The woods were still, and dark, and silent. 

Why did people speak of things going bump in the night? It wasn’t even night, just late evening—and even now, watching the trees racing past the window of the Honda, Sang Mi found the silence far more uncanny than any mysterious growl. She was almost glad of the occasional, eerie glimpse of another pair of tail-lights ahead in the distance, matching their speed, dipping in and out of view as the road twisted.

Flatwoods. Somehow, the name fit. It wasn’t that the terrain was particularly flat—not in any way that would register to a girl used to perfectly-even, terraformed environments—but there was an eerie evenness to these forests, as if the rows upon rows of pine trees on each side of the road were simply painted backdrops, and the road an oppressive corridor whose walls might at any moment press together and crush them. 

Chris was driving slowly. He’d been driving slowly all throughout the trip; that was the point of this diversion, after all, as it had been the point of all the others. A bit more time. Taking things slow, one stop at a time. Somehow, irrationally, she found herself wishing he’d speed up; wishing this particular leg of their road trip could be over already. She repressed the urge to voice that need. She’d been the one to suggest they drive through Flatwoods, after all; the Phantom of Flatwoods had been one more name on the cryptid checklist, one more legend to investigate at a leisurely pace of their choosing. And they were nearly at the end of their journey, now—running out of viable ways to extend it. What sense would it make to call it off now, when they’d barely gotten started?

But the silence was getting to her, all the same, and by the looks of him, Chris Cwej himself seemed equally ill-at-ease. His chiseled jaw was clenched, and his hands gripped the primitive car’s steering wheel more tightly than anything about the situation could rationally justify. Eventually, she worked up the will to speak. 

“So,” she said, in the kind of falsely casual tone that wasn’t actually intended to fool anyone about her state of mind, “what do you think we’ll find, if we find something?”

Sang Mi felt a momentary warmth, seeing a bit of tension leave her friend as the silence was broken.

“I’m not sure,” he said finally. “A ship, maybe. According to those reports you found, some kind of spacecraft was seen landing here in 1952. But no one saw it leave.”

“Could have been cloaked,” she suggested.

“Well, maybe. But why would they let themselves be seen on the way down? No, this smells like a crash to me. Ship too wrecked to take off again, at a guess. The pilot clambered out, spooked those farm kids who called it in… and then, I don’t know. They’ve never been seen again around these parts, and not for lack of people looking. Maybe they contacted someone up there and got picked up, or they made it to a bigger city and joined up with the local alien underground. Even without groups like SIGNET, castaways and refugees tend to help each other.”

“Cool. Yeah, that all sounds… plausible.”

They drove on for just long enough that the looping spectacle of trees whooshing past in the twilight gloom began to make Sang Mi’s skin crawl anew. 

“…But you don’t sound very convinced,” Sang Mi added.

“It’s the species,” Chris confessed. “You’ve seen what it looked like.”

“What’s wrong with that? Judging by that novelty chair we saw when we passed through the town, I think it looks pretty cute. That little round head!”

“Oh, sure,” Chris agreed. “Love the chair, it’s a great chair—they’d hardly put it in front of the town hall if it wasn’t. Remind me to send you that picture I took, when this is all over.” He blinked, as if sorry he’d brought up the endpoint of their odyssey. “But—it doesn’t look like any species I know. And believe me, I ought to know. Back at the Academy, I was drilled on every spacefaring species in the quadrant. None of them fit the bill, not remotely.” 

He seemed about to say something more—then paused.

After a while, he took his eyes off the road to check on his friend in the passenger seat. Upon seeing the unmistakable I-saw-that look on Sang Mi’s face, he reddened and instantly gave in.

“…None of them except… creatures I really hope we never meet,” he admitted. “Creatures from the Time of Legends, unbound by the laws of the Superiors—hardly even a species, in the modern sense of the word. They’re almost… elemental. Creatures of absolute fear. The stories say they looked sort of vegetal; big, round, reddish heads… You know jack-o’-lanterns? The Halloween tradition?”

“…Yeah?” Sang Mi blinked. “We’ve got Halloween back in Cheonsa. Never really got the pumpkin thing, though, to be honest. I hardly ate anything else when I was in the hospital, so I speak from experience when I say—pumpkin porridge is not spooky.”

“No, it isn’t, is it?” Chris said with wry tension. “But Hervoken are terrifying, and early humans got the image from them. The whole scary-scarecrows thing, actually. Why is a man made of twigs with a gourd for a head supposed to be scary? Well, they’re why.” Then he blinked. “Or anyway, that’s where this Earth got it from. Not sure about your universe. But… let’s just say—if your world ever had Hervoken, you’d better pray they’re extinct now.”

“Hervoken,” Sang Mi repeated, tasting the word. Chris took his eyes off the road, driving on instinct, and met her eyes. “And they’re supposed to be extinct here too?”

“That’s what the Superiors say,” Chris told her with a hint of weariness as well as unease. “But… well, you’ve got to wonder why they’d bother briefing me about them, if they really believed that.”

“I think you might be right,” said Sang Mi, rushing the words with a sudden urgency which vaguely confused Chris until she added, in a much louder shriek: “Brake!”

He stopped the car dead a few feet from the figure which stood, still as a tree, in the middle of the road. 

“Bloody H—what is that?!”

It was lanky and strange, with a head like a big round tomato, its only features a pair of luminescent eyes. A collar shaped like the Ace of Spades framed that head from behind, but Chris and Sang Mi knew, somehow, that the creature wore no clothing. The flaps of the long skirt that shrouded its body looked more like vegetal fronds than any kind of cloth or armour. And then there were the arms, twig-like, thin, oddly stunted, with long, clawed fingers. The left was hanging limply at its side, but it was holding the other out in front of its chest, claw-hand out-stretched, palm forwards. The gesture was jarringly human. 

Chris’s head moved quickly back and forth between Sang Mi and the creature. They’d seen worse things by now, stranger, angrier things. But their hearts were thumping just the same as if they’d been a pair of lost children, and they felt a strange vertigo rising up within their chests.

“Chris, I feel—”

“I know,” he told her quickly, not raising his voice, hands gripping the wheel. “I’m getting it too.”

“It’s like… I’ve felt this before,” she told him. “Once or twice. When I was using —”

She cut herself off before she said Delirium, but he seemed to take her meaning just the same. 

“Like the ground’s vanishing beneath your feet? Just sinking and sinking, and you’re going to be sick—you’re going to bleed out, and you don’t know what to do?” He gulped and screwed up his face. “That’s not drugs. It’s because we’re—sensitive. You and I. To certain things. You more than me, I think, but with what I’ve been around, the people I’ve worked with… I can feel it, too. Damn—never felt it this strongly before. But I know what it means. It’s reality that’s askew.”

“And that thing is responsible?” asked Sang Mi, pointing at the alien.

The creature hadn’t moved a muscle—if it even had muscles. Its eyes remained fixed on them, unblinking. 

“But… but it just appeared,” she went on. “One moment it was there, one moment it wasn’t.”

“Teleportation’s fairly common tech by this century, in this dimension,” Chris replied. “Well, not for humans. You know what I mean. But…”

She followed his train of thought exactly; neither of them bothered to say it. If the stranded alien had a working teleport, why would it still be here, five decades later? She found her gaze drawn back to the unmoving figure. There was something profoundly strange about it, something ghostly. It wasn’t translucent or anything so theatrical, and it took a moment for Sang Mi to spot it. When she did, she froze a moment before getting Chris’s attention and attempting a wordless gesture. After a moment his own eyes widened, and she knew he’d got it. 

The Honda’s headlights were shining directly upon the phantom. And still it cast no shadow on the road behind it. 

Suddenly, as if sensing that its nature had been probed, the phantom stirred to life. It moved slowly, even so, gliding like mist; but all the same, it was moving, and moving towards them. 

Chris and Sang Mi stared at each other out the corners of their eyes, neither of them now daring to stop watching the creature completely. They remained silent, breath bated, until the apparition reached the hood of the Honda—and went through it as if through a hologram. 

“Get out of the car!” Chris shouted. “Out! Out! Out!”

Even as he spoke, he pushed the door open and unstrapped his seatbelt, jumping out of the vehicle like a trooper into action. Sang Mi hesitated for a moment, her hand halfway to the handle of her own door, before she decided that she had better not split up from him; unbuckling her own seatbelt, she crawled as fast as she could over his empty driver’s seat and followed him out of the door on his side of the car. Out in front, the creature was still slowly, slowly gliding through the engine; its outstretched hand was almost touching the windshield. 

Chris took her hand as she got out of the car, and helped her find her footing; and then they were running, off the road, into the woods—hand in hand, without looking back.

Sang Mi couldn’t have said how long they kept running. It didn’t seem like a prolonged effort, more like a single moment of fear and exertion, stretched out until it was almost unbearable. Neither she nor Chris were strangers to running, to say the least, but eventually they had to stop, lungs burning, pulse beating a samba. Sang Mi collapsed into an almost foetal crouch, then, confirming with a glance that the ground was soft and mossy, let herself sit down in earnest. Chris stopped a second later, looking back to see her there, and he turned round to join her. 

“…I don’t think it’s chasing us,” she told him when their eyes met. 

He swallowed, and nodded. “Agreed. I think… Goddess, it sounds stupid. I think it wanted the car.”

Sang Mi felt herself chortling, despite the hoarseness of her throat and the adrenaline in her veins. “…What?”

“Think about it,” he explained, tilting his head and spreading those thick, long arms of his. “It’s a crashed pilot, yeah? Powers know what species, but stranded, anyway. Stranded here for decades, and it clearly didn’t make contact with humanity, for whatever reason. I think it wants off this planet. I think it must have recognised you and me—time-sensitives—as higher lifeforms, not native to this time and place… so it figures our vehicle must be advanced technology it could use to escape.”

Sang Mi thought for a moment, and straightened, looking Chris dead in the eye. 

“…Well, it’s not entirely wrong, is it?”

“What do you mean?”

“Well—you’re saying it’s basically a hitchhiker, aren’t you?” Sang Mi replied. “Sure, the Honda won’t get it where it wants to go, but maybe we can help. Can’t you, I dunno, contact those Superiors of yours? You told me they see themselves as peacekeepers, sorting out Time and Space and all that. Sending a stranded creature home ought to be within their wheelhouse, even if it’s dangerous.”

“Especially if it’s dangerous,” Chris granted. “But—uhm—my T.M. comms unit was in the trunk.”

She blinked at him. “I thought you had some sort of telepathic link to your bosses. Is it only one-way?”

“No…” groaned Chris as he began to stand up again, brushing twigs and dead leaves off his trousers. “But it’s delicate stuff. See, it’s not exactly telepathy. I’m connected to the Vicinity, and that means I’m connected to the Threads of the Infinite Spiral of Space-Time Itself—and the Base of Operations is built, basically, on top of the Astral Nexus, where all those threads converge. The eye of the storm.”

“Isn’t that dangerous?”

Chris shrugged. “It’s… a place of power. They keep it in their basement.”

“Uhuh,” Sang Mi nodded, not without sarcasm. “I hope you realise how that all sounded.”

He gave her a wan smile as he offered her a hand and helped her to her feet in turn. “You have no idea,” he told her. “But my point is, it only works when the structure of reality itself is nice and orderly. And let me tell you… What we’ve been feeling, you and I… There’s something very wrong with Space and Time in these woods.”

“Y-you can say that again,” said Sang Mi, letting go of his hand as she took a step back—then pointed, eyes wide, over his shoulder. “Look!”

Chris Cwej whirled round, bracing himself for the sight of the green phantom, the thing without a shadow, stalking them once more. What he found, what Sang Mi had spotted, was altogether more disquieting. 

There, in the distance, barely visible in the gloom behind the black bars of the tree-trunks, were two human silhouettes, standing quite close together. Looking directly at them. One was a tall, broad man with long arms and square shoulders. The other was a girl with a skirt, her hair styled in a bob.

She was pointing.

Chris swallowed.

“Ah.”

He inched closer to Sang Mi and took her hand again. The other Cwej did the same with the other Sang Mi. 

“Ah,” Chris said again, and Sang Mi felt a chill down her spine as she faintly heard the same remark coming from the duplicate Cwej, with not the slightest time-delay. 

“Chris?” she asked him in barely more than a whisper, just so she wouldn’t hear those words coming out of her other self’s mouth. “What’s happening? It’s not a shapeshifter, is it?”

“No such luck. Don’t —” he paused “— be afraid. Not of… them,” he added with a vague gesture in the direction of their duplicates. “I don’t think they’re copies at all. I think they’re us. Literally us.”

“You don’t mean —”

“Oh, I do,” he exhaled, frowning with concentration. His grip felt tight around her fingers; not so tight that it was painful, but anxious. “Space-time is screwed up much worse than I thought. Gah, I should have seen it! That ride was taking way too long.”

“And those tail lights… Those car tail lights in the distance…” Sang Mi added in frightful realisation, still keeping her voice low. 

“You’re right,” Chris confirmed grimly. “There was never anyone else on the road. It’s this forest. It’s folded up on itself, like—like a maze.”

“A fractal maze,” she added, staring, entranced, at her own face a hundred yards away. “No wonder that creature never found its way out, even after half a century. And—look,” she added.

So saying, she slipped her hand out of his grip and began to turn in place, scanning the dark horizon beyond the nearest trees. It didn’t take long for her to spot yet another duo a quarter-turn away; a tall man standing still, and a girl spinning in place. 

“Look over there,” she said, grimly but without fear, pointing at that more distant pair. 
Chris followed her gaze, and she saw in the way his eyes widened that he’d understood what she meant.

“…And there,” he added in turn, pointing even further away. 

“Chris,” she asked him, turning back to him, in a level, serious voice. “How… How are we going to get out of here?”

“I… I don’t know,” he confessed. 

She heard in his tone that he’d considered a comforting lie, for just a second, then chosen honesty. Just for that, she flashed him a brief, sad, but thankful smile. Then she took a moment to collect herself before smiling again, with as much genuine hope as she felt.

“There’s got to be a way,” she assured him. “We’ve been through worse. We’ve got our memories., this time. Our wits. And no one’s trying to keep us here, are they?”

“No, I don’t think so,” he granted, drumming his fingers on his chin like a child playing at Sherlock Holmes. “I don’t think it’s a trap. Just an anomaly. A higher-dimensional ship crashed here, and it… cracked space itself. Like a crater tunneling into the fifth dimension. Accidental. Doesn’t explain what the pilot is, how it could phase through the Honda like that, but… It’s not malicious. Neither the place nor the creature.”

“Exactly,” said Sang Mi. “And if there was a way in, there must be a way out. We just have to find it. We just need…”

She trailed off, eyes widening again; Chris watched, confused, as she rocked back on a single heel and spun once more, then twice, then thrice. Suddenly she stopped and snapped her fingers. 

“Of course. Chris! What was it you said? The eye of the storm!”

She fell to her knees and began to pat at the mossy forest-floor until she found a long, thin, sturdy twig.

“…what are you doing?”

“Space in this forest has been turned into a fractal,” she explained with a kind of giddy franticness as she cleared away some of the moss and began to etch markings into the earth. “Don’t you see? A spiraling fractal might be infinite, but it must have a centre. Like the Spiral of All Space and Time that your Superiors created. We just need… to find… the pattern.”

She stepped back and beckoned Chris to look at her handiwork. With a remarkable eye for proportions, she had noted down the positions of all their duplicates in sight, then joined the dots to form a perfect spiral—and bisected it with a long, straight line. The path of their run. 

“…Oh,” said Chris, eyes shining with admiration. “Wow. I… wouldn’t have thought of that.”

“They do teach us a thing or two at Academy 27,” she replied with an impish look that could not disguise her blush at the praise.

“I went to an Academy,” he replied with a playful pout.

“Yeah, you said. And they taught you how to recognise every species in the galaxy except the one we needed today.”

They shared a stifled laugh, then joined hands again as they began to run anew. But this time—they knew where they were going. 

The heart of the woods—the eye of the storm—didn’t look like much. It was barely worthy of being called a clearing; the trees were sparser here, younger, but it was the sort of thing which someone would only notice if they were already looking. Whatever area had been scorched clean by the original spaceship crash, the plant kingdom had begun to conquer anew half a century prior. There was no doubt that they had the right place, however. Stepping into the centre of the fractal, Chris and Sang Mi finally saw their spatial reflections vanish into an impossible angle and out of sight. 

They looked at each other. It was Sang Mi who spoke.

“Well… we’ve made it. What now? We dig?”

“No,” Chris said with an odd graveness to his tone. “We’re going to have to do something much harder.”

Sang Mi repressed the urge to puncture that seriousness with some meaningless quip. Chris wouldn’t have said it that way unless he meant it, and what her friend needed right now, she felt, was for her to respect that fact. Hence, she slowly nodded, instead, repressing the urge to let her eyes wander over the trees and keeping her gaze fixed on the tall man’s face, in silent encouragement to continue his explanation.

“Most higher-dimensional ships have… minds of their own,” he told her. “Souls of their own. They’ve got to. A structure that complex, it can’t maintain itself without knowing itself. I think the ship that crashed in 1952 didn’t just bury itself down there from the force of the impact—I think it’s hiding, like a wounded animal. And that fear, that nausea we’ve been feeling… I got it wrong. Half-wrong. It isn’t the spatial distortion, not directly. We’re feeling what it feels.”

“And we need to draw it out? Gain its trust?” guessed a distressed Sang Mi. “But how do we do that!?”

Chris tried to avert his gaze for just a moment, scratching the back of his head. 

“Simple,” he replied. “We’ve got to show it that we understand it, that we understand its pain. That we want to help. Which means—that feeling of wrongness we’ve been talking about? That pain we’ve been distracting ourselves from?”

Sang Mi had guessed his next words many long seconds before he uttered them. 

“We need to sit down and focus on it as hard as we can.”

No words could describe the work it took to summon the Ship. It wasn’t anything as trite as telepathy, as poetic as a wish upon a star. No sigils were etched, in skin or in the dirt; no incantations uttered. No palms were joined in prayer; not a word was uttered.

They simply stood in silence, side by side, at the eye of the storm—the man and the girl—and let themselves feel. The silent darkness of the woods was a blessing now; with only one another’s breathing to ignore, it was oddly easy to close their minds to the ills of the world and their situation; oddly natural to let themselves feel. And all the things they’d been running from came flooding out. The fear, and the pain, and the wrongness. 

She felt it clearly, keenly, intimately. A journey that should have been the briefest of visits, a little taste of that strange, beautiful place called Earth—extended, now, loop after loop, into an alluring fractal of places and people. And there was safety in that, though it should last forever. Who knew what lay beyond? They’d been away from home for such a long time, now. Had it changed? Had they changed? Home was such a tumultuous place, for all its allure. 

How could they trade this silent peace for the chance of a war-song? Here, things were simple. Just them and their faithful companion. Their guide. 

And things could stay that way forever, if they willed it hard enough. Making time was easy. Every loop could be looped back on itself, unto infinity. Fractal. How large was the forest? How far was it from Chicago to the Blue Ridge Mountain? As long as you liked. If you broke the rules, summer could last forever. And if not—if they let this end--

—they’d be alone. They might never see that special someone again. Friend. Companion. Mentor. Pilot. 

And that hurt more than anything. 

Sang Mi was crying. The tears were hot on her cheeks, and after all a while, she couldn’t keep her eyes shut anymore. She opened them and wiped at them with the backs of her hands --

—and gasped in surprise. 

There had been no great rumbling and moving of earth; no trees had been felled. But the Ship now hovered, suspended in front of Sang Mi and Chris, its geometrical form impossibly overlapping the tree-trunks like a poorly-rendered computer image. A perfect sphere, so flawless it looked unreal, its golden hull glowing with an inner light. Flawless in design, yes--

—but cracked.

“Well done,” said Chris, his wide eyes still brimming with tears of his own. “Well done… Well done,” he repeated, and Sang Mi didn’t know if he was speaking to her or to the Ship. Perhaps, in this moment, there was no difference.

But it was definitely the Ship that he addressed when he stretched out a hand and touched the metal surface with boundless care.

“Now,” he asked it, “can you let us in?”

Dawn was breaking when they drove out of Flatwoods in the Honda. In silence. Only when the sign disappeared in the rear view mirror did Sang Mi dare to speak.

“Well… We found the Flatwoods Monster,” she said, wry, forlorn perhaps, but not unhappy. They’d done good—as good as anyone could have done. “And now it’s gone forever.”

“I told the Ship to take its pilot home,” said Chris. “To its home planet. It’s still there, I could promise it that much.”

Sang Mi nodded. She’d assumed as much, but the controls of the Ship had been nothing she could understand. Even Chris had seemed to struggle with them, after they’d moved the body—gently, ever so gently—out of the pilot’s seat. 

She didn’t ask if Chris thought the creature would make it. They didn’t know. Couldn’t know. Nobody did; that was the point. The Ship itself hadn’t known; it hadn’t known if its pilot would heal from their injuries, it hadn’t even known if it could survive the trip home without repairs that the pilot was in no condition to provide. 

In both cases, it was… possible. They’d sensed that much from its aching, swirling thoughts. But the Ship hadn’t wanted to gamble on those odds, whatever they were. For sixty years, it had delayed—hiding itself in a cocoon of repeated space-time, trapping an echo, a ghost of its pilot in the maze. Keeping them safe. Keeping them close. Keeping them lost and far from home. 

But it had known, deep down, this couldn’t last forever. All it had needed was a friend there to give it the strength to let go.

Sang Mi understood that. She understood it all too well. 

So she didn’t ask if the alien and Ship would survive; if they’d ever be reunited on other journeys, other adventures. Even if she could somehow get the answers, she didn’t want to know. Not yet. The truth might hurt too much. 

But the time for silence was past, so she asked a different question, using one hand to shield her eyes from the rays of the morning sun dead ahead.

“Do you know what it was, then? The pilot’s home planet?”

Chris nodded, keeping his eyes on the road. “Yep. Ship was unmistakable—I know what species made it. And they’re as old as the Hervoken, too, if you can believe it, only much… nicer. They’re from another Galaxy altogether; I never expected to see one on Earth, and I’d never seen them in person. I only know about’em because they’ve been allies to my Superiors since, oh, before the Big Bang. If my bosses see to Time, they’re the people who look after Space.”

“Cool,” said Sang Mi, her tone meditative. “I guess that makes sense.” Then her mouth curled into a lopsided grin, and she elbowed the driver—lightly. “Well, go on then. Tell me the name.”

He gave a subdued half-snort as he turned off the main road. “You’ll laugh.”

“Aw, I won’t.”

“You will! People always do, when they aren’t used to intergalactic, uh, stuff. The universe is… big,” he said, and she saw his hands twitch on the steering wheel, repressing the urge to spread out his arms for emphasis. “Big and populous. Which means there’s bound to be coincidences. Sandy planets called Desertis Minor. Warrior races from the Militarius System. Doesn’t mean anything, really, there’s just as many punny planets in the sky no matter what language you speak—the ones I mentioned are just off the English list.” He gave her an embarrassed smile. “I, er, don’t know the Korean ones off the top of my head, sorry. Uhm… Okay. Here goes. The pilot… was what we call a Space Lord—from the planet Fractallax.”

“Hah!” Sang Mi laughed, but the mirth of the joke was all in the telling; she doubted she’d have even noticed the oddly fitting syllables in that name, if Chris hadn’t worked his way to it. “Frankly, I expected worse. So the Lords of Space in your dimension are a bunch of plant people from a planet called Fractallax… Good for them. Good for them.”

