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Love in Plastic

Chapter 02

The Dark Descent


When Berdly and Kris left the abandoned classroom, Susie didn't intend to leave immediately. She was too curious about the dark world. While Kris had spent the day keeping a cool head and repeatedly telling himself it wasn't real, Susie fawned over the idea like a little girl and was open about it in ways she wouldn't have been otherwise. And now that they weren't watching was no different. She picked up a random card from the floor. A three of hearts. She stared at it, and , without thinking, started talking to it. "Hello?" Of course, it didn't respond. What was she thinking? It was just a card. Then again, maybe there was no point in overthinking it. She shot the card a wink and leaned down to the card to talk to it. "Hey good looking, what's cooking?" Again, no response.

Then, she heard something and froze. Upon looking up, she realized she got caught by the deer girl from her class flirting with a playing card. Best thing she could think of was to drop the card and pretend it didn't happen. "Um...", Noelle began. "...is this a bad time?"

It was best for Susie to keep her cool. She put her hands back in her jacket pockets. "No, what's up?"

"I wanted to ask if we should..." Surprised at what she found looking around in the room she was peeking into, she couldn't help but drift off from what she was about to say. "...what a mess."

"Can't be helped I guess."

"I - I actually wanted to ask if we should go back to do physics together - if you don't mind." She had walked up to Susie, but was visibly intimidated by her motionless stature. "B-but we could clean up this place and work here instead."

Actually, Susie did like that indeed. She remembered Seam saying the 'Lightners' abandoned them. Maybe it wasn't such a bad idea if they changed that. "Sure, I'll get chairs." By the time she was carrying one of the slightly longer tables through the doorframe, Noelle was already done picking up all the cards from the ground and had placed them back with the other piles of cards.

"Okay. I - uhm." Gee, did this girl ever speak in full sentences? She wasn't like this in class. And she avoided looking Susie in the eyes too, or at least in their general direction. Instead, she stared at her bag, trembled, and eventually reached inside to pull out something other than the papers from this morning. "I...I got you something. It's for you." Very hastily, she placed a cardboard box in front of Susie, and when the confused dragon peeled open the lid, she was all the more confused. Chalk. A lot of it. The 'present' was just a box of chalk.

"Uhm...thank you?"

Her in her own eyes very reasonable reaction worried the flustered girl. "Is it not - don't you like it?"

"No, it's just." She leaned a little closer, picked one up and started putting it in her mouth like a cigarette. "Why are you giving me a box of chalk? Is this about yesterday?"

She didn't mean to, but she appeared to terrify the girl. She threw up both hands and tried to dismiss it, and stuttered for quite a while before she could actually talk. "I - it's - I thought..." Her eyes were shooting left and right in search for an answer.

"You thought what?"

The deer lowered her head and got down to putting all the relevant school material on the table to work. "Never mind. It doesn't matter." Strange. Susie got the notion that she should bring this up when talking to Kris. To see if he had been ratting her out.

They got to work, but they only made progress very slowly. The longer Susie let Noelle talk, the more confident she became in doing so. But overtime, Susie got the impression that Noelle wasn't taking this seriously. She took ages solving basic stuff she could do in seconds when they were in class. Which made the entire exercise pointless because Susie wasn't taking this seriously either. So with an increasing frequency, her attention drifted away from the actual subject matter and towards the cupboard and all the remaining chess- and other board game pieces still strewn on the floor.

"...and if we use this formula to calculate the acceleration and then construct a triangle to...hello?"

She was a bit shaken from being woken up from a trance thinking about yesterday. "Uh yeah. So..."

This time, for once, the deer wasn't nervous. She was pouting at Susie's lack of attention. "Are you even listening?"

"Yeah...nah. Not really."

"You know if you don't want to do this, we don't have to."

"Wait, what?"

"The material here is beyond what we're supposed to have done and there's too much of it to do in one day. I don't know what is going on, but I'm confident we won't be in trouble if it isn't all done tomorrow." She tried to give Susie a reassuring smile. "You seem pretty interested in those cards."

"Kinda."

"Should we take a break and play a game?" She got up and fetched the deck she had just collected, came back to her seat and began going through them all within a few seconds. "Okay, we can't use this deck."

"What? Why?"

"It's incomplete. There's no Queen of Spades, and no Joker."

"Wait, there was, right next to Seam."

