11:47 PM: "Hey, Chidi. It's Eleanor. You asleep yet? If you're not, you should come meet up with me and Tahani. We're at a bar down the street! No pressure, though. It's just, uh, it would be fun to have you around."
12:09 AM: "So, what's the deal, bud? Eleanor again, by the way. Are you asleep or not? Jason can come down, too, if you want. Just call me back. Or don't. Whatever. I don't care."
1:01 AM: "CHIDI! Chidichidichidichidichidi… You better get your ass down here, get some of this shit. Shellstrop ouuuut."
2:04 AM: "CHIDI! …I forgot. But it was really really really really really important. You cannot let me forget again. If I don't call you again, you need to pester me all the way to Whatever, Canada tomorrow. Because it's really important. Okay?"
2:07 AM: "CHIDI! I remembered! I need to know—oh, hang on one second. TAHANI. WHAT ARE YOU—I have to go. Tahani is flirting with her own reflection. I have to go record it with my phone so she can be mortified by it forever. Bye."
2:33 AM: "Okay, here it is. The really really really important thing is this: I have a question for you. Absolutely crucial. I mean, life-changing. Here it is, oh boy… Did you and Jason ever make out in any of the reboots? OR MORE? Because Michael definitely made you soulmates in Attempt 672, and Jason was selling that monk shit hard. At one point, you said you could see the answers to all the questions in the universe in eyes. So if you guys made out OR MORE, then I think at some point, all of would have… you know. Or more."
It's three in the morning when Chidi wakes up. When he sees the sheer number of calls he missed in the last few hours, his anxiety goes off the rails. He's only slightly less alarmed when he realizes it's just an increasingly drunk and slurring Eleanor wanting him to go out and have fun.
Even before getting audibly obliterated, Eleanor apparently only thought to vaguely mention the bar as being down the block, and Chidi does not want to go wandering through an unfamiliar city after dark alone, so he decides to call for more directions.
She answers the phone after one ring.
"Chidi!? Is that you for-real, finally?"
Despite the situation, Chidi's mood lightens when he hears her voice. He can hear the smile in Eleanor's voice, and he can't help but feel warm at the thought that just talking to him would put a smile on her face. "Hey, Eleanor. What are you getting up to?"
"We're at the bar! Did you get my voicemail?"
"I got all six of your voicemails."
"Are you coming down or not?"
"I think you all had better come back up."
"Chidi. The night is just getting started. You have to come down. Please. It's all I want."
"I will come down. For one drink," Chidi concedes. "And then we have to get some sleep."
Eleanor cheers on the other end and gives him the name of the bar, Michel's, you can't miss it, because there's a big mean guy out front, and then Chidi is on his way.
The problem is, there isn't a bar down the street called Michel's. At least, as far as Chidi can tell after wandering for what feels like an hour.
Actually, he realizes, he might not even be anywhere close to the hotel anymore.
Curse his directional insanity.
And, quite possibly, his actual insanity.
Lack of sleep, jet lag, and the general absurdity of his life as of late is making the world spin.
I have to find a bar called Michel's to babysit my drunk friends so our inhuman celestial friends aren't mad at them in the morning because we're on a mission to save all of humanity from the endless horrors of the afterlife which we came back from after being trapped in it for three hundred years and now we know about it SO WE'RE DOOMED.
That's what he'll say when he goes up to those two guys leaning against the railing of a bridge.
He's trying to figure out a way to make this sound less insane—Is there a bar called Michel's nearby? will probably do better—when one of the guys' heads comes off.
Chidi stifles a scream and staggers backwards as a massive mantis head wriggles out of the guy's hoodie.
"Ugh," the other guy says. "Good idea." Then, his skin falls away, too, leaving Chidi horrified at the crumbling magma mass that emerges.
He wasn't aware of it, but a strangled scream escaped him, and now the two monsters' heads snap toward him.
"Oh, crap," the mantis says, its voice still unnervingly human and vaguely annoyed. Then, "Wait, isn't that one of them?"
"Yeah. That's one of them."
"Nice."
And then, the monsters are charging toward him.
He's ninety percent sure this is all a fabrication of his stressed-out and sleep-deprived mind. Maybe he's hallucinating, or maybe he's up in the hotel room, asleep, or maybe he's back in Australia, and he's been asleep for the past few insane months.
Regardless, when a man with a smoldering magma face and a man with an immense bug face start running toward you, you run away.
He runs without looking back for several blocks, and his legs are on fire when he races past another unfamiliar building. He'll worry about where the hell he is when he's sure he's lost them.
When he spots the couple a few yards in front of him, everything gets even more complicated. He only has a moment to ponder the terrible implications of pushing past a nice couple out and about, whether he would be leaving them to run into the Scary Heads before he does it.
He doesn't time to stop, but it's against his nature to just let them wander into danger; that would be wrong. He turns on his heel and shouts, "STOP, RUN," a conflicting command that is met with only two very alarmed, very human faces. "There's monsters," he adds sheepishly, now more convinced than ever that he's going crazy.