“S’pose it is.” He was quiet for a moment—not meditative, just thinking. “Funny thing is, they usually keep to themselves. Sat out the Cosmic War and… everything. Wonder what one of them was doing on Earth, all on their own.”

“I think that’s their business,” she replied. “Don’t you? Oh, but about those planet names—one thing.”

“What’s that?” asked Chris Cwej.

The road ahead was clear and well-lit. He risked a head-turn, and found Jhe Sang Mi smiling at him with eyes full of hope.

“It’s okay you don’t know them off the top of your head—but next time, promise you’ll bring me a list of the funniest ones.”

He didn’t know whether to laugh, or to cry all over again. He settled for a smile to match hers. “Next time?”

She nodded decisively, and turned back to the road as Cwej did the same.

“Yeah. Next time.”

I’ve always thought it indicative of the arrogance of the human condition for people to assume they know of every monster.

Humans have this victim complex, you see; they like to imagine that the unknown is made up entirely of big bads that go bump in the night, licking their chops, desperate to skin alive any human being they come across. Survival mechanism, so they don’t go looking for things in the dark and fall where no one can find them, or maybe they just want to imagine that they are hunted, so they can celebrate that they have survived. Whatever the reason, this complex blinds them, stopping them from taking something really quite obvious into account—any creature they can imagine is alive, and all living creatures share a common need. Do you know what it is?

That’s alright, you’ll figure it out.

Mighty presumptuous, to refuse to consider that the darkness doesn’t have to be evil. Mighty lonely, too, if you happen to live in the dark.

Maybe there are some monsters they haven’t met yet. Not under the bed, or in the closet, or even in the woods—this one, for example, lives in a stop sign. An abandoned stop sign, if such a thing is even possible; if you saw this stop sign, you would certainly think so. All rusted edges and peeling paint. You can’t even read the word; you probably only know what it is because you recognise the shape. The blood-red paint is all but gone, the meaning eroded, and it is in this liminal space between “Stop!” and Gone that anything can happen. Anything in between.

There is a car, now, hurtling towards that stop sign. Its orange paint is eroding too, giving it that special touch of magic you only see in old cars and ghostly stop signs, but it is not quite kin. Will its occupants see the sign? Will they know its meaning, heed its warning? 

“Hey, it’s getting dark—we should probably pull in somewhere for the night soon,” the larger human said, speeding right past the sign. “Though, I don’t remember seeing a motel on the map… How do you feel about another night on the mattress in the back?” 

The smaller human beside him groaned. “Again? How long is this journey, anyway?”

“Well, it didn’t have to be as long as it has been, but…”

“We keep stopping?”

“We keep stopping,” he confirmed, taking no notice as he passed the stop sign once again.

The same stop sign.

Cwej and Sang Mi were playing a game of Go Fish when they first sensed something was wrong.

Slap! went Cwej’s cards onto the mattress they’d wedged into the bed of the Honda. “And that’s my fifth pair,” he proclaimed, spreading out two sevens. “I’m winning.”

“Still think we should be playing the version where you need all four, not just a pair,” Sang Mi grumbled. She’d only played three matches. “Would be more fun with more players, too—I wish my brother was here. We’d always play games together.”

The air grew colder, a sharp breeze striking through the trees around them. Sang Mi shivered.

“Well, don’t worry, you’ll be back with him soon. We’re not that far from West Virginia now. Could be there in another day or two, easy.”

She looked askance, before her attention shifted. “Do you feel that?”

Cwej looked up from his hand. “Feel what?”

His young charge drew her shoulders in, looking around nervously. “Like… someone watching us.”

They slept under the stars that night, trying to ignore the churning air and the whispers among leaves that sounded more like shrieks. Sang Mi tossed and turned, unable to shake the feeling, despite Cwej’s best assurances, that there was something not right. He did his best, he really did, but he just didn’t feel it like she did. No monsters under the car, I checked. Well, check again!

The next morning, they woke up to a cloudless sky, a couple hundred miles away. You can still feel them, where they slept, and you wonder if they have a way to check the date. 

“Can you remember what you dreamed last night?” Sang Mi asked, stretching before getting back into the car. It smelled like doritos. It always smelled like doritos.

Cwej shrugged. “I don’t really dream.” At least, not dreams I’d like to remember.

“Everyone dreams.”

They got back into the car, and talked about mundane things. How she was doing at school, his more child-friendly missions. Neither noticed when they passed a stop sign. It was rather old, rusting and peeling and eroding into nothing, but the meaning was still there, if you cared to look.

That night, before going to bed, Cwej got out his pack of cards. There really did seem to be nothing that bag of his didn’t contain.

“Wanna play some Go Fish?”

Sang Mi frowned. “I don’t know, I’m kind of bored of… wait, no, when did we…” She shook her head. “How about you teach me a new game? One I don’t know.”

Cwej furrowed his brow, concerned, but quickly moved on. “Oh, alright—how about some Vexjhi?”

“What’s that one?”

“Well, it’s common among children on Merinos One, but I actually learned it from a smuggler. I was on a mission with my friends, you see, and Larles said something to one of the customers…”

The pair played a few rounds, but the rules were complicated, and Sang Mi quickly got tired of losing. She was used to being good at games. It was kind of her thing. This card game, however, was proving a different story. She moved to gather up the cards to put back into the box, but when her hand touched the top of the pile…

“Hey, Chris?”

He turned to look at her from where he was wrestling with the mattress. “What’s up?”
“Well, it’s just… do you ever get déjà vu?”

He sighed. “All the time. I think everyone does, but, when your life’s as complicated as mine… let’s just say time travel and muddled memories don’t exactly make an ordered mind.”

She let out the kind of noise you make to show you’re listening, but don’t really have anything else to say, and went back to packing away the cards. They slept under the stars that night. Cwej knew that Sang Mi was having trouble sleeping, and he could feel why—something was watching them. He didn’t know who or what, but he could feel it, the same way he could feel something wrong with time. Something local, something personal, something on repeat… he usually had someone watching him, and that someone was usually messing with time, so, he tried not to think about it. And he really tried not to think about what it meant if his Superiors were watching, if they knew how far he was stretching their rules… it could be very, very bad for both of them.

Best to ignore it for now, and try to get some sleep.

The next day—the same day—Cwej and Sang Mi started a few hours away from the stop sign. Sang Mi happened to turn her head and spot it as they were passing, but they were not passing, they were Past, and it was Gone. The night was drawing in, and she didn’t really See—it was quite eroded, anyway, whatever it had been. Probably nothing.

That night, despite his best and most concerned protests, Cwej was convinced to teach Sang Mi poker. Neither of them slept more than a few fitful hours, and when they woke up, there was not a cloud in the sky, and they were a few hours away from the stop sign. 

“The wind howls so mournfully,” Sang Mi remarked, “almost as if it wants something. Like a dog, left out in the cold.”

“Maybe it is,” Cwej mused. “Cold, or lonely. Maybe it’s been forgotten.”

It was an uneventful game of bridge. Sang Mi stayed up all night, just thinking, and yet didn’t see when the hours rolled over, and they were the same, recycled hours. Familiar, so familiar you don’t even notice that they’re there. They never notice

Today was the same day and the same day would bring the same cloudless sky, the same tree-lined road, the same--

“STOP!” Sang Mi cried, and Cwej slammed on the breaks.

“What? What’s wrong?”

She looked to her right, taking notice of what no one ever does—something old and discarded on the side of the road. It was a rusty metal pole, the kind that was all spotted and covered in grime, but there was something so familiar about it. And then she looked up. Suddenly, she knew why she needed to stop—why they’d been stopped, stuck in some half-remembered dream of a pattern, why this road looked so familiar and why they couldn’t move on. Because she was sure, now, that they hadn’t moved in a while, even if the calendar said otherwise—hadn’t moved in space, or in time. You shouldn’t ignore a stop sign.

“Look, at the top of that pole… I recognise it, I think. Stop signs on Gongen aren’t that shape, or that color, but… there’s something about it. I can’t explain it, it just is a stop sign.”

Cwej looked around. “It’s not like there’s anyone watching.”

“That doesn’t mean we don’t have to stop. The rules don’t stop mattering just because no one’s looking—you used to be in law enforcement, right? You should know that.”

I don’t just disappear because no one’s looking.

Cwej sighed. “The rules don’t mean as much to me nowadays… I rarely see a fair one. But, maybe there are still some that are necessary. Maybe I’d forgotten.”

“Good job I’m here to remind you, then.”

“Yeah. Yeah, it is.” The air was still as the pair looked at the stop sign. It was old, probably meant to be removed, but received a stay of execution simply by virtue of being forgotten. There was a lot like that in the world, remnants of the past that had been left behind, for better or for worse. 

The soldier and the student sat on the bed of their rusty old car as the night drew closer, playing a game to pass the time. They could have moved on, kept driving a little longer, but there was something in the air, like someone was begging for their companionship, just for a little while. They obliged. 

Not all humans are arrogant. Not all the time.

Cwej thumbed through a pack of cards, shuffling them well. Sang Mi said she was ready to try Go Fish again—maybe this time would be different, not that there’d been a last time, not really. Maybe she’d find what she was looking for—and Cwej found himself dealing out three hands. One for him, one for Sang Mi, and one for…

“There’s only two of us,” Sang Mi remarked, and Cwej looked down at the third hand. He didn’t know why he’d done that, but it felt kind. Drawing himself up, he looked at the sky—it was calm tonight, and the stars were showing. Maybe there was someone, out there, who was by themself and just wanted someone to play with. Waiting to be included.

“It’s like… Elijah’s hand,” he replied, and Sang Mi laughed.

“Like Passover! There’s a girl in my class, Hannah, and she gave a presentation about it for culture week. It’s a Jewish tradition of leaving out an extra cup during Seder for the prophet Elijah—it’s an invitation for anyone to come and join the feast who needs to, and to bring hope for the future. Everyone could use a bit of hope.”

Cwej smiled. They played a few rounds—which was a bit difficult, what with them missing seven cards, but it was a nice gesture. Offering a hand to anyone who needed it—you don’t have to be scared of the dark. The monsters get lonely, too.

Maybe she felt it because she knew more of what it was like to be lonely. Maybe it was just because she was on the passenger side, closest to the side of the road. Or maybe she was just younger, and had not been so hardened by a cruel world as the puppet-soldier, beholden to unfair rules. Though, he had still noticed, even if it did take him a little longer… maybe, he was not as lost as he thought. Maybe there was still hope.

Have you worked out the answer to my question? Oh come on, you remember—I asked you if you knew what common need all living creatures share. I think you’ve worked it out now, but if you haven’t, I’ll tell you—it’s to belong. Everybody needs someplace to feel a part of, to be included in something bigger than yourself. The girl had her friends, and the man had his ideals, and together, they had hope.

Cwej and Sang Mi slept peacefully through the night, and, in the morning, they left the stop sign behind.

They may have taken the cards with them, but they left by that sign on the side of the road a little of the joy they had brought. Not gone, but multiplied, because it was shared. Even from a rusty old stop sign in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by nothing but trees, I was not forgotten. As long as a passing human would be willing to open up their hearts and leave a space for me, deal an extra hand—yes, I was sure.

I would not be lonely

The screams echoed throughout the field and into the surrounding area. People covered their ears and tried to pretend it wasn't happening. Those who saw it, could scarcely describe what they saw. 

Blue and gray. Bayonets against the enemy’s chest. Blood spilled on the very ground as each side attacked the other. A battle beyond the other, a battle on the soil of Northern Pennsylvania, where wound after wound was dealt, stab after stab… and yet not a single man died.

And then, after all was said and done, they left. The dead would come after, falling away from the grasp of life in hospitals.

But not in the field. Never in the field.

“Airport parking prices are a scam,” Sang Mi muttered as she and Chris Cwej walked away from their car towards the airport in the distance.

“It’s not that much better out in space either,” Chris replied. 

Sang Mi merely nodded. She had far more pressing issues on her mind. Namely, her leg. She rubbed it, but the tension in her tendons was still there. An airport parking lot wasn’t the best place to get it stretched out, but apparently there wasn’t another good rest stop for a few miles.

“Any better?” Chris asked.

Sang Mi shook her head. “I’m gonna need to stretch it out more.”

A driver honked, startling the two. They raced to the side. Sang Mi gave a quick apology wave before continuing to walk. It was then that she noticed that the parking lot was full. Disturbingly full.

“Not gonna lie, there are better places to take a walk,” Chris said. 

“Yeah,” Sang Mi replied.

“Airport?”

“Sounds good.”

Limping slightly, she continued to march with Cwej towards the airport. The automatic glass doors opened as they entered, only for Sang Mi to come close to faceplanting the back of an annoyed passenger. Chris barely managed to pull her back in time.

“This is inexcusable!” an old lady moaned, not noticing Chris and Sang Mi slowly walking away. “My luggage has been gone for thirty minutes!”

The two looked around and the lady wasn’t the only one that was having issues. The entire baggage claim area seemed crowded, people hovering around waiting for their luggage. If the cars were crowding the parking lot, this was even worse. It was obvious: there was no way that Sang Mi was gonna get her leg stretched out here.

“Deeper in?” Chris asked.

“Deeper in,” Sang Mi confirmed. With a grunt, they pushed forward.

ATTENTION. FLIGHT 904, HEADING FOR THE UNITED KINGDOM AT 8 A.M., HAS BEEN DELAYED. WE EXPECT THE DELAY TO LAST TWO HOURS. THANK YOU FOR YOUR PATIENCE. 

Harold Armstrong the Third groaned upon hearing the announcement. He leaned back in his seat in the waiting area, his pale British hands held firmly over his face. Scarlette Goldling was much more muted in her response, letting out a little sigh.

“I thought that being government employees meant that we would get the easy flights out,” Harold muttered. “We come all this way to help them with their school problem and we can’t even get a private jet home?”

“Well to be fair, we did fail to figure out whatever it was,” Scarlette said. “And given the current political environment, the fact that we’re here in the first place is a damn miracle.”

“Yeah, but we deal with the… unusual. I thought we'd get a pass because of that.”

“The real world overtakes all, it seems.” Scarlette put her face back into the book she was reading. She got about four or five words in before she sniffed. “Great,” she muttered. “Got a bit of a runny now.”

“Need a tissue, love?”

“That’d be nice,” Scarlette said, sniffing harder. “This one doesn’t feel like it’s going away.”

Harold rustled through his backpack. Nothing. He swore under his breath. He knew he should’ve gotten some tissues from the school before they left.

“I’ll get some paper towels for you,” he said, hurriedly standing up. “I was gonna take a moment to fix my hair anyway.”

“Don’t fall in!” Scarlette teased as he walked away towards the nearby bathroom. If only her nose wasn’t running. She cringed, knowing that she was going to have to deal with this on the flight back. 

“Ow!”

Chris swore under his breath as he was slammed against the wall by the crushing force of the crowd, Sang Mi following along. A prick of pain shot into him as he could feel the scrape of his flesh against a stray nail in the wall. His fingertips danced across his side, until he came across a wet feeling. He brought his hand up to check his suspicion. Yep. Blood. He leaned up against a little plaque on the wall, taking a glance at it while he wiped his bloody fingers on his pants.

‘The Battle of the Northern Pennsylvania Range’ it read. That was odd, thought Chris. There weren’t any Civil War battles in Northern Pennsylvania, were there? The Confederacy hadn’t gotten any farther than Sporting Hill and that was in the South of the state. He wasn’t exactly a history aficionado, but time traveling had given him a bit more of a perspective than he’d had before.

“You, okay?” Sang Mi asked, throwing him out of his thoughts and into reality.

“Yeah, just a cut,” he replied, patting the wound once more. “Probably gonna need a bandaid. Or at least a towel.”

“Well, there’s a bathroom over…” She looked across the room and saw a line leading out of the door. “…Nevermind,” she groaned. “Now what?”

“Maybe the ticket lines will be better?” Chris suggested.

“Probably not,” a man walking by interjected. “Those lines have been long as all hell for hours. Might as well just wait here for all the good that’s gonna do ya…”

Sang Mi’s shoulders slumped. “So that’s out then. What now?”

Chris paused. He pressed his shirt up against the wound. Still bleeding. He looked over at Sang Mi and noticed a pained look on her face. Her leg wasn’t getting any better and this area couldn’t be any worse.

“We’ll have to go to the departure terminal,” he said. “There’s gonna be security, but I can handle it.”

“You sure?” Sang Mi asked worriedly. 

“It’ll be fine,” Chris said. “As long as we look like we know what we’re doing and speak in a really authoritative voice, people let us by. At least most of the time…”

Sang Mi raised her eyebrow, but they didn’t really seem to have many other options, so forward they went. Pushing past people in suits, sunglasses, all waiting around, not moving or advancing. 

The ticket lines were as they were told: long and arduous. Grumbles and complaints surrounded them as the mid-morning sun shone through the large windows behind them. Sang Mi grimaced; her leg still ached, tendons and muscles pulling at each other in ways that should’ve fixed themselves by now.

“Okay, here we come,” Chris said. “There will be a Transport Security checkpoint, but we… should be able to bluff our way through it.”

“You don’t sound very sure.”

“It’ll be okay! See there’s… huh.”

They rounded the corner, and both of their eyes widened as they saw the long line to the T.S.A. checkpoint. What surprised them was that there were no T.S.A. officers in sight. Their chairs were empty. Because of this, the line wasn’t moving an inch.

The two looked at each other. Chris’s blood started to drip on the floor. Sang Mi’s leg spasmed. It was a good enough reason for them to run—or hobble, in Sang Mi’s case—for it, moving through the sea of human bodies.

“Out of the way!” Chris shouted. “Official airport business!”

A few people grumbled, and one teenage girl shouted various expletives at them, but most noticed the blood dripping from Chris and didn’t challenge it.

Pushing through the last groups of people, the two made it into the airport lobby. The room contained everything you would expect from a lobby: benches, restaurants and best of all, there was room. Room to walk. Room to breath. Room to stretch.

Sang Mi let out a sigh of relief. Chris smiled, catching sight of a bathroom with no line. Perfect. He motioned over to Sang Mi.

“Gonna see if I can stop the bleeding,” he said.

She nodded. “See you in five?”

“See you in five.

Scarlette could barely breathe through her nose. Where was Harold with those tissues?
The bathroom door creaked and she hurriedly turned her head, but to her disappointment it was a blonde man going inside. With a sigh, she turned her head and saw a girl in a skirt limping over to a nearby bench. For some reason, the girl was grimacing.

She tried to return to her book, but couldn’t help but watch the girl. Sweat was dripping down her face. Whatever was wrong, it looked painful.

The girl looked relieved when she made it to the bench. Smiling, she put her leg up and leaned back. She stayed there for a few moments, as Scarlette turned to see what she was doing.

Then the girl’s smile fell. She put her leg down and knelt on the floor, holding it. And then she began to scream.

The bathroom smelled like absolute garbage, but Chris didn’t care. He made a beeline for the paper towel dispenser, yanking out as much as he could and pressing them against his side. The only person in there with him was standing over a sink, running his hands through his hair. 

Chris held the paper towels hard and applied pressure. He counted down the seconds, making sure to regulate his breathing. Satisfied the bleeding had stopped, he removed the towels and held them up to see. Yep, pretty bloody, but at least it had stopped.

He started to feel lightheaded. He placed his hand back against his side. Blood. It was bleeding just the same as before.

“Goddamnit!” the man at the sink said. “How hard is it for my hair to look good?”

Chris turned around and caught a look at the man in the mirror, who yanked at the tips of his hair. He had been doing it since Chris had entered, which gave him pause for thought. Something was going on here, something that wasn’t entirely natural…

“Hey, do you need help?” Chris offered. 

“Sure, yeah,” the man replied gratefully. From his accent, Chris noted he was British as well. Chris walked over and ran his hands through the man’s hair. He took a glance at the man’s nametag, noting the UK government credentials. 

“Slicked back or more forward?” Chris asked.

“Slicked,” the man replied. “I’m Harold, by the way, Mr., er…”

“Cwej. Chris Cwej.”

Chris frowned as he felt the strands of hair in his fingers. This should’ve been easy, but for some reason, he couldn’t get it exactly right. He brushed them through again. Nothing. It was as though he hadn’t touched it at all, as if something was deliberately keeping it from being altered.

“Bloody hell mate, you’re bleeding,” Harold said, looking down to Chris’s abdomen.
“You alright?”

“I’m fine,” Chris grunted. “It’s just a small cut.”

“Then why hasn’t it stopped bleeding?”

“One second,” said Chris said, trying again with Harold’s hair. At this point, sweat dripped down his cheeks. No matter how hard he tried, nothing seemed to change. 

“I’m so sorry,” Chris said. “It’s like…”

“Like you can’t truly solve the problem?” Harold said.

Chris nodded. “Yeah…” 

Chris looked at the man, then at his cut, two things which refused to be changed. Whatever this was, it was affecting both of them.

“If you and I are suffering a similar affliction, that means we’re connected,” Chris said. “Come on, follow me.”

“Wait, wait, wait, hold on!” Harold protested. “What do you mean by that?”

Chris sighed. He really didn’t have time for this. “Look, I’m a time and space traveler from the future. Something alien or otherworldly is interfering here and I need to make sure that my companion is safe. So come on, let’s go.”

Harold opened his mouth to respond, but was interrupted by a scream. It came from the  lobby. Chris didn’t hesitate. He ran for the door, grabbing Harold’s hand and pulling him along behind him.

Agony. Sang Mi was in utter agony. Worse pain she’d ever felt in her life. Her leg kept spasming, the muscles and tendons inside twisting. It wasn’t going away. It wasn’t going away, no matter how hard she stretched. 

A young woman was kneeling over her, desperately trying to calm her down. Sang Mi barely could pay attention to what the woman was saying though. Hell, all that Sang Mi could really make out through her tears was the woman’s ginger hair and nametag with the word ‘Scarlette’ on it.

“Honey, honey? You okay?” Scarlette asked.

“NO!” Sang Mi screamed. “It won’t stop! It won’t go back!”

“Sang Mi!” a male voice shouted. Scarlette turned to see Harold along with a tall blond man. Said blond man raced over to the girl, who Scarlette guessed was Sang Mi, who was hyperventilating.

“Who’s that?” Scarlette whispered.

“Calls himself Chris Cwej,” Harold muttered. “He knows about… our line of work too.”

“Hey, hey,” Chris said, holding onto Sang Mi. “Calm down, calm down. Tell me what happened.”

“It won’t stop,” Sang Mi cried. “My leg is still cramping.”

Chris frowned. The wheels turned in his head. It was all coming together.  “You’re not alone in that,” he said.

“So is it… alien?” Scarlette interjected. She sniffled. Why wouldn’t her nose feel normal, damn it? She’d wiped it at least a dozen times. 

“Maybe,” Chris said. He helped Sang Mi to her feet. She held her stomach and her legs shook slightly. “But what exactly, I don’t know.”

“Well should we go into the airport itself then?” Harold suggested. “See what we can find?”

“Yeah,” Chris distractedly replied. “Sang Mi, can you walk?”

“I think so.” Her legs were still shaking, but the tears stopped. She took a deep breath and started to walk towards the T.S.A. line, Chris holding her hand as Scarlette and Harold followed behind them.

