Archive of Our Own

Everything began, really, when a knock came on Alice Baskerville’s bedroom door as her uncle’s voice said, “Alice, are you awake?”

“Yeah,” said Alice, rolling out of her bed where she’d been texting her online friend, B-Rabbit, and opening the door. Her knuckles were still bruised from the fight that had ended in her gaining a criminal record and getting expelled from school, and her uncle looked as though he hadn’t slept since her arrest, which—honestly, Alice was willing to bet he hadn’t. Oswald Baskerville was prone to deep bouts of melancholy and worrying, and apparently always had been, though it had gotten worse after Alice’s mother’s accident, and worse again now.

“Do you have time to call Levi with me?” Oswald asked.

“Not Mom?”

Oswald’s frown deepened, and Alice internally kicked herself. “Lacie…still isn’t speaking with us,” he said after a moment. “So no, it would be us and Levi. Do you have the time? I have news to share with you both.”

“Sure, alright,” Alice said. She followed Oswald down the hallway, shooting off a quick goodbye text to B-Rabbit as she did so, because when you called Levi, you rarely got off the phone anytime sooner than four hours later.

When they got to the dining room, Oswald carefully and slowly set up his ancient laptop in order to Zoom Levi. In years past, before Lacie’s accident, he would only fumble with the computer for a few moments before Lacie, laughing, would push him out of the way and quickly and easily get it running. Now, though, it took him around thirty minutes to even log on (Oswald refused to remember his password and instead logged on using an extensive and ever-increasing list of security questions) and forty five more to get Zoom up and running. This was where Alice stepped in; he frowned at the application, and she reached over with her unbruised hand and clicked her way to Levi’s contact. Alice was terrible with computers too, but she was better than Oswald (that wasn’t hard) and so, over an hour after sitting down to call Levi, Oswald and Alice waited for him to join the Zoom call in mutual silence.

Alice did not typically enjoy silence, but it was far preferable to fighting with Oswald about her “reckless activities” that had “ruined her future”, so she poked at the bruises on her knuckles and sulked and wished she was still texting B-Rabbit and missed her mother terribly, which was dumb, because even when her mother had loved them she’d lived far away in Reveil and Alice hardly ever saw her anyway.

Levi picked up quickly, killing the silence dead with cheery greetings, and Alice returned them in kind before he leaned over and said, “I heard Alice assaulted a golden boy politician!”

Alice pouted; Oswald said, “Yes, a gentleman named Bernard Nightray. He is, as you say, a massive cunt.”

Levi snickered. “Good for her!”

“She has gained a criminal record and is on probation, and has been expelled from school,” said Oswald. “And none of the schools in the general area will take her, either. Alice’s education is important. Education is—”

“I hate school,” said Alice. “I’m glad I was kicked out.”

Levi whooped; Oswald glared him into submission.

“Well,” he said, “I hope that you will enjoy your new one more.”

Alice gaped, betrayed. “But you said that none of the schools in the area would take me!”

“Oh, are you two moving finally?” said Levi. “Oswald, are you finally coming to the city, where Lacie’s ex is waiting for you to sweep him off his feet?”

“Alice will be moving to Reveil, temporarily,” said Oswald. “I will do nothing of the sort.”

Alice gasped, delighted. “I’m staying with Levi?!”

“No.”

“Why not?” said Levi. “I’m a responsible guardian— and I’m her biological father.”

“You are the opposite of a responsible guardian,” said Oswald. “The last girl you raised, you impregnated.”

“Technically, we had a fight that pissed Lacie off so much that she went to the sperm bank, stole my sperm, and artificially inseminated herself so that whenever I annoyed her she could tell me to shut up on the basis of my being the father of her child,” Levi corrected. “No actual sex was had.”

“That’s because nobody would ever willingly have sex with you, Levi,” said Alice.

“I’ll make you sleep on the wet concrete outside for that,” Levi threatened.

“And that is why you aren’t getting Alice when she goes to school in Reveil,” said Oswald. “I have you listed as her emergency contact on the school paperwork, but Alice will be staying with a gentleman by the name of Oscar Vessalius for the remainder of the school year. He owns a café called Unbir—”

“I know who Oscar is, he’s my ex,” said Levi. “We had a lovely little ménage-a-trois with a prosecutor by the name of Xerxes Break a few years back. How considerate of you, Oswald! Now we can go for a second rou—”

“Do not sleep with Alice’s temporary guardian until she’s moved back home,” said Oswald. “If you do, I will contact Lacie and take her up on her offer of holding you down and personally cutting your balls off.”

“Why, Oswald, you’re growing up! I’m so proud of you!”

The conversation, rather predictably, devolved from there; by the time they hung up, it was long past Alice’s bedtime, and Oswald tucked her in like she was a child again and said, “I’ll miss you while you’re in Reveil.”

“I’ll call every day,” Alice promised.

“I don’t know how to charge my cell phone.”

“Well, I’ll leave you messages,” she told him, “and when someone loses their patience and charges your phone for you you can listen to them.”

He smiled down at her and kissed her on the forehead. “I’ll listen all the time,” he promised. “Sleep well. I love you.”

“Love you too,” Alice said, and waited for her uncle to leave the room so that she could start texting B-Rabbit again, but he remained sitting at her bedside until long after she’d fallen asleep.

Two days later Alice was getting off the train in Reveil, bitterly regretting the fact that she’d already eaten the meals Oswald had packed for her, feeling stupidly homesick and ridiculously angry that, since Lacie had left them, Oswald had to stay home and mind the house and therefore she was all alone in the big city. Levi didn’t count—Levi was fun, all the time, but he wasn’t Oswald, whose very presence made you feel safe and secure. Levi was practically the antithesis of feeling safe, which was great most of the time, but a whole city away from Oswald…

Alice turned on her phone in order to try and find Oscar Vessalius’s house, noting a weird new app with an eye symbol on it in the center of her home screen. Figuring it was probably another virus, she deleted it, but as the tip of her finger came into contact with it blue flames appeared in the corner of her vision as time itself seemed to freeze. Alice looked up to see a grinning face emerging from the center of the flames—and then, just as quickly, it was gone, and the world resumed its motion around her.

Alice shivered a little against her will, and finished deleting the app before entering her map app and typing in Oscar Vessalius’s address. She let the screen load, and then took a slow breath and set out to the subway, trying her best to shove the strange flames out of her mind. She was all on her own in a strange city—it was probably just a stress-induced hallucination, or a completely normal afternoon event, or something.

Luckily for Alice, it wasn’t too hard to find her way to the right train, to get off at the right stop, to wind her way through city streets to Oscar Vessalius’s house. For some reason, ever since she’d started texting B-Rabbit, her maps had grown more helpful—little notifications would appear on her screen telling her where to go, and she would get free tickets from it, and it would tell her what public transport to get on and when and where she needed to get off. It was very nice.

The Vessalius house was very nice, too, just a little bit nicer than the other houses around it. It was also very soundly locked—the gate and all the doors and all the windows refused to budge, and when she texted B-Rabbit complaining about it, he helpfully suggested that she check out Oscar Vessalius’s café and provided her with directions there.

It was not a long walk at all, though for Alice, unmoored in an unfamiliar world, it felt like a small eternity before she reached the café doors and slowly pushed them open. A bell above the door jingled—the jovial-looking man at the counter called over, “Welcome to Unbirthday!”—the smell of coffee beans and curry tickled Alice’s nose, and her stomach growled, and she pulled her bag inside.

“I’m looking for my dad’s ex,” said Alice, which maybe wasn’t the best thing to say, even though she tried to sound as polite as possible. “Um, Mr. Oscar Vessalius? Levi said, uh, that they had a threesome a few years ba—”

“That’s me,” said the man behind the counter quickly. “You’re Alice, right? I didn’t realize that you were Levi Baskerville’s daughter.”

Alice shrugged. “I mean, it was really my Uncle Oswald who raised me, so I’d say I’m his daughter, but yeah. Levi’s not really super involved, and Lacie fucked off a couple years ago, so.” She paused, noting with confusion a flicker of pain in the man’s eyes at her words. “But you didn’t have a threesome with my un—”

“No, I didn’t, and your father was a mistake,” said Oscar. “I…am sorry that that was your first impression of me.”

Alice shrugged. She and Oscar stared at each other for a few minutes, until Oscar said, “You can bring your bag upstairs, you’ll be staying above Unbirthday. I’m sorry the room isn’t in very good condition, but…”

“It’s alright,” said Alice. “If I stayed with Levi he said he was gonna make me sleep outside on the concrete in the rain, so.” Oscar Vessalius looked genuinely horrified, and Alice quickly added, “It was a joke! He said that after I made fun of him for not being able to get laid. He wouldn’t really do that, Uncle Oswald would find Mom and then they’d hunt him down and kill him.”

“Was that a joke?”

Alice shook her head. “Mom loves hunting down and killing people,” she said. “When I was little she used to take me along, sometimes. It was fun.”

Oscar did not seem to know what to say to this, but after a moment he pulled his face into a smile and said, “It sounds like you and your mom are close.”

Alice felt something in her chest turn hard and small and cold. 

“Yeah, I guess,” she mumbled. “I’ll, uh, I’m heading upstairs. Thanks for taking me in.”

“Of course,” said Oscar, still looking at her with those strange, sad eyes. “I’m sorry I couldn’t have you stay at my house, but it…wasn’t feasible.”

“It’s okay,” said Alice, visions of having the entire café utterly to herself at night dancing before her eyes. “If someone comes to murder me in the night I’ll just beat them up and make them apologize and buy me stuff.”

“Please just call the police,” said Oscar.

“No way! Last time I did that I got arrested !” Alice protested.

Oscar took a deep, slow breath. “I have cameras throughout Unbirthday, Alice,” he said. “You don’t have to worry about getting falsely accused of anything here.”

“There was CCTV when I punched the guy, too,” Alice grumbled, but this was a fight she’d already lost multiple times, so she tugged her bag upstairs without waiting for a response.

Oscar Vessalius hadn’t lied when he said that the upstairs apartment wasn’t in great condition—it was a wreck. The room was coated in dust, and books and games and—strangely—a chair were all scattered across the floor, and a rope hung down from one of the rafters. It quite honestly looked as though a whirlwind had come through the room and then the room had been left abandoned ever since, though the security camera up on the wall was unharmed.

Alice, who was not a girl in the habit of cleaning things, stared in shock for a few seconds before dragging her bag over to the bed and dropping it next to it, and then proceeding to hit the bed until dust stopped flying out of it. This took a while, and when the bed was relatively clean Alice looked at the stuff on the floor, considered it, and scooped it all up and shoved it in an empty box and pushed the box against the wall. It was just junk, after all, and Alice had plenty of her own junk, from a lifetime of a world-trotting mother who only  brought her daughter along when it would slightly nettle her brother, and an uncle who had spoiled her completely rotten (perhaps as apology for his sister’s capriciousness and cruelty), and Levi who thought it funny to buy big presents that there wasn’t space for, or to slip Alice candies and meat and occasionally weed that she’d sell at school to buy her weight’s worth in fast food hamburgers. She didn’t need to have someone else’s abandoned dusty junk all over the place—though, it was true, Alice had left most of her own junk back at home. Oswald had worried over her losing things, and had flat-out banned drug selling until she was off probation, which was annoying. How else was she supposed to get money? Mug people?

By the time she’d finished these activities, Unbirthday had closed, and Alice could hear Oscar Vessalius on his way up the stairs, pausing every few seconds. Alice considered the dust that still lay on everything and remembered her uncle’s dust rags; hoping to make a good impression on her host, she grabbed a shirt out of her bag and frantically started dusting. Once her temporary guardian had made it up, her once-red shirt was nearly white, and it was starkly obvious which parts of the room had been dusted and which had not, and Alice, for the first time in her life, deeply regretted actively ignoring every time Uncle Oswald had tried to teach her how to clean up after herself.

But thinking of Uncle Oswald right now hurt, so Alice tamped down on those thoughts and glanced over at Oscar and said, “Sorry, I don’t—I’m not very good at cleaning and stuff.”

“It’s alright,” said Oscar. “I…am sorry that I didn’t prepare the room for you. I had planned to, but…” His eyes trailed over to the chair that had been in the center of the room, now pushed over to the desk with the rope tied to its leg and ready to be thrown out the window for midnight explorations, because Alice could not think of anything else one did with a rope and a chair. “I was unable to,” he said after a moment. “I came up here to let you know that I’m going to be heading home for the night, and that we’ll be visiting your new school tomorrow, so that you can get to know the principal and your homeroom teacher. I’ll drive you tomorrow, but with Unbirthday, I won’t be able to do so every day so you’ll have to take the subway.”

“Awesome!” said Alice, whose mother, uncle, and Levi all had lifetime bans from the Reveil subway system for public sex acts involving her mother’s ex (who was all of their ex, really, but he was called Lacie’s ex only) and who, because of this, had never been on the subway before in her life.

Oscar looked at her with a kind of soft smile, and he said, “I hope you sleep well. You can call me if you need anything—I believe I sent your uncle my contact information along with my address?”

Alice shrugged. “Uncle Oswald can’t work his phone,” she said. “But, um, I got your contact from Levi, so I have your number. His picture of you was kind of weird, though.”

Oscar looked horrified.

“I didn’t see it!” Alice quickly assured him. “I’ve got an online friend, and he lives in my phone, I think, and he deleted it and replaced it with a picture of you from a grocery store security camera, and he just told me that Levi’s picture of you was deeply weird.”

“Alice, have your uncle or father ever discussed internet safety with you?”

“Uncle Oswald doesn’t know what the internet is, really,” said Alice, “but my mom taught me how to send good death threats and suicide-baits to people who messed with me, and Levi says that if anyone ever causes me trouble to find their nudes and post them on every social media page possible. And my friend in my phone usually just makes assholes on the internet go away.”

“...Go away how?”

Alice shrugged. She did not even attempt to understand how B-Rabbit did what he did, and had never asked because, as he was her only friend, she liked to pretend that she understood everything he did out of a deep-seated terror that if she didn’t fake it, he would, like her schoolmates, scorn her for being an idiot with anger issues, and she would be left alone again. “They just go away,” she said. “I don’t—he’s really smart, and I’m not, so I don’t really know what he does, but…I don’t know, he just makes them go away.”

“What does he say about it?”

Alice fixed Oscar with a scornful glance. “I’m not going to ask, ” she said. “If he finds out how dumb I am he probably won’t want me around anymore, like how Mom left when I got held back and my classmates don’t like me. He isn’t dumb like me and Uncle Oswald. He knows a lot, and if I ask him obvious stuff he’ll figure out that I’m not really worth his time. I just know he makes them go away before I have the time to tell them to go kill themselves, that’s all.”

Alice’s phone buzzed in her pocket.

“Alice,” said Oscar, “you aren’t dumb, and there isn’t anything wrong with being different from other people. I’m sure your friend wouldn’t mind explaining things to you, and that he won’t cut you out of his life just because you aren’t as intelligent as he is. There are more important things in life than just knowledge, you know, and I’m sure your friend values you because you’re a kind, fun young lady whom he enjoys speaking with, and wouldn’t throw you away over something so trivial as intelligence.”

Alice shrugged a shoulder. “It’s not important, but people sure as hell care a lot about it,” she muttered. “But whatever, I guess.”

“Alice…”

Levi never texted if he could help it, and Oswald did not really know how to work his phone. Alice’s text was probably from B-Rabbit, wanting to know how she’d settled in; she wanted to respond as soon as possible.

“I’ll be fine,” she said. “Dusting, you know. It’s—he’s my friend who lives in my phone, so he’s mine and you don’t have to worry about him.”

“Alright,” said Oscar. “Just…take care of yourself, alright?”

“Yeah,” said Alice, who under threat of grounding was not allowed to pick fights with strangers on the street anymore and who other than the recklessness always took pretty good care of herself, and when she didn’t, her uncle did and used his considerable influence in their small town to make her problems disappear.

“Alright. Sleep well, Alice, I’ll see you tomorrow. Remember to call me if you need anything.”

