Viatos

Worlds Apart

"We've met," Tristan said to Keahi as the group slowed and stopped. He was absent-minded, but he wasn't sure his synthesized almost-voice carried that over, or tinges of emotion, an uncertainty that earlier had created a wash of despair, its edges trailing down into the fear his modified psyche now swallowed up into its endless roil. A hateful fisherman casting lines into the darkness. For the moment, he was only absent-minded. One eye swirled along its clockwork track to find Keahi. "Officer. I was in...bad shape. You were kind. I'm afraid I didn't live up to that kindness."

He paused for a moment. Three eyes roved; one stayed with Keahi. The other had never left his one-time maybe-someday friend.

"I think most of us have met. Except...him," said Tristan. No need to specify. "The...ghost girl, she brought us all here. Selected us all. Empowered us all. You the lawkeeper,
yeah, but also me the petty criminal. With weapons. To be blades."

Tristan gestured towards his haul. Before they'd left the clearing his curious dais had spread out into new flowers, a geometric pattern, but its ambitions had been curtailed there - the whole thing had collapsed by now, he sensed, a serious of small, calculated explosions transforming the garden, just as it had been a transformation to begin with. Chaos into order. Order, into chaos. Those new flowers had provided, anyway. A second weapon, identical to the first, and a pair of what looked very much like fruits, whole and inviting, with soft silvery-green skin.

"These aren't innocent wishes we've been granted, Officer Keahi."

Tristan hesitated, previously-devoted eye flowing away from the officer now, towards their prisoner. Might as well. He moved to where the other had been left in the grass, reaching down to do what he could about the gag. As soon as he stepped back, the ranting started. Of course.

But...

The machine-thing stood quietly, weathering Oedipus' speech, unreadable except within the ugly murk of his mind. His thoughts were not pleasantly-flavored. He watched Oedipus for a while, then turned away. Corrupted was too close to the theme of his thoughts to dare a response. An acknowledgement would make it real.

So he moved again, offering Koda and Stormy fruit as he passed, along with the short version of the effects and side-effects. Safe without any strong prior addictions. Dangerous with. Tristan tried not to feel like a monster as he explained it. There'd been farming back home, at the ranch. But this isn't the same.

He tried not to think about what it WAS like as he made his way to Tabitha at last.

Hi, hello, how's it going, what's up, are you tired, Tabitha, help me... Variables. He crystallized. "Hey."

Tristan resisted the urge to shuffle, suspecting it would look ridiculous on his anodized frame, conscious again of himself. The monster. Oedipus' words rang in his mind, a supporting counterpoint, creating the inviolate architecture of a prison wall. He didn't like thinking about it around her. They'd all touched lives somehow, some kind of twisted daisy-chain being threaded by a dead imposter, but Tabitha was different. The kid and his sister, Stormy and their pioneer, the cop and the killer...significant pairings. Was he significant? To her? To anyone? The day was beautiful, but it wasn't their world. Everywhere he looked, the tinge of unreality seemed to wait to swallow the scene. Things boiled up in him, geysers from that terrified ocean, questions...

Are you okay?

Are our friends okay?

Will I be like this forever?

Is there a way back home?

Can you stop Her?

Am I...

He'd been staring too long. Five golden points formed a star that centered the girl he'd admired, once, the girl so careful with her faith. So careless of her fate. He wasn't sure how much the group knew about where he'd come from. Lane knew some of it; had he followed up? It wasn't a hard dig, however he sold himself these days. There'd been a couple back-page articles, when they arrived - the first door-to-door missionaries in Lightbridge, with a few unkind jokes in tow - and one for the front when Wolfgang had bought it. It should have felt distant now, but it never did, the life he'd left throbbed in his brain, sparked and twitched like a cut power line. Everything else had been mist, except the gang. I was starting to...

No. Focus.

What did people want around monsters? The answer was so obvious, so simple, even if he hadn't been attuned to it - and he was. Whatever his Semblance had been, it had cared an awful lot about the concept. Safe.

Tristan took the second gun, reversed his grip, unconscious of the way his arm fractured and reconstituted to do so, avoiding the vulnerability of letting the weapon enter empty air with a fluid maneuver of tendrils and carbon grips. "I wanted to give you this. In case..." He trailed off, suddenly acutely aware there were no safe in case scenarios. He had no lip to bite.

