If my life had been a horror movie, this would be the point in the movie—well, one of the points, anyhow—where the audience would be yelling at the characters—in this case, Heggy, Suisei, and myself—to not follow through with the obviously stupid thing we were about to do.

Leave it to Andalon to make that a reality.

“No no no no no no,” she begged, shaking and sobbing. “Mr. Genneth… please, don’t go in there. It’s in there, I can feel it. The darkness, it’s in there, and it’s stronger than ever!” She darted around, pacing once more. Then she stopped again, whipping her gaze back to me. “It’s not safe!”

More than ever before, I found myself agreeing with Andalon: she was right, it almost definitely was not safe.

But what else could I do?

Currently, I was existing as two of me. One of me stood in front of the airlock’s plastic tunnel, its opening looming before us, as if awaiting our entry. The other part of me sat on a chair in my Main Menu, watching the goings-on through a window in the air. Andalon stood in between my Thin World self and the window, where she was currently having a nice, big freak out. As much as I wanted to, I couldn’t decouple myself from my body. I needed to be fully present out in the real world, which meant that both hypostases of my consciousness were completely aware of my hazmat suit’s sweltering, sweaty, sticky confines.

I’ll admit it: I was scream-your-pants-off terrified. Just looking at the double doors beyond the plastic airlock had me feeling like someone was trying to pull my eyeballs out of my skull—optic nerves and all. And yet, my fear barely held a candle to Andalon’s. She was running circles around me in the Thin World, shaking her hands and clapping her head, fretting like no one had ever fretted before.

“Andalon, if we don’t find a way to stop this incursion, the real world might very well end up like Lantor. I have to try!”

In my Main Menu, Andalon ran up to me and tugged on my coat. “It’s not safe! It’s bad, bad bad bad bad bad. It’s evil!”

“You did a good job of being brave when we went through the memories of the rifts,” I said. “You can do that here, too.”

“No, I can’t!” she cried, shaking her head. “It’s back, it’s back, all the bad things are back, and they’re gonna hurt me, and then they’re gonna hurt you and—”

I placed my hand on her head.

Her lips trembled.

“I have faith in you, Andalon,” I said. “I know you’re scared, but… I’m here to help you, remember? My powers are getting stronger. I’m saving more people than ever before. We have to take the next step, Andalon. We have to.” Lifting my hand, I got out of my chair and went down on my knees, bringing my eyes level with Andalon’s.

“W-What’s the next step?” she asked.

I exhaled softly. “You have to face the darkness.”

She started to retreat from me, but I reached out and grabbed her hand, which got her to turn back and face me.

“I’m stronger than I was before. I’m not saying I’ll be able to beat the darkness, but… we can’t just keep running. We’ll never learn the truth if all we do is run. We have to take a stand.”

“But…”

“Think about it, Andalon. So far, all this time, you’ve been running and running and running, right?”

“Yeah.” She nodded, her eyes big and blue.

“But what has that accomplished? You’ve been chased and beaten and hounded.” I looked at her with deep concern. “One of these days, the darkness might corner you, and then what will you do? Where will you run then?”

“I…” Andalon stared at me in fear. “…I dunno.”

I rubbed her head again, tussling her sky-blue hair. “We’ll find out together,” I said. “I’m tired of running. I’m tired of being scared and confused.”

“But… can we do that?”

“We have to try.” I poured my lips. “Look at Cat. Catamander Brave was only a little older than you when he got thrown out into a strange place, all alone, away from everyone he knew and cared about. But he didn’t give up. He persisted.”

Andalon looked down at the floor in shame.

“How can I be like Catamander Brave…” She shook her head. “How can I be brave if I’m scared? If I’m so, so scared?”

She locked eyes with me.

“Being brave doesn’t mean you aren’t scared, Andalon, it means not giving up, even if you are scared. I know it’s difficult… but, would it be worth doing if it wasn’t?”

“I… I guess not.” She quivered. “I’m… I’m just scared… for you. So scared.”

I smiled at that.

“Then stay close. I’ll do my best to keep both of us safe.”

Andalon shook her head. “No, Mr. Genneth, you don’t get it.”

