“Chloe had… a weird relationship with her parents,” Brian finally remarked, rearranging the messy lasagna on his plate with his fork in a listless manner. “Her dad’s some bigshot corporate executive type, don’t remember what kind of business. He was, uh, well. Basically if you picture some stereotypical chauvinistic male, that’s him, I guess. Rich, handsome older dude, would hit on anything that moves, hired hot secretaries and usually wound up fucking them.”
“Wow. Livin’ the dream,” Emily laughed and rolled her eyes. “I heard a bunch of that from her, too. Who knows how much of it was total BS.”
“Well, Chloe’s mother was at one point one of those secretaries of his, so… I dunno, definitely some grains of truth in there,” Brian shrugged. “Now, when I say her thing with her parents is weird and complicated, it’s because while I think her dad was this asshole chauvinist guy, and her mother wound up being this bitter man-hating feminist… But. Growing up, Chloe loved her dad to pieces and couldn’t stand her mother, ‘cause her dad spoiled her rotten and bought her stuff, while her mom was the super strict harpy who never let her do anything.”
“My mom was like that, too,” Kelly nodded. “Maybe I’d have turned out like Chloe if my dad had still been in the picture?”
“Yeah, but with Chloe it’s like…” Emily brought her hands up as if to try to illustrate them, but wound up clenching and unclenching them in frustration. “It’s like when she turned eighteen she had this big fucking epiphany where she realizes her dad was the bad guy all along, her mom was in the right about everything. About men. And she would shittalk about him to no end. ‘Til she needed something, then with zero self-awareness he was daddy money again, to sweet talk on the phone like she was his innocent little baby girl.”
“Yeah, it was kinda… yeah,” Brian grimaced. “My dad’s wealthy, too, but the idea of trying to even have a civil conversation with him now, after the way he treated me for years? There’s just… no, no fuckin’ way. I think that was one of the sore spot uhh… I guess kind of first relationship hiccups Chloe and I had. Where’s she’s all like, ‘what’s the big deal, just ask your dad for help.’ Don’t even remember what it was about.
“But, I was like—no, not only no, but hell no, and she looked at me and the way I was acting and seemed to think I was just being childish by not setting aside all of… that that had happened and just going to him whenever I needed something. And then, well yeah I kept it to myself, but then I would look at what she was doing, and it just seemed… I dunno. Shameless and infantile, to talk about her dad like he was this sexist abusive monster, but then have zero qualms about just… setting that aside whenever convenient, putting on her pouty face and calling him up to ask for—”
“Brian—it’s okay,” Stephanie quickly assured him, rising up from her seat. “It’s okay, it’s okay—”
“Damn, uh, yeah,” Brian made a face. “Sorry. Don’t usually get into all that or talk about it. It pisses me off.
“I uh, I dunno if we even told you yet,” Emily winced. “But, before we all split up, Chloe squealed on herself, said she had both you and her dad paying all the bills. Not like, not like some half-and-half thing. You were paying everything for her, and then she told her dad you weren’t paying anything, ‘cause you were out of a job or something, so her dad was sending her money to cover everything. For both of you. All of the fucking bills you would’ve had for two people.”
“That’s—” Brian tried to let out a laugh, but one didn’t come out and he was forced to take a deep breath instead. “That’s. She really…?”
“...Yeah,” Emily reached across the table to take his hand.
“So, Chloe was living this fiction,” Kelly shoved her plate aside with her fingertips to indicate her appetite was gone. “Where, her dad was the bad guy, because secretly, all men are the bad guy. It got to be this story she told herself but didn’t really believe, not deep down, and so naturally whenever you might’ve mentioned your dad actually being some abusive asshole for real, on the surface she’s one hundred percent with you on that. But, actually—in her mind, to her it’s just like her fictional bullshit she spun up. Where you’re both just pretending to be victims, so of course then if you don’t man up and still ask for your dad’s help whenever you need it, you’re just being a big baby.”
“Let’s, c-can we just talk about something else?” Stephanie pleaded, hunching up her shoulders as the feelings around her started to rise. “We don’t have to talk about all of this.”