"And to talk, if you want." The if was easy, through the speakers. It didn't stick and choke the way words used to do. "Everything's so...much. I'm overwhelmed. We're all moving in the same direction, but..."

He gestured helplessly. Helplessness was an emotion this new body seemed encoded to understand.

"I look different. I know. It's isolating. You saw - everyone saw. There are currents forming in the group, and...we know so little about each other. I'm afraid-" of me of you of what you say and don't of Her of him of the future the past this moment this feeling of power of weakness of corruption of faith of fate of everything "-of falling out of step.

I don't want to get left behind."

Shadow Smiles

Shadow Smiles has a pretty awesome hook going in. Malicious (?) extradimensional entities and the kind of scientists you need quote tags for are some of my favorite things. The company name is awesome, also. So few appreciate the value of a really evocative name for their disturbing clandestine corporations. A flurry of wonderings:

What kind of changes/powers are you envisioning characters developing, if not overtly external? Psionic, transmogrificative, magical, undead-themed?

The humans targeted by Smile (or those imprisoned in Blackthorne M&M's lab) are not typical in terms of Miasma Infection. They will become something more, retaining their human forms and sanity; but with the capability to temporarily embrace the Miasma within them...allowing them to morph their bodies in nearly limitless ways. They manifest Abilities, much like in Worlds Apart, along with their ability to transmogrify

...

The Abilities themselves I will leave to the Player. Psionics are fine, but I want to avoid mind meddling

Redward

Is this more on the Lovecraftian side, gothic horror, or more of a Parahumans-esque the-source-is-menacing-not-necessarily-the-result kind of a thing?

The Lovecraftian elements are there, to be sure, but I don't think it will be a very large influence
This, weirdly, makes me think more of Eternal Darkness

Redward

What is the Evadne Complex?!

The Evadne Complex is the HQ of the Blackthorne M&M forces in New Steel City. It's the building they were in during the Flavor Intro

Redward

You mention all walks of life - does that extend to Blackthorne and its constituent factions?

Yes, it encompasses everyone. Smile picks those he thinks will 'take to the change'
Previously Infected subjects are also an option, alongside S.C.A.R.E and Blackthorne Scientists

Redward

And finally, what's the general level of awareness/panic in the population at large? Is this something that's been mostly kept from the news and slithers silently through the background noise of conspiracy theories about chemtrails and the Antarctic Wall, or is everyone fighting to keep order in a world where sometimes the neighbor's kids rip through your living wall sporting flesh-rending fangs and layers of scarlet pseudoflesh?

At the start of the RP, people are only vaguely aware of the Miasma's existence. Reports from all over the world provide some small proof of their existence; but there is no large-scale panic...as of yet
Most of the people who worry about it are those directly involved and conspiracy theorists
Technically, there are no Miasma Infections in New Steel City; aside from Smile
After the corpse parts are distributed, there will be a Miasma presence
Which could intensify
Hope that's adequate!
The corpse parts will actively force their way into an appropriate host
As a note

Redward

Worlds Apart

"I hear you, Tabitha," Tristan answered, one molten-gold eye - the same eye, a constant - fixed on the girl, the others tracking the recent chaos. The reborn cyborg examined the gun in his hand; silvery, oddly shaped - too square, apparently designed to flow around the hand in Venetian fashion in lieu of the Earthborn preference for recoil applied elsewhere than directly into the wrist - and of unknown lethality. The group was making him nervous, he was almost positive, after allowing for the difficulty in tracking specific anxieties among the new sea of compartmentalized terror spreading out beneath his rational mind. Oedipus had attacked the policeman not even half an hour - or was it longer? - into the past, yet that whole encounter had been too surreal to apply anything like ethics or law in the moment. They'd all been gathered, hadn't they? Oedipus, too, had made the journey. Oedipus, too, held a Semblance. Was he the only wild card among them? Clockwork along the cracks in his 'face' shifted, triggering a liquid aureate rearrangement.

The thought was disquieting.

"You're right. We shouldn't linger. Not that I want to..." He trailed off, suddenly remembering his own suicide. Something not unlike embarrassment raced through him, and he was suddenly thankful that whatever the mask had done to him it had also excised any apparent capacity to blush. What an empty fucking gesture. The eye focused on Tabitha rolled off, shifting towards the horizon. They were more like droplets of golden fluid than eyes, really, their form and function fixed by rune-marked gears that ran along his faceplate. Scrying pools for a mechanical seer. "Not that I like that bit about becoming blades, or meeting whatever passes for her friends, but I don't think it's safe out here. Anywhere here. Maybe people will..."

