Red had watched with great curiosity as Lord and Dame had stormed through her house to interview the being in the void behind the street. Her notes on the pair were now filled with details, the gentle floating of Lord’s hair as he launched himself into the void, his gasps as the Collective found him.

Her notes were filled with speculations as to why Dame had followed seventeen seconds later. How she had suffered the same strange event as her life was extinguished just as she reached Lord’s body. Red frowned as she cross referenced the event with her notes on the pair, that level of recklessness did not seem to track with their legislative intents and even more concerningly did not match her current assessment of the void which had left her unharmed.

A familiar, haunting uncertainty flooded her brain. The safety of certainty slipped away as previous results were contradicted and overturned. She grimaced and highlighted the relevant sections in pale blue, a scrawled note in the packed margin noting the points of deviation.

To calm herself, she paced the room, making note of the shimmering vines that ran through it. She knew it was there to defend them. A glistening metallic connection to the void winding from the gap in the wall all through her home. She placed a hand on the nearest one, still cool to the touch with a mild electric current. It was nice to be on the same page as her housemates for once – Perhaps the system deserved some kind of moving in gift, that was a thing people did, right?

As she considered this option, Red was disturbed by a knock on the door, a firm tapping to the tune of god save the queen – a familiar oddity, but one which made little sense when they thought of the bodies floating in the void.

She smiled to herself, perhaps this was the answer to Lord and Dames peculiar behaviour? There was only one way to find out, and she pulled the door open without a second thought.

The doorway opened, and two people who looked a lot like Lord and Dame stood before her, very much alive.

Lord met her gaze and smiled back rakishly before pushing past Red and into the house as she stood trying to process the implications of this crucial new data.

As their thoughts realigned, Red watched warily as the pair sauntered in, clearing the table with a callous sweep of a hand, and leaning back upon the chairs Red had left at its edge. She frowned and approached them warily, the entire interaction was off, inconsistent with past behaviours. Red flipped back open the notepad of their prior interactions with the duo and frowned – Easy confidence and charming smile? Something was off here.

She considered the line of thinking further. Lord was approximately half a centimetre too tall, and Dame’s hair was a few percentages away from the hue it should be. Red focused back on the moment as they looked back from the messy scrawl of her writing and addressed them as she pointed at each of them in turn.

“You are not Lord” She gestured at the relaxed lounging man before locking eyes with the woman.

“And you, you are not Dame.” The air of joyousness dropped out of the pair as not-Lord eyed the notepad whilst not-Dame quietly opened her briefcase to extract a strange glowing blade.

The not-Lord stood and stretched, cracking his knuckles against his back as he eyed her up with a frown.

“Ah, I see – You’re one of those freaks who makes notes of everything, we have dealt with your sort before. I am Lord, one of many Lords in his majesty’s service. We shall of course be pressing charges for what you did to the one who visited you earlier.”

He nodded to Dame who stepped closer, knife drawn and smiled wide.

“Of course - we will be pressing charges for their death. Two charges of first-degree murder for you, one Mr Locksy will be in order naturally.”

Red flinched and pushed herself to be assertive.

“It’s Ms Locksy and I have murdered no one! They went and recklessly endangered themselves, and besides England doesn’t even use degrees of murder!”

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

Dames spoke for the first time, an air of quiet resentment and disgust infusing her tone as she twirled the glowing blade in the palm of her hands.

“Oh, Mr Locksy, you would be wrong on both counts. Our King does not recognise your ideology, and as for your crimes, well they are whatever we say they are…”

Something gave way inside Red as she looked between Lord and Dame. Two pairs of eyes, each gleaming with their own flavour of joyful malevolence. They felt suffocatingly warm, their lungs struggling to breath against the panic that threatened to overwhelm her. She had a moment before it did, they knew as much from years of self-analysis.

So, she did what she had to, the only thing she could. She reached her hand towards the tendrils of void the wove through her home and whispered into the cool black metal.

“help.” She said.

And the void answered.