Noelle was startled for a second. "S-Seam?"

"Yeah, Seam." She got up to fetch the plushie and placed it on the table when she sat down again.

Noelle had to cover her mouth and squee a little. "You gave the plush animal a name?"

"Pretty sure he alre - " For a moment, Susie shot Noelle a glare, even though the glare was more directed at herself. Just blurting out the truth would have made her look completely nuts and for some time, she had completely forgotten that. "...yeah, I gave him a name." Only after that, she realized that admitting that she was interested in these playing cards and giving plushies names made her look like a complete nerd, she needed a scapegoat. "When me and Kris found this place, we found all the cards and he wanted me to give him a name."

"Oh. Seems like you two had an interesting day." Noelle had gotten up to fetch a new deck. There were a lot of them, all of them unopened.

"Boy, did we..."

She sat back down and began to shuffle them. She did so with so much of a routine, she didn't even need to look at them and was looking as Susie instead. "So what game do you want to play? Poker? Jass? Go fish?"

"Whatever you know the rules of, I never really played with cards."

"Go fish then. Let's keep it simple."

While Noelle was still busy shuffling cards over and over, Susie couldn't help but wonder: "Why do you know so much about playing cards anyway?"

"They used to be a hobby of mine. Playing cards, reading cards, I used to read my way through all sorts of rule sets and guides. I even drew a whole set of tarot cards of my own. I could bring them to school tomorrow and read your fortune."

"I never heard you talk about that before."

Slowly, she shrunk back and started looking the other way. "It felt like a wasted effort in the end, so I sort of lost interest."

"Why, what happened?"

Noelle kept looking away, but eventually considered shuffling done at last. "Nothing. Nothing happened."


The house Berdly lived in, quite a bit to the west from where Kris usually wandered around, was five stories tall. A single-family house with five floors, and each one with at least one balcony. The sky around it was still pretty clear. "Let's not waste a second!" Berdly was very impatient. Kris hoped he wasn't going to be very impatient for the next eight or so hours on end. The three of them were barely enough to carry all the bags. They were quite heavy. What did Mom put in those?

"Maybe, I could meet your mother as well?" Toriel followed the two all the way to the front door, where Berdly fumbled in the pocket of his shirt to fetch the key and unlock the door.

"Missed her by a few hours. We're all on our own."

"Oh." She stopped and stared at Kris. "All on your own?"

"Yep."

"Nobody else?"

The bird raised an eyebrow. Kris knew he was noticing how used Mom was to keep an eye on Kris every step of the way on everything he did. And he worried - correctly - that Berdly would use this to make fun of him later down the line. "Well, there's my little sister, if that counts."

"Shouldn't someone look out for you? Do you want me to spend the night here as well?"

Annoyed, Berdly picked up and threw away a feather that hung over his right eyebrow. "Done this more often than I can count, it'll be fine."

While the bird was already carrying one of the bags further inside, Mom grabbed Kris by the shoulder and once he faced her, by both. She had a very urgent look on her face. Not angry, concerned was a better way to describe it. "Please, be good. If you need anything, do not hesitate to call. I will be right at home, I can come by any time." Kris nodded. "And please, please. No more extended disappearances." He told her not to worry. They hugged and he made his way after Berdly with another bag. "And be sure to open the blue one!", his mother called after them with her van's door already open. With all the bags inside, Kris immediately proceeded to doing as she had told. Ham sandwiches. And some with salami. In that short time she had, she somehow managed to pack all these bags and make sandwiches.

"Perfect." Berdo picked one out. It was still wrapped in wrapping film. He squeezed it a bit and saw the butter ooze out a bit. "A bit fatty. But then, what did I expect? You having a good diet?" In spite of what he just said, he took them all upstairs and opened one for himself to eat anyway. A carpet was covering the stairs. For the time being, Kris only brought his school bag along while following his classmate upstairs. The ground floor, when he peeked past the open doorframes, consisted mostly of unused rooms relegated to storage for outdoor utilities like bicycles, garden chairs and tables, a grill, garden tools and so on. The first floor looked much more like what he expected. The living room, kitchen and dining room made up the entire floor. Here, they stopped to put the sandwiches in the fridge. Kris followed him to see if Berdly had anything worthwhile other than the sandwiches to eat, but was immediately shouted at, the moment he reached for a familiar and very tasty-looking pastry. "Hey! Don't touch that!"

