Sprawled out on the ground of Ume Park were Erin and Vivie, catching their breath as they both felt their hearts racing in their dry throats.

Erin sat up first, or tried to, before settling on pulling up to a sitting position on the grass near the bleachers.

Vivien sat up beside her, both of them looking up at the sky.

The city was gone behind the clouds, but dozens of those blue flames were floating gently down to the earth. Except they no longer looked like balls, they looked like blazing blue outlines of people on a backdrop of the starry night sky.

“Looks like something from a sci-fi movie…” Vivie said.

“Looks like some sort of omen to me…” Erin said, just above a whisper.

They both stared upwards at the brilliant omanic sky for a few minutes while they caught their breath.

Erin turned to Vivie, saying, “You can stay the night if you want, I just live a few blocks away.”

“I’d like to decline, but I don’t think I have the strength to walk across town back to my house—so thank you.”

“Don’t mention it, because you're helping me find them tomorrow.”

“Already planned on it. Oh, I’m Vivie, by the way.”

“Erin. What were you doing up—” Her phone started ringing. She answered it. “We’re safe, Nina. I’ll tell you when I get back.” She flips her phone close and looked expectantly at Vivie.

“I was just taking a late night walk, is all. It’s not every day that you see a city in the sky. Rowan, the girl I was with, said she’d been somewhere similar before, but it didn’t make much sense to me.”

Erin made a mental note of that. She stood up. Vivie stood up. They started walking in silence to her house.

Eventually, Erin spoke up. “Tell me about yourself, Vivie.”

“Hmm—there’s not much about me to tell.”

“People who say that usually have the most to say, in my experience.”

“Want me to be honest with you, or would you like to be superficial?”

“You know, superficial things usually have a hint of truth. Tell me both.”

“I like video games, I hate working. I’m an aspiring poet, and I race my car on the weekends. I just quit my job, got in a car accident that I don’t remember and lost my eye in the last week.”

“Can you see with that one that dropped from the statue?”

“Oh, so you did see that. Yeah—it’s even better than a normal eye, I think.”

“So that was superficial? Tell me the honest part.”

“I’ve always felt lost in the world. I feel that at some point without my knowing I broke apart into hundreds of little pieces, and I’ve given up on putting myself back together at this point. Sometimes I wonder if I ever was whole.”

“…What happened to you?”

“It wasn’t one thing. It was a lot of little things through the years, all of them adding up until I fell apart. But I’ll save that for my therapist.”

“At least you’re here with me right now,” Erin said.

“I don’t look at it that way.”

“Sounds suicidal… are you?”

“No. Not suicidal, I just think I’d be better off dead. There’s an important distinction, apparently.”

Erin couldn’t help but let out a small, exasperated laugh. “What's the difference?”

“There’s, like, a medical scale of how dangerous you are to yourself. I rank pretty low, according to my therapist recently. I see my therapist a lot, she’s like a good friend at this point.”

“Sounds kinda messed up, don’t you think?”

“Our whole medical system is. Welcome to America, baby. I’ve been to a psych ward once this year already, trying not to find myself there again anytime soon.”

“Was it bad?”

“No—not at all. It was really nice in a way. I just couldn’t smoke in there. Made me irritated with everything. Tell me about yourself, Erin.”

“...There’s not much to say,” She laughed.

“Oh really?” He looked at her and grinned.

“I just graduated high school and I have no idea what I want to do. I’ve been agonizing over it for the past year. On one hand, I want to see the world with my boyfriend. On the other, I know it’s smart to get it over with and go to college.”

“Are you rich?”

“...That’s a little pointed.”

“Oh. Sorry, I was just trying to say that it’s only fun to travel with some spare cash. I’ve done it, I would know.”

“It’s just that my family is poor. We barely make enough to make it by.”

“Do you already work?”

“Yes, part time at a grocery store. It sucks.”

“So go to college. But you don’t want to, do you?”

She grunted. “I didn’t like school too much, so I can’t picture myself liking college.”

“You don’t have to like college. You just gotta make it through. Not that you have to… college is fun. Especially the first two years of community college. You barely have to try, if you’re smart.”

“You really have a way with words…”

“I’m just telling you the truth, and the truth is never pretty, it isn’t some cute poetic line that neatly wraps things up. It all depends on your perspective, anyways.”

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“Perspective?”

“If you think you wake up and think ‘today sucks’ that day will suck, but only because you told yourself it would. Perspective is like a precondition, but for everything. Perspective is reality.”

The words resonated with her. “Perspective is reality, huh? Sounds profound, even though you just said the truth isn’t elegant like that.”

“It’s my personal philosophy, which shares something with poetics. It wouldn’t be a very good philosophy if it wasn’t infectious.”

She shook her head. “Infectious?”

“Idea’s—they're infectious. You can kill millions of people with a singular idea, which is itself just a thought in their minds, but you can’t kill that idea. Richard Dawkins called them memes, the ‘counterpart’ to genes.”

“So that’s where the word meme comes from? This is my house,” She took a left into a rundown looking house that badly needed a paint job and new fence. Vivie looked around the neighborhood, every other house was in much better condition.

They walked up the cracked cement pathway leading to the house and Erin stepped in, the front door being already wide open.

“Welcome back,” came an even voice from down the hall. Erin walked straight to the refrigerator and grabbed a pint of ice cream from it before grabbing two spoons and sitting down at the dinner table. Vivie took a seat near her.

The perpetually young doll stepped out into the dinner area. “I’m Nina,” she waved a peace sign at Vivie with a faint smile.

“Uh, Vivie. Nice to meet you…” She couldn’t get rid of the feeling that there was something strange about her, looking at her face.

“She’s my sister, and a doll created by my parents.”

