“Are you sure we should be here…?” Theora asked, looking around all worried to make sure they wouldn’t bother anyone. Meanwhile, Dema was advancing stealthily through backstage to get a peek at the crowd.

“It’s gonna be fine as long as we make sure we’re not bothering anyone,” Dema proclaimed, her hand tightening around Theora’s. Technically, Dema did have permission — Serim was helping out with the electronics on stage and let them in somehow.

At least, that’s what counted to Dema as having ‘technical permission’.

Finally, the midpoint of the performance arrived, and it was time for staff to move in and help reorganise. Dema ushered them both onto the stage, pretending to be staff themselves, and without knowing how it happened, Theora was already carrying large devices around in front of thousands of people, which she did her best to ignore — that is, until she lifted a particularly large box and heard girls from the crowd screaming. So she turned.

It was one of the biggest crowds Theora had ever seen.

And then she recoiled.

Quickly finishing up the reorganisation, she scurried off the stage with Dema, her mind hot.

Among the thousands of people with countless pieces of clothing and countless writings, one had seared itself into Theora’s mind — in the back half of the audience, a tanned girl with long, open hair, clapping and yelling encouragement at the stage, had been wearing an old shirt with three words printed on.

When they were out and behind the stage construction, where they were mostly shielded from the noise, Dema turned to face Theora. “What’s wrong? You alright? Crowds make you uneasy?”

“I don’t know…”

The words were still burning in her vision.

Procrastinating the Apocalypse.

That’s what they were doing, right? By staying their smaller selves, not thinking about the horrors waiting for them after their return.

Their return. Waiting. There was more to these three words than that, wasn’t there?

Theora pulled Dema with her, to a path towards the crowd. “I think we need to talk to her.”

Dema was startled, but hurried along. “To whom?”

They went along an elevated rail, until Theora recognised her once more. “There. The woman wearing the shirt about the apocalypse.”

Dema squinted. “You can read that from here? Didn’t you look at the stage for like only a second?”

“We should talk to her.”

“Sure… just gotta find a way to meet her… she’ll disappear somewhere in the tents when the show’s over.”

Theora stopped. “Do you have a piece of paper with you?”

Dema’s eyes fluttered at the sudden question, and then she patted down Theora’s travelling attire that she was still wearing. Eventually, she pulled out an almost uncrumpled sheet, folded in half. “Like that?”

“Is that important to you?”

Dema looked at it. “Nah. Just some doctor’s notes.”

Theora nodded, asked Dema for a pen, and then wrote ‘If this hits the person wearing a shirt saying about an ‘apocalypse’: I apologise. Could you meet us at these coordinates?’

Then, she signed it ‘Dema and Theora’, folded it into a paper plane, took a deep, steading breath, read the wind, and launched it.

Dema looked like she was trying hard to stop herself from laughing. “Are you for real right now?”

A few seconds later, the plane buried itself into the poor girl’s hair.

“Oh, that?” the woman asked about two hours later, after the performance, when they’d finally met up. They sat in front of her tent, her in a foldable chair, with a few books next to her. Theora wondered how she had time to read at a festival. She also had a notepad and a calculator peeking out of a bag; perhaps it was homework?

“Belongs to my brother,” she continued. “Was the only shirt not in the laundry the morning we went.”

“So you don’t know anything about it?” Theora asked. She sat on the damp grass next to Dema, who had her notepad out but wasn’t writing anything down.

The girl shrugged. “It’s from a story. Both me and my brother love reading, but I was never interested in that one. He was kind of into it a few years ago, but he moved on when the writing went to shit. I can ask him, though, if you care that much?” Her voice was deep and matter of factly, and she had a slightly amused undertone. She even pulled a bag of chips out of her luggage a moment later.

Dema tilted her head, turning to Theora. “Do we care that much? What’s it remind you of?”

“Not sure…” Theora wracked her brain to no result. Some shouts came from the distance; was it from the playground area?

Dema hummed. “I guess it’s related to our larger selves then, isn’t it? Probably?”

