"It liberates the vandal to travel — you never saw a bigoted, opinionated, stubborn, narrow-minded, self-conceited, almighty mean man in your life but he had stuck in one place since he was born and thought God made the world and dyspepsia and bile for his especial comfort and satisfaction." - Mark Twain
Lara's bedroom was significantly neater with foreknowledge that she would be having company, but Marie was nice enough not to say anything. She simply allowed the vaguest hints of a smirk imply her acknowledgement, enough that Lara wasn't sure if she was seeing it or not. Enough to destroy her quietly and slowly. Yes, she was nice enough to do that.
As with everything else she said, though, Lara didn't waste her utterly pristine brainspace even paying attention.
"Word from Fearnley?"
"Nothing. Shocker. Almost like it's my job to put up with you, and not hers."
"If it was a job, you'd be getting paid. I like to think you're just here for kicks."
Marie made for the door. "Would you like to test that belief?"
"Crawford!" she gasped, clutching at absent pearls. "This is hardly the time for jokes! A man has died!"
"Wait, who?"
"Hold on." Lara squeezed past her and rapped urgently on Sinead's door. "Sinead, you in?"
Sinead climbed the stairs behind her, biting into an isosceles-trimmed sandwich, husked of crust. "This way, Einstein."
"Right! Can you think of a famous guy who's died recently?"
"J.G. Ballard?"
"J.G.-" Lara called, back at Marie. "Wait. You serious?"
"I-"
"Cool, it doesn't matter. Thank you, though."
...Then back into her room.
"As I was saying, though! I'm proud to have someone like you playing diplomat. It tells me the city's in safe hands."
"Didn't people say the same thing about Phoebe?"
"Look! Look. The past is the past. You're in safe hands too! I can personally guarantee you the protection of the Marquess."
"...Didn't people say the same thing about Phoebe?"
"Alright, sure! But come on. I know you're going to do better than she did. I've never met a magical girl like you before."
"...And didn't-"
"I don't mean it in that way! I don't mean you're all... balanced, or whatever. No. That sucked."
"Bipartisan?"
"Me? Oh, no. I can only write with my right hand."
"That isn't what..."
"Can I continue?"
"Sure." Marie shook her head.
"What I mean is you're just like me."
"Oh. Ew, no. Absolutely not."
"You're hungry."
"I just had lunch."
Lara smirked. "You have to fight."
"Fight what?"
"Doesn't matter. It's just a part of who you are. You need to fight like other animals need food and water and sex. Thanatos."
"Thana...? Okay, Sigmund. I get it, you think maybe I'm a little fucked up in the head."
"I don't think that. That would be like saying I am, too."
"You are."
"Okay, moment of honesty, time out," Lara bordered on soliloquy, "can we maybe let mental illness be the one thing we don't shit around about? You know, I find it in poor taste."
"That's it? Just one thing?"
"Just one thing. Love it or leave it."
"I-"
"But your hunger! That's different. You were raised learning there are certain people, places, things, which it was your duty to hate. Now you live in those places, with those people, doing those things. And no matter how much you want to shake it, there's this part of you-"
A half-finished titanic concrete cube, balanced impossibly on one corner, on a podium inscribed with seventeen sigils.
"-that's building contempt, contempt cooling and hardening into anger, anger you have to let out or else you're going to burn."
"What makes you think that?"
"Anyone who's ever hunted a witch with you."
"Okay! Sure, maybe I am a bloodthirsty weirdo.
"Then you're not alone." Lara smiled. "You're the only other person I've met who's felt this way, but..."
"You...?"
"Hard to believe, huh?"
"No."
"But I'm glad to know there was a point to my struggle with it. You know? Because if you want, I can teach you how to overcome these feelings too."
"I don't want your charity."
Lara blinked. "Wha...t? Please, consider-"
"I know you faked my death, Macquarie." Marie jabbed a finger at Lara and for once, she was intimidated enough to step back in turn. "Call me crazy, but so long as you feel comfortable stepping up and turning my whole life inside out, I'm not going to rely on you for anything."