In the space between seconds, the Collective flooded the room, a swirling swarm of dark silver that roiled like a great wave around Red and their two unwanted visitors.

As the inky darkness receded from the room Red’s hand began to tremble and darkness swirled around the edges of their vision. Recognising a panic attack creeping in Red dropped to the floor, head between their hands as they tried and failed to not notice the mangled forms of Lord and Dame strewn across the room.

Unwanted her eyes drank in the detail, the limbs splayed thirty-five degrees past breaking point, six-millimetre lacerations leaking smoke into the air around them. It was the eyes which broke her resilience though, the pure white blankness pushing past the last of her resistance as she fell into herself, hiding from the horror she had knowingly unleashed.

Red awoke to a familiar figure shaking her shoulders gently. Li pale and clearly exhausted leaning down from eir wheelchair whilst below and to eir left a wolf sat on her haunches, wise eyes brimming with compassion.

She sat up slowly as Li helped her up, eir grip was weak on their hands and eir hand trembled under her own, but nether-the-less pulled her into a sitting position. A bleary distant part of their mind noted that the tremors were new, an exacerbation of Li’s existing condition worsened by recent trauma.

Red watched as Li looked past her at the pair of mangled bodies splayed out her room and began to move with a grim efficiency as they rolled towards the kitchen, pushing through carefully hidden pain. She watched em move, struggling against her defensive shutdown as they longed to reach out and offer their friend the support and compassion ey needed.

Heedless Li moved on, twisting to yell back as ey began to root through the kitchen “Red, I am going to borrow some binbags for…Disposal. Can you let me and Stevie here know what happened?” Ey nodded at the wolf staring up at Red intently.

Red allowed herself a small smile, they could do that – it was necessary to get all the details down whilst it was fresh, and she enjoyed sharing her thoughts as she put them to paper.

One extremely detailed breakdown of events later, and Li and the wolf were nodding along thoughtfully next to the binbag wrapped bodies.

Red glanced down at the still forms and mused quietly, her bubbly instincts dampened by the knowledge of the contents within. “What are we going to do with these, dump them in the fish hole?”

She paused as she noticed Li and Stevie staring at her.

“I mean, they WERE royalists…”

Li frowned and shook eir head slowly. Ey seemed to have misunderstood Red’s joke, but ey interrupted them before she could explain.

“That does not mean that you should just dump them into an unmarked hole – it is disrespectful. At the very least we should take them to the graveyard. It is not like there is limited plots.”

Red shrugged and gestured at the glowing knife still clutched in Dame’s hand as she scanned the index of a notebook, punchline forgotten.

“Hmm, I have not encountered any people waving glowing knives at me before, but what I have seen in movies leads me to feel they would not feel the same about me had they succeeded.”

Despite Red’s arguments, Li held to eir entirely unreasonable stance and soon the two of them had built a quick sled for Stevie to pull behind her. A little later and they were in the street, the sky marking the street as in configuration Sigma_01b. Red Beamed at Li, it was one of her favourites, the assorted buildings of the street laid out in near perfect chronology, a beautiful array of pieces intricately placed in the most satisfying formation.

And merely a brisk 12 minutes and twenty-nine seconds from her house to the infinite graveyard.

Much to Red’s annoyance they arrived twenty-five minutes and thirty-seven seconds later, the additional time noted down in a blur of pen and ink so she could work out a maximum corpse dragging speed upon her return.

The trio entered, between the ancient gates, and a familiar low rumble of wind swirling around them as they moved between the graves looking for empty plots.

They found them soon enough, a pair of graves dug deep by people unseen. Red glanced at the names as they approached. One for Lord, one for Dame in both cases, the surnames obscured by deep scratches that rendered them all but illegible.

The trio shared a look and pushed each plastic wrapped body into its appropriate plot and waited for some sign.

Eventually Stevie broke the silence.

“Do you think we should we say something?”

The two humans shared a look and shook their heads, neither of them knew much about the pair of corpses they just buried.

The trio just bowed their heads for a moment, and with a shared awkward reluctance began to fill the graves one handful of dirt at a time.