"God does not play dice with the universe. He takes it out for poker with the lads every now and then, though." - Albert Einstein

"Oh! Crawford! What a pleas..." Lara's smile faltered. "What a thing to happen."

"Can I come in?"

"God, at least take me out to dinner first."

"Can I enter your house."

Lara leaned what she believed might be seductively against the doorframe. "Well, that's a start. But if you want-"

"I know who killed Phoebe Deckard."

"Oh shit!" She scrambled madly and fell back off the doorway. "I'd have expected you to lead with that!"

Marie pushed past her. "Do you have a room we can talk about this privately?"

"Oh, come on. We're alone right now. You can tell me."

"It's an Attendant."

"...Come with me."

She beckoned in an unclear direction and made for a set of stairs at the back of the hall. "And don't think I don't know your power. Touch a thing and I'll bleed you where you stand."

Marie followed, certainly, but caught herself tucking her arms in. "Is anyone else home?"

"Only Sinead, and she's studying."

They ascended the stairwell, and at its apex, Lara rapped on a door.

"Is someone there?" the door appeared to say, or as Marie effortlessly inferred, someone behind it.

Lara opened it. Marie suppressed an astonished blench to meet a girl who didn't look any bit like Lara at all.

"Who's this?" Sinead asked.

"Oh, this is Marie. She's a mate from work. Just in case you can hear me talking to someone, yeah, it's her."

"Can't she speak?"

"Oh, how I wish she couldn't."

"Oh, come on!" Marie smirked. "She's only kidding. The two of us are actually quite good friends."

Sinead nodded at her sister. "I rather see what you mean."

"I can't win with you people."

Taking the opportunity for an aside, Lara put her hands in her pockets; "You still need help with homework later?"

"If it's alright."

"Sure."

"I've had a rough time of it since last Friday, so I'm pretty far behind."

"Yeah, no problem. Just let me deal with, uh," she threw a sweeping gesture Marie's way, "all this... and I'll be right there."

Sinead smiled. "Thanks."

"Door open or shut?"

"Open, I don't mind."

"Sure. C'mon, Crawford."

Marie glanced back and forth between Lara and Sinead on the way out.

"So which one of you's adopted?" she whispered.

"What? You can't just ask that."

"No, I was just thinking maybe I shouldn't have been such a dick to you if you've had a hard and complicated life."

"I know you. Isn't that hard enough? Anyway, mum got around a lot when I was, like, two, and that's the long and short of it. After Sinead she figured two kids was too much of a handful to raise by herself, and then she went and met my dad."

"So she's your half-sister, then."

Lara opened another door, this one to her own room. "That makes her sound lesser. And what's more, a lot of people get this idea that because me and her barely look related, that somehow it's weird that I stick up for her as much as I do when she gets picked on."

Marie took the invitation. "Common occurrence?"

Lara faltered, before closing the door behind her. "You joined in."

"I mean I sort of heard some people from your school say something at sports outings. I just figured it was an indirect dig at you, because she suffers the untenable misfortune of being related to you."

"And that's it?"

"...Yes."

She stepped away from the door. "No other reason?"

"What? What are you getting at?"

"Marie... Sinead's been living with schizophrenia for three or four years now."

Perhaps more than any of Lara's threats or jeers this caught Marie off guard. "Oh... I'm sorry. I had no idea. Is it... bad?"

"Better now that she's taking something for it. Most days there's next to nothing. That, or she's not telling me, but I respect her privacy. But the combination of that and getting picked on for it was... well, it was a lot. She's proactive, though, talked it out with her teachers. Now she studies from home."

"Well, I'm glad to hear it."

"But all this is a lot to say I'm setting a ground rule. No telepathy in the house. I don't know if she has the same potential we had, but if she picks up on that she's going to think she's backsliding and that her medication isn't doing a damn thing. Alright?"

"...Alright."

"You don't seem too sure."

"Well, this is the longest we've talked one-on-one without you sarcastically making mention of the possibility of either making out with me or slitting my throat. It's kind of unsettling."
Lara laughed. Disingenuously, of course - this was a more standard 90's anime villainess affair. Or perhaps that was genuine, which Marie found even stranger to consider. "Oh, I promise it won't happen again."

Being quite so afraid of having completely and utterly exploded, Bytch was actually rather pleased to find herself in one piece. Although she had been more or less expecting that once she was dead, she wouldn't have any problems. Life was generally good, except for the problems. Always with the problems!

What wasn't a problem was that she found herself in the living room of a decently luxurious inner-city villa. What was a problem is that it probably wasn't hers. What was also a problem is that probably everybody she knew wanted to kill her? She disregarded that. Small goals were the real key to long-term change, she'd deal with that later. Or die, which similarly would alleviate the problem.