“It’s okay,” Brian shook his head.
“No—no, it’s not okay,” Stephanie insisted. “You, you’re not, you’re not okay, and it—it bothers me so much that you’ve had to deal with, with—”
“Steph and I were talking ‘bout all this back at the convention,” Emily said. “About you, about your parents, about Chloe. Your shitty parents had like, no love or trust for you, and, that sort of gave you this blind spot, and what happened was Chloe discovered that blind spot and crawled herself in there like a spider and—”
“Emily—” Stephanie frowned.
“Alright, alright,” Brian sighed. “We get it. It’s—it’s whatever. She deserves plenty of blame, but I was in the wrong for letting it all happen, letting it go on for so long, to where things could even… play out like that.”
“You weren’t in the wrong, though,” Emily argued. “At all. It was completely, totally all her fault. Literally. All—”
“C-can we just—” Stephanie tried to interrupt.
“—There wasn’t a—” Brian said.
“—All of it was Chloe’s fault! Think about what—” Emily spoke over her.
“—I was on the fence about all of it,” Kelly cut in. “Like, when I first met Brian, that first night he did seem like he’d just let himself become this total doormat and only had himself to blame. But. Knowing all that I know now? Jesus fucking Christ.”
“Exactly!” Emily fumed. “She—”
“She had the bitter feminist rhetoric on the outside,” Kelly began ticking off fingers. “Then, beneath that, feeding into that—gaslighting and projection. Anything wrong that happens was your fault, any wrong she does is righteous and justified. Beneath that, just, like—overt manipulation. Isolating you from your friends, deleting messages to cut you off from people, controlling what you do. Setting up that big narrative where you’ve gotten her pregnant but don’t want to take responsibility, trying to make you out to be abusive or a rapist. All of those layers, wrapped around the core fact of Chloe just actually being a psychopath.”
“Thank you!” Emily huffed, rocking her butt back onto her heels. “Fucking exactly.”
“So, Brian, it’s all way the fuck beyond you being in the wrong for not catching on sooner,” Kelly summed up. “You’re guilty of assuming she was a human being with basic decency. Imagining there were common ground sort of bottom lines that, as a person, she would not cross. But, the reality is, she’s a psychopath who doesn’t actually feel things like guilt, or remorse, or empathy. She at best just pretended those things because it helped her blend in, helped her take advantage of people.”
“Well,” Brian shrugged. “I don’t know. I mean, yeah, maybe? I just—I guess towards the end she’d lost her patience for even pretending, but. I really believed at first, that she was this, this different person. And. I thought me and this person had a future together, so I was… when she started changing, I kept thinking that maybe… that. I don’t know. I want to believe she wasn’t always like that, but if she… no, I don’t know. Fuck, this all got so fucked.”
“In my opinion, we need to just put Chloe out of her misery,” Emily crossed her arms. “No more of this naive ‘oh, I can fix her’ bullshit. I’m just so done with her. Done with her hurting Brian, done with her constantly trying to fuck us over. Yeah, I get it, murder is wrong, we can’t just kill her. But, it’s not even murder. It’s self defense. She claimed she would try to sell us out to the masters—that’s it. That’s it.
“She’s done, right there,” Emily continued, looking around the coffee table at each of them. “That’s not a risk we can ever tolerate. Period. Even if harem bullshit magic makes her less of a psychopath, sure, yeah, maybe it does—I don’t fucking care. I don’t want her in the harem with us, I don’t want to share Brian with her, she doesn’t fucking deserve that. We’ll never, ever be able to trust her, and honestly? Anyone who ever does try to trust her is fucking stupid.”
Stiff silence filled the apartment after that. Their food wasn’t finished but it was forgotten, and pensive tension pushed each of them into their own thoughts as they sat together around the plates of lasagna and scraps of garlic bread. Brian hated to think that Chloe could ruin their reunion like this even without being present, because it made him feel like in some way or another, she would just always continue to exert an influence over his life. That dating her had damaged him in intangible ways, that he was going to carry either trauma or guilt about the situation for the rest of his life, and now it was just a matter of picking which.
