Hello everyone! Before beginning, I would just like to say thanks to all of you who read and (hopefully) reviewed this story's previous chapters! Thank you so much!
In this chapter, we see what's happening with the others in Nick's house while he and Raven are having their heart to heart that was covered in the last chapter.
DoktorK: I think we can all relate to Raven in that scene. lol
Here's the explanation of this chapter's title. It's a direct reference to the classic horror film The Bride of Frankenstein. In that title, The Bride's relation to the main male character refers to the female monster. With the Bride, the man who created her defines her within the title. Even though she is meant to be a bride to his other monster, not Frankenstein, for some reason? But I guess "The Bride of Frankenstein's Monster" doesn't sound as good? It's the same with Jane Stitch to Nick. She is Nick's girlfriend, and she is a female meat golem like the Bride.
Here is the eighth chapter of Ultima: Witches Night: The Girlfriend of Moss
(9 months AGE, Realm 82, Nick Moss' Home, April 30th 1957, 10:35 PM)
Machi had wisely ignored Raven as she had left the main living room. And right after the Teen Titan left, another entered the space. Toru walked towards her from the house's bathroom as she appeared to be wiping her imperceptible hands on her uniform's skirt, seemingly oblivious to the foul mood as she hummed to herself.
"When it comes to action,
"My Quirk is in Light Refraction.
"So it has the side effect,
"Of never being a distraction."
By the time she was within earshot of Machi, the dullahan heard that the humming had been replaced by soft singing. The original source was unknown but she liked the words.
"Sneak up on my enemies,
"Let me be the best assassin.
"Toru Hagakure,
"You can feel my passion."
The invisible teenage girl stood beside Machi's head but said nothing as she was, presumably, looking out the window. The gaze closer to the ground matched the one that couldn't be seen. There wasn't much else to do besides wait for the siren to arrive.
Her disembodied head on a pillow resting on the windowsill stared out in sincere disbelief at Juniper Street. Though her view was somewhat limited within the distance between the window to the lawn on the other side of the street, Machi saw enough. She saw an imposing horse, pale white in color with pure blood red eyes devoid of dark pupil, who's every breath emitted a thick gust of sulfur and who's every hoof strike created a bloom of sparks and scorching hoof prints that glowed like molten crescents upon in the asphalt. It kept charging that house most easily seen before abruptly veering off course.
Absentmindedly Machi wondered about how you would house such a creature when every strike of its hooves tended to set things on fire. Must have made replacing bedding a nightmare in its own right, to say nothing of the steeples sacrificed to its flaming feet.
But such idle speculations didn't linger long within her mind. The ginger haired young woman whose head was currently level with her chest became more squarely focused on another detail of the scene, the rider of the mount possibly literally from Hell.
It was hard to confuse a headless horseman with any of the other kinds of monsters running around, after all. Even as she had read the books that covered this Realm, the claims about this particular species were hard for her to accept. Riding horses? Repelled by gold coins? Literally having no head at all? It was so hard to believe any of it.
"YAAAAH-HA-HA-HA-HAHAHAHA!" And yet there it was, all of those absurd claims given credence. A headless horseman with an eerie laugh echoing all around him.
Before reaching the last book of the Research for this Realm, the headless horsemen were briefly mentioned but never described in much detail. Machi had imagined something like in the Disney version of Sleepy Hollow, a imposing specter with a billowing cape dressed in dark colors on a equally dark horse's back with a sword, flaming pumpkin, and a clear opening above his shoulders that look like a cannonball had been fired upward from within. Then she got to the last book, and saw how wrong her initial imagining was. And how the frightful force in front of her conformed to what the book had designated.
Rather than a nice clean gaping hole, where a head should have been there was just a ragged stump of desiccated tissue. She could vaguely make out the gray of decayed muscle and the white of bone that stuck out in the middle like a cut of meat. Rather than imposing flowing garments, he wore all dark denim and leather with a white undershirt that made him vaguely resemble a guillotined James Dean. Rather than a sword, he held a one-handed hatchet with flickering flames and arcane symbols on its blades. There was no pumpkin or cape to be found. The only thing this creature and the Disney version had in common was their creepy laugh. She knew many headless horsemen didn't have that.
"YAAAAH-HA-HA-HA-HAHAHAHA!" The headless horseman began a bombastic charge on the house right across the street, his hellish mount at top speed. The creature and its rider were close enough to knock on the door. Then, at roughly the same spot as before, helpfully marked by the scorched remains of previous hoof strikes on the doormat, the hell horse yet again sharply turned away in total terror. In unison with this change, the laughter of the headless horseman transformed into scared crying screams.
"AHUHUHUH-AUGH-AUGH-AUGH-HYUCHHYUCH!" The hellish thing rode away, determined to get as far as the menacing glint of the Spanish doubloon hanging from a string connected to the top of the front porch. Once he was safely outside the coin's reach, he would pull on his horse's reins and do it all over again. Again and again.
The dullahan from another Realm might have laughed at the strange sight if she didn't understand the context. That dulla—headless horseman, was trying to break into that house, to forcibly change someone into another one of his kind…of their kind. That notion made Machi feel ill, that someone so like her could be the opposite of her.
As the echoing screams of the headless horsemen still rang loudly, a much softer and sweeter kind of voice began to be heard much closer to Machi's ears, an energetic girly chuckle that almost danced on the eardrums. Her hands grabbed her head and turned it slightly towards its source. It had been the first sound out of Toru since her singing.
"It's so funny how he keeps charging at that house only to back away each time! Hahaha!" Toru said in between chuckles, feeling like she was watching a comedy routine.
Machi looked at her perplexed, speechless. Why did a monster trying to break into a human's home not disturb her? Did she understand what would happen if he succeeded? Did she just not care? The demi-human didn't think so but she was quite confused nevertheless. Partially to not have to dwell on her own thoughts on the subject, she asked, "How can you find any of this funny?"
"Because it is!" Toru exclaimed cheerfully, as if that explained everything. One of her uniform's sleeves shifted, becoming horizontal and rigid. "Oh, look over there!"
Machi's big blue eyes moved to where she assumed Hagakure was pointing, a lawn next door to the one the headless horseman was charging at. It was a little hard to make out much because a kind of substance had started to shroud the place in obscuration. There was a muffled explosion as a cloud of debris expanded outward. But what expanded wasn't fire of shrapnel, instead it was a fine flakey white powder. Flour. Baking flour.
Just as Machi recalled reading something in the Research about flour, a loud scream pierced the night. She looked for a source to the scream but found none. That's when she realized the truth. Flour bombs, a measure used by humans here to repel invisible people. Suddenly Nick's desire to hit Toru with the baking ingredient made a lot more sense.
"No! NO! You can see me! YOU CAN SEE ME!" A partially visible outline of a man began shouting with increasingly panic as more snow-white sprinkling clung to his transparent skin. "I'm naked. NAKED!" He ran off screaming, his semi-whiteness visible against the darkness of the night alit by the occasional odd glow from some random monster device. "DON'T LOOK AT ME!"
The grey high school girl uniform top became creased and crumpled along the middle, and two visible fist-sized depressions were sinking into the dark blue-green short skirt as Toru kept laughing and laughing. Machi guessed that Toru was literally bent over with uproarious amusement, her hands pressing against her upper thighs to keep her upright.
The dullahan waited until the laughter died down before asking her teammate. "Uh…d—do you know—know what the…monsters…uh, are trying to do?" she asked nervously, worried that she might insult her new friend's intelligence as if she needed to explain it.