I crossed my arms and lowered my head, meeting her eye to eye. “Then enlighten me.”

She sniffled “Wha?”

“Explain it to me,” I clarified.

She bit her lip. “When you said the darkness was wanting’ to ‘tack the Paradise, you were right.” Andalon shook her head. “I remember. It… it breaks wyrmehs, and all the peoples in ‘em go bye-bye forever.” She looked up at the ceiling of sky. “It’s gonna do that here, too. It’s gettin’ ready. And when it does, everyone will be gone and I’ll be all alone again, and I,” she stammered, “I…”

I nodded. “I understand.”

She wept. “But then why are you goin’ inside? You gotta run, Mr. Genneth. Eberybody’s gotta run run run! It’s—”

“—Remember what I just told you, Andalon. You can’t keep running.” I spread my arms at my sides. “Look at us now? Where can we run, Andalon? Not even the worlds inside our minds are safe.”

“I…” Andalon lowered her gaze. “I dunno.” She furrowed her brow. “I think I ran here, to get away.”

“And look,” I said, “the fungus is still attacking you. Brand and I have been able to hold back its advance in Lantor—at least, for—but that won’t make much of a difference if the fungus breaks through time and space!”

“But how are you gonna stop it?” she asked.

I sighed. “I admit, you got me there.”

“Got what?” she asked.

“It means you were right. And, to answer your question… I don’t know what I’m going to do. But, I’m gonna try my best. That’s all I can do. It’s really all that anyone can do.”

Andalon’s voice cracked, her blue bangs swaying over her brow. “But what if you can’t?”

“Well… then we’ll have to run as fast as we can.”

“Okay…” Andalon said, in a shaky reply.

I stood up.

“Mr. Genneth?” she asked, softly.

“Yes, Andalon?”

“I thinks you’re really, really, super brave.”

I smiled, trying not to cry.

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“That…” my voice nearly broke. “That means a lot to me, Andalon. Thank you.”

Closing my eyes, I shut down my mental self, reducing myself to a single existence, back in my body, all sweaty and miserable. But as miserable as I was, at least I wasn’t alone. I had my colleagues. I even had Andalon. She bunched up close beside me, with her arms wrapped around my leg.

As Heggy, Suisei, and I stood outside of the plastic tunnel leading into the lobby’s double doors, you would not have been wrong to point out that I met nearly all the criteria for being a superhero. I had a flashy outfit, wild superpowers, and a drive to help people that sometimes caused more trouble than it was worth. I had my teammates, too.

My squad.

I had Heggy Marteneiss, with her military training, her sharpshooter’s eye, and her indefatigable spirit.

I had Suisei Horosha, with his own mysterious powers, crystalline mind, and peerless stealth.

If my life had been an action movie, this would have been the scene that would have gotten my kids pumped up. All three of my children had fallen in love with the Primo Cinematic Saga without fail—that big-budgetest, blockbustorious of all big-budgeted, blockbuster superhero movie franchises. Their rated-E-for-everyone tales of men and women in flashy armor snarking left and right as they hopped between dimensions, battling everything from vindictive ancient gods to armies of sapient submarines had dominated pop culture for over a decade, and had breathed new life into what it meant to be a superhero.

I just hoped I could live up to the hype.

I was staring down a great unknown, and worlds were at stake: my world, Paradise, and all the others.

Heggy was the one with the goods: carrying the insulated messenger bag holding our batch of mycophage ampules, and twin, alcohol-filled spray bottles holstered at her hips.

Not knowing what lurked behind the static-streaked screens did not sit well in my stomach. But then again, that’s exactly why I was doing this in the first place: to get answers, and to avert catastrophe.

Assuming catastrophe could still be averted.

Still, I made a point to not to think about all the frightening, anomalous things I’d seen before the signals had cut out, because if I had, it would have had me leaking resolve like a broken bucket.

Just like Andalon said, I was being brave.

Heggy stepped toward the airlock.

“Are you certain you want to do this, Dr. Marteneiss?” Dr. Horosha asked.

“Hell no!” Heggy answered. “But that’s not the point. The system is there for its people, and the good folk in there—the patients and our colleagues?—they’re our people. Going in after them isn’t optional. It would be that way even if my brother was here on the outside, safe and sound.”

