There were black leaves scattered over the stairway, leading to a door marked ROOF ACCESS. It was facing the east side of KRAKEN's base, so theoretically it would provide cover from the snipers on the western building. I opened the door, and found myself standing in the middle of a grove of trees, their leaves prematurely reddened. There was a cellphone sitting on a bench, not new but not too old, right in the center of the clearing.
As I stepped towards them, I heard the door lock behind me, and the phone going off. Despite what it sounded like (a high-pitched "Dorh-ru-ru-ru-ru-ru. Dorh-ru-ru-ru-ru-ru.") it was heralding the arrival of text messages.
I picked up the phone - which lacked a password - and started reading.
--pharmaciasPharmakon (PP) started pestering silvertonguedPharmakeus (SP)--
PP: As I foresaw, here you are.
PP: Approaching the sound of my 'voice,' like a mongrel who abandons the hunt to heed the call of its master.
PP: ...
PP: ok this speech is p goddamn long lmao
PP: lemme make this easier 4 evryone n just
PP: [Link Redacted]I tilted my head in a few different directions, as if to alleviate the effect of that sheer tonal whiplash.
SP: ...well, this is the first time someone's delivered me a villainous monologue through pastebin.I noted that my response didn't set off a notification noise. Either the other person was out of earshot, or they simply turned their device's volume down to nil.
PP: ur welcome
PP: the boss originally wanted me to c/p the whole thing bit by bit
PP: talkin's a free action n all but for half an hour???
PP: neither of us wants that bullshit
SP: You've got me there.I opened the link, reading through at a much faster clip than probably intended.
SP: ..."and you will lead me to the arc."
SP: Interesting choice of words.
PP: yea he was p sure about usin "arc" over "ark"
PP: said it's a lot more punny that way
PP: u skimmin or r u just that fast of a reader
SP: Under the right pressure, yes.
SP: I wanted to read the last updates live, so I read all of Homestuck within two weeks.
PP: dam dude
PP: respect
SP: It's mutual.
SP: A surprising amount of people in these circles are fine going for that full anime flex.
SP: The melodramatics, the measuring of you-knows.
PP: lmao you can say dick around me
SP: It's refreshing to see someone instinctively avoid that.
PP: thanks
SP: ...is this a custom chat client?
PP: made it myself :P
SP: The respect dial has been turned up.
SP: Not only were you trusted enough to deliver The Monologue, but with your own program.
SP: How high are you?SP: In your group that is.
PP: bout as high as you *wink
PP: oh u mean rank
PP: i mean
PP: we dont really do
PP: ranks???
PP: ive been workin for him for a while tho
PP: why
PP: r u trying to seduce the bbeg's right hand lady
SP: That wasn't my original intention.
PP: "original"
PP: thats not a no
SP: I mean. People are getting shot at downstairs. And that's not even getting into the literal magic that's flying about.
SP: It'd be kind of fucked up if I was actively trying to flirt at a time like this?
SP: Though what I say doesn't negate how you interpret my words. I could be obfuscating my real thoughts/intentions for all sorts of reasons, like plausible deniability.
SP: On my end, all I have to go on RE your relationship to your boss here is your word.
SP: On their own, each of the three perspectives gives an incomplete version of what's really going on here.
PP: 3?
PP: urs mine and ???
SP: Whoever might read this conversation later.
SP: For all anyone reading this conversation knows, we're also carrying out an entirely different conversation out loud.
PP: whos to say there isnt any1 else here
SP: Fair enough. But that just ties back into my limited perspective - as far as I know, it's just you and me here.
SP: Without getting into metafictional possibilities, your boss could even be somewhere nearby, a fourth perspective observing this conversation. Possibly reading over your shoulder.
SP: Maybe I'm just talking to him and I don't know it.
SP: Again, for all I know, either one of you doesn't actually 'exist' - maybe you're actually 'your boss,' or you're someone entirely different from that AND who you say you are.
SP: ...for the sake of keeping it simple, though, I'm just going to roll with the original context. That in this moment it's a conversation, it's me talking to "the bbeg's right hand lady"
SP: Hey speaking of your boss.
SP: If you're actually handling this conversation by yourself...
SP: Why IS he not doing this himself?
PP: hes kinda busy atm
PP: "preparing the arc"I considered that for a moment. And then, epiphany. Downstairs, there was a small army of ARC agents. People who, given the chance, would gladly kill a Fear. It was well-established to the point where the idea'd be taken for granted.
And that dagger could destroy a lot more than just a summoning circle.
I considered whether I could alert anyone in time. My radio would be the fastest way to get the message out... if it hadn't been shattered by bullets on the way into the building. Texting someone was a gamble as well. I might get someone's attention, but unless they were out of the line of fire the distraction could get them killed. And that's if I didn't manage to tip off PP or her boss in the process.
Unless...
I pulled out one of my own phones and texted a number attached to the one group I believed could not be compromised - a cell belonging to one of GENOME's Towerborn, or at least they person they used to be. I belatedly wondered if GENOME would even try to stop what was about to happen, but I was low on options.
I had the nagging feeling that my involvement would be periphery at best.
PP: u brought ur cell to an eldritch clusterfuck
PP: you kno the track record of those things
SP: You also left one for me to talk to you.
PP: truI was about to reply back when a thought occurred to me. I turned abruptly, jumped up onto the bench, and crouched into a deep dab the second I landed. I also bent both sets of fingers into 'okay' symbols for good measure.
pP: nmkiopJust a little bit of stifled laughter, coming from up a nearby tree.
Aha.
Before I could decide what to do with this information, the building shook like God was using it to mix martinis. I flopped off of the bench with all the grace of an ice cube. A good deal of leaves fell to the roof, but none of the snipers seemed interested in shooting at my exposed form. In fact, they'd stopped shooting altogether.
