the lid, to see what’s inside.

 

Clothing. Of course. Excessively dirty clothing, but clothing.

She closes the lid. The machine seems to stop itself, and she resumes pacing and catasrophizing and trying not to hyperventilate -

The machine makes an unpleasant thud - it sounds like a gunshot, in the enclosed space. She startles back, trips, lands on her rear. It thudtwice more - she scoots back, rapidly, making a shrill sound - and then it stops.

Maybe she should unplug it. Maybe something horrible is going to happen if she doesn’t.

(Flicker, flicker, flicker, flicker -)

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She bends down in front of the machine, tries to ignore the continuing sloshing of dark fluid, reaches forward to unplug it -

There is a pale, manicured, green hand, with delicate green nail polish, at the edge of her vision, just for a moment.

 

She

Is 

Absolutely 

Still.

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Nothing else happens, just then. Amaris lets herself breathe, after thirty seconds have passed, and then slowly stands up, and starts backing up, cautiously, towards the other end of the laundromat.

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“Hello,” says a pleasant, feminine voice, coming from behind her.

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Amaris turns around, looks at her, and starts backing briskly away in the opposite direction.

(Her breathing is coming out very quickly, but it is under her control, she is under her control, she is not going to panic until she has a spare moment to panic -)

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Is she quite sure about that? It would be so, so very easy to panic.

Easier still to panic about how she’s dressed than how she’s imperiled, even - the woman in front of her, every feature perfect, every lock of hair in place, dress of beautiful emerald scales swishing as she moves, seems like the embodiment of divine beauty - it seems tempting, to kneel, to stare at her until the end of time, to pay attention -

The washing machine, behind them, rocks over onto its side, and spills dark fluid, everywhere. It doesn’t seem important.

“Do not be afraid,” says the woman in green, matching her stride for stride.

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Amaris can tell when she is about to be mesmerized by ethereal beauty and she is going to fuck that noise - it isn’t real, anyways, it’s - it’s some sort of glamor, she can feel her eyes twitching, she can feel the bzzzzzz of her surroundings ramp up, she can feel her breathcome fast and hot and smell the ozone, sharp in the air, she knows that this is not what that thing really looks like -

 

She closes her eyes, briefly - it feels like breaking a spell, like just barely catching a knife before it lodges itself in your throat, like the sudden gasp of air after you nearly drown - and summarily darts towards a nearby washing machine. She nearly slips, in the growing puddle of black, but she makes it over all the same.

She flips herself over it - all those years of gymnastics lessons, all those wasted hours, finally coming to fruition - and grabs a swiffer, brandishing it wildly with both hands.

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The woman is walking around the washing machines, gracefully, beautifully, as if her every step is carefully choreographed. 

“You are making this difficult,” she says - and isn’t her voice beautiful, couldn’t she just listen to it forever? “Do not. I will not hurt you. You will be fine, and you will be lovely, and then everything will be fine, and everything will be lovely, forever. I am not so frightening, am I?”

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Amaris carefully refrains from looking at her directly, and continues holding the swiffer, in slightly trembling hands.

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“... I was difficult once, myself,” the woman offers, conversationally, continuing to slowly stride towards Amaris. “I have been difficult, so many times. You have been difficult, so many times - but this is the last time, she awakens, this is the last -“

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Oh, look at that. She seems to have gotten in swiffer range. 

Have a swiffer to the face, and an Amaris rapidly scrambling towards the door, creepy green lady. 

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Cleaning implements do not seem to be particularly efficacious, in this instance. Perhaps she’d have better luck trying to clean up the puddle.

 

The woman in green seizes her by the hand, spins her around, and kisses her.

The world fades.

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She wakes up in a courtyard.

She stands.

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There’s a man there, about her height and age, and two people on a couch. The courtyard otherwise seems fairly empty.

”... um,” says the man. “Hello?”

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... she gives a little wave. 

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“You, um, fell out of the sky - I’m not as surprised as I would be if this weren’t probably the afterlife, but it’s still pretty surprising? Sandy and Wendy both just sort of spontaneously appeared on the couch. And have wires coming out of the back of their heads. And spend all of their time silently watching something that I can’t see. It’s weird and upsetting and I would like to receive a refund from the afterlife store.”

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She glances over at the two people on the couch and - yep, that sure is the owner of the laundromat and some random woman. 

She looks back at whoever-he-is, and makes an evocative little motion, pantomiming someone zipping up their lips.

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“... um... you can’t talk?”

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She nods.

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“That... makes this whole thing a little less convenient, but not prohibitively so! Um. I suppose I should tell you my name - I’m Caden -“

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She doesn’t hear the rest of what he says. 

 

There’s something very, very pretty, and very, very green, behind her. It’s a little like the woman, but - more. Like the woman is a shadow, and this is the sun.

Pretty, pretty sun. Pretty, pretty light. Little tendrils of it, everywhere. She tries to touch one...

Oh, isn’t that strange. It’s going through her arm.

Is that bad?

She doesn’t think that anything can be bad. Everything is fine. Everything is beautiful.

A tendril approaches her eye. It’s so pretty...

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As far as Caden can tell, Amaris spontaneously zoned out, began staring into empty space, and then started bleeding profusely from one arm.

That seems... bad.

He tries to pull her back -

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The tendril worms it’s way out of her arm - and she can’t feel that arm, now, can she, how strange - and the tendril reaching for her eye pulls short, like she’s just barely too far away.

She sees teeth, now, in addition to beauty. Like walking in a forest, and only afterwards, noticing that every branch was a venemous snake and every leaf was a viper -

She closes her eyes, and grabs onto Caden, and tackles him, away from the pretty pretty pretty -

And then she can feel her arm.

It hurts it hurts it hurts so fucking -

She falls unconscious.

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Caden, head having abruptly jolted against concrete, joins her for the ride.

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Amaris Baker’s Dream, Age 6

 

Her grandmother is in France. Amaris is, too. She’s visiting

She’s always liked her grandmother. She’s so, so smart, and so, so brave, and she never took anything from anyone. She has a cane, and these cool little cigarettes, and always seems to have a glass of wine nearby. And she never mentioned it, when Amaris started shivering or walking funny or had her arms flap around, and she never seemed to notice, that Amaris never spoke.

Amaris has a little paint set, with big, big brushes, and little, itsy bitsy wells of paint. She’s painting something special. It wants to be known, and it wants to be looked at, and it wants people to pay attention, but it has to stay a secret. 

All her itsy, bitsy wells of paint are green. She has plenty of paint to finish it.

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“Can I see?” asks Caden, peering curiously.

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She glances, cautiously, at their surroundings, and then lets him take a peek.

It looks like empty canvas, to him. He doesn’t have a shadow; he doesn’t count.

Her grandmother comes into the room. They’ll go on a neat adventure, tomorrow, with cotton candy and clowns and men in funny hats, but today they’re going to do something different.

They’re going to talk about monsters.

“My darling,” says her grandmother, looking down at her seriously. “Your mother has told me of your nightmares? Can you show me what they’re of?”

She adds one last little dab of paint, and presents her with the painting.

Her grandmother doesn’t see nothing at all, at all. She sees something dark, and green, and bright, and mean, and oh so terribly beautiful.

“... monsters,” says the grandmother, quietly. “Monsters... you have good taste in fears, my darling. Has your mother been telling you that monsters aren’t real?”

Amaris nods. It’s a funny little nod; she does it twice more, for good measure.

“What a horrible thing to say, to a child. For monsters are real, my darling, very, very real. You must watch for them, but they do not live under beds, or in stories. Watch for them in factories, and in mansions, and in offices, and at the heads of countries, and know what they have done. That is how you catch them, my darling, by the watching, and that is how they catch you.”

Little Amaris nods, again. It seems like the thing to do.

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Caden nods, too, solemnly. 

(He didn’t watch for monsters, in factories and mansions and offices and heads of countries. He didn’t even watch for them in laundromats.)

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Her grandmother will be in such terrible trouble, later, with her mother, and they will argue, and they will fight, and her grandmother will brandish her cane like a sword, but she isn’t quite in trouble, yet.

Caden and Amaris are. Amaris scrunches up her eyebrows, contemplating this.

Her grandmother pats her on the head.

”You already know one monster, my darling, and you cannot watch it, quite - yet that which you cannot watch, you must still perceive. I cannot help you; I am dead. Your friend cannot help you; he is dead. You are alive, and you will win, if you are smart and clever and lucky and well prepared, and if you are perceptive.”

