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“I don’t know much about my past anymore. But someone sent me here, so I’m wondering if you are the next step.”
Hannah looked at him. Lex looked at him. Ketch scanned the floor, finding worn floorboards that creaked as he stepped.
“Hannah was saying something about a seer, or something. Black hair, kinda looks like she’s in a band. Apparently she’s a friend of yours.”
Her eyes narrowed.
“A fling, maybe.”
Ketch shook his head, scanning the room for exits, and finding none.This was dangerous. This should have been neutral ground. But they seemed just as on edge, so he knew they probably weren’t malicious.
In fact, this had been their idea to meet here, in the storage unit that Lex rented at a favor from a richer friend in a Santa Barbara lot.
“She’d never let me,” said Ketch, “and I wouldn’t want to risk her any more than she volunteers-I don’t doubt people assume all sorts of things about us.”
He sighed.
“I don’t have much control over what I do anymore. Ghostrider is a responsibility, and an honor, but I wouldn’t have chosen the sacrifices. Doubt anyone in the lineup would have, if they knew.”
The man frowned, keeping steady against the chair.
“Well, that’s not true, I’m sure they would have come around on it-there’s a certain way of being that Ghostrider needs to exist within. Most were chosen for a reason, and that reason keeps the flame alive. That righteous vengeance.”
He clicked his tongue.
“Anyway, reason. Now. Tell me something I should probably already know but currently have no way of accessing.”
Hannah frowned, running to her sister’s side and adjusting her headphones squarely on her head as she did so. The industrial lights flickered and then dimmed, leaving the room in a soothing, neutral, soft light
“Merge, double, bubble,” she said, as she took hold of her sister’s hand.
His eyes narrowed.
“Hmmm.”
Lex narrowed her eyes in response, mirroring his almost exactly, like a ‘two could play at that game.’
“Has anyone ever told you you look like actor Ryan Gosling?”
Ketch shook his head.
“They’re usually focused on more important things, but I have heard that a few times.”
Lex laughed. Hannah didn’t stop hiding behind her but it was clear that it wasn’t because Ketch was evil or anything, just that he was visually striking which came with an intimidation factor.
“What to do about the apocalypse problem, I suppose you’re going to ask.”
Ketch nodded.
“It’s near impossible to live in this stupid apocalypse. But we didn’t die. And Hannah and I are where we always deserved to be. What else is new?
The start of this mess was where we used to-live, yeah where we used to, I wouldn’t say live, actually. We survived. Coped.
And Hannah’s imaginary friend just went radio silent after she helped us out during the whole thing. I didn’t understand exactly why. Not sure if Hannah does, either.
There’s something we’re missing, and I would like to take it from her hands myself, but I’ve heard news of some sorta lock? Corruption? Shift in the, eh, cosmic balance or somethin.’ According to Hannah, her imaginary goddess up and left to a place called The Void Beyond the Black and White. Unclear about whether that was her idea or not; can’t tell ya.
But I trust the friend who referred you to be a good source as to why you might understand what her plan is now if she hasn’t gone completely nutso.”
Ketch raised an eyebrow.
“And why would you think that?”
Lex scoffed, brushing the hair out of her face.
“What, the nutso thing? Why else would she just up and leave? If she felt she would only be a hindrance if she showed up, I get the feeling she wouldn’t show up at all. Simple equation.”
A quick awkward chuckle from Lex ensued as she snapped back into ‘talking mode.’”
“I’ve also heard rumors from Richie Lipschitz of all people that she’s revealed herself to him and asked him for anime recommendations of all things. Anime recommendations. From Richie Lipschitz. Of course he might be making it up. He would. But who would make up that kinda thing?
If he’s telling the truth, he’d be on the very short list of men who got to interact with her, mostly guys who work for the government or are funded by the government, or benefit tremendously from the-it’s not a conspiracy because I have met these men, but they don’t know for long, like at all. She makes absolutely sure of it. Might be her, might be those ‘brothers’ of hers, but her ‘friends,’ ‘associates’ more like, always end up lost somewhere, invisible, fingerprints ripped off them like the guys from freakin’ Men in Black.