Eat us on sight, maybe. Maybe there's nothing in this world but monsters. No data. No map. No boundaries. Oddly, the thought produced a kind of discord. Part of him, despite their surrounding unknowns, was at home here. That was almost as disquieting as wondering how many of the others were like the man with the knife, or worse.

Tristan took a step southwards, hesitated. He raised his pseudo-voice towards the trio of what had been the kid, Officer Keahi, and the attacker, whatever they were now. "Don't...do anything you can't take back."

Worlds Apart

His voice wasn't modulated, Tristan realized, subroutines ticking into action to analyze the dying sound. It wasn't actually his voice at all, which made sense, given that what remained of his throat was half a dozen feet away now. The sound was an approximation, an almost-Tristan, vented out of steam valves set along his neck and shoulders.

Some parts of him were still alive, encased within his carbon coffin. Or...maybe still alive gave the wrong impression. Parts had been integrated, repurposed, nerve endings sparking against copper, vascular branches flooded with oil and something pale. Some of his brain had survived, his memories. Most of his personality. Some living parts were new, organs he couldn't have quantified any more than he could have defined his previous kidneys by feel alone, a generative chamber where a single tendril curled restlessly, new cognitive structures that were as much soft tissue as circuitry. They opened new avenues of analysis and design, generated data as something almost like -

I'm scaring them.

The thought was a metallic screech dividing the soft hum of Tristan's altered awareness. An escapement tripped by the sudden realization that he wasn't...no, he was afraid. Terrified, actually. The loss of his humanity, the uncertainty of their circumstances, he was drowning in fear in a way he'd rarely

Faith and Fate. Calloused hands.

experienced in his lifetime, it should have been choking him, and yet...he could breathe. Terror surrounded and engulfed him. You don't know them. You don't know what they can do. You're not human any more. What they will do. You're exposed. You gave up your soul. Light armament. You can't go to Heaven. Limited armor. Limited resources. He neither transcended his fear nor was imprisoned by it. He felt...amphibious. Fear was just part of his environment, now, overwhelming, constant, but external. Fear spread through him like a second skeleton, etched into secret circuits sealed up in titanium bones, fear flowed through him like blood, surging through pneumatic veins. Paranoia and panic, but without debilitation. Suffering absent the urge to falter. It was under control. It was...safe.

But you're scaring them.

Tristan inhaled, shifted his eyes from his Semblance's overlay to the people it was silently assessing, searching for hidden threats. He looked down.

That's a lot of blood.

The flower Tristan planted had spread roots of hard light and filigree deep into the soil, disdaining its slick red beginnings. He concentrated and felt it - saw, through tiny sensory points like drops of dew - expand its criteria, accept the inefficient rendering of his discarded biology as necessary to his design. Silver moss spread slowly across the ground, artful blossoms growing up from its midst to enfold bone and gore. Sharp cracks and soft wet sounds gave way to the quieter shuffle of new growth, and beneath the moss a circle of ivory slid upwards out of the earth. In moments there was little left of the detritus but for a small and elegant dais, a curved bench rising at one end, a planter opposite filling with a rich compost, the filigree flower at its center, just beginning to branch out.

Tristan shifted his plating, hoping to conceal anything that was still - glistening.

Better?

Worlds Apart

Everything was happening too fast. This is what it's like to see a dream from the outside, Tristan, thought. to be separated from the transitions, absent the instincts that hold it together.

Which wasn't true. Time flowed normally, moment to moment, as steady and sure as ever. Keahi's gun - is mine back home? Fuck, I wish I had a gun - gleamed in the light as the others spoke, laughed, confessed...the scene was surreal but perfectly linear, drawn from an extant history. He was the thing unbound. The earth felt soft beneath his feet and as he scuffed one the scent of the grass rose up from where he'd broken stalks, and breathing it in, something so solid and certain, made him feel like the beginning of a second disappearing act.

The truth is invariable.

"I am a variable."

Fuck. Was that out loud? Where did that -

The mask gleamed in his hand. Like a gun. He felt like he'd been standing still for a long time, but his breathing was getting faster, heavier. It wasn't that nothing was making sense. It was that sense was what he was afraid of. The weight of destiny. There's even a quest. The kid was dashing off, and then the kid was an angel. The killer was smiling in the sunlight. The Ghost Girl was still herself, measured, collected, even and attuned. Everything was right. Everything was wrong.