She unwraps her scarf, then - red, bright red, with little flowers poking out their heads onto its pattern - and wraps it snug around her grandchild’s neck. She kisses her, once, on the forehead, and then leans down and does the same to Caden.

”Be safe,” she says.

 

And then they wake up.

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“Mmmmlrgh,” says Caden, from underneath Amaris. “Absolute worst afterlife. Worst afterlife ever. Zero stars.”

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Amaris quietly agrees with that sentiment. She tries to push herself off of him -

OW.

 

She collapses back down. Pushing maneuvers aren’t happening, apparently. And she’s already lost so much blood...

She closes her eyes, rolls over, sits up, flops out her injured hand in Caden’s general direction, unwinds her grandmother’s scarf from around her neck, and presents it to him.

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“You want me to use the scarf as makeshift gauze? - after tearing it in half, presumably, since there are two separate, um, holes?”

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She nods.

(Flicker, flicker, flicker, flicker - something that would be seen, should she open her eyes, wants her attention, and it can fuck right off - flicker, flicker, flicker, flicker - but it was so pretty, and so deadly - but she is still going to ignore it -)

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He sits up, tears the scarf in half, and gingerly sets to wrapping her wounds.

(There is so much blood, and he always gets pale at the sight of even a droplet, but he is absolutely not going to faint, this would be a terrible time to faint -)

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She winces, occasionally, but otherwise remains stoic.

When he finishes, she... attempts to stand, turning around so that her back is facing the whatever-it-is. This involves a great deal of leaning on Caden, but they manage to make it work.

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“- wait, where the fuck am I,” says the laundromat’s owner, suddenly perking to attention. “Caden? Random bitch with bangs? I was... I don’t know where I was. I don’t know where I am. What the fuck.”

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“... did I die and go to heaven?” says the woman next to him, similarly coming to alertness - Wendy, presumably, staring at the sky. “Mother, mother, is that you? Can I hear the toll of bells? Are those the pearly gates?”

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Amaris quietly notes that they’re standing directly between the people on the couch, and the - thing. She doesn’t say anything.

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“Sandy? - I, I’ve been here with you for days, and I would shake you and hug you and cry and you never responded and - I tried to get away, that’s how - but I was yours and you -“

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“Calm down. You are still mine, and don’t you forget it - and I’m here now, even if I was in some sort of weird coma. Man, I am going to kill Zeke - you die because he convinces you of some hairbrained scheme, and then while I’m still - he suckerpunches me, drags me down to the basement - and kills me? I think he killed me. I don’t remember. What a ripoff, I died and I don’t even get to remember it.”

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“He didn’t kill me,” says Wendy, absently, still looking at the sky. “He showed me the pretty, pretty light, and it gobbled me up like green lights should, and now I’m in heaven. I always thought that it was a white light, that killed you.”

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Amaris isn’t technically mute, in the formal sense of the word. Speaking is horrible and difficult and it sounds like a frog being strangled by an eel but if she concentrates, very carefully, she can sometimes - just barely -

“Greeeeeeeen bad,” she - croaks, uncharitably. “Behind us. What you were staring at. We block it, now. Close eyes, else coma ‘gain when we don’t block. Is a - thing, think wants attention.”

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- he supposes she was trying to indicate ‘I can’t speak without substantial difficulty’, not ‘I cannot speak’ per se, earlier, and that the nod was a ‘close enough’ - 

- also that’s impossibly terrifying -

“I can’t see it at all, but I died ordinarily, not by - why is Zeke murdering people in our basement by exposing them to alien light, I don’t understand, I don’t know why this is - everything was fine, a week ago, and now we’re in some sort of eldritch purgatory, I don’t understand -“

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... Sandy closes his eyes.

“I don’t know, babe. And I - can move my upper body, looks like, but I can’t move my legs, and I want to hug you, could you -

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Wendy keeps her eyes open.

”This is - move out of the way, then, I need to see it, I want my pretty, I want my pretty, give it back.”

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Amaris, feeling moderately recovered, ceases to lean on Caden, and stumbles a bit to the side. 

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And Wendy -

Resumes looking like an unusually realistic mannequin, completely lifeless, and completely still.

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- and then Caden is going to rush up to Sandy and hug him, because that seems like the thing to do.

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Hugs! So many fucking hugs! 

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Amaris drifts on over, back still carefully towards the - green thing.

(Flicker, flicker, ficker, flicker -)

She notes the wires, coming out of the back of Wendy’s head, out of the back of Sandy’s head, leading in the direction of... it.

Her instincts say that these people... aren’t their own. She doesn’t know if they’ve been - claimed by a god, kidnapped by an alien, ensnared by the fae - but they’re... not.

Like little boys in storybooks, having lost their shadows. Or shadows, having lost their little boys.

 

She’s just going to watch, for now.

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They continue hugging, for a while.

 

”Caden, babe? Could you do something for me?”

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“- yes, um, of course? -“

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“My legs don’t work, and I can’t open my eyes; I want you to go with the weird chick and check this place out. We can hug more afterwards, try to figure out what the fuck is up with this place.”

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“... okay.”

He looks at Amaris.

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And Amaris - still dizzy, but not debilitatingly so - looks everywhere the flickering thing isn’t.

A plain, dull little courtyard. smokestack, with Latin letters written on it. A garage-style gate, and an iron gate, with piles and piles of beets on it.

They should’ve been swarming with flies, ants, little birds.

They weren’t swarming with anything.

She couldn’t hear any birdsong, she realized. Just stillness, and silence, and the sound of her own breathing. Breathe in, breathe out. Breathe in, breathe out. Breathe in, breathe out...

Look at something other than the beets -

A door, with a delicate window, made from frosted glass.

 

She points at it.

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“- um, I suppose that’s the place to start,” says Caden, setting off toward it. “I hadn’t wanted to go off on my own, before, I was - worried about Sandy...”

He sets out for the door, reaches it, opens it, and - with a little glance towards Sandy, looking pained and confused and lost and angry - steps inside.

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Amaris follows.

There’s an inscription, written on the inside of the door’s window.

What kind of maggot grows in the corpse of day?

 

... she thinks that she knows what maggot grows in the corpse of day. She remembers an impossibly beautiful - creature, in the courtyard outside. She remembers an impossibly beautiful woman, talking about how ‘she’ was going to awaken, about how everything was going to be fine and lovely, about how Amaris had been difficult ‘so many times’.

She remembers the color green.

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Caden has properly encountered precisely none of those things, and can’t draw the same conclusions, but he vaguely suspects that it’s somehow related to the green thing that Amaris mentioned. And is deeply unnerved. He closes the door.

The rest of the room is a sort of dimly lit office - lots of wood, not a lot of metal, no plastic.

There’s a calendar, on the wall, indicating that it’s July 17th, 1911, a Monday. The date is circled in green, and ‘factory closed for experiment’ is written on it, in French.

”Um, ‘factory closed for experiment’,” Caden says, with audible quotation marks. “That... doesn’t sound good?”

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He’s not going to hear her dispute that assertion, for several reasons.

The lights - flicker - and something subtle about the air feels different. More real. Less... green. There’s no longer dust, everywhere, and a old-timey phone has appeared on the desk. 

(Flicker, flicker, flicker, flicker - she thinks she’s seeing it from her arm, now, which is disturbing on several levels -)

 

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“Wait, that doesn’t - we - we’re not in the same -“

He opens up the door that they came through - 

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- and in storms a fifty-something caucasian woman. She seems surprised to see them, for a moment - but only for a moment. She speaks rapidly, in crisp, brisk, old-fashioned French.

What, precisely do you think that you are - good heavens, look at all of that blood, girl, what have you done to yourself? And why is there an Oriental, I was very strict about - bah, nevermind. Jean Francois, dear that he is, will be in positive rage - one hundred and thirty-two days without a single workplace accident, and for what! Has no one ever bothered learning the meaning of the word ‘caution’? I knew that those cargo hooks would be the death of someone, I told them to get them out of the way before they shoved everyone into that wretchedly cramped little place, but does anyone ever listen to little old Melanie Duboise? - boy, sit. Girl, get out of my way, sit over there.”

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... Caden obliges. 

(He didn’t see a couch, when he opened that door.)

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Amaris is just going to sit as instructed and pretend that she has any idea at all what’s going on.

(This woman’s French is old, and her style of dress is similarly archaic, alongside the phone - and the calendar would have them believe that it’s currently 1911 -

She’s suspicious that the ‘experiment’ mentioned on the calendar may have had some unintended consequences. ‘Rip apart the fabric of time and summon something old and terrible’ type consequences.)

