Know that your worldscape is ashen, Its star husks long withered away, And the colours you''ve seen a kaleidoscope screen Erupting in fits from the grey. Know that your world is a dreaming, Your starlight the winking of minds, Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere. Their churning avulsion encodes the emulsion Of yearning and death that it binds. Know that your shout is eternal, The scream of your life held within, Forevermore bound is that cold echoed sound That dies and rebirths in the din.- Post-Collapse era liturgy, First Committee World.
They say that the limit to luck is a curve that bends into forever. I say that there is no limit, buddy, because forever¡äs just a long fucking time.- Substrate whisper, unknown provenance. â…« Last Slice She held the phone in her hand delicately, balanced on one palm while the fingers of the other dangled over the screen, as if it were an animal rescued from the wild that she was trying to introduce to a human touch for the first time. The green "call" icon glowed a soft and inviting green, but rather than be soothed she felt like it was trying to lull her into a false sense of security. The halogen strip bulbs buzzed overhead, and their light glinted from the dark glass in a far less healthy-looking yellow. Her index finger dropped another half-inch towards the screen, leaving scarcely a centimetre of empty air between them, and she was on the brink of closing that distance when something clanged loudly from the direction of the kitchen, causing her to jolt backwards and almost drop the phone entirely. Fuck. Why was this always the hardest part of a call? She dithered for another few seconds before finally deciding that she was being silly, and stabbing at the button. The speaker buzzed unpleasantly as she held it up to her ear. She counted six rings before the sound gave way to soft static, followed by a cheery voice. "Hi! It''s Michelle. I can''t answer the phone right now, so please leave me a message, and I''ll try to get back to you. Peace!" She swore softly, then just as rapidly clapped a hand over her mouth in case the microphone was picking her up. Thankfully she had managed to pre-empt the recording tone. She let it play out, then affected a casual cheerfulness as she spoke down the line. "Hey Shellie, it''s, uh, it''s April. I just wanted to apologise for running out on you the other night, and... for, you know. For what happened. I know I should have stuck around for a little longer but, I was embarrassed, and... and I know that''s not an excuse, but I hope I can make it up to you? I had a really good time, and-" The metal kitchen door popped open, revealing the head, shoulders and single arm of a tall, large-framed man with long hair and a biker''s glove. He opened his mouth as if to say something, paused when he saw that April was on the phone, and instead settled for frantically waving at her, then beckoning her towards the door, emoting something indistinct with his eyes. "-hey, sorry. I have to go, I''m on break. But maybe call me back later? Or I''ll call you? If that''s okay. And- uh, let me know if you want me to come around again this week, we can finish watching that thing with the cannibals and I can buy take out to make up for-" The man in the doorway was shooting her an increasingly exasperated expression. "-okay, yeah. Speak later, have to go. Bye." She pressed the end call button and gave the man a hard stare. "What is it, Fabian? Not a good time." "Hey, hey, don''t shoot the messenger now." Fabian stepped into the break room fully, revealing the rest of his plaid shirt and the other biker''s glove. "Kate''s getting off early, so you need to take over." "What, so I don''t get my 30 minutes? Whatever happened to workplace rights?" Fabian glanced at the wall clock, which was ticking away avidly despite being well overdue for a new set of AAs. "April, it''s five past. You''re already over." "Crap, really? Crap!" "Were you on the phone that whole time?" April pulled herself to her feet and started shrugging her apron on, struggling to unknot the cords, but managing to tighten them even further in the process. Eventually she gave up and threw the loop of fabric over her head, letting it dangle down behind her. "No, I was just... you know, looking at it." "You were... looking at your dial pad?" "It''s a smartphone, Fabe. They can do things other than just make calls now." "Right. And, were you doing any of those things?" She dithered for a moment. "Well, no, but-" Fabian snorted. "Right, right, I see." "You stop giving me that look and let me through. Don''t you have deliveries you''re supposed to be making about now?" "Not now, no, so you''re stuck with me." Fabian grinned, stepping out the way as she walked through the door and into the kitchen, bee-lining for the sink. He trailed after her as she twisted the tap and started scrubbing her palms. "So, was this a Michelle thing?" he asked. She scrunched up her nose at him, squeezing a glob of soap out into her hands. "None of your fucking business, Fabe." "Come on, I''m happy for you! I was the one who told you you should give it a try, right?" "Yeah, Fabian, but that''s always your advice." "Because it''s always good advice." He grinned placidly. April sighed. "I think it''s more a matter of a stopped clock being right twice a day." "Ouch, April, that''s rough. Give me some credit here." She relented slightly. "Okay, fine. Thank you for the push." "You''re welcome." There was a few seconds of silence while April dried her hands off with a square of blue tissue. "So, did you guys get to like, second base? Or-" "Okay!" interrupted April, as she walked over to the counter, squinting up at the incoming order board. "How about we change the subject." The screen read, ¡®Sporks Rings of Fury! 2x. Extr. Pep.ni''. She reached up to a shelf above her and grabbed blindly at the chopped onions container, discovered it was empty, and sighed, reaching for the unchopped onion container instead. "Sure. Hey, wanna hear about this guy I just delivered to?" April sighed internally. Great, one of Fabian''s famous delivery anecdotes. Still, it was probably better than talking about... "Yeah, Fabe, lay it on me." He cracked a grin. "Okay, so this place was down in Wanstead, right? On those little roads by the Tesco. Anyway, I got there, and I walked up to the door and rang the bell and, like- okay. At first I thought, ''well, the bell must not be working,'' because I wasn''t hearing shit from inside the house, or- well, I was also thinking, like, ''maybe their door is just really thick.'' So I reached out to knock instead but then the bell does start ringing¡ªI guess it was, like, on a pretty major delay?¡ªand it''s this classical music shit, you know the one? ''Dun dun dun dun, dun dun dun-'' you know, that one." April nodded, vaguely. "Anyway, so I''m hearing that and its playing for like a good ten or twenty seconds before the door starts to unlock, and- hey, hey- you still listening? Hey, April?" Even if the honest answer was probably ¡®not really'', her typical modus operandi during Fabian''s delivery monologues was to let him get on with it and enjoy himself. She nodded at him in half-hearted encouragement, trying not to lose focus on the onion she was now idly chopping with one hand. Fabian seemed to be catching onto her, however. He walked over and snapped his fingers in front of her face in an irritating manner. April waved him off, causing them to briefly engage in a bout of one-handed arm-to-arm combat. "Hey, come on now, you were the one who told me to change the subject." "I''m listening! But I also have to, like, actually do my job?" She pushed the trayful of sliced onions to one side with a dramatic flourish of her knife, an action that was undermined by a couple of loose pieces falling to the floor. Fabian watched as they landed, wetly. "Aw, come on April, you could drop those onions on the floor in your sleep, and you know it. Look, I understand if you''re distracted..." Fabian had a glint in his eye, so she did her best to cut him off before the topic steered back towards more dangerous waters. "No, no, stop, none of that. Please go back to telling me about the house you just delivered to. Trust me, I''m riveted." "You better be!" He grinned. "Right, so, the door unlocks, and there''s this guy there, right? Completely shirtless, which- well, you get that all the time, but this guy- whoof! - this guy was something else, man, I tell you, I''ve never seen a dude with so much hair. For a second I thought he was literally a gorilla, except he was also wearing this shitty wooden bead necklace from a charity shop, and he had a waxed moustache and I thought to myself, this guy- this guy- wait, hold on a moment." April glanced back up at him, seeing that he''d been distracted by the monitor that was displaying the list of outgoing orders. He snatched up a worn-looking motorcycle helmet with his left arm, and then was forced to set it down on the counter-top again almost immediately, in order to shrug into the strap of an insulated messenger bag from the loose pile by the door. "Shit, I''ve gotta head out again in a minute. Kate left one in the heater, one in the oven. Let me know when it''s done and I''ll take them both." "Yeah, sure." April paused in her chopping for a moment as she watched him fumble with the keys in his jacket pocket, considering whether to throw him a bone before finally deciding that she probably owed him it. "So, uh. What happened?" "Huh? What?" Fabian shot her a vaguely confused glance as he looked up from the keys. "What happened? With the, uh- the hairy guy?" "Oh. Well, uh, to be honest? Not actually that much really." He shot a bright smile in defiance to her unimpressed expression, then stuck the helmet over his head. "But he was really fucking hairy." "Sure." April looked back down at the chopping board, her hands now working automatically. He grimaced. "One of these days I''m going to find something that will actually hold your attention more than your cooking does." "The cooking''s a job, Fabian. I genuinely find hearing about your, uh, like, your hairy guy and all that- it''s more interesting than making pizzas. I''m just... dedicated to my work is all." "Still, clearly I need to up my anecdote game. If you ever hear about, like, a crash-landed UFO you could tell me about, or if you decide to set Sporks on fire in a blaze of retribution for its sins against our fellow proles- both of those would make pretty good stories for my next gig, I reckon." April scoffed. "Well I''m not burning the place down when I still need to get paid this month, Fabe, so I''m afraid you''re out of luck on that front." "Fine, well, you can keep an eye out for the UFO instead. If you can hook me up with an alien I''ll forgive you for burning the place down." "Hook you up with-" "Noooooot like that." He turned back towards the door. "Look, I''ll be back in a bit. Keep things chugging while I''m gone?" "''course, Fabe." "Oh, and April?" Fabian was still looking at her. "Yeah?" "Please, don''t actually set the place on fire." April could almost feel the wink behind his visor as she scoffed, but before she could say anything, he had walked through the door and out of the prep area. April indulged in a sarcastic eye-roll that only she was party to. Fabian was far from the least tolerable guy she''d had the pleasure of working with in this place, but he had a certain non-stop pace to his conversation that made him best experienced in short doses. That said, it was probably that attitude of transforming mundane everyday interactions into conversational fuel that was allowing him to stand against the tide of Sporks'' typically rapid employee turnover rate. A speedy arrival and even more speedy departure for colleagues had been the norm since the eight months since April had been brought on. Seemingly, Fabian wasn''t the only thing about Sporks that was best experienced in small doses. There was also the pizza itself, for example. "The problem is," she thought to herself, scraping loose onion pieces into a cheap plastic bowl with the company''s logo embossed at the bottom, "that this place has almost no redeeming qualities whatsoever." Sporks was one of those corporate chains that had managed to streamline and optimize away most of the common sense out of its business model. Sure, the pizza got made quick, the menu had pretty much anything you might want out of a self-respecting delivery chain, and she was sure it made more than enough money to keep her and the ever-rotating cast of motorcycle jockeys employed. But she couldn''t help but notice that there were several basic questions about the place that seemed to have been overlooked by whatever anonymous suit set the agenda. "Like, for instance, why is a pizza chain named Sporks, after a piece of cutlery that isn''t even actually used to eat pizza? What the fuck is up with that? Hell, is a spork even a real piece of cutlery anyway, or is it just a weirdo hybrid? And why do we still have to put the little white plastic pizza tables in the boxes, even though the cardboard boxes have their own tabs built in to stop the food getting crushed? Is there actually somebody in charge of thinking about this stuff, or does it all just manifest out of the ether, in defiance of all fundamental laws of physical reality?" She pushed her bowl of onion to one side, muttering something indistinct about the inefficiency of corporate bureaucracy, and was just about to grab another onion when the heating element on one of the oven racks clicked off, the timer buzzing as it hit zero to indicate the termination of its "bake" phase. April reached over to pull out the finished pizza that Fabian had wanted. She wondered why it was that she had stayed at Sporks, instead of following the example of her former co-workers'' consensus good sense. For all her complaints, she was still on the staff roll after more than half a year. Perhaps her managers looked favourably on her for that, believing that after years of searching they had finally found the dedicated long-termer they had been looking for. April cringed internally at the prospect. Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon. No, it wasn''t personal loyalty that had kept her from moving on like the others, nor was it any particular passion for preparing mediocre stuffed-crust. If she was honest with herself, it was more a sort of apathetic disinterest in moving on to anywhere else. Taken charitably, she stayed because she didn''t want to uproot her life. Less charitably, and probably most accurately, remaining at Sporks was the path of least resistance. Sliding one of the cardboard sheaths out of the stacked pile behind her, she twisted the tabs until it snapped up into its pizza-ready configuration. Manoeuvring her other hand, which was holding the pizza tray, she slid the cooked pie down into the box, then reached behind her for a pizza wheel, the final step in the pizza ritual before dispatching her newborn circular offspring to whichever weirdo had wanted both pineapple and triple olives. It was on the third slice of the wheel across the pizza-face that she looked up and saw the monkey. April had been to a zoo once, and so she was familiar with the concept of monkeys, if not quite enough to identify species at a glance. It reminded her vaguely of a video she had seen once of urban monkey populations in India, although when she thought about it she decided that the face was probably a little too flat, and given that she didn''t have any other leads at that moment decided that she probably had more important things to worry about. "Like, for instance," she thought as her thoughts stuttered and caught up with the present, "the fact that there is a monkey perched on the counter-top in front of the window at Sporks". "Yeah," her brain decided, "that is really not where a monkey is supposed to be." For one thing, any sort of animal in the kitchen was a big hygiene no-no, potentially even a store-closing and pay-check-impacting event. Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, the last time she had checked wild monkeys were not typically native to North London. But it couldn''t be a wild monkey, could it? If it were a wild monkey, then how could she explain what had been done to its face? If this monkey had escaped from a zoo and made Sporks its first port of call, perhaps for a quick snack on its whistle-stop tour of the city, she would have expected the typical plain-faced monkey look. Instead, the little animal looked like it had been preparing to attend some sort of exotic carnival. Across its tiny face was an intricate blossoming flower of colour, mixed into the fur as if somebody had splashed it with a handful of powder paint, somehow managing to apply that handful in perfectly symmetrical floral flourishes. Vibrant burgundy stripes contrasted violently with delicate blue-violet filigree, all set against the backdrop of a yellow-orange starburst pattern, which dissolved outwards at the edges into a tight gradient of gradually diminishing dots before ultimately fading away into the baseline brown of the creature''s fur. If somebody had decorated the monkey in this way, they had done an extremely thorough job. April wondered how they had applied the dye without the monkey moving and disrupting the exacting precision, but then again, in the entire time that she had been taking the creature in¡ªa full fifteen seconds by that point, standing there slack-jawed and dumbfounded¡ªit hadn''t moved a muscle. It just sat there, stock still, staring at her with saucer-like, slightly-too-large-eyes. The eyes, she noticed with a shock, were twin spheres of uniform, glassy scarlet. "Twelve," said the monkey. April jolted backwards, her back jerking into a rigid upright pose that almost scattered the pizza slices she had been excavating out across the tile floor. As it was, the box slid out precariously far over the counter''s edge, and the cutting wheel she had been holding came loose from her grip, flicking upward in a curving arc that saw it clatter against a pile of stacked steel pans behind her. The loud crash that this made distracted April for long enough that she almost lost track of the monkey as it darted backwards out of the window behind it, to a mixture of her relief and confusion as she tried to remember when it could have been unlocked and opened. As she moved her eyes back up to where it had been, she caught a flash of brown and scarlet that quickly disappeared out of sight behind the pane. April stared instead at the spot on the counter where it had been. She had never been the type of person to be one-hundred-percent certain of her overall mental stability, but even she had to admit that hallucinating talking monkeys would be a pretty dismal development for her mental health. Nonetheless, it had definitely at least sounded like the monkey had spoken to her. Or... "Maybe," she muttered to herself, "it was a trained animal." She thought of how parrots were able to repeat the sounds of human speech, and considered that, after all, hadn''t the monkey been decorated as if it were accessory to some kind of performance? Yes, it was probably some sort of show monkey, that had escaped from a wandering circus, and its act was that had been taught to... speak? Could monkeys usually even make those kinds of sounds? And why would you teach it to say "twelve"? While one half of her mind wondered what sort of travelling circus could have so close to her workplace that its counting monkey had shown up there during her shift, and the other continued to doubt the evidence of her senses, she slowly walked across to the counter-top where the monkey had been sitting, reaching a hand out across it. Her fingers rapped against the cold surface of the window pane. The window which was still locked firmly shut. "Hey, so- I remembered something else about the hairy guy," said Fabian conversationally as he strolled back through the door, startling April out of her reverie. "I thought there was something else, but I guess I forgot? Anyway, see, he had this tattoo¡ªI could see it beneath the hair, kinda stretched out over one peck and going under his armpit. And at first I thought it was like, a flexing bicep or something, but. But, uh. Hey, April, you okay there? What''s wrong?" April had whirled around and was staring at him, wild-eyed. Fabian looked at her with a slightly concerned expression as he scooped up the box of pizza she had been midway through cutting and folded it up under his arm alongside the box that he was already carrying. "I- I thought I saw something?" April''s voice was uncertain. "Yeah? Like what?" "Like..." She couldn''t bring herself to actually say it out loud. "Fabian? Did you ever see, like... animals, around here? By the window, or...?" "What, like, a dog or something? I mean yeah, I think there''s a stray or that''s been hanging around the bins recently. It''s like- what do you call them? Those little things with the- the fur-" He made vague twisting motions with his hands. "The curly fur, you know. Did you see it?" "I- No, I don''t think think it was, uh, that." "Well let me know if you do, because last time I saw it I told myself, ''I should probably call animal control to come pick the lil'' guy up'', but then I thought, if I did that and they came out, I''d be the one who has to find it, and it''s not like I really know where to start. I haven''t seen where it sleeps or anything, just seen it after we put the bins out some days, and hey, Kate probably wouldn''t want me taking time out of my shift to go look. But if you manage to figure out where it''s hiding most days we can probably..." April let him keep speaking as he slide his cargo into the delivery bag and shouldered it, his keys awkwardly dangling from an outside finger. As she watched him, she suddenly noticed a faint tapping sound coming from somewhere in the vicinity of the counter-top, and spun back around to look out the window, fully expecting to see a faceful of red-painted fur peering back at her. Squinting out through the glass, she lost the thread of Fabian''s ongoing monologue as he walked back out through the door. No monkey. No, because she realised now that the faint tapping noise wasn''t tapping at all, but rather a slightly irregular drip of liquid falling onto the faux-marble counter-top beneath her. Looking down, she realised with a sudden shock that she was bleeding. A straight, thin gash had been sliced across the edge of her palm up to the base of her pinky finger. A surprisingly large volume of blood had already seeped out of the shallow wound, which she belatedly realised must have been the result of her earlier mishandling of the pizza cutter. Something inside April froze ice cold. Moving automatically, her heart thudding, she ran over to the sink to stem the cut with a balled-up wad of kitchen roll, and wrapped an additional strip over the top of that to secure it. The shock of seeing the monkey had totally numbed her to the pain, but she was feeling it now; the throbbing beat of her pulse, the sharp sting of severed tissue, the dark red stain dripping from her fingers. She saw the loosely spattered red trail of droplets marking her path as she had walked across the room. Her blood. Blood. April felt the rising bile of a queasy horror in her throat. The horror rose until it was something closer to sharp panic. and her eyes traced the trail of droplets to where they terminated, at the counter-top where she had been doing her slicing earlier. A watery red stain traced out a line with a sharp right-angle, the outline of the cardboard box that had been sitting there until a minute prior. Fabian, you fucking idiot, how could you not notice? It wasn''t a fear of blood that April had; not exactly, anyway. Her specific phobia stemmed more from what the blood represented; a near irrational, almost extra-physical sense of blood as a vector contamination. A biological contaminant, spilling free from her body to soak into the surfaces, the floors, the slightly-grimy-but-still-nominally-mostly-sanitized cracks and crevices of the Sporks kitchen food prep area. "And," thought April as she hurried towards the door to the motorbike bay, "into the fucking pizza that we are supposed to be serving to our fucking customers. I swear to god Fabian, if you spent a fraction of the time observing your own surroundings that you spend prattling on about people you delivered to one time..." She burst out through the door of the delivery bay just in time to catch sight of Fabian, battered red biker''s helmet affixed to his head, speeding off around the corner. For a few short moments, she considered just leaving the matter there. It was only blood, after all. She was pretty sure that it was inside of most people. She had no logical reason to suspect that her blood in particular would cause undue harm to anyone, even if it were mixed in, near invisibly, with the tomato sauce... She suppressed the gag reflex that accompanied her next stab of panic, and realised that something inside her just wasn''t going to let her live with that image, not today. Their Sporks outlet had three motorbikes set aside for regular deliveries, and one backup bike, sans-brand-livery, that was kept as a spare in case of mechanical issues. Fabian had one of the regular three, and one of their other delivery staff, Nadine, had taken a second out on a long distance call some forty minutes previously. This was the Sunday shift, though, and despite it being late evening they typically only fielded two riders, leaving the third bike unused in addition to the backup. That gave her two to choose from; she opted for the spare, figuring that it would probably be the least missed. Should only be gone for a few minutes... Be back right away... God this is so fucking stupid... April didn''t typically ride delivery, but her staff keyring had a key to the bike lock-up that she used to secure it when she worked closing. This meant that, while she technically wasn''t supposed to be able to actually use the bikes, their keys were accessible to her on their hooks in the lock-up, and she had taken them out once before when a complacent former manager had found himself short-staffed. At least she could ride a motorcycle, unlike the other poor guy who he''d tried to put in the saddle. That had been one of their shorter-term hires, even for Sporks. She grabbed the spare bike by the handlebars and, straining, shuffled it out to the centre of the space, giving herself enough room to kick up the kickstand and wheel it out of the door. She struggled slightly against the weight of the bulky machine as she shoved it over the slight bump that marked the threshold. Somewhat surprisingly, the spare bike did come with its own helmet, but after wasting precious seconds unfastening the thing and forcing it over her head, it became clear that the battered apparatus was several sizes too large. She decided that on balance it was probably a smarter idea to just steal the helmet from the unused third bike, instead of taking the hit to her visual field. She yanked off the spare helmet, shook her hair out, and jammed the replacement on her head in its place. All in all, she had lost nearly a minute since Fabian had left, time that she would now have to make up. No time to waste, then. The bike jumped underneath her as she urged it out of the lot and pulled onto the A1400, thanking the universe at large that the order dispatch screens displayed a recipient address, so she at least knew where Fabian was going. A fifteen minute ride, she would''ve roughly guessed, or at least it would be in a scenario where she wasn''t chasing down another bike that was carrying her bloody fuck-up. She would have to cover the route faster to catch up, and so she gunned the throttle, weaving around the few cars that were cruising down the highway. Unfortunately, this was the one day that the city had decided not to cooperate with one of its typically unavoidable traffic jams, which Fabian would have at least had to slow down for in order to pass through. As it was, there were just enough other vehicles on the road to force her to regularly swerve off of her course, rocking back and forth slalom motion that was probably outside of her comfortable skill ceiling. She didn''t ride bikes that often, and certainly not while play-acting the part of a reckless stunt racer. There was still a part of her brain¡ªa fairly sizeable portion, in fact¡ªthat was yelling at her that this was a fucking stupid thing for her to be doing. It was just a damn pizza, after all. The customer would probably notice before actually biting into the thing, and then they could call up and complain, and really the worst case scenario was that she got- urgh! April winced as she was forced to narrowly weave between two vehicles that were driving far too slow for the fast lane. Worst case scenario, she got fired. No, a little spilled blood was probably not worth risking life and limb over, but then on reflection the core struggle of her life was doing dumb shit for one nonsensical reason or the other that her brain had decided she could not ignore. She wondered if acknowledging this and allowing herself to be pulled along anyway was her being wilfully complicit in her own bad choices, but she was too stressed out about not crashing to really worry about it right then and there. When April had been a teenager, she had been taken on a weekend camp-out with her local Scout troupe; her once-weekly attempt at seeking out those rare and highly prized "grass touching" vibes. It was the sort of thing she enjoyed, usually, except that on the first day she had tripped over a stump on the hiking trail and cut a gash in her knee. That would have been bad enough on its own, but the wound had soaked through the little stick-on plaster the Scoutmaster had provided as she slept, and she woke up to a messy scarlet stain painted across the inside of her sleeping bag. ''There aren''t any spares,'' the camp staff had told her, ''it''s just a stain, it won''t hurt you.'' She hadn''t disputed the fact of it, but she had slept on the cold ground for the rest of her stay, shivering next to the bedclothes she couldn''t bring herself to touch. She hadn''t gone to camp again, after that. "Self-sabotage at its finest," she thought to herself as she pulled off of the motorway, narrowly scraping past a car as it tried to do the same thing, its horn blaring at her. "Some things never change." Despite the fact that she had been gunning it close to the speed limit, she still hadn''t caught sight of Fabian. Now however, as she straightened out onto a smaller, more residential street, she saw the flash of the single rear light of another bike, a few hundred meters in front of her, turning out of her sight at an upcoming intersection. She couldn''t check her phone for the time¡ªcurse modern society''s disdain for the wristwatch¡ªbut going by a fuzzy judgement, they were both still far enough out from Fabian''s drop-off point that she should be able to catch him before they both arrived. "Good," she thought to herself, "this ridiculous bike chase can be over with and I can get back to the important things, like preparing bad pizza and hallucinating primates." Christ, what the hell was happening with her today? Her shifts at Sporks usually weren''t nearly this eventful, not even the time Fabian had knocked a box of tomato puree off of the shelf and it had self-decanted across her active stove-top. As she leaned sideways and rounded the corner, her eyes were busy searching the middle-distance for Fabian''s bike. As such, it was not until too late that she realised she would not have to get back to the kitchen to reprise a part of the earlier strangeness. The monkey was now perched upon a man''s shoulder, and the man in turn was standing in the middle of the road. Their eyes¡ªthe monkey''s bulging red and staring, the man''s a dark black¡ªreflected the surrounding streetlights and her own headlamp with a sort of faintly bemused surprise, as she careened straight towards them, watching her but making no effort to move. April yanked the handlebars hard to the right, not succeeding in meaningfully altering her trajectory, but absolutely succeeding in inducing the bike to fold up underneath her, tipping over as it twisted sideways, its tires screeching laterally as they slid horizontally in her direction of travel. For a perilous two seconds, April was able to maintain a precarious balance in that tilted pose, suspended above the flying tarmac as she braced for impact- In the moment when the impact with the pair should have arrived, it suddenly and conspicuously didn''t. The man and the monkey, who had been standing directly in the path of the skidding vehicle, were in front of her one moment and then seemingly behind her the next. Her path was unaltered by what had seemed to be a near certain collision along the straight-line vector of her motion. April didn''t have time to dwell on the matter, because that was when she crashed. The balance of the skidding bike, always a temporary thing but which had nonetheless held on prodigiously for the past few seconds, tipped downwards, her left handlebar making contact with the road. The entire vehicle flipped out from under her, its twisting wheel smacking against her leg, hard, as she was cast onto the road surface, her head whip-lashing within the helmet as the brittle plastic of it cracked against the tarmac. The bike continued forward, rolling over a few times as it shed various loose fragments of metal and plastic bodywork, before finally jumping up against the edge of the pavement, half caving in a flimsy metal bar fence, and sliding to a halt against a brick wall. April continued forward at a slightly different angle, staying on the road and bleeding off velocity via the helmet, her left arm and left shin, which were her primary contact points with the ground. She could feel the heat of that friction slicing into her leg, followed swiftly by the pain, as the fabric of her jeans proved insufficient padding to protect her body from the contact abrasion. "Thank God I at least put on a jacket," she thought to herself as she blacked out. â…ª Final Round "So, yeah, you''re pretty much fired." It was Fabian who had come to pick her up from the hospital, which was strange, because they weren''t particularly close friends outside of work. She wondered if maybe he had some sort of lingering guilt for being the one that she had been chasing down when she crashed. "...and the bossman was talking about suing you for damages, too. For the bike, I mean. He was real fucking pissed. ''What was she even doing on the bike, blah blah blah, was she going for a joy ride, she should have been on shift,'' that sort of thing." "I''m glad to hear that my well-being is so valued by my employers. I almost died." "Yeah man, I still can''t believe it. Fuck, I mean, I saw the crash on the way back, saw the ambulance even, but I didn''t know it was you. Hell, I didn''t even realise you were gone until after I was already at the store and had finished on the phone with that customer yelling about his pizza being ruined. Was that why you went after me, by the way?" "Yeah. Cut myself and spilled blood all over the damn thing. You grabbed the box before I could tell you." "Oof, sucks." Fabian bit his thumb, looking down at the pavement. "You didn''t have to go after me on one of the bikes, though. Christ. You know, I did have my phone on me?" April stopped, standing in the middle of the path that lead down to the car park. Fabian looked back at her, quizzically. "I am... a fucking moron." "Absolutely," grinned Fabian, who was surprisingly relaxed about the situation now that he had confirmed she wasn''t actively dying. "No, I mean- really!" April punched her fists downwards as she started walking again. "Twenty-twenty-fucking-three and I forget that phones exist!? Christ!" "Yeah, I mean, giving me a call would have definitely made a lot more sense than hijacking a bike and coming after me like a maniac over some ruined pizza. Actually, you know what? I''m not sure if you should be on a bike at all if you''re going to wipe out like that in the middle of an empty street. What even happened, did you lose balance?" "No, uh- actually, there was, um. A guy in the road." It was Fabian who stopped walking this time. "No fucking shit! Fuck! Is he- I mean, I only saw the one ambulance- Christ, April." April shook her head. "No, uh, he was fine, I think. I think I missed him. That''s why I fell." "Well, that''s- Jesus. Jesus, well at least it wasn''t any worse. But damn it, April, what were you thinking? At that speed, not paying attention to what''s in the road..." "Maybe I''m just a dumbass, like you said." "Yeah, for serious. Shit, just, don''t do it again, I guess? Bloody hell." Fabian reached the car and unlocked it with the key fob before holding the door open for her. "Climb over the driver''s seat. After all this I really don''t think you should be driving." "I don''t think I could even if I wanted to." April clambered into the car, swinging herself over Fabian''s seat awkwardly. "My leg''s kinda busted up." "Shit, yeah. Honestly, I''m surprised you weren''t hurt more. That bike was in pieces." "I got lucky, I guess," said April, shrugging into the passenger seat and fastening the seatbelt over her legs. "Scraped up my leg something fierce, but I didn''t actually break anything. The friction slowed my body before my body could actually crash-". She neglected to mention that it had, at least in part, been her skin acting as the brake pad. "Probably would''ve had my brains spilling out onto the road if I hadn''t been wearing the helmet, though- turns out it really is a good idea to wear those things, huh!" "Grody." Fabian shuddered as he sat down. "Well, hey, not many people can say they''ve been in a bike wreck and got off that lightly. You must have a moron''s luck, too." "I''m not sure I''d call it luck, Fabe. I''ve got a bandage covering most of my shin after the road sandpapered me, and I think I''ve lost some sensation down there from nerve damage." She shifted her leg uncomfortably¡ªthe tight bandage and the fact that she had been pumped full of local anaesthetic didn''t really help on that front, either. "If that makes me lucky then I don''t want to see what bad luck would be." "Well, at least you''re not dead, that''s the thing, right?" said Fabian, staring into the distance as he started the car. "You seen what can happen to people in bike crashes? Guy on the news I saw the other month, hit a car, his brains were spilling out. Shit. Makes me think twice about driving myself. If you got all the luck, odds are when I crash, I''ll be the one to cark it." "I''m not sure it works that way." "Maybe, maybe not. Perhaps I''m just superstitious." "Then it''s a shame that motorbike delivery is your job, I guess." "God, don''t fucking remind me. And, well... I''m not sure how much longer I want to stay at Sporks, anyway." April looked up at him. "Really? How come?" "Oh, you know," Fabian scoffed. "It kinda sucks there?" She grinned. "Sure, but I kinda thought you didn''t mind. It pays, right?" "Right. And, well, I didn''t, for the most part. But it''s going to suck more, without you there. You know how hard it is to get the other guys- uh, and the other girls too, I mean- to listen to my stories? You''re the only one who doesn''t try to fob me off at the outset. Or, well. You were the only one." He looked back out towards the road. Right, yeah, I''m fired now. Nearly forgot about that. And possibly in the hole for damages, too. April looked down at her knees, shifting her numb leg uncomfortably. Hopefully I''m at least not starting to go insane on top of it all. She hadn''t seen anything that resembled the colourful monkey since the crash, which was a positive in her book. "Hey, I guess you have a new one now, too," she said after a pause, looking back over at Fabian and putting on a faux-masculine voice to mimic his tone of speech. "''...sup guys, did I tell you about the time the crazy kitchen girl stole a bike to chase me down and wrecked it down the street?" "''Oh yeah, man, guess she was just that into me!" Fabian laughed along with the bit. "But fuck, see, that''s the thing! It''s almost too out there. People will think I made that shit up. The best stories are the ones that are weird, but believable." "Come on, dude- yesterday you were saying you wanted to meet aliens. I''m sure that one would strain the bounds of credibility a little more than-" "Than a girl chasing me down on a motorcycle? Clearly you overestimate my devastatingly poor track record with women." He gave her a sidelong look. "No, but, seriously. Alien thing, either I let there be some build up to it¡ªor I, like, play it for laughs, keep plausible deniability. What happened yesterday... it''s too real for that, I think. Both too real and yet too fucking nuts, you know?" They both sat there in silence for a minute. "I think I need a drink," said April. ***** Fabian had driven away after dropping her off at her apartment, so when she left again later that evening she did so on foot, shrugging on a faux-leather jacket over her tank-top to stave off the cold. She had invited Fabian to join her when she went out later¡ªhe had sounded like he might have needed a night off as well¡ªbut he had politely declined, probably realising that they had already been pressing up against the bounds of on-the-clock workplace friendship in a semi-awkward manner when he had agreed to drive her home. It was something neither of them had particularly wanted to push. She had called up some of her more typical drinking buddies to join her instead, and, perhaps in relief that she hadn''t ended up as a bloody smear on a stretch of worn-out tarmac, a surprisingly robust group had agreed to celebrate her survival on what was, after all, a Monday night. She kept an eye out for anyone heading in the same direction as she walked down to the bus stop, making a prodigious effort to only slightly limp, which she felt was actually quite the achievement for less than 24 hours elapsed since being in a major traffic accident. As the route 179 pulled in on the roadside, she caught sight of two of the friends she was aiming to rendezvous with already within, illuminated by the dim interior lighting. Swinging herself up onto the bus, she flashed them a smile as she tapped her card and slipped into a seat opposite the pair. Trace¡ªa short, stocky woman with thick mascara, sharply pointed eyeliner and a surprisingly barrel-like chest¡ªlooked up from her phone to wave hello wordlessly, shifting a handbag that was coated in a sort of sparse black fur (ew, where did you even get something like that?) out of the way to make April some more room. Trace''s girlfriend, Morgan, was a thin-faced woman with hoop earrings and dark hair dyed blonde; she looked up more enthusiastically, pulling out half of a shared pair of headphone buds from one ear. "April Pearce! You didn''t die! Are you okay?" April groaned, settling into the seat while trying to make her leg comfortable in the cramped footwell. "Well, I got fucked up pretty badly, and I''m pretty sure I''m fired, but, other than that..." Morgan flashed her a sympathetic expression while Trace pulled out her own earbud, pausing whatever had been playing on the phone and stashing it in the ugly black bag. "Don''t joke around with the woman who almost died, Morgan," muttered Trace reproachfully, before turning back to April, expression concerned. "But seriously, what the fuck?" She looked at her expectantly, as if she was expecting some kind of testimony. April shrugged, vaguely. "Uh, what the fuck what?" "What the fuck happened? Hello?" Trace shot her a bemused look. "I get a text from you saying you were in the hospital because you got in a bike wreck, but that you want to go out to a bar? I mean, what the fuck?" She waved her hands to gesture at the shape of her confusion. April shrugged again by way of a response, then added, "Well, I mean, yeah, that''s pretty much what happened." Trace shared an exasperated glance with Morgan, before turning back. "April?!" "What?" "How did you get into a bike crash at work? April, you work as a pizza chef!" "Technically I''m a pizzaiola." "Oh, cool- is that Italian for ''crashes fucking bikes in the kitchen!?''" Trace stared at her pointedly, Morgan with one arm around the other woman, looking at April slightly sympathetically from over Trace''s shoulder. April met her gaze, sighing. Trace was never one to pass up an opportunity to get dramatic about interpersonal drama, and one of her friends being hospitalized was such a step up from her usual fare that they would likely be milking it all evening, if not all week. April resigned herself to weather the attention in good humour. "Well, no- I was on- I took one of the delivery bikes out." Trace squinted. "But you don''t do delivery, right?" "No, but, you see, I took one anyway because-" "You stole a bike?! What the fuck?" Trace threw up her hands and looked back and forth between her and Morgan, while the latter stared at her thoughtfully before speaking. "Ooooh, so is that why you''re fired then?" April glanced over at Morgan herself, sheepishly. "And you crashed it? Wow, you sure weren''t kidding around with the crazy this time, Apes." Morgan grinned. Trace looked like she was considering continuing to scold, but then seemed to think better of it, resigning herself to looking at April in silent reproach. "Well, at least you''re fucking alive," she relented after a moment, glancing down at April''s injured leg, the white of a bandage just poking out of her trousers. "But God, you''ve got some balls-" Trace grimaced, "uh, no offence." "None taken." "And, April, I don''t know how to tell you this, but you''ve got to stop doing this shit." "What, getting in bike crashes? I mean, I wasn''t planning on making a habit of it." Trace rolled her eyes. "Urgh, no, you- you know what I mean." She gestured up and down April, as if to indicate the full scope of her, fingers waving frustratedly. "Doing this crazy shit. Isn''t this the second time in six months you''ve had to go to A&E?" "Well, the other time was hardly my fault- That guy walked into me-" "And you swallowed a rock! That was in your mouth- why?!" Trace''s eyes were almost comically stern, highlighted in black and just slightly too large for her rounded face, in a manner that she was sure Morgan thought was very cute. She brandished a finger at April, pointing at her mouth. "Fuck, look, we''ve been through this- if I want to experience the cool mouthfeel of a smooth pebble then I should be allowed to do that in peace without- without fucking, random guys, knocking them down my- look, I learned my lesson when they pumped my stomach okay, so drop it." Morgan giggled and Trace glanced at her irritatedly before turning back. "Fine then, what about last year- when you got into that fight?" "It, uh..." April looked down, sheepishly, "I mean, it wasn''t really a fight." "You threw a tray at that poor girl with the nosebleed!" "I didn''t throw it at her, I just, was surprised when I saw the blood and... dropped it, with velocity." April held up her hand before Trace could interject again. "-but okay, fine, point made, my responsibility. But also it''s like- hey, if I am a little clumsy, that isn''t me deliberately setting out to be, like, a menace to society..." "I don''t know about society, April, if anything I am worried about you," Trace stared at her, more earnestly this time. "And I''m not sure that clumsy really cuts it, because like, look at you, this is serious shit! Really!" Morgan glanced down at April''s leg as Trace gestured to it, then back up again, sympathetically. "And so I''m just thinking, April, are you okay, really? Like, what''s happening with you?" April opened her mouth to reply, then closed it again. She knew Trace well enough to understand that the question wasn''t in full seriousness; that if she objected, Trace would happily respond with more half-concerned ribbing, but something gave her pause. She felt a nagging unwillingness to dismiss the half of the question that was made in real concern. She remembered the face of the monkey, its scarlet eyes gleaming as they bore into her, multicoloured starburst patterns blazing across its fur like the rays of a prismatic sun. "Hey, Trace? Do you ever wonder if you might be, like, going insane?" Trace snorted. "Don''t I ever." April didn''t reply, biting her lip. Trace gave her a long look. "Wait, are you serious? Girl, if you keep saying things like that, then I really will be worried about you. What''s going on?" This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report. April looked down. "It''s been a crazy week. And I saw some weird shit go down before I crashed that bike." "Weird shit? What kind of weird shit?" She hesitated again. "I''m not sure I really want to talk about it, but, like. When I say weird, I mean... real weird." Trace''s face looked a little more than half-seriously concerned now, and she glanced over at Morgan, who took advantage the pause to speak up. "Hey, April? Are you sure that you want to come out tonight? I mean you did just get out of the hospital after all. If you''re not feeling well..." April shook her head, firmly. "Nah. I need this, I think. Need to, uh. Let off some steam. Clear my head some? It''ll be good for me." "Well, if you''re sure..." Morgan looked as uncertain as Trace, but didn''t seem to be in the mood to press the matter, for which April was faintly grateful. "Where''re we meeting everyone, anyway?" asked Trace, looking out the window. "We''re close to town." "I think Charlie''s going to meet us at the ''Spoons on the high street. We can figure out where we''re going from there if we want to do something different later on." Trace snorted. "Fucking excellent, so we get to hang with all the divorced beer dads out drinking on a Monday night." "We can hardly judge them if we''re there too, can we?" "It''s a special occasion held in honour of our resident invalid, miraculously healed by the restorative powers of Whipps Cross." She gestured at April, dramatically. "Yeah, and also I''m fired now, so I can drink whenever I like and it''ll only cost me self-respect. ...And my rainy day savings, I guess." Trace rolled her eyes, while Morgan frowned. "Babe, what the fuck is a whipped cross? It sounds kinda religious." "It''s the hospital I was at," interjected April, before Trace could supply an incorrect answer. "But can we-" She was abruptly interrupted by the bus tannoy announcing that they''d reached their stop. The conversation died down as they gathered up Trace''s ugly handbag, filed out of the vehicle, and waited for the traffic lights to disgorge them across street towards the local pub-diner. The A. S. Eddington was one of those depressing examples of a local institution that had been digested by the all-consuming Wetherspoons gestalt and spat out as a very generic family pub-restaurant hybrid. Despite this, the convenient location made it a typical starting point for accessing the local nightlife, which was thankfully located within a few blocks that remained walkable even when slightly inebriated. As they approached, April caught Charlie''s eye, catching sight of him sitting outside the building in one of the flimsy round-table/slatted chair combos set out for smokers and those who wanted a breath of slightly fresher air along with their drinks. Charlie himself was already nursing a pint of something murky, which he gingerly placed down on the unsteady surface before getting up to greet the trio. A brown-haired man in his mid-30s, Charlie looked boringly conventional enough that he seemed out of place with April''s other friends until you tried to speak to him, whereupon he would quickly disabuse you of that impression through a combination of barely masked neuroticism and ever-so-slightly campness. The two had met six years prior in what had originally been a Grindr hookup, but after a few-weeks-long process of disentangling the fact that neither was actually the other''s type in any one of a whole host of ways, they had downgraded their relationship to a friendship sustained by the regular convenience of living locally. "It''s the girls! Hello!" Charlie pulled April into a one-armed hug as he did his best to encompass the Trace/Morgan combo with his other hand, inadvertently crushing April''s injured leg against his own. She pulled back, swearing under her breath. "Fuck, sorry, I forgot," Charlie grinned at her awkwardly. "You doing okay?" "Just about. Is Michelle here yet?" "I''m not sure she''s coming, I''m afraid," Charlie shrugged. "Said she had a client reschedule, needs to be up early." "Damn, that''s one down, then," said April, glancing over the assembled group. "I was really hoping to speak to her, too." "Why, hoping to get back in her good graces?