Chapter 60 - Worrying For Nothing
Past the Thanksgiving weekend, I sat once more at the device with an idea derived from six hours of waiting for someone to open the door to where I lived. It was a three-step plan for dealing with Kara. I hoped the third step would not be necessary. If the first step worked, I would not need the rest. It was more of a one step plan with two contingencies in case of failure. It was a real if-then-if-then-if-then scenario, with the last “then” drawing a blank. In programming, that would error out, but here it was the last line of defense, the third “if” being the exterminating final bullet to the problem Kara presented.
I entered the library almost confident. I would be throwing emotions I had to field from Tarne back at Kara. I was interested in seeing how she felt after getting comfortable with the kid. It broke my heart. Maybe it could melt the ice around Kara’s wounded one. All she could see now was anger for what happened to James at the hands of someone very much gone. When I got up the stairs, Fyntn was there waiting for me.
“Hey,” I said. “I’m going to need a tiny bit of creationism in there this time. Can you push some through the portal with me?” Fyntn put a hand to his mouth opening. It did not have lips, and most often was just a black circle, but now curved into an oval, then a bean, as if he was smiling.
“Is it impossible?” I asked, after a few minutes of no response. “Just say so, if it is. My whole plan relies on it. If I can’t execute it, I’d like to—.”
“I can do it,” he said. “But it comes at a price.”
“A price?”
“I can push some through, but you’d first have to stop the expansion,” he said. “And you’d lose a very big part of what you’ve grown here.”
“So it’s a win-win,” I said. “I never intended to grow the seed of thought here.”
“And it’s going to hurt.”
“How?”
“Your reality core is connected to the seed of thought you planted in the fertile soil of the virgin existence,” Fyntn said. “First you’d have to kill the plant, then I’d have to prune the roots, and make you some plot armor. It could just be clothes, but they will basically let you use creationism wherever you are.”
“If all it takes is pruning the roots, why would I need to kill the plant?”
“As a favor to me.”
“Oh.”
“You won’t do it?”
“Willingly kill the living thought I escape into from my reality when it becomes too much to bear?” I asked rhetorically. “I’m a little afraid of not having this space.”
“Ah, there you misunderstand,” Fyntn said, coming up to hold my hand. I could feel the sharpness of the claws, gently against my skin so as not to hurt me. “The space will linger long after it stops growing. The only thing you’d be doing by killing the plant, is sealing the seed of thought from expanding further. I’d be correcting my own mistakes, and you’d be one step closer to the end of this venture, all the while solving a problem.” His hand felt so fragile, limp mustard-yellow flesh holding up three very powerful weapons of the Nth Goni. His eyes churned in molten gold, with the green pupil cut into a specific shape for seeing, polished to perfection.
“Ok,” I said. “Let’s do it.” Fyntn put his other hand over our already joined hands as we found ourselves in the bottom of the library, the origin of the seed growing out of control in the untethered space. I could not see it normally, but with a bit of creationism, I saw the vines overtake my vision, thick and plump with a light green veil of color to them. They looked like ghost vines woven solid over time at the base of a very powerful tree, but there was no tree. The roots grew in all directions, overtaking vision as a green mist further away.
“Use your creationism to seal the seed in a perfect glass bubble, tempered instantly with the fragile tail on the inside,” Fyntn said. “While this is not possible in your reality, I couldn’t think of a better example.” I created a glass globule just like a Prince Rupert's droplet, then expanded it to an orb, folding the tail on the inside. It was a bubble, but not quite. You could see the tail twisted into the inside, within was one small part of greenish brown. Without the special sight, the bubble was empty.
“Is that good?” I asked.
“Yes, perfect,” Fyntn said. “Let me see that. For now, you only put the seed into the container, but it isn’t containing anything. I’m going to have to do a bit of stitching here, so look away.”
“Why?”
“I’d say it’s harmful, but that would be a lie,” he said. “Trust me. You’d rather not see this. I may look little and innocent now, but when stitching I have to use some… internal stuff.” I was ever curious, and tempted to look even after turning away, but I did not. When it was done, the seed was snug in the glass bubble and the vines that encapsulated my vision were missing a giant chunk in the very center. As the result, the green veil of their ghostly forms was dimmer, dead-like. I felt sad about it for some reason, but could still use creationism in the box, and where they remained.
“You’re crying,” Fyntn said. “Are you ok?”
“Oh,” I said, checking my eyes. Water was coming out, but only there. The sensation of it in my reality made my eyes water, but not enough to cry. “Sorry. It’s ok. Let’s keep going.” Fyntn nodded, handing the glass bubble back.
“Keep this safe,” Fyntn said. “Somewhere, in the back of your mind.” I looked the bubble over and transferred it into my ghostly form. It felt like it vanished, but when I reached back inside, it was still there.