"And what? You're just going to let your battle-hunger overtake you?"
"You're not even going to refute the accusation? God, you're pathetic. What, were you also the officer at my... oh."
"Officer?"
"Hold on, how did I never put two and two together?"
"Crawford? What officer?"
Marie's eyes darted at any old thing that dared catch her attention. When they met Lara's, she adopted a carnivoran grin. "That's what I'd like to know."
It happened that in her life there were other things she would have liked to know, vanishingly few but still numerous of which didn't even involve beating someone to death with a warhammer or shooting herself in the head.
The Woodward house was not a particularly sophisticated house, but it possessed the quality one might expect, at least, of soap-operatic interpretations of houses not particularly sophisticated. Behind its door, one would not be astonished to discover why good neighbours become good friends. Marie couldn't fathom how Thalia could live here without being noticed, but she recognised that there were many things she couldn't fathom.
She knocked. A man who vaguely resembled what photos Marie had seen of Danika's (sister/creator) answered and shook her hand.
"Ah! You must be a friend of Lauren's!"
"Of a sort!" Marie part-quailed at his convivial intensity. "Marie."
He turned. "Lauren! Your friend's here!"
Danika was by the pair of them with hardly a word, small hessian tote upon her shoulder. "Marie! Hey!"
"Hey."
"You want to go to the library?" Then through the mind, "If you think maybe having a collection of historical records or something would help. Also me and Thalia are still getting the hang of reading."
"Works for me."
"The library?" her father parroted.
"I don't... tell you all my hobbies." She passed Marie a quick grimace for backup, thankfully without need.
"Well, I'm not gonna complain. 'S good for you."
Excuse made, Danika and Marie half-hearted some goodbyes and departed. There was something rigid to the demeanour of the former, like she was condemned not to look back just as in Orpheus himself.
"Dani?"
"Hm? Yes, hello."
"Everything alright?"
"I... lied."
"About what?"
"To my dad, I mean! Both my parents! I mean... it's hard!"
"Lying?"
She nodded. "I don't know. Even when it's a really bad idea, I just want to tell people the truth."
"What, do you feel guilty?"
"I feel gross. It's not like... I think it's the moral thing to do, or anything, more like it feels against the grain of just who I am as a person!"
"Doesn't that make things complicated?"
"Yes! You have no idea. Just last night, I... okay, let me back up. Thalia thought I was flirting with her or something, and I turned her down. I mean I don't know if I'm not into her, or just women at all, or maybe into anybody. But I did make it about her appearance, a bit. A lot. She didn't deserve that."
"Is it about her appearance?"
Danika winced.
"Okay, fair point. Did she seem upset about it?"
"I don't think she cared..."
"Then you're probably fine."
A long, spindly arm coiled its way out of the bag and hauled the rest of Thalia's body out with it. "It is fine."
Danika yelled and pulled away. The bag dropped off her shoulder and into the labyrinth of the barrier within from which Thalia had emerged. A second later, she herself emerged, bag on one shoulder, Florian on the other.
"I don't care about your opinion anyway."
"Harsh, but fair."
"You even think you aren't good looking. Idiot."
"I'm sorry, is that a compliment?"
"Don't know, doesn't matter."
There comes a profoundly particular, strangely unique air one can only find in state government institutions, and there are few places this air gathers more densely than libraries.
The library evoked nothing, unless one had regularly attended as a child, in which case it provided a sensation of nostalgia, which in turn evoked nothing. It was sizeable, certainly, and so was its collection, but its design carried no grandiosity. It was as if someone had seen the initial plan for the most unexceptional, suburban library and asked the nearest technician how much it would cost to multiply everything by three. Or perhaps it was like the state of cars to rap music - broader and duller as anaesthetic, as protection against the scope and density of the collection of poetic genius which loomed large over - well, not Thalia, but anyone else, certainly. All so neatly categorised too - entire fields of thought, stratified by the DDC, cut off from each other (no wonder it bared its Christian imperialism like fangs - to be derived from such a one-minded framework!).