She heard footsteps from another room and dove behind the couch. The sound of her striking the floor was enough to rouse an utterly abhorrent beast from his sleep. He was very recognizably an Incubator, but his growth must have been stunted, and his rings were missing. He bolted toward her and hopped around frantically. "Mokyu!" He spoke, apparently incapable of telepathy. Did that mean he didn't have a soul, either? "Mokyu, mokyu!"

Wow. She hadn't heard anyone say such a thing in some time.

"Is everything alright?" asked the apparent owner of the footsteps, now accelerating slightly into the room. From around the corner of the couch, she caught and lifted the mutant. Bytch couldn't see who she was, or where she put him, but she did find herself scooting further back to the opposite side, for safe measure.

"I think the sound came from outside."

Her creature disliked that, and tried to protest.

"Well, nothing's fallen over. And nobody else is home right now!"

He continued to protest.

"Unless Felicia's back already, but I haven't seen her around. Have you?"

Her pet very audibly pouted. She put him back down.

"I'll tell you what. Why don't I get you something to eat?"

"Mokyu."

"But only if you stop barking at random noises. Otherwise you won't get anything until dinner. Okay?"

"Mokyu!"

Bytch caught the back of whoever claimed ownership of the terrible little thing leaving the room with said T.L.T. riding upon her shoulder. He returned her gaze and hopped down, tripped with a caught claw in the seam of her pink jacket, barely landed on his feet, and scampered towards Bytch. His owned smiled over her other shoulder, but still left the room.

Had she seen him?

No. Definitely not. Impossible.

The kitten, however, looked Bytch right in the eye and whispered, "Mokyu."

"Mokyu," she retorted, head held high. "Oh, that sounds weird. Forgive me, I'm getting used to this throat. This throut. This threwt. Ooh-err."

"Mokyu!"

"See, when I say it, it sounds more like Mækiu. Oh, I like the sound of that. Do you mind if I use that? Feels very natural to say."

"M...okyu?"

"Thank you." Mækiu grinned, before being pulled out of time and place again.

Lara threw herself onto her bed and landed squarely in what she believed to be a melodramatically seductive position. "This is where the magic happens."

"And when you say magic, do you mean a lie you're showing off to a gullible crowd to make yourself look cool, or...?"

"No, Idiot. The real kind of magic."

"Okay. So something you wanted to an unhealthy degree as a teenager and will throw away the rest of your life trying to find satisfaction in. Got it."

Marie took a seat regardless. She refrained from pointing out how she could see that not very much of anything had ever happened on this bed.

"So," Lara mumbled. "Smug potshots aside, the suspense is killing me. Who, if I might be so proverbially inclined, done it?"

Marie crossed her legs. "Selene Antonio."

"Interesting. But seriously, who killed her?"

"I'm telling you, she killed Phoebe!"

"Why?!"

To Marie's knowledge, her recent enlightenment was not common knowledge. Lara would be none the wiser if she projected only human-speed thought processes and took the next few hundred microseconds to think of a convincing answer.

"It was an accident. She'd chipped Phoebe's gem earlier but, being negligent and - might I stress - literally, like, fourteen, thought nothing of it at the time. That evening it must have spread into a crack and broken."

"This whole thing," Lara clarified, "this case we've been looking into for months, that's been compelling us not to trust each other... you're saying it was manslaughter?"

"I'm sure this must seem like a bit of an anticlimax."

Lara reclined. "And somehow, a relief at the same time."

"If I might ask, why did you take on the Deckard case?"

She shrugged. "If I assumed responsibility, it was going to make me too popular among the other Attendants of the Deep Light to unseat, lest my... methods stray too far from convention. Thanks for that, by the way."

"I did it for her. Not for you."

"Ha! Don't expect me to believe that. How's she going to pay you back?"

"Can you take this seriously? Francis is dead because of this case, dammit."

"Is she? Oh well, I already thanked you once."

"There you go again! Making this all one big joke!"

"Alright, Queen Vic. You're not amused? Alright! Algoddamnright! Full disclosure: I'm glad that leaves us with only one casualty of the political fallout from this brouhaha. I expected a lot more. Good to know that in these uncertain times, Fearnley and I can restrain ourselves."

"She's not the one I'm worried about."

"You know she's killed someone, right?"

"Is this about Soni-"

"This is about Sonia Vu."

"That's all one big misunderstanding."

"I know, right? She was going to be out of that pain in just a couple hours. All they needed to do was wait it out."

Marie faltered. "You seem... very sure about that."

"Obviously. Whitman may be powerful, but I don't think she can concentrate that long."

"...What?"

Lara gasped facetiously. "Did I say that out loud? Look here, Crawford. She may be all about 'the law' and 'protecting people' and calling herself 'high empathy' or whatever else, but she's a genuine scourge."

"And yet, she's your viceroy."

"We talked about this."

Marie groaned. "Your visceroy."

