AN: Thanks for all the wonderful reviews! I wish I could respond to the anonymous ones, because those were pretty awesome too.

CHAPTER 22

"…And then there's spin the bottle, where you—"

"Sorry, Emmy, but I can't take in any more information about these promiscuous modern games…"

"Why? Jealous you weren't a teenager living in this era?"

"Yes!"

It had been an hour of just sitting in the break room with Emmy explaining games (but mostly getting off track and telling a story about what happened when she had played at so-and-so's house.) Erik had been plagued with the urge to ask if they could try any of those games "just to kill time" but always stopped himself before he said anything, for fear of sounding foolish, or worse, creepy.

"Well, they aren't just meant for teenagers," Emmy said as casually as she could manage, with a nonchalant hand wave.

All Erik could do was acknowledge that he had heard her by nodding. She paused then tried again.

"I mean, do any of those games sound like something you'd want to do?"

"With you, you mean…?" Erik trailed off unsurely. When she nodded, he shrugged his awkwardness off and said, "Sure, if you would like."

"Which one?"

"Um…your choice."

Emmy, of course, went with truth or dare.

"You or me first?" Erik asked. She thought a moment.

"You. Truth or dare?"
"Truth."

"Pansy," she said, sticking out her tongue. He glared.

"Whatever that is, I am not a pansy."

"Then go with dare!"

"I thought I had a choice!" he protested. She rolled her eyes.

"Yeah, but everyone knows truth is boring!"

"The truth can be FAR from boring, trust me…."

She shut him up with a palm over his mouth, which he did not appreciate. "I dare you to…try and break into one of those vending machines."

"Why…?"

"Just do it!" she said, giggling a little at the idea. He halfway laughed while giving her a strange look, not sure how he was going to accomplish this. Unsurely, he stood and approached the machine, looking at it.

"I don't even know how to work this normally…is it safe?"

Emmy almost snorted. "No, Erik, the vending machine isn't going to bite you. Just try to get one of the candy bars out or something."

He gave her a look then turned back to it and attempted shaking it, only moving it a few inches. Then he tried kneeling next to it, reaching his hand into the machine as most try to do (and unsuccessfully.) Emmy watched in amusement, crossing her arms. Then, Erik glanced over the machine again and noticed the lock. He smiled ever so slightly and pulled something out of his pocket, fiddled with it, and then twisted it into the lock.

"Oh come on, you just carry around paperclips?" Emmy whined, displeased with how quickly he had figured it out.

"Paperclips? I believe this is called a pen," he said. He held up the separated pieces of a pen in his hand. "I usually figure out how things work by taking them apart. I wanted to do so with Mr. Wilson's car, but that put me in quite a predicament."

"You took apart Patrick's car?"

Erik rolled his eyes. "No, I just considered it. I barely touched the damn thing and it started screaming and flashing lights at me."

"That's called a car alarm, Erik. It keeps thieves away."

He just gave her a 'like-I-even-care' glance and finished picking the lock, opening up the vending machine with a smug grin.

"Ha!" he declared, and extracted a Milky Way bar. Emmy nodded, impressed, and gave him a thumbs up before beckoning him over. Raising a brow, he approached her, only to have the candy snatched out of his hand and unwrapped and in Emmy's mouth in less than a second.

He just held his hands up and looked at her incredulously. She gave him a chocolate filled grin.

"Thanks, Erik."

Sighing, he said, "You're welcome. Now, I believe it is my turn—"

"Truth."

"But I thought 'truth is boring'," he said, mocking her tone.

"Humor me."

Knowing he could come up with a question much easier than a dare, Erik sat down beside her again and hummed quietly as he thought. When he came up with a question, he looked at her with a mysterious smile.

"Did you enjoy my intoxicated kiss?"

Emmy's smile faded and she just stared at him, unable to answer.

/

"I think…we can just…" Gerry trailed off, about to jump through the spinning mirrors but then backing off in fear of getting hit, over and over again. Christine sighed hopelessly.

"I don't believe this…"

The next time he approached the spinning mirrors, Christine shoved him forward before he could jump back again. Miraculously, he stumbled forward in one piece—though in one rather pissed off piece.

"Christine! The hell! I could have been sliced up by those things!"

She stepped forward, looking at the mirrors interestedly before putting her hand through it. Gerry had to shake his head, blink and look at that again. Her hand was really going through the rapidly rotating mirrors.

"It's an illusion…Erik is very good at making those…" she murmured, stepping through them next to Gerry, completely unharmed. His expression was a mixture of shock and annoyance.

"So all the traps I don't know about actually KILL you, but the one I do know about is completely harmless…yet I didn't know that," he said, slapping his palm to his forehead. "I just knew Madame Giry somehow got Raoul out of there…."