But tragedy was innate to any system developed by Melvil Dewey, for from whence does the name Melvil derive, but from the Norman 'bad home'? The books had certainly found bad homes indeed.
And yet it was the volume of text that imposed, not their permutation. Marie felt that she could spend the rest of her life reading through every last book here, and still - well, no. She couldn't even do that, the collection stood too tall.
Florian found the group a table and scampered off. The other three pursued at a pace at least regarded as decent within a library. Let us not lose track of our senses and plunge the world into complete disarray just yet. Or, had they thought such a thing, ever, would have urged the Incubator they found sitting at their table, Florian clinging for dear life to his swinging tail.
"Oh!" Danika's attention wasn't on him at all. "No chairs. Someone must've taken them. Marie, you call dibs on this spot while me and Thalia grab something to sit on."
She would hear nothing for this, and leave Marie with Kyubey for what was their first time alone in too many weeks.
"You know, if it was a vast repository of knowledge you were after, you could have just come to me."
"Well," Marie gestured at him, then the nearest shelf, then himself again. "Both is nice."
"In a certain manner of speaking, I suppose. Have you been avoiding conferring in me, Marie?"
"I thought it would be weird, since you're trying to murder Mækiu. That's all."
"Who?"
"You know, that clone of yours I accidentally set rogue. She's my girlfriend... kind of. Maybe."
"You're having relations with an Incubator?"
"Of a sort...?"
He shook his head. "I don't appreciate that."
"Okay. I Didn't ask, but sure."
"Have you and she openly displayed affection?"
"Bro!"
"...I don't appreciate that either."
"Hey, great news! Turns out I did care a little bit before! I can tell because I care even less about this!"
"Is she any good?"
"No."
"Predictable. It can't be helped."
"Chairholder meeting!" Danika interrupted, and took between a bitter Marie and disinterested Kyubey. "Chair holder? Get it? It's a joke! Because I'm-"
"Thank you!" snapped the former.
"Marie... this is a library. You have to be quiet."
"Right. Yes. Thank you. Let's read this thing, then."
But the revisitation of old circumstances needed not a word of writing - the past spoke of a day too great to ignore.
There was the girl with the bone mask, out the front of the Sydney Female Refuge Society. There were other girls like her, totalling eleven inclusive, all sporting similar masks twisted into an assortment of grisly expressions.
"I'm afraid I can't let her go without getting a name."
Marie was stood in the matron's chambers, where she kept her journal, but when she strained she could hear the woman speak to the crowd.
"We can't help you," spoke one, English-sounding, and more excitingly dressed than her peers. "We all seem to have misplaced ours. But you will find you tried to fill that field anyway."
She looked down at some manner of log, bewildered. "I... when did I...?"
And from another point, Marie moved her finger to the ink upon the page, in time to watch the late Mme Malbon discard its respective pen.
The space in the log where a name should be had been scribbled completely black.
"Take mine," insisted another, dressed for far colder climes. "Is all I have... I once was writer, but those times... long ago."
"Darling," hissed the Englishwoman, "speak proper English. We can't have you making us look bad."
Another, American, tapped her shoulder. "She's of the same leyline as our new friend. You aren't. If she wants to talk, let her."
"And why should I?"
There stood one figure in the middle of the crowd, tall and lean, who Marie only now noticed in thumbing back through the moment had never moved. A nearly debilitating psychic force arose from the diamond ring upon her finger.
"You will get your chance soon enough. Do not let your impatience squander it."
By this time, the new pen was well in the Matron's hands. Marie drew herself back to clarity, and then hurried through the journal's pages - alarming to her companions, each at least old enough to comprehend the fragility of antiquity. But still, but still! There came a point where the width of the penstrokes shifted slightly! A new pen! She put her finger now to this, and dove back beneath the sands.