So much delicious suffering. So much delicious food. It watched, devouring the misery with an insatiable appetite. So many people. So many sources. Especially those four. It kept a close eye on them. Their misery was so satisfying. The blond one though… he looked like trouble. Felt like trouble too. So did the girl. It would have to hide in the shadows as usual.

But those two, oh their misery was so filling, regardless of the trouble. So delicious…

The main concourse of the airport didn’t seem to reveal anything unusual. Crying babies, the angry voices in the T.S.A. line and loudspeaker announcements of cancelled flights. Including Scarlette and Harold’s once again.

ATTENTION. FLIGHT 904, HEADING FOR THE UNITED KINGDOM AT 10 A.M., HAS BEEN DELAYED. WE EXPECT THE DELAY TO LAST TWO HOURS. THANK YOU FOR YOUR PATIENCE. 

“Bloody hell,” Harold muttered. “Could this day get any worse?”

“Don’t jinx it, swee…snooort….sweetheart,” Scarlette said, blowing her nose yet again.
“Are you sure you’re okay?” Harold mussed up his hair again. Damn it, why wouldn’t it stay the way he liked it?

“Yeah, it’s probably just allergies,” Scarlette replied.

“Or another part of what’s going on here,” Chris grunted. He started to sway. His vision grew spotty and he became light headed. A trail of blood trickled behind him. 

“What do you mean by that?” Scarlette asked, nose dripping.

Chris didn’t respond right away. He turned around, facing the group, and looked them in the eyes.

“All of us have something going on that won’t stop,” he began. “Sang Mi’s leg is cramping, my cut won’t stop bleeding, Scarlette’s nose won’t stop dripping—”

“And I can’t get my hair right,” Harold finished.

“Precisely,” Chris said. “And no matter what we do, it won’t stop. That’s not natural. Something’s affecting us.”

“But what about everyone else?” Sang Mi asked. “They’re not like us. They’re acting normally…”

Chris racked his brain and spun in a circle to take in every inch of the airport: the screaming babies, people waiting in lines—everything that seemed normal. Just like it was when he’d entered.

“I’m not sure everything’s normal,” Chris said. “Take a look.”

“We did,” Scarlette said. “All typical airport bullshit.”

“Yes, and that’s the point,” Chris stood tall, spurned on by the discovery he’d made. “Come on, follow me.”

Harold and Scarlette marched on after him, Sang Mi limping along beside them. He stopped at the T.S.A. line that they’d run past only a few minutes before. 

“Right here,” Chris said. “That’s the proof. What do you notice?”

Harold and Scarlette glanced at the scene: people waiting in line, the scanner beeping, the lack of a security guard in the chair…

“The guard isn’t there,” Scarlette answered. 

“And because of that, they can’t move,” Chris said. “It’s all stopped. All the announcements, all the delays—nothing’s coming to a conclusion. All the most miserable parts of the airport experience, and they don’t seem to be ending anytime soon.”

“Like we’re frozen in time?” asked Harold.

“Maybe not time, but rather in state,” Chris said. “We’re in the space between destinations. Just like an airport.”

“So what are we gonna do now?” Sang Mi asked, fighting back her discomfort.

Chris frowned. He glanced at the plaque—the first red flag, that should have tipped him off from the very beginning.

“This whole airport is suspicious,” said Chris. “And if we’re in the space between destinations, then we need to choose a destination and leave.”

“How?” Harold asked. “Our plane’s delayed, and if you’re right, it’ll be delayed over and over again.”

“Hold on, let him cook,” said Scarlette. “You’re talking about leaving the airport, right?”

Chris nodded. “A destination doesn’t need to be forward. We can go backwards, and that means leaving.

It scowled. The shadows surrounded it, turning itself into something corporeal, leaking from behind the plaque. They couldn’t leave. Not the two at least. They were in so much pain, it was delightful.

But for the briefest of moments, it wondered if the ones sure to be trouble were worth keeping. After all, they were out of sync. One wrong move and it would lose more than a meal, but its life.

The hesitation, however, lasted merely a moment. After all, it consoled itself, hadn’t it done riskier things before? Every single combatant was out of sync on the battlefield which it had fed back in 1863. They could’ve killed it with so little effort, and yet it had been so clever, hiding in the shadows, in the weeds, watching as the two sides fought.

It could handle these two. All it needed to do was keep them in.

“There’s the exit!” Scarlette shouted.

The four started making their way towards the doors, the very doors through which Chris and Sang Mi had entered. Around them were blissfully unaware travelers, their only certainty being long lines and wait times.

“Can’t we warn them?” Sang Mi croaked, still leaning on Chris. Her eyes were nearly dry, all moisture having been expelled through her tears.

Chris shook his head. “It’s too risky. We don’t know what’s causing this, and if we disrupt it, who knows what could happen.”

“Look,” Sang Mi protested, “whatever’s causing this clearly doesn’t want the people here dead. If it went to all the work to even create a fake plaque—”

“Let’s just get out of here,” said Harold, “before we alert any—”

Too late. A black shadow-like figure emerged from the wall, rippling and changing nearly every second. Its body shifted, shape to shape, from humanoid to monstrous, never staying in one for too long.. Its only constant were dark tendrils that emerged from every orifice, thin and long, stretching out as far as the eye could see. The tendrils floated in front of the door, ripping Harold’s hand from the handle and knocking him back. The main body of the creature floated over to block the exit, glaring directly at the four as the rest of the airport ran in horror. A young boy tripped, falling into the luggage of a woman ahead of him. A man grabbed him, pulling him up into his arms as he ran, his bloodshot eyes looking back in terror.

To the confusion of those gathered, a crackly voice spoke over the chaos and screams, emitting from the shadow figure.

“For the record, there was a battle here,” the voice said. “Just not that battle. What happened here was more a heavenly conflict. Such a shame that humans are so fragile—they had to fill in their own war to make sense of it.”

Chris reached for his pocket, only to remember that he didn’t have his gun on him. Biting his lip, he turned to Scarlette and Harold, who shook their heads. Sang Mi, meanwhile, was kneeling on the floor, the pain of her leg unable to be released, stabbing deep into her soul. 

“So,” he began, trying to sound intimidating. “What’s all this, huh?”

The dark figure laughed. “Really? Did you think that I was going to reveal what I was doing, give a big villain speech so you could ‘save the day’?”

“Maybe,” Chris admitted. “Wouldn’t be the first time. But I’ve fought in a war, darling, one where we didn’t even know our enemy’s name.”

“I know your war, where time itself stretched from end to end, wrapping around and around and around,” the creature said. “Oh what lovely days those were. Such a wonderful place, so many moments between life and death…”

“So that’s what you feed on, huh?” said Scarlette. “I think I get it now. The space between destinations, the misery of people stuck in the middle of two points.”

“And that’s why you’re in an airport,” Harold interjected. “Where else, but the place in-between all others?”

Sang Mi just groaned as she knelt on the floor.

“Very clever,” the creature hissed. “But sadly, clever doesn’t save you.”

Multiple tendrils flung out from the main mass and grasped onto Harold and Scarlette. Lifting up off the ground, Cwej thrust his hand out to grab them, but they were already out of reach. More tendrils surrounded him and Sang Mi, cutting the two off from each other.

“What is this?” Chris shouted.

“A warning,” the creature snarled. “You’re going exactly nowhere.”

Grunting, Chris balled his fists and swung them at the creature. To his surprise, the tendrils slicked back, revealing a small opening where he could see Sang Mi. She cried out as her body spasmed. The tendrils moved away from her as well, just outside her reach.

“Interesting,” Chris thought to himself. He stepped forward. The tendrils moved further back and the creature scowled and hissed.

“One more step and these two die,” it said, motioning to Scarlette and Harold.

“So you’re afraid of me,” Chris muttered. “And Sang Mi too.”

“I’m warning you!”

“Okay, okay,” Chris said. “So what do you want me to do?”

“You’ll stay here,” the creature growled. “Right here in this airport.”

“So you can feed on me even more?”

“Indeed,” the creature smiled. “Forever and ever.”

“And you’ll release these two?”

“When you’ve walked far away enough, yes.”

Chris took a second to respond. An idea was running through his head, potentially a good one, but he needed to be sure it was going to work. “And what do you think is gonna make me walk away?” He crossed his arms, trying to look more confident than he felt.

“Well,” the creature said. “You’re something special, all right. But you’re still humanoid. Very humanoid. If you bleed out, you’ll never be able to help anyone.”

“Fine,” said Chris. He gave a look at all three of his compatriots, desperately hoping that it would be enough to convey his intentions. With a sigh, he marched away.

And oh, did he march. He had no intention of staying away for that long. He brushed past the wreckage and abandoned wreckage that dotted the floor, each footstep faster than the last. With a grunt, Chris flexed his muscles, ignoring the blood dripping down his side. This was going to hurt, but it had to be done.

Grabbing the T.S.A. officer’s abandoned chair, he smashed it into the wall where the plaque was located. Over and over again. The wood crumpled and cracked. Splinters dug into his fingers, drawing even more blood. Black spots dug into his vision, but he didn’t care. As soon as there were enough holes in the wall, he tossed aside the remnants of the chair and dug his hands into the cracks. Screaming, he pulled out that entire section of the wall, the plaque along with it. The veins on his temples bulged as he lifted the section of drywall over his head and ferried it back down the halls.

Breadcrumb-trails of blood dotted the floor behind Chris as he walked. He tried his best to ignore it—his timing had to be perfect. Blood poured down his body, but he carried on. Step by step, he moved forwards.

Time was a blur. He was here now, at the edge of the hallway, vision so fuzzy he could barely see. The section of wall shook in his hands and he knew he would collapse any minute now. Except… maybe he wouldn’t. Maybe that creature’s little stunt meant that his muscles would never give out.

The creature was counting down. He could hear its slimy voice in the fringes of his perception.At least it seemed to be keeping his word. But that wasn’t good enough.

With a strained grunt, Chris heaved the drywall over his head and crashing down to the ground. The weakened structure exploded. A cloud of dust blew into the air, plaster and debris, flying in all directions. The plaque, severed from its mountings, ricocheted off the floor and spun in the air, right towards the creature. It hissed and ducked out of the way, dropping Harold and Scarlette in the process. Still spinning, the projectile smashed into the door behind it, embedding itself into the frame and shattering the glass in the process. 

The creature turned towards Chris, but he was already in the air, diving towards the monster. With a smile, Chris slammed into the creature so hard that  the two became one. Tendrils flailed as Chris clung tight.

“I know why you’re scared,” Chris snarled. “Sang Mi and I, we’re not traditional travelers. Our destinations are beyond the very boundaries of this universe. We’re beyond your space between destinations.”

Flesh melted, shadows folded. The two seemingly melded into each other. The creature’s body seemed to morph into memories, as Chris and it became intertwined.

Chris saw it: an unimaginable war, one he knew all too well, had been brought to a definitive conclusion by his own biodata. In that terrible conflict, the creature seemed to weave through it like a parasite, feeding off moments in time on the secondary fronts, trenches on the outskirts of the conflict.

When the battle came, Chris shivered at the sight. Whilst both sides sought death, the creature prevented any of it: a stalemate of perpetual injury. Not a single combatant would die. Not on that field in Northern Pennsylvania, where any native bystander would go mad at the sight.

But even that wasn’t enough. When the war ended, the creature remained, starving. As V-Time moved on, it began to die. That was until the airport was built, a space where little miseries were commonplace. Not enough to sustain its voracious appetite, but enough to keep it alive. A black echo, feeding on scraps until it was strong enough to emerge. 

The creature howled in pain. Its body contorted as it in turn saw Chris’s memories: childhood, adolescence, meeting Roz, the Defector, the Superiors, W-Time, Larles and Kwol, rebellion. Change after change after change. And with each glimpse it saw, it began to shrink.

“You are just an echo,” said Chris, emerging from the mass. “One that’s long past its welcome.”

The creature let out a scream, as its writhing form continued to shrink. The sound grew quieter and quieter, its body smaller and smaller, until nothing remained.

Normality returned. Crowds of people rushed around them, desperate to catch their flights. A crackle and bleep of a radio sounded to their left, as airport security returned to their post. And above it all came a cry of relief from Sang Mi.

Chris raced over to her, no longer afflicted by the cut to his side.

“Is it over?” she asked.

Chris nodded. “It’s over.”

ATTENTION. FLIGHT 904, HEADING FOR THE UNITED KINGDOM, WILL DEPART IN 25 MINUTES.

“Guess I’m gonna have to go soon,” said Harold. “I don’t suppose there’s time for a debrief?”

Chris shook his head. “That’s probably for the best. No use letting that echo take up any more space in our heads. Time for it to fade away for good.”

Reluctantly, Harold nodded. “Are you and Sang Mi going to be alright?”

“We’ll be fine,” Chris said. “We’ve been through worse on this odyssey of ours.”

The car ride was silent. Sang Mi gazed out of the window as the airport passed out of sight, to be replaced with the trees and suburbs of Northern Pennsylvania. Golden edges of sunlight shone in their eyes. No one said anything. Not even the radio played. No echoes, just silence.

Dave was a collector, although it didn’t actually amount to anything impressive. He had a shelf in his room which made him very happy, where he kept all of his CDs. It was a well organized shelf, each row a musical genre and then sorted alphabetically. The rest of Dave’s house was a wreck; he didn’t really care that much about organization usually. But the shelf. The shelf was important. An ex-girlfriend he’d had wasn’t a fan of the shelf. She cattily nicknamed it the virginity shelf. Hence, ex. It was funny though. At one point during their breakup, she whined at Dave and said something along the lines of: “You care about that shelf more than me!!” and all Dave could eventually say, looking at how much she hated something that he valued dearly, was a mild, “well, …yes.” 

The shelf was a thing of importance. Music could take you to other worlds, even when you were just sitting there in your car. Music made Dave feel safe when even the worst was happening. So it wasn’t really that hard a decision. He just didn’t know why a shelf made one a social pariah. He had thought it made him cooler.

This morning, a handful of CDs were missing from his shelf. He could see the gaps in the collection, as plain as day. He blinked at first, hoping he had been astonishingly out of character last night and, god forbid, mislaid a disc. But no. They were gone. 

Dave spent nearly the whole morning looking through his apartment frantically. He spent nearly the whole morning holding back tears.

Concurrently, a small orange Honda Element drives past Dave’s apartment building. Inside it, two passengers. Your average passerby, even if one happens to notice a bright orange car, will not anticipate these two passengers having a familiarity with righting wrongs and causing(?) wanton mayhem. However, they’ve stopped five semi-decent to large scale alien incursions on the most recent roadtrip, the fourth whilst picking up a soda at McDonalds. 

These two legends are, incidentally, bored out of their minds. 

Sang Mi, the first of the two passengers, has spent the past several nights in a motel room. (You know, because of the Targellan incident.) She has recently been introduced to the marvel of twenty-first century cable television. This has been, for the past few days, much of what she has been talking about. This fad will pass quickly. 

Chris Cwej, the second of these two passengers, has spent the last several nights actually dealing with the Targellan incident, a situation far too bloody, interesting and devastating to bear mentioning further, except for the fact that it involved a rutabaga and a spaceship shaped like a spoon. He has, in fact, not been thinking about the marvel of twenty-first century cable television. He is not hopped up on sugar either. 

“Last night, I watched The Good, the Bad and The Ugly,” Sang Mi explained. “I don’t actually think I’ve seen a western before, well, except for The Ranger of Dallaspex, and, um, wait no, actually, I’ve seen a lot of Westerns but it was a really good one, except for the part where it kept pausing to advertise detergent and insurance.” 

“Those are commercials," Chris said, as Sang Mi barrelled further. 

“Yeah, but I really liked it, except the old weird bits that I think were racist or something. Still. Great time. And I was thinking, I was just sort of thinking, maybe you’re like, the guy in the poncho to these people or something. Semi-modern poncho man. You’re the guy with no name, you come into town on your horse slash orange car thing, and you save the day, before vanishing off into the sunset. It’s like a whole thing!” 

Chris considered the parallel carefully. “You know, I don’t quite see it. I mean, I have a name, and I tell people my name, and also you’re there. Aren’t cowboys sort of lonely and sad and friendless?”

“The cowboy has friends. I’m Tuco,” Sang Mi declared joyfully, in a statement that was hopefully a joke. 

Chris didn’t know how to respond to that. Thankfully, he didn’t have to—they had just happened, once more, to run into something interesting. 

There was a strange man in an utterly massive oversized trenchcoat, walking down the street, trying to hide (unsuccessfully) that he was carrying a large bag of various things.

“…Is that a burglar?” Chris asked out loud, a little surprised at the sight of a strange figure in broad daylight trying to hide a very large bag. It was certainly very weird. Chris pulled the car to a stop.

And then there was a strange note over the wind, like an odd flute, and like magic, the man on the street stepped into nothing. It was like he was never there, and not just in some kind of Invisible Man way, Chris could sense it. The figure had left this earth entirely… for parts unknown. 

“Woah!” Sang Mi shouted, a bit too loudly. “What was that?”

Chris shrugged. His mind was already racing. He had absolutely no idea. 

Dave did not understand what was happening. He had thought that he had seen a man try to leave his apartment, but it was hazy, leaving him this very moment, like he had dreamed the figure up in the first place. 

Time felt wrong to Dave. There is no other way to describe that accurately. There is a feeling when one second follows the next—even if you have never noticed this feeling, because it has been there your entire life—and Dave was feeling something else. Like a headache, or when you’ve had too much water and your whole body feels like it’s swimming. And nothing like that. It was a bizarre thing. 

He was in his room, looking at the shelf, and he was also outside, chasing that man. The man who was stepping into nothing, the man who wasn’t there. It hurt a little. Dave also saw the orange car. The orange car was important. 

Dave put on his shoes, and began his trek down the stairs out towards the street, and where the orange car would be. 

Chris and Sang Mi were still trying to figure out the next step of what precisely they should be doing when the next man approached them. 

“Hi, I’m Dave,” Dave said, wearily. “Listen, do you guys know about a man, a weird man, possibly a CD stealer?”

“Just saw him, I believe,” Chris answered. “Weird overcoat, stepped into nothing…?”

“That’d be him, I think,” Dave said, feeling woozy again. “I had thought I’d imagined him.”

Sang Mi looked at Dave, concerned. It was the Delirium face. The face that Saki would sometimes make, when she was on Delirium. Those weird blissed out eyes… Yeah, drug city. Today wasn’t making sense. The unlikelihood of all of this. Another strange man. You usually don’t get two in a day. The coincidence felt bizarre, manufactured. 

“Take this thing,” Dave said, handing Chris a CD. 

“What is it? What are you going on about?” Chris asked, confused.

“A way, I think. In a direction,” Dave said, still not entirely there. 

Music on the Honda’s stereo began to play of its own accord. And the car, entirely without Chris’s input, began to go. Chris and Sang Mi looked in wonderment as the music hit the air with a bizarre tone. Chris knew all about music. About its power. He had seen something almost like this before, but this… this was different. 

Music can take you to other worlds. 

And then, they were off. And for once, neither of them could even believe it.

2378
INITEC SPACE-CITY RR-ONE ORBITING RYTEL RIANA TROPOS 

…What just happened exactly? Chris blinked to be sure. He certainly didn’t think he would ever be back here. His brain had sort of crossed the idea off. There was no conceivable way that he could possibly be on Rytel Riana Tropos, not after what had happened. Not after Glasst. 

But here they were. An orange car, sitting right in the middle of the promenade  on a space-station orbiting the finest resort planet in the cosmos. 

Pity that the planet was going to die soon. 

“Woah,” Sang Mi gasped. “Nice place. Finally, we get to the PRESENT.” She took it in stride. Chris grit his teeth. She didn’t know. She didn’t know how absolutely and magnificently wrong this all was. I mean, it surely seemed to her as normal as their other hops in time. She just didn’t know the rules.

The bustling station was perfectly and absolutely normal. Chris wildly glanced from place to place across the promenade. There was a view of space—which was perfectly normal, all the stars in the right place in the sky for these coordinates—there were little shops along the side, which again, were so utterly normal that Chris hardly noticed them. This was every space-station he had ever been on: silver and beige, glittering with bronze and muted colours that softened the idea of only living in space. All of those typical details he had learned to spot. The way people grew little saplings in pots to liven up all of this with some greenery, to stave off seasonal depression. This was space. How was this space? 

Chris couldn’t begin to process exactly what was happening. He didn’t even have a theory. One moment, he had been on Earth, and now he was in orbit of a planet he knew would die, and everything was fine. Everything was simple.

And how had he gotten here? How was this even conceivable? Chris knew the jolt of time’s maelstrom, the strength of the bifrost. He had, under the Superiors, been to thousands of worlds under thousands of suns. Perhaps he understood what was normal, how it differed, how it didn’t, better than any other man. 

He looked down. There was no CD in his hand. Dave had handed him nothing. 

What was going on?

“Excuse me, you can’t park here,” said a supercilious looking non-binary parking attendant, who walked up to the car. “You’re blocking lots of people.”

“Apologies,” Chris said, trying to put on his most charming face. “But I’ve rather materialized without comprehending how this is physically possible. Could you please give us a minute?”

“That’s what they all say,” the Parking Attendant mumbled with a disappointed and condescending glare. “You should know that all materializations are to take place in sector seven, pylon G, and to have the requisite paperwork available.” 

“Yes, but what if I don’t?” Chris spat, rather irritated that he was being attacked by bureaucracy for happening to have randomly broken every law of physics and time out there. His mind still racing, Chris examined the dashboard. He swore under his breath. There was no way the car could possibly have sustained a trip through the heart of the bifrost—it was a car. It couldn’t even sustain its own atmosphere—he and Sang Mi should have popped. Like balloons. Even if they had passed through some sort of anomalous field, some sort of hi-tech mitigator that could allow them to travel to this place, he would have sensed it. Those things were far from subtle. 

“Could you please step out of the car, sir, madam, or variations thereupon,” the Parking Attendant intoned monotonously. 

Chris sighed. Even if he was glad at the parking attendant’s inclusivity, this was looking to be a very long afternoon. 

They can’t hold us for long, Chris told himself. They can’t hold us for long. 

The cell, primarily a maroon room gilded with neon-blue force fields, wasn’t uncomfortable. Goddess knows he’d been in worse. But still, the existential dread was kicking in. Was he really here? Back here? Right before… and… and everything? How’d he get here? This had to be a trick. 

Yes, a trick. That explained it. He must have been captured by an illusion-making species, such as the Morphiite, maybe he tripped into a Haunt manifest… It must be playing games with his guilt, his subconscious. Lots of creatures played games with open wounds like that… 

“Gongen to Cwej,” Sang Mi announced, snapping her fingers a few times. “What’s going on, exactly? What makes this place such a big deal?”

Chris shrugged the question off. “We have to get out of here, we have very limited time.” 

“Hey, we got time,” Sang Mi said gently. “We’re in a cell, aren’t we?”

“For parking evasion,” Chris said, mildly annoyed. “It’s not exactly grand theft larceny. We’ll be out shortly, and then—” 

“Why does this place have you on edge?” Sang Mi asked him suddenly, and very astutely. Chris sighed. It was weird how she could just read him like a book. He could hardly finish a sentence these days. 

