--=-Chapter 71: What Happens Next?--=-

With Nia set free and my missing memories given to Sori as replacement collateral, Sori told Hands to hurry up and then vanished—well, left. He was still only visible to Hands for reasons he refused to explain.

Hands didn’t necessarily need to be around, except that he was Nia’s warden, and I needed Nia’s to help me get Alice and company on the same page. Hands had brought goons with him—well, he’d brought Steve and Larry anyway—and at some unseen communication, they wheeled in Alice, Jessica, and Maebe’s catatonic bodies.

“Can we start with Alice?” Nia asked.

“That’s probably for the best; Hands and I won't be familiar to any of them; we’d just be random guys.”

“A problem that’s overcome easily enough. Even you should be able to change your appearance here.” Hands said.

“I mean, I can, but not into anyone they know.”

Hands’s appearance changed to that of Anderson, and when he spoke, his voice was also Anderson’s. I hadn’t considered that he’d be able to do auditory illusions, but then, how else had he spoken as a dolphin?

“Okay, that’s great, but we need them to trust us for more than a minute. The second they leave this place and see Anderson’s body, our efforts will immediately be undone. Besides, we’d need to tell Alice about you and your domain anyway.”

“As well as my ability with illusions, but I take your point.” Hands replied, regaining his previous appearance of a suited gentleman.

I didn’t know from looking which of the dozen memory crystals was Alice’s, but Sori said to just try them all until one worked.

One at a time, Nia pressed the crystals to Alice’s forehead.

“You don’t think the sight of her sister as a demon from folklore will scare the good doctor?” Hands asked.

“Oh crap, I forgot. Can you?” I gestured vaguely toward Nia

“Hold a moment, Calfling,” Hands said to Nia, “and pay attention. When you cast an illusion on yourself, you’ll only see it if you wish to. If I cast on you, you’ll have to try to pierce it, to believe in its falseness.”

Nia’s increased height remained, but her wings and horns were gone.

“Nia’s normally not that tall,” I pointed out.

“I’m aware. If I change her height, she’ll be looking through an illusion that blocks most light. It would take time to overcome and would threaten the stability of the rest of the illusion. This will be enough. Nia, please continue; I, too, have business to be about.”

A few moments later, Alice was blinking to focus her eyes and then sat up in a panic. “Shit! No!” she said, flailing. “Don’t— What? Nia?”

“Alice! Alice, it’s okay! Alice!” Nia started trying to get Alice’s attention right away, but the disorientation made it take a second.

“Nia? Where am I? What happened? Where’s? Oh, that bitch. That BITCH!” Alice said, looking around. “Nia, where’s your mom?”

“She’s gone, for now,” I said for Nia, who was understandably torn on the whole thing.

“She’s insane.” Alice spat.

“I know. I...Well, she won't be as bad in the future, but I’m not sure she was ever far from that particular edge.”

“And who are you?” Alice said, pushing herself off the gurney and unsteadily to her feet.

We spent a few minutes getting Alice caught up. Unfortunately, she didn’t have much in the way of memories from the previous loop, which wasn’t to say she didn’t have any.

“Sam… Oberon. I know that name. Aren’t you supposed to be a werewolf?”

“Oberon, you can go over that with her later. What matters now is her choice.” Hands interjected.

“My choice?”

I told her how she’d been attacked by Crowseph and that the trauma of that event had manifested as a monster that would hunt her if we let her keep her memories.

“You have a few choices. You can try to face it, Hands, remove the illusion on Nia.”

“Fine,” Hands said, as the illusion on Nia vanished, “but that’s the last time you make a demand of me. I’m not here to do tricks for your amusement.”

Alice took Nia’s transformation largely in stride, responding with curiosity more than anything else. “May I?” She asked, reaching tentatively toward her sister. She spent several minutes convincing herself they were real.

“Both Nia and her mom reunited with their repressed memories. Nia was able to accept and adapt to the trauma she experienced. Kay was overwhelmed by it, fixated on it. Her pain was also self-inflicted, and I’m guessing there were deeper issues involved. If you face your trauma, those memories will change you. Only you can know if you're capable of facing your past and growing beyond it or if you’ll be consumed by it.” I explained.

“That sounds like a pretty big risk. I take it there are reasons I shouldn’t keep avoiding it?”

The biggest problem with avoiding the monster was that it left the monster roaming about attacking random people, and I told Alice as much. “There are also advantages. Namely, you’ll stop forgetting when the days reset. Nia will be learning to create illusions with Hands, and, to be frank she’s a hostage to make me follow another’s schedule. She could use an ally around that knew what was happening.”

“You wouldn’t necessarily have to face your demons to stay with your sister.” Hands interjected. “You're welcome to join her in my Dreamland. You’ll face your past, but you won't be required to accept it, and you’ll have a community to protect you from its attacks.”

A case of theft: this story is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

“We can also erase all your memories since the day of the apocalypse. That may not seem like much, but you’ve got memories you don’t always know you have.”

“Like knowing your name...” Alice said thoughtfully.