The young woman who lamented the loss of her penmanship stood upon an icy drift. However much farther back this was, already she wore her mask. Marie glared through the weather, eager to discern any surroundings. She jumped to realise the still figure from the Sydney vision was right behind her.
Thw writer realised the same thing at the same time, and responded in the same manner. She stammered something in Russian.
"Do not fear. Your mask... doesn't it prove we're the same?"
More Russian.
"For all my wisdom, I'm afraid I don't know your tongue. Can you lend me your thoughts?"
"Who are you?"
"Your salvation."
"There is no salvation. I had believed for so long in the might of the people, now I learn our dearest Chernysevsky will be sent to live out the rest of his days here. He'll be a constant reminder."
"Of what?"
"That the Narodniks achieved nothing! The people have no power, and now our greatest mind rots in the darkest corner of Yakutsk."
"And yet, here I am."
"And what are you?"
"For you? Ecdysis."
And the pair wandered the Earth, seeking new company in an order which, if Marie was figuring correctly from their number in each memory, made no practical sense whatsoever. A double-agent amassing a small fortune among political turmoil in the Carribean. A Canadian lowlife showing up the wrong crowd she'd fallen into. Peshtigo's arsonist. A misanthrope from a Brazilian city. A young girl in Iceland who couldn't fathom the strength of her power, who went under the wing of her sisters on pain of death. A teenager in Southeast Asia, distrustful of a man named Miklouho-Maclay and with her fears played up by the company until they had convinced her only they were on her side. A narcoleptic in Hawai'i, much to the concern of her parents until their worries were instead rerouted to her kidnapping. The aforementioned daughter of a wealthy English baron in India. And then, landing in Australia, the story of the pen came to a close.
Marie slumped, dazed, face to the ceiling.
"What did you see?!" Thalia urged.
"Uh... I dunno, why don't you write this down:"
And so she proceeded, but with nothing bearing repetition. How strange, that the semiotic value of the ink was supposed to carry more information than its physical presence. And how much stranger, that penned parallel in time, metaeclyptic in theft, disturbingly similar in subject matter, existed another tome Marie would find within her possession.
She found herself lying awake at 3:28 one morning (like 3:13 as she had thirty chapters prior, but the difference was then that her nightmare had shown no quarter). It was dark. Of course it was dark, how strange it'd be if it weren't? It was dark, but she could tell she wasn't alone.
"Mae?"
A shape on top of her shifted. It was now she realised its weight was almost definitely what woke her up.
"Mae, can you move? You're too heavy for me to sleep."
"The word, 'Incubator', derives from Latin 'incubare' - to lie on top of..." she groaned, visibly crossing the crepuscular mezzanine of sleep herself. "It's what I do... let me have this."
"Yeah, but you're not a little cat thing anymore."
"That's fair... should I change back...?"
"Ew. No."
Upon the coffee table, Marie's phone flared to life.
"Could you get that, Mae?"
"What if it's important? Then I'd be meddling in earthly affairs again, and-"
"Fine. I'll get it."
Adia: Hey, is your birthday coming up soon?
Marie: I'm not really a birthday person anymore.
Adia: Oh, I'm sorry to hear that.
Adia: I was going to say,
Adia: "Because it's going to start feeling that way"
Adia: But I feel like a jerk now.
Marie: Why, what's happening?
Adia: Well, C.O. your old friend Mrs. Cahill-Madigan, I'm sending you a very special journal by a very special mad scientist.
Adia: You there?
Marie: Oh, sorry!
Marie: Just surprised.
Marie: And tired.
Marie: Are you sure that this is a good idea?
Adia: You're psychometric, yes? You can make better use of it than I can.
Marie: That's not what I'm worried about. What if it gets intercepted?
Adia: Come on. You think I'd let that happen? I made a website my dad liked once.