Rather than immediately retracting his open hand, Kris froze in place. "I assume it's yours."

"Noelle's."

"Noelle keeps her food in your fridge?"

"No, she made it. And you're not going to touch it, now get away from there." Regular sleepovers, baking those crusty pieces with creamy goodness on the inside for him, how much involvement did Noelle have with this guy? Either way, he probably had best not to antagonize Berdly any further, so without a word, he closed the fridge, picked up a bottle of water and two glasses from the cupboard and put them in the bag to carry it along as they headed further upstairs. The entire next floor save for its bathroom, consisted only of office space. Neatly set up desks with computers, racks of cds and other old disc types, printers, scanners and a faxing machine. And a pattern he noticed by now, was on each floor, there was at least one piece of furniture covered in little statues and paintings that looked like they were from the middle east, the far east, from all over the world. "There we are." The next floor had several rooms and a little bathroom of its own.

Kris assumed one of them belonged to his little sister, going by the pink painted walls, plastic house and the poster advertising something kitschy involving pastel coloured horses, as well as the little blue chick walking out of it in her pajamas. "Berdo where's Scott?" She was carrying a 'Debbie' brand plastic doll under her arm. It was modeled to resemble an unnaturally tall human woman with very long legs, long blonde hair and wearing some kind of work uniform.

"Hell if I know where Scott is." her brother just snapped back at her. 'Scott' was the trademark male doll that was usually part of a set with all the 'Debbie' dolls. Their height made sense with the dollhouse in the girl's room.

"Could you look for him?" She looked a little helpless standing there.

"We'll see, now leave me alone."

All Kris did was slowly raise a hand to wave at the girl and greet her. "Hi. I'm Kris.", and then proceed to follow 'Berdo' again while he was greeted back.

The very first thing Kris heard Berdly do, while he was still coming in, was lock something with a key. Berdly's dedicated room, which from the one bed, Kris could tell was all his own, must have been twice as big as his and Asriel's. It had a tiny oval carpet in the middle that must have been there only for decorative purposes. One side had two large windows that doubled as balcony doors. The other had regular windows and a long, long table along the entire side of the wall. The corner he had been able to see from outside had his bed with a cleanly painted white frame. What surprised him was that rather than having the kinds of things he expected under the bed, all that was there upon looking closely was another mattress. In the corner opposite to the beds were two humongous red boxes. They had their lids on, but whatever was in there, there must have been a lot of it.

"Let's not waste any time." Berdly placed all his paperwork on his desk and Kris, sitting quite a bit to the right of him, did the same. He laid out all the loose sheets of paper with school notes he had amassed in the course of the day's classes and began to sort them. "Hey!" As a few of the pages fluttered a little too close to a stack of little plastic shelves that stood on the table, an angry bird near-shouted and pointed at him. "Be careful. I don't want your stuff to get mixed up with that." Kris remained silent, slowly looked over to the plastic shelves and pushed them a little further to the side so there was no danger of anything getting mixed up, even if the mess had turned that ridiculously big. Then when Berdly wasn't looking, half in jest, and half out of curiosity, Kris' hand wandered slowly over to the plastic shelves only to be forcibly pushed onto the table. "Stop that." Now he couldn't resist biding his time to check what secrets were hidden in there later.

Once he had sorted everything that wasn't relevant to their project to their respective binder, he was ready and they could get to work. It was much easier, now that they could easily look up everything they needed on the internet with Berdly's computer, sometimes with explanations that were more comprehensive and to the point than what the school material gave them. And Mom wasn't kidding when she asked him to keep his phone on. She did call to ask if he was fine and whether he needed anything. And whether he and Berdly had changed their mind and wanted her to come over, or if he wanted to come back home early. There was a lot of time for her to ask a lot of questions, because less than an hour after each of her phone calls, she called him again. This wasn't normal, even for her. She knew exactly where he was. Why was she so worried now?

Berdly wasn't as impatient with that as Kris was afraid he'd be. But that had other reasons. "Berdie! Did you find him?"