To Machi's relief, and greater confusion, without facing her, Toru responded, "Yeah, I know. They are trying to break into those houses and turn the people inside into monsters like them. Meeeeh!" Machi swore Toru stuck out her tongue but she couldn't be sure.
"H—how can you laugh…uh, k—knowing that, I mean?" asked Machi, once again her desire for knowledge overpowering her fear of offending her friend.
The floating top of the uniform turned slightly, the waistline wrinkling as a result. Toru was facing her now. "Because if any of them actually break in, I'll stop them." She said. Her voice was the same as always, bubbly and cheerful, but with an underlying confidence. It was the voice of someone almost incapable of being dishonest or false.
The demi-human stared at Toru in naked awe as the Quirk user turned back to the window and resumed laughing at the failed efforts of monsters to break into houses. In that moment, her confidence and general aloofness reminded Machi of her friend Hikari. Now that she thought about it, Toru and the vampire girl had a lot in common. Perhaps most important was their desire and drive to protect those who truly needed it. Machi remembered how Hikari helped Yuki when she was being bullied, stepping in to help the snow woman without a moment's hesitation or doubt. She had always admired that.
"Say…uh…Toru," Machi began. She then paused, and allowed silence to hover there, until Toru embarrassedly said that she was waiting for her to continue. The head on a pillow took a deep breath, preparing to broach a topic she had wanted to talk about for a while. "So…uh…w—what do you think of Angua?"
"What do you mean?" asked the Invisible Teen, the confusion in her voice sounding sincere.
"Well—uh…does—doesn't she seem—er—kind of distant and—" Machi allowed her comment to trail off, already feeling like dirt.
"Well yeah," Toru said as if that were obvious. "But she's got a hard time being around people in general. Just her being here at all says a lot. She's not used to having friends."
The technically beheaded girl found herself able to relate to that a little too easily. But before she could feel bad about herself for making someone's time harder than needed, she realized something. The way her new friend just spoke wasn't as aloof as usual. The Quirk User seemed to be speaking from more than just hearsay, as if she actually knew that. The redhead knew that Toru had met Angua at the same time she did, so that left one viable way for how the unseen teen could speak with such certainty on the werewolf.
"You—you read…uh, her…books?" asked Machi, especially uncomfortable phrasing it like that. It wasn't like Angua wrote the books that covered her life and Realm, after all.
"Listened to the audio versions for some of them," Toru admitted with a cheerful laugh devoid of shame. "Just so happened I discovered them a little before I learned we would be working with Angua. A little hard to get into at first but after a while they really grew on me. The Society translators we got really made them easy to understand, though they weren't in Japanese. I kinda want to visit Aunty-Porky someday. I'd like to meet Captain Carrot and Cherry. Oh, and Death too! He's such an awkwardly cute little caramel roll!"
Machi simply stared at her, assuming none of those statements were actually correct. She knew about the Star Turtle and the four elephants standing on its shell but even so those names were too absurd. And she couldn't even begin to wrap her head around that comment about death. Then that vexation was erased by a moment of sudden clarity. "Toru," she asked, "Have you read the…um…well, the books that cover my Realm?"
There was a brief pause. "Maybe…" she finally admitted, somewhat embarrassedly. The way one of her sleeves creased suggested she was actually rubbing the back of her head.
The dullahan wasn't sure how to react. Mad that her new friend had basically looked behind her back at her life, in effect spying on her? Relieved that she didn't have to explain her more embarrassing moments? Several more options flashed within her mind before she settled on a seemingly minor option when compared to such loftier emotional states. Rather than an emotion, she focused on a single question.
"If you already knew all about me, then why did you talk to me as if you didn't know?"
"Because I wanted to get to know you," Toru said, as if that were simple and obvious, "It's hard to get to know someone when you act like you already know all about them."
Machi fought to not look struck at her friend pointing out something she should have figured out. To help her efforts, she started turning her gaze to other sections of the room. Eventually she looked back over to the couch. Nick had left, leaving Jane Stitch alone.
The meat golem was making an effort to look all around, suggesting she had been staring at the dullahan mere moments earlier. But what Machi noticed was the look transparent through her mismatched eyes. That jogged her memory about something she read in the Research for this mission. Every monster had repellents, things that kept them at arm's length, and for meat golems that was fire. Based on that, she knew what this look was. Fear. It was a look of fear, of the fire spouting from her neck. Fear of her.
A part of Machi wanted to go over there and comfort the clearly distressed woman but several rapid thoughts kept her in place just as much as her head being stationary. It took most a while to get truly comfortable around her. They tended to act distant around her. True, she had recently learned ways to lessen that, but she wondered if they would be enough. It wasn't mainly that her head wasn't attached; it was that she was a dullahan. The redhead didn't see any self-deprecating jokes that could smooth that truth over. She was worried at somehow making the meat golem even more uncomfortable with her pathetic attempts to alleviate that condition. Besides, she realized quickly, if she carried her head closer to talk to her, that would bring the fire that was the fount of the fear closer.
Then, the head resting on a pillow below the chin noticed another detail. For some reason, Jane was rubbing the stitches between the middle and ring fingers of her right hand. Machi was spared the full details by distance and lighting that didn't reveal everything but the dullahan noticed how the patches of muscle exposed by the partially undone bindings were different colors, one a sort of greenish hue and the other a kind of gray. She was very thankful the flesh was frayed and bloodless, more like a bolt of cloth ripped in two. Despite some discomfort on Jane's face, the meat golem kept rubbing that exposed flesh. She didn't appear to even be consciously aware of what she was doing.
It took her a few moments but then Machi realized something about the nervous tic. She had read about its origin, and about much more.
The four books she had been requested to read as Research for this mission proved to be a minor challenge in their own right for the dullahan. They were well written and conveyed their contents with much skill. However, said contents were hard to stomach knowing it was reality somewhere. Though her tastes in entertainment kept much closer to Disney than the Brothers Grimm, she had managed to get through the first three books with only a few hurdles. She had withstood the fantastic absurdity, the petty unfairness towards humans, the gallows humor, and the tragic events that couldn't be stopped.
That last book though, the one that explained what had prompted that nervous tic, had been a labor that she almost couldn't finish. What had often only been implied or spoken of in the previous trilogy was actually described in horrifying vivid detail. It was a coin toss as to what had been the thing to almost make her stop reading the book completely, the scene of humans being turned into monsters after a rigged "lottery" or what had been done to Jane by that same especially nasty group of monsters. At the moment, due to the victim of that group's torture sitting in the same room as her head, the latter left a deeper impression.
Machi's head shuttered as she remembered what she had read about what they did to her. Like many teenagers, the dullahan knew that evil existed in the world. But like most she thankfully only knew this in an abstract sense, and not from true experience. The hours of purposeful pain-infliction upon a cocktail waitress from out of town with weapons possibly literally from Hell itself showed her what evil looked like. As they mutilated her, they gloated that what had been removed wasn't even truly hers, rather belonging to those women whose bodies were used to build her. The pain, at least the most immediate kinds, hadn't ended until Jane literally forced the roof above her head to fall, like a stitched-up Samson. A Samson just as blind to God. Her only award after that labor of faith was her carrying away the pieces of her that had been on the floor to be reattached later.
Even before, there was the scene of humans being turned that had led to her putting the book down and staring at her bedroom's wall for over an hour, that scene had near traumatized her. It had taken a whole afternoon with her lively vampire friend to find a reason to keep going. Amidst all the cruelty and pain displayed, two other details made it all the more terrible.
First, there was the species of monster that had done that to Jane…headless horseman.
Second, there was the name the gang of headless horsemen had gone by…the Dullahans.