He needed an anchor, something that didn't stink of faith and fate. Something - someone - to trust. Tabitha, the harlequin? Laughing and crying with more emotion than he'd dreamed her capable of, watching from the shadows of their little band? He wanted to trust her, but wanting wasn't enough. The cop? For reasons that didn't make sense here. The killer? He didn't want to trust him, but maybe that, too, was based in reasoning that no longer applied. There was a girl shouting at both of them. Outside their dynamic. Stormy, too, and the vomiting man. Were outsiders safe?

What was safe? He felt a scream start to bubble up in the back of his throat, could almost hear it...

...but it wasn't entirely his scream. He could feel his Semblance against his fingers, almost but not quite trembling, somehow communicating this imperceptible perception through his fingertips. You were afraid, too. Had he really thought he'd go insane if he heard that scream? What had the Ghost Girl said? That they were alike, but she didn't scare so easy? But that wasn't true, was it? You were afraid all the time. No one to trust. But you found a way,
to move, to make things...

He gasped suddenly, a ragged sound like the tatters of a clothesline in a storm. Fingers scrabbling as his eyes darted, trying to keep the others all in view, stepping backwards, tripping, scrambling, the mask in his hands, the metal pressed against his face, breathing in sweat and oil, fumes and fear, breathing, shaking, screaming-

...safe.

His heart tore out of his torso, impaled on a spined tendril of carbon and silver. He stared up - he'd come to rest on his back, hands fisted in the grass - at the excised organ, uncomprehending. Then the tendril opened, blossomed as if in imitation of one of the field's many flowers, shredding and shedding its gorey bulb.
"N-" His new appendage reversed its path, slammed home into his chest, driving the breath from him. "T-"

A dozen more tendrils split his skin, discarding the detritus that defines a human being. Gears boiled up beneath muscles and churned them to ruin, their relentless rotations drawing out armor plates and sliding them into position, pistons priming and separating the chaff of his flesh wherever it interfered with their novel operations. Sprays of thick black ferrofluid warped and then retracted in midair, hardening into angular segments. Limbs, vitals, skeleton, musculature, the wailing indigenous vanishing beneath the conquest of clockwork and chrome. Soft circuitry, too, wormed its way through his mind, shocking him with its unbidden architecture even as the immediacy of his terror expanded - spreading out into its own subclusters, dedicated threat-calculating mechanisms that need not interfere with efficient action. A clockwork screaming, moment to moment, steady and sure as time.

Holograms of soft green light flared around him as he climbed to his feet, cycling through possibilities. Tristan dismissed them with an instinctive wave of his hand. A single tendril separated out from the back of his chassis, sunk into the soil to discharge a potentiality there. An emerald shard that set to shivering at a hungry frequency, wave-patterns like roots spreading across the ground to draw iron from his blood, calcium from his bones, pulses burrowing into the earth in search of richer veins than Tristan's former. After a moment the flow of materials coalesced and the shard unfurled into a delicate filigree flower, another set of holograms forming around it like petals, displaying future plans. At its heart a single offering gleamed, and with the hiss of steam lifted up into the air to meet Tristan's reaching hand.

Though it corresponded to no human design, there was nevertheless something immediately interpretable about the function of the device he held. A weapon. A gun.

Tristan examined it with too many eyes of molten gold as he stepped forward on mechanical legs, tilting his head briefly as the horns grew, four branching lengths of sharpened silver. He came to rest a few paces from where Tabitha sat laughing, but his unsettling golden gaze was fixated on their half-dead host.

"This isn't just...power. Is it?" One eye each flicked to Tabitha, Koda, Ascot, and for some reason Stormy, but the central orb stayed its course. "This was someone's. What was...she?"

He paused.

"And what are we?"

Worlds Apart

A terrible sound, a terrible darkness, and then something - light in white and ruin-red, pressure and the promise of maelstrom - happened. The world was being torn apart down to its bones, the sky was falling and above there was a color that didn't exist, he could feel the equator of the universe splitting into abyss and then there was soft earth and grass beneath his feet, and someone was asking him something. The hammer of his returning senses drove the thought from him for a moment; for a moment he was only there, empty and fragile as a blown-glass bowl.

