Chase woke up hyperventilating, eyes shooting wide open in pain and panic with Miles crouched over him looking like a deer in the headlights.
“Chase! Just breathe! Focus on my voice, name five things you can see!” Miles half-shouted.
“Dude, he can barely breathe, how is he gonna talk right now?” Tom snapped, stepping into view and slipping a paper bag over Chase’s mouth. After a few quick breaths in and out, he moved it away.
“I don’t know! I read that was supposed to be good for calming someone down! Five things you can see, four things you can touch, that whole thing!”
“That’s for panic attacks! Which this might be, but he also just woke up. Give him a minute. Breathe into the bag again for me man, nice and easy. Just relax, it was just a nightmare. You’re back here, you’re safe.”
Chase grabbed the bag from Tom and pulled it off his face as he felt his heartbeat and breathing start to even out. He barked out a laugh, then a series of noises somewhere between a laugh and a sob. He looked up at Tom’s concerned face with wide, manic eyes.
“It was a nightmare, but here is the opposite of safe. Someone should go get the girls, because the ghost of this picture frame just told me everything that’s happening behind the scenes here, and we’re gonna need a goddamn miracle to stand a chance.”
Tom turned to Miles, who shrugged helplessly. Tom sighed and turned back to Chase, taking a seat on the edge of his bedside table. “Chase,” he began. “You just woke us up screaming your head off and breathing like you’d sprinted a marathon. So forgive me, but I’m gonna need a little more to go on than some ranting about ghosts.”
Chase sighed. “Alright, that’s fair. But I was serious about getting everyone. It must be about time for our recording attempt, and I only want to explain this once. Scratch that, I don’t want to explain it at all but somehow Echo chose me to be the messenger. Inconsiderate noncorporeal entity…” Chase trailed off, relishing the look of utter confusion that came across Miles’s face. It was the little things, especially when the big things were ghosts who wanted to eat your mind to make more of themselves.
For all their skepticism, Tom and Miles recognized that Chase wasn’t going to give them any more hints and went to get the girls. It gave Chase time to put his objectively wild dream sequence in some kind of order that hopefully wouldn’t have the rest of the group scrounging up a straightjacket. This was something huge, paradigm-shifting, and Chase knew that none of them would want to accept it. Whatever power demonstration Echo had cooked up would help, but it definitely wouldn’t be enough on its own.
“Alright, Chase, the gang’s all here. Want to tell us about the ghost of the picture frame?” Miles smirked a bit as he delivered his jab, and Jess shot Chase a withering look.
“Yeah, alright.” Chase said, mentally reshuffling to regain the credibility Miles had just undermined. “This is going to sound completely crazy, just as a warning. But considering we’re living in a timelooping lab surrounded by the northern lights, I hope you’ll at least hear me out. Because if any of it turns out to be real, we are in much deeper shit than we thought.”
Ellie blinked. “You have learned something new? But we were all asleep, right?”
“Yeah, and I had a dream. Don’t give me that look, Kayla, this one was both bizarre and important. And side note, have any of you had any dreams that you remember since we got trapped here? Cause this was my first, and I can remember the conversation I had in it word for word when I usually can’t remember anything at all.”
A gallery of hesitant looks and nods met Chase’s words, until finally Kayla sighed. “We’re all here anyway, may as well hear you out.”
“Thank you for that resounding vote of confidence.” Chase said dryly, then began to explain his dream the best he could. It was hard to impart just how chaotic it had been at the start in mere words, but he made a go of it and judging by the wincing he got in return, his descriptions were at the very least evocative. He did stop before his final conversation and agreement to be a bridge for Echo’s power, hoping he wouldn’t need to call on it and risk that kind of pain again.
“Well,” Miles said as Chase finished his summary. “That’s certainly a thing.”
Chase met his skeptical look. “You don’t believe me.”
“It is hard to take on your word alone, Chase.” Ellie said gently. “We have had many disruptions to our understanding of how the world works in the past few weeks, but it is hard to accept that all of it is due to these ghostly creatures on the word of one who supposedly spoke to you in a dream.”
“Well when you put it like that of course it sounds far-fetched. But what do I have to gain by spinning up some elaborate lie?” Chase protested.
“Not saying you’re lying, dude.” Tom said. “I believe you had that dream. But without talking to this Echo or seeing it for myself, I gotta take it with a grain of salt. We’ve been under a lot of stress being cooped up here and starting our investigation. Stress can definitely lead to some weird dreams.”
“Chase,” Jess cut in before Chase could continue the argument. “We’re literally here right now to test the blank 34. It hasn’t even been a full day since you found out about it. For what it’s worth, I think you’re telling the truth. But give us some time to process, alright?”
