I'm back. And immediately have a cold. I think it's because I was so stressed prior and during my event that my body had become just about immune to any illness, and then as soon as it was over and I heaved a great sigh of relief, my immune system was like "finally, we can rest…"

And I immediately got sick. Yay.

Cover Art: Kirire

Chapter 72

Blake did her best to ignore Amber as she cleaned up the home, all while Jaune played distraction with the landlord. It was annoying work, but she'd rather be setting chairs and tables than dealing with some stuck-up parasite leeching off other people. It should have been quiet work, but Jaune's annoying little sister seemed determined to make it anything but.

"You shouldn't sleep with Jaune."

"Give me strength," Blake whispered to the ceiling, before saying, "Jaune and I are not sleeping with one another. I'm his employee. I'm more of an assistant."

"Saphron said that about Terra and we all knew they were a thing."

"It is possible to have friendly business relations without there being sex involved."

Amber shook her head. "That's how it went for our mother, too. She was just father's employee, but then she fell in love with him even when he didn't love her back. It always starts with we're not together, but it never ends that way. You should get out now while you still can."

Blake refused to respond. She wasn't about to get into an argument with a fifteen-year-old brat, least of all when Jaune could come back and see her acting childish. If it weren't for his sisters hating him so much, she'd have said Amber was jealous. That was much too unlikely, however. The only one of his siblings who had cared about him was Coral, and Blake still had the feeling that care was born more out of scientific curiosity than familial love.

She really didn't want to get involved in that family – either via romantic terms, or through sibling rivalry and petty squabbles. It was bad enough she still had a date with Sun to go on, and even worse that she thought about a guy who was probably really good fun in such negative terms, but she was over-worked and over-stressed, and all she wanted was to chill with her pet monster-spider on the couch, stuff her face with sweets and read a good book or six. Preferably with the door locked and every other person on Remnant told to stay far, far away.

But no. The world couldn't give her that. Too many ridiculous shenanigans with anomalies here, there and everywhere. It honestly felt crazy how fast they came and how many, but then she supposed she didn't actually know the average population density of them. Maybe this was normal. Maybe there was an anomaly for every five people, and the rate at which they were finding them was entirely on par with what other offices faced.

If so, she needed to press Jaune to hire some more people so she could take a week's holiday and go back to Menagerie, though even then she was sure she'd run into an anomaly. It wasn't that they hadn't always been there because they obviously had been, but she was now paranoid enough to notice them everywhere she went. Things she'd have written off as folklore and nonsense before were now dangerous creatures and objects that she had to investigate. Even someone acting suspicious would draw her eye, and she wouldn't be able to enjoy a holiday for her mind constantly running around ideas of what they could be up to.

I'm turning into a paranoid wreck. No. Paranoia suggests unreasonable fear. I'm just becoming a nervous wreck, and the worst part is it's perfectly reasonable for me to be this way. Ughhh. Blake pinched the bridge of her nose and used her other hand to massage her forehead. Now I see why the stupidly high salary is needed to keep people in the job.

Righting the last chair, Blake sighed and looked about the dining room. It looked about the same as it had when they entered the house. Thankfully, whatever knocked the furniture over hadn't tracked any mud or dust in. It had just been the items knocked around.

"I'm done," she called out. "You?"

"Yeah. Close enough." Amber strolled back into the room with an indignant, spoilt princess look about her. "When I have my own office, I'll have employees to do this for me."

"Yeah? Be careful you don't fuck them all, then." Blake enjoyed the scandalised look on her face. "What? Wasn't it you who said employees are sleeping with their bosses? I just assumed you'd be doing it the same way."

"W—What!? No! I'll hire women!"

Blake smirked. "Love is love. I don't judge."

"NOT LIKE THAT!"

"Why are you shouting? That's not very professional. A director should be more in control."

"You— But—" Amber gnashed her teeth. "Ugh. You're stupid."

"Sick burn."

"I'm done here!" she announced. "Let us see if Jaune has managed to befriend this landlord, or whether it's another person he's let down." The snipe had Blake frowning, but Amber headed for the door and pushed it open. "Jaune, we are done with—" Her voice cut off. "J—Jaune…?"

Jaune wasn't there.

Neither was the landlord, their truck or, and perhaps more importantly, the city of Vale either. They were in a wide, open plane of flat grass. It was plain, but it was also a plane – perfectly flat and barren of any and all decoration but for bright green grass as far as the eye could see, and a bright blue sky with thin, wispy clouds blowing slowly by.