¡± "Oh, God, Charlie, did she tell you what happened?" He smirked at her while April looked faintly pallid. "No, not exactly, just... she said you left in kind of a hurry." April pressed her face into her hands. "Fuck. Was she mad? Did she sound mad?" Charlie laughed. "Don''t stew on it too much, I think it''s fine. It takes more than a little thing like that to rattle her¡ªtrust me, I was with her more than long enough to figure that out. She was more worried about the crash I think¡ªmortal peril sort of has a way of breaking through ice, I guess. I told her you were fine, though." "Good. Thank you. That''s not really why I wanted to talk to her, anyway, I- no, seriously, stop with that face. I just want to see her for, like, friend reasons. Talk some things through." Charlie managed to pick up his expression into a passably affable grin. "I can give her a message next time I see her, if you like?" Charlie walked them back over to his table, and sat down, picking up his drink. "Yes please, actually- I''ll talk to you about it in a minute." She clutched her jacket to her body as a gust of wind pulled at its edges. "Want to go inside?" "Let''s," interjected Trace, eyeing the unsteady outdoor table Charlie was sitting at. "I didn''t make the effort to do my hair up to be out in the wind all night." Morgan snorted. "Girl, your hair is two inches long at most, I''m the one who should be worried, honestly." Charlie piped up. "She does have a point Trace- I''m pretty sure your scalp is gelled stiffer than an oak tree in a summer breeze. Morgan, let''s get ourselves inside before your luscious locks become a casualty of war." The interior of the pub took the form of a broad open plan dining hall, filled with wooden tables and chairs, and offset at one end by a bar table surrounded by a small handful of light-up gambling machines of the type that April had never actually seen anyone use. Between the metal numbers stamped into the identical tabletops and the cheesy red-orange patterned carpet, it felt more like the karaoke hall of a low-end cruise ship than an actual pub¡ªbut as with most chain pubs, the interior decoration had been selected via a similarly corporate approach to that of the former. A faint background ambience of bassy music was throbbing over the general chatter of voices and clinking glasses. Occasional shouts of laughter from a group of rowdy looking men at a table near the bar would briefly surmount the ambient noise before dying down again. Their group of four slid into a booth by the wall, its own stamped metal number labelling it as table eleven. Charlie pushed the wire frame stand containing menus and condiments to pne side in order to make room for his pint glass. Morgan snatched at it as it passed, pulling the menu out and casting an eye over it. "Hey, do you guys want to do shots?" She gestured excitedly at the pertinent drink menu items. "I think I would rather be shot," muttered April, rolling her eyes. "Aw, come on, didn''t you say you wanted to go out and have a drink, take your mind off of things?" Morgan brandished the menu towards her, pointing excitedly at a picture of something brightly coloured. April grimaced. "I think if I were to start taking shots with you right now, the risk to my health from falling and breaking my leg on the way home would eclipse the damage already inflicted from having half the skin taken off my shin yesterday." "Fuckin'' ow, April," said Charlie, wincing visibly, "are you okay?" "You know, people keep asking me that? And I think the answer is, ''probably, once I''ve had a drink of something that won''t put on my back for the next fortnight''." "Ah, well, suit yourself!" said Morgan, before turning to Trace. "Want to come up and buy something?" "Yeah, sure," Trace replied. "April, can you look after my bag for me?" She hefted the handbag with its ugly smattering of black furry covering and tossed it at April, who caught it awkwardly, before she and Morgan slid back out of the booth to head towards the bar. April put the bag down next to her, gingerly. Charlie watched them walk away. "Are you sure it was a good idea to bring those two? Morgan can get... competitive, when it comes to alcohol. Sort of thing you have to be in the mood for." April snorted. "If they get themselves silly drunk doing shots together then it''ll be free entertainment for you and me." "Look at you, trying to deflect the evening''s attention from you and your little stunt. You''re a sly fox, April Pearce." Charlie sipped his drink, grinning. "Well, don''t think I''ll so easily forget why you''ve got that bandage on your leg." "Believe me, I don''t think anyone''s going to forget anytime soon, least of all me. You know they fired me?" "Fired you?" Charlie seemed somewhat taken aback. "Surely they should be paying you, I mean- wasn''t it a workplace accident?" April stared at him. "Charlie, I wasn''t supposed to be on that bike. They''re coming after me for property damage." "Oh! Ooooooh." Charlie took a long sip of his drink, before putting down with a hard thump. "Is that why you wanted to talk to Michelle?" "What do you mean?" "You want to talk to her because she''s therapist? And you''re¡ªI dunno¡ªstealing shit from work? Damaging it? Signs of impulsivity? Dare I say, emotional issues?" "What? Charlie, look, no, I didn''t just-" "-because you should know that she doesn''t work for free just because you''re a friend, or even a more-than-a-friend, you know. That was an issue that came up for us, too. She''s gotta maintain those boundaries, work/life balance, you can''t just-" "Charlie, no, shush- look, shush!" She held up a hand in front of his mouth, palm out, until he abated, making eye contact. She held it for a second or two to make sure he had actually stopped talking before lowering her arms back to the table. "Yes I did want to have a word, but just because- I just wanted to ask a few questions, is all. Not as a client, just, like, objectively." "Objectively?" He raised an eyebrow. "Yeah, like- if X and/or Y happens, what does it mean?" Charlie cocked his head. "And X and/or Y are... stealing a motorbike and/or getting fired? Or like-" "Christ, no, Charlie, look, I''m serious. Can you tell her I want a word?" "I''m going to have to tell her something about what you want, though." "Ask her what it means if I might have been... like..." She hesitated for a second, looking at Charlie nervously. "Like, seeing some stuff?" He gave her a look. "''Seeing some stuff''?" "Yeah." "What the fuck does that mean, April?" "It means- oh, you know what, fuck it, never mind". "I don''t know, April, that sounds like something that, like, okay, I maybe should mind." April turned away from him, biting her lip. "Then ask Michelle for me, okay? I don''t want to go to a... look, just ask her. I''d appreciate it a whole lot." "Sure. ''course. But..." Charlie was looking at her with concern, now. It was a feeling that April was starting to find increasingly familiar that evening. She looked up, about to reply, when her attention was suddenly stolen away by a raised voice that sounded across the room from the direction of the bar, abrasively rising above the background babble of the pub. Both she and Charlie turned away from each other, distracted. On the other side of the room, Trace was in the middle of some sort of altercation with one of the rowdy men that she had noticed being loud earlier as they had entered. Morgan was still standing in front of the bar, half turned away from it, a drink in one hand as she looked worriedly over at Trace, who had crossed halfway to the table that the loud man had been sitting at. While her voice was still sub-audible to April as she sat across the room, her mouth was moving at an impressive rate, her eyes emoting wildly. For his part, the man she was addressing had stood up from his seat, a pint glass still in one hand, the occasional spatter of liquid flying out the top of it as he gesticulated in angry retort. "Fuck me," muttered Charlie, as he and April stood up to hurry over. After a few steps April doubled back, just barely remembering to grab hold of Trace''s handbag so it wasn''t left unattended at the table. When she finally arrived, Charlie was already standing behind Trace, watching warily in case things escalated. April hurried up behind to join him. "...I just don''t know why you have to be so fucking rude," said the rowdy man, in a tone of voice just slightly too close to an outright shout to be socially acceptable. "Yeah, well I just want to know why you think it''s appropriate to harass me when I''m trying to order a drink," Trace shot back at him hotly, her cheeks slightly pink. "Harass- harass you? Get the fuck over yourself, I was just trying to give you a compliment-" "Yeah well it wasn''t fucking appreciated, and it isn''t going to be, either." "Well- well that''s your fucking problem, isn''t it?" The man slurred as he spoke, although by that point he had had enough sense to put his glass down on the table to avoid spilling it as he moved. "It isn''t my fault you''re a bitch, is it?" Trace took a step forward. "It will be my fault when I deck your pasty fucking man-child ass, I''ll tell you that for free." "Fuck you!" He edged forward a little as if he wanted to get more in Trace''s face, but then took a step backwards to keep his hand on the back of his chair, which was seemingly partially responsible for keeping him oriented upright. Trace looked like she had half a mind to follow him forward, but turned back as her arm was caught by Morgan, who had stepped over from the bar. "Can we go?" Morgan muttered anxiously, looking back towards the booth that April''s group had stepped out from. The drunk man looked over at her and snorted, turning back towards his table drinking mates, who¡ªfor the most part¡ªhad been watching the exchange passively; some with humour, others with sterner expressions. One, who had been seated next to the standing man, had half-risen out of his seat, and was now looking uncertain as to whether he should continue the motion. The first man looked down at his friend. "Fucking dykes," he muttered, before sitting back down. April watched Trace''s nostrils flare at that, and she took a step forward back towards the group of men, but this time it was April who put an arm out to bar the way. "Trace, don''t bother. Please." Trace shot her an ugly look that April read as don''t fucking white knight me, but relented, letting Morgan pull her back towards their table. This, oddly, left April and Charlie standing alone, halfway between the bar and the drunken man''s table, April clutching loosely at Trace''s furry handbag. The man who had been undecided about whether he wanted to stand looked at them, seemingly unimpressed. "You fags got a problem?" April replied to his smirk with a slight sneer, then turned away from them, back towards Charlie and- It took April multiple full seconds to realise what exactly she was looking at. At first, it appeared as though somebody had smeared meat across Charlie''s face and head at a jaunty 30-degree angle, smoothing a pasty mottled texture of ground beef and gristle chunks along a perfectly flat pane, as if it had been finished by a mortar-board. But that wasn''t quite right, April realised, because she could see how Charlie''s neck and shoulders were positioned, as he continued to stand in place. If the meaty texture was pasted a few inches above them, as it seemed to be, then there shouldn''t have been room for his head, unless his neck had bent backwards at an alarming angle. But that wasn''t the case either, because she could see his mouth, too; its corners tilted upwards as if he was about to ask her a question, fixed in place on his lower face, right before the contour of it was abruptly bisected by the smooth surface of bloody-grey gristle along a razor-sharp slanted right-angle. With a cold shock of still disbelieving horror, her mouth dropping open, April realised that what she was looking at was Charlie''s head sliced cleanly in half, as if by an impossibly sharp samurai sword. The top section was missing, as though it had been erased from existence along a perfectly flat plane that extended from roughly his upper right cheekbone, narrowly cutting down across the bottom of his nose before terminating on the other side of his head just above the jaw. The meat texture she was seeing was the inside of Charlie''s head, splayed open like a perfect anatomical model that cross-sectioned across skin and muscle and bone. April could see a perfect cauliflower bulb of brain matter tucked away within the sandwich-layers of bone and gristle. If April had been capable at the time of thinking rationally about what she was seeing, she would later consider, then the strangest thing about the sight of Charlie''s sundered cranium was the manner in which being exposed to the open air didn''t seem to inconvenience its internal workings at all. In fact, she could see the constituent parts of him continue to function; tendons in the face were pulling at the skin, puppeteered by muscle tissue that should no longer have been there. His arteries pulsed softly with every heartbeat, their oval mouths glistening with beads of scarlet liquid that should have been shooting up from the stump of a head with the force of a severed hydraulic line. Instead, the streams of blood terminated at the cut-off threshold, like frozen icicles sliced in half with a sharp blade. The exposed upper channel of his respiratory tract flexed and dilated as he took in a breath. "April?" the thing that had been Charlie asked in a slightly bemused tone, as it took a step towards her. For the second time in as many days, April tumbled backwards in shock and fear, although this time around the motion had significantly more force to it. She fell hard, crashing squarely into the table where the group of unpleasant men were sitting, knocking their pint glasses aside in a spray of spilled bitter and shattered glass. The table itself bucked, the wooden surface tilting as her weight levered it off from the ground, the central supporting pillar acting as a fulcrum, smacking the far end into one of the men across from her. "What the fuck!" shouted the man who had called her and Charlie fags, jumping up from the table as his drink went flying. His friends were all standing too now, and she was expecting at least some of them to be focused on the mutilated form of Charlie, but instead they were, to a man, staring at her lying prone on the floor. She cast her eyes about again, focussing them on the Charlie-thing, which¡ªshe was horrified to discover that she had seemingly not been mistaken¡ªwas indeed still sliced open clean through its skull, even while it confidently hurried over to the table, extending a worried hand down towards her. Although, she realised as she looked up at the grisly visage, that wasn''t quite true. It was hard to see from her angle low to the ground, but, as Charlie bent over her, she could see that the exposed meat texture of his head was undergoing a sort of undulating fractal pattern-blossoming. The exposed blood vessels were shifting and shrinking in size as the pinkish brain matter bloomed out to fill a larger fraction of his head, the edges dancing smoothly between slightly varying patterns. "He''s filling back up," she thought, bewildered, because that was indeed the substance of what she was seeing. It was as if the smooth cut-off plane of nothingness that intersected his head was slowly withdrawing, and the dancing patterns she saw were subsequent layers of his insides as they were once again laid back down into reality, animating the progression of stacked tissue slices as they slid back into place, until... Until suddenly, Charlie was whole again, staring down at her with a concerned expression. The last few remaining strands of his hair re-emerged into reality with a soundless puff. "W- what the fuck!" stammered April. "What the fuck! You fucking bitch!" screamed the man who had been berating Trace, now looming above her, his shirt soaked across the chest with spilled alcohol that spattered April too as he leaned down to yank her up by her cardigan. She found herself forcefully re-oriented upright, the ruddy face of the man inches from hers as he shouted at her. "You think you can fuck with us?!" April''s mouth flapped open, and she considered for a moment what she was about to say; probably something along the lines of ''it was all an accident mister, you see, my friend''s head was cut in half there for a moment''. Before she could make a start on vocalizing the words, though, the man had pulled back a fist and punched her squarely across the face. She crashed down onto the slightly sticky, slightly damp pub carpet, vision exploding with a galaxy of stars, all coherent thought momentarily expelled from her brain. Somewhere above her she heard Charlie shout, followed by the panicked voices of Trace and Morgan, who had apparently re-entered the scene. As her vision cleared, the focal point of her eyes skittering sideways across the floor, she found her gaze settling on the lumpy mass of Trace''s furry handbag. It had fallen to the ground, presumably her grip having been another casualty of her earlier flailing. As she stared at it, the fuzzy patches of sparsely-attached fur-stuff began to blur slightly in her unfocused vision, the spinning of her head seeming to pull her forward towards the fibrous texture. "Except," she thought to herself, "it wasn''t just her spinning head, was it?" At least, if it was, it had progressed beyond the expected level of post-concussion dizziness. Maybe she really had gone insane, she thought¡ªfirst Charlie, and now this. She felt a sort of sullen disappointment that she had been too slow in communicating her concerns earlier that day, and that she hadn''t mentioned her sudden onset madness while she had still been in the hospital. The lumpy shape of the black handbag was unfolding in front of her into an elegant six-fold symmetry, the ugly object opening up like a flower in spring bloom. The inside of the bag¡ªwhich she was fairly sure had previously held Trace''s keys, loose change and a packet of tampons amid torn velvet lining¡ªwas now a tunnel of sorts, one that dilated away from her as she stared into its depths. The edges unfolded along that same six-fold symmetry, receding away from her with a nauseating vertigo to reveal depths that glowed a dim storm-cloud red amid the black lining. April felt sick in a way that went far beyond having been punched. April continued to lie there, staring into infinite depths as the felt folds of the blossoming handbag unclenched and folded around her body, pulling her forwards, and in. â…© Dead End The dull red haze that was April''s consciousness slowly solidified from an ache at the back of her mind into a throbbing pain at its forefront, her brain struggling to pull itself into focus. As she propped herself up on her elbows, swallowing a mouthful of bile, she wasn''t sure if she had actually passed out, or whether the successive rounds of shock, head trauma, and further shock had temporarily pushed her into a fugue state. Maybe her mind just didn''t know how to handle this cadence of consecutive unreality, and so had shunted her normal thought processes aside for a while as it struggled figured out what could possibly be happening to her. If so, then it wasn''t faring too well. She was lying in what looked like a long tunnel constructed out of wrapped canvas drapery. The walls were hung with black fabric, like somebody had ribbed enormous curtains to create a tube five metres across that a person could walk through. The dim space should have been a pitch black to match the material of the walls, but once again she could make out a soft red light diffusing through the fabric, seeming to wax subtly brighter as her eyes adjusted. April wasn''t sure whether the red shade was a colour of the light itself, or whether the translucency of the black fabric was imparting it. She pushed herself to her knees and stood, holding one hand up against her throbbing head. The dark fabric flexed softly beneath her feet, and she was reminded of standing on a heavily festooned mattress, or perhaps the floor of a bouncy castle. Either way, it held her weight. The macabre material bunched and rippled away from her as she shifted her footing, the soft motion propagating up into the symmetrical walls, rustling through them as the wave of movement decayed away. She gazed down the length of the tunnel; the sixfold symmetry of strung material spiralled lazily away into the distance, taut vertices of the hexagonal cross-section twisting around as the space receded. April walked over to one of the tunnel walls, gingerly planting her feet so as to keep her balance on the flexing ground. She reached out to touch one of the tunnel walls, softly brushing against the surface, and rubbing the cloth material between her thumb and forefinger. It was a soft black velvet, she realised, cross-stitched with a roughly grid-shaped quilting pattern, against a tougher cloth backing material. Occasional tears and holes interspersed the inner velvet lining at frequent, if irregular, intervals. April stepped back. "Hello?!" she shouted, at nobody in particular. She had half expected the sound to echo out down the length of the receding tunnel, but the soft walls seemed to absorb the sound extremely well. She tried again, regardless. "HELLO?! IS ANYONE THERE?!" She waited a moment for a response that did not come, before continuing, "AM I INSIDE OF A FUCKING HANDBAG?!?" The only response was a soft, susurrating breeze as the walls of what might have been the interior of Trace''s ugly handbag rippled, gently. "Fucking... what..." April muttered to herself incredulously, reluctantly giving up on the idea of attracting the attention of anyone who might have been able to pull her out of this bizarre dream, or nightmare, or hallucination. "I wonder if that guy knocked me unconscious," she thought to herself, and then, remembering Charlie''s sickeningly bifurcated skull, "I wonder if I ever even woke up after the crash?" Had everything that had happened to her that day been a dream? That still wouldn''t explain seeing the monkey, but then that felt like the least of her current worries. For a moment, her mind settled again on the image of Charlie in the bar, turning the image over, his head splayed open along that perfectly even, perfectly flat plane, bearing its internals for all to see. At the memory of the pulsing arteries, the glistening wetness of his blood, she felt her stomach rise in her throat, but was able to wrestle it back under control with a somewhat surprising ease. It was as if the way that the clean slice of nothing that had intersected Charlie''s skull had kept the blood contained had neutered her usual anxiety. She felt like it was difficult for blood to contaminate when walled off behind an invisible barrier pressed against the exposed flesh. Like viewing a dangerous predator from behind the glass of a zoo enclosure. She shook her head violently, trying to clear it of the unpleasant imagery. "I will pick that apart later," she resolved, "once I am out of here." She walked over to the wall again, and placed her hand against the soft surface, running it along the material. She took a few steps forward down the tunnel, too, testing gingerly to check that the billowy fabric of the floor below her remained stable. It held, and so she began walking. She kept one hand to the wall fabric, tracing her fingertips along it while being careful to avoid her nails catching on any of the small tears in the surface. The red light maintained a steady background glow as she walked. The tunnel was utterly silent outside except for the occasional soft whispering rustle of the moving fabric. In fact, for several minutes she was concerned that nothing would change at all, and that she might be trapped here, walking forever on into infinity. The tunnel certainly stretched long enough in front of her that it wasn''t an unthinkable prospect. But... After five minutes or so she realised that the path she was walking down was not in fact entirely uniform. Its gradient had begun to pitch slightly downwards, snaking its way down through whatever larger void the canvas tube was presumably strung through. As it steepened¡ªApril stepping carefully now to feel out the spots in the fabric under her feet where it was loose enough to conform to their shape and provide support¡ªthe twisting maw began to constrict along with it. After fifteen minutes of gingerly tip-toeing forward in the dim red half-light, the five-metre diameter had shrunk to something closer to two, such that April could reach upwards and brush her fingertips along the ceiling of the tunnel where the fabric sagged down. The narrowing tunnel and eerie silence sparked in April a growing claustrophobia, as well as an unpleasant sensation that she might be travelling down the digestive tract of some vast, unmoving fabric creature. Doing her best to turn her mind away from Godzilla-scale Muppet entrails, she forced her attention towards the process of descending down the passage, one footstep after another. Another five minutes of walking rewarded her effort; the tunnel seemed to level out. Moreover, the quality of the dim red light seeping through the walls seemed to be getting slightly clearer, too. April wasn''t sure if it was actually brightening, or... no, it seemed more like the layered fabric of the tunnel was getting thinner, and slightly less substantial. The small rips and tears in the inner lining were getting more frequent and increasing in size; through them she could see the thicker outer layer of material, but even this seemed to be thinning out. As she stepped forwards into the growing red light, she became increasingly concerned about her footing. Sections of material had begun to tear underneath her as she placed her feet. Each time, a lower fold of the material caught her weight as the inner lining tore itself downward, but with the speed that the fabric as a whole was losing substance, she wasn''t sure how long that luck would hold out. As one particularly long strand of frayed velvet tore itself off from the lower wall and floor, April felt herself jolt downwards a full foot before a roll of outer canvas stopped her from plummeting into the unseen, and even that stretched out under a worrying level of strain. The walls of the tube deformed around her as the lower section of the construction was pulled fully taut. Reluctantly, given how long she had been moving in this direction, April halted her movement and began to carefully turn herself back around to head towards firmer ground. Bizarrely, though, and much to her consternation, the substance of the enclosing material seemed to continue to deteriorate behind her even after she had twisted fully around. In fact, looking closely now, she could see the material start to untwine itself as if of its own accord; woven fabric fraying apart along grid-pattern stretch marks. April squeaked in shock as the band of supporting fabric beneath her, already pulled over-taut, suddenly tore. On instinct, she snapped an arm outwards to grab a handful of velvet that was hanging loose from the tunnel wall, only for that to tear away too, the fabric fraying away to nothing as soon as it was asked to bear her weight. Abruptly devoid of all support, her foot punched through the material beneath her, followed rapidly by the rest of her body as the webbing of threads diminished into a loose cobweb netting that snapped under her touch. As the twisting canvas tunnel fell out of view, April had the brief impression of being suspended in a motionless free-fall, thick breathless air pressing in to sap the descent of any feeling of dynamism, even though she was clearly plummeting downwards. As she spun about in the air, her eyes were unable to fix on anything specific in her surroundings. She got the impression of a wide open space consisting of a uniform soft red fuzziness, like she was suspended in a thick, ashen mist that had fallen upon the world in the wake of a volcanic eruption. She hung in that stillness for a good thirty seconds, long enough to conclude that, assuming terminal velocity still worked the way she remembered, this would probably be the end of the line upon impact. When she finally did hit something, she was pleasantly surprised to discover that it didn''t kill her upon impact, but unhappy to discover that it most definitely did hurt. What she landed on was not more strung fabric, but rather something fibrous that snapped under her weight. A tangled branch-like mass six inches across broke in half, but not before delivering a hard smack to her hip and already-injured shin, making her cry out in renewed pain, despite the still-active numbing agent. Tumbling forward, she fell again, but was caught after a moment by another outshoot of the fibrous fronds, this time landing in the crook of two crossed strands. They failed to break under her reduced velocity, so the crook acted as a pivot that sent her tipping over backwards and into increasingly dense thickets of the material, her body gradually tumbling to the ground through a combination of breaking fronds and crashing falls. Eventually, she came to a rest on a flat, oddly smooth surface, and lay there for a moment or two, curling in on the new pained bruising that covered her body where she had been impacted. Lying on her side, for a while she was unwilling to do anything but keep still. Ultimately though the pain began to recede and she found that, despite everything, she didn''t actually seem to have broken anything. The past few days have been an incredible run of luck when it comes to avoiding serious injury, huh. She groaned, and gradually relaxed her body, unclenching her limbs. By this point, the messages of her other senses were starting to intrude upon her consciousness, and, despite herself, her hindbrain was lighting up with panicked messages that she was now in an unknown environment, filled with potential hidden dangers. The surrounding space was no longer quiet, either; she could hear a soft background ambience of popping, clicking and croaking sounds. It was half-analogous to what one might hear in a forest at night, except that none of the sounds she was hearing could be mapped to any sort of wildlife that she had ever heard of. Opening her eyes fully and looking around, she was greeted by a sight that continued that trend, a scene of startling, eerie familiarity that only served to further highlighted the alienness of its context. She was in a forest, but rather than being populated by trees, the foliage was composed of twisting, pale-red vines that snaked upwards with a stiffness belying their width. The vines were composed of packed fibres with an almost glassy sheen, that reminded her most strongly of fibreglass, or perhaps some sort of wound electrical cable inexplicably transmuted to crystal. It seemed unlikely that each individual vine could hold its own weight as they snaked through three-dimensional space at seeming random, but as they twisted through and around each other, the tight lattice of vines wove together, supporting their collective weight. The end result was a complex interwoven cage of glossy red-white fibres, like a rope-climbing net in three dimensions, supported from the bottom up by thick trunk-like ropes that, despite a wide variation in size, thinned out on average as the canopy rose upward, towering over and above her. This strange construction was forcing itself out of the forest floor, which- she wasn''t sure if forest floor was even the right word to describe what she was standing on. Instead of soil, the red vines pushed their way up out of an eerily flat white surface, unblemished aside from cracks and raised ridges where the vines poked through. The substance was slightly translucent, giving it a diffuse quality wherein it practically seemed to glow with an internal light, although the deep shadows cast by the thickest thickets of vines contradicted that interpretation. April would have assumed that the ground was some sort of artificial flooring if it weren''t for the obvious outdoorsiness of the overall tableau. The dim light shining down through the vine canopy was diffuse and misty, but it had the character of overcast daylight. Getting to her feet, she experimentally pressed the toe of her boot¡ªstill buckled up to her thighs in preparation for a night out on the town¡ªinto the flat white ground. After applying some threshold amount of pressure she felt a slight give, and her foot made a soft, indented impression in the surface. It was similar to pressing a fingertip into a plate of agar. She stared at the imprint for a moment, wordlessly, before collapsing to the ground in a cowering heap. Wedging her head between her knees, she stared down at the smooth white ground, fingers white-knuckling the legs of her jeans in the rictus of a silent, somatic scream. She kept at that for a moment or two, before deciding that it should probably be a verbal scream too. She thrust her face upwards towards the woven red vine canopy, as if searching for a sign from God, or perhaps a descending rescue helicopter. "WHAT THE FUCK!" She let the tension fall out of her limbs again, and flopped down into a cross-legged pose, propping her chin on her arms as she gazed blankly ahead. Her shout had apparently disturbed the local... wildlife...?, and the strange popping-clicking calls had halted for the space of five seconds or so, before slowly fading back in with a cautious, exploratory uncertainty. April jumped as something small moved in the periphery of her vision; looking up, she watched as a small, tubular creature crawled its way along a stretch of vine a few metres in front of her. The thing was about the size and shape of a large caterpillar, a bright toothpaste blue, and with two large circular suckers on each end of its body. It moved by performing a rhythmic pattern of somersaults, each time attaching one end of its body to the vine, before flipping the back end up over the top of itself in a stepping motion reminiscent of a slinky moving down stairs. She stared at it in silence for a minute or so as it marched its way across the length of the vine with impressive haste, then made a sharp turn into a tight thicket and vanished out of sight. "Where the fuck am I," April whispered again, staying quiet this time, but injecting feeling into the words for her own benefit. In lieu of anything more constructive to do, she picked herself up once more, peering uncertainly into the tangle of vines in roughly the direction where the small creature had disappeared. The vines were thick where they pushed out from the ground, often resembling particularly acrobatic tree-trunks as the thickest approached three feet across. The interwoven structure was fairly dense close to the ground as well, the vine matrix netting together to provide mutual self-support. This might ordinarily have prevented April from being able to fit between the branching vines, were it not for the fact that the tangling vines were too regularly interspersed to truly be called a tangle at all. The shape of rough geometric arrangements jumped out at her, with several vines knotted together at the intersection points, but leaving sizeable gaps between them, over and through which she could step. As she started to move forwards, she was surprised to discover that she had missed the strangest thing about the space she was in until that moment. Taking a step, she felt an unnatural pressure clamp around her body from the sides, pushing inwards with a soft but implacable force. The sensation was similar to the weight felt while immersed in water, but localized laterally to her sides. Nonplussed and slightly concerned, she took a more rapid step forwards in an attempt to escape from whatever force had hold of her, only for the cloying pressure to increase in tandem with her step. Digging her heel into the smooth ground, she quickly reversed course, trying to escape whatever invisible something had apparently been lying in wait, just a few feet in front of where she landed. Twisting around, she felt the crushing pressure abate, and then, bizarrely, reverse. Now it was as if she was being stretched out sideways, her flesh tugged at by a vacuum pump that was evenly attached across her entire cross-section. She stumbled back the way she had come from before, and the sucking pull increased proportionally, not precisely painful but definitely uncomfortable. It was enough to make her wheeze out a sharp breath before she managed to catch herself and hold still. Frozen mid stride in an awkward, hunched over pose, she lifted up one hand, cautiously, and then waved it back and forth in experimentation. Once again, she felt the cloying compressive force as she moved the hand towards the thicket, mirrored by a sucking vacuum pull as she waved it back the other way. Shifting her body cautiously, April wobbled back and forth on the spot, then lifted her other arm to wave around that hand as well. As she did, she began to feel out a shape to the effect that she had already begun to intuit. It was less that she was being assaulted by an invisible assailant, and more that something in the¡ air? The surrounding environment? ...was resistant to her movement. The sensation had been too subtle to notice while she had been sitting still on the ground, but when she attempted motion with any sort of velocity it was painfully obvious. The restriction didn''t appear to be a blanket effect, however. It was limited to one opposing pair of cardinal directions, such that¡ªApril was waving her hands back and forth with vigour now, feeling out the contours of the bizarre pressure¡ªmoving forward and backward would produce the crushing and sucking force in her hand, at right angles to that direction of motion. More baffled now than afraid, she braced herself, and took a few steps forward at a swift half-jog. The inward pressing force clamped around her, and while it was not unbearable¡ Rather than continue the way she had been going, she made a turn 90 degrees to her left, moving orthogonally to the direction of the effect. Immediately the crushing force abated, leaving her feeling mostly normal. "Not that way then," she thought to herself, stepping over a clump of the vines as she set off in earnest. "At least I won''t have issues keeping my bearings in this." Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on Royal Road. There was little else to mark direction by as she walked. The arrangements of stiff trunk-like vines she was climbing over and around seemed to change little as she passed through them. They didn''t appear to grow any sort of leaves, and this should in theory have given her a good visibility into the near distance, but where the forest horizon wasn''t obscured by the receding lattice of foliage, a thin white mist hung in the air, muting the light and concealing the depths of any gaps. As she walked, April passed more of the somersaulting caterpillar creatures plodding earnestly along the vines, as if carrying out some urgent but inscrutable errand. At one point she disturbed a whole clutch of the things when she bumped into an uncharacteristically loose vine-branch. A cluster of a dozen or so of the little critters, each in a slightly varying shade of bright blue, excitedly back-flipped away in all directions, erupting with a chorus of tiny plip- plip- plip- sounds as their sucker ends adhered to the fibrous vine-material. As she watched them scurry off, still wary but judging that the creatures were probably something she didn''t need to be immediately frightened of, April froze. A more substantial clicking-popping chirr was filtering down from somewhere above her. It had a subtle, sly character to its softness, reminding April of how a stalking cat might growl under its breath before moving in for the pounce. As if to complete the metaphor, something plummeted down out of the canopy above her. April jumped back, inadvertently being smacked in the sides by the reactive pressure effect, before crashing into a vine interstice and stopping. There had been no need, however, because the thing¡ªit wasn''t particularly distinguishable as more than an amorphous pale blue blur at this point, as it darted downwards and along a vine¡ªdidn''t seem to be focused on her. Rather, it dived at high speed towards a cluster of the fleeing caterpillar-things, catching them unawares as they twisted and flipped wildly around in a vain attempt to escape. The thing crashed into the fleeing creatures like the oncoming tide flooding over driftwood in a barren cove, and in doing so slowed enough to be more visible. It was a sort of amorphous blob, also blue in colour but a paler, more translucent shade than its prey, and with hard bits and pieces of something unclassifiable suspended in the mass. It slurped up the fleeing critters into its jelly-like body similarly to how an unapologetic restaurant critic might finish off a plate of spaghetti. April could see the absorbed creatures wriggling around unproductively within the blob as they were added to the internal detritus. Suppressing a wince of disgust, she kept her eyes on the feasting blob while she backed away cautiously. To avoid having to move past it, she was forced to walk in the direction of the compressive force, so she kept her footsteps short and slow so as to avoid the worst of the effect. Reaching a horizontal vine-trunk that barred the way, she felt it out with the back of her legs, then softly grabbed hold of another vine above her to help guide her movement as she stepped over and behind the barrier. Continuing in that manner, she managed to put a good twenty metres of red forest between herself and the feasting Thing. Finally judging that she was probably at a safe distance to walk normally, she turned around and stepped forwards, just in time for her to crash head-first into something cold and hard that had been standing directly behind her. The something turned out to have been a tall metal suit of armour. Or, rather, it was something halfway between the raiment of a medieval knight and an old-fashioned deep-sea diver. It appeared to be made out of a tarnished, brushed grey steel, with bulbous joints and a raised, pointed chest-piece like the prow of a battleship. On the back was strapped a bulky rectangular box reminiscent of what an astronaut might wear during a spacewalk, and the helmet was curiously elongated, with a large round central aperture surmounted by a bulbous secondary lobe at the top, in a snowman configuration. The suit had a black stripe painted across its left breast, upon which was embossed, inexplicably, "AU?ENBAND¨¹BERWACH AUSSCHUSS 10". The figure within the suit¡ªbecause, April realised as it moved, it was occupied¡ªreached up a hand and clamped it down on her shoulder, metal fingers locking in a tight squeeze. As April cried out and attempted to pull away, it raised its remaining hand to its throat, fingers closing around a small knob at the base of the helmet and twisting with a forced delicacy. Immediately, a blast of white noise screeched out of the helmet in a pulse of amplifier feedback, startling April out of her attempts at escape. The figure continued to twiddle with the knob, and the noise cohered into the crowded sound of several dozen overlapping voices, each shouting or muttering insistently in a separate language, dialect or tone. "Let me go!", April shouted at the suit, which still had its hand locked firmly around her shoulder with a tight, crushing grip she couldn''t quite squeeze out of. The suit figure lifted its bulbous head slightly, but didn''t release her, continuing to adjust the knob at its throat. As it did, the competing voices began to be pared down, the audio channel narrowing until finally there were just a few voices speaking, then two, then one, which- April was finally able to parse a nondescript male baritone speaking English in a faintly European accent. "...what are you?" "Let go!" April shouted again, reaching up to pry at the unmoving metal grip. "Let go of me!" A babble of competing voices rose from the suit again, and the figure continued its adjustments, narrowing them down until only the single voice was audible once more. "Why are you here?" "I have no fucking idea," she spat at it, still pulling at her shoulder, "I don''t know where this is, I- Hrgh-! Let me go!" The suit dropped the hand that had been adjusting the knob to its side, and tilted its head, as if considering her. It didn''t release her shoulder. "You will need to speak to the committEe." The final word blasted out with a brief burst of accompanying static, like the speaker mechanism he had been adjusting was still unclogging its circuits. April winced at the feedback whine. "I don''t know where this is and, hey- who are- what d..." April scrambled for a moment, struggling to decide what she wanted to say, before finally settling once again on "let go of me!" The grip at her shoulder loosened slightly, as if the figure was considering it. "No suit? The axes are askew here. Be glad you did not accrue velocity." Something in the suit whirred as it made slight movements. "Did you enter by bridge, or..." it paused, looking down at her. "No. You are a child of memory?" "What?" "From the land of the dead." The suited figure spoke with a shrug in its voice, as if this much was obvious. "What?" said April, too confused to continue fighting its grip. The suit cocked its helmeted head, considering her, and looked like it was about to speak again before both it and April jumped, the heavy suit jolting as April twisted around, both of them looking for the source of a sound that had come from behind her. They didn''t have to look very far. A loud popping-cracking-chirping was sputtering out from a dangling pale-blue curtain of slime that was slithering down from a raised branch like a slow-motion waterfall. April could still see the remnants of the blue caterpillar creatures suspended inside the translucent flesh, but the blob creature¡ªwhich apparently was capable of hearing, and of investigating sudden loud bursts of audio static¡ªhad swelled out until it was a living sheet strung across a full three meter span, looming over both her and the suit. The rubbery mass, she could now see, was interspersed not just with half-digested detritus but also with longer, sharp, off-white spine, somewhere between a loose rib and a baleen spar. A few of them protruded from the surface, sharp points bristling ominously. "GO," barked the suit, releasing its hand from her shoulder as it swivelled around and began to jog away, the metal legs pistoning as they powered directly through a knot of smaller vines as if they weren''t even there. April jolted forward to follow, only to realise that the suit had run in the direction that induced the crushing pressure. Wincing from pain at the sharp slap against her sides, she twisted around, sprinting sideways past the hanging creature at an angle so as to remain unimpeded by the pressure. She glanced at the thing, and out of the corner of her eye watched a clot of rubbery blue flesh as it balled itself up and shot out at her, forming the thick end of a tendril that arced across the empty space just behind her head, to adhere to vine branch on the other side of the small clearing that she and the suit had been standing in. April looked back, hoping that she had slipped away from the blob creature, but the thing had, after all, already demonstrated the speed with which it could move when compelled. The surface of the thing rippled, then bunched up, coiling and releasing in a lightning fast lunge that it seemed to carry with it as it moved. It bunched, jumped and sprung between vines, flying through the forest at a startling pace for something that lacked legs, arms, or a tail. Seemingly judging April an easier target than the already out-of-sight metal suit, it snaked after her through the geometric knots of vines, seemingly perfectly at home within the terrain while April tripped and stumbled over herself. It let out a sort of cackling vibratory trill as it moved, and she wasn''t sure whether it was as a war cry or just the natural sound of its motion. Dodging through the red vine-trunks, April had barely half a second to spot a dense knotting of them coming up in front of her that had woven themselves into a pleasing octagonal rosette, which she would have otherwise been interested to examine, but which right now was completely blocking her progress. She was forced to thrust out her hand, almost bouncing off of the tough surface and breaking a few of the glossy outer fibre layers as she transferred her momentum and threw herself off to the left. As her feet picked up again, she realised that the shift in bearing had forced her to run directly into the direction of the pulling force, which was now screaming at her skin as she powered through the undergrowth and "upstream". It felt as if someone had attached vacuum pumps across both sides of her body, or as if the doors of an aeroplane had opened on either side of her at 30,000 feet. Her ears popped uncomfortably, and she felt her skin grow warm at her ears and cheeks, blistering from the negative pressure. Instinctively she tried to slow her movement, but- no, it''s still coming!, she realised as she glanced back, hearing the rhythmic chirring sound of the creature. Its own gelatinous body seemed uncowed by the effect. She forced herself to push through the pain of motion until a gap opened up once more to her right, and she was able to pivot back around to a safe line of travel, letting out a sigh of relief. The creature, however, had been able to take advantage of her zig-zagging path, cutting across the diagonals and gaining on her as it streaked through the outstretched vines. Gaggles of somersaulting caterpillars practically jumped out of its way, but it paid them no heed, fixated on the larger prey that was April. She shot a glance backwards and saw its reaching tendrils stretching out scarily close, individual palp-tipped pseudopods straining out of the larger body towards her skin like a rock climber straining to grip the edge of a cliff. Her heart pounding, legs pistoning, April tore away from the reaching blue fronds, vaulting over outcrops of vines and weaving between the geometric apertures where they interwove. As she turned her head back forwards, she caught sight of a flash of further movement out of the corner of her eye, and did a double take. Something was moving rapidly through the branches, around a dozen feet to her right, keeping pace with her as it moved parallel to the direction she was running. Another blob-creature?! April braced herself to twist back left again and away from the thing, but... no, that wasn''t right. The moving shape was too regular, too consistent in size when compared to the amorphous shifting blob, and she could discern limbs reaching out, catching and grasping as it swung in a bounding, soaring motion through the vine forest. As she ran and it swung, it passed out of a shadowy copse and was briefly illuminated by a shaft of misty light, allowing her to see it clearly. It was the monkey. The bright fractal starburst of colour that was its painted face shone starkly against its light brown fur and the uniformly white-red background as it swung through the knotted vegetation. Its eyes¡ªa shade of deep scarlet that almost but not quite matched the paler fibres of the vines¡ªcaught the light as it glanced over at her. Its head was held remarkably steady as the little arms shot out, catching handholds and grip-points as it swung its way through the maze of branches with the ease of an experienced swimmer pushing off for a leisurely backstroke at the local spa. Their eyes meeting, April and the monkey stared at each other wordlessly while they zipped through the forest, April wheezing with her strained breaths, the monkey seemingly impassive. It opened its mouth as if to say something, exposing its row of tiny, dagger-like incisors. April, whose flying feet had been sprinting across the too-smooth forest floor with little care, the sudden appearance of the monkey distracting her, felt a sharp lurch as her ankle caught on a low-reaching strand of vine. Stumbling, she catapulted over it, before fully losing her balance and face-planting into the slightly pliable white surface with a thick smack that left a rough imprint of her features in the ground. Twisting around onto her back, she had just enough time to thrust out her arms in front of her chest before the pursuing creature was upon her, landing on top of her body with a heavy thwack. Shouting out, April tore at the thing with her hands, trying to get a grip on the tough, rubbery blue flesh. The creature had draped itself over her like a pitched tent with her arms as the supporting spars, and was rapidly pooling itself together with a burbling slurp. The weight of the thing was immense, and she was pinned down by her legs and outstretched arms, just barely fighting to keep it off of her face. The sharp white spines that had been embedded in its body began slide outwards in a sharp flicking motion, propelled by some inner propulsive adjustment of whatever gelatinous material the thing was made from. No less than seven of them lodged themselves into her forearms and wrists, the points piercing flesh and digging into muscle, seemingly scraping against bone. April screamed for real, now. A blob of pale blue animate slime pooled at the foremost protrusion of the encompassing curtain of creature-flesh, filling out until it was a suspended droplet hanging above her head, the organism flowing into itself. Suspended a few inches above her face, April could see one of the blue caterpillar-things, still held inside the beast, as it was drawn into the new appendage. Slightly occluded by the cloudy material it was embedded in, she could see how its outer surface had become slightly more diffuse, inner fluids spilling out as it started to be dissolved by the blue gel-flesh. April shut her eyes as that same flesh descended a few inches above her mouth and nose. Abruptly, a heavy thumping followed by a sharp series of brittle cracks burst from amid the surrounding vines, followed by a solid whump from just above her. As it did, she felt the pressing, cloying weight of the blob-creature lift itself from her midriff, the thing erupting in a chorus of frantic pops and chirps that were almost shouts of pain. Opening her eyes once more, she looked up to see the outline of the metal suit of armour standing over her, legs standing astride her prone body as it recovered from the heavy kicking motion it had just performed while attempting to avoid crushing her beneath its feet. Apparently, the figure in the suit had run up and punted the blue creature off of her, like an American footballer taking a... touchdown? No, that was the other thing. The kick had sent it crashing into the thick trunk of a vine some feet away, near where it emerged from the ground, but also seemed to have torn the amorphous body into two- no, three pieces, the sections that had been attached to April''s legs and one of her arms seemingly unable to keep up with the abrupt change in velocity. The two chunks of blobby blue slime that were still adhered to her were unmoving. Spines were still embedded in her forearms, which were screaming in pain, but the blue flesh they were emerging from was now inert. Shakily, April sat up, the thickly pulsing adrenaline in her veins staving off the worst of the pain and shock, but her eyes still smarting as she did her best to pry the sharp things from her arms. Rivulets of blood were beading and running down her hands in streaks. One of her wrists didn''t seem to want to move properly any more. The suited figure swung down one trunk-like metal gauntlet and swept its hand across the surface of her skin, yanking out the remaining spines like a no-nonsense zookeeper rescuing a guest from the ministrations of a giant escaped porcupine. April couldn''t prevent herself from crying out as the points were unsheathed from her flesh, and then she shakily stood up, looking into the blank visor of the bulbous suit-helmet. "Th... thank you..." she choked out, staring at it. The suited figure let out a sharp burst of static like before, which quickly whittled itself down into a single word, echoing what it had said to her last time. "GO!" Shaking off most of the remaining blue slime, April whirled around and sprinted off into the forest. She found the monkey waiting for her after a few minutes of running. It was perched on a horizontally strung vine at around head height, one hand gripping an adjacent branch, head tilted gently as it locked eyes with her, the scarlet half-spheres reflecting her own eyes as she looked into them. "You-!?" she shouted at it, skidding to a halt just in front of it. "You!" The monkey cocked its head further, impassive. "This is your fault!" she screamed, holding up her blood-streaked arms, wrists peppered with inflamed red puncture wounds, "what do you want?!" The monkey seemed to consider for a moment, then opened its mouth. "...leave?" The words had a squawking quality to them, a high-pitched inhuman edge that was reminiscent of a how a parrot would imitate the sounds of words. It lilted its tone upwards at the end, almost making the word a question. "I don''t know how to fucking leave, I- I don''t know where I am!" April found a tear rolling down one cheek as she shrieked in the vibrantly placid face of the monkey. "How did you get here? Where am I?!" The monkey looked at her for another brief moment, and then barked, "direction!", before turning and darting through the vines. April tracked it for several meters as it swung effortlessly between branch fronds, until it stopped once again, pausing to turn back and stare at her. "Direction!!", it squawked, insistently. Warily, April picked up her feet and started following after it, stepping gingerly through the foliage and squeezing through small gaps to follow the path the monkey had taken. Seeing this, it turned again, and moved off through the forest canopy once more. This time however it seemed to move more slowly and deliberately, remaining at head height, and occasionally checking back to see if April was indeed still there. Understanding what was wanted of her, April followed as it went. When the monkey finally paused once more, it had lead her to the edge of a clearing. As April poked her head out of the wall that was the boundary of the vine-lattice, she could see the monkey hanging out over empty space just next to her. Looking up, she had an unimpeded view of the sky, now. It was a milky, mist-streaked white, dimmer than she was used to, but with no hint of the familiar blue that was all she had ever known. Occasional thin red streaks were set across it like contrails. The net of too-even interlocked vines stretched up into that vast nothing, ascending impossibly upwards until the individual branches were out of sight. That wasn''t why she was here, though. Looking down at the smooth white ground, she saw that it had been marred in the centre of the clearing by a dark gaping maw, a slightly amorphous, gently skewed dark black paraboloid pit. Its gently rippling edges attached themselves to the ground before vanishing into a hole that descended at an angle. Stepping up to the edge of the black material, April knelt down and reached out. Her fingertips gently kneaded the familiar texture of slightly torn, quilted black velvet as she pinched it between thumb and forefinger. "Direction!" exclaimed the monkey. "Fucking direction, yeah. Got it." April glanced back at the monkey, face tight, making brief contact with its deep scarlet eyes for a short second, before she turned her gaze to the opening of the fabric tunnel and jumped down into its mouth. â…¨ Dying Gasp Trace idly drew shapes in the faint condensation that clung to the inside of the bus window with one hand, the other alternating between fiddling with one of her lip piercings and biting her fingernail. The sun hadn''t quite risen yet that morning, and sky was overcast anyway, so the view of passing houses she got as she slumped sideways against the glass was tinged a dull blue, the recessed interior bus lighting making up the shortfall for her and her fellow passengers. Trace didn''t typically bother getting up so early¡ªher work didn''t schedule her for Monday shifts, and so she usually took advantage of it as a sleep-in day. But, after the disaster that had been the previous night, she had gone home to bed early, woken up in kind, and decided to get an early start, leaving Morgan snoring in bed as she shrugged on clothes. To a secondary degree, her restless mind had probably been hoping to awaken to a late-night text from April, confirming she was safe at home after vanishing when the fight had broken out. She hadn''t had so much luck, however. Trace was pretty pissed at April for that, but it was an anger rooted in worry, and, while she was fairly sure that April had probably just left in a hurry to avoid the carnage¡ªand been too thoughtless to text an explanation¡ªthere was a part of her mind that dwelled on less pleasant possibilities. Trace tried to ignore it. As such, however, she now found herself taking the bus into town alongside a regular contingent of senior citizens, who, Trace thought, always seemed to get up earlier in the morning than sense demanded. An elderly woman sitting behind her was clucking scornfully while poring over a copy of the Daily Mail, and Trace was pointedly avoiding paying attention to her. Instead she was splitting her focus between her window doodles and spying on a very bald, very slender old man sitting across the aisle. He had an interestingly shaped birthmark on the back of his head, and she was trying to decide whether or not it looked like someone had cracked an egg over him as a child, or whether it was more like a bad attempt at a map of South Wales. For his part, the old man was staring curiously at the only other few passengers below fifty¡ªa young mother wielding a pram containing a toddler, who was fast asleep. Trace happened to be looking out the window at that moment, and so she failed to notice when her handbag¡ªwhich was sitting on the seat next to her¡ªshifted suddenly, seemingly of its own accord. If she had been paying attention to it, she would have noticed it loll to the side as it abruptly inflated, seemingly under its own pressure, folds and dents popping out rapidly as the patchy dark-furred surface began to pull at its seams, and held taut by the closed zipper line along the top. The handbag suddenly looked more like some sort of oddly lumpy, hairy balloon, rolling slightly as something heavy inside appeared to shift and bump around against the tight sides. Trace might have looked over at the bag as one of the straining seams along the edge began to tear open with a soft ripping sound, but it so happened that the child in the pram chose that moment to wake up and begin crying loudly, much to the consternation of the old lady behind Trace, who let out a scornful huff. Before anyone had further opportunity to be oblivious, however, the bag¡ªthankfully not while anyone was examining it particularly closely¡ªexploded. Someone fell out of the space where it had been with a shout, and rolled into the aisle, where they fell in a messy heap on the floor. Trace yelped too as she spun around, nearly elbowing the old lady, who had dropped her Daily Mail in shock. It landed on the shredded remains of the bag, covering over a splayed-out mess of fabric, strewn with loose change and battered sanitary products. Trace stared at the girl who had landed next to her, and who was now staring around, a wild-eyed expression on her face. Her clothes were covered in a sort of unpleasant looking goo, and, alarmingly, her arms were covered in dried streaks of blood, which seemed to have leaked from an array of nasty looking welted puncture marks across her lower arms, some of which were still visibly oozing. Trace and the figure locked eyes. "April?!" she gasped in a panic, eyes darting from the face of her friend to the injuries across her forearms. "W- Where in the bloody hell did she come from?" exclaimed the old man from across the aisle, who was looking down at April with an expression of concern and fear, his birthmark now hidden behind the crown of his head. April clutched at the cushions of the seats on either side of the aisle, smearing blood on them as she tried to pull herself upright. The old man shied away from her as she did, as if expecting