Chapter 56 - Not An End

I came back to the library after a few days of stress about moving. I would have to move again soon enough, but the temporary respite was welcome. The first thing I saw inside was Tarne, sitting at the desk in the open space with a book in her hands. I scanned around before coming up to her, but Lila and Kara were not around.

“Hey, Tea,” I said. She held up a finger for a moment of silence, then slipped a divider into the section of the book where she was, and closed it with a heavy slam. I wondered what she was reading, and questioned whether I put my stories back into the library, or if Lila did. She could probably recall them from memory after the library got shattered to pieces. I did still worry about those books and where they ended up.

“Jack!” She said, and jumped across the desk with hands in a loop. The arms caught my neck like a ring tossed onto a hook. From there, her hands split apart for just a moment as she floated slowly down thanks to creationism into a hug. I smiled, and thought up some of my own with rockets on the bottom of my shoes. We took off into the air, hovering for a moment until the thrust increased. I flew up to the attic ballroom and did a few loops as Tarne laughed from the speed. Next I flew back down from the attic and right through the double doors into the garden where we surprised Kara and Lila on a stroll.

“Faster!” Tarne called out, over the blasting sound of rushing air. I put on some goggles that let me see the vines growing from the seed of thought, and throttled the rockets as we burst out into the darkness outside. I could fly anywhere within the confines of the vines with my creationism, and even that felt small. The rush of air disappeared right as we exited. It felt more like flying through space, with no stars, and nothing to guide us except the place we departed. I slowed down to a stop after a few seconds, hovering in the emptiness.

“We should go back,” I said.

“When are you going to fix me, Jack?” Tarne asked. Her face was sad, with tears welling up. “You said you would fix me. You said mommys would love me again. It hurts when they look at me like I did something bad all the time. It hurts here.” Tarne put a hand over her chest and circled over her heart. I felt saddened at that. She was young, but Kara and Lila were treating her like an older person. Kids could not handle that much negative emotion.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “It’s a hard thing to solve. It’s also my fault, so if you’re mad at anyone, please be mad at me. Don’t blame them for anything. They do still love you, it’s just buried. They see another person when they look at you, someone you used to be once.”

“I don’t wanna be anybody else!” Tarne burst out, tears running down her cheek and off her chin just a few inches into the emptiness, before floating in zero gravity. I reached to hug her.

“I know,” I said. “Soon. I’ll fix it soon. Trust me. I’ll take the pain away. Just hold on just a little bit longer, ok, Tea?” I wanted it to be true, but I had no idea how to solve this. They would have to forget that she was Akier Vilamones Moredo to love Tarne the way they did before. Time reset was already out of the question even if Fyntn and I fixed parts that caused the collapse before. Even approaching the idea of ripping out the regurgitated leech of Akier out of Tarne’s empty shell body was out of the question. It WAS him, without memories, and without the previous shape. Even if I once occupied the form, I had no power to go back.

It had to be based on Kara and Lila, and it would take a massive chunk of convincing on my part. It would have to deal with their minds, and those places were very likely just as chaotic as mine, if not more so.

“Let’s go back for now, ok?” I asked. Rather than fly with the rocket shoes, I teleported us back to the library where Kara and Lila were waiting. “Hey.”

“What was that all about?” Kara asked.

“Just having some fun,” I said. “It was fun, right?”

“Yeah!” Tarne said, tears still welling from the hurt she was feeling constantly.

“Here, try some of these foods I like,” I said, and motioned a hand to set out stuff I liked to eat sometimes. Maybe they would bond a bit over eating. I had to hope there was a way back to them loving Tarne again. “Meanwhile, I have to go. Enjoy!” I reached above me in the air and tugged on a rope that took the whole scene with it as I exited the library.

break

I came back a few days later, early awake from a hard day at work the day before. I had to help Tarne. It had been on my mind a lot when I rested. There was no way to do it unless Kara and Lila both forgot about me telling them the truth. Tarne would have to forget, too, even if to erase the possibility of destroying my patch job. I shuddered at the thought of changing their thoughts and memories. I would have to go inside their minds.

While delving into Tarne’s mind would be simple, Kara lived many lifetimes of pain and struggle. If I stepped a foot inside her mind, she would pummel me with all of it to feel everything . Lila’s mind, on the other hand, contained her maniacal self before meeting me, before giving birth to me, to Tarne. I would have to be careful at every step, and the first one was catching them off-guard.

I entered the library in spectral form, away from their view. The main room was empty. I flew over to the garden to scan it to find Tarne playing with Reaper Flare. Rather than sickle teeth, the flower now had feathers. When it closed around her, the plant maw mangled her in the feathers like a shifting hug. I smiled and flew over to the second floor, where sounds of sex drew me to the door of the hidden third floor. I peeked through the door to find Kara on the bed, mouth positioned over Lila’s back with licking involved.