"I believe it is designed to kill you in a less direct way. As in, make you go mad and hang yourself," she said as she pointed to the noose in the middle of the circle of mirrored illusions.

Gerry was about to comment on how cruel that was, but then remembered this was explained to him on set already. So he just coughed and muttered, "Yeah, I knew that…"

Christine's thoughts drifted to Raoul and how upset and confused he must be. If she ever did get out of this, how would she explain it to him? Unless Madame Giry and Nadir were doing a superhumanly good job at making him believe what they said, he would never accept such a ridiculous story.

Just as she was about to ask Gerry what they were going to do about this, he fell back as if he was pushed by something. Half a second later, so did she. It was that same feeling from before, only stronger this time.

Panting, Christine grabbed his wrist and pulled him closer. "Here's our chance!"

"No, wait, I—"

Before he could say anything else, she had initiated the kiss. And this time, something definitely was happening. The rapid increase in their pulse and respiration didn't help the newer sensation of being pulled in all different directions. Gerry swore he heard voices. But when he opened his eyes, he was in the exact same place, with Christine laying beside him, trying to slow her breathing.

"What the hell was that for if NOTHING changed?" he snapped at no one, banging his fist on the floor.

"G-Gerry..?"

He looked down at Christine. "What?"

She looked around in wild confusion. "Oh my God. Oh my God, Oh my God, I can't be here! NO!"

"EMMY?"

Sitting bolt upright, she nodded quickly, still obviously panicked. He groaned and rubbed his eyes.

"Oh no…it switched you and Christine…"

She gave him an almost disgusted look. "Did you figure that out all by yourself?"

"Oh, that's cool, go straight to snapping at me, no 'hey Gerry, nice to see you're alive and well…'"

"Fine. Hey-Gerry-glad-to-see-you're-alive-and-well," she repeated back dully. He rolled his eyes and stood up.

"Good enough. Now, explain what's going on over there."

"You mean in the real world? Well, Erik's doing a fantastic job being you, seeing as he just has to be himself on screen…."

"Yeah, alright, at least I still have my job," he sighed, not very relieved. "But why does he keep kissing you?"

Her eyes widened. "How do you know he's kissed me?"

"Because every time it happens, Christine and I felt it," Gerry said. "It's a hard feeling to ignore."

Emmy looked down, thinking back hard. "Did you guys kiss right after we did a few days ago?"

"Yeah, because we figured that's what was going to swap us back, doing the same thing that swapped us in the first place, but then we found out it had to be at the same time. So when we did it at the same time, it worked, but now you're here instead of me being there."

She rubbed her temples and tried to take this in. Her mind was still swimming from whatever had just happened to her to transport her into this dimension.
"But maybe…" Gerry said. "Maybe we just have to do it again and it'll set everyone right."

Emmy gasped and stepped back. "No, no, no. If I'm going to be stuck in a piece of the Victorian era that isn't supposed to exist, I'm going to enjoy myself. I was just locked in the break room with Erik playing Truth or Dare, for God's sake….and I'm sure Christine will explain to Erik how this whole thing works too. We have plenty of time."

"Playing…truth or dare? Locked in the break room?" Gerry repeated, raising an eyebrow and crossing his arms in disapproval.

"Yes, we went there to eat after Miranda gave us some takeout and told us we needed to find her laptop, and after a few minutes, someone slammed the door and locked us inside. We didn't see who it was. So we got bored and started playing truth or dare…and we ended up kissing, so here I am."

He shook his head, confused. "But that's not a kissing game."

"It is if you're dared to kiss someone."

"So he dared you to kiss him?"

She looked away. "Actually, he asked if I enjoyed the first kiss and I said I wasn't sure, since he was drunk-"

"He was drunk? In my recovering alcoholic body?" Gerry shrieked. Emmy couldn't help but snort a little.

"It isn't funny!" he snapped, voice cracking a little from the panic. She just burst out laughing.

"He ended up…haha… having a fork fight…ah…with Patrick…"

Groaning, Gerry shook his head. "I can't believe this. What else did he do in my body?"

"What did you do in his?" she challenged with a smirk. He scoffed.

"Nothing! I just went around trying to figure out how to get out of his body. Honestly, who the hell would want to BE Erik?"

"Maybe he doesn't want to be you either!"

"Don't be stupid, guys would kill to be me," Gerry retorted as if this was the most obvious fact the world. After noticing Emmy's amusedly shocked face, he added, "How I am now, anyway. Who doesn't want to be paid an insane amount to play famous leading roles in movies and make out with hot women in almost all of them?"

"Am I considered a hot woman then?"

"Ye—well, that's kind of a loaded question."