#char: kamila

[zecretsanta]

A Cat and his Schrödinger

To: @alto-tenure

From: @chessanator

Merry Christmas, Alto-Tenure! Here’s a Ghost Trick/Zero Escape crossover for you, and I made the D-End 2 timeline the important one in honour of one of your other requests. The plot’s pretty much an excuse to take a tour of every crossover idea between the two series that came to me, so I hope there’s something in here that fits your fancy.

A03 Link

(Content warning for Suicide. Honestly, quite a lot of suicide.)

I leapt up onto the windowsill, tail coiling and flexing as I perfected my balance, before slipping through the window to the cold air outside. From there it was only a few short bounds across the branches of the nearby tree to the drainpipe, and an easy climb up the side of Detective Jowd’s house to the rooftop. That was the route I took every time I went exploring the town.

From up there it was easy to head out, jumping from the roof of one house to the next, making my way to the clothes-lines that would let me cross to the other side of the street. My target was this one house further along the line, with an arrangement of windows perfectly placed to use their arches as stepping stones back down the ground level; from there it would only be a quick crawl through the hedge-rows and I’d reach the edge of Temsik park.

But as I headed that way – a route I’d taken many times before – a shiver ran along my spine. Huh? Was something wrong up ahead? I continued making my way forward along the rooftops, eyes peeled for the problem. As my eyes peered intently up ahead they also began to water.

It was impossible to miss, once I’d reached it, what had set my nose to twitching. Not in the least because by then the smell was thick enough that even a human would have noticed it: hazy coils of ash and smoke rising up in front of me. But even more so, the fact that the next roof I’d intended to hop to was now nothing more than a skeleton of charred wood stretching out across a black chasm.

What had happened here? I couldn’t pass through this way, with nowhere for me to jump to and land my feet. And if I tried to find another way to the park – I took a moment to catalogue everywhere I’d explored since moving in with Jowd and Kamila – ugh. I’d have to go all the way around to the other side of the block. It take ages, and by the time I got to where I wanted to play it would already be time to go home. So my decision was made.

If I wanted to make a route forward, I was going to have to investigate what happened to this house.

I took a few steps back on the roof where I was standing. Once I was away from the edge I curled up snugly, right in the middle of the roof’s peak. Then I leapt out of my body.

I’d been right to go ghost. I saw it instantly through the smoke: a core shining bright somewhere deep in what had once been the house. I just had to get down there. As a ghost I jumped, first to the drain on the side of my current building, then to the nearest rafter of the burned house. It was a good thing I hadn’t tried to jump onto this as a cat. As it was I shook the wooden beam until it snapped then rode it down to the floor below.

There were more cores for me to use down there. I jumped to some metal that had once been part of the kitchen plumbing, then to the husk of a cabinet. Opening the door of that cabinet and then stretching to my fullest extent let me reach the next room. The charred bit of metal that had once been a wall light was a perfect perch for surveying the room.

There it was. The core that I’d spied from the roof, the one I wanted to sniff out was right ahead of me. The dead body it was part of had been burnt to a crisp, but what was left of it looked like a woman. She’d obviously died in the fire that had brought down the rest of the house. Everything was sorted, then. All I had to do was undo her death and the path I’d wanted to take wouldn’t have been burnt away from in front of me. I crossed the room in a quick series of hops and jumped into her body.

:readmore:

Rewind Time – 4 Minutes Before Death

Four minutes before she’d died the woman had been standing in a chamber beneath the rest of the house. Huh: I hadn’t realised that was there on my way in. None of the damage that had brought down the rest of the building had spread down there. I guess this basement was something special, what with the gleaming chrome walls and all the screens built right into the surface. That included the screen the woman had been looking into like it was the most interesting information in the world.

Now that I was looking at her before she’d burnt up I could see that the woman was rather elderly, with her greying hair tied into a thin ponytail over one shoulder. Her dark blue dress had a band of jewels running across one side, far more suited for the elegant townhouse that had burnt down around her than the secret lab she’d been working in four minutes before. Still, that was where she’d been at the start of her last few minutes of life.