They weren't in Vale anymore.

"Back in the house!" snapped Blake, grabbing Amber by the collar and yanking her violently back inside. She kicked the door shut behind her. "We're staying in here!"

"W-W-W—" babbled Amber.

"We've been transported."

"I know that!" howled the girl. "T—The interdimensional rift or… or this house, as the vehicle, it's transported us to the other side. This is all because Jaune left us alone inside!" she ranted, then her eyes widened and she gasped. "Wait! It is because Jaune left us alone inside!"

The first time she'd said it, she'd meant it as a blanket insult aimed at her brother, but it looked like she'd realised that it might actually be true, and Blake could see why. Jaune, as an anomaly, had acted as an anchor to their world, preventing another anomaly taking them away to another dimension. Then Jaune left the house, and like a ship cut free from its anchor, they had drifted. The worst part was knowing she'd left her Slaved Anomaly back at the apartment because she hadn't trusted the creature within. It would have been nice to have that on her right now.

"Okay," said Blake. "We need to stay here, in the house, and hope that it transports us back whenever the rift opens again. That'll be whatever time it was when all the furniture in the house was knocked about, right?"

Amber looked ready to insult her, then realised they were stuck together and let it go. "Yeah. Yeah, it's probably that. Unless we get transported sooner for some reason. But the house is the gateway, or the vehicle, so we definitely have to stay in here. Everything out there is another dimension."

Blake nodded and moved back into the living room. There was a window looking out over the grassy field that carried on seemingly forever. It looked like a dimension without human habitation, but then how was the house here at all? Had the house become an anomaly and travelled to this dimension, or had it been built in both and become a bridge of sorts? But, if it was built here, then who built it and why? The lack of any landmarks suggested the house had come here on its own, and likely dropped onto some empty world in the middle of a giant field of grass.

The lack of any wildlife, birds, flowers or anything that wasn't grass was a little bit jarring, but who was to say an alternate dimension would have any of those things? Maybe this was just one where no creatures other than plants lived, and where grass was the dominant lifeform. A planet covered in a carpet of grass from pole to pole.

It was weird to imagine, but at least it felt safe.

"The people who lived here never mentioned being transported to another world," said Blake. "And we'd have had case files if there were disappearances or deaths involved with this. We should be fairly safe as long as we don't go outside and get lost in another dimension. I guess we just wait." Blake took to the closest couch and laid down on her back, placing her head on a cushion and her feet over the far armrest. "Grab a seat."

Reluctantly, Amber sat on the chair across the rug from her, but she sat prim and proper with her hands on her knees. The girl looked ridiculous in her tailored suit, primarily because while it did fit her perfectly, the fact she was only about five-feet tall, and the suit fitted to that, made her look like a posh baby.

Ruby had looked the same, but she acted her age and didn't try to pretend to be otherwise, so it had looked charming on her, especially when she rolled her sleeves up and wore a skirt. Amber was trying too hard to mimic her stern father and looked ridiculous.

"I did not even want to be here," she hissed.

"Hm?"

"Here in Vale, with you people. I asked to be sent to the Fist Office where—"

"Sorry," Blake interrupted. "I think you mistook my automatic humming response as my being even remotely interested." The girl fumed, but Blake wasn't done. "I'm sure you have your little drama around Jaune and what happened in Mountain Glenn, but it's one-sided. Jaune and I do good work and we've put down anomalies constantly. Neither of us really care if you do or don't approve of our methods. You're here to learn, so shut up, pay attention, and maybe you'll come out of this internship with more brains than you came into it with."

"Are you always this rude?" asked Amber.

"Only to entitled little brats who think they deserve better."

Huffing again, Amber crossed her arms, looked away, and settled down for the long haul.

/-/

The long haul turned into a couple of hours, and Blake couldn't lay down for all of it. She got up and checked the house over for anything out of place, found nothing, then went to the kitchen and tested the taps for some running water. They also didn't work. Oddly, the electricity did work, and the fridge was fully functional and had a few bits and pieces in it to eat and drink. Not enough to survive here for very long if they got stranded, but enough to have some snacks and a drink of soda.