Theora blinked, and her gaze went back to the lettering; the woman fortunately did not seem uncomfortable from having people stare in the direction of her chest, though Theora still tried to keep the glances short. “I think you’re right. ‘Procrastinating the Apocalypse’… Even then, it would have been a long time since I heard it. It barely rings a bell. Plus, why would the title of a story in this world be relevant to what we saw in our world? They are totally different.”

“Are you guys LARPing?”

“Oh!” Dema let out. “Unless it was DespairLit, remember? My fav genre when we were in Hallmark.”

The girl looked at Dema with a hint of disgust on her face. “Hallmark is your favourite genre? I have to say, that lost you some respect.”

The shouts in the distance warped to laughter. Children playing.

A shiver ran down Theora’s spine. “Lostina,” she whispered.

“Lostina!” Dema agreed. “Oh, that little cutie. Wait. Did we reincarnate into her world?”

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Theora blinked. Then, she frowned. That didn’t quite add up. “How would that work? It’s been hundreds of years. ‘Procrastinating the Apocalypse’ doesn’t seem to be hundreds of years old here.”

“Nah, I’d say it’s like, five years old at most, or so,” the girl said. She was leaning back in her chair eating potato chips while watching their discussion.

“Yeah,” Dema went, “but like, doesn’t the portal in your training place let you go ‘anywhere you want’? You really like Lostina. But Lostina’s frozen in time with the others. Is it even possible to go somewhere that’s frozen? So maybe the portal just led us to another version of her instead.”

“But we’ve been here since our childhoods. It would mean we actually went back in time. I don’t think changing the past is possible.”

“Huh…” Dema nodded. “Oh, but!” She grabbed her phone to look something up. “Ah, there. I don’t remember the details, but I think Lostina died around the time when… Oh, there we go. A FanWiki says Gonell’s dead.”

Theora instinctively wanted to reject that phrasing; neither Lostina nor Gonell were truly dead, of course. They were just dead here. The thought felt foreign; the idea that someone could be dead in one world, but alive in others. If they found ways to travel between worlds and Lostina was released from the Frame, could she, one day, return here?

For some reason, Theora felt almost sure that she couldn’t; that it was too dangerous to even try. Not that Lostina ever really voiced any desire to return in the first place; and Gonell had never truly lived here anyway. Theora shook her head, trying to stop the train of thought. It was uncomfortable.

“Gone and Lost, huh?” The girl was talking with chips in her mouth. “That’s some thematic naming.”

“Still with us, little rabbit?” Dema asked, causing Theora to focus back on reality.

“Apologies. I spaced out. You said both Gonell and Lostina may be dead in this world. What does that have to do with time travel?”

“Well, Iso’s been trying to reach us basically ever since we left. But nothing worked. What if it was blocked until Lostina died? To prevent us from remembering the past while we could have still changed the outcomes. I mean, we went back in time but we didn’t really change anything, is what I mean. At least nothing we would have known about. Lostina probably still kicked the bucket here and all.” Dema’s choice of words was crude, but she sounded genuinely sad while saying it.

“I see…” Theora nodded slowly. “I wonder who blocked it… was it Invent One?”

Dema shrugged. “Honestly, maybe nobody? Can’t change the past. It’s already happened.”

“Yeah,” the girl said. “It’s because we happen to view reality from the perspective of being thrown at almost the speed of light in the direction of time.”

Dema and Theora stared at her, and she shrugged.

“I don’t understand what you are saying,” Theora admitted.

“Welcome to the club, honey,” the girl laughed. “What I’m saying is — let’s say you are watching a video of someone walking to the beach, but it stops halfway. Well, just because you didn’t watch the second half, doesn’t mean they never reached that beach, right? And if, later on, you talk to another person who was also walking to the beach at the same time, of course their account would all magically align so they didn’t appear on camera at all. Because it already happened!”

Dema scratched her head and looked around as if the festival surroundings would give her a clue. “But aren’t we the people starring in the movie rather than the ones who watch it?”

The girl pushed her hair behind her ear and shrugged. “Sure, we pretend to live like that; but it might be a lot more accurate to say that what we actually do is experience being the flat characters on screen. In a way, we all are just shadows of larger multidimensional entities, and since we only see the projections, of course sometimes things would seem to ‘magically work out’ for us.”