The woman wasn’t alone in there. Next to her, peering intently at the same screen, was a man with curly green hair in a white labcoat, hunched over… Was that the Pigeon Guy? It was: there was the insufferably serene bird nestled on the crown of his head. It looked like this woman was far more connected than just living in some random house I crossed over, if she was working with him.

About thirty seconds into the replay they finished working on whatever they were looking at on the screen. Then they were done and the woman escorted Pigeon Guy back up; they emerged through a well-concealed trap door into the main part of the house. They passed by the lamp I’d perched on for my journey to the corpse and headed towards the entrance. There the woman gave Pigeon Guy a polite wave off before closing the door behind him.

I hadn’t interacted with him much in this new life. But I was glad Pigeon Guy hadn’t gotten caught up in this.

After seeing her guest off the old woman headed back towards the kitchen. She was beginning to make something on the stove when my attention was drawn to something underground. Along the thin metal pipe that ran up to the oven a series of bright, bursting pops came in quick succession, jumping towards the house. That wasn’t how fire was supposed to work. Now that I was looking in the right place I could see the row of weird blobs that had been added to the pipe at the spots where the flashes came from.

When the sequence of flashes reached the woman and her oven the stove burst into flame.

She wasn’t dead yet; that wasn’t where I’d found her body. Instead the old woman stumbled back, covering her face with her arms, before retreating to the other room with surprising pace for her age. She closed the door between her and the fire, sweat pouring down her face.

She could have run. Made for the nearest exit and fled the house. But she didn’t. I didn’t understand why, but she instead dragged a stool into the centre of the room, climbed atop it and started fiddling with something on the ceiling.

Was that a sprinkler? About a week back Kamila had scolded me for trying to leap up to the one in our house. If it activated and sprayed the water around it should quench the fire, right? I guess that was what the old woman was trying to do.

But even with the flames starting to lick under the kitchen door the sprinklers were refusing to work. It didn’t have to drag my viewpoint far to find the cause. In the alleyway between the houses I found a familiar blue-skinned lady with a whirl of blonde hair. She was perched at the top of a ladder, which was being steadied by her hunched-over partner, tampering with the water pipe that led in to the sprinkler system.

That sealed the woman’s original fate. When I dragged my view back to her the fire was already spreading across the carpeted floor. When it reached the woman’s stool she stumbled, falling backward. And as the flames caught onto the hem of her blue dress the woman screamed.

Trick Time!

I had to do something to change the course of events. Convince the woman not start cooking, so she wouldn’t let in the fire with the gas? Probably not good enough: that fire would do enough damage anyway. Try and stop the explosions in the gas pipe? I had no idea how. There was only one option I could see working: I’d have to get the sprinkler working again.

I started where the woman’s body had fallen. It only took a few hops up the photographs mounted on the wall to reach the core of the sprinkler. I tricked it and… nothing. Looked like I was going to have to deal with Beauty’s and Dandy’s sabotage if I was gonna make this work.

I tried to make my way back along the path I’d used to enter the building, jumping to the wall-mounted light that had let me cross from the kitchen into this room. Then I realised the problem. I could only make the jump from the lamp to the next core along when the kitchen cabinet was open. And it wasn’t, back at this point in time. I could trick it open, but only if I could reach it. As it was this wasn’t the way forward.

There had to be another route. A detour I could take. It had to be… up and over the entire house. That was the only way I could think of where I might get through. I returned to the centre of the room and entered the core on the edge of the concealed trapdoor. I couldn’t reach the front door yet, but I’d be able to once the old woman and Pigeon Guy opened it to come up.

While I waited I figured I’d check out that secretive basement. I could jump into most of the screens that were on there, which let me look at the images displayed. The Temsik meteorite, a map of that other country, an overview of this strange bunker in the middle of a desert. One of the screens, on the other side of the room from where the two were working, offered me a trick to use when I jumped into its core. The image looked like the street outside, and when I tricked it the view moved. On the periphery of my vision I could see something swivelling around, just above the front door. A concealed camera? And there was also something shifting about on top.

I didn’t know if that had accomplished anything. But I’d been able to do it, so it shouldn’t be a problem.