All at once, a stomach that received food via a warp in the reality of space-time itself felt a cold rock drop within it, its weight almost bringing the body around it to the floor. It wasn't just the fire that Jane was afraid of…it was her. It was every time Jane saw her head not being on her body's shoulder, every time she heard the word "dullahan."
That notion made Machi feel uncomfortable. It made her feel dirty and wrenched. She knew that she did nothing to warrant those emotions but she felt them all the same. That would have been the case under normal conditions but they were magnified in this specific situation. She had read about what happened to Jane from Jane's point of view, she had an unnervingly complete idea of how badly the Dullahans had hurt her.
The idea that creatures from this Realm that were her closet analogue did that to her…well, it made her feel like a monster. Like the headless horseman outside, like the ones who had tortured Jane and terrorized so many innocents.
Machi didn't want to be that. She wanted to be someone better! Like Hiarki! Like Toru!
She might not have had superpowers, but she wanted to be a hero and not a monster.
Machi's mind was made up in that moment. Despite the hurdles, she would talk to Jane.
But how could she?
The greater trauma, that she was like the creatures that had hurt Jane so, couldn't be denied. Machi would have to work through that the hard way, or at least start to. But maybe the other source of fear wouldn't be so daunting to deal with. What Jane was scared of, in part, was her fire, a part of what she was. The dullahan knew if she could just show the meat golem that her fire was harmless she could end that part of her fear. But she knew just as well that doing so wasn't feasible so soon after meeting her. She didn't know much about the subtleties of social interaction, but she knew that much. No, the only way to get around the fire dilemma, and hopefully building the beginnings of a bridge to the greater dilemma, was to remove it as a factor. But how could she—?
A light bulb went off in her disconnected head. "Hey, Toru," Machi said, fighting through the nervousness and uncertainty intrinsic to her plan. "Could you please do me a favor?"
Jane Stitch had seen many strange things in her time since being assembled. Living in this Realm meant that was a given. Even so, what she witnessed while on her human boyfriend's couch certainly ranked in the top ten.
A served head trying to smile reassuringly while being carried over by a floating high school girl's uniform.
Jane couldn't talk. But if she had, that sight would have rendered her utterly speechless. As it was, she simply waited for whatever would unfold next as the uniform stopped in front of her.
Machi swallowed a few times, her salvia vanishing into the same hypothetical wormhole that led to her belly. "So...uh...Miss—Miss Stitch." she began, not knowing what to say now. Her cheeks blushed with embarrassment. "H—how are you?"
A small portion of the meat golem's burrowed brain was perplexed by what she had just heard. She didn't recall either Nick or herself ever telling this team her last name? How did she know that? But a stronger current of thought overwhelmed that merger section. Jane might have been made of dead women's body parts, but talking to a severed head felt unbelievably uncomfortable. She wanted to look away, but every time she did, her eyes were always drawn to that awful fire that never seemed to stop burning. That moaning green inferno a few feet away was like a blue whale pressing down on her back. She couldn't even process responding to that fumbled question from the floating head. The meat golem was certain nothing would ever match that sight for pure strangeness.
Then, as was so often the case, she immediately saw something that had eclipsed it. Jane's mismatched eyes widened, the right one slightly more than the left, as she watched an erupting body suddenly get up and leave the room under its own will. The miraculous effect of this was somewhat undermined by how it would occasionally pause or bump into something before continuing to fumble its way out of the room and into the kitchen.
Again, strange things were common, but even so the meat golem had never seen anything like that. It took her a few moments to form an idea of how that happened, fight through the lingering fear that the fire left, and then comply with her stolen limbs to act on that idea. With fingers just barely shaking, she wrote out a message to the two teenagers.
Did you do that? As usual, the writing was clean and clear.
"Uh-uh," Machi admitted, somewhat bashfully, as she remained in Toru's unseen grasp.
Is your body something separate from you?
"N—no…it's mine to control. It's a part of me."
Jane balked at that, making Machi's sense of unease rise even further. The meat golem then wrote again, her discomfort around this teenage girl briefly overpowered by simply curiosity. You can have your head be apart from your body? With it in another room?
"Yup. It's no big deal," Machi explained. "Once they were as far apart as Tokyo and Okayama."
The next time Jane showed the teens her slate; one of her eyebrows was slightly raised. I'm guessing that's really far apart. Never been to Japan.
"Oh…well—er…yeah…that—that's really far," Machi admitted, now realizing that wouldn't be common knowledge here. A few cringing rattling chuckles escaped her lips.
Those chuckles, devoid of much real mirth became thunderous in the silence that followed. Jane merely sat there, seemingly waiting for the beings that approached her to say something else. It was starting to feel like that time might not ever come.
Machi truthfully didn't know what to say. Normally, she wasn't the one attempting to start a conversation. She cursed herself for not thinking this out before she asked Toru to carry her over. And she doubly regretted not telling the invisible girl what it was she had in mind. If she had, the Quirk User might have been able to help her reach her desired goal. A goal, she thought, that was only half-formed.
She was brought back to the discomfiture when she noticed movement, and saw that Jane had written a new message. Unnerving seeing those peepers outside those homes, isn't?
Machi blinked in confusion until she realized what had happened. Jane thought her, embarrassingly obvious, unease was based purely on what she had just witnessed out Nick's window. The dullahan was half-tempted to correct the meat golem, before realizing it would be counterproductive. Instead, she ran with it. "Yeah," the head floating in the air admitted. "It's just so...so..." she paused, struggling vainly to find a single word that accurately encapsulated the transcendentally perverse nature of the spectacle outside. She was found wanting.
To her relief, Jane seemed amused by this fumbling indecisiveness, as proven by a small grin that appeared as she nodded her head in agreement.
She erased her slate and wrote a new message for the two teenagers.
Yeah, I know the feeling. To think, I had been blind to this sort of thing before Nick. I didn't even realize humans had it this bad.
"How could you not know that?" Asked Toru, her voice devoid of accusation.
Despite their being no malice in the words, the meat golem still winced as she crafted a new response. Never been to a human neighborhood before then. Believed all the bad things I'd been told about humans. Never thought it wasn't the simple truth. Didn't realize how hopeless their lot was. She again wiped the words away with her palm and added more, after a look of pained remembrance flickered across her face. All the pain us monsters inflict on them.
Machi knew exactly what the pretty patchwork woman meant by that vague statement, how she had nearly destroyed her relationship with the one creature in this whole Realm who hadn't viewed her as just a joy girl or a spontaneously mentally unstable berserker or a living pile of corpses. The fact she was here now showed that ultimately things worked out, or at least would, but that probably didn't erase the scars caused. A part of Machi wanted to address that directly but she realized now wasn't the proper time. That being said, she had no idea how to get them out of this conversation-killing tongue-tied pause.
"Hey!" Toru announced with no warning, seemingly ignorant of the awkwardness she had unintentionally birthed. Both Jane and Machi winced at what would come out of those transparent lips next. "Do meat golems poop?" she asked without any tact.
The awkwardness was swept away like sand in a hurricane, to be replaced by alarmed gasps. "Aaaaah!" Machi exclaimed as if her hand had been stuck in a pot of hot coals. "You don't ask people that!"
"What?" Was Toru's near indifferent reply, with the way Machi's head slightly moved up and then down suggesting a casual shoulder shrug. "You wanna be a scientist, right?"
"What's that got to do with—!?" Machi attempted to shout before she was swiftly cut off.
"And I thought you had to always ask questions to be one?"
"Not about that!"