Chase sighed. He knew they were right, and honestly it didn’t make much difference whether they believed him now or after whatever strange power Echo was channeling through him became obvious. He could feel something in the back of his mind, but no amount of hand gestures, pointed stares, or magic words mumbled under his breath had any effect. Because those were definitely things he didn’t do, and Kayla was looking at him like he was insane for no reason at all.
“Well, we have ten minutes until the blank 34 begins.” Ellie pivoted the conversation. “We should review exactly what each of us will be recording and investigating. Tom?”
“Right.” Tom nodded and held up his phone. “I’ve got an alarm queued up for 12:59 linked to one of my playlists. Should let us know if the time is being fast-forwarded or just skipped over entirely depending on what we hear when 1 AM rolls around.”
“Very good. Miles?”
“Two stopwatches, digital and analog.” Miles answered, holding both of them up. “I’ll start them a minute before 12:26 and keep my phone camera trained on them the whole time.”
“Excellent, between you and Tom we have a certain amount of redundancy. Now, Kayla?”
“I’ve got eyes on the pantry, we’ll see if we can catch anything actively resetting.”
Ellie nodded. “Jess?”
“I’ll be on Chase watching duty, especially after what we just heard.”
This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.
“I resent the implication that I need babysitting.”
“Then you should try being less of a baby.” Jess said primly.
“Hey…”
Ellie tittered. “And Chase?”
“I’ll have my camera fixed on the picture frame the whole time, provided my tiny baby arms can handle the weight. What about you, fearless leader?”
Ellie smiled. “I will be on overwatch; there is a spot in the corner that I will be able to see everyone from. It is an important extra layer of security and observation.”
A round of nods and murmured agreements met Ellie’s words, and then there wasn’t much to do except get in position. Chase, naturally, took the laziest option possible and stayed sitting exactly where he was, just holding up the frame in his left hand and his phone in his right. Jess settled across from him, and Chase positioned the frame to capture her portrait. She rolled her eyes at first, then did her best aristocratic painting impression, gazing off into the middle distance with the ghost of a smile on her lips. Very Mona Lisa chic.
A beep and a click sounded as Miles started both his stopwatches. Chase thumbed the record button on his phone and let it run, keeping an eye on the duration as a sort of countdown. He heard Tom take a deep breath, as if psyching himself up. Logically, Chase knew that this had happened every night they’d been stuck here and nothing had interrupted or otherwise made things strange besides the missing time itself. But here in the moment, it was much easier to imagine physics-breaking consequences for delving into mysteries that were beyond them, especially with his time in the dreamscape so fresh in his memory. Twenty seconds to go. Jess was looking a bit more nervous now, and Chase wished he could offer more reassurance than a shaky smile and nod. It was time, and even knowing nothing was likely to happen didn’t dampen the adrenaline of the moment.
Chase flicked his eyes back to his phone, determined to hold them there for as long as he could before blinking and losing time. It was easily the highest stakes staring contest of his life, and even if his opponent didn’t technically have eyes Chase wasn’t going to back down from a challenge. Something moved in his peripheral vision, but Chase fought the urge to look over at it, knowing that would be all it would take for time to skip. Flashes and floaters and strobes continued to pound at his tiring eyes as he kept them locked on his phone screen, Jess’s face still centered around the picture frame but now looking paler by the second. Chase wasn’t sure if that was her stress, something esoteric due to the blank 34, his eyes messing with his perception after being open so long, or some combination of the above.
Finally, as if acknowledging his stubbornness and seeing no other way, a sourceless gust of wind smacked Chase in the face and reflexively forced his eyes shut. The next second he heard music filling the room from Tom’s tinny phone speakers, and he rapidly blinked his thoroughly dry eyes to see the exact same room as before. Anticlimactic? Definitely, but the blank 34 so far hadn’t been a source of fabulous and dramatic changes, otherwise it wouldn’t have taken two weeks for them to notice.
Tom, though, was reacting as if he’d seen a ghost. Or, since Chase didn’t find Echo all that intimidating, like he’d walked in on his parents explaining their murder orgy plans in excruciating detail. His hands shook as he navigated his phone menus, and his voice trembled a bit as he announced to the room.
“That - that’s the second song on this playlist. If this is right, it’s been a little over five minutes since 12:59.”
Chase ended his own recording and checked the time just to be sure, but as he expected, the numbers read 1:00. Knowing somehow made it more disturbing; it was one thing to lose time, it was another to basically have confirmation that it was passing five times faster than usual while you were blacked out. When Tom finally hit pause on the music, silence descended like a heavy blanket. It was real, and it was even stranger than they thought.
Finally, Miles managed to whisper the results of his experiment. “The stopwatches - they both stopped at a minute and twelve seconds. That must be when I blinked.”
