Chase woke up feeling like he’d been punched in the face repeatedly with a side of needles under his fingernails. His body was slow and sluggish to respond, flopping about as he tried to sit up and triggering even more bursts of bone-deep pain to make themselves known. He let out a low moan as he forced his crusty eyes open and found himself looking directly down the barrel of an unholy combination of a kaleidoscope and a strobe light. Hissing in protest, he immediately closed his eyes again, but his seared retinas left their phantom spots and added to his profound discomfort.
His first thought was that Echo had somehow pulled him into the dreamscape when Bright had blindsided him. But Echo had definitely moved past the sensory assault phase, which left exactly one entity on his suspects list. A suspicion that was confirmed seconds later when a voice that was simultaneously Dr. Redmond’s, the hissing of thousands of snakes, and nails on a chalkboard reached his ears.
“Do you have any idea what you’ve done, you foolish lesser creature? Why am I asking, of course you don’t! Your idiocy was amusing when it merely doomed yourself, but this has gone too far!” Each syllable was an assault, and Chase was playing the role of the helpless victim. He groaned in response, then gasped as the sensation of needles under his fingernails redoubled, forcing his eyes open by reflex.
The room wasn’t one he recognized, but he hadn’t really expected it to be. While Echo was familiar enough with Chase’s thought processes to make a reasonably comfortable space, Bright was entirely alien and would probably say they had no time for such petty things as comfort. The space reminded Chase of a cross between a war room, a sterile lab, and a torture chamber; it was very on-brand for Bright and their latest host. The riotous strobing kaleidoscope was still present along one wall, and Chase found the others were equally unpleasant in their own way. One was constantly shifting and never quite resolving into the shapes of thousands of eyes of every possible shape and color and several that his brain insisted were impossible. The wall opposite was polished to a mirror shine, yet reflected nothing, instead offering brief glimpses of what seemed like eels made entirely of gnashing teeth lurking just beneath the surface. The final one was the most normal yet simultaneously the most disturbing. Crayon drawings like kindergartners would make of their parents covered the surface, each one somehow carrying an aura of almost surgical misery. Looking more closely, Chase noticed that none of the crayon people had eyes. Because of course they didn’t, that would make things less of a horror movie.
“Well, you got me.” Chase started to bluff. “I want to say we had a good run. Certainly pissed you off plenty there at the end, and anything that pisses you off I’m counting as a win.”
A sound somewhere between a sigh, a witch’s mad cackle, and a hiss filled the room. “You certainly would think that way. It has been enlightening, looking into the minds of your so-called friends and that filthy fugitive. They all thought quite highly of you, you know? Yet here you are, a shell of man only seeking to spit in the eye of his betters before being torn apart.”
Chase shrugged, only wincing slightly at the aches the motion provoked. “It’s the human way. I’d tell you to get used to it, but I don’t want you to ever do that. I want you to be baffled every time as someone like me defies you to the last, just so it hurts you that much more.”
The room shook as a bitingly cold wind blew through. “So arrogant, so naive. A dangerous combination. Shall I tell you what’s going to happen now?”
“Blah blah blah, eternal torment, something about snacking on my mind or soul or whatever it is you do, flaying me with torture until I beg to make it end or break and serve you as a husk of my former self. Am I close?”
“Not in the slightest.” The smug satisfaction dripping from Bright’s voice made Chase immediately want a shower. “Quite the opposite, in fact. I’m letting you go.”
“Fuck the what now?” Chase asked eloquently.
“I’m glad you asked. You see, I have no need to expend my efforts on the kind of frustrating worm you’ve turned out to be. You’ve already given me the final piece of the puzzle. Here I thought we’d have to spend countless cycles refining the implantation process until our agents could seamlessly meld into your primitive society, yet you and that traitor mongrel you call Echo already did all the hard work for us, and you didn’t even realize it! That defective just thought they were granting a connection and protection vector to you and your companions. But with just a little twisting around, those same sorts of objects can hold… I suppose you’d call it an egg. A sliver of a greater whole, needing only fertile ground to grow into one of us. One of me.”