Everyone had.
I picked myself up, and by that point the Tower had burst through of the roof.
I heard the sound of wood shifting and groaning, but it wasn't coming from the Tower. At least, not yet. The trees around me were beginning to bleed. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that they resumed bleeding.
And the Tower avoided the grove like it was radioactive.
"Thanks," I said out loud.
"You're welcome," came the voice from behind me.
I turned, and saw her stepping out of the trees. Literally. The assorted flesh, bone, and viscera started reassembling themselves like so many LEGO blocks. Her right hand, still holding a cell phone, slid down from the top boughs to reattach itself to her wrist. I caught a glimpse of the custom chat client, open to our conversation, on the screen.
Her outfit - where it was bloodstained or just already dyed red - has so many zippers that it looked like Tetsuya Nomura designed it during a bender. Though they were a lot more practical, considering she could apparently dissemble and reassemble it on the fly.
I recognized it immediately, and I tried to downplay it at the time.
"Nice to meet you in the flesh," I said.
I didn't hear most of her replies - probably on account of the unholy mechanical grinding noises the Tower was now making behind me - but I did notice her mouth moving. And, unfortunately, I'm not very good at reading lips. (All I recognized for certain was "WHAT? WHAT DID YOU SAY?")
The Tower froze mid-writhe, and I remembered thinking it was almost like a YouTube video trying to buffer after the wifi cuts out.
Then it started screaming.
No, that really doesn't do that ungodly nightmare fuel justice. Let me try again.
Remember the sound that AOL made back in the early 2000's? When modems were using dial-up to connect people to the Internet? Imagine that sound.
Now layer it over the sound of television static.
Layer over that with the audio of "the sound of ultimate suffering" from the Princess Bride, after running that soundbite through a MIDI converter.
Sprinkle in that one voice line from Monster Ock, penultimate 'boss' of the Spider-Man 2000 videogame: the one where he screeches wordlessly before spitting out a distorted "DIE."
A metaphorical Billy Mays manifests from the beyond to tell you "but wait, there's more;" just audible enough to be heard amidst the auditory slurry, the electronic crackling of a broken speaker.
Now imagine that those weren't the only sounds it made, but the only ones with a discernible, earthly component.
And the entire Tower is blaring this, from every component of its amalgamated form, at a volume just shy of destroying your hearing the second it starts. A sound emitted at just the right level so that you never forget it, wants you to never forget it, in a vain attempt to cling to the immortality of memory in that one last moment. This moment that even this Fear Feared, in which this being of eternal technological hunger is consumed by oblivion. No, not even something as comforting as an abyss.
To be consumed by a foreign, living entity, in an act of dramatic irony.
Its world ending not with a whimper, but the biggest crash ever amassed.
I was thankful for the fact that I wore sunglasses. It hid my watery, wide-eyed stare. Probably dulled the full effect of the strange blossoms flowering up from the quivering corpse. Come to think of it, that wasn't the only sense that received protection.
Unlike the majority of the people in the area, we at least had the auditory buffer of those bleeding trees, and the benefit of being outside. Down below, those who were still alive experienced this in an enclosed space.
Speaking of those trees...
I turned to face her. "...do you think this'll hold up?"
By this time, it had quieted down enough for us to hear each other. Considering why that was the case, it wasn't all that comforting.
"Against whatever hell pollen is coming down on us?" Zipper Woman looked... really concerned. "Well, since a buncha trees aren't exactly airtight..."
I'd actually thought that they might be able to divert their path, much like it had done with the Tower. "Do you have a way out of here?"
"Already on it," she said, before I'd even finished speaking.
Black leaves flew off of the trees, completely obscuring my vision for a moment, before they parted to reveal a forest of black leaved trees around us. My brows raised up over my top of my shades, like confused soldiers peering out of a trench when everything's abruptly silent.
Many people called this place "The Path of Black Leaves." Most believed it died with its ruler. In a way, maybe the silence reflected that. No wind. No rustling of leaves.
The only sounds were the ones we made.
Compared to what we'd just heard, THAT was deafening in itself.
The ground beneath us, within the circle of trees, had made the shift with us. I wondered if that meant an equal section of ground/arrangement of black-leaved trees had been shunted over to the other side. I put that to the back of my mind when I noticed where we'd arrived in this forest - at the edge of a very, very familiar clearing.
There are many names for it, that endlessly bleeding tree. Some people call it "the Bleeding Tree," which is... practical, if nothing else. The sheer size of the thing instantly set it apart from the ones surrounding us, but I noticed something odd about it. Most accounts I've encountered described the tree as having the image of faces in the bark. While I viewed it with my own two eyes, I didn't see any at all. And then there was the more obvious detail.
There's a massive chunk of it missing. Not in the right shape or size to be the one used to carve the dagger, even though we already learned where that wood had actually come from. No, this hole was large enough for someone to step inside.
Or rather, for someone to step out from.
Without turning my head, I looked at her from behind my shades.
"Listen..." she said, oddly hesitant. "I've only got enough juice to get myself out. Sorry dude." She stood in front of the Bleeding Tree, and paused. Then turned back to me. "I can. Uh. Call your ride for you?"
I considered my options for a moment.
Doctor Ferris was right out, especially since I wasn't sure if he'd survived the raid.
Collector Delta was a bit more promising, partly because Archive security had already been breached by Roxanne and her boss... but I wasn't sure if she actually *could* reach this place if she wanted to.
Those from the Black Garden might be better specialized for the job, but then there was the matter of trust.
Which left...
I made up my mind.
"You want me to call your florist?"
It was a gamble. But the only thing I could really bet on with the odds in my favor.
From my perspective, Roxanne had only been gone for a minute.
My "florist," when we had returned, told me that it had been over a month since the raid.