"No, we're busy." This was his first interaction with his tiny little sister ever since they got to work. Or rather tried to. Since then, from time to time, she would go upstairs or downstairs to look for her toy. When she did, her brother regularly followed her to check on her to make sure she didn't do anything dangerous. When he was gone all the way to the ground floor, Kris finally reached over to pull out one of the many sheets of paper in this stack of shelves he was supposed not to touch. It was, just as the 'math' marker at the shelf he grabbed from advertised, a sheet with notes on math problems in Noelle's handwriting. And the same went for any others he went through. No love letters, no naughty stories, not even some doodles. That explained the third glass and toothbrush in this level's bathroom with 'N' written on it. She had her own shelf for school notes, her own toothbrush, her own mattress, how much time did Noelle spend here with no parents watching? And yet he knew from things she had said on the previous day, when his choices weren't his own, that she was more interested in Susie than Berdly, so for all he could tell, they were nothing more than a perfectly innocent, tight-knit working team of aspiring academic prodigies in a sea of suburban mediocrity.

Still, something seemed off to him about this. If he hadn't visited the hospital and talked to Noelle after that, both against his will, he wouldn't have even known what he knew. This constant within the previous day started feeling like it was a blessing along with being a curse.

When Kris just got done with another phone call from Mom, he could hear and feel rumbling from upstairs. And shouting. "He's scared! He ran away! What if something bad happens to him?", the girl screamed while wrestling with her brother over whether she got to climb the stairs again.

"He's not scared, he's a piece of plastic!"

"You're so mean!" Once finally back in her room, Berdly knelt down and held her by both shoulders. "Look. Just go to bed. I'm sure wherever you left him, he'll still be there and he will turn up sooner or later." She teared up a little, but she was tired enough to rub her eyes, turn around and go to bed. "Phew. So much for that!" The increasingly strained bird wiped some sweat off his forehead, adjusted his slipping glasses and removed a stray feather from his otherwise still flawless shirt. He gave Kris a nod. "Come on then. We've still got work to do." Berdly's - and Noelle's approach to doing these projects was to solve all of it on separate notes, then compile the path to the solutions on a presentable set of sheets with nothing struck through, erased or otherwise altered. Then because that usually ended up with corrections too, repeating the same process at least once until they were confident in all the problems being solved correctly. Which was why them doing it this way took a lot longer than Kris originally expected it already would.

Eventually, the orange evening light made way for the dark of the night, and the two of them had long opened the window and dimmed Berdly's table lamp enough that the only thing you could really see, was whichever piece of paper was directly under it. That was when yet again, at twelve o'clock in the night, Mom called. Now, for once, Berdly showed signs of his patience with her wearing off. The moment he heard the phone vibrate on the table, his feathers stood up. "Does this woman ever actually sleep?" He glanced over at Kris, who didn't like what he was hearing. "What?"

It couldn't be helped. He knew Berdly was right, this was going a little bit overboard. He gestured Berdly to be quiet, lay both arms on the table and buried his face in one of his elbows before picking up. The moment he did, he only made muffled noises that resembled what he was 'saying'. "Hmmph Mph.", he began.

As expected, Mom's voice had a worried note to it. It almost felt like she was expecting trouble and was relieved to be proven otherwise. "Oh, I am sorry. Did I wake you up?"

"Mhmph."

"I am sorry. It is good to know you're all right. Good night, Kris."

"Gnph nph, Mph." And with this, she had hung up.

Berdly's closed beak was torn into a very wide grin and he raised a hand pointing at him like a pistol. "Didn't think you had it in you, you little Momma's boy."

When they just thought they had some rest from their distractions, someone knocked on the door. "Berdie..." Of course it was her sister. The phone vibrating on the table must have been loud enough to wake her up. "I can't sleep. I miss Scott." With narrowed eyes, Berdly stared back at Kris and sighed. "All right, you go back to bed, we'll go look for him." Since she had already looked in several places around the house without finding him, they figured to look in Berdly's room first, Kris pulled out what he could only assume was Noelle's mattress to see if Scott was under Berdly's bed. No such luck. Berdly opened the two huge red boxes, with the lids still concealing to Kris what was inside them, their search started off smooth. Of course, that was until Kris was shouted at again. "Stop! Step right back." He was being very strict, and Kris suspected it had something to do with his hand being half a foot away from the grip of the very tall closet next to the red boxes. "Aw, not that it matters, it's locked anyway. But either way, don't go touching other people's closets. It's rude." All right, maybe he had a point. "It's not going to be there anyway. " Kris shrugged it off and followed Berdly while they started looking in other places around the house. They searched in places like under the sofa in the living room, under the table in the dining room, within cupboards in the kitchen, in those pieces of furniture with the statues, it wasn't anywhere. They tried the office rooms and all sorts of places, there. Nothing.