Theora still did not understand, but it was alright. She could at least attempt to make something of the information. She glanced at Dema. “So in other words, as we went through the portal, my desire to see Lostina again and my desire for the two of us to be happy is what led us here. We ended up in Lostina’s old world with our memories closed off until the past could no longer change, and because we didn’t know our pasts, we were able to get together so easily.”

“Yeah,” Dema said. “That sounds about right to me.”

“How is this ‘Lostina’ related to ‘Procrastinating the Apocalypse’?” the girl asked.

Dema scratched her head. “She wrote AU fanfiction for it, I think.”

Theora frowned. “AU fanfiction? What does that mean?”

Dema shrugged. “Dunno. That’s just the term I saw while researching Amanda’s past.”

“AU stands for ‘Alternate Universe’,” the girl said. “It’s basically when you take characters from a story — for example, a Fantasy story — and imagine what their lives might have been like if they’d grown up and lived in a mundane, more realistic world instead. It can be an exploration of how the characters would interact if they didn’t have to contend with the heavy struggles of their homeworld.”

“Huh… really?” Dema put her chin in her hand. “That sounds kind of familiar…”

The girl shrugged. “That’s probably not the worst starting point to finding out more about her, but still a pretty bad one. Most fanfiction authors are anonymous.”

Dema sighed. “Yeah… Amanda Dupont used an alias as well…”

“Who’s that now?”

“Ah, Theora’s got that one grave she feels magically drawn to. A girl named Amanda was buried there, and she wrote fanfiction too. But we never found out more.”

“Lots of people writing fanfiction nowadays it seems… not like I haven’t tried myself, either.”

“Right? It’s popular!”

Right. Theora rubbed her eyes. There was this whole other thing they still had to worry about. “I’m still scared that there’s a Fragment of Time in that grave.”

The girl resumed eating her chips. “You know, this is great. You should write a book or something.”

Dema looked concerned. “Why worried?”

“Because if there’s a Fragment of Time there, I would need to [Obliterate] the grave to create an incision to retrieve it. I don’t want to harm a grave.”

“But it’s empty, right? You said the urn was empty when you put it in.”

Theora shrugged. “It is. But it’s still the place people go to remember her. Where I go to remember her. And the earth has absorbed the urn by now. What if it means I have to cut up the tree?” Shivers went down her spine at the mere thought.

“Well… there’s still a chance the Fragment could be somewhere else,” Dema offered.

Theora looked away, gaze falling onto the sea of tents. “I don’t know. Is there a chance? I think a place I don’t wish to open is exactly where a Fragment would be hidden. It’s true that there might be other places, but I doubt any of them would be easier to access.”

The girl scratched her temple. “Like, you’re saying those Fragments are hidden in abstract locations?”

Theora looked back to her, pushing her hand through her hair while finding the words. “They are magically hidden in places that are difficult to find and access.”

“Then wouldn’t like, the top of a mountain, or the centre of the earth be better places to look?”

Theora bit her lips.

Dema said, “I don’t think Theora would have any trouble reaching either of those. Them being stuck in abstract places like that is probably a little bit her fault.”

“Really? Reaching the centre of the earth is easier for her than digging up a grave? Damn.”

This was horrifying. “I don’t think I’ll be able to get this Fragment. But then what happens to Time?”

Would she have to make a choice; what to abandon? Like back when she went off to space, leaving Treeka at home? It was frustrating. She wanted to save Time without felling a tree; without destroying a place of remembrance.

But Dema leaned over, catching Theora’s arms in her hands. “It’s alright. You’re not alone, remember?”

Theora blinked with teary eyes. “But I’m the only one who can open it.” It required, on top of finding it, an incision in the fabric of reality only she could make; one of the many reasons this task had been put on her shoulders in the first place.

Dema shook her head. “It’s not there. Won’t be there. And even if it is, you won’t have to do anything bad. I promise, little rabbit.”

Theora swallowed hard. How could Dema promise that? She couldn’t possibly know. “You don’t even have magic here.”

Dema shrugged nonchalantly. “Don’t need that kind of magic to take care of my girl. I’m gonna find a way. Trust me?”

Theora really wanted to. “Alright. I’ll try.”

Dema smiled, and gave her a kiss on the forehead. Theora leaned into it with eyes closed.