Alice nodded, and waved goodbye, and once Oscar was gone she flopped down on her bed, dusting forgotten, and pulled out her phone to see the single notification on her screen.

wabbit season (b-rabbit)
alice, you’re one of my best friends in the world and i love you more than anything and nothing will ever change that, even if i can’t come meet up with you for real

duck season
i love u 2
we’re in the same city now tho

wabbit season (b-rabbit)
yeah <3
can’t go outside though :(
maybe you can break into my house

duck season
uncle oswald banned me from crimes until im off probation 😭

wabbit season (b-rabbit)
booooo
unrelated but 1 what do you think of oscar vessalius 2 would you ever break into HIS house,,,

duck season
sad old man who fucked my dad lol

wabbit season (b-rabbit)
HE FUCKED YOUR DAD???
is that how levi had his nudes
oh god oh fuck
what the HELL

duck season
yeah they had a 3some w some clown named break lol

wabbit season (b-rabbit)
omfg when

duck season
uh a few years ago according 2 levi

wabbit season (b-rabbit)
more or less than three years ago
alice please this is important for my eternal regrets

duck season
u have more regrets than levi has exes

wabbit season (b-rabbit)
your point?

duck season
ur mom
also i try vv hard not 2 know anything ever abt levis sex life

wabbit season (b-rabbit)
that makes sense tbh i would not want to know that either

duck season
why did u ask then lol

wabbit season (b-rabbit)
morbid curiosity mainly

After this, B-Rabbit wanted to know what Alice thought of the city; once she was ready for bed, she called her uncle and told him everything that had happened, said goodnight to B-Rabbit, and .got into bed, noticing as she did so that the strange red app she’d noticed earlier was still on her phone—she must have forgotten to delete it. Without a second thought, she removed it from her phone, turned the phone off, and snuggled down to go to sleep.

It seemed like only moments later that she awoke, no longer on the slightly thin and still quite dusty mattress but instead on a hard metal slab, covered in a thin sheet instead of the several blankets she’d piled around her, shivering like mad and with her arms chained together and a single manacle on one ankle, attached to a thicker chain that led to a massive iron ball under the bed. She blinked, looking around—she was in a barren cell, the floor hewn rock with only a single small toilet in the corner. In contrast to this, the walls were lined with plush blue velvet.

Someone laughed from nearby, and Alice scrambled into a sitting position, turning to see a girl at her cell door. Their eyes met—violet to violet—and Alice slowly stood, walking to stand on the other side of the bars and face the girl.

Ever since Alice was a child, she’d had a strange recurring dream. In it, she was in a glorious bedroom, filled with wonderful toys and beautiful clothes, and she was always happy and always loved and never alone, because in the dream she had a twin sister named Alyss, and they were best friends, and they could play together in dreams for as long as they wanted.

This was not that dream, and even as Alice thought so her old dream blurred and faded in her memory, until she could no longer quite recall Alyss or the room or anyone else who might have been there.

This room was cold and bleak—a [proper jail cell—this girl looked at Alice emotionlessly as she gripped at the bars and looked back, trying to assert her own dominance over this strange situation. The other girl’s hair was pure white, a blood-red rose like a stab wound around her neck, and she wore a deep blue blouse with gold trim and a neat black skirt over white stockings and black Mary Janes, and she stared at Alice a moment more before stepping aside and revealing a decrepit old woman sat at a massive desk.

The woman looked up at Alice, black holes where her eyes ought to have been, and said in a voice like the rusted hinges of a coffin unopened in a thousand years, “Trickster. Welcome to my Velvet Room.”

Alice shook the bars, moving past terrified to furious, as the girl glanced back and said, “So you’ve come to, inmate.” A small, muted smile touched her lips. “The you in reality is fast asleep, and is experiencing this world only as a dream.”

“A dream…” Alice looked around her. Usually, her dreams were far nicer than this. “Wait, this world ?!”

“My master will explain everything in due time,” said the girl, gesturing to the old woman. 

“Welcome,” the woman repeated. “I am delighted to make your acquaintance. This place exists between dream and reality, mind and matter, a room only those bound by a contract may enter. I am Jury, master of this realm; remember it well.”

“I’m Alice,” Alice said, tamping on every instinct she had that was screaming at her to say and I’m the master of fucking your mom. She’d clearly somehow been magically arrested; she didn’t need to disappoint her uncle any further by mouthing off at her captor.

“I know.” Creepy. “I have summoned you here to speak of important matters.”

“Then why not let me out of this cell?”

“Silence, inmate,” said the other girl.

“No! I’ve been fucking arrested, aga—”

The girl smacked Alice’s knuckles with a metal stick; Alice stumbled backwards, doubling over, as electricity coursed through her body.

“Know your place! Who do you think you’re talking to?!” the girl snapped.

Some old bitch probably wasn’t the correct response here; Alice gritted her teeth and remained silent.

“The state of this room, young girl, reflects the state of your own heart,” said the old woman named Jury. “It seems that you truly are a prisoner of fate. In the near future, there is no mistake that ruin awaits you.”

“You’ve got to be fucking shitting me,” Alice muttered, rubbing her aching arms and eyeing the other girl warily, though the metal stick was still tucked away for now.

“Do not worry. There is a means of opposing this fate. If you are rehabilitated towards freedom, you can still avoid the ruin ahead of you. Do you have the resolve to challenge the distortion of the world?”

“I’ll challenge anything,” said Alice.

“That is excellent to hear. In that case, please allow me to observe the path of your rehabilitation.”

“Sure, whatever,” Alice muttered. “You’ve given me your name. Who’s she?”

“Ah, pardon me for not introducing her. This is the Intention of the Abyss, my assistant. She will serve as your warden for the duration of your stay. I do hope you get along.”

Alice glanced over at the Intention.

“The duty of wardens is to protect the inmates,” the Intention of the Abyss said. “Alongside my other duties, I will be your collaborator…assuming you remain obedient.”

Alice thought about the whip-quick metal, the jolting electricity, and shuddered. But Jury spoke again before Alice could say anything further.

“Morning approaches. I shall explain her role in further detail at a later occasion. You may take your time to understand this place; we will meet again, eventually.”

The Intention of the Abyss turned away; something deep within Alice’s heart ached.

“Rest well,” said Jury; somewhere far in the distance, a bell tolled. Alice felt herself grow dizzy and begin to fall as the edges of her vision clouded over—and then she was awake, sitting up in her bed in Oscar Vessalius’s upper room, shivering away the rough edges of terror. She groped for her phone and pressed her uncle’s contact, letting it ring out and listening to his voicemail (“This is Oswald Baskerville. I do not know how to work my phone. If you need to reach me, please call my niece Alice or my brother Levi. Have a good day.”) three times over before she felt steady enough to roll out of bed and get dressed.

She called him again while she was putting her shoes on, and then sat on the ground against her bed and texted B-Rabbit.

duck season
what did u have for breakfast

wabbit season (b-rabbit)
bold of you to assume i eat??

duck season
u cant fool me i know ur a rabbit u eat carrots

wabbit season (b-rabbit)
you’re so right. i had carrots for breakfast
have you had breakfast yet?

duck season
no idk what 2 get or where 2 get it

wabbit season (b-rabbit)
oscar vessalius makes the best curry in the world so you could see if theres any of that around?

duck season
how do u know this

wabbit season (b-rabbit)
i know everything

duck season
b rabbittttttttttttttttttt

wabbit season (b-rabbit)
i used to go to Unbirthday a lot before everything happened w my aunt, the curry there was my favorite thing in the world
havent been in ages ofc but
you should definitely still try it
tell me what you think
i will live vicariously through you

duck season
dont u always?

After this, Alice headed downstairs. Unbirthday was closed and dark and empty, so she had a staring contest with the security camera until its constant and frankly unnatural whirring between Alice’s face and the refrigerator freaked her out enough that she said, “I win, you’re looking away,” and went right back upstairs, lay down on her bed, and pulled out her phone.

wabbit season (b-rabbit)
you know it <3

wabbit season (b-rabbit)
xoxo

duck season
xoxo
do u know when my guardian is going to be here oh wise one

wabbit season (b-rabbit)
it is still only 5 am my darling alice he will not be awake until 7 and will arrive at Unbirthday at 9 since it wont be open in the morning

duck season
boooooooooooo
do u know any good restaurants in the area i have levis credit card

wabbit season (b-rabbit)
Unbirthday

duck season
it isnt open stupid

wabbit season (b-rabbit)
theres probably food in the fridge loml

duck season
loml?

wabbit season (b-rabbit)
if i recall correctly

duck season
???

wabbit season (b-rabbit)
its an acronym

duck season
ur moms an acronym
im going to beg levi to ubereats me and then set up a punching bag

Levi, who had gotten banned from any and all Uber properties within three weeks of the company's founding, did not UberEats Alice any food. Instead, he showed up at Alice’s new bedroom window, said, “Damn, last time I was here this was his crazy nephew’s playroom. Wonder what happened!”, dropped her off six fast food hamburgers, and left. Alice sat at the desk and unwrapped her hamburger and went to text B-Rabbit.

duck season
ubereats acquired i will not starve

B-Rabbit didn’t respond, and Alice moped through the rest of her food before realizing that he’d probably gone to bed. Thus decided, she used the rope from the chair to make her duffel bag into a makeshift punching bag, hanging it from the same place she’d initially found it, and then spent the next hour and a half hitting it, again and again, wishing for a proper fight, wishing she was home.

When she heard the door to Unbirthday open and Oscar Vessalius enter, Alice immediately darted down the stairs. B-Rabbit still hadn’t responded to her, and she was horribly bored, and her duffel didn’t have anywhere near the level of resistance a real punching bag would.

Oscar smiled at her. “Good morning, Alice.”

“Good morning.” She considered asking if he could get some money from Uncle Oswald for a proper punching bag, but decided that that would probably be pushing her luck. “Thanks for letting me stay. It was nice up there.”

“I’m glad you like it. Would you like some breakfast?”

Alice nodded enthusiastically, and watched as Oscar showed her where the food was in the refrigerator—there was, in fact, some of the curry that B-Rabbit had recommended—and walked her through the basics of making coffee. The curry was delicious, and though the coffee was bitter once Alice had stirred some cream and sugar into it, it was wonderful. As Oscar did something with the sign up front, Alice opened her phone to text B-Rabbit.

duck season
u were right the curry fucks

She didn’t get a response by the time Oscar came back in and got his car keys and told her it was time to go, and something unsettling pricked around her collarbone and down into her stomach, where it curled up next to her homesickness and started telling her that B-Rabbit had found Lacie, had learned exactly why Alice wasn’t the sort of person worth loving.

Alice hadn’t cared about what people said about her growing up. When other kids called her dumb, she’d laugh at them for thinking that what grades you got really mattered. When people messed with her, she’d beat them up. She had been perfectly happy and confident in her identity, because she had Uncle Oswald and Lacie and Levi, and they all thought she was awesome, and they all loved and spoiled her.

And then she’d gotten held back a year, and the principal told her that her parents would be disappointed, and she laughed in his face. Some of her classmates cornered her and said that her mother and father were out of town all the time because they were ashamed of Alice, and that now that she’d proven herself stupid beyond repair she’d be sent into the foster care system and they’d never have to bother with her again. She came home and her uncle was crying on the phone and having a fight, and he sent her up to her room immediately, and that weekend they went down to the city to see Lacie and she said that Alice wasn’t her daughter, that she didn’t know who she was, and not to bother her again or she’d castrate them all. 

Alice had known, then. The problem had been her all along, and she’d just been too dumb to see it. And now—she’d probably driven B-Rabbit away, too, even though she couldn’t figure out what she’d done wrong. But the problem was her—it always had been.

It was a very subdued Alice who kept checking her phone every few minutes who entered Pandora Academy on the heels of Oscar Vessalius. There was still no response from B-Rabbit (though she could see now that he was online), and she half-typed a message and then deleted it, and before she could think of something else to send, they were called into the principal’s office and she had to put her phone away.

The meeting wasn’t anything special. Oscar Vessalius seemed to be the only person in the room to actually want Alice around, and her new teacher actively complained about getting a delinquent in his class, where his foster daughter was, and suggested that Oscar Vessalius was insane to allow her around vulnerable children.

Alice’s hands curled into fists, but she didn’t bother punching. What was the point? It would only be proving him right.

The car ride back to Unbirthday took most of the rest of the day. Traffic was hell—standstill, most of the time—and the radio talked on and on about the mental shutdown problems (apparently a girl a year or two older than Alice had recently had one that caused her to walk into traffic, and another one had just shut down all the subway trains for the day) until Oscar turned it off and they sat together in silence, Alice closing and re-opening her texting app, waiting for a response from B-Rabbit. She wanted to complain about her new teacher and the principal, but B-Rabbit was mad at her, and he probably wouldn’t care.

Alice’s usual instinct, when someone was mad at her, was to pick a fight. Usually, after a nice tussle in the grass, laying there panting and bloodied, any problem seemed so much smaller and it was easier to laugh together again. But B-Rabbit was somewhere else, shut away somewhere and on the internet so much that they joked that he lived in Alice’s phone, and so that was how she talked about him to people, and a fistfight wouldn’t be able to solve this problem. She didn’t even know what she’d done wrong.  

They arrived back at Unbirthday around dinnertime, and Oscar sent her to go get washed up, promising to make a fresh curry for her to eat. When she emerged from the bathroom, the entire café smelled wonderfully of spices and cooking meat, and he was on the phone over the stove.

“I know, honey,” he was saying into his phone. “I know. Traffic was worse than we expected, sweetheart. We were in the car all day.” He paused. “He did, huh? Maybe you should say hi to him. …Darling, I know, but…” Oscar sighed. “I know. I know, love. I’ll be home soon, right after I get dinner for Alice. I promise. I love you.” Another pause, this one accompanied by a smile that suggested that the heart behind it was broken. “I’ll see you soon.”

He hung up the phone and put it away, and jumped when he saw Alice.

“Dinner will be ready in a few minutes,” he told her, hoisting his smile a little bit higher on his face.

“It smells great,” said Alice. “Who were you talking to on the phone?”

“My son,” said Oscar. “He’s…very ill, which is why we couldn’t host you at the house.”

Alice thought about what her new teacher said about not allowing her near vulnerable children, and she nodded. “It’s nice here, anyway,” she said.

Oscar smiled at her. “I’m glad you like it,” he replied.

Alice took a quiet seat at the counter as Oscar resumed cooking, thinking about fathers who called their sick sons darling and fathers who called raising children “an experiment in seeing how fucked up a chimera of Lacie and I could be” and who wondered, when his daughter caught a cold, whether it could be used for biological warfare. Oscar’s son was very lucky, Alice thought as she finished her curry and said goodbye to Oscar as he left for the night and locked up behind himself. Oscar’s son was sick, but his father still loved him, didn’t laugh at him. Probably he had a mother, too, who didn’t pretend not to know him. Maybe she and Oscar weren’t married anymore, if Oscar was having threesomes with Levi, but…

For a moment, Alice entertained a wild daydream where Oscar and Levi fell in love and got married. Then she remembered that Levi only married people in order to get frankly insane amounts of alimony, and banished the daydream. Oscar deserved better than that.

That night she didn’t dream of anything at all, and woke up to still no texts from B-Rabbit even though she’d made the conscious decision to sleep in until seven, and dressed and went downstairs to see Oscar Vessalius opening Unbirthday. She got breakfast—an egg, bacon, and cheese sandwich and orange juice, packaged for her to eat on the subway—and said goodbye to Oscar before hurrying out under a heavy grey sky.

Within about fifteen minutes of figuring out the subway system, Alice completely empathized with her parents and uncle for getting themselves banned. She didn’t have that option, though; she had a whole school year to get through, and Oscar didn’t have the time to drive her every day.

By the time she emerged from the subway station outside her school it was raining; Alice sulked under the awning for a moment while entering her new school into her map app as a young man stopped next to her.

He was tall, and blond, with a mole under his eye and a tiny fang in the upper right corner of his mouth, and he glared at the rain as though it had done him a personal disservice. Alice glanced over at him, wondering why he was just standing there, when a car pulled up and the window rolled down.

“Hey, Elly,” said the young man inside. “Need a ride?”

“Ernest, I’m sixteen now,” the boy—Elly—complained. “I can get to school myself.”

“You’re my baby brother,” said the man named Ernest, “and it’s raining. Come on, Elly. There’s nothing wrong with taking a ride when it’s offered.”

“But—!”

“Elly, you don’t want to be late for school, do you? I’ve heard there’s a dangerous delinquent joining your grade. You don’t want to get into any trouble with them. Come on. Just one ride.”

“...Fine, whatever,” Elly grumbled, stepping out into the rain and heading to the car.

“Elliot, wait up!” a boy’s voice called from behind Alice; she turned to see another boy, this one with messy black hair and worried golden eyes in a matching uniform to Elly’s, running up through the station. By the time Alice looked back at the car, though, it had driven off, Elly (Elliot?) inside, and the other boy stopped under the awning behind her, leaning on his knees and panting. “Not again…”

“You know each other?” Alice asked.

“Yeah, they’re, uh, they’re my brothers,” said the boy. He looked at Alice and offered his hand. “I’m Gilbert Nightray. Those were my brothers, Ernest and Elliot.”

“Why didn’t they wait for you?” she asked.

Gilbert shrugged. “You know how family is,” he said. “And—I mean, Ernest is kind of…awful. You go to Pandora too, right? You’ve heard the rumors?”