Then it was time to race back to the trapdoor, so that I wouldn’t get stuck down there when they left. The woman lifted the hatch and me with it, and as she climbed the stairs back to the main house I jumped to the front door and headed outside.

From there I could see a path of cores up the front of the building. I jumped to the camera I’d moved earlier then reached out to the next core along… I couldn’t quite make it. The gap was just an inch too far.

Was that it? Was there simply no route to where I needed to get to. If nothing changed the situation I was in then…

I realised it. There was one last thing that could help. Pigeon Guy was coming. I’d have to time this just right.

The front door opened and I waited one more second. Then, as the Pigeon Guy stepped through the door, I tricked. The things I’d seen shifting on top of the camera turned out to be a tangled pile of twigs, blown up there by the gusts of wind that ran down this street and trapped by the cavity that concealed the camera. Now, jostled loose by the camera’s earlier movement and tossed about by my trick, the twigs fell out. They fell like rain onto Pigeon Guy and with an annoyed coo the bird tumbled off his head.

On reaching the ground the pigeon flapped its wings a few times to right itself. Before taking off it grabbed a couple of the sticks in its claws – I guess it had taken a fancy to them. Then the pigeon clumsily flapped its way into the air. It had to get a bit of extra height if it was gonna comfortably settle back on the man’s head, so… There! I froze time at the right moment, jumped up to the cores on the sticks the pigeon was carrying, then back over to the core on the wall that had just previously been out of reach.

For a moment I thought I saw a faint smile on the old woman as she closed her front door.

From there it was just a race. I left Pigeon Guy behind – the pigeon now threading the twigs it had collected into his curls of hair – and zig-zagged my way up the drainage pipe and the various bits of ornamentation on the front wall until I reached the roof. Jump to the weathervane, spin it against the wind, then leap off the other side. Within moments I’d reached the top of the alleyway, above the two blue-skinned saboteurs.

The sound of several quick explosions told me when I was in time, how few moments I’d got left, and it spurred me to action. I scooted down the wall to the core of the water pipe and forced it back open.

Beauty’s eyes, right in front of me, narrowed. “How strange…” she murmured.

“Is something wrong, my dearest, most beautiful darling?” Dandy called up from below.

“My sixth sense is very strong, you know,” Beauty said by way of reply, “and it’s telling me someone’s trying to interfere”. Then she took her tool to the pipe again, undoing my actions.

I wasn’t going to be able to do this while Beauty was right there. I dived down to the middle crossbar of the ladder and collapsed it. Then quickly up – I needed to get back to the pipe while the ladder was still erect enough to let me – where I watched Beauty fall away from me. As she landed on her partner I turned the water back on one last time.

Returning my perspective to the inside of the house I saw the results of my actions. Just as the fire was starting to breach the room water sprayed from the nozzle on the ceiling, drenching the old woman and knocking her off the stool she’d climbed on. I was sympathetic, but at the same time I’d also managed to drench the fire that had been spreading towards her. I’d consider that a win.

Fate Averted!

I surveyed everything else I’d accomplished. Though the kitchen had been charred black by the start of the fire it wasn’t in any danger of burning down completely. When I returned to the present the roof should be right there, solid, for me to hop across to and continue my trip. All I had to do now was leave the world of the dead. If I went before the old woman woke from the unconsciousness of the recently deceased she wouldn’t remember a thing, and so…

“Good,” the woman said, her spirit’s image of herself perfect to every detail and not unconscious at all. “You’re finally here.”

o-0-O-0-o

The woman’s name was Akane Kurashiki.

After I’d undone her death she’d told me to come to her in person, so we could talk in person in the land of the living. I got the feeling that she was used to having people do what she wanted them to. From the water pipe where I’d finished saving her life I’d jumped back up so I could reunite with my body. Then I’d crossed the gap to the roof of Akane’s house and dropped down to a ledge with a window I could trick open. Now I was curled up in her still damp and smouldering living room, licking at my fur and putting on an air of nonchalance.

“A cat in a red scarf and sunglasses. Not quite what I was expecting,” Akane said to me. Then she lowered her voice to murmur, “He would’ve appreciated it, if he’d had the chance to see you.”