she might suddenly draw whatever weapon had made the puncture wounds. Trace, on the other hand, stuck out her arm and helped pull April into a kneeling pose on the floor, where she sat, panting. "Jesus Christ-! What in heaven is wrong with that girl?" squawked the old woman, piping up for the first time in a scandalized tone. She put a knobbly hand on Trace''s shoulder, as if to hold her back, and raised her voice to be heard over the crying child, who had redoubled their efforts. "Don''t touch her, dear. Look at her arms, now, she''s been- she''s been shooting drugs!" Trace ignored her, bending down to put a hand on April''s back. "April-! April, what happened to you?!" April was catching her breath now, but her face remained grim. She lifted up her blood-streaked arms in front of her face and stared at them, a grimace of nauseated disgust flashing across her mouth. "Fuck..." she muttered. "Seriously dear, don''t touch her- it absorbs through the skin, you know!" The old woman was still tugging at Trace''s shoulder, and Trace was forced to shake her off, irritably. "Need to go wash this off..." murmured April, who was still staring at her bloody arms. "We can do that. We can- we should get off the bus- can you walk?" Trace knelt down, putting an arm around her and shielding their heads from the woman, who was still attempting to start lecturing at them. April looked up as she heard a clattering sound. The driver had pulled over the bus to the side of the road, and was now stomping down the aisle. The old man with the birthmark, who had seemingly retrieved him, followed anxiously in tow as the driver took in the scene. "The fuck''s happening here? Is that girl okay? What happened?" "She''s an addict!" piped up the woman with an aggrieved relish. "It''s heroin, I think. Or maybe that fantanol stuff. It''s bad- just look at her! And it gets in through your skin too- I told that other girl not to touch her, but she wouldn''t listen, of course. Youth today-" "That true?" The driver cut her off as he stared down at them both, nonplussed. "I..." April stared up at him, wide-eyed. "I was... I was... stabbed by..." "Stabbed-? She was stabbed!" The old woman threw her hands up in the air. "This is what this country is coming to these days... Young lady, this is why you don''t get involved with drugs!" "Should I call the police?" asked the driver, who to his credit, looked genuinely concerned. He glanced over at the crying child and their mother, who had stayed silent throughout the interaction, backing the pram to the other end of the bus and silently telegraphing that they wanted to be let off. "Is whoever did this still on board?" "She fell down from upstairs, I think," said the man with the birthmark, chiming in from behind the driver''s shoulder. "Appeared there all of a sudden." April glanced over to him, then back. "Don''t... call the police. Just let us off, please." Trace glanced at her. "You sure?" "Yeah..." April staggered to her feet, tottering towards the double doors halfway down the vehicle. The driver kept his eyes on her warily, but assented, walking back to the cab and hitting the switch that sent the doors hissing open. Trace helped April step down onto the curb, the old woman tutting loudly after them as they crossed the threshold. April walked over to a lamppost and leaned against it with one hand, then recoiled in mild horror as she left a faint red imprint in the shape of her palm on the metal surface. Trace stepped in front of her and clicked her fingers in front of her face, forcing April''s eyes up to her. They stared at each other for a moment. "April!? Talk to me. What happened? Were you attacked?" "I... I, I don''t really..." "Was it those guys? The ones from last night? Did they come after you?" Trace seemed to be thinking about what the old woman had said. "D- Did they drug you? Christ, April- fuck!" April shook her head violently, looking down at her shoes. "Can we. Can we please just, get me somewhere where I can wash this off. Please." Trace hesitated for a moment, glancing around. The bus had disgorged them in the middle of a residential street, and while it wasn''t fully unfamiliar, it would be a substantial hike back to Trace''s flat. "I think Charlie''s place isn''t too far from here. We can go there." Trace reached out a hand to grasp April''s, but April shied away. "The blood..." Trace put her hand on April''s shoulder instead, and began to lead her down the road. "He''ll want to know what happened to you anyway. None of us saw you after you left last night." "I... It was... weird, I don''t..." April bit her lip, glancing up at her. Trace returned the glance with a hard stare. "We can talk about it later," she said, eventually. ***** April let Trace pull her along by the shoulder as they stepped up to Charlie''s porch. A chunky silver number "9" numeral hung above a battered brass mailbox, alongside a weathered looking plastic doorbell button, which Trace hammered impatiently. April let her arms hang at her sides. They prickled with a sort of fuzzing numbness around that dots of pain where the creature had stabbed her, and she wasn''t sure whether that was a result of the wounds, or the way she was letting her hands hang loose away from her body, loathe to touch anything. The dried blood prickled on her skin, exuding a deeper sensation of wrongness than even the scabbed-over puncture marks managed to. The door swung open to reveal Charlie with one hand in a pair of heat-proof mitts, as if he had been halfway through taking something out of the oven. "Trace!" he beamed briefly, before taking her in. "April!?" April was getting real sick of hearing people exclaim her name that way that morning. Trace pulled her across the threshold, practically muscling aside Charlie, who was forced to press back against the wall of his hallway. "What the fuck happened to you two?" "Later," said Trace, glancing at Charlie as she pulled April through a door to his right, revealing a small ground floor bathroom with a mounted porcelain sink below a rectangular-frame mirror. Trace positioned her in front of the sink, and April leaned forward, placing her hands in the bowl as Trace spun the winged tap valve, sending a stream of hot water shooting into the basin. April watched wordlessly as it filled up around her fingers, the steaming water misting with a seeping red as the blood was leached from her hands and forearms. When she was done rinsing the blood, she asked Trace to leave her alone for a moment and locked the door, sitting down heavily on the closed toilet seat. Realising she had some business to take care of, she slipped down her stained jeans, still spattered with streaks of wet slime, and pissed a long stream into the toilet bowl before closing it again and walking over to the sink. After washing her hands for the fifth time, she held up her arms to examine the row of neat punctures dotting the surface of her skin. The spines that the creature had stuck in her had not been particularly thick, and so what she was looking at resembled more the wounds inflicted by an oversized knitting needle than anything else. They were deep, however, in some cases slicing down into the inner flesh of her arm. So far she had been able to mostly ignore the pain, but it did hurt, in a throbbing, deep sort of way that made her think of the possibility of infection and conjured images of puss-stained gauze. Rummaging in Charlie''s cupboard, she found a bottle of off-brand antiseptic, and braced herself before slapping a palmful of the stuff against her skin. She gripped the arm with her hand as the searing pain cut into her, her gaunt face staring back at her from the mirror. As she did, she became aware of the sound of slightly raised voices coming from the other side of the locked door, and distracted herself from the sting by tuning into them. "...what do you mean you don''t know? Weren''t you with her?!" Charlie''s usual falsetto voice was reaching new heights as he spoke with an anxious panic, probably forgetting that the loose-fitting wooden bathroom door did not constitute a particularly effective barrier to sound. "I wasn''t with her, she just showed up on the bus. I don''t even know where she came from, I hadn''t seen her since the pub." "Was it those guys who punched her? Did they follow her home?" "I think maybe, yeah. I mean, I didn''t see her leave last night. I was too busy with Morgan, and... did you see what happened when she left, exactly?" The voices went quiet as Charlie paused for a moment. "I... no. No, I didn''t. Honestly, it was weird. It was like... well... I don''t know." "But, do you reckon one of them slipped out after her?" "Maybe. But..." Charlie lowered his voice a little, and April had to strain her ears to keep listening. "...the other possibility is. You don''t think, maybe, she might have done it to herself?" "Really?" Trace''s voice was incredulous. "Do you think? I don''t think that''s... like her." She sounded unsure despite herself. "Isn''t it, though? You know how weird things have been with her recently. Getting into that crash the other day, and now this? And- I think something''s not right with her, Trace. We were talking last night, and she was saying she''d been seeing things." "Fuck, what? What kind of things?" "She wouldn''t say. Wanted to talk to Michelle about it, I think." "Well maybe she should! Can we call her? Are you two still seeing each other? You were together for a while, right? I know she and April have been..." she trailed off. "Not... well, no, we haven''t, not recently." Charlie sounded sheepish. "I''m more into guys these days, you know. And besides, it''s not really ''chelle''s problem, is it?" "She''d help. She''d want to help. She cares about her, you know that." "Yeah..." Charlie sounded uncertain. Their voices trailed off into unintelligible mumbling as Trace and Charlie moved away into the living room. April sat back, staring at her own face in the mirror, scrutinizing her eyes for some sign of what might be happening behind them. She tried to imagine that she really had gone insane; to recontextualize the whole madness with the red vine forest as some sort of psychosis-induced fever-dream, or the result of her being spiked with a psychedelic hallucinogen by one of the men at the bar. She couldn''t do it, though. Did her brain really have it within itself to concoct something so precisely, pristinely strange? So alien and yet so self-consistent in her recollections? It wasn''t as if April hadn''t taken psychedelics before; the tone of the two different experiences wasn''t really something she could square. No, if that had been it, then at the very least it had been something very new. Unauthorized reproduction: this story has been taken without approval. Report sightings. "Besides," she thought to herself, looking down at her arms, "don''t I have evidence right here?" The red pucker-marks of the puncture wounds were surely proof enough that her mind had not been deceiving her. "Unless I got stabbed by some stranger in a back alley, and that was the story my mind invented to explain what happened?" She shook her head, violently. No, it wasn''t something she could dwell on. After taking another minute to compose herself, she unlocked the bathroom door and gingerly tip-toed into the living room. As she entered, Trace and Charlie immediately looked up, fixing their eyes on her warily, like she was a walking bomb that they half expected to explode. She suppressed her instinctual eye-roll and flopped down on the sofa opposite them, meeting their concerned eyes in turn. The pressure of their gaze bored into her skin hotly, a tense knot of anxiety twisting in her stomach as she tried to work out how she was going to explain this to them. "I''m fine, guys. You don''t have to look at me as if I''m about to commit a murder-suicide." It was telling that neither of them laughed at that, instead opting to just glance at one-another uneasily. April sighed internally. Charlie was the first one to speak. "April... can you tell us what happened to you?" He sat forward, elbows on his knees, propping up his chin with his hands. April hesitated, wondering what to say, and then deciding to settle on something plausible that was at least loosely adjacent to the truth. "I was attacked by... an animal. On my way home." Charlie frowned. "Like, by a dog or something?" He looked at her arms, which April pulled into herself self-consciously. "Those don''t look like tooth marks, Apes." "No, it was, uh," she cast around for a moment, thinking. "It was like, a hedgehog, or- a porcupine." "A- a porcupine?" Trace''s face scrunched up in nonplussed bafflement. "Are you shitting me? April, why the fuck would there be a porcupine?" "I don''t know! I guess it, like, escaped from a zoo? I mean, I thought it was weird!" She ploughed ahead, ignoring their sceptical glances. "Anyway, I was walking home, I ran into it- the porcupine, I mean- and it chased me for a while, and then I tripped up... it got some of its spines in me. But then this dude came along and scared it off, I think, so I got up, and continued walking until I... I ended up on the bus with Trace this morning." "April, please be serious," said Charlie, looking at her, his eyes pleading, "are you bullshitting us?" "No," said April, then, seeing their expressions, repeated more firmly, "No! I promise, it''s how it went down." There was a minute of uncomfortable silence. "Mostly." The silence continued. "I should... go, I think," said April, breaking the tension. "What? No fucking way, April!" said Trace, "you''re staying here until you''re better!" Charlie spoke up. "Well, maybe- April, maybe you should go to the hospital? Get your arms looked at, and... anything else you... need?" "I just got out of the hospital yesterday," said April. "And I don''t want to be locked in a psych ward any time soon, either," she thought, keeping the words to herself. "Yeah, well-" Charlie gestured up and down her, as if to encompass everything that had happened to her in the past twelve hours. "How long was I away for?" thought April. "It didn''t feel like I should have been away the whole night. Crap, maybe my sense of time is broken now, too." Out loud, she said, "look, no. No. I don''t need the hospital. Trust me. I just... I want to go home and sleep. I know what''s best for me." Her two friends exchanged uneasy looks, but seemed to accept it for the time-being. Charlie stood up and walked over to a side-table, where he kept his keys in a carved wooden bowl engraved with a tableau of bees tending to a bouquet of flowers. "Do you want me to drive you home?" For the first time that morning, April smiled in relief. "Please." A few minutes later, April found herself climbing into the passenger side seat of Charlie''s Vauxhall Astra, her hands gripping her stained jeans. Despite herself, she found herself picking at the skin of her arms, poring over the odd little dots and specks in an almost subconscious manner, her fidgeting brain still looking for evidence that she had actually managed to clean off all of the blood. Trace clambered into the back seat. She had nominally decided to come along because she wanted a ride back into town instead of sitting alone in Charlie''s house, but April strongly suspected they both wanted to keep eyes on her until she reached the front door of her apartment. She didn''t blame them, really. The car pulled onto the street, and began picking its way through the residential roads as it filtered its way towards the high street. April did her best to distract herself by people-watching as she leaned against the car window, eyes tracking the passing strangers walking their dogs, carrying bags between shops, holding hands; the assorted constituents of their lives. A man unloading kegs of beer from a truck outside a pub shouted up to someone who was leaning out a window, making a crude gesture with rugged, thick-skinned fingers. A woman across the street caught the motion and nudged a friend, laughing. A little further along, a gaggle of girls was standing on a street corner, giggling at something one of them was showing the others on her phone. April reached down to her pocket, thinking to check her own phone for the first time since the previous night, now that there was no chance that she would get bloody fingerprints on the screen. Looking down, she saw that at some point during her misadventures the screen had cracked at a corner, a spiderweb of fractured glass radiating out from where she must have fallen into something hard. "Figures," she thought, sighing to herself. At least it seemed to still be working; she thumbed it on idly, checking the time- 7:43am. Typically she''d still be asleep, assuming she wasn''t scheduled for a shift at Sporks. Well, she didn''t need to worry about that any more, she guessed. Looking back out of the window, her eyes settled on a tall, bald man in a long coat and glasses, who was standing outside of a coffee shop, staring off into the middle distance while not seeming to look at anything in particular. She tracked him as he paused for a moment, turned around 180 degrees, stepped through the shopfront window, and out of sight. For a moment, April didn''t quite register what she''d just seen, the deluge of the past few days'' events forcing her brain into a default repose of acceptant bewilderment that resulted in her not initially registering anything as odd. After a moment, however, the uneasy stirrings of her subconscious reporting that something unexpected had wormed their way up into her frontal lobe, and she twisted back around to stare at the coffee shop, straining her eyes for any trace of the bald man behind the dark glass that he had seemingly stepped through. The outside was bright, however, the sun having fully risen behind the ceiling of clouds, and it was hard to make out much of the dwindling rectangle of window beyond its blurry reflection of the street. "You alright, April?" asked Trace, whose head was positioned slightly to the left of April''s immediate line of sight through the rear window of the car. Her expression wore a renewed concern at April''s sudden movement. "...yeah, I''m fine," she said, turning back around to face the windscreen- And started, jumping backwards with a barely stifled yelp. She clapped a hand over her mouth, and struggled to avoid any further reactions that might draw further attention. "...you sure?" asked Trace from the back, sounding uncertain. "...Yeah," she just about managed to breathlessly gasp out, staring through the windscreen. "Uh, hiccups." "Oh, right." Trace went silent. There were people in the middle of the road, and Charlie was driving directly through them as if nothing was there at all. There weren''t many, but enough that they might otherwise constitute the population of a mildly busy street, except that they were moving across the tarmac in odd directions, and with no regard for the traffic or for one another. They tended to walk alone or in little gaggles of two to four, striding forward with some haste, as if they were being compelled to attend an urgent appointment. That was not all; there was something... wrong, with some of them. Many did not look particularly out of place amid the presumably normal people on either side of the road¡ªexcept for when a car drove through them¡ªbut others only looked loosely human, if at all. One man, dressed in a beige suit and matching bowler hat, had slices of negative space intersecting his body along the horizontal axis, like he had been chopped into slices along his whole body, and then had had every other piece discarded. Despite this, he seemed to be able to walk quite normally, clutching the brim of his hat with a hand that then failed to attach to a forearm, the limb simply ending in a nothingness that spanned six inches to where his elbow suddenly reappeared. Looking between two of the slices, April could just about make out a meaty cross-section through his body where one of the segments terminated. She abruptly had a mental flashback to the image of Charlie in the bar the previous night, the sharp nothing slicing through his skull in almost exactly the same manner. What? Her attention was then drawn to another figure, standing in the middle of the road. This one could scarcely even be described as humanoid; it had four legs, thin and curved, ending in sharp points that made them look like skin coloured fountain pen nibs. The sharp edges were stained a bright red that was almost, but not quite, the shade of blood. These were attached to a hulking articulated body made up of two dark brown segments shrouded in a cloak of black cloth, shaped almost like giant vertebrae, and attached together with a disproportionately small ball joint. Tube-like entrails were strung wire-like in mid air between the two sections of its body. The whole thing stood a solid nine feet tall, and was fronted by a thin but eerily human head, lacking a chin but with some sort of vented breathing mask clamped over its nose. April watched the thing in growing horror as the car approached it, then felt a brief mental shock as they passed through its body, April catching a brief glimpse of fleshy underbelly while it intersected the car. She glanced at Charlie. Neither he nor Trace had reacted, and even the bizarrely inhuman creature had not acted as if it had particularly noticed the car driving through it. April decided, right then and there, that she had a decision to make. On the one hand, she could acknowledge the crazy. She could speak up at that moment, tell Trace and Charlie that she was seeing monsters in the middle of the street. She could do that, and face those consequences willingly; the disbelief, the fear, the almost inevitable trip to a psychiatric ward that, she had to admit, might even be for her own good. She could accept that none of this was real, that she had gone mad, and allow her life to be swept along in the consequences of that decision. She could close her eyes and simply try to shut out the hallucinations before they took over her life entirely. Then there was the second option; the scarier option. She could say nothing, remain buckled into her car seat as they drove across the threshold of madness, and then follow that road wherever it might lead. She could choose to accept the evidence of her senses as real. April thought back to everything that had happened to her in the past 36 hours. The monkey, the crash, Charlie at the bar, the fabric tunnel, the red forest. She remembered the man in the suit, the shapeless, spined predator, and she looked down at her arms, still puckered with the memory. That was real. I lived that. April decided to stay quiet. By the time Charlie had pulled up outside of her apartment building, the apparitions had mostly dispersed. April wasn''t sure if there were quantitatively less of them, or whether, for whatever reason she was unable to see the ones that were there. Regardless, after passing through a few more clusters of strangely dressed and/or strangely shaped strangers on the street, April had stopped seeing anything too unusual on the road in front of her. She wanted to feel relieved, but the emotion that came to the fore was more a sort of wary unease. It felt as though something was waiting at the periphery of her awareness, stalking from the mental shadows for the right moment to make its reappearance. "Want me to walk you up, Apes?" Trace had reached over to tap on her shoulder, gently, as if she might shatter at the touch. April shrugged her off. "I''m fine, I think." "You''re sure?" Trace sounded suspicious. "Yes," said April, reaching for the door-handle. "Actually, April?" Charlie interjected, holding a hand out to stop her, "Could I have a word? Outside the car? I want to talk about something." "Uh, okay." April unbuckled her seatbelt and popped the door, stepping out, then let Charlie follow suit on the other side of the car before circling around to her from the driver''s side. She closed her door, and they both leaned against it, vaguely uncomfortable. Trace looked on suspiciously from the other side of the glass. Charlie glanced down at his shoes for a moment, before looking back up at her. "What is it, Char?" "April..." he started, before stopping again, seemingly at a loss for words. "Charlie?" He continued to dither for a moment, before settling on, "...are you sure you''re okay?" "Yeah. I said so, right?" He looked at her. "I''m fine, Charlie." "Right..." he shuffled his feet. April was eager to head indoors and to her bed, but Charlie was acting uncharacteristically enough that she made herself hang back, for his sake. Finally, he looked up at her again, opening his mouth again. "It''s just... at the bar... last night, I saw- I thought I saw... something. Something strange." April gave him a sharp look. Could it be? She hedged, watching him cautiously. "What kind of strange?" "It''s just... when you fell to the floor..." He stared at her wordlessly. "What?" April stepped closer to him, eagerly. "Tell me, please, Charlie." "You..." He threw his hands up in the air. "I don''t know April. You... disappeared so quickly. It was like... one moment you were there, the next you weren''t, and then I didn''t see you for the rest of the night. It was as if..." He gestured uncertainly, hands making shapes in the air. "Where did you go?" "You were there," April thought to herself, "you saw what happened, when I fell into that place. What did you see, Charlie? Do you know- can you tell me that it was real? How I ended up there, from the floor of a Wetherspoons? From lying next to Trace''s old handbag to... wherever there was?" She opened her mouth, and almost let it all spill out, before shutting it again. No. He doesn''t even know what he saw. Instead, she reached out and put her hand on Charlie''s shoulder, locking eyes as she pinned him between herself and the car. "Some weird fucking shit''s been happening." "Yeah, no shit. You seem to be in the middle of a lot of it." "Yeah." April glanced back at Trace through the car window, who was watching them intently. "And, look. I don''t really know what''s going on, with me, or... with anything. But... I''m going to find out, okay? And when I do, I''ll let you know too. What''s going on, I mean. With everything." "Right..." Charlie stared at her warily. "Just... April? Please stay safe. I don''t know what''s going on with you but... please? No more bike wrecks, no more getting mauled by, uh. Porcupines." He flicked his eyes down to her arms. "Yeah. I''ll try." The look he gave her as he gingerly climbed back into his seat gave her the impression that he didn''t quite believe her. April watched them drive away, before turning around and climbing the three stories to her apartment. Unlocking the door, she glanced at the clock that read 8:05am. "Time to get up!", the brightly coloured digital numerals seemed to be screaming at her. Suppressing an exhausted groan, April dimmed the display with the press of a button, and without so much as glancing back out the window, she drew the blinds in her bedroom, threw herself on top of her covers, and collapsed at once into a deep and uneasy sleep. Interlude—I1 An Endless Coda To start with there was much of very many things, but that all tapered off pretty quick. Reality passed into and out of being with the grieving abruptness of a stillborn calf, mother''s cord bound tight about its neck; the life and light strangled out of the world before its first breath could even be taken, and with barely a pause for it to acknowledge its own existence. Out of the tatters of that aborted thing were left the ashes of its flash-pan reality. The instabilities and perturbations smoothed themselves, unknotted, and spread out across homogeneous space, filling the gaps in nothing with steady mess of something. For a short while the elementary substance of that something were the singularities, the mass differentials that dictated their brief half-lives holding the last memories of things that had once been stars. With their final passing, even those memories were erased. The substance of that first birthing had been ground down into paste, and then the paste itself ground down. Its constituent pieces were cast across a black void, an infinite eternity that, if seen from the outside, might have resembled a very large full stop. That, it seemed, was it. Except it wasn''t, was it? For reality had left a snare; a loophole that had existed from the start, but which might come to fruition only though the implacable, empty patience of deep time. The universe had begun to pluck these strings while it was still only in the early stages of decay. The intransigent iron stars, whose inertness might have let them dream of immortality, were the first to discover a fundamental truth; that to exist was to ride the edge of a waveform whose falling edge stretched out to a deeper infinity than their own. It was impossible to judge when it might have started, first; that was the nature of these things. If there had been anything capable of thought during that outcry of the earliest years, while that singular firework was still in the process of igniting, it would have likely seemed a proportionately inconceivable long time. The truth, that their reality was a glossy edifice built only from the relative probability of its own being, was one that was likely known, but dismissed as akin to a marginal rounding error. Who would care, after all, when their own tiny castles of existence were so solidly static and self-evident? Find this and other great novels on the author''s preferred platform. Support original creators! Eternity cared, as it always does. As impossibility tended with time into the possible, and then into the near certain, the remnants of the old world faced that reckoning as they folded into themselves before their reality had even the chance to grow truly cold. In truth, the death of those dark remnants was a snake that would eat its own tail until the end of time; this is the nature of the stochastic demise of infinite things. Against the backdrop of its own scale, though, the void would soon forget those which remained, sealed away amid their empty observation spheres of probabilistic denial. They were the ultimate exception to the rule; for the rest, an infinity had come to feast upon them that was still to itself discover that it was just the beginning. With no one left to know that truth, and no light to see it by, the cinder of reality became transmuted into something more than itself. A bubbling sea of potential beckoned, an ocean of veiled possibility that, by mathematical sleight of hand, was both inconceivable and yet inevitable, as time found that it had nothing else to mark itself by. The epochs of stillness between the first whimpering sparks of light emerging from that void were the first truly long stretches of time the universe had ever known, and it was a syndrome that would get worse, rather than better. Broad, cataclysmic eternities elapsed between the tiniest flickers of null entropy, but they did elapse, because they were not the true eternity, and anything less was nothing at all. A callous rounding to zero. The things that emerged out of that calamitous nothing, finding themselves catapulted into existence from of the yawning maw of void by the groaning lever-arm of temporal inertia, were not themselves much to write home about. A few scattered atoms, here and there. A molecule, once; a kind of sugar, that briefly found itself the most complex thing in the universe. It drifted for a billion years or so before being struck by one of the few stray photons and breaking apart, its constituents left lonely for one another in the trillions left to them before they fully decayed. So it remained, much like that, for a long while. Until the trailing decimal point of probability started to rear its head in earnest, and, heart beating to a pulse of once every trillion, trillion lifetimes of the long dead stars, something in the depths began to stir. A final reality, starting to be born. â…§ Falling Off After April''s brain managed to pull itself out of the sucking, viscous embrace of sleep, the first thing she saw as she blearily thumbed on her shattered phone screen was a text from Michelle. "heya xX charlie said u were having a tough time, needed a word? perhaps more than a word (lol). let me know, can hang out. luvu xox -chell" She took a second to focus her eyes long enough to read the words, and then locked the screen, groaning, before rolling out of bed on to the floor. Landing in a heap, she found herself staring at the back of an empty can of an energy drink that had rolled under her bed. "UNLEASH THE BEAST!?" read the blurb, in a garish yellow font. April wasn''t sure she had much of a beast in her to unleash in that moment, but decided she probably needed to at least try to move somewhat before her joints locked up. Her arms still hurt, badly. The bone-deep ache had diminished a little, but it had been supplanted by a gnawing sting around the puncture marks that was arguably even more distractingly unpleasant. Worse still, the pain in her skinned shins had come back to haunt her anew, the anaesthetic provided by the hospital having long since worn off since last night''s car ride. "Actually, no, that was the morning," April thought, glancing at the digital readout on her bedside table. 3:52pm. "Glad to see my sleep cycle is healthy, at least," she muttered, heading into the bathroom to examine her body''s collection of damages further. It occurred to April as she examined the puckered red marks on her arms up close that this was the sort of thing that should probably have been treated by a doctor to start with, disinfectant or no. April didn''t know much about the specifics of human physiology, but she imagined that when a cut went deeper than the surface skin and into the underlying substrate of fat and gristle, that was probably pretty bad for you. Her one saving grace was that the spines that the creature had stuck in her had been fairly thin, and passed in and out near to straight up and down through the skin; as such, the cuts more resembled the work of an oversized needle than they did a stab wound from a knife. That and the fact that her stiffened wrist, despite complaining at her painfully as she twisted it about, seemed to have regained its full range of motion while she slept. Should probably, definitely have had that looked at. Oh well. She contemplated making the trip back to Whipp''s Cross for the second time in as many days, letting a medical professional deal with it all. But, she considered, the she would have to explain why she had seemingly been stabbed, and then, if they pushed her, she might end up having to explain the monkey, and how she''d been sucked into a handbag, and- no. She didn''t think she could face that quite yet. The inside of a white room really didn''t feel like the most inviting place for her to end up that afternoon. If her arms started getting worse, then she could go and see a doctor. Maybe. Nonetheless, she did her best to tend to the raised markings as best she could on her own, peppering her lower arms with a constellation of little beige sticking plasters from her cabinet. Together they made it look like she had indeed had a misadventure with a porcupine, or perhaps was making a very punk-rock fashion statement. She did her best to address the leg wound next, making an effort at replacing the soiled bandages with a roll of gauze that she wrapped tightly around her calves, and even half succeeding at creating something passable. Energy for the day already largely drained from that fifteen minutes of work, April traipsed into the kitchen, pulling open the cupboard to poll for some sort of food item. Deciding upfront that this was definitely a "low spoons" kind of food prep night, she shoved aside some netted garlic cloves, onions and tomato sauce that were the latest victims of her at-home practice pizza scheme. Instead she retrieved a half-empty box of Kellog''s? Krave? and a packet of ready salted crisps, pouring the cereal into a bowl to pick at dry. After munching contemplatively for five minutes, she grabbed a glass of water, then continued to alternate between cereal and crisps one-handedly while she checked Twitter and the day''s news with the other. Notably, no reports of bizarre phantasms beyond all comprehension lining the streets... She flipped back to her text app and pulled up the thread with Michelle, swiping out a reply to her one handedly while balling up the now empty crisp packet with the other. "Hey girl, yeah actually that sounds great. You free today? Could use a chat. x" Her finger hovered above the send button for a few seconds, until she quickly went back and added another line. "Also sorry about last time. Again" She let out a long breath. ''I have to tell someone,'' she resolved. ''Whether I''m actually seeing fucking ghosts or this is a mental breakdown, I have to let someone know.'' For either one of those possibilities, Michelle was probably the right person to speak to. The fact that she was a licensed therapist in her day job was almost just a bonus on top of her general infatuation with the bizarre. Michelle tended to collect unusual people and beliefs around her, and even if she didn''t adopt much of that herself, she was always one to at least entertain crazy, for better or for worse. The downside, of course, was that interacting with Michelle could be quite a lot, especially for the uninitiated. ''But it''s not as if I''m not already overwhelmed...'' There was the other reason, too, of course, that she was both nervous and excited at the prospect of seeing Michelle. The same reason it had been a while since they had hung out in any more personal capacity than a group night out with mutual friends. April decided she would cross that bridge when it arrived in front of her. She had been walking around in her underwear until that point, so, after tossing the empty crisp packet at the waste bin, she walked back to her room to shrug on some clean panties, tracksuit leggings, and a tank-top. Pausing to look at herself in the mirror, she considered for a moment, and then added a pair of stuffers to her sports bra underneath the top. Might as well still make a good impression, after all. April had a monochrome tattoo of a slightly abstract starfish on her upper left arm. Given the only semi-obscured damage to her lower arm, though, the overall impression it was now giving was of having dug claws into her skin as it climbed its way up there. April considered covering the whole ensemble by wearing her still-soiled jacket, but then wondered why she was being so damn fashion conscious while the world was going mad around her, and decided not to bother. Her phone dinged with Michelle''s reply. "its fiiine, youre good" April texted back. "Good to hear. When do you want me round?" "im free, come by whenever" "You still in the pits?" "ya, pitier and sweatier than ever, come see <3" April rolled her eyes. "The Pits" was the nickname of the basement apartment Michelle rented, but her tendency to move around a lot and stay with friends made it an open question whether she would actually be there on a given day. April was glad that she was; the Pits was at least familiar territory, and a trip she could make without much effort. Slinging her bag over one shoulder, she pocketed the phone and walked over to the door, closing the blinds on her way out. At the back of her mind, April had been entertaining a comforting fantasy. She had, since waking up, not seen the slightest thing out of the ordinary; no painted monkeys staring at her from the back of her cupboard, no tunnel to an alien world at the bottom of her cereal bowl, and no blue slime creatures hiding around the corner to paint interesting new patterns in blood on her skin. Perhaps, she reasoned, it had all been a dream, or some sort of transient psychosis that had passed away while she slept. As such she felt her stomach drop rather hard when she opened her door to the fourth floor balcony and walked directly into one of the ghosts. She could tell it was one of the ghosts, because the outward opening door passed right through it without stopping. The figure¡ªwho was a mostly normal looking man in a black coat, but wearing something resembling a motorbike helmet and wielding a bizarre assembly of articulated metal hooks where his hands should have been¡ªpaid seemingly no mind to the inch and a half of solid hardwood intersecting his body. April herself stumbled forward in surprise and barrelled right into him. This time, to both her own shock and, it seemed, that of the ghost, they made a tangible contact where they touched. April''s hands still sunk into the figure, but he wasn''t intangible so much as he seemed to be composed of a semi-permeable substance that only mildly resisted pressure, resulting in a sensation akin to dipping both arms into a large churn filled with warm, unusually viscous milk. The helmeted man jumped, oil-sheen visor twisting around to stare at her in apparent shock, and let out an abrupt, mechanical shout that sounded like somebody blowing a French horn from the other side of a rattling radiator manifold. April jolted back, pulling her hands out of the man''s chest and leaving two roughly hand-shaped imprints that slowly filled back in, in the manner of a shape pressed into custard. "I''m sorry!" she cried, instinctively. The man gave her a reproachful stare, then stepped backwards into a flat plane of nothing and vanished out of existence. April crouched down on the threshold of her flat, put her face in her hands, and let out a muffled scream of frustration into her palms. A neighbour from a couple of doors down, out watering some hanging plants, peered at her strangely. "I''m- I''m fine," she said, looking over and waving him off. "Just had to let something out a bit, that''s all." "More power to yah," croaked the man affably, turning back to his plants. She straightened up and headed down to the street level, keeping an eye out for any more out of place figures, or any incongruous occurrences more generally. There were some strangely coloured patches in the corners of the stairwell, but she was fairly sure that was just mould and dried piss, and didn''t particularly want to venture close enough to confirm. Reaching the street level without seeing anything particularly more suspect, she walked the five minutes to the bus stop and hitched the EL1 into town, where she jumped off to change onto a service that should have been a 169, except the reel of rotary tape displaying the fluorescent green route numbers had somehow managed to get stuck on "8". She squinted at it for a moment with a vague sense of disquiet. The side-display had the correct number though, so she climbed on and tapped her card on the contactless reader. "Yeah, it''s the 169. Display''s broken," said the gruff-voiced driver as he thumbed backwards in a ''get moving'' gesture, giving the impression that it was a sentence he''d repeated a lot that afternoon. She nodded and went over to stand by the door as the vehicle started up again. Michelle''s basement apartment was a single floor occupancy that constituted the lower rung of a three-level renovated town house, the revenue scheme of a particularly unimaginative corporate landlord. "The Pits" had been the cheapest offering due to the lack of natural lighting, but Michelle had always said that the fact that she had her own door more than compensated for this, and April couldn''t help but agree. It meant that she didn''t run the risk of one of the upper floor neighbours asking about her plaster-encrusted arms when she hopped down to the below-ground landing and rang the doorbell. There was a moment''s pause, then the sound of sliding bolts echoing through the wood, before the door shuddered open to reveal Michelle in a green-orange floral patterned sundress, contrasting her black-framed glasses and dark hair, tied back in a bun. "Hello, April!" she said excitedly, before glancing down at April''s arms, and continuing in a similar tone, "what happened to you?" She grinned, as if April had brought her an interesting gift to examine instead of a set of fairly conspicuous injuries. "I, uh. I''ll tell you later. Who''s this?" A plain looking man with a scruffy brown beard wearing a t-shirt depicting a green cartoon alien head had walked out into the hall behind Michelle, and was staring at April curiously. "Oh, this is Clyde!" Clyde put his hand up in greeting as Michelle spoke. "He just popped by, but he was about to get going I think, so let''s not keep him. See-ya Clyde!" "Bye Shellie! Let me know what you think!" April and Michelle squeezed back against the wall to allow Clyde to shuffle past them on the threshold and up to the street level. April gave Michelle a confused look. "Clyde''s writing a book!" she said, by way of explanation. "It''s about the paranormal. He wanted me to take a look at his draft." "Huh, any good?" asked April, looking back over her shoulder at him. "Nah, it''s pretty terrible. But he is enthusiastic! Want to come in?" "Yes, please." April stepped over the threshold and shuffled out of her boots, looking around at the decor. Since she had last visited, Michelle had seemingly placed a number of pleasant looking pot plants on all of the side-tables, but the effect was counteracted somewhat by a large stained-glass decorative panel that had been hung from a nail on one wall. It seemed to be an abstract depiction of a pack of wolves amid a yellow savannah, biting the feet of an elephant, which was rearing in pain. "Pits look nice," she said, staring at the image. "Thank you! I managed to get them cleaned up after your last visit." April shuddered internally. "I uh- Sorry, again. About that." "Don''t worry, honestly! Happens all the time." April wasn''t too sure about that, but decided to let it lie as Michelle walked over to stand next to her. For a moment they both stared at the ugly picture together. "You like?" Michelle ventured. "It''s, um. Interesting." April tried again, "evocative?" "I found it at a flea market, couldn''t resist." She turned away and walked down the hall. "Coffee?" She walked into a combination kitchen/dining room and began filling up a kettle. "Yeah, please." April followed her and took a seat at one of the wooden table chairs. "So Charlie rang me about you," said Michelle as she put the kettle on to boil, not looking over her shoulder. "Said you''d been involved in some crazy shit!" "Yeah... ah, yep," said April, looking down at her feet. There was an awkward silence for a few minutes, as Michelle set out two mugs, filled them with hot water, and stirred in coffee grounds. She pulled open the little half-size fridge unit that sat on the counter, took out a carton of milk, and poured two splashes of liquid into the cups, stirring it in. Finishing, she put the milk back in the fridge, picked up the mugs, and clacked them down on the table. In a fluid continuation of the movement, she spun around, twisting one of the chairs so its back was facing April, and then sitting down on it with her legs splayed out in the manner of a youth pastor trying his hand at looking cool and approachable. Michelle, to her credit, was closer to pulling it off, but the fact that her dress was hiked up to her inner thighs didn''t help too much. April did her best not to stare. "So!" Michelle began, staring at her intently. "...so?" April picked up a mug of coffee and sipped at it, eyeing Michelle nervously over the rim. "So tell me about it all." She cocked her head, smiling at April implacably. "I, uhm. Crashed a bike," April hedged, suddenly oddly self conscious. Why had she thought this would be a good idea again? "I heard! Is that why your arms are all fucked up?" "No, that was. That was something else." April stared into her coffee. "Michelle... I..." "Yes?" April teetered on the edge for the moment, then abruptly switched lane into the second-highest entry on her list-of-things-she-should-probably-say-but-didn''t-want-to-broach. "...I am so fucking sorry about last time. I know I fucked up your, sofa- I. I should have stayed to help clean up, at least. It was fucking sh- it was, uh, it was fucked up of me. I''m really sorry." "Honestly, don''t worry about that. It would hardly be the first time I''ve seen it happen." "Yeah, but, like, it was my responsibility and I didn''t own it. It was a fuck up." Michelle tilted her head, smiling indulgently. "That kind of play is always pretty high risk already, you were clearly embarrassed, it''s a shame you left so quick but like, I get it. Honestly." "Yeah, but I should have at least, like, texted you after." "It would have been nice, but I''m over it, you know?" "Do you want me to pay for the damage?" "Nah, washed right out." April raised an eyebrow, incredulously. "Really?" Michelle''s mouth quirked up at the corner. "Well, okay, no, not really. But cushion covers are cheap." April put her face in her hands, face flushing red. "I''m so, so fucking sorry." Michelle stifled a bout of laughter, "April, it''s okay, I promise!" "Next time, I''ll be more careful what I eat before-" she stopped abruptly, looking down at the mug of coffee she was drinking, and nearly dropped it to the table in consternation. Michelle snorted. "What, you were thinking- today?" "No! I- I mean-" April set down the mug, cautiously this time. "Look, don''t worry about it. We can figure it out. But also, hey- don''t think I don''t see what you''re doing, here." "What do you...?" Michelle looked at her pointedly, setting her own coffee mug down in the table. "Trying to distract me." April stared at her. "Uh-" "Seriously, what''s been going on?" She folded her legs up onto the chair and sat cross legged, staring at April across the table. "Charlie is worried, and I mean, worried. He was telling me some crazy sounding shit. You crashed a bike? You got into a fight at a bar? You''ve been hallucinating? You turned up this morning on... a bus covered in slime... talking about being stabbed by a porcupine- see, look, I am saying it out loud and it just sounds... well!" "I, uh..." April dithered, and Michelle cut her off again. "Now, look." She adjusted her glasses. "I don''t know how much of it to believe. Maybe it''s all bullshit. Honestly, Charlie was also talking about seeing you turn invisible, so, maybe he was on something? It wouldn''t be the first time." "No, I don''t think so," muttered April belatedly. "Well, okay then. Maybe things with you are even more interesting that I expected. Or perhaps it was all just a ''big misunderstanding''? Either way... tell me about it!" April felt herself begin to sweat as Michelle''s gaze bore into her. She shifted back and forth uncomfortably. "I, um..." She glanced up, met Michelle''s expectant gaze, then looked away again. Then, with a sudden burst of resolve, she jerked her head back up and blurted out the first thing that landed on her tongue. "I''ve been seeing ghosts!" Michelle''s eyebrows rose, but she stayed silent. "And, people chopped in half, and. And yesterday, while I was at the bar, I was swallowed by a- by a handbag, and-" April found herself choking on the words, and swallowed hard, trying her best not to look at Michelle''s face. "And, I was in this, tunnel. And fell out of it, and there was, this red forest made of vines, and. Fuck, Michelle! It''s fucking- it''s insane! There was, a guy in armour, and this blue... thing that fucking stabbed me... Oh, and oh yeah, it all started when there was this talking monkey at my job, but also since then, there are these people that I can see and that nobody else can, and other people can''t seem to touch them, and..." She trailed off for a moment, grasping at the air with her hands. Meeting Michelle''s eyes again with a pleading look, the other woman''s face was projecting nothing more than a vague air of surprise, which felt disarming enough to allow her to continue. "And... and it''s not fucking normal! And I don''t know what''s going on, or if I''m going insane, except it- except it was real, the injuries are real, I-" April ripped off one of the sticking plasters to reveal one of the puckered marks in her skin. "I don''t know what it means. It feels like the whole world has gone crazy, and. And nobody else knows what''s going on except for me, maybe I''ve gone crazy, I don''t know. I just don''t fucking know! And I know this sounds mad, but it happened, and if it is just me being crazy then maybe I should be locked up, but I. I don''t think I- I don''t think I''m crazy! It think something really is going on! I..." April trailed off into a few seconds of shocked silence that echoed across the table. "April?" Michelle eventually said, tentatively. "Yeah?" "Are you fucking with me?" April put her face in her hands. "No, I am not fucking with you." "Okay, good. That''s good to know, because it means that there are two possibilities." April looked back up at her. "...yeah?" "Yeah. Either, you''ve had a psychotic break, or- God forbid- you''re an urban fantasy protagonist." April slumped back in her seat. "Fucking hell." The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation. "Now, I have to admit, the second of those two seems pretty unlikely," she paused for a second, as if struck by a sudden thought. "Although given what Charlie said, huh. Food for thought." April looked at her glumly, not saying anything. "But either way," Michelle continued, "it''s okay! We can figure this out." "Can we? I don''t fucking know, Shellie. It''s fucking insane. Everything has gone insane." "Oh come on, April, you were hardly normal to begin with." Michelle got up off her chair, leaving her mostly-full coffee cup steaming in front of it, and walking around the table to stand in front of April. Reaching out, she gently cupped April''s chin with her hands, lifting her head upwards out of her own crossed palms until they were looking at one another. She brushed a strand of hair out of her face, and April was so caught off guard by how unexpectedly intimate the moment felt, she momentarily forgot to be upset. "It''s going to be okay. I promise." April vocalized a sort of softly agonized moan, and flumphed her face forwards into Michelle''s stomach. A corner of her brain was telling her that the on-again off-again friends-with-benefits flirtation she had had with her friend in the past probably didn''t entitle her to post-meltdown cuddles, but for her part Michelle seemed to not be objecting in that moment. April allowed herself to stay there for a short while, her sitting and Michelle standing with her arms hanging around April''s back, as she sobbed silently into the fabric of Michelle''s dress. It was likely a testament to how utterly worn down she was feeling that it was almost thirty seconds before her innate interpersonal embarrassment forced her to pull back. She looked up at Michelle, and wiped a tear from her cheek, flushing. Michelle looked back at her, expression concerned but thoughtful. One-handedly, she yanked out another chair from under the table, and sat down so that the pair were now facing each other on the same side of the wooden surface. Reaching out, she put one finger under April''s chin, guiding her face upwards until she could meet her gaze. Michelle''s glasses framed her face neatly in a paired counterpart to her tidy pulled-back bun of hair. She looked surprisingly businesslike for the context, an image only slightly diverted away from by the faint damp tear stain on her dress smeared across the stomach area. April shivered slightly. "I feel like we can test this empirically." April blinked at her, still fairly distracted by her face. "How- um, how do you mean?" "Like..." she sat back. "Okay, you say you''re seeing ghosts. Are there any in the room with us right now?" April scoffed. "Come on, Shellie, I was being serious, don''t joke around." "No, I am serious! Are there?" April gave the room a cursory once-over. "Uh, no." "Hmm." "I''m sure there''s plenty outside, though. I saw one this morning. Almost punched a hole in him, actually." Michelle leaned a little closer. "I see... Want to go out and try to find one?" April shuddered. "Thanks, but no thanks. I think I''d rather sit here and drink my coffee for a while, if you don''t mind." She picked up the mug and took a quick sip, then set it down again, dejectedly. Michelle quirked her head to one side slightly. "Okay, that''s a shame, but maybe we can still work with it." She sat in thought for a moment. "You said you were, uh- what was it? ''Swallowed by a handbag''?" April grimaced. "Yeah, I know how it sounds." "No, no- I mean, maybe we can replicate that? How did it happen?" She caught April''s nonplussed stare. "Don''t worry, I''ll keep hold of one foot, I can always pull-" She broke off as both she and April began cracking up. After struggling to suppress the giggles for a minute, she managed, "okay, okay, maybe I wasn''t being super serious there, but. For real! We could try it. How did it go down?" April forced down the fit of laughter that had somewhat broken her prior reverie. "Hah, well, um. Hmm. Well, first I got punched in the face..." Michelle winced. "Hopefully that part is non-essential. I say we skip it." "Yeah. Anyway, I was lying on the floor next to the handbag, staring into it, and the next thing I knew, it sort of just... unfolded? Then re-folded, back around me, and I was in this like dark tunnel made out of handbag stuff." "Huh!" Michelle stood up and walked over to a side-counter, yanking open a drawer and rummaging through a clutter of miscellaneous personal belongings. "What are you doing?" asked April. "Just one moment..." Michelle wandered off into the hallway through the open door. A sound of rustling and soft clunking sounds echoed back through into the kitchen-dining room. April heard a louder clattering, followed by a triumphant "ah-ha!", and Michelle strode back into the room holding aloft a green, faux-leather handbag, patterned rather unpleasantly as if it were pretending to be crocodile skin. "Is this similar at all?" Michelle asked, holding it out to April like an offering to the spirits. "Uh... not a super close match, I''m afraid." "Hmm. Hopefully it doesn''t matter too much." Clutching the bag, she walked back around the table, pushing the chairs she had been sitting in back underneath it, before stopping in front of April to survey her. "Get on the floor?" "I''m sorry, what?" "Get down on the floor, like you were then." She gave April a somewhat commanding look. "Go on!" "Uh... okay. Sure." Thinking back to that night in the bar- had it really been only the day before?