"Well, from what I've heard," Toru began, her voice slightly more playful than before, "You've gotta be willing to ask questions about everything and never be settled until you know for sure what's up." A kind of wisdom seemingly foreign to the invisible girl found its way into her voice. "Am I wrong?"
The contrast between Toru's usual demeanor and how she seemed at this particular moment threw the held head for a loop. Eventually, an answer forced itself out of her lips. "Well...no…but..."
"Exactly!" The Quirk User exclaimed, again easily cutting her off. "That's where you've got to start! At the butt! Didn't you say you wanted to learn about the butts of the universe?"
"I said I wanted to learn about wormholes, not buttholes! I want to learn about the hypothetical connections between widely separated regions of space-time!"
"So? They are still holes, right?" Toru said as if that was the simplest thing ever said. "It's just like my new teacher says sometimes." She paused, before speaking with a new voice, the voice of a young high-pitched woman bursting with life trying to mimic the gravelly world-weary tone of an elderly gentleman that had their optimism ground into dust. "'Science isn't easy. It'll lure you in and then leave you high and dry just when you start getting somewhere good. Sometimes you've gotta take something and stick way up there inside your butthole if you want to learn! Way up in there! As far as it can fit!'"
Machi did her best to not stare vacantly at her transparent friend, but since her head was still being held next to the tummy of said friend, she only managed to turn her eyeballs upward enough to have the pupils be almost as unseen. She didn't even know where to begin with that statement. Her mind boggled at the idea of a teacher saying that. She attempted to imagine Mr. Takahashi saying that, before her brain briefly shut down.
A bizarre noise brought the dullahan's pupils back into focus and her mind to the present. The first thing Machi saw was Jane sitting there, covering her mouth while repressing a very obvious full-body laugh and struggling to write with one hand while also holding her slate in place on her lap. The chalk scraped against the blackboard in a way it hadn't since they had seen her write. When the noiseless laughter had died down at last, she showed the teens what she wrote. The handwriting was messy for the first time yet. Luckily it was still quite legible.
Yes, I do poop. Not often but I do poop.
There was studded silence before one of the teens broke it. "Ha! See, Machi? She gets it!" The Quirk User released a few chuckles of victory over her smarter new friend.
Machi looked absolutely horrified by this. She couldn't stop thinking about the meat golem's rump, mainly about if there were stitches and where they held flesh together. Jane had an amused grin on her lips as she wiped the slate clean before writing a new message. Well, I do have a keister and it isn't just for show. She accentuated her point by raising her right side slightly and giving said kiester a gentle slap of acknowledgment.
Though it couldn't be seen, Toru was rocking back and forth as her laughter increased. This was mainly noticeable by how Machi's head swayed as if tied to a metronome. It would be debatable if the sense of seasickness this produced matched her uneasiness.
"M—Ma—Miss Stitch!" Machi shouted, flustered at the reveal, her cheeks became red as they continued to be held in the air while being rocked as a casualty of the invisible girl's mirth. "We—wee—are ta—teens and you are act—acting more im—immature than us!" She said with an attempt at being scolding, something she couldn't recall ever being, that came across as screechy. Plus being moved against her will made a stuttering effect more severe than her natural timidity would have. "You're supposed to be the adult here!"
Another soundless laugh rang out. Actually, I'm five. You're older than me, kiddo! Her lips became a cocky smirk.
The floating head stared at her like a deer caught in the headlights. Though she had read about that, she had forgotten. After all, the six women whose bodies had been used to create her had all been adults when they died. And Jane certainly didn't act like someone who was only half a decade old. The thunderous laughter had since ceased. A long whistle replacing it that came from no seen mouth suggested Toru's thoughts on this.
The meat golem stared at the innocent befuddlement with obvious enjoyment. Headless horsewoman or not, this girl's reactions were very entertaining. And the invisible girl's reactions weren't that far behind. It encapsulated something that Jane was slowly discovering about the duo. They were innocent, carefree kids...uncorrupted by malice and unburdened by trauma. Those qualities made them stand out more here than one of them holding the other's head like a fresh pumpkin. Even the most well adjusted monsters had pieces of their old lives that could muck things up. Jane could write a book on that.
But rather than writing that, she chose to write something else instead. You know, you can have a sit if you would like.
Both girls laughed sheepishly at realizing that Toru had been standing this entire time. She sat down in a nearby chair with Machi's head nestled in her lap on top of her skirt. The dullahan didn't even notice this as she was basking in how Jane asking them to have a seat must have been a good sign. She couldn't say the gaze being sent her way from eyes of different colors was welcoming, but it wasn't hostile. The fear wasn't quite as obvious. That idea was further reinforced when Jane presented them with a different message. Judging by that question, I'm guessing they don't have meat golems where you're from?
"How do you know we are from someplace different?" asked Toru.
I was listening to the moody witch when she was talking to Nick at the door.
"Moody wit—? Oh! You mean Raven!" The Quirk User exclaimed as she understood.
Assuming that the unseen girl knew the names of those she traveled with, Jane nodded.
"And you," Machi began, flinching a bit as eyes of silver and purple turned towards her, "you were…uh, okay with what she showed him?"
Jane took a moment to consider before writing her reply. It was a lot to take in but it seemed too wacky to just be a scam to make me buy the Brooklyn Bridge. After all, where I'm from has stuff like this. As she showed her response, Jane gestured to herself.
Machi nodded at that, her chin digging a little deeper into the skirt of her invisible pal. She wondered if the addition of how every Realm was a work of fiction somewhere else might color Jane's acceptance of the truth. That was usually the biggest pill to swallow. While Jane had been nothing but a charming and clever conversational partner, the redhead knew that could change at any moment. With no warning, meat golems could be swept up in 'the Green,' vivid memories from the person who used to have their brain. And when 'the Green' took over, they became unthinking assaulters who would pummel anything or anyone within reach until their own minds could reclaim control of their patchwork bodies. And given the strength of meat golems that could be lethal to most. As far as Machi knew Jane had managed to figure out how to not lose herself to 'the Green' but she didn't want to risk it unless she absolutely had to.
So, what's your— Jane had begun writing as Machi contemplated that, before pausing, trying to remember the word, —realm like? She showed the two her written question.
"What do you—oh!" Machi thought out loud before realizing the source of the confusion. "No, no. Toru and me come from different Realms. We don't live in the same place."
Two other realms with monsters?
"Oh, I'm not a monster," Toru said. "I'm actually a superhero!" she exclaimed proudly.
"Uh…in training," Machi added while looking away as she did so.
The topmost portion of the schoolgirl uniform fell slightly forward. A pained gasp was heard. "Come on, Mach!" Toru whined like a little kid denied her favorite toy. "Why do you need to say that!? That doesn't sound nearly as cool!"
"Oh…uh…sorry…" the held head said shamefully as she tried to look further away.
There was a moment of pause. "Oh, I can't stay mad at you!" pronounced Toru happily, all of her high-pitched ire absent. "You've got the cutest widdle chubby cheeks! Oooooo!" Jane didn't exactly know what happened next, but the way the floating uniform's right sleeve creased, Machi's right cheek changed shape, and the dullahan's distressed cry all pointed to her having her cheek pinched.
There was an instantaneous eruption of wailing moans that was coming from the kitchen. The meat golem remembered quite well what such howling was connected to, a part of. Jane's eyes were glued to the kitchen's portal, dreading that she would see green flames forming. Luckily, even after a solid ten seconds of wait, no inferno began to form. Her desire to make sure was balanced by the equally powerful drive to not see that fire again.
Partially to distract herself from the fire, she quickly wrote out a new inquiry for the two. There are superheroes in your realm? Like in the comic books?
