I am inordinately frustrated about the fact that I can't dress up cute for my date.

There are obviously a number of valid reasons for this. I'm in the closet and hiding my relationship from my family. My old clothes don't fit very well anymore and they don't match my constantly-changing complexion as much as they used to. My entire body is shifting into a horrific mess of chitin and claw, which may cause people to call the police. Various things like that. But despite all logic, it's still irritating to bundle up in my usual long-sleeved layers like it's somehow going to snow during a Tennessee May. I want to show off for my girlfriend. Is that so wrong?

…I mean, according to a frighteningly large number of people in Tennessee, me having a girlfriend at all is wrong. Buuuut I'm going to do my best to not think about that. Only fifteen percent of hate crimes are due to sexual orientation! It's still mostly racism running rampant in the good 'ol US of A. Plus we'll be keeping to public areas, daytime on a Sunday, and I can supernaturally detect every weapon in a thirty-foot radius or so with my admittedly-still-weak-on-earthside spatial sense. I'll also probably survive any gunshots that aren't to my head. So, y'know, I think I'm prepared.

I realize, intellectually, that getting attacked is pretty unlikely, hate crime or otherwise. But for some reason, couldn't say what, my anxiety has been acting up lately. It's difficult not to think about risks, threats, and possibilities for fights. It's scary to consider all the possible things that could go wrong, but it's scarier still to realize I'm ready for them. That when push comes to shove, I'm fully prepared to phase into w-space, rush down a gunman, slice his arms off, and fucking eat them. It doesn't matter that doing so would expose me, it doesn't matter that doing so would cause all my gosh dang clothes to fall off. Alma's safety is what matters, and if anyone threatens that I will do whatever I have to in order to reclaim it.

Is that what I've always been like, or is that something the Goddess' magic made me into?

I've certainly always been willing to go to bat for my friends, I guess. I've never been in a position to do so violently before, but now that I've apparently become really good at violence, it only makes sense that I'd start working it into my methods. As much as I hate it, as much as it's a horrible, horrible hammer to take to problems, it is a very big hammer and sometimes you have to crush nails.

Before all this, though? Was I a good friend? Was I loyal the way my friends are loyal to me? I feel like I at least tried to be, but only they can really answer that, I guess. If nothing else, Ida and Valerie seem to believe I deserve the care, support, and attention they've showered me with since my insane transformation started. I guess it's up to me to make sure I don't let them down.

…But first, I have a date.

Dressed up in my nicest baggy hoodie, I commandeer my dad's car and drive over to Autumn's house. We scheduled the date for a time she knew her dad wouldn't be at home, so I'm not surprised when I pull up in her driveway, head to her front door, and don't feel anyone in the house other than her. I am somewhat surprised when I knock on the door and just get a text from her telling me to let myself inside.

I always feel weird and awkward when I let myself into someone else's house, even with permission, but I do as she says and head towards where I feel her in the kitchen. I spot her doing… something, miming in the air and not looking my way, so I call out to her.

"Hey, Alma!" I greet.

"Hannah?" she answers, turning and looking around like she can't see me. "Oh, watch out, there's a—"

I don't hear the rest of what she says because I walk face-first into an invisible wall and get rather distracted by my own sputtering. I stagger backwards, seeing the ripple of visibility flow outwards from my impact point, revealing the exterior of a pale white wall, seemingly made out of some kind of ceramic. A door is set into the wall, only partially visible, so I give the wall a good thump with a fist to bring the rest of the door into focus for me. Then I open it, and walk inside Alma's magical funhouse.

Alma spots me immediately now that I'm inside, her power apparently having created a small, one-room shack this time around. Or at least… I think it is? My spatial sense doesn't work on this place at all. I thump another wall or two in order to be able to see the whole thing. Once again, the ceiling depicts a mural of Autumn's face: half of it normal and half of it crumbling, broken machinery, like a robotic brain leaking out all of its parts. Alma herself is dressed for the date, which means like me she's covered in baggy clothing and a bulky, bulky skirt to disguise her tail as much as possible. It works… okay. It looks like she's hiding something, but it's not obvious enough what she's hiding for anyone to be likely to care. That'll change if the tail keeps growing, though.

"Hannah!" Alma greets me happily. "Hannah, check this out! I got the water running!"