“Well, I wanted to fuck tonight,” Kelly murmured under her breath. “Way to ruin the mood, tugboat.”
“Well excuuuuse me, princess,” Emily retorted. “I’m just sayin.’”
“I… really just don’t want to kill anybody,” Brian said with a sigh.
“We can—does it count as ‘killing’ Chloe, if we just, just remove her from Christine?” Stephanie asked, looking around at each of them. “Christine was, she was different. She wasn’t… broken.”
“You know, I don’t like that you think she can just rebrand,” Emily snorted. “Doesn’t change all the bullshit she did. I don’t care what the fuck she calls herself, Chloe, Christine, Cristinith—I fucking hate her, and I’m not going to forgive her or forget what she did. Ever.”
“One of the future sends, the Kelly told me I should go easy on Christine,” Kelly said. “This was… way back late Saturday night of the con, I think. Didn’t realize at the time that Christine meant Chloe.”
“So, you think we need to go easy on her?” Emily shot a venomous look at Kelly. “Fuck that! That was probably just one of the shitty futures. High on copium or whatever to try an’ convince themselves they knew what the fuck they were doing. Fuck that.”
“I trust the future Kellys even less than you guys do,” Kelly gave them a helpless shrug, shaking her head. “I don’t know. Sure, she maybe had more perspective on a post-Chloe Christine, but also—none of those Christines were exactly like the one we’ve got. All of those Christines had a uh, a real bad end, courtesy of those fucks in the alleyway, and then we just sorta eventually pieced her back together. Or tried to. Our Christine didn’t actually get raped, right?”
“It was… close,” Brian said, gritting his teeth. “Very, uncomfortably close. I think… I think I don’t know. I think Emily’s right, in that there’s no way to forgive some of the things she’s done. At least for me. But, then also—Steph has a point in that maybe her being either bi-polar or a psychopath or both might be one of those broken things that charm magic can solve. At which point… whether or not I can personally forgive her, or we as a group can, how much blame does she deserve? It’s not none, but it might also not be all of it.”
“I say it’s all of it,” Emily said. “Why wouldn’t it be?”
“I don’t know,” Brian stared down at his plate. “And I uh, I hate to just wipe out all of our options, but I’m not sure I’m comfortable being intimate with her. After… yeah, after everything. Which might mean the whole put her on the love magic track to fix her thing is untenable. Which might not be fair, but… uh. Yeah. I don’t know. Emily does have a point, in that whether or not we should trust her, I may just personally not be able to trust her, or ah, or form that intimate sort of bond with her that might be needed for the charm magic route. If that makes sense?”
“It totally does,” Emily affirmed. “Good call. Seriously, man. Like—yeah.”
“I’m, I’m not happy with Chloe, either,” Stephanie said. “You all know that. If you were to ask me if I hate Chloe… then, I think yes. I did, I do. But… Christine isn’t really Chloe, I don’t think. She did stay with Brian that night and protected him from the Masters.”
“Pssh, out of self-interest, more like,” Emily scoffed. “If she even really did much of anything—like, if you think about it, all we have to go on is her word. Maybe the Masters didn’t really show up, maybe they did but she barely did anything. Maybe—”
“Actr—” Kelly paused, working her mouth as if to take back a misspoken word, “Actually, the uh, the person I can’t talk about, the healer people who delivered Brian, they corroborated at least part of Christine’s story. She said they ‘took care of’ what was left of a Master who got left behind there when the Masters there at the hospital withdrew. And, I know it’s not something we can confirm, but in the other timelines where one of us winds up in the hospital, the Masters always show up.”
“Did we… ever find out why that is?” Stephanie asked.
“Magic bullshit they have set up,” Kelly explained. “Hospitals and police stations both, I think. Some sort of enchantment… ward… fuckery, that sends off a ping or a notice or something whenever stuff is afoot, trips some alarm. Then, the Masters send out people to clean up whatever it is. Or uh, whoever it is.”