“Today’s my first day,” said Alice. “I’m the delinquent transfer student.”

“Oh!” said Gilbert. “Oh, I’m so sorry.”

“Why?” said Alice. 

Gilbert grimaced. “Ernest treats the school like it’s his own personal castle and he’s the king. He’s, like, the star Olympic medalist, or whatever, and so everyone’s always just…kissing up to him to try and get a good reputation, get into a good college…and, um, he’s not really happy about the school taking you in, so he leaked you being a ‘dangerous delinquent’ to the volleyball team, and now everyone’s been saying awful things about you, before you even showed up.”

“Gross,” said Alice, not noticing the strange red shimmer growing around herself and Gilbert. “I guess that means you know my name already then?”

“What, like Ernest ever spreads useful information?” Gilbert said, and Alice snickered.

“I’m Alice,” she said. “Alice Baskerville.”

“Oh, my bio mom was a Baskerville!” said Gilbert. “Vince and I were taken away by social services when we were young, but…yeah, um. That’s cool.”

“Vince?”

“My little brother.” Gilbert puffed up with pride. “He’s a detective—on TV and everything! He’s great. I mean, I don’t see him as often anymore because he’s so busy, but…yeah. He’s great.” Gilbert paused. “And so is Elliot! I mean, he’s kind of a dick sometimes, but Elliot’s great too. He’s younger than both Vince and I.”

“If he’s so great, then why’d he leave you here?” Alice asked.

Gilbert cringed a little. “That’s…um, hey, look, the rain’s lightening up!”

The rain was not lightening up.

“We should head to school, so we aren’t late!”

Gilbert took off at a trot; Alice followed on his heels.

“Do you have any friends?” she asked him. “Do your brothers ignore you because you don’t have any friends?”

“Of course I have friends!”

“Who? Where’s your friends?”

“Do you have any friends?”

“I’ve got one, I think,” said Alice. “He lives in my phone. He’s mad at me for some reason, though. How many friends have you got?”

“...One.”

“Cool! What are they like?”

“He’s smart, and kind, and funny,” said Gilbert. “He’s super cool. Basically the best person ever born.”

“What’s his name?”

“He goes to a different school, you won’t meet him.”

“So he isn’t real, then?”

“He’s definitely real! Is your friend real?”

“I don’t think it counts as catfishing if you don’t have any pictures,” Alice said, “so yeah he is!”

This argument carried them through the wet streets and through an alleyway that Gilbert called a shortcut until they reached the gates of a massive, real-life castle. Alice gaped at it; Gilbert stared in shock and horror.

“The school’s supposed to be here…” he said slowly.

“I mean, that sign says Pandora Academy,” Alice said, pointing.

“It does, ” said Gilbert. “That’s weird.”

“Maybe they remodeled.”

“So fast?”

Alice shrugged. She was not an expert in construction. “The sign says Pandora Academy,” she repeated, and made for the great gates; after a moment, Gilbert followed her, nervous and trembling.

“I don’t like this,” he said. “It isn’t right.”

“You can go home if you want,” said Alice, “but I can’t. If I get into trouble at school I get expelled, and it was hard enough for my uncle to find a school to take me last time. I’m not gonna be tardy on my first day.”

“Your uncle?” Gilbert echoed.

“Yeah, he takes care of me, usually. He’s a big worrywart.” Alice poked her head inside, looking around at the glorious entry hall. “Hey, Seaweed Head.”

“Huh—what, me?!”

“Yeah, you, your hair’s like seaweed. You think we could steal and pawn this shit in here?”

“No, that’s illegal! Also, my name’s Gilbert, not Seaweed Head!”

“Whatever, Seaweed Head,” Alice said, grinning a little to herself. “It doesn’t look like whoever owns this place would miss one or two trinkets. Hell of a school!”

“I’m telling you, I don’t know what this place is, it doesn’t look like the academy at all—”

A whole entire knight in a suit of armor entered the massive hall; Alice wolf-whistled.

“What’s…going on…?” said Gilbert uneasily. “You aren’t a student, are you?”

The suit of armor raised an unwieldy sword, and Gilbert began backing away as another one appeared.

“This school is insane,” said Alice.

“This isn’t what school is like! We need to run!”

“What?”

“Run!”

Gilbert grabbed Alice by the arm and started dragging her away, but they were stopped almost immediately by two other suits of armor walling them in. 

“What is this?!” Alice shouted. “What’s going on?!”

One of them slammed Gilbert to the ground with its massive shield; he stayed down, trembling. Alice went to hit it in retaliation, and felt cold metal slam against her head. She screamed, stumbling—it hit her again, and everything went dark.

When she awoke, she was lying on the floor of a cell, Gilbert kneeling over her, tears streaking down his face.

“What…happened…?”

“I don’t know,” he moaned. “They just—locked us in here, they said the k-king was gonna decide what to do with us…”

“A king?” said Alice. “What the hell? Aren’t we a democracy?!”

“I th-thought so…”

Somewhere off in the distance, someone screamed; Alice and Gilbert exchanged glances and rushed over to the bars. Alice was uncomfortably reminded of her strange dream of the “Velvet Room”; she wondered if the Intention of the Abyss and Jury were going to show up here, too—and if they did, whether that would be a good or a bad thing.

Somewhere down the hall, footsteps echoed; Alice craned her neck, and caught sight of a small group of the suits of armor approaching, in formation around someone she couldn’t quite see. They stopped in front of the cell she and Gilbert shared, and the suit of armor in front said in a voice that seemed somehow unreal, “Be glad that your punishment has been decided upon. Your charge is unlawful entry; therefore, you will be sentenced to death.”

“Death?!” Gilbert squeaked.

“No one’s allowed to do as they please in my castle,” a smooth, somewhat mocking voice said, as the young man Alice had seen driving the car earlier swaggered to stand in front of the cell. He was dressed somewhat differently from earlier, wearing naught but a crown, a fur-lined coat, and a pink speedo, which was—hm. Creepy as fuck. If Lacie were seeing this, she would have already gone at him with a razor.

“...Ernest?” said Gilbert, staring in shock and horror. “Is that you ?”

The man scoffed. “I thought I’d find some petty little thief, but instead it’s just the worthless interloper…have you seriously not learned your lesson?”

Gilbert cringed a little and stepped backwards.

“Is this little girl the newest friend you’re going to hide behind until she breaks?”

“Hey, perv!” Alice snapped. “Don’t call me little, you freak!” 

Alice was actually under 5 feet, but that didn’t really matter when it came to what she loved best: picking fights with someone bigger and badder than her.

“Is that really how you speak to a king ?” said the person named Ernest. “It seems like you don’t understand the position you’re in.”

“I understand the position I had your mom in last night!”

“Cute, really cute,” said Ernest. “Why don’t you watch me kill little Gilbert here, and then you can show me all about those positions?”

The door burst open; Gilbert and Alice both scuttled back, Alice reaching for her little pocketknife. If that creep Ernest thought he was getting anywhere near her, he’d have another think coming, that was for goddamn sure.

The one surrounded, though, was not Alice but rather Gilbert; he trembled on the ground before them, a poor frightened animal with nowhere to hide. Alice screamed and rushed at the suits of armor, trying to knock them away and failing. 

Gilbert looked up at her. “Run!” he shouted. “Just—get out of here! Don’t worry about me, go somewhere safe!”

“No way in absolute motherfucking hell!” Alice screamed back, hitting uselessly at the armor until she was knocked back. She watched in horror as the person calling himself a king approached Gilbert. The suits of armor yanked him from the ground and held him up as the so-called king began absolutely whaling on Gilbert, who cried out and sobbed.

“You worthless piece of shit,” said maybe-Ernest, his voice light and almost amused. “What on earth made you think that you could be a Nightray, you little brat?”

Gilbert only cried, even as he was hit out of the armors’s grip and maybe-Ernest spat down on him.

“A peasant like you isn’t worth the time it takes to beat you,” said maybe-Ernest, kicking him against the wall. “So welcome your death.”

“No…” gasped Gilbert, shaking and crying. “Oz…”

Oz?

“Stop it!” Alice screamed. She got kicked against the wall for her troubles, and the man called king called Ernest looked at her as though she was the dirt under his feet.

“Hold her there,” he said. “I’ll have my fun with her once little Gilbert is dead.”

“No!” Alice screamed, getting up and trying to rush for Gilbert; she was grabbed by the suits of armor and shoved against the wall. She could only watch in horror as the so-called King Ernest approached the sobbing Gilbert when suddenly the room fell into shadow and a girl’s voice as familiar as a dream brushed against her heart.

Truly, the voice whispered, this is an unjust game. Your chances of winning are almost none. But if my voice is reaching you, there may yet still be a possibility open to you…

A single silver butterfly flapped across the room and then vanished as the light returned; another voice bounced around between Alice’s ears.

What’s the matter? Are you just going to sit back and watch him die? Are you abandoning him to save yourself? Death awaits him if you do nothing. Was your previous decision a mistake, then?

A memory flashed before Alice’s eyes—that cunty guy trying to force himself upon a woman Alice had never seen before. She’d gotten between them and punched him in the face, and gotten arrested for her troubles, sent away, disappointed her uncle—but at least that woman was safe.

“No,” she whispered. “No, it wasn’t.”

Across the cell, Gilbert was pinned against the wall, a sword against his throat.

I have heeded your resolve, said the voice in Alice’s ear, like the voice of her temper, the voice of her fury. She was vaguely aware that her body was contorting, screaming, but she was lost in a whirlwind of righteous fury. Vow to me. I am thou, thou art I—thou who art willing to perform all sacrilegious acts for thine own justice! Call upon my name, and release thy rage!

There was something on her face—something wrong. Alice screamed, clawing at the skin around her eyes, her fingers scrabbling for purchase amidst the sticky and wet.

Show the strength of will to ascend all on thine own, though thou be chained to hell itself!

She found it—the thing on her face, the thing that was wrong. Alice ripped it away as a name bloomed on her lips. Blue fire burned around her, and every single suit of armor in the room was knocked away, and the so-called king was knocked prone. She grinned.

“Come, you pillager of twilight—!” she shouted. “Arsene!”

Good, good. Jet-black chains swirled around her. I am the rebel’s soul that resides within you. If you so desire, I shall grant you the power to break through this crisis.

“Hell yeah!” shouted Alice.

“Who the hell are you,” hissed maybe-King Ernest, climbing to his feet. “Guards!”

The suits of armor clattered up into a standing position, ready to fight, and then transformed suddenly into strange spirits and creatures. Alice planted her feet and clenched her fists.

“Kill her!”

Alice didn’t even bother waiting for them to attack her. She lept forward, knife out—it had transformed from a little nubby thing to a long, wickedly sharp, black blade, and she loved it like it was her own mother.

Alice ended up getting hit back, a few times, but within moments the strange creatures were black smoke, and she tucked her knife away, panting, truly pleased with herself for the first time in months.

I can’t wait to tell B-Rabbit about this! she thought, and then winced slightly. B-Rabbit still wasn’t talking to her. But surely he’d be interested in hearing about this?

“What…what was that…?” said Gilbert, pressed against the wall, tears drying on his cheeks.

“No fucking clue,” said Alice, grinning at him. “But it was cool as hell!”

“You little slut,” snarled maybe-King Ernest, stalking towards Alice. 

Gilbert quickly stuck out his leg in front of him, and the so-called king stumbled and face-planted on the floor.

“Oh, sorry, didn’t see you there,” Gilbert hissed, grabbing a ring of keys from where they’d fallen from somewhere on the man and bolting up, dragging Alice out of the cell and quickly locking the door.

“Damn you!” shouted the maybe-king, but neither teenager was paying him any mind anymore. Gilbert turned to Alice.

“What was that just now?” he asked. “Your clothes—”

Alice looked down. Instead of her school uniform, starchy and neat and just a little frumpy, she was wearing a bold red coat that nearly reached the floor, a massive bow tie, high white boots, and a shiny black miniskirt. Her hair was loose now, too—instead of the pigtails that she’d tied it in to try and look more like the sort of girl who did well in school, it was loose and wild and unbrushed, a few tiny braids flying free from the rest and ending in sharp metal tips, like chains.

“Oh damn, I look cool as hell,” Alice said, and was disappointed a moment later when light shimmered over her body, and she was returned to her school uniform, pigtails and all.

“It changed back…” said Gilbert, and then he jumped when maybe-King Ernest rattled the bars of the cell.

“You stupid little freaks,” he said.

“Run!” Gilbert shouted, and he started tugging Alice away. Figuring that he probably knew what was going on better than she did, since this was his brother and all, Alice followed, watching Gilbert throw the keys to the cell into what appeared to be a fetid stream running through the strange dungeon they were in. They ran, jumped, climbed, and crawled their mad way through, trying to find an exit, bitching about Gilbert’s horrid, creepy brother in stage whispers, until they hit yet another dead end and saw, for the first time, another prisoner who seemed to actually acknowledge their presence.

“You two! Over here!”

Alice and Gilbert turned and looked to see a catboy—or, at least, an emo boy with incredibly real-looking cat ears and a cat tail—crouched inside the cell. Gilbert yelped in terror and then covered his mouth with both of his hands.

“What the fuck are you?” Alice hissed.

“You aren’t soldiers here.”

“Uh, no, definitely not! We’re high school students!”

“Then Cheshire requests that you get him out of here. The key is right over there on the wall, but Cheshire cannot fit his hands through the bars.”

“Are…you Cheshire?” asked Alice.

“Yes.”

“Are you a real catboy or just a guy in a costume?”

Cheshire fixed her with a bloodred, one-eyed glare. “Cheshire is a cat, ” he said. “It is unfortunate that Cheshire is in this shape, but Cheshire is not a human or a catboy. Cheshire is a perfectly ordinary cat.”

“Then why should we let you out?” Gilbert asked, voice shaking. “You’re a cat! You’re probably in league with Ernest!”

“Cheshire is a prisoner here,” said Cheshire. “How could he be in league with the Palace’s ruler?”

“I mean, it could be a trap,” said Alice. “Plus, why should we help you? We don’t even know you. What’s in it for us?”

Cheshire hissed, and Gilbert squeaked in terror. “Cheshire knows the way out, and can show you,” he said. “Cheshire owes no loyalty to the ruler of this Palace. Cheshire is only seeking his owner, so that he may be her beloved pet again.”

“You’re a guy,” said Alice. “You are an actual human person.”

“Cheshire is a cat ! Not a human! Cheshire does not know why he has assumed this form, but he is not a human !”

“I hate cats,” Gilbert said fervently.

Cheshire hissed at him and he scooted behind Alice.

“But—you know the way out?” said Alice.

“Yes.”

Alice considered, decided that it wasn’t like they had any other options, and carefully opened the cell. Cheshire stalked out and down the stone corridor, and Alice tugged Gilbert after him. They went through a winding path filled with traps, which Cheshire let Alice try her hand at undoing—and she found that she was good, too! She was better at fighting—and they did fight a few times, when they couldn’t avoid running into the strange suits of armor (Shadows, Cheshire called them) and she beat them into dust with extreme prejudice until, finally, they crawled back out through an air vent.

“Cheshire will remain behind here,” said the catboy. “He still has some things to do here yet. If you keep walking, you will return to the real world soon enough.”

“Good,” said Gilbert fervently; he took Alice by the wrist, now, and began to hurry off. She went willingly, eyes darting around them as the city changed—one moment totally empty, the next filled with people, all hurrying to get to where they were going and out of the rain. 

“We made it,” Alice gasped, coming to a stop, and she and Gilbert panted under his umbrella for a few minutes until the truancy officers showed up. They did not take kindly to Alice and Gilbert’s explanations of a castle, but didn’t really seem to care, either, and soon enough Alice and Gilbert were sent unhappily to school, which was not a castle this time around. Terrible Ernest was there to greet them, and Alice pretended not to recognize him as he said something quiet to Gilbert that made his face turn purple and his shoulders bunch up around his ears. Alice paused, waiting for him, but Ernest waved her on.

“Aren’t you supposed to go to the faculty office?” he said. “You’re really very late, you know.”

“Gilbert said he’d show me where it is, because I have no sense of direction,” Alice lied.

“It’s on the second floor down the first hallway to your right.” Ernest smiled like he’d smiled in the strange castle when he kicked Gilbert in the ribs. “You can’t miss it.”

Alice gritted her teeth, but Gilbert waved her on, so she muttered, “Fine,” and soldiered on inside. Ernest had been right about the location of the faculty office, which burned, and she didn’t bother knocking before she entered the room, wanting only to get this humiliation over with, burning for her uncle to be inside, disappointed in her but still around.