She grabs the handle of a sink faucet that distinctly isn't the sink faucet of the actual, real kitchen and turns it. My spatial sense does a confused mental flip as water in the actual, real pipes seems to phase through solid matter as if it was suddenly traveling through a completely different set of pipes, drops into Alma's not-real sink, then heads down the drain through another set of undetectable imaginary pipes before meeting back up with the actual pipe system on the other end.

What the heck?

"You, uh, are tapping into the municipal water system somehow," I tell her.

"Yeah, I kind of figured that," she muses. "My imaginary house pipes only work if the house overlaps with a part of my real house that has running water. It doesn't work if I restrict the house to, say, my bedroom. Same with electricity, although pretty much the whole house has that. When I'm outside I have to just hope there's an underground line or something."

"I guess that makes some kind of sense," I shrug. "This spell isn't Light or Matter aligned, so it can't make… stuff. I mean, I guess it can make a whole bunch of stuff, but the stuff isn't real somehow? Like… okay, I'll be honest, I seriously have no idea what's going on here."

"I might," Alma says, grinning at me. Her teeth look sharper than when I last saw them. Not carnivorous like mine, but those canines are big. My heart skips a beat, and I almost miss what she says next.

"I didn't notice my dad coming home one day when I was testing things, but he didn't hit his face on my spell like you do," she continues. "He walked right through it, like it wasn't even there. Freaked me the heck out when he said my name, too, because I couldn't see him."

"What?" I ask, dumbfounded.

"I couldn't see him, and he couldn't see my spell!" she confirms. "I quickly ran out the fake house's door to turn the spell off, of course, but I wouldn't be surprised if I couldn't touch him, either."

"How does that even work?" I ask, unconsciously feeling over the smooth walls of the house. The interior is… interesting. There's a bookshelf along one wall, which is an odd sight to see in the middle of a kitchen.

"Well, my dad doesn't have a soul, right?" Alma says casually. "And my house is a Pneuma spell. You can probably only interact with it because you have a soul."

Huh. She might be onto something, there. So Alma can be seen while she's in her house, but she can't be interacted with by anything that hasn't entered her house, and only things with souls can actually find the door. If it doesn't have a soul it doesn't exist to her. …Mostly. There's presumably an exception for objects that come inside close enough to an ensouled person's body, because Alma's not acting like I walked in naked. And the water in her pipes probably doesn't have a soul, so that's another weird exception… but still! That's pretty wild. If someone shoots her with a gun from outside the house, would the bullet just phase right through her without her even noticing?

"Magic is crazy," I conclude.

"You don't have to tell me that," Alma snorts. "It's pretty darn cool, though. I have a lot of control over what the house is shaped like when it shows up, so I can do some pretty neat things with it. Check this out!"

She hurries past me excitedly and exits out the door I came in through, which immediately dissolves the house into nothingness. The residual moisture that was resting inside the soul-house’s sink splatters softly to the floor.

"So, the basement is right below me here, right? So I can just imagine that I want my house to have a spiral staircase downwards when I make it, and…"

She walks right through the floor, and I lose sight of her. Holy crap! I head over and knock on the walls until I find the entrance, and sure enough there's the very top of a spiral staircase in front of me when I open it. But I also still see the physical house's actual, real floor, so I can't follow her down.

"...This is so complicated," I groan.

"Hehe, yeah, a little!" Alma agrees, her head popping up from the floor. "It's cool though, right?"

"It's very cool," I agree, holding out my hand to her. She takes it despite not really needing my help and lets me pull her into a hug after she runs back up the stairs.

"And you know what the best part is?" she continues, babbling excitedly. "Jet can't come in here. At all. It's completely mine."

"Really?" I ask, suddenly a little worried.

"Yeah, see?" Alma says, pulling up the back of her skirt a little and making me blush. "The tail doesn't move."

Sure enough, the normally-active tail is completely limp, almost lifeless. It might even be drooling slightly.

"And when I walk out of the house…" Alma demonstrates, stepping through the door and dissolving the stairs into nothing. Her tail immediately perks up, swishing side to side slightly before curling protectively around Alma's leg and snarling at me.

"See?" Alma shrugs. "I've never started to… I don't know. Fade out? In the house? I'm safe in there. It's a place I know I'll always be me. It's the coolest thing ever."