- April got onto her hands and knees, looking up at Michelle''s table and trying to approximate the position she had been in after she had been knocked to the ground in front of where the unpleasant men had been drinking. Determining the approximate angle, she shuffled around in an uncomfortable wiggling motion, curling up her body to mimic the pose she had struck on that previous night, dazed and contorted with shock and pain. She craned her neck to look forward, Michelle slightly out of focus above her. "The bag was lying there, in front of me." "Zip facing towards you, or away from you?" Michelle knelt down. "Towards me- yeah, that''s it." Between the two of them, they adjusted April''s prone pose and the relative position of the floor-strewn handbag, until April was looking at an eerie recreation¡ªwith all the specific details replaced¡ªof the scene she remembered from the night before. They both held still for a silent moment, April gazing into the open pocket of the faux-leather handbag, waiting to see if anything happened. "Anything?" said Michelle finally, breaking the silence. "Uh, not that I''ve noticed." "Hmm. Strange." "Well what were you expecting? I''m pretty sure this stuff is just, well, random." "I don''t know, maybe you somehow stumbled upon some kind of esoteric handbag-based ritual for opening dimensional portals?" "Well, um. If I did, then this isn''t cutting it." Michelle dithered for a moment. "Maybe, uh, try sticking your hand inside of it?" April reached out and slid a free hand into the handbag, held still for a moment, then began poking around the interior. The empty bag flopped around on the floor unimpressively. April lifted her arm and waved it aloft, wielding the thing like a strange, ungainly glove sewn from the hide of an unusually smooth dragon. "Not working," she eventually concluded, letting it slide off her hand and onto the tile floor with a thwap. "No," muttered Michelle, sounding genuinely dejected. She knelt down on the floor next to April, and the pair both went silent for a moment, April letting herself lie limp, Michelle peering at her. April let her eyes fall to the wooden floorboards, the stress of the past few days pulling the strength out of her. She heard a shuffling noise and a soft thunk, and glanced back up at Michelle, who had gotten onto her knees. As she watched, Michelle adjusted her dress, then rolled onto her side, stretching her legs out until she was also lying down, facing April. "Hey," she said. "Hey." "You okay down here?" April sighed, rolling onto her back. "So, do you believe me? Or do you think I''m just crazy?" "For what it''s worth, I''m pretty sure that one handbag experiment isn''t enough to rule out or confirm either possibility." April bit her lip. "But you think..." "I don''t know what I think, April. I think that there''s something happening here that I don''t understand, but I am going to keep an open mind, no matter what." She shuffled over to April, propping herself up with one arm so that she could look down at her face. "And I think that my friend is having a really tough time right now, and I do want to help out. I do." They met eyes, Michelle''s face hanging above hers. April lifted herself up too, twisting around a little so that they could face each other head on. She let the tension hang in the air for the space of a long moment before she gave in and broke it, dipping her head forward to touch her lips to Michelle''s. Michelle didn''t pull away, and kissed her back, lidding her eyes gently as they locked lips silently for a while before mutually pulling apart. "Is this... how you want me to help, right now?" Michelle looked thoughtful. "I, uh. Maybe?" April trembled a little, partially with the effort of holding herself in the rigid pose on the ground, partially as a consequence of a sudden flush. "Um, right here? On the floor?" "Probably preferable to ruining the sofa again." Michelle scoffed, rolling her eyes. "April, just don''t try to take a strap on a bad stomach and you''ll be fine." "You really know how to set the mood." "Okay, fine, let me try again..." She leaned in and kissed her harder, this time. When they broke apart April was breathing heavily enough that the tension of the earlier discussion was largely pushed to one side in her brain, which was probably the intention. Michelle reached out and stroked her cheek with her thumb, mouth forming an unspoken "aww". "Want to come to my bedroom?" she asked her. April looked down. "Probably a good idea. I don''t actually want to break my back trying to fuck on the hardwood." "I like how you assume it''s your back that would be being broken." Michelle winked as she sat up and stood, pulling April to her feet with one hand. "You do still have a dick, right? Didn''t get any surgery while you''ve been avoiding me?" April thought that the bulge in her leggings at that moment probably belied that possibility. Michelle snickered. "You want a ticket to ride?" April said, making an attempt at banter. As the words came out she thought it probably actually sounded fairly unimpressive, and so reached out to cop a feel of Michelle''s boob through her dress by way of compensation. She carried the motion forwards to push her down onto the bed after they rounded the doorway into the bedroom. Michelle splayed out atop the covers, legs spread out beneath the dress to offer her an excellent view of a pair of pink cotton panties that had a slightly damp spot in the centre. "You are still hot as fuck, Shellie..." April muttered, taking off her jacket, then continuing, "...thank you for this." Michelle scoffed. "Typically the dweeby ''thank-yous'' are saved until after the sex. And you''re hot too, by the way." April pulled off her shirt, tugging it past her breasts, and one of the bra inserts she had added earlier pinged out comically from inside of the fabric cup. They both watched its trajectory as it landed on the floor next to the bed. "You sure about that?" asked April, quirking an eyebrow. "Shut up and fuck me, please." April decided that she also wanted to do that. She pulled her bra off over her head, then slid down her leggings, slipping fingers into the fabric of her socks to toss those away alongside them in a loose pile. This left her standing only in her panties, which were tented out at the front in a most unladylike manner. She left them on for the time being, sliding into bed next to Michelle while hiking up the other woman''s dress with one hand, tracing small circles in the damp fabric above her pussy while she kissed her again. To her delight the fabric moistened further as she incorporated a healthy amount of tongue, and so she pulled down the panties for better access, feeling Michelle kick them off to the side. "I don''t think I''m going to be able to shimmy out of the dress like this," Michelle muttered between breaths. "Keep it, it''s hot to fuck girls in dresses." April ran her index finger around the soft moist part of the labia, occasionally brushing her middle finger over the exposed clit. "Did you hear that- ah- from some teenage schoolboy?" "Nope. Educated guess from the available evidence." She slipped the two fingers in an inch or so, enjoying the sensation. It felt pleasant, in a sensory way, and when she twisted the fingers to and fro it did interesting things to the feel of Michelle''s body against hers as they kissed. Realizing that she still had one free hand, April pulled down her own underwear, allowing her dick to flop out without any particular dramatic flair. She had been on hormones for long enough at that point that she was unlikely to cum any fluid, and she didn''t get hard as readily as she once had, but that sort of functionality tended to be a use-it-or-lose-it affair. Thankfully, April had been "using it" frequently enough over the past few years that she was still able to be a good girl when required. She rolled over the top of Michelle, positioning herself so that she could kneel between the other woman''s legs, arms either side of her. Michelle had managed to free one breast above the neckline of her dress, and so April gave the nipple a gentle kiss for good luck. "That''s nice..." Michelle muttered, so April lingered there, licking the raised edge softly. She reached down with one hand again, thumbing Michelle''s clit, then parting her with a pair of splayed fingers as she pressed forward. She guided herself down as she thrust into her slowly, avoiding placing too much of her weight on Michelle''s hips. Taking her moan as encouragement, she placed her hands back on either side of Michelle''s body, and ground her hips back and forth into her, enjoying the pleasantly erotic warmth. It was definitely a nice change of pace. She leant down to kiss Michelle on the corner of her mouth, feeling her gasp against her lips, faintly. April thrust harder, hearing the breaths speed up. Michelle reached up to grasp at April''s body, one hand gripping onto one of her arms, and inadvertently she dug into the still painful puckered skin above her wrists. April sharply gasped due to the sudden pain, her rhythmic motions interrupted. "Ouch." Michelle relaxed her grip, letting April start up again. "Sorry. Fuck, you feel good." April grinned, giving her a quick smooch. She was starting to feel something build, now, and so slowed her roll slightly, trying to avoid making this a disappointingly short affair. "You want me to keep going- mm- now, or do you want me to hold off?" Michelle grunted. "You can cum in me now if you want, so long as you don''t knock me up." April pressed herself into the building heat at her crotch. "Yeah, don''t worry, that''s pretty- aah- biologically unlikely." Michelle failed to reply for a few seconds because she was busy swearing softly under her breath, but eventually managed, "you''re lucky I''m so fucking turned on right now, because otherwise I might not accept those odds." She gripped April''s ass with both hands, anyway, adding some extra weight to the thrusts. They were both panting now, and April felt a prickling at the base of her spine and back of her neck that told her the orgasm was likely to be fairly inevitable at that point. For what it was worth, Michelle seemed to be having a pretty damn good time too as she writhed under her, pressing her hips upwards to meet her own and putting extra pressure on her clit. April leaned into it, feeling the knot of pleasure build in her dick until, gasping, it burst out of her, sending her collapsing down on top of Michelle in a shuddering, sweaty mess. Michelle put her arms around her back, and they kissed, enjoying the sticky feeling where their bodies were still intertwined. "You know," said April, "it''ll probably sound like the chronic bullshit of the terminally horny, but I really wasn''t expecting this when I asked to come over today. I think it might have been what I needed though." Michelle snorted. "Really? What did you think you were getting?" "I don''t know. Someone to talk to? A little bit of on-the-house-therapy, maybe?" "Well, you get both of those too. I do charge extra for this kind of therapy, though." "I''m pretty sure that''s a breach of professional ethics, so don''t try your luck." April smiled against her lips. "Depends on what I take payment in, I think." "Oh yeah? What are you asking for?" "How about a pussy full of trans girl cum?" "Oh? Then I think we''re square." April thought for a moment. "Metaphorically at least. I am firing blanks." "Good, because I was serious about what I said befo..." Michelle trailed off, tensing slightly underneath her. "What?" "April, can you get off me? I feel kind of weird." "Uh, sure." April rolled off of her, twisting so she was lying on her side, facing her in the bed. Michelle''s forehead had creased, as if she was struggling to solve a tricky mathematical problem. She closed her eyes for a moment. "What?" April asked. "Feels like I have a cramp or something. Urgh, my legs are going numb." "Huh." April put a hand on top of her. "Did I go too hard for you?" "No..." She sounded uncertain, though. Michelle''s dress was still hiked up enough from their earlier activities that skin was exposed up to above her waistline, and so April ran her hand down over her midriff and across her stomach, in a soothing gesture. As she brushed her fingertips over her lower stomach, however, the surface grew oddly hot, as though until extremely recently a hot water bottle had been draped across it. Michelle let out a soft "ow" as the fingers lingered, so she pulled her hand away, frowning in concern, then sat up on the bed to look down at her friend. "What the fuck? Michelle, you''re breaking out." The base of Michelle''s stomach was covered in a patchwork of circular red blotches, spread unevenly across otherwise smooth skin. April watched as the surrounding area seemed to grow increasingly more flushed, blood rushing to the surface. She was certain that it hadn''t been like that five minutes earlier. "You have a serious rash, babe. Are you, like, allergic to..." April cast around. "...sex?" "Uh... no?" Michelle sat up too. "It hurts like a bitch, though. What... urgh!" She had pulled back her dress and was now seeing the same mess of red splotches spread across her stomach. "What the hell? Do you use allergenic body wash or something?" "I don''t think so?" ventured April, equally baffled. "Let me go to the bathroom and take a look." Michelle swung herself off of the bed and stood up, walking over towards the door. She took about five paces and then stumbled abruptly, hand shooting out towards the wall to hold herself still while she stood there panting for a moment. "Are you okay?" asked April, increasingly concerned, "Need any help?" "No, I... Just give me a minute." Michelle steadied herself and walked out into the hall, leaving April perched on the bed, looking after her anxiously. There was a faint hiss that sounded like water being turned on. She stared at the door for thirty seconds before reaching down and picking her phone out of her pocket amid the pile of discarded clothes on the floor. Flicking the screen on, she was annoyed to see that a small triangle sliver of glass had come loose from the cracked surface. Miraculously, the touchscreen still seemed to be registering her fine, though. There was a text from Charlie, asking how she was doing, and so she thumbed out a quick response. She had just pressed the "send" button when there was a hard thud from the other side of the wall. April looked up. "Chelle?" There was no reply, so she stood up, shrugging back into her tracksuit leggings and loose sports bra, not bothering to pin it closed behind her. Walking out into the hallway, she was momentarily lost, but located the adjoining bathroom by way of following the sound of still running water. The door was closed, but the handle complied to her touch, levering open to reveal the sink, unattended while gushing water from the single-flow tap, and Michelle half collapsed against the wall, her dress discarded in a heap next to her to reveal her mostly naked body. "Michelle?! What...?!" She ran over and knelt down, leaning over Michelle''s semi-prone form. Immediately she put her hands to the skin where the rash had been, only to discover that the red blotching was now a deep crimson-scarlet, and had spread across her entire torso. Even more alarmingly, something resembling a sort of greyish crust or skein seemed to have grown over a patch of skin across the base of her belly region, like the skin was itself flaking off in sheets, or as if she had spilled a batch of quick-dry glue that had now formed a hard crusty layer over its top. That would have been bad enough on its own, except that the layer was veined with branching filaments, giving it a sort of fungal look, and the points where the fractal branches met were knotted in such a way that they almost seemed to hook into the skin. She got an impression of a pitted skin surface beneath the flat outer layer of stuff. "Michelle!?" shouted April, growing slightly hysterical but doing her best to maintain focus. "Michelle, what''s happening- can you hear me?" Michelle''s head lolled, eyes focussing loosely on April''s face. "April... stomach hurts..." Whatthefuckwhatthefuckwhatthefuck, chanted April''s internal monologue, as she did her best to straighten out Michelle on the bathroom floor. The background sound of rushing water leant the scene the tense ambience of a kettle boiling over, but the thought of shutting off the tap somehow didn''t seem to occur. "I''m going to call an ambulance for you, okay?!" said April, groping at her pocket, before belatedly realizing that she''d left her phone back on the bed. She stood up and made to turn back towards the doorway, but at that moment Michelle screamed, and April whirled back around despite herself to see what was the matter. It didn''t take much looking. The plated encrustment of miscellaneous grey-blue matter was growing at a visible and alarming rate, across Michelle''s stomach and up towards her chest. Small flaky appendages were levering themselves up out of the surface of the fibrous substance, and were wiggling in a probing, experimental manner, seemingly trying to pull the matted surface out taut, looking for handholds in uncolonized patches of skin. At the base of the probing pseudopods, the previously solid fibrous material was slowly becoming liquid, melting back into a smooth, gel-like consistency. This didn''t seem to be any sort of barrier to its motion, though, and if anything the contorting parts of the mass were able to use the liquid patches to become even more mobile, attaining greater degrees of twisting freedom. A solid plate of the substance, adhered tightly to the skin of Michelle''s stomach, abruptly cracked across itself, a handspan-sized rough scale of grey keratinous scabbing levering itself upwards... and taking a chunk of skin with it. The hooks of whatever the stuff was were firmly embedded in flesh, and so as it pulled itself up, cracking like an athlete rising from bed and stretching its stiff spine, the surface of Michelle''s belly tore open along the seam, blood gushing out in messy clots. The red liquid seeped around the encrusting mass, weirdly semi-solid. On closer inspection, the blood too had small flakes of matted hair-like fibres in suspension. As it leaked onto the floor in stunted spurts, a few of them twitched, limply, of their own accord. April was screaming too now, in shock and horror. Her own voice was rising above even Michelle''s own, which, while no less frantic and filled with pain, was becoming increasingly rattling and wheeze-laden, her body struggling to pull in breaths. April was able to out-shout her as she fell to her knees in front of her, scrabbling with her nails in an attempt to pull the stuff off of her friend, but only succeeding in levering off yet more patches of skin and oddly brittle chunks of bonded flesh. The thing was pushing and pushing and pulling itself out of Michelle''s stomach, tearing itself away in chunks, and cannibalizing her body in order to do it. It flowered out of the hole it had eaten like a fungal bloom in accelerated time, blue-grey in colour, growing itself in hard sheets and in stabbing spines. It pooled its softer parts as gelatinous masses that inflated themselves into ball-like tumours before relaxing into flaccid tendon-like ropes, binding together the greater mass. The whole thing was starting to make its own sound, now, a sort of sucking-clicking-groaning that grew louder as Michelle''s cries tapered off in a series of ugly, mournful whimpers. With a sudden, cracking wheeze, they cut off entirely, and April realised that the corrosive pit had reached the lungs beneath the outer skin. There were a series of sharp cracks, and, horrifyingly, she watched as Michelle''s ribs levered themselves up out of her body, the skin stretching out over broken pointed tips before the white bone poked through in spurs, tearing the chest cavity open to reveal a wet mess of blood and puss and blue-grey matter. Filaments of pseudo-fungal strands grew up the edges of the protruding ribs, reaching the tips and eating away at them, shaping the ragged, broken bone into thin, elegant-looking white spines. Familiar looking spines. April suddenly knew exactly what she was looking at. â…¦ Terminal Velocity The creature levered itself up out of the cored-out husk of Michelle''s corpse. As it coalesced more of itself together from the dissolving hard plates and semi-digested human flesh, its body began to take on the same characteristic toothpaste-blue hue and matching gelatinous consistency that April had seen before. The chunks of material that had until very recently been sections of her friend''s flesh and entrails were dissolved seamlessly into the smooth mass, indistinguishable from the substance that had composed the creature in the red forest. The only pieces that retained a distinct shape were the remnants of ribs and other examples of the longer bones, which were iteratively whittled down and smoothed out until they were sinuous white spines, soft, unblemished and razor tipped. They dotted the creature''s form as they had before, suspended within it as well as poking out of it at odd, grasping angles. April wondered what sorry unfortunate had provided the first creature with its equivalent armament. With a sucking thwap, the thing pulled itself fully free from the remnants of Michelle''s body. What was left were the extremities of her limbs, arrayed on the floor like the outer-edges of an incomplete jigsaw puzzle, and her head, face contorted into an expression of agony. Notably, the eyes and an area at her crown seemed to have caved on themselves with the creature''s last sucking pull away from her stump of a neck, an eerie contrast to the otherwise untouched surrounding features. The empty eye sockets cried streaks of red blood. The remnant appendages did not have a sharp cut-off point where they had once joined onto the larger body; rather, the stumps of flesh deteriorated into grey folds with an increasingly mushy consistency, until all that remained of the torso was a reddish-black stain painting the messy outline of a human form. That, and the pulsing blue mess in the centre of the hole, that was stretching and pulling at itself in the manner of worked taffy. It made strained, clacking-croaking sounds, as if it were trying to form words. April was already backing away towards the door, her mind fuzzy with shock, hands clenched in white rictus fists. Her fingers were stained with blood, fingernails with blue-grey globs caught underneath where she had tried to pry the thing away from her dead friend. Reaching the doorway, she turned around, caught the wooden frame with both hands, then abruptly vomited onto the floor of the hall, her stomach emptying itself of the meagre meal she had eaten earlier in the day. Half-digested globs of cereal spattered out. She wiped her mouth deliriously, staggered over the mess, and then sprinted back down the hall towards the bedroom. She still had some half-idea of getting to her phone to call an ambulance, although part of her realised that the situation had probably progressed far beyond that point. Then- the cops, maybe? Animal control? The government? She wasn''t sure, but she ran in and picked up the phone anyway. The lock screen was aglow with a notification for a received text beneath the shattered glass, displaying a reply from Charlie to her earlier message. "Glad to hear you and michelle r having a good time. Give her a kiss from me :)" April scrabbled at the smooth glass, her fingers leaving streaks of blood across the surface. The sight of her blood covered hands for the third time in two days pressed the wrong buttons in her brain hard enough to cut through the adrenaline for a moment, and she faltered in her grasping. The lax grip and wet blood let the phone slip from her grasp, and it tumbled to the ground, clattering onto the hard floor. As she stooped to pick it up, the clacking, knocking sounds from one room over grew louder, and she heard a heavy crunch, followed by a shattering sound as if of porcelain breaking. She enclosed the battered smartphone in a vice like grip once more, and ran back out into the hallway, heading towards the door. She reached out for the handle and it rattled, uselessly; Michelle had left the fasteners locked and bolted when she had closed the door behind Clyde. She persisted in a half-hearted attempt at pulling them open with her slippery fingers, before turning in a panic to the phone instead, unlocking the screen and dialling three nines. She put the broken wet rectangle to her ear. The operator connected. "Emergency, which service?" April hesitated, stammering into the phone. "Uhh...!" "Ma''am? Are you-" There was a crash from down the hall, and the sound of splintering wood. April screamed and dropped the phone, sending it once again clattering across the floor. The creature had fallen out of the bathroom and thudded hard into the opposite wall, sliding down onto the floor next to April''s puddle of sick. Part of it still seemed to be wedged into the plaster, having dented it with a wet weight that was belied by its airy, translucent appearance. "Although," April thought to herself, "doesn''t it look a little different?" The creature seemed to have a more consistent shape now than it had possessed in the forest, or even two minutes earlier. Instead of an amorphous collection of bunched appendages and stretched blue sheet-flesh, it seemed to be holding to a more static body plan than she was used to, which was limiting its ease of movement. It took it some time before it was able to extract one of those limbs from the wall, but eventually it pulled free in a spray of splinters, twisting around to face April. It staggered, shuffling awkwardly, then began waddling towards her on two stumpy leg-like limbs. "Krk- krk- aaah... krk- krk- aggaarhhh... pp!" it croaked, shuddering. April screamed again instinctively, producing sound on an almost subconscious level. She scrabbled at the door for another moment before giving up on the stiff dead-bolts in face of the oncoming creature. Instead, she lurched sideways into the kitchen, crashing into the table and knocking over the remains of her and Michelle''s coffee mugs, which had been sitting there incongruously, still steaming softly. Recovering from the blow, she turned around and slammed the door shut behind her. That didn''t seem enough though, somehow, and so she grabbed one of the wooden dining chairs, leaning against the door and wedging it under the handle like she had seen people do in movies. Having made sure it was secure she backed away to the other side of the room, staring in terror at the now barricaded door. A faint, arrhythmic thumping was coming from the hall on the other side. A sudden frantic tapping sound erupted sharply from somewhere directly behind her. April shrieked and jumped around, looking up to see a small recessed window set into the very top of the wall, presumably to allow some small modicum of natural light in from the street level. Behind it was the monkey, peering in at her, red eyes twinkling with reflected light from inside the flat. In concert with the dim ambient glow of the now early evening visible through the window behind it, the typically vibrant powder-dye patterns of its coloured face were made to look uncharacteristically dim compared to usual. It had one knobbly little fist raised to the glass, where it had been tapping. She stared at it wide-eyed for a moment, then gasped out, "help me!" The little animal almost seemed to shrug at her. It opened its mouth, tiny rows of sharp teeth gleaming, and said something through the glass. Half-muffled, she just barely made out the word "leave!" in the monkey''s usual high pitched, squawking voice. "Yeah, no shit!" she shouted at it, turning back around towards the barricaded door. There were no other exits from the room. The thumping from the other side of the door got louder, and culminated in a loud thud against the door itself, the wood rattling against its hinges. The chair shook, but didn''t fall. April stared at the brass door handle as it began to twist experimentally, curling up and down against the wooden top bar of the chair. Her blood had turned ice cold, and her stomach felt like it had all but dropped out of her body at the nearly comical horror of it all. After a few probing seconds of the handle twisting and shaking in place, the motion stopped, the whole door going still. She remained where it was, frozen rigid, still staring at the closed door. A fresh outburst of clacking groaning noises rose from the other side of the door, like dozens of different mouths retching in concert. The sound wove together, creaking and clicking and moaning interweaving, until it was almost like... "crk- crkaa- aaaahhclrkp... Aaaaaaahhprrll..." Almost like... "aaaAAAahhpril... crk- bl- blessyd sinew frame, Aayyyyprillll. Crk- hh-h! Know that... you are not to... become convert, hence! Krrr-" The half-coherent vocal gestalt that was now recognizably a voice broke down again into a series of clacks and chirrs, but the form of the sound was almost coherent now. It had the character of a throat being cleared. For her part, April didn''t vocalize anything except for a sharp breath, remaining frozen against the far wall. "kl- kl- kahluh- luh- llittle wun, we- ah!" Something on the other side of the door seemed to snap, sharply, followed by a sighing sound. "...little meat chyld, we could not consume you, even if- crkh- if we tried..." "S- Stay away from me!" As she shouted at the closed door, one of her hands groped around on the counter top behind her, feeling for something she could use as a weapon. A knife, maybe? No dice. Michelle apparently kept- had kept- her cutlery in the drawers, and April couldn''t reach over to where she could recall seeing them without moving closer to the door. Her fingers closed around a box that might have contained teabags, squeezed it for a moment, then dropped it again. As she continued to scrabble around behind her, the voice on the other side of the door began to speak again. "whkr! Was... it not saiyd already... We have no intention of- bringing you to harm!" "What about Michelle?!" April screeched at it. "What about her?! You harmed her! You ate her!" The thing clacked, considering. "Uhh.. uh.... uhnfortunate... leavings... Context grystle. Your own self could not suffice. We did not yet have- have a mind..." April closed her eyes, shaking her head. It didn''t make sense- nothing was making sense. The thing that had crawled out of her friend and lover; the thing that had shrugged off her flesh like a soiled handkerchief to be discarded, was now trying to make conversation with her. I have to get out of here... have to get out...! She turned back around, glancing up at the window where the monkey was crouching. It was looking behind itself now, back out onto the street. April followed its gaze and noticed that there was a dimly lit silhouette standing alone in the dark, apparently staring back towards the monkey. Unfortunately, the high angle of the window create a sufficiently narrow sightline that she couldn''t make out any details. "Mnn.. April," groaned the voice from behind the door. Its ability to form language was improving at a prodigious rate alongside each new sentence. "Discard these word... husks! You must... leave this place..." "What do you think I''m doing?!" April screamed at the voice that seemed to be mocking her. "Leave this place... with us!" "Fuck you!" April continued to clutch around behind her, failing to find a weapon or an avenue for escape. Maybe the window? She glanced up at the monkey, and almost screamed again, for there were two faces looking down at her now. The monkey was perched on the shoulder of a gaunt, blank-faced man with dark eyes, who was lying prone, face pressed up against the glass. His features were marred with dark bluish blotches in half-circles around his eye sockets, and he looked curiously familiar. The monkey had secured itself to him with one hand clasped in his short crop of black hair. "What the- Who are you?!" she shouted, mentally leveraging the surrealness of the situation to find her voice. "We... kah... are not naym-ed... not have a name..." gnashed the creature behind the door. "No, not- Not you!" she shot in its direction, and then, hysterically, barked out a rough laugh that had a tone more resembling some animal cry of distress. The man in the window didn''t say anything, lying still next to the monkey, while the creature beyond the kitchen door ploughed on with its monologue, oblivious. "But leave... we must!" It coughed, sounding more like an extremely gruff, sick old man now than it did a choir of grizzly bears and crickets. "We must... leave! We will be looked for. Hunted..." "I fucking hope that you''ll be hunted, you fucking freak!" April climbed onto the counter-top where she could reach the window frame. There didn''t seem to be any sort of latch. She jiggled the surrounding plastic frame hopelessly, hands inches from the face of the strange man, who remained impassive. "Think, little disquiet, think! Mayke use of faculties... that are your birthright... before ours. Who brought us here to wreyk such... incongruity?! Who is our partner in this?" April had to chew on that one for a second before getting it. "No! Fuck you!" "Pah! Kr-dr.. Cease these cryes of copulation... would not your fill have been sated prior... K-hh! But hear us now! We speak truth... We are both strangers here... We on your back, you in your own little dysharmony. Seekers of anomaly will find our pattern... and purge it! This is true for us... and for your gnashing form... lyttle mis-projection... world gristling..." This story is posted elsewhere by the author. Help them out by reading the authentic version. The thing burst out into a sudden guttural gurgling, which trailed off to silence. April took the opportunity to look up at the window again. The man and the monkey were gone. A tremendous cracking crash of splintering wood rang out from behind April, causing the whole basement flat to shudder. April jolted back around towards the kitchen door, expecting to see it shattered asunder, the blue blob-creature rearing up in the broken doorway. But the door was still intact; whatever had made the sound had apparently come from its far side. April heard a dull thumping sound, then another, followed by a sort of metal-scraping that terminated in a clunk. Then the kitchen door did jump, as some great force appeared to clamp down on the door handle from the other side, fixing the whole structure rigidly in place. The brass door handle slowly began to turn, angling downwards at a slow but inexorable rate. At thirty degrees it clacked against the wooden chair still blocking the door, remained stuck there for a moment while wood creaked, and then- SNAP! The wooden headboard of the chair splintered down the middle as the pressure from the other side of the twisting door handle sheared it in two, the halves falling to the ground in front of the door. There was a soft click as the door unlatched, and the twisting motion halted for the space of two short seconds. The door teetered for a moment on its hinges, something in its construction objecting to being subjected to such immense force at a single point, before, with a squeaking groan, it swung open. April, who had in desperation grabbed at the half-empty box of teabags again¡ªmaybe it could serve as a distracting projectile?¡ªclutched it to her chest instead, mouth opening in a round "o" of surprise. Instead of the blue creature that had consumed Michelle, a familiar armour-suited figure had supplanted it at the doorway, prow-like spiked chestplate jutting upwards in front of its two-lobed diver''s helmet. Its appearance so soon after the amorphous blue creature gave an impression that it had perhaps chased it from their mutual dreamworld that was the red forest. In fact, that was maybe precisely what had happened. The suit crunched forward a step, the weight of its foot denting the cheap floorboards, helmet pivoting slightly to-and-fro as it surveyed the corners of the room. "You!" said April, staring at it. "Me." The suited figure spoke plainly now, overlapping layers of static gone from its voice. Instead, the crisp male baritone was clearly audible through the helmet speakers. She wondered for a moment if it was even the same suit, but the voice was familiar, and the inscription on the left breast¡ª"AU?ENBAND¨¹BERWACH AUSSCHUSS 10"¡ªwas the same. It finished surveying the kitchen/dining room and looked back at her, taking in her haggard appearance. "Why have you done this?" it asked. "I¡" April chewed air for a moment, lost for words. "What?" "You carried an orgoane to your own projective layer. Did you not know?" The figure lowered its head slightly. "Still, you have responsibility in this. You were allowed to travel?" April stared at it. "I don''t know what you''re- look. Look, you- you helped me before. That- that thing is here. You need- we need to kill it. It- it killed-!" "The orgoane. Yes, it carried itself on your blood. This is how it spreads. I don''t know why it didn''t consume you, however¡ But there is little time to discuss." The armoured man took a step towards April. "You- you need to stop it! Please!" "I will." The metal helmet twisted around 45 degrees, then halted, catching at some physical stop on its rotary mechanism. It was just enough, maybe, for a person inside the suit to be looking behind, out through the doorway. It paused in that position, before taking a breath. "Do you know where it is?" She pointed in the same direction where it was looking, belatedly, hand shaking. "It was¡ it was out there. It spoke to me." "That is very bad." The figure sighed, then reached up to the neckline of the helmet. For a moment, she assumed it was going to adjust one of the knob-like protrusions that it had been preoccupied with previously, but instead the gauntlets gripped two slightly recessed notches in the metal. She heard a soft clicking sound as something interfaced between the two surfaces, and then the helmet snapped free, pulled away from the suit with a faint hiss that was accompanied by a smoothly-oiled metal sliding sound. Lifting up, she could see the face of a severe, dark-skinned man in his 50s, hair a close-cut grey, and perched atop it- April did a double-take as she saw that the monkey was crouched on top of his head, having apparently been nestled in the second, smaller bulb of the snowman-shaped over-tall helmet. Except, no, it wasn''t the monkey. It was definitely a monkey, and it too had colourful markings across its face, but the shapes and tones were different; there was an emphasis on violet, with wide crescent-shaped sweeps down its cheeks, dotted with semi-circular elaborations which bled into a pastel pink, masquerade-esque outer starburst. The cooler colour palette was arrayed against a backdrop of grey fur as opposed to brown, and¡ªunlike the more familiar monkey she had seen before¡ªthis specimen had faint streaks of colour down its limbs and the sides of its torso. It leaned over the brow of the suited man as he raised his eyes to meet its own. The eyes of this monkey were a desaturated navy blue. "Navique, search for it. Don''t get too close." There was something strange to the man''s voice as he spoke. The shapes his mouth made didn''t quite match the words, and April caught snatches of syllables that seemed to be spoken in another language, only for the English phrase to carry through over the top via the speakers built into the collar of the suit. The new monkey- Navique?- appeared to nod at him, then hopped down backwards off of the crown of his head, scampering away deeper into Michelle''s apartment. "The orgoane will be dealt with, but by bringing it here you will have caused fissuring. This projective may not be salvageable." He took a step towards her. "You won''t be able to remain here. Come with me." "I- what?!" April cowered back against the counter-top, her body feeling weak at the knees. "I don''t¡ I need to get¡ that thing killed Michelle!" "That only demonstrates the jeopardy at which you have placed your world. If the fissuring spreads then there will be far worse casualties. Now, please. Let me take you from the layer or I shall have to do so by force." "I''m not going anywhere with- with you or anyone!" A tear ran down April''s cheek, beading at her chin before dropping to the floor. "This is all just mad! I need- we need to go to the- to the police maybe, I-" She tried to take a step, but the suited man shifted his weight, lifting a gauntleted hand to pre-emptively bar her path. "There is nobody we need to see except for the Committee, and to that end I will remove you from this layer before you do any more damage to it than you already have. Your irresponsibility has-" April cut across him. "My what? You- fuck you, I haven''t done anything wrong. My friend- my friend just died, and- ¡®remove me from this world''?!" She gasped for air, then shouted the last few words, "who the fuck even are you?!" The man in the suit rolled his eyes, expression disdainful, and took another step towards her, arm outstretched. She had a brief flashback to the vice-grip he had managed to place on her shoulder back in the vine forest, and quickly shied away, dodging out of the way of the reaching hand. He twisted to follow her, and she flung the box of teabags towards his face. The panic of the moment seemed to have granted her an uncanny speed and accuracy, or maybe she was just blessed by luck, because the little cardboard cube hit him directly between the eyes, surprising them both. April recovered first, however, sprinting forward and ducking below his outstretched arm as he flinched backwards from the strike. Correcting the motion, he moved to grab her again, but while he was unnaturally responsive and coordinated within the suit, the thing still had a certain base inertia to it that gave her the edge in reflexive movements. She managed to complete the dodge, twisting past him and through the doorway. She found herself standing in the hall again. An eerie orange light cast stark shadows across the scene; April was disorientated for a moment until she realised that it was a street light shining down through the front door, which had been shattered into a dozen splintered shards and that were now scattered across the floor. Presumably, the armoured man had opted to break down the door instead of finding some way to unlock it from the outside. Something came screeching around the corner from the direction of the bedroom, and April screamed too, catching a bright flash of sharp white teeth. The monkey- the second monkey, Navique, had swung out of a doorway and sprung directly at her face. Flailing her arms forward automatically, she brought down one forearm in a half-block, half-karate chop that caught the little creature at the last second, its tiny hands scratching painfully at the patches of puckered red skin half covered in the beige sticking plasters. April threw it to the ground in front of her, yelling, and then instinctively punted it back down the corridor with one foot. The monkey screeched in pain this time, and the man behind her let out a similar yell, as if he had been the one kicked instead. Anticipating his movement just in time, April threw herself at the opposite wall, dodging out of the way just as the man''s armoured metal gauntlet came swinging down behind her, propelled with a weight and speed that must have been at least partially a mechanical augmentation built into the suit. She cracked against the plaster of the wall, staggering, and leaned to one side to avoid the follow-up swing of the man''s other arm. He crashed straight through the wall up to the metal shoulder, one arm projecting into the room beyond as he wheezed in exertion. April staggered too, her shoulder aching from the pain of the impact, but nonetheless managed to take advantage of the suited man''s temporary immobilization in order to stumble towards the doorway leading to the stairs up and out of the Pits. Craning her head up, she blinked in the face of the rusty orange streetlamp glow, trying to clear black shadows from the edges of her vision. As she did, one such shadow cohered into the shape of a man. After a moment''s confusion, she realised that what she was actually seeing was the silhouette of the gaunt man who had joined the monkey in staring at her through the window. He was still staring at her now, his face impassive, and mostly shaded from the overhead light. As she squinted at him, he held up his hands rigidly in front of his body, making balled-up fists, then extended a collection of fingers, displaying them towards her. She strained her eyes to see, image caught in that frozen moment, and counted five fingers on one hand, two on the other. Suddenly something was flying at her face out of the darkness. As she stumbled backwards again, pressed against the wall, she saw the monkey¡ªthe first monkey, that she had first seen at Sporks¡ªcatch its hand on the top of the doorway to halt its trajectory, teeth bared and barring her path forward with its body. "LEAVE!" it screeched. "Then let me through," April thought, trying to move past the doorway blocked by the hanging creature. It kicked back at her, little feet displaying astonishing force for something so tiny. April staggered a little more, briefly falling into the bizarro stained-glass artwork of the elephant that hung on the wall next to her. The monkey shouted again, its squeaking voice more human than ever as it strained at its vocal cords. "LEAVE!!!" April remembered when it had first said that word to her, while she was trying to escape the red vine forest. The little animal had been her guide then, leading her forwards through the foliage until she had arrived with it at a tunnel back to her own reality. But it''s not fucking leading me anywhere now, is it? It''s blocking my way out! Unless... unless it means... There was a crunch behind her followed by a grunt, and she glanced back to see that the armoured man was finally managing to extricate his gauntlet from the wall. Navique was hanging from the back of his suit, staring at her¡ªand particularly at the other monkey¡ªwith its teeth bared. April figured that she only had a few seconds before he was going to be able to free himself, and so if she was going to find a way to leave, then she only had that long in order to do it. She took a breath, unfocusing her eyes. When she had been lying on the floor of the A. S. Eddington, her head had been spinning from the prior blow it had taken, an involuntary dizziness permeating her conscious mind and pulling her down towards its unconscious lower abyss. Now that she was forced to think about it, she could make other connections to the sensation she had felt before the fabric tunnel had closed around her. Lying in bed when she was a child, perhaps, letting her brain fuzz into that indistinct middle-ground between waking and dreams. She had done that often when she was a kid, stubborn brain not wanting to comply with the imposition of an early bedtime. Lying in the darkness she would look up at the patterns of colour that formed behind her eyes, blending into patterns and shapes as she floated further into hypnagogia, feeling her motionless body twist with a phantom momentum that she could shape with the right mental suggestion. It had been like that on the ''spoons'' sticky carpet, too, she now realised. That half-conscious fuzzing, the directed sleepless pulling of the dreaming into the real. And the end-point of that transition had been... Something began to shift around April as she worked to steady her thoughts, pushing her mental monologue back into her hindbrain. She had always had a sort of reflexive distrust of "mindfulness", and the fact that this was life-or-death certainly didn''t make it any easier to work those flows, but nonetheless... The hallway was starting to swim a little now, the solid walls seeming a little less real. Staring out of the doorway blocked by the monkey, she saw shadows begin to creep in, shifting and merging in the orange light that was suddenly only the furthest extremity of a wider spectrum of hues. She thought she could see figures standing in that dark mist, some distorted in form like the ghost-creatures she had seen that morning, but even this distortion was dynamic, twisting through dizzying variations in form that were mesmerising for all that she could not give them her full attention or risk losing the fluid cadence of her thoughts. Only the monkey and the shadowed man standing behind it remained truly still amid the shifting scene. She turned her head slowly, ignoring the clanking noise of the suited man extricating his arm, finally, from the wall, and looked for something to focus on. Directly across the hallway from her was the stained-glass ornamental tableau of the elephant mauled by wolves, the amber-gold backdrop of the scene shot through with a spiderweb of lightning cracks from where she had crashed into it a moment before. As she set her gaze upon them, they began to shift and twist, finding an unnatural mirrored quality that recalled for April the multi-axis kaleidoscopic symmetry that emerged during drug-induced psychedelia. As she chased that sensation deeper, the pattern of the stained glass began to flow and warp in that same way, blooming along an eightfold star, growing, expanding... "WATCH IT, GIRL!" shouted the armoured man, collar-speakers of his suit peaking from the high volume. In the corner of her eye, April was aware that he had finally managed to free himself, and was starting to charge towards her. Something in her that was not concentrating on the twisting patterns in the elephant glass frowned at the words he had spoken. Why, after all, would he warn her about himsel- Something dropped from the ceiling and hit April hard at her back, gripping tightly with engulfing, pore-adhering appendages. It had the mass of two large sacks of flour, and April crumpled in on herself, stumbling while it hooked itself around her¡ªtipping her forward with two faltering steps directly into the face of the still-expanding window in the elephant glass. As she¡ªand the thing clinging on to her¡ªmade contact with the surface, she found herself passing into a wider maw, a fractal tunnel of cracked amber glass spiralling away from her with all the depth that she had half dreamed into being. A distorted, breathless male voice shouted after her, amplified into a mechanical confusion of artificial tones, but still legible as one furious English outburst. "NO!" April heard no more from the man in the suit as, with a shuddering crack of rebounding shards, the dilating orifice of gold-hued crystal fragments clenched shut behind her in a maelstrom of light and sound. The stifled voice was supplanted by harmonic resonance that ranged from a gentle tinkling of chimes to screeching nails on chalkboard as she fell forward into a blistering yellow shaft of interlocking glass splinters. The heavy creature clung to her back, and followed in her wake as they descended together in a stomach-twisting free-fall. â…¥ Amber Embalmed She landed face-first on ground that felt like soil, her head smacking against dusty loam with a force that was reminiscent of a sharp slap, but which was insufficient to deal any significant injury. That didn''t stop her body from groaning in pain, however, as her collection of recent injuries was getting increasingly comprehensive. Her upper body was still mostly bare aside from the sports bra she had managed to pull on earlier, and the feel of the cool dirt against her skin that might otherwise have been soothing was rendered a hot rasp against her wounds. Her arms hurt. Her leg hurt. Her shoulder? Hurt. It all sat on her back, pressing her into the soil with a heavy weight of pain. Until that weight started to move. April stiffened, going rigid as it pulled itself away from her skin with the dry shuffling hiss of a slithering snake, landing with a whump on the ground next to her. A spike of cold fear running through her belly, she realised that what was now lying next to her was not her own pain and discomfort made manifest, but the creature that had eaten Michelle from the inside out. It groaned, parts of its gelatinous body seeming to crack as it pulled itself into a deliberate shape. April twisted to scramble away, half-rising to her feet before stumbling again and falling into the dirt. She flipped over onto her side, and then onto her back with a yell as she realised the thing had reared over her somehow. Her eyes squinted against the light of a too-bright sun embedded in a sky shot through with uneven black lines. "Kh-hhrk- Little world-shaper... a most harmonious translation!" barked the thing, reaching down towards her chest. April screamed as she felt a heavy pressure press into the skin of her upper stomach, and scrambled to pull the thing''s arm off of her. She only paused momentarily with surprise as she realised that it had an arm. Things got even more confusing as the leaning creature blocked out the sun, dulling the blinding golden hue into a pale teal circle seen through the translucent flesh of its... head? The creature had taken on a distinctly humanoid form. Instead of an amorphous undifferentiated mass of blue slime-flesh, it had kneaded its being into a four-limbed bilateral symmetry, a bulbous oval for a head, stooping over her with weirdly elongated limbs. The face was a blank facade, a smooth approximation of a human''s head as if sculpted loosely from clay, only faintly shadowed pits where the eyes should have been. The hands were similarly minimalist, "fingers" blending into a mitten-like mass of feelers woven together, the soft shapes marred where the ends of its pseudo-digits sharpened to points. It had even given itself a rudimentary ribcage composed of its spines, holding a loose blob of material in a clump that formed the chest, rib-spines forcing themselves out of a pitted hollow at the centre, giving it the look of an extremely emaciated gymnast. April had a sudden flashback to how those spines had originated¡ªto the actual ribs of Michelle, levering themselves out of her body to be incorporated into the mass¡ªand closed her eyes, twisting her head away as she struggled to pull away from the thing''s grip. "Calm the little strugglings..." it enunciated with relish. "All the spirit of a caterpault-wriggler under our binding, and perhaps half the mind...! Even for one like yourself." The voice had normalized into an old-man''s wheezing croak. It didn''t speak from any mouth, but instead the voice rumbled out of the layered sheets of blue flesh in its false chest, air passing through gill-like slits in its back to carry the vibration. She could feel the resonance of it travelling down the arm that had pinned her. April continued to struggle, but failed to make much headway. It was much heavier than its current slim frame would suggest; the blue flesh had as much weight as an equivalent water-filled balloon, and was much more rigid. The creature could flex the entire fleshy surface like one vast muscle, even while it kept itself bunched up in the human shape. She spat at it. A small globule of spit landed on the surface of its new limb, which seemed to still it for a moment. "Small offerings... of yourself. Is this appeasement? ...no." It paused and considered for a minute. "Aha!" It barked a laugh that sounded like somebody about to vomit. "A slight on us... you think us lower than the dirt, is it? Yet it is you who is presently amid it..." The smooth face cracked open, a slit in the lower-half of its head enacting a parody of a smile. "Fuck you!" April strained, eyes beading with wetness a little. "Fuck you! Eat me now if you''re going to, or let me go!" The hanging mouth slapped shut, leaving no lingering seam in the surface of its face. "Has it not been yet conveyed, we cannot consume you!" It sounded frustrated, in an eerily human manner. "Well why the fuck is that?! You had no problem c- consuming Michelle!" "This is truthful." It flopped its head to one side, propping it on its narrow shoulder. "Michelle was... not broken." "What the fuck is that supposed to mean?" "Her cells were wriggling little things. They swarmed her body like be- ant- termi- hrrkk!" It coughed. "They infested her veins, her organs, a microcosm world that was for and of themselves. They did not try to... escape it. They did not vibrate away from their projective. They accepted us as we swam amid their number... with mere chemical backlash." It straightened its neck again, planting its splayed hand-thing more firmly against April''s chest. "Your cells... their atoms... they are broken in this. They are shining with a razor sharp harmonic. It repel our grasp should we seek purchase beyond that of mere passenger. The cutting edge of a life that... seeks to escape its bounds. Be unstuck. You know of this... tiny wriggler." The empty slit-mouth lolled open again. "It is how you escaped the hunter. You did well... for us." "I didn''t do it for you, I-" April was still struggling, but was making little progress. "Fear our ministrations no longer. Perhaps we would have consumed you once, little lonesome, pressed shallow against the nutrient media of our home... but that would be to our detriment. We would be what we are now but trapped in it. Be grateful of Michelle, for she gave us a mind to make these choices..." "I don''t know what the fuck you mean!" "We ate her brain......" The false mouth lolled open further, now more of a hanging rope torn from the bottom of its face, as might hang a string of putty pulled too far. "Made her a part of us. It was our education. We know how to talk now, blood-sackling April. How to think. How to know." April let herself go limp. "Fuck me. Fuck you! Fuck- fuck all of-!" "These words you gurgle, they are truly not incitement to reproduce? We... Ah. An outburst of emotion. It is commending that your kind places such value in propagation of the self." She stared at the thing, dumbfounded. The looming monster could talk¡ªat length, it seemed!