The emotions around this place were strong, even coming through over the mist of memory. Sea surge. Music. Hyperspace. So many bodies. Chris tried to put the pain of the memories to the side, to focus. But he was around it again, it literally surrounded him. Because he was back here. He was a ghost… 

“I don’t think I could ever… relay it to you. ” Chris said, quietly, showing no emotion. This was the only way he could manage. “I was on, well, training wheels. It went haywire. Planets blew up.” He stated, which sounded matter of fact, but wasn’t. Despite the clarity of his voice, he nearly didn’t go on. He cared, he just couldn’t process. The pause was heavier than what he was actually saying.  “Can you begin to understand that? Entire planets. Life lost on such a scale…” He trailed off again. He was incredibly close to being a wreck. Sang Mi was surprised to see him this low. 

“Hey, Chris,” Sang Mi feebly attempted. “I’m sorry, I didn’t realize. If it’s too hard, you—you don’t have to tell me. I can…” 

“No, no,” said Cwej, forcing himself to be strong again once more. “You deserve to know. It affects you too, it’s important information for you… even the hardest bits. I lost a good friend out there, though I knew her only briefly.” 

“Roz?” Sang Mi asked, trying to piece together what she had heard of Chris’s past. She felt horribly insensitive, even just asking about this. 

“No.” Chris said, darkly. “No, someone else.” 

Sang Mi did not know how to say the next thing she needed to say politely. The circumstances were too big and dour for words, and Sang Mi, while many wonderful things, was never exactly a poet. 

“I’m sorry, man,” she said. She immediately cursed herself for not knowing to say anything better. 

She did not ask about what bothered her most. If this other friend he met had died and wasn’t Roz… How many people had Chris lost over the years? How many people was he not mentioning? She didn’t want to ask. It was insensitive. But it felt like it almost applied to her too: The two of them working on borrowed time, and in a “profession” with a high mortality rate. Maybe she was in over her head or something. 

Like that had ever stopped her before. 

Something occurred to Sang Mi. “Wait, and despite the whole planets blowing up thing, you still got the job?”

Despite the sore topic, despite himself, Chris actually laughed at that. Not a big one, a quiet laugh, but it was funny, you know, and the alternative would be to cry. 

A moment later, he was somber once more. He stared at the wall. 

“I don’t know when it happens. Will happen. I don’t know the precise time. It’s close. Soon, my past will show up, down below. And the continents will burn. The whole planet will crack like an egg.

A synth approached the cell doors an hour later, looking at them with animated, bulging and fluorescent yellow eyes. He deactivated the force-fields, wordlessly. Sang Mi and Chris looked at him with surprise mixed with confusion. They didn’t move. This seemed to irritate the figure, who should rightly be emotionless. “Your debt has been deducted from your account. You are free to go.”

“Debt? What account?” Chris asked. He did not like the sound of this. 

“Your debt has been deducted from your account. You are free to go,” the synth said, louder, assuming they had not heard him, which was additionally bizarre. It stalked out of the room at great speed, without bending its legs.

“You take me to the most normal places, you know that?” Sang Mi said, bewildered, but still finding room for sarcasm. 

The promenade of the station was still as bustling as ever. It was a veritable Chinatown, a Little Italy of compression and maximalism, seeing how much one could put into a single place. There was hardly any area to stand thanks to the number of stalls and mini-buildings blocking the walking path Chris and Sang Mi took about, not even mentioning the probably hundreds of people, and that was just this floor. A few feet above them, through the literal glass ceiling, hundreds more people walked. The world smelled of sweat and also deodorant. 

“There’s gotta be a manga shop somewhere around here,” Sang Mi said. 

“We need to find out why we’re here, how this is all happening, where the car’s been moved. We have a litany of questions,” Chris said, though he didn’t want to once again spoil her mood. 

“I’ve-been-very-good-lately,” Sang Mi said, speaking so fast she invented a new singular word. 

For once though, they really couldn’t afford to waste time. This whole day had been an elaborate mystery, teasing Cwej with contradiction after contradiction. And Sang Mi had to admit, she was intrigued too. It’s just, when life’s mysteries were this vast and obtuse, she really liked to go shopping. 

Ahead of them, down a “side street,” a difficult concept in a place where every inch of space had to be carefully accounted for and maximally utilized, the stepping man, (for that’s who he was—a man in lowercase…) the one who couldn’t be, sauntered vaguely upwards. His ballerina dance with no feet ascended steadily into the ceiling at a vertically diagonal angle, as if this was a reasonable path for a man. Though perhaps it was, as he stepped through the ceiling like anyone’s business. One supposes nobody ever told him the rules. 

It was always difficult and intimidating, even for one as accomplished and heroic as Chris Cwej, to have to deal with the help-desk. A man in venomous green lipstick, every bit as sour as he looked, tapped his feet, glaring over half-moon hologlasses as Chris and Sang Mi approached. The man was certainly not pleased to see them, they could tell this instantly. 

They could tell a lot about him instantly, really. He was the product of a union with a biosynthetic and a humanoid. The birds and the biorobot bees are, in this century, quite compatible. The nametag on his uniform stated his chosen name was Mr. Help Desk. Good taste was apparently not compatible this century. 

“We’re looking for where our car is,” Chris said. “You see, it was sort of taken out of our hands when we showed up here.”

“You’re the guy [™] who managed to park in the middle of the prom…? Tsk, tisk,” said Mr. Help Desk.

“You aren’t supposed to actually say tsk, tsk, you’re just supposed to make the sound with your teeth.” Sang Mi said, and was instantly ignored.

“Well, yes, Mr. Cwej, is it?” Mr. Help Desk snipped, despite Chris never saying his name. “I believe your debt was deducted from your account.” 

“We don’t have any debt, we don’t owe anyone anything” Chris said. “For that matter, I don’t think we even have money in your currency—” 

“Well, yes, I know,” Mr. Help Desk said, again excessively unhelpfully. “It’s incredibly indecent of you. So, in the event of a lack of currency in your P@Y! account, your vehicle was claimed as collateral.”

“No!!” Sang Mi exclaimed. “Not the car!!” 

“Yes, well, you shouldn’t have parked it illegally. It’s worth quite an amount of money too, I’m not quite sure why you did that.” Mr. Help Desk sighed melodramatically. “But your debt was thoroughly annihilated by such a venture. You’re lucky. 99.7% of illegal parkers [😭] are unable to pay their debts to the station.” 

Chris felt himself getting remarkably angry at the injustice of it all. He wanted to do something serious, but for once, he couldn’t decide what that would even be. Sang Mi rubbed her forehead aggressively, trying to work out the knots of tension. Were people like this everywhere?

“The car went to the antiques place,” Mr. Help Desk said, helping for the first time in the last four years. “Maybe it’s still there?”

Sang Mi had hardly blinked before Chris was off like a dash. 

The antiques place, Xotol Xoalaam’s Haberdashery and Antiquities, was one of the largest establishments on the station, amounting to around half the size of your average antiques store. Xotol had, like Dave, shelves himself. He took the same neurotic pride in their specificity as Dave did. But Dave was an amateur, a hobbyist with a narrow curated lens of things he collected, whereas Xotol was unmistakably a professional; a legend in his field. And Xotol would take anything. 

“Please, please, step inside,” Xotol would say cheerfully. And they always would. 

The shelves in Xotol’s storeroom weren’t quite dimensionally transcendent, though they came close. The human perspective would view Xotol’s work on the subject as something aligning the idea of a “shrink ray.” There are all sorts of laws of conversation of mass and  everything against the idea of a Shrink Ray, but Xotol had figured it out, something only a few others had, and in his drawers lay dozens of vast vehicles, subdued down to the size of your average hot-wheels and light as a feather, their mass invisible. Far more advanced than simplistic tissue compression; Xotol’s matter compressor was the pinnacle of design. Inside one of his drawers there was a 23nd century United States Aircraft Carrier, just sitting there, waiting to be reinstated upon the request of the right customer. Next to it, Xotol placed his newest treasure. 

This Honda Element was a magnificent little thing, a lovely creation, in pristine condition, though he had to clear out a few chip bags strewn about the back seat, and occasional other bits of detritus. But still—these cars usually had decayed to ruin in the years since their inception. It was a rare, exciting find. Most antiquity dealers would be more excited over 19th and 20th century Earth vehicles, but Xotol was happy to see anything at all. 

Someone at the door. 

“do you still take cds?” asked the stepping man, half of their body subsumed into invisibility. It was not the same half as before. the stepping man would have half a head or no right leg, or any combination of missing things. Xotol never paid it any mind. 

the stepping man knew Xotol would want the CDs. There were very few in the galaxy who were interested in CDs the way Xotol was. They were certainly fixated upon a particular era. And in addition, this was the ritual. the stepping man believed in ritual. He was mostly composed of it. 

Xotol enthusiastically nodded. “Yes, yes. I’d be glad to,” the stepping man always had great things for him, even though he was quite a fright to look at. This arrangement had been beneficial to them both. He even never questioned why the stepping man exclusively obtained antiques of musicians of the twentieth and twenty-first earth centuries, when there were many successful musicians in the twenty-third and fourth. 
the stepping man reached into the air where his pocket should be and retrieved a pile of discs in compact cases, ordinary CDs, except for the fact that they came out of absolutely nothing, the stepping man’s undulating invisible half. 

“Very good. Very good. Though I don’t take the Beatles,” Xotol clarified. “Everybody has all sorts of Beatles’ stuff, it’s not worth a thing. Same with the Swift stuff.”

the stepping man huffed. “they’re good artists.” 

“It’s not about that, it’s about scarcity, as you well know,” said Xotol, examining the atomic structure of the case for damages with his Zerto-eye. He flipped through the cases discerningly. “No, no. I’ll take the Doors, Jethro Tull, Au Revoir Simone, Supertramp and, oh, Gwen Stefani, now this is delightfully rare. One of the finest artists of the initial human age!” 

“i thought we were talking about scarcity,” the stepping man insisted. “not taste.” 

“Oh, yes, yes, sorry,” Xotol said. “But you know, Glasst has been looking to do a Stefani cover in his classics suite. Same with Kendrick, if you have any of his.” 

“i’ll pick him up next time,” the stepping man said, droll as anything, “though you know that for twenties’ artists, there was a vinyl resurgence. that costs more.” 

Xotol nodded. He had always been a man ready to pay a high price. “One more thing —” he said, a perfunctory reference to an ancient program of historical import in this classical era: “Do you have any of the work of Austentacia Wicker?” 

the stepping man shook his half-head. While most people have to exaggerate when they say this, Xotol had in fact been looking for ages. 

Sang Mi was astonished at how boldly Chris now moved through the crowds of the station. Though it did make a sort of sense that a quickly moving armored man of his size made people get out of his way. Sang Mi had no such luck parting the sea, continually pushed back by the surging masses of people. 

Sang Mi had seen Chris in several life-and-death situations before, plenty of ‘em, but she certainly hadn’t seen Chris this wired. It was this place, the bustle and bureaucracy of it, but also his memories. Even at its worst, the road trip had been a place of a sort of relaxation for Chris, a quest that was chosen. This place was thoroughly against his will. He had never wanted to come back here. 

And he was still forging ahead, deeper into the white noise. Frantic thoughts filled her head in the large crowd. Was he seriously forgetting about her? Or, and she wasn’t sure which option was worse, did she just slow him down?

Chris sped along on his circuitous path to the antiquery, which he was certain was close, he just knew it. He could almost sense where it was. He was almost certainly going around in circles, but he was making progress. The storefronts were changing. He just kept looking at them. Looking at the people. Looking for, well, anything in particular. 

But it was life overstimulating, a run on-sentence of distractions, the sheer variety of people was immense: a bald blue skinned woman in the uniform of a classical earth pirate, a man who looked almost human if not for latex-like forehead ridges, a tripedal cowlike but elfin figure carrying a babe in their arms, a mantis velkranoid, a wooden-fish like thing simply swimming through the atmosphere, a very attractive young man in a holographic cheerleader’s outfit extending a beckoning finger—and any other day, any other day, he would like to investigate it all. Especially that last one.

But he had to do the proper thing. He had to get the car back, understand what was going on, get Sang Mi and him back home. He couldn’t change history. There were rules regarding meta-time and dangerous people looking over his shoulder. His Superiors most of all. It was all so very dicey, him even being here. He kept thinking that, over and over—it was hard to pay attention to anything else. 

Just when he nearly lost all track of where he was, he saw the antiquery on the side of the promenade. (He did not know this, but this is, of course, how one finds the antiquery.) Relieved at his bizarre luck, he approached the storefront. 

The antiquery was a place of amber and copper. Orange and bronze and carved, grown, possibly of bioorganic material—he had seen many hive species build places like this, of alien honeycomb and precious metal, but it was stranger to see one in a predominantly human (or at the least post-human) settlement. Most hive species he knew didn’t make friends outside the hive, after all, they were never alone, so there was a deep loneliness in the hollow. He was initially unsure if this was the right place.
It was a small place, too. Wait, were those shelves dimensionally modified? That technology probably shouldn’t be here… maybe in an advanced INITEC starship, say, a hundred years from now, maybe they might have the prototypes, but not in an antiques store. 

This whole mess was getting deeper and deeper. 

“Good afternoon! Good afternoon! Good afternoon! Good afternoon!” Xotol said, rushing into the centre of the room. He was hyperactive, immensely pleased with himself. 

Chris was, suffice it to say, a little baffled. 

“All the pieces are here!” Xotol whispered, as if this whole thing was a gift from God. “All the pieces are here.” 

Sang Mi, like a shipwreck victim, washed ashore, gasping for oxygen. The fullness of it, the mass. There were far too many people. Standing by the hydro-stairwell, she had the most miniscule moment for herself. She felt terrible. Like fish in a barrel. Lemmings. It was the sort of place that developed one’s claustrophobia. 

Gongen wasn’t like this. It encouraged entirely normal nervous breakdowns; it never physically felt like she was being crushed in a vice. She didn’t like this place, she realized. It was a revelation. The fact that she did feel closer to home—it was soulcrushing. An ad appeared on the large screen across the way. Tourmaline Hawke blew a crimson kiss to the masses. “Cupkeen. The number one brand in seven systems. And I say so.” 

People (and unpeoples) were starting to funnel towards Sang Mi again, her brief respite was coming to a close. Sang Mi began to feel terrible once more, and then she heard the bleak sound of a boy crying. Her soul steeled itself. 

She could feel bad—that was fine—but someone else feeling miserable? Why, that was something of which she wouldn’t put up with! She rushed off to discover the source of the noise. 

Which was how Sang Mi found the cubbyhole.

Stars smeared in bright lines, like one was travelling in warp, into the depths of Hyperspace. Flashes of bright garnet, magenta, cyan and other psychedelic colours blurred before Sang Mi’s eyes. It was the opposite of the arrival when they found themselves on the space station—Sang Mi felt flung with immense momentum, every impact of the travel. It was the opposite of walking across a room. 

The boy is by the mountaintop’s point. A lonely peak, the tip of the world, or at least this part of it. It looks almost like Japan but the sky is a green-pink colour impossible for human minds to picture, the kind of colour that makes one’s nose bleed. It looks almost like Sri Lanka except it’s in technicolour, the grain of a classical 1960s picture. It’s almost like Switzerland except it’s far from neutral. The boy. He’s by the mountain’s peak and he’s crying. He looks terrible in his loneliness. Too young to be left alone at his home, at the Ice Cream stand, much less a solitary mountain. He wails. His parents aren’t coming back.

“It’s okay,” Sang Mi said, realizing very quickly that it isn’t as she looks at the despair in the boy’s eyes. It isn’t okay at all. The emotion of the boy seeps into her. “…I mean, it’s okay to cry.” 

Chris had no clue what any of this was about, which was becoming a frustrating theme. “Slight question: have you been fooling with the fabric of spacetime lately?” 

“The fabric of the universe is spongey, absorbent. It cleans up all sorts of things with the proper detergent!” Xotol said, not exactly beating the no-sense allegations. 

“So… yes?” Chris asked. 

“No,” Xotol answered sharply. 

Xotol turned to the nicest shelf of his antiquery. The bronze light reflected unfortunately upon his lilac face. He was about to spurt some more bullshit: “There are all sorts of results of the last great time problem in not-hell. The absorby-worby thingy mc-thingies, mainly. There are things in the thing container. For instance, one could find themselves caught in the couch cushions. The wrong loose change! The wrong loose change.” 

Chris subconsciously reached for his gun, perhaps out of fear, only to realize he didn’t have it. Ah. All the better, probably. 

“One of the benefits of being a time-aware collector,” Xotol began, “is to have a variety of historical oddities. After all, it’s why I’m here on this station right now. The planet’s going bye-bye in a few hours, I doubt they’ll miss much.” 

Xotol placed a brown shoebox on his pristine glass countertop. “What history are you in, Mr. Cwej?”

Chris hesitated. “I believe that’s probably too complicated a question to explain in as many words,” he said eventually.

“Exactly,” Xotol answered. “We are all subject to revision. It is a byproduct of the conflict that has been and will be. It makes my job as a completionist exceptionally difficult. Which is why I have this,” he said, pointing at the box. “Everything inside the box is unaffected by alterations to the timeline. You’d be amazed—” 

“You’re an antiques dealer. You’re a time-travelling antiques dealer. You’re looking for old stuff.” Chris said, genuinely baffled as to why anyone would really do this on such a scale. 

“Time-aware please, I’m not so gauche as to involve myself. Butterflies. Euugh. Dreadful business.” He trailed off. He tried to move for the door. Chris stopped him halfway there. This conversation wasn’t just going to be another loose end, Chris swore. 

“But…” Chris struggled to find the right word. “Why old things exactly?” 

“Prioritization,” Xotol said. “Everything gets old eventually.” 

Sang Mi was back where she had been, like a dream. But the promenade was empty. Blank. None of the surplus of people that there had been before. It was bizarre, this emptiness. She began to wander. The station was blue midnight. She could begin to see a sort of seclusion to the place. More of that loneliness. She could still smell where she had been before – the sweat of the place, the hundreds of people, the impending heart disease. But there was no incoming coronary here. Just the still blue and the bizarre contradiction of that stillness. She half fancied that she would wake up any moment now and Saki would tell her that she had a bad batch of delirium or something. Anything would make more sense than today. 

“preach, sister,” said the stepping man, who was not stepping, but sitting by a barstool. he was visibly depressed. In front of him was an enormous glacier of a window, half-opaque with discolouration. 

Sang Mi had an unreasonable amount of questions, but she settled for “Hey, what the heck’s going on? Who are you? Where have you brought me, what’s your deal? What the—” 

“it’s the ephemerality of it really. you can see out the window.” the stepping man said, even though Sang Mi really couldn’t. the stepping man drew a line in the condensation of the glass with his finger, rubbing open a miniscule viewport. 

Looking out of the glass, Sang Mi saw the rubble of an asteroid field. So many billions of rocks. The annihilation of a planet. She could hardly begin to comprehend it. The vastness was unbelievable. Looking at it, she thought that it would be like this, exactly like this, if Gongen or Earth went. You think about the end of the world, but now she saw what that looked like. 

“he told you it goes,” the stepping man said. 

“I thought the station did too,” Sang Mi said, confused.

“in most possibilities,” the stepping man said, not elaborating-further. he did that very well. “besides, six billion casualties is probably enough.” 

Sang Mi scowled. She could feel tears welling behind her eyes, but spitefully refused to cry. She wouldn't be able to put herself back together if she did. She carefully thought about what she should say next to get the most answers out of this imperious figure. She ran out of good ideas. “I hate to ask, do you have any water?”

the stepping man opened his un-coat and handed her a bottle of namebrand liquid, the kind that she had seen many times on earth. She uncapped the bottle and took a sip, nearly spitting it out. 

It was hospital water, Sang Mi thought. The kind of water that they give you at hospitals. So cold that it’s nearly frozen, so cold that it puts you into a kind of state of mini-shock. Well, maybe more surprise than shock. She was never sure why hospitals had water like that, and she had thought that it was entirely a hospital invention, that it was one of those weird solitary things that Earth and Gongen had in common. Bizarre that this guy had his own bottles of it. This weird substance was so cold that it probably wasn’t water anymore, she joked to herself. But it was nothing but a joke. It was water. Very cold water. 

“Thanks,” she said, so as not to seem unpleasant. 

A terrible awkward pause passed as they observed the newly formed asteroid belt of oblivion in front of them. 

“i think sometimes, what if that happened to a place i know?” the stepping man mused. “you know, a real place, that i was close to, not some place i hardly know. if i had a connection to it. like, a place that’s real to me because i understand it intimately, a hometown of sorts, if it happened to a place like that, then i might understand.” he paused. “i don’t really know what goes on in vancouver.” 

Sang Mi didn’t know why he made the jump to that topic, but she doubted that this man was from Vancouver. 

“whenever there’s war or death it always seems i’m far away. usually on business to be fair… but i do think sometimes, what if it happened to a place i know?” 

“Everyone knows someplace,” Sang Mi said. “And don’t you know here?”

“yes.” the stepping man said, with more of that sense of realization. “i do know here. but there’s no connection. hm. bit odd, that.” he paused.

The two of them at the window, looking out there into the frost and oblivion. It was oddly striking, oddly beautiful, that there could still be condensation on glass. That in space, somebody could hear. 

“i suppose i’m one of those people who’s just run out of empathy. shame…” the stepping man murmured. It seemed to be a major realization for him. “yeah, that’s really disappointing to think about. i should really fix that.” 

“Who are you, exactly?” Sang Mi asked, now for the second time. She was still very frightened of him, even though he had been nothing but personable.

“i steal things usually. i go somewhere and i steal things and then i sell them and it’s usually for some big fancy time reason. i have employers, i think.” 

“You think?”

“look at me,” the stepping man insisted. Sang Mi did, but she didn’t notice anything about him that was any different than it had been. He was still the same strange partially invisible figure. “i’m not the kind of man who knows things one way or another. if i am halfway, then my employers are more so.”

Sang Mi sighed. She clearly wasn’t getting anything definite out of him. They stood there, continuing to watch the horrible view. It was a terrible future. Standing there by the glass in the dark blue room, she hoped against hope that this was only a possibility or something. That someone would make a big important change.  

Change. They definitely needed change. 

The station was electric with people, as per usual. Mr. Help Desk was un-thinking, sitting there without any real cognizance of the hustle and bustle of the people around him. Mr. Help Desk was an automatic man. He was excellent at that and had 483 preprogrammed phrases. Not that he was entirely synthetic in his un-thinking. These were phrases that everyone said. He was normal, he told himself, and very proud of it. 

Unfortunately, that evening, he began to actually think. My goodness, what on earth was going on with that Mr. Cwej fellow? It didn’t make a lick of sense—such things merit investigation, and really—why did we have to confiscate the man’s antique car? He seemed dreadfully cut up about it, and just because he didn’t know the rules—subsection B-D-841-BAGGAGE was very clear on the subject and there were no exceptions that were to be made, that was entirely important because the rules said so and he always had to refer to the rules, this was the glory of his position. The point of rules was that they were steadfast when people failed. 

Myla Jessica Parker snapped xher fingers in Mr. Help Desk’s face. Xhe had been in front of Mr. Help Desk for quite some time and was getting remarkably impatient. As one of the richest bioforms in the eleven microspans, this was a big deal. “Hellooooo?” Xhe scowled. “Where exactly is my room? I’m meant to have a room on Substrata-B.” 

“Apologies, madamex,” Mr. Help Desk said. “I was distracted.” 

Myla Jessica Parker made a face. Xhe was very rich and very important and hadn’t been disrespected this much since that thing with the beeswax. “Distracted?” Xhe insisted with great indignation. “Distracted? Why, I never… You should have that head of yours checked for anomalous sentiment.”