I swallow. I feel like I should talk to Alma about Jet a bit more, having gotten to know both of them at least decently well by now. Alma has some intense resentment for her headmate, that much is obvious, but I'm not sure if it goes deeper than just the general distress her memory problems bring her. What I do know, however, is that Jet wants to do right by Alma, but Alma just wants Jet to stop existing. I'm not really sure how I would go about having that conversation, though, so hopefully I can leave it to their therapist.

I'll have to think about it. …After the date.

"How are your, um, physical changes going?" I ask, awkwardly changing the subject. "I saw you had fangs?"

Among many other things. With my spatial sense I can tell her wings are getting a lot bigger, and Alma has had to get completely new bras to deal with not crushing them on top of her increased breast size… which I can't help but continue to notice every time I see her. I'd complain about my own transformation not giving me bigger boobs, but mine are already kind of difficult to complain about. Is it narcissistic to admit I have the same sort of figure that I'm attracted to?

"Oh, uh, yeah," Alma scratches her head awkwardly. "I noticed those when I started fronting this morning. I guess they grew in sometime yesterday. Jet got us a bunch of new clothes. Gloves like yours for the claws. And, uh, we have scales on our butt now. They're growing in more and more all around the tail."

"Oh, cool," I say nonchalantly. "Butt scales."

"Uh, yep," Alma agrees halfheartedly, reaching back to give some of them a scratch. "It's. Certainly a thing."

"Sorry again."

"Don't be," Alma insists. "Really. You ready to head to the aquarium?"

I get the feeling that while Alma genuinely doesn't want me to be sorry, it isn't because I haven't actually hurt her. But I'm not sure if pressing the point right now would hurt her more, so I swallow my thoughts and give her a smile.

"Yeah," I agree. "I'm ready."

She smiles back. She's happy. Really. Is that enough?

"Cool," she says, and we head to my car together. Two girls bundled up like it's winter heading to hang out with fish.

The actual Tennessee Aquarium is a bit too long of a drive for a simple Sunday date, but there's a piddly local-ish one less than an hour from here that we can go to instead. I don't really have any particular interest in aquariums, especially considering that I nearly got murdered by a sea monster last week, but I didn't have any better ideas for a place to go and Alma seemed marginally more excited when she suggested it than any other thing we talked about.

That's something I'm coming to figure out about Alma in general: she does not actively or purposefully express her preferences. She mostly wants to talk about me and get me to lead things for her, but as long as I'm not overwhelmed (a condition that is slowly but refreshingly becoming less absent in my life) it's not too difficult to pick up on her real feelings regarding whatever I'm talking about. It's weird, but not too dissimilar from how I learned to be a good friend to Valerie. Most of what really matters to the both of them is easier to pick up on via mediums other than words.

It really helps Valerie out, me being able to do that. When she's overstimulated or stressed, it's often a situation where asking questions and doing other normal communication things can't help, because she can't properly wedge her brain into that kind of crack. The sooner I pick up on that from context cues, the sooner I can start doing things to actually help, be that redirecting her attention, giving her backup on dealing with the problem, or just giving her space and silence. Talking with Alma often feels like flexing a similar sort of muscle, learning to navigate a new sort of minefield so I can help guide her through it.

I am, uh, not very good at it yet. So many questions, not enough answers. But I'm learning, a little at a time.

We make it to the parking lot of the aquarium and wander inside, showing the receipt of ticket purchase on my phone to the lady behind the desk and getting physical tickets in response. There's a number of different exhibits, all with very fancy-sounding names like "Antarctic Adventure" and "Carnivores of the Deep."

"Well, where do you wanna start?" I ask, giving Alma a careful look.

"Uh, wherever's fine," Alma says noncommittally, gazing at various signs.

Well, may as well start with the one that looks most fun to me.

"How about the 'Tropical Reef Tour?'" I ask.

She shrugs. No go on that one, huh?

"'Antarctic Adventure?'" I try. "That one probably has penguins."

"If you want to!" she answers cheerfully. Hmm, another dud. I try following her gaze.

"'The Sunless Depths' looks cool," I say.

"That one's probably neat," she agrees. "Deep sea animals get super funky."

Okay, that was a reaction. Score!

"Let's start there, then!" I conclude, and she seems pretty happy about it. Which is good, because asking three times is about the usual limit for being annoying and I would have had to conclude the search there either way.

