Chapter Text
I.
She was there before she knew it.
Blinking, she twisted around, trying to find out where she was, why she was there in that moment. She saw movement and swiveled toward it.
Back and forth. Back and forth. The man was pacing, muttering things under his breath, rubbing his hands on his pants and pacing, back and forth and back and forth. Finally, he spun around to face her.
“Answer to all my problems. Finally.” He strutted over to her. “Your name — Helena. Hel-ee-na, like Sabrina, but more creative. You got that? You got all that?”
“Um…yeah.” She watched him rub his neck, rub his legs again, and pace back over to the window.
Finally, she got awareness of where she was. They were in an observatory-like room, with all the lights almost down in a purplish hue. The room was massive, but there was nothing in it. Just a giant circular room with a massive window overlooking…
She peeked over it and shivered. Darkness stretched out, towards…stars. Galaxies. Nebulas, all there and collected, as if this man were the god of the Universe.
A hand weighed down her shoulder, and she turned her head. The man was still there. His hand was unusually heavy, but what really caught her attention were his eyes — gray and dark, with shadows within them. She got a sensation that she was falling in through to the edge of the universe.
“Who…are you?…”
“I’m your creator,” he said, his hand slipping off her shoulder. “Yes.” He ruffled his hair. “Yes, you’re going to solve everything.”
“What do you mean?” she said quietly.
“I mean that there’s new spirits. Evil spirits, unauthorized spirits being made.” He leaned over the observatory gate, and Helena followed his gaze, looking out onto the shimmering blanket of existence.
“There,” he said, pointing at a dot. All of the sudden, Helena felt this horrible whoosh as if she’d been sucked down a vacuum. Her hair was pulled forward, and when she finally got all of it out of her eyes, she saw a beautiful orb, sitting, bright and green and blue.
“That’s a world,” he said under his breath. “Earth.”
It was beautiful, Helena thought. The clouds moved very, very slightly, almost like a light-up decoration in a dark bedroom. Something about it felt ethereal yet warm.
“And you’re going to destroy it.”
She turned her gaze. “Huh?”
“The spirits. The…life.” He waved his hands in an exaggerated Ta-Da! motion. “The things pretending to be like us. You’ll know when you see them. They practically broke some sort of copyright law.”
She stared at the orb, imagining it turning red and black and dead.
“It seems all beautiful, all aaa~~ but no. No!” He scowled. “I hate them. Uncontrolled, vicious little insects pretending to be intelligent. No!”
He turned to her. “You must kill them all. All of them.”
“Oh…okay,” Helena mumbled.
He went back to pacing, back and forth, back and forth, abruptly stopping. “I’m going to send you there now.”
“Now?—oh—okay.” She rubbed her hands together. She felt a kind of anxious buzzing in her chest looking at this man.
“Goodbye.” The man snapped his fingers, and all of the sudden, she was falling.