Dr. Horosha nodded. “Understood.”

“Alright,” she said. “Let’s do this.”

We stepped into the tunnel. The way the ceiling’s fluorescent lights shone down on us, streaming through the tunnel’s translucent plastic, made it feel like we were walking through the clouds.

Our destination? A doorway in the sky.

It was only a couple of footsteps to the other end of the tunnel. A chill trickled through me as I reached for the handle. Tingles danced at the base of my claw-tips.

Heggy stepped beside me. “Genneth… if you’re feeling any apprehensions, just remember: always keep on talkin’.”

Her words pulled me back into the moment.

“If you keep on talkin’, then you keep on truckin,” she added. “Don’t let yourself go all stir-crazy.”

Andalon skittered through Heggy’s body, coming to huddle in the safety of my shadow.

I couldn’t help but stare at Dr. Marteneiss’ hand as Heggy reached for the door.

Slowly, she pushed it open. “Strange,” she said. “It’s cold.”

The doors swung inward, clearing the way—but none of us moved.

“Bite me…” Heggy swore, with a sigh. Her words clung to the air.

Though Ward E was not my usual stomping grounds, I’d grown immeasurably familiar with it in the past week. I knew the double doors in front of me almost as intimately as I knew the door to the bedroom at home. Hardly a day had gone by where I hadn’t walked through these very doors at least half a dozen times. With all that experience, I knew that when I opened those doors, I should have seen Ward E’s lobby. It should have been there, as surely as dawn came after dusk.

But the lobby wasn’t there, and what was there was utterly, utterly wrong. When I say that, I don’t mean that it looked different or had some other twist to it that made it other than what I’d expected it to be.

No.

When I say it was wrong, I mean that there was a completely different room on the other side of those doors: a hallway. A long hallway, long enough that the seams where the floor and ceiling above and below formed a great X whose center receded, away, away, to a vanishing point whose end I could not discern.

And that barely scratched the surface of the wrongness.

Umbras obscured the hallway’s depths. The lights in the ceiling flickered on and off, setting a pale green haze aglow in hair. The spore clouds hung in the air like an esurient specter. The walls were covered in dark, fungal growths, crooked and gnarled, like the trunks of ancient trees. Cracks ran through the floor and ceiling where the fungus’ tumid branches delved into the structure. The floor was littered with flakes of paint and chunks of molding, doubtless having fallen there after the fungus’ growths had sloughed them off the walls.

On a hunch—curious to see what would happen—I thickened my wyrmsight, just a little bit.

This proved to be unwise. I inhaled sharply, cursing under my breath as I thinned my wyrmsight, making my vision mundane once more.

Through my wyrmsight’s lens, the darkened hallway was at once both the brightest and darkest thing I’d ever seen. It was paradox incarnate. The open corridor sucked up energy like a vacuum wind, dragging it into itself in wisps and threads.

But that wasn’t all. During my brief glimpse, I’d noticed some of the pataphysical threads of Suisei’s electrostatic anti-spore shell had been coming loose and wafting away. The energy shell unraveled as our surroundings tugged at its woven music, unwinding the threads and pulling them away. The effect began right as Heggy had opened the door.

Though I’d thinned my wyrmsight away as quickly as I could, the pain of staring at that impossibly bright darkness persisted, leaving a slow-to-fade, baleful aftertaste all over my head and eyes.

For a while, none of us said anything. Andalon clung tightly to me, keeping her face buried in the back of my leg. Standing there, I felt like a glass jar filled with candy, poised at the edge of a cliff, teetering left and right, at risk of plummeting into a bottomless ravine. The candies were the souls stored within me, pressing up against some inner glass, given weight down by the darkness’ ravenous pull. Barriers within me trembled, as if I’d shatter any moment, freeing the spirits within me to be sucked up by the void.

With a gulp, I stuck my arm into the hallway. A chill wrapped around my hand.

“Tell me I’m dreaming,” I said.

“I wish you were,” Suisei replied.

There was fear in Dr. Horosha’s eyes—but not the same as mine, or Heggy’s. No, his fear was that of a soldier remembering his traumas, or perhaps staring down the face of an old enemy.