We head into a darkly lit hallway full of water tanks, the sound hushed around us as the darkness instinctively makes everyone in the area speak quietly or not at all. The exhibit is pretty neat, if incredibly subdued, with overall more diagrams and less actual aquatic life than I was expecting. I suppose it would be really hard to get living samples of creatures that can only survive at pressures unlivable for humans all the way up to the surface.

Hesitantly, Alma comments on some of the displays, seeming to actually know some neat trivia about deep sea animals that she wants to discuss. So I do my best to encourage her, trying to get a good ramble going because I suspect it will be cute as heck. She spends a while likening ocean floor methane bursts to a planet in one of her favorite sci-fi novels (and thereby proving me right) before we finally come across a tank with live bioluminescent jellyfish and she locks onto it like a heat-seeking missile.

"Haha! Oh man, look at them bloop around!" Alma grins, her wings twitching excitedly under her shirt.

"Yeah, they're cute," I agree, watching them with my eyes as I feel them with my spatial sense. Water is always an interesting presence to my spatial sense because the major defining feature of water is usually its utter lack of defining features: it has no color, it has no scent, and it doesn't really even have a texture so much as it has wetness, a feature almost incomparable to other aspects of touch. Yet water is strange to my spatial sense largely insofar as it isn't strange; to that part of me, everything lacks color and opaqueness. I can simply feel and know the presence of the water in the same way I feel and know the presence of the organs inside the jellyfish, which for the first time I can actually look at with my eyes, too. The clear body of the floppy little fellas lets my eyes track the same internal movements as my soul, and I do have to admit that it's weirdly hypnotizing.

Enjoying this book? Seek out the original to ensure the author gets credit.

"Oh, uh. Sorry," Alma says hurriedly. "I've been staring a while, huh? We can move on."

"Huh?" I ask, blinking with confusion. "No, you're fine. These are cool."

"It's okay, we can move on," Alma insists.

She doesn't believe I'm interested. She thinks she's bothering me. It kind of reminds me of when I first met her, and she thought I was faking interest in her book.

"...Their internal structure is really awesome," I comment, searching for something specific that caught my interest. "I'm trying to figure out how they breathe. They don't seem to have lungs or gills."

Alma looks at me for a moment like she's an animal deciding whether or not to run, but then turns back to the jellyfish, pointing at one.

"...They breathe entirely through diffusion," she tells me. "Oxygen from the water enters directly through their skin whenever the oxygen levels in their body are lower than the levels in the surrounding sea. Their bodies are just a lot more permeable than ours, and require a lot less resources."

"Ohhh, that's kinda sick," I smile, turning to look at the jellies again myself. "I was thinking it was their droopy tentacles maybe, because there's so much surface area with how bendy it is."

"No, that surface area is for catching microorganisms," Alma answers. "And those big long dangly bits aren't the tentacles, they're called oral arms, because the jellyfish eats with them. They do have tentacles, though: that's the name of the little hair-like structures coming off the rim of the bell."

"The bell is the head?" I clarify. "The blorpy-blorpy part?"

She giggles. Eeee, I made her giggle! That means I'm doing well!

"Yes, the 'blorpy-blorpy part' is the bell," she smirks at me. "Jellyfish are really neat because of how simplistic they are. No central nervous system at all, absolutely no chance of sapience or thought or self-awareness, but they still do everything required to be an animal: reproduce, grow, respond to stimuli. They're like organic robots, capable of only two or three tasks that they loop forever until they finally break. There are so few thoughts inside that head, it isn't even called a head at all."

Woah. She really seems to like jellyfish, huh? New hyperfocus unlocked on the character sheet, I guess. But what's with the weird feeling of… longing?

Well, it doesn't matter. I do my best to keep her talking, something she really seems to enjoy when given ample and repeated reassurance that yes, I am actually interested and not annoyed or bored. We crawl through the rest of the deep sea exhibit at a slow pace, but it's the kind of awesome slow pace where we're having so much fun soaking in every detail that time just slips away. Things transition smoothly into the next exhibit, and by then Alma is so engaged with things that the rocky start just melts away.

It's just fun, because we're both huge nerds and Alma's obsession with fantasy and sci-fi lends itself to a lot of love for speculative biology, a field of thought that seems to stem primarily from looking at real biology and going 'holy crap, that is so cool.' So that's what we spend the day doing: looking at aquatic creatures and geeking out over how cool it is. Everything is going great.