“Makes sense,” Emily nodded. “Wonder what they do about like, news, and social media and all that?”
“Don’t know, don’t care, let’s all just… be real fucking careful,” Kelly crossed her arms. “We have—us here, I feel like we’re good together, we have a good thing. We don’t need to be flying around or turning into dragons or throwing fireballs. Can’t we just—fucking be together and be happy? You know? Live our normal lives?”
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“Do we turn into dragons in the future?” Emily’s interest was immediately piqued. “Do we have weird animalistic dragon sex?!”
“No, Emily,” Kelly shot a glare her way. “And—magic, it’s not all fucking fun and games, alright? I don’t like it. Period. The girl I spoke to that dropped off Brian, the healer peoples, she kind of offhand mentioned them having to pull half of some dude out of a fire and try to put him back together. Alright? That could be one of us. If we keep fucking around with this stupid magic bullshit we don’t understand. What happened to Brian, all the stuff that almost happened to Steph, the shit that did happen to her in the timeline just before ours—do you want shit like that to happen again? Do you?”
“No, I just—” Emily gave her a sheepish look. “Sorry. It’s just, c’mon, magic. It’s exciting. Interesting.”
“Okay, and I get that,” Kelly shrugged. “Just, it’s also dangerous, and I never want you to ever fucking forget that. Mindbendingly great sex and like, being able to form better personal connections or intimacy or whatever? Is already good enough for me. More than good enough. Don’t want the future send powers, even, I’d trade them in if I could. Don’t think we should get any more involved in the magic bullshit than we already are.”
“You know from the future stuff what my power actually is, already,” Emily narrowed her eyes at Kelly. “Is it something I like? Or is it something I don’t want, like with you.”
“You—” Kelly grit her teeth. “Fucking love your power. Probably more than any of us.”
“Okay,” Emily tried and failed to stifle a smile of anticipation. “Okay. Awesome. I uh, I think that if we—”
“Do I get powers?” Brian interrupted.
“Yeah, does he?” Emily joined in. “I’d been like, wondering about that a lot. ‘Cause that could bring a ton of cool options for stuff to the table.”
“Do you want me to spoil whether or not you get magic BS, or… do you want to figure it all out on your own?” Kelly countered, sticking out her tongue at him. “Have it be your self-discovery personal journey thing, instead of something someone else just kinda drops on you.”
“Kinda both?” Brian let out a chuckle. “I don’t know. All still feels unreal to me. Even just having a harem is already—crazy?”
“I’d say we need to, in every instance, get more involved in magic,” Emily insisted. “Other groups out there have it—the Masters, the healer peoples. We need to be aware of what’s really going on to be able to defend ourselves from, I don’t know. Anything weird, whatever stuff that might crop up in the future. Right? Better to be forewarned and forearmed, and all that.”
“Everything I’ve seen makes me think we should just steer fucking clear,” Kelly said. “So, I’m against.”
“Is, um, is using my power bad?” Stephanie asked, reentering the conversation. “I mean… if I feel your feelings, if we connect our feelings like we’ve done before—is that setting off… signals? That others could detect? Or sense? Because, I, I—I don’t know how to turn it off or stop, really.”
“Exactly,” Emily spread out her hands. “We need to know more, so—”
“—I’ll find out,” Kelly promised, looking uncomfortable. “Somehow. I think it’s probably okay, in that you’re only connected to us, so I think it should be mostly under everyone’s radar. But… I will find out. Either get a hold of healer peoples again, or… I know somebody that I should be able to ask, that will be able to check on that for us. Okay?”
“That’s one of the things I was going to ask,” Brian nodded. “Like—when we have sex. How is that not a giant beacon of… well, magical energy or what have you. Because, from what we’ve experienced, we must be setting off massive invisible sky beams, or something. Right?”
“I’ll find out,” Kelly pursed her lips.
“Hold up, hold up,” Emily dropped her palms onto the surface of the coffee table. “We’ll find out. Because, it’s not like we’re gonna go abstinent anytime soon, right? We’re all banging tonight.”