He wasn’t, of course—there was only her new homeroom teacher, already fed up with her antics, and Alice stumbled past an explanation of getting lost before getting lectured on her poor sense of direction, utter lack of respect for authority, and association with Gilbert Nightray, who apparently had used to be a good student but had become a class-cutting delinquent last year after the old student council president dropped out, and thus had gotten held back. Alice perked up an ear at this—she had honestly gotten the impression that Gilbert was a bit of a goody-two-shoes—but her teacher seemed to notice her interest and stood, stopping his explanation before he could say anything actually interesting.

“Follow me,” he said. “We can keep your tardiness today just between us as long as you don’t repeat it, alright?”

“Alright,” Alice said, following him into the classroom, where she was made to introduce herself and then sent to sit behind the boy who’d gotten into that jerk Ernest’s car earlier, Gilbert’s little brother. She wondered if he might tell her more about Gilbert being a delinquent, but the boy completely ignored her as she sat down, and the rest of the day wore on with absolutely no highlights. To make matters worse, B-Rabbit didn’t text her even once, even though she spammed him at lunch and whenever she had a free moment between classes. On top of all that, after school her teacher told her that Oscar Vessalius was unhappy that she’d skipped classes, and then when she started back to Unbirthday Gilbert grabbed her by the arm and pulled her up to the roof.

“What are we doing up here?” said Alice. “I mean, I like the rule-breaking, it’s ballsy as fuck, but—I really, really cannot be expelled, and—and my teacher said that my new guardian’s pissed I missed the first half of the school day, and Mr. Vessalius seems really nice—”

“Mr. Vessalius?” Gilbert echoed.

“Yeah, he runs some café or something, called Unbirthday. He’s my dad’s ex, so, you know.”

Gilbert did not look as though he knew. After a moment, though, he said, “Well—I know him, so I can walk you back and explain our situation. It’ll be alright.”

“Explain—like, the castle and everything? Who would believe that ?” 

Anger flashed across Gilbert’s face. “Mr. Oscar will—because it’s true!”

“Just because things are true doesn’t mean anyone will believe you, ” said Alice. “I should know, I’ve been arrested before.”

Gilbert’s face fell, just slightly. “Then—I’ll say you got lost and I, uh, overslept,” he said, and then grimaced as though he’d bitten into something sour. “Or maybe something else.”

“Sure,” said Alice. “Is that why you brought me up here?”

“I just—the castle thing—you do remember it too, don’t you?” said Gilbert. “It wasn’t a dream? Nobody drugged me again or anything?”

“You’ve been drugged?” Alice asked, suitably impressed.

“It’s—my family doesn’t like me very much,” said Gilbert. “Things were better—before—but, I mean—look, that’s not important. Just—you do remember the castle too. Right?”

“Right,” said Alice. “I kicked ass in there!”

“Yeah,” said Gilbert. “Thanks for, you know, saving me from Ernest.”

“No problem,” said Alice. “I love fighting people.”

“Is that why you got arrested?”

Alice stuck her tongue out at him. “Fuck off, Seaweed Head.”

“I’m not a seaweed head! My hair is perfectly normal!” Gilbert argued. “Also—back to Ernest—you’re new here, so you probably don’t know, but there’s a lot of, um, pretty nasty rumors about him. Like, he physically abuses the volleyball team, and, um, some people say that—the girls—he, um—well, you’d better stay away from him, is what I mean.”

“Are the rumors true?” Alice asked.

“Well, I’m not a girl or a member of the volleyball team, but—well—I mean, I wouldn’t really be surprised if they were,” Gilbert admitted. “So—just keep yourself safe, and stay away from him, okay?”

“I could kick his ass,” said Alice.

“Please don’t,” said Gilbert. “You just said you didn’t want to get expelled—and if you fight Ernest, that’s definitely what will happen. I just—wanted to ask if you remembered the castle too, and tell you to stay safe. That’s all. I can walk you home now.”

“My home is like two hours away by train,” Alice grumbled, but she followed Gilbert out of the school and all the way back to Unbirthday anyway, where Gilbert did in fact tell Oscar that she was late because she’d gotten lost and he’d found her after oversleeping, at which point Oscar reminded Gilbert that he definitely hadn’t overslept, because he had left Oscar’s house before Oscar went to open the café, and Gilbert had flushed red and mumbled something about taking a nap on a bench before fleeing.

“...Alice,” said Oscar, “what really happened this morning?”

“Some weirdo creep tried to get me into his car and I said no, and then I got lost and met Seaweed Head,” Alice recited dutifully. “And then apparently learned he’s the weirdo creep’s little brother and the weirdo creep, like, beats him up and drugs him sometimes, and also the weirdo creep is, like, the gym teacher. Also my teacher said that Seaweed Head is a delinquent too, so that’s cool.”

Oscar had been looking more and more distressed during Alice’s speech, but in the end he only said, “Thank you, Alice. Please keep yourself safe. I’ll speak to the school about this teacher—Ernest Nightray, is it?”

“Yeah, I think,” said Alice, taking the opportunity to escape back upstairs before she had to answer any more questions and possibly let it slip about the castle. She flopped onto her bed and prepared to tell B-Rabbit all about the castle—but when she sent her first text, nothing went through. Alice closed out the app and prepared to try again, but this time, she found their text string totally blank, headed up with Deleted User 3765.

Alice froze. She left that app and went over to the site she’d first met B-Rabbit on, and found him gone from there, too; over the course of the evening, Alice discovered that all traces of her best friend had totally vanished from the internet.

She was completely alone.

Alice cried herself to sleep, and when she woke up again in the strange jail cell she was so furious she tried to fight the Intention of the Abyss through the bars of her cell until her ass got completely kicked and Jury said, “Enough.”

“Eat my ass, old woman,” Alice muttered, pushing herself up off the ground and scowling at her.

“My master wishes to speak with you,” said the Intention of the Abyss. “It’s for your own sake that you take her words to heart.”

Alice rolled her eyes, but Jury was already off.

“First,” said the old woman, “let me congratulate you on awakening to your powers. They are quite special ones, you know. Your rehabilitation can finally begin.”

“If I’m rehabilitated—can I see B-Rabbit and my uncle and my mom again?” Alice asked, hating how her voice shook.

“...Yes,” said Jury.

“How do I do it?”

“There is no need to understand it all at the time being,” said Jury, which was incredibly unhelpful. “For now, you will be training your powers of Persona.”

“Of what ?”

“Persona. Your persona is, shall we say, a mask you wear out in the world, when interacting with others—an armor on your heart, one might say.”

“An armor…on my heart…?”

“I have high expectations for you,” said Jury, which wasn’t really an answer, and, “It isn’t that we’re forcing you into this fate. Neglect it, and you will fall into ruin and die,” said the Intention of the Abyss, which kind of was.

“Oh, great,” Alice muttered.

“On a perhaps somewhat brighter note,” said Jury, “how are you appreciating the Abyss Navigator? Using it will allow you to move between reality and Palaces. I bestowed it on you as a means to train you as a thief. Use it wisely.”

A thief? Alice liked the sound of that.

“If you find yourself in contact with an ally you can trust, they will gain the Abyss Navigator and the ability to summon a Persona as well, so that you do not have to bear this burden alone,” said the Intention of the Abyss.

“This is all for you to grow as the most excellent thief,” the Jury said sharply, and the Intention of the Abyss’s shoulders straightened and she turned sharply away from Alice. Alice almost said something, but then found herself blinking awake to her alarm, and so she put the odd dream out of her head and went to go get ready for the day, aching with loneliness and the loss of B-Rabbit. She dressed, and got her school bag, and switched the sign on the café door to open, and got on the train, listening to people talking about the subway accident caused by the recent mental shutdowns, and wondered if that was what had gotten B-Rabbit, if he’d had a mental shutdown and then all his accounts got deleted by his family or something.

When she got onto the second train, she noticed a blonde girl in the same uniform Alice wore get on with her; other students were whispering about how pretty she was, how renowned for athletics, but Alice honestly couldn’t give a shit. What she had noticed the girl for was that she’d gotten the last available seat on the train, and Alice, whose legs were tired from a weird trip to the castle yesterday and whose best friend had just ghosted her, deeply wanted the seat and was trying to kill the girl with her mind.

A few stops before the stop for their school, the girl did actually stand, and Alice considered making a dive for the seat, but when she saw that the girl had stood for an elderly lady to sit down, she didn’t move. Another passenger did, though, some young businessman, diving in moments before the little old lady could sit down.

“Excuse me, the seat was for this lady,” said the girl, but she was soundly ignored.

“Hey, bitch,” Alice snapped, moving into the man’s personal space. “Do you really think you’re the only person in the world who’s tired? Get up, she wasn’t giving the seat to you.”

“Oh, no, don’t worry about it, dear,” said the old woman. “I can stand.”

“At least let me take your luggage,” the blonde girl said to the whole woman as, divested of her opportunity to get in a fight, Alice stepped backwards and checked her phone once again as if B-Rabbit might have reached out to her again in the minute she’d been occupied.

He hadn’t, of course, and Alice sulked her way off the bus, though the blonde girl cut off her path before she could reach much further than the stairs.

“Thank you for earlier,” she said.

“I didn’t exactly do much,” Alice pointed out.

“You still spoke up. That was admirable of you.” The girl’s eyes flicked over Alice’s uniform. “You are a second-year at Pandora, aren’t you?”

“Yeah,” said Alice. “I’m new. Do you go there?”

“Yes, I’m a first-year transfer student. Thanking you completely slipped my mind back on the train, and I didn’t want to be rude to my senior. So—thank you.” The girl nodded at Alice once, and then vanished into the crowd. Alice stared after her for a moment, and then shrugged and continued on her way. To her surprise, when she left the subway station Gilbert was outside waiting for her; without saying anything, he walked her to school, eyes darting back and forth as though searching for the castle they’d been to yesterday. No such thing showed up, though, and the day passed without incident, though Alice did get to watch Elliot Nightray doing his level best to avoid Ernest Nightray’s blatant favoritism of him from the classroom door as she headed out. Gilbert’s brother looked uncomfortable as all hell throughout the conversation, and practically fled when it was over, and Alice considered going after him, but she really didn’t care that much, and so continued down the stairs and out the building, where she found Gilbert waiting for her again.

“What the fuck are you doing?” she said.

“I want to find that castle from yesterday,” Gilbert said. “It’s—been driving me crazy, trying to figure out what that was all about, and I thought we might be able to look around for it? You’re the only person I can ask. —The only person that still talks to me, I mean.”

“I thought you said you had a friend,” Alice grumbled.

“I do!” said Gilbert. “He’s just—he doesn’t want me around right now, that’s all. He’s going through some stuff. And anyway you were at that castle too.”

“Yeah, but…” Alice scuffed the toe of her shoe on the ground. “If I get back late…”

“I can text Mr. Oscar and tell him we’re hanging out together,” Gilbert offered.

“Then he’d think we’re friends.”

“So?”

“So—” Alice scuffed her toe harder. “I don’t want to be friends.”

“Look, I know I’m a loser, but that castle—”

“I don’t care if you’re a loser, I care that every time I make a friend or even fucking start to give a shit about somebody they just disappear and pretend they don’t know me!” Alice shrieked. “And I”m fucking done with it!”

“What about your online friend?” said Gilbert. 

“He fucking ghosted me yesterday,” Alice hissed. “Didn’t even say why. I don’t know—if he’s dead or done with me or whatever, but—yeah. And I really don’t want to try that shit again right now or even make someone think I’m trying it again, so fuck off!”

“Fine, I don’t have to tell Mr. Oscar anything!” Gilbert shot back. “But I want to figure out what’s up with that castle! It might have something to do with those mental shutdowns on the news—and if Ernest is using it to hurt people—”

“Why should I care?!” Alice shouted. “Why don’t you drag your actual friend into this?! If he’s really your friend—”

“He is!”

“Then fuck off to him and leave me alone!”

“I can’t!” Gilbert shouted back. “And anyway your phone was talking at us when we went into the castle—”

“Bullshit it was—”

“It did, it said something about arriving!”

Alice yanked her phone out of her pocket, unlocked it, and threw it at Gilbert. “Fine, then! Prove it!”

“I will!” Gilbert snapped, and then tapped angrily at the screen. “...How does it work?”

“Huh?”

“I’ve got a flip phone, I don’t really know how touch screens work,” Gilbert said. Alice, against her better instincts, moved to look at the screen as Gilbert found the weird red and black app that she’d tried to delete at least three times already. “What does this do?”

“I don’t know,” said Alice, “it just showed up one day. A lot like you, actually. I’ve tried to delete it but it just won’t go away.”

“A lot like me,” said Gilbert. He opened the app. “Huh, it is a navigation app—and look at your history. Ernest Nightray—Pandora Academy—Pervert Castle—”

“Beginning navigation,” said Alice’s phone, and she and Gilbert both jumped.

“Motherfucker,” said Alice. “Fuck shitting fuck fuck.”

“I guess it’s going to tell us to walk in a certain direction—”

The sky suddenly went dark, and red, as though there was a deep cloud cover, and then Alice and Gilbert found themselves standing on the steps to the same castle they’d visited the day before, Alice once again in the dramatic red coat and boots.

“Shit,” said Alice.

“After we get out of here you can beat me up and we can tell Mr. Oscar that’s why you’re late,” said Gilbert, handing her phone back to her.

Alice tucked it into her pocket and noticed her clothes had changed again. “Or just not say anything to him,” she said, heading up the drawbridge. “That’s always an option too.”

“Yeah, but then you might get in trouble!”

“Why should you care?” Alice said. “We’re not friends.”

“No, but Mr. Oscar’s taken you in, and he’s like a father to me, so—I guess I feel kind of responsible for you,” Gilbert admitted. “Plus, you did save me yesterday, so…”

“I guess,” said Alice. “It wasn’t really that big of a deal, though.”

“It was a big deal to me,” said Gilbert. “Oz is the only person who’s ever really protected me before, so.”

“You mentioned that name yesterday, too,” said Alice. “Is he your friend?”

Gilbert nodded. “He was—one of the earliest victims of the mental shutdowns, we think,” he said. “I visit him every day, but…”

“Oh,” said Alice. “I’m—sorry I said that stuff about him. About him not really being your friend, and stuff.”

“Thanks,” said Gilbert. “I’m sorry I was pressuring you to come here.”

Alice shrugged. “It’s okay, I can probably fight someone here. That’ll be fun.”

Gilbert did not look like he approved of that, but he didn’t say so. Instead, he looked at Alice for a long time and said, “How old are you?”

“Fifteen and a half,” she said. “Why?”

“Did you skip a grade?”

“Yeah, back in preschool, because I kept biting my classmates and they didn’t want me around kids smaller than me, and then I got held back last year, ‘cause I couldn’t pass algebra and then I stopped going to school at all after my mom left,” she said. “Why?”

“I’m eighteen, and Oz is sixteen.”

“Who cares?”

“I care,” said Gilbert. “I mean, I’d like to get to know you a bit better if we’re going to be exploring the weird castle together…especially since I’m not sure how we can get out…”

“Well, we can always ask the catboy,” Alice pointed out.

“We are not asking the catboy.”

“Cheshire is a cat, not a catboy!” came a familiar voice behind them, and Alice and Gilbert both jumped and turned to see the catboy in question standing behind them. “What are you doing back here? You barely escaped last time—and you’ve already gotten the attention of the Shadows.”

“We were trying to figure out what the fuck this place is,” Alice said, stepping in front of Gilbert, who appeared to be having a panic attack. “Is it the school or is it a castle?”

“It’s both.”

“But it’s a castle!”

Cheshire rolled his eyes. “The school is this castle—in the eyes of its ruler,” he said. “His distorted heart, his Shadow self, controls the rules of this world in its entirety…unless you are a Persona user, like you. Because you have your own control of how the Abyss effects you, and this castle’s ruler sees you as an enemy, your appearance manifests in your image of a rebel rather than your typical human self.”

“This castle’s ruler—Ernest?” Gilbert said, his voice shaking slightly.

“Yes, Cheshire believes that is what you called him,” said the catboy. “This is how his distorted heart views the school.”

“Ernest has a heart ?” said Gilbert. “That’s a surprise.”

Alice snickered, and Gilbert flashed her a small smile. Cheshire nodded.

“Everyone does,” he said. “A Palace ruler’s—in this case, Ernest’s—heart is just more distorted than most, and this distortion…this Palace…is the result. It’s a world of his own, where all of his distorted desires have materialized, typically centered around one object that symbolizes their origin—a Treasure. Cheshire is here, as a Phantom Thief, to find and steal that Treasure and remove the distortions from Ernest’s heart in hopes of being reunited with his owner. Cheshire believes that if he finds enough Treasures and goes far enough through the Abyss, he will find her again.”