If they ended up trapped here, she always had Gambol Shroud on hand to take the less painful way out. Morbid, but she didn't think they would be stuck. Or at least she hoped not. The house allegedly bounced back and forth, so all they had to do was wait. If every previous tenant hadn't been sucked into another dimension and lost, then she wouldn't be either.

So long as she and Amber didn't go outside, of course.

Blake was kind of grateful Amber Arc was as paranoid as the rest of her family because she could just imagine someone like Ruby or Yang wanting to "test" the outdoors and then getting themselves trapped in the dimension. The only way anyone was getting either of them outside this house was if they carried them.

"It's getting dark outside!" shouted Amber. "Really fast, too."

That was no exaggeration. There was a window in the kitchen and Blake could see the sun setting second by second, casting what looked like a wall of shadow that continued to reach across the grass. She supposed the lack of anything to cast a shadow during the day made the night look darker or something, because it was pitch black in a way that was more than hyperbole. Normally, darkness still meant some light in the form of moonlight, stars, or little bits of electronics. This was blacker than that. It was the kind of darkness you could only find deep underground, or so she assumed.

Blake had never seen darkness so dark before. When it overcame the house and the window, everything outside was pure black. A black she had never known existed for how all-encompassing it was. Even her faunus eyes couldn't pierce it. Night vision just meant adjustments to the eyes that allowed for better receiving the limited rays of light that existed at night, or mutations in the eye to reflect and process them better.

There was no light out there for even her eyes to pick up.

"I guess this dimension doesn't have anything like a moon to reflect light on this side of the globe." Blake paused. "If it's even a— No. No." She shook her head. "I am not giving the flat-remnant society even the slightest ammunition to work with."

"They do good work for us," said Amber. "Their conspiracy theories are so stupid and dumb that people lump in every other theory with them, and they drag the whole lot down." The younger girl was peering out the larger window in the living room. "But yeah, I can't see anything. You could get lost forever in this darkness. I'm surprised we still have lighting in here."

"Something-something electrical connection existing in both dimensions," said Blake. It was about the best explanation they were going to get. "This nighttime came on a lot faster than it should have, so hopefully means it won't last very long either. We might be able to get back to our dimension when the night-day cycle here ends rather than the one in our world."

"That would be nice. Then we can destroy the house."

Blake hummed. "Well…"

"It's the rules!" snapped Amber. "Even you can't possibly be trying to advocate for this to stay!"

"I'm not. I'm not. It's just that we don't know if it's the house that's anomalous, do we? It could be something within the house." Blake's reasoning had Amber dropping her explosive scowl. "I agree that whatever it is needs to go, but if we destroy the house and the item lives, then it can snatch other people away."

"Right." Amber relented a little and put the fist she'd been making to threaten Blake with down. "You're not wrong. Well, we can't go outside if it's an aerial or antennae doing this, but I suppose we could split up and search the house's interior." The girl coughed into her fist and adopted a lecturing pose, "As the only acting member of the Arc family here, I believe it only right that I take command in this dangerous time."

Blake rolled her eyes. "No one needs to take command when there's no orders to give. Let's just split up and look for anything suspicious."

"But—"

"Amber, you're interning. I'm fairly sure your father would tell you to do as we say during this. If you push it, I'll make sure Saphron knows you spent your time in a crisis situation bickering about who should be in charge. I'm not sure she'd be impressed by that."

As expected, the threat of Saphron was a hefty one and Amber's teeth clicked together. Without a word, she hastened for the stairs and the second floor, leaving Blake to browse around the bottom floor. It was childish of both of them in all honesty, but Blake wasn't afraid to admit she could be childish at times, especially when it came to someone prickling her. Quite frankly, she'd had a bad enough month without dealing with a brat.

Searching the kitchen and living room didn't take as much time as she feared. A benefit of the tenants having moved out was that they'd taken a lot of things with them, leaving only a few trinkets behind. Blake wasn't exactly sure what she was looking for, but she poked and prodded items and turned appliances on to see if they acted unusually. The oven worked just fine, and the TV worked but couldn't find a signal, which was expected enough a problem for it that she ruled it out as being anomalous. It would have made her more suspicious if it could find channels.

The lights all turned on and off, and she took herself to the storage cupboard under the staircase where a lot of old houses like this had their electrical boxes. The fact that the electricity worked in this dimension was odd enough that she suspected the fuse box of being the anomaly, or a fuse or piece of wiring within it.