But if she wants to have a continuous source of anime recommendations, psh, she can’t pull any time bs with ‘special boi’ Richie, now can she?”
Ketch sighed.
“I don’t know. It’s your right to rant about it but I feel like you’re-“
“What right do you have,” said Lex, “to complain about how I deal with the imaginary friend that is a problem to my sister.”
Hannah finally poked her head out from behind Lex. She held her head high and spoke, biting and pure.
“She is not a problem, Lex.”
————-
Void 4 beyond the Black and White was usually not home to gods like Webby, but her brothers needed her out of the way. Even if she wanted to, there was a special kind of hell where she knew she was being watched, and in fact had a fixation with creating Eyes, but was alone, ultimately. It brought her twisted comfort, creating them.
She didn’t go into the void much before her ‘move,’ but now she was here it was a lot less lawless than she thought it was. There was a king (or a prince? or something?) who ruled over the vast nothingness, and there was no phone signal at all and the one you could get was shaky, but Comcast worked fine. The old networks seemed to have a monopoly over the void.
She was never someone to be a bad influence, but she found herself actually wanting alcohol for the first time in her long life since she had been a reckless teenager. Maybe it was a midlife crisis or something, but she knew that her usual associates would hate her for drowning her sorrows in such a way, however they wouldn’t hate her for taking the easy choice to forget. She wasn’t like Thor, or even Crowley; she had alcohol tolerances.
Luckily WiFi seemed to work ok, although it was shaky, but she was able to even it just enough. She wouldn’t be able to invite her usual crowd, but maybe she could get someone who understood how to watch such things. But she wasn’t presentable so she had to work her way up to it.
Loading up a game on her PC that she was almost positive was logging her data, she found herself clicking through the first few title cards. And soon she found herself lost in the game of Undertale.
She was compelled by the choices, and didn’t choose the more destructive, but was amazed that that had been an option. Interactivity to that level was something exciting to her.
Taking a break to microwave some pasta, she got back into playing.
It seemed like forever but time was immaterial enough that it didn’t matter, after she had played both newly released chapters of Deltarune as well and realized that she needed more.
And that’s when she discovered YouTube gaming playthroughs. And although she didn’t need sleep, she found herself falling asleep anyway to Markiplier’s playthrough (where she learned of the pivot he had made from completing a genocide run), and stayed that way on the unusually comfortable couch
—————-
until she heard a knock on the door.
“I heard you were moving in!,” said a friendly voice from the other side, “I brought pie, if you have any tea or coffee to go with!
Kinda trashed my coffee maker, but that doesn’t mean I’m not still energetic-guess I’m just an extrovert. Wanted to welcome you! Not many newbies to the Void; it’s always so exciting to meet new people!”
Webby yawned. She felt at the blade in her pocket.
“Sure! What kind of pie?”
“Blueberry!,” said the voice, “I was going to get cherry, but they were out.”
He sounded a bit sad at that for a second, but quickly recovered.
“But blueberry is just as good! Try to make sure it’s actually blueberry when you buy it, though. Some berries like to masquerade as blueberries and they are very temperamental.”
She opened the door and almost startled. It seemed like he was almost as startled as she was. It was for different reasons.
“Do you know my brother?”
He looked at her strangely.
“Your-who?”
Something flashed in his front two eyes and he replied in recognition.
“Oh, maybe you mean Billy? I think Billy mentioned you once. Wasn’t keeping track. We don’t talk.”
She paused for a second, looking back into her flat and gesturing him in.
“No, I- forget it. It’s stupid. Small minded.”
He nodded.
“Probably best not to, then. Who knows anyone’s motives here. The small minded ones usually go first.”
“…right.”
————
The mom to two of the people she was to protect, Pamela, had been drunk, absentminded, and rather terrible when she shouldn’t be, to Hannah and Lex. Webby wanted the last thing for her influence to be to be more of that, to anyone, really, so as soon as she heard the knock she had put the bottle she was drinking from on the back shelf to match the others.