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The woman - ‘Melanie Duboise’, as she said - fetches some sort of medical kit, instructs Amaris to take off her bandages, and continues griping.

”Dear, you got blood all over my desk - I would most appreciate it if you would bleed on the floor, in the future. Some other floor, ideally - just like those old fools, to send me a wound to mend when I have a scientific paradigm to overturn and a crowd of fifty people waiting! But of course little Madame Duboise never has anything better to do, even on days like today. how could I have imagined otherwise - and look at that inflammation!  What, did they rub dirt all over you and hope that it would stop the bleeding - bah... You have lost so many liquids, dear, and your flesh is so angry - I will get you a washbasin, and a glass of water, but you must not touch anything. Especially that box!”

She storms out a different door.

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Caden eventually regains his composure. He should not be this sad to be separated from the serial killer that he’d died in the process of running away from - even if that serial killer - is, was -

“So,” he says, eventually, “um - am I alone in thinking that we’ve somehow travelled back in time?”

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Amaris shakes her head.

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“And - the experiment that it mentioned -“

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She nods.

Her brain is buzzing, buzzing, buzzing, like a bumblebee in flight, and there’s still that repetitive flicker, flicker, flicker at the deg of her consciousness. She’s not even sure, now, whether it’s from sleep deprivation, blood loss, or mysterious otherworldly nonsense.

Bzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz -

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The woman eventually bustles back in, hands Amaris a glass of water, and sets to cleaning her wounds.

”- dear, this can’t have been a cargo hook, it seems to have gone through your arm in two separate locations! Was there some sort of pitchfork? One of the cosette wheels?”

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“- she, um, doesn’t speak - we actually think that it might’ve been something to do with the ‘experiment’?”

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”Oh. Oh, dears, I don’t know what nonsense you’ve heard, but the experiment really isn’t so intimidating as all that. We just need fifty pairs of eyeballs, and all we’re going to do is turn on one, harmless little green-tinted light.”

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“... um. Eyeballs?”

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“Just observers, dear, observers, don’t believe the rumors! We just need fifty people to look at this wonderous, marvelous, innovative device, and it is going to supply enough electricity to power a light. And the energy production of the machine moves up exponentially with every additional observer - sixty people could light a thousand lights, seventy people could light a million. It is going to be the start of a new era of energy production! Just you wait, I’ll show my every critic, I’ll show them all! - in any case, dear, this is going to sting, we don’t want these to get any more infected, now do we? -“

She carefully applies rubbing alcohol, and, squinting, sends a bit running through each puncture wound, using a little eyedropper.

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It feels like being flayed alive, bitten by a thousand ants with wirejaws and venemous dispositions - like having fire, distilled, run through channels of her body that should not be - it feels like buzzing, buzzing, buzzing, like a swarm of a a hundred bees, each made from fire and ice and bitter acid - like the smell of ozone and brick dust, sharp and biting, and the kiss of a woman as green as death -

She doesn’t visibly react.

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Caden winces on her behalf.

”- I don’t suppose you tell us more about the device?” he asks, in slow but competent French.

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“It is what I call an observation engine - a revolutionary discovery! A particular symbol, when carved into a conductive surface and indirectly observed, produces electricity, and the surrounding machine channels the electricity to the light bulb. wanted to use a galvanometer, like a woman of respectability, but no! My husband, my dear, he insisted that if we were to close the factory, it would not be for a needle - but he knows how to sell sugar, and who am I to contradict him? If he thinks that a little colored light will make people sit up and pay attention, then perhaps it will.”

She takes out a bit of gauze, and wraps both of Amaris’s puncture wounds with it; the blood scarf-halves are thrown on the table.

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Amaris moves her arm, experimentally, and then proceeds to wrap one half of the still-bloody scarf around her neck, and wrap the other around her uninjured wrist. 

- she needs to know, for sure, if this experiment really sounds as closely associated with the - whatever it is - as it sounds like - and one pattern had stood out to her, when she stared into the beautiful, beautiful abyss -

She grabs a loose piece of paper, and a pen, and draws something.

She presents it to the woman, tapping it with the end of the pen.

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“How the hell do you know what that...

You don’t work here at all, do you.”

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She shakes her head.

There’s a small wind, picking up. She can feel her hairs standing on end, feel the breeze on her face, see the flicker flicker flicker flicker pick up the pace, like a clock, ticking down to some invisible destination -

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“Are you on the run, from some sort of malfeasance? Is that how you got that injury? - I am not cold hearted as I sometimes seem, I may be able to protect you -“

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“I think that we’re not the ones who need protecting, here - I think we’re supposed to stop you - there’s, there’s something wrong with the device, or with the symbol, or they are something wrong, they’re - I died, days ago, and it collected me, and it collected my - and its controlling his brother, and - and it wants people to look - don’t give it what it wants, don’t -“

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The wind picks up and up and up until it’s like a maelstrom, until Caden can’t hear himself speak, until Amaris and him can hardly breathe - the flicker seems like it’s screaming, the air seems like it’s screaming, the world is spinning faster and faster and faster - 

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- Caden grabs onto Amaris’s hand, he can barely stand but he doesn’t want to be stranded or seperated -

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- Madame Duboise is yelling, now, but they can hardly hear her speak -

Amaris pulls Caden closer, and then they’re both toppled over with the force of the wind -

 

 

bzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

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The wind is gone, and the lights are as they were, and the flickers and buzzing are as they were, and the air feels cool and thin and not-quite-real.

She stands, slowly, offers her arm to help him up, and stares at the dark, gooey inscription on frosted glass.

What kind of maggot grows in the corpse of day?

She knew it then, and she knows it now, and nothing she could call it would be quite right, but -

“The Botfly,” she croaks, quietly.

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Caden looks up, startled, at the writing, and then nods, slowly.

“I - I guess we need something to call it. That works.”

 

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She nods, too.

And then - she makes a habit of being perceptive. Her dream with her grandmother had emphasized it. She notices things.

The place in the calendar which had been circled, in green, has a hole punched through it, and through the wall’s plaster. She peers at the inside of it, after some hesitation, and plucks out a piece of paper, and a pen.

 

It’s the same piece of paper that she drew the botfly’s symbol on, back in time, now with an added annotations.

”Do not cross own history”, it begins. “Back bad, forward worse. Events lock. Complicated.”

... that’s her handwriting - and, for that matter, her preferred phrasing. And it was on the same paper...

She shows it to Caden.

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Caden sees an empty piece of paper, annotation aside.

“I, um - are those the rules of time travel? You can’t interact with your past selves, going backwards in time is - difficult, dangerous - but going forwards in worse, the whole thing is really complicated?”

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Shrug.

She turns her back to the door, and, in a mildly awkward motion, opens it.

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He walks out.

There doesn’t seem to be a couch, there, anymore.

”I hate this place so much - the couch is gone, Sandy and Wendy are gone, I don’t know whether the Botfly is still there but it probably is, I want to get out of here - you fell down from the sky, could you, I don’t jump back up, could I follow you, I don’t know how any of this works, we just travelled back to 1911 there has to be some way to travel to the real world -“

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- she pauses, for a moment, scribbles down a few sentences on the hack of the paper, and follows him out, walking backwards.

She hands him the paper, and then attempts to jump. No dice.

 

The paper says: ‘This world is strange. I think you and Woman in Green are connected. I could kill you, see if that brought me back. May be urgent; do not know how this place works, seems bad idea to linger.’

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“Do it.”

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She hugs him, suddenly and tightly, and continues hugging him for several seconds.

 

The tip of her pen finds his eye, and pierces it, with a horrible squelch; it continues on for several inches. The body in her arms goes limp.

The scarf around her neck, and the scarf around her wrist, feel like they’re pulling her, impossibly, bruisingly -

 

the 

world 

fades.

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She wakes up on a hard linoleum bench.

The washing machine that she’d seen spill behind her is gone, now; there are a few smears of mud, on the floor.

She’s just going to do the prudent thing and leave immediately before she has another panic attack -

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No.

No, she isn’t.

Zeke seems to be on the other end of the glass door. He’s wearing a heavy coat, holding the same bloodstained shovel that she’d seen earlier, and -

A bright green scarf, for whatever reason, of precisely the same style and pattern as the one worn by Amaris’s grandmother.

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Quiet hyperventilation it is, then. She steps back from the door.

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He opens the door, steps inside, and perfunctorily locks it.