"Ooh, that one looks pretty!" I say, pointing to one of the fish in the tropical exhibit.

"I mean, yeah, everything is pretty here," Alma dismisses. "But they're all basically the same fish with different shapes and colors, you know? I wanna see… ooh! There! A lionfish!"

She starts babbling about how the lionfish has hardly any natural predators because of how effective its venomous spines are, and a comfortably dopey smile blooms on my face as I look around at everything swimming all over the place. This is one of the big tanks, with countless different animals all in it at once, from beautiful fish to imposing sharks to creepy eels. It kind of makes me hungry to watch all the beating hearts floating around right in front of me. I haven't eaten since our usual after-church Taco Bell, and I didn't get much since I can't actually digest most of the ingredients there anymore. So the movement of the fish through the water is kind of… hypnotic.

I step towards the glass, putting one gloved hand up against it like I could reach right through. Well, I mean, I could do that, actually. That's pretty explicitly in my skillset. And it's not like killing and eating a fish would be hurting anyone. Goddess, I want to chase one. I want to chase something. But… no. It would be pointless. …And also weird, but mostly pointless! I can easily reach my hand into the tank, sure, but not only would that make my glove come off, I wouldn't be able to bring anything back out of the tank with me. Plus there's like, people around, and probably security cameras. I definitely shouldn't hunt any of the delicious, delicious fi—

"Hannah," Alma hisses, and I feel her grab one of my blade-limbs. Wait, how did—oh crap! I pull my extra bits out of her grasp and back into full 4D space. It wasn't completely visible, not even mostly visible. It was just a little bit of organic blade peeking into reality next to my head. But we both know that's way more than I should be showing, so I stare back at her stern expression in horror as I rapidly look at everyone in the room with my spatial sense.

…Nothing. Nobody noticed or cared. Of course they didn't; we're in an aquarium. Everyone is here to look at fish, not people. But as my heartbeat calms and I look back at Alma with a sheepish smile, I can't help but feel the weight of my extra limbs in the other realm. They're getting harder and harder for me to hide, and not just because of how monstrous I am. I'm… running out of reasons to, I guess.

I want to just be me. I want that so badly and I'm not going to be able to hold it in forever. But I don't say that out loud. Not yet.

"...We should break for dinner," I say instead.

"Yeah," Alma says flatly. "I guess I've been hungrier lately too."

"Nobody noticed, at least," I say, giving her an apologetic smile. "Thanks for, uh, grabbing me there."

"I just figured it would disrupt our date a little if you started slaughtering the exhibits," she sighs. "Come on, let's get out of here. Where do you want to eat?"

"Sorry, I kind of interrupted things. I know you were having fun."

"It's fine," she shrugs. "You looked like a cat watching birds through a window. It was kind of cute."

"Well, as long as I was cute," I joke, and we head out of the aquarium and back to my car. Alma stays quiet the whole time, so I ask "Whatcha thinking about?"

"You, mostly," Alma answers, focusing ahead at the road even though I'm the one driving. "It's…"

She hesitates.

"You're not gonna offend me," I assure her. "Open and honest communication for the win!"

"'For the win?' Really?" she chuckles. "Fine, I'm sorry. It's just… kinda scary when you get all monster-brained like that."

"Oh," I say. "Sorry. Yeah, I guess the last time I did that I gave you a tail, huh?"

"Well, that's part of it," she admits, squirming uncomfortably in her seat. Her tail is getting really thick and it's clearly not comfortable for her to sit on. "I'm also just worried that it's going to happen to me. What if I start chasing squirrels or whatever?"

Oh, yeah. That'd be spooky.

"The mental stuff happened to me pretty much immediately," I say. "It was terrifying at first because I didn't know what was happening, but I've started getting used to it. And my therapist kinda started helping me work through it too?"

"Oh. Right. You're going to therapy now. Your therapist knows?"

"Yeah, as of yesterday," I sigh. "Hopefully she won't spill the beans. Jet's the one that pushed me to get more open with her, actually."

"...Oh," Alma says flatly. Yeah, she doesn't even like hearing the name, huh?

"Is it weird to ask how your therapy is going?" I press a little anyway, trying to make sure to give her an out.

