A portal with purple and red edges opened up at a barely noticeable corner behind an old house with somewhat European design, a large yard and tall metal fences and police tapes somewhere in the suburbs of San Jose, California. The whole portal was flickering, shaking and its edges kept changing shape, indicating that its structure and integrity was weak, brittle and unstable. After a few seconds, Emilia Corin, still wearing her cotton robes and carrying a bag loaded with medical supplies with her, was thrown out of it by a violent force.
Emilia Corin grunted and slowly stood up on the grass with her hand on the small tree beside her. She had to drink some more liquid from the IV bag and take a few pills from a tiny blue porcelain bottle in the process, so that she could still control the muscles in her legs and keep her brain from sending out wrong signals to her limbs and making her lose balance.
“Fuck.” Emilia Corin cursed and stumbled to the backdoor of the house. Turning the knobs on the door did not work, and she escaped in a hurry so she did not have her keys with her, so she had to conjure her power again and concentrate it on the lock. After a few tries, she was finally able to pick the lock using her powers and got into the house without triggering any alarms.
The interior of the house was mostly as she remembered - shot up, bullet holes all over the place, and dust and broken glasses, porcelain and bricks were scattered around the corner. She could see that someone cleaned up the house and removed some of the things that were on the floor and on the wall last time she was here: blood, dead bodies of some of her former family members and help, some were loyal to her, while others had betrayed her in an unexpected turn of event, and one particular, was the girl that flashed before her eyes before she woke up in the mansion owned by Carol Summers, her “mentor”, who she had always suspected might have been suspiciously good to her.
But it was as if she just woke up from a dream - she could remember a lot of the details about the girl: her smile, her usual clothing style, her favorite food, her favorite movie, her cat, but she just could not remember her name, though it just seemed to be right on the tip of Emilia Corin’s tongue.
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Looking around, Emilia Corin tried to find anything in her sight that could maybe jolt her memory. But everywhere she looked, everything of value that she remembered had been taken away, presumably by other members of the family. She had a housekeeper while she was the de facto mistress of this very house whose sole responsibility was to keep the house taken care of and items of value be accounted for, but he was missing the day everything changed for her, so all she could say was he probably betrayed her as well.
The fatigue and pain seemed to have sneaked up on her once again, and she had to take a few more pills and drink up the rest of the liquid from her final IV bag, as she stumbled across the guest room of the house and toward the fireplace below the red brick chimney.
Her memory did not fail her this time, the hidden metal door was indeed there, below a movable brick panel covered in several layers of burnt wood and ashes. When she squeezed herself through the hidden metal door, she was faced with the charcoaled face of a completely burnt body. And as she went completely into the room, she found that the cozy furniture and semi-luxurious decoration were lost in some kind of fire as well - now all that was left in the room, was the burnt remains of everything she remembered.
Emilia Corin used up almost the last bit of her energy to close the metal door and push the handle beside the door to rearrange the ashes and wood that served as cover for the metal door, then she almost rolled down the stairs, bringing down the burnt body along with her.
A pin and a barely recognizable ring rolled on the ground when the body fell and crashed against the brick floor covered with ashes, dust and charcoaled pieces of the wooden furniture. Emilia Corin reached towards these two items, as she felt that they looked quite familiar.
The pin was made of gold and jade, and the ring had a plain design but had some engravings on it - these were the items worn by the housekeeper. Then, she pulled some pieces of clothing from the body, and found out that they were made of the same material of the housekeeper’s favorite robe.
“Okay… okay…” Emilia Corin found the corner in the underground room where she could feel most of the sunlight redirected into this hidden room through some hidden structures in the chimney, pulled over a half burnt blanket and a piece of the carpet to make herself comfortable, and curled up in the corner like a wounded animal.
The pain was still radiating through every inch of her body, but so was the extreme fatigue and dizziness. After a short while, she simply could no longer keep her eyes open.
The girl’s name did not come to her.