[Player Log Start!]

[Log Holder: Terence Glasgow]

[Level: 2 (Sub-Level)]

Lucky explained what happened, in as much of a rush as they could. Their words were scrambled and erratic, skipping parts in their obvious excitement.

But Terry latched onto the important part of that statement. Someone in Delica had betrayed them. This wasn’t really a perfect place after all. And not only that, but that person was Peter Paterson. Should have suspected someone with a name as false as that to be untrustworthy.

“Stay with us, Lucky.” Tench cut in, voice calm and soothing, eerily so in the tension that filled the room, “What was he trying to do with the Console?”

“I don’t know!” She snapped, nerves fraying before their eyes, “He was saying a lot of stuff, but I didn’t care to hear it. He was a liar and we need to get out of here.”

Adding onto the confusion of the scene, someone gasped from the doorway. Nancy Mitt and her siblings had now joined the fray. Terry was starting to feel overstimulation nip at his heels.

“Are you sure?” Nancy asked, stepping further into the room, “Paterson- he’s a good guy. Always helpful and kind. Why would he just snap like this?”

“Maybe ask him yourself.” Lucky replied sharply, “While we leave you guys behind.”

They were leaving already? The timeline was changing too fast. Terry cast a look around, trying to gauge what the others were thinking. If they went along with this, then he wouldn’t argue. Asadullah’s eyes were fixed on the Console, and his body was more difficult to read without the extra features, but Terry could tell he would receive no support from him.

The Mitts all looked amongst themselves. Kathy’s lip were trembling, “Are you leaving?” She asked, her voice shaky and heart-wrenching.

“Seems like that’s the best idea.” Tench agreed, bringing down the gavel, “We need to get out of this place, and if the Console can do that…” He trailed off meaningfully.

Terry knew that that was the sensible thing to do. Wasting time could prove to be a death sentence for countless people across dimensions. That didn’t mean he wasn’t upset about his timeline being disrupted.

“We still need to work on having me and Asad meld back.” Babur said, bobbing in the air. It was the only rational reason to not get out of this surrealistic nightmare dimension.

“My mom made us promise to tell her if we decide to go.” Nancy broke in, eyes flickering around the room, lingering on the windows and doors in visual range, “And I’m not running just because you’re sick of waiting. I’m going to ask Paterson what happened, and Simon, you grab our bug-out bags from the house. Kathy, here you have to make a choice.” She knelt down to put a hand on her little sister’s shoulder, “Do you want to come with us?”

Kathy was shaking. Of course she was. She wasn’t even a teenager yet. This wasn’t a decision she was prepared to make. Simon made a hasty exit, even as every other person in the room remained rooted to the spot, shamelessly listening in.

“I think… I think I want to stay.” She confessed. A relieved smile stretched across Nancy’s face. Obviously she had shared the opinion of everyone else that Kathy was too young for the undertaking.

“Okay, that’s good. Hide for now with Linda and Danny, will you? I’ll go figure out what’s going with Paterson, and if this turns out to be bad, he won’t be able to target you next.”

Kathy nodded, and on shaky doe legs she turned around and walked off into the Delica sunshine. Nancy made to follow suit, only to be blocked off by Asadullah, “You can’t go by yourself.” He argued, “What if he attacks you?”

She looked at him snidely, “And I suppose you’re going to be much help, former catboy?”

Asadullah flinched, and Terry should have said something in support of him, but he remained silent, seething alongside his friend. Lucky cleared her throat, “Fifteen minutes.” She promised reluctantly, “Be here by then.”

Nancy jerked her head in a reluctant nod and turned to continue down the path again, straight where Lucky had so peacefully been heading just an hour or three ago.

“Okay, what do we do now?” Tench said, not wasting any time, “Anything you people need to grab that’s of utmost importance?”

Sentimentality was a powerful thing in their circles. Terry had seen more than a few of them make life-threatening risks to get back a souvenir or memento with no value except for the memories associated with it. But Tench’s tone made it clear that anything like that was being left behind this time.

“My bangles.” Asadullah said, quick as a whip.

“I have them.” Lucky opened one of the containers hidden around her chair, revealing a swath of metal and glass. Both the boy and the djinn resting on him sagged in obvious relief.

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

“Anything else?” Tench looked at each of them.

Terry hesitated before saying his piece, “I was… growing some cultures in my bedroom. They need to be transferred into travel-friendly containers for the trip.” They weren’t important enough to include in this list of must-haves. He didn’t understand why he was telling them this at all when he knew he was just going to get shot down.

But he spent a long time on them, analyzing the workings of fungus in this other dimension, and slowly adopting a collection of the more peculiar ones. Hours of work had gone into this tiny fronds, and he refused to just let it be washed away as if it had never existed.

Tench tilted his head, “What can these ones do?” He asked, not throwing away the possibility outright.

Terry’s stomach flipped, and he replied quickly, “Er, one of them, definitely has strong antibiotic properties. But it’s not penicillium. Might even be better than that, if I had to guess. Haven’t picked out a name for it, though. There probably already is one, but there hasn’t been much time to consult academic sources in this town. Another, um, it can start fires.”