“How do you know that’ll work?” said Alice.

“So if that Treasure is stolen, Ernest will become a better person?” said Gilbert. 

“It’s possible,” said Cheshire. “He may also lose his will to live, or simply and immediately die. As we are currently operating within his cognition and perceptions, it is very easy to mess things up in terrible ways that even Cheshire does not fully comprehend. Simply extracting the Treasure will remove the distortions from his heart, causing him to no longer be able to maintain the Palace and return his desires to what they originally were before the distortion. Cheshire does not know how that will affect him, though.”

Before this line of conversation could continue, though, horrified screams split the air and everyone jumped.

“What was that?” said Gilbert.

“Can I fight it?” said Alice.

“That’s the other prisoners,” said Cheshire. “You saw other students held captive here yesterday, right? They aren’t real like the two of you or Cheshire, though—they’re cognitions, the Palace’s ruler’s impressions of the students at the school. Interacting with them is useful for gaining information on how the Palace ruler sees and treats them in the real world, but otherwise there isn’t much point in engaging.”

Gilbert’s jaw tightened. “Other students at the school…” he said. “Do you think he has one of Elliot?”

“What?”

“My little brother, Elliot. He—he doesn’t talk to me, not really, but he’s a good kid and he spends a lot of time with Ernest and Vanessa, and…I just want to make sure he’s alright.”

Cheshire eyed Gilbert, and said, “If the ruler has a cognition of him, then it is in there. But the two of you barely escaped yesterday. You probably should not go back in.”

“I’m not going to do what a cat tells me to,” Gilbert snapped. “If my brother is in trouble—if I can figure something out about how he’s being treated by finding his cognition in there, then I’m going to do it and you won’t stop me!”

Despite this brave speech, Gilbert was pretty obviously shaking with fear, so Alice squared her shoulders and added, “Plus, I can fight, so I can protect him, obviously. And we did get out yesterday! We can do it today, too!”

Cheshire sighed. “Fine. If that’s the case, then Cheshire will be your guide again. He does have business in this castle, and your skills will be helpful with his goals.”

Alice cracked her knuckles. “Great.”

They followed Cheshire into the castle, using the same broken window they’d escaped through the day before. This, Cheshire explained, would be their entry and exit point; it would draw far less attention than the front doors, and unless they led a Shadow right to it and let it go, Ernest would not be aware of its existence on any level whatsoever. Cheshire called this one of the basics of phantom thievery, and promised to explain more as they went on through the castle, and then vanished through the window, moving far more like a cat than a human.

Gilbert swallowed, eyeing it, and then looked over at Alice. “Sorry for dragging you further into this,” he said. “I just—I can’t lose anyone else.”

Alice shrugged a shoulder. “It’s fine,” she said. “Whatever. I mean, we’re still not friends, but I like fighting, and I like fighting when I can’t get arrested for it. If we get away with this and I can fight more people for you, I guess we might maybe become friends at some point.”

Gilbert smiled at her. “Thanks, Alice,” he said, climbing through the window after Cheshire. Alice followed, too, and the three of them made their way through the dark, creepy castle, making sure to stick to the shadows and out of sight, even as their vision occasionally blurred and overlapped with images of the real school. These, Cheshire explained, were places where Ernest’s cognition was a little bit weaker, either because of less attention to the area paid by him or more attention paid there by others. In places where it was weaker because he paid less attention, Cheshire told them, they could rest safely—but in places like the entrance hall, where many people’s cognitions overlapped and occasionally weakened Ernest’s, they were in extra danger, since he had to pay more attention to it to maintain his own cognition.

This sneaking didn’t mean that they didn’t get into any fights, though. Instead, Cheshire showed Alice how to jump Shadows from behind so that they didn’t see her coming and she could more easily beat them into smoke. Alice preferred having a challenge in a fight, of course, and at first she thought the ambushing made it a little too easy, but she soon realized that fighting over and over and over again was its own challenge, and that sometimes even when she did get the drop on an enemy, it was strong enough that she struggled a little in the fight. After each fight was over, Alice was able to collect money and sometimes food or objects from where the Shadow had fallen, and assuming those returned to the real world with her—well. This Palace and Phantom Thief stuff was awesome. Alice was starting to see far more of the appeal. She wasn’t fighting alone here, either, which was even better—Cheshire had his own Persona, which, like last time, he used to fight alongside her, and after asking a few more clarifying questions about the effect of cognitions in this world—the Abyss—Gilbert pulled out an incredibly realistic-looking model gun and began arguing that he should be able to use it in fights. Apparently, he carried it with him everywhere; if someone thought he was holding a gun, they were more likely not to mess with him, and if they messed with him anyway, it made a great blunt-force weapon, and nobody expected you to use a gun as a club.

Even though Cheshire refused to let Gilbert fight without a Persona, this fake gun and Gilbert’s typical usage of it made Alice’s opinion of him skyrocket, and by the time they’d made a full sweep of the castle dungeons and completely failed to find a cognition of Elliot Nightray, Alice was reconsidering her stance on not befriending Gilbert. He would definitely be fun to fight with, and he was completely insane in a way that Alice was also completely insane, and—and maybe if she ever got into contact with B-Rabbit again, B-Rabbit would like him too.

Alice was reflecting on this, and Gilbert was muttering about confirmation of the rumors of Ernest abusing the volleyball team, and Cheshire was suggesting that maybe they give up on the search when they made their way back into the main hall and ran right directly into the King Ernest—the Shadow version of him, still dressed in his velvet cape and underwear, flanked by two other Shadows in shiny gold armor.

“ You’re back again?” he said. “Really? I can’t believe you’d make the same mistake twice…no, actually, I can. How pathetic of you.”

“At least we’re not the ones imagining running the school as a castle wearing nothing but underwear,” Gilbert muttered.

“Bold words from a useless, unloved, pathetic little worm,” Ernest said, smirking. “What are you going to do when these new friends of yours realize that you can’t do anything worth keeping around? Really, you might as well spare everyone the pain and tell them how worthless you are now.”

“Seaweed Head’s worth a hundred of you, you creep!” Alice shouted.

Ernest rolled his eyes. “I’m sure you’ll see the truth soon enough,” he said. “Though you are an idiot delinquent, so who can say?”

Before Alice could suggest he shove his bitch-ass words right up his ass, the armored Shadows twisted and transformed into great horned horses, and lunged for the three of them. Alice and Cheshire immediately lept into battle, but it was to no avail: neither of them were strong enough on their own to take down all three, and within moments they were both pinned to the ground, Ernest’s slippered foot digging into the small of Alice’s back.

“You—piece of shit,” she grunted out, trying and failing to throw her off. Gilbert was staring at the scene in wide-eyed horror, the only one of them not physically restrained, though he was kneeling on the ground too.

“I bet these two only came in here because you asked them to,” said Ernest. “Don’t you see? You can’t do anything for anybody, and whenever you try you only hurt them. Why do you even try?”

“I—I—” Gilbert’s breath was coming in quick, sharp gasps, and his eyes were glassy with tears. “I—Oz—”

“That was your only good accomplishment,” said Ernest. “If it weren’t for you, that annoying little gnat would still be buzzing around, stopping me from ruling the school as much as I deserve to. Thanks, Gilbert. Getting rid of him was the only good you’ve ever done with your worthless life.”

Gilbert stiffened. “No,” he said. “No.”

Ernest laughed. “Once I’m done with these two, I’ll deal with you,” he said. “You can watch what fate you’ve led them to.”

“Seaweed Head!” Alice shouted. “Don’t listen to him, stupid! Are you really gonna let him say whatever he wants to you like that?!”

“…I’ve already lost everything that was important to me,” said Gilbert. “I’ll never get it back. But…but that just means there’s nothing that Ernest can take from me now.” He swallowed, and then looked up, his eyes a burning yellow. He screamed, hands flying to his face, until he ripped off a long, black mask like a raven’s beak and gritted his teeth, pulling out his model gun as his clothing changed to a white blouse, a long black coat, and a top hat. “You’re right,” he breathed. “I’ve made you wait far too long. I am thou, thou art I…come, Raven!”

A massive, chained bird with fiery wings burst into existence behind Gilbert as he shot at the Shadows restraining Alice and Cheshire, which had all been knocked back by the rush of power as his Persona came out. Alice rolled to her feet, cracking her neck and grinning as the battle began again, far less one-sided now that there was a third member in their party and their opponents had been weakened by the blast of power from Gilbert’s Persona. Once the Shadows were gone, Gilbert turned to the Shadow Ernest, still with that angry grin on his face.

“I told you,” he said, “I’m not letting you or anyone else hurt someone I care about ever again!”

“You still don’t understand?” said Shadow Ernest. “I told you, this is my castle.”

Before any of the three Persona-users could respond, a figure strolled out of nowhere to come and stand next to Shadow Ernest. It was, Alice realized after a moment, Gilbert’s little brother Elliot, but it was his little brother Elliot dressed extraordinarily oddly. He was wearing a sailor suit the likes of which a small child would be dressed up in, and he looked far more cheerful than the boy Alice sat behind in class, though granted, she’d only seen him for the first time the day before and they hadn’t officially met yet. He hung off of Shadow Ernest’s arm, and barely spared the three of them a glance.

“Elliot?” Gilbert said. “What are you doing here?!”

“Obviously that’s a cognition,” said Cheshire, and Gilbert relaxed just slightly until Shadow Ernest groped the cognition of his brother and Gilbert yelled in rage, even though the cognition seemed perfectly happy with it.

“Do you understand now?” said Ernest. “This is my castle, where I can do whatever I want. Everyone wishes to be loved by me…that is, everyone other than idiotic thieves like you.”

“You make me sick,” said Gilbert.

“Why?” said Ernest. “Are you jealous? It is true that you don’t have any siblings who love you.”

“Gag,” muttered Alice. Gilbert was vibrating with rage, now, as more and more Shadows began to enter the room.

“We’re outnumbered,” said Cheshire. “We need to go—now!”

“But Elliot—”

“Isn’t real, but we are, and if we die here that’s it! We’re dead!”

Gilbert swore, and grabbed Alice by the back of her coat when she tried to fight the closest Shadow, and the three of them tore out of the room like bats out of hell. They did not stop moving until they were certain that they had lost the Shadows pursuing them, and only then did they sneak out the way they’d come in and stood in a triangle outside the broken window, upset and panting.

“Oh, my God,” Gilbert gasped. “Ernest is going to actually murder us at school tomorrow. Or if I come home tonight. We’re so dead. We’re so dead.”

“Don’t be an idiot,” said Cheshire. “That was his Shadow self—the part of himself that he keeps repressed and doesn’t want to see. The real Ernest won’t know about anything that happens in here…at least, not consciously. He may be more upset with you, but he won’t know why.”

“Oh,” said Gilbert, “oh, thank goodness.” He paused. “Does this mean that I have a Shadow in a Palace somewhere? And Alice, and Oz, and Elliot, and Vincent?”

“Cheshire cannot speak for the other three having Palaces,” said the catboy, “but everyone has a Shadow. You and Alice and Cheshire have all accepted and integrated yours, and now fight with it as your Persona. Most people’s Shadows aren’t strong enough or distorted enough to do much, though. You can find them hanging around in the Abyss, usually, but they can’t do much. Ernest and the other Palace rulers are outliers.”

“How many Palace rulers are there?” Alice asked.

“Cheshire doesn’t know. Ernest’s is the first he has stumbled across. You need to find the Palace ruler’s identity, the location, and the shape of their distortion in order to access the Palace at all.”

“That’s a lot,” said Gilbert.

“Yes, it is.”

“Doesn’t sound like it,” said Alice. “I mean, we’ve just got to steal Ernest’s heart and then he won’t be a problem anymore, right? And if we come across anyone else with a Palace, then we steal theirs too.”

“I don’t want to work with a cat!” said Gilbert. “Or even just a guy dressed up as one!”

“Then what do you think we should do?” said Alice.

“Well, talk to Elliot, first,” said Gilbert. “That cognition was really—uh. Really really bad. And we should try to deal with Ernest in the real world first, so he gets the justice he deserves instead of two teenagers and a cat acting as judge, jury, and executioner.”

“If we only stole his heart, then he wouldn’t die,” said Cheshire.

“Still. That should be our last resort,” said Gilbert. “We all live in the real world, more or less. We should try and handle this there, first.”

This plan, such as it was, did not work out perhaps as well as it could have. Alice and Gilbert were both exhausted when they left the Palace, and Alice went right to bed when they got to Unbirthday while Gilbert made up a story about helping her with her homework to a concerned Oscar and assured him that he was keeping her out of trouble. The next day at school, there was a volleyball meet that meant that there were no classes during the second half of the day, but it also meant that they had to sit in a smelly gym and watch everyone cheer as Ernest Nightray completely eviscerated his high-school aged opponents. The only things of note that happened that week were that Gilbert got the strange app on his flip phone, which should not have been able to host apps, and began using it to face his fears and discuss the Abyss with Cheshire, and Alice dreamed of the Velvet Room again, of Jury being ominous and telling Alice, basically, that she needed to make friends and fight alongside them if she wanted to be rehabilitated. With B-Rabbit’s recent ghosting, it felt more like rubbing salt into an open wound than the encouragement the Jury had probably meant it as, but as the week progressed she began to admit to herself that maybe it was okay to be friends with Gilbert. He was fun to fight with, and nice enough, and anyway Oscar Vessalius didn’t think he was a bad influence, which meant that Alice got a bit more leeway when she hung out with Gilbert.

At the end of the week, though, Elliot Nightray approached Alice as she was visiting one of the vending machines outside of school in the hopes of getting some caffeine before classes started.

“Hey,” he called. “What’s your deal?”

“I’m trying to get a soda,” Alice said.

“Not with that. What are you doing with Gilbert?”

What Alice was doing with Gilbert basically amounted to trying to get evidence that Ernest was a creep out in the real world; she thought about the cognitive Elliot, and Gilbert’s worry and insistence on not losing anyone else.

“We’re trying to find solid evidence that your brother Ernest is an abusive creep,” said Alice.

Elliot scoffed. “Yeah, that’s what I thought,” he said. “Everyone is talking about it.”

“Wow, really?” said Alice. “D’you think they’ll give us evidence, then?”

“Hell no. Nobody’s gonna believe you, and you won’t find anything,” said Elliot. “So stop fucking around with it, okay? You can do whatever you want with your life, but don’t drag my brother down with you. Gilbert’s been through enough as it is.”

“The only person going down is that pedophile creep of a volleyball coach!”

“Lower your voice!” Elliot hissed. “Do you have any idea how much trouble you could get in?! Also, there’s no proof of that, also, stay fucking away from him and if he messes with you like that let me know and I’ll get him off your back like I do for the other girls, okay? Jesus fuck. Some of us have lives, you know?”

“I kind of think everyone does,” said Alice.

“Yeah. So stay away from my brother, for everyone’s good,” said Elliot. He turned to leave, brushing past Gilbert, who had just arrived, looking exhausted and somewhat confused, though that confusion solidified into upset once Elliot was gone.

“What were you and Elliot talking about?” he asked.

Alice shrugged. “He said, like, that we weren’t going to find anything about Ernest and that I should leave you alone,” she said. “Also that if Ernest messed with me to come get Elliot and he’d deal with it.”

Gilbert frowned. “That’s…I wonder why,” he said. “Are you sure he said it was me he wanted you to stay away from and not Ernest?”

“He said I could do whatever I wanted with my own life but not to drag you down with me, ‘cause you’d already been through enough already,” Alice reported.

“Oh.” Gilbert swallowed. “That’s…oh. Well, don’t listen to that, okay? I’d like to be friends with you. And I can make my own choices. If I really wanted to wreck my life, I’d go tag along with Vince and Break poking at the mental shutdowns. —Break’s a prosecutor, Xerxes Break, and he’s in charge of prosecuting whoever’s been doing them, but he hasn’t got any leads. My brother Vincent’s been working with him lately, and neither of them are happy about it. They’ve never gotten along, and Break’s wanted to work alone ever since, um, Oz, my friend, he was Break’s intern, and he’d gotten a lead on the mental shutdowns, he thought, and was going to go look into it, and—and Break wasn’t really the most responsible boss in the world so he told him to go for it. And then Oz had a mental shutdown, either immediately after or within a couple weeks—we’re not sure. So Break’s pissed that he has to work with Vincent because of that, and Vincent said that he doesn’t want to work with someone who doesn’t want him around, and it’s a big mess. But Vincent’s the only person really capable enough to work with Break without getting killed. So. If I really wanted to get involved in something and wreck my life, I’d go to them. So you don’t need to worry about it.”