She looked at it on the wall as she heated up the water and ground up the coffee beans.
“You said you wanted black coffee, right?”
The man grinned.
“Yep, that is correct! And you like Earl Grey. Going to have to remember that if you manage to earn our trust and become a friend.”
“And how hard is that?,” asked Webby, “I have been craving any sort of connection at all in this place since I got here. Unfortunately not familial.”
The man sat down at the small modest coffee table adjacent to the kitchen after cutting the pie into segments. Webby sat across from him, waiting for the whistle.
“Ah, I get that, unfortunately. You can call me Argos.”
Once they had their hot beverages, they started to dig into the pie.
“You said something about a ‘we?’ asked Webby, taking a long sip of her Earl Grey after pouring it from her teapot.
“Yeah. My beau, Mr. Plant, and I.”
He gained a crazed and lovesick look in his eyes as he looked at someone who wasn’t in the room but that he could see with perfect clarity.
“I’d do anything for him.”
He snapped out of it, scanning the kitchen for whipped cream, and pulling the metal bottle off the shelf before shaking it violently.
“You’ve been drinking,” he said, noticing the alcohol. “responsibly, I hope?”
He aimed the whipped cream canister at his pie and it came out in a perfect, commercial-quality swirl.
“I should hope so myself,” said Webby, “but I wasn’t expecting anyone with a housewarming gift.”
This time she took the canister and somehow made a smile with it.
“Ah, I should’ve done that!”
Argos scanned the table, seeing a pile of books, most seeming either sketchbooks or decorative, but one that was notably a novel.
“Bit irresponsible to keep books on that if you’re eating here.”
Webby laughed.
“I just finished it. I was going to move it. I hope I can find the others in that series here (not sure if they got packed with the rest,) but honestly it’s not just that one I have strewn around somewhere. I was trading off, between that one and IT. I don’t know, seemed like something I could do to keep busy.”
Argos smiled.
“Interesting choices. IT and The Bad Beginning. I don’t think I’ve read either. I like cozier novels, but I’ve been really into mystery recently (I like to learn how and why the murderer did it. It’s the best part!)”
Webby took a bite of her pie.
“That is good. Where did you get it?”
Argos smiled again, blinking as he adjusted in his chair.
“I found a plant friendly pie shop in Void 7. It’s rare to find someone I actually want to support here. Affordable and fair, even! It’ll probably be taken over within the week. Their grandma just passed.”
Webby paused in her devouring of the pie, to pay a short respect as was due.
“That’s horrible. Taking a break, then?”
Argos shook his head, totally serious.
“No, they might start hearing things. And then the Void’ll take them. It’s happened before. It knows where to look.”
He took another bite of pie, taking a napkin and wiping his face.
“Who knows what you’ll see, but it will never be who it actually is. It wants you to join it. Don’t. It’s stupid. It never works.”
He brightened.
“Be careful!”
Argos stared at the right side of the still-packed room.
“What are you putting there?”
She shook her head.
“I don’t know yet. But I think it’s going to be something big. And maybe something to help me channel through it to the outside.”
————-
It had been a few months and Webby felt, ultimately, wrecked. It was a deep depression, one she had indeed found a way to breach through to contact Lex and Hannah to help them with a futile rescue, but one she couldn’t escape at all fully.
Her more regular companion these days was someone else, someone who understood her more nerdy hyperfixations. Through him she could feel a latent connection to her brother’s schemes.
He was good with machinery, enough to hook up large portions of the flat, and she would pay him more than triple the going rate for such services and in return he’d regale her with conversations about his famous anime, and once she mentioned the YouTubers she liked, he’d chime in about those too. Oddly enough, she had no troubles with tech that one would expect from someone as ancient as she was, but hooking up wires (any that didn’t involve world-ending issues) still evaded her.
So she let him keep coming.
And eventually she didn’t leave as much as she really should have. Escape would come soon enough.