At that point, a thought occurred to Kris that he immediately vocalized. "So what if it actually is in the closet after all?" That kind of big closet in your room wasn't something you just kept locked at all times, and Kris was convinced it was the thing Berdly locked for this particular occasion, the moment he entered the room right before Kris did.

"It won't. She wouldn't open it. She knows better." They tried the office rooms a little more and found nothing. Kris only thought it to himself this time. It was going to be in the closet, wasn't it? They even searched the parents' bedroom, with all of the cupboard and everything.

He wasn't there. He really was going to be in the closet, wasn't he? They even went all the way downstairs to search the storage rooms full of outdoors they had to get out of the way while searching, where the mess was so tall, it only ended where their heads began. They spent so long searching everywhere for that doll, Kris was afraid to even look at the time. For lack of ideas where else to look, they were already on the way back to Berdly's room, so perhaps this was a good opportunity for Kris to bring it up again. "I really, really think he's in the closet."

"Ugh, fine!" He really sounded annoyed now. Kris already saw how saying something was a bad idea. "But..." He stopped barely outside of his room, when Kris stood just around the corner from where he would be able to see the closet door. To not let things get too sour in the middle of the night, he dropped the curiosity for the time being and did as he was told. "Stupid momma's boy, it's not going to be in there, nobody touches...wait!" He heard him unlock the closet with a key he must have had on him. What followed was a brief moment of silence, in which Kris felt like the room got colder, and some shadow began covering the walls. Then, when he was still around the corner and unable to see what was going on, he clearly heard, Berdly slide against the wood, which was followed by a strange thud. "Where's - help! There's no floor!"

When decided to ignore the bird's wishes, he just caught him hanging off the entrance to his closet. Scared for his life. "What's going - help!" He tried to rush closer to help him, but by the time he got there, Berdly's fingers were sliding off and leaving behind loose feathers. Kris did try to reach down to catch his hand, but he simply failed. The bird, screaming off the top of his lungs for help, fell down into the endless darkness in his own closet. No, this couldn't be happening. He reached into the dark of the closet and wound his hand around. If he wound his left arm right around the right side of the frame, he could move his hand 'outside' of the closet, while still being inside. He started to realize what was going on, and that he had no choice but to jump after him. And fast. He balanced off the ledge with the middle of his feet, held onto the frame with his hands, until he was in a position where he could try to soften his fall. But in the end, he had to let go, so he pushed himself off the ledge. Immediate panic grabbed him by the spine and part with intent, part out of reflex, he pulled his arms and legs forward and bent them a bit. The cold wind against his whole body made it terrifyingly clear to him how fast he was going. He regretted going after Berdly, but now it was too late. Then, he crashed on solid ground. Everything hurt. His whole body was in pain. He lay there for a while, not sure whether he even could get up. But when he tried, he could and moving all the joints that should have been crushed the hardest, he realized he was perfectly fine. One by one, he checked every part of his body. Even balanced on his forefeet to make sure those were okay. Nothing was broken, there weren't even any real wounds.

He was only staying in place when checking for injuries. He couldn't see after all. It was almost pitch black all around him. Then again, that wasn't entirely true. The only things he could see, were the pale-greyish floor and his own hands. He couldn't even see where the light source was that made it visible, it was as though there was none. The ground wasn't even, in fact it was very steep. Standing on it and not sliding down was easy, because it took some effort to even get up. The ground was very sticky, but he noticed it wasn't that there was something sticky on the ground, it was the ground itself. It went too deep to be something 'on' the ground that didn't drip off the ledges to his left and right. Only now, that he was here, in the silence and the dark, wandering down a sticky slope, did he have time to really think about this in a way he couldn't when he was chasing after Berdly or feared for his life. The dark world was real. All the way until now, he had settled on believing it was some kind of shared dream with Susie to explain how he remembered things about it that matched with what Susie believed. He shouldn't have been so afraid of believing what he saw with his own eyes, just out of fear of putting people off. Come to think of it, Susie was convinced it was real from the start. Maybe it was time to start trusting himself - and others - a little more.