“Can’t we just bang normally?” Kelly griped. “Without having to have it be this super big magical event?”
“I don’t know, can we?” Emily glanced towards Brian and then Stephanie. “Is that even fucking possible?”
“Hell if I know,” Brian shook his head. “Don’t look at me, I’m new here. I just woke up from the month-long coma, or whatever.”
“I um, like I said, I can’t turn my charm power off,” Stephanie admitted. “I don’t know if I even can. It’s a, like you said, it’s a passive ability. I can’t turn it off. Th-the only thing that worked to do that was… Chloe. Christine. Her power.”
“Then…” Emily looked like she was at a loss. “Fuck it, give us spoilers; Kelly, is the charm ability stuff each of us have, is that magic that can be learned? Like spell frame stuff? Can we learn how to do Christine’s mirror thing that blocks magic, or have someone teach us how to do it? Seems like that’d be super handy.”
“It… no,” Kelly shook her head. “No. The charm ability stuff we have is all pretty unique to each person. As far as I know, none of us can even learn the healing spell frame stuff, either. We don’t have the… I guess you’d say compatibility?”
“So, we can’t learn magic beyond whatever we get for our charm powers?” Emily pressed.
“We… can, sort of,” Kelly hedged. “But, it’s not the same, wouldn’t be on the same level. In at least some of the futures… some of us learned a bit of magic stuff.”
“Some of us,” Emily repeated. “Like, who? Specifically.”
“Rebecca managed a bunch, Brian and Stephanie learned some,” Kelly admitted. “You specifically had trouble learning, and were even worse at practicing it. Discipline and exercising it, and all that. It’s not even a big deal anyways, it’s all… stupid little unimportant parlor trick stuff, especially compared to our individual powers.”
“Fuuuuck,” Emily swore, sagging back against the base of the chair behind her. “So fucking unfair. Does it—do I have trouble picking it up because of like, because of magic compatibility, or… or is it just because I’m me?”
“Do you… do you really want me to answer that?” Kelly asked, averting her eyes.
“No,” Emily pouted. “Fuck. Wait, what about you? Are you just against learning magic on principle, or are you not good at it either?”
Kelly’s features scrunched up as she made a face at Emily, for a long moment she wore a scowl, and then she stared up at the ceiling and blew out a slow breath. To everyone’s surprise, she then lifted one arm out over the table, palm up and fingers outstretched as though she was grasping at the air. Her limb trembled, Kelly bared her teeth, they watched as her entire body shivered from exertion, and then they all felt something happen.
A tiny red mote of light appeared in the air, and then immediately blinked out.
“Hax. Hax,” Emily accused, jumping to her feet. “Ohmigod you already fucking know magic. You already know. You already—of course you fucking do. You can teach us how to do magic! You can—”
“That—” Kelly shook out her arm and cupped her other hand to her forehead as she tried to recover. “Was the start of the start of the beginner's first basic magic spell thing. Cool! Great! Wow! I can create a speck of light that only people with magic can see. Why? Because it doesn’t generate actual real light, so it can’t actually illuminate things! Which makes it super fuckin’ pointless.”
“But—” Emily tried to cut in, but Kelly wasn’t done ranting.
“With a couple months more practice, I’d be able to hold a sustained speck of magic in the air. Amazing! Incredible! Then with like, seven more months and a lot more work, I’ll get it to where it puts off a tiny bit of actual real light. Or, you know what else I could fuckin’ do? Buy a fucking lighter. A flashlight. Have a fuckin’ phone that shines actual bright light. Every single basic magic thing you can learn with a ton of fucking effort, months or years of practice is bullshit you can accomplish in other ways, easily, without magic.”
“You can still—”
“It’s not even fucking free!” Kelly went on. “Guess what, part of regular practice is getting an instant fucking migraine from using up all your personal magic or whatever. A migraine that doesn’t go away with pain relievers! Also kinda sore already, and fucking super tired for no reason. So, there you go, Emmie. Have at. Learn fucking magic. With the time spent practicing enough to where you can levitate a, a bit of down fluff with magic, you could have become a decent guitar player. Or learned piano. Started picking up French, or Spanish, or—you get the idea.”