Perhaps this was a very odd day or something, and he knew he absolutely should say, “Yes, my apologies, my apologies, my apologies,” but what he actually said was, “Please piss off, Myx. Parker, I am rather busy.” 

And that did it. Xhe stomped off in remarkable indignation. 

And Mr. Help Desk, having been unhelpful for the first time in all of his spans, had a moment to think. 

Xotol sighed. “But now, I must be off,” he said. “I have very much enjoyed this place, but every good salesman’s gotta know when there’s too much heat on his back.” 

Chris still did not budge. And Xotol realized, looking up to Chris’s full height, he would not be able to move past him. Chris was a brick wall of a man compared to weird little Xotol. 

“You know what I know, and you never once thought about actually helping people?” Chris asked. “Everyone’s life is going to end and you’ve not done anything to help them?” 

“Oh, no, no, any good time-aware has an excellent non-interference protocol,” Xotol babbled, and looking up at Chris’s uncaring expression on his face, completely changed tactics before whining: “Ah, c’mon man, I’m just a little guy, I ain’t done no wrong, I’m just a little guy, I’m just a little guy.”

Chris couldn’t believe the audacity of this uniquely terrible person. He could tell that Xotol was at least three-thousand—common for his species—and thusly he had been time aware for some time. How many atrocities had he done this little game with? Reverse-vulturing and picking at the scraps of a civilization before it even fell and then buggering off? How much death had this self proclaimed “little guy” seen? 

Xotol put his shop into his bag, causing Chris to stumble as the entire building dissipated into a small cube which Xotol placed in his purse. And now in the bustle of the promenade, there were suddenly hundreds of people in all directions. Xotol made a break for it, and it all happened so fast even Chris couldn’t catch up. Damn it. 

Sang Mi and the stepping man were still there. They sat by the glass some more. “I can’t be here. I need to get back to Chris.” Sang Mi said. the stepping man nodded. “i can take you,” the stepping man said. They looked out the window at the fog in space and the desolation. The apocalyptic end of Ritel Ryana Tropos. And then they weren’t there anymore.

Sang Mi and the stepping man were still there. They passed the store and picked up a copy of the Illiad, but it wasn’t how either of them remembered it. They pay for the walkman.

Sang Mi and the stepping man were still there. Where they were before. At the top of the mountain in Japan or Sri Lanka the boy bounces up and down in excitement. 

Sang Mi and the stepping man were still there. They slow down. They have to not do as much, be careful and delicate with this, because Sang Mi’s only ever passed in his wake before, not touched the man itself. …the world in one day. 

Sang Mi and the stepping men were still there. It’s nice of him to do so Sang Mi thinks, but I still don’t get it. The dead sun twirls. Gongen smiles, and Au Revoir Simone sings Another Likely Story. It's one of the few CDs he has on him. 

Sang Mi and the stepping man were still there. the stepping man saw she was confused about all of this, the things that didn’t make any sense, and he put on some music to comfort her. 

Sang Mi and the stepping man were still there. Where they were before. At the top of the mountain in Japan or Sri Lanka the boy bounces up and down in excitement. Nothing’s changed. 

Sang Mi and the stepping man were still there. In the stepping man’s invisible eyes, Sang Mi saw—no, not quite saw, that’s not really the right word—she sensed what was to come. What would happen for everyone, even a universe away, back home. Her body shook. 

Sang Mi and the stepping man were still there. The window is still so still and heartless and cold. Looking at the dead planet still makes Sang Mi’s heart ache. The longer they stay here, the less she can bear it. “When are we going to get going?” Sang Mi asked.
 
Sang Mi and the stepping man were still there. Where they had always been. walked in the room in the old video just to know what the room was and what it felt like. Baby steps. You don’t change…

Sang Mi and the stepping man were still there. They were walking down the stepping man’s corridor, a place of unplaces, which wrinkled like a bag of potato chips. “i’m sorry, you know,” the stepping man said, although he never explained why.

The planet. An orb in space. A tiny Christmas tree bauble in blackness so vast that there are hardly words to describe it. So much lack of meaning and presence that people can only call it “space”. Something between things. So, the orb. From an outward view of the totality of existence, remarkably small. A pinprick, hardly visible to the naked eye, although the naked eye can hardly perceive all this everything anyway. In the vast blackness of eternity that covers everything, the planet reflects the light of its sun just right, so that from far enough of a distance, it looks a bit like a star itself. The matter of scale is important, because what causes the planet’s end is damn near microscopic, insubstantial. It’s almost like a joke.

Someone played the wrong song on their little tour. A resonant tune, which echoed and built and vibrated to such a strange degree that steadily, the planet began to shatter, like a wine glass when the lady hits the high note. It’s a remarkably ridiculous way to die normally, all the more so when your entire planet goes while you’re at it. But the song begins playing out of those speakers anyway. 

Our dear performer was still yet to hit the crescendo, but the song began at that moment. And the world began to shake. 

Xotol made a whew(!) noise, stepping into the Last Call’s cockpit. There were a few other time-awares on board, from Tourmaline Hawke, to Myla Jessica Parker, to anyone else rich enough to have first dibs intel on history. 

The Last Call was always the safe haven for time-awares’ like he to make a swift exit just before the inevitable occurred. But still, Xotol felt unsatisfied. He still didn’t have an Austentacia Wicker. Regularly regarded as the finest artist to ever hit the Mutter’s Spiral, thoroughly unappreciated in her time. A copy of her work should be easy to find, but still, his holy grail was always out of reach. He thought the stepping man would have found it for once. But no luck. 

But there would be other opportunities. 

After all, just a few years from now, Gggeelpaxacorionalisvertadownaeretrograd VII would combust, and there was plenty to nab there before it did. And the stepping man would continue to make his shipments, no matter where he was. the stepping man was kind like that. 

The shuttle attendant’s perky voice chirped over the intercom. He was home free. He relaxed into his seat. Tuned out her miserably cheerful voice. But then the mindless droll of the please fasten your seatbelts and our flight time today will be and our estimated time of arrival—all that was completely interrupted. Xotol couldn’t believe what he was hearing. 

“Hello there. Sorry to interrupt your evening, all. Except I’m not really sorry. Nice to meet you all. My name’s Chris Cwej. And all of you are going nowhere.” 

And then, as naturally as anything, just how they drove here from 2025 like it was nothing, Sang Mi stepped onto the station once more, the moment she left it. 

In her arms, there was a walkman with Au Revoir Simone in it, and she was holding a copy of a new edition of Durarara!! which she had been meaning to pick up. She had no clue how she had gotten it. She squinted at the world in front of her, still reeling from the shock of everything that has happened to her today. Her throat was still exceptionally cold—like she swallowed ice or something. 

“What?” She said out loud, although no one in particular was listening. She was in this state of stasis for about forty five seconds. She stared at the world, unblinking. 

Then: “Chris!” she exclaimed. “Ohmigod, ohmigod, gotta go help Chris.” 

The city in space was moving, faster than it ever had before. Not the station itself, that was thoroughly stationary, but the people at the heart of it, the city was moving even faster than the bustling crowds ever moved. Word had gotten out. None of them knew how it would happen, the actuality of Glasst’s influence, how this planet was going to go. But the news had hit. And thus the panic.

Mr. Help Desk watched the surge of terrified people beelining for shuttles and escape pods and transporters. It was worse than Galaxanioid Black Friday—people kicked and bit and did whatever they could to reach an exit. Chaos. People bumping into people, bumping into people. A lady shaking a sign with The End is Nigh scrawled on it. 

Mr. Help Desk could not abide by this nonsense. “EVERYONE!” he yelled to the cacophonous crowd. “YOU MUST LISTEN TO ME!” 

The crowd didn’t do so. They were all far too busy—yelling and fighting and shaking and crying and climbing and breaking glass and running as fast as they could. 

Mr. Help Desk had been having a very difficult day of soul-searching up to this point, but a person can only change so much. He needed to do something. And he knew how to do one thing very well. He moved to action. 

“You four, you four, and you three,” he pointed at groups in the crowd, “go to pylon twelve and board the G7 Gallant. You, you and you, go to Geraldine’s, get some coaxious-nitrade for the ship and bring it to cargo bay two, get on board there…” 

He didn’t stop talking. He helped everyone he could. But everything still kept getting worse. The planet wasn’t even going to blow up yet, and fear was already breaking this place down. 

The Last Call shook with outrage and indignation. Shrieking voices bounced around the cabin. “Just who does this fellow think he is?!” “Why, I’ve never been treated with such indignity!” “This Chris Cwej, I want all his assets liquidated, I want him sold into servitude at the inhumanities auction—” “What on Earth is happening here!? My darling, I need my beauty rest!” “He must be stopped!”

Chris sat back in the cabin, leaning back into the seat, just for a moment. When the chaos finally began to die down, just a bit, he clicked on the intercom again.  

“I don’t think you understand where I’m coming from,” Chris said, dangerously. “I think it’s time you all listened up.” He tapped controls in the cockpit, guiding the ship slightly away from the station. 

Xotol impishly tapped the man sitting next to him, Peter Vuulye, an important posthuman business magnate in a dark black suit considered decidedly retro. Peter Vuulye got the hint, especially as it appealed to his ego, and rose to his feet. Only he could possibly represent all of them at a time like this. 

“Mr. Cwej,” Vuulye said, stepping forward. “I am sure you are aware of me, Peter Vuulye, CEO of—”

“I really don’t care,” Chris said, the harsh words surprising himself. “All of you have had the chance to save people, all of you have known what’s coming, and you’ve all done nothing.” He paused, trying not to get too angry. “We’re doing something.” 

Chris was all the more surprised by himself now that he had actually said it. He hadn’t realized what he was doing until he said it out loud. He really hadn’t. The impact on a grand scale that could result from what he was doing.

He was going to change something.

“This is a matter of established history,” Vuulye insisted, not one to be put down. “We are little, blessed to be aware of our place in that history—and you should know it too, especially considering your Superiors and Their rules, Their laws, Their considerations,” Vuulye was so incensed that little bits of spittle were forming at his mouth.

An insectoid woman in pearls near the back clapped a little at Vuulye’s words. She stood to her feet. “It is a matter of established fact that Grigori Glasst’s suite is responsible for the destruction of this planet and several others. It cannot be altered, as it has already happened. You should know this. You were there, weren’t you?”
 
He could not deny they were well informed. But it didn’t matter. His heart was thinking now, not his head. He had to do his part. He couldn’t just choose inaction, silent observation of a horror like this. He could not go through that suffering again, as selfish as that sounded. Let people die for no reason other than his bosses’ random values. He had his morals, he had to live with himself—and that was more important than anything else. 

The law was never more important than what was right. 

“You’re right, I was,” Cwej said to her. “I know the laws. And I don’t give a damn.” 

He clicked buttons in the cockpit, adjusting the ship’s course further. Every instinct in his body railed against it, but he knew it was necessary. 

“You mustn't change history!” yelped Xotol from the cabin, figuring out what Cwej was about to do. “You mustn't!” 

“Well, if the rest of you aren’t going to help me, I may as well change history as dramatically as possible,” Chris announced, aiming the ship carefully. He was about to do something incredibly stupid. He desperately hoped it would pay off. “What do you think will happen if I aim this ship at Glasst’s? Stop the signal destroying the planet at it’s source?! Maximum speed, collision course, disregard all safety protocol!” he declared, as manicly as he could manage. “Well?” 

Fear gripped the cabin, exactly as Chris had hoped. “You can’t possibly be serious,” Vuulye declared. “You’d die horribly!”

“Eh, I’ve had a good innings,” Chris shrugged it off, hoping he was a good actor. “And hey, big heroic cause, great way to go.” 

“His Superiors would just negate the paradox,” the insect woman said, trying desperately to smile and remain calm. “We will be perfectly fine, whatever happens, we—” 

“Ever been a paradox, miss?” Chris asked rhetorically. “I don’t recommend it. You have to die and everything. You tend to remember that afterwards too. The pain of burning alive…” 

“He’s—he’s insane!” Insect Lady declared. “Insane!” “He’s bluffing,” Vuulye insisted, as the ship increased rapidly in speed. 

“Oh, you think so?” Chris said, as pleasantly as he could manage. “I’m a serious person. Think about it.” 

The engines moved to a fever pitch. The ship’s cabin turned to red alert, little oxygen masks helpfully falling from the ceiling, for all it did the passengers. 

Chris was really hoping he wouldn’t have to actually do this. He probably would, but he was really hoping he wouldn’t. Oh dear. He really probably would. 

“Are you proud of your collection, Xotol?” Chris snarled. “Your historical research? Well, I’ve got a real piece of history coming up for you now. I hope you enjoy the culmination of your work. A rare piece, dying by explosive paradox. And lucky for you, today it’s 100% off!”

Xotol squealed. The passengers screamed, all of them. It was the end of the line. They were time-aware, well-informed people, and this was not how history went. They were outside the possibilities that they had thought defined their life, and they were for the first time, in truly serious danger. It was strikingly terrible. 

“STOP THE SHIP!” Vuulye shrieked in fearful despair. 

And just in time, Chris pulled the breaks to a stop. The cabin breathed a heavy sigh of relief in unison as the ship shuddered to a halt. There was silence. The anticipation and dread they felt was palpable. They had known of this man but thought him surrounded by myth and overabundant exaggeration. They looked up in fear at the loudspeaker relaying Chris’s voice. 

“Now, we can try that again and see if my piloting skills get any better, or we could stop wasting time and actually help some people,” he said sternly. 

There were no dissenting voices from the cabin. CEO and conman alike opened their phones and began to make call after call. 

The Moonlight Sonata. Not actually the name of Beethoven's piece, he himself called it the grand and estimable title of Piano Sonata No. 14, which just rolls off the tongue. Some historians think it was actually, according to the original notes, entitled “Sonata in the manner of a fantasy,” which isn’t really an excellent title either. But in times since, it has become The Moonlight Sonata by popular reputation. There can be many Sonatas by all sorts of composers that are the fourteenth one they did. There is only one Moonlight Sonata, or at least only one that matters. 

The Moonlight Sonata now plays over the end of the world. It’s fitting, somehow. The notes already hold that friction in them. You can hear it even if Glaast isn’t playing. And it’s special. Usually it’s Glasst’s personal arrangements that cause these Earth-shattering reactions. But The Moonlight Sonata… 

It’s part of the Glasst repertoire at this stage, one of the finest examples of humanity’s musical work and thus preserved perfectly in the Sol Three tour, next to covers of Cher’s Walking in Memphis and some piece by Sinatra. But those aren’t what's actually playing right now during the end of the world. They passed harmlessly and unheard. 

The people of the station can see through the great big windows on the promenade. They can see the fires of the planet below. The planet’s crust breaking. They see it. It makes them run. Mr. Help Desk has helped the best he can, but he’s got nothing to Beethoven. The panic has been fed to a fever pitch, chaos is consuming the station. And all the while, they hear it. They should feel so honored – it’s something Beethoven himself never did, at least not completely. But isn’t the deterioration appropriate? The Sonata—so loud—it makes the station shake with every gentle frantic note. It goes on and on. The acoustic sessions of the end. 

And Sang Mi at the window. Not knowing how to help. Remembering the future she’s seen of that hollow shell of a planet below this, the dead promenade.

Sang Mi at the window. 

“Chris is gonna come and get me. I know he’s gonna come. I know it.”

That single, crystalized moment of pure despair, and—Ships materialize out of the bifrost one by one. Like the Tholian Web, beams of light connect them in a lattice of lasers. A shield begins steadily to form around the space station. 

It’s the Time-awares. The people on board the Last Call had their contacts. Of course they did. People who would do anything to make sure that Uncle Vuulye is okay, or someone who owed Insect Lady a favor. Word gets around when it doesn’t necessarily have to travel linearly. The lovers of paradox and the rebels of dissidence and various slug people and all of them come too, it’s not entirely done via the conniving self-preservation instincts of the CEOs. 

In the grand scheme of things, it’s small. Infinitesimal on the grand scale of the universe. Except scales aren’t grand. To the people on the station weeping and shrieking and begging to their Gods, it’s everything. 

The Superiors will probably be mad. If they actually hear about it. If this private act of rebellion actually makes waves across the grand cosmos of the universe. The motley crew coming out of spacetime for their own agendas are careful nobody hears about this due to fear of reprisal. Nobody needs to know, they keep saying. 

Chris, still in the cockpit of the Last Call, looks at the planet below. It still burns. He sees the trail of Glasst’s ship going off to its next destination. For a moment he thinks he hasn’t changed anything. And then he reminds himself that he has changed things here. He’s saved people. 

But it’s not enough. 

He’s not the Superiors. He’s no God of Time, no grand Archon of important standing. He can’t sit in inaction. 

Would that make him an egotist if he kept trying to change history? Save the people that mattered? Doesn’t everyone matter? He doesn’t want to be like the Superiors one day, in their golden and time-soaked ivory towers overseeing the only right form of history. 

He keeps thinking about Fionara. He’s been thinking about her the whole day. Or trying not to. If he saves her, then he probably stops existing, doesn’t he? Crossing his own timeline? Does it go by Back to the Future rules or does it do something else? Will Time Pterodactyls show up or something? The time stuff is never really consistent, doesn’t make sense, not even to him. 

His makeshift fleet is departing. They look at him with wary eyes as they go. He’s made a name for himself here. More than ever. 

Goddess. He just wishes they could just keep going. They won’—he’s only managed this via mass CEO threat via spaceship. It’s just… it’s still so terrible. If only someday all of his mistakes didn’t show up. 

When the Last Call re-docked at the station for Chris to depart, Sang Mi was waiting. Chris sort of stumbled his way out, tripping over his own feet for no real reason. He was visibly very down, Sang Mi thought. 

“Oh,” he said, looking at the issue in her hand, “you found that manga shop.” 

Sang Mi felt confused. “Yeah,” She said, eventually. They sat in awkward silence. 

Behind Cwej, a little strange lime-green creature presented itself.

“Xotol,” Chris said, surprised. 

Xotol handed Chris a vast shelf of CDs and of course, the car, still shrunk down to a measly hot-wheels sized level. “Please,” Xotol said. “Never interact with me again.”

After unshrinking the car to its usual size quotient at the local inflatomat, Chris sat in the front seat of the vehicle, still confused as to how they had even gotten here. It seemed so strange and… even felt a little bit irrelevant now. So much had happened. 

Sang Mi sat in the seat beside him, placing her things in yet another bag on the floor. She was accumulating quite a few bags. “You alright, man?”

“Not satisfied…” Chris said eventually. “Don’t really think I’ll ever be satisfied.” 

Sang Mi thought about this and shrugged. “Me neither.” 

The words spilled out of Chris, suddenly, and without warning. “I just wish I could do more. I… I still don’t understand what makes helping people here different from helping people in 2025. I’ve dealt with all sorts of paradoxes my whole life, all sorts of stuff about fixed points in time and temporal wibble-wobble. But I don’t think I’ll ever understand what’s… right.” 

Sang Mi nodded solemnly. “You saved this place. That was… like a no, no or something, right? Laws of time?”

“Yes,” Chris said, with some difficulty.  

“Well, I mean, laws are laws. They’re sort of, like, made by the, uh, in charge people. You can’t follow them if they tell you to do something that’s wrong.” She shrugged. “Least that’s what I think.” 

Chris thought about this. “Yeah,” he agreed. It had been what he needed to hear, even if he sort of knew it already. “What next?”

Sang Mi shrugged. “I don’t know how to get back.” 

A moment passed of further bewilderment as they really thought over events. How this all happened. 

“Well, we do what we can, I guess.” 

Sang Mi slotted open the CD player in the car. She tentatively slid in the copy of Au Revoir Simone’s The Bird of Music into the player. Somebody Who began to softly play in the background. 

“Where’d you get that?”

“Dunno.”

“Fionara,” he said suddenly. 

“What?” 

“You asked me about her earlier. Who I’d lost here. Her name was Fionara.” 

As the synth of the song surrounded them, it was happening again. Outside the car, the stepping man looked on in his world of lowercase. Half of his face was visible—far clearer than before in the open light of the station and not his typical shadowy hideaways. But whether that half-face looked like Chris, Sang Mi, Fionara, or even something else, no one could begin to say. 

2025
The Road

Dave was a collector, but he was suddenly without a collection, really. He felt purposeless, confused and decaffeinated, although he had never really bothered with caffeine since his days at college. It was so weird. He was missing something now that the shelf was gone. He wasn’t one of those collectors that needed to constantly expand the shelf or he’d die—but not having the shelf there at all was its own little death. Days passed, two or three or something, of this sad and morose life. He drove to work everyday. He also drove back. There was hardly anything in between, great big swathes were just missing. But he was fine, really. Just a little emptier.  

A girl came to his house on the fourth day or something. The girl. The same one from the car on the road with the second strange man. She apologized, as she stepped through the door, said that she just got back and everything. 

“I’m Sang Mi,” she said. “Here’s my number. Let me know if anything else goes wrong.” 
Dave nodded. It was, uh, fine. “Nice to see you,” he said. He didn’t expect anything. 

She handed him the shelf. It took him a while to even understand. He went through the stacks, making sure it was complete, as it was. It was the very same shelf. It was impossible. There was absolutely no way. But it was absolute. There was the same crease on the inner sleeve of A Momentary Lapse of Reason. There was the same signed name on Raye Genesis. It was impossible! 

Dave wept as the girl went. He didn’t understand, but he didn’t need to. There was proof of magic in the world, of  good people. 

Such a damn funny thing. 

The girl—sorry, Sang Mi—excused herself to meet with the man, who was in the same spot as before, three or four days ago. It was exact. Even the car was on the exact same spot on the street as where it had been. Dave had stored the image of that car in his photographic memory, expecting never to see it again—he certainly didn’t give CDs away for free, but something had compelled him to. That last copy of The Bird of Music… 

Such a damn funny thing! He laughed and laughed and thanked the lord. 

But that copy of The Bird of Music  wasn’t there. Figured, he thought, he had given it to her, but still. That wasn’t the odd bit. The last CD on the shelf was by somebody named Austentacia Wicker. An album called Living Halfway. Dave shrugged. It was strange, but it probably wasn’t important. 

Jhe Family Apartment, Cheonsa Dome, Takumi, Gongen
2384

As the hours passed by, it became clear to Sang Mi that nobody was going to come. She’d sent out dozens of invites, but the only person here was her twin brother, and not only had they shared a womb, he lived here. The bowls of snacks she’d asked her mom to get ready for them sat nearly untouched, aside from the candy-covered chocolates she'd been depressively shoveling into her mouth, and the extra-spicy tteokbokki Sang Eun had been picking at.

“The flu is going around, I’m sure a lot of people are sick,” her brother lied kindly.

“Yeah,” she replied.

“And there’s that big baseball game between the Hongtu Cannonballs and the Takumi Tengu?”

“Sure, I guess,” she said, defeated. She put on the next movie. It was one of the Lubin Studios Films she had the files for. She wanted to enjoy it, it was a movie she loved. To be swept away in it. But she just felt alone knowing no one but her twin wanted to share it with her.

As the action played on, both of their phones pinged. They picked them up in tandem, and checked.

“We’re in!” Sang Eun said. “Mom’s going to be so proud. And Min Jun can stop hounding us.”

She looked at the message. She’d been accepted to Academy 27, the second best High School in Takumi.