Pretty much everything that Gilbert had just said was worrisome, but it also was not Alice’s problem, so she nodded and put it out of her mind. The conversation shifted, then, to other topics—their continued failures to find proper evidence of Ernest’s crimes, and whether or not they should just crack and steal Ernest’s heart like Cheshire wanted them to. Alice was all in favor of it, but Gilbert was more unsure, since he wanted Ernest to face consequences in the real world.

This stance changed, though, at the beginning of the next week of classes, when a girl named Shiho Suzui was called into Ernest’s office at the beginning of the lunch hour and jumped off the roof of the school to her death at the end of it. As the paramedics took her body away, and teachers tried unsuccessfully to corral students back into their classrooms, Elliot Nightray called his brother Ernest a motherfucker and took off towards the faculty office, and Gilbert grabbed Alice’s arm and ran after him.

When they burst into the faculty office, Elliot was screaming at his brother about how dare he touch that girl, that he’d good as killed her, that he was a miserable excuse for a coach and a miserable excuse for a human being. Ernest looked completely bored with it all, and whenever Elliot had to pause for breath, Ernest would tell him that he was clearly misunderstanding things, saying little calm things that sounded smart and sounded a lot like Levi when he was trying to teach Alice how to gaslight people.

“Hey!” Alice shouted, pulling away from Gilbert and storming fully into the office. “What did you do to that girl?!”

Ernest Nightray turned cold eyes to face her. “Oh, the delinquent and the fake,” he said. “I see now where you’re getting all these wild ideas from, Elly. Bad influences.”

“Bad influences?!” Gilbert spluttered, hot on Alice’s heels. “You’re abusing the sports teams, and apparently you just drove a girl to suicide!”

“What a ridiculous idea,” said Ernest. “And really, hypothetically, even if it was true, what could you do about it? The girl was dead on impact, the poor child. It would be impossible to get any sort of statement from her. Even if your absurd allegations were true, there’s absolutely nothing you can do about it.”

Alice balled her hands into fists and glared.

“But as things stand,” continued Ernest, “your allegations are clearly untrue, and are having a negative impact on the other students, as evidenced by dear Elly here.”

“Oh, fuck off,” said Elliot.

“So, Alice Baskerville and Gilbert, I will be reporting the two of you at the next board meeting, and you will be expelled. Good luck finding a new school that’ll be willing to take you.”

“You don’t have the power to do that!” Gilbert protested.

“It’s my word against yours,” said Ernest. “And yours doesn’t exactly have any weight now that you’re no longer the student council president’s pet. Who would ever believe scum like you over me ?”

“Stop it, Ernest, that’s way too far—”

“Be quiet, Elly, before their poor behavior reflects too much on you,” Ernest snapped. “Now, are we done here? You’re both expelled. You’re done for; your futures are mine to take. Now get out of my sight!”

“So we’re definitely beating up his Shadow self and stealing his heart now, right?” Alice asked Gilbert once school was out for the day and they were loitering around the alleyway near the gates, both fuming.

“I mean, I’d rather him face real consequences in the real world,” said Gilbert, “but yeah. I mean, the catboy said that he wouldn’t have distorted desires anymore, so at least nobody else would get hurt.”

“Plus we can kick his ass.”

“Plus we can kick his ass,” Gilbert agreed, pulling out his phone. “Alice,you know, I…I’m really grateful that you’re sticking by me with this. It really means a lot to me.”

Alice shrugged, somewhat embarrassed. “It’s whatever,” she said. “I mean, you’ve been making a big enough deal about it and everything that I guess we can be friends.”

Gilbert beamed at her. “Alright,” he said. “Let’s ruin him!”

Gilbert pressed on his phone screen, and the world blurred over red as the school transformed into a massive, ornate castle. Like last time, Cheshire was visible making his way out of the window to greet him; unlike last time, someone quite nearby shouted, “What the fuck?!” and Alice and Gilbert rounded the corner to see that, somehow, Elliot Nightray had gotten caught up in the transportation and was now in the Abyss with them. He was staring around him in shock and no small degree of horror, and as soon as Alice and Gilbert passed into his line of sight, his eyes snapped onto them.

“Oh no,” Gilbert said weakly. “Elliot, what are you doing here?”

“Gilbert?” Elliot said, incredulous. “The hell are you wearing? And what the fuck is this place?!”

“It’s, uh, look, you really shouldn’t be here—”

“Shouldn’t be here my ass, what the shit is this place, is that the new girl why is she here too—holy shit is that a catboy?!”

“Cheshire is a cat, ” said the catboy in question, annoyed. “And how did you get here? Alice. Gilbert. Did you bring him along on purpose?”

“Obviously not, he’s Ernest’s brother,” Alice snapped.

“Hey, so’s Gilbert!”

Cheshire ignored this. “Was he nearby when you two used your ‘app’ to travel here? If it can transport multiple people, it’s highly likely that it will bring along anyone nearby.”

“Oh,” said Gilbert. “We didn’t check.”

“It’s not like we knew it’d be a danger,” Alice complained. “Plus people mostly ignore us anyway, ‘cause I’m a delinquent and Seaweed Head’s an idiot.”

“I am not a seaweed head!” Gilbert protested. “And Alice is right: we entered the Abyss in an alleyway that hardly anyone goes to, and we’re widely avoided at school, especially since everyone knows we’re getting expelled in about a month. There’s no way we could have known Elliot would have gotten caught up in the travel.”

“I actually wanted to talk to you guys about the expulsion thing, that’s why I followed you—but seriously, where the hell are we?!” Elliot demanded. “What do you mean, ‘Abyss’? And what does me being Ernest’s brother have to do with you not bringing me here on purpose?! Also, Gilbert, why the fuck did you get upset at that girl insulting your hair but not your intelligence ?”

“Oh, right,” said Gilbert. “I’m not an idiot either, Alice!”

Alice stuck her tongue out at him.

Elliot sighed. “You two are ridiculous,” he said. “Would you mind addressing my other questions, too?”

The three Persona-users glanced at each other.

“Sorry, we can’t,” said Gilbert. “You should probably go back.”

“Go back—where?!” Elliot demanded. “And how?! I don’t even know where we are !”

“If we bring him back to the entrance, do you think he’ll pop back into the real world?” Alice asked.

“The real world? The fuck do you mean, the real world?!”

Gilbert shrugged. “It’s worth a shot. It’s dangerous here, Elliot—like, really dangerous here.”

“Dangerous how. ”

“Dangerous like this place might be what causes the mental shutdowns,” said Gilbert, “and Ernest is doing something fucked up with it that he doesn’t know about in the real world.”

“It’s more like he knows but isn’t conscious of knowing,” Cheshire corrected.

“What the fuck, ” said Elliot. He paused. “Hang on, does Xerxes Break know about this? What about Vincent?”

Gilbert and Alice looked at each other, and then Gilbert shrugged. “We haven’t told,” he said. “It’s—I mean, you know how busy Vince is. And Break and I haven’t spoken in years.”

“Sorry,” Elliot said, his voice low with fury. “I must have misheard. I thought you just said that you think you discovered the place that causes the mental shutdowns and haven’t done a damn thing about it. But that must be wrong. It must be. I mean, that would just be cowardice. That would just be betrayal. Wasn’t your best friend a victim of one of the mental shutdowns? Are you just going to abandon him like that?”

“Of course not!” Gilbert shouted. “But if I tell Vince and Break then they’ll take it over and I won’t be able to find out who did it and kill them myself!”

“You mean someone’s been doing the mental shutdowns?!”

“I don’t know. Probably.” Gilbert grimaced, scuffed the toe of his boot on the ground, glanced at the castle. “I mean, me and Alice could do it to Ernest if we wanted. —We’re not going to! But here, there’s a Palace that’s basically just how Ernest sees the school and everyone in it, and inside that is his Shadow self, and if we killed it he would have a mental shutdown in the real world. We’re not going to do that, though. Cheshire told us about a way—these castles manifest when someone’s heart and desires are so distorted that they just…they do really awful things, like Ernest does, and that if you steal those distorted desires—he called it a Treasure—then because the desire to do those awful things is gone, then the person’s heart changes and they become…well, a not-horrible person. So we were going to do that to Ernest—break into his Palace and change his heart, so that he doesn’t hurt anyone anymore. He won’t face any consequences since he’ll just stop being a bad person, but…at least, you know. What happened today shouldn’t happen ever again, probably. That’s the impression I’ve gotten from talking to Cheshire, anyway.”

“Like phantom thieves,” said Elliot. “Okay. And you think there’s an evil phantom thief going around here somewhere killing people’s Shadows and causing mental shutdowns, and that’s what got Oz.”

“Maybe,” said Gilbert. “He—you know how he vanished for a few weeks before the shutdown? And it wasn’t like all the other mental shutdowns, he’s still there but just…different. And he was helping Break look into the shutdowns, before it happened. I think he found this place, and maybe the person doing the mental shutdowns. And I think they got him. Like I’m going to get them, only what I’ll do is a hundred million times worse than what happened to Oz.”

“And obviously if you tell Vincent and Prosecutor Break then they’ll stop you because that’s super incredibly illegal,” said Elliot. “Alright. Yeah. And right now you’re practicing on Ernest except you won’t be torturing him to death, or whatever it is you plan on doing to whoever got Oz.”

“Torturing them to death sounds about right,” said Gilbert.

“Ooh! Can I help?” Alice asked.

Gilbert smiled at her. “Sure, if you stay out of trouble,” he said.

“Okay,” said Elliot. “I was planning on following you guys and telling you that we should threaten to publish Ernest’s nudes if he doesn’t reverse your expulsion, but this idea is a lot better with a lot less danger of retaliation. Right. I’m not leaving this Jungian hellscape. Find me one of those dumb outfits you’re wearing—I’m coming with you.”

Even after they had explained about Personas to Elliot, and the danger he would be in accompanying them without one, he refused to budge, and in fact insisted that he would and could awaken his own Persona, if only he were given a shot. Finally he exhausted everyone’s patience and they gave in, and so the four of them slipped into the Palace and began exploring in order to map out a path to the Treasure.

“Okay,” Elliot hissed, once they were far enough inside that nobody could change their mind and kick him out, “if we’re going to be phantom thieves, we’re gonna need codenames.”

“Codenames?”

“Yeah, so that nobody finds out our identities.”

“That sounds stupid.”

“It is actually a good idea,” Cheshire said. “If the Palace ruler doesn’t know who you are, his emotions on you in the real world will not change.”

“See? The catboy gets it,” said Elliot. “Right. Code names.”

“Cheshire does not need one, as he will not be operating under his name in the real world, anyway,” said Cheshire.

“I dibs Joker,” Alice said.

“Joker?” said Gilbert. “Why?”

She grinned. “Wanna know how I got these scars?”

“Joker from Batman wasn’t a phantom thief,” Elliot argued.

“No, but he was dangerous as hell and so am I,” said Alice. “Plus, I’ve been told I’m a wild card and that’s what the joker is in a deck. And I love to deck people in the face.”

“Alright,” he said, “Joker you are. I’ll be Arsène Lupin.”

“Oh, hey, that’s my Persona’s name, too!” Alice said. “Arsene!”

“Damn!” said Elliot. “Okay, I’m not going to steal your Persona’s name, that’s rude. Hm…I’ll be the Headhunter, I think.”

“Why? Do you like to chop people’s heads off?”

“Nah,” said Elliot. “It’s kind of an inside joke. Gil’s and my brother Vincent found me making a list of all the guys I know ranked on how good head they give, and so he said—that’s not important. Basically, Headhunter is both badass and kind of funny, so that’ll be my code name.”

“I’ll use my Persona’s name,” said Gilbert. “Raven. That’s just easier to remember.”

“Furry,” said Elliot.

“What do you mean?” said Gilbert. “I’m wearing leather. Plus, ravens are feathery animals, not furry ones.”

“No, I’m calling you a furry.”

“I don’t have any fur, though,”  said Gilbert. “Seriously, look—it’s all leather. There’s no fur at all. So I can’t be…”

This argument carried them straight into an ambush. They had already gotten into a few fights—Cheshire said that, since they’d provoked Ernest earlier, he was on a higher alert and so there would be more Shadows about than usual—and this fight was nastier even than the ones they’d gotten through already. By the time it was over, one of the Shadows had kidnapped Elliot, and though the Phantom Thieves were in hot pursuit, they lost track of him all too soon.

“Damn it—I knew we should have sent him back!” said Gilbert.

“Obviously we just have to go save him now,” said Alice. “I mean, it’ll probably all be alright. Plus if he’s been kidnapped maybe we can see his reaction to Ernest’s cognition of him.”

Gilbert shuddered. “If I never saw that thing again I’d be ecstatic,” he said.

“Cheshire thinks he has an idea of where the Headhunter has been taken,” said the catboy. “He will direct you there.”

“Oh, thank goodness,” said Gilbert, pushing himself off the wall. “And then we’ll send him home immediately after. If he dies here—”

“He won’t,” said Alice. “We’ll save him. We’re phantom thieves, you know?”

“I know,” said Gilbert, but his face was still pale as they hurried through the castle after Cheshire. Soon enough, Elliot’s cursing and struggling became audible, and it wasn’t long before the three Persona-wielding phantom thieves had slipped inside, making sure to stay out of sight of both the Shadows and the captured Elliot.

Elliot was tied to a large, X-shaped sheet of brass set up in front of a large portrait of Ernest’s Shadow, struggling against his bonds and cursing at the Shadows restraining him. Before any of the thieves could move to rescue him, Shadow Ernest himself entered, with the cognitive Elliot on his heels.

“So,” he said, “this is the intruder.”

“Did we tell him about cognitive copies of people in here?” Gilbert whispered.

“I dunno,” Alice whispered back. “We told him a lot of stuff.”

“Yeah, but if we didn’t mention that specifically then he’s not going to know what that thing is and—”

“Hang on, is that a fucking shadow clone of me?!” Elliot yelped. “Hang on, is that my Persona? That’s such a wimp Persona! What the fuck! What a loser!”

Alice snickered; Gilbert clamped his hand over her mouth.

“How dare you mistake my Elly for someone like yourself,” said Shadow Ernest.

“How dare you make me look at you almost fully nude !” Elliot shouted back. “That’s fucking nasty!”

“I can do as I please here,” said Shadow Ernest. “After all, this is my castle—the world of my desires. Everything here is exactly how I want it.”

“So you want to look like a thirty year old perv who lives in his mommy’s basement and never bathes, got it,” said Elliot.

“What a lively slave you are,” said Shadow Ernest. “Are you afraid?”

“Hell no!” Elliot shouted. “Screw you, asshole!”

Shadow Ernest turned towards the cognitive Elliot; Gilbert, still covering Alice’s mouth, cringed and looked away.

“That boy’s decided to tell me off,” he said. “What do you think of that?”

“Wow, that’s totally unforgivable,” said the cognitive Elliot, its voice vapid and cutesy.

“What the fuck is that thing!” the real Elliot shouted.

“Unforgivable, hm? I agree, Elly,” said Shadow Ernest, and the real Elliot let out a rage-filled scream. “We should execute him.”

“Yeah, I would rather fucking die than have to watch another second of this farce !” Elliot yelled. “Take your best fucking shot, I dare you!”

That was it for Gilbert; he lunged out, summoning Raven as he went, and Alice and Cheshire followed, hot on his heels.

“Get the fuck away from my brother!” Gilbert shouted, brandishing his pistol at the Palace ruler.

“Oh, you trash are back again,” sighed Shadow Ernest. “Let me guess, that other intruder is with you?”

“Hell fucking yeah I am!” Elliot yelled. “Eat shit and die!”

Alice wondered at the variety of sibling relationships Elliot Nightray seemed to have. Both of his brothers whom she’d met seemed to love him immensely, though there was something twisted and rotten about Ernest’s love. He had a brother named Vincent who was a TV detective and who neither he nor Gilbert seemed to speak to very often. Elliot was a bit rude and snappish to both of them, but there was a new edge to his interactions with Ernest now, in the Abyss and in the real Ernest’s office after that girl—Shiho—had died. She wondered if that girl and Elliot had been friends. She wondered if Elliot had known Ernest was bad for a while or if he’d only just figured it out.

Shadow Ernest flicked cold eyes over at Elliot. “You know, that girl…I forget her name…but you do know it was your fault she died,” he said.

Elliot went still.

“Your idiotic attempts to keep her away from me made her far too reluctant to throw herself at me than she should have been,” he continued. “Your only role is to be my cute little yes-man, and hers should have been to throw herself at me like all girls do. If you hadn’t interfered with that, I’m sure she would still be alive today.”

“You asshole!” Elliot shouted.

One of the Shadows drew its sword; before any of the thieves could react, Shadow Ernest shot a cold glance at them and said, “Take one more step and I’ll kill him on the spot.”