"Well, of course. True to form, if I was ever absent for any reason, it'd be down to her to act in my stead in the interim. And not a single person, Attendant or no, wants to see that happen. Nobody threatens me. They know what the price is."

"What's keeping her from taking your place?"

Lara scratched her chin. "Sense of duty, mostly. Not that I'd let her step up or down from the role if she wanted. Keep your friends close, Crawford. And your enemies on a very tight leash."

Of all the places to substantiate, Mækiu had started to take the fact that none of them would be underwater for granted. Oh well, she thought to herself as powerful currents threatened to tear her body to shreds. Goes to show how much she knew.

Much to her good fortune, for some value of good, and another of fortune, a powerful hand - a magical girl, in fact, if she had to guess - ripped her out of the water by the wrist and onto the bank of a canal.

She gagged and spluttered for a few seconds before the opportunity to open her eyes presented itself. Above her were two very pale young women dressed in all black. They almost resembled ghosts, which, strangely enough, had remarkably little to do with the fact that this was exactly what they were.

"Hm," the elder of the two lifted her chin ever so slightly, ever so disdainfully. "She's not what I expected."

"What was Annabelly expecting?" Her junior tipped her head to one side.

Instead of giving her the satisfaction of acknowledgement, the girl only tapped a barely-conscious Mækiu with one foot. "You. What's your name?"

"Hm?" Mækiu rubbed her eyes. "Ah! I haven't decided yet."

"What was the silly girl doing underwater?" the younger grinned.

Mækiu thought it over. "Drowning, I imagine. That's what one tends to do when underwater."

"Please excuse my little sister- no, actually. You seem even more insane than her."

"Sorry," Mækiu said, for some reason.

"Forget it, Nikki. This isn't her."

"Should Nikki put her back in the water, then?"

Her sister shrugged. "That wouldn't achieve anything."

"Yeah!" Mækiu nodded erratically. "I'm a grown woman. I'm perfectly capable of jumping back in the canal myself."

"What? Why would you want to do that?"

"I don't know why I said that actually. I think there's just a lot going on all the time."

Nobody could disagree with this.

At last, she stood up and dusted herself off. This achieved little, due to the absence of dust and abundance of rain.

"Well, I should be heading off. I can do that without exploding now, which is nice. Do either of you know a good place to get something to eat?"

No answer.

"And if you do, would you be so kind as to say what it is?"

She looked around. The other two had left already.

Lara produced a notebook from atop a dresser skirting the line between antique and unrelentingly tacky. "Well, I promised you this two and a half months ago. Let me tell you a little something about the ways of the world."

Marie sat up. "What's this?"

"The All-Permeating Abyss. It's constructed some kind of treasure hunt, over the centuries. If you can say its true name, all its power - power enough to reshape the world - is yours. Can you imagine? The other Attendants deem it some kind of superstition, but what would they know? They only see what they can have in front of them right now. They don't see what holds the universe together, and they don't see what can tear it apart."

"And you think I do?"

Lara smirked. "Don't let me down."

"So how much do you know?"

"Oh, you know. A bunch of people from throughout history claim to have some deeper connection to it, like somehow they're its avatars. I don't think that's true. I don't think that if you were, you'd go around telling people about it. But... well. I've seen certain things that at least compel me to keep an open mind."

"Such as...?"

"I'd tell you if I knew more, I really would."

This was utterly and opaquely a load of crap, but Marie knew questioning it wasn't going to get her anywhere. Either Macquarie knew something and was withholding it to intimidate her, or wanted her to think that.

"I've said before, we don't know how many other entities are on its level. Could be just one. Could be thousands. There could be a whole world of universe-controlling immortals out there. But it's the one who's made herself the most visible, and it's the one offering up this power. For all I care the rest can just go and... well, I guess an immortal by definition can't die. Forget about it."

"Right. The treasure hunt."

"Exactly! Supposedly, its soul was shattered into dozens of pieces. I think the idea is that if someone were to collect all of them, they could stoke something called the Deep Light and bring enlightenment to the universe. But details on that are hazy as anything. Presumably whatever power on high is out there saying all this doesn't want to talk about it. Besides! There's only one part worth hunting, and that's the name."

"Why the name?"

"Don't you get it? A name is what gives you definition, shape. A name is what takes all this... you-ness, out there in the universe, and decides what is a part of you and what isn't."
"Why does that... matter, though?"

"Oh, for..." Lara sighed. "Look. Maybe you'd call just your body yourself, right? But if you needed a prosthetic limb of some kind, that would also be you, right? Well, what if you take it off? Is that still you? What about an organic part of your body? If you take that off is it still you? Is your dead skin or cut hair you?"

"Yeah, I know all this already. We define ourselves by our connections to other things."

"Okay. Is the street you walk on you? Is the table you eat at you? You're clearly acting on all these things."

"Right. Well, they'd be a lot less me than, to use your example, a prosthetic."