Marie: I'm not sure I follow.
Adia: I bet.
What Marie failed to understand, and what stood as Adia's greatest achievement, was that which the greatest minds of a generation had tried and failed. At the present epoch of technology, it had become trivial to make a website. Not so much, however, one fitted to the wants and expectations of one's own father. To take such a website and ensure it wouldn't break, then, took an exceptional genius. And then, at the end of it all, for that genius's father to actually like it? That much was unheard of. Since the days of Arpanet, it had been accepted fact among computer scientists that such a feat was impossible.
This was a lot to say that the journal was not merely safe as houses, but it made the houses resemble heroines of melodrama, tied to train tracks by flamboyantly cruel moustache-twirlers yet-unchallenged.
And for her part, though she wasn't superstitious, Marie stroked what she liked to pretend was a talisman of good fortune - the remaining coin granted by the Knight. She just as soon stopped as she always did, like in the discomfort of a truly silent room. The coin held nothing. There was no past to see.
Marie ran to the nearest phone booth and dialled the number she'd least wanted to ever since she'd learned it. She drew loose change from a back pocket - and that was odd. One of the coins the Brass Knight had bestowed upon her had vanished. Into thin air, the idiom would posit, but something in her gut told her not even that was true. For something in her gut to tell her would be yet another inaccurate idiom, as it prefers to confide in the enteric nervous system, which doesn't like telling the brain much of nothin'.
Not that the ENS can be said to have anything of a consciousness, despite its independent operation and neurological complexity. The sole exception to this was Keith Holyoake (1904 - 1983), the 26th Prime Minister of Aotearoa New Zealand, whose lower digestive tract was completely sentient. Stranger still, despite the staggering implications arising not only from such a miracle of human physiology, but that it happened to him and him alone, this was lost on him, his gut (who was equally as oblivious to the brain), and every other person to have ever lived.
"Crawford! What's shaking?"
"I... I'm using a payphone. How did you know it was me?" It took great effort not to double over in wheezes of smoke. To suppress coughing up her surprise too was no small feat.
"Now, now. A good magician never reveals her secrets. An evil one doubly so."
This number was known only to Marie. It belonged to a cheaper, less reliable phone than Lara's go-to - it resembled more closely the implement used to kill Abel. On the one hand, Marie was her emergency contact in the case of a dissolution of her sect of the Attendants to the Deep Light. On the other, knowing with one-hundred-percent certainty when it was Marie calling her, no matter where from, would make her certain she was being watched, keep the panopticon in her mind on full alert. She had never told Marie that such a private line existed between them, nor did she intend to. If, for whatever reason, this secret and its motives were revealed to Marie, she honestly wouldn't give half a softboiled shit for longer than the afternoon.
"Yeah, okay, whatever." She spluttered, away from the receiver. "Don't worry about that. Where are you right now?"
"Ha! I'm not busy tonight, if that's what you're asking. Really, though, I could do a lot better-"
"Your office is on fire."
"What? Sorry, it sounded like you said my office was on fire."
"It-"
"Hold, please. Whitman's calling."
"For God's sake, I don't have time for this!"
"I know, right?"
There was a silence one detached from the situation would hardly call lengthy, but by the end of which Marie was ready to enter a mid-life crisis.
"That was Whitman. She says she has reason to believe you snuck into my office and set it alight."
"Well, I must have been pretty bloody sneaky, then."
"How so?"
Marie glanced at the backpack on the ground beside her. Its new contents gave it a sinister aura, until she dreaded having to wear it again. "Because not even I noticed me doing it."
"The hell kind of an excuse is that?"
"If I knew, I'd tell you! But the facts are that your office is on fire, there's like... two entire firefighter squads or something - is that the right collective noun?"
"Uh, yeah. Because I'd just happen to know the collective noun of every stupid occupation you run into. Give me a break, Crawford, some fuck just set my office on fire and I'm kind of freaking out!"