The three froze, though if looks could kill both Ernest and his Shadow self would have been long dead. 

“Now,” he continued, “why don’t you three just sit back and enjoy the dismemberment?”

Shadow Ernest turned away from them in a full dismissal; Alice, Gilbert, and Cheshire desperately tried to find an opening to attack him but came up empty.

“Shit!” Elliot hissed. His eyes darted wildly around as Shadow Ernest and his entourage approached. “Damn it, damn it—is this my punishment for not protecting Shiho?”

“Yes,” said Shadow Ernest. “You should have looked like that from the start.”

“Don’t listen to him!” Gilbert shouted. 

“Yeah, we all know whose fault it really was!” Alice added.

Elliot’s jaw set. “Yeah. You’re right,” he said. “I never should have let this bastard toy with me for so long. What was I thinking?” There was a moment, and then Elliot screamed, thrashing even harder against his bonds before going limp. “I am thou, thou art I,” he breathed. “You’re right. Nothing will get done with appeasement or restraint. I hear you—Humpty Dumpty!”

A mask reminiscent of a knight’s faceplate appeared over Elliot’s face as he effortlessly yanked through his restraints, his fingers hooking on the mask that appeared out of nowhere on his face and yanking it as he screamed wordlessly until he flung it aside amidst a spray of blood and column of light. When the light faded, Elliot stood in an outfit resembling nothing so much as a fairytale knight, his Persona floating behind him—a great big head with a great big tongue that swiped forward and removed the head of the cognitive Elliot like a hot knife through butter. The other Shadow shielded Shadow Ernest as Elliot rounded on him.

“I’m not your cute fucking toy who does whatever you want,” he snapped, grabbing the blade of the Shadow’s sword. “I am my own fucking person, and I’ll do what I please, and I won’t let you get away with this shit anymore! Suzui deserved better, but you stole everything from her, you destroyed her…and now, it’s your turn. We will rob you of everything!”

“Enough of your insolence!” Shadow Ernest spat. The guards around the room began to transform, melting into oily black before reforming into monsters out of legend, and Alice gritted her teeth and set her feet and prepared for a fight. It was a good fight, too, even though Elliot clearly wasn’t used to his Persona yet and tired out quickly. The only downside was the fact that Shadow Ernest fled once it was clear that his Shadow guards were losing miserably, but since Elliot looked like he was about to pass out and Gilbert was, it seemed, a devoted older brother, nobody except Elliot complained about having to return to the real world.

Once they were back, they headed to the train station to talk things out in a place they weren’t likely to be overheard. Gilbert and Elliot got drinks from the vending machine while Alice held Cheshire (who was now in the shape of an actual cat) in her lap and did her best to bite him without getting bitten herself. They stopped this when the boys returned, both distracted by the tasty drinks they’d been brought, and Alice opened her soda with her teeth and drank all of it without stopping as Gilbert and Elliot spoke quietly just out of her earshot.

“So,” Elliot said finally, turning away from his brother and picking up Cheshire off of Alice’s lap. “If what you three chumps have told me is true, we can make Ernest have a change of heart. If we make him have a change of heart, he won’t hurt anyone else, and he might even confess to his crimes, and then justice might be done. And he won’t die, if we do this right.”

“Or he’ll have one of those mental shutdown thingies,” said Alice. “Walk in front of a truck or something.”

“Nah,” said Elliot. “We won’t let that happen. That would be going too easy on him.”

“Going easy?” Alice frowned. “But he’d be dead. Wouldn’t that be a better way of making up for what he’s done?”

“Are you kidding?” said Elliot. “That wouldn’t make up for anything at all! Sure, if it’s the only way to stop him hurting people maybe it would be an option, but it isn’t. Once someone is dead, or mentally shut down, or whatever—that’s it. They’re gone. They can’t do any more good in the world, and no matter what them being dead’s gonna hurt someone. Our sister Vanessa, our brothers Fred and Claude, Mother and Father, me. Any friends he’s made. And he’ll be remembered as a good guy, too, which fucking sucks. And none of the people enabling him will learn their lesson, either. But if he lives—and becomes a better person—he can put good into the world, which won’t erase what he’s done, obviously, but it’ll be better than him dying and none of that good ever happening. Plus the people who’ve been enabling him will realize that they can’t get away with this bullshit. Dying’s no way to atone for anything. It doesn’t make anything better, ever. It’s fucking bullshit.”

Alice started to say that she guessed that made sense, but Elliot kept going.

“And that bullshit narrative about suicide to atone for past harm? Don’t make me laugh! It’s a bullshit cop-out from writers who don’t know jack or shit about the real world, and it doesn’t make the real monsters likely to off themselves instead of hurting people—and offing yourself does hurt people too, by the way, obviously the people who care about you will be hurt when you die, or when you’re in pain, and if you try to shoulder all of that by yourself it hurts them because they love you and want to help you—”

“What does this have to do with Ernest?” Alice whispered to Gilbert.

“No clue,” Gilbert whispered back.

“—and so all that stupid trope does is it fucks up regular good people who might maybe be clinically depressed or something, but who knows, because does that pipsqueak ever go see a psychologist? No. He tries to fucking off himself instead—thinking it’s some dumb way to atone for his existing at all, which is such bullshit—that short dumbass makes me so goddamn mad—”

“Ernest isn’t short,” Gilbert said, confused.

“Obviously I wasn’t talking about Ernest!”

“Then who were you talking about?”

Elliot’s face flushed a deep crimson, and he looked for a moment furious, but then he swallowed and looked away and muttered, “Nobody, I guess. Anyway. Ernest. Change of heart. What’s the plan?”

“Easy,” said Cheshire. “We map out a path to the Treasure, and then, once we’ve secured our infiltration route, we inform the Palace’s ruler that we intend to steal it, which should cause it to manifest in its cognitive form. Then we defeat the ruler’s Shadow—but keep it alive—and then steal the Treasure and return to the real world as fast as possible.”

“Okay, but what’s the timeline on this?” said Elliot. “I’ve got college prep, and we’ve all got schoolwork, and I haven’t been able to see my crush in months since he left our school.”

“Crush?” said Gilbert.

Elliot’s face reddened again. “You wouldn’t know this guy,” he said. “He goes to another school. Cheshire cat. Timeline. ”

Cheshire huffed. “However long it takes us to find a route to the Treasure,” he said.

“Hopefully before Alice and I get literally expelled, ” said Gilbert.

“A little over two weeks, then,” Elliot said. “Great. Let’s try and get this done as quickly as possible. We should make a groupchat for it—and I’ll keep the Cheshire cat with me. I’m the best option, since Gilbert stays out all night half the time and Alice is a criminal delinquent.”

“You’re going to be keeping a cat in the house?!” Gilbert squeaked.

“Don’t worry, Seaweed Head, that fellow’s not a real cat,” Alice assured him. “He’s a guy with cat ears.”

“Cheshire is a real cat!”

“See?!”

“Gilbert, you don’t even come home half the time!” Elliot argued. “What do you care?! Plus Cheshire needs some place to stay if he wants to keep in contact with us. He can’t work a phone, he’s a cat, and he definitely can’t stay in the Abyss at all times, that’s dangerous as fuck!”

“What do you mean?” said Alice.

“Well, for one he can’t contact us from there,” said Elliot. “For two, if Shadow Ernest catches him—”

“He hasn’t caught Cheshire yet,” Cheshire complained.

“If you come live with me I’ll buy you sushi every day.”

Cheshire’s ears perked up. “That is acceptable,” he said. “Cheshire will remain with Elliot Nightray.”

Gilbert did not look happy about this, but he also seemed too frightened of the cat to argue with him, and so after a few more minutes of conversation, they all split off to go their own separate ways for the evening. Gilbert, presumably to avoid the cat as much as possible, walked Alice back to Unbirthday and then, after the afternoon rush made it clear he wouldn’t be able to hang around and chat with Oscar Vessalius, went upstairs and attempted to teach her how to clean her room.

This did not go well.  Within five minutes Gilbert had a stress headache. Within thirty, they were having a blowout fight. When he found the box into which she had shoved all the things that had been in the room before she arrived, he had a full-blown conniption and stormed out with it. In the end, within two hours, Alice had a fully clean room and a new nickname (“stupid rabbit!”), and was fuming far too much to even think that she might have lost another friend. Instead, she used her new clean desk space to video-call Levi and make him teach her how to pick locks, and by the time they’d finished that lesson Alice had a somewhat messy pair of lockpicks and a few new texts from Elliot Nightray.

edwin fan 2000
Hey, do you know why Gilbert came home crying?

edwin fan 2000
Nvm figured it out
It wasn’t your fault, don’t worry about it
By the way, did you ever read any of those Holy Knight books that were in that box? And if so, who’s your favorite character?

Alice stared at the texts for a minute. Holy Knight had been B-Rabbit’s favorite book series; they’d gotten on call a few times and he’d read the first book to her. She couldn’t really care less about it, but he’d absolutely adored the character Edgar.

duck season
part of the first one yeah but idrc abt it
ig edgar seems cool? though ngl he’s the only character whose name i remember

edwin fan 2000
FUCK YOU

duck season
yuck

That was fun. Alice wasn’t sure why Gilbert had been crying—surely the fight hadn’t been too bad? Anyway, she was certain that when you lost friends you lost them not with a bang but with a whimper and so wasn’t worried about their friendship at all—but figured that if it was her business he’d tell her tomorrow and if it wasn’t, he wouldn’t, and that would be that.

And Alice was right, too: the next morning, Gilbert was waiting at the door to the café as usual, his eyes red and shadowed as though he’d been doing a lot of crying and not a lot of sleeping. He had two packed lunches with him, for some reason, and then he gave one to Alice, which distracted her from asking him what was wrong for the majority of their trip to school. Once she had finished eating the lunch and finished telling Gilbert how great it was, he was looking a lot happier. She still asked if he was okay, and when he lied and said he was, Alice didn’t call him out on the lie, because she figured that bringing her a lunch for the walk to school more than earned him the lie.

School went on as usual, which was to say, bad but not unbearable. Afterwards, the four of them went out on the hunt for supplies for infiltrating the Palace—medicine and snacks and weapons, though none of the snacks survived the afternoon, let alone made it into the Abyss. And the next day after school, they began their Palace infiltration.

This infiltration was trickier than their previous attempts, mainly because, now that all of them had unlocked their Personas and didn’t run the risk of collapsing from exhaustion, they wanted to get it all done as quickly as possible. This didn’t mean they could get it all done in one day, of course—they still had human limits—but after five days of sneaking, fighting, and conning their way through the disgusting depths of Ernest Nightray’s subconscious, they finally reached the Treasure, kept at the top of the highest tower behind opulent (and occasionally real!) riches, enough evidence of Ernest’s predation to get him locked away in any court if only they could prove its existence in the real world, and a truly disturbing cognition of Elliot. It was here, standing in front of Ernest Nightray’s distorted Desire, that they realized their next problem: the Treasure was in no form in which it could be easily stolen. It was, in fact, a ball of light floating above the gold and jewels heaped on the floor. Cheshire batted at it, acting more cat than human despite his current shape, and nothing happened.

“What the fuck,” said Elliot.

“…Maybe…Ernest really likes…flashlights…?” Gilbert suggested, though he sounded unsure of himself even as the words left his mouth.

“You’d think there would be more flashlight stuff in the rest of the Palace then,” said Alice. 

“How do we steal a ball of light ?” Cheshire hissed.

“Maybe it’s more Jungian shit,” said Elliot, scowling. “Like, Ernest hasn’t had any reason to do the kind of self-reflection to have a cognition of whatever the fuck his distorted desire is, and so we’ve got to drag it out of him, or something. Like how the reason we have these sick outfits and shit is that he perceives us as enemies, and the reason we have guns that shoot is that people expect them to.”

“No, mine has real bullets,” said Gilbert. “I got it from Break a few years back. But I never seem to leave here with less than I came with…”

“Cool!” said Alice.

“I hate that,” said Elliot.

Cheshire hissed. “So we’re going to have to inform the Palace ruler of our intent to steal his desires,” he said. “Great.”

“Like real Phantom Thieves!” Elliot said, almost jumping with excitement. “We can send a calling card—I’ll write it—post it everywhere, drum up attention, and then steal his desires right afterwards. It’ll be fucking awesome.”

“How long will it take?” Gilbert asked, frowning. “Joker’s and my expulsion—”

“Definitely before that, don’t worry,” said Elliot. “I was thinking I’d do something this weekend. It’ll keep the heat off of us and it should get everyone’s attention come class on Monday.”

Gilbert frowned. “Won’t you be suspected for having had access to the school after hours?” he said.

“Nah, I don’t actually, I just know where Vanessa keeps all her copies of Ernest’s keys,” said Elliot. “The only students who’ve got keys are the student council president, and also Ada Vessalius who’s supposed to be the only person allowed on the roof—”

“I got our roof keys from her,” said Gilbert. “She’s really nice, actually.”

“Wasn’t gonna say anything about her, it would be deeply fucking weird of me with all the shit that’s gone down with the Vessalius family over the past couple years,” said Elliot.

“Vessalius—like Mr. Oscar?” Alice asked.

Elliot and Gilbert both looked away, uncomfortable.

“Yeah,” said Gilbert. “She’s his niece. She’s a couple grades above ours in school…I’ve known her since I was little. She won’t rat out on us using the roof…I think she’s glad that I’m talking to new people again.”

“Yeah, well, who isn’t,” Elliot muttered. “I’ll…do what I can to make sure she isn’t suspected, then. I guess.”

The relief on Gilbert’s face could have revived flowers.

“Cool,” said Alice. “You can do that this weekend and I’ll get Raven to buy me a real gun.”

“I am not doing that,” said Gilbert.

“But Raven it’s not fair that you have a real gun and I don’t!”

“You’re on probation, stupid rabbit!”

“That doesn’t mean I can’t have guns, stupid Seaweed Head!”

“That is literally what it means!”

“Keep your voices down!” said Elliot. “What if you attract a Shadow, huh?”

So the argument was tabled until they got back to the real world, and Alice spent the weekend  pestering Gilbert for a real gun, to no avail. That Monday, when they got to school—on time, because Gilbert insisted that, even though they were probably going to be expelled soon enough, it was important not to be late—they arrived to find the school in cacophony. Red calling cards were pasted on every available surface, and some had even been painted directly on the walls, to the teachers’ and administrators’ horror. It took some doing to find space to read the cards, the walls were all so crowded with clamouring students, but finally Gilbert was able to wrest one from the wall and he and Alice hurried into the library to read it aloud.

“To Ernest Nightray, utter bastard of lust,” Gilbert read, “We know how shitty you are, and how you force your distorted desires onto students who can’t fight back. Because of this, we will steal those desires and make you confess your sins. By tomorrow, this rotten school will be down one warped bastard, and justice will have been served. Yours truly, the Phantom Thieves of Hearts.”

“That’s dramatic,” said Alice.

“You are not one to talk, stupid rabbit, you just spent two days alternately begging for a gun and crying when I said no,” said Gilbert.

“I meant like it’s cool that it’s so dramatic,” she said. “Your brother’s a bitch.”

Gilbert snorted. “You’re right about that,” he said, tossing the calling card into the trash can. “Come on, let’s go to class. Sooner the school day starts, sooner it’s done.”

This was not the case. The day felt like it was dragging on and on, and everyone was buzzing about the calling card. Alice was fairly certain that Gilbert’s brother Ernest believed the two of them responsible for the card, but as there was absolutely no way either of them could have gotten it up they didn’t get in any trouble, despite Ernest’s best efforts. Gilbert even told her over lunch that Oscar Vessalius had been called, and had informed the school that she’d been at Unbirthday all weekend and that he had security camera evidence to back it up.

After lunch, classes continued dragging on. Elliot, seated in front of Alice, had smuggled Cheshire into school and was hiding him in his desk, which was entertaining enough, but the cat was not in Alice’s desk which meant that, most of the time, there was no Cheshire-given entertainment for her. Finally, though, the school day ended and the three of them gathered in the alleyway in front of the school.

“Alright,” said Elliot. “Let’s steal my brother’s stupid fucking desires!”

It was easy work to make it through the Palace. The entire castle was on high alert, but the route the four of them had so painstakingly mapped out kept them from tripping any alarms or drawing the attention of any Shadows, and soon they were standing in the Treasure room again, staring at a large, opulent crown floating where the ball of light had been only a few days earlier.

“It worked!” Cheshire grinned at all of them with sharp teeth, and Gilbert cringed back.

“Great,” said Elliot. “Let’s grab it and get out of here before the calling card wears off and it loses its shape.”

“How?” said Gilbert. “It’s massive. ”

“I guess we all carry it together?” Alice suggested.

“And if a Shadow shows up?”