Toru had heard her writing on her slate and brought her attention back to her, or at least that's what Jane assumed because she responded very quickly. "Yuppers! We've got lots of them. And most of the people where I'm from have got really cool Quirks!"
Quirks?
"That's what they call superpowers in her Realm," Machi examined, figuring her friend probably wouldn't want to enter the role of explainer, given her short attention span. "Most of the population where she's from have Quirks. I think it's—uh, over eighty percent of people have Quirks, right Toru?"
"You got it, Mach!"
Jane blinked a few times. 80%? As in 4 out of every 5 people?
"Yup!" Toru exclaimed. "And if you think I look odd, you should see some of the other people my Realm's got!" To Jane's shock, she said that with no sense of loathing or bitterness at all. "They look so awesome! And I just have boring transparency!"
The meat golem was especially curious about how total invisibility could be viewed as a boring state. Just what do you mean? What are some ways people look in your realm?
"Oh!" Toru began, her voice having the most zeal this entire time, and it had never been particularly lacking at any point previously. "Well, there's Mina, who's got pink skin and hair and the cutest little horns on her head! There's Mezo, who's got six arms all attached to each other by a web of skin, like a bat's wing! There's Tokoyami who's got a black bird's head! Oh, and then there's Ojiro," she paused, before resuming with the tiniest bit more gusto, "He's got this really awesome and powerful tail he can kick butt with!"
Jane sat there utterly amazed and slightly disturbed as the invisible girl continued to list off the extraordinary appearances and powers that these "Quirks'' created. Whenever she thought the girl had finally run out of examples, she would always dig up more as if there was no limit. The meat golem learned about a man made of cement, a woman who could transform herself into a dragon, a boy whose head was an empty comic book word bubble, a girl who could retreat her body within itself like a turtle retreating into its shell, a man who was to killer whales what wolfmen were to wolves…a man who was always on fire but never burned. Jane had winced when she heard about that one. Toru didn't notice as she just kept listing examples. Eventually, to Jane's relief, she finally stopped.
By the third dozen or so examples, Jane's mind had needed to retreat from the onslaught of overpowering trivia, so it dwelled on a particular topic that hadn't been acknowledged. You said 4 in every 5 people have quirks. What about the 1/5 who don't?
"What do you mean?" asked Toru confused.
Are those without these quirks in your realm treated like the humans in this one?
"Oooohhh…" Toru uttered after a few moments to understand exactly what was meant. "You mean do those Quirks treat the quirkness badly because they don't have them?" Jane nodded. "I mean, I'm not sure exactly. I had never really paid attention to—" The Quirk User stopped talking, her words cutting off sharply. Jane would have given anything to see her face right now. But even without that clue she knew exactly what happened, the invisible girl had realized how her stance on the marginalized of her Realm had matched Jane's, ignorance through lack of experience with those directly affected. She waited patiently until Toru continued. "W—well…from what I've heard, some people made things harder for the Quirkless," To Jane's shock, her voice was soft. "There were some bullies and jerks. But it was never how most people acted. Those kinda people were frowned upon. That stuff isn't cool." When she spoke again, Toru's voice had its previous tone. "But it's better now! After the G.E., everyone learned that All-Might—!"
"Their Realm's number one hero, basically their Superman," Machi added, knowing Toru wouldn't clarify who that was.
"Right!" The Quirk User agreed. "Anyway, we all learned he used to be quirkless before he got his Quirk. And after that the news said treatment of the quirkless got better, I think. To be honest, I don't watch the news that much. Too sad most of the time."
Jane nodded, satisfied with the invisible girl's explanation. And your realm? She wrote, addressing Machi, who had hardly said much for the longest time.
The held head looked surprised to be addressed. "Oh! Uh…what do you want to know?" she asked, still seeming a little uncomfortable.
Jane decided to start off easy. What is your realm like? she wrote.
The held head took a long time before answering. "Imagine this place, but reserved."
That made Jane's interest rise, enough to where she didn't point how vague that answer was. Instead, she wrote out, Are their monsters in your realm?
"Well…no…" Machi said after a few seconds. "We don't have monsters. We call them demi-humans. Or demis. That works too."
The meat golem wondered about that name, about why it included the word "demi," a word that could mean either something being half of what it once was or of an inferior quality. Because they used to be humans before they got turned? she asked.
"What!?" Machi screeched in alarm, so much so her head ever so slightly hopped in the air before bouncing back onto Toru's dark blue-green short skirt. "No—no! I would never—!" The dullahan exclaimed, sounding terrified and offended in equal measure before she had a moment of clarity. Of course Jane would ask questions in terms that applied to the only realm she knew, even when they didn't translate over. She coughed. "Uh, I mean, no. Demi-humans don't turn humans. We are born as demi-humans."
Jane looked at the redheaded head as if she had slapped with a technicolored halibut. Being born as a monster? That flew in the face of how her entire reality seemed to work. Her initial reaction was a convoluted combination of pity and envy. She wondered if there were other differences. One of those questions was put to slate.
Do demis rule your world?
"No. They are actually pretty rare. Only a few pop up each generation."
So humans rule things?
"Well, I mean I guess. There's nothing saying demi-humans couldn't but there are a lot more humans, if that's what you mean."
Jane felt like she wasn't asking the right question for what she truly wanted to know. Do humans persecute these demis?
Machi wasn't quite as flustered this time, more prepared for this kind of question. "No, they don't," she said, her voice not shaky, "I can only speak for me but I've never dealt with that sort of stuff. Being a demi-human isn't exactly easy but it's not because of people trying to make things harder out of hatred or fear. My parents and teachers have been nothing but helpful and concerned about my well-being. And, I mean, sure, people are kinda unsure what to make of me at first but they aren't mean about it. They just don't know. At least until I show them they don't have to walk around eggshells around me. I've got lots of human friends who treat me the same as anyone else."
The only sound in the air after Machi said that was the sound of chalk hitting the floor. Jane sat there with her mouth hanging wide and her stolen eyes held completely open. Her borrowed brain struggled to even grasp what the words just uttered would look like. It was something so beautiful that Life itself seemed like it should be trying to destroy it.
Humans and monsters living in peaceful coexistence? With no hatred or horror? Where she and Nick could be together with no one ruining their beautiful fiction? Where one of them didn't need to get the short end of the stick? Where they could be with Vivian?
The meat golem didn't believe in a Heaven for her, but that was the closest she could get.
It took a few moments for Jane to realize what had happened, pick the chalk back up, and try to act like that had never happened. Luckily the two teens seemed to understand this. The only acknowledgment it got was Toru lightly chuckling, though about something else. "This place is nuts," the Quirk User explained, "It's like Mach and me entered a time machine into a dark past or something." She said with no deliberate intention to insult.
Even as Machi was telling Toru how that wasn't the kind of thing you should say, Jane had already been writing out her reply. Yeah, that sounds about right.
A cheerful "Ha!" from no seen lips racked another tally for Toru on the nonexistent scoreboard between the redhead and the girl whose hair color was unknowable. Please tell me more about your realm. Jane wrote as she spun her other hand repeatedly on its wrist in a "continue on" gesture.
That led Machi to resume explaining certain features of her Realm, or at least it's Japan. Jane was in truth only half listening to what the held head revealed to her. A few of the bits she could recall upon reflection were things like how demi-humans called "snow women" existed, how vampires got monthly blood packs from the government, how her math teacher was a succubus, and how she often brought up a human teacher. The bulk of her mental space was devoted to diving more into her primary impressions of the realm being described, how it sounded like a really great place for herself and Nick.