“What?”

“Fires.” He repeated, trying not to stutter too much, “It. Gets hot. Some metabolic property, I think. And that heat grows and grows until… fire.”

Tench gave a wicked grin, “Yeah, we’re definitely keeping that.” He agreed, “Hurry up and get it down. Anyone else got a hopefully very useful tool sitting around gathering dust?”

Everyone shook their heads. Terry left to grab his petri dishes and swaps, ready to transport the most stable of the cultures back into his jacket. Everyone else continued to discuss in quick voices about the Console, clearly crowding around it to discuss how it worked.

He regretfully stepped out of earshot, letting the sounds become indistinct, as he approached the corner of his room where the humidity was just perfect for the types of fungi he was working with.

Usually, this type of transferal process would be intensely difficult to achieve. Too risky to upset the requirements of the fungus, and minute changes in the containment conditions were likely to be overlooked, causing the entire system to die.

But he was able to sidestep that issue with an unfair advantage.

[Applying Nature Affinity!]

The fungus began growing in sharp bursts, swelling up at a rate of what would have taken days or months, while also peeling off the surface they were growing off in careful chunks.

Terry forced himself to breathe through it, feeling the control he had over these precious forms of extant life, and vowing not to overuse it.

He compelled them to come into the containers he had arranged, and carefully cleaned off the stray fronds sticking to the edges before putting them into his jacket. They had almost forgotten the feeling of walking around with glass tucked close to their chest, the only safe place to store them.

There was the sound of a step behind him, accompanied by the click of a metal clasp locking into place, and Terry turned around to find Asadullah, staring at him with wide eyes and a hand over his arm where he had shut the bangles. His eye was twitching slightly. It had to have hurt, even without flattened ears to broadcast his discomfort. They remembered the wrecked state of his arm just hours ago, with glass shredding the entire limb. Reattaching it so soon wasn’t advisable.

“You should give it more time.” He said, continuing that train of thought.

Asadullah frowned, “We don’t have time.”

That was true, too. But it wasn’t an excuse to so flagrantly put himself in danger. Terry glared at him, but then decided that none of it mattered if they were able to get his cat-hybrid powers back. He looked nervously at Babur, who was wrapped around Asadullah’s shoulder like an actual tame cat, and asked, “Can you really merge again?”

Asadullah shrugged, “That’s what I’m going to find out. Give me some space? But intervene if you think it’s going badly.”

If he knew that there was a chance of things going catastrophically wrong, Terry didn’t see why he wasn’t doing this in front of all the others, who were downstairs navigating the Console. But there was logic behind it, now that he considered it some. Terry was the only one here with an Affinity for things that affected Babur. The Game and nature both had a profound effect on the djinn because they were where it had come from. Which meant that Terry would have the best shot of stopping the remerging.

Babur shivered slightly, sparks of energy flickering through his cloudy form, until it dissipated, drifting into the bangles in the form of dark misty vapor.

Asadullah’s arm pitched forward, as if growing astronomically heavy, but he managed to steady himself as the clear glass spiral of the bangles began filling up drop by drop with blood laced with black smudges and sparking blue flecks. His face twisted into a grimace as he continued to force himself to keep his hand up, and Terry wanted to comfort him, but when Asad let out a drawn groan, he quickly retreated a few steps back, mind flashing to the zombies he had worked with while making the Cure.

It was working, though. As impossible as it sounded, it was definitely working. The ears and the tail first took form as light constructs, like three dimensional outlines that were soon to be filled by rapidly growing flesh and bone and skin and fur.

Until Asadullah was standing up straight, chest heaving for air, with his tail whipping around him as was needed. He reached up carefully to feel out his ears, turning around to give Terry a bright smile.

Terry tried to smile back, even as the phantom taste of old, damp cat food stuck to the back of his mouth.

It had worked out for Asadullah. His greatest fear, the djinn getting loose, had come to pass, and it had all been fine. Everything had been fine so far, no matter the danger and the fear and the excruciating pain they had been put through. Why had any of them even been so afraid? Now that he had fought through an Apocalypse and a half, he had to wonder: why had he spent a third of his life inside that convenience store?

Why had he let it all go to waste?

“Hey, uh, you okay?” Asadullah asked, a hand reaching forward to cup his cheek, “You look upset.”

“I am.” They replied, because the only flaw in their group was their compulsive need to hide things that could easily be resolved, and he didn’t want to further that trend. So instead, brutal honesty, “This feels like a rat race. Nothing is real.” Not the stakes, not the world, not the people to help. Yet the words weren’t coming out of him, he was just that rattled.

“Of course it’s real.” Asadullah insisted, and probably would have continued that train of thought if the front didn’t screech open downstairs, accompanied by heavy things being dragged inside.

“I’m back!” Simon panted out. Then, there was silence for a few seconds, before he finally said, “Hey, where’s everyone?”

[Player Log End!]