Chase stilled. He had been the one to ask Echo to try to split their attention, to make it so that they would be protected from the sight of the other parasites and able to move through the blank 34. He was the one who had indulged Echo’s curiosity time and again, only questioning how the alien could be useful to him and his friends, never considering what would happen if the innovations they came up with fell into the wrong hands. It was shortsighted. It was impulsive. It was all of his worst qualities, and it was going to doom the Earth.
“Yes, now you’re starting to see.” The voice took on a mocking lilt. “Truly, something only a defective could come up with. A way to impart only a sliver of self, why, it’s unheard of. Self-mutilation is for hosts, yet with this, well, I wouldn’t have to rely on lessers any longer.” A victorious smirk could clearly be heard through the next words. “They would all be me.”
Chase thought for a second before responding. There had to be some kind of angle here, some kind of chink in the armor. He was holding out hope that Jess and the others were still free, not trapped in their own personal torture chambers. He didn’t think Bright could split their attention that many ways, but that was just a gut feeling and the others could easily still be physically captured back in the real world. Or the physical world, at any rate. As disorienting as this dreamscape was, Chase couldn’t shake the feeling that any injuries he picked up here would carry over to his real body. He was hoping that didn’t include the phantom pains that were still jolting through his body every minute, but he wasn’t exactly optimistic. It would require some notion of mercy on Bright’s part, and they would only engage with that concept insofar as it would advance their ambitions.
For now, the best Chase could do was keep Bright’s attention focused on him and give the others a chance to do something on the outside. Then the implications of her last words fully processed, and Chase couldn’t help it. He startled laughing, transitioning quickly from small, painful chuckles to loud, even more painful guffaws. Tears were streaming down his reddening face as each breath was converted faster and faster into laughter. He had the distinct impression that Bright was taken aback, feeling their metaphorical eyes staring at him with a new coating of bemusement over their usual disdain.
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“So - hic - sorry!” Chase gasped out. “It’s just - it’s just, you haven’t thought this plan through at all, have you? Ah man, I almost want to let it blow up in your face, I’d pay good money to see your expression when it does!”
“You know,” Bright began, trying to mask their emotions with a conversational tone. “So long as you’re here, I can kill you as easily as thinking.”
“Good to know I’m effectively immortal then! Urk!” Chase’s taunt was met with the sensation of his spine and intestines switching places, sending him flopping painfully onto his back as the pile of bones in his torso lacerated his stomach and internal organs. Still, he grit his teeth into a smile through the agony and was rewarded with even more disorientation as his spine popped back into its proper place. He tried to bark out another laugh, but it came out as a weak, wet gurgle.
“This is becoming tiresome.” Bright intoned disdainfully, as if that was the most grievous insult Chase could have given them. It probably was, right next to the fact that Chase existed at all. “Perhaps I’ll simply leave you here to stew as I hunt down your companions and bring in that defective for reeducation. Such a waste of potential.”
“I know you are,” Chase taunted wearily. “But it takes a lot of maturity to admit it.” Even as he tried to redirect Bright’s attention back to him, he was processing what they had just revealed. Leaving him here to hunt down his friends and Echo, implying they hadn’t been captured with him. Knowing that Jess and the others were safe for now was a load off his mind, but if Echo was still free to maneuver, that was potentially a game changer. It was too bad he couldn’t communicate any plan he came up with while trapped here, but Chase was okay with being the damsel in distress this time. Hopefully Echo had picked up enough from his thought patterns to come up with something good, and there was no one he trusted more than Jess to pull off whatever plan they cooked up.
Which is why he was only slightly surprised to see a bright ribbon of green and white light cut through the wall of shifting eyes, neatly bisecting one with a spiderweb in the place of a sclera. Bright seemed to sputter, the rest of the room stuttering like a video game suffering a sudden lag, dropping frames of reality. The only part unaffected was the line, spreading and widening into a circle that brought with it the promise of sweet relief.