He stared down at his hands. He was equipped with metal gloves, and his skin was blue again. There was no doubt. He was wearing the same armor he did in Ralsei's and Lancer's kingdom. And not far from where he had landed, he already saw something. A sparkling white light, similar to many he had seen last time. He went closer to slowly approach it. There were only very, very few of those in the real world, the 'light' world. Lights that no-one else could see. He reached closer and touched it, and knew, if anything really bad happened, he could always go back to now. Not just 'here', but 'now'. As if whatever bad things happened had never happened at all.

Wandering through the dark, he eventually spotted a silhouette. Upon coming closer, it wasn't a silhouette. In the darkness that surrounded them, the figure's orange clothes were brightly visible. Dressed in a not too tight, formal suit, with a jacket, a tie, matching shirt and suspenders. He was wearing a vintage bowler hat and even his feathers shared the attire's bright orange colour instead of his usual blue. It was Berdly, and he was standing at the edge of the platform and staring off into the dark. "Kris?" Kris walked up to him to stand beside him and stare into the abyss like he did. "Where are we?"

"I'm not sure myself. You wouldn't believe me if I told you. I don't even believe it myself."

Berdly set off to continue down the slope. "Cut that out, if you know what just happened, just say it. Am I dreaming? Is this a dream?"

He shrugged together when Kris took him up on the offer and pinched him. "You want to know what me and Susie really were doing yesterday?"

"...sure?"

"We were here. I think. A place that's a bit like this. Not quite the same, but yeah."

The slope just ended blending into a wooden platform attached to a much, much bigger wall that reached further in all directions than they could see. On the platform stood a tiny wooden hut with green leaves for a roof. When they left the sticky slope, and carefully stepped onto the wooden boards, something stirred within the hut. Something came around to peek outside. A tiny creature with even more tiny green arms. It consisted mostly of large, wound-together red petals and had a face right on them. "Hey there, little fella..." Berdly tried getting closer to the creature. "...could you tell us where we..."

"Stranger danger!" The creature just took off as fast as it could with its tiny feet. It ran away from the hut, behind it and onto another slope behind the house. They tried chasing it. "Wait! We just want to know where we are!" But that thing was fast. They could barely keep up. It didn't stop until it came by three green stalks that somehow just peered up past the left edge of the slope. Two of them already had similar sets of red petals mounted on top of them. The little creature jumped on the third one, turned around so its back pointed at Berdly and Kris, jumped up in place and upon hitting the stem, its legs sank into it. Then, all three stalks began to move about. All three trembled and one by one, the wound-together rose petals opened up horizontally to reveal very carnivorous-looking mouths with sharp teeth. Two of the roses growled at them, while a third one barked. Then, something rocked the platform and almost sent the two stumbling over just from the imbalance, hadn't their feet been practically glued to it. Large paws and a large body, all of which were made up of thorny vines, climbed onto the slope and got in their way. All three heads belonged to that one body.

Berdly actually did stumble back from the shock so much, he fell over backwards and wound up with his hands stuck to the ground for a moment. "Geez laweez! What is that?" The growling roses foamed at their mouths like rabid dogs. Kris struggled to come up with a name for it on the fly. It was a little bouquet of roses that barked, so a barquet? Then again, it didn't double as much as a dog, but more as a cerberus. So a Roserus?

Nevertheless, that thing looked hostile. Kris took a battle stance and swung his hand to summon his red sword. "Wait!" The bird was getting up again, but he had no weapons. "How'd you do that?"

"I don't know, I just did. Don't you have a weapon to draw? Just reach for it."

"Do I look to you like some weirdo who carries weapons around? Wait.." It wasn't until then, that he realized that under his coat, he wore a holster. And reaching for it and drawing what he found did indeed led to him having a pistol in his hand. It wasn't the kind of gun you expected, it didn't seem like you could refill it with ammunition anywhere. It was a dark red, one-handed firearm with a roundish design that was the widest where grip and barrel met. There wasn't much more time for introductions though, since the rabid Roserus already came closer and launched its middle head right the still confused bird's way. Kris jumped almost in the way, to get close enough attack it and severely injure the Roserus' neck.

If he wasn't going to move, they were going to have big trouble with this thing. "Do something!"

Berdly shrugged. "What? I can't just shoot it!"