"Right, right, I'm sorry. That, and Madeleine bloody Whitman is pointing the finger at me because she saw me nearby! But what was she doing there, huh?"
"She works there."
"For real?"
"I guess. I don't pay her anything, she's just sort of there and tells people what to do. It's company, by the way."
"What?"
"A group of firefighters is a company."
Lara hung up.
Why was it that Macquarie talking to her was just as frustrating as avoiding doing so?
Oh, well. Did it matter? All the better to leave her to it sooner rather than later. Tonight would be... well, she was sure nothing short of the strangest night of her life.
Naturally, she underestimated the rest of her future nights.
Marie: Are the Americans up around this time?
Marie: I've been working alongside Attendants lately, and found some notes on what I'm pretty certain are locations of the fragments. I was hoping we could try to catch what we can before they do.
Alice spun a glance about the room, not that notice of Margaret's absence ever necessitated such concentration. She reached out.
"You busy?"
Margaret's mind-voice resounded, "Come back with a warrant."
Her standard response to any interruption while on the toilet. Alice had heard it too many times to count by now. She thought it was pretty funny.
Keyword 'was'.
Margaret: Margaret can't come to the keyboard right now. You've been working with who?
Marie: Not by choice.
Oh, didn't she know the feeling.
Margaret: Okay, well let's just say for a moment that I believe you, and I'm not going to ask any questions about that.
Margaret: Pretty much because I believe you, and I'm not going to ask any questions about that. So what's the situation?
Marie: Apparently some young teen in the south uncovered a fragment by mistake, with no idea of what it is, and now the deeplighters are stalking her.
Marie: south? South? I don't know. Whatever.
Alice jumped to discover that Margaret was once again right by her side. Until she spoke, she had been inaudible over the faintest hum of the computer.
"What are you typin'?"
"One of the Aussies wants our help."
"Yeah? How'd that work out for them last time?"
"Now they actually want us to steal something."
"I'm listening."
One leaned over the other and shared in the light of the screen. The light took the shape of yet more text. It wore not its most promising shape.
Marie: My North American geography is lacking, as you might expect.
Marie: It was the first I'd ever heard of Decoverley, Hancock.
"No."
"What? But we've gotta-"
"Who's in charge of what you've 'gotta'?"
Alice sighed. "You..."
"And I say we're stayin' right where we damn well are."
"In Phoenix?"
"Alright, I'll think of something else! But not Decoverley."
"Oh, for- why is it every time you don't want to do something we don't do it, but every time I don't want to you pass me ten dollars, mouth 'final offer', and make me do it anyway?"
"That's not... like that. Okay? This is different."
"I-"
"And why do they need us to go do this shit, anyhow? Of every idiot this side of the country, why us?"
"No idea, probably... prestige, maybe? And I guess they trust us because they've worked with us before. I think this would be a really really bad thing to let slip into the wrong hands."
"And your friend down under ain't the wrong hands? How do you know that? Why do you trust her so easily?"
"I don't. But, you know, spending as long as we had living it up in the Bay Area, I think if some old friends of the Carlos family are wanting to get something done, we owe them that much."
Margaret bounced her weight from leg to leg.
"You don't think so?"
"Nobody in this world owes anybody anything else."
"Fascinating. I'd love to see what kind of place made you believe that kind of crap."
"Alright, fine! Fine." She huffed. "Fine."
It wasn't fine.
Though it was grim business to return Ms. Cheung's body to her hosts, it seemed, somehow, nonetheless the only appropriate course of action - both out of respect that her friends might see her face one more time, and clinging to the hope that the apartment she had stayed at might contain at least something pertaining to circumstance, some obscure connection one might trace to her kidnappers from among her belongings. And Wai-Fong would have confessed they were two for two on that front. She only wished it hadn't been like this.