The couple exchanges a worried glance, then slowly backs away from him, as if pretending to think he'd been talking to someone else.
They are not eaten by Scary Heads.
"What is going on?" Chidi whispers frantically to no one in particular.
Now it's his turn to call Eleanor. And then Tahani. And then Jason.
By fate's cruel hand, only Jason picks up.
"Hey, homie!"
"Jason! Where are you?"
"The potato place."
"The what?"
"The state with the potatoes. Idaho. I was on a road trip and we were trying to get to Canada but everyone was arguing and then we got in a crash and had to fix the car so now we're in Idaho."
"I know, buddy, I was there."
"Oh, yeah!"
"What I mean is where in town are you? What are you doing? And have you seen anything… weird?"
"Janet and I are on the walking trails. We're playing SURPRISE!" He shouts the word so loudly and suddenly into the phone that Chidi has to back it away from his ear. "That's a game I invented just now where we find people to talk to and ask about their night and I have to walk backwards and on one foot if they mention something Janet didn't know about. But then it got really late and there's no one out so we're picking up rocks and if—"
"Jason, Jason, listen to me. Are Eleanor and Tahani with you?"
"No, they're at the hotel, aren't they?"
"Apparently, they went out for drinks."
"Hey, so did Janet and I! Oh, four worms, that's three points for me!"
"Sure. I have to stand on my head for two minutes now anyway because Janet called Dishwasher."
Chidi has no idea what that means, but he's grateful to talk to someone who wasn't plastered.
"Hi, Chidi," comes Janet's refreshingly clear and sober voice. "How can I help you?"
"Janet, I'm lost. And I'm scared. And I think probably everyone should be getting to bed. I don't mean to be a party pooper, but if we could not handle a road trip together while sober and well-rested, I really don't want to know what it will be like when we're all exhausted and hungover."
"You make an excellent point, Chidi. Describe what you see and we'll come get you."
Chidi describes the parking garage and apartment complex he's standing between and internally thanks Janet for knowing he would be unable to follow even the most straightforward directions if she gave them to him over the phone. Being a Janet, she surely knows about when he'd first arrived at Sorbonne when he was told to get one simple form from the financial office and only came back six hours later.
"Alright. Stay right there."
/
Chidi fully intended to stay right there. He had.
The problem was, after what felt like three hours but was probably more like then minutes, the Scary Heads caught up to him.
He saw them before they saw him, and he scrambled into the parking garage. He could hear their voices echoing off the cavernous ceiling, and just to be extra safe, crawled under a car.
His whole front is now filthy and wet from lying on the pavement, but he's not worried about that. He's trying to hear whether or not it's safe to come out.
Another problem: There is no way Janet is going to find him underneath this random Honda. Without moving too quickly or too suddenly, he slowly checks his pockets for his phone.
No. No, no no no no.
He checks all of his pockets again, trying to stay slow and calm, but quickly letting the panic infect his movement.
His phone is gone. Had he dropped it-?
His question is interrupted by the dreaded sound of one of the Scary Heads.
"Where did he go?" It growls. "He was right in front of us! How was he so fast?"
"On only two legs! Man, if I didn't have to wear this stupid human suit, I would have caught him in a heartbeat."
"Whatever. We have his scent. He's gotta be close by."
They have his scent? Chidi wants to unpack whatever this statement means, but he suspects it really just means he needs to get out from underneath the random Honda and find somewhere else to hide, maybe someplace he can disguise his scent.
He's read about survivalists who cross running water to hide their scents, and logically there should some falls somewhere in Idaho Falls, but he's not sure how to find them. Instead, he tries to look for anyplace that's still open; maybe he can mask his scent with other humans just as well.
He eventually staggers into the first place he can see that seems to have other people in it: A bar and grill called Ryan's that he ducks into as fast he can.
He orders a coffee, trying to keep his wits about him, and watches the window. There's a statue in front of the bar of an old-timey trapper that keeps startling him; he thinks it's one of the monsters, and it doesn't help that the trapper has a scowl and a shotgun.
There's a big mean guy out front.
"Hey," Chidi says suddenly, turning to the bartender, "Were there two women in here earlier? One of them blonde and kind of short, in a hoodie? And the other one tall with long dark hair?"
The bartender rolled his eyes. "Oh yeah. They were here. Worst darts players I've ever seen, and I've seen a lot of bad dart players. Threw 'em out not too long ago, they had too much."
Chidi rubs his head, exasperated. "Any idea where they went?"
"Don't care, as long as they're not taking my customers' eyes out with darts. You know, they…" The bartender keeps talking, but Chidi turns his attention to the window, as if maybe Eleanor and Tahani will come back. There are two people outside, and he's not sure if they're regular men or if they're the Scary Heads with their human suits back on. They're looking at the bar, as if deciding whether or not to go in, and Chidi decides he has to get away from the window.
"I need to use your bathroom," he says with urgency, cutting off the bartender.
He hears the bell jingle as he rushes off to the back, and prays the bathroom has a window he can crawl out of.