"I mean, it's fine. My therapist is okay. There's not really much for me to talk about. I'm not the one that stole a bunch of stuff and got us arrested. It's not my court-ordered therapy. I'm just stuck going to it anyway."

"Oh," I say. "Yeah, I guess that sucks, huh?"

"I guess."

Well this went poorly. Abort!

"Where do you wanna eat?"

We end up going to some old-school American diner, mainly on the basis that I have a sudden and inexplicable craving for chicken wings. I just want to crunch through some bones, is that so wrong? Alma seems to enjoy her burger well enough too, though it's apparently a pretty mid-quality restaurant. I can't really tell those kinds of things anymore, my taste buds are still screwy as heck and don't seem to care a whole lot beyond the distinction between meat and not-meat.

"So," Alma says. "Elephant in the room. You got kidnapped?"

Oh. Right. I'd sort of been trying to forget about that.

"Yeah, uh, so in the other universe there's this creepy centipede cult that thinks I'm going to destroy the world or something?" I hedge.

"Yeah, you've talked about them before," Alma encourages, taking a sip of soda.

"Right. So, they found us and started following us, so we split up and followed them back, but then they ambushed our ambush of their ambush and hit us with this Chaos and Pneuma mage who blasted us with a depression beam until we couldn't think anymore, and now I think my other body is stuck in a 4D cage."

Alma just stares at me, continuing to slurp up her drink through a straw.

"...And, uh, yeah I know that sounds really bad," I hedge. "I mean, it probably is really bad. But I have no idea how bad because I literally couldn't really acknowledge what was going on around me all that much so I have no idea what my options are for escape. Maybe it'll be easy, maybe I'm stuck, I have no idea. So I'm just trying not to think about it as much as possible. I'll figure it out when I have some kind of actual information."

"I guess that makes sense," Alma agrees, finally taking a breath. "Can you bring anything from our world to help?"

"Huh?" I ask. Of course not, how would I do that? Except the obvious answer to that question is 'magic' so the question instead becomes 'can I do that?' "Uh. I haven't. Actually really considered that before. Maybe?"

"Could be worth looking into," Alma shrugs. "Not sure what you would bring, though. A gun?"

"I don't have a gun," I point out. "Or fingers."

"Oh, right."

Is such a spell even possible, though? A magic for traveling through dimensions? I guess it must be possible, I'm a living link between two dimensions and it's obviously within the Goddess' purview. If anyone could use a spell like that, it'd definitely be me. What would I do with it, though? How would I activate it? What would I bring?

"...It's definitely something to think about," I agree with Alma. "No idea if I can do that, but… maybe. Won't know until I try, and all that. Can we change the subject away from my kidnapping before I have a panic attack, though? I'm starting to feel some anxiety creeping up."

"Oh, sure. Sorry."

There's a pause, and then she adds:

"Avoidance coping mechanisms for the win."

"For the win!" I laugh. "Yes!"

"Ugh, don't sound so excited," Alma grumbles. "It's internet slang from two thousand and five. Why are you even saying it?"

"I don't know! Because my brain is a horrid mess of memes and depression and sometimes it retreats to my childhood for comfort?"

"Oh. Well, mood I guess."

The rest of the date swaps over to easier topics, thankfully. It's a little awkward, but mostly fun. We don't do much beyond finish eating and go find a place that sells wigs, but I manage to collect a few more laughs from my girlfriend by trying some of them on, and that's always delightful. Then I drive her home and reluctantly return to my house, where I promptly sneak upstairs and start streaming, just for an excuse to stretch my body. Nothing much happens there, though. I'm too exhausted to provide much in the way of color commentary, and I'm starting to worry a vanilla nuzlocke just isn't very interesting content anymore. Most influencers have advanced forward into increasingly complicated and difficult challenge runs. Good thing my channel can get carried by my tits and the fact that I'm a freak!

Oh geez, when I stop playing this video game I'll wake up in a cage.

I pause, my clawed fingers going still on the keyboard. Crap, it has officially become too late in the day to not think about it anymore. I'm going to be in a cage. I have no idea what the cultists are doing with any of my friends. And while I'm trying to be optimistic about my escape chances, Hagoro made it clear that I'm not the first interdimensional traveler that the cultists have captured and lethally experimented on. They don't expect me to be the last, either. The organization most likely has a routine.

I don't know what to do.