Could a length of wiring be an anomaly? How would they even deal with that? Would they have to remove all the writing, all the way back to the main grid, or would Jaune know of some way to test it and have them just cut out a certain bit.

It probably didn't matter because the fuse box looked perfectly normal, and each switch was labelled. Blake flicked the one in the kitchen on and off, and sure enough the lighting flicked off along with it. She refrained from casting the upstairs into darkness, even if it would have been worth it to hear Amber shriek in fright. Blake poked around the wiring for a bit, but it disappeared into the wall, where it presumably travelled outside and – in their dimension – into the main grid. Blake wasn't an electrician, and didn't really know how that all worked, but this felt normal enough.

"And if you are the anomaly then I have no idea what happens if I disconnect you or turn you off," she told the box. "So, count yourself lucky. Yourselves. Whatever you are. Ugh." Blake let her head dink against the plastic covering. "I'm talking to a fuse box. I'm really losing it." She closed and locked the box. "I'd best go see how Amber is—"

Riiiiiiiiiiing. Riiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiing. Riiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiing.

The first ring of the phone had Blake jumping so hard she hit her head on the low ceiling, and the second was concealed by muttered curses, but, by the third ring, she had managed to stumble out of the small cupboard just as Amber's feet came stamping down the staircase.

"Phone!" she said. "Phone! Phone!"

"I can hear," groused Blake, pacing over to the device attached to the wall, practically a relic in an era of portable scrolls, but if the electronics were connected then the phone system might be connected as well. It was a long shot. "Hello?"

"Blake!"

"Jaune!" She sagged against the wall, leaning on it while she held the device between her ear and shoulder. "Thank goodness. We're okay, both of us, but we're in an alternate dimension. It's dark here, unnaturally so, and we've locked ourselves in the house. We're hoping that'll let us come back when the day-night cycle ends."

"Good. On all accounts. Do not leave the house no matter what. I'm outside it right now and keeping anyone from entering in case that somehow delays the transition. No matter what, you must not leave the house. If it goes without you, there may be no coming back!" He sounded panicked, but also relieved to have reached them. Blake shared the sentiment. "I'm going to end the call in case this is making it worse, too."

"Right. We'll see you soon. Hopefully," she added as the line went dead. "You catch all that?" she asked Amber.

"Yes. But we still haven't found the anomaly—"

DING-DONG!

It wasn't the phone this time.

It was the doorbell.

DING-DONG!

Blake and Amber stared at one another, then the door, which was less than two metres away. There was a tiny, glazed and frosted window in the top, but it was obviously still that impossible shade of black outside and they couldn't see a thing. A quick step into the living area revealed it was black outside as well, meaning they were still in the wrong dimension.

Meaning there was something from this dimension ringing the doorbell.

DING-DONG!

"Do we…?" Amber gestured at the door. "Were there any reports of missing people?"

"None."

"Would an alien from another dimension know how a doorbell works?"

"It might have learned from experience," said Blake. She didn't want to open the door, and found her legs were trembling. "We're not opening it. Whatever is out there can stay out there." Blake's fingers wrapped around the grip of Gambol Shroud, and she took comfort in its reassuring presence. "Don't make a sound," she whispered. "Come on. Upstairs."

Blake tugged Amber to the staircase and they ascended slowly and as quietly as they could. The doorbell continued to ring, and it was increasing in intensity. By the time they were halfway up the stairs it was a constant ringing, as if the person was holding the button in.

Then they became impatient and knocked on the door.

Almost politely. Three short raps, each measured and spaced apart.

And then again.

Then they came a third time, and they were not polite, nor were they patient. It was a fist slamming on the door with a mighty thud. Demanding to be let inside. Blake bolted at the top of the stairs and went into the first bedroom with Amber just as the door crashed open downstairs, and what sounded like millions of feet stampeded inside.

Heart in her throat, she dove for a standing wardrobe and yanked Amber in with her, then shut the door. The power went out in the house, casting the interior into the same impossible dark as outside. Blake couldn't see the wardrobe doors in front of her face and only knew Amber was beside her because of her quiet, stifled breathing. The girl had a hand over her mouth to quieten herself, and Blake did the same after a moment's thought.

Downstairs, it sounded like a riot. There was crashing and banging and bumping and loud thuds, and then she heard the staircase thumping as people – as something or some things – ascended it. The door to the bedroom they'd entered crashed open and feet entered. Blake drew Gambol Shroud and aimed it forward, just pointing it in front of her read to squeeze the trigger if she heard the wardrobe open, and hope that the muzzle flash would give her some light to work with.