“Exactly. You’ll lose that. Your repressed memory will be destroyed along with the rest of your memories. It’s become dangerous out there, though, and you could find yourself in this same situation again pretty easily, especially since you’ll barely remember anything from each loop. Which means you won't be able to help Nia.”

“Help her with what?”

“We have one year to evacuate everyone in town before we lose our chance.”

“I’d think people would jump at the chance to escape.”

“It’s going to require accepting some pretty outrageous truths, but we can talk about that more later,” I said, seeing Hands impatiently checking the time on his illusory watch. I had to assume it was performative, but if he was trying to hurry me up, it worked.

“You should also know that erasing your memories will require one of two things. You can either jump into an ocean of plasma, or we can operate and remove a crystal from your brain.”

“Wait, I did that. I had a patient with a crystal that suddenly appeared in his brain while we were operating. The next thing I knew, I wasn’t in surgery anymore.”

“Mr. Peterson, I know,” I supplied. “I’m a little surprised you remember that the timing seems off. Yes, Hands, I see you. I’ve never tried getting someone caught up on all this. Can I have a minute?”

“I’m just watching the clock, not setting the schedule. Take all the time you want, but if the sands run out, don’t blame that on me.”

“Then, let me save you time. I’m not running. And I don’t want to forget. If my sister needs help, that just makes it even easier.”

Nia threw herself at Alice and burst into tears. She’d been playing it cool since we’d woken her sister up, but understandably, she was still vulnerable.

“Well then,” Hands said after giving the sisters a bare few seconds to find comfort in one another. “Then Nia and I will take our leave. Alice, should you wish to visit your sister, simply come to physical therapy, and you’ll be shown the way. Oberon, until next time. Come along, Nia, the day grows long.”

“Wait, can’t I stay until they’ve woken the others?”

“I’m afraid not; there are other matters to attend to. I’m sure you’ll see them again in good time.”

He only gave the sisters a few seconds to say goodbye, but I knew it wouldn’t be forever.

“Alright, well, we’ll have to find your trauma monster before you can confront it, but I know where we can start looking. For now, we’ll need to wake Jessica and Maebe and give them the same choice.

“Waking them means they’ll have to choose between accepting their trauma and brain surgery?”

“Brain surgery or death, but yes. They could also stay in here, as you might need to, until we find your trauma monster. If they chose that, they’d be stuck following me around, though.”

“Then, if you can wake Jessica up without restoring her memories, you should. She went to Kay looking for help, and Kay promised to take the bad memories away. She may not have known everything, but she chose this.”

I wanted to argue. I wanted Jessica to meet the real me. The memories I’d be destroying would include those moments of closeness shared in the waiting room and whatever partial memories she had that made her trust me in the first place. I didn’t want her to lose those. I didn't want to lose them.

“You’re sure? There was a lot she didn’t know when she decided that.” I tried halfheartedly.

“As much as I can be. Jessica is great, but she doesn’t deal with fear well. And she was scared, physically shaking from fear.”

I wasn’t sure there was a right choice here. It seemed wrong to utterly destroy Jessica's memories without at least informing her. And yet, from the sound of it, she’d already made a choice, if an uninformed one. Ultimately, I’d only known her briefly, and I couldn’t justify ignoring Alice’s insight, even if it felt wrong.

We still had to go through the process of going through crystals to find Jessica's, but when we found the right one, I simply pocketed it for later disposal in the plasma.

Neither of us knew Maebe’s story, so we did wake her up. She also wasn’t confident in facing her pain, so after making Alice promise to keep an eye on her, we went up to the stone ship.

“You don’t have to jump. We can take the crystal back out.”

“It's okay. I think I’d rather have the control.” Maebe said quietly. She hadn’t said much about what happened to her, but I got the impression that, unlike Jessica, she hadn’t chosen for things to go that way. “Don’t forget, you promised to look out for me.”

And then she jumped. It was an utterly silent affair. There was no splash, no yell of pain or surprise, just instant incineration.

Having died several times, I didn’t know what to feel about it. Like me, she wasn’t dead. She’d just lost a couple months of vague memories and her old connection to Crowseph’s trauma monster.

I tossed Jessica’s crystal in next. It felt like saying goodbye, but it wouldn’t have to be forever.

“What happens next?” Alice said.

“Next, we take Jessica out of here, and hopefully, she wakes up. Then we go find Mr. Peterson and see if we can offer him the same choice.”

“What about that Crow guy?”

“Crowseph”

“I’m not calling him that. Won’t he be a problem?”

“I've got a plan for him. And we have to start looking for your trauma somewhere."

“Okay...And then what?”

“And then I start trying to organize people so they’ll know what to do in a year’s time. It means I’m going to have to leave the hospital. I’ll leave things there to you and Nia, and I suppose Hands as well.”

“What about you? No one’s going to help you?”

“Maybe. We’ll see. I’ll find help along the way, if nothing else. You don’t have to worry about that. Just get things organized here and take care of your sister.”

“It doesn’t seem like enough.”

“I mean, I’ll be around. Learn everything you can, and keep me updated. Right now, I’m mostly relying on the ramblings of a delusional personal assistant.”

--=-

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