“It’ll be different in High school,” she said finally. “I’ll be different.

​The Pennsylvania Wilderness
May 2025

By the time they reached the tunnel, it was nearly midnight, and the world seemed to be on the edge of itself. Usually, they’d have stopped to sleep by now. Their journey could have been over already if they’d wanted it to be that way—sure they’d have gotten to the lodge in the Blue Ridge Mountains ahead of time, but they’d have been guaranteed warm beds and maybe could have investigated this whole strangeness.

Instead, they hadn’t encountered any hotels, well any that were operating, and there hadn’t been a place they’d felt comfortable or capable of pulling over to sleep at either. Chris and Sang Mi had pulled over to have a spirited debate about whether or not to drink an energy drink.

They’d eventually agreed to each down half of it, and now each had a strange feeling of being slightly too awake.

It was the kind of dark where all you could see was what the car’s headlights illuminated. The sky was overcast, and there were no lights on this stretch of woodland road. Sang Mi looked at her phone. “It says we’re out of service range?”

“That’s pretty normal, there’s not a lot out here.”

“What if we’re lost?”

“We’re not lost—”

“CAT!”

Sang Mi sprung forward, caught by her seatbelt as she pointed at the road, and Cwej hit the brakes hard—the car skidding to a halt. The headlights shone that they were about to enter into a tunnel carved into the side of a mountain. There were a lot of those out here, but there also wasn’t one shown on the map on their phones.

But that wasn’t the really interesting thing.

There was a cat there, illuminated against the shadows, its body flickering, pockmarked with flecks and lines like it was made of film. They’d seen a cat like this before, back on Gongen at Sang Mi’s school, and it had led them to the dangerous film-projector in Violethill. Sang Mi swung her car door open, and Chris followed. They left the lights on the Odyssey on, the orange Honda Element sputtering in park as they approached the cat together slowly.

“It’s a cat made of film!” Sang Mi said.

“Yeah,” Chris replied.

“Like in—”

“YEAH,” Chris replied more.

Reaching into his pocket, and crouching down, Chris pulled out a piece of jerky. The cat sniffed the air, and tail high crept towards him as he cooed at it.

Then a sound came from the tunnel, like gears turning, and the cat did a turning leap—bolting back towards the tunnel, disappearing into it and the darkness beyond.

“Should we follow—” Sang Mi began asking, but Chris was already going after it. Wasn’t he the grown up here? She sighed, and tailed after him, pulling out her flashlight and turning it on as she ran.

The tunnel was dark. She could feel something though—feel something turning and spinning around her, like gears and cogs that made the clouds move were pulsing in her ears. Like the lack of anything she could see was spinning in a black vortex.

She stumbled out finally, into the light, and looked behind her to see that she’d come out the door of what looked like a small white shed with a shingle roof. Cwej shut the door behind her.

“But—” he put a finger over his mouth, and she could see in his eyes he was giddy to watch her see what he’d already seen.

She obliged, and turned around with him. And she knew very quickly he’d been right to be excited for her reaction.

Chris and Sang Mi looked out to the horizon, deep and dark and blue, and at the collection of buildings silhouetted against it. A row of large shapes, lit by moonlight and surrounded by trees. The distinctive shape of a water tower stood over them all.

Sang Mi knew where they were. She's seen enough photos - probably most of the photos of it that had ever existed - to know its shape even in the dark. “That's Betzwood. The Lubin movie studios.”

“Yes it is.”

“The real one? Are there any other ones, like theme park versions or something?”

Chris paused. “I don’t think Betzwood is as iconic as you think it is.”

She ignored him and took a step towards it. She moved her head, as though to check it was 3D and not just a flat image. “You can go to Betzwood. We, together, can go to Betzwood. The Lubin Manufacturing Company made so many silent movies. So many great shorts! They could've been as big as Hollywood, you know. They were a real competitor. Then a fire destroyed the Lubin film vault...”

Chris looked down at Sang Mi.

“We get to be here,” she said. “Moments and places…I guess they can last forever.”

When she’d sat with Sang Eun and watched movies together, so long ago and so far in the future, she used to think about what it was like for the actors being on set.

That way of thinking always confused her mom. “Doesn’t that ruin the magic?” she used to say. Even though she was a grown up, her mom never liked to be reminded it wasn’t real.

But Sang Mi loved it. Not only did movies let her escape into a story, they let her escape into the past. Each shot was a moment in time, captured on film. But even those captured moments were fragile. The fire in the Lubin film vault destroyed so many movies that will never be seen again.

Sang Mi turned to meet Chris’s eyes. “Can we stop the fire from happening?”

He took in her expression. This meant something to her. Then he shook his head. “You can’t. It’s a hard thing to learn but you can’t. Be content looking at history like a pretty picture in a gallery. You don’t get to do your own finger painting over the top.”

Sang Mi paused. “I read a book about painting restoration once.”

“You can’t change history,” Chris said flatly.

She screwed up her face. “Is that ‘you’ as in ‘we’ or ‘you’ as in ‘me’?”

“Nobody can change history—not on purpose anyway. Anyone can change history without meaning to. You could make an amazing discovery in your native time. Cure a disease, write a hit song, invent a com unit that never loses signal. But going back in time to change things on purpose doesn’t work. If you knew a fire was going to break out so you went back in time to install a state of the art sprinkler system, the fire wouldn’t happen, so you'll never have known about it, so why did you go back and install the sprinklers? Paradox loop. The timeline disintegrates.”

Sang Mi turned back to the view. “It’s not fair.”

“I’m afraid it is fair,” said Chris. “It’s the same for everyone. Nobody’s… superior.”

She nodded, but it was a hollow gesture meant only to end the conversation. “Can we look around?”

“We have to," said Chris. “It’s where the cat went. Whatever’s going on is going on in there. Come on.”

There was a chill in the air. A bird called out somewhere, hoping for a reply in the wind.

Sang Mi led the way. She drifted forward as though in a dream, finally walking through a place she'd known for years.

Chris moved more cautiously, looking down the dark paths between each building, imagining where the best vantage points to watch them from would be. At this point in his life, these checks were purely instinctual. He'd do exactly the same if he was heading out for a bite to eat after his shift on Spaceport 5.

The pair reached the biggest of the buildings and shared a silent look of acknowledgement that, yes, the biggest one was probably the place to start.

Sang Mi started towards the front entrance. Chris tapped her shoulder to stop her and gestured instead towards a side door.

It opened with a rusty sound louder than Chris would’ve liked. Accepting that they had now announced themselves, he stepped in, Sang Mi following behind.

The moonlight shining through the door was their only source of light.

Chris squinted to see. “Make sure the door doesn’t—”

The door blew shut.

“Sorry,” said Sang Mi.

A beam of light illuminated Chris Cwej’s smile. “Have a torch.” He passed her the other one from his belt and the pair set off.

Their torches cast sharp shadows across uneven walls, creating an aggressive expressionist world.

Sang Mi turned and her light fell on a fireplace. It wasn’t lit, save for the light of her torch. Slowly, she raised her beam up across stone walls with old, unrefined brickwork.

She took a step closer, and closer, then she put her hand on the wall. The cold, dark stone looked cold to the touch, but it wasn’t. It was warm. She pushed against it - it was slightly soft. Spongey bricks?

“Ah ha!” Chris’s voice came from somewhere off in the darkness. “That’s what we need.”

A buzz, and one by one the lights sparked on overhead.

Sang Mi looked around at the medieval castle she was standing in.

At the end of the room was a long table, with a shining throne in the middle and several smaller, only slightly-less impressive chairs on either side. Banners hung on the walls above with stark black and white designs, and several empty suits of silver armour stood on guard by the entrance.

A man in a blue suit of armour walked through that entrance. “Not sure about the historical accuracy,” said Chris. “Black and white banners, I suppose so the designs show up well on a black and white camera. Also…”

He pointed downward at the dirty studio floor that this old castle sat upon.

“It’s so detailed,” said Sang Mi. “I’ve never seen this film. What’s through there?”

She ran across the throne room with no regard at all for royal protocol and stepped across the threshold into a dressing room.

Two chairs sat in front of mirrors on either side of the room, and the most colourful array of suits and dresses were arranged on rails against one wall, feathers and sequins everywhere.

Sang Mi sat down and swivelled towards the nearest mirror to admire herself, but saw nothing. Instead of a reflection, she only saw a frame filled in with solid white.

Chris stood by her shoulder and looked. “Mmm. An early attempt to avoid the camera accidentally showing up on film?”

“You mean…” Sang Mi looked around. “This is a set too?”

“Looks like it.”

She examined one of the costumes. “It’s like something they used to wear on stage at musical revues. The Broadway Melody of 190-something.”

Chris opened the door of the dressing room and stepped outside into a wide open space, a dark studio filled with slices of different environments, like windows into different times and spaces, all frozen.

A shape moved through the frozen places.

“CAT!” Sang Mi ran off, Chris following close behind.

The shape disappeared into a rocky tunnel. As Sang Mi and Chris wandered through it, it became harder and harder to see without the light. At the end, Sang Mi pressed her hand against the cave wall and found it was soft again - even softer than the wall of the castle. Hesitantly, she pushed, and a giant hollow boulder rolled out of the way.

The pair stepped out of the tomb.

They turned and looked back at what they had just emerged from.

“This is…”

Chris nodded. “I think it is.”

They were standing on the set of a film Sang Mi knew very well. Chris had seen it too, briefly, but crucially neither of them had seen its ending.

The film was Battle on the Easter Front. This whole wild journey had started when a girl named Petra had moved Heaven and Earth to try to see that ending; it had been her mother’s favorite film. She’d gone so far as to kidnap her fellow students to try to recreate that ending. And crucially, they’d followed the trail of a flickering cat, and found a projector that made the movie… well, real.[a]

“This is the second time we’ve been inside this movie,” said Sang Mi.

“We’ve had the immersive 4D experience,” said Chris. “Now we’re seeing behind the scenes. Battle on the Easter Front was made here. But that means—”

A low grumble distracted him.

Sang Mi heard it too. They looked at each other and silently questioned whether the noise was something they should be worried about.

They heard it again. A heavy droning sound from somewhere nearby. It came and went, every six or seven seconds.

Whatever was making the noise was clearly big, probably dangerous, and the two of them couldn't help but start moving towards it.

They listened as they walked. The low grumble got louder and louder as they got closer and closer.

They found the source more suddenly than they expected. Around a corner, sitting in the middle of the studio floor, was a giant something. At first it looked like a formless pile, but as they got closer they realised it very much had form - a deliberate, sculpted form. It was hard to tell what it was made of. Clay? It seemed to move, rising and falling slightly as the grumble came and went, but the movement was jagged and uneven.

The shape was also flickering. Just like the cat, it juddered as though the image was a projection.

Sang Mi reached out to touch it, but stopped when she saw Chris raise a hand to stop her. He shook his head and gestured to stay quiet.

He led the way as the two walked around the mound. His mind was reeling, trying to connect dots. It looked like a lump of sentient something. Is this what the flickering cat was made out of? Could he take a scoop of this stuff and shape it into whatever he wanted to bring it to some form of life?

He stopped when he saw a strange circle on the mass.

Sang Mi held her breath as Chris leaned in to examine it.

It opened. A reflectionless eye stared back at them.

"Back!" Chris pulled Sang Mi away as the mass started to rise. Part of it lifted off the ground, and as it did its form became clear. Two mighty hind legs, two small front arms, and one massive tail, all moving with not quite enough frames of animation.

They'd woken up a stop-motion dinosaur.

Chris grabbed Sang Mi and they ran. Despite how much she wanted to, Sang Mi didn't look back at the impressive spectacle of the tyrannosaurus rex rearing back, roaring, then charging after them, knocking down sets and lights and rigging as it went. She could at least appreciate the foley that emphasised its footsteps. It chased after them in a flickering rage, each step sounding like a deep drum being struck.

It chased the two of them back through the old dressing room set and the royal throne room. The table crashed over as the t-rex's mighty tail swung. Whatever that flickering material was, it was solid enough, Chris thought.

They ducked through the swinging doors of an old timey saloon - there's no way the dinosaur would fit through after them. Then they turned and saw the set only had two walls.

“Budget cuts,” Chris growled, and they got back to running.

They ran out the side of the saloon and kept barrelling forwards, away from the ever-approaching footsteps. They flew together through different times and places, always with danger hot on their trail.

“Over there!” Sang Mi pointed.

In front of them was a section of the studio that was boxed off from the rest. From this angle, they could see it had at least two walls.

They ran around those two walls, the t-rex not far behind them, until a third wall came into sight. Then, a wave of relief washed over Chris as he saw the vital, intact fourth wall.

He led Sang Mi through a door into the box, entering a pretty swanky-looking hotel room. It was bigger than any hotel Sang Mi had been in - with twin beds, a seating area with a sofa, a sideboard with drinks, the works.

They waited in silence.

Outside, the T-rex had stopped. It slowly crept around outside the four walls, looking for a way in.

They were so quiet, they could hear not only its footsteps, but a sound of whirring coming from the creature—the flickering of the film that made its greyscaled skin.

They heard the sound of something approaching, much closer than the dinosaur. The door to the hotel's restroom opened and a thin flickering man stepped out. “Say, what goes on here?”

Chris grabbed him and covered his mouth.

The sensation of directly touching the man's flickering face felt like static on Chris's hand. He fought the urge to let go.

Regardless, the man quickly fell silent of his own free will. The dinosaur's silhouette passed across the drawn curtains, its shape projected onto the screen.

All three were silent, watching, waiting.

The projected image faded.

They listened as the heavy drum footsteps got quieter and quieter until finally, they were alone.

Chris removed his hand from the man’s mouth. “Sorry.”

He was smartly-dressed, with a sharp suit and perfect hair. “Now do you mind telling me who you two are? And who was that man out there?”

“‘Man’?” Sang Mi repeated. “It was a dinosaur! Didn’t you see the shape?”

The man blinked. “Dinosaur? Now what does that mean?”

Chris circled him, taking in every detail of his flickering form. “A dinosaur. Do you know what a dinosaur is?”

“Can’t say I do. Listen, I tell you what…” He turned towards the table and picked up a teapot. “How about a nice relaxing drink, huh?”

Sang Mi whispered to Chris, not wanting to be rude. “How does he not know what a dinosaur is?”

Chris paused. “Outside of his frame of reference. Maybe the movie he’s from doesn’t have any dinosaurs in it.”

“Is that how this works?”

“Depends. Did I sound convincing?”

The man turned back to them holding two cups of tea. “I suppose I should make an attempt at a proper introduction. I’m Peter.”

Sang Mi smiled and took the cup offered to her. “I’m Sang Mi, this is Chris.”

Chris nodded to confirm that this intel was accurate and took his cup. “Where do you come from?”

“Oh, all over really.” Peter turned and sat down as Chris and Sang Mi sipped their tea. “I’ve been staying here in New York a while, trying to get the big scoop on a new Broadway show.”

Sang Mi tried to read the man’s face. Was he acting? Did he wear the face of some actor from this era of film she just didn’t recognise? Or was he a character personified? Pure unrestrained fiction. “We’re not in New York,” she said finally. “We’re in Pennsylvania.”

“Not to him,” said Chris. “Cats and dinosaurs and even people from movies. What’s bringing them to life? What's giving them mass? How does it work?” He paused as he muddled through it in his head. “There’s one more important question though. The most pressing question of all.” He turned to look Sang Mi in the eyes. “Why would a prop tea pot sitting in a film studio set at night have real hot tea in it?”

Slowly, the two of them looked down at their cups and saw that the liquid they’d been drinking was grey and flickering.

As Chris lost consciousness, he could feel the end of the reel.

Sang Mi’s first thought was that Chris had just said something. Unfortunately, the thought came to her too late to actually listen.

She looked around at the rows and rows of shelves around her, all covered in film cans.

“Are you okay?” Chris repeated.

Sang Mi’s first instinct was the turn to face Chris, then she realised she couldn’t. The two of them were tied on chairs, back to back, in the middle of some sort of film collection.

“I’m fine,” Sang Mi finally responded, although she realised after she said it that she hadn’t actually checked if she was. She stopped trying to turn and focused her gaze forward, on the film can sitting on the shelf in front of her. “Outwitting Dad.”

Chris tried to see behind himself. “Excuse me?”

“This film canister. It’s called Outwitting Dad. It’s a 1914 movie, I think the first movie Oliver Hardy was ever in. It doesn’t exist any more—it’s lost media. It burned… we’re in Lubin’s film vault.”

“Well, you certainly know your stuff,” said a new voice.

Sang Mi and Chris both turned their heads.

For a brief moment, Chris thought the voice belonged to the flickering cat, which wandered out from the shelves and passed by his feet. Then he watched it slink off towards a woman standing in the darkness. She wasn’t flickering. She looked entirely real.

She reached down, and picked up the kitty as it started to rub against her skirts,  stepping out of the shadows as it flickered in her arms and she stroked its shifting fur. She’d blended into the shadows because she was wearing all black, from her head to her toes. Her face was covered by a black veil. They knew her. They’d seen her before.

“How long has it been now, twenty-one years since the Chicago World’s Fair? Though for you… days, weeks? Being a time traveller must be so convenient, while the rest of us slog through every day between two points, you just touch the highlights and disappear.”

“Something like that,” Chris answered. “I didn’t expect to see you here, Salome Herodian.”

She sighed. “Just Sal. I’ve been funding films here. I am hoping Battle on the Easter Front will allow me to fund other period pieces… including a better representation of my life.”

They gave each other a glance, which hurt both of their necks in the attempt, and tried not to give too much of the future away.

“Well, I’m glad to see you’re doing okay!” Sang Mi said optimistically.

Sal turned her blank veil to face her. “Yes, after you kicked me out of the top of the Ferris wheel and I broke my body in three dozen places and crawled away in agony, I did make a full recovery.”

Sang Mi tried to shimmy so she was more hidden behind Chris. It almost was a good attempt. Chris tried to straighten his back to assist, and calm Salome down. “We’re not here to pick a fight. We’re just…”

“Poking your nose where it doesn’t belong?”

“Investigating,” he said evenly. “That cat is unusual. And it’s not the only thing that is.”

Sal raised her veil just enough they could see her grinning. “Oh, you’re curious about them, are you?” She lifted the cat to look into its eyes. “Inside all of them is a projector. An omni-directional 3D projector. Using AI, it extrapolates a person or an animal or a thing from a movie and sort of…fills in the blanks. Completes them in a way. It imagines what the back of an actor’s head would look like during their close-ups, if you get my meaning.”

“Giving them physical form,” finished Chris.

Sal nodded and placed the cat down at her feet. “Ultimately, corporations turned against theme park mascots. They’d break character sometimes when park visitors misbehaved, and would demand things like ‘pay’ and ‘rights’. With these projectors, you can rip a character straight off of the screen. I’ve been experimenting with them for a while. The cat was simple. Relatively speaking,” she quickly added, for fear of offending the cat. “Then I started to think bigger.”

“Love the dinosaur,” said Chris. “A stop motion dinosaur made of clay. So these projectors can give life to even inanimate material.”

“Of course,” said Sal. “They don’t give life to the clay, they give life to the story. The fiction. The belief that the clay is alive. That’s what’s being animated.”

Sang Mi was starting to get a twinge in her neck from turning to face Sal while being tied to a chair. “Why did you move us here? And why are we tied up?”

“Well, I thought I might just leave you both here,” said Sal. “Locked up in the archive, left to gather dust. A pair of lost stories nobody will be able to reconstruct. Tell you what…while I’ve got you here, let’s see how well you know your film history.”

From one of the shelves she pulled out a projector screen and set it up against the wall.

“Tell me if you recognise this.” She pushed a button and on screen was a still image of a train station.

“The Arrival of a Train, from 1896,” said Sang Mi, almost instantly. “Thought to be one of the earliest films ever made. Just a simple shot of a train pulling into a station. You know,” she said over her shoulder to Chris. “There’s this legend that the first audience it was shown to thought the train was going to burst through the screen and hit them.”

That statement sat there for a heavy moment.

Chris raised an eyebrow at Sal.

Sal just stood there and beamed.

“You realise,” Chris started, slowly, “that this is a very small room. If a train came in here, you’d be crushed too.”

“Would I?” Sal took a step close to the tied-up pair, letting them get a good look at her.

She waved her hand in front of Chris’ face, which at first he found annoying and obnoxious, but it suddenly became very interesting when he noticed her hand moving just a little bit too quickly. Or too slowly? It was hard to put his finger on what was wrong with her fingers, except that sometimes, for a split frame, it looks like there were more of them than there were.

“Wow,” said Chris at last. “Well done. You really have been experimenting, haven’t you?”

Sang Mi tried again to turn. “What’s happening?”

“She’s not really here,” said Chris. “She’s just a recording, like the others. A 4k, high definition recording, running at a higher frame rate and in full dazzling colour, but a recording nonetheless.”

“Well,” said Sal, lowering her veil. “The show's nearly over.”

She pushed a button on the protector and the still image of The Arrival of a Train started to move, a grain now playing across the screen.

“Goodbye!” Sal waved, then the image of her fizzled. For a brief moment, she was entirely blue, then the image retracted, and all that was left was a floating silver ball with several black lenses. The omni-directional 3D projector that had been sitting where her heart was fell gently to the ground and rolled.

Chris and Sang Mi struggled to free themselves as the train on the screen came into view.

“What do we do?” asked Sang Mi. The rope was so thick and rough, it dug into her wrists as she pulled against it.

Chris’s mind reeled. Were they really about to be killed by something so simple? A nefarious villain tying them in front of an oncoming train? “Don’t panic. Panic isn’t helpful. Just pull.”

The pair pulled against the rope as hard as they could, and all the while they couldn’t take their eyes off the screen.

The train got closer.

Chris and Sang Mi were on the edge of their seats.

Closer and closer.

And then--

— it stopped.

The train setled into the station.

The film ended.

Chris and Sang Mi sat in the darkness for a moment.

Sang Mi spoke up first. “I suppose those people who thought they were going to get hit by the train were a bit silly, weren’t they?”

Chris gave a nod she wasn’t in a position to see. “Very silly, yes.”

“I suppose it makes sense, really,” Sang Mi said, relaxing back in her chair. “If she was making movies here, she wouldn’t do anything to destroy the archive.”

They both took a moment to breathe deeply.

Then the breath was ripped from their lungs.

A deafening blast like a canon and the sound of something heavy shattering echoed through the room and shook their hearts. Cans fell from the shelves and the shelves fell from the walls.

“What now?” Chris shouted, a little too loudly while his ears still rang.

Sang Mi knew immediately. “An explosion in the Lubin film vault. The….um…the gases, I can’t remember. From the celluloid. It heated up and caused an explosion. The fire’s started. We have to stop it!”

“We have to get free—one thing at a time.”

Chris and Sang Mi struggled against the ropes once more, and the pain in their wrists returned as if they hadn’t had a break.

“There has to be something to cut it with,” said Sang Mi.

They became aware of the air around them, somehow thicker, heavier, dragging against their throats as they drew breath.

A confused meow caught them off guard.

The flickering cat climbed over the fallen shelves and film cans. Sang Mi wondered whether an A.I.-fuelled 3D extrapolation of a character from a movie could feel heat.

Then she noticed the particular film can that the cat had its paw on. It had a label on the side that said ‘A Little Hero’.

Another explosion shook Sang Mi, but somehow she didn’t notice it as much this time. Because something was very wrong, and it sent her brain into a frantic rush.