My screen flashes as messages from chat ask why I've suddenly gone still. I tear my attention back to the game, my character taking a few steps onscreen before I just get overwhelmed again, unable to focus even on Pokémon. Once again, I stop.

"I'm scared," I admit to my audience.

"Why?" "What's up?" "Is everything okay?" and a dozen other concerned messages fly by on my screen. I almost smile. There's nothing like parasocial concern to boost the ego, but ego isn't really the issue here.

"I bought a wig today," I admit. "Because my hair's starting to fall out. Just… in clumps. I can probably show you."

I reach up and rake my claws lightly over my scalp. Sure enough, a ton of black hair ends up wrapped around my fingers as I pull them away. It's even more than expected, and I can't help but stare in horror for a few moments before silently Refreshing it all into the trash.

"I know none of you believe me when I say this is all real," I sigh. "And I get that, I really do. It's the smart thing to believe. Burden of proof and all that. It just… sucks. Ugh."

I start combing away more patches of loose hair, knowing that it's getting visibly thinner as a result.

"I don't know why I'm talking about this," I mutter. "I don't think I can stream any more tonight. Sorry, guys."

And I just end things there. Honestly, my options are to either go to bed or have a panic attack over going to bed, and I'm getting a little tired of panic attacks. I strip down to my underwear, crawl under the covers, and sure enough I fall asleep almost immediately. I know this, of course, because I wake up almost immediately.

I am, indeed, in a four dimensional cage. I wonder how they made it? It looks almost like it's made of fossilized wood, and I suppose that might be my answer right there. But of course, I'm not generally stopped by solid matter regardless of how many dimensions it features. Immediately, I intend to channel a Spacial Rend, but the moment I think about instilling my claws with power I feel a gentle but dangerous pressure. The Goddess is warning me: don't do it, or there will be consequences. I am, after all, currently in a Zone of Law. The Goddess plays favorites, but that doesn't mean She breaks the rules. She'll tell me what's going on, though, just because She can. Zone of Law: Ban Space.

It's then I notice that Hagoro is here in the room with me, on alert the moment I moved. That cultist with the talking-really-good magic is also here, Danny or something. They're both armed to the teeth, wearing what I suspect are magical items. Hmm. No need to just suspect; if Hagoro is banning Space magic, he's not banning anything else.

"Aura Sight," I hiss, scaring the crap out of both cultists before they realize what I just said and relax very, very slightly.

"Holy shit, what a wake-up call," D-something swears.

"I told you she would be immediately alert after coming to, Donny," Hagoro answers.

Donny! Right! His magical items are mostly Barrier magic, it looks like. Hagoro has a wider collection, from Art and Order to a whole bunch of Death. He's still missing both his right arms.

"Well! I guess you were right, big guy!" Donny agrees as I look around the room as best I can. It's a small cell, but the surrounding rooms are mostly empty. There are other guards outside, in front of the door, with various collections of magic. No Heat, Light, or Chaos, though; nothing I strongly resist. The 4D cage doesn't have any obvious weaknesses either, though I might be able to mundanely damage it with my claws, if I'm careful. …But also maybe not. The cage itself has Barrier magic imbued in it as well. I wonder if any of the souls they use to make these enchantments are sapient.

"I realize you're probably busy looking for a way out, but I was hoping we could maybe have a bit of a chat first?" Donny asks amicably, flashing me a smile. "I feel like we really got started on the wrong foot, and Hagoro here certainly didn't do anything to improve your opinion of us."

"Neither did you," I quip back. "Falsely surrendering and then leading us into a trap?"

"Well, I appreciate you vastly overestimating my intelligence, but I assure you that was a very real surrender. You have repeatedly demonstrated your interest and capacity for killing people who cross you, Hannah. I don't wanna be on that list. My allies just rescued me from you because of course they did. You're probably thinking of ways to rescue your friends from us right now, aren't you?"

Well. Yeah. He's got me there.

"You've got good reason to assume we're all crazy bastards, Hannah," he continues. "I get it. Really. But we're not. We're just stuck trying to deal with a really shitty situation for everyone in the best way we know how, and even the best way happens to not be all that good. The Goddess is fucking everyone in the ass here, and you've got it worst out of all of us."

"Oh, that's rich," I sneer. "You've openly admitted to being a Pneuma mage that magically knows what to say to convince people of stuff, and you expect me to believe you're on my side? That your crazy apocalypse cult is anti-Goddess, when She's basically the one feeding you everything that ends up coming out of your mouth?"