”Hey. God, I hate the police - ‘why are you carrying a shovel’, they say, as if I’m going to say ‘well, you see, I’ve had to kill a bunch of people today, super big bummer’. ‘Least I got that one traffic cop, he gets to meet the Lady...”

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... she has no idea how to react to that.

Sympathetic nodding? Let’s go with ‘sympathetic nodding’.

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“So, you good to go? Basement’s kinda dirty, but it’s not like your fashion choices are gonna be super important...”

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She shakes her head, and makes an inscrutably elaborate gesture.

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“... charades are gonna take a while. Is it super important?”

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She nods.

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“Kay. Soooooo could you run through that again?”

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Another inscrutably elaborate gesture!

(Her brain is still going bzzzzzz, bzzzzzz, bzzzzzz, in the background, and her everything hurts, and her arm itches and flickers, but she does still have a brain, and if she just stalls for long enough then maybe something will come to mind -)

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“Uh. Timmy fell down the well. Sears has a discount, better buy, buy, buy - I guess I should, like, actually take this seriously - do you need to get something, or do you need to, like, do something?”

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She nods, at ‘do something’, and holds up two fingers.

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“Uh... not thinking of a ton of things. Kill someone? Mail a letter. Have sex - totes willing to do that one, by the way... go to the bathroom?”

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She nods again, firmly.

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“Guess it’d be pretty weird if you met the Lady and peed your pants while she was still... introducing herself. Sure. Whatever. Go ahead. It’s by the fire exit.”

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She strides confidently towards the bathroom, and enters it.

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And he’s just going to follow her and loom conspicuously outside the bathroom door, if she doesn’t mind. 

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She’s not exactly in a position to complain.

 

She quietly hyperventilates and collapses shivering onto the floor. She washes her hands. She flushes the toilet. She fails to think of any incredibly clever ways to use the contents of the bathroom to escape.

She opens the door, and walks back out.

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“Great,” he says. “So -“

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He’s interrupted by a loud thud, and a loud, angry tirade in Russian, coming from the back room.

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“Oh, for fuck’s sake -“ he starts yelling back in louder, angrier Russian, opens the door to the back room, and shuts it, with a louder, angrier thud.

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Amaris smells brick, and ozone, and a faint tingle of blood and detergent and sharp, sharp acid. 

And she isn’t quite so distracted by panic that she can’t also smell opportunity.

She walks, calmly, over to the fire door, and she hesitates there, for a moment -

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“Amaris! Could you help me, over here, this guy really isn’t calming down and you might be a friendlier face -“

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- he knows her name -

She kicks open the fire door, and she runs down its associated alleyway.

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At the end of the alleyway, the concrete stops, and there’s a steep, dirt-encrusted slope down into the nearby - construction site? Archaeological dig? 

There’s a woman, at the bottom, with cracks running down her otherwise flawless skin, sitting perfectly still in a cross legged position. Her dress of emerald scales is similarly motionless; the effect is of a statue, rather than a person. 

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- no time to go around -

She skids down the slope, pointedly avoids looking at the Woman in Green directly, goes around her -  noting that this sparks no reaction whatsoever - and hears the back door to the laundromat slam open.

Zeke is - fast. She only has a few seconds. Run, hide, stand perfectly still while she panics and come up with some complicated delaying tactic for when he catches up to her and then - people on a couch, television wires writhing around the back of their head, watching something beautiful and grand - a woman shouting ‘give it back!’ like a drug addict deprived of her fix -

She can’t run; she’s still so, so tired, and the dizziness from blood loss isn’t helping, and neither is the way she’s breathing.

(bzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz -)

She can’t just stand here and panic.

(bzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz -)

So she hides. Easy enough, to dart over to the nearby loader and open the -

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No dice. It’s locked.

Zeke seems to have made it to the top of the slope. He hasn’t spotted her, yet, but it’s only a matter of time -

“Amaris! Amaris! It’s - I know this is confusing, but I can explain, please, just come back up here -“

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- she darts behind the loader, just in the nick of time.

Okay. Breathe. Breathe in, breathe out; breathe in, breathe out...

 

She’ll head for the offices - she’ll be in the open, for some of the trip there, but she can probably avoid being seen, and they’ll supply plenty of places to hide.

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“Amaris, construction sites are dangerous - I’m not going to hurt you, the Green Lady isn’t going to hurt you, she likes you, she loves everyone but you’re her friend -“

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He isn’t really angling for plausibility here, is he.

She brushes her hand against the side of the loader - it’s been flickering, flickering, flickering, flickering, but she’s been ignoring it - 

It’s daylight, for a moment - hazy, dim, thin - and then she startles back, and it’s once again nighttime. 

It’d been her injured hand, the one that’d been pierced by the - tendril - that touched the truck.

She takes a moment to peel back one of her bandages, in a moment of morbid curiosity -

Green. Green light, like there’s a candle in the wound.

She shouldn’t be surprised, should she.

No time to think, no time for the word ‘infection’, no time to panic and feel like worms - flat, with rings of teeth, thin as a needle and just as sharp - are traipsing around her insides and taking delicate little bites as they squirm into her flesh -

She makes a run for it, not bothering to drift down from her tiptoes - she’s always run better like that, however much people made fun of her for it - each step careful and fast and precise - 

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He’s faster than her, even still.

Must’ve gotten down the slope, while she was busy panicking over potential parasitism, without a sound. 

He reaches her, grabs her hand, and tugs her towards him, with the hand that isn’t holding a bloodstained shovel.

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no no no no no no NO 

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It takes him about two seconds to scoop her up into a sort of bridal carry, with her hands and legs both constrained from substantial movement - all the while still holding the shovel.

He lets out a sigh of relief.

”Okay, great, I didn’t - totally screw up everything, again - you okay?”

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She vividly imagines responding to that question with rapid-fire series of invectives - why had she used up the last of her verbal energy saying ‘the Botfly’, like it was some sort of profound -

Not a productive line of thought -

She shakes her head, slowly, and makes a show of wincing.

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“- gonna have to deal with that back in the laundromat, sorry.”

(He does shift positions a bit - just a little less restraining, although she’s still pretty thoroughly pinned.)

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Crazy plans, ridiculous plans, seize on every line of thought and follow it to its conclusion, anything that doesn’t end up with her dead or attached to an extradimensional parasite -

She fiddles with her gauze, one hand just barely in reach of the other -

The gauze slips off, just a little. Green light - brighter now, if still gentle, and lit with a searing, burning sense of not-quite-right - illuminates Zeke’s chest. 

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It reveals excellent abdominal muscles.

And a hole in the ground below them, surrounded by jagged, frosted ice, seemingly leading off into the infinite void. That too.

”What the -“

And then he’s falling - the shovel goes down into the void, one arm clings to Amaris, one arm scrambles for purchase and then heaves him up - 

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- that was so much less pointless than she expected -

Is this a good time to use her increased freedom of movement to elbow him in the neck, push down on him with her legs, and leap over to the side?

Let’s find out.

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He coughs, looses his grip on the side and on her -

Falls.

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She scrambles for purchase on the edge, for a few moments -

And then she, too, falls.

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She lands.

Earlier.

Not by a large margin. She can hear herself kick open the fire door, a few seconds after landing, hear the alarm start blaring -

‘Do not cross own history’, she remembers reading.

So she - doesn’t run, quite, she’s sort of worn out her ability to run for the next little while - but she briskly walks behind cover, and then commences skedaddling towards the construction site’s offices, using assorted piles of miscellany as cover.

She looks at them, as she passes by - 

Are those body bags?

Those. Those are definitely body bags.

(Flicker flicker flicker flicker -)

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“Amaris! Amaris! It’s - I know this is confusing, but I can explain, please, just come back up here -“

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What did they find, here? What did they discover? It - it had to be connected to the Woman in Green, had to be connected to the laundromat - 

And were those gas masks?

... she plucks one up, out of an abundant sense of caution, and continues on.

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“Amaris, construction sites are dangerous - I’m not going to hurt you, the Green Lady isn’t going to hurt you, she likes you, she loves everyone but you’re her friend -“

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She experiences the most justified case of deja vu to ever occur.

And she continues creeping, stealthily, in the dark, towards the offices.

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”Okay, great, I didn’t - totally screw up -“

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The door to the only still-lit office building closes, with a click, before she can hear him finish.

 

There’s a body, on the floor, and there’s blood splattered everywhere. The body is a man’s, and there is a gigantic gash on his neck.

The sort of gash one would acquire from a shovel.

 

She feels... floaty.

Oh, yes. Of course there’s a body. Zeke had joked, earlier, about how many people he’d murdered today.