A Little Hero was a silent movie from 1913. Granted, they were currently in 1914 - the time checked out. What didn’t check out was the fact that she’d seen it. Sang Mi had seen A Little Hero.

If it burned here, in Lubin’s archive, how is that possible?

She’d watched it with Sang Eun. It was a charming little film, barely 5 minutes, about a bird, a dog, and…a cat.

The flickering cat turned to look at Sang Mi, and in that moment, she got it.

She’d seen that movie because it wasn’t a Lubin movie. It was made by Keystone. Which means it being here was wrong—it must be a copy. It must have been brought here by Salome.

And finally, she recognised the cat.

“Is that the movie you’re from?” Sang Mi asked.

The cat just stared at her. It tilted its head slightly, judging her reaction.

Chris looked over his shoulder at her. “Making any progress?”

The air was thick and dark now. The fire was getting closer.

In A Little Hero, a dog saves a bird from a cat. If that’s the movie this cat is from…

Sang Mi started whistling the best bird song she could conjure.

The cat’s ears perked up immediately. The film it came from may have been silent, but the projector in its heart brought the story of the movies to life - it could hear the bird song.

It jumped towards Sang Mi and started attacking the rope, clawing at it and meowing. In moments, it was slack enough for Sang Mi to pull herself free. She turned and untied Chris.

A third explosion rocked the building.

Without saying a word, Chris took Sang Mi’s hand and they ran. They burst out of the archive and escaped.

Sang Mi and Chris sat on a bench in the middle of Philadelphia. The fire brigade had arrived, but Sang Mi already knew how much they were able to save and how much was lost.

“There were only around 20 injuries, and no confirmed deaths, which is lucky," said Sang Mi eventually. "A lot of people worked there, in Lubinville—that's what they called it. There was one boy called Ray who was badly hurt. An actor called Harry C. Myers saved him. I saw him in a movie once...”

Chris could feel Sang Mi trying to work through it, speaking more to herself than to him. “That's history. It's the way it always was. But, for a moment, we got to be there, didn't we?”

Sang Mi nodded. “Now that moment’s gone.”

They both sat and listened to the noise of the sirens. Then a noise under the bench made them both jump.

They looked down and saw the flickering cat, curled up asleep. A little hero.

“Come on,” said Chris. “Let’s go watch a movie.”

​​Deep in the trees, where the branches crowd out the light like intertwined fingers, there was a madman. He needed subjects for his experiments, subjects who wouldn’t be missed. He found them in children—abandoned and forgotten. Orphans who had been shunted off to the local asylum.

The madman was named Doctor Crow, and he had been working on a secret serum, which he injected into the children’s heads—causing them to swell up like melons.

The children turned feral—their teeth grew sharp, and they ate anything they could.

Nurses.

Each other.

And finally Doctor Crow himself.

Now they roam the forests, feasting on flesh, wandering in the darkness—”

“With their melon-heads?” Sang Mi cut in, her voice as dreary as her disposition. The black suits and ties she and Chris were wearing certainly didn’t help that.
 
Carol looked to Cwej hoping desperately he’d back her up. “It’s a real local legend!” She held up the bobblehead of the melon-headed child. “And that’s why we’re naming the baseball team after them.”

Chris looked over at Sang Mi, trying to keep his composure better than her. Unfortunately, he was well aware Sang Mi was a better liar than him, and he also knew she was doing a bad job that was better than his own bad job right now. “…It’s certainly an interesting proposition but, uh, you don’t hear people saying to name their team after say, the Jersey Devil.”

Carol crossed her arms, still holding the bobblehead. “You mean like the New Jersey Devils? The hockey team?”

“Oh shit, really?” Chris gave Sang Mi a look of pleasant surprise. She shrugged. “Well I still don’t think it’s a very catchy name.”

“With all due respect, you’re just consultants, and this is my team. Starting a minor league team isn’t easy, and I’ve invested everything I have into buying this baseball field, renovating it, and scouting out players. And we have a backer who’s going to make this place a real success… even if they keep saying we should name the team the Corvids.”

Chris raised an eyebrow. “Like that Doctor Crow?”

“I guess. I think we should stick with the simpler reference. Regardless, I appreciate that a generous donor paid for you to come here to assist us, Mr. Rodonanté and Ms. Kim, but I really think the Melonheads name is what suits our community.”

Sang Mi, aka Ms. Kim, scooted her chair back and got up. “Okay, well, I think we should go then, Mr. Rodonanté.”

Cwej nodded. “Sure. Not sure how much good we’ll be here at this point. Hopefully some of our suggestions were helpful.”

“Yes, I mean you did realize we were getting double billed by a few of our vendors, which is going to reduce our overhead tremendously, so I do thank you for coming.”

They each shook Carol’s hand, and filtered out. Chris made his way from the office to look out over the small stadium. Sang Mi scampered to follow him. “Did we really have to wear the suits? And why did we use our mothers’ maiden names?”

Chris stuck his hands in his pockets and shrugged. “I really wanted to feel like we were undercover.”

“You didn’t change your name at the school, and we were undercover there for like, a while.”

That was a good point, and he didn’t have a good answer, so he changed the subject. “So, what do you think, about the Melonheads?”

“I think that she's going to need to rebrand as fast as she can once it sinks in that It’s a terrible name for a sports team.”
 
He twitched and looked over at her. “No, the cryptids! The legends!” He threw his hands out, trying to gesture in a way that captured the mystery of it, but instead made him look like an insecure bird trying to take off.

“Oh. Well, I mean, they’re in our book, aren’t they? They don’t sound real, but nothing has sounded real. It’s not like I expected to meet vampires, or shadow people, or giant turtles.”

“There’s a lot of strange things in the world. And this trip has been filled with coincidences. I knew a Dr. Crow a long time ago, well, nearly the same name. So, I was curious.”

“I’m guessing you’ve concluded it’s nothing?”

He nodded. Then he shrugged. Then, as if hoping it would make him look more confident, he gave a second firmer nod. “Well, whatever. Let’s hit the road. Not every town is going to have a real mystery.”

And so, they abandoned the search for the Melonheads. Sang Mi already had their hardcover copy of Roadside Oddities of America out on her lap, flipping through the pages for something interesting. Chris shifted into his seat, turning out onto a country road. “Sorry that was a waste of time.”

Sang Mi screwed her lips to the side, holding a page of the book in the air as it bounced on her lap. “Isn’t that the whole point of what we’re doing, wasting time?”

“I wouldn’t call it a waste, we’re on an important mission.” The page stayed held in stasis between her fingertips.

He glanced over, flicking the turn signal as he did so. “Are you getting homesick?” “No, no, it’s not that. I don’t want to go home. It’s just…”

Trees flicked past the window. A stray dog perked its head up from some roadkill as they zipped by. “I can’t know unless you tell me.”

“It’s nothing, don’t worry about it.” “It’s really okay—”

“I said don’t worry about it!”

He held his gaze on her—probably too long for someone who was trying to pretend they were a safe driver—but as she leaned over and let her head bang at the window, he couldn’t help but go through an incredible list of improbable possibilities about what was bothering her. He started with fairly reasonable thoughts:

“Hey, Sang Mi, you’re not… in a love triangle with a dog-person and a pirate, are you?”
 
She tilted her head up from the window. “Stop kidding arou —” She saw the look in his eyes. “Oh, you’re serious. Are uh, dog-people real? And why was that example so specific?”

“Never mind, happened to a friend of mine,” he mumbled. “I’m just worried about you.”

“It doesn’t matter. It’s just the storm clouds in my head. Just ignore me,” she said as she went back to flipping through the book, examining an illustration of not a cryptid, but what looked like a very large ball of twine.

He tried to think of what to say, but it wasn’t long before the first roar of thunder—and that thunder was far from metaphorical.

“I don’t remember rain in the forecast?” Sang Mi said, looking up from a page on the Flatwoods Monster. She blinked, then rubbed her eyes to check if she was seeing things right. “Hey, Chris, the sky went dark? It was blue just a second ago.”

Of course the sky had gone dark. He really should have been expecting more things like this when they were looking for monsters. It almost made him want to call it quits and just drive to the lodge early and hope they didn’t get bored in the mountains playing board games. “Yeah, that’s bad.”

She pulled her shoulders in. She was probably thinking of their car wreck by Elkhart that had put her in the hospital when the same thing had happened there. “It’s not just like, when they turn the lights off in the dome instead of dimming them?”

Chris glanced at her. “Shouldn’t that all be automated?”

She shrugged, and he realized her eyes were filled with draining hope. “No, it’s not like that. But we’re going to be okay I—”

Chris looked back to the road, and with a curse hit the brakes hard. But not fast enough—the sound of their front tires popping caused both of them to groan.

Then it started raining.

“…Was that a strip of spikes in the road?” Sang Mi asked. “Sure looked like it.”

“That’s not normal either, right?” He could feel the spiking anxiety in her voice.

Chris shook his head, and looked out his side window. The forest on that slide sloped up onto a hill, and at its peak was a large and aged brick building, either a boxy manor or a fancy sanitarium. “I’ll call for roadside assistance. But it might be a little, considering the sudden and unnatural night.”

“We should just wait this out. Take turns napping and being on watch til the lights come back?”

Cwej bit his lip, pulling it back over his teeth till it snapped back into place. “…Yeah. Yeah, let’s do—”

Something rammed into the car.
 
Not with the force of another car, it had come from the side facing the forest after all, causing the Honda Element they’d dubbed ‘Odyssey’ to rock, just like Ulysses’ boat buffeted on Neptune’s waves.

Chris and Sang Mi looked at each other, and Sang Mi gestured for Chris to look behind him. He turned in his seat, only to see a being with a bulbous head, light purple skin, yellow eyes, sharp teeth, and claws, dressed in hospital clothes—and balancing on the shoulders of another small bulbous- headed being.

“It’s a freaking Melonhead!” Sang Mi said.

“It’s kinda cute, in a weird way,” Chris said.

"Seriously?”

As they bantered, more of the Melonheads started to make their way through the treeline, poking their heads out from behind trunks at first, and shuffling their way forward curiously. Some were holding hands delicately, comforting their friends as they approached the car.

Sang Mi softened. “I guess they are kinda cute, now that you say it—”

The Melonhead by the window let out an ear-piercing shriek, its mouth wide showing all its razor teeth in full gleam, and started pushing the car again. The car rocked harder.

Sang Mi un-softened. “They're going to turn us over, we have to get out—”

The assembled Melonheads charged the car, and Chris’s eyes turned serious and cold. He reached over, and opened Sang Mi's door, unbuckling her, and shoving her out the door as he leapt after her. She stumbled out into the rain, gaining her footing, and Chris grabbed her wrist. “Run!”

As the Melonheads screeched, she complied wholeheartedly. They ran across the road, and up the muddy hill towards the old brick building on the hill, the lights in the windows a guiding light. The sound of a swarm of feet splashing through the damp earth followed them. Sang Mi’s time as a runner was clearly paying off for her as she kept her footing in the muck better than Chris had expected.

Behind them, the Melonheads scrambled and screamed. Sang Mi had gotten ahead of Chris, and he could tell she was slowing her pace to not lose him. “Just go!”

She nodded, and bolted.

Looking along the path, Chris saw a fallen log, a bit rotted, but it met what he needed. Hefting it up, the Melonheads closing in, he dropped it, and pushed it with his foot down the hill. Most of the Melonheads scrambled out of the way, but the closest pair were knocked over like bowling pins as the rotting log broke apart upon impact. The pair thrashed their limbs and rolled around crying while the others went to try and help them.

Good, they’d be fine. He hadn't wanted to hurt them at all, but he also didn’t feel like getting chomped on today.
 
He charged up the hill after Sang Mi, finding her banging on the door. “It won’t open—uh—should we break it d—?”

Before she could even finish her question, Chris took in a deep breath and bellowed: “OPEN THIS DAMN DOOR!”

Sang Mi blinked, and the door creaked open. A Melonhead wearing a miniature orderly’s outfit with a suit jacket lazily placed over it opened the door.

“Mrah?” the Melonhead asked.

“Could we come inside?” Sang Mi asked, with a surreal politeness.

“Mrah,” they replied with a nod, and gestured that they follow them in. After they slipped in the door, Chris and Sang Mi scrambled to shut the door, turn every lock, slide the deadbolts, and then shove a nearby chair under the knob. Only then did they allow themselves to catch their breath and examine their surroundings.

The building was something between an old-timey hospital and a manor house. Clean white tile, interrupted by a grand wooden staircase in the center. A purple carpet rolled down it all the way to the doorway. The walls were decorated with framed baseball jerseys and cards. Slightly obscured by a great chandelier, were a set of five pictures of various people, two in black robes, three in medical gear. And above that, a great sign:

‘DR. CROW'S ORPHANAGE, SANATARIUM, AND HOTEL’.

Sang Mi looked at the sign, looked back at Chris, and then repeated the motion three more times.

“That is not a serious sign,” she said.

“No, no, it is,” Chris said with an exhausted acceptance. “You said you knew a Dr. Crow, this is them, isn’t it?” Chris pursed his lips.

“What are they like?” He scratched his nose. She squinted.

He glanced away.

“Oh no,” Sang Mi said, realization hitting her.

“I didn’t say anything!” Chris said, way too defensively. “You and this Dr. Crow… you guys were like… an item?”
 
Chris sighed again, performatively louder. “Yeah. Guess there's no fooling you there. He and I uh… my Superiors trained me in Japan for a while.”

Sang Mi blinked. “Wait, you said your ‘superiors’ run the Universe—so why, like, Japan?”

There was a certain lack of respect in the way she said "Superiors" that he felt like he should correct, but he couldn't find the words, and now wasn't the time anyway. “It’s a long story. Dr. Crow, or the Corvid as I knew him then, was sort of a… trainer? Physical therapist? He monitored how I was doing for my Superiors. We may have uh, gotten a bit closer while he was helping me stretch my hamstrings—"

“Chris, I mean this with all the love in the world, please do not tell me more, ever.” “Sorry—anyway, he got reassigned before I finished there, due to some, uh, unauthorized experiments.”

“Please no more euphemisms.”

“No, like, he did experiments on people without their consent. Which… lines up with the Melonheads legend. I assumed he went home, but maybe he didn’t. Maybe he was just wandering the Earth for centuries.”

“Hundreds of years of medical malpractice,” Sang Mi mumbled.

“But apparently he got eaten. That’s… well, if the legend is true, he might not come back from that one.”

“…Being cannibalized would do that, yes?”

There was banging on the door, he looked over at the friendly melonhead who had let them in. “This guy seems okay. Maybe the others are trying to get him?”

That didn’t seem quite right, they were holding hands with a sweet compassion. But maybe they were in factions? Sang Mi turned this over in her head like a pancake: quickly and without the desire to flip it again. “Yeah, that tracks. If they ate their creator like you said, they might eat each other?”

The kind melonhead tugged at Chris’s sleeve with a “Mrah!’ and pointed at the doorway to the right. “Want us to go in there?”

“I’ll watch for traps!” Sang Mi volunteered as he went and opened the door.

Beyond it was a grand dining hall. A long table extended out, with a huge golden chair at the far end, and beautiful and expensive but less grand chairs lining the table on either side. On the table was a blue tablecloth, a noticeably empty spot for plates, cups and silverware, and an elaborate centerpiece depicting a star.

Two places already had glasses filled with water, and one with wine and the other with milk, to the left and right of the golden chair which had a stuffed toy of a crow sitting on it.

“Mrah!” the kind melonhead said.
 
“Are you serving us dinner? Mr…. Uh…”

The melonhead pointed to a pin on his jacket with the number ‘Five’ on it. “Five? That’s your name?”

He nodded.

“You look more like a Ji Ho.”

He shrugged, and gestured again to the table. They sat, scooting in the rather heavy wooden chairs. In just a moment, Five came back with a large cart containing several plates under covers, which he pulled off with a flourish and set down before each of them. The plates were fine china with gold-leaf filigree, and on them was food that was rather unlike anything Sang Mi was familiar with. But as Chris saw it, his face drooped. Sang Mi looked up at him, eyes bright with excitement, which dimmed just like the light in the domes was supposed to at twilight.

“Something wrong with the food?” When they were alone in the car, Chris and her talked almost exclusively in Korean. When they were around others, they usually spoke English. But Sang Mi asked this question in Korean, even with Five right there.

“Yeah,” Chris replied in turn. “It’s made from local ingredients, but this is trying to emulate food from the Base of Operations. The home-world of my Superiors.”

The food was a fried chicken cutlet, the breading thick with herbs, with several parallel cuts down it, and a dark blue seasoned sauce made primarily from berries laid into each of the trenches. To the side was a set of what looked like kebabs on wooden skewers, but made of peppers and Brussel spouts, slightly charred and smoked. Finally there were small pieces of bread, each the size of a golf-ball, soft and drizzled in butter and honey with nutmeg.

Sang Mi picked up her knife and fork, and cut into the chicken, taking a bite. The roller coaster of the light in her eyes continued, as they lit up again. “It’s good! It’s sweet and savory, and it’s got the crunchy coating, juicy meat, and the texture from the berry goop.” She immediately went to the bread. “That’s yummy too!” She rushed into a bite of the veggie kebab. “…A bit of a weirder taste, but I could get used to it?”

Reluctantly, Chris tasted it too. They probably should have been more cautious about eating it, but well, Sang Mi seemed fine. She was right—it was good.

“It’s been a long time since I had this.”

“Is it like, a delicacy?”

He shook his head. “No, honestly it’s probably the closest thing to home cooking they have up there. Food isn’t common among them.”

She perked up, strangely. “Food scarcity? Like three years ago when the hydroponics failed back home?”
 
“Er, no, nothing like that. They have enough to eat,” he clarified. “They just sort of mostly… don’t? Not proper meals, I mean. Fun ones. Mostly, they just eat these, I don’t know, nutrition pills.”

Sang Mi chewed and swallowed. “That has to be boring.”

“They love being boring. It’s one of Their biggest talents.”

“Huh. Then when did you try this before?”

“Oh, with friends…” he said vaguely. “Leaving home isn’t the only way you can rebel.”

She picked up the last of the mini-breads, turning it around in her fingers. “I can understand that. Even getting a good grade can be rebellion sometimes. My mom always said so.”

“Speaking of home… earlier, you were saying something about going back?”
​
She stopped spinning the bread in her hands, and shoved it in her mouth, looking away from him as she chewed. “Hey, Chris, why are they serving Superior food here?”

He was trying to figure out if he should call her out for dodging the question when the music kicked in, and the doors to the dining room swung out. Five stood there, in a half-bow, holding his hand out gesturing for them to return to the grand entryway.

“I don’t know this song.”

“It’s called Science Fiction Double Feature,” Chris said, suddenly looking dreary. “Well, we’d better go see the Show.”

“The Show?”

He got up, and she scampered up as he gestured for her to follow.

The lights in the entry hall dimmed, as they approached the center, where they stood together, tense.

From the great stairwell came a spotlight, then awkwardly timed in the wrong order, the lights then went off. Framed there was a woman in a long white lab coat with long raven hair, posed with her arms out, staring them down like she was trying to mimic a bird in flight.

“Chris Cwej,” a musical cue followed, and she changed her pose dramatically with the beat. “It’s been a while.”

Chris and Sang Mi were of one mind. They immediately turned around and ran for the door. However, that door shot open, and the Melonheads that had been chasing them from the car up the hill waddled in, looking unhappy, dirty, and tired, but no longer like they were going to take a bite of them. They were, however, glaring at them with malice. Naturally, the duo took a few steps towards the staircase. One of the Melonheads hissed at them, supporting one of the pair Chris had hit with the log, who was sucking their thumb.

“Oh, uh, hey Corvid… How’s it been? I see you’ve, uh…” Chris gestured at the Melonheads. “…been keeping busy?”
 
She effortlessly leapt onto the banister, landing side-saddle, and sliding down to hop off with a perfect gymnast’s landing. The Melonheads all clapped.

“Thank you, thank you.” She tossed her raven-black hair back. “I see you’ve been busy as well. Who’s this child?” She gestured at Sang Mi with feigned disinterest. “I heard you’d been travelling with some Grigori, but she doesn’t have four arms.”

“This is…” he trailed off, so she cut in.

“Jhe Sang Mi, I’m from Gongen.”

She tapped her cheek. “Gongen? Never heard of it. At least you look human.” Sang Mi furrowed her brow. “I am human!”

Dr. Crow laughed, covering her mouth with one hand and flapping her other hand in the air. “I’m sure you’d like to think so. How much genetic modification did they have to do so you could survive on this Gongen? Look at you, your DNA is a mess.”

“You can’t just see my DNA,” she said dryly.

“Actually, she can,” Chris said. “She’s a Superior. She’s messed with her own bodies so she can do that. Those aren’t the eyes of a normal person, or even a normal Superior.”

Dr. Crow grinned.

Sang Mi nodded slowly. “I’ve met people who modify themselves like that, I get—wait, what do you mean, bodies? Like, plural?”

“This little hatchling really doesn’t even know that? Tsk tsk, you never were much of an educator, were you…”

Drained, Chris looked back to Sang Mi, as if explaining this was taking a year off his life. “Her People can reform themselves after death. Take on a whole new body. She’s less a person and more a forest fire that’s been bottled in skin. She didn’t have a medical procedure to change herself from the man I knew before—he was a man then, and in this body she’s a woman. She’ll change bodies again in the future, and she could be any gender or sex in any combination. Her features could be anything. But she’ll always be a Superior. An inferno kept in check with manners and smiles. That’s who she is.”

“Very poetic,” Dr. Crow said. “You could have just said I’m like a god and be done with it.”

​“I have strong feelings on that word,” Sang Mi said.

Crow’s face hardened. “I bet you do. A little girl with insignificant superstitions.”

Chris moved protectively in front of Sang Mi, and Dr. Crow took that opportunity to stroke his face, which caused him to back up, bumping Sang Mi on the nose, who promptly yelped.
 
Dr. Crow smiled. “Did you enjoy the meal? You used to love that. I cooked it for you. I couldn’t get the turoon but I made do.”

“Substituting the chicken for a vegetable worked better than it should have.”

Her hand crept up to stroke his face again. “Why don’t you stay the night here? I promise you’ll be safe, and it’s so wet outside. Plus what a tragic accident that happened to your car—”

“The strip of nails literally right in front of your house with your minions waiting to flush us to the front door?”

She smiled wide. “Whatever could give you that impression?”

“Every single thing that happened gives us that impression,” Sang Mi said, still rubbing her nose. “We thought poor Five here was under siege, but it looks like this was all choreographed.”

“Well, what can you do?” Crow said, throwing her hands up and shifting them side to side in the air with her palms up a few times while bobbing her head. “Guess you caught me. But more accurate to say, I caught you.”

“Okay, well, I think that’s our cue to.…” At that, Sang Mi bolted again for the door, causing the surprised Melonheads in the way to scatter. She rattled the handle, and then rammed her shoulder into it.

“It won’t budge,” Crow called coolly. “But you’re welcome to leave anytime.”

Chris knew that way she was talking. That was the way the Corvid talked when he had already won. “What’s your game?” He clenched his fists and stomped towards her. “You experimented on these children—”

“They would have died anyway, I saved their lives, give me a little credit.” “I bet you didn’t ask them if they wanted to get turned into melonheads.”