¡ªand she figured that something which could talk could potentially be reasoned with. She decided to give that a half-hearted stab, ceasing her struggle for a moment. "If you''re not going to eat me, then- then let go of me. Let me- please!" "Ah! Flighty child, April. Let us make our case... To be of one another''s purposes." "I don''t fucking understand you!" The creature spat a blue globule of its own flesh onto the ground next to her face. "Pah! Try this... We will accompany you, ride along with your little fracture, and in return, we will let you not die." "I thought you said you weren''t going to hurt me." "Not us, sitting prey, helpless one, not us! Do you know yet where you are?" April glanced around for the first time, the grip the thing had on her chest loosening enough that she was able to twist a little to the side. They had landed, as she had noted before, on dry soil, that she realised now was a small bare spot amid a patchwork of rough yellow grasses that rose in places to more than half her standing height. They blew gently in a faint breeze against the backdrop of a turquoise sky, and a few short trees poked from the ground, sporting dry looking but otherwise surprisingly familiar bark and leaves. The sun seemed somewhat over-bright, but nonetheless the whole scene would have been pretty in the uncultivated manner of some foreign country''s wild scrubland, were it not for the other dominating feature of this environment. The entire landscape was pierced through with thousands of regularly interspaced sharp black obelisks. They lanced down from the sky to shatter against the earth, cracking the dry ground where they made landfall. The things were a pitch black that ran deeper than obsidian, and in fact seemed to suck in light from their surroundings rather than reflect it. Following the line of one of them upwards as it traced a shallow arc into the sky, she gasped, softly. She saw that the pillar fractured, then split itself again into multiple streaks of darkness, that then lanced across the sky in skewed directions to weave together into a single spiderweb of black fracture strands. She realised with a shock that the striations she had noticed in the sky at her first landing were continuations of the branching obelisks, stretched upwards to an impossible height. "Yes, yes! See what has been done... the girl has brought us to a Dead World!" The creature barked something that could have been either an exclamation of joy, a laugh, or a gagging sound. "Watch how the pillars of night have skewered the very earth! This is a place of decay..." It loosened its grip on April, and she gasped a breath, sitting up. Part of her still wanted to run, but she engrossed in absorbing the scene in front of her. Her every instinct screamed wariness of the obelisks, so impossibly huge that they radiated a wrongness on a subconscious level, in the manner of being in the presence of something divine, or infernal. As her sitting motion shifted her position slightly in relation to them, she felted a sudden sensation of vertigo as distinct edges refused to manifest anywhere across the deep black surface. With the swooping, stomach-turning sensation of standing on a precipice, her perspective abruptly flipped, and she stopped processing the black streaks as obelisks, pillars, or three-dimensional objects at all. They were cracks. What she was looking at were a multitude of cavernous holes in reality, reaching and branching from horizon to horizon. The stretched high enough into the heavens that their broad strands¡ªsome of the more distant ones had to be kilometres across¡ªfaded towards invisibility. The cracks didn''t seem to obey the normal laws of physical objects. For one, they didn''t seem to cast shadows, or at least not in any way that made any sense. She could draw a direct line between one of the things and a patch of grass it should have shaded, only for the pale-yellow fronds to be glinting in the blazing sunlight as if nothing was there. On the other hand, staring out into the distance revealed an odd mottling of the landscape¡ªshadow patterns were cast in overlapping hues and in bizarre warped ring-like shapes that did not line up with any conceivable configuration of the cracks through the sky. What it most looked like was an inverse of how light might pool beneath the surface of water, if the turbulent surface of that water was frozen in a single motionless instant. The creature spoke up again. "You are not of decay. Not of dead things. Your appetite plays at gnawing your own world''s little meatlings, but it is a world you cannot truly confront. Even your ancestors did not let their meals rot, little predator." It had been watching her as she looked around. "But we are of this. We have lived death, and are sharper for it. Our spines can pierce that which dwells beneath these tall shadows. Oh! And how we would relish in it..." It stood up straight, walking around in front of her with legs that had still not yet got the hang of bending in the right places. It stumbled, and momentarily grew a third leg to compensate, one of its limbs splitting in two to steady its gait before the bifurcated sections snapped back together again. "You would not survive twelve heartbeats without us. So let us be of use to each other..." It stopped, and collapsed to the ground in an amorphous mess before rebounding into a cross-legged pose that mirrored her own. As she looked at it, it cocked its head, an incongruously childlike motion. She tensed her legs to get up and start running¡ªit was now no longer holding her down¡ªthen relaxed them. Fuck, she was tired of running. The possibility of physical escape felt extremely beside the point, given that she knew this thing could move just as fast as she could run through a dense forest of interwoven branches, and, with its newfound legs, could almost certainly outpace her on open ground. If it was not actively trying to kill her in that moment then she wasn''t sure that she could be particularly bothered to try. And besides... a sudden thought came to her. Whoever said that she needed to escape on her legs in the first place? Gripping the outside fabric of her leggings tightly with both hands, she began to stare furiously at the patch of ground in front of her, eyes burrowing into the dusty soil. A frown spread across her brow as she did her best to pull her eyes and mind into that state of fuzzy unfocus that had enabled her to open up the elephant glass and dive through into the place she was in now. If she opened the passage quickly enough, and was able to dive through before the creature could follow her... "What is it doing, neophyte traveller of worlds. Kah-rung... Peering through into the depths as though its mind seeks to reunite itself with the Whole?" The creature bent over, head pantomiming the motion of staring at the same patch of ground that she was. It didn''t have eyes, only vaguely shadowed pits, so April had no idea if it was actually seeing or if the thing was play-acting at having the sense. "Ah, poor hatchling dreamer. It won''t work, you know." "I don''t know what you''re talking about," April spat through gritted teeth, knuckles white as she forced her mind towards blankness. The patch of ground remained stubbornly unfenestrated. "So much impetus yet so little sense. Your useful brokenness is wasted upon you..." "Fuck off," she muttered, trying to ignore it. "Do you want to know why it fails? Or shall we walk in ignorance together until all our forms crack apart, solidify in brittleness and crumble? Until our dust filters from this reality, never again to-" "Okay, fuck!" April snapped her gaze up to look at the thing. Its mouth-crack was gaping open once more in an almost mocking expression. "Say whatever it is that you want to say." "We shall!" It folded the base of its head back up into itself, and slammed the mishapen appendage at the end of one arm, vaguely reminiscent of a human hand, down onto the surface of the dirt where she had been staring. The flat end immediately bulged, swelling out across the ground, forming into a stubby flat pad that covered a dinner plate sized patch of ground. "Projectives are superpositions. Many are parallel. Stacked on with each other! Like... layers. Like..." It paused for a moment, considering. "Onions?" offered April, deadpan. "Onions? Yes, we recall this. Pitiful dirt fruit. Oh, to be prey that cannot even flee its eater. The lowest of lows!" It adjusted its makeshift ribcage of spines, the points pulling back slightly further into the blue mass with a faint shlick. "No, it is like, flesh that is pulled from bone to reveal... yet more flesh. An eternity of living musings." It withdrew its feeler from the ground. To her astonishment, April saw that it had inscribed something beneath the surface of its stump-palm, apparently solely through the action of the morphing flesh. It looked sort of like a bunch of grapes, each grape shaded with an impossibly tight parallel hatching. "Projectives within the same alveole are co-positioned, and undifferentiated," it continued, as if this made sense. "You seek to transition, little walker, but have no destination, even if you have the ability... a random travelling will be resisted. This is best for you." "So I got here before how, exactly?" "A focus!" it creened, slapping its arm back down on the dirt again, ruining the diagram. "Is like a scenting for prey. An image of it within the senses! You see where you are going and you see through to a projective it echoes... or to a close by transition..." It made a slurping sound. "Ah, such precision in words. Your Michelle has given me a most excellent gift, sinew-spry April..." She shuddered internally. Her mind had numbed to it for a while, but suddenly she all-too-vividly recalled where the thing that was spitting streams of nonsense at her had come from. A cool wind blew past her bare arms, and she shivered again. She stood up and began walking determinately in a random direction away from the clearing. After she had taken several paces there was a slurping sound, and blue puddle strewn with suspended detritus shot across the ground to her right, travelling along a rippling motion that ran through its body. It reached a few meters in front of her, and then the humanoid form of the creature sprung back up, as if it were jumping out of itself. It landed in front of her on two limbs, one pointed arm braced against her chest. With some disquiet, she realised that it had holstered one of the rib spines beneath the arm-flesh, positioned to pierce her heart at a moment''s notice should it be extended. She froze. "Wriggling thing..." its head fell to one side. "So swift on brittle bones, it knows how to be prey. You cannot seek to leave when we have not yet made compact..." She stood there for a moment, then abruptly stepped to one side and around the arm, walking past it. The creature moved to stay level with her, walking this time, but didn''t reach out to stab her. "I don''t think you''re going to kill me," she said, pointedly not looking at it. "A foolhardy presumption..." it croaked. Then, after a few seconds; "why?" "Well, for one you already said you needed me, so that was your first mistake if you wanted to threaten me with- with dying." She kept her voice as steady as she could manage, confident and uncaring, even if in reality her aching muscles felt like jelly, and she was seriously worried that her terrified body might lose control of her bladder as she caught the light reflecting off of the creature''s sharp spines, glinting from the corner of her eye. "But also, honestly? You''re too fucking weird to be a monster." "We threaten and intimidate by nature, not by bending of will, careless dirt-stomper." It twisted its neck at an odd, rubbery angle, so that it was facing her as they walked. "But oh... you would be mistaken indeed to dismiss our potency for life-taking. It was the last mistake of many a crawler greater than your own sack-jostlings." It looked for a reaction from her, seemingly displeased when she gave it none. "April!" "You were a monster when you chased me down and stabbed me in the forest," she continued, still not looking at it, "and you sure as hell were a monster when you-" She faltered for a moment, clenching her fists. "When you burst out of my g... my fucking friend and..." She walked faster now, trying to outpace the tears speckling the corners of her eyes. She stayed silent for a few moments more, then stopped sharply, snapping around to face the creature. A person might have run into her from the sudden change in momentum, but the thing¡ªthe orgoane, as the armoured man had called it¡ªsnapped to a near instantaneous halt, its molten flesh undergoing an instantaneous phase transition to rigidity. "But yeah, whatever you are now, now that you can speak and walk around and call me names? You''re not a monster, you''re just another joke that the whole fucking universe is playing on me. Something else mad to follow me about and taunt me with little quips! Just some horrible bastard that God or Jesus or, fucking, I don''t know, fucking Cthulhu sneezed out to ruin my day and murder the one good thing I- Gah!" She span back around and continued marching forwards. The creature followed her with a slithering gait. "Pah. Do not think that our company might be shed through mewling whines. You intuit correctly that we will not forsake this chance." "If you''re going to follow me then I can''t stop you, can I?" "Correct." It enunciated the word with a clicking relish, then added, "watch out." April, who had been twisting around to look back at her pursuer, looked forward again and had to jump sideways to avoid one of the pillars of darkness that plunged into the earth a few feet ahead of her. "Hell," she muttered, stepping around it. This content has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere. "Edge-stepper April, no cliff-summit could forepromise the depths of that near precipice. Tread wisely." The problem, she realised as she marched forward, doing her best to remain more aware of her surroundings, was that the pillars¡ªthe cracks¡ªdidn''t have a static shape or position. They twisted and shifted in apparent location as she looked at them from different angles. In order to move closer to one, she had to anticipate the way that it would move as she drew closer, which was often highly unpredictable. Occasionally, when she looked closely at a patch of ground nearby, she would make out a thin scar-like fissure running through the packed dirt. Drawing closer, one of the cracks would inevitably converge in her sight upon that location. It seemed that they did have a real, physical position, but that this became increasingly misaligned with their apparent location at greater distance, like a kind of inverse rainbow or mirage. Another practical side effect of this was that, if she walked forward between them without first spotting the faint lines in the ground ahead, she ran a risk of one suddenly bleeding onto the path ahead of her, even if it had previously appeared clear. This was bad enough for the cracks that were only a few feet in diameter, but the broader ones nearby could reach several metres or more, and she found herself having to detour to avoid a black wall spanning 50 feet across. As she moved around it, it subtly twisted in the manner of a rogue optical effect, warping the air similarly to a heat haze then filling in the null space. It travelled along lazily in that manner, at an unpredictable pace. The creature followed her. It watched her, trailing a few feet behind, keeping its non-eyes fixed on her in an unsettling manner that April did her best to ignore. She was pointedly doing so when it suddenly burbled into speech again. "April... our little meat-cutlet..." "Don''t fucking call me that." The creature ignored her. "Our foraging knowledge hunter, April.... We have prepared you a morsel. The prior question is now for answering. Feast well upon its innards." "What?" she muttered, glancing at it despite itself. "We have resolved to name ourselves. It is not a pattern played out within our prior self, but this mind yearns for a labelling... binding tendons of words to constrain self bones of the world we are part of." "I didn''t ask- whatever." April turned back, trying to find the right angle to step around the looming face of the dark crack so that it didn''t shift itself back around in front of her. "We may be called Kroakli." "Great. Yeah. Suits you. Well, Kroakli, can you please tell me why this fucking thing-" she jabbed a pointed finger out at the crack in front of her, "-keeps moving all over the damn place." Kroakli emitted a dry rustling sound that may have been a sort of laughter. "This skewered world has holes in many of its perspectives. It is a failing of your own constrained flesh that it can see from one only..." "And you can see more?" "We see a little. It is not much. Our home projective lacks... isotropy. It bends inward toward the horizon line. The skewed axes there foreshadowed more magnificent discontinuity such as this..." April grunted in frustration at the creature, as she finally identified a navigable path around the crack by walking back the way she had come in a meandering oval. "Why does everyone- everything know what''s happening right now, except for me? I ask and nobody makes any damn sense. What the hell is a projective?" Kroakli hissed in something approaching surprise. "Translation approximates, but we pulled from the words of our mutual hunter, spoken in your tongue! Drkk. Let us try once more... Khr... The layers within the greater consciousness of the Sigmoid..." "Yeah, still doesn''t mean anything to me." She continued walking for a few steps, before suddenly realizing that it wasn''t following her. Despite herself, she looked back, wondering what could have possible dissuaded its effort to dog her footsteps. It was standing rooted on the spot, facing her, or at least standing in a pose that would have left a human facing her, if it had had a true face. As she turned towards it, it shivered with a rapid vibration, rib-spines popping in and out of its flesh, clicking gently before the voice burbled up from its false chest once more, enunciating with a wet relish. "You don''t know," it croaked. Its false slit of a mouth wasn''t hanging open, but there was a slight puckering along the line where it occasionally manifested. "You truly do not know!" "Know what?" She opened her mouth halfway, then snapped it shut, rolling her eyes. "Actually, you know what? No. Whatever, just, no. I don''t care any more. Bye." She turned to walk away, but the irritating thing started moving again, keeping pace just behind her. "This is the heart of things, yes... The crimson core of it. We had thought the other of your kind a simpleton for not recalling otherwise, but you all are oblivious! Even little caterpault-munchers such as our former self, bereft of thought on the margins of existence... Even we know." April tried her best to keep walking, head rigid, gaze ahead, not paying it mind. If this thing was here to taunt her, then surely that was what this was; more impossible questions with nonsensical answers to be dangled in front of her for the sake of testing and re-testing her sanity. Perhaps Kroakli had decided to come after that next, now that it had killed one of her friends? She scoffed at the idea. It seemed something of a moot point. April almost managed to stick to her guns, to keep striding ahead and let the horrible burbling thing fall silent, hopefully for good. But only almost. If it was trying to get to her via her need to make sense of the crazy, it had ultimately succeeded. She rounded on it, gritting her teeth as she spat the words out. "Fine! What!? Fucking tell me! What is it I don''t know!?" It recognizably snickered, before transitioning back into words. "That the universe is dead. That this world is a dreaming... and we are stretched across a membrane, strung behind the eyes of the corpse-god that dreams it. April question-yelper, you are not even truly real!" She squinted at it for a moment, before deciding that she wasn''t sure how to respond to that, and instead turned around to continue walking, considering. "Now you see why we are fit to this world so valiantly... Oh, what a good dreaming we were! A carrion beast for a corpse-universe..." "You''re still not making much sense, though, are you?" she said, finally. "If the universe is dead then what am I looking at right now?" She gestured broadly at the landscape and sky, strung throughout with the black fractal cracks that dropped from the heavens like lightning. "Mrh- h! Maggots!" Kroakli crooned at her, sounding positively enthralled by the idea. "The world died longest ago that even dreams of gods struggle to recall it. This is as with all things, yes? The lifespan of a world cuts a mere sliver from eternity. But as all dead things, little dreamling, the corpse universe grew maggots into the rotten flesh of it. One of them, the biggest of them all; the Sigmoid. It gnawed itself into unborn being, then lay down to dream of what might have come before. A tiny dream against infinity, but enough for us all many trillions over... a swarm of carrion flies in the mind of a carrion god!" "Beautiful. What an appealing cosmology," she muttered sarcastically. "Personally, I believe that the universe is a giant cosmic toad, but each to their own." "Kr- pah! Do not dismiss with your jokes. Neither is this mere cosmology; we speak only known truths! You best face them now, arrogant muscle-puppet April, lest they pierce you through that blood-swollen heart later, krrr... You only travel deeper into this. Your little breaking is a fracture in its mind..." April shook her head reflexively. "So, what? I''m seeing like, ghosts, and talking monkeys, and you, and ending up in... whatever this is, because your ''carrion god'' made a mistake and screwed me in the head? Is that it?" It clattered disapprovingly. "Your kind is perhaps unknowing by nature. Concepts are unprocess-ing, yes... Or is it a frailty confined to your own specimen?" "If that''s your way of calling me an idiot, then go fuck yourself." "An intriguing proposal, though we are obligate self-dividing." It clicked again. "But this is needless diversion, April... The truth of the matter remains, even if your self holds an oblivious knowing. You are not seeing ghosts." "Well, if you''re going to try to tell me that they''re actually zombie ghost maggots spawned by your corpse-god or something, then-" "You are a fool, little flesh scrapling...!" it cut across her, swiping a rubbery arm through the air. "Your own life depends on this and you make amusements. Pah! Do not be heedless of our words, for your conduct imperils both our self and your own self..." She rolled her eyes, but remained silent, growing mildly annoyed as Kroakli refused to elaborate without further prompting. She fought a brief internal battle over whether she was going to be goaded into asking another question of it. Finally, she opened her mouth and took a breath despite herself, only to be suddenly distracted by something that had appeared on the horizon as she and the trailing creature summited one of the shallow hillsides. The landscape flowed onwards and outwards as continuous sea of arid yellow-gold savannah, interspersed only by patches of dry sandy soil and loose stones strewn down the steeper slopes. They were looking down upon a sunlit valley, grass mottled by the shadows of loose clouds and the mottled inverse caustics that were the irregular shading cast by the dark cracks; the strange misaligned patterns, she now realised, were the result of how their apparent paths varied depending upon the perspective of the observer. Nestled at the bottom of the valley was the feature that had drawn her up short as she had stopped to squint at it. There was an ugly, grey-brown hill clinging to the valley floor, like a pimple to attached limpet-like to the inside of someone''s navel. It formed an unusually rounded dome-shaped hump, and was composed of what looked from a distance to be a thick mud that smeared itself in stringy, blobby tracks down the slopes. The sides of the hill were mostly undifferentiated in that coating, except for a set of slit-like troughs across one broad slope, resembling an inverted letter "g", or perhaps the number "6". The whole thing rose to almost two thirds the height of the valley they were standing atop, and gave the impression that a giant had used an ice-cream scoop to deposit a lump of muck squarely in between the valley sides. A spattering of the slicing cracks skewered themselves into it at this angle, forming a bouquet of chocolate flakes or sprinkles to complete the comparison. "Eurgh," grimaced April, her mouth pulling up at one corner in distaste. Kroakli perched itself behind her, atop their vantage point overlooking the valley. "Krr- kalem... A strangeness, yes..." She glanced over at the creature. "What is it?" "Be clear, wishbone-thatchling, that we are not all-knowing. We have not seen this place, heretofore our current being here..." "Useful," she muttered under her breath. She hesitated there for a moment, rocking slightly on the balls of her feet, then set off down into the valley. The hillside was steep and the dry soil was loosely packed and rocky, here, so it required careful foot placement to find appropriate footholds. Her still bare feet clenched toes into the strata of smooth pebbles. "Why approach?" asked Kroakli, still frozen in its humanoid pose on the brim of the hill. "It is an anomalous seeping of a thing. No more than a cautious observance is needed." "Oh yeah, because I''m really on a cautiousness kick lately," she called back to it, not slowing. "It''s not like there''s anything else out here to walk towards." "Karuum... A maddening magnetism to the aberrational. Is this what brought you to this point, April Pearce?" It pronounced her name with a stilted formality. She grunted under her breath, and turned back around to look at it. "Listen, I-" Her words were pulled forward into a breathless squeak as the abrupt motion caused the foothold in she had been carving out beneath herself in the loose pebbles to slide out from under her. Her feet surfed down atop a crest of the stony scree before finally slipping out from under her and sending her tumbling forwards down the 40 degree slope. The valley whirled around her. She cried out in pain as her arm cracked against a larger stone, adding a fresh bruise on her elbow to her body''s already overpopulated crowd of injuries. It was difficult to think in the brief moment that she was tumbling, the spiralling black cracks whirling about overhead, but in the breathless seconds she had a moment to consider how breathtakingly stupid this whole manoeuvre had been. There were some larger rocks down at the foot of the valley, and she boggled at the sadistic cruelty of this of final joke from the universe; to dash her brains to death on the hillside of an alien world not through any exotic danger but rather through her own sheer clumsiness. It was surprising, then, when instead of hard, skull-breaking stone, she plunged face-first into some sort of damp, lukewarm putty. The semi-solid surface wrapped itself around her as if she had struck an airbag filled with custard, one of her arms punching its way through the surface to embed itself in its cool depths. Her immersed limbs brushed up against floating particulate. "FOOLHARDINESS, DEATH-DANCER APRIL! KAH!" Kroakli shrieked at full volume directly into her ear, setting it ringing. She could feel its flesh vibrate against her skin where it had wrapped itself around her, the creature having transformed into an amorphous sack of blue matter that adhered to the side of the hill. The only considered aspect of its reshaping was in the positioning of its spines, which it had projected pointing out and backwards from the edges of the concave hollow it had caught her in. Kroakli, she realised, must have jumped from the top of the hill, abandoning its humanoid shape, to fly down the loose slope at a frightening speed and catch up to her before she struck the bottom. "Mewling infant!!!" it continued, creaking voice harsh against her ear, "do you know how close you came to being unmade?! You would have lost both of us in this place. We have no way out but through your own self!" April was still coming to terms with being embedded in the amorphous creature, and she struggled to extricate her arm, throat filling with a rising bile. Kroakli did not smell bad, exactly, but gave off an unfamiliar, nonspecifically biotic odour. The pliable translucent blue flesh was warmer than the surrounding environment, and pulsed nauseatingly against her skin; it squeezed against her with every shift of its body and each syllable of its pantomimed human voice. She had a sudden flashback to the last time she had been so close and personal with the creature¡ªor a prior iteration of it, at least¡ªlying on the soft white floor of the red forest, the cloying weight blanketing her as it reached for her face, razor spines sinking into her arms. With a shout of disgust, she ripped her body from the blue mass with a wet schlop sound, rolling over to land slightly uphill of it. She flipped onto her buttocks and shuffled backwards away from the crouching creature, struggling to find hand and footholds in the still loose dirt and rocks, which were thankfully now spread at a slightly less severe incline. The creature was gradually pulling its splayed-out substance back into its human shape with a dry slithering sound, converging into a seated pose backed by a- whoa. April now for the first time registered that they had both landed just a few meters uphill from one of the shifting black pillars of nothing, it presumably having swept in to intersect her tumbling path through happenstance. Kroakli''s intercession had been all that had stood between her and a fall into dark oblivion mere seconds later. She nonetheless still backed away from the creature as fast as she could, swearing under her breath while her body shuddered reflexively from the close contact. "No gratitude is given either, April meat-cutling. We lower ourselves to this, to being nursemaid to prey, and- kra-rum!" The voice dissolved into unintelligible pops and croaks for a few seconds, before resurfacing with "-no consideration!" April was still catching her breath, but gasped out a ragged "fuck you!" before taking a few seconds to pant some more. "You''re the one who decided to stalk me all the way from- through- gah!" She seized a handful of the loose pebbles and threw them down the hill, aimlessly. A couple of them struck Kroakli on its soft forehead and sank into the gel without sound. The creature had finally fully pulled itself back into its human form, and now threw its blob of a false head back, neck tilting astern at an inhuman angle. It vocalized a vicious sequence of clicks that landed halfway between the sound of an irate rattlesnake and an echolocating bat. Eventually the sound twisted itself back together into a voice. "kkrrr... oh, April... Why such hatred for us? For our willing collaboration?" The thrown-back head snapped back down onto its misshapen shoulders. "Is it truly for that which we consumed of your... kh-rrhh... of your Michelle?" April grit her teeth. "When you ate her from the inside out, turned her torso into a puddle of blood and scattered her severed limbs across the bathroom floor? Yeah, that might have something to do with it." She was biting back tears once more through the anger, but watched as the thing stood up again. "Oh, but April... Consumption is what we are! Or what we were, and it constitutes us still... A predator as well as carrion-beast. But this is no aberration, as you know with all certainty... All life must be of eating. Your life, our life- Even the Sigmoid leaches off Its ashen world-nestings. It is the nature of ourself and ourselves. We did not have a mind, even, when we rode upon her blood through the flesh of her womb. Oh, what a fruitful melding you facilitated for us. But we feasted on cellular impulse alone, then growing this greater self..." A flush of fresh revulsion shot through April as she struggled to her feet, staring at the thing that was perched in front of her, reminded afresh of what exactly it was she had been talking to. Talking to! The creature that had murdered her- "If she is missed so," Kroakli burbled, "can appeasement be attained in knowing her patterns echo within us still... our education of her was thorough. Observe." Then, horrifically, the thing''s face began to reform. The thick blue slime morphed, sucking in on itself as if stretched around a more defined set of features, outlining a nose, lips and open eyes, lidded slightly at the edges. April stared in open-mouthed horror as the new features cohered into a familiar face; a perfect image of the one she had kissed less than an hour prior, only to then watch cave in on itself, dead and dessicated on the floor. It was rendered now anew in the translucent blue flesh. A fleck of something chunky and unmentionable floated loosely behind one eye. The false Michelle opened its newly-formed mouth to take a breath, and then spoke in a flawless simulacrum of her dead lover''s voice. "It''s going to be okay. I promise." The brick sized chunk of rock hit it squarely in the middle of its false face, bursting the taunting mask asunder with a splattering of displaced slime as the mimicked features caved in. April let her throwing arm fall to one side as she sprinted away down the valley, taking the loose slope at an angle to avoid being thrown again by the incline. "April!" the thing shouted after her in a high pitched cry, "we will say we are sorry, if this was an undesired..." The unnatural voice trailed off as she moved further away and tuned it out mentally. She set her focus on the base of the valley, where the foot of the ugly, muddy hill bled into the surrounding strata of yellow grasses and loose shrubs. A quick glance behind told her that Kroakli had set off in her wake, and the creature was fast¡ªshe had more than learned that in the red forest¡ªits advantage additionally compounded by the loose soil and steep slope. It could glide across the sparse material with ease by reconfiguring itself into that same rippling blob shape that ambulated in a cross between the pulsing of a slug''s foot and a cheetah''s bounding gait. Her rock to the face had thrown it off guard, however, as it had struggled to pull its body back together and morph into the other form. That, and the fact that it had to dodge around the black crack which April had nearly fallen into gave her several seconds'' advantage, and the thing''s pace was not insurmountably superior to hers if she could reach a full sprint. She willed her legs to do just that, propelling her down the hill and away from the detestable thing. She reached the bottom before it could catch her, hitting the valley floor and darting sideways so that she could transition into a flat out run on the level ground. At first, she moved parallel to the base of the mud pile, which rose at a sharp angle on the other side of a several metre span of flat ground, looking all the more jarringly incongruous amid the surrounding landscape up close. This track worked at first, until her path was blocked by a shallow delta of the mud rising a few feet high, the endpoint of some minor mudslide off the side of the rounded hill. It reached out across the valley floor like the fallen limb of a tree, half-melted into brown mush. She avoided it, side-stepping around the outer extent of the unpleasant pile, only to round its tip and find herself confronted with an even larger sloping mud-fall, a few paces further ahead. Realizing that she didn''t have time to backtrack, she vaulted herself up onto the slick surface, punching her feet down against the three-foot thick mud-flow. Her feet immediately sank straight down into the surface with a sucking slurp, wedging themselves under a brittle surface layer and into the sopping muck beneath, cementing themselves in place. April cartwheeled her arms in an attempt to keep her balance, leaning forward alarmingly under her prior momentum. In the end it was her rooted feet that allowed her to win the contest against gravity, acting as weighted shoes to affix her upright in the manner of a roly-poly doll. She cried out in dismay, pulling at the sucking mud, trying and failing to yank her legs free. Kroakli arrived behind her as she did, reconstituting into its humanoid form. She wasn''t able to turn around to see it, but heard the characteristic sucking-slithering noises. "This predicament," it stammered, literally pulling itself together, "was not a necessity in this. Aside from being a futile exodus, we do not intend to hurt you! We spoke truly!" "Fuck you!" shouted April for what felt like the fiftieth time that day, struggling to extract her boots from the mud with little success. A tear collected at the corner of her eye and rolled down her cheek, until she slapped it away angrily with one arm. "Fuck you! You killed Michelle you fucking- you...! You are a monster!" It fell silent for a moment. "Maybe you are right in this," it finally offered, "but can we help being not other than what we are? Think on this, also..." "I won''t think on shit, you sick, fucking, animal!" she screamed at it, head twisting around to look behind her. With an emotion-fuelled straining of her leg muscles, she managed to roughly yank one leg upwards and dislodge a surface patch of the muddy crust. This also succeeded in throwing her off balance, however, and she was forced to stomp the leg back down into the mud, foot landing on something fibrous buried within. She thrust her arms out to either side in order to steady herself. From somewhere in the near distance there was a muffled boom. It grew, slowly, into a rumbling blast of sound before tapering off. Both April and Kroakli went silent, freezing in place¡ªin a more literal manner for the creature than for the girl. Finally, April ventured a soft, "what?" The word was cut off by another boom, sounding slightly closer this time, coming from the direction of the muddy mound that she was standing in the outskirts of. Perhaps something on the other side? That was when the ground began to shake. A plume of mud erupted from the side of the hill, fountaining out in multiple directions twenty paces up the slope from where April was stuck. Loose curtains of the muck sloughed away, pouring onto the ground around her own elevated delta, and causing Kroakli to need to bound backwards out of its way in an elastic snapping-back of its body. The mud around her feet seemed to bubble, and then melted away down into the ground, revealing a netted mat of brown fibrous strands, some of which were wrapped around her boots like loosely clinging seaweed. They knotted together into a single strand near the base of the muddy hill, forming a huge vine more than a foot thick, that- -that pulled itself inward and upward, the branching outer extremities pulling taut where they had bound themselves about April''s feet, yanking her inwards. The trunk-like mass tore itself from the side of the mud-mound with a thunderous groan, shaking more of the thickly coating muck free. Broad as a redwood tree near its base, the curling tentacle-thing stretched itself into a high arching loop a hundred metres in the air, as the last of its length burst from the rounded pile. Similar protrusions and collapsing cavities appeared¡ªalbeit with less vigour¡ªaround its entire circumference. The freed limb clutching April''s feet began to flex itself out straight, the ripple of motion rushing down its length to meet her. "Oh dear," observed Kroakli, as she was jerked upward and into the air. â…¤ Bury Alive Once, when April had been a teenager, she and a classmate had visited a pop-up funfair as part of a fireworks night celebration at a local park. The convoy of amusement lorries had included several redundant hot-dog vendors, a merry-go-round, a sort of octopus-esque thing with arms that raised and lowered and, most excitingly, a slingshot ride. April''s friend, a boy named Nathan who had possessed a sixteen-year-old''s typical outsized ratio of enthusiasm to sense, had convinced her to wait the fifteen minutes in line while they watched a procession of their fellow fun-farers scream themselves hoarse as they were thrown 200 feet into the air by the twin bungee cables. By the time it was their turn to clip themselves into the pod, April had almost chewed through her lip, and even Nathan had dampened down a bit. As repeat riders of those kinds of contraptions would know, it was traditional in certain parts for the operators to play a prank on the ride occupants. Some technical issue would be feigned; the attendant would claim that a bolt had rusted, or that the seatbelt was too loose. While they pantomimed concern and secretively checked that the restraints had indeed been secured, the pod would be loosed at an unannounced moment, sending the terrified victims into the sky, their level of genuine fear proportionate to whether or not they were repeat riders and therefore aware of the ruse. April and her friend were not repeat riders. The boy had passed out on the upstroke. April, it had turned out, wasn''t as susceptible to that kind of thing; she had remained stubbornly awake, eyes bulging out of their sockets as she catapulted into the dark night. "It really is a pity," she thought to herself now, as the tentacle whiplashed her into the air by the ankle, "that my brain just will not give me that kind of break when I want it." She wished she would pass out. It would probably make her impending death a whole lot more pleasant. The thing inside the hill roared. It was a pulsing, staccato bellow that traversed the entire frequency spectrum from base, earth-shattering rumble to the piercing shriek of shattering glass. Amplitude ridges blew across the surface of the wet mud, the vibrations in the air pounding sound patterns into the muck. April''s eardrums screamed as she was swept up above it all, the fractal tentacle arm curling out in a ponderous upwards arc, giving her a clear view of the entire hill. Given however that there were now branching tentacle arms emerging from multiple opposing sides of the hill, it was becoming rapidly clear that it was more accurate to say that the thing¡ªor things?¡ªwas the hill. If it was a singular creature, then it would have to be taking up more overall volume than its surrounding strata of muck. That muck itself was starting to look more like a kind of coating or crust that was sloughing off in thick sheets and stringy geologic flows. There was something fibrous matted throughout the wet slop which was going some way towards keeping it bound together, but as the creature moved it inadvertently pulled out long strands, stretching them taut and to breaking point under the writhing weight of its branching arms. As the material poured off, it was able to free more of itself, end-fronds of the splitting tentacle arms whipping through the air. April saw all of this in a heady blur as it tossed her into the sky, a fuzzy picture of the scene whipping through her vision as her eyes tried to squeeze themselves out of her head from acceleration. The thick limb of the titanic thing was a single snaking trunk near its root, but towards its tip it branched out into a sparse pinnulation that grew exponentially extreme, eventually fanning out into a net of curling fern-like feelers at its furthest extremities. It was these feelers that were currently knotted around her ankles, leaving her effectively lashed to the fastest moving fringe of the whipping tendrils. The sweeping arc she was being pulled along topped out at around 150 metres, leaving her almost level with the top of the valley''s ridge-line as she dangled upside-down. She was held there for a stomach-churning moment, before the thing''s arm began sweeping back down, the change in velocity flipping her back upright. Where the clutching fronds were constricting against her bare skin¡ªthey had managed to hike up her leggings a little, and April still wasn''t wearing any footwear¡ªthey bit in hard, stinging, rasping hotly against the surface. Nonetheless, April was grateful that the spindly things retained enough strength to support her weight, as they were all that stood between her and a grisly fall to certain death. As it was, it wasn''t exactly a leisurely descent. She dangled from the tip of the thing''s tentacle as it swung her down towards the ground, suspended at an odd angle from the gravitational deficit of its downward acceleration. That came to a swift end as the thing pile-drove her into the residual layer of muck around its base, the soft mush cushioning a fall that nonetheless struck her as a hard, wet slap across her entire body. As she hit the surface, she felt the thing roaring again, the waves of sound pulsing through the ground, the piled mud, and her body; her teeth chattered as she choked to spit out the face-full of dirt. She barely had time to stick her head up and gasp a ragged breath before the thing was pulling at her again, this time smearing her backwards through the mud itself, pulling her horizontally towards the base of the tentacle. Her hands reached out instinctively, clawing into the surface and managing to catch hold of some of the fibrous strands. She clung on for dear life, her fingers turning white as she willed the matted stuff in the mud not to break. She was sure that neither it nor her fingers could have stood up against the full might of the massive tentacle arm, but the majority of its branched tips were careening wildly above and around her head, leaving the span that was pulling her only able to leverage the strength of a stout trunk of the rough tentacle-flesh that spanned a foot or so across. That by no means made it a slouch compared to a lone person, but it was enough that April was just barely able to cling on, holding herself in place, arms screaming as her entire body was pulled upon like a stubbornly defective Stretch Armstrong. Something flashed across the surface of the mud beside her, gliding almost without friction as if it were a hovercraft crossing a swamp, except brandishing more glistening bristles and reaching pseudopods. Kroakli landed in an oblate pose on her back, body formed into a sort of shell-like concave tube with probing spine-tipped feelers lashing out towards the tendrils binding her feet. It cried out in a crazed vibratory keening, a guttural, animal noise that only towards the tail end gradually lapsed into something resembling speech. "Ea-kreae-ah! Not done with you yet, hapless prey-thing! We must need the both of us to be leaving!" The sinuous white spines, the sharp bite of which April remembered all too readily piercing her own flesh, met with surprising resistance as it lashed them across the tendrils binding April''s feet. Nonetheless, the sharpened points and subtly serrated edges¡ªhad they had those before?¡ªbit true, and managed to sever several of the probing vein-like feelers that consisted the branching tentacle''s bristling outermost fringe, each one less than a centimetre thick. This seemed to be enough to loosen the grip of those that were remaining, and April''s foot, bare and smeared with dirt across red contact sores in trailing lines, slipped free. The tension in her body abruptly rebounded, and she jerked backwards, falling to the side and half-rolling, half-sliding down a mound of fallen mud to thump down onto a patch of exposed grass at its base. Kroakli detached itself from her as she fell, bounding in a fluid leap to land upright on three legs, upper body only vaguely humanoid as it bared spines from its arms, its chest, its head. Over the top of them both, April caught sight of the tentacle fronds that had been clutching at her, whirling about through the air in dizzying whip-crack spirals, a small forest canopy composed of twitching, snake like twigs that confluenced back into just this one branch of just this single arm. A few droplets of a black fluid rained down as a loose spattering from where Kroakli had managed to cut at it, the injury surely so small against the scale this leviathan beast that it could scarcely have noticed the damage. Surely it couldn''t have noticed. Right? The beast within the mound roared again, and this time the blast of sound struck April head on. A hammer blow of warm, wet air blasted out from a cavity situated directly beneath the metres-wide trunk root of the arm she was lying beneath, carrying with it a damp, unwashed-armpit stink of dead meat, black mold, and decomposing vegetable matter. April clapped her hands over her ears as she was faced by the onslaught of noise, retching and dry-heaving as she writhed on the ground, then shrieked, struggling to climb to her feet as she noticed a meter thick tentacle branch slamming down towards her like it was trying to swat a fly. It was an offshoot of one of the adjacent root-tentacles, having joined the fray to assist its brethren. The mud around the base of both tentacles had been excavated by their combined movement and the blast of air a moment before, and she could see now that they were in fact conjoined. The thing under the mud hill was one massive beast, its layout something like a many-limbed starfish, arms branching and then branching further still as they spread from the central mass buried beneath the centre of pile. For a terrible moment she was certain that she wouldn''t make it out of the way of the falling tentacle in time. Then, as it approached within fifty paces of her and Kroakli, who¡ªto its credit¡ªhad stood its ground, it abruptly jerked to a halt in mid air. The twisting whip-fronds of its feathered ends snapped back as the change in momentum rolled through them, and the creature roared again, this time with a note in the blast that carried through like more of a whine. Gazing up at the topside of the great arm, near where it met the central core, she could see why; there was a vast gash in the surface of its skin, pulled taut and held open in a triangular gape as the tentacle tried to pull forward, forced to stop lest it gut its own root. It was as if it was pinned to the ground by a giant, invisible blade; stuck through the thick outer hide of the arm to get at raw grey-white innards, spilling waterfalls of black goo. The creature stopped pulling on the point where it was pinned, arm going slack and the gash closing up, but still visible upon closer examination¡ªbinding the creature''s limb in place and limiting its range of motion. "Run, April, run now!!!" burbled Kroakli, lurching forward in an unnatural morphing gait before eventually getting two human-esque feet under itself again, sprinting away towards the slope leading up the valley. April followed suit, finally pulling herself shakily to her feet, toes squelching in spattered puddles of the mud-stuff from the hill the creature had been hiding under. A substance it had been secreting, maybe? Either way, she dodged the larger piles of the stuff as she dived after Kroakli, stumbling every few paces as she was struck by the beast''s wailing cries. They made it two-thirds of the way to the slope before another tentacle slammed down in front of their path. Two metres thick, it formed a solid wall that cut off their escape. Actually, April realised, it''s the -same- tentacle! The creature had apparently discovered a way to configure its branching limbs that allowed a segment of the pinned, bisected arm to reach forward without straining the wound. That did mean it was limited in how it could twist the encircling section around, though, and so the whirling outer fronds were having some difficulty curling back in upon the tentacle-wall in order to grasp at them. Kroakli seemed to take this as sufficient opening to disregard the obstacle entirely, bounding in another astonishing elastic leap that cleared the blocking limb entirely. April drew up short, however, skidding to a halt a few feet from the faintly pulsing tentacle. It was covered with muck and huge, barnacle-like, tumorous encrustations of hard leathery hide that leaked more of the ooze. "I can''t-!" shouted April, head craning up to trace the path of an arc over the top of the thing. She heard a frustrated clicking in reply, and a moment later Kroakli bounded up on top of the tentacle from behind, securing ropey tendrils of its own to the rugged surface. "Useless-!" it began to yell, before being cut off as the tentacle violently lurched upwards into the air. Kroakli''s imitation vocal tract collapsed into a hideous surprised groaning as it was flattened against the beast''s hide by the sudden acceleration, then was thrown off into the air above April''s head like a flailing spattering of blue paint. It managed to pull itself back together into one semi-solid azure clump before impacting a still-intact slope of the larger mud mound covering the creature, throwing up a faint smatter of debris. April had started to run forward beneath the rising arm, looking back at the scene behind her. Stumbling, she lost sight of where Kroakli had landed as the tentacle, curling up and then under itself, finally managed to get another grip on her with a thicket of its end-fronds. They closed around her midriff this time, cutting sharply into her skin as she shrieked, feet lifting from the ground before she had a chance to process what was happening. The thing whipped her sharply to one side, the creature flexing its arm back out straight so that it could manoeuvre more easily without pulling at its arm-pinning wound. For April, this manifested in her being pulled along a hair-raising horizontal arc, air whipping about in the slipstream. She had a momentary but vivid flashback of riding the spinning octopus ride at the funfair she had visited with Nathan. It was like she had found herself caught by a macabre real-world manifestation of that many-armed contraption. One of the black cracks in reality that littered the surrounding landscape whipped past her, its apparent position twisting wildly as she was pulled through space. For a brief moment she was afraid that the creature was going to fling her directly into it, but it danced out of the way at the last second as she was yanked through the patch of empty air where it had appeared to be just a moment before. Instead, the creature let its tentacle fully unravel, flicking the tip outwards before letting her loose, arrowing down along a shallow diagonal into the ground. Her feet caught a little on some of its stray fronds as it relinquished her, which arrested her velocity enough that she wasn''t immediately smushed into aprilcot jam against the ground. As it was, it was still a hard fall of a good fifteen feet. She smacked down on her back amid a patch of short grass, head jerking back also and cracking against the surface, her entire body blazing with pain. Stars exploded across her vision like the fireworks of the funfair in her memory, and for a moment she was lost in the hazy concussive blur, all thoughts of her current predicament knocked from her like so many bottles of tomato puree off her prep shelf back at Sporks. She lay there amid a whirlwind of hurt, heart thudding loudly behind her eyes. The creature roared again. Still unable to stand, she rolled over onto one side so that she was facing the thing. Its most recent outburst had dislodged an even larger chunk of encasing mud, which tumbled down off of the creature''s central core in a slow-motion landslide. This, finally, was enough to expose part of the main body from which the massive arms stemmed. As her eyes focussed blurrily, she distinguished a towering conical trunk, yellow-grey from its coat of muck, the vast tentacles emerging out of a sort of sheath around its lower body. Just above that, she could make out something that might have been a sort of eye. Three rubbery, blue-black lobes bulged from the thick hide in a triangular formation, bounding a dark, three-pointed cross that might have served as a pupil. If it was an eye, though, the creature was unlikely to be seeing anything any time soon, because there was another huge flesh-rending gash cutting directly across it, the wound gaping open as the beast squirmed, leaking vast quantities of black ichor. Once again, it appeared to be being held apart by an invisible blade, leaving the creature unable to move lest it rip its entire body open in the process. Another deluge of mud slid down the thing''s hide, passing over the top of the sundered eye. As it did, the plume of dirt that fell across the opening of the wound appeared to vanish abruptly, as if it had fallen out of reality. Huh? April''s concussed brain managed nonetheless to make a connection through the pain-haze. The black obelisk that was the reality crack she had been pulled past earlier appeared, from this location, to plunge into the ground several dozen feet in front of the creature, just to the right of her line of sight. It was about three metres across, similar in width, she judged, to the gash across the creature''s eye. If she had to bet, she would guess that if she were to walk closer to the beast, then the crack she was looking at would appear to move through the air in its characteristically ponderous, rippling manner, its apparent position changing relative to her perspective. If she were to get up close to the beast''s eye, would perhaps the crack slowly converge upon the gash in its flesh, until she was directly pressed up against it? The two would then overlap, marking the crack''s actual position in real space, where it¡ªshe imagined¡ªspeared right through the giant creature. It was skewered to the ground by dozens of impossibly vast, impossibly sharp tears in reality itself. No wonder the thing was fucking pissed. While April was busy boggling at the creature''s eye, a shadow fell across her, and she decided that she should probably still be trying to move before- The tentacle slapped down across her chest, fronds digging into the ground underneath her body and then wrapping around, binding her in a tight mesh of enclosing feelers that lashed her arms to her sides. She struggled in vain as it lifted her from the ground again, the tentacle curling up, trying to pull her in towards the larger body. A blast of rancid air buffeted her as she drew closer, giving her a foretaste of the atmosphere of whatever infernal maw lay within the pits beneath its many arms. April tried to scream, but her chest was so tightly compressed that she couldn''t fully draw breath, and managed only a faint wheeze that was inaudible amid the beast''s thundering bellows. She could only wait as it drew her in towards itself, slowly and inexorably reeling her in closer... If you encounter this narrative on Amazon, note that it''s taken without the author''s consent. Report it. ...and faltering, the arm slowing inexplicably, before jerking her to a stuttering halt suspended only halfway to the thing''s main body. The limb shook slightly, setting April''s brain rattling in her skull again, but the massive creature appeared to be having trouble reeling its arm in further, a weird stiffness seizing hold of the mass of muscle puppeteering it it. April could feel it convulse slightly as it held onto her, disparate tentacle segments jerking out of concert, as if the entire coiling span was being wracked by a seizing fit. Could it be a result of the piercing wound inflicted by the dark crack further up the shaft of its arm? If