Tristan looked around. He felt like he should be screaming, or drawing huge ragged gasps of air, but he wasn't. Everything was calm. Even his mind; he'd appeared absent adrenaline, absent anxiety, his heart beating steady and slow. It was only speeding up now, his overwhelmed thoughts slowing, two briefly separated dancers now approaching equilibrium once more.

His gun was gone.

"Fuck," he said. "What the fuck. Fuck."

Will's proximity suddenly registered and Tristan moved back unconsciously, seeking space. Nothing he was seeing made any sense, and yet here it was. The others from the station and the thing that had taken the shape of the Ghost Girl. He didn't feel dead, and the tableau was too far from his conceptions of death, but he'd blown his brains out.

"...Tristan. Christ, you don't work at Johnny's too, do you?" Tristan shook his head and looked around. "Actually, nevermind."

I'm alive. He couldn't have given voice to the feeling the thought engendered; some strange and coiling thing, blue and green, its contours unfamiliar to him. But there was a lightness to his body wholly unrelated to its restored physical condition. It hadn't been his own, but he'd seen a second miracle: he'd seen faith rewarded. He couldn't tell if he should laugh or cry, so he did neither, his eyes lingering instead on the living cop, the hopeful killer, Tabitha, the array of employees and the rest of their newfound fellowship. He didn't look at the Ghost Girl.

The mask was in his hand. His fingers traced her - her? - sharp carbon edges idly as he turned back to the boy, raising his voice to carry past the two of them and make it an open question: "So...what happens now?"

Worlds Apart

Tristan stood stunned, struck senseless by the sudden surge of savage intention. The gun was in his hands - shaking hands - and leveled at the cop-killer's chest, but he hadn't fired. Not during the rush and not now, as the other approached the group.

He couldn't pull the trigger.

I have told you all that it is inevitable. You have made your stance clear, in response. That will delay several important events, for you. Events which would prove beneficial to your understanding. Her thoughts in his mind, whirling around his own, strong and dark and strange by contrast. The gun - the gun? My gun - swung towards her, the way he imagined his ancestors might have held knives of stone out towards Smilodon fatalis. Well, maybe not his ancestors. The people who felt the way he felt now, Tristan thought maybe they didn't do a lot of surviving and reproducing, as a rule. Would he? He tightened his grip. Fire if you wish. What did he wish for?

He couldn't pull the trigger.

Tristan's hand fell limp to his side. He looked around, eyes wild, lost, at faces familiar and otherwise. At Officer Keahi, bleeding out on the tracks, just like the Ghost Girl wanted. Just like she wanted, more people were down there now. Just let death take you, and you'll be given something extraordinary. If there's anything in the world I wish for, it's not to understand. Loneliness, hunger, frustration, rage, a loss...he looked at Tabitha, waiting for the train. Faithful. Fateful.

That broke and scattered him, and for a moment he was ten years old again, the first time he'd seen a miracle. It was his baptism. His father had taken him by the head and shoved him under the water of the huge ceremonial tub, the trembling sweetness of the hymn they'd sang for him still echoing in his ears. His father's eyes on his, so powerful, so knowing, detached from the flow of things. The Ghost Girl's eyes are the same. He remembered one of the women from the choir - not his mother, no, that little lamb would not bray or kick then or at world's end - had started forward, into his field of vision, and he remembered that her face had been changing. He hadn't seen what it had changed into, because right about then he'd run out of air and started to move, when his father simply moved his hand down and wrapped it around Tristan's throat.

At this point Tristan began to panic and to fight.

The woman was gesturing, maybe shouting. He couldn't hear and his thrashing made the water an opaque chaos, affording glimpses only when his desperate struggle brought him near - never through - to the surface. He'd struggled and shoved at his father's arm, which was immobile, impossible, a pillar of the temple descended to crush the life from him according to some higher ordination. And the woman had rushed forward, screaming - he heard a little of that - and without ever taking his eyes from Tristan's the older man had simply reached out with his other arm and taken her throat as well, and then it was she and Tristan together, two wild beasts strangling in the grip of divine judgment. She was clawing ruby slivers from his forearm and Tristan had his whole being set against that one limb, but his father never flinched or shifted. No human force could have altered him in any way. The black had closed in, a killing circle, and he'd felt his life slipping out of him like sand from a broken hourglass, taking his mind with it, perhaps his soul. But it was there in that moment of deepest despair that Tristan realized what his father was looking at, that it wasn't a judgment, that in fact Tristan didn't matter at all. The self-made messiah of the Way of Light was not looking at him but through him, to something only he could see. The end of his path, upon which every act of love and violence, every moment that passed at all, was another thundering and inevitable step. Tristan was merely a window looking in upon that end. Something was waiting there, something his father never took his eyes off of.