Such thoughts were strengthened when she saw the human leave his bedroom and head into the kitchen. The sound of the sink being turned on suggested he either didn't see the body with an endless inferno sprouting at the neck or he was simply too tired to care.
That notion filled Jane with a tiny bit of levity, which helped somewhat distract her from a growing thought. Truthfully, there was only one thing she felt like didn't make it sound perfect, though that honest feeling made her feel something like shame in her stolen stomach. A part of her wanted to just ask the question point blank, but she couldn't summon forth the will to do so. She didn't want to risk hurting this sweet young woman's feelings. Instead, she decided to ask smaller questions and just hope she triggered the reveal of what she truly wanted to know. The meat golem waited patiently until Machi stopped talking and asked her if she had any questions.
You said these demis are rare in your realm?
"Uh-huh," Machi said, "Maybe not even one percent of the total population. Not sure. Never really looked at any hard numbers. But yeah, pretty rare. For example, there are only three dullahans in the entire—" The visible Japanese schoolgirl suddenly stopped as she noticed Jane close her hands and breathe in deeply. As she did so, her left hand once again played over with the frayed stitches on her right without conscious thought.
Jane hadn't noticed Machi had paused. 'Got it in one,' she said within her own mind. That had been what she wanted to know, how many headless horsemen were in this realm of hers. Her happiness at it being a low number was matched by her disappointment that it was more than one.
The dullahan decided it was time to get to the heart of Jane's issues, at least a little bit. But she realized something. Toru probably shouldn't be here for that. What was likely to be discussed was beyond personal and the invisible girl didn't read the Research. Machi didn't want to make it too obvious to avoid arousing Jane's suspicions so instead of flat out asking Toru to leave, she merely sent her a look that she hoped conveyed her unspoken message. She knew she was taking something of a gamble. Toru didn't seem to grasp much in the way of subtlety. As was often the case, Machi wished she could see her new friend's face.
There was a few seconds of pause. Toru exclaimed with an "Oh!" whose emotional motivation was difficult to pinpoint. "I gotta use the bathroom!" She said eagerly. Afterwards she walked over to the windowsill and got Machi's head-pillow.
"Wait," Machi wondered out loud, hoping this was part of some kind of ruse, "Weren't you just in the bathroom a little while ago to wash that flour off of you?"
"I didn't have to go then!" Toru whined as he placed the head-pillow and head on the table. The dullahan was once again unsure if the Quirk User was being sincere or not.
Both Machi and Jane blinked at the floating schoolgirl's uniform as it left the room. It wasn't until a few seconds after doing so that one of them broke the silence. "So…" Machi began, "I've noticed that you've been flinching whenever I say my species' name. Dullahan." Another shudder from the meat golem proved Machi's point. "Why do you—uh, not like hearing that word?" she asked, both certain and rife with uncertainty.
The certainty came from how she already knew the answer to that question thanks to her reading the Research for this mission. But following Toru's sage words from earlier, it's hard to have a real conversation, strike up a real friendship, when you act like you already know everything about them. However, that made the uncertainty all the stronger. She wasn't sure what to do with that knowledge. The dullahan had to hope that Jane would start to offer some small pieces of the truth so they could have a full dialogue about it.
To Machi's dread, Jane was being tight lipped, or rather tight-slated, about the answer. Her eyes of different colors had a bit of distanced look to them, purple and silver suggesting no hints of her exact emotions. She hadn't even moved her chalk towards her slate. Just like that Machi was left feeling helpless, even more so than just being a head sitting on a pillow usually caused. The dullahan was stuck between a rock and a hard place. She didn't want to reveal the full truth of the omni-verse due to Jane's questionable mental state, but now that Toru had left she couldn't count on any wildcard options to loosen any words from Jane's board. She cursed her inability to plan this stuff out!
But to the dullahan's immeasurable relief, another wildcard option did appear. One she could see. A tired looking human, carrying two glasses of water from the kitchen.
"Jane," Nick began, "I couldn't help but overhear what you were talking about."
He handed one glass to Jane, who took it with the same hand that held her chalk. "How about I tell her instead?" he asked with a weary yet gentle smile on his weasel-like lips. The meat golem looked up at Nick (a rarity), gave him a grateful smile, and nodded.
The human detective then turned his attention to Machi and showed her the other glass of water in his hand. It took her a few seconds to realize he was offering her a drink. Surprised, she nodded her head, not wanting to reject his hospitality. The most startling thing about it was how he offered her, a monster from another Realm, a glass to begin with. Showing a look of uncertainty mingled with equal resolve, Nick carefully brought the rim of the glass to Machi's lips and very slowly tipped the glass to allow the gradual travel of water into a mouth that could easily be blocked without even trying. As nervous as his face seemed, his hand was steady, a by-product of both the Day and Night Wars. He waited until roughly half the partially filled glass was drained before taking it away.
Looking pleased at his efforts, Nick then wiped the dullahan's lips before beginning. "So, how much do you know about certain monsters from around here?" he asked.
A pained look crossed Machi's face as she bit back the truth for a more palatable fib. "N—not much…" she looked away ashamed.
Nick looked at her for a second unsure. "Well…anyway," he coughed. "Monsters here got…uh…quirks to them unique to each type. Meat golems are no different. One of their quirks is that sometimes they end up in a state they call—" he paused, starching his hairy chin with his hand as he struggled to remember the precise term he needed to impart. "They call it—uh…um—what was it agi—it's on the tip of my—"
"The…the Green?" Machi ventured.
"Oh yeah, the Green!" Nick proclaimed proudly with a finger snap. A second later he turned to Jane, his confidence already withered. "Uh, it is called 'the Green,' right Jane?"
A look of bewilderment on the meat golem's face was erased by a proud smirk that flashed as she put down the emptied glass in her hand and wrote. That's what I call it, anyway.
"Fair enough," Nick said, before turning back to Machi, who's face hadn't changed. "Anyway, there was this one time, almost a year ago, when Jane entered the Green. And, well…she lost control." The human and meat golem exchanged looks, not knowing that the dullahan knew exactly what they hadn't said. How Jane had almost accidentally killed Nick while in the Green. Another reason to not reveal all she knew. How do you bring that up in a first dialogue? "A—after that," Nick resumed, his voice a little chunkier than it previously had been, as Jane looked away in shame, "Jane decided to go back to her…home to find out some stuff about herself. And while she was there, she had some…trouble with some headless horsemen who called themselves the Dullahans."
"What kind of trouble?" asked Machi, knowing she wouldn't have to fib for much longer, hoping that smoothed out the unnatural look that cropped up onto her face once again.
Again, Nick waited a moment or two before answering. "The worst kind of trouble," he said vaguely. "They hurt her…they hurt her very badly." His voice sounded colder than before. One thing Machi truly didn't know was Nick's reaction when Jane told him about her ordeals in Arizona. He had only found out very recently so his emotions were fresh. There was an overpowering urge to take care of the Dullahans still riding around where his girlfriend had been created. His imagination ran dark. At least until he felt Jane's hand reach for his own and gently rub the fingers with her own. He smiled at the gesture.
Machi didn't want to burst the little bubble of happiness the couple had created, so she waited until they released hands and returned their gaze back to her. Though they couldn't see it, her pointer fingers were being taped together in the kitchen. She still didn't do well being the center of attention. Regardless, she willed herself to speak. "I've, uh, heard how nasty they can be. I have seen what dullah—uh, I mean headless horsemen do to humans who they turn." A sincere shiver crested its way across the skin of her face.
Jane had a look of sympathy. That had been the most horrifying thing she had ever seen, and she had easy access to mirrors.