“So - things can activate within the blank 34, but things that are started beforehand just to measure it will fritz out somehow?” Chase asked, prodding the rest of the room into thought. He and Jess had had the most time to acclimate themselves to this flavor of strangeness, it was the least he could do to coax the others out of their shellshock.
“Looks that way from over here.” Kayla was trying and failing to mask the fear in her voice with an extra helping of anger. “The food definitely got reset alright, but my video cut off right when the stopwatches did. A minute and twelve seconds.”
“It was only two seconds before.” Jess said, staring past Chase more than at him. “When we were in the security office. All the tapes there cut off two seconds after 12:26. Now we’ve got an extra ten. What’s changed?”
“And do we have anything unexpected showing up on tape? I don’t see any extra wall hangings around, so we’re probably safe from that particular quirk.” Chase said. “Come on, let’s get comfortable and dig into this. Something tells me it could take a while.”
Kayla nodded slowly. “I’ll make some tea. Not like I’m gonna be able to get back to sleep any time soon.”
Slowly the group assembled back on the couches, mostly sporting thoughtful frowns. Just like with Jess in the security office, Chase had a feeling he was going to have to direct a lot of the conversation until Ellie’s distant eyes finished whatever processing was happening behind them.
“Right, well, welcome to the conspiracy.” Chase shot a glance at Tom, but the larger man was still staring at his phone like it would tell him the secret of the universe. “Let’s see what we’ve got recorded and what we can glean from that, yeah? Ellie, you’ve been quiet. Anything interesting on the overwatch video?”
Ellie blinked, seeming to drag herself into the present. “It is similar to what you are likely expecting, and also only runs twelve seconds after the start of the blank 34. Here, perhaps we should simply watch it.” She set her phone in the middle of the coffee table and hit play on the video. For the first minute there was the typical fidgeting and changes in facial expression that would accompany any recording of people. It made it extremely easy to tell when the blank 34 started, as everyone froze hunched over their phones. It was just like the videos Chase and Jess had watched earlier, but even creepier being closer and involving people he knew. The video did stop after twelve seconds of that frozen tableau, with nothing obvious happening during the stopped time. Still, Chase’s story senses were tingling. There was something here.
“Play that back one more time, just the final twelve seconds.” He urged, and Ellie dutifully rewound the video. Chase leaned in for a better view, drawing a grunt of protest from Tom. His instincts were telling him something had definitely happened, but the visual evidence simply wasn’t there. Any change would have been immediately obvious with how nothing else was moving, and there was nothing.
“Huh. I could’ve sworn I saw something the first time… maybe not. Okay, next up. Miles, I’m guessing your video just shows the watches going until they stop, but let’s see it. Leave no stone unturned.” Miles gave a half-shrug and played his video as well. It could have passed for a normal, albeit extremely boring video comparing the performance of digital versus analog stopwatches. A niche market, but Chase had stayed up late watching more niche video essays before. There was again no sign of interference or weirdness like the picture frame appearing, but that itch in the back of his mind wouldn’t leave Chase alone. One of these videos would have the answer.
It wasn’t Kayla’s, as she played hers after returning with tea for everyone. A pantry recording was just as boring as Chase expected, without even the satisfaction of seeing numbers go up that Miles’s stopwatch video provided. The itch intensified. Tom hadn’t had a particular focus for his video and it ended up pointed at the front door of their dorm with Miles visible in the periphery. Still nothing. Chase scratched the back of his head, but it offered no relief from the itch inside his skull. His own video showed Jess, and it was supremely uncanny to see her go from imitating a portrait to essentially becoming one for twelve seconds, but it offered nothing except more itching and a tightening of Chase’s focus.
Finally, Jess’s video was focused on Chase himself. It started as the rest of them did, with those little movements before 12:26. Chase saw himself lift the picture frame to make a portrait of Jess, and following some bizarre instinct he did the same with the frame still in his left hand, holding it between his face and the phone on the table. Jess shot him a sidelong glance, but Chase’s eyes were glued to the video. And after the minute of preamble, his instincts were rewarded.
The video ticked past a minute, but the Chase on screen didn’t immediately freeze like he did in the other recordings. Viewed through the picture frame, white light began shining from Chase’s eyes as the frame took on its own multicolored glow. Chase didn’t think he’d been staring hard enough to develop laser eyes, but clearly the video evidence disagreed. Twin bands of light slowly extended from his pupils, and just when they met the picture frame the video cut off.
Chase raised his head and tried to call on the feeling he’d had during his staring contest with his phone during the blank 34, to pull that intensity into his gaze once again. He was as shocked as anyone when just like the video, twin beams of white light shot out to hit the far wall. Chase turned to see the incredulous stares and dropped jaws of the rest of the group.
“Well,” he said sheepishly. “That’s new. Thanks, Echo.”