She shrugged. “Well, no, but look, I already paid for that—how do you think I lost my last body?” She leaned in. “They did eat me, you know. That was hard to come back from. And look at me, I’m still caring for the little carnivores!”

“You always think things are okay if you just do things and ask forgiveness afterwards. That’s why we broke up.”

She grabbed the lapels of his suit jacket, drawing him closer. “We broke up ‘cause I got fired.”

“It was a two-for-one,” he said, trying to brush her hands off his chest, but she grabbed his instead, intertwining their fingers. He glowered at her. “You’re not as slick as you think.”

“But you haven’t let go,” she said, then pushed up on her toes. He dodged her lips.

“Sang Mi, now.”

Crow raised an eyebrow, but didn’t look away from him as Sang Mi sucker-punched her in the jaw.

“OW! What the heck!?”

It was Sang Mi's turn to grab his hand and pull him away—why was it hard to be pulled away?
 
Was there something in the food? They ran down the hall to the left of the staircase—the rooms were labeled with big numbers, one through nine, with child-sized beds in each one, the floor checkerboard tiles, the rest all white and fluorescent lights. He didn’t know where this hallway led, but at the very least it was leading somewhere away.

He let himself feel a moment of relief, before Sang Mi stopped. He didn’t quite halt his momentum, and rammed into her. But she just stayed staring, her body swaying along with her tie like a pendulum.

“We have to keep—”

“I get it now. I get it. Why we came here.”

He stared into the room. It had a larger bed than the others, but otherwise looked the same. A signed picture of some baseball player on the wall. Hospital monitoring equipment there. She stepped into the room, and took her suit jacket off, then her tie, sitting down on the bed, eyes somewhat vacant. He rushed over, shaking her by the shoulders.

“Sang Mi, we have to go. Now. NOW!”

She looked up, glassy eyed. “This is my room, though. It’s okay. I understand.” She placed a hand gently on his own, and patted it. “This is where I get left behind. I knew it would happen. The road trip ends. And you forget about me. Everyone forgets about me. This is where it ends.”

He shook her harder. “No—no, stop talking like that. I came back for you, remember? That’s why we’re here.”

She shrugged. “I wanted to keep it going. Force this to never end. I’m just a fool. Everyone should stay away from me.” She seemed to realize he was there. “Stay away from me!” She shoved him back, and ran over to the wall, she pulled her head back, ready to smash it into the plaster, but he put her into a bear-hug, and tore her back as she thrashed.

“Sang Mi, listen to me, you’re not yourself! Something—AGH!” She whacked him in the face. She’d gotten better at that, all due to him, and it was a bad way to learn she’d picked things up. “Let me go!”

“Not if you’re going to smash your head into the wall, stars above!” A voice called from the doorway. “Number Five, sedate her.”
​
Before he could let go and try to stop it, the little Melonhead slipped over and jabbed something into Sang Mi’s leg. It wasn’t an ideal spot to inject a person, but it still worked pretty effectively. He held her as she slowly grew limp, and lay her down gently on the bed. Looking over her, his heart ached at her heavy breathing, the pained look on her face, the way her closed eyes seemed to clench, and her hands ended in curled fingers that neither clenched or straightened.

He closed his own eyes, and turned to face Dr. Crow in the doorway. “What did you do to her?” “Do to her?” she scoffed. “I didn’t ‘do’ anything.”

“Bullshit.”

“This place, this building, this is a place where your desires are let loose,” she said as she posed in the doorway, in an attempt at sexiness that would have worked a lot better if she was still in her last body. Still, there was a certain appeal… She approached him again, and he didn’t step back.

“It was the food,” he spat.

“The food is a part of the experience.”

“Sang Mi has fought harder to grow to where she is now with her mental health than you’ve fought for anything in your immortal life.”

She tilted her head, and after all her smarmy cockiness she finally sounded serious. “You took a mentally unstable girl off her home-world, and brought her on a road trip? You’re not being kind by taking her on this trip; she’s going to break because she’s already broken. Chris, she’s not the kind of girl you take on an adventure. Do you think your mentor would have?”

“I’m not him,” he shot back without thinking. He would have stopped to sit down and think about it, but things kept going too fast for self-reflection.

She stroked his chest. “Oh, I know you’re not. Trust me.”

“This girl—Sang Mi—she deserves this. She deserves to… travel, and see amazing things. She deserves someone to believe in her.”

“There’s a difference between believing in someone and ignoring that their deepest desires are to be abandoned and harm themselves.” She snaked a hand under his shirt. It felt good. It… No. He pulled away. He had to pull away. He pinched his own cheek.

“She was holding herself together until she came here!”

“Oh? She never broke down and curled up in the corner? She never started having a panic attack and had to convince you to keep going?”

He stomped his foot. “That doesn’t mean she’s broken! She’s kept going. She’s kept fighting.”

“This is what she wants, Chris. You strip away all the coping, all the filigree, all the ways she’s taped herself together, she wants to be here. Wants to stop being a burden. Just like you want to be comforted right now.” What was this place?
 
She was a Superior, and this place was her forest that she could burn at her leisure. Her eyes cut into him like torches, and the world was warm and dangerous. He needed to focus. Needed to stay in control.

But she was right.

She wasn’t a good person. But he did want her. He’d wanted him back then, and he wanted her now. And he shouldn’t. And something was wrong about this place, the laws of reality were wrong here.

He should be able to control what he wanted.

But…

“You said I never asked permission Chris,” she whispered as she wrapped her arms around him. “So I’m asking.”

Oh, to Hell with it. He kissed her.

And they left the room, and shut the door behind them.

4th August, 1869, Future Site of Kobe, Japan

It wasn’t so long ago that no one could walk the shores of the city from the training center. And even now they weren’t supposed to be, but that made it all the more exciting. It didn’t smell great up here, but that was how it often went with the past. The great ships that had come into port belched smoke and steam, and the foreigners and locals mingled about the docks.

“It wasn’t too long ago we wouldn’t fit in at all here,” the Corvid said.

“We still don’t,” Chris replied, tipping his hat to a woman carrying a huge basket on her back as they passed.

“You know what I mean. This whole country was closed off. Now we can get some fresh air.” “You shouldn’t let your friends down there hear you, next they'll be whispering you’re touching plants, or some other heinous deed.”

He laughed, and nudged Cwej in the arm, then shifted to feeling his bicep. “That’s pretty nice. You’ve gotten more muscle mass.”

Chis pulled his arm away. “Don’t make it sound so clinical.”

“I’m not trying to, I was trying to sound sexy. Was I not sexy?” He leaned in and whispered. “Can I prove to you that I’m sexy?”

Raising a hand to cover the blush on his face, Chris gave a small nod. “…Later though,” he added aloud. “Hey, what’s going on over there?”
 
On a rough patch of dirt, four chalk squares forming a diamond had been drawn, with two groups of men—one made up of sailors, the other of locals—gathered together. A local, a Japanese man with a well-trimmed beard, was holding a ball in the center of the diamond. He pulled his arm back, and hurled the ball at one of the sailors, an American man with a thick moustache. The sailor was holding a wooden bat, which he struck the ball with, an action which caused all the locals on the pitch to go running for the ball to catch it. The sailors cheered as their batter started running for the next chalk square.
“What in the Architect’s schematics are they playing?” the Corvid leaned in, using the excuse to press into Chris’s side as he performatively stroked his beard in curiosity.
“Its one of those old-timey sports, I don’t really know which one…”

The Corvid noted this, and called out to a well-dressed Japanese man holding a notepad. “You sir, what game are they playing?”

He looked up. “Baseball, I take it’s not played in your outsider country?” “Not so much,” Chris answered curtly. “Its interesting though.”

“Quite! I’m covering it for the Hiogo News. I humbly ask you buy a copy if you see one,” the reporter said brazenly, giving a bow of his head to offset it.

“Sure,” The Corvid replied, fixated on the game. “Baseball. I like it. Let’s get some food, and watch it together. It can be our first date.”

“Our first…” Cwej folded. “You really are forward, you know. You can’t just decide we’re dating.”

“But I kinda just did, and you’re kind of into it, aren’t you?” Cwej looked away.

“You’re blushing.”

“I am not.”

“If you turned around your face would be as red as a cardinal.”

Cwej knew he was right on every count. But if he turned around he’d have to admit that. The Corvid put an arm around his shoulder, like a sheltering wing.

“Come on then, let’s watch some baseball. If the sport survives, we can go on another date and be all wistful. What do you say?”

Cwej just nodded.

He probably should have paid more attention to the game they were supposed to be watching, but his attention wasn’t focused on the pitch, the ships, or the great bustle of history all around him. Instead, he looked at a face, and let his cheeks get red again.

The Present, 2025
One Week Since Cwej and Sang Mi arrived at the Mansion

Sang Mi stretched as she woke up to the sunlight stroking her face through the window. She slipped her feet into the bunny slippers she’d been provided, threw on her robe, and stumbled her way down the hall.

“Morning, Eight,” she said.

“Mrah!” Eight replied, carrying a basket of laundry to the chute.

She made her way down the staircase, and over to the dining hall where Chris and Crow were already eating together. She went over to the buffet and grabbed a plate of more food than she was going to eat—waffles, bacon, scrambled eggs, copious syrup and hot sauce, a banana, and three beverages (orange juice, milk, and coffee). Balancing it all precariously, she slipped back out before they could notice her. They’d probably be sucking face before she made it back to her room.

She set her tray down on the bed, and turned the TV on, then the Super Nintendo. They didn’t let her have many games, and right now the only one was Super Baseball Simulator 1.000. She pulled the controller over to the bed—it wasn’t wireless, which was, frankly, silly, and the wire hung awkwardly between the TV stand and the bed. She shoveled some eggs into her mouth, and got started. The game was kind of weird—she was an RPG and open world girlie, not a sports game gal—and it had taken her a bit to figure out the mechanics. At first she’d just button-mashed and hoped she could hit the ball or throw it, struggling to pass the ball around to the right places as the game shifted what player she was every time she did. But she was getting the hang of it now. She wasn’t good at it, hell no, but getting better.

“Mrah?” Five said, poking his head in the door.

“Yeah, sure, take a seat. You can take controller two on the next round.” “Mrah!” Five said, sitting down in excitement, rocking back and forth.

She tapped the button right, and her batter whacked the ball far into the outfield! She ran her little guys around the bases, and pumped her fist. “Yes! I am the queen of Baseball. Or at least of Super Baseball Simulator 1.000 on the SNES.”

“Mrah,” Five agreed.

She was glad Chris didn’t have to worry about her.

She knew her mom, dad, and brothers had to be relieved to be done with her now. They’d feign sadness, but she knew they’d be happier without her.

She was content here. Hidden away.

Something about that was wrong. But she couldn’t hold onto it, and went up to bat again.

Chris shot up in bed, just like he had every night. The Corvid rolled over and moaned. “Oh, stop having nightmares,” she mumbled.

Not like he could help it.

He slid out of bed, and washed his face off. The dreams weren’t the same. They were more like a collage of bad memories. A blade in his hand red with blood, and the sky cracking open in response. A fierce hunger in the desert, and only his own flesh to sate it as he grew more ravenous. His friend Kwol becoming more erratic, threatening his life, and only violence could stop it. His friend Roz charging off across a battlefield into death. Sang Mi, doing the same back on Gongen, suited up in yellow armor, charging across a field of invading soldiers. No, no, that last one hadn’t happened. Wouldn’t happen.

She’d be okay, wouldn’t she? Or…

He looked into the mirror, and hated who he saw. He couldn’t be like Charles Zoltan, and solve a problem with peace and dignity. He couldn’t even save his friends. He couldn’t even make the right choices. Sang Mi looked at him like he was someone, like he was a hero. Like she wanted to grow up to be him. He couldn’t think of a worse prospect than that.

When he was with Corvid, he didn’t have to think about that. Did he like her, or did he like that she made him forget, just for a little, what he saw in the mirror? There was something wrong with all of this--

Whenever he tried to think past that though, he came back to the mirror, to the dreams, and to that boiling pit of self-hatred that he’d kept capped off.

He put on a robe, and went out to the living room of the suite, turning on a radio. Chris Cwej froze in place.

Always Something There to Remind Me.

He knew that song.

That song was… part of something.

It came back to him; he’d been there with Sang Mi. They’d gone back for the deer statue.

Sang Mi, a scared little girl, looking down from her lonely hospital bed, seeing him standing by the deer statue in the Cheonsa West General Hospital courtyard. Waving at him. And he waved back.

Seeing him again, and bravely coming down to help him with the strange cat. He’d bought her a baseball bat in Louisville.

She called him her deer, guiding her through the dark forest.
 
And it was dark.

And The Corvid had lit the trees on fire.

Always Something There to Remind Me.

The Deer. The Forest. The Song. The Bat.

The Crow.

She was here. Sang Mi was still here. It didn’t matter how much he hated himself, and right now that was quite a bit, but he couldn’t keep drowning himself in bed with his ex and keep forgetting this.

Her family had smiled, and left her at the hospital. They were good people, really. She loved them. But they hadn’t visited her. He knew they’d have refused to let her go on this adventure. They treated her like a fragile cup that could shatter at any time. But she was a living person, damn it, she was his friend. He was the only person who could tell her she wasn’t crazy and mean it.

He looked down from the mirror, into the sink. This place amplified your desires till you couldn’t control them. Good ones and bad ones, it made no difference.
But he’d woken up now. And one desire rose in his heart above all others: he was going to save his friend.

He didn’t wait, he didn’t plan. He ran.

Chris flew out the door, down the stairs, past Melonheads Six and Three, and skidded a turn on his bare feet towards the ward where the Melonheads and Sang Mi’s rooms were. He charged in, flung open her door, and she blinked and looked over from where she was playing video games with Melonhead Five.

“Hi?” she said.

Chris knew what he had to do, and it wouldn’t be dignified, but dignity be damned. He took a deep breath, and started belting out Always Something There To Remind Me. He even did his best vocal approximation of the solo synth riffs.

She and the Melonhead stared at him.

“Chris, I gotta be real with you, you should not join a band.”

“That’s too bad, cause I was thinking of playing bass, now come on,” he held a hand out. “We’ve been trapped here like Lotus Eaters, but I’m the deer that leads you out of the darkness, remember?”

Her eyes focused. “You… wait a second, why have I spent the last week playing Super Baseball Simulator 1.000? I don’t even like sports games?!”

He tilted his head a little. “Not the weirdest thing, but I’ll take it—let’s go!” She began to get up. She froze. “No… No, I…”

He held his hand out. “Sang Mi. I want you to take my hand. So—please.”

She took his hand, and as the Melonhead scrambled up behind them, they rushed out back to the lobby.

“How are we going to escape? Won’t we just… go back into whatever loop we were in?”

“This place amplifies our desires. And I’m betting that includes hers too.”

They skidded to a halt together in front of the grand staircase as Dr. Crow marched down it, stopping in the center of the staircase, for what seemed to be no reason other than to dramatically frame herself in her kimono and nightie.

“I didn’t think listening to The Naked Eyes would have such a strong effect. Oh well. You still can’t escape.”

Chris pointed at her. “If you want us to stay, then let’s make it permanent one way or the other.

Stop this cat and mouse game. I challenge you to a contest of skill.” Sang Mi raised an eyebrow. “Not a duel?”

“It has to be something she’d actually accept,” he mumbled.

The Corvid tapped her cheek. “…Perhaps. Perhaps. It… you’d really stay here, if I won?” “If you win. And if we win, you let us go.”

Sang Mi jumped between them. “She could just, you know, not do what she’s saying! Lying is real, Chris!”

He shook his head. “No, for all her faults, she’ll hold to this.”

“But I’ll hold you to it too. No running away. If you try to escape, you’ll be here forever.”

“Fine,” he said, lightly stomping his foot.

“And what contest did you have in mind?”

Chris had not thought that far. He stood awkwardly, finger in the air, his brain feeling like mush, until he looked at Sang Mi, hoping she had an idea.

“Of course we have our challenge,” she said. “Doctor Crow, we challenge you to a game of Super Baseball—”

“I ACCEPT!”

“…Simulator 1.000.”

“No, I accepted baseball.”

“You accepted Super Baseball, which isn’t a thing.”

“Baseball is super, just because I am playing it.”

Chris scoffed. “Baseball. I guess it’s full circle. Works for me.”

“Very well, we will play against each other tomorrow. Assemble your team, and meet me at the Melonhead baseball diamond I helped fund. Thankfully, there are eight Melonheads and myself. Good luck finding your own team. It would be a pity if you had to forfeit.”

Chris and Sang Mi looked at each other, nodded, and gave her each a different rude hand gesture before turning for the door, which opened without a hitch.

“And don’t you dare think of running. I’ll be watching you.”

“Wouldn’t dream of it.”

They shut the door. It was a warm morning, and the forest was alive with noises and life. “You’re still wearing just a bathrobe,” Sang Mi noted.

“So I am,” Chris replied, stretching his arms up. “That’s the least of our problems, but I think I know the first person to recruit for our team.”

She put her hands on her hips. “You don’t mean the French lady, right?”

“She’s a short drive away, and she’s still studying Oscar!”

Sang Mi sighed. “I don’t think she knows anything about baseball.”

Chris put his hands on his hips to mirror hers. “And you do?”

“Uh, baseball is one of the most popular sports on Gongen, I’ll have you know.” “Have you ever played it?”

She looked down at her slippers. “…In gym class? And I played Super Baseball Simulator 1.000 for like, a full week.”

His arms moved from his hips to crossing his chest, and she knew she’d lost this round. “Find, we call Odette Caron. Who next?”

He grinned. “Some friendly faces.”

When Sang Mi and her twin brother Sang Eun were six years old, their father took them to a baseball game for the first time. It was the Takumi Tengu versus the Hongtu Cannonballs, and both of them were more interested in the scripted antics of the two animatronic mascots for the teams that were doing live-action cartoon comedy on the sidelines.

They got a big thing of ttekbokki, and of popcorn, and shoveled their faces while the match progressed. Moreso than the game, the twins enjoyed the chants and cheers, the songs and pageantry. All these years later, Sang Mi couldn’t remember who won that game. She knew she’d be able to look it up easily, but she didn’t want to. What had been important was her father reaching over and tousling her hair, and her brother stealing “her" popcorn (that had been expressly bought to share) and them squabbling over it til their dad got them both ice cream to shut them up.

He held their hands on the way back to the train station, one on each side of him, mouths ringed a little in strawberry ice cream he’d only mostly been able to wipe off.
They went again years later, and she’d regretted it because she and Sang Eun had been messaging their friends their whole time and didn’t pay attention to the game. At the time she hadn't cared, but now she looked back on her father’s blank face and knew it was masking a hurt as he wanted to share that precious time he had off from the factories with them.

What a selfish thing I am, she thought.

But she would still look back at that memory when she was six with a deep fondness.

Now, she stood in a parking lot doing practice swings of the baseball her friend Chris had bought her. She’d had her nickname, Kalingkata, engraved on it along with a little reference. She pulled the bat back, and swung at the air.

“You’re pretty good.”

It was Chris, walking up with most of their team. A few of them were familiar faces. Back during the big storm on Gongen, when she and Chris filmed that TV show together, Lady Aesculapius and her girlfriend Blanche had helped solve that whole affair with them. Aesc had curly black hair and brown skin, and looked incredibly confident in her baseball uniform, but also gave off the vibe she didn’t know why she was here. Blanche, on the other hand, had tied her white hair back in a tight bun, and looked prepared but like she’d rather be anywhere else.

“Blanche, look, it’s Sang Mi!” Aesc exclaimed while pointing at her, a few feet away.

“Yeah, I see her. Hi.”

Sang Mi waved. “Good to see you both and—COLOTH!”

She dropped the bat and ran over to Coloth. The two high fived, which turned into a spin and then a handshake. Coloth had also been a part of that whole debacle, only he’d been in the cast of the TV show with her, so they’d spent a lot of time backstage hanging out.

“Oh, okay, didn’t expect such a warm welcome!” he said, a little bashfully.

“Hey so, before I thought you were a guy in prosthetics, but you’re actually an alien who looks like a cactus-person right?”
 
“More like you’re an alien who looks like a shaved monkey, and my species aren’t supposed to look like cacti, but uh, yes, something like that.”

She squealed a little. “Chris, Coloth is an alien!”

“So is Lady Aesc, honestly,” Chris deadpanned.

She looked over at her. “Well, she isn’t green.”

Aesc sulked. “Sorry.”

“It’s okay, everyone with good taste likes Coloth. I get it.”

She picked her bat up. “Baseball teams have nine people, right? So that puts us at five.”

A car pulled into the parking lot, and Chris nudged her. “A little more than that.” Odette Caron of C.R.U.X exited the car, followed by another familiar face--

“Is… is that Bill Murray?”

“Yeah.”

“Like, the actor?”

“In the flesh.”

“Does he know how to play baseball?”

Chris considered this. “Well it’s cool that he’s here, right?”

Sang Mi stared him down til he looked away.

“Okay, but I do have a surprise you might actually like. Maybe not better than Coloth but,” he gestured with both hands, waggling his fingers in a way which was trying to be both magician- and cheerleader-like, and was hitting neither. From Odette’s car, the back doors opened, and out stepped the pair of Megan Grabowski and Martha Sandalwood.

Well, she’d give this one to Chris—she bolted for her friends from Hughes High. She’d spent weeks there with Chris under cover, and Megan had been her closest friend there. Martha was Megan’s friend, and Sang Mi and Chris had saved her from being kidnapped and trapped inside a movie projector, and it’s hard not to be friends after that.

“SARAH!” they yelled, which was her undercover name, but whatever. “MEGAN! MARTHA!” she yelled back.

The three girls promptly hugged, and then jumped up and down together while cheering.

“Thank you so much for coming!”

“Of course, like we’d leave you in the lurch!” Megan said. “When Mr. Cwej called, we got packed right away! What are you doing anyway, is like, part the secret agent stuff you guys were doing when you saved us? Are there more people trapped in movie projectors?”

Sang Mi blinked. “Well uh, right now we’re playing baseball against monsters from urban legends and an immortal mad scientist, so… kinda?”

Megan and Martha were very excited by this turn of events. After they’d caught up, Chris clapped and got everyone to order. “Alright everyone, today is the first ever game of our team, the Starmen, against the Corvids. It’ll also be our only game.”

Aesc’s hand shot up. Reluctantly, Chris called on her. “Hello, yes, what game are we playing again?”

He stared at her, the mirth gone from his face. “Baseball.”

“Right, right,” she noted this down on a clay tablet she had with her for some reason.

Bill Murray’s hand went up, so Chris called on him too. “Sorry, uh, so is this for a documentary? Or a movie? Is there a script or am I just improv-ing? My agent said this would pay off that bad trip to Monaco, and so I’m all in, just uh. Why is he a cactus?”

“Why were you in Garfield?” Coloth shot back.

“You know what, that’s fair,” he replied.

“Don’t worry about anything. Just do your best, and have fun. No script, just… make sure to treat the Melonheads with respect and kindness, they’re just little guys.”

“Melonheads?” Martha asked.

Odette chimed in. “You’ll know them when you see them. The name explains it.”

“What about—”

The questions continued, and as they did Sang Mi watched as Chris fielded them expertly. Megan and Martha were right on things. Coloth was cool as always. Aesc and Blanche were fun. Odette Caron was clever and analytical. Bill Murray was, well, Bill Murray.

She wondered if she walked away now if anyone would even notice. Eventually, she did.