Lila flexed her spine every time Kara ran her tongue over her triangular vulva. I felt beast rattle his cage, and grip hands on the metal of it. Lila reciprocated with her hand, running fingers between Kara’s thighs with increasing speed. Both seemed about ready to pop, but beast was rapidly closer to breaking free from my control, so I dumped his cage into tar as I watched Kara and Lila climb together. In that moment, when their breathing was hardest, I faded them to sleep. It was the most believable way to get them asleep, but the second Kara fell asleep, she lurched awake and jumped to her feet.

“JACK!” She called out. “WHAT ARE YOU DOING?” I remained invisible. There had to be something installed into her system that woke her back up when in danger. I tried to fade her to sleep again with a push of sleep fog, but she kept herself awake by rubbing her keir tattoo. I had to take a different approach. I took James Denizen’s form. Her guard dropped.

“Another visit?” She asked. I was confused, but nodded. “Where are you now, honey?” I assumed that James met her several times all over while traveling the worlds to help bring down the system that had him trapped.

“Some volcanic place,” I replied, realizing my voice was different. Kara came up still naked, and hugged me. “So, I see you moved on from guys. It was bound to happen.”

“You knew?”

“That you liked women?” I asked. “Yes. I was just lucky to be in your vicinity.” Kara grimaced and kissed me, shoving her tongue down my throat. I felt beast spring at attention up against her, as his hand cleared the tar I threw him into.

“You were more than lucky,” she said, digging her hand into my pants to take hold of a penis that was not like mine at all. James Denizen was quite well endowed, and Kara enjoyed her time with him every time she saw him. I was not about to have sex with Kara, so I touched her keir tattoo on her shoulder to produce the physical copy from her skin. She looked at me for a moment with her hand still on my erection, and looked about ready to explode with anger.

“Sleep,” I said. Rage vanished from her face, to be replaced with a calmness. I slowly slipped her hand out of my pants, but not before beast used it to stroke a few times. I dumped him into a pool of tar for that. With a quick motion, I clothed both Lila and Kara, and placed them on the bed side-by-side. They would sleep soundly as long as I needed, and with my keyboard dying, I had to come back to this later. I also left a sign by the bed for Tarne not to wake them up as I would come back and make them forget that she was a reincarnated enemy.

With that, I snapped my fingers to vanish from the library.

break

I came back the next day, right beside the two sleeping on the bed meant for other activities. With a wave, I moved them to one of the bedrooms instead, and tried to figure out which mind I wanted to tackle first. Lila was on board with changing the timeline, so she would be ok with changing her memories. There was however the matter of her being an abused girl who destroyed her world in pursuit of killing the people who abused ones like her. That had to culminate in some darkness, and could be difficult to wade through. I would have limited control inside, instead being a guest in a mind. It would very much have to be a sort of inception of the idea.

Kara on the other hand was chaos incarnate, and partly created by me. She was cloned, and shared a bit of consciousness with all of them. With time working weird in the ivy, she probably already experienced several lifetimes of adventures on many worlds that would only make it that much harder to find her and reason with her. I partially wanted to let them both sleep for now. I had to find time for the dive. It was not something I could just do in half an hour, which was how much time I had left until work.

It was best to work on some archive stuff for the time being. I nodded, and fell backward against the floor, splintering into planks that reformed on the floor.

break

I came back at the start of a new week. I woke up early, ahead of my three alarms set at certain increments of time apart. This resulted in getting to the currently overused Starbucks early. It was a perfect setup for delving into one of their minds. I did not want to. I wanted to return to the tiny cliffhanger I left for Anton and Moira in the Archive. I stayed away from the sleeping lovers for too long. Before long, someone would come by and wake them up. But, who?

James Denizen was gone. Johnny was unlikely to stop by. Mr. Barcode had made himself human, much in the way of bicentennial man, and died. The two pretty much just had each other for all of eternity. Tarne was something both of them needed. After all, she was the key to altering Lila’s thinking. For Kara, she instilled a peace, let her settle in one spot rather than jump about the other worlds.

I had to do this for all three of them, even if I would have to see some things that I did not want to. I stepped into the library to find Tarne sprawled out on the floor. I ran up to check on her, but she jumped up before I got close.

“Boo!” She exclaimed. “Hey, Jack. I’m Booooooorrrreeedd. Both moms are sleeping, but it’s so boring now.”

“Garden no longer fun?” I asked.

“I know all the plants by name,” she said. “Some of them are quite funny.”

“There is also the ballroom upstairs,” I said.

“I’ve danced all I could dance.”

“Books?”

“Read all the ones that have words already,” Tarne replied. “Over half of them are filler. Made to look like books, but nothing inside.”

“Nothing, yet,” I said. “Those are just meant to be filled up by ideas and stories that haven’t been explored yet. Lila was a pro at turning an idea into the full story. She…” I trailed off, remembering before all this complex stuff happened. It was nice, when she helped me see the stories to their fruition, but it became something else when she started taking ideas I had not started yet. That was her own writing, based upon my ideas. Maybe that’s what I needed to do.

“You can WRITE stories?” Tarne asked, with a shocked expression.

“So can you,” I said. “All you need is a spark, as it blazes to life. It can sputter there recorded as an idea until you fuel it into a full story, a book, even a series. Before long, it becomes a universe where many different parts intersect. Sometimes universes get crazy because there is no limit to what can be done. Kinda like here. See?” I held out my hand to burst a big ball into the library which was a portal into an imagined Infinity Void. It dazzled with gemstones, floating around like giant icebergs in the darkest sea, crashing into each other, throwing off gems in all directions that latched themselves onto other ‘bergs.

“That’s my imagined ivy, or Infinity Void,” I said. Sometimes, a green corridor appeared between two gemstones in the dark sea, only to vanish in a few seconds. At times, a big fish swam by to bite through the corridor created. “It’s not even a tiny bit accurate because the actual space is infinite, but that is where it all goes, after the story is done.”

“Whoa,” Tarne said, getting closer to the bubble. It was dangerous to give a child the power of creationism. She could very well burst this tiny ivy into existence beyond just to look into it. I closed my hand, snapping the viewing portal shut. “That’s where all things end up?”

“After, they have run their story through,” I said. I hesitated to tell her this, as her reality core was entangled with mine. Would she die when I died? Was she even going to the ivy at the end? “When your life ends, the life lived becomes the gem, one of countless, and your imagination becomes a specter that can visit any other gem, to live through their life as they did.”

“That’s scary,” Tarne said. I was confused. “Seeing someone’s life the way they saw it feels wrong.”

“Why would it be wrong?” I asked. It was my dream to see life through the eyes of others, experience the things they experienced, be born and struggle the ways of being a woman. It was the ultimate data bank of information.

“Because once you stop being yourself, you’d want to rest, wouldn’t you?” It was a childish notion. Going through life meant not understanding why some people were the way they were. The end was a way to understand that, but there was a way to not seek understanding, to not delve into adventures and lives of others.

“It’s a choice,” I said. “You only go seeking if you want to. Otherwise you can travel around the vast array of gems and watch the highlight of their stories on the outsides of their gems.”

“But that sounds lonely,” Tarne said. “Watching something amazing, only to not be able to share it with someone. Is that really the way things are at the end?”

“I— I don’t know,” I said, maybe to myself. I was so stuck on that idea that I did not entertain how others would see it, how a child would see it. To a child, that sort of afterlife must have looked lonely, but that was the reason children who died young, did not experience it. There was a whole system in place that allowed them to live out their lives in different worlds, no longer the way James Denizen did. I was going to explain it to her, but instead doubted my own deliberation of it.

“I think it would be more like another place where people walk around with bubbles of their previous lives like a balloon above their heads,” She said. “And when two of them have a similar experience, their balloons stick together and they talk about it. And if enough of them have the same experience they can fly.” I tried to understand how that was the end of anything, but then again, my version of it was not the end either. I shook off the doubts. My view made sense.

“Sure,” I said, dismissing her strange thinking. Ivy made sense because it incorporated dreams and imagination which sourced the giant memory bank of ideas from the collective pool of knowledge. The young who died, got to live again. The babies who died were taken care of until they could go adventuring. The ideas for new things drew upon the collective to live in other worlds, and the end was not an end, but a beginning to understanding those you could not during your life.

“I’m still bored,” Tarne said.

“Here,” I said, then put a hand on my shoulder to bring out JJ, my own childhood self around Tarne’s age. He was aloof most of the time, just like her, and the two of them could have fun together in this space before existence. At least, I hoped that she would be entertained enough while I found time to go into the minds of her moms. I burned through an hour already just talking to her. Going in now would be disastrous. I needed a dedicated few hours per dive, and that was not easy to come by. I had to sacrifice a few of my nights for this, or wait for the weekend yet again, only to waste it.

No. I would do it after work. I could not leave them sleeping, and could not leave Tarne this way, hiding her pain behind boredom.

“You two have fun,” I said, “I’ll be back later.” I did not wait for a response and turned into an ice sculpture that melted right away into the floor. 

 

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