Chase didn’t stop to think, pouring all of his energy into lunging for this new portal. Bright gained their bearings just in time to snap an extension out of the silvery mirror wall, a twenty foot long iridescent lamprey that sunk its teeth into his calf as his upper body made it through the portal. With a cry of pain, he brought his hands to bear hitting and prying the impossible creature off, but it was as hard and immovable as the wall it was born from. Chase tried in vain to free his leg from its grasp, so consumed in his struggle that he didn’t notice the extra hands helping until they’d succeeded where he had failed.
Miles gave a war cry as he thrust his inexplicably glowing hand forward, neatly lopping off the head of the lamprey and drawing a cry of shock and pain from Bright’s previously arrogant voice. With its head missing, the extra length of the lamprey’s body seemed to snap back to the wall it was born from, leaving ripples in the surface. This didn’t really help Chase, who still had its teeth sunk into his calf, but it did let him pull said calf fully through the portal, which promptly snapped shut as he did. Chase looked up at Miles, who was breathing hard and staring at his hands in wonder.
“Little help here?” Chase asked tersely. He would normally be more eloquent or at least attempt a joke, but it turns out having your calf muscle gnawed on by nightmare spawn hurts enough that it limits the brain’s speech centers. Miles snapped out of his daze at Chase’s voice and quickly moved to the creature’s head still adorning his leg like the world’s most unfashionable accessory, placing both hands on it and dissolving it into a cloud of silver dust that was promptly vacuumed up into those hands, only adding to their glow. Chase was well past the point of questioning the inner workings of these sorts of impossible things and just went with it as Miles helped him up.
“Not that I don’t appreciate the rescue,” Chase began as the two limped away from the wall where the portal had been. “But what the hell exactly?”
“Thank me later, we need to move before Echo has to shuffle again. What’s the last thing you remember?” Miles asked breathlessly.
“What the hell does that have to with any-”
“Answer the damn question, Chase!”
“Uh, we were running from the room where we’d smashed the machine, then there was a green light and I woke up in Bright’s little torture chamber back there.” Chase gritted out as they hobbled along. Unlike the sensations of pain that Bright had been subjecting him to, the lamprey bite wasn’t fading away and he could feel the bloodstain on his jeans spreading with every shaky step they took forward. Miles nodded at his reply, looking relieved for some reason.
“Good, good. That means we found the right spot this time. You wouldn’t believe how difficult it is to track things in a place like this. It’s like everything that has ever existed is somewhere, but pinpointing anything specific takes ages to pin down.” Miles babbled, shooting Chase a grin. “Good thing you’ve got such good friends, eh?”
“Yes, yes, I’m blessed, now what the hell are you on about? How long have I been in there that you’ve had ages to track me down?” Chase was thoroughly confused at this point.
“It’s better if you figure it out yourself, for no other reason than the looks on our faces when we learn the truth. Just remember the blank 34 and that nothing is truly impossible. Extremely improbable, sure, but we’ve been dealing with that for a while.”
Chase didn’t know how to respond to that, and the blood loss was starting to make him feel faint. They proceeded for a few moments in silence down a corridor that shifted from castle walls to wood paneling to some kind of red crystal every few steps, the sound of a raging waterfall getting closer all the while. Every few steps Miles would throw out his hand that wasn’t supporting Chase and hit the wall, leaving a glowing white handprint. Chase had more questions than he’d ever had before, but his mind was so thoroughly worn out that all he could get his mouth to do was groan in pain.
Miles shot him a look of sympathy as the corridor opened up, revealing the waterfall they’d been hearing. It was a remarkably thin thing, only about the width of a person, and composed not of water but what looked like liquid gold flecked with deep blue. Idly, Chase thought that it shouldn’t sound like water if it was so clearly something heavier, but whatever the substance was, it threw up mist just like a waterfall would and didn’t look to be flowing any differently.
“This is where we part ways.” Miles said, disentangling himself from Chase. “You’ve got a lot to do, and where you’re going time still matters for a bit. Just don’t do anything too weird, I’d like to exist one day.”
“Wha-” Chase’s confused reply was interrupted by Miles abruptly shoving him into the waterfall’s stream. He only had time to briefly spin about, catching a glimpse of his smirking savior and leaving him with one burning question that stuck with him as the waters swept him away:
When did Miles grow a mustache?