————
It was a giant room, that almost looked like a throne room, but with no throne, covered with plush walls that seemed to breathe, stuffed animals covering the floor to ‘light’ up a path to the chair in the middle, like an art piece, or a ‘nursery’ lab from one of those old anime.
It looked almost lawn-ish, painted a saturated, perfect white on plastic wicker, and there was something resembling a woman sitting on it.
Her white hair had seen better days, but she was still combing it through incessantly, trying to get it to a state of tidy.
Her eyes flickered in mania, with her vessel steadying herself every few seconds against the armrest.
Her lipstick was smeared, and her eyeliner streaked, an attempt at cleaning both having clearly been attempted but failed miserably.
Webby eventually settled on the container of yarn next to the chair, beginning to knit another of the creatures.
A boy sat in the middle of it, setting up a plug in the wall that wasn’t there a second ago to attach to a small TV, the antennae sticking right out the top modeled in a toxic neon gradient.
“I don’t want them to see me like this,” said the figure resembling a woman who was not-actually-human-at-all.
“I’ve let myself go. I’ve found myself falling deeper. And I guess the world is changing. I never expected Wiggly’s apocalypse to last more than one cycle. It’s not supposed to do that. The timeline-“
The boy got the TV working, pulling out the remote.
“Well, I know no one would believe me if I told them that I actually interacted with an inhuman woman like yourself, but I know that I have often related to loneliness.I hope that this will bring you some comfort. I can stay if you’d like me to.”
She smiled at him.
“If only just a little longer. If it’s not a bother.”
“No, no,” said the boy, matter-of-factly, “it’s always a dream to introduce a newbie to my passions, especially to a real life inhuman woman like yourself! Besides, it’s Saturday. It…is still Saturday, right?”
He frowned as he fiddled with the picture quality, finally getting to a channel.
“Sure you don’t want to grab something, eh, more like a flatscreen?”
“Wouldn’t work right down here anyway. Nothing modern works in The Void Beyond the Black and White. And, yes, it is still a Saturday.”
“You shouldn’t talk down to yourself.”
She exhaled.
“What, about earlier?”
The boy clicked his tongue.
“Yeah. You said you weren’t real.”
Webby winced, anticipating it enough to set down her knitting so it didn’t jolt.
“I said that I’m more of a being than I am a woman.”
Her melodious laugh seemed like she truly believed it.
“And is that really true?”
She contemplated this for a second.
“Well, I suppose I-“
Richie stared at her in disbelief.
“Well, it’s not. It’s not true.”
She sucked in a breath, one she probably didn’t even need to take.
“But what is true is how rapidly I feel like I’m becoming like them.”
“Your brothers?”
The boy finally got the TV working before pulling out a bootleg DVD and inserting it into the slot at the bottom.
“Yes, Richie, my brothers. And it scares me, because it means the balance, the balance is broken.”
There was a knock.
“I brought more yarn!”
The person at the other side of the invisible door set the new plastic bag full of different fiber strands at the bottom of the lawn chair, grinning at her. As he smiled, his many eyes smiled with him.
“If you’d like anything else, I’ve heard there is a sale at the grocery! I could grab a bag for you, if you’d like some? Hook up a fridge?”
She laughed.
“Thank you, Argos. If you could talk with Ms. Broccoli for me again, that would be amazing. Just…don’t kill her, okay?”
He laughed.
“I’ll try not to, but no promises if they insult my beloved.”
He picked up a stuffed animal, inspecting its quality.
“This is really good! I’d love to buy one, if you’re selling.”
Webby contemplated this for a second.
“If you’d like one, I might part with it. Not like they’re doing me any good, anyway.”
Argos grinned, handing her a few coins.
“I hope this is enough-we’re already struggling a bit with the upcoming nuptials. But the teddy bear would be perfect for the bouquet!”
“Speaking of, how’s your wedding planning going?,” said Webby.
Argos brightened at this.
“Oh! I’m a big planner, so everything has to be perfect! Mr. Plant doesn’t talk much, so I need to get everything in order myself, but it’s ok, I love to schedule things!”
He looked towards the TV and consequently to Richie.
