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The world is breaking into pieces.
why did you sacrifice us
The very landscape screams out in agony.
what did we do
In betrayal.
how could you be so cruel
Things are ungluing themselves from reality, breaking apart and coming back together, moving in impossible ways.
who are you to decide who lives and who dies
The corn maze is filled with the fragmented ghosts of people who died in the corn. People who weren't meant to be here. People who might have never existed in the first place.
we hate you hate you hate you hate you hate you hate you hate hate hatehate hate hatehate hate hatehate hate hatehate hate hate
Time comes to a standstill.
"THROGDAZORG THE SUPREME WILL BE BACK HOME IN TIME FOR SUPPER!! IT'S TACO NIGHT!!!!!"
THROGDAZORG THE SUPREME takes off into the night. There is only the light of the streetlamps and the headlights of a briefly passing car.
Distantly, Terri wonders if she should go after the dino guy. And then she feels something soft wrap itself around her leg.
She shrieks and flinches away from the contact only to hit someone next to her-
"Gah!"
-sending them both crashing to the sidewalk in a heap. She hears the sound of glass cracking.
"Sorry, I- AAH!" A glimpse of a body wrapped in tissue paper sends her scrambling back on her hands and knees in a blind panic. Did it follow her? She doesn't want to look. She won't look. She can't look-
"What the hell has gotten into you?"
Eustace is wiping a bit of dirt from his cheek and looking at her with a look that is bewildered and irritated at once. Behind him, a frightened cat licks at its nose and runs away into the darkness.
The worn toilet paper bandages that cover his body are scuffed and torn on one side from the impact. There are no bloodstains on them. There is not a pumpkin with sharp teeth and piercing eyes staring through Terri. The world is not coming apart at the seams around them.
"Bestie..."
Eustace's eye twitches. He hastily gets to his feet and starts to speed-walk away from the scene.
"W-wait! You're leaving?"
"Yes."
"After all that?"
Something in Terri's voice makes him stop and look over his shoulder at her. She's still on the ground. She dropped her orbs when she knocked him over and they've been forgotten on the sidewalk, one of them cracked by the impact. She seems to remember something and grabs frantically at her forehead and the sides of her face, then pulls her creepy face-smoothie mask off like she's afraid of it. There are bits of debris and corn silk in her hair. She looks traumatized.
He would feel a little bit bad leaving her here. Just a tiny bit. He turns around.
"...What happened to you? Aren't mazes your whole thing?"
Terri looks up from the mask in her hands. "Do you not remember?"
"I remember getting lost in a stupid corn maze for two or three hours of my life and then being teleported onto the street. That's weird, sure, but I don't get paid enough to look a gift horse in the mouth."
"Two or three hours... Heheh..." Terri starts to chuckle. "Hhhehehehehee..." She can't stop. Neither of them know what's so funny. Neither of them can quite tell whether she's laughing or crying. "You really don't remember?"
A long, uncomfortable second passes. Terri sucks in a breath and quickly wipes her eyes, then looks at Eustace with an uncharacteristically serious expression that deeply unnerves him coming from her. "If you were in on any of that, you need to tell me right now."
"H... huh?"
"I thought I was about to die. I thought you died! The Guests. They..." She shudders and cuts herself off. "You really don't remember?"
"You just said that ten seconds ago-"
"Answer me."
"No."
There's a pause.
"The answer is no. I don't know what kind of insane prank they pulled on you. I don't want to know."
She looks at him for a long moment. "...Okay," she breathlessly says. She runs a hand through her hair and comes away holding something purple that he can't quite make out. She stares blankly at it for several seconds. Then, she throws it away from her like it's burning hot and draws her knees up to her chest.
"...The hell is that?" Eustace asks. He crouches down to take a closer look. It's... a piece of corn husk? Maybe? Did they dye the corn? No matter how hard he tries, he can't quite focus his vision on it. He reaches for it-
"Don't touch it!" Terri lunges forward and bats Eustace's hand away. For good measure, she takes her mask and swats the piece of debris onto the road, where it disappears into a storm drain.
Eustace stares, uncomprehending. "I'm too tired for this," he finally sighs, pinching the bridge of his nose. He stands up and firmly decides that he is done asking questions about the corn maze. "Look. Do I look dead to you?"
She looks at him with wide, frightened eyes for an uncomfortably long time and whispers something to herself about... pumpkins? Eustace does not want to know what pumpkins have to do with this.
"...No," she finally says.
"Then that settles it. I want to go home. I bet you want to go home." He takes a moment to look Terri over. She's half-delirious from whatever she saw in that maze and it's got to be one or two in the morning from how still and quiet everything is. He takes a few moments to brace himself for what he's about to commit to.
"Do you want me to walk with you?" It's not that Eustace wants anything more to do with Terri. He wants nothing more than to go home and never think about her or that corn maze again. It's clear in his voice. But he'd rather not deal with a guilty conscience on top of everything else in his life if he lets her walk home alone like this and something happens to her.
"Wait... really?" Terri perks up a bit.
"Yes, really. Get your stuff before I change my mind."
"...Thanks, bestie! That's so nice of you..." A bit of Terri's chipper self comes back. Eustace leans back heavily against a wall and tries his best to tune her out.
"I really thought you were gone back there," Terri says. She looks at her mask and thinks about putting it back on just to have less to carry around. "I kept thinking, 'what now?'" She does not put her mask back on. She reaches for one of her orbs, the one that cracked when she dropped it. "I mean, you're-..."
She gasps and recoils from the orb. A sharp soreness flares in her chest.
Ten times.
The number flashes through her mind for the briefest second. For once, she doesn't want to know why. She is so, so tired. She feels herself slump down onto the concrete-
"Shit, are you okay!?" Eustace asks.
She pushes herself back to her knees and pats at her face to keep herself awake. "Probably not," she says.
She is never going to be able to look at a spooky corn maze in the same way after this.