Kris figured that he had to go about this differently. As soon as he caught the beast's attention, he patted both his ankles to beckon it to come closer like a dog. It simply barked all the more. This didn't seem like it worked. He turned back to Berdly. "You can, just do it! Take aim and shoot!"

Unsure what he should do, Berdly finally pointed his weapon at one of the heads with both hands. The moment he had his arms stretched out and aimed at the creature, a little circle lit up around the head, along with a reticle. Then, a bigger circle appeared around the smaller one and shrank down. When he pulled the trigger, it fired a glowing bullet at the creature's head that dug its way through the petals. The painful cry that followed, showed them that it was working. The attack actually hurt the creature.

The Roserus stumbled backwards and was on the retreat, when Kris pursued it and took another swing. This time, he cut right into its main body. Thorns broke off the vines, floated up in the air, and then shot right Berdly's way. And Kris knew at this point, that Berdly would waste too much time thinking about it, to actually dodge the attack. He reshaped his sword into a shield, and rushed over to Berdly to block all the thorns. "You have to start dodging attacks!"

Berdly just snapped right back at him. "How many times have you done this before?"

"Once - sort of."

Now that they had it intimidated and Berdly at least had attacking figured out, they continued to injure it while it retreated down the platform. It was still a strenuous fight for Kris, because every time a new wave of thorns appeared, he had to either alert Berdly to get him to actually move out of harm's way, or block them with his own shield and sometimes even get hit by a few anyway. The more they swung and fired at it, the further it retreated. They weren't sure how long they had to do that, but eventually, the creature stopped, roared, and lowered its legs. Then, with a force that rocked the entire platform they were on, it launched itself into the air and took a leap right into the endless depths below. They didn't even feel or hear the impact when it presumably hit the ground. At last, it was quiet again.

"Phew, good thing that's over." Berdly sighed as well, but he stopped. Kris tried turning around and encouraging him to follow. Not that Kris knew where they were going, but moving ahead was better than just staying in place forever. "I'm sorry, but we need to move on."

He never really calmed down, instead, he stared at Kris. He was so furious, his frowning beak was trembling. When Kris was going back and forth between looking back to see if Berdly was following, and moving ahead, he had to stop, when Berdly screamed at him. "Kris, will you get back here and explain to me what the hell is going on? What was that? What is all this?" He pointed at the void beneath them and a foot he lifted. He was now wearing shoes. Matching in colour with the rest of his getup and made specifically to fit his feet. "What is that? Why do I have a gun? Scratch that!" He reached under his coat on the other side to pull out another weapon almost identical to the first one. "Why do I have two guns? Why do you have a sword, and what are you even wearing?"

Perhaps he couldn't be rushing this like with Susie. He had an easy start to get used to the dark world, because Susie was a simple person. A brute that just attacked everyone and didn't question her own motives, let alone questioning anything strange about her environment. She just acted without thinking. Berdly was the polar opposite and losing his cool over a lot of open questions that Kris didn't know the answer to. So all he could do, was his best at trying to calm down. He marched right towards him, grabbed him by both shoulders, and gave him a stern look. "Listen. I know this might be confusing to you, I know I don't have all the answers but we're going to get through this. We are going to go home, we are going to find your sister's toy. Everything is going to be fine in the end. But I need your help for that."

It did calm him down a bit. Not as much as Kris hoped, but it did. He was still very upset with him. "At least give me the answers you do have."

"That's a bit difficult. This isn't really the same as being in the closet with Susie."

"Uh..."

"I mean, this looks different from where we ended up. There are no smooth purple walls with black goop."

"...smooth purple 'walls'..."

"Yes, and there were...things wiggling around."

"...things wiggling around, huh..." Berdly gave him an increasingly strange look. And for the love of him, Kris couldn't put together why.

"Yes, and this white stuff that blows up when you touch it too much."

Berdly raised a finger. "Okay wait, stop, serious question: Are you messing with me right now?"

They stared at each other for a bit until Kris started to realize how this was sounding. "Wait, no, I mean that's what was around us instead of this." He had enough trying to explain it to Berdly, he'd only hear what he wanted to hear anyway. "You know what? Let's talk this out another time, I'll draw every bit of it when we're back, it will make sense."

"I don't want to see drawings of what things you and her have been wiggling around in a closet." Kris began to cover his face with his hands, but he didn't bother to respond to it. "It's bad enough just imagining what and who you might be drawing as it is."