“Oh! That’s a beautiful television! I wanted to set something up like that once, but it didn’t work out very well. Luckily I got one just as good!”
Argos narrowed all of his eyes at Richie, clearly thinking of something.
“Is he here to set up the TV?”
He settled, wide smile glowing again.
“Because if he is, you should have introduced us! Ours took a while, even though there’s a lot less wiring. Looks like yours just took a few hours.”
Webby laughed.
“I’ll see you with the groceries.”
———-
“So there’s something called a ‘magical girl?’ And this being, this entity, he manipulates the girls by sealing their souls into gems to produce power and feeding off of them?
And they are really just destroying themselves by destroying the anomalies they could become? And these beings are called Witches? They’re nothing like the Witches I know.”
Richie nodded, sticking his hand into a cheesy popcorn bucket.
“Yeah, and he promises their greatest wish, but it’s more the illusion of having it all, and then losing it.”
Webby frowned, then took a long sip of soda.
“That is truly horrific, but I can’t look away.”
Richie stifled a laugh.
“Better than not looking away at imminent doom, at least for a while.”
Webby looked down at the floor, then stole a bite of Richie’s cheesy popcorn.
“I might be able to…”
“What?”
“If I had enough of them, would I have enough power to contradict the incoming Birth?”
“What-“
“Magical girls. But…I turn down how Monkey’s Paw it is by simply asking what they are willing to give up. And hopefully there will be no amount of that kind of Witch.”
“I don’t know,” said Richie, “Seems like not a great plan to me. There’s room to turn it into the nightmare it was in the anime.”
“Well,” replied Webby, “let’s hope it doesn’t come to that.”
———-
“You can’t just erase everything and call it progress, or good, or-“
Lex inhaled.
The voice on the other side of the phone sighed.
“I know you can hear me. You understand how imminent destruction is, and how it won’t reset this time. I don’t want you to see me in this state, and seeing you at all is hard because you wouldn’t believe that I exist if I didn’t allow you to.
Earth has already reset many times due to my brothers. Erasure? No, never. But it’s come close. I want a paradise because you deserve one. There is a world where you did get to move to California, Lex, without any of the issues that you gained from moving there during the apocalypse.
One where you’re safe, one where your family isn’t broken, one where Ethan is all right. A price would be unavoidable, however I don’t want to take something you wouldn’t give.”
“Yeah, right,” said Lex, “like that pipe dream is gonna happen.”
——
“So, Ketch set up a meeting with you two.”
Janus nodded, leaning back in his chair.
“I assume you know why.”
“Yeah,” said Lex.
“Yeah I do know why. This stupid fake world we’re in right now. Right? I heard that she was saving us from something but it’s all kinda blurry. My sister believes she did the whole thing for some righteous greater good but I don’t know how much I believe it.”
“She?,” asked Celine.
Lex pursed her lips.
“Ah, c’mon, don’t tell me you don’t know. I thought all Seers knew this kind of-“
Celine paled.
“How did you-“
Lex shrugged.
“You… feel different, I don’t know. Instinct type thing. What did you want to hear?”
——
“Total Nuclear Annihilation?,” said Eric, looking at a pinball machine, “look, I love pinball but we’d need a dedicated spot for games in the playroom if we wanted to do this.”
Sara just smiled at him, pointing to a blank piece of floor.
“Why do you think I asked you to buy it? I’m sure it will be a hit. We can just have one of the animatronics look over the section like we normally do.”
“But-,” frowned Eric, finally setting it down from the wheely cart.
“I know that half of them haven’t spoken a word and that Lewis is still tirelessly trying to get them to say something, or even to do their tasks that they were programmed to do, but that won’t matter if the humans are also on task monitoring the bots, now would it?”
Eric shook his head.
“One more thing. I’m a founding member too, and yet here I am moving-“
Sara hid a grin with her hand as if she found it funny.
“-Heavy machinery. I think that matches some of your job description, right?”
“Not really. But all right?”
She nodded.
“Great! I’ll let you have a free token to test it for me?”
“Why not.”