I stared at her for about half a minute more, meowed to make a point, and then switched back over to the world of the dead so I could connect straight to her, soul-to-soul. “I told you meeting in person wouldn’t do us much good.”

“It was necessary that I see for myself. Even with the research we’ve been doing into this particular phenomenon, it’s somewhat outside my usual sphere of experience. After creating a situation where you would intervene I received a suitably informative view of your powers, but I still didn’t know what sort of person or entity was wielding them.” Once again she muttered, “A cat in a scarf, and sunglasses, of all things.”

I pondered what she’d said, then asked, “Wait, you ‘created a situation’? Looks to me like those two out there were the ones creating a situation.” And by the ‘situation’ they were ‘creating’ I meant Akane’s death.

“Nevertheless,” was her only reply to that. Then she continued her explanation. “We knew that something in this neighbourhood had been affected by Temsik radiation. Once the Professor noticed the little oddities that surrounded this neighbourhood and started investigating the effects of the meteorite it wasn’t long before he brought me onboard. Not many people around here know about my past, but for those that do it would be clear that I could assist his research. And I was happy to help: this place is one of the few islands of sanity left in the world, free from the issues caused by a certain foreign country.”

“The one those two out there work for,” I said.

Akane nodded. “It was always going to be the case that when that country picked up on rumours about something like Temsik radiation they were going to become interested. Given the manner in which they acquired all the power they currently possess, it must be incredibly tempting for them to acquire the Temsik meteorite for themselves. Just as it was in that other timeline.”

“Wha-?! You know about that?” Only the four of us who’d followed me back ten years to save Yomiel from the meteorite should have had any knowledge of what had happened beforehand.

“Let’s just say that other timelines very much are my usual sphere of experience,” Akane replied. “In any case, even though it took them longer this time around that country has started to catch on to what we’re doing here. That’s why they sent those agents here to attempt to destroy the samples we’d collected and make sure no-one else found out about the conclusions we’d reached. Knowing that they were coming, we moved everything crucial to the Professor’s other facility at the junkyard last week.”

You know, if I knew something was coming that was going to try and kill me I would try to get out of the way.

“So what do you need my help with?” I asked. “If I’ve got everything right you baited those two into trying to kill you so you could watch me saving your life. You’ve gotta have wanted me here for some reason. Does it have to do with what the other country is planning?”

Akane sighed. “Indirectly, yes.” She paused, brow furrowed. “I’ll have to explain to you the details of where this all began, and that might take some time. Plus there’s something I’ll need to show you as well.”

This was beginning to look like it would become another whole deal. Still, I’d already stepped my paws in it, and there was nothing to do but wade on. I’d hear Akane out. But before that, there was something in the air that was making my hair stand on end.

Akane turned away from me. “We’d better get started. Now that those agents know about this place we can’t know how long we’ll have before they try–”

At that moment, just as Akane stepped past the living room window, a bullet crashed through and pierced her neck.

Rewind Time – 4 Minutes Before Death

I’d only just lived through these four minutes of our conversation. All I had to do was work out how to change things.

At least the ghost of the woman I was trying to save was conscious this time; rather, at least I knew that she was conscious. We could confer on how I’d need to change things.

“That… was abrupt,” she was saying to herself as I reconnected. Her soul’s image of herself was cradling the side of her neck.

“Shooting you from far away, right through a window,” I said. “Looks to me a lot like Tengo’s work.”

“Information that you retained from the other timeline?” Akane asked. Then she nodded. “Good to know. Very well: let me know what I’ll need to do to assist you.”

For a moment I was puzzled; I could feel my sunglasses falling down my face from the confusion. “Huh? Usually it doesn’t work like that. When I turn back time the person I’m saving does what they would have done in the first place in response to whatever happens.” Even Lynne, who I’d saved more than anyone and who’d gotten very comfortable with offering advice on how to avert her death, needed a nudge or two from ghost tricks in the environment around her if I wanted to influence her behaviour.