"How do you know what they do?" asked Nick, sensing something that didn't quite add up. The confused stare looking up from Machi's big blue eyes was so cute it canceled out how odd it felt to be talking to head without anything below the chin, not even a neck. It also made him pause. "Uh—what I mean is…how can you know what they do if you aren't from here? You said you had 'seen it,' but how could you? How could you see it?"
Machi suddenly felt like all the breath had been robbed from the lungs in the other room. She chided herself for being so sloppy! This was one of the many reasons why she hated lying! But tried to push that down as she considered some plausible answers to that question. The effort took her longer than she would have preferred, and she didn't doubt that the difficulty of her efforts were as transparent as Toru's skin. Eventually though, she thought of one. "Well, y—you see, before coming here, the Society sent probes to—" she paused, realizing that these two from the 1950s might need more clarity to understand, "—Those are little flying machines that collect visual and audio data from a place." They nodded. "Anyway, the Society sent some to see how things were. You—you know, to figure out how to handle talking to them so they might join them. And they recorded an example of a du—headless horseman turning a human." She shuddered.
Wads of saliva gathered due to her tenseness were swallowed across the room as Machi waited with bated breath to see if what was hopefully the last lie she would need to tell worked. The greatest reason to hope it would was that it was at least somewhat true. The Society had indeed sent probes to do what Machi said they had for the exact reason given. It was just that those probes hadn't been how she had seen how headless horsemen turned humans. She hoped it would be enough.
Nick ran what he just heard through his mind. Given what little he heard about this Society, that made sense. Though it wasn't perfect, he had developed fairly good skills at detecting lairs. And what Machi said didn't have the feel of a complete deception. The Society did have access to technologies with no foundation here. And if you wanted to go to a new place with unknown intentions you would of course want to get the lay of the land before you ever set foot down on the foreign soil. At the same time, his finely honed detective senses were tingling something fierce. It might not have been a complete lie, but it wasn't the complete truth either. It was something in between the two. His instincts were fumbling with something his conscious thought hadn't quite pieced together yet. Though he felt bad about what he was about to do, he felt like it was a necessary evil.
"What did you see?" asked Nick. He noticed Machi stare at him confused. "Uh…I mean, how did the headless horseman turn something? What exactly happens during that?" The scared look on the head on the table sent his way made him feel like he had kicked a puppy.
A loud hiss came from the couch. He turned to see Jane writing on her chalk slate. What the hell, Nick!? Why would you ask her to relive what she saw? Jane erased the last message with the heel of her hand, but the edges of the words were still there. Thankfully they did nothing more than form a crude kind of border for the newest communication. She doesn't need to prove anything! It's bad enough seeing it once!
The human made an attempt at a defense of his inquiry, but the only result was a sputtering rambling of half-formed sentences. Thankfully for everyone present, another voice cut him off.
"It—it's fine, Miss Stitch," Machi said, a little happy that Jane had come to her defense. "I—I don't mind telling Mr. Moss what I…uh, saw if he really wants to know." And while that wasn't strictly speaking true, it wasn't as much of a lie as it would have been before this conversation started. In the dullahan's mind, this would sort of even the scales. She had been lying to them this entire time. They deserved some real honesty.
Machi took a deep swallow as she attempted to gather her nerves and recall the precise progression of atrocities. "W-well, first they—Uh, the...headless horseman, I mean—they made the men get on their knees. Their shoulders slumped, most of their heads tilted forward. One of them—the headless horseman—drew a sword. It—it had fire all around it. Like a snake. Always moving and shifting." The dullahan swallowed a few times.
"A-and with that sword, with the first guy, he—he—" Machi found her voice caught in her throat. "You—you know, it's kinda funny. Before I read—I mean, I saw what happened next, I didn't think of it. But it should have been obvious." A few chuckles devoid of humor left her lips. "I mean, of course they'd cut his head off! That's why they are headless horsemen!" Again, Machi laughed, but in a very brittle way.
Both Nick and Jane winced at her reaction. The human in particular felt terrible.
"The head," Machi continued, "rolled away. Going thump as it did on the planks. The headless horseman picked it up, showing everyone. All his neighbors, his friends and family. Then it was set on fire, the whole thing going up in flames, even as the headless horseman held it!" She screeched before swallowing again. Her vision was getting blurry. "It—it all burned away so fast! Like coal! All the skin and hair and other stuff! The wind took it away, blowing all the black grit away! Soon there was only his skull left!"
"Lis—listen," Nick said limply, "you can stop. I believe that you—"
"And then the skull changed!" Machi exclaimed, not hearing Nick's words. "Lines started to blaze all over the bone, craving themselves into odd patterns to mark how he wasn't human anymore! How they had taken everything from him because they wanted to, because they could!"
Machi's voice was getting hoarse and she couldn't see anymore. Tears welled up. And her hands were in the other room. The room around her became a watercolor painting. "The dead—dead bodies that had been kneeling the whole time stood up! B—but they weren't dead bodies anymore. They were headless horsemen—dullahans—like me! And they rode off with those monsters that had done something so evil! They ruined lives and families! And they acted like they were giving them a gift! They had cheated and ruined their lives!"
Outside, the headless horseman from before was heard laughing up a storm once again. The dullahan teenager found this to be the straw that broke the camel's back.
The human P.I. felt lower than pond scum as he watched the teenage girl devolve into a series of thoughts too charged by emotion to be smoothly connected by a logical through line other than true despair.
"You have every right to hate and fear me, Miss Stitch!" Machi exclaimed. "What they did to you is unforgivable! I couldn't believe what they had done to you, and him, and his son, and everyone else! It was—!"
The inferno that had nothing to do with the fire in the other room coming from Machi found itself snuffed out from a single example of small stimuli.
A gentle brushing against her watery eyes, by something papery and cold. Something that wiped away the tears that had refused to slide down her cheeks and stain her pillow. Something that had a soft touch but one that suggested restrained power.
For the briefest of moments, confusion overpowered sorrow and shame. Machi blinked a few times before she clearly saw what had happened. Jane had wiped away the tears with a single curled finger. A finger that could be forced through a man's chest. She had been using the pointer finger of her right hand. As it wiped her eyes, a faint tremor rippled.
That same finger wiped away a few more building tears before Jane deemed that Machi's vision wasn't too badly obscured by them. After wiping said finger along her clothing, she started to write. For every few words written, she would briefly gaze back at her.
Machi stared at the meat golem in confusion as she wrote on her chalk slate. Those mismatched eyes had looked at her with such concern for her even as her right hand would still flinch, a spasm of physiology one part persistent muscle memory of a woman long dead and another part trauma endured by Jane Stitch and Jane Stitch alone. Even as those vivid memories played themselves like a film reel on nerves in both hand and head, her look of compassion hadn't left.
After what seemed like ages, Jane finally showed Machi her thoughts on the dullahan's thoughts about her ordeal.
You have no reason to feel responsible or guilty for what happened. It was horrible, but you did nothing wrong. I'll admit I didn't know what to make of you at first, and I was a little afraid, but I never hated you. How could I? I literally just met you.
The dullahan chuckled, this time with some light sincerity, as Jane wrote a new message. I don't think you could be like that gang. You're too sweet. Nothing like those creeps. And you might be the one monster I've ever met that has more easily triggered self-loathing than I do. Believe me, that's not easy to do.
Machi laughed a little as Jane erased her slate and wrote again. You might be the same species, she had paused, before adding, generally speaking. But you're not the same. You might be a monster in body, but not in behavior. She showed her the slate.
Then Jane erased and wrote again. I've learned that's what truly matters, Machee.
