If she was fighting the pair of anomalies that were clearly causing damage to valuable city infrastructure, she wasn't fighting them very seriously. Had she been hit on the head? Forgotten all her training and resorted to limply wrestling her assailants? This wouldn't do. A demotion, and or brain surgery, was required, but that'd have to come later.
The director felt around the back of his belt line, finding the rubber grip of his high caliber revolver. He paused a moment. Where were the tracers? How had these things been prowling around unnoticed and unpursued long enough to cause a traffic jam? Defective units, maybe. Either that, or more demotions were in order. It was going to be one of those days, Mason sighed.
Holly's eyes were swiveling in opposite directions as she stood on her head. They eventually managed to sync up again and view her boss. Her pupils then shrank to pinpricks.
"Director!" she inverted, and saluted him. "Lovely weather, we're having, isn't it?"
Mason blinked at her again, and moved his sunglasses back into place. He had a sudden headache.
"Did you just refer to me by my title in public?" he asked.
Holly scratched the back of her head.
Mason pointed to the smoke fox, currently growling at him with raised, wispy hackles, and the agonized Chikita slumped beside it.
"I suppose it's a moot point now. Care to explain this?"
All the while, that voice he had heard earlier when he terminated the boy in the green cloak was echoing in his pounding head.
What now, good Director? How will you cover all this up? All these eyes on you, staring in abject confusion and horror at the impossible taking center stage in their mundane little lives. Are you going to detain everyone? Send them off to some black site, or eliminate the witnesses in a mass purge, perhaps? What of the cameras? How are you going to censor it now? There's no fog to justify these "hallucinations" now, is there? And what of the disturbing little rumor you heard about Miss Yule here? Was the boy right? Did your subordinate leak classified info? That carries a mandatory death penalty. You've already murdered a child, why stop there?
Mason clutched at his throbbing temples.
"Shut up..." he demanded of the voice.
Did you really think you could take so many lives without incurring consequences? What was it all for, Director? You've sacrificed your ethics, your relationships, your allies, and your sanity for a game of war. And while you're justifying your deplorable actions, the real monsters move unchecked. When are you going to release details about the Police Station Massacre? You can't freeze all info on such a big incident forever, you know. Perhaps if you hadn't alienated those old men you held in such contempt... Oh, and let's not forget how you miserably failed to protect your little girlfriend-
"SHUT. UP!!!" Mason roared.
The genie was irreversibly out of the bottle now.
Holly, only having just begun to stammer and try and think of a good explanation when the director shushed her rudely, not that he was often not rude, then escalated to outright yelling. "So much for not causing more of a scene..." Holly thought.
Chikita, sufficiently tousled and numb from the ankles down, stood shakily on phantom feet, her pain-blurred vision finally focusing in again. Chinokiri was growling at something, she noticed. Following the giant fox's gaze, she met eyes with a grim looking suited man, one hand firm behind his back. She narrowed her eyes, a palm coming to rest on Yukihana's hilt.
"Who the fuck are you?!" she growled.
Mason looked like he'd been shocked back into focus out of a waking night terror.
"That's my line. Who the hell are you people? What am I missing?!"
Chikita caught a glimpse of Holly's face.
"Oh, I see. You're the top egghead, eh?" Chikita smirked. She turned to Holly. "You never told me your boss was so handsome, Holly. Too bad he's scum."
Holly looked at Chikita in gaping horror. Now the blue bimbo had really done it.
Chikita, what are you doing? Yukihana asked his master.
Don't know, Yuki, my concussion has a concussion. But you know me - I've never gotten along well with authority.
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She had a manic look, her eyes twinkling.
"Everyone!" she called out at the top of her lungs.
"That's enough!" Mason roared, pulling his magnum on Chikita.
Reflexively, Holly grabbed it by the muzzle, blocking the shot with her hand. It punched through her suit's protection, and lodged the bullet in her palm. Mason gave her a look of genuine confusion and betrayal, as if he had been holding out that the boy's story about Holly had been a lie.
Chinokiri swirled around Mason and trapped him in her vortex. Vampiric smoke flooded and drowned him, and he was utterly immobilized, unable to make a peep.
How does it feel, Director? the voice asked him. How does it feel to be silenced?
Chikita then went on to throw off the world's veil of normalcy.