“That won’t be a problem,” Akane said with a quiet certainty. “It will still be the case that the version of me talking to you here is a different individual to the Akane Kurashiki who will be taking action in the replayed window of time. That does not make communication between the two of us impossible.”

I shrugged. If you’re that sure it’s going to work… “We have to get you out of Tengo’s line of sight, right? Then… If we get you back into the basement…” The hatch to it was just behind us: it shouldn’t take too much for me to create a safe route.

“I can’t do that just yet,” Akane interrupted. And you’re saying that right after asking me to tell you what to do. “There’s something important I need for what comes after.”

“It isn’t stored in the basement?”

“No. It’s on the other side of the house. Get me over there and we’ll work out what to do next.” Akane paused, then pressed a hidden switch near where she was standing causing the trapdoor to automatically open once more. “You should get yourself down there, though. The sniper won’t be looking for you, but there’s a risk you’ll be caught by a ricochet.”

I thanked her, then stretched out my body and headed for the stairs. As I put my paw on the lip I turned my head back and asked, “By he way, who’s ‘he’?”

The Akane in the house didn’t react but the one opposite me in the spirit-world did, playing absent-mindedly with her ponytail. “Who do you mean?”

“You said earlier. That ‘he’ would appreciate meeting me.”

Akane closed her eyes. “Just someone I knew, many lifetimes ago.”

Trick Time!

Akane was insisting on moving left, from my perspective. I’d have to create her a path for her that would let her go that way without Tengo seeing.

“He shot you when you stepped past the window, right?” I said. “So if we can just cover them…” Leaving my cat body on the basement stairs I began hopping my way up the cores on the wall. This time as I passed through the photographs I paid more attention to what they depicted: a group of nine people and a dog in front of a strange grey building that looked like an inverted pudding pot, the young woman from that photo relaxing on a sofa next to a man with messy white hair in a baggy white shirt, a young boy cradling a rabbit. Then I reached the top and landed back in the sprinkler nozzle. From there I looked about for cores near the window that would give me something I could use.

There wasn’t a core in the window itself but there was in an object positioned right above it, a horizontal rod. This looked like my best shot. When I tricked it something inside unrolled and a translucent sheet of fabric unfurled down, stopping only when the entire pane of glass was covered.

“That should work,” I said to Akane.

In the real world the old woman began to move, staying low as she went. And then, just as she passed below the window, a bullet punched through the wall and embedded itself in Akane’s chest.

I could practically hear Tengo drawling, ‘Always one step ahead,’ as Akane toppled to the floor.

Time to try again.

When I returned to the start of the replay and spoke to Akane again, she simply said, “It seems like my assassin reacts to you covering his vision by pre-emptively shooting into the path you’ve created.”

That sounded like it perfectly scuppered our first plan. If covering a route only caused Tengo to shoot at it… “Still, maybe there’s a way we can use this,” I said.

I headed out again, back up the wall to the ceiling. But this time I leapt over to the window to our right, where a similar blind was waiting to be tricked down. I gave Akane the signal then spun the blind down to cover the window.

It was only natural that Tengo would focus on that window and the space beneath it. I’d acted to block his vision again, of course. And not only that, but heading to our right and towards the basement entrance was the way he would expect Akane to go – at least if she had any intention of trying to survive this thing. It wasn’t a surprise when that window and the wall below it were riddled with bullets.

At the same moment Akane headed the other way. She cleared the space covered by the window just in time, stumbling up against the far wall as Tengo adjusted his aim to the window she’d just passed by.

Fate Changed!

I reraised the blind I’d just rolled down to get back in reach of other cores. Then I jumped across to join Akane, settling back in the wall lamp above her head.

“We’ve made it through, right?” I asked Akane. “We’re past the window you were originally shot through, and when you get to the kitchen” – I quickly dragged my viewpoint that way to confirm that all the windows there faced away from Tengo’s line of fire – “he shouldn’t be able to see where you are.”

Akane didn’t reply immediately, deep in thought. “There’s one further danger we have to consider. We’re sheltered by the stairwell here, but when I move into the kitchen there’s a chance the sniper could use infrared to track me.” To my confused look she added an explanation. “A set of goggles that let him see the heat I’m giving off.”