With one of the legs not visible in 3D space, I start clawing away at the cage. No dice, as expected. What do I do, in that case? Wait for Hagoro to go to sleep? Try and survive the Goddess' retribution when I break the Zone of Law?

"Huh," Donny blinks in surprise. "I mean, I guess we're anti-Goddess, yeah. Kind of. It is our running theory that She's the one who keeps trying to destroy everything. Care to comment?"

"Not to you," I snap, reorienting my 4D vision as much as I can to check for any potential gaps or weaknesses in the cage.

"Right, yeah, the justified antagonism stuff. Here, let me back up, kid. I'll give it to you plain: yes, we are gonna need your help to figure out what's going on with you and how your kind keep showing up here. Yes, your help isn't going to mean your consent, as much as I'd love to have it, because unfortunately the stakes are kind of high and every option available to us is kind of terrible. For the nothing that it's worth, I'm genuinely sorry. But despite how terrifying you and your group of pals are, I get the impression that you're not evil, yeah? You told Hagoro here you wanted to help if you could. That's still true, right?"

"Of course it is," I growl. "I just don't think helping serial kidnapper-murderers is likely to be the best way forward."

"Yeah," Donny nods. "Yeah, I know, kid."

"Seriously, if you're really as altruistic as you say, why not at least give me a chance to prove I'm on the level before whisking me away? Have you ever considered that the horrific treatment you give everyone like me might be the cause of… whatever it is we do to mess things up?"

Donny seems genuinely shocked at that, and then his expression shifts to sadness.

"...Oh, kid," he sighs, clutching the sides of his head. "You don't already know? Seriously?"

"She's not authorized to know," Hagoro grunts. "Traditionally, telling founder's kin tends to make them unstable, and—"

"Shut the fuck up, I know," Donny snaps, cutting him off. "It's literally my job to decide what to tell people, so I'm telling her."

I clack my teeth together, unimpressed by what is likely a scripted performance. Maybe good cop bad cop is a novel interrogation technique over here, I don't know, but it's pretty cliché on Earth and I'm not falling for it. I wish this stupid cage had a door, I could probably pick a lock super easily with Refresh. How did they even get me in here?

"Kid, this is gonna suck to hear," Donny continues, either oblivious or uncaring of my skepticism. "But you wouldn't be a founder's kin if you weren't going to fuck over the world. It's just what you are."

Oh boy, interdimensional racism! How fun.

"This isn't the first time a religious organization decided to claim that I deserve to suffer just for being what I am," I spit at him. "Knowing you assholes, it won't be the last. Are you at least smart enough to have not hurt my friends?"

Donny stares at me for a moment, then sighs and turns for the door.

"Yeah kid, they're fine," he tells me. "Also in prison cells so they don't try to kill us, but fine. But I can see I'm not gonna convince you that we're making a reasonable sacrifice for the world—"

"Have you considered that you aren't!?" I snap.

"—so I'm definitely not gonna explain the process by which you're eventually going to end it. The last thing we need is another fucker trying to use a cataclysmic event to break out of a box. So sit tight and have fun with the tests; if you wanna treat us like hostiles we'll do the same. But if you wanna cooperate… Goddess damn, but I'd love to have one of you that actually cooperates for once. Just let us know whenever, because despite the friends of mine that your posse has murdered, you're still the most reasonable founder's kin I've ever met."

He steps outside, and motions the two people waiting at the door to head in. They're a human man and a dentron woman, and they stare at me the way I stare at a particularly annoying homework problem.

"I take it that these two are doing those 'experiments' you were talking about," I say. "What are they, anyway?"

I don't get an answer, though. No one seems inclined to talk to me now that Donny is gone. The human man, a Death and Order mage, just reaches for the cage, putting his hand on the outside. He has sunken eyes, slightly graying hair, and the kind of smell that implies a glandular problem. Then he casts something, and I learn one very important fact about these tests: they hurt. Deep within my soul, he reaches towards the thread holding my two bodies together, and he tries to peel it apart.

I only last five minutes before I start to scream. That, apparently, is all the man's dentron partner is for: her magic deafens the room, so my torment can continue without undue distractions.

They were, as I suspected, quite prepared for this.