Something had to - had to be wrong with you, to joke about that. It was one thing to murder people via shovel, and it was another thing entirely to - to - she hadn’t really recognized it then but -

There is something very, very wrong, in the brain of Zeke Lakeman.

Something old, something seen, something borrowed, something green -

(Flicker, flicker, flicker, flicker - it seems to be coming from the body, now, she isn’t sure if that’s supposed to be meaningful -)

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Okay. Time to -

(bzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz - at this point its almost getting repetitive, the way that reality seems to hum and churn at irregular intervals -)

- time to get to work. She can hyperventilate about dead bodies and charming sociopaths and alien parasites - later.

(If there even is a later, these days. She’s been spending a terrible amount of time in the Before.)

She slides back up, off the floor - now when did she get down there? - and starts pacing. There's blood on her pants, now. It complements the color of the scarf around her neck, at least, and the scrap still wrapped around her wrist.

She doubts that Zeke will stay gone for very long; she needs to escape, or to hide. She could just leave the office straightaway, run away off the ramp -

Thunder cracks, outside, and the light pitter patter pitter patter accelerates, rapidly, until the sky is pouring rain.

So much for that. 

Hiding, then. 

She - can't, actually, hide very well in here. The only possible place for it is underneath the desk, and, be it better than nothing, it was still an obvious place...

Well, she wasn't a journalism student for lack of curiosity. She can try the computer, see if it has any files conspicuously labeled 'in the event of my death by shovel'. The computer is a Windows, surprisingly - the decor seemed like it would correspond to a Mac - and the username is 'wendyf'.

Wendy. The woman on the couch. Someone important enough to have a mobile office, placed incongruously in the middle of a construction site.

... and who apparently had a terrible sense of information security. Her password is 'Password'. 

She brings her infected hand, absent-mindedly, close to the screen, while the computer is still loading. The screen glows green, in delicate, pretty little swirls; she half-startles out of the chair, and closes it with a snap.

She wonders if that had happened to the television, back at the laundromat...

The blood - on the floor, on the painting, splattered everywhere - is still flickering.

And - did the man on the floor just breathe? Did his chest just rise and fall?

She frowns, leans down - the idea of him being alive is ridiculous, but this night had worn away most of her instinctive disbelief - and checks his pulse.

With her - injured, infected, glowing, electronics-scrambling, ambiguously magical - hand.

The world turns green. 

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She's in the past, again - all the way back to daylight. 

A quick glance through the window - 

Wendy, there, looking more composed than she had been on the couch, her voice an aggressive, projected alto, in lieu of a childlike coo. Her face, firm - her every motion scripted for drama, for intimidation, for a sense of presence - the shorter woman before her with the look of a very, very small minnow, confronted with a corporate shark, rightfully intimidated.

The shorter woman is stuttering, stammering, stumbling over every word - 

"I-I-I-I just, I had to ask if you cuh-could move your office buh-back to the parking lot? It's not safe h-here. We cuh-can't guarantee that the ground here won -"

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"Won't collapse? - tell me your name," commands Wendy.

"Ma-ma-Martha, Ma'am."

"Well, Martha, do you think that crane, over there, is about to fall into that pit?"

"What? Nuh-nuh-no, Ma'am, we double checked?"

"Yes, and my office is a fair fuck farther away from the pit than that crane, and double checked, because I'll be damned if I have to pay out insurance because incompetent government busybodies injured themselves on my property. Not literally, mind you, if you get yourself killed it’s no stain on my coattails, but the paperwork, Martha, think of the paperwork!"

"Nuh-now you listen here -"

"No, honeybunches, I'm afraid you'll have to leave a message after the tone. My office is on Canadian granite, and the ground here - on my property, don't you forget - is solid for ten meters in every direction! And perhaps I'd be more willing to avoid random acts of plausibly justified inconvenience if you would tell me what is on my property -"

"That inf-inf-information is classified, Ma'am," says the shorter woman.

"That inf-inf-information is classified, Ma'am," parrots Wendy. "Listen, flunky number four, I already know about the buildings buried beneath there, what I don't know is anything about them, anything about why they're there, anything about why the city council didn't, oh, I don't know, tell me about them before I invested ridiculous amounts of money in this land -"

"We di-di-di-didn't have the re-records!" 

"I don't believe you! I knew that Henry Wood had something out for me, it would be perfectly in character for him to arrange a little mishap, don't you dare stand here and whine at me about - nevermind. I'm done with you. Go bother someone else. Skedaddle. Shoo."

The construction woman, wisely, obliges, and another man - official looking, formally dressed - scurries in front of Wendy, and starts briskly delivering some manner of report.

The very same man who lies dead, on her floor, ten hours from now.

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No.

No, that isn’t going to happen.

She isn’t going to let it.

She - she’ll write a message. She rifles around in her pockets -

-  she lost the pen at some point - and she doesn’t want to interact with the possibly possessed computer -

But she does have a shard of broken time.

Or, well, that’s the best explanation she has for why she has a hunk of ominously glowing ice in her pocket. Come to think of it, she does remember a bit of the edge breaking off, when she was about to fall into the void - she’d been panicked enough to disassociate, but it’s plausible that she’d put it in her pocket -

(- bzzzzz - bzzzzz - flicker flicker flicker - )

She’s starting to feel a breeze, tickling her hair, a little whisper from the universe saying ‘don’t you dare’...

She dares.

Shrick, goes the shard of time into an abstract painting on the wall. There isn’t time to write anything complex, not with the wind picking up...

She carves the word ‘SHOVEL’...

Is that - why is there writing behind the abstract painting. Why is - that writing is in her handwriting - 

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(“If you read this, you took dangerous way out of turning point. Must do three things before sent back to future: - On wall are two plastic baggies. Take big one, open it, INJECT SYRINGE IMMEDIATELY. - Take small baggie, hide in bra or shoe. - Lie down, start humming ‘if you like pina coladas’ song, on repeat. If you do not follow instructions, seizure kills us!”)

 

What.

- well, okay. She shoves the little ziplock into her bra, opens up the big ziploc, takes the needle, and the tourniquet -

She has no idea how to inject needles into people.

That. That may be a problem.

Well, she’s fair skinned enough to find a vein, and she’s probably supposed to tie the tourniquet around the arm that she’s injecting into? Maybe? She doesn’t know, why would she know that -

She ties a tourniquet, and carefully, carefully injects into her most prominent vein - she has to dig around a little, but she finally manages to find it, and inject -

Okay. That didn’t involve any horrible disasters.

She lies down, carefully - the wind is getting faster, now, like the roaring of a train, like an approaching tornado, her hair is flying everywhere and her clothing is rippling and blowing -

She starts humming the tune to ‘if you like pina coladas’. - wasn’t that’s song actually called something else, if she remembered correctly? She didn’t - she had to concentrate, every note right, she has no idea what this is doing but it must be helping somehow and it’s actually kind of soothing, otherwise she’d be panicking about the fact that the wind was pressing up against her and making it a little hard to breathe - pina coladas, pina coladas, just hum about the damn pina coladas -

The pressure stops. The world’s lighting changes.

She starts seizing.

She falls unconscious.

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She walks into the office, and there isn’t a body there. There’s writing, on the wall, and no painting.

She slides to the floor, and, on some strange whim, starts humming.

She seizes.

She falls unconscious.

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A man walks in.

He stares at her, for a few moments.

He picks her up - slung over his shoulder, this time - and carries her out of the room.

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Amaris wakes up.

Her head hurts. Like someone drilled a hole in it and started pouring in alcohol, from some pipette. Like that searing ache when you’ve eaten a whole chili pepper in one bite, spread out throughout her brain, spreading out in delicate curlicues throughout her body.

 

She is on a couch.

She can’t move her legs, or lower body.

Her hand moves up to brush at the back of her head, and - wire.

Television wire, squirming around like a bundle of snakes.

Okay. Okay, okay, okay, she can panic this is a perfectly reasonable time to panic but she cannot open her eyes she cannot open her eyes she won’t -

 

Half an hour later, having successfully panicked and successfully kept her eyes shut, she starts considering her options.

Her pockets are empty - Zeke must’ve had the foresight to empty them out -

But she hadn’t put the shard of broken time - or at least she though it was a shard of broken time, for all she knew it was a piece of decorative plastic - into her pocket. She’d stuffed it into her bra, with the smaller baggie. 

It might’ve been a bad idea, in retrospect - it’s sharpand doesn’t quite seem like something she wanted in contact with her body - but she’s glad of it, now.