Humans could do stuff like that? I’d never seen it before but I guess it made sense. More to the point, I had to think about what Akane was suggesting we do next given that information. A sinking feeling spread through me as I realised. After all, I’d only just put in that effort to keep the house from burning down.

It was still the only plan we’d got. “I don’t have a way across,” I told Akane. That cabinet door was still tantalisingly just out of reach. “I’ll need some sort of object to jump into to cross the gap.”

“I’ll see what I can do.” Akane reached around, careful not to emerge too far from the wall and expose herself to the window again. Eventually she settled back down next to the door. It didn’t look like she’d found anything, but when I reconnected with her she was holding a small ring in the palm of her hand. “Is this suitable?”

It was. I entered the core and then gave the signal. Akane cracked open the door between the living room and kitchen and, through the narrowest of gaps, tossed the ring and me inside. I paused time at the top of the ring’s arc and jumped into the cabinet door. After giving the cabinet door a few quick open-and-closes like I was stretching out a muscle – it was reassuring that I could now get back and forth between the rooms as I wanted – I headed over to the oven. The devices that Beauty and Dandy had used to sabotage the gas line were still in place, and I could pretty much guess what trick would be associated with the stove I’d found myself in.

Yup: the moment I tricked it the air above the oven was consumes by another inferno. I just had to hope that with the sprinklers working again this one wouldn’t grow out of control.

Akane, now unconcerned about the threat that had given her pause earlier, opened the door fully and crossed the kitchen. On the other side she entered into a small shed-like extension and immediately got to work manipulating one of the objects inside. When I caught up I found that it was a narrow but incredibly robust safe. Akane carefully turned the dial one way then the other and the safe opened up.

At first I thought the item inside was a piece of the Temsik meteorite: it certainly looked like that sort of space rock. But it lacked the telltale glow of Temsik radiation in the world of the dead and when Akane took it out it was coloured a dull, dusty red, not the shining blue I’d been expecting.

“This is what you needed?” I asked. To Akane’s nod I continued, “Then it’s time to deal with that guy. Get me to a phone or something so I can get out there.” That was how I’d beaten Tengo last time around: by using a phone line to travel to where he was shooting from.

“That won’t be necessary,” Akane replied. She took out another item from the safe and then closed it back up. It was a… gun? I didn’t really get how guns worked but this one was tiny – even smaller than Lynne’s detective gun – and nothing like that long thing Tengo used. Was Akane really planning on fighting back with that little thing?

Then Akane placed the barrel of her gun under her chin and blew out her brains.

Fate Changed!

Why had Akane done that?! She’d killed herself so casually, too. Was the idea just to die earlier and buy us a little more time in the four minute window? I couldn’t see how that would help us, but I didn’t have any choice now but to try it out. I reconnected with Akane’s corpse to rewind back to the start of the four minutes.

Rewind Time – 4 Minutes Before Death

I felt… dizzy. It wasn’t supposed to be possible for a ghost to feel dizzy. And yet I did.

That dizziness came from the fact that, although this was supposed to be the four minutes before Akane’s death I was nowhere near where we’d been just before. Instead I’d found myself in a gleaming but sterile room, like a reception. The space rock Akane had retrieved from the safe in her house was displayed with pride in a glass cabinet in one corner of the open space.

The only person in the reception was a young woman with long brown hair in a brown dress with a black bow-like belt around her waist, one I recognised from the photos I’d seen in Akane’s house. I waited and watched, expecting events to happen that would give me some idea what was going on and how this led to a death, for the woman to at least do something. Instead she stayed seated in the waiting area, idly reading a magazine and taking the occasional sip from the glass of water on the low table in front of her, for the entire four minutes’ time.

Then the dizziness returned. The surroundings shifted around me, I was back in Akane’s scorched kitchen, and the shot from her small gun rang out once more.

Trick Time!

I’d started at the young woman, for some reason. The only core I could jump to was in the glass. Once there, I tricked. It was the only thing I could do. The glass tilted one way, the other, then finally toppled off the table.