“Doll? She does sort of look like a doll…”

Nina took a seat across from Erin. “Tell me what happened.”

- - - -

In the middle of the city, there was destruction. It all seemed to stem from a blue bricked fountain in the middle of the road, sunk into the asphalt but in pristine condition, still spraying water over it’s top. Where once there was an iron fence guarding a parking lot to a liquor store, now there was a path of destruction represented by a random scattering of more blue bricks, none of them broken, but laying a path straight through the store. Two other roads like this stemmed from the fountain, making their own paths through the city.

Not far away, at the steps leading to the bus station, Avery and Rowan were talking amongst themselves, handcuffed to a rail. The conversation was going like this:

“I have two penises.”

“You’re kidding me!” Rowan said.

“I kid you not, I really do and always have.”

“What do women say…?”

“I’ve only been with Erin, but she thinks it’s pretty cool.”

“No, I mean—in bed.”

Avery thought for a second. “I think she said once that it can be a lot to handle.”

Rowan nodded her head. “I can see that. Do they both function normally? Are they, like, side by side, or…”

“The second one is below and to the right a bit. Only the top one can pee—and you know.”

“That’s honestly amazing,” she said. “I’m amazed. Who would have known that could happen!”

“My parents never told me it wasn’t normal, so imagine my surprise in the locker room when someone noticed. ‘You have two dongs!’ He said. I never showered in the locker room again. It became a sort of urban legend in middle school that year.”

“That just sounds like bad parenting, no offense to your parents.”

“I’m not even sure if they knew—you see, they're my foster parents. I asked them about it later and they seemed to be suppressing shock.”

“What a turn of events. Did you ever think about getting it removed?”

“I was too afraid to have surgery done, what if they mess something up? It’s not like it was stopping me from doing anything, and I already had Erin in my life. She was on the pro-keep-them side.”

Brave girl… thought Rowan.

“I might have a plan,” Avery whispered. “Just be prepared for anything.”

Rowan nodded her head.

“Hey! I have a question!” Avery yelled to the FBI agent, standing watch about twenty feet away.

“What is it?” He said, walking over to them.

Perfect, he got close. He let it out, which he’d been keeping held in for the past four days as he’d been trained.

A darkly purple cloud enveloped the area, thick with enough static to make every hair stand on end. You could practically taste the electricity, one could hardly breathe in the stuff. The two others around him didn’t make a sound, but Avery was coughing.

Just as soon as the darkness came, it rose above him in a condensed dark cloud. Avery thought he saw a bolt of lighting inside it building up, and he hiccuped a pink bubble.

Around him where the other two had been, stood instead two different potted plants. One a tulip, and one a tall rosary of some kind, with their clothes scattered on the ground. He reached out as far as he could with his leg and dragged the FBI agent's pants to him. Luckily one of his arms was free, and he quickly found the key.

He grabbed the tulips adjacent to him, some of Rowan’s clothes, and ran for it. He’d run for a minute before the potted plant burst with dark flames, and like a paper being burned in reverse, Rowan came alive in his arms, slowly gaining all her physical attributes. If he didn’t know better, he’d say it looked like some bad CGI.

“What the fuck… was that!” Rowan yelled as he ran. He stopped and put her down, trying to speak but only more pink bubbles came out. He grabbed her wrist and kept running.

“I’ve never gone streaking before!!” She shrieked as they ran into the night, lit only by the occasional streetlamp.

- - - -

“Bleeding eyes is a sure sign of immortality, amongst all creatures,” Nina said. “Bad things come in three, I wonder what this Yumiko god-person has going on.”

“Like I said, she seemed normal… besides being naked.” Erin said.

“Many gods are depicted naked, and that’s because clothes are lowly human constructions to protect from weather. We’re frail, they’re not.” Vivie said. “To the Ancient Greeks, the nude form displayed your full glory, it’d be insulting to hide.”

“I wish I were there,” Nina said.

“But don’t you love clothes?” Erin said.

“I do, that ranks below being fully in the buff though.”

“You’re so weird…” Erin practically spat, arms crossed.

“Let’s get on topic. What’s next?” Vivie would be the one to get back on topic, wouldn’t he? He certainly looked uncomfortable.

“Are you saying you like being constricted by clothes? Why do you always wear loose fitting things, Erin? Those pajamas you’re wearing sure are two sizes too big. And you don’t wear underwear!” Some emotion came to her voice, a rare occasion.

“Maybe when I’m alone!” Erin was blushing furiously.

“What’s. Next.” Vivie slammed his hands on the table. The two ladies coughed. Maybe they are sisters… Avery thought.

“I say we track that scent in Avery’s house. There’s only a one in three chance that it leads to a murderer,” Nina said.

“We need our full strength to do that, power in numbers and all that. Let’s go look. You said you had a car, Vivie?”

“An old Tesla, yeah. You want to look for them? It’s dark and it’s a fairly decent sized town. No cabs are running this time of night, either, we’d have to walk probably two hours to get to my house.”

“Got another idea?” Erin said.

“Yeah, we sleep. We need energy for tomorrow.”

“I don’t need as much ‘sleep’ as you two,” Nina said. “I can do some scouting.”

“Fine,” Erin put in the proverbial towel. “That’s good enough. Nina, do reconnaissance. We’re gonna get a few hours of beauty sleep.”

The three of them looked at the clock. It was four o’clock in the morning.

Nina walked out of the door, quickly disappearing into the darkness.

“Can you actually sleep after all that?” Erin said.

“I can always sleep, it’s one of my strong points.”

Erin laughed. “I’m tired, but I think I’ll be too worried to actually get any good rest… Here, let me get you some blankets and a pillow, you're sleeping on the couch.”

Vivie looked at the couch: it’d seen better days. This whole house has, for that matter, he thought to himself.