"Really? Isn't a prosthetic just fulfilling a bodily function you can't quite do without it? Look at this notebook. I use it to remember things I can't just keep in my head. Is it a prosthetic brain?"

"I get it! I know the point you're trying to make!" Marie waved her off. "I've just come to accept that you-ness is vague and impossible to pinpoint, and that's that."

"Wrong!"

"What?"

"That's where the name comes in. By naming something, you decide the totality of what it does and does not represent. You give it form. Even in magical girls, having names limits our power, but makes it easier to control. The All-Permeating Abyss has endless power, but endlessness doesn't have a shape. It doesn't do you any good in the real world."

Marie sighed. "I really really hate to admit this, but I completely understand the logic to something you're telling me."

With a head of long, wet hair, and utterly soaked clothes, there certainly would have been better places to appear than a snowy night some way below zero. The heat of teleportation certainly caused the water surrounding her body to kick up enough of a stink to steam-burn her, but the cold immediately slapped each individual molecule upside the head and told them to sit back down. No sooner than her own brutal steaming was she soaked once more. Not long after, her hair and skin would be flaking off in sheets of ice.

Thankfully, she was offered the privacy of a dark alley between a Thai restaurant with exactly one staff member who could pronounce the name of its dishes and a real estate office so dilapidated one had to question if they even owned themselves. She snapped her fingers, and every drop of rain upon her was cast into a whirlwind and thrown against the walls in a burst of heat and light.

Two girls, each looking on the cusp of adulthood, strolled past. The one speaking had a thick American accent.

"That's why I've been thinking. If I can't get through her shield, what other- Delaney? Delaney."

The girl she was speaking to had stopped by the alley and smiled at Mækiu. She had a disarming Canadian cadence, but the rest of her demeanor kept Mækiu on edge.

"Just a moment, love. It looks like we've been watched."

Slowly she crept toward Mækiu. The American wandered back to her side and shook her head. "Some nobody. I don't recognize her."

"I really just got here," Mækiu protested.

"See? She's just some wandering tramp. Although..." she looked back and forth between her and the Canadian. "Do you have a cousin or something?"

"Not that I know of." The Canadian's grin widened. Mækiu noticed a knife in her fist.

"Look, I really don't know what you two want from me. Is this a mugging?"

The American huffed. "Do you know anything about magic?"

"What? Magic? What do I look like to you, a kid?"

Her assailants relaxed.

"Sorry for the trouble," the Canadian admitted, not looking the part.

"So, for instance, the name 'Incubator' wouldn't mean anything to you?"

Mækiu shook her head. "Never heard of him."

"...That's funny. I never said it was a 'him'."

The Canadian pinned Mækiu to the ground in an instant, and drove the knife deep into her left eye. She howled in agony, couldn't think through the sensation of the knife being drawn out and driven in over and over and over again.

She played dead. Not by choice, but by the excruciating paralysis of shock. Once they started patting her down for a soul gem, she willed it over into the next circle of her personal Tartaros.

"And then there's the Brass Knight! Everyone calls him an old superstition, but there's no way that can be true, right? I mean, think of all the writers who'd never heard of each other, all writing that same longform poem!"

"I don't get how that proves anything."

"I see. So you're another nonbeliever."

"Oh, no. I mean I've met the guy."

For the first time in all the years they'd known each other, Marie caught a glimpse of discomfiture on Lara's features.

"You're not toying with me, are you?"

Marie smirked. "Like you said, I'd at least take you out to dinner first."

"But... how? Why?"

"I don't know, and I don't want to know. Respectively."

"What did it do?"

"Not a whole lot. Crawl out of some black fog, spout some riddles at nobody in particular, and leave without elaborating on anything."

"Oh. Right, okay! So, like, usual elder god shit."

"I don't know, maybe. Is there a usual?"

"Good question. I wouldn't want to establish some kind of unfortunate stereotype about the cosmos's ancient puppetmasters. Wouldn't want them to lodge some kind of complaint in the fabric of reality."

"Weren't you saying something that actually mattered like a minute ago?"

"Was I? Doesn't sound like me. Oh, yes! They say that underneath its thick hide is its mechanical core. The thing which dictates all of its actions. Imagine that, the future already certain, already written into the machine! Can you imagine what that kind of technology might be capable of?"

"I think I literally cannot."

"Ah!" Lara whined in an accent bordering on the inexplicably and unplaceably European. "My girl Craufordt... she is very beautiful woman, but, oh, she is perhaps not so smart. C'mon, man. All the information pertaining to the future is written into that. It's gotta be a solution to free will, and entropy, and who knows whatever else!"

"That can't be right. It can do magic stuff, like telepathy, and teleportation, and stuff. So it's gotta have a soul, right?"

"If it doesn't, then it's a monumental achievement. Probably the most powerful enchanted object in existence. If it does, then there you go! Like I say, free will done! Solved! Wrapped up! It's not implied by just having a soul! But that's not all."