Kim-Wan, the Professor, and herself didn't take all that long to come across decent directions, but the weight of the body made it appear so much longer - and not some literal weight, the force consequent from mass within a gravitational field, but something of a weight regardless.
In 1907, an American doctor by the name of Duncan MacDougall installed scales under the bed of the terminally ill, in the hopes that the weight discrepancy before and after the moment of death would tell him the mass of the soul. He found it to be 21 grams, a figure better explained by any number of other factors - not least of all the fact that he gathered this result from only six subjects.
And of course, the soul has no interaction with the Higgs field, and therefore, no mass. Yet, it was the absence of one which threatened to crush Wai-Fong.
They stood outside the apartment for several seconds, still, silent. Seconds proliferated, became long enough to slow the passage of a cleaner with a cart through the hall. She cleared her throat. Kim-Wan looked at her expectantly, then the body occupying her hands in some kind of clarity.
"Oh! Of course."
And knocked herself.
Someone crept slowly to the other side of the door and opened it a fraction. Half the face of another girl, about fifteen, stared unblinking at each of them, before swinging the door open.
She looked terrified. The disarray of the room behind her, and the inertia of bodies occupying it, implied a cause.
"Hey! My name is Yuen Wai-Fong, I'm your community representative in this neighbourhood." She tried what she believed to be a reassuring smile. The shock on the girl's face wasn't helping.
"I... I know."
"Me and my friends are trying to get to the bottom of the disappearance cases around the city. Your roommate, Cheung, disappeared a few hours ago. Would you know anything...?"
The girl burst into tears before she could finish her sentence. Wai-Fong welcomed her into a hug and put a hand on her back.
"Hey! It's alright. We'll figure things out, and we'll get everyone back home safe and sound. Okay?"
Silence, punctuated by tremolo breaths.
"Okay?"
"Okay."
The two let go of each other, sharing smiles in varying degrees of certainty.
"What's your name, anyway?"
"So..."
"Nice to meet you, So. Do you mind if my friends and I have a look around inside?"
Ms. So stepped aside wordlessly and ushered them in. Once they were past her, she mumbled, "I'll wait outside. I don't want to get in your way."
"Oh! You're not in the way at all!"
"I..."
"I understand if you want to have a moment away from all this, though."
So stared at the floor and stepped into the corridor.
"Alright. Let's get started. Any observations?"
"It's stuffy, for a start." Kim-Wan looked around for an open window, but couldn't find one. "Unnervingly quiet, too."
"Yes! Brilliant. Someone must have cut the power! Ah... Professor, could you find me a chair?"
Professor Chang nodded and wandered off searching for a kitchen. Wai-Fong did not feel fond of the stability of the chair with which she returned by its appearance, but for that matter, neither was she enjoying a mass disappearance case.
She stood upon the chair and unscrewed a light globe from its place in the ceiling. Much to Professor Chang's surprise, she then carefully inserted her finger into the socket.
All the lights in the apartment came on at once. The air conditioning and the fridge whirred to life. Satisfied, she screwed the bulb back into place and stepped down.
"Still got it. Still am... probably obligated by magical contract to have it, whatever 'it' is." Despite herself, and despite perhaps everything else, too, Wai-Fong smiled to herself. Telepathically, "So! How many people lived here?"
"Four. Why?"
"Counting Cheung?"
"Five. Is everything okay?"
"Yes! Everything is fine."
And then, to Kim-Wan, "I've got a really terrible feeling about all this."
"On account of which part in particular, Sir? There's not a lot to feel good about."
"I mean there are three bodies on the couch, completely disconnected from their - should we say - distressingly absent soul gems."
"Well, of course. Is that even worth mentioning?"
"So why can I feel someone else in the apartment with us...?"
Before the passage of seconds struck double digits, Wai-Fong stormed into the bathroom and threw open the shower curtain - from the top, as its lowest corners had come to gather some kind of waterborne rot.
On the wall behind it, without the slimmest shadow of a doubt, was a barrier.