Machi stared at the slate, waiting for the meat golem to scream a wordless "April Fool's" while doing jazz hands. It never came. And that broke down a dam blocking a tidal wave of laughter, full and verbose and unspoiled by negativity. Jane and Nick stared at each other in confusion. When the dullahan realized this, she forced down the giggling long enough to explain that there were no E's in her name. Apparently her name in English ended in an "I" instead.
She and Jane completely missed the unacknowledged implication that she didn't know how to spell her own name in English despite having spoken it quite fluidly the entire time in this house. But Nick hadn't.
That jogged a few faded memories from earlier in the evening loose. Ever the P.I., the human began to again see a puzzle whose borders he could barely make out. He saw things that didn't add up. Then exhaustion started to tug on his eyelids.
A content silence hung in the air like new car smell for an unknown amount of time.
"Well, as nice as that was," Nick said before he uttered a loud and slightly exaggerated yawn, "some of us have got to head to bed. Only got twelve hours to burn."
Jane stood up, towering over her boyfriend by more than a head's difference, and wrote, Not for much longer, Nick. Her eyes, though possessing different colored pupils, shared a happy radiance that the human rarely saw.
That pleased him immensely. "Yeah, yeah," he admitted with a pleased small smile. "But I still wanna get a little shut-eye before Ser gets here. Goodnight Jane." The couple shared a quick kiss before he turned down the hall to his bedroom.
The meat golem returned to her seat and seemed much happier as she turned to Machi. The severed head and the woman made from corpses continued to talk for some time. The conversation didn't dive to any of the chilly depths that it had just surfaced from. There was no more talk of prejudice or horrors. It was light and casual, asking more small things to learn about the miniscule details of either the other's current life or their Realm. Things like how Jane had to wash her hands often due to always erasing her slate and how Machi did things like eat a meal or take a bath if she had to always hold her head.
At some point during their talk, Raven had appeared from seemingly nowhere and began to walk to the other side of the room. As that was happening, the discussion moved to Machi's plans for college and the dullahan saying she was determined to "get ahead" of her competition. It took Jane a few moments to realize that Machi had made a pun. Once that clicked, she started to soundlessly laugh with gusto.
So much gusto, in fact, it made both her and Machi unaware of the door to Nick's home opening. They only turned towards the opened portal when they heard footsteps. A few seconds of unsure silence followed…before being followed up by voluminous screaming.
And that was the eighth true chapter of this story! As always, I hope you liked it.
The little bit that Toru sings to herself is the second half of her section from the YouTube video "CLASS 1-A RAP CYPHER" by RUSTAGE. Once again, aside from a fun little shout out, the purpose of this is to show that this chapter is happening at the exact same time as the previous chapter.
I hope you enjoyed the little nod to Disney's version of Sleepy Hollow, featured in the 1949 animated film The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad. The headless horsemen of the City of Devils series don't laugh like this version does but it's so iconic I felt I had to include it. Lol. And it also proved to be an effective segue to Machi's musings on the monster species of this Realm most like herself.
In fact, that in and of itself segues nicely to another little quirk of this story. One day, Crossover4 came to me with an idea. He suggested that the members of the Society team should "meet" their analogues in this Realm. I was skeptical at first because I feared this would make the story too bloated and tangent-filled but after a little convincing he swayed me over to the concept. And I must thank him for that! Some of these were already planned out but others were mostly his idea. Giganta meets Pilar O'Heaven, N'Kantu sees the mummy's billboard, Drakken argues with a mad scientist, both Angua and Jack clash with the wolf-people…and now both Machi and Toru have witnessed a headless horseman and invisible man. Some of these are meatier and more vital than others, admittedly, but the point still stands. And don't worry; the remaining characters on the Society team will have a similar moment with their equivalences of this Realm. Do you like this concept?
This might be one of the longest author's notes so I'll keep this next part brief. Toru was a lot of fun to write! Between her bubbly, direct personality and the creativity of describing gestures or movements for someone who's invisible, I had more fun with her than I would have assumed at first glance.
This chapter shows the first real exploration of a topic that Ultima offers that most other crossovers don't. How would you react if people read or watched what you were from? To know that they knew of both your highest and lowest moments as if they experienced them themselves? The idea of this was largely my own and it's something I couldn't avoid thinking about. Most wouldn't be comfortable with admitting they were fiction somewhere else or that others knew so much about them. I thought of it as someone finding your most embarrassing photo album, but with the negative feelings elicited magnified many times over. Not all feel this way and some even actively research others for advantages but generally speaking beings in this new omni-verse don't like thinking about or talking about such things. What are your thoughts on this idea and how it was conveyed in this chapter?
In chapter 3's closing author's notes, I made a few allusions to a future chapter. As you can likely guess, I was referring to this one. Now you know why Jane winces at Machi, or more accurately the word "dullahan." Remember back in those author's notes for chapter three where I said the novel A Stitch in Crime added so much for me to work with? I was mainly referring to this! I honestly had just picked Machi at first because I wanted to use her for this story and I thought it would be fitting to have her being around Jane, who's greatest fear aside from electricity is fire. But it turned out that Justin Robinson ended up making these two interacting a GREAT way to give this scene the talking points it needed to have some real meat! Sometimes the stars align, I guess? Lol.
So, what do you think of the interactions between Machi and Jane, and to a lesser extent Toru? Was this enjoyable to read? Did you think the strong emotions were warranted or was it overly dramatic? Did the resolution of this feel natural to you?
On that talk, I also must once again reference the chapter 3 author's notes. Here's what I meant when I said I would be forced to spoil a piece of the City of Devils series, about Nick and Jane's relationship. They hooked up and were together for months before breaking up because Jane almost killed Nick by accident in a rage. And that is what spurs Jane to go to Arizona to face her demons and develop. As of the end of A Stitch in Crime, the two are still broken up, but it's implied they will get back together eventually. I hope they do! So, probably not having read the books, what do you think of this development and how it was conveyed in this chapter? I hope this doesn't deter you from reading the series. YOU SHOULD READ IT!
Fun fact, Machi's musings on how it should have been obvious how a headless horseman turns someone without her thinking about it matched my own. It's so obvious but I still somehow missed it! Lol
Second fun fact, Machi's reaction to learning about the headless horsemen turning people was inspired by a real life source. You know how it says she would just stare at her bedroom's wall for over an hour? Well, the basis for that came from Terry Pratchett, the author of the Discworld books. He said once he sometimes got letters from terminally ill fans of his work, who would say they hoped that Death was like his version. And that had a profound effect on him the likes of which I can't fathom.
I want to give a shout out to Crossover4 once again, because the man has this rare talent for throwing out these basic but out there things that I end up running with! Remember the jam question from chapter 2? Well, one day I asked him for something that the girls would ask Jane. I had been struggling with some fun banter between them before we got to Machi and Jane alone. He replied a few minutes later with this: "Do meat golems poop?" And all at once, I hashed out much of the conversation between these three before things got serious from that alone! Lol. Sometimes inspiration is a funny thing. Ideas can come from literally anywhere!
You might have missed this but there was a brief mention of a person called "Vivian" in Jane's thoughts. Does anyone have any guesses as to who this could be?
So, that's it for the eighth chapter of this story! Remember, if you give this chapter at least ten reviews, then you'll get chapter nine sooner! If not, then you have to wait two weeks. In the next chapter, you'll see the siren Serendipity Sargasso, a proper Society interview, and the power of the omni-versial guiding principle of irony!
Until next time, please read, REVIEW, favor, follow, spread the word, and REVIEW!