“Uh…brain it with the Treasure?”

After a few more moments of discussion, it was agreed upon that they didn’t really have any better plans, and so the four of them hoisted up the massive crown—despite its floating in the air, it was still heavy as hell once they’d gotten their grip on it—and begin slowly carrying it out of the room. This went well for all of three minutes—and then they heard the cognition of Elliot cheering for Shadow Ernest, and a volleyball flew through the air and smashed the massive crown out of their hands.

“God-mother-fucking-dammit!” Elliot screeched as they watched the crown arc through the air, shrink, and land perfectly in Shadow Ernest’s hand.

“Did you peasants really think I’d let anyone take this?” the Shadow mocked as the cognitive Elliot threw his arms around Shadow Ernest’s neck and cheered. The real Elliot mimed vomiting in the space between them where the Treasure used to be. “This crown proves that I’m the king of this castle. It’s the core of this world!”

“Eat my dick!” Alice yelled up at him. “We’re stealing that thing and taking you down, you asshole!”

“I cannot believe that that is how he sees me,” Elliot muttered.

“You were waiting here for us, weren’t you?” said Cheshire.

“I only made it easy to track you down,” mocked the Shadow. “And now, I’ll dispose of you myself!”

“That’s our line, you rapist fuck!” Alice shouted up at him.

“Rapist?” said Shadow Ernest. “That’s just a misunderstanding.”

“Misunder—secretly sexually assaulting the students in your care, that’s a misunderstanding ?!” Elliot yelled. “What the fuck is wrong with you?!”

“I wasn’t the one who kept it a secret,” said Shadow Ernest. “What do I have to be ashamed of? No, it was everyone else who wanted it secret—the adults who wanted to share in my accomplishments, the students who wanted my training to become winners…they willingly shield me from any consequences so that we all can profit from it. The real problem is those imbeciles who don’t understand that—like you and that girl who killed herself!”

“The only idiots here are the people who don’t see how you’re the problem!” Elliot shouted. “But no matter what kind of fool someone might be, they don’t need your permission to live their lives!”

“Drop that attitude, you mediocre peasant,” said Ernest. “There’s nothing wrong with using my gifts for my gain. I’m a cut above all other humans—I deserve the best in everything, whatever I want, whenever I want it!”

“Bullshit!” shouted Elliot. “You’re just a demon pervert obsessed with his own distorted desires!”

“You’re right,” said Ernest, which shocked Elliot enough to keep him from responding. “I’m not like you peasants. I’m the demon who rules this world, and you four are going to burn in hell !”

Over their last several trips to the Palace, Alice had seen countless Shadows warp from their Palace roles to their true grotesque forms. Still, though, it came as a shock to watch the Shadow of Ernest Nightray begin to melt and bubble, shifting from a grown man in the most embarrassing outfit humanly possible to a massive, horned, purple version of himself, arms and legs too spindly to support his hugely muscled torso, with a light blue tongue a mile wide swiping all over the room. The Shadow now wore the crown, infuriatingly, and held a wine glass in one hand large enough to drown in.

Gilbert shrieked and shot the tongue, Raven unfurling behind him. Alice, Elliot, and Cheshire summoned their Personas as well, lunging into a battle that was somehow harder than any they’d fought previously. And like Shadows often came in groups, the Shadow Ernest, too, had cognitions fighting for him—cognitions that turned out to be strong Shadows in their own right, because fuck their lives, basically. Worst of all, Shadow Ernest never shut up. Throughout the battle, he kept up a constant vile stream of abuse, claiming that he was the backbone of the school, that they were the only people who disliked him, endlessly spewing cruelty towards Gilbert and Elliot that occasionally even got them to falter in battle. Eventually, Alice thought, fuck it, we’re not here to kill his Shadow, we’re here for the Treasure, and booked it away from the fight, scrambling up the staircase and towards the upper landing that came near enough to the crown that Alice thought she might be able to snatch it and end the fight properly. After all, she was a thief—they all were. Did they really need to fight?

It seemed that her timing was good—as Alice raced along the landing, making sure to keep out of sight, she heard the Shadow shrieking about how he’d run out of meat shields, which hopefully (she thought) would make it easier for the others to land hits on him while she got to the Treasure. She didn’t have the time to pay attention to the ongoing battle, though—instead, Alice lept onto the banister and hurled herself at the chandelier about the Shadow, kicking off the crown as she went before landing on him and stabbing him as hard as she could with her mother’s knife. Shadow Ernest screamed, and thrashed, and threw Alice across the room so that she landed at the feet of her fellow thieves—but she’d gotten the crown off his head. They could (almost certainly) escape with the Treasure. Shadow Ernest screamed in horror, and Gilbert took the opportunity to shoot a wave of fire at him as he was distracted. Alice followed suit with Arsene, and Elliot and Cheshire did the same, and within moments the Shadow was lying broken—but still breathing—in front of them. He shrunk back to his previous form in a matter of seconds, lunging for the crown and then bolting towards the balcony, where he stopped short.

“What’s the matter?” Elliot called, the mockery in his voice a faint imitation of that of his older brother’s Shadow. “Not running away?”

“It’s always been like this,” Shadow Ernest hissed. “All these goddamn hyenas forcing their expectations on me! I’m doing all this for them. What’s so wrong with taking a reward for it?!”

“That’s just an excuse!” Gilbert shouted. “Plenty of people have massive expectations put on them, and they don’t become rapists!”

“What do you know?” Shadow Ernest shot back. “You’re completely worthless—nobody has any expectations for you. You were just that former student council president’s hanger-on, and now you aren’t even that.”

“And Oz had more expectations on him than you could ever dream of!” Gilbert screamed, “And he carried them—and he fulfilled them—perfectly! And he never hurt anybody ! You have no excuse for what you did!”

Alice cracked her knuckles. “He won’t make excuses for long,” she said. “We’ll take care of that distorted heart of his.”

Elliot stalked forward; the rest of them followed. Shadow Ernest remained on the balcony, staring down, seemingly paralyzed.

“Are you scared?” said Elliot, beginning to stalk towards him, Humpty Dumpty unfurled over his shoulder. “Right now, you’re seeing the same view Suzui did. I’m sure she was scared too—except she had no choice but to jump—because of you. What will you do? Will you jump? Or would you rather die here?”

“Headhunter, we already agreed that we aren’t killing him—” 

“He’s the one of us who’s closest to Ernest,” said Gilbert. “It’s his call.”

“Wait, please!” shouted the Shadow. “I beg of you—don’t kill me! Please forgive me!”

“I bet that’s what everyone you hurt said to you, too,” Elliot hissed. “But you…you took everything from them! You’re a shitty brother and a worse person, and I’m not the one who can forgive you for anything!”

Purple circles lashed out from Humpty Dumpty’s open mouth and hit the wall above Shadow Ernest’s head. The Shadow stared at it, and the back at Elliot.

“Fine,” he said, tossing the crown toward their feet. “I admit defeat. You want this? Take it. But it won’t solve anything. Everyone else will still be there, as they’ve always been. You can kill me—it’s your right as victor. Do that, and the ‘me’ in reality will be gone too.”

“And if that happens, you can never admit to or atone for your crimes,” Elliot hissed, scooping up the crown. “No way in hell. I’ll see justice done.”

He turned away from the kneeling Shadow, who cried out— “I’ve lost. What can I do now?”

Alice thought about Elliot’s speech, on the day they’d decided to steal Ernest’s distorted desires instead of killing him. “You stay alive, and you make up for what you’ve done,” she said. “You do better things in the future. You never hurt anyone else again. Also? Stay the fuck away from us. Not our monkey, not our circus—not anymore.”

“Alright,” said the Shadow, and Alice blinked, surprised that it had worked. “I’ll go now, then, and return to my real self. I’ll make sure that I—”

The Shadow dissolved into golden light and was gone.

“And good fucking riddance,” Elliot muttered, still fuming. There wasn’t time for much other discussion, though, because with the Shadow’s disappearance the ground began to shake, and then pieces of the ceiling began to fall.

“Cheshire! Does the Palace itself disappear with the Shadow?!” Gilbert shouted.

“Cheshire told you the Treasure was the core of this world!” the catboy shouted back. “It stands to reason that with the Treasure stolen the world won’t hold up—”

“Then we need to get out of here!” Alice yelled, grabbing Gilbert’s arm. “Come on—if we die here—”

“Right! Let’s go!” Elliot grabbed Cheshire as he spoke, and the four of them bolted through the now-empty and shattering halls of the Palace. As they ran, they could feel the cognition fading—between one breath and the next, Cheshire transformed from catboy to cat and lept down the hall with inhuman speed, and Alice could almost feel the jacket and tights of her school uniform replacing her coat and boots. At least that skirt was easier to run in than her leather one—but that was a cold comfort when one thought about their bodies turning up crushed under cognitive stones.

They made it out, though—one moment they were sprinting through the collapsing castle, and the next they were all panting in the alleyway, back in the real world once again. The crown was gone, replaced with an Olympic medal on a ribbon, but none of them paid it any mind. Gilbert dropped to the ground and leaned against the wall, gasping like a fish; Elliot leaned against the wall beside him and pulled out his phone, tapping through it.

“Nothing from Ernest,” he reported. “You’d think something would have happened, since we stole his heart…”

“We only just got out of the Abyss,” Alice pointed out. “Maybe it’ll take some time.”

“Hopefully not so much time that you guys get expelled before his heart changes,” Elliot muttered.

“There’s no way to control that now,” said Gilbert. “Let’s just…go to school and live like normal. It’s out of our hands…and anyway, Alice really needs to catch up on her homework.”

“I do not!” said Alice. “Besides, I’m getting expelled anyway, what does it matter if I do my homework or not?”

“You still need to learn!” said Gilbert. “You agree with me, right, Elliot?”

“Yeah,” said Elliot. “I mean, maybe not tonight, we’re all wiped, but yeah, homework’s still important.”

No amount of complaints from Alice changed this; it was hard to pay attention to what was going on with Ernest Nightray, even, with all the tutoring and homework that Gilbert and Elliot put her through. This was, of course, also affected by the fact that Ernest had seemed to have vanished from the school overnight—the official story was that he was ill, but people were still whispering about the calling cards, about his heart having been stolen by phantom thieves.

Finally, on the day of the meeting where Alice and Gilbert would have been expelled, something happened. Alice had barely noticed the date, so concerned with getting out of homework was she, but Gilbert and Elliot were on edge all morning, and then, after lunch, all of the students were called down to an assembly instead of going to their usual classes. The beginning of the assembly was concerned with the girl who had killed herself, but before the principal could get much further in giving some canned speech about the importance of life, Ernest Nightray stepped into the gymnasium, shoulders slumped and eyes downcast. Everyone stared as he made his silent and unstoppable way to the stage in the front.

“I have been reborn,” he announced to everyone once he was there, and Elliot cringed and buried his face in his hands.

“If this shithead has found religion I swear to fucking God—”

“That is why I will confess everything to you all.” He took a breath. “I have repeatedly done things that were…unbecoming of a teacher. Verbally abusing students, physically abusing my team, and…sexually harassing and assaulting female students, and even my own brother. I am the reason Shiho Suzui killed herself. I thought of this school as my own castle, where I could do whatever I pleased. There are even students whom I have sentenced to expulsion simply because I didn’t like them. I will, of course, rescind those.”

“Ohh, thank God,” said Gilbert, his entire body relaxing with relief.

“I am truly sorry for putting innocent children through such horrible things. I am an arrogant, shallow, manipulative, and shameful person.”

“Yeah, no fucking shit!” Elliot shouted, and Ernest flinched.

“I will take responsibility and kill myself for it,” he finished.

Elliot exploded. “No you fucking will not, you fucking coward!” he yelled. “You’re going the fuck to jail! Face the consequences of your actions for once in your life!”

“Please don’t draw attention to us…” Gilbert moaned. It was too late, though; the room had taken its cue from Elliot and now everyone was freaking out. The principal tried to get Ernest off the stage, to regain control of the situation, but it was too late. Only after the police had shown up and escorted the former volleyball coach away did things begin to calm down, and the teachers managed to successfully usher the still-shocked students away to their respective classrooms.

“I can’t believe it,” Gilbert said on the roof after school. “His heart really did change…”

“You live in the same house as him, how did you not notice earlier?”

“Ernest’s got his own apartment,” said Elliot. “Or at least—he did. And Gilbert’s out all the time, anyway. This is the first time either of us’ve seen him since—you know. In the Palace.”

Alice nodded.

“We’re lucky this went as well as it did,” said Gilbert. “Our first time—and he didn’t even have a mental shutdown—”

“Yeah, ‘cause we didn’t kill him after kicking his ass and stealing his heart,” said Alice. “Looks like it’s pretty easy to get people without causing a mental shutdown. Just kick their ass, steal their heart, and get them to admit they were wrong. Easy peasy!”

So whoever or whatever’s doing it, is doing it on purpose, hung in the air between them, unspoken. Elliot batted it away.

“That’s good to keep in mind for our future targets,” he said. “Still, though, I agree with Gilbert. “We did great. We should celebrate our success with a party or something.”

“Let’s go out to eat!” Alice said. “Somewhere with plenty of meat. And no studying!”

Gilbert laughed. “That sounds good to me,” he said. 

Elliot nodded. “I’ll see about getting us reservations somewhere this weekend,” he said.

“And we can pay for it by pawning off the Treasure we got,” said Alice. “That medal was solid gold, right?”

“Gilbert and I are Nightrays, we can pay for it,” said Elliot.

“But it is a good idea to get rid of the medal,” said Cheshire. “If anyone saw it, they might grow suspicious. And do you not want to use Ernest Nightray’s Treasure to celebrate his downfall?”

“Tempting,” said Elliot. He frowned a little, tapping his fingers against his lips. “We should wait, though,” he said finally. “It’s a bit risky to sell Ernest’s medal now, when he’s attracting so much attention to himself. We can pawn it later—donate the money in Suzui’s remembrance, or something. Do something to make sure this doesn’t happen again. For now, I think we’ve got something more important to worry about, anyway.”

“The party,” Alice agreed.

“Our next target,” Gilbert said at the same time.

“Thank you, Gilbert,” said Elliot. “Yeah. I mean, Ernest’s not the only person out there who does…shitty things. If we have this power to change things—to make people change for the better—shouldn’t we use it? Isn’t that the honorable thing to do?”

“Yeah,” said Alice. “But how do we find them? You don’t usually run into shitheads of that caliber on the street. I mean, I did once and I punched him, and that’s how I got on probation in the first place. But that was, like, just one shithead in my entire life.”

“I guess we’ll wait and see if we can find any Palaces?” said Gilbert. “And maybe look into whoever Alice punched.”

“Can’t,” said Alice. “He was an insignificant asshole. I already forgot his name.”

Gilbert sighed. “Well, try to remember?” he said. “And we can look for more Palaces, too. Since—the cat—said that Palaces form around distorted desires. So we can probably assume that if someone has a Palace, they’re a bad person, right?”

“Probably,” said Elliot. “So we just look for Palaces then? Is that it?”

“I guess?” said Gilbert. “Maybe if we learn more about the Abyss, it’ll come easier.”

“Maybe if we go to a fancy restaurant, we’ll run into some rich asshole there,” Alice suggested.

Gilbert sighed.

“Speaking as a member of the rich…I guess you’re not wrong,” said Elliot. “Alright. I guess the plan is we go out to eat and play it by ear?”

“Hear, hear!” Alice cheered.

So it was that, a few days later, they found themselves all inside a fancy all-you-can-eat buffet. Alice got herself a veritable mountain of meat that she was only very unwillingly sharing with Cheshire, while Elliot and Gilbert were far more moderate in their consumption. While they ate, they chatted about school, about the atmosphere around them, and then, finally, about the Phantom Thieves.

“Somebody’s set up a fansite for us,” Elliot reported, holding up his phone. “I got sent the link in one of the Holy Knight discord servers I’m in. The Phan-Site, they’re calling it.”

“Another student at Pandora?” Gilbert asked.

“I mean, probably,” said Elliot. “Though the account that sent the link—I don’t know. It might not be.”

Gilbert tilted his head. “What do you mean?”

Elliot stared at the screen of his phone; Alice craned her head and caught a glimpse of the username that had sent the link: blackrabbit_vol1 . “It’s nothing,” he said, turning off the screen. “Just—probably a coincidence. It’s cool as hell, though.”

“Yeah,” said Gilbert. “I’m glad people like us.”

Elliot’s phone lit up with a notification— blackrabbit_vol1 , in the general chat of the Holy Knight discord server. I love the Phantom Thieves, it read, and Elliot smirked and showed it off around the table.

“Not just like,” he said. “People love us. And no way in hell are we stopping now that we’ve finally gotten started.”