He sighed.

I looked Suisei in the eyes, but he quickly glanced away.

After exchanging a couple more stares, curiosity got the best of us, and we stepped forward.

Bending my neck forward, I groaned as a piercing pain struck my skull. Everything buzzed. I felt like aluminum foil in a microwave. I vibrated, as if I was receiving a signal. The sensation was so overpowering, it took me a moment to recognize it for what it was: a ghost was bubbling up within me. And something within that ghost was screaming to be free.

“Are you alright?” Heggy asked.

I nodded. “Sorry, I’m just feeling a little lightheaded,” I lied.

I sighed. At least this problem was something I could fix.

Heggy and Suisei disappeared as I grew a second consciousness and recentered myself into a hastily assembled Daydream Alley, leaving my body in charge of a decoupled dopplegenneth. This wasn’t an issue; it would only take a moment, and then I would be back in the driver’s seat.

The next thing I knew, my reality was me standing in Daydream Alley with Andalon and the ghost. Given my extremely spooky surroundings, instead of copying where I was, I’d whipped up a generic WeElMed hallway to serve as the backdrop for receiving this ghost. I figured it would be rude to just put the spirit on mute, so the plan was to quickly sequester them spirit in Daydream Alley and then swap out with the dopplegenneth, who could then work with the ghost while I focused on dealing with the madness out in the real world.

What lurked in those dark halls, I wonder?

Andalon hid behind my leg as I turned to face the new arrival.

I immediately wanted to switch places with her.

I gasped.

It’s not every time that your childhood hero walks toward you, in plain view. I tried to speak, but could only stutter. I ended up clearing my throat rather loudly, which succeeded in catching his attention, “Him” being Mr. Kosuke Himichi.

Mr. Himichi was younger than he’d been when we last met. The Mr. Himichi I now faced was the one I’d known in the latter parts of my adolescence, at the height of his powers. He sat in bespectacled comfort on the far side of middle age. Line of gray streaked his aging black hair from where it stuck out beneath his even blacker beret. Mr. Himichi was dressed in near-monochrome: a muted, beige-gray vest atop a darker pair of gray slacks, with a white dress shirt underneath, its stiff collar crisply folded. The soft gold twists on his black tie provided just the slightest dash of color.

Mr. Himichi pressed his hand down on his beret, as if to steady himself. “Dr. Howle?” he muttered, staring at me through his rounded rectangular glasses.

I exhaled sharply. Emotion twitched at my lips.

After Andalon and I kicked the fungus in the butt—assuming we figured out how to kick it in the butt—it would be the honor of my life to guide Mr. Himichi to his well-deserved afterlife.

I guess I just had one more thing to fight for.

Closing my eyes, I willed everything to pause. I could deal with this later, and there was no way I was going to do it through a dopplegenneth. No, this was gonna require my full attention, so it would have to wait for later.

“Who is that?” Mr. Himichi asked.

My eyes fluttered open. I looked around in shock.

We were still in Daydream Alley.

For a second time, I willed the mind-world away.

“I’m now returning to my physical body,” I said, under my breath.

But nothing happened.

Andalon crept around my leg to look up at me. “Mr. Genneth?”

Leaning forward, Mr. Himichi smiled. “She speaks!”

Meanwhile, my heart was racing. I kept trying to recenter my consciousness in my body, but nothing happened. Neither my physical body nor its mental accoutrements were obeying me.

“Andalon, what’s going on?” I asked. I lowered my voice to a whisper. “My powers aren’t working.”

Mr. Himichi approached us. “I, also, would very much like to know what is going on.”

My lips trembled. I was embarrassed and terrified all at once. I felt like I was about to cry.

“It’s the darkness, Mr. Genneth,” Andalon whispered. “It’s attacking. It’s making things horrible!” She shook her head. “Nothing works. Nothing works!”

I guess the fungus had struck first.

“Oh fudge,” I muttered. “I think I might have just walked into a trap…”

Mr. Himichi scratched his chin. “It seems your wa has been disturbed, Dr. Howle,” he said, pointedly.

I sighed. “You have no idea.”