"What's that doing there?" Kim-Wan demanded.
"What's what doing there?"
"A labyrinth, Professor." Wai-Fong grimaced. "Someone notices a weird kind of smell coming from this room, the landlord notices the lights are off every hour of the day, something happens, and someone calls the police. The police get here, and for some inexplicable reason, they all shoot each other to death. Oh, whoever raided this place was intent on covering their tracks. But there's one thing they didn't count on."
"Present." Kim-Wan saluted.
"Thanks, kid. We'll be waiting for you out here."
She dove into the labyrinth. Professor Chang stared at Wai-Fong long enough for her to notice.
"Is she going to be safe in there?"
"No, not at all. I almost feel sorry for her, in fact."
A beat long enough for the Professor to wince.
"Oh! Oh, I thought you meant the witch."
"You have that much faith in Ms. Chau's abilities?'
"When she was ten, she got hugely into old, foreign action movies. Everything we could get on VHS secondhand or cheap, from Kurosawa to Leone. See, we share these kinds of things communally-"
"I'm sorry, I'm awfully sorry to interrupt. But you know that if you put them in alphabetical order, Kurosawa and Leone are right next to each other?"
"Like I said, anything we could get. But she was obsessed! Learned all the stunts, now she incorporates them into her fighting style. She might just look like the average fourteen-year-old, but she's got the physical prowess of the average stunt double in their prime. And then also a magic spear, because I guess that wasn't enough. Oh, that reminds me! Let me go talk to our friend So for a second."
She jogged back into the hall, looked left. Looked right.
"She's gone."
"What?"
"She's gone!"
She sprinted back onto the street only in time to catch a van turning off down an otherwise empty street. Loathe though she was to presume, it bore the same logo as the cleaner from before.
Professor Chang struggled to catch up. "What happened?"
"I don't know," Wai-Fong huffed, "but something tells me we have to look out for more than just military types in suits now."
LYING
Lying is a practice of either delivering untruths or withholding truths with the intention of misinforming an audience. Lying was invented in 1768 by Sir Richard Lying (1732 - 1801).
No it wasn't. I made him up. Do you see the problem here?
Herein arises the conundrum of the speaker-god. If the world comes into existence as I write of it, that entails that for me to talk about lying causes the existence of lies. No it doesn't. Yes it does.
The purpose of the act of lying has been the source of much philosophical inquisition for about as long as philosophy has existed (twelve days). Immanuel Kant (1724 - 17224) claimed that there existed a categorical imperative not to deceive. That if one misleads another person, then any negative consequences of the other person's actions can then be blamed on the first. On the other hand, Aristotle (322 BCE - 384 BCE) claimed that no argument on the value of lying can achieve anything meaningful, because any side who advocates for lying is at a disadvantage of credibility. I claimed that I'm thirsty right now, Aristotle could you be a darling and fetch me a glass of water? Oh, any glass would do. Thank you.
You come to a fork in the road, knowing down one path lies a nest of hungry snakes, and down the other, fortunes untold. The fork is watched over by two guards. One always tells the truth, and the other always lies. You may ask them one question before being on your way. What do you say?
The answer is simple. There is no fork in the road, no snakes, or riches, or guards. I made them all up.
OVERSEER: Do you see, Cage?
UNDERSTUDY: Is this a problem?
The Overseer grins. I decide I'm not a fan.
OVERSEER: She's eccentric, isn't she? Ensnared in delusions of grandeur, masking her obsessions with the occult and the esoteric, losing sight of the people around her.
UNDERSTUDY: I just figured that's how she is.
OVERSEER: And isn't she almost perfect? She's certain she's right about everything. Conspiracies, superstitions, fictions of every kind. But that means all you have to do is put an idea in her head, and nothing can ever shake her faith in it. Not ever.
UNDERSTUDY: Err... why are you telling me this?
OVERSEER: It's simple. I want you to crush her before she starts thinking she matters.