No, no, no! Mason tried and failed to shriek out. He was freezing, but even beyond the chill of what felt like a liquid nitrogen cloud, what froze the deepest was his heart. This was beyond the worst case scenario he could have envisioned. Everything he worked for, everything he sacrificed, everything he had strove toward, how hard he had tried to protect-
You are a fool. You can't protect anyone. All you've managed to do is make more victims for me.
Mason was suddenly in a green field at twilight, surrounded by gigantic steel windmills. He heard the goblin he had cruelly annihilated back in his lab cackling at him from beyond the grave. He saw a somber church on a hill, and he saw a tall figure in a cobalt cloak standing before him.
"Hello, Director." the Faceless Man said. "Comfortable?"
Mason blinked, looked around his surroundings, and then at his own hands. He wiggled his fingers, as if trying to see if he had perished or not.
"Cat got your tongue? I'll answer the questions already on your mind. Welcome to the World of Forms. Your theories about the ether fog emissions weren't too far off, you should feel some pride in that much. Right now, the living nightmare playing out in Station Bay is a frozen point in time and space. The 'scene' has been effectively paused so that you and I can talk like this."
Mason adjusted his tie.
"Why is this happening?" he asked.
"You'll have to be more specific. If you mean why is this happening to you, then it's simple. Every moment since your conception has led to the next, an intricate series of variables in the chain of causality. Every thought you've had, every emotion, every choice you've made has inexorably carried you here, like a meager leaf on a river current. You stand, smug and comfortable, in an illusion of control. You have no idea how small you really are. The moment you are returned to your world, causality will crash back into being, and you will burn in the kindling you threw on your own pyre. Or..."
Mason had countless questions, but he felt bound by some predetermined dream logic, as though he were bound by scripted lines, a character who couldn't rewrite the script that contained them. All he could manage to ask was "Or?"
"Or," the Faceless Man said, "I can give you temporary sanctuary. The mass chaos and confusion of this incident has created a brief overlap between our realms, and you are the link. The ultimate consequences of this incident cannot be prevented, but they can be put on pause, perhaps long enough for you to come up with a plan. I can suspend the memories of all those within knowledge of this chaos, and skip the record, so to speak, to the next causal event. Of course, this will include yourself as well. Though, I think you would prefer for this to be a forgotten nightmare anyway. I offer you a choice, Director,"
"I will delay the flow of this city's memories. No one will know what has just happened, or notice any gaps in their memories whatsoever. Discrepancies in cause and effect today will effectively be smoothed out. However, on Halloween Night, this dam will burst, and everyone, yourself included, will remember everything."
"What's my other choice?" Mason asked.
"I will tell you what happened to your beloved subordinate, and your family." the Faceless Man said.
Mason stiffened, going pale.
"However, you will only have this knowledge, and immediately be returned to Station Bay... to suffer causality's wrath, along with Station Bay."
The Faceless Man already knew what Mason would pick. He could see into his mind and soul. The suit was, at heart, a coward. Knowing the truth might render his delusions of righteousness moot, and force him into a new Hell. He would continue playing hero and be blissfully ignorant, the epitome of one who - willfully - did not learn from the past being doomed to repeat it.
Go on and create more death, pain, and fear for me, boy. the Faceless Man thought. Go demonstrate the true nature of the human heart.
Mason licked his teeth, clammy sweat oozing down his forehead. “I..I...” He stammered, something he hadn’t done since grade school. He spat the sensation out of his mouth.
I what, you idiot? Mason cursed his own indecision. I can make a plan by Halloween. he nodded to himself, clearing the desert that had become of his throat.
“Fine. Pause the memories.” Mason said. The words brought weight off his shoulders as they left his lips, like the sharp click his revolver made when he got lucky in a game of Russian Roulette, something Mason had done more than once since seeing...killing...that kid in his office.
The Faceless Man nodded solemnly and waved his hand to send Mason back on his way. In the moment before Mason would spill out of the World of Forms to awaken, with his groceries, back home, he would catch a glimpse of Cuppy, a hundred yards or so behind the cobalt figure. Somehow, as if his vision had zoomed in like through a sniper rifle's scope, he could see Cuppy waving goodbye.
-
The Faceless Man chuckled softly. "I'll never get over how profoundly easy it is to manipulate mortals. Clueless puppets."
Cuppy trained his slingshot on the Faceless Man.
"Hold that thought." he said, smiling.