AN: So, as should be clear now, this story alternates between the past and future chapters. That's all I really wanted to say. Expect a lot of tragedy and feels in the past chapters, though I figured that would go without saying. Enjoy.

Moments after a tragedy... but not many...

Nepeta knelt on the floor in shock before the mangled body of her beloved moirail. She was too stunned to contact anyone; too shocked to scream. There were tears. A great deal of them. How could this have happened? She had just talked to him... she was too distraught to check if the body was still warm. She was too distracted in grief to consider if his killer was still nearby.

"Nepeta! Nepeta!"

"She was shaken from her shock after an unknown length of minutes. The voice had come from inside her head, accompanied by a pulsing warmth from the circular stone hanging from a cord around her neck. She reached into her shirt and drew out the charm, a boon awarded by her sprite upon reaching the mid point of her echeladder. The spirograph on the white stone glowed with the same green tint as her own blood.

"P-Pounce?" She managed to utter. The stone glew more intensely as her sprite faded into existence before her.

Following her death in an inevitable and unfortunate cave in, her beloved Lusus and best friend had been merged with the kernel and brought into being as a game construct. Pouncesprite, now armed with a vocabulary, had been a great comfort to her over the session... she never tired of her roleplaying... she shared her affinity for ships and listened with attention. It was with her and her alone that she had been able to vocalize and discuss her true red ambition. Even in death, she was a determined and devoted guardian. She said nothing at first, merely embracing the crying troll in a hug with her front paws, the back two having been replaced with the tail of a sprite. As Nepeta cried into her shoulder, Pounce maneuvered them to put Nepeta's back to the body, averting her sight. There was silence for a few moments... but Pounce grew tense.

"Listen..." She whispered urgently in Nepeta's ear. "It's not safe..." Nepeta still wept, but for the first time made an attempt to stop. It failed. "We need to go someplace safe."

"But..." She glanced back at Equius' body. At this point in the session, the rules by which one might be revived via dream self had been established. However, it appeared the killer had made a point to take the head with them, making that impossible.

"You can't do anything for him now." Pounce urged her. "He would want you to be safe. I want you to be safe." Pounce's hug tightened. "So please... we have to..." Pounce's sentence was cut off by the sound of a circus horn. The honk reverberated around the primarily metal room as both she and Nepeta froze stiff. Pounce broke the hug and met Nepeta's eyes. "His second gate. It's the fastest way out. Hurry!" Pounce pushed Nepeta away towards stairs upwards and out of Equius' lab, before taking a defiant stance at the shadow that had appeared in the door way. She hissed at the glowing yellow eyes, bulging and enraged in appearance.

"LOOK WHAT THE MUTHAFUCKIN CAT DRAGGED IN?" A smile of all teeth replied. "a muthafucking cat and a muthafucking ghost cat." The troll in the shadows continued.

"HISSSSSSSSS" Pounce backed away from Gamzee, while glancing back at Nepeta, urging her to run.

"Pounce... I..."

"GO!" She yelled before leaping at Gamzee, only to be knocked out of the air mid pounce by a circular object thrown at her by the clown. Though horrified of what had just hit her, Pounce was glad Nepeta had not been there to see. She probably would have frozen up again."

"HONK HONK KITTY KITTY." The clown advanced. Pounce extended her claws. As a game-sprite, she was ordinary bound against interfering with other players. But at the same time she got a sense that none of those rules mattered anymore. The game was off the rails. There was only one thing on the cat lusus' mind... securing an escape for her daughter.

She ascended, bounding faster than she ever had in even her most intense hunts. Despite the terrifying sorts of wildlife on Alternia, she herself had never truly felt herself as prey. She tried to shut her recent memory from her mind. She was running. That was all that mattered. If she just focused on that... maybe she could live. All her energy put into flight, she hadn't even properly processed yet, that Gamzee, the calm and melancholic, had killed her moirail... and was not probably killing the ghost of her lusus. Can ghosts even be killed? She didn't think so. She didn't think about it much at all. Running. Running up endless steps, flights above, until Equius' second gate, which would take her to the home of his server player. The maid of time. Maybe she could fix this. That was her job, right? Go back and fix things when they go wrong. Things had gone wrong. They had gone so very, very, wrong. As she reached the second gate, there was blood curling screech from below... one she had heard before, when a cascade of rocks fell and slew her guardian. There was no time. She stepped through the gate.

On the other side, she found herself alone. No one around. A ruined hive, as it had been since the game began. Outside the windows of the hive, the crystal landscape was bathed in light from the purple aurora surrounding the Land of Quartz and Melody. She felt the sprite pendant around her neck pulse, as she pulled it out again. It was now cracked, and the crack was spreading.

"P-Pounce?" She tried to summon her guardian from the stone. The cracks were now encompassing most of the stone. "Are you there? Pounce?!" Nepeta pleaded... but after a brief moment, the stone crumbled in her hand, turning over the moments into a finer and finer grey dust, as it became clear that her lusus was now dead for the second and final time.