“Here,” Fyntn said, and threw over a bundle of folded clothes, tied off with a shimmering purple bow. “Merry Christmas, I guess. Right? That’s what people do in your reality?”
“It’s not Christmas for another three weeks,” I replied. “Are these the plot armor?”
“I was only joking about that,” he said. “Plot armor is something you give a character in a story. Seeing as you’re a story I’m recording, it’s kinda funny. Not that I have any say of what is written. I’m just the only one keeping it on track.” I smiled.
“Or completely off the rails, you mean,” I said. His mouth opening curved to the shape of a bean again. I hoped it was a smile.
“Uh-huh, and who’s fault is that exactly?”
“Partially yours, I suppose,” I countered.
“I suppose so.”
“Let me change real quick,” I motioned a hand as my clothes disappeared and the green shimmering clothes wrapped themselves around me. They were jeans, sneakers, a shirt, with an over shirt buttoned halfway up. It was the perfect combo. “I’m ready.” With another blink we were at the three sleeping princesses. Maybe it was more like the sleeping bear family from that one old story. Only Papa bear remained convinced they would live a happy life.
“Here,” Fyntn said, cutting a portal in the air. I stepped through it as Fyntn followed. We stood together at the portal into Kara’s mind. “Good luck.”
“Thanks,” I said, stepping through the portal, instantly turning back into Tarne. The shimmering green changed to a pretty green dress with a hoodie over it, and jeans underneath. Dress, pants, and sweatshirt was a fun look, but I changed the clothing to something Tarne wore once to look like a memory before Kara found out.
It was pure darkness around me, with the portal vanishing from sight for the time being. I wandered aimlessly for a bit, feeling hopeless. There was no forest, no box of glass, and no lava. Maybe I actually tricked Kara into believing that I was Tarne, and she was deciding how to proceed. After a bit more walking in the dark, I lowered my head in disappointment.
“Pull me out,” I said. A hand pulled me by the collar back to the library.
“What happened?”
“She didn’t even give me a chance.”
“So what’s next?”
“I’ll try again tomorrow,” I said.
“And if that won’t work?”
“I’ll try again the next day. Or the day after that. I’m not giving up on this.”
“Good.”
I nodded and faded from the library.
break
I came back to the library three days later. I would keep trying, just not every day. This was stuck in a very strange place right now. Most of the time, if I wrote something in the morning, I would feel pretty good for the rest of the day. With this, I only felt more stress I could not find a good outlet for.
I appeared in the corridor, and merged their three rooms into one with three beds with a wave of my hand. Fyntn appeared through a portal to join me. With a motion, he clothed me in the same shimmering clothes I wore before, the plot armor, and opened a portal to Kara’s mind. I had to keep trying, for Tarne’s sake. I nodded, changing my form to Tarne, and walked through into the middle of the ocean. I stood on the water for the first few seconds, but fell through into the water. Thanks to my creationism, I created myself a small boat to stand on. The horizon stretched all around with no landmarks in sight.
“KARA!” I called out over the water. The sound quickly vanished into the emptiness. While it was the middle of the day, the sun was nowhere to be found. It took me a moment to realize, but it was the water itself that was glowing a light blue, creating a field where I existed that looked just like an atmosphere would look like in the sun. “MOM!”
“No.” A voice burst from a bubble that surfaced on the water. It was her voice.
“No, what?”
“You’re not Tarne!” Another bubble delivered the sound.
“I was, once,” I said. “I wanted to be… I— This isn’t about me. Kara, I’m here as Tarne to show you what pain you caused her.” Rather than a response in a bubble burst from the depths, the sound of bubbling water turned me to find a female figure rise out of the surface. It was a see-through representation of Kara, void of clothes. I got hung up on the water nipples too long and Kara clothed herself in a layer of water just as clear, but effectively erased the nipples from existence.
“Pain that I caused?” She asked. “Did you not see? He made me kill James!”
“Akier is dead, Kara!” I said, forgetting that my voice was still that of Tarne. I fluctuated back to my normal form. “This isn’t going to work. I’ll show you, thanks to this.” I pointed to the green shimmering clothing. I tightened my fist to retrieve the memories of Tarne breaking down because of how Kara and Lila were treating her after finding out that Akier’s regurgitated being made home in the empty shell I created.
Empty… Shell… I paused in a terrifying thought. Rebecca was an empty shell once. If a void leech made a home of that shell, who was she? I put the thought into the back of my mind, where it would no doubt fester into a real bad theory. I played the scene of talking to Tarne after Kara and Lila found out about Akier. Tarne trying to explain sadness before knowing what sadness was hurt to see. I could not tell if it gave Kara anything to think about, mostly because she was entirely made of water. I wondered whether it was time to move onto the bargaining phase.