She’s attached to something, now. She doesn’t know if it has lived for the lifespan of the world, or if it was born a hundred years ago. She doesn’t know if it’d been unearthed, as the construction site implied, or if it had simply re-arisen. She doesn’t know if it’s really as it presents itself, or if that’s some sort of facade; she doesn’t know if it’s really waking up, or if that’d been the rambling of a madwoman.

She knows that it wants her to pay attention

She knows that she wants it out of her head.

One hand rises, and grips the television wire. It feels like holding something venemous, something angry, something static electric -

Her other hand rises, and grips the shard of broken time.

Shrick. 

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Nothing explodes.

The world is buzzing, buzzing, buzzing, but - no explosions.

She tries moving her legs, experimentally, and - yep, she can.

Carefully, ever so carefully, time to get up off of the couch, walks over to behind the couch, and opens her eyes.

The sugar factory, and the courtyard.

No Caden, this time.

She tentatively touches the back of her head, expecting to find blood - nope. It seems perfectly fine.

Okay. She can - do this, probably. She can’t just kill Caden, again, and get out in the same way, but if the first thing that occurred to her, the first time around, worked, she’s probably going to find a second.

 

She spends a while, considering her options - she could try killing herself, but that seemed excessive, for the moment - she spends a little while staring at the sky.

- is that a star? Just one, dim, tune little star, barely visible in the darkness -

... no. 

She remembers something that her grandmother told her, once, a long time ago. She’d been watching television, and news anchors had been fawning over some celebrity or another, and her grandmother had muttered about how stars were just stars, from far away, all pretty and bright and shining. But then you got up close, and they were hooks, instead, and they’d catch on you and drag you up and up and up until you would do anything to keep riding their coattails.

There isn’t a star, up there. There is a hook.

She unties the bit of scarf still wrapped around her wrist. She stands, slowly, shakily - she still hasn’t gotten a speck of real sleep, tonight.

She takes the scarf. 

She flings it up, and it soars, unnaturally, fluidly, like a stream of blood flowing in reverse. Impossibly, unnaturally - it catches, on that single hook, in a lonely, darkened, muddled sky.

She starts climbing.

It should take ages, ages and ages and ages. Perhaps it does. But it feels like it takes minutes, the intervening time slipping away. Like blood, slipping away, hardly even missed...

She really does need to start coming up with less morbid similes.

She’s so, so close, then, to the light...

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“- girl? Girl, you must awaken, or else perish, as I perish alongside you. Do you wish to die in vain, girl? Wake up.

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She does.

Her head still feels like she bathed it in boiling water and gave it a thousand little paper cuts, on the inside, but - less so, than it did when she was still attached to the Botfly.

And she really, really has to use the restroom

She opens her eyes, half-expecting this to result in entrancement.

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The man she’s next to is handsome enough to suit the most discerning critic, bruises and dishevelment aside, but he’s not that pretty. They’re handcuffed together, with the chain running behind what looks like a - gas line? 

Their surroundings look distinctly suboptimal, as surroundings go; the foundation has a crack running through it, support pillar in the middle of the room is bending, and some madman dug a large hole through the floor, with a single ladder leading down it.

”Good. - good. Do you have a paperclip or pin? Other options are less pleasant.”

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She goes to shake her head - and stops, partway through the motion.

She'd almost forgotten about the ziplock.

She plucks it out of her bra, and deposits it’s contents into her hands. 

... a sparkly wristwatch, a folded piece of paper, and a paperclip.

She hands the man the paperclip, snaps on the wristwatch - a bit awkwardly, given her current state of confinement - and unfolds the note.

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He promptly starts fiddling with the handcuff - the end gets unfolded from the body, the tip goes into the little keyhole, he bends the rest of the paperclip against the handcuff so that the tip acquires a hook, and he sets to work.

The note reads:

Ceiling falls at 5:57.

Remember party!

- AJ (you AK, one before me AI)

PS: Tell the Woman, green is not her color, bad with complexion, too matchy.

PSS: Take gas-mask!

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And she can hear something singing, softly, off in the distance, voice perfect in every respect.

Someone can hear, child, someone can hear, 

Someone can see, child, someone can see,

Someone can feel, child, darling my dear,

No matter your hardship, there will be me...

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- her mother used to sing her that lullaby - god, that was just gratituously creepy -

She checks her watch - 

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They have two minutes.

The sound of singing is growing louder.

The man’s handcuff falls away, and he stares at her’s for about two seconds, before unceremoniously bending out the other end of the paperclip, and lodging it into the gap between handcuff and chain. He shimmies it a bit, and her own handcuff pops off.

“High quality handcuffs always guard keyholes, rarely guard gaps,” he comments, idly, standing up, pulling her to her feet, and then pulling her towards the hole. “It is like guarding windows but not walls. And we must go down ladder, now, dangerous to stay, someone approaches -“

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The singing stops, and a woman dressed in a green dress and an unnerving glow starts walking steadily down the stairs.

”Yes,” agrees a voice that seemed much farther away a few seconds ago. “Someone does.”

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He turns his head -

And stares.

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Amaris refrains from looking at her directly.

Can she just pull away and go down the ladder herself - no, doesn’t seem like it, he’s clinging too tightly to her hand -

Well then. 

She elbows him in the neck, and uses an added push to send him toppling backwards into the pit, before slipping out the shard of time and throwing it at her.

She leaps for the hole -

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The Woman in Green looks at the shard, annoyedly, and plucks it out of the air before it reaches her; it crumbles to dust in her hands -

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The man snaps back to alertness, as he’s falling, and grabs at the ladder; it helps, for a moment, and then promptly starts falling backwards with him -

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She grabs hold of the ladder, on her way down.

They fall.

So does the laundromat.

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Amaris Baker’s Dream, Age 16

 

She’s so, so drunk.

The world is spinning, and tilted, and truncated and elongated and stretched, and she keeps walking towards things and finding that they’re farther away than they appear, and bumping her shins, and having to lean on walls. And she’s giggling, and she doesn’t feel at all obliged to avoid walking on her toes, and she can gesture grandiosely, and her attempts at babbling incoherently get laughs instead of stairs, and it’s fun.

She knows that the next part isn’t fun. She knows that it’s horrible, and painful, and traumatizing. But she can’t stop giggling, anyways; the tone is a little different, less dizzying glee and more hysteria, but nobody seems to notice.

There’s one guy there, who’s cute, cute, cute; he latches on to her, and she latches on to him, and they’re kissing, and then he picks her up and brings her gracefully up the stairs. She knows that this ends poorly, this time around, even if she was ignorant the first time, but her head is spinning like a top and isn’t he such a nice boy, he would never do anything like that, he’s so nice -

And hadn’t had so much as a beer, that night.

She might’ve forgiven him, if he had.

He throws her onto the bed, and starts taking off his clothes, and she sits there, and giggles, and then he takes off her top, and she giggles, and he takes off her pants and she stops giggling, tries to say ‘no’ -

But she can’t quite manage it. Might not’ve been able to manage it sober. 

She tries to fend him off, but she’s slow, slow, slow, and he’s fast, and he just pins down her arms and breathes some sentence that she doesn’t quite hear and -

It’s horrible. It isn’t over quickly. Her mind is blank, for most of it, can’t quite accept what’s happening and she sort of wants to vomit and sort of wants to cry and mostly wants to stay very, very still -

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Someone knocks, sharply, on the door.

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That didn’t happen the first time.

The teenage athlete who’d previously been... occupied... lets out an exaggerated sigh, gets off of her, pulls on his underwear, and answers the door.

He blinks.

”Wait, what the -“

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The Amaris on the other side of the door has a gun, equipped with a silencer.

She shoots him.

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He gurgles, falls, gushes blood,

And dies.

She steps over his corpse - hugs her alternative version, hard, wraps her up in nearby blankets - and stands.

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Someone appears in the doorway. He winces, heavily, at the dead body.

”... um? I was looking for you but I couldn’t find you and then - what happened?”

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“Asshole,” says Amaris-J, with an illustrative gesture towards the corpse.

She mimes shooting it with the gun.

Dead asshole.”

And then she levels the gun at Caden, raising an eyebrow.

”Dead asshole?”

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“... yes to the first part, no to the second? Um, please don’t shoot me, I’ve already died twice and it really isn’t as fun as it looks?”

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The younger Amaris murmurs ‘friend’, hoarsely, to the older one; the older one nods, shrugs, and holsters the gun.

”Leave room, leave dream: do in next few minutes. Good luck. Goodbye.”

