Chapter Text
105 Hilltop Road was a break in reality. Just a crack, really, but the Web had plans to widen it. Or, that wasn’t entirely accurate. The Web itself wasn’t sentient in the same way as people, and most of the plans were actually held by its avatars. Then again, perhaps the line between the Web and its avatars wasn’t all that clear cut. In any case, the universe was fractured, and there were plans to create a passage through the break.
Annabelle Cane was currently the main actor, so to speak, for the Web, which meant she was the one setting things in motion. Which meant she had to pay attention to the threads that connected everything and everyone. Which meant she was the one who noticed. Which meant she was the one who had to figure out what to do about it.
Somewhere in America, there was a man being terrorized by threads which occasionally pulled him through motions he couldn’t remember. This wasn’t an unusual occurrence, the Web took many victims, and they were rarely important to everything else. But that was the issue — this man wasn’t affecting the rest of the world at all . Oh, he had plenty of threads surrounding him, but they just stopped after a certain point. It was like dropping a rock into a pond and watching the ripples abruptly cut off at an invisible line.
When she looked closer, she could see that it wasn’t just him either. With few exceptions, his entire town seemed to only interact with itself. Lots of small towns didn’t impact much of the outside world, but there was always something — calls to friends or family, stores restocking, votes cast, taxes paid, packages received and sent. This town had none of that. There were a few threads leading in, where people had moved into the town, but these were few and far between. And once they’d arrived, their only impact to the rest of the world was, apparently, in having gone missing.
Add to this to the fact that everyone there had a handful of Marks, and this town was probably much more important than its complete lack of influence would seem to suggest. Annabelle couldn’t actually See the town, and, truth be told, she was somewhat hesitant to visit a place that was so clearly a stronghold for the Beholding, but that was okay. Jonah would be more than willing to send his Archivist somewhere he’d be so likely to be Marked, after all.
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”I’m not going to America , Elias. I have far too much work organizing this disaster of an Archive before I can take on anything else.”
“You can always bring some of the statements with you. Now, if you don’t have any other concerns…?”
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Jonah had never Seen this town before, but after Ms Cane left he Looked for it. It took longer than he would’ve liked, but he found it. Even then, he couldn’t Look directly at it. It was even harder to See than it was to See that house on Hilltop Road, although it was clearly another place where reality didn’t quite line up. But there was more to it than that. It was such a tangle of Dark and Spiral and Stranger that the Eye could barely get a foothold, and the very center of the town was a blind spot not unlike the tunnels.
Of course, the tunnels were the way they were because of their connection to the Panopticon. Ms Cane had implied that the town was a place of power for the Eye, so he supposed it was theoretically possible that it was a similar situation. But he couldn’t imagine how a place so filled with unKnowable things could ever belong to the Beholding.
He supposed all he could really do now was hope his Archivist managed to survive.