Tristan couldn't be sure, but later he thought it maybe looked like a throne.

And that was the miracle. Revelation at death's door. He'd been rebellious and cynical and worldly because his father was a man and the church was his world, but he'd been wrong. A man could not hold two beasts of the world and break them in his hands, could not deny them all their aims and remain untouched by their terror and need. His father really was God, or God was in him, or some other immaterial transposition of human and divine. In that moment he'd understood that the power of life and death was held over him, the power that separated Heaven from Earth, and so too was his father separate from him and from all of them. Tristan's lungs screamed with far-off, fading pain, but his father had never felt pain, could not feel teeth or fingernails now. He had only ever felt his own power, and was invincible in it. He was the Way of Light, and life and breath and all other things were through him and him alone.

It had taken nine hard battering years to break the faith Tristan found there, that had been crushed down into the core of him by those calloused unbreakable hands.

And now God had found him again, astray and afraid, and brought him to this place to show him, once more, the power of life and death. The dying officer, the bleeding killer, the unconscious artist, the scientist and the believer, the uncertain, the strong, they were all...the tableau took on mythic dimensions for Tristan, a painting of the Last Supper, and at the center was the Ghost Girl with her otherworldly eyes. He had run so far to make it to this place, to close this killing circle. One more game, one more test of faith. I don't want to understand. Events which would prove beneficial to your understanding. 'For to me, to live is Christ and to die is gain.' Such a gift does not come without expectations. What kind of story is this? The train is coming, after all. He looked down at the - at his gun. The power of life and death. Beyond pain, beyond reach. Faithful. Fateful. Fire if you wish.

He couldn't pull the trigger.

The truth is invariable.

He couldn't pull the trigger?

"Fuck that," Tristan said. He looked towards the Ghost Girl. Maybe she didn't see him, maybe she only saw the end of her path, but that was alright - he didn't see her either. It was something else he spoke to. "Fuck you," he said, and put his gun in his mouth, and was gone.

Worlds Apart

As everything went to hell, Tristan stood by with dull eyes, head throbbing. It wasn't really what he'd expected, but he couldn't have had what he'd expected instead. A unified response? Panic? Despair, like his? The Ghost Girl wasn't a ghost girl after all, he'd been right, she was something else from somewhere else. And to go there, all they had to do was kill themselves and become ghosts themselves. To sojourn in some other world. When Tabitha took to the tracks, the last of the hope in him for salvation died. I wonder if she's thinking it.

If we're the first ones to hear this song and dance.

People were revealing themselves, the way they did during a crisis. Guns out. Dragging an unconscious Stormy. Tristan felt a weird pang, imagining her parlor empty, the tracks painted bright with her blood. All of their blood. Yelling, disbelief, fear, rage. Commonplace things that hinted at the extraordinary and unique nature of the hearts manifesting them into the world. What am I revealing? The gun, he realized, it was in his hand, he was pointing it. It was ugly, chrome and carbon, oversized, a generation behind the aesthetic of today. Firearm, he thought suddenly. Prometheus stole fire from the gods, Moses on Mount Sinai, and this is what we did with it. Arms reaching out for each other, intent on the exact opposite of warmth and light and life.

In the movies you could hear a pin drop when someone clicked off a safety or pulled a hammer back, a sound that echoed, menace for days, but he'd done it without really thinking about it while someone else was talking. He thought for a moment, absurdly, that he was pointing the gun - the firearm - at the kid on the tracks, the one who'd tried to offer him comfort before taking the devil's deal they'd been given. Who thought he hadn't been forced here. Couldn't be forced further. But he wasn't aiming at the kid. Officer Keahi was one of the good ones, in other circumstances, on better days, but he was cracking now. Not that he was wrong. Not that they weren't all insane. Yet there was something that wasn't a ghost standing up in front of them, telling them awful things, incredible things, and they were each holding a mask - a face, his rousing subconscious whispered unbidden - that wasn't just a mask. The guy shouldn't have drawn his gun. Not that Tristan should have either.

But he wasn't aiming at the cop. Just in that general direction.