But the door didn't open.

Despite the loud crashing to come in, and the fact that she knew there was something, or many things, in the bedroom with them, there was no movement and no sound. The anomalies were still and silent, making it seem for all the world like she and Amber were the only ones there.

A trap. It had to be. Blake stayed where she was, and Amber was wise enough to do the same. They held perfectly still, all too aware of how loud their breathing sounded in the silence and didn't move a muscle.

A floorboard creaked.

Something tapped against a glass window.

Downstairs, something wooden toppled over and was then scraped across the floor.

Something bumped into the bedframe in their very bedroom.

The barrel of Gambol Shroud made a tiny thunk noise as it touched the wooden wardrobe door.

"YARGHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!"

A scream, from downstairs, pierced through the silence and made Blake and Amber jump so badly she almost pulled the trigger. Thankfully, she didn't, and the entities in the room stampeded out, converging on the sound of absolute agony with no sound other than that of feet pounding on the ground. The scream petered out and was soon replaced with silence once more.

And then a strange music she couldn't quite place sounded, and the stampede of feet headed outside. And light filtered in through the window, casting horizontal lines of yellow across Blake and Amber's faces, and illuminating the room through the closed door. The bed had been moved, and a chair had been knocked over. Things had been disturbed here and there.

"Are they gone?" asked Amber, her voice quiet and frightened.

Blake wasn't much better. "I think—"

"Blake!" Jaune's voice sounded downstairs. "Blake! Amber! For the love of anything, tell me you're there! Please—"

"Jaune!" shouted Blake.

"BLAKE!" There was a fresh set of feet on the stairs, but this time it was just the one and she heard Jaune's panting as he shouldered the door to the room open just in time to see her and Amber spill out the wardrobe. "You're alive!" he gasped and raced over to embrace her. "You're both alive," he added, as an afterthought.

But he didn't hug Amber and the look she shot him said he'd find a knee in his balls if he tried.

"We're getting out of here," she said.

"Trust me. I know. Come on." He pulled her toward the door, Amber following. "And… mind the… uh… mess downstairs…"

"Chairs and tables? I think we heard what caused those."

"It's a bit messier than that I'm afraid."

It was the stench of blood that clued her in, but even that couldn't make up for the vomit-inducing sight of chunks of human meat scattered around the bottom of the staircase, by the front door. It was all too easy to pick out which chunks had been part of the man's face and which had been other parts, and it wasn't even like a beast had eaten him. She'd seen the results of Grimm tearing people to shreds, and this was different.

For one, Grimm tended to spread people across an area and rip and tear. A person might be torn in half or have part of their body shredded but the rest relatively whole. That wasn't the case here. The man had been separated into roughly even-sized chunks of meat, and they were piled up on the floor in a pool of blood and guts. It was as if something had disassembled him and left his parts on the floor in a neat pile.

"Who—?" she asked.

"The landlord. He wouldn't believe me when I said to stay outside. He thought you two were stealing something or causing damage. Said he'd have us arrested and reported to trading standards, then burst in before I could stop him." Jaune shook his head sadly. "He vanished before my eyes. Just disappeared, instantly swept into the other dimension. It ended less than a minute later."

"We know," said Amber. "We were there. We heard him."

"At least this gives us ample excuse to close the house down." Jaune helped them navigate around the mess, and Blake felt so much safer once she was outside. "We'll slate the house for demolition and destroy every object in it at the same time. Nothing will remain."

"I started in a house that tried to eat me and nearly died in another." Blake's joke was in poor taste, but she laughed at it either way. "I think I'm going to develop a phobia of houses at this rate."

Jaune laughed with her.

"How is this funny?" demanded Amber. "We nearly died!"

"You get used to it after a while." Blake smiled, if only because she could, and because she found Amber's stunned expression to somehow be funny. "This is an average week for us. But don't worry. You'll have your own office soon, and then you'll be on your own with a bunch of amateurs trying to keep them alive. I bet that'll be fun."

The blood drained from Amber's face.

"T—The internship isn't over…"

"Not yet." Blake clapped the girl's shoulder. "Make sure to pay attention and learn a lot."

Her life would depend on it.

Anomaly inspired by a ceepypasta that I'm sure a lot of people will recognise.

Next Chapter: 9th October

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