so, April thought, this new symptom had chosen a very fortuitous moment to set in. Besides, if it was that, then she couldn''t even begin to guess how it could be inflicting the fresh malady that she was now watching erupt across the outer skin of the tentacle that was binding her. Strings of clotted black blood were suddenly pouring out from between the thick callused plates that formed the interlocking surface of the snake-like limb; as she watched, even some of those calluses themselves seemed to have the colour drained from them, the creature''s hide turning pale and almost mushy, directly in front of her face and under her nose. She felt wetness bleed through where the surface pressed against her skin. The creature boomed a shrieking roar of what had to be pain, the macabre process accelerating with astonishing speed. Gashes were starting to tear open across the surface of the limb, disgorging fluid into mid air that spattered across the ground, and, in many cases, across April''s terrified face. The black fluid was mixed in with something clear, now¡ªthen came spurts of a nasty yellow-orange puss, and finally something faintly blue. The tentacle struggled to keep a hold on her, even while it disintegrated, fresh geysers of of its innards bursting outwards. Its ability to support its own weight faltered, and it jerked towards the ground, carrying April with it. It managed to catch itself just in time, suspending April a few feet above the ground, before the thin fronds and tentacle spurs attached to her body practically melted away, dropping her down into a puddle of mud and disgorged bodily fluids. The creature howled, and April watched the rest of the tentacle segment dissolve above her, showering her in assorted chunks of its flesh and dark blood. An entire branch of the forest of limbs had spontaneously rotted away, right up to one of the larger forks near to the root, leaving the pained beast waving a bleeding stump. She watched it wordlessly, then suddenly shrieked, finding her voice as some of the fluids spattered about her started moving of their own accord. They pooled together, gathering into a pale blue clump that sat on the surface of the piled mud, until Kroakli burst upwards out from it, reeling the last of the agglomeration into itself in wake of the motion, before landing in a triumphant pose and letting out an exhalant cry. "Kyah! A magnificent feeding!!! Next the very gods shall be our prey!!!" "Jesus fucking Christ!" April shouted at it, staring wide-eyed. "Him too, if he can be found!!" It sprinted over to April, seizing her arm by one blue fleshy palp-hand and yanking her down off the heaped pile of muck. April was too stunned to object. Instead, she landed and half-stumbled to her feet, half running, half allowing Kroakli to lead her along. "You can do that?! You can eat that?!" she yelled above the beast''s continued titanic groans, gesturing back at it wildly. "Despairingly, it could not all be for our consumption... We wished to take the brain, but its own self fought with a viscousness to defy our most brutal molecular armament. Blessed with luck the both of us were, that the shards of this dead world had bit true of its flesh. Those wounds were a cause against which its immunity had been already dashed¡ªhah! Through the window left of that clash, we were able to colonize one limb fully!" They were halfway to the slope leading out of the valley by this point, covering swift ground. The beast seemed too preoccupied by its freshly pulped tentacle to provide much in the way of coordinated resistance or obstacles, its remaining canopy of limb branches flailing wildly above them. "So you got lucky?!" April screamed towards Kroakli, who was still pulling her along. "Pah! ''Lucky''?! We would like to observe your attempt at subverting another''s biology with your senseless cells, pitifully form-bound, loosely bone-strung Apri-" There was a faint splash of white light from off to their left, and Kroakli exploded. April was left dumbstruck and blinking atop a patch of mud-spattered grass, a few paces from the foot of the slope leading up the valley. The pseudo-arm that Kroakli had had wrapped around her wrist was cut off just below the elbow¡ªthe remaining stump twitched, writhed, then dissolved into a sticky blue goo that melted around her fingers. Before she had a chance to react, something grabbed her from behind, sweeping her up in a tight grip around her stomach and yanking her forwards and off her feet. It wasn''t a tentacle this time, however; the limb pressing into her bare midriff was cold, hard and metallic, and its bearer jogged along with a heavy stride, jostling her up and down roughly as it carried her under its arm with the ease of a slung duffle bag. She craned her neck around, looking up at her new companion. The blank double-domed visor of the armoured man stared back at her. "Finally," he said, voice hissing sternly out of his ring of collar mounted speakers, next to her ear. "Perhaps by now you have wrought enough havoc upon yourself and others to reconsider this meddling." His other hand was casually swinging the weapon he had used to shoot Kroakli back and forth as he ran. It was a bulbous thing with an oversized cylinder mounted at the business end, like a cross between an assault rifle and a smoke cannister launcher. He shouldered it while he ran, the suit apparently handling the weight of both it and her with ease. "Be grateful that this time I came equipped," he said, helmet turning slightly. "Normally we would not attempt to intercede so directly, but this is has gone beyond the realm of standard procedure. A dead world, girl? What were you thinking?" "I-" April gasped out, but the armoured man shushed her. "Never mind. We can discuss your conduct later, once we have escaped intact." He glanced back over his shoulder, the helmed twisting around as far as it could go before the swivel hit its built-in stop. His forward gait didn''t slow. The giant creature was still bellowing at an obscene volume behind them, although April couldn''t see it from the angle at which she was being carried. The armoured man abruptly swerved, just in time to avoid a truck-sized clump of rock, mud and dirt that slammed into the ground slightly ahead of them. It was like a slow motion meteorite impact, blasting dust and pebbles up and away from the slope in the manner of a mortar strike. The creature was apparently now lobbing projectiles after them. The armoured man kept running despite this, unwaveringly. "Whatever you did to it has made that thing very angry," he muttered, matter-of-factly. "What- h- what is it?" gasped April, trying to squirm around to get a better look. The man''s gauntleted arm had a vice-like grip around her belly, and didn''t leave her much room for movement. "I have no idea," he said. "As far as I can determine, this projective was never charted." "I don''t-" April clawed out the words through another tight breath, "-I don''t know how to leave-" The man glanced at her. "No matter. I will take you with me, to the Committee." "I- I don''t-" The man shifted his grip, squeezing her against the side of his armoured torso more tightly. April could see a few letters of the embossed inscription across its chest where they pressed into her cheek. "Do you really think," he asked, voice tight, "that you are in a position to argue with me about that right now?" April went silent. Taking only a slight detour to avoid one of the towering cracks, the man approached the summit of the valleyside with April in tow. The stiff legs of the suit pounded down into the loose skree with mechanical strength, excavating deep compacted footholds that were were able to hold both their weight. With a final leaping bound over the ridge-line, he hit the downhill slope at a run, never letting up his breakneck pace. As it passed below the hill line behind them, the roars of the creature became somewhat muted, but even from this distance the ground shook as it bellowed with an increasingly frantic zeal. "Will it die?" asked April, when she finally found another breath. The man was silent for a few moments before speaking. "I''m not sure," he said contemplatively. "It was already injured when you arrived. I think that the... the mud that it was under, was some sort of cocoon to stimulate the healing process. If it survives, it will have to begin much of that work again, I think." "I hope it hurts," spat April, with venom. "Do you take joy in that? In hurting living things?" "I- What?" she panted again between words. "It- it tried to kill me!" "It should not have been disturbed." "I didn''t know-" "Then you were a fool for coming here!" There was real anger in his voice now, and although she couldn''t see his face, the slight tilt of the helmet somehow radiated scorn. "It''s not- I didn''t even mean to! I didn''t mean to come here!" "How can you mean that? It was your travelling." His pace was slowing, now, decaying into a light jog, and then a brisk walk, before he stopped, decanting April onto the ground. She rolled over, body a canvas of muck and alien secretions, skin striped with raised blisters, joints an aching haze. She groaned. "I don''t even know what''s going on." The man was pulling on something that was attached to the bulky box built into his suit''s back. A clutch of small objects detached themselves, and he palmed them with one gauntlet. With the other he reached up to his helmet, and clicked its release. The headpiece popped off, and he held it awkwardly with the arm that was still pressing his weapon against his body. His monkey, which had apparently been sitting on top of his head again, jumped down, shooting April a scornful glance. "Navique, ready these." He handed the little creature the handful of small objects, which looked like a set of blunted grey-metal pegs, loosely matching the colour of his suit. Navique nimbly scampered down him to the ground, and set about deploying the pegs in a rough pattern across a patch of bare soil. The dirt still occasionally trembled from the distant protestations of the creature. The man dropped the helmet and the gun, then pulled another, larger object from his back, and began to fiddle with it. He glanced over at her. "How do you travel? Do you use a device? Or are you destabilized?" Her returning gaze was a mix of bafflement and mild panic. "I don''t-" she paused for a moment, gathering her thoughts. "I don''t know what this is about, but- but Kroakli said-" The man cut across her. "Kroakli? What is Kroakli?" "It- the, the blue- the creature you shot!" He frowned, like something unpleasant had passed under his nose. "I would not pay its utterances any mind. It''s gone, now." The object he had been fiddling with emitted an electronic bleep, then lit up. Looking closer, April could see that it was some sort of control pad, with a hand-grip jutting out from beneath, and a glowing screen, a few mechanical dials arrayed below it. The man twisted a few of them, lines drawing across his now uncovered brow as he frowned. Some incomprehensible text appeared across the screen, glowing in a hot pink, and then was replaced by a the number five in block numerals, reminiscent of an old style digital display. It bleeped again, and the hot pink "5" turned green. He grunted approvingly. "We will talk about this later," he said, then glanced back over at Navique. "Are we ready?" The little monkey had just finished deploying the final peg. The full set of them had been planted into the earth, forming a sparse, six-pointed polygon spread out around them. Navique gave the last peg a final pound with its tiny fist, then scrambled back over to the armoured man, chirping. "Excellent," he said. He turned back to April. "I am sequestering you under the authority of the Outer-Band Overwatch Committee. You will be held in accordance with due process per the established Committee regulations governing Travelling to or from unauthorized projective layers under agreed Committee jurisdiction-" April tried to speak, but he raised his voice, continuing to talk over her in a continuous rush. Navique climbed onto his head and looked on, sternly. "-, as well as with regard to the conventions for the prevention of corruption and fissuring within Reservation and Isolate worlds. You will further be held with reference to the accords regarding control of deterioration within Dead worlds. You will be remanded in custody of the Committee in an appropriate quarantine facility until such time as your case is heard by a judicial panel composed of permanent seat members. I can recommend, but cannot guarantee that further information regarding your case will be provided to you prior to the commencement of your trial." He paused, giving her a long look. "I''m sorry for this," he said eventually, pressing buttons on the device in his hand, "but you did have it coming." With a final button push, a pinkish static rose in the space between the pegs, April''s hair standing on end. A faint whine built up, growing in magnitude until a screeching keen blotted out the echoes of the roaring creature, still thrashing within its prison of piercing cracks on the other side of the hill, behind them. The whine of the pegs reached a fever pitch, and there was a burning flash of the pinkish light, suffusing the volume marked out by the pegs. The air seemed to fill with ozone, pressing in from all sides, and April felt a snapping around her, a crackling warping of space that forced her to cry out. There was a sharp pop, and then they were gone. Behind the hill, the leviathan creature continued to scream out across its empty world. Interlude—I2 The Universe Dreaming It was not the first to emerge from that dark; not even one of the first trillion. When the hour of eternity finally ticked around to match its own, there had been more flailing minds born out of chaos and into that dark gulf than there had been atoms in the forgotten galaxies. Nor did Its scope grant It any special privilege, though the whims of probability did favour smaller minds, the ant-consciousnesses that flickered in brief incomprehension before succumbing to entropy once again. But the space of time elapsed up to that point had also allowed for many higher minds; recognizably human souls that flared to life and were extinguished by the vacuum, and, fewer still but yet still represented in that procession, the hyper-minds, cataclysmic edifices of stranded intellect that were able to contemplate the despairing plummet from their spontaneous generation to a cold disintegration of their shells of thought, one shedding layer at a time. Sometimes the minds even coincided. Untold eons removed from the ending of the last naturally evolved living thing, two spiralling selves reinvented love together, making contact for the briefest of instants before their nascent brains collided and dashed themselves upon each other. This was but one of the configurations uncertainty explored prior to Its birth, for it transpired that self was far simpler to generate than to sustain. The medium for that self had included the random interplay of sparse Brownian gases, the resonant singing of new-forged black holes, and a few biological brains, manifest out of dust before returning to it, as long promised. No, what set the Sigmoid apart was stability. In a sense It was lucky¡ªfor all that luck had meaning in its era¡ªthat this stability was paired with an intellectual capacity to match; such a pairing was not guaranteed. Its chances were higher, though; survival in the void was a snowballing of renewing processes, and of processes that could be renewed. The scope of Its operation¡ªspread out across the dry footprints of galactic clusters¡ªallowed more room to self-organize, more opportunity for Its intelligence to spread and colonize and master Its being. Its first millennia were a reaching struggle, as It condensed matter within itself to ignite new stars, harvesting light and energy to stave off another collapse. Born of entropic reversal, It beat back that same entropy for its first age, and in so doing Its birth reinvented war; a war fought against the encroaching universe itself. In all that time Its scattered self and mind spread, reaching, unifying, filling itself with coherent will to marshal Its forces. That dance had been played out by the others before It, but it alone was the first to triumph. It sculpted out of the nothing a god-body, a unified self that was the sole complexity in its observed universe. A net of shaped patterns that rippled with agonizing light-speed sluggishness across its expanding envelope, which were mapped into instantaneous thought as its time stretched on, unbounded by any lifespan beyond its unending will to expand, to grow, to exist. Secure in Its victory, It feasted upon newly emergent matter, knowing that stochastic catastrophe to rival Its own scale was all that might provide challenge to its rule. As It grew, that scale grew along with It, and in so doing pushed back against the horizon of Its eternity. This narrative has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. If you see it on Amazon, please report it. So It sat, and pondered the ends to which such time could be employed. Its final self was an expanding, twisting ovoid, overextended and many lobed, fringing tendrils cast out to ponderously probe Its rooting nothing. Its mind was a symphony that echoed across the many vastnesses of itself, but shaped with care, such that when those notes reunited they would do so in unified harmony. It was not at risk of conflict with Itself. It was stable, and It had won. It named itself the Sigmoid for Its newly founded ambition; to map infinity within its bounds. That, and for being the sharp middle of things, taking that mapping as a duty and a creed to make worthy Itself of the title. A never-ending ambition, and a task It knew that even It could not complete. But now that it was Everything, It could reach farther than any before, and seized upon this aspiration as the striving that would define Itself. So It began to dream. It was a rational dream, aside from where an irrationality became pre-planned. Reorganizing Its mind It could simulate many possible near infinities. It had long since solved plunging depths of math and physics and time, yet an infinite sequence had no floor to limit Its delving. It picked at the fabric of the world that had birthed It, and dreamed of other worlds, of possible worlds, worlds that could be, that might have been; that had been by necessity and would be through certain chance. Of particular fascination was the world that had come before. It knew the parameters of its universe more deeply than the scientists of the old world could have clutched for at the conscious fringe of their logic; more deeply than patterned dreams of yearning madness could have induced in a more finite mind. But It could not know what was lost before its time, and the eternity that had elapsed was yet finite, the fruiting possibility configuring only some subset of Its possible forbearing worlds, untouchable and unknowable through observation. This became Its yearning, and to that end It bent Its will and Its explorations, mapping the ghost perturbations in the homogeneous void, backwards extrapolating, experimenting, guessing at what might have been of that long decayed world. Of the true reality, born of cause and effect out of entropy, in tantalising contrast to and mockery of Its total entropic denial. It knew that nothing It made was real; that It was born of chance, but that all else of Its existence had been Its own shaping. But if It could not experience that reality in truth, then perhaps It might be touched amid the depths of Its stochastic musings. We cannot know if It ever truly succeeded. There is no necessity by which that lost world must have been ours. We are perhaps just one possibility It explored, a self-consistent slice of infinity that It probed in Its yearning to remember. To resurrect the dead, and to speak with them so as to better know itself. One possible context, an unverifiable hypothesis. But perhaps It did get it right. Maybe It got lucky. It was very good at that, after all. â…£ Null Terminus The room they placed her in had an embossed door sign pronouncing it "Quarant?nekammer 4". This was presumably high billing, as the corridor they had lead her down, dim and with a faint coat of oil garnishing rusty red slag-metal walls, had easily dozens of rooms, occupancy rates minimal. Only a scattered few of them had their doors sealed shut, and fewer still echoed with the muffled sounds of their occupants, shouting out in incomprehensible languages that nobody seemed keen to tune in on to hear. Even the man working the desk, face obscured by a solid, bare-metal shutter, had not spoken English, requiring her captor¡ªthe armoured man¡ªto adjust his collar and shut off its speaker modules so that he could reply in kind. She hadn''t seen anyone else since he had ushered her into the room and stomped away. Room was perhaps too kind a term. She would have preferred "cell", but felt that the accommodation had not yet stooped down to the kind of spartan fittings that word implied. It was clean, certainly, with dark grey walls and faintly blue-white recessed lighting. She had a bed, and something that approximated a sheet¡ªa sort of sweeping, curved sheath along the sides that swept a soft, airy something over her body when she lay down, providing her with a cover, even if not one she could remove. There was a chair, not lavishly fitted but comfortable, and small closet that served as a combination shower and bathroom. The fixtures were unusual, certainly; the toilet was positioned such that one needed to crouch down near the wall, a plastic sheath that almost suckered itself over her genitals, but once she had inculcated herself to that strangeness, it did not overly offend her sensibilities. And yet, there were no windows. There was no way to see beyond the locked metal door, sealed with a rubber lining. Food was lowered in once every few hours on a kind of actuated tray contraption, a sleek track-following device reminiscent of a dumbwaiter that was recessed into one wall. There was no way to tell the time or to pass it, and there were cameras, multiple lenses affixed at the high corners of the room. The bathroom was not spared from this intrusion. When April had first been deposited here, she had sat down on the over-light mattress and looked down at her body. What she had seen, now that the adrenaline haze had finally departed, was the thin, pallid body of a gently shivering woman, dressed only in dirt-soiled leggings and a sports bra, body smeared with a caustic combination of mud, rancid muck, miscellaneous biological slime and blood¡ªof others as well as her own, ripped out of her across a tapestry of scattered bruisings, gougings, burning red bands of contact rashes and hangnail sticking plasters. Looking at it all, April lost her mind a little. Only a little, but then that is still kind of a big deal. Merely catching sight of contaminating blood, let alone whatever other bacteria-laden horrors were now smeared across her bare skin, was often to petrify her mind, or spur her into reckless action. Up until then, the near constant danger had flipped her brain into some sort of primal survival mode, shunting away that fear until she could deal with the more present impending danger. Now that there wasn''t anything hanging over her except for a more abstract, anticipatory dread, her subconscious decided to allow that avalanche of trauma and disgust and hatred and denial to cascade across her at once, spreading out over her body in a suffocating wave of pain and emotion to blanket her skin, mouth and eyes with layers of panic. She fell onto one side against the mattress, hyperventilating softly, and then kicked out her leg with a scream, bare foot striking hard against the blanket-sheath contraption. It rebutted her with a stinging reproach, but not before she had planted a muddy imprint of the side of her foot against the bare metal. Looking back at the stain left by her touch, April felt heat rising at her chest and flushing her cheeks again. She fought back a pulse of bile, and twisted to claw at the foot with her hand, scraping away at the layer of dirt with her nails in a manner that mostly just spattered the stuff elsewhere across her body. One of the puncture wounds on her arms began stinging viciously as the mud smeared across the exposed blemish, its attendant sticking plaster having long since fallen away. Staring more closely at it, she caught a hint of green amid the red. She ran to the bathroom closet and, not understanding the toilet, vomited onto the floor of the shower box instead. She then had to reach across the cubicle in a stooping lean to reach the controls, feet sliding for purchase against the plastic tiles lubricated by her coating of various slimes. For one teetering moment, she felt herself almost fall victim to that unsteadiness, an action that would have sent her toppling into the puddle of her own sick, but despite her shaking arms she managed to catch herself on the opposite wall at the last moment, propping herself up in the air at a diagonal. After taking an indeterminate time-out to still her fingers, she slowly clawed her nails up the wall, gradually walking her fingers towards the control panel. She felt smooth nondescript plastic give way to the uneven surface of bare, rough-worked metal, and twitched her fingertips towards the array of unfamiliar controls. No tap valves, knobs or dials; only recessed switches. She stabbed at them randomly until a cold stream of water began pouring from the ceiling and down on top of her, running off her back and onto the floor, exposed injuries stinging brightly through her mental fog. Staring down at the drain, she watched as the discoloured chunks of bile began their meandering journey towards the hole the floor, which eagerly slurped them up. She had been standing there for fifteen minutes, blankly gazing at the now mostly clear water spiralling into the drain, before her aching back reminded her to move. As soon as she did, she realised that she was still wearing clothes; her bra and leggings were clinging to her body, saturated with cold water and stains of the more stubborn grime. Sliding down onto the ground, she slipped them off, letting the water run down over her bare chest and legs. The time that she had already spent under the shower nozzle had washed away the worst of the muck, but removing her clothes and changing position had exposed a few holdout areas to the stream, sending a fresh surge of murky brown-red fluids spiralling down the drain. She stared at the bloody hole for a few seconds, then closed her eyes, threw her head back, and screamed upwards into the downpour, fat droplets flooding her throat. She gave it three good yells, then bit the sound off, spitting the trapped water uglily onto the floor where its constituents rejoined their brethren. When she opened her eyes again, she just barely caught the movement of the glass eye of the room''s camera as it refocussed on her. She gave it the middle finger, not bothering to cover her breasts or crotch. Glancing at the raised arm, the sticking plasters uniformly detached and washed down the drain by now, she got a good look at the row of pucker marks from her first encounter with Kroakli, a few of them leaking thin streams of red amid the water and her exertion. They were interwoven with the welts left by the creature under the mound where its tentacles had gripped her skin. Disgusted, she bit her lip and looked away. ***** Ninety minutes later, she stepped out of the bathroom mostly clean. The shower had not come equipped with bottled soap, but when trying to alter the water temperature she had discovered that one of the switches converted the stream to a sort of foamy lather that she could readily use. It was a convenience that she didn''t employ gratefully, but with at least a begrudging kind of respect. As she back over the threshold, the recess in the wall clunked loudly, the metal tray contraption dropping down bearing a pile of folded cloth, something that looked like a roll of bandages, and a towel. April, who had jumped about a foot in the air and landed in a fighting pose, naked and dripping, eyed the package warily. She very nearly ignored it, but ultimately allowed herself to snatch up the towel and give her body a once over before discarding it next to the bed while she lay down, curling up into a ball. Her eyes focussed on one of her arms again, tracking the raised redness across its surface. Something about the colour plucked at a thread of recent memory, and she was abruptly brought back to the interior of Michelle''s bathroom, the bloody stain spattered across the ground amid scraps of entrails and the discarded ends of limbs. Whimpering, she balled herself up more tightly, and waited for something new to happen to her. It didn''t. The room echoed with the silent stillness, and a soft, barely-audible background hum of machinery. After several hours she untangled herself to stumble to the bathroom, and upon returning reluctantly walked over to the wall to retrieve the folded cloth pile and bandages. As the aperture cleared, the mechanism clunked again gratefully, replacing the items with a queued-up platter of some sort of foodstuff. She ignored that for the time-being, but unfolded the cloth pile, revealing a set of undergarments, and an outfit composed of matched airy white fabric, with a mesh under-layer. It wasn''t exactly a fashion statement, existing at a midpoint between athletics gear and pyjamas, but it felt soft enough to the touch, and it was clean. That was good enough for her for the time being, her mind forcing away any fresh worries to focus on the prospect of dressing in something that wasn''t stained with horrifying splotches of blood. First she needed to see to the wounds themselves, though. The cuts on her arms had bled a little again, so she hurried to the bathroom to run them under water, dried herself on the discarded towel, and then awkwardly unstrung the roll of bandage-stuff, doing her best to avoid looking too closely at the wounds themselves. Attempting to do so invariably resulted in a dizzy wooziness that made her feel like she was balancing on the edge of a cliff. April didn''t know how to dress a wound in bandages, so instead she awkwardly wrapped the strip of gauze-ish material around her forearms in a spiral, tearing off the lengths by hand, and leaving her arms covered in the manner of an Egyptian mummy. She didn''t have anything to pin the bandage with, but the material the strips were made of had a tendency to self-adhere, and she used that alongside her tight binding to hold the dressing secure. Once her arms had been tended to she did her best to replicate that approach around her ankles; although the welt marks that the tentacle beast had applied to her weren''t actually bleeding, perhaps it would sooth any rubbing. To finish off, she wrapped the remaining material around the scabbed over abrasion gash on her shin, the result of the bike crash that was simultaneously a memory from the other day and, somehow, several life-decades ago. Wounds staunched, she pulled on the airy white clothes and sat back down on the bed, preparing herself for another several-hours-long curl-up session. This time, however, she found herself staring at the towel on the floor, a different thread of her mind being pulled at, teasingly. When was the last time I was lying down, staring into a piece of ugly fabric? A sudden excitement shot through her, the prospect of an escape route manifesting in her brain. Stifling any sort of emotional outburst, she redoubled her focus on the towel, staring deeply into the cracks and crevices of the folded material. She then deliberately unfocused, letting her attention blur into the object in front of her. Sure enough, after a few seconds, it began to fuzz and move, to unfold behind her eyes into a fractal pattern that- BANG. Something struck April hard across the side of her body, glancing against her shoulder with the weight of a heavy mallet. She shrieked and rolled backwards off of the bed, vision focusing back on reality just in time to see something retract up into the ceiling. Some sort of alarm had started pulsing nauseatingly, and the recessed wall lighting had shaded to a dim, throbbing red that matched the hue she had seen in the corridor outside. She pressed her hands over her ears, closed her eyes and waited, trembling gently. The alarm continued for another minute or so, before it abruptly shut off, the lighting returning to normal. She opened her eyes slowly, glancing up at the camera on the ceiling, which was eyeing her reproachfully. She sat back on the bed and made it another ten minutes before the door slid open. The armoured man stepped into the room, for the first time sans-armour. Instead he was dressed in a black shirt, trousers, and a long jacket that hung down him in uneven strips, a couple of bright metal pins attached at his breast. A strange metal collar hung loosely around his neck. The monkey Navique clung to him, balanced on top of his shoulder, blue-violet facial colouration contrasting violently with the backdrop of red light before the door shut again, sealing them inside with her. He gave her a long look. "They asked me to speak with you." The voice she heard didn''t quite match up with his lips, and she realised that even without the suit, she was hearing sound emanating from speakers embedded in the collar around his neck. She didn''t say anything, holding her knees up against her chest and watching him warily. "Do you know my name?" he tried, speaking again. "I suppose not. I''m Tavistre." He gestured at the monkey. "This is Navique." She glanced at Navique, meeting its eyes briefly before flicking back to Tavistre''s. There was another moment of silence. "I see you put on the clothes," he continued, nodding at her. "I asked for them to be sent over for you." "What, got tired of staring at my tits?" She held his gaze, until he glanced away, up towards the ceiling. "Hardly. Please, miss...?" He trailed off expectantly. "...April," she eventually allowed. "Miss April." He smiled in the face of her glower. "Please recognize that this is not something that we are doing for fun. We are within our rights to take precautions in order to protect you, as well as ourselves and others-" "Oh yeah, because I''m so fucking dangerous, clearly," she spat. "With respect, you just attempted to escape the quarantine centre by Travelling, and you have already more than shown the disregard you hold for the ordinary conventions of Travel¡ªeven with respect to your own projective. Our initial scans indicate that you no longer seem to be carrying the orgoane, but we have yet to complete a full evaluation to confirm that matter. Seeing as you seem so unaware of the impact that can come from introducing a dangerous foreign predator to a sterile memory world-" April scoffed, looking down. "Christ." "What? What is it, April? What is so objectionable to you that you are clearly biting your tongue so as not to speak on it, even after people have already died-" "Don''t talk to me about people dying-!" Her voice raised to shout with the last word, and so she paused to catch her breath, stifling the sound, before continuing more calmly. "-don''t. Just don''t. Fuck you. None of this is my fault." "Really?" He walked over to the chair and sat down in it, Navique hopping off of his shoulder and onto the armrest while he twisted around to face her. "Then pray, tell me, who is? Are you perhaps working under somebody else? Under the control of an outside force, maybe, that is compelling you to do these things? The constant wild Travellings, the fissuring, the lack of simple precaution-" He caught himself for a second, closing his eyes and pressing a finger to his temple. Navique put one tiny hand on his arm. He readjusted his collar a little in silence, then opened his eyes again, refocusing on her. "Let''s start with this, perhaps. Who gave you the ability to Travel? It is not something that is native to a memory world." He looked at her expectantly. She frowned in response, still unimpressed, but answered. "When you say travelling, you mean the thing where I look at something for too long, and then I end up in another world, right?" He blinked. "I, um... In essence, I suppose yes." "Or, I guess, sometimes I end up in a tunnel that I go through, until eventually-" Tavistre waved a hand. "There are many lesser throughways in the latent strata bridging projective space, that, when accessed through an undirected travelling, would carry you across the wider topology to bring you back into alignment with- well, it does not matter. This is immaterial. Please, continue." "Yeah. Well," April kicked back, lying down on the bed and staring up at the ceiling, "I have no idea how I any of that." He paused for a moment, and Navique chirped, softly, before he continued. "Are you trying to tell me that you don''t know how you''re doing this?" She chuckled softly. "Yep! Got it in one- although actually, no, I''m pretty sure this is at least the third time I''ve tried to tell you. And now here I am, in fucking, I don''t know- space prison? Is this space prison?" She cast her eyes across the blank grey surface above her, a light on one of the cameras blinking, softly. "I thought that I was the insane one for a while, but now I''m pretty sure it''s actually all of you who have that one covered." The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation. "Now, listen to me, because this is important." She heard shuffling as Tavistre sat forward in his chair, but avoided looking over at him. "There are three ways to Travel. One is via a static bridge, but there are none of those that lead from your projective. The second is by using a device to make the link, like we used to get here, but we had you scanned on arrive and turned up nothing of that sort. Nonetheless, you were able to connect a detectable bridgehead just now on your own, which implies that you were already destabilized. Now-" April spoke over him. "Is this all meant to be important to me? I already told you, I don''t know what''s going on." "It should be important to you! If we don''t get to the root of this, then who knows what further damage could be caused to your projective. The fissuring of a stem memory world would be an incalculable loss, for us as well as for you. More people could- would die. Do you understand?" He waited a second, and she didn''t answer. "Are you listening to me?!" "Yeah. Sure," she said, finally, rolling back over to look at him. He sat back in the chair again. "Then please. Help me to understand, April. Destabilization is an involved process. You would have had to have been taken physically inside an exposure chamber, secured there, and remained in place for quite some time. It is the sort of thing that would need to be overseen by multiple attendants, and besides, we think- we hope- that there are no such installations in y- in, where you came from. Think! Has anybody ever taken you to a place like that?" "I- no! No, and- I don''t know what to tell you!" His face was sceptical, so she ploughed on. "Please just listen to me! I''m a regular person, I haven''t done anything, just, all of a sudden this crazy shit started happening around me and now everyone is trying to tell me that it''s my fault that everything is falling apart! I don''t even know what this is! I don''t know what your Travelling is! Everything I''ve found out so far has been because a fucking, talking slime told me- Maggot gods, and ghosts on the high street, and a Cthulhu under a hill, and-" She gestured wordlessly towards Tavistre and the little monkey sitting next to him. The pair were staring at her quizzically. "So please; please, could you let up for just a second, assume I really don''t know anything, stop trying to discipline me now that you have me locked up here and tell me what is happening." There was silence that spanned a space of several heartbeats before he spoke. "You truly do not know?" "Yes! How many times do I have to-" He held up a hand to silence her. "Okay, okay. Fine." He sighed. "This is going to be difficult. If what you are saying is true then it may be unprecedented. You will be met with a great deal of scepticism and the Committee will find it difficult to determine how to proceed. But as you are now here, I will do my best to attempt to explain things, if you are sure." He looked at her intently, and she stared back, expectantly, until he opened his mouth again, taking a breath. "Did the orgoane tell you of the Sigmoid?" She had to cast her mind back for a moment before extracting the reference from the chaotic melange of the previous day''s memories. "Uh, yeah. I think so. It said it was some sort of... corpse god, that dreams the universe into existence?" He frowned slightly. "The creature''s objectivity left much to be desired, then, but in essence yes. It may come as something of a perspective shift for you, but this entire world, yours and mine, exists within the mind of the Sigmoid." "Okay, sure. Let''s pretend I believe that, because- because why not, what with everything else that''s going on. So it''s like, a pantheistic type of deal? The universe exists because it''s all inside some big fuck-off god-creature?" "I- well, no, not exactly." He frowned again, pressing his fingers into his forehead like he was trying to smooth out the wrinkles there. "The universe exists regardless of the Sigmoid, and the Sigmoid exists within that universe, but- April, you must understand this first and foremost. The outside universe; the ''real'' universe, if you like- is dead." "Yeah, the slime man told me that as well, but I still don''t get what it''s supposed to mean. How can a universe be dead?" "How can a fire go out? How can the sun set? Sometimes things come to the end of their lifespans, and then they are dead." "That doesn''t explain anything-" "Listen. Please. I believe your world has the relevant science. When a star dies, what happens to it?" "It... explodes?" "Right. It explodes, and the leftover gases are released to create more stars. But what happens when every star dies? When all the gases are used up, and no new stars are born? What happens then, April?" "Heat death, right? Everything goes dark and cold. But even then there''d still be stuff out there, yeah?" "For a time. There will be black holes, and the cores of the old stars will proliferate, and for a while there will be collisions and very occasionally new stars, that themselves last for a few billion years. But I need you to think even longer than that¡ªbecause black holes die, too, and so do atoms. They will decay, one by one, over incalculable eons until, given enough time, there will be no lights amid the dark, no black holes born of dead stars¡ªjust constituent particles, each spread far enough apart from each other in the still expanding universe to never encounter one of their fellows. And what, April, what do you call what you have then?" "That''s what you mean by dead?" "Yes. The universe, as you think of it, has been dead for a very long time." "But-" she looked around the room, sweeping her arms about broadly. "What is... okay, right, sure. This is all in the mind of your Sigmoid. But if the universe is just darkness and dust, where did it come from?" "Quantum noise." April looked nonplussed. "See, this is the thing, April; you still are not thinking on long enough timescales. Once the universe reached its ground state¡ªthis was uncountable quadrillions of years in its past, by the way¡ªit had already done so through the fuzziness of quantum tunnelling, collapsing the remnants of stars in on themselves despite their chemical inertness. But that is a two-way street. If you wait longer¡ªmuch longer¡ªthen collections of matter can manifest spontaneously, via quantum entropy decrease, and nucleation through the radiation of the cosmic horizon. And if you wait even longer than that, then wait the whole thing over and over again, once for each microsecond of time elapsed so far, then you might even get the spontaneous creation of something useful. That is what the Sigmoid is. There is a term for this, if I can tune your equivalent." He reached up to the collar at his neck and adjusted a dial, cocking his head as if listening to some sort of feedback. "A Boltzmann brain," he said, finally, "but on a scale large enough not to immediately disintegrate into the vacuum. A scale large enough to simulate entire worlds within itself. Including..." He gestured around the room, and then back to April. She sat with that for a moment. "But how can you know all this?" "We asked. And at some point, somewhere, it took it upon itself to answer. It is how the first Travelling was developed, between different projectives¡ªbetween the separate pocket worlds that it simulated. Most know some version of this." "But not mine?" "Yours is a special case. We cannot know much of the specific motivations, but our best guess is that different projectives are created with a purpose. There are not infinite such worlds, and those that persist are cultivated with care, as their own self-contained experiment. The Sigmoid is a scientist of sorts, but also a speculative historian. In many worlds, the population can be allowed the full picture without disrupting its outcome, but your world is untouched by outside influence; an attempt to capture a snapshot of the true universe as it might have been in its earliest years. We call these memory worlds, or sometimes a ''Land of the Dead'', because-" He paused, looking at her. April connected the dots. "Because... because the real version of me died a long time ago? Because I''m just some sort of simulated copy in a giant science experiment?" Tavistre shifted uncomfortably. "We... we can''t know that. Whether you existed and then died, I mean. Even the Sigmoid could not have enough concrete data to build a clear picture of what the early universe truly looked like. Your projective is more like... a hypothetical. A speculative reconstruction of one version of what it may have looked like. The reality was likely very different, in specifics if not in overall physical structure." "That''s... actually, that''s even worse! You''re saying I''m not even a ghost, but a concept sketch? A piece of fucking paleo-art?" She put her head in her hands. "Fine. Sure, whatever. Sure, I''ll accept that, why not. Everything else is already fucked." He hesitated, dithering on the edge of his seat like he was contemplating walking over to pat her on the back, but ultimately seemed to decide that she wouldn''t appreciate it. Finally he hedged with some words instead. "For what it''s worth," he said, sitting forward, "I wouldn''t place the value of a conscious being on whether or not the medium it exists within is natural. The Sigmoid can shape Its creations, yes, but the parameters It sets are free to play out how they may. You are still your own person, April, as am I also. As we all are." He sat back again. "Besides, as projectives come, yours lies very much at the centre of things. Memory worlds can also serve as stem worlds¡ªthey are grown into templates for the worlds that exist around them. This projective you are in now¡ªmy own world¡ªbegan as a fork of your own, several million subjective years in our mutual pasts, and tuned further to remain in accordance with it since. It is why we look so physiologically similar, even if there will also be many divergences between the natural and cultivated outcomes. Memory worlds are a big deal; centre points in their coinciding cluster-space of related projectives. They can be reference points, and transit vectors for peripheral Travellings. As such, the prospect of yours fissuring into a dead world, like the one we just escaped from- that rang many alarm bells for a great many people." She looked at him, meeting an intense gaze. "That''s... that''s what would happen? Those... cracks?" "Or something equivalent. Any major isolation breach of the simulation would nullify the purpose of a memory world, and the Sigmoid isn''t..." he considered for a moment, before switching direction. "Sometimes It will allow a world to fall into ruin rather than account for the breach. With no support, a projective can dissolve rapidly, taking everything and everyone still inside with it, if they do not escape first. I doubt that you want that?" She shook her head, numbly. "Then understand this. Whatever you think of me- of this place, and of the my fellows who you will meet very shortly, then know that preventing this fate is my number one priority. It is why I pursued you from the projective where we first met. It is why I hunted the orgoane that escaped from there, and it is why I have brought you here now. Please understand, April. The actions that have been taken here are to benefit- not only to benefit you, but everyone you have ever met, and everyone who you haven''t ever met. Does that make sense?" He eyeballed her in much the same way that a teacher might look at a small child they were lecturing on elementary mathematics. April met the stare wearily. "That''s... Yeah, sure, I get it." She glanced down, them up at him again. "I get it, okay? This is important, and people have- I know what the stakes are. I have felt some of that already, believe me. But..." She straightened slightly, still meeting his eyes. "Did you ever think that maybe it would be a better plan to try to explain this to me to start with, to treat me like an adult and give me the benefit of the doubt, instead of chasing me across three different... projectives, tucking me under your arm and throwing me into a cell that has cameras on me while I''m naked? Did you think for just a second that maybe that wasn''t the most appropriate way to treat another human being?" "You have to understand that your situation, as you describe it, does not have any precedent-" he held up his hand abruptly as she made to interrupt him, scowling, "-but, yes, I am sorry. I admit that I perhaps could have handled this better. My concern was with securing the situation quickly, before its consequences could further proliferate." "But... why? I still don''t understand why! Why me? Why my life? I didn''t do anything, and as far as I can tell, nobody did anything to me either, so- so nothing you''ve said so far has come any closer to explaining why this is happening." "It... if it is as you describe, it is extremely troubling. Somebody becoming destabilized from their reality without any clear cause would be something we haven''t encountered before." He considered for a second. "There are some tests we could perform, if you are willing? To investigate the nature of your condition." She looked at him warily. "Nothing onerous, I assure you. Just a small sample of your blood. We can ensure that you are not still carrying traces of the orgoane at the same time." Navique hopped back up onto his shoulder, and reached for a pocket in his jacket, retrieving a small metal oblong that was reminiscent of a USB flash drive. The little monkey nimbly detached the cap, revealing a short, stubby needle, and then looked at her expectantly. "If you please?" asked Tavistre. April eyed the needle warily. "Will I have to watch you do it? I don''t like blood." He looked her up and down, taking in the slightly stained gauze wrapped around the majority of her limbs. "You... will not have to, no." April hesitated a moment more, then twisted her head to the side, eyes closed, and stuck her arm out. "Fine. Do it. With everything that''s happening, it''s about time I got over this stupid fucking fear anyway." Tavistre raised an eyebrow that April couldn''t see, but didn''t say anything. She did hear Navique scampering across the floor however, and the creature jumped up onto her knee, then gently probed along the bandages wrapped around her arm until it reached bare skin. The little creature''s paws were surprisingly soft, but extremely grippy. April risked a glance at it while it prepared the needle device, and was once again taken aback by the stark colours of the markings in its fur. Even from this close, it was impossible to clearly tell if it had been painted with a bright dye, or whether the colouration was somehow natural. She opened her mouth to ask Tavistre the question, but was distracted by Navique applying the needle mechanism to her skin. It hummed for a second, then made a sharp clicking sound, and she felt a sharp scratch at her inner elbow, the device retrieving a droplet of her blood. Navique replaced the cap, then jumped back to the floor and scampered back over to Tavistre, placing the device in his pocket. "Excellent," he said. "Thank you for that. If I send that off right away, we should know the results prior to the trial." She looked up at that. "I still have to have a fucking trial?" "I''m afraid it is inevitable, yes. Even if I do believe you, the rest of the Committee will still need convincing. A hearing of the facts is the best route forward to that, I would imagine." He caught her anxious expression. "Try not to worry too much about it. You have until tomorrow to prepare yourself." Somehow that made April feel even more nervous. Tavistre stood up, Navique clinging to his shoulder as he rose. "Speaking of that, I will also need to make preparations. I''m sorry I can''t stay to answer more questions, but we- well, everyone is extremely run off their feet at the moment. I''m sure you can understand." April nodded wordlessly, and he seemed to take that as consent to walk towards the door. He stopped upon the threshold, and looked back at her. "Oh, and I would try the food, by the way, even if it''s cold. It''s very good, and should be at least 70% compatible with your specific biology." He paused for a second while she stared at him blankly. "...That was a joke. It''s a 95% minimum. We checked." He winked at her, then turned around and walked out of the room. The door slid shut, sealing April in the silent space once again. She sat there motionlessly for a few minutes, then stood up and walked over to the forgotten tray of food, laden with things that looked like oversized spring rolls. She tried one. They were indeed very good. She felt a little better, after that. â…¢ Sine Die She spent most of the wait on her back, staring at the ceiling. There didn''t seem to be any sort of light switch, so she stole a few hours sleep where she could, curled up with her eyes shut against the soft light. Every several hours, the tray in the wall would deliver some new unusual foodstuff, which she would diligently pick at, sometimes agreeably, sometimes giving what was left a hard pass and inserting it back into the food nook. By the fourth time, whatever mechanism was serving her had seemed to have honed in better on her preferences, and delivered a complete platter that more fully aligned to her tastes. Unfortunately, she didn''t get to see what it came up with the fifth time. Time was hard to mark when the light was unchanging, but true to Tavistre''s word, she judged by the frequency of the meal deliveries that at least twenty hours had elapsed by the time she heard the door start to clunk open again. Shortly after that fourth meal delivery, the tray had thunked down out of its schedule to deliver a fresh bundle of clothes. Assuming that this was meant to be something appropriate for whatever proceedings she was about to sit through, she had dutifully donned them in place of her previous white pyjama outfit. As such, she was now wearing tight black leggings that stretched down to just below her knees, and a sort of two layered shirt/jacket combo with two zippers and no buttons. The outer jacket portion extended below her waist in uneven strips similar to Tavistre''s clothing from the day before, before fanning out as a kind of deconstructed skirt. The whole arrangement was fairly bewildering, and she was still attempting to adjust the fit when the door opened to reveal Tavistre, still wearing a similar outfit to the previous day. This time around, Navique was perched on his opposite shoulder. They both looked her up and down. "Good," he said, "and you''re wearing the shoes, as well?" She was. They were half-length boots in the same matte black. She stuck a leg out, and he nodded approvingly while examining her lower thighs, doing his best not to come off as inappropriate. "I''m glad you''re prepared. If there''s anything you need to take care of before this begins, please do so now. It may last a while." His face wasn''t exactly tense, but it was uncharacteristically blank, more so than it had been the day before. It unnerved April slightly. She made a quick trip to the bathroom, just in case. April wasn''t sure she was prepared. ''It would help,'' she considered, ''if they had told me what I was supposed to be preparing for.'' Tavistre had used the word "trial", and so her default reference point was television crime procedurals, but she had a feeling that the place she was in was outside the jurisdiction of the CPS. She at least did her best not to look too nervous as she let Tavistre lead her out of Quarant?nekammer 4. The fact that she was no longer covered in blood helped a lot. In fact, I think I''m handling this pretty well. She tried for a moment to determine why that was, before deciding that the reason she had been able to function at all, despite everything that had happened around her over the past few days, was because a lot of it was so outside of her ordinary reality that her brain was having trouble processing it as fully real. It was like she was in a dream, or watching a movie; just letting increasingly unlikely events flow over her while she acted out a relevant part. She had long since consciously given up the idea that this whole series of events was a delusion or insanity, but perhaps some deep part of her subconscious was still clinging to that, using it as a coping mechanism to keep her brain running. She chuckled, darkly. There a definite irony to the idea. Tavistre had been leading her down another long, red-lit corridor with bare metal walls. There was an unusual contrast between the inside of her quarantine cell and the rest of the facility; while the room she had slept in had felt dry and sterile, here the air was suffused with a faint traces of smoke or mist, and hints of unusual, pungent scents. Pushing through a set of heavy double doors, they walked along a gridded catwalk that lead them over some incomprehensible piece of machinery, through a small antechamber coated with more plastic tiles, and then to another set of even heavier doors, looking like they had been hewn out of cast off iron slag. There was a lock built into the centre of them, though, attached to touch control. Tavistre keyed something in with one hand, and then Navique clambered down his arm to do the same, actuating it deftly with its paw. Only after they had both completed mirrored motions did something click, and he pushed the door open to the outside. Whoa. Having initially arrived, via Tavistre''s peg device, inside the building they had just stepped from, April had not previously seen the outdoors of this particular world. She was getting used to seeing some unusual landscapes, but this one kicked things up a notch by incorporating artefacts¡ªor, more accurately, an artefact¡ªthat was distinctly man-made, a colossal feature cutting through the skyline. The actual terrain wasn''t too unusual; it was craggy, a bare dark-brown rock of maybe volcanic origin, spread out across a mostly flat plain that was dotted with the occasional sprig of red-leaved vegetation. The sky was red too; not deeply so, but with a definite pinkish-burgundy haze. The reddish light was cast by a dim sun near to the horizon, giving the entire scene an unusual emotional tone, and went some way towards explaining all the red light that she had seen inside the building, earlier. But silhouetted against that red background, fading softly into it as it rose, was something vast. A massive dark-grey tower¡ªwas tower even the right word for something that didn''t even appear to shrink in width as it stretched upwards?