"Don't do it," he said, hearing his own voice like it belonged to a stranger. "Officer.

Behind you."

Worlds Apart

"The train is coming, after all."

Tristan shivered despite himself, the efforts he'd taken on the way to reclaim a little steel, immediately hoping the chill beneath the surface would disguise the gesture as something less emotional. Tabitha was there, too, which gave him a nasty shock. This thing, when Will died, they said it... It was part of what had drawn his attention to the Ghost Girl stories. And now here she was, and Tabitha, and...the shock hardened, stretched unpleasantly inside him. At least she didn't look much happier than he was to be here, all tension and stormclouds while she spoke to the spectre, no smile when she took her lonely place. Not too many happy faces in general, here.

He recognized a surprising number. A handful of strangers, yeah, but there was a cop he'd seen around, who he'd caught a break from once, and Stormy from the tattoo parlour, and what looked like...half or better of the staff at Johnny's. That was probably the thing driving him closest to madness. He wished he could clear his head. He was mostly sober now, but his head just kept on swimming.

A different world. Tabitha. Johnny's. Masks. Everyone has a mask.

Tristan leaned back against the grimy pillar he'd chosen, drawing on the cold stone for whatever it could offer him, certain his knees wouldn't be enough on their own. No one is screaming, so I guess I shouldn't be the one to start, right? Which got him thinking about why everyone else had come, these chosen few, what absences or secret wish compelled them. For no reason he could articulate, he shifted to remind himself of the gun in its ragged homemade holster, nestled beneath his sweatshirt at the small of his back.

Ten minutes. Time felt swollen, dilated. Diseased with potential and pulsing inevitability. The silence he carried in his throat was starting to gibber and claw. He had to say something.

"What do you want with us?" he dared. "Why are we...why did you gather us? What are you using us for?"

His voice wasn't as strong as he hoped. He shot a glance at Tabitha. An absurd thing to be worried about, hierarchies and posturing, but it grounded him among all the other thoughts crowding his mind. All the darker and stranger stuff. Like how many people had jumped tracks just like these for the spectre calming preparing them for transport...on a train...to...

Oh, he thought. Another world. The tracks. They all followed her onto the tracks. She's talking about death. She's going to kill us all.

Worlds Apart

Ring, ring.

Tristan groaned beneath the warmth of the Mylar blanket, pulling himself to a dead man's approximation of upright in a series of uncomfortably loud crinkles. The little office was heatless at night, the walls just barely insulated by layers of fake certificates, imitation tapestries, and mass-produced paintings of peaceful landscapes. The window was a problem, and Tristan's inevitable oversize poster of water droplets falling into more water had not proven much of a solution. His desk was a better one, pulled into the corner for overhead cover, and along with the space-age shininess of the Mylar formed the basis for what might well have been a contender for the saddest lean-to on planet Earth.

Warm, though.

Ring, ring.

Should fire my secretary, he thought, issuing another groan as he began the slow, noisy process of extricating himself from under the desk. He was just drunk enough to hate it, not drunk enough to accept its necessity. Should get a secretary so I can fire them. It is at best... When had he left the circle? Rani's smile, too bright, too easy. A shooting star on a collision course. Tabitha's growing estrangement. Not his business. Maybe his concern. Saying goodnight to Lane... It is at best four thirty in the fucking morning. I don't even know if you can use that word. Best. Best be the most critical fucking call of my life, that's -

He was about three-quarters out from under the desk when he remembered the phone was disconnected. He'd been cellphone only for months.

Ring, ring.

His head slammed into the bottom of the desk, and what came out of his mouth was half snarl, half scream as he lunged to his feet, immediately crashing to a kneel as the world wobbled out of its familiar alignment. One hand scrabbled blindly for his gun, impossible, it was in the drawer on the other side and the drawer was angled into the wall -

His vision blurred, doubled, but there was a little light sliding in under the poster over the window, enough to catch colors in the gloom. Familiar colors, pink and green.

"Ring, ring."

Tristan stopped scrabbling. Stopped breathing for a moment. Then he resumed, as slow as he could, faster than he wanted.

"Sorry to startle you," she said, in a voice that had never been sorry. "But you have to get up. It's time."

"Yeah. Uh. Time," he said, incoherent, throat dry. Ridiculously he thought of the sage, which was for customers, which could not possibly have an effect on the thing standing patient in his office outside Cinkaid Park. He thought of the gun again, but somehow that seemed less sane and not more.