“Wait, can, can’t—can’t we like, restore magic by just kissing Brian?” Emily refused to be dissuaded. “Whenever we run out of magic points?”
“...Somewhat, you’d basically have to, to get anywhere,” Kelly admitted with reluctance. “It’s complicated. But, there’s a limit to drawing on him like that, too, and no matter what, you’re going to wind up with a headache and pretty much jack shit to show for it. And, honestly? Not worth wasting your time on.”
“Still want to learn,” Emily refused to budge. “It’s… it’s fucking magic.”
“I… also want to try?” Stephanie gave them a sheepish smile. “Are you alright? Your head? Can we, can we kiss it better for now, or—”
“So what if it’s magic?” Kelly countered. “It’s one of those things—like normal magic tricks, card tricks. Magic tricks are cool, right? You can learn to hide a card back behind your fingers in this certain way, to where you just gesture, flick out your fingers and—voila! The card seems to appear. Or, you make a coin disappear, whatever. Yet, despite it being such a cool trick, how many people actually put in the time and effort to learn how to do it well? Almost no one. Steph, that’s what this is like.”
“Okay, but then—how are these ‘Masters’ so capable, then?” Brian frowned. “If learning how to do all this stuff is that much work for so little reward?”
“It’s just straight up different for them,” Kelly shrugged. “And, not in a good way. Different rules. Has to do with the way it works, like we have our innate charm powers that, well, they bring our group together, and center around that. Empathy, foresight and so on. Masters likewise have an innate sort of… thing, that makes them the way that they are.
“Outside of our charm stuff, us learning magic is like learning to woo a woman. It’s a courtship process, a… a mastery, requires hard work, and a drive to improve yourself, to communicate and learn and understand, really understand, and, yeah—involves a fair bit of pain and suffering. Future Rebecca’s words, not mine. Them learning magic, the way of the Masters, isn’t a courtship, it’s holding a gun to the girl’s head and telling her to start stripping or they’ll blow her fucking brains out. Except the girl in these metaphors is, uh, reality, I guess.”
“Well… oof,” Brian closed his eyes for a moment. “That’s… ugh.”
“What the fuck, their innate power is the gun?!” Emily protested. “Basically? I mean like the gun in the metaphor? That’s so fucking unfair!”
“Sort of,” Kelly said. “It’s probably more like whatever innate power they would have had, with the way they do things they traded it away for a gun pointed at the world.”
“What about the healer peoples?” Brian asked. “Are they like Masters?”
“I… can’t even talk about them, sorry,” Kelly pressed her lips shut. “They did us a solid favor when they didn’t have to, and all they asked me for was privacy. Not gonna talk about them, please don’t ask.”
“Okay, fair,” Brian nodded. “Fair.”
“They’re not Masters, though, right?” Emily demanded. “Or, I guess like, are they white-hat Masters?”
“They’re not Masters,” Kelly shook her head. “Masters have their credo with the laws or rules or whatever. So, likewise we are not Masters. Brian is definitely not. If you’re not pledged into their charter contract bullshit with whatever vows or oaths, you’re not a Master.”
“But, Brian could have joined them,” Emily said. “Like, they were gonna try to recruit him?”
“I don’t want to talk about that, either,” Kelly clutched her head with both hands, now. “You know Brian’s not like them.”
“So, um… what are we?” Stephanie asked. “How are we… classified? Is there a name for what we are?”
“Harem,” Emily suggested. “Anime harem.”
“I have no idea,” Kelly shook her head. “Classifications and all that imply… a hell of a lot more coordination and agreement then I think you would ever find from everyone on ‘that side’ of things. It’s a bunch of big fish in tiny ponds, occasionally crossing paths and eating one another. There’s no overarching organization or hierarchy that I know of. Maybe to the Masters, everyone attuned to a focus counts as a proto-Master, to them. It’s obvious the Masters police magic stuff from the normal people somewhat to keep all that secret, but rather than counting them as a real authority, I’d say they’re just… guarding their own interests and advantages?”