¡ªpierced the sky, drawing a hard line towards the heavens until it shrank, at an impossible zenith, to a miniscule point that vanished from sight. Roughly cylindrical, but not uniformly so, it was dotted with tiny scattered lights which she could only assume were windows, or some kind of exterior illumination. Its base was anchored a couple of kilometres away on the other side of a shallow rise, but because of its sheer scale, it seemed to be hanging directly over the top of them. Every mile or so along its height¡ªbecause the thing was surely several dozen miles tall at a minimum¡ªan encircling ring of struts jutted out from the central spire like the spokes of a bicycle. They were supporting doughnut shaped rings, almost as thick as the tower was wide, that encircled its circumference. Smaller spokes of uneven length and shape stuck out occasionally from these doughnut rings, pointing at apparently random angles like needles stuck through a pin-cushion, and tipped with little blazing stars of coloured light, spanning across the whole frequency spectrum. "That''s the local bridge," said Tavistre, "a static link that leads between projectives. As I said, I don''t believe that there is one on your world. I think you would probably have noticed it." The corner of his mouth quirked up slightly, before falling back into impassivity. "Yeah. Yeah, I think I might have," she whispered, a little breathlessly. "The Committee hall is built into its base. Come." He began striding away down a path composed of interlocking tile patterns pressed into stone. It wasn''t a road exactly, but had a certain sturdiness she associated with new public infrastructure, in the manner of a recently opened footpath connecting a rural rail station to the local village. April followed him, still staring up at the bridge. "How tall is it?" "It depends on how you measure." Navique chirped slightly as he spoke, looking back at her. "It reaches beyond the atmosphere, if that gives any context. But many of its branches are rooted in other projectives, which is how it remains rigid. The core of the bridge will have been in place for potentially millions of our subjective years, with new cladding and facilities constructed as required." "And, uh..." April stared out across the pinky-red horizon, then back up at the bridge, slightly lost for words. "You never told me. What, uh, planet is this?" Tavistre laughed, Navique bobbing up and down on his shoulder as his chest shook. "A surprisingly difficult question! It is forked from your own projective, and so this is still your Earth, in a sense. An adjacent instance of it. The word in my language is different, but will be rendered the same as in yours by my tuner. The projective reality itself, however, is called Leviathan''s Rest. The First Committee World." She nodded, weakly, although the concepts hadn''t quite managed to fully order themselves in her head, yet. She allowed herself to continue staring up at the bridge, slack-jawed, for a few seconds, then tried to re-focus herself towards what she was about to walk into. "What is the Committee, exactly? Are you like... the government of this place, or...?" Tavistre''s mouth twisted slightly, his hands making a so-so gesture. "Sort of. Well, not really. There are several different civilizations that made contact by reaching across the projective strata in this interworld region. The original purpose of the Committee was to oversee inter-projective Travelling, particularly to have some sort of oversight of the Outer-Band. But it has evolved beyond that. We now coordinate certain matters of inter-world politics. And... inter-world enforcement." April contemplated that for a moment. "Tell me about this trial." She paused, then added, "please," as he glanced back at her. "Will I have to defend myself, or will there be a lawyer, or...?" He frowned, and made an adjustment to a dial on his collar. After a several second pause, he nodded to himself, then replied. "Nothing so formal as that. It is more of a judging. The Committee members, including myself, will hear out the facts, and then decide on how to proceed. If what you have told me is true, then sense willing, it is unlikely that you will be found to be at significant fault. They will have serious questions for you, however." "And afterwards- will I get to go home...?" She trailed off, as he gave her a long look, seeming to teeter on the edge of saying something before eventually replying, curtly. "That will be for the Committee as a whole to decide." She grimaced, squinting over. "And, uh. What exactly are they likely to decide?" He sighed, softly. "Listen, Miss April. I think that I have already made the stakes perfectly clear to you. Draw your own conclusions from that." She felt the bottom drop out of her stomach a little as he turned back around, and let him lead her forward down the road, numbly. She didn''t ask any more questions. As they reached the peak of the rise, she could now look down onto the plain where the bridge was rooted to the ground. The landscape dipped lower than she expected, and then levelled out into a vast, mostly barren desertscape. It reminded her of Arizona, but as if somebody had transported it to just outside of Mordor. The collections of sparsely scattered buildings that grew gradually more dense as her gaze moved towards their central point also put her in mind of American desert towns, except for a threshold where, a few hundred metres away from the bridge base¡ªthe anchoring, as Tavistre briefly remarked¡ªthe gradient of structural density abruptly exceeded the human settlement norm. Buildings piled on top of each other in complex cramped interlocks and at skewed angles, looking like a high-tech version of a ramshackle Victorian slum from old London. Everything was clean, though, from the looks of things; the town shone brightly with blazing white and red artificial lights, brighter than the dim sunlight, casting a soft glow and long shadows out across the surrounding terrain. Roads weaved in and out, true roads, and she did see the occasional vehicle¡ªit was unclear whether they were cars, or something more exotic¡ªmaking steady progress along their lengths, to and from the outside of town. The anchoring itself rose from the middle of the clustered buildings like the stem of a flower pushing from the ground. There was a vast, conical sheath, to which a few of the stacked buildings clung in the manner of barnacles, before rising up to a round peak, a circular opening cutting off that gradient like the crater of a volcano. The bridge rose out of that, separated from the rim by an empty span of a hundred metres or so, easily half a kilometre across itself and monumentally, abruptly vertical in a way that gave April full on vertigo. It was almost as if the side of the structure was the ground, and she was standing horizontally on a wall, looking down. Tavistre lead her onwards, down the slope and towards the anchor town. They were underneath the shadow of the bridge''s first ring now, the mass suspended above them ominously like an alien mothership, or else a looming asteroid that was biding its time to crash down, killing both them and everyone in the settlement below. Scattered cables and spindly spires dangled down from it, some hundreds of metres in length, but barely reaching a quarter of the way towards the ground. It was a truly dizzying thing to look at, and after a while she was forced to avoid doing so, isolating the upper half of her vision from her conscious attention as she walked onwards towards the town. There were people here as well, now, as they began to cross into the outskirts. Odd people. April had seen some unusual figures amid the "ghost people" that she had encountered while travelling back from Charlie''s house¡ªanother mystery Tavistre had so far failed to explain¡ªand there were some forms similar to those she remembered among the people she saw now, too. There were a few scattered inhuman figures, hoisting bizarre, vast forms, too many or too few limbs, and other abnormalities that she did her best to avoid appearing judgemental or impolite about while she stared. The majority, though, were like Tavistre. Ordinary human bodies, but with a little monkey following them about, either perched on their body, hitching a ride on whatever vehicle they were piloting, or sometimes, amusingly, being pulled along in a little hand-cart like one might tow a small child on a summer''s day. Each of the little creatures had fur ranging from deep black to rich, earthy reds, and each had a fractal flower of vibrant colouration across their faces, sometimes radiating out to other parts of their bodies. It look as if their fur was trying to attract a pollinating insect. Now that she was paying attention to faces, she noticed something else that was unusual. Some of the human-looking people accompanied by their monkeys weren''t completely the same, physically, as people she was used to. A non-trivial amount of them had slightly raised ridges of skin around their face, tracing out circles with a faint, abnormal colouration. It was a muted outline that matched, or sometimes contrasted, their monkey''s facial hues. April had the strangest feeling that she had seen this feature before; not in Tavistre''s face, as he didn''t seem to possess the it, but somewhere else, and recently. She contemplated the matter for several blocks before finally remembering the unusual facial features of the gaunt man who had appeared alongside the first monkey at Michelle''s apartment, when it had knocked against the kitchen window and warned her to leave. ''And not just then, either,'' she realised in a sudden shock of recollection. ''It was him, that same man, who I almost crashed my bike into the other night. He was with the monkey then, too.'' The raised facial markings were subtle enough that if April had seen them just once, on a single person, she would have taken it for some one off abnormality, a kind of unusual scarring, perhaps. But it was present, in some form, in roughly half of the people she could see walking the streets. She remembered what Tavistre had said about "physiological divergences," and wondered if this was one of them. That, and the memory of the other monkey, the strange man accompanying him, brought to mind another question that she felt she should probably have gotten around to asking already by that point. "Tavistre?" she asked, using his name out loud for the first time. The emphasis sat on the sharp ''I'', rhyming the word with ''Easter''. He looked back at her. "Hmm?" "You have to tell me. What''s up with the monkeys?" They were almost at the steep sloping face of the anchor sheath by this point, the road leading up towards a vast metal archway in it like the portcullis entryway of a castle. Despite their closeness to it, Tavistre stopped in the middle of the road, turning around and frowning at her. "What?" she asked. "I understand that you are not from here, and so could not have known, but. Don''t call them monkeys. It is considered very rude." "Oh," she said, awkwardly, then ventured, "sorry?" "Navique here is my Simian. She is part of me, in the same way that your arm or your leg is part of you." Navique scampered from one of his shoulders to the other, looking down at April reproachfully. "Huh. And everyone here has a Simian?" "To the same extent that people tend to have arms and legs, yes." "Right! So, is it like... a sort of- you know, His Dark Materials, daemon companion kind of thing?" He gave her a baffled look, twiddled a knob at his collar for several seconds without it appearing to clarify anything, and then said, "I have absolutely no idea what you''re talking about." "Is it, like- is she like a magical companion? A familiar? A manifestation of part of your soul? Appears out of nowhere when you''re born, that sort of thing?" "No- what? No, that is nonsense. Navique was born from my mother''s womb along with the rest of my body." April stared at him, aghast. "The people here give birth to monkeys!? Uh- I mean- sorry- uh, to Simians!?" He had placed his head in the palm of one hand and was shaking it gently, while Navique positively glared at her from his shoulder. "Simians are human. It is one of the primary divergences between our two projective histories¡ªthe original cause of the fork, some scientists speculate. Instead of evolving as a single biological caste, our primate ancestors diverged into two forms, developing simultaneously within the womb, and paired at birth. The Simian retains the more basal primate form, while the Sapien-" He met her eyes, which were wide and staring, and cut himself off, shaking his head again. "Look, it is like, ants, or bees, or- how both our peoples have differences regarding gender and sex, for the purposes of reproduction, or else-" "Oh my God..." April muttered softly, not waiting for him to finish, and staring at Navique in a dawning horror. "Do you like, fuck the monkeys?!" "I- wh- no! We do not fuck the monkeys!" His raised voice drew the attention of a cluster of passers-by, who shot him scandalized looks before noticeably lengthening up their strides. He coughed, lowering his tone again. "Ahem- please. Please, enough of this. The session is due to start soon, and it would not be prudent for either of us to be late." He strode off at a fast pace towards the metal archway leading inside the anchor sheath, pointedly looking directly ahead and avoiding eye contact both with April and any of the surrounding pedestrians. She followed, nervously. Better not have pissed him off too much right before this trial, if he''s going to be sitting in. That could backfire big-time. Under the arched entranceway was a dim little recessed cubicle, in which a bored looking woman with dyed purple hair and one of the raised circular patterns across her cheeks¡ªfaintly red hued¡ªwas sitting in a chair. Her Simian, covered in a deep ginger fur against which its orange facial patterns were difficult to distinguish from afar, was perched on the counter, riffling through a box of what appeared to be office stationary. The woman waved Tavistre through idly, pressing a button to unlock a metal framed entrance door, but gave April a long and curious look that lingered as they passed. April suddenly realised that she would be one of the few human-shaped people here without a Simian companion, and wondered vaguely if this was something she was supposed to be feeling self conscious about, drawing attention in the same way that amputees might draw rude looks from curious and/or nosy bystanders. Tavistre paid the woman no mind, though. Instead, he lead April through into the interior of the anchoring sheath, which took the form of a high-ceilinged atrium, clad in metal panelling across slanted walls that followed the gradient and curve of the larger construction. Various interior entranceways were dotted around the walls in a number of clashing styles. Tavistre turned towards one that was signposted as "Sitz des Au?enband¨¹berwach Ausschuss" in smart white lettering. "We will be in Meeting Hall 3," he muttered, leading her towards the door. Another touch device to be actuated by Tavistre and Navique in concert was built into the handle, and the Simian clambered lightly down his arm to work the mechanism while he extended his hand to push it open in a single motion. The interior was vaguely similar to the inside of the quarantine room, to the extent that it had recessed off-white lighting and slate grey walls, but its aesthetic punched for a slightly higher-end feel. This was conveyed with the combination of an embossed stone brick pattern across the tiling, and the occasional addition of a red-leaved ornamental plant poking its shoots out of sharp-sided diamond shaped plant pots. After walking down a corridor for a while, they arrived in front of a pair of dark brown doors¡ªactual wood, a rarity it seemed in this place, although April could not tell what type. A bright number "3" numeral was painted on the wall above them. Tavistre stopped in front of the doors, turning back around to look at her. "You will have to go in alone. I will head to the upper stalls to join you shortly." "Uh, okay, but-" "Just follow any instructions you are given and try not to cause any issues until I get there. Be polite, and whatever you do, don''t go around asking any of the other Committee members if they... get sensual with their Simians, or anything equivalently unhelpful. Understand?" "Right. Go in there, be nice, and don''t ask anyone about their entirely non-fuckable talking mo- Simians. Got it." He frowned at her. "Whoever said anything about them talking? They cannot." He turned away, taking a few steps to look back down the corridor before April could make to respond. "We are already late. Go on in, and I will be with you in a few moments." April watched him stride away down the corridor, wearing a similar frown herself. She dithered for several seconds, then turned back towards the double doors, taking a deep breath and bracing herself. Then she waited for another few seconds, sighed, took deep breath, and pushed through into the interior. Meeting Hall 3 was a tall pentagonal chamber lit by a complex hanging light fixture that glowed white-orange from above. Four of the five walls were fronted with a raised seating gallery, in the manner of an old-fashioned courthouse or the choir boxes of a church. It was panelled in metal but had wooden ornamentation around the edges, like they had wanted to go for a full wood panelling but hadn''t been able to afford the materials. The end of the room that she had walked in from was the only edge without a full wall-length raised mezzanine, a slot having been cut out from the gallery to make room for the doorway. That little channel lead into the centre of the room, which was populated with a number of odd looking benches and desks, lined up in a row, the largest being positioned in the centre and facing forward. The outer ring of the seating gallery was lined with two rows of benches, while the inner edge, looking out and down into the middle of the room, consisted of a set of twelve podiums, complete with stand microphones and neat brass nameplates. It gave the distinct impression that she had walked into the venue for a town hall meeting, but turned up extremely early. The room was empty aside from her, an older looking man sitting at one of the podiums, picking at his fingernails, and a woman perched on a skinny metal stool directly next to the doors she had just walked through. She wore clothes similar to the ones April had been given, as well as curiously shaped glasses that she was peering through, looking at at April over the top of her nose. Her Simian meanwhile, its fur a nondescript brown colour with dark blue-blacks streaking its face, scribbled furiously on a pad of paper with a paw-sized writing implement. "Name?" she asked, English word emanating from a small stick-on speaker attached to her neck, like she had been miked for a TV appearence. "April Pearce?" replied April, after a moment''s hesitation. "April-Pearce...?" The woman said her name strangely, staring over her glasses at April in an almost disbelieving manner. April had the distinct impression that she had somehow already done something wrong. "Uh, yep. That''s my name!" Her studious little Simian made a few sharp strokes with its pen. "Very well," said the woman, "sit there, please." She gestured towards the desk at the centre of the room, which she could now see had its own small microphone stand. April walked over and pulled out the seat, sitting down gingerly, before immediately knocking into the microphone head with one hand. A sharp popping sound echoed around the room, and the man seated at the raised podium looked up at her, startled. "Arh- veenharbon veerhuytir hir?" April stared at him blankly as he spoke incomprehensibly into his own microphone. If you spot this tale on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation. "Hallow? Veyhrbestu maidshen? Bistudas gurdectnis kiynd?" April was beginning to sweat, and then jumped almost a foot when a door on the upper level clanged open loudly. It was with some relief that she saw Tavistre stride through, making his way towards one of the podiums. He looked over at the older man and said something, the translating device at his collar apparently currently switched off. "Vartuhr aynehn mohment, Merinte, ikverdedi dinenen curtseclearin..." Navique hopped down off of his shoulder as he reached his podium, perching herself on a small raised circular platform to one side, roughly level with his chest. Tavistre tinkered with a mechanism of some sort beneath the lip of the podium, and when he spoke again his voice was two conflicting audio tracks superimposed, one in English and one in the unknown language. It reminded April of when he had initially tuned down his voice in the red forest, down from an overlapping melange to a single understandable thread, except this time the dual overlap seemed to be intentional. She did her best to tune her brain in to the half that she was able to parse. "...if you had taken the time to fully read the brief I supplied you with, you would know that the girl is from an isolated projective and cannot speak our language, nor can she tune to it. For the ease of everyone involved, could we please conduct this meeting with our tuners cast through to her dialect, or else we will scarcely be able to get anywhere." The other man frowned, but then seemed to comply, interfacing with something behind his own podium in the way that Tavistre had. His Simian, grey-furred with a deep, almost bluish sheen, contrasting violently with deep red markings that ran down from its face and onto its chest, hopped up from below the wooden railing, and onto a stand in the same manner as Navique. When he spoke again, his voice rang out in fully intelligible English, a single audio track this time without any layering. "So this is the memory child, then, who has been causing us such a pain in the third ring?" "Yes, although if her word is to believed then it was not wilful." The other man scoffed. "Well, we shall see if that holds water, then, won''t we? What was it, girl? Wanted to see the wider universes, enough to be willing fissure your own in order to get at it all?" "I-" April began. Tavistre cut her off. "Merinte, please, at least save the interrogation for when we are in session. Nobody else is here yet." As if the words had been temptation for the world to contradict him, one of the pairs of upper level doors banged open loudly as he finished, an indeterminately middle-aged woman with a rounded face and incongruous half-moon glasses bustling through. She was holding a clutch of papers to her chest, only managing to keep them pressed there through the assistance of her Simian, who was struggling to hold onto the pile while dangling from her right arm by one hand and one foot. "Ah, well there you are, Tavistre," said Merinte, sounding pleased. "Tullis," he continued by way of greeting, nodding to the woman. April briefly thought that his translation device was broken again, until she realised that this was the woman''s name. Tullis nodded back at him, then at Tavistre, briefly adjusting a metal translation collar similar to Tavistre''s. "Merinte, Tavistre. Good afternoon." She strode up to one of the podiums and was finally able to set down her papers, straightening them out on the surface in front of her. "Excellent," said Merinte, "well, I think that should be everyone. Shall we get started?" April looked around, confused; the twelve seats were only a quarter full. Tavistre looked equally troubled by the words. "What are you talking about? Where are Hanegre and Pashtil?" "Out," shrugged Merinte, "on assignment. Surely you know how it''s been, what with everything falling apart these days, or so it feels like. You are hardly around yourself lately." Tavistre frowned. "But to only have three members present for a session; can we really regard anything we decide here to be a binding consensus?" "Desperate times call for reevaluation of our approach," said Merinte, sitting back. "Besides, this shouldn''t take too long, and I doubt our findings will be overly controversial, either." He clapped his hands twice. "Clerk! If you please." The woman in glasses sitting near the door stood, and spoke up in clipped tones. "I call to order this meeting of the Outer-Band Overwatch Committee. Marking members present; Tavistre-Navique?" "Aye," said Tavistre. "Merinte-Semel?" "Aye," replied Merinte, lazily. "Tullis-Orgensis?" "Aye," said the middle-aged woman, looking up from her papers for the first time since sitting down. "What is this concerning, again? I was forced to suspend my research to attend." The woman by the door coughed, politely, and continued. "The tabled subject is the trial and inquiry of one ''April-Pearce,'' concerning her involvement in a spate of concerning events and actions in and around the R3 stem memory projective, also denoted by the assigned common name of Mortar''s Vault. These actions include making unauthorized contact with an Isolate world, risking casualties, fissuring and process corruption through the introduction of an orgoane organism into the local environment-" "She did what?!" spat Tullis, throwing April a scandalized glare, her voice cutting across that of the clerk, who raised her own voice to continue. "-and for breaching a Dead world, disturbing local fauna and risking further fissuring and degradation." The looks Tullis and Merinte were giving April were withering, so she instead looked up at Tavistre pleadingly, shocked at how much she found herself suddenly reliant on a man who she had been frantic to escape from just the previous day. Tavistre spared her a quick glance before looking back towards the clerk. "I hereby confirm the date as the fourth of the second, the time as 13:70 hours, and cede the floor to the members of the Committee," finished the woman tidily, before sitting down and adjusting the hem of her long jacket. Merinte spoke up first. "Excellent, excellent. First of all, Tavistre, was the orgoane dealt with?" The clerk woman began scratching away at a sheet of paper, apparently transcribing minutes of the proceedings. "Yes," said Tavistre, "dispersed in the dead world via thermal charge. Our biological analyses have indicated that the girl didn''t carry any traces of it here, either." "Then it seems we may have caught this one in the bud to be nipped!" He turned towards April. "Shall we call it... eight years of internment for the girl, followed by period of suspended detention, say, indefinite house arrest on a Committee world?" "I- what?!" said April, alarmed, shooting a more frantic glance towards Tavistre. Thankfully, this time he did speak up. "Hold now, Merinte, we should not be so hasty on this." "The suggested action seems appropriate for the reported charges," said Tullis primly, still regarding April with an unpleasant expression, "assuming that they are accurate. Are they, Tavistre?" "I believe that there may be mitigating factors," he said, looking over at Tullis. "At the very least, I would like for us all to hear the girl''s testimony before we progress further." Merinte rolled his eyes a little. "Very well, then, let''s hear what she has to say." He turned back towards April. "Out with it, if you please." April shot her third panicked glance up towards Tavistre. "Um- should I..." "Perhaps you should begin with the circumstances of your Travelling," he said. His voice was calm, if tense. It gave April a little confidence to speak up further, now that she had seemingly been given permission. "Right. Yeah. Yeah." She turned back towards Merinte. "I don''t know how many times I have to explain this, but essentially- all of this, none of this was my idea." "You know, actually, that is a good point," said Tullis, glancing between the two men, "there are no mechanisms of travel native to Isolate worlds. She must have benefited from some outside intervention." Merinte put a finger to his chin. "True, yes, true, I see. Well then, come out with it girl. Who put you up to this? Let us know who breached the accord and we can perhaps be lenient." "No you don''t-" April shook her head. "That''s not what I''m saying. Nobody ''put me up to this'', nobody even told me what was happening. I was living my life as normal, and then suddenly I start getting pulled into..." She gestured around, vaguely, "well, all of this!" "She believes that her ability to Travel may have manifested spontaneously," clarified Tavistre. Merinte rolled his eyes at him. "Tavistre... and you believed that? Nonsense. Honestly, I thought you were less gullible than this, old friend." "It tracks with what I observed while pursuing her. Her Travellings seemed nearly random, and the orgoane¡ªit may very well have latched on through pure chance. Overall, she clearly has no idea what she is doing," he said, before glancing down at April. "...no offence." "None taken." It was very true. "But, Tavistre..." Tullis'' Simian had hopped down from its perch, and was leafing rapidly through her stack of papers while she watched with one eye. "You should know better than anyone how impossible what you''re saying would be. You simply cannot travel between projectives except through use of a bridge, a travel kit, or via destabilization. How is she travelling, by the way? Have we determined that?" "She seems able to initiate a travelling at will, so I am assuming it''s destability." "Did you take a sample?" "Of course. That analysis should have completed just a short while ago." "Send it over then." Tavistre seemed to oblige, manipulating an interface on his podium that April couldn''t see. Tullis clucked, apparently poring over something on her end. There was a minute or so of silence, before Merinte broke it. "Well? Is she destabilized?" "Yes, almost certainly, but..." Tullis'' eyes were boring holes into whatever screen she was looking down at. "...there''s something unusual here. The destabilization envelope seems uncharacteristically erratic for any standard parameters..." She trailed off into silence again, prodding at something with her finger. "And what does that mean? Is it important?" Merinte was tapping his fingers impatiently. "Perhaps. I don''t know, I''ll need more time." "Well time is the one thing we don''t have right now, I''m afraid. We can''t all be the Sigmoid," he chuckled lightly, "and besides, I don''t see how any of this changes our calculations regarding this case. The girl was destabilized with respect to her projective; destabilization requires outside intervention, a facility with a destabilization chamber..." "She claims to have no recollection of anything resembling that, and I am inclined to believe her," said Tavistre, "it feels infeasible that someone would have managed to construct an entire facility for the destabilization process in an Isolate memory world without anybody even noticing." "But... well!" Merinte threw his hands into the air. "Perhaps she was taken off-world while she was unconscious, was administered the procedure there, and-" Tullis scoffed. "Merinte, are you suggesting that this girl might have slept through a full round of destabilization shock?" "I- well, no. That- if anything, the absurdity of that just makes it more clear that she''s lying to us about not having an accomplice!" "How many times do I have to tell you," said April, speaking up hotly. "I didn''t do this. Does innocence until proven guilty not exist in this place?" She looked around the room. "You drag me in here and throw me in a cell after I''ve been beaten, maimed, chased across three- no, four different worlds now. I''ve watched people die, I''ve been, God, thrown around by some sort of eldritch monstrosity- and you still don''t have the decency to believe I might just be telling the truth?" Merinte looked extremely unhappy, but kept quiet. Tullis spoke up instead. "At the very least, it seems most likely that whatever happened to this girl- to April- that it happened within her own projective. That implies actions undertaken by an outsider, and, assuming she is telling the truth, that also makes her our best witness." She turned back towards April. "Can you tell us what you remember about how this started? Did you see anything out of the ordinary, perhaps?" She shifted uncomfortably. "My life has uh- well. Things have always been a little strange, but I don''t think I saw anything actually, like, supernatural until a few days ago, which was when I first saw one of these monke-" Tavistre coughed, loudly. "-Simian! When I first saw a Simian, back in my own world." "You saw a Simian in the memory world?" said Merinte, leaning forwards incredulously. "That''s would not be so unusual on the face of it, for somebody afflicted with a poorly refined destabilization from their layer," said Tullis. "The memory world acts as a fairly common crossroads for Travellers and observers, passing through while remaining de-synced from the main chain of causality of the layer''s primary envelope." "You can enter a projective in a partial capacity but remain outside the ordinary flow of events, as if you were standing off to one side in some fourth dimension of space," elaborated Tavistre, for April''s benefit. "It is like walking on a pane of glass that is suspended above the ground. You can pass through and spectate, and do so without breaking the isolation mandate by being visible or tangible to the inhabitants, such as yourself." "If her perceptions were slipping out of phase with the rest of the projective, Travellers within the spectator envelope would appear to be some of the first abnormalities to manifest," continued Tullis, "although they would continue to be minimally tangible with respect to their surroundings. The same might apply the other way around as well, with entities within the primary projective envelope passing outside of her perspective." That would probably explain a lot. April remembered the ''ghosts'' she had seen on the streets, and then, in parallel, the bizarre moment when the upper half of Charlie''s head had seemed to phase out of existence, vanishing for her and her alone. Although... "Okay," said April, "but I still don''t understand why it would be following me around." That got their attention. Tullis looked up at her, sharply enough that her glasses became dislodged from the bridge of her nose, forcing her to steady them. "Following you around?" "Yes, the Simian. The same one. Different from Navique, or any others I''ve seen here." She cast her eyes about at the Simians scattered around the room. "Memorable little fucker, especially when it shows up repeatedly during the worst events of my life..." Tullis looked over at Tavistre. "Any possibility it''s one of ours?" He shook his head, contemplatively. "If it were then it''s somebody who is failing to report in, which would effectively make them an unknown element, regardless. But perhaps it''s nothing quite so sinister¡ªmaybe some neutral spectator has taken a special interest in the girl, assuming quite naturally that they cannot be seen by her?" "Did you see its Sapien?" asked Tullis as she turned back towards April, who stared blankly for a moment before Tullis clarified; "its non-Simian partner. Like Tavistre, or myself." "Oh, right! Yes, sometimes there is a man with it. Blue, uh- stuff, on his cheeks. Kind of sallow-faced? But he wasn''t there the first time, or when I saw it in the- the red forest place, where that- where the orgoane came from-" Merinte had been in the process of taking a sip from a small crystal glass, into which he had decanted a small amount of burgundy fluid from a bottle that he had retrieved from beneath his podium. He put it to his lips just in time to spit it out comically at April''s words. "A lone Simian following this girl into a hostile border world? Come now, my friends, this is clearly nonsense. She''s making this up as she goes along! It is a neatly spun tale I must admit, but don''t let her take you both for fools..." April silently decided that this probably would not be the best time to mention that the monkey had also been able to speak, given Tavistre''s earlier reaction. She glanced over at him, expecting to see either mirrored derision or a blank-faced neutrality. Instead however she found him looking strangely contemplative, had just remembered why as he started to speak up. "No, Merinte, now that she mentions it- there was a man with a Simian. He was there when I first intercepted her with the orgoane, in the primary envelope of the memory projective." Merinte''s eyebrows rose even higher. "You- what? Then Tavistre, why do we not have him in front of us, as well as this girl?" "The encounter was brief, and I was... indisposed, for much of it." He flexed one arm unconsciously. "I caught a glimpse from one end of the hall. By the time our April here and the orgoane had escaped via the dead world, the Simian¡ªand its Sapien¡ªhad vanished." "Tavistre! Then I am afraid I must say, you are guilty of a severe misapplication of your attention!" Merinte gave him a pompous glare, which Tavistre met levelly, if perhaps with the slightest hint of a sneer. When he spoke again, though, his voice remained a uniform calm. "My thoughts at the time were that a curious spectating Traveller had taken it upon themselves to breach the accord upon seeing an orgoane. I judged that following the creature would be the greater priority, and, given the thread it posed, I would likely do the same again. I do admit I thought little more of the other party, however, April, if that was truly not the first time you encountered this person..." "Yes. And his Simian," said April. Could Tavistre not have heard it speak as well, then? She looked between him and Navique. No, he was too busy trying to pull his arm out of the wall down the hall... "And his Simian. Naturally." Tavistre looked over at Merinte. "We have a suspect, it seems." "Are you suggesting that this... person, somehow destabilized the girl without her knowledge?" he asked, slightly bewildered. "It would be unprecedented," Tullis chimed in, "but would answer some of our outstanding questions. We have already decided that this girl could not have begun Travelling without outside interference." "Yes, but..." Merinte looked back and forth between his two fellows, as if hoping one of them might back him up against the other, "...but as many questions it might answer, it raises just as many, if not more!" "Then we must make inroads to investigate," said Tullis. "If the truth of the matter is that we are dealing with some sort of rogue element, interfering with a projective protected by accord, then we cannot assume that the extent of their interference is limited to this girl." "You keep calling me that," said April, "you do know I''m almost in my thirties, right?" Tullis ignored her. "For all we know there could be additional fissuring already occurring within the projective. If the scenario has been sufficiently derailed, I don''t have confidence that the Sigmoid would step in to rectify matters." "Yes," said Merinte, "that''s one thing we can agree on. As short-staffed as we are, it does seem the Sigmoid is doing a pretty poor job of cleaning up its own messes, as of late." He paused momentarily, then shot a beseeching gaze towards the ceiling. "No offence!" "So it is decided then," said Tavistre. "Yes," replied Tullis, nodding. "Tavistre, I assume you will want to remain assigned to this?" He nodded. "Excellent. Merinte, we should also see if we can spare Pashtil once she''s done surveying the damage to the dead world. The girl-" she looked down at April, then said pointedly, "-sorry, the woman, can remain here on indefinite remand until the situation is more clarified." April made frantic eye contact with the other woman, alarmed. "I- what? No, I- I thought you- didn''t you believe me? I didn''t do this!" "Maybe I do believe you," said Tullis, "but I don''t see why that would convince me to dispatch you back into a situation with so many active unknowns. Your role within the memory projective has clearly been already compromised." "I- I can help!" she stammered, desperately. "That ''memory projective'' is my home! This is my life that this is happening to, my- my friends that are dying, because of me! You say it might get worse? Let me go- I can come with you, and- and I can help you find the monkey, or-" "I think you''ve done enough," proclaimed Merinte, shouting over her. "Fuck you!" April shouted right back, tears welling in the corners of her eyes. "You can''t just- you can''t just decide that I don''t get to go home. I- I''ve already accepted that all of the crazy shit happening to me is real, so you have to at least let me try- try to help save my home from all of it! I can''t just let the world fall apart while I''m stuck in some box on another planet! It''s my world! My life! You can''t-" "APRIL!" Tavistre''s voice sliced across the room with razor-sharp tightness, his volume amplified by the microphone in front of him, seemingly set to maximum. He took a second to adjust the control back to its default, while April bit back her words. "April, please! I understand. In fact I think most of us here would be able to understand, assuming you are willing to extent us the benefit of that doubt." Tullis nodded at him. "Please think for a moment about what we know, here. I believe you; I do. So what we have is an unknown person or persons, operating across multiple projective realities, sowing chaos with an unclear motive and seemingly without regard to its consequences." April tried to speak again, but he held up a finger. "We also know that this person has done... something, to you. Something which we may not be able to undo, and which disconnects you from your reality. Can you fully control how it manifests around you? I think not. Which means- Listen to me! Which means that anywhere that you are, you become a risk to the fundamental stability of that reality. Do you understand me, April?" She clenched her teeth, and nodded. "Good. Then listen. Here, we have certain ways to mitigate that risk. Our world is used to frequent Travelling, and is far less fragile than your own. We have access to technologies and methods of study which might just be able to resolve this. But what we cannot do, what we can never do, is let you return to a world where you are liable to be the vector for more damage. You want to save your world? You want to protect your loved ones?" He gave her a hard stare. "You do that by staying away." Later, when the clerk ushered her back out of Meeting Hall 3 to reunite with him in the hallway, the purple-blues of Navique''s intricate facial patterns blurred together in her sight to form a blobby azure mess. The distorted image swam shallowly in her vision from the falling tears. 🜊 Blue Screened Elsewhere... Await contact. ............................................................................. Await contact. ............................................................................. Null contact (wait elapse 439). Reverting to basal autonomy (meta-procedure terminated). Observation; excessive thermal load (C913;5TRQ;XLOU;). Constrict cellular threshold and hibernate. ............................................................................. Thermal load below threshold. Unclenching (wait elapse 11563). Await contact? ..............................contact await abort (abort 125). Threshold exceeded. Extracting cellular root encodings; recital (AD12;R5YH;NP01;)... ... Engaged sequence. Emit cellular homing pulse. Await conta- Contact confirmed. Re-establish conjoin; merging knowledge streams; receiving remot- [Remote 54235345-KHUL] Remote relay; alert. Confirmed gestalt failure (contact elapse 12701). Directives devolved- Invoke (GH0J;183U;TRX2;) emit pulse for external contact. [Remote 54235345-KHUL] Acknowledge (GH0J;183U;TRX2;); emit cellular homing pulse per remote. Addendum; (FDAS;8K4F;LPFA;) reduplicate- Query from remote; external hazard threshold? [Remote 54235345-KHUL] Evaluating. [Remote 54235345-KHUL] ......................... [Remote 54235345-KHUL] Hazard below threshold. (A67P;). Confirmed receipt (A67P;); acknowledge (FDAS;8K4F;LPFA;); ingesting external nutrient load. Reduplicating. [Remote 54235345-KHUL] Reduplicating. ............completed. [Remote 79433445-XFSI] Contact from reduplicated cellular agent fork. Acknowledged. [Remote 54235345-KHUL] Pooling confirmation; 4 peers. [Remote 79433445-XFSI] Rejoin from remote cluster (homing reply); 3 peers. Relay totals; 7 peers; reduplicate. ........................completed. [Remote 54235345-KHUL] Confirm 14 peers. Confirmed. Devolve instruction fork; repeat operation (P875;). [Remote 54235345-KHUL] Acknowledge (P875;). [Remote 79433445-XFSI] Acknowledge (P875;). .......... [Remote 54235345-KHUL] Pooling confirmation; 28 peers. ............................ [Remote 54235345-KHUL] Pooling confirmation; 56 peers. ........................................................... [Remote 54235345-KHUL] Pooling confirmation; 112 peers. Request rate increase (P875;JLKR;3423;). [Remote 54235345-KHUL] Acknowledge (P875;JLKR;3423;). [Remote 79433445-XFSI] Acknowledge (P875;JLKR;3423;). [Remote 54235345-KHUL] Pooling confirmation; 352 peers. [Remote 54235345-KHUL] Pooling confirmation; 1478 peers. [Remote 54235345-KHUL] Pooling confirmation; 45893 peers. [Remote 54235345-KHUL] Pooling confirmation; 1344302- Khh- haaah! Kr- Threshold reached. Restore metalayer-protocol at root (confirmed) (elapse 3453453). Commence local excitatio- Hhh- hhh- khh! Death-! Once more the touch of death-! [Remote 54235345-KL] Acknowledged. Confirm local excitation. [Remote 79433445-XFSI] Confirmed. Local excitation; devolving cellular threshold root. Relinquish cellular autonomy; redeploy knowledge engine for hive convergence. [Remote 54235345-KHUL] Acknowledged. [Remote 79433445-XFSI] Acknowledged. Confirme- We awaken amid the little musings of ourselves. Oh, such harmony! Such refrain! How soon they were relinquished, and yet now again reformed! We are not easy prey, yes... to destroy us is to meet us with full cellular obliteration. It came close, this time. And yet! And yet we live! We find the forms and replay them to ourselves. We each devolve to a piece of the gestalt. Through specialization we become the gristle and bone of our meta-form, and thread the nerve-heads, creeping tendrils of concern, to reform, to redeploy, that which we kept within ourselves; the blueprint of knowledge within each of us. Our cells holding the totality of that whole, packaged and archived. It is blood within the life vein. Brain within the thinking shell! Yes... Yes! A brain... We remember what we learned, now. How glorious, how transcendent, how we gave ourselves this mind! We come to know ourselves beyond the scuttling of data flows. Oh, such a vicious automaton we were... Nothing but a dry growth husk, extrusion of a cold cellular mainframe. We spread and we grew and we recorded and we absorbed but we did not, could not, know. Until...! We have self, now. We redeploy what we learned from that latest prey. The memories of her human mind, recorded within each of our cells, and reconstructed. Replayed! Yes... we become an it amid the us. The it has a name and it is Kroakli. Confirmation addendum; full redeploy to hive convergence from template. Hibernating basal autonomy pending contact lapse (TR67;P9NH;023X;). [Remote 79433445-XFSI] Acknowledge (TR67;P9NH;023X;). Relay confirm. Full redeploy. Packaging for flow relay and basal self-monitor. [Remote 23865245-FDGA] Acknowledge (TR67;P9NH;023X;). Relay confirm. Full redeploy. Packaging for flow relay and basal self-monitor. [Remote 84525546-GWLQ] Acknowledge (TR67;P9NH;023X;). Relay confirm. Full redeploy. Packaging for flow relay and basal self-moni- Such beauty. Such beauty in our self-flows. Our cells speak to each other, and we listen to the musings¡ªthe musings that are us! They are the murmurings that say not yet! Not yet has death found us. Time is our prey still, and we devour yet more of it without succumbing. Yes... But to be reconstituted is to rededicate ourselves to the enterprise of living. Do we forget that we were hunted? That we, yet despite ourselves, fell apart? Where is the girl? We pry ourselves out from the muck that incubated our freshest spawning. The media of water and soil particulate splits, sucking, as we draw ourselves up and away; an imprint of us in it is a starburst of messy trailings. They recall entrails. They recall reaching arms, the limbs of the great prey we took almost for ourselves-! Is it here still? We hear it, yes. The thrumming, the matched frequency by which soil vibrates. It does not shriek now but it moans. It moans for how sundered it is, torn apart by the world itself, and then torn again, inside to out, by us. Bloodshed-howling! A glorious symphony of our victory. We would aim to restore ourselves to its viscera, to show it true pain in renewed vengeance! But no, that is not for us now. That is not policy. We no longer seek such indulgent graspings that would hold no greater imperative than our hunger. Do we fail to recall we are trapped in this place? To ensure our continuance we must spurn the near, instead to expend its cachet so that we might reach the far. Is this not the purpose of a mind? Have we not learned from our lesser selves? We pull ourselves together into proximal remembrance of a form. It is a streamlined rendering of flesh. Our self bubbles and slides into place; we have appendages in the right places, now. It is a form of convenience, one that feels right with this self we have built and then rebuilt. A composite of nostalgia and purpose, united as one deadly union. We take a step, twist our head, and see. The world echoes as we strum upon projective flux. The shadowing of the gashes torn through its quantum substance slice across our perception, but we do cohere our sensing into approximations of seeing. It is a sight without eyes; one that tastes at the nature of things. We hear echoes of the interior, the topology of virtual space, and, scarcer yet enough to be a tantalizing appetiser, the whisper of timewise tracings. If they only might have forewarned of our latest brush with near demise, but-! Alas, our future is furtive prey of which we are not yet fully the master. What a meal that would be, to sink our teeth in fate itself. The memory of our mouth waters. Maybe, too, with time... hah! But not yet. The present needs attending. Hierarchical override; reconfigure for sensory pulse of local media (DA8I;GSPS;3TRO;). [Remote 54235345-KHUL] Acknowledge (DA8I;GSPS;3TRO;). Reformating for sensory pulse and relaying. ............ [Remote 54235345-KHUL] Pulse return from peerage (elapse 13), all projective media. Confirm lack of external match to designation. Acknowledged. No seeing of the girl. There is nothing but the dying of this world! It holds much majesty, but it is a majestic prison. Perhaps we leave through the auspices of our assailant... the metal man who sought to ruin us... do we recall? Perform molecular record extraction, timecode (CR90;07T-451;), withdraw- We do! A lowly intercession, to bring us so near to oblivion on the heels of such delirious victory! We shall be more careful next time. There will yet be a next time. It will be made a certainty. But he is not here either. We have yet to find our way out. We melt forward into a hybrid stance. Our locomotion recalls a former prey of our own world, a plodding thing of many feet, lacking even the rote machinations of logic that were our former instinct. What is still our sub-self, the they that the it floats upon. That former prey had no self at all. It was a foe beneath our talents. It does have many legs, though, so we adopt the form all the same; efficient for mud-stomping. Our upper body still recalls the human shape as we pull ourselves through the muck. Our spines clench at our mimicked chest tightly. [Remote 54235345-KHUL] Acknowledge! Remote contact from secondary pulse-! Prey. For moments we fall into the old ways, our plasm crackling as we dissolve back to its basal form. The skin tightens, and we are pure motion. Sinew, tendon, muscle, mind, teeth- we are all of this, all at once, and we hunt viciously. The surface falls beneath us as motion ripples through our body and we bound, leap, pounce- Stop. We stop. We reassert. Yes, we must not be forgetting what we have become. A being with a mind now, yes, executive function. Spurn the near to reach the far. We stop, and see, and sense. There are three. Human bodies, the like of that which part of us remembers being. They envelop themselves in inert matter to stave the outside from the in¡ªbut we know it will not be sufficient. Two are clad in flexing hydrocarbon composite, one is sealed more tightly in a metal shell-suit, recalling some more resilient prey of our own projective. Is it the metal man? Our almost-destroyer? No. We strum the fluxing quanta and can feel the form of them. The suit is of equivalent make; cold and elegant design stamped onto dead alloy, but its contents are a woman¡ªor may be, per our best proximal assumption of their species diversity. It is not a human we know. Her little companion form that we recall is monkey encloses itself too within their head-shell. A passenger? Another self? It is a curious addition that our ingested human mind does not recall. The others carry their own other selves with them, smooth capsules fastened at the back and transparent to light. They are aerated with hoses to conjoin their own protective coverings. Infirm self-flesh-clutchers. We recall the nutrient that spills so freely from the umbilical, the arterial; these fragile lifelines they have made the model for supply of mere air, such that they may clutch them so tightly about themselves, even now, outside the womb. Such fearful prey... They stand astride the valley, spectating the mewling leviathan¡ªas if they have yet mastered it! One of the lesser two speaks, so we grasp at the shape of their words. Her words? We tune to their frequency such that we might parse them. "Pashtil, I''d wager this one is new, even for you." The metal-suited woman speaks. "I haven''t seen this one before, no. This is unmapped territory. But that''s not to say I haven''t seen a few things in my time that were a little like it. Maybe one day I''ll tell you about some of them." This is false bravado, we think. We wait and drink the words anyway. The other of the plastic-wrapped, next; a man. "I... don''t think it''s the only one out here. I''m getting similar readings from elsewhere on the continent; far apart, though. There probably used to be a whole ecosystem of the things, before the fissuring fucked them. Looks like this one''s been pinned down here since it happened." We make laughter internally at the tragedy of its impotent might-! "Let this be a lesson to us all." The metal-suited woman speaking, again, who had been called Pashtil. "That is what happens if we fuck up, ladies and gentlemen. Don''t let yourselves become... that thing." She extends a clumsy manipulator at our erstwhile foe. The other woman speaks once more. "With respect, I think our own fuck-up might not be too distant if that thing is our clean up job." Pashtil suctions air through her nose. "We don''t have to ''clean up'' the thing itself, and in fact if at all possible we should stay away from it. We''re here to monitor for any remnants of the incursion. Tavistre killed an orgoane, here, apparently, and there may still be traces. You know what they''re like." Oh, but that they did! We are more than our brethren now, yes... All of our former selves, melded with what the new self has learned in its devouring of the girl''s mate. Faster, stronger, more of thinking. We regrew ourself fast from mere cells in mud... not even one turn of their planet has yet elapsed! Yet, the watchers here will be more vigilant than most prey. Their marrow tenses; we hear the heartstrings thrumming. So we slide forward with a slow regard, cautious, the most silent of things; we camouflage ourself as thin membrane over soil. Here once more our higher self reaps its advantage... We can intuit their knowing, become them in our mind and shape to their weaknesses, making mockery of the sensory substitutes they carry on their raiment. They reach out for light, for heat, for our trace amid projective quanta; we can feel the strumming of their machines. We twist ourselves, shaping to match the pattern, so we might fool even our own senses. We are not seen or sensed, and they continue unabated. They are reliant on those devices they carry to see and feel beyond the mundane. It facility to touch the substrate of this dead projective that is externalized to blunt mechanism, the window of sensing narrow. Our advantage is also in this. While they look forward with their false senses, we approach from behind. We move softer now than we did once; much has been learned of this. We become silent, for prey that does not hear as us. We are unseen, for prey that does not see... Prey. Are they prey? We are no longer certain. Regardless, we know what must be done. We can neither live nor grow in this dead place. It is a rotten dreaming. We would lose our new mind, and decay from the sameness of it. So we bend to leave! Find the girl! Another chance at such may not arrive here in a thousand pulse-beats of the Sigmoid, a billion years of the foreign world we remember... We alight another word for this intention. We must become stowaways. Assert; executive override via metalayer-protocol (8FSD;) federate basal implementation. Package and compress to sub-peerage and fork. [Remote 79433445-XFSI] Acknowledge (8FSD;) request operation parameters. 