She leaves.

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“... do you need any help?”

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... she shakes her head, after a moment, and makes a little ‘shoo’ gesture. 

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“I’ll - go have my impending emotional breakdown in a corner somewhere, I guess, sorry. Um, good luck?”

 

He leaves.

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Amaris, after a few minutes of processing, calculation, and staring at the dead body, gets up, and puts on her previously discarded clothing.

And then she, too, leaves.

She doesn’t look back.

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“- girl? Girl, I cannot linger long, if I should live; if you are alive and of some consciousness, speak, else I should go and you should drown.”

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It’s completely dark, and completely cold, and she’s completely covered in still-sloshing mud, from neck to toe. She’s also just barely coming to alertness, glad that she’s leaning against a wall and accordingly without need to support her own weight, and rarely capable of speech on more ordinary occasions -

- he’ll have to settle for a dull ‘nnnnnnnnnnngh’ sound.

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It’ll do.

”Make sound, and stay still. I will get you, and we will go,” he says, starting to drudge through the muck.

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Oh, will he.

She thinks that this maiden is going to rescue herself, thanks but no thanks. She starts humming the tune to ‘I will survive’. 

She’s lying down, mostly, with only a little elevation from the wall. She starts drawing herself up - slowly, slowly - 

Her hair presses against her scalp.

She raises one hand up, tentatively, and - it’s a dryer, or a washer, just barely propped up by the wall. She can feel it, slowly sliding down, millimeter by millimeter.

 

Great. She’s about to be crushed to death. Or drowned. Or both. 

The fact that she’s still humming the tune of ‘I will survive’ starts to seem hilarious, all of a sudden. Because she’s not going to survive, you see. She’s going to die. She climbed out of hell with a magic scarf, crushed an impossibly beautiful green woman under a laundromat, relived her rape, made tentative friends with a ghost, travelled through time on several occasions, escaped from the clutches of someone who presumably ate four dozen eggs, every morning to help him grow large, and now that he’s grown he eats five dozen eggs, so he’s roughly the size of a -

She giggles, with an edge of hysteria, and switches to humming that song. Much less on the nose. Good job, Amaris, your death will be a little less ironic, now.

Ha, ha. Ha, ha ha, ha ha ha ha fucking ha -

Oh look. She’s crying. 

Her feet kick out, tentatively - maybe she can shuffle to the side, maybe she can make it -

It isn’t very wise, flailing around like that, when everything around you is being held up by fond dreams and thick, squishy, wet-sand-esque mud.

You might knock over something important, you see, and then where would you be?

 

She knocks over something important. 

The dryer falls.

Amaris dies.

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He hears the crash, and the squelch, and the abrupt cessation of sound.

 

He sighs. 

“Oh lord and master and governor of all, father of our lord Jesus Christ,” he begins, in Russian. “Who desires not the death of a sinner, but rather that they may turn from his wickedness and live, willing that all men should be saved and come to the knowledge of the truth. We pray for you to loose the soul of your servant -“

He continues on in that vein for a while, and concludes with a quiet ‘amen’.

And he’s never gotten particularly good at echolocating, but he’s practiced it, a fair deal, and it’s enough to give him a vague guess at his surroundings, combined with decent night vision. There’s a tunnel, leading out of the room, relatively unobstructed by debris; he walks into it, and continues on, for a while.

Trudge, trudge, trudge -

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He encounters a television, eventually, standing in the mud.

It shows static, in spite of its concpicuous lack of power source.

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... it’s flickering - or, no, the light is constant, but its flickering in some deeper sense, jumping in and out of his vision -

He nudges it with his foot - it falls, face first, into the mud -

And he disappears. 

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He lands in the laundromat. 

A clock on the wall says ‘1:53’ - AM, presumably, given the general darkness of the place. He peers, briefly, out the windows -

That’s... a moon. And that’s... the girl that he just saw die, carrying a laundry hamper, looking tired.

... time travel. 

It’s ridiculous, as an explanation, but it fits. 

He doesn’t know the rules, here - doesn’t know if he’ll break reality by changing anything - but he finds he’s distinctly disinclined to let events happen as they had. It’s embarrassing - first he’s taken down effortlessly by some random blond, then he’s entranced by some sort of bewitching gorgon and has to be saved by some civilian, then he lets that same civilian die - 

He turns sharply away from the windows, towards the employee’s only area where he’d been kept -

And stops.

There’s a shard of cheap, tacky plastic, lit faintly by some internal glow, lodged in the back of the television. 

It seems... important, somehow. Like one of those splash photographs, where most of the world is grey and only one object is allowed its color.

He leans down, grabs hold of it, and pulls it out; some of it comes out, and some of it breaks off inside, with a somehow distinctive ‘shrick’.

He stares at it, for a few moments, before pocketing it, and continuing to walk.

The door to the employee’s only area starts to open, as he reaches for the handle.

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Nathaniel is saved by the grace of outward-opening doors.

If the door had swung inward, he would’ve been finished, unless he’d tried to stab the man with plastic shard. As is, he can hide behind the swinging of the door, duck in under the huge man’s arm, and, miracle of miracles, avoid notice.

He mutters something in Russian, as the door closes, and looks around.

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His earlier self is tied up in a corner, thoroughly unconscious; the rest of the room looks as he remembers it.

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... including the backwards safe. 

He’d spent so long staring at it, wondering what it could possibly contain, thinking about what it could ssibly contain. It wasn’t like it became less obviously a safe, turned around so that it faced the wall, unless you were oblivious enough to mistake a large metal box for something more innocuous -

He notes that the lights have turned on, and that the blonde man is blabbering something to the girl.

He decides to turn around the safe.

It’s heavy, but the process doesn’t make much sound. And the rest is child’s play - he’s cracked more than one safe, in his time, and this one is so basic as to be trivial - 

- he opens it.

Quite contrary to his expectations, it doesn’t have even one eldritch abomination, waiting patiently to devour his face.

It has a tastefully black backpack, a miniature flashlight, and a note, written in his own handwriting.

Take out the tourniquet, and the medication, from the backpack; it takes some sting and pain from paradox, although painful it remains. Do what is needed, do no more, turn around the safe, and put on the backpack. Do not tarry.”

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Well then. Only one thing to do.

He ties the tourniquet, injects the medication with a practiced hand, tosses the syringe back into the safe, and takes out the flashlight and the backpack, putting the latter garment on. He closes the safe, and turns it back around, slowly, painstakingly, letting out little grunts of exertion.

He hears the same voice as earlier, outside, muttering indistinctly, and some truly concerning thumps and thuds and crashes; he ignores them. He feels wind picking up; he ignores it.

He puts the miniature flashlight in his earlier version’s pocket, and puts the backpack on.

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The wind is getting faster, faster, faster -

 

“Hello, Nathaniel,” says a beautiful, green woman, in a beautiful, green dress, from behind him.

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- he hadn’t heard the door open -

He spins around, and pointedly avoids looking at her directly. The wind feels less like wind, now, and more like a uniform pressure, matting his hair down against his head, pressing down on his clothing -

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She takes three steps forward, blindingly quick, seizing his wrists with one hand, pulling down his head with the other -

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He looks, involuntarily, and sees something blindingly bright and blindingly green and beautiful beyond description -

And then he’s gone.

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“Make sound, and stay still; I will get you, and we will go,” he says, starting to drudge through the muck.

His hand, goes absently, to his pocket, and - a miniature flashlight.

How does he have a miniature flashlight. He distinctly remembers the blonde man searching his pockets, and there’s no way he could’ve possibly missed something that conspicuous - 

Whatever. He fiddles with it, for a little, turns it on, and continues drudging.

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Oh, will he.

She thinks that this maiden is going to rescue herself, thanks but no thanks. She starts humming the tune to ‘I will survive’. 

She’s lying down, mostly, with only a little elevation from the wall. She starts drawing herself up - slowly, slowly - 

Her hair presses against her scalp.

She raises one hand up, tentatively, and - it’s a dryer, or a washer, just barely propped up by the wall. She can feel it, slowly sliding down, millimeter by millimeter.

 

She almost panics - it’s a very near thing - but then the flashlight comes on, and she can see, just a little, and she’s only a little tempted to start catastrophizing.

She climbed out of hell with a magic scarf, crushed an impossibly beautiful green woman under a laundromat, relived her rape, made tentative friends with a ghost, travelled through time on several occasions, and escaped from the clutches of a gigantic nordic man incongruously named ‘Zeke’. A dryer is hardly going to inconvenience her.