"You're not going to wait for me to say 'do go o-'"

"There is... this poem. I take it you're already a fan of it."

"What makes you think that?"

"Well, you intercepted one of its components I ordered from Germany a couple of months ago."

Marie straightened up. "How did you know that was me?"

"Because I left you the contact details lying on the ground at the time. I'd heard that you knew a lot about what magical girls are capable of, but almost none of our history. So I figured getting you in on our biggest mystery would be enough to rope you in. And now that you've solved Deckard's death and resolved whatever political tensions might have started up if it went unsolved any longer, I'm sure a lot of people would be glad to hear you're taking her place."

"What? I didn't agree to that."

"Okay, not the 'being dead' bit."

"That's... piss off. Back to the poem."

"Right! It's in fifteen fragments, and hidden in one of them has to be the name of the Abyss."

"How can you be so sure?"

"It's our only contact with it. Me and a few other... believers, shall we say, have been trying to recover as much of it as we can. T.K.? A friend of mine in Berlin. Answers directly to our empress herself."

"You have an empress?"

"Yeah, Crawford. Sure. What's more, we have a goddamn puzzle that could unlock the secrets of the universe, but care about the specific titles the Attendant hierarchy uses instead."

Marie didn't say anything to that. Lara was bound to continue rabbiting on anyway.

"As I was saying," Lara continued to rabbit on anyway, "there are still quite a few of them nobody's found. We're keeping an eye out for them, all over the world. Here, have a dud." She ripped a sheet of paper from her notebook and passed it to Marie. "I've gone through this one under every possible literary lens. Nothing. But still, enlightening. They all tend to be. Take this copy, and if you happen to come across any more, try to compare them. Maybe assessing their similarities will make spotting the odd one out easier."

Mækiu was surprised by three things. That is not to say she was surprised exclusively by them - in fact she was surprised by more or less everything. But only three of those things were the point.

The first was that somehow, the gash across her eye was so vicious that no amount of healing magic seemed to return sight to it. The second was that despite this, the raw energy of teleportation this late was enough to cauterize it instantly. The third, and perhaps most shocking of all, was where she ended up.

The first and most obvious feature of the room she was in was a makeshift bomb. Dangling above it by a concerningly thin rope was a small metal safe, gently swaying back and forth. She crawled back in a panic and bumped into something. At a glance, two unconscious men - the elder dressed like some kind of don, the younger with the obvious build of his bodyguard - both bound in spider's silk. To her side was a tape-reel computer, with a grief seed somehow driven in so deep on its point that the reels have jammed. To her other side, a small television, before which stood a half-dressed girl of about fourteen or fifteen, waving an antenna around with one hand and holding a can of paint in the other, with webbing running from her ajar mouth to the lid of the paint can. She caught a glimpse of Mækiu and double-took.

"Thaht'ch nyew..." she mumbled.

Mækiu scrambled up and bowed profusely. "Sorry for the intrusion. I assure you, I can explain my circumstance."

"Hiii! Thaht'ch good. Hwee can't eckshplain..." she gestured around with the antenna arm. "Mutch of ennyshing."

"Mækiu. By the way." She pointed at herself. "And yo- I'm sorry, but can we do something about that bomb? I really don't like it just sitting there."

"Hyou can put heet shumwear elch."

"Somewh- Oh! Somewhere else. No, that's not what bothers me about it. Shouldn't you get rid of it, or something?"

She knelt and firmly tapped the side of the television. No result. "Heet nevahr eckshploads until laytahr."

It took Mækiu some puzzling to understand what she was saying, but she felt like not having a spiderweb in her mouth would hardly make the girl any more comprehensible. Never explodes until later? Never explodes until later?

Oh! This girl must have developed timeloop fever. It's been known to happen - just as cabin fever is a state of psychological unrest caused by confinement in space, so too can the same occur in time. King George III of England had it, even though it was naturally more common among the magically inclined.

"Well, it really adds to the room anyway. How many loops have you been at this for now?"

"Loopch? Oh. Hwee losht count." The girl slowed, waved the paint arm around frantically for quiet, and held the antenna very still. It was very clearly picking something up now.

That something happened to be Mækiu. The precise electromagnetic frequency the antenna amplified happened, at its exact location and angle, to emanate from the more volatile of Mækiu's powers and resonate back and forth like the interference by which a Theremin functions. She exploded too soon to control, stop, or slow. Where it had sent her was as uncertain as ever. Perhaps moreso, given the unexpected circumstance. Wherever she was, the shockwave of her departure snapped the rope, crushed the bomb, and cut short the girl's two-hundred and seventy-sixth life.

"So what do you say, Crawford?"

"To what?"

"Well, I'm getting you in on the hunt for omnipotence. Isn't that enough to win your trust?"