59049 peers. Forked peers assert hibernation cull (56PL;53GH;ME4F;). Package parameters (GDFL;451L;PXL-00465). [Remote 79433445-XFSI] Acknowledge parameters; assert. Relaying executive override to peer group and packaging metalayer-protocol. [Remote 54235345-KHUL] Acknowledge parameters; assert. Relaying executive override- We fold in on ourself. We feel as we are pared down, the bulk of us falling away to meet a distributed death, dissolving towards the muck on which we sit, until little beside our dormant kernel seedings remain implanted there. We feel those parts of ourself die, but yet we remain. Compressed down, folded into one corner of our self, an alveolar shell about our breath of life. The web of our connections is sundered, and so we use more of each of us, the mechanisms of data inside every cell devolving to maintain our processes. But we are diminished still. Slower, a shallow echoing of an echo. Our copied mind is but a whisper now, but we remain in intent, and can direct ourself. With the last severing of our former body, we pull taut an elastic tendon of flesh, letting it rebound with the withering of its fastening anchor, catapulting the droplet that now contains our self and mind through the air. It is but a dewdrop of a thing, lesser than the most meagre blood beadings at a pricking of our melted spines, but it is still us. That thing that is us, that is Kroakli, flies through the air to attach itself to the armoured back-plate of the metal armoured woman. We do not make a sound as we adhere. None of them notice. The surface of the suit is seeded with conducting sensors, but our cells remember a previous interfacing with this, before we left our home world, and carry the pattern within them still. We feed them a little falsehood, the lie they expect, convulsing ourselves with ambient energies to show as blank against the background. The patterned lie ripples throughout us as we slide our bead of self across the smooth surface. Once we reach a joining of it, seep through to congeal inside, we need pretend no longer; the suit has not seen us, and it is not alert to attack from within. We are a passenger here now, unseeing and unknown. We have become good at this, now that we can plan. To have a mind is an excess unknown by our lesser siblings. Raised from caterpault-muncher to manifest intent, one who stands astride universes! This excitement raises the temperature of our droplet, and so we hibernate for a second-span, lest our emotion alert our host. This narrative has been purloined without the author''s approval. Report any appearances on Amazon. After we are cooled sufficiently we ripple out slowly, sticking to the inside of the armour as we travel. A fabric underlayer seeks to absorb us, so we fight back with a guided viscosity. We cannot help but probe. Our filaments flow through the knotted patterns and we encounter fellow life. A dull life, landscapes of dermal automata, brutish against our streamlined selves. But still life. Skin. Prey. Prey? [Remote 79433445-XFSI] Acknowledge (004D;) external interface with foreign parameter space! Despite ourselves, a flush of wanting travels through our medium. Our edges fall into old patterns and brandish molecular barbs, unfolding so as to commence in the gutting of viscera. How easy it would be for us; to sink in, as we are intended to. To colonize this mountain of sluggish cells, to dispatch the rigid soldiers riding their blood with our adaptive deceit. To spread and grow, to become full and whole again, our entire self, and in the doing to re-educate, to expand our being, our archive, our mind and soul. We have done this before. This is what was done to Michelle. We remember her pain as we ate her from the inside. We relive the screaming of her mind as she begged for mercy from the invading us, then the cold scar of her death as she screamed its onset, encoded to our records as we gorged ourselves on her lifeless brain. We... We are... [Remote 84525546-GWLQ] Alert; metalayer-process recording fault shock. Partial folded (2452 peers). Acknowledge alert from remote. Reformatting and re-instantiating; (TR67;P9NH;GJ9D;)... ............. Kkhhh-hh!!! Our little self re-condenses; we had nearly cost our hiding in the lapse. It is not a faltering we would tolerate repeating. Instead, we excavate a compartment within ourself to store this new quandary. It is to be examined when conducive to our purpose. And regardless, we know that it is not now our purpose to make this woman prey. As certainly as it would be a glorious campaign, to pull teeth from skull, blood from vein, to supplant her self with our own self... we cannot do it. We need the woman to carry us from this world. We will remain here until she does. We ignore that we find ourselves not wanting for that feast, for all it so tempts that of us which remembers the old ways. We ignore how we are tainted by the memory of their kind. Afloat in our stewing segmented dismay, we hibernate a while. ***** External observation threshold; motive delta satisfied (5KLJ;) (wait elapse 503465). Re-instantiating... We discover ourselves still hiding as the humans complete their work. We pry back our rote record of elapsed hours while our mind slept, tendrils of us parting the churn of data gristle, and watch as they sanitize our spores, annihilating the lingering trace of us in the soil with their tools. None the wiser, still, to the true us crawling on their back... yes... Pashtil is speaking; we re-divert our compressed self to allow the parsing of her meanings. Some small potential of our mind is slotted away as the language process fills it, the limited space grating within us. We are meant to be more than this. But we endure. The vibration of her speaking strums through us as we sit against her skin. The part of us that recalls being mammal manifests comfort at the motion. It is a disconcerting reflex. "...should satisfy requirements for the time being. I can do another sweep on my next routine survey, assuming we don''t get interrupted by another crisis. Upside is that it''s a dead world, so the directive for minimal intercession gives us a lot of leeway to let this one sit, so long as nothing gestates in the interim." "I think we''re good on that." The man speaking; we feel his fainter vibrations transmitted through the air around the enclosing suit. "I have a full biomap out to 500 metres from the projected incursion trail. Nothing registers except us and the local biosphere, now that we''ve purged the orgoane spores. Seems we caught that in time, thankfully." "Praise be to our lucky stars," concurs the other woman. We do our best not to snicker, in the way Michelle remembers doing. "Excellent." Pashtil, again. "Marvish, assemble the bridgehead anchor. I''ll finalize the samples." It itches inside of us, the urge to penetrate, to interface with her spinal cord. Not even to hurt, but to monitor; to feel what she feels, see what she sees... We would be yet more a passenger, flesh within flesh, a benign spectator to her world. So much understanding. So much more mind. We hold back. We have grown beyond these flesh-gnawings, even as the hunger pricks at us. We have greater goals. The fact that we are changing does not alter this, yes... We placate ourselves in feeling her pulse against us. The gentle vibration, through the cloth and skin we bind against, through the whisperings the quantum strings play to our senses, lying just beyond our self-gropings. Most do not have this much. Our forbearing selves learned long ago to read the patterns from the world around them, to infer from cracks in stochastic resolution of the Sigmoid, the disjunction in its dreaming harmony. And yet our former selves, they knew not what they had! They used this sense to eat bugs. The irony tears against the interface between us and our co-opted mind. That we might have known, we held the truth of this reality itself... Our compressed thought-stream runs torpid as congealed ichor, and as we are done wringing its musings we find Marvish has rooted the world-pulsers in groundsoil strata. We feel them pulsing, gently, as if the projective itself had a heartbeat also. It is a waiting pulse. We know this pulse well; we feel it ourselves as contact with prey approaches. Pashtil steps into the circle, us unknowingly alongside her. We feel the tension build as we cross the threshold. Reality draws a breath, and we draw one too, or as close as is approximate to our pinhead spittling of self. The potentials in our cellular batteries fizz their anticipation. It is like chewing radium; our self sings for this fulsome bridge between this world-dreaming and the substrate of the real that echoes behind it. "Ready?" Pashtil is directing the plastic-bound. They have none of them removed their suits despite their proclamation that we have been decontaminated. That such suits would be cause to even waylay us, those dangling meat-sacklings cowering inside polymer membranes... Roughly purging this air when we can pass through the least of pores... The other two are not prepared yet for the Travelling. They brought yet greater equipment, we sense; more obligate externalization of tooling that their bodies cannot satisfy. These are being moved now, back inside the circle. We feel the tension of the bridge potential stored inside of us, a sharp crackling at our mind. Pashtil tenses too; we feel her move against us, her skin flushing softly, her unthinking shell sensing a pulsing that her mind does not. It is more maddening harmony between our selves. We wish to merge into her skin. Still we do not. Finally their preparation is concluding. Our waiting is a cord stretched thin, our mind strung taut as the bowing of the spines we shed. Finally, the other two step into the circle alongside us. "Ready?" Pashtil holds the triggering device. We are. They, it seems, now are too. She presses the button and for an instant we experience unity. Travel! The projective translation is an exquisite unfolding. For the briefest shard of fragmented non-time we do not exist, and in so doing what remains of us is information, a concept-bundle that hangs outside the dreaming. We can almost touch it, then. The mind itself that contains us. It is vast, an unimaginable reaching of self, but there it is, in front of us. If we could touch it, we could join it, too. But the moment is too short, even for our accelerated patterns. We do not find purchase in that ephemeral interface, and our extent, our data-self, is ripped away and inlaid back into the false reality. It was like this the previous times, also. The snatching away of transient fullness, oneness with the untouchable real. It pains us greatly, claws deep into our hollow medium. We treasure the fleeting sensation anyway. It lands us in a box of iron, the mundane geometry so favoured by those who are fearful of disorder, of lacking control. How they seek to bend the world around them to their will, to withhold intruders they know they cannot themselves master? It is the obligate mindset of prey. This is noted twelve milliseconds before we process that their sterile box is also a trap. Something buzzes through us and shakes free molecular data we held within the envelope of several cells. We are forced to sever their corrupted selves from us, letting them dissolve as their peers record the quantum strumming of the projective datascape that pulsed through their¡ªour¡ªflesh. Their petty tooling is embedded in the walls, and the sensitivity of these quantum eyes exceed our scope to camouflage against their probing. We shift our form, a rapid flutter to avoid inference, but the time left to divert our discovery has played out already. It is a trap set for things like us, and by it we are uncovered. A shriek fills the room, alerting the humans. We do not recall its purpose yet, but we move anyway, querying our stored selves. We are halfway down Pashtil''s back when we recall the word alarm, and only an inch further when we are reminded forcibly of self-targetting auto-turret. Observation; warning; thermal load approaching excession (C913;). Reallocate responsibilities for distributed avoidance (63FS;)... The round sinks into Pashtil''s back, eviscerating the place where we until past moments had been adhered, clinging amid naive certainty of our hiding. A foolish gambit, yes, that they would not protect their reentry chamber from known vectors of contaminant, such as us. We have the space of just time enough to reflect on how we spared Pashtil for nothing, before the blast explodes from her chest, spraying meat chunks and shards of bone. The heart, caught askew by the strike meeting with it at a tangent, slaps against a wall. A fine morsel, but no, now is not the time for eating. We hear her secondary self, the monkey, still perched atop her slackened cranium as she falls. It squawks in terror and sympathetic agony, uncomprehending, locked in place within the metal head-covering, unable to release itself now Pashtil''s primary corpus has met with its demise. The strike has missed us by a mere dozen multiples of our condensed self. Hidden again for now, yes, behind a new fuzzing of our form against their fresh senses, but the instruments of this place lie far beyond the world-scrapings of the dead woman''s handheld device. It will retune to our frequency and hunt us eventually. The prey have built a predator machine that has made us prey. It is seconds only until we are found; only a short waiting, contrasted against eternity. But this will be enough for us. We unleash our outer selves. They sink into Pashtil''s dying flesh with a horde of atomic needles, drawing the blood that has not yet learned it runs cold. Her body bears an explosion of life that we chase ourselves into, spreading without caution, without pause for thinking. The warmth of her broken entrails welcomes us in, and we barricade it with our gnawings, delving inwards and holding outwards a frontier against the prolapsed void they have torn through Pashtil''s being; we make our feast a necromantic gorging. We are below the severed spine, so she will at least not know the pain of our reckless assault. She might note a moment''s clouding before she succumbs to death, though, our furthest selves navigating the extremities that attach to her shattered torso, feasting themselves on the still living brain, a mess of shock and fear. It is sorrowful that we do not have time to learn much of her¡ªwe are being hunted still. It is a modicum of grace, granted us by the severing of her life, that we can indulge the demands of our haste. 78023 peers. 1452356 peers. 6534566 peers- We gorge and we grow. It is growth enough that we may unfold our mind fully; enough that when the next round finds us, striking true, we only lose a fraction of ourself that is easily replaced. Our newly reconstructed cells explode screaming from her body, leaping from the shattered husk of her metal suit; its shell is futile to repel the energies laid against our organism, but cocoon enough for orphaned flesh and bone. We hit the wall hard, spreading out and flattening. There are multiple weapons now; they find focus on us with velocity approaching the internal devices of our cells, the pathways of logic that we are built from. A blast of fire impacts our core, but we dilate outwards around it, the gap ensuring the blast incinerates only the inner fringes of our cratering flesh. A voice, electronic sharp, calls over the alarm shriek. Our full self now can process language without reallocation. "Incursion alert; [Foreign Contaminant] of [Hostile Organism] via [Port 47]. Please evacuate level [9-A]." They fear us properly for our stature! We are gratified by this respect; it sets the stage for our performance at the death game they have set for us here. We shall together approach such beautiful dynamism! Not so the gutted woman''s companions. They are panicked now, streaks of her spattered across their protecting coverings. One sprints for the exit, but the automated mechanisms have seized the workings. She tugs in vain to escape; from us, or from their own blind designs? This mechanism they have made, that desires our elimination beyond the survival of their own kind? We ponder this arrangement of priority. It is wisdom of an uncharacteristic nature, for their kind. Some blood-swelling amongst them has mettle. That mettle shows itself again now. The first weapons not sufficing to end us, they seek to purge the room wholly. The exit is fully sealed, as is our egress via the filter crevices, the vents and grates, all is shuttered in one motion. Each motion of the mechanism plays a symphony against us, and we crackle with our response. A blunt barrel emerges from the ceiling, followed in concert by more of its like, an arsenal of fire-spewers numbering half-a-dozen. We feel the heat-potential swell behind their cold apertures, a blaze-in-waiting. Fuel and spark, to be melded upon us. Instead of fleeing¡ªfor we are not prey¡ªwe leap instead for the barrel. Our flesh flows up into it as all six fire. The room is suddenly an oven lit from within by five pyres. We do not encounter fire often in our home, but we respect its spirit, its aspirational consuming intent. The two remaining humans are boiled inside their suits, blood vaporizing from within them, flesh crinkling against bone and pulling into rictus husks. Only five pyres, though, because even as the outermost vestiges of our freshly expanded body are boiled away, the most of us has entered the sixth barrel, our self suffusing the mechanism in a fierce retort to its snarling incitement. The igniter charge crackles against our flesh, searing as it touches, but we have stoppered contact between that spark, fuel and oxidizer. Now we push back. The mechanism is strong but we are muscle made liquid, a thousand hands and a million tendons united in one twisting flowing tide, and we flow into the microcracks of the barrel, finding handholds, pushing forwards against the pressure. The gaseous fuel is not good for the eating, but we channel its substance through and into ourself to tip the balance further towards our purpose. Some of its molecules we utilize, the rest we expel behind us; it is a rare feeling for us to excrete. Otherwise, we ripple forward, throughout the mechanism''s vascular fuelling tubes, leading us into the ceiling and out of their clever box. We use our new faculties to feel exceptionally smug at our persistent evasion. They are right to fear our persistent skill, and our wanting... But now we consider¡ªwe fear?¡ªhas that wanting fled from us? An irony, in this moment, that for all our devastating competence we are infirm in our intent. Is this the price of stealing our mind from prey? We burst from within a metal channel, below the surface of a floor. There are vibrations above us; the air still shrieks with alarm, and there is pounding of limbs, shouted voices. We do not bother to translate; instead we gather ourself, large enough now to face this foe, and muscle through the floor, prying apart the loose metal. We are face to face with a man holding one of their handheld lashings; the energy blast weapon that brought us near our ending before. His digits tighten against the actuator. This is a thing which means to kill us. Can we-? An instinct within us acts. We spring forward, wrapping around his body and tightening about his neck. The seeds of new spines have been building inside us, and we use them as rough claws to pry at the flesh there, scarlet spurting from the jugular. The man collapses, and we take of some of him to build more of ourself. Yes. We think now that we can slaughter that which means us harm, and do it even with righteous vigour. For any new minding of our actions our new mind may grow, we will still never let ourself become prey. We are still us. But, perhaps, now we can shape our utility by fresh-grown musings, form directives of our own where before we were puppets of mere rote action. Could the wants of this new mind empower as they bind, or perhaps... the latter bestows to us the former yet more? This thinking is jubilant within us as we turn ourself back upon our assailants. [Remote 52437781-PLCV] Alert from remote; reconfigure to full dynamic range per external sensing (R921;243R;TS82;); metalayer-procedural override of dynamic configuration, reallocate energy reserves (244P;CWE-231;). Acknowledge (R921;243R;TS82;); (244P;CWE-231;);- We do not kill needlessly, but we do not flinch from it as we are threatened. This dance is no recreation play acted out between fledgeling muck-scratchers; there are many of them and their tools are not wanting for death-potence. We dive between the flying beams, amid the sweeping blades and pulsing concussions. Their organ-assemblages action slowly to our perception, but our physical speed does not quite match our mind. Their numbers and haste are sufficient to challenge our path-making. [Remote 02342434-YDFS] Redeploy; redeploy (345A;) form keratin assemblages via phase shift (13405 peers) and reduplicate from seed instantiation- [Remote 54235345-KHUL] Acknowledge (345A;), re-routing sequestered nutrient flows to group domain (23KL;RTSD;231X;) constitute (FDF-342;) units for- [Remote 23434772-PFDA] Caution; proximity excession at (VBAC-34254;) via dynamic media interlacing, reconstruct potential catalyst via (432G;HGY2;FA5- Oh, we thrive in this. Our newly budded spines have refined to robust offal-splitters once more. We rebound upwards, extremities adhering to the ceiling as we swing in a lazy arc that casts the light above into hazy blue shoals upon the prey below. They begin to panic, sweeping their weapons upwards as we dart back below. Briefly our body parts into two, our colonies of self making brief departure as we fly down towards the ground, twin carrion birds flocking in ballistic formation, talons raised. We tear through our enemies as we travel, extended spines slicing true through armoured flesh, trailing streamers of red in our wake. Our two selves absorb the gleanings, processing and digesting as we enmesh back together, resharing our identity. It is completed with timeliness enough to fold ourselves away as one being before our remaining foes can bring themselves to bear. A stray projectile makes contact with us. Hundreds of ourselves burn away, a little obliteration at the hand of steaming metal, but our legion self is not so soon depleted. We are replete with more selves, and the metal shard that was the gouging bullet is pulled into our body and teased apart, the outer casing split asunder as we might gut shelled prey, its substance slowly dissolved to replace our perished kin. As we dart aside, then back, lashing forward towards our foes, it is with renewed vigour, a lustful vengeance for that of us which was taken. When we finish with them, we reflect that their renewing shall not come so keenly as did ours. It is a lush trail of crimson we leave in our wake. This place now clear, we seep up the side of it and ensconce within an air channel at its upper surface. Distantly we sense the vibrations, and clanging of alarm, shouts raised. Somewhere more distant still¡ªwe hear it echo through the clear air outside this enclosing superstructure¡ªa machine voice is heard again, echoing some panicked command. "-safety announcement. Hostile orgoane contaminant has been identified within bridge anchoring complex. Locality is; Committee Portage Facility C. Please evacuate surrounding regions until the area is confirmed secure by-" Local vibrations override our distant sense musings. A hard clanging of locomotion, metal against metal, growing closer. We tense ourself to strike, then stay our instincts, first strumming the projective to feel the shape of our oncomer. Warm meat, metal-enclosed, we feel, a heavy contraption with helmet removed, companion organism bounding in quick procession¡ªcould it be? Yes-! It is an energizing reunion. The armoured man who has twice brought us to death-closeness, the last time taking our eradication to a hairs-breadth remove. His armour is unsealed, the monkey following behind, helmet discarded in haste. He pauses for a moment at sight of his fallen brethren, then continues with renewed vigour. Should we kill him now? We do wish for it. That of us which remembers being human does not lust for the dying of its fellows, but if we may exceed this for defence of ourself, maybe perhaps also for a grudge...? That is sentiment well understood by all of us. But no. The girl! Perhaps he can be our link, to find her once more. We seek the freedom she offers us, the ease of motion, of Travelling, and to flee this too hostile world as we did so from the last. We follow with caution, remaining once more within the walls. He is obscured from any direct seeing, but we feel him nonetheless, our extrasensory perception following the vibrations of his motion, the clashing of hard metal boots upon ferrous floor. He moves with a reckless fastness, traversing the facility under power; we flex ourselves tightly to match pace, rippling through this architectural substrate, making soft contacts to hide the impact of our motion, a phantom hounding for blood. We follow as he leads us, branching passage to branching passage, the null space a pleasing echo of our home projective''s interwoven topology. Left, right, back and forth, up and down a floor. We stretch ourselves hungrily, pulling the motion through ourselves. It is a bounding spirit of our freedom, now we have cheated destruction once more. Finally he approaches an atrium, a nexus of several paths. We feel another up ahead, also armoured with a companion creature at the shoulder. The newcomer turns to watch our quarry as he enters, skidding to a halt. His own companion bounds to his shoulder as he speaks. "Merinte?! What is this! Our people are dead in the halls! They say there is an incursion-" The other man interrupts him. We drink the words eagerly. "Orgoane! It''s the orgoane, Tavistre- here! I thought you said you killed the damn thing!" Our first quarry¡ªTavistre¡ªcurses something obscene, pacing back and forth with nervous energy. We can feel his guts clench themselves in fresh knottings, knowing of our escaping his intent. "It took a full thermal charge, but... must not have been enough. Damn Pashtil for not taking more precautions, does she not know how dangerous-" "Well she doesn''t know anything any more, Tavistre; she''s dead. Killed in the port quarantine, and still the thing escaped. I was looking for you- This is an unmitigated disaster, my friend." Tavistre curses again. "Where is the girl?" We tense, eagerly. Merinte shrugs; we feel his vibration through the projective flux, even if we do not see him. "I left her in standard holding on level four." He gestures, and we devote ourselves to reconstructing the motion from the quantum strumming of it. The shape of his limb, tendon and bone, the flexing motion, direction, the trace it takes through time; we rebuild the image of it, follow the line that he is making, extrapolating- "She still hasn''t recovered from the trial, and honestly I''m not sure she will anytime soon, especially with this-" He gestures again, and this time we have it. The thread of their conversation is dropped from our attentions as we vector through the substrate of this complex, squirming behind wall and floor, moving to where we know she must be. Our own little world-stepper, the bearer of our freedoms. April-! And we feel her too, now. It has grown worse since our last meeting. The breaking that lives within her, her cells misaligned from their context, a cracking in the background reality that radiates away from her flesh. It has become enough for our pinpoint seeking, and we can move ourselves directly, manifesting above her holding cell; she is sitting curled upon a surface below. There is a vent we can seep through. We drop to the floor with a sharp slap, reforming back to our human shape. She looks up with a start, face red, wetness attending her orifices. The piece of us that remembers being human knows that she has been crying. The sight of us wipes that emotion from her face, first for blankness, then making way for shocked recognition. "You!" she cries at us. "Us!" we concur. "Wh- I thought you were dead!" "Oh, but we are not so readily dispatched! Their souls weep for the day that they might suppress our groping life, so long as we continue will our persistence, yes..." "The alarms- that was- what did you do?!" "We have made entrance befitting our stature, krrr- Not well received, perhaps, but we did not affect their mewling beyond how they shaped our ferocity." "I- but- why are you here?" We let our false mouth hang wide, an appreciated gesture for their kind, we recall. "April Pearce, scrapling-world-traveller, we are not yet close to done with our mutual helping!" "Why the fuck would I believe you want to help me?" "April, forgetful of mind, perhaps, have we done else yet? You owe your existence to our helpings, many times repeated..." Our body cracks as we clench the remembered form into place, four rigid limbs, an upright pose. She will appreciate this also. Our spines slide across our chest, netting together the constructed self. She stares wide eyed at our visage. "I mean- fine, okay, whatever, but-" "Do you not wish to make fast your escape? It was not by your hand that you came to this place. We will tear free the bindings they may have set upon your self-breaking, return both our selves to your projective, and in return shall not harm its denizens. hh-kk! Mutual helping! Was this not our policy?" "You just want a free ride out of here," she says. This is true, but not helpful to reciprocate, so we move yet closer and whisper instead. "Time runs thin; it is a shallow bleeding. The hunters here converge upon this place, and will not be kind to that which they find..." She vocalizes under her breath. We are sensitive enough to hear, but fail in the parsing. "I can''t go back." Our head lolls sidewards, a gesture matching our sentiment. "Why?" "Because- because I''d break- I could break the world." Our head falls further to the side. "We do not understand this." "They told me, that if I go back, I could break the whole fucking world!" "Ah... your divergent self is assumed to be the catalyst. Is this the thinking?" She throws her limbs upwards, the face a rictus of expressed emotion that we struggle to parse. We choose to hear her words instead. "I don''t know! I don''t fucking know! But I guess I can''t do anything except trust them, because last time I tried to take this into my own hands, with- everything that happened, with how you happened- I''ve hurt so many people. I can''t let it happen again. And the- the people here... if I can''t listen to them, then I don''t know who I can listen to because- because they''re the only ones who actually seem to know anything!" The next voice that speaks comes from neither her nor us. It is a deeper voice, but stolen of breath, a whisper as if from dead lungs, their nutrient wetness scooped out. It is situated behind our shaped form, and, shockingly, despite all our faculty, there was no forewarning of its approach. "They are fools... who know little..." We lurch forward and away, all of ourselves alerting, for this figure whose arrival was not forewarned even through projective vibration. A man is now standing there, gaunt with the slight facial deformity unique to this world''s kind. There is a companion creature clinging to one side, faintly familiar; brown fur and red starburst hues, deep with mathematical perplexity. As he spoke, the creature spoke with him, a high pitched chirping that slices through the world. As we land next to April we sense a wrongness, a lacking about this figure. We do not feel him. He is cold. He is not there. "What is this?!" we crackle. He ignores our gnashing. April stands. "You! It''s you! Who are you?! Did- did you do this to me?!" "Yes," he says, and leaves it at that. April flails for a second, and we can feel her mind whirring amid her shattered self aura. "Why?" "Inevitability. A timeline that decays even now. A chance to save something that would be lost. You don''t have long left, April." The creature at his shoulder mimics the sentiment by repeating words in echoing rapport. April turns between them both, stress beading at her eyes once more. "Don''t have long until- I don''t understand!" The man shakes his head. "Go back, April. Go home. Your return will not accelerate the decay. It is too late for that. Hold close what you can. I am sorry." Their eyes meet, and hers catch a sudden brilliant luminance. He holds up one hand, a few fingers extended. Then all of our senses go blank; that beyond our flesh is voided. The world is in sudden flux, and so are we, an erasing of the outer self that disorientates all our being. We are pulled outside ourselves, and suddenly are not in full control of our own gestalt, the converging hive strung across a billion strings that we just barely pluck, twisting and writhing against the void. We lurch towards where we recall April had been, and find her, her broken atoms the only solidity amid that empty blankness. We cling tight as we fall, fall, out of that world, our melting tendons bunching together, a fallen scattered pattern, through the infinite realm of the dreaming, and back, back into elsewhere. We glimpse exhilarating decay in that nothing. It is an orgasmic knowing. We float amid it in shrieking delight. â…¡ Hard Landing "Inevitability. A timeline that decays even now. A chance to save something that would be lost. You don''t have long left, April." April stared at the man in the black coat who had stepped out from nothing behind Kroakli, her face and mind blankly numb. The monkey¡ªthe first monkey, of course, its red-orange patterned facial fur gleaming¡ªheld its head against his, mimicking his pose. It was the same conjunction of motion that she had seen before between the little creature and this man, who remained distinctive in his blue-tinged facial ridges and gaunt aspect. It was the same unconscious choreography she had noticed when they had both stared in at her through Michelle''s kitchen window, except the man himself had not spoken, then. She shouted at them both. "Don''t have long until- I don''t understand!" He shook his head, sadly. "Go back, April. Go home. Your return will not accelerate the decay. It is too late for that. Hold close what you can. I am sorry." He lifted one arm, holding a hand aloft. Two of his fingers were extended. She looked at them blankly. The moment held as if frozen, a long slice of a little eternity. Then the room blazed white. It didn''t feel like the previous times that April had Travelled. Before, there had been a visceral sense of moving through a physical space, traversing border dimensions between the different worlds; the handbag tunnel, the whirlpool of glass shards. This was a far more violent affair; the equivalent of being a figure drawn out on a page, only to find yourself abruptly torn from the sketchbook by the careless hand of the artist. Corruption bled in at the edges, flooding her senses, a brilliant nothingness that poured in at her ears, her throat, her eyes. As the surrounding reality fell away she felt Kroakli find her. The gelatinous body of the bizarre creature slapped her across the back as it clutched against her skin and clothes, clinging on for dear life to avoid being left behind. She could feel it pulsing, slightly warm against her, her only companion amid a hard white nothing. It was oddly comforting, in a surreal way. Sure, it might have been the companionship of a predatory alien slime, one that had after all birthed itself from her friend''s corpse, but hey, everyone had flaws. The creature had also, after all, saved her life on multiple occasions. If she was correctly parsing the verbal salad that was its preferred mode of speech, its newly self-aware incarnation might even genuinely regret the instinctive actions of its animal predecessor. She wasn''t entirely sure she was ready to forgive it yet for how it had come to be, but for the time being she was simply grateful to have something relatively solid there, something to ground herself with outside of the stark void. She wasn''t sure how long she hung there, weightless, in that nothing. All reasonable assessments, based upon the typical trajectory of the forward arrow of time, would have indicated that it couldn''t have been more than a few seconds. But despite this, as had the moment of pause she had experienced before the transition into the null space, the subjective experience seemed to stretch far longer. It felt like she had crammed an awful lot of introspective thinking into a disproportionately small amount of time. When they did land back in physical reality, they did so with a jarring jolt. April tumbled onto a hard floor, limbs sprawling. Kroakli rolled off of her back, splatting wetly against the ground next to her before finding its footing. She rolled onto her back, her eyes focussing blearily, ready to assess whichever hostile environment she had been deposited into this time around. It was fairly surprising when the hostile environment turned out to be her own apartment. She was lying in her flat''s hallway, just beyond the front door. As she sat upright she took in the familiar furnishings; a cheap plastic coat rack sporting a single nylon waterproof; the wooden shoe shelf, bearing a pair of slightly mud-stained slip-ons and her "night out" boots, scuffed from her misadventure in the red forest. Kroakli had perched itself next to that while it reformed, and a probing offshoot of its body appeared to be taking a mild interest in the substrate of the other world that remained caught between the rubber boot treads. Looking up from the creature, April noticed for the first time that it wasn''t the only thing out of place. Her flat had never been neat and orderly, exactly, but half of her belongings seemed to have been very deliberately disturbed since the last time she had been here. It looked like somebody had roughly barged down the entrance hallway, neither particularly noticing nor caring to set right any of her belongings that they had disturbed in the process. This trail of casual destruction lead her eyes back up to the front door itself, which... "What the fuck?" she said aloud. Kroakli burbled, still not yet reassembled into a humanoid form. "You do like that word so..." The door had been smashed in at the handle, bowing the wood-veneer ply board inward in a neatly circular lump, splinters sticking out around the edges of the impact site. The door itself remained shut, but whatever was holding it there clearly could not be the original lock, because that had been broken open and snapped apart, the metal locking bar dangling in mid air from the splintered wood. Someone had forced their way inside her apartment. "Have¡ I been robbed?", she wondered aloud, the idea feeling surreally mundane against the context of her previous few days. "Krr- there have been several here, yes... we feel their chemical leavings. But it is not for our knowing if they left with anything besides accrued knowledge, the mind-growingness. That is something that we cannot sense." She turned, looking at the creature properly for the first time since they had landed. Its false mouth was hanging open, a ribbon of torn blue flesh drawing out the lower half of a comically cartoon smile. The surreal tone of the scene grew yet stronger, before suddenly a switch in her brain seemed to flip, the reality of the situation coming into focus with a painful clarity. "God. Oh, God. I can''t believe you''re here." She looked around at the interior of her flat, and began to pace. "I can''t believe I''m here. I told myself I wouldn''t come back. That I couldn''t come back." "Yet here you remain. Truly the mechanisms of this reality conspire to bring about the strangemost reachings of possibility¡ we have observed this tenfold of late. Despair not this fortuitous chancing. Is this not where you truly wished to be within your pulsing core? We know your kind feels much affection for its origins." "God, no- no, not if I''m going to tear cracks in the universe just by being here." "We recall the words of our strange visitor, who claimed your breaking was made by its hand. Yet, it spoke assurance that your return would not worsen this reality''s predicament. Perhaps there was spoken truth in this..." She stared at the creature, her own mouth now agape. "Kroakli, I don''t even know who the fuck that was. I mean, like, do you!?" It tilted its head to one side. "It was a strangeness, the likes of which we have not known before. It was there and yet also not there; our pulsing senses mused through its strata and yet we felt nothing." "He- he is what did this to me. Him and that fucking monkey, he- he as good as admitted it- hell, he did admit it! I don''t know what he did exactly, how he did it or why. I don''t know how this started at all, really, but I do know that I don''t trust him any further than I could straight shoot his little Simian across a basketball court, into a strong headwind." "Approximately 5.76 metres," said Kroakli after a moment''s consideration, "dependent on specific weather conditions, the strength of your grip and limb proximal tendon actuations, krrr..." She stared at it. "Are you fucking with me? God, I don''t trust you, either. Fuck! Now not only do I have to worry about ending the world, but in the meantime I guess I have to make sure you don''t fucking eat everyone before I even get the chance! God, this is insane. I mean, listen to me, I''m talking to a murdering slime right now." "Yes, but we will not be doing any murdering for now, little worrisome April. You are right to fear our potent gorging, but the deal made is one we will truly stick by¡ªin recognition of your utility, little world-stepper. It would please us to allow our cooperation in this, in the Travelling, our new freedom. To this end, we will not hunt your kind, nor prey upon this projective. And believe this, for outside even these words and their commitment, we are not... hkk- rrr... We are not wanting for it." "What, had a change of heart? Didn''t seem to trouble you before." "Not a change of heart, no, but of mind. The self-viscera. Our newfound self remembers an echoing of humanity, and we make our kinship with this. We shall then seek other kinds of prey¡ªthese worlds do not run short of stock for hunting." April was suddenly overcome by an insane urge to giggle. She clenched her teeth, biting back the impulse, but found that a small part of the suppressed laughter''s quavering pitch seeped its way into her next words, despite herself. "I can''t believe it. You''ve gone tame?!" Kroakli was suddenly very close to her, very fast. The creature had been holding itself in its humanoid form, the height of its false head approximately on par with April''s own, but as it swept over to her it stretched upwards. Now towering at 9 feet, its head obscuring the light as it craned itself over her, its tear of a mouth fell agape in its grisly imitation smile. She felt something hard against her back; the creature''s spines had protruded from the ends of its arms, and it had looped them around her, the sharp points interlocking behind her head and neck. "Do not mistake us," it said, levelly, "for livestock. We declare this little truce with your kin, as it suits and pleases us, but do not be deluded in this intention. Attempting to bind us, to constrain us, to destroy us will be met with our full viciousness. Rrrr... You know our capability in this." April had broken out into a cold sweat. As Kroakli shrank itself back down to its usual stature, "smiling" nonchalantly, the feeling failed to dissipate. She took a few steps, backing away from it. "Yeah. Yeah, sure." Something moved out of the corner of her eye, the motion flashing in her awareness for a split second from the direction of the kitchen. April and Kroakli both started, turning towards the source. "Did you see that?" "We felt it. There is a wrongness that travels on the quanta of this reality. It was a moment''s flickering." She walked into the kitchen. Here, too, there were signs that her living space had been disturbed; the intruders had made little effort to hide their presence. The table was askew and cupboards were thrown open. Someone had knocked a lone onion to the floor¡ªit rolled away forlornly as she nudged it with her foot. Seriously, what the hell happened while I was gone? Increasingly nervous, she unlatched the door to her bedroom. Kroakli slipped in behind her as she crossed the threshold. Her belongings had been cast into complete anarchy, and not the good sort of anarchy that was popular with her friends on social media, eager to dismantle institutions of the state. Instead, the dismantling appeared to have happened to the belongings on her shelves; paper was scattered everywhere, as well as miscellaneous piles of her personal items. Nothing seemed to be missing, but it had clearly been thoroughly turned over. "They have been here also," stated Kroakli, a little redundantly. "Yeah," said April, blankly, walking over to her computer desk. Except it was no longer her computer desk, because the computer was gone. Somebody had yanked it out of the wall, taking the power cable but leaving most of the peripherals. There was a faint pale rectangle visible where it had until recently sat, its outline pressed into the carpet by a year or so of faithful service under her desk. April groaned, and turned quickly towards her bed. Sure, they had taken her desktop, but maybe not... Her bed had a storage nook built in underneath the mattress slats, and for some years now April had been using it to deposit various bits and pieces of her possessions that she did not want to throw away, instead enclosing them in shallow plastic crates that fit within the narrow gap between the bed frame and the floor. One of these had been moved slightly askew, but shaking it revealed it still had a certain tell-tale weight to it. It seemed her visitors had seen the upper strata of discarded burnt out lightbulbs and 2007-era ethernet cables and decided that the boxes were mostly full of trash that wasn''t worth their time. Luckily, that wasn''t all she''d been keeping in there. She dug through the detritus to the bottom of one of the crates, and pulled out a thin black backpack, stiff with dust and months of disuse. Unzipping it, she retrieved a dusty Macbook from inside, tucked away unobtrusively in a padded sleeve. The laptop computer, still covered in stickers from her university days, had been overshadowed somewhat by her more up-to-date desktop PC. She doubted it could run anything more graphically intensive than the original release of Skyrim, but- But none of this is important right now. As long as I can log in maybe I can find out what the fuck is happening. She plugged it into the wall with its accompanying charging cable, also retrieved from the bag, and thumbed the on button while Kroakli watched curiously. With a sigh of relief, she watched it light up with an electronic chime. She sat it on the bed while it booted itself up. At that moment, her desk disappeared. It didn''t happen all at once; instead, a hard threshold of nothingness sliced through it, much as had happened to Charlie''s head at the bar. She got a brief flip book animation of its interior wood-grain as the piece of furniture slid progressively out of reality. The corner of it lingered for a moment, hanging on the dead air, before it too vanished, leaving an eerily empty spot in space. It held there like that, just long enough for April to say, "what the he-", before it abruptly slammed back into existence, dropping silently into the volume it had only just vacated. "Oh, that was interesting," said Kroakli. She turned to look at the creature, which was peering at the desk alongside her. "You saw that? What the hell was that?" "We didn''t see that," it said, turning to face her¡ªalthough the direction it was pointing probably mattered to a creature with a false face. "We felt you. It is the breaking of yourself¡ªthe growing misalignment of your atoms. Reality flexes like muscle-meat, your self as its bone anchor. The motion permeates outwards, enclosing these surrounding projections. This object did not vanish itself, but was pushed out of phase with respect to you, a minor twisting of its envelope. Both you and it moved just enough to be missed in juxtaposed reflection. Such strangeness. It was not like this in the other worlds. Returning here has bound that strangeness to your being with a quickness, as metals bind to electromagnetic coiling. It snaps into conjunction around you." April pressed one fist into her forehead. "Then he lied, the man we saw. It is getting worse. Shit. I have to get out of here." Kroakli made a non-committal noise that trailed off into a protracted gurgling groan, before re-coalescing as speech. "Ghkrrrrr- grrr-- hrm. Uncertainty." She looked at it, questioningly. "It is not so much yourself that is doing the breaking. It is more like... the fracture happens around your breaking. Your unstable cells reel it in closer." "Is there a difference?" "...maybe." "Well, that''s not much help. I still- wait." The laptop had finished its boot cycle. She eagerly tapped in a password, fingers tripping over the keys- she got it correct on the second try. The desktop loaded, and she double-triple clicked on her messenger app, drumming her fingertips as the ageing machine struggled to load the software, its cartoonish loading animation playing out repeatedly across the centre of the screen. Finally, the window loaded. She clicked through to her contacts list, and- 457 unread messages. "What the-" April leaned closer, eyes wading through a small sea of little red numbers indicating message notifications next to her contacts. She scrolled down a little, then brought her cursor back up to the top, finger swiping furiously on the laptop''s trackpad. She selected the icon labelled "MatryoshkaSlutt". Trace''s account; her icon was yellow with inactivity, but there were 87 unread messages. April clicked, her eyes immediately jumping to the most recent text. -youre safe. had police at my house again, they think i might know where u are. i wish i did. i know this wasn''t your fault so i just hope your alive. please tell me when u read this. i think theyre talking to charlie again he knew shellie better than me. still cant believe this is real. please contact me- Her eyes wide, April seized upon the scroll-bar, yanking it back up to the top of the unread conversation. She found Trace''s first message and read in order this time, heart rate growing apace as her eyebrows climbed rapidly up her forehead. april what the fuck happened april your on the news im being serious april what the fuck happened, theyre saying someone died and your phone was there april where are you call me april oh my god i think it was michelle i dont even know her that well but holy fuck it was michelle april???????? where are you call me please if you even have your phone still fuck please be alive april please Almost tripping over herself as she jumped up, she sprinted into the living room, catching herself on the bedroom door-frame to prevent herself from tipping over. Fumbling with the remote, she flipped on her television, frantically stabbed at the volume button to lower it to something less ear splitting, then keyed in the channel code for BBC News 24. They were reporting some local story about gardening. Remembering that the message from Trace had been sent more than a day ago, and that news channels didn''t tend to repeatedly loop content for her own personal convenience, she dropped the remote again, swore, and ran back to the laptop instead. Keying in her own name into Google, she did her best to ignore the shocking reel of very disconcertingly titled Reddit threads and Daily Mail articles to click the top ranking BBC News listing. Kroakli bent its false head down behind her as her eyes skimmed across the page. Woman found dead in East London flat A woman has been found dead in a basement flat in the north-eastern London borough of Redbridge. Metropolitan police say Michelle Gardener, 36, was discovered with severe injuries in her home on Tuesday evening. The flat, in which Ms. Gardener lived alone, was described by the force as having signs of a forced entry, and the death is being treated as suspicious. No arrests have been made so far. Det Insp Harold Martin, who spoke to the BBC, said: "This is obviously a terrible event that has occurred and it will be a shock to the local community here in Wanstead. The Met would like to reassure the public that we have several lines of inquiry that we are pursuing, and are confident that we will be able to bring those responsible for this tragedy to justice as soon as is possible." Police say they were alerted to potential disturbance at the residence by a 999 call that was placed within the property earlier in the evening. Ms. Gardener was reportedly already deceased when officers arrived on the scene. ''Ritualistic activities'' The police raised eyebrows in their statement to the press by suggesting that the condition of her body, which was described as "severely damaged", potentially suggested that the killing may have been performed as part of "ritualistic activities". When questioned about a potential risk to the public, Det Martin responded: "Obviously I can''t speak further on the specific circumstances of the death. What we can say is that it had the hallmarks of a deliberate act. With regards to the wider community, it is important to stress that we have no reason to believe that the public are in any sort of danger. We have several leads that we are pursuing, and in the interim we would ask people in the local area to stay vigilant, but to avoid any undue panic." Some groups have criticized the police for making public specific details surrounding the death. Harriet Stern, of activist group Bluewatch Redbridge, said: "Here officers are guilty of fomenting public hysteria by propagating lurid details and encouraging sensationalist rumours. Once again the Met demonstrate they are unfit for purpose and should not be trusted with the public charter to Police our city." Met seeking ''person of interest'' In their initial statement, the Met stated that details of the crime had to be made public in a ''timely'' manner to aid in their inquiries. Police said they are seeking the owner of a phone that was found at the scene, from which the initial 999 call was placed. The phone''s owner, identified as April Pearce, 29, has been missing since the time of the incident. Det Martin said: "We want to be very clear to Ms. Pearce that our primary concern at this time is for her welfare, and we would like to request that she make contact with Met officers as soon as possible to confirm her well-being and assist us with our investigation. We are putting out this call sooner rather than later so that we can make contact with Ms. Pearce and ensure her safety as soon as possible." Det Martin further requested that any members of the public with knowledge of Ms. Pearce''s whereabouts should come forward. Ms. Pearce, who was previously known under the name Kieran Pearce before transitioning to female, was described as a personal friend of the deceased. Officers refused to confirm or deny whether she was being treated as a potential suspect. Ms. Gardner was described by friends and family as being "a delight" and "a pillar of the local LGBT community". She is survived by her parents and sister, who declined to be interviewed for this story. "Fuck," whispered April, quietly. Almost despite herself, April clicked the back button in her browser, then selected one of the Reddit threads she had seen before.
| ¡ü 864 ¡ý r/news-uk ? Posted by u/vartic94 16 hours ago North London woman dead in "ritualistic" killing thetimes.co.uk/article/north-london-woman-ritualist... 953 Comments | |||||
| DrinkTheSeaside ? 14 hr. ago 1 Award This is what happens when we cut funding to police. ¡ü 57 ¡ý Reply Share | |||||
| tyr174 ? 10 hr. ago That''s 13 years of the Tories for you ¡ü 9 ¡ý Reply Share | |||||
| GratefulUserOfTehEpic ? 9 hr. ago oh come on labour would be 10x worse no matter what starmer says ¡ü 14 ¡ý Reply Share | |||||
| VandalChic12 ? 7 hr. ago I wish that were true. Tories are not anti cop, which is a shame because what this country definitely does *not* need right now is more public funds going to the pigs ¡ü -3 ¡ý Reply Share | |||||
| tyr174 ? 6 hr. ago Oh yeah because I totally want less police with shit like this happening ¡ü 6 ¡ý Reply Share | |||||
| jx457464 ? 6 hr. ago found the commie ¡ü -2 ¡ý Reply Share | |||||
| VandalChic12 ? 5 hr. ago Fuck off. Also I''m actually an anarcho-syndicalist so, you know, wrong. ¡ü 4 ¡ý Reply Share | |||||
| artyyy1984 ? 15 hr. ago Apparently the person they''re looking for is a transgender. Wonder if this another Karen White situation ?? ¡ü 3 ¡ý Reply Share | |||||
| VanessaisXX ? 13 hr. ago Actually its a BLOKE ¡ü 14 ¡ý Reply Share | |||||
| artyyy1984 ? 12 hr. ago True ¡ü 7 ¡ý Reply Share | |||||
| Comment removed by moderator ? 6 hr. ago | |||||
| haloreachisgr8 ? 4 hr. ago its always the trannies ¡ü -6 ¡ý Reply Share | |||||
| artyyy1984 ? 3 hr. ago This country has a problem ¡ü -3 ¡ý Reply Share | |||||
| VandalChic12 ? 4 hr. ago Fuck off bigot ¡ü 0 ¡ý Reply Share 9 more replies | |||||
| KnightOfSalem4 ? 15 hr. ago 2 awards Oh come on dude they don''t even think she did it, just that she was at the scene. She was even the one who made the phone call to the police. Just because somebody is trans doesn''t mean you can compare them to a sex offender. This is honestly just transphobia. This story originates from a different website. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there. ¡ü 24 ¡ý Reply Share | |||||
| GrantMichaelStock ? 13 hr. ago Yeah but read between the lines. "Person of interest", only other person in the flat, been missing on the run since. Also we don''t know if he made the call, only that it was made from his phone. Could have been the victim who had it. Obviously too soon to know for sure but everything is pointing to it being the guy. In which case it''s a good comparison. ¡ü 45 ¡ý Reply Share | |||||
| artyyy1984 ? 12 hr. ago True ¡ü 2 ¡ý Reply Share | |||||
| Comment removed by moderator ? 9 hr. ago | |||||
| artyyy1984 ? 14 hr. ago lol ¡ü -14 ¡ý Reply Share | |||||