"Exactly," she said. "So you have to get a move on, I'm afraid. I'm afraid. You're afraid. But you don't have to be, Tristan. I'm not here to hurt you. I'm here to help you."

"Jesus Christ."

"No. No, I'm afraid not. But you still are, aren't you? It's easier once you get moving, you know. Your body takes over from the part of you that's calculating - "
"What are you?" he blurted.
"Oh," she said. Paused.

"Well, I'm the Subway Ghost Girl."
"You aren't."
"No?"
"No."

She looked at him blankly for a moment. Her eyes were iridescent, taking different colors in the light as they moved, but they weren't moving now. She watched him with such perfect stillness that he thought, whatever she is, she knows what it means to be dead. Then she smiled and he felt the shudder start deep, work its way up along his spine.

"What am I, then, Tristan Traeger, if not a ghost? In spite of how haunted you are," she said, walking towards him on silent feet. Stepping close, leaning against his desk, leaning towards him. Something brushed his arm and he jumped, flight instinct propelling him halfway across the room towards the door before he realized it. She let him go, still smiling, and one hand reached out to stroke the faded wood of the desk and trace lightly over the little makeshift nameplate he'd engraved himself with a knife and too much time. "What do you want me to be?" Her tone was playful. Flirtatious. "Shall I be your dragon, little knight? Or a princess..."

She stalked forward, and Tristan backed away. A quiet thunk and rattle as he hit the office door. The Ghost Girl kept coming. "Or...a queen. An impatient queen, with things to do, and great big plans for all...of...you. I wouldn't," she said casually, stalling the half-formed thought involving the window and the alley below in his mind, "Make me chase you. You're already caught, Tristan. It's time to slump your shoulders and resign yourself to a little destiny before dreamland, or..."

Mouth almost too dry to manage it, Tristan swallowed. He tried to focus on the different in their height. On what he didn't believe in. Nothing is more dangerous than misplaced faith. And there is no such thing as destiny. That thought reclaimed, he found his voice. "Or what, exactly? Maybe I'm too drunk to stay scared of you. Maybe I'm too tired for your fucking plans. So what happens-"
"Heads roll," she said. No hesitation. No smile now.

And then she took two fast steps and she was in his face, eyes bright mercury, so close his nerves ached with the phantom expectation of body heat and biostatic. There was nothing but her too-wide eyes and the sudden pressure in his ears and the crushing black circle at the edges of his vision, where the world beyond the Ghost Girl used to be. "I'll drown you," she whispered, "In blood."

No need to ask whose. Never that need. The terrible pressure swelled and the world grew darker, tighter, there was a sound - she laughed. He was kneeling again. On his hands, too. She was sitting on the desk. "Just kidding. That's horror story stuff."

Tristan pulled himself to his feet, not trying to control his breathing now, or the shaking, not that he could have. She was pretty -
she looked like Tabitha, which bothered him awfully when he let it - but her eyes weren't pretty, he realized. They were his father's eyes. They didn't see him, didn't need to see him because in them he'd already been measured and mapped. They were focused on their future,
and the place he'd serve in it. "What kind of story is this?" he asked.

"Whatever kind of story you want it to be, Tristan Traeger."

His shoulders slumped.

"What do you need me to do?" he asked, but somehow he already knew. "Do I need to bring anything?"
"Just this," she said, drawing the mask out from behind her back and holding it towards him.

He hesitated, then reached out to claim it.The mask was almost wholly black in the semi-darkness, but the little light gleamed off its elegant horns and their draping in gaily colored ribbons. Something else about it struck him, and his fingers just above its surface. It's like it's screaming. If I touch it I'll hear, he suddenly knew, I'll hear that scream and I'll go insane. But when his fingers brushed it, there was nothing but crystal and carbon, silver and silk. It was a little too warm, that was all.

"She was much like you," said the Subway Ghost Girl of Lightbridge. "But stronger. She didn't scare so easy. And she kept her faith forever, even there at the end, and even though - again, like you - she was so totally fucking wrong about it. Don't put it on yet," she added. "You have to wait a while longer. You can wait, can't you, Tristan Traeger, little knight, doomed one, false messiah of a false messiah? For your destiny?"

And then she was gone. Tristan stood in the office for a few minutes, and then left. He took with him the gun, and the mask, and the memory of her voice like a hand around his throat.