As the glass shattered the young woman paused, carefully put her magazine aside, and stood up. Then she turned to face directly towards my viewpoint. “I see you’ve made it back with me, Sissel. Good work.”

Fate Averted!

I connected to the young woman, whose soul now had a core just like anyone else I’d tried to save. “The hell do you mean, Fate Averted?!”

“That is quite easy to explain,” the woman replied. “I switched places with the version of myself that you met in the future, and then died. Once I’d confirmed that we’d successfully brought you back to the past I simply chose not to do that.”

“A-Akane?” Though her spirit-image was now the young woman who I’d found in this waiting room it really was the same person. Her soul appeared the same in the world of the dead, and her words confirmed it. “Huh? Does that mean you have powers too?”

She smiled. “Dying in the presence of Temsik radiation is not the only way to acquire special abilities. If anything is evidence of that it is where you’ve now arrived.” She gestured, directing my attention away from the entrance and further into the building. “Welcome to the Mars Mission Test Site. Where everything began. Where the world you lived in was created. Where everything…” Here she trailed off to a whisper. “…went wrong.”

So this was where Akane had recruited me to help with. And if I’d learned anything from the previous timeline it was that there wasn’t any other way forward than to get to the bottom of in front of me.

“We’ll have a week before the incident begins. Take the time to explore and relax so that you’re ready when I need you and your ghost tricks. Oh: but we’ll be knocked unconscious and moved when it starts. The ring we used before will be located in DCOM: that should have a suitable core for you to ensure you are brought with us.”

So began my journey through the incident at the Mars Mission Test Site.

o-0-O-0-o 

In the underground bunker that all the participants had been carted off to I reunited with Akane after some time away. For her it had been only a few hours, most of which she’d spent asleep.

For me it had been quite a bit longer.

“I couldn’t save them! All four of them! Even the old guy in the wheelchair and that little kid.” In the mental image I was communicating with Akane through my fur must have been frazzled from my head to the tip of my tail. “The only thing I could trick were those collars around their necks, and… and…!”

“And that would have only made them explode sooner,” Akane said with a sorrowful expression on her face. “I should thank you for trying, at least. But that’s the thing you have to learn about this place. It’s not the same sort of situation as that which you experienced in that other timeline. Averting the deaths that will happen here isn’t always possible.”

It was probably for the best that when I communicated with a soul I’d saved that paused time. In the real world Akane was talking with the tall firefighter Carlos and her friend Junpei after waking up in this dimly lit room full of medical scanners, and they would have been very surprised if she’d started up a conversation with a ghostly cat on the side.

I didn’t want to believe what Akane was saying to me, even after having it conclusively proved many times over. “What even is this place?” I asked her. “When you were all knocked unconscious at DCOM and carried here… Why would they do that?”

“I owe you an explanation,” Akane replied. She paused for a moment in the instant of frozen time before saying, “There once was this cult called Free the Soul. The Mars Mission test and this incident that followed it were the lynchpin of a plan by them to remake the world according to their twisted beliefs. They’d kidnapped various scientists for their advanced technology and gathered together people with powers similar to mine and yours, all in order to bring this about.”

I licked at my paw in confusion. “Wait… so you mean that the future where I met you was what this ‘Free the Soul’ wanted?”

“Not quite. Instead the timeline you met me in was one where everyone lost. If this goes as it did then, I will be the only survivor of this bunker. And while I’ve never been able to find out why… in the aftermath Free the Soul fell apart, leaderless, as well. No-one got what they wanted from this.”

I shook my head fitfully. “That… doesn’t make any sense. You brought me back here to help you with something. If it wasn’t to stop this Free the Soul, and if I can’t avert the deaths of the people in here, what am I supposed to be doing? Didn’t you say that this was about preventing the plans the foreign country had in the future?”

“It is, yes,” Akane said. “After Free the Soul imploded their technology and resources were left behind. My own failures meant that my people were in no position to recover and dispose of anything dangerous. There was a free-for-all as agents from every power on Earth squabbled for what was left behind. In the end there was a clear winner, who managed to recover the most. Can you guess who that was?”

“You don’t mean… that foreign country?”

“Exactly. