--=-Chapter 32: If The Shadow Fits--=-

I hadn't noticed until Sori pointed it out, but he was right. Aquarium Guy hadn't been glowing green. Most people barely had much of an aura as it was. Hands hadn't had one at all—though, human-Hands had apparently been an illusion. However, Maebe's glow was missing, and Guy's was the same. Maybe his face hadn't been blank in shock; it had just been blank.

"What does it mean?" I asked.

"It means pirates are stealing our jewels, or master burglars are pulling one last score before retiring to live out the end of the world."

"Nope. Ignoring that. How about, why am I back here?" I asked the floating eye.

I was lying in a wooden deck chair at the front of the stone ship. Slabs of sandstone stuck up from the prow, creating a low wall that could be looked over to view the roiling expanse of plasma ocean. The sandy front of the ship was separated from the green lawn that made up most of the deck by a rustic wooden fence.

My chair was near the fence and looked out over the beach. There was a dry and gnarled-looking tree and a couple beach-ball-sized boulders scattered across the sand. Leaning up against the tree was a full-sized bonsai rake.

I was looking at a life-sized zen garden, or something similar, nestled at the front of a stone ship, floating along on a plasma ocean with nothing else but a silently raging storm in sight. It was simultaneously bizarre and familiar.

"Well, just before you died, I sequestered you again, which was basically impossible. Then, as I expected, you brought us here!"

"Ok, but why?"

"What do you mean why? You were about to die. Didn't you notice?"

"And then the day would loop, and I'd be back," I said, confused. The Zen Garden looked inviting, so I stood from my inclined deck chair and walked over to the rake.

"Still. Well, whatever, go back if you want. I just thought you might want to hang out here for a bit rather than die again. Sue me for caring." Sori said, floating off as though turning his back to me and overacting his dejection.

"Alright-alright-alright, calm down. Tell me about the guy with the non-aura, then." I said, setting the rake head against the tree and slowly dragging it to form four parallel divots in the sand.

"He's a car without a driver at this point. I told you; someone broke the trash collectors, and this is what happens."

"Most of what you say is nonsense. Also, you tried to pin that on me."

"Well, if the shadow fits."

"And I guess you still are." I dragged the rake around the gnarled tree twice before circling one of the boulders in the opposite direction, slowly starting to expand outward.

"You heard that swarm of crows."

"flock of crows."

"No, Sam, that was a swarm. Semantics is more important than taxonomy here."

"What?"

"They didn't flock to your friends; they swarmed them. And that swarm said your missing Shadow is related to the trash collectors."

"Didn't we already know that?" I asked.

"I was just wildly speculating before. Now we have eye witness testimony and expert analysis."

"And how is that related-"

"I'm the expert."

"Of course. And that's related to the Guy-"

"I was also the eye witness. You're a little slow, but did you get it? Because I'm an eye?" Sori asked, sounding skeptical that I had.

I ignored him some more, letting the garden features guide me between straight lines and curving arcs as I thought. "So, there's a shadow that's not a shadow, and it can erase memories and turn people like Aquarium Guy into a mindless drone?"

"You sound skeptical," Sori said, watching me work. "If the Shadow wipes memories and holds minds. Add strings to what's left, and you have a puppet."

"Let's just say I don't find the eye-witness-testimony credible."

"I told you, I'm the eye-witness- oh."

"Ok, I'll humor you. Who's the culprit? So far, Crowseph seems unlikely since he didn't kill me when I was unconscious, believing I still had the Shadow he feared."

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"Right, but Hands did shoot you. Well, he had you shot. I don't think the dolphin has a waterproof gun. That was the first time I caught a glimpse of you."

"Let's assume for a second that Hands has somehow stolen my Shadow that's not a shadow. How would he make drones? How would he control them? For that matter, how does it work to take memories at all?" That wasn't really what I wanted to ask, but more information was better. Stress was beginning to build in my tightening chest. I focused on trying to learn and understand while distracting myself just enough with the soft hush of raking sand.

"Some things, by their very nature, can only exist once without changing that nature. One King is a monarch, two kings is a war, and twenty is a parliament. Minds are the same. So if someone found a way to trap a mind outside their body, say in a crystal inside an extra-dimensional shadow, that mind wouldn't be created again. The body would be empty and idle, waiting for input from the absent mind, making it perfect for a little grand theft corpus if you know the trick."

"Do you know the trick?" I asked, dragging the rake around the perimeter of the design I'd made so far.

"...Magic?"

"How about a new topic. If this thing was mine, how did I lose it?"

"Probably the same way you lost your memories. In fact, if I had to guess— which I do because I don't know—I'd guess that your memories are still inside the Shadow. If you got it back, I think you'd remember everything you've forgotten before now."

"I get, I need to find my Shadow. I've got enough motivation; you can ease off on the manipulation."

"I'm not trying to hide my motives. How am I supposed to schedule trash pickups if everyone is on strike?"

"I'm not in a union."

"I don't expect much from your strike then."

"Well, I guess it's about time I restart the day-"

"Wait, no, stay. I'm just joking. Anyway, I wanted to see if I could sequester you just before you died, and then you could bring us here and use this place to prepare for the next loop."

I stopped dragging the rake to give Sori a baleful look. "Prepare how? What am I supposed to do? In case you haven't noticed, these guys have guns, or they're actual monsters who can thrash me into pulp. I've died six times. Most of them were terrifying and painful. I keep rolling with the punches, and it only leads to more people punching and more people expecting me to take punches for them. All I wanted was to find my friend and hole up as best as possible. I'm a seven-foot-tall monster, but all that means is that I'm on my own. I can't even speak. People at least listened when I used that crow, even if the words weren't always mine. I'm alone out there, Sori, and I'm tired of dying. It hurts. It's scary. And I don't know what to do."

Sori was quiet for several long seconds as I returned to scratching patterns in the sand to hide the tears threatening to fall.

"If you look inside that cabin, you'll find a desk and office supplies. I snooped last time I was here after I kicked you out. That's how I ended up taking that bird. Too bad about that. It was nice seeing everything from the front row. Without that crow, I won't be able to tell what's going on nearly as easily."

"Yeah, it would have been nice if you could have told Jon what happened to me."

"I never got why you were so hung up on that plan if I'm honest. It's not like Jon would remember for more than a couple hours anyway."

"Still, it would have made me feel better to tell him and get some encouragement. The last few days haven't exactly been a vacation for me. You understand that for most of my life, I'd not even been near a gun, let alone been shot? Now, I've been killed by three guns, shot in the arm by a fourth , and threatened by a fifth. And that's not even the unbelievable part. Sharing this with my friend would make it easier to hold up."

"Oh, I see, but you're saying it to me, so that must mean I'm your best friend now! Well, I hope you feel better now that you've unloaded all that on me. Good job!" Sori said, sounding more proud of himself than concerned about me.

"Sure Sori. Thanks." I said, my heart still heavy. He was right that it would be worse without him. If nothing else, he'd brought me somewhere peaceful. The sky and sea raged, but the stone ship barely rocked. The storm was little more than white noise, soothing me as I raked swirls in the sand and worked through my worries.

"Anyway," Sori said, "I thought if I brought you here, you could prepare for the next loop. Alice had that note on the note card. You could do something similar. If you wanted." The floating eye sounded uncharacteristically uncertain, maybe picking up on my mood.

"Then you could send it with me, like the buttons?" I asked. It was a good idea, and I tried to sound like I was into it. I'd finished raking furrow in the sand and leaned the rake up against the wooden fence as I stepped through the gate onto the lawn. "Alright. Let's go see what I can find in the cabin. How big can I make this thing? Alice had a note card of information on it. Do I need to worry about making it that small so it lasts across loops? I'm assuming that's the plan."

"I thought you might ask something like that. If you make it here, you can make it reappear here at will. So I would just need to be able to sequester you so you could spawn another one. Unfortunately, that will be hard now that I'm not riding around on your shoulder. I got pretty lucky catching you that first time."

"Ok… Where does that leave us?"

"Well, you have the right idea, planning to use a memory crystal to keep it intact through loops. You'd be able to store things in the shadow, too. If you had it." Sor said, apparently unable to help himself.

"Yeah, yeah, so, without the Shadow, how big can this be?"

"Not very, maybe a handful of pages front and back if you use a full-sized memory crystal, not the shards that Alice uses."

"That should be enough. I could write a detailed explanation even with a handful of pages."

"Oh, uh. You probably won't actually be able to write coherently."

"Why? I mean, I can't write back in the real world for whatever reason—I'm assuming it's related to my other communication problems—but here, that doesn't seem to be a problem."

"Yeah, I'm helping you out with that. You are fairly exhausting to translate, I have to say. If I couldn't read your thoughts, it would be impossible. I can't write for you, though. I don't have hands. I can probably help you shape the letters; just don't expect us to write an entire form letter or something. I am not that patient."

The cabin was a one-room space, which was pretty well-filled. On one wall was a bulletin board with handwritten notes I couldn't read; the words looked like chicken scratch. Next to it was a metal filing cabinet that was locked closed. In the corner was a familiar lounge chair that looked awfully similar to my Grandma's, though it had been years since I'd seen it. Most of the opposite wall was occupied by a desk containing some of my most used art supplies.

Whatever Sori thought, this place was connected to me. If I hadn't made it, I'd at least been consulted. Now, I just needed to figure out why. Here, I had a voice and a body I could relate to. There had to be a way to take that back to the waking world with me. I was already planning to find the shadow, but the more time I spent in this place, the more of a priority it became. Sori would be thrilled.

In the end, I did what I knew and drew a series of comics. I kept the art simple, only using color to add highlights. Most of it was simple line art. Frustratingly, it wasn't just words and letters that were beyond me. Most symbols and emoticons were just as indecipherable. I became a toddler proudly pointing at squiggles and declaring it a horse. It made me wonder if the smiley I'd scratched in the door had actually looked right or if it was just my confused brain seeing what I expected.

Because I couldn't do letters, icons, or symbols, but more complex art was unhindered, my simple line art comic was dotted with odd spots of detail to add context to otherwise emotionless art. Then, with the help of Sori, I managed a few keywords to make sure it made sense.

The lettering was as painstakingly slow as Sori had warned and was completely inconsistent. I would tell Sori what I wanted to say, and he would tell me what to draw. I drew the letters upside down to trick my brain into drawing what I was told and not what I expected. It mostly turned out ok; some characters were swapped or flipped, but I guess even God's virtual assistant can be dyslexic.

--=-

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