“But there are lots of other groups besides the Masters?” Emily asked.
“I think so, but I can’t give you anything concrete about them,” Kelly said. “If any of that crept into one of the Sends I got, it didn’t process or parse beyond just me vaguely being aware there’s other groups out there. Because, again—it was a daisy-chain cram study session. I ‘know’ a bunch of the obvious important stuff they were trying to convey, a lot of the rest is either… digesting very slowly, or is just completely forgotten by now.”
“Digesting slowly—so you are still getting information?” Brian asked.
“Yes. No. Sort of,” Kelly made a face. “With the ones from that being a lot of Sends within Sends a lot of it becomes nonsense data. Like, uhhh—to make up an example of what it’s like; does Stephanie flip a coin and have it land on heads tomorrow? Yes, some futures agree. Also; no, some futures say it lands on tails tomorrow. As well as no; Stephanie does not flip a coin tomorrow at all, with a lot of futures playing out like that.”
“Wait…” Emily narrowed her eyes. “What the fucking…how does that even help anyone?”
“I thought I explained this before, but the Sends aren’t from our exact future, per se,” Kelly grumbled. “They’re mostly from parallel, very-similar futures. The ones that have the potential to be the same-ish timeline take less… oomph, or broadcasting bandwidth, or magical amperage to reach, so we count those as being in the same ‘branch’ of timeline, and thicker branches are better for… some stupid stability reason we figured out in the future that I doubt I understand correctly right now.”
“Okay, so…” Brian laughed. “We’ll just say take Sends with a grain of salt?”
“Ehh,” Kelly frowned. “Yes? I think what I was driving at was, uh… more like a precision versus quantity thing. Single sends can have pretty precise information, nested Sends and batch Sends contain a lot of information but the accuracy drops off? Or starts filling up with false positives and straight up contradictory shit. Lot of that stuff just gets shunted over anyways because it might be important. Like, uh—‘don’t let Emily drive on this certain day, she gets into a car wreck.’ You’d want to proliferate that Send out in batch to as many nearby timelines with the potentiality of Emily driving that day as possible, and if you overshoot—oh fucking well, better to wrongly warn more timelines than to undershoot. Because, then we might have Emily turned into hamburger in a bunch of timelines that maybe didn’t get the message.”
“Hah, whoa, uhh, hey that was just a hypothetical, right?” Emily winced.
“No, that does really happen somewhere in the future timelines,” Kelly said. “There’ll come a certain specific day—I forget which one—where almost all the timelines in our branch get that warning, even though in theory only this small part of the branch even has the actual risk of it happening.
“Wh-what the fuck do you mean you forget the day?!” Emily blustered. “How can you forget the day?! Kelly—”
“No, Emily—this is like, vague future knowledge of what future sends get,” Kelly said. “It’s not even time for us to get that warning send yet, and when we do I’ll write down the date. Or, if we do.”
“But, is it like—” Emily made a face as she tried to process all of that. “Can I just not drive at all, until you’ve cleared me?”
“Here, it’s like this,” Kelly grabbed one of the paper towels and held it up. “This is our timeline, right? Now I take this—”
Holding up her fork for them to see, Kelly then folded the paper towel over and with a bit of finagling, pushed the fork to punch through both layers.
“—And then the fork’s pushed through like this,” Kelly turned to show each of them. “So, the fork pushing through represents how fed up I am with trying to explain timeline bullshit that I barely understand.”
“Pffft—” Emily snorted out a laugh at that, and Brian smiled and shook his head.
“Alright, alright,” Brian shoved his plate back a bit. “Kell—you said your head was hurting from putin’ on that little lightshow for us. Can I kiss it better for you?”
“Yes,” Kelly sat up straight, closed her eyes in a very self-satisfied cutesy expression, and planted her hands in her lap in such a way that her arms squeezed her breasts together for him. “Yes, please.”