"What, to act as your diplomat?"

"Of course! You'd be good at it."

"You didn't bring me all the way out here just to beg me to be kind of okay with your shitty radfem terror group."

"Aren't you tired of the way humans run the world, though? Don't their ideas of sensibility and maturity make you sick? Aren't you deeply disappointed that Monopoly is seen as a more 'grown-up' game than Snakes & Ladders?"

Marie blinked. "Hold on, I think you've skipped a step in your logic or twelve."

"Do I have to spell it out? Snakes & Ladders originates in ancient India and represents the path to enlightenment. When we're kids, there's a point we're expected to give up on that and care more about postcapitalistic hedonism."

"Well, that's the stupidest thing I've ever head, but alright. Go on."

"My point is, we've become people this world isn't built for. And I think we should change that."

"Nice try. Next time rehearse an argument to use on someone who's actually getting comfortable with their life."

"Comfortable? Come on! What, are you finding routine in washing the dishes and cleaning the floor of your apartment while all your flatmates go out and earn enough to get by?"

"Actually, yes."

"Bull... shit! Face it, Crawford. You were raised your whole life for bigger and better things."

"I know. I just don't care."

"Goodness me. You act like you're so enlightened now, but because you dress like half as much as the lesbian you are, but-"

"I'm not a lesbian."

"...What?"

"These broad categorisations of sexuality are social pigeonholes which have basically no relation to my actual physical lived experience at all. Don't try to pick out some buzzword to fit me."

"And they've got you reading feminist theory, too. Freaking hell."

"What can I say? I'm enjoying it more than I expected."

"Well, is there anything I can say to make you take me seriously?"

"Oh no, I will! I'm going to go home now, read this, and consider your offer. I'm not being disingenuous, either. I'm going to mull it over sincerely. But if I were you," Marie stood up, folded the poem away into her pocket, and made for the door. "I wouldn't be terribly optimistic."

It had long since come to pass that Mækiu had become accustomed to the worsening of her own distortion. This was different, though. This was the product of some kind of feedback strong enough to... disconnect her from whatever kind of sense still applied.

She was on a small island in the middle of an endless sea, and this time that wasn't just some metaphor for Earth. The sun was setting behind her, somewhere beyond a patch of trees. How was the serenity? Well, one would be inclined to presume it was infinite.

A fair-haired young woman swam aimlessly back and forth along the shallows. Once the light had passed far enough over the island to no longer reach her, she emerged and trudged to the shore. A red and black coat extended from some unseen soul gem and around her body. Mækiu frowned. This didn't seem like the kind of place any soul should roam. She ran down an old cobblestone path to greet her.

As she got closer she could hear the girl sing to herself:

"I'm skidding out,
I can't help yourself - I skid in doubt,
I've dealt with yourself - I tricked hell out,
I'm all Helter-Skelter; I'm on that-"

The two locked eyes, both immediately froze in place.

"Hey!" Mækiu tried. "Hey, I was wondering if you could help me out here? I think I'm lost."

Tears welled up in the other's eyes. She suppressed a seizure of relieved laughter and shook her head. "Me too."

"Really? Oh, forget it, then. I'll go figure it out somewhere else."

"Wait!"

Mækiu waited.

"You're the first person I've seen in four hundred years. How... how did you get here?"

"A series of terrible and convoluted life choices, really. Oh, here specifically? I don't know. It just sort of happened, and I'll probably end up leaving soon too in much the same fashion."

"Where? You can't leave this place. I've tried. There's nowhere you can go."

"Well I'm going to end up going somewhere, I'm afraid. Although now I'm not sure where that could even be. Where are we now?"

"This is Starcrossed Place. It's something I dreamed of, long ago. I wish I dreamed a little bigger, now."

Mækiu couldn't think of anything to say to that. The idea of a dream world made her shift her weight from leg to leg uneasily. The last thing she needed was to be in a place where anything was possible.

After a pause, she extended her hand and recited her name.

The girl took it and shook. "Please, wherever you're going to go, let me come with you. I can't... I can't stay here any longer."

"Gladly. Although I can't promise it's better than here."

Still holding onto her hand, Mækiu welcomed her dice-roll passage to another place and time. Searing heat overcame her body. The girl cried out in pain and pulled her hand back, just missing the moment of synapse and watching the first person she'd met in centuries evanesce forever.

Alone once again, she fell to her knees and screamed.

Marie was on her way out when she ran into Sinead again, walking up the stairs with a bowl of chips in hand.

"Want one?"

Marie raised a hand. "Actually, I was just going."

"You don't have time to eat a chip."

"Well..."

"One single chip. That's... I mean, okay. For all you know, you might have just lost out on what would have been the best individual chip in your life."

She kept walking. Marie did the same, although the missed opportunity would haunt her for hours.

Sinead rapped on Lara's door. "Hey. You said you were going to help me with my homework?"

Lara opened the door. "Right. Yeah, what is it you need help with?"

There was a large bronze machete laying on her bed.

"Is that...?" Sinead pointed her chips at it. Lara swiped one off the top.

"You're not going to believe this, but it's for work."

"I thought you worked in an office."

"I do. It's a ceremonial gift for someone visiting from an overseas branch. I'm handing it over next Tuesday. Sorry, what did you say your homework was?'

"It's physics."

"What kind?"

"The normal kind."

"Wow, boooring!"

Sinead raised an eyebrow.

"But, you know. Foundational. Useful to know."

They pulled up chairs at a desk in Sinead's room. Her textbook was spread open by Lara, and her notebook by herself.

"That friend of yours who was around earlier."

"What about her?"

"Was that the same Marie you said you'd 'have a crush on' in high school, and I quote, 'if she was less of a kayak down shithead rapids'?"

"I really said that? Jesus."

"Ha. Knew it."

"Okay, smartarse. What's the question you're stuck on?"

"Of a force of 48 Newtons is- quick aside, is she less of a kayak down shithead rapids?"

Lara smirked, but hesitated to answer. "I mean, sure, but I forgot that she's also just generally kind of annoying. C'mon, champ. Finish the question."

Though she was too accustomed to the forces now to be knocked out by the intramolecular soirée between worlds, this jump certainly caught Mækiu off guard. So had the last, but this genuinely made her feel hollow.

Something about it felt... certainly not uncomfortable. An unpleasant surprise, at any rate. Something was clearly missing here. Something which she could normally take for granted. It took her what she decided to chronoceive as a moment longer to realize it was her.

It was embarrassing, almost, to essentially trip, fall, and discover that she didn't exist. No doubt it was far from her most elegant moment, but to have this cap off the symphony of stupidity she'd written, conducted, performed, and hated the entire time was the salt in the wound, and then a half-dozen more wounds for good measure.

Where she wasn't was suspended in a soft, white volume of nothing, lack of arms out to her lack of sides as if in freefall. It felt nauseatingly expansive. It felt dreadfully claustrophobic.

Outside of the volume was a room rigged with hanging, elliptic devices of esoteric and dubious function - technologically, possibly even edging out the Concordance's own fine selection of hanging, elliptic devices of esoteric and dubious function, if only by mere centuries. Suspended from them were a manner of tendrilous pipes, almost low enough for her not to reach out and touch. But she couldn't tell this would be a bad idea, and didn't abstain. Didn't do anything, in fact, because again, and to be completely clear, she did not exist.

There was a window high on the wall, and the gruesomely-strewn suggestion of desecrated carcasses which might have once been titanic, armored cephalopods. A cabal of youthful Terrans, this one all clad in spacefaring gear, approached and looked down. Almost right at her, in fact, or at least the place she wasn't in a way that was different to everywhere else. They all seemed just as uneasy to look at the void she wasn't in as she was to not be in it.

There were hints of telepathic chatter reaching her bubble, although it was seated in a slurry of epistemological presuppositions Mækiu hadn't seen in Terrans before. The short girl at the front of the pack was thinking loud and clear... or at least someone around there was. Something to the effect of a topological discontinuity. A lack of space-time.

Well, that was certainly convenient. Or perhaps it was as inevitable as anything else when a problem keeps getting worse forever, as the totalitarian principle might posit. Either way, this was precisely what she'd been hunting all this time. It turned out that sharp-dressed islander was right - one could go nowhere from where she'd been. And here she was! As long as the chance presented itself, then, she bore into the deepest recesses of her potential, every iota of joy, of love, of grief, of wonder, of hate, every drop of energy she could squeeze out of her soul...

...And cast it into the void.

Marie finally returned to the Citadel, and was delighted to find Danika and Thalia hanging around.

"Hey, you two! How's it hanging? How's it kicking? How's it... uh, jumping, maybe?"

Thalia nodded and shot a half-indifferent thumbs-up.

"I taught her how to do that," Danika boasted.

"How's Lara?" Hope grimaced.

"Decently normal, all things considered. Wants me to be the new Phoebe, though."

"Oh, that's great news! You'd be good at it, I reckon."

"I expected that from her. I didn't think you'd agree."

"Speaking of," Danika nodded, "how's the case? Fearno said you had news."

Marie shrugged. "You know. The not-so-big deal of, I solved the whole thing."

"Oh! Oh my gosh, that's great! Who did it?"

"That much, I think is..." Marie and Hope shared a glance. "...maybe too soon to say publicly. Don't worry, though. It's not anyone here."

"Still though! Nice work solving it, and fricken' sweet work taking her place."

"Woah, woah, woah. I never said I agreed to it. I said I'd think on it."

"Now hold on there," Hope put a hand on her shoulder. "Lara is a bloody menace. She'd manipulate her way through a brick wall if she wanted to. I can't play her mind games, alright? When you're brought up by a bunch of kids in low-income families and an alien that's never felt anything in his life, nobody teaches you how to use rhetoric. She can get in my head. But you're the kind of mad dog who studied that at school, yeah?"

Marie sighed. "Yeah."

Marie took the armchair and sulked into it as pronouncedly as she could. The other three took the couch.

"This isn't related, but after meeting Abigail out in Jonquil... I think I might like girls."

Her friends erupted into sports-fan-class cheers.

Mækiu clicked back into reality like a vertebra. Her shadow appeared something worse for wear, though, only taking shape in waves until she knelt and tapped it twice. Her manner evinced all the dissatisfied white-glovedness if she might do the same to correct a barometer, and a degree of madness one might typically infer from a frantic umbral monomania. A degree of madness which, naturally, she possessed, but for altogether different reasons - her shadow corrected itself, and forthwith the bilious unease of shunting lifted from her.

"That was a close one!" she told herself, aloud for some reason. "Well, now I have to go kill Marie Crawford."

This never stopped being something she needed to do, even at her psychological, emotional, and apparently existential nadir. It remains to be seen if it had ever actually started.

She appeared to be standing in the middle of Fearnley Park. This much, she accepted, made about as much sense as anything else. A wise man once said: "Es ist das Werden seiner selbst, der Kreis, der sein Ende als seinen Zweck voraussetzt und zum Anfange hat, und nur durch die Ausführung und sein Ende wirklich ist." Mækiu questioned his wisdom on a moment of thought, though - he was dead, and she wasn't. Should have spent less time meditating on spirit and more on trying not to become one.

Of course, the complication to her goal was that she had no idea where Marie lived now. She'd have to really think about this, and as long as she needed the time to, she'd do well to hide out the one place the Incubator couldn't follow her.

And so, with a deep breath, she brought herself to teleport one more time. To the Citadel.

The overjoyed congratulations were interrupted by a firm knock from outside.

"Hold on. I'll get it." Marie stood and made for the door.

Behind it was the man she'd briefly caught at a distance on the roof of the ABC building, but... not.

She was still recognisably the same person, same white hair - not white like a human, but like the fur of an Arctic beast - same pink-brown complexion - but again, still distinctly unlike a human, but like a newborn carnivoromorph - same stature, nearly identical physique save for the vaguest of sexually dimorphic traits. And her eyes! How veins of colour like precious ores peppered her irises, and they glimmered in the light, even if one was only scarred, dull, and unfocused now. She was the most beautiful woman Marie had ever seen.

They each were lost for words, lost for breath, to reunite under such circumstances. Marie stared, wide-eyed and still as she could only hypothesise one of their cadavers would be momentarily. Mækiu panted, deep and hot, fighting the tremble of her every limb and failing.

And then, without a word, she hugged Marie and sobbed. Softly, but impossible not to notice. And to Marie, there was something familiar to the way she leaned her weight on her. And her scent, once her breath had resumed enough to make any use of an olfactory register.

"...Kyubey?" she mumbled into her assailant's chest.

Mækiu pulled away. "Right! Yes! Hello."

"How..." Marie indicated, at the entirety of her. "...?"

"Ah! Okay. Look, I promise you there's a perfectly straightforw... a perfectly reaso... a perfectly true explanation for this, but you're going to want to sit down for it."

- End of Part 2-

THE DUD

This fragment was written in 14th-century Kenya, but its author is unknown, as records from the time suggest some form of disagreement over whether its author was Swahili or Persian, with neither side of the argument providing any more specificity than that. Over the centuries, this uncertainty has only led to the proliferation of theories as to the author's identity. Today, the answer is considered lost.

Elsewhere, out beyond the sea, was a volcanic island. A cloud of ash had fallen from the mountain, and condemned its people to a terrible sickness. Any day now, they knew, the mountain would grow only more violent, and nobody would survive what it had to offer.

But the people were too sick to build their boats and leave. All but one had fallen ill - a young girl with only the strength to build a boat for herself. Seeing no other option, she bid her family farewell, and sailed off into the ocean.

But the ocean returned her the next day.

She asked the ocean why, and the ocean told her she could not survive sailing alone. She said she could not survive the volcano, but it told her that she'd misunderstood. She only needed to survive the eruption of the volcano, but the ocean was something she would have to endure all the time.

So she could not survive either, then, she told the ocean. Her family was ill still, and the mountain could blow any day.

The ocean pondered this for some time. It did not care to see the girl dead. It was destructve, but it was not death, and it was not evil.

In the evening, the air was filled with a rich aroma. Many, many small jars, pots, and flasks had washed ashore, each containing oil of myrrh. If the girl could not wait for the people of the island to get well, then it was up to her to nurse them back to health instead.

The girl gathered the oils and returned home.