She can do this.

And she has a light of her own, doesn’t she?

She unwraps the bandage around her hand, just a little, just a touch - 

Green.

Green light pours out. The - washer, dryer, whatever it is - is still on top of her, but she can see that if she just scooted a little to the left - carefully, oh so carefully - and then just sort of nudged aside those linoleum floor tiles - 

She’s out. 

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And Nathaniel can see her!

He looks at the light, then looks at her, looks at the light then looks at her -

 

“... I will have questions, later. For now: the tunnel?”

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She nods.

He stays still, while she reaches him, and then they carefully, carefully walk out of the tunnel, and spend a while walking in silence, through the cold, and the mud.

(Is it her imagination, but does it smell... sweet? Like something putrid, producing honey to attract its prey.)

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(It isn’t her imagination.)

They eventually encounter a television, standing up in the muck, showing static in spite of its lack of power - flickering, in some metaphysical sense -

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He tentatively nudges it over, and it lands, face down, in the mud -

- he disappears, he collects the shard and goes into the room and opens the safe and reads the note and injects the medication and puts a flashlight in his past self’s pocket and puts on the backpack and is seized by the Woman in Green - 

And he reappears.

 

“... time travel is very complicated,” he reports, stepping away from the television. “You may have to assist me in standing.”

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(Bzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz - the television stopped flickering, at least, but she’s still cold and muddy and sleep deprived and haunted by a faint sense of unreality, of danger, of television static -)

She nods, and goes into a position where she can help him stay on his feet.

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And he - doesn’t seize, exactly, but he does abruptly need quite a bit of help staying upright. His eyes go unfocused, and he starts muttering, softly, in Russian.

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She can probably help him stay in place indefinitely, even when he’s only barely better than dead weight - but they can’t, actually, stay here indefinitely; it’s so cold, and the mud is even colder, and they’ll probably freeze to death.

So she starts moving, carefully avoiding the prone form of the television.

(She doesn’t think it’s really a television. She thinks it’s something else. Something old, something seen, something borrowed, something green -)

 

It’s hard. It’s hard and it’s horrible and it’s long, just getting to the end of the tunnel. And the end of the tunnel isn’t the end, really. It’s the beginning of a long, horrible little journey across more mud.

She’d heard Wendy - earlier, in the office building, when she went back in time - mention ‘buildings underground’. 

She knows, now, what Wendy had meant.

The Astro Sugar factory, buried beneath the surface. Several Astro Sugar factories, warped and mutated and twisted together, if she read the landscape right. All encased beneath a giant, darkened dome, with only one visible gap in the structure, at the very top.

There’s a little concrete island, twenty meters or so from the tunnel entrance, protruding from the mud. 

Just twenty meters. She only has to make it for twenty. fucking. meters.

One step, keeping an insensate Russian man who weighs more than she does from falling over, slowly freezing, as exhausted as she’s ever been. Another step, keeping an unconscious Russian man who weighs more than she does from falling over, slowly freezing, as exhausted as she’s ever been. Another step, keeping... 

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Step one: contemplate the ultimate futility of existence.

Step two: consider how the odds are stacked against you so hard it’s not even funny, anymore, it’s just sort of sad. 

Step three: shiver at the cold, at the mud slipping against your skin, at the smell of something sugary and decayed, at the psychosomatic sensation of maggots writhing up your arm, at the hints of green light peering out of corners and dark places, at the complete certainty that you are going to fail and die a miserable death.

Step four: keep walking, keep moving, keep breathing and fighting and clawing your way up against everything that’s trying to keep you down, it’s hard and it would be so, so easy to stop, so easy to panic and flail and drown and die - but you don’t you won’t you won’t.

Step five: succeed.

Step six: collapse, and dream.

 

Amaris succeeds. She doesn’t know how, but she lugs the Russian man over the mud and the muck and she climbs up onto the island and she drags him up, and she pants, and she shivers, and she rests, for a moment. She opens up the backpack and discovers two space blankets and more heat pads than she knows what to with. She rolls the Russian onto the space blanket, breaks a few heat pads, and wraps him up, and then does the same with herself. She feels shaky tendrils of warmth, tentatively, painfully make their way down her limbs, and she’s so tired...

Amaris dreams.

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Amaris Baker’s Dream, Age 11

 

She’s at the theatre. 

She’d rather not be at the theatre, honestly, stage productions are lame, but her parents think she needs more ‘culture’ or something, so the theater she is at. It’s playing ‘Hamlet’, except it’s one of those weird versions of Hamlet where everything is super modern, and people’s ‘rapiers’ are really guns, and stuff. 

But she sorta likes it. Like, she doesn’t like like it, but it’s okay. All of the actors are good at delivering their lines, and this Gertrude seems way more complex than the way she’s presented in the written version, and there’s something relaxing about being allowed to just zone out and stare at something interesting, you know?

... though she didn’t want to zone out and stare at that ‘something interesting’. 

You know. The green one.

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The green one seems to have other plans. 

 “A chalice for the nonce, whereon but sipping,” says Claudius, on stage, “he by chance escape your venomed stuck, our purpose may hold there - but stay, what noise?”

That’s supposed to be when Gertrude arrives on stage.

It isn’t.

 

”One woe doth tread upon another’s heel,” says the Woman in Green, fluttering onto the stage after a pause. “Your sister’s drowned, Laertes.”

Every actor on stage pauses to stare at her, awed; everyone in the audience leans forward in their seat.

Laertes still manages to say “Drowned? O’, where?” in a small, awestruck voice.

 

And then he isn’t there. There’s nobody else in all the theatre. 

The Woman in Green smiles slightly, and turns to face Amaris, leaning forward.

”At the bottom of a hole in the ground,” she says. “Covered in mud, pointless, insignificant, panicking, pitiful, alone. Is it not sad, Amaris? Is it not sad, being so alone? I can be your friend, Amaris, and everyone can be your friend, and everything can be perfect forever. Everything will be perfect forever, Amaris. Everything will be fine. You just have to look.”

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That isn’t how this is supposed to go. 

But this is her dream.

And there’s someone else, who lives in her dreams, who comes out on special occasions - 

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And she isn’t alone.

And there is somebody else in the entire theater.

He looks at the Woman in Green, not seeming awestruck in the slightest.

”... hello, shadow,” he says.

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“Hello, little boy. Thank you, Amaris, your cooperation will no longer be required.”

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What is it with the Woman and vaguely ominous statements - 

Whatever. 

Time to grab Caden’s hand, dart over to an aisle, and commence RUNNING THE FUCK AWAY.

(And fidget one scarf-scrap off of her wrist, just in case -)

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The Woman in Green gives them a moment’s head start.

Then she takes a few steps backwards, starts running forwards, leaps like a wild cat about to make a kill - 

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No time to think -

They’ve reached the back of the theatre, by now, and it’s about level with the stage -

She flings the scarf towards one of the rafters; it wraps around it, and holds. 

She grips Caden’s hand, holds onto the scarf for dear life, and swings them both over rows and rows of cushioned seats, to the stage.

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They only narrowly avoid the Woman in Green’s midair trajectory. She claws at them, ineffectually, making a sort of hissing sound - 

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And then they’re on the stage.

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Caden really hadn’t thought that would work.

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But it did. 

She darts to the left, leading them backstage - 

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And they’re in a different memory.

She isn’t eleven, anymore. She’s twelve, and very proud of that fact; they’re at a moderately fancy restaurant, eating moderately fancy food with moderately fancy relatives, to celebrate.

”So, Amaris,” says her uncle. He always wears a business suit and a tie, and he’s the most moderately fancy of anyone here. “How is school going?”

She stares at him, blankly.

Her father’s smile grows strained.

”We’re homeschooling her,” says her mother, dabbing at her mouth wth a napkin. “She’s excellent at math, history, and science, although even though we have to spend more time on English she excels at it, really, so long as she really applies herself...”

”You can’t just keep coddling her,” opines the uncle, who in addition to being the most moderately fancy is also the most moderately drunk. “She’s gonna have to live in the real world at some point. What are you gonna do, just keep her in that house ‘till she’s fifty?”

”Plenty of people homeschool their children,” glares her father. “She just needs time...”

”She’s gonna need more of it than you can give her, if she keeps acting like a re -“

“Stop it, Mark,” snaps her mother. “Amaris, sit down.”

Oh, had she stood? She hadn’t realized.

She runs. She runs and she runs and she runs and she’s in the restaurant’s bathroom, sniffling and looking in the mirror and sniffling some more.