“Stop,” Kara said. “I can’t give the memory up, Jack. I can’t forget. I can’t RAISE the person who took my life away from me.”
“IT’S NOT AKIER!” I shouted. “It used to be me! I FUCKED UP! AGAIN! I’M SORRY, BUT TARNE IS NO LONGER AKIER! I MADE SURE…” I bit my tongue to stop talking. I had knowledge of the timeline before the reset, but Kara was blissfully unaware. The slip up caught Kara interest. The water form glided over and broke off from the ocean. Kara stepped out of the water in flesh, naked for a brief moment as clothing wrapped around her.
“You made sure of what exactly?” Kara asked. “What aren’t you telling me, Jack?” I could feel Fyntn’s grip on my back, but walked forward to slip out. I bet he wanted to stop me from ruining the time reset.
“Akier did come back, through Tarne,” I said. “It was… It was a different timeline. Fyntn reset it with a ten-cut. In that timeline, Tarne was playing with Garr and he somehow aged her to a woman. From that point, and I don’t know exactly when, but void amalgams Akier prepared in this untethered space returned his memories to him. It was as if he was back, in a brand new body.
“Fyntn gave up his only time-cut to prevent that from happening, although there was a beautiful moment in that timeline where I expanded my seed of thought into a different sort of domain, and I was fully female there.”
“Hold on, back up,” Kara said, “So Akier IS Tarne. My hate for him was correct.” I winced. That was not the thing I wanted her to get from this. Seven minutes remained before work. I did not want to leave her here.
“No, Kara, damnit!” I said. “Tarne is Tarne. It’s my fuckup. I removed Garr, and Fyntn hunted down every last amalgam in the untethered space. There is no chance the memories will find their way back to Tarne now. She’s your daughter! I— I have to go.”
“Some things never change,” Kara said.
“YOU THINK THIS IS EASY!?” I shouted, and held my hands against her neck. I wanted to kill her, but this was in her mind. Kara’s face contorted to an angry scowl, as her neck exploded my hands off to leave just the nubs, with blood flowing out freely with the heart pumping. I grimaced and healed my hands just before two daggers stabbed me in the stomach. She moved them to cut deep, but I healed and knocked her back. “I’ll come back later.”
“No, I’m not done,” Kara said, motioning for all the water to approach as spikes of ice. Before I got skewered, Fyntn pulled me through the portal behind me.
“It was not a good idea to tell her about the broken timeline,” Fyntn said.
“If it works out, I’ll take that memory from her, too,” I replied. “But I am sorry. I—.”
“Go.”
I nodded, and vanished into a puff of air spinning in place.
break
The next day, I skipped all the formalities in a huff while jumping into the portal Fyntn barely made in time while already wearing the shimmer green. Anger boiled at my surface. The stress of work, living around loud people, and the matter at hand culminated in a very bad start to a Friday. I had no time to myself, no moment of relaxation beyond sleep, and that had been escaping me from stress.
“Kara,” I said, pulling into the darkness to focus her mind.
“Again?” She asked. “You should stop trying. I’m not giving it up.”
“You want to fight?”
“What?”
“I’m asking if you want me to get angry and hurt you,” I said.
“As if you could hurt me in my own mind,” Kara said. I bared my teeth in anger, and made her own arm create a fist and punch herself.
“You forget, I have my creationism in here thanks to Fyntn,” I said. “And I’m not having a great week, Kara. I could set beast loose on you. We both know what kind of things he likes. I can let you sleep like this for an eternity. I could die, and you’d still be asleep here in the corner of nowhere, of the before, no keir, no help, no hope. Do you want that?” Kara’s expression changed to anger for a few seconds, then grew concerned. At the mention of him, beast already started taking apart my protections around him.
I watched as the beastly figure walked out of my body, shimmering in green fur just like my clothing, With a swipe motion, Kara’s clothes shredded off to leave her naked in the darkness. She motioned to clothe herself in the next instant, but beast kept swiping to strip her over and over. I could feel that wild excitement in my mouth, a deranged hunger. When he took hold of her naked body, I reeled myself over beast as a cloak to inhale him. In the resulting motion, I was the one holding onto Kara’s buttock pulling her up against me. I let go with a grimace as brand new imprisonment stages wound around beast in my mind.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “Take the weekend. Think it through. He can do so much worse, and so can I.” I shook the memory off and was retrieved from Kara’s mind. I did not want to speak to Fyntn about it, and he understood. I grimaced at another failed attempt and sighed into the room, becoming the air that escaped through my lips until there was nothing left.
break
I came back on Monday, reluctantly. Sunday went great, and I was even hopeful for the week, but waking up earlier than necessary to try to get Kara to forget something was not an enticing prospect. I wanted to put this holding pattern behind me.
When I entered the library, Fyntn was nowhere to be found. I was in the main room of the place, somewhere I felt I had not visited in years because of the added stress of the emptiness where memories once were. The enclosure still felt like a sanctuary even after all that.
I made my way up the staircase and over to the room where Fyntn was waiting for me with an open portal.
“Hey,” I said. “Sorry I’m late.”
“There is no late here,” he replied. “Just showing up or not showing up. Thanks for showing up.”
“You think this is going to work?”
“It has to,” he said, then motioned over to the portal. “Good luck, nonetheless.”
“Thanks.”
I stepped through the portal with the green shimmerwear into the darkness just like before. This time, Kara stood in the distance, alone. With a swipe of her hand, she created a table and two chairs. I sat cautiously opposite her.
“I can’t give you the memory,” she said.
“Then what am I doing here?”
“I do realize that to get out of here, I need to play by your rules,” she said, “But I can’t do what you want of me.You can hurt me, abuse me, violate me, send beast on me. Do whatever you like, but I just can’t let you take a memory away. I am prepared to grant you alternative things for handing Tarne over to me.”
“Handing her OVER?” I asked. “There is no handing her over! That will not happen!”
“Please, listen!” Kara said. “I’ll disappear. You will never see me ever again. I will keep the Rahin away from you. They will no longer bother you. You could make another Rebecca. Hell, you could make a whole room of them. You could wear them like skins, and have sex with them, and let beast kill them, and have them throw orgies. You could make a whole unbound world for yourself where you are god, and this time Fyntn and I wouldn’t screw with it. You can’t tell me you haven’t thought about something like that before.”
“And what happens to Tarne in this scenario?”
“She dies,” Kara said.
“Then, no,” I said. “I wouldn’t do that to her.”
“To HIM!” Kara said. “She’s Akier, Jack!”
“She ISN’T anymore!” I shouted back. “Someone beat him! Someone did what you couldn’t do! He’s dead! He got consumed and regurgitated into the untethered space! Tarne IS NOT AKIER VIL MOREDO!”
“But, it is, he is, she is…” Kara trailed off into mumbles. Something was broken with her. Now that I could see into her mind instead of her masked disposition, I felt the struggle she had been through. Her mind was quite literally laid bare to me, unable to hide the hang ups and insecurities she hid away to become the godly woman who traveled between worlds. I grimaced as beast split a bit of creationism to create a copy of Kara, naked on the table, spreading her legs in my direction. I looked in the one spot as a hand reached out of her vagina bloody red and reached out to cling to my face. It was a bit of a jump scare, and I recoiled.
Once I was standing again, and secured beast back in the pit of tar of my mind, I found Kara up beside the table. She looked over the naked copy of herself and then back to me. I wanted to explain, but she knew enough about me to know beast’s influence at first glance. Much to my surprise, she started taking off her top to reveal a dark green bra.
“Maybe there is a way to get to you through beast,” she said. “I’m not above using my body to get what I want. This is more important than being embarrassed.”
“No— I— Kara,” I said, as she popped off her bra. I stared at the nipples I once suckled as a baby while three other topless Kara’s walked closer to me. Two held me down to the ground, while the third crouched to let the main walk up and mount my midsection. I felt excited as a molten hand reached from inside the tar pit to evaporate it. “NO! FYNTN!” I shouted the words as a hand pulled me back through a portal into the library.
“FUCK!” I shouted at the top of my lungs. “That’s not the Kara I know. Her mind is just as chaotic as mine, and this is literally Virtu all over again. She’ll do anything to eradicate every trace of Akier from the world.”
“You do know Virtu isn’t real, right?”
“No, he’s writing my story, somewhere,” I said.
“He isn’t,” Fyntn said. “I’m writing your story. Thought we had that cleared up.”
“No, Fyntn, he’s writing my story in his reality from the link to the ivy. He’s writing it there.”
“Oh, right,” he said. “You do know that nothing he says has any purchase though, right? You know of the infinite array of timelines running alongside. He’s writing one timeline, with a specific outcome. Nothing he says should linger in your mind. It’s very unlikely to be true.” I closed my eyes and felt the shiver of that one moment in my past run across my back. That night when I heard him tell me that I would die before I was forty ruined my sleep for years, and still sometimes bothered me, even if Rebecca said she found him and made him change his mind.
“What?”
“You choose which timeline you lead by the choices you make. Basically, your life is your own, and when it gets recorded, all those timelines are still there, recorded in the gem. So, just do what you can.”
“So… I spent all this time worrying for nothing?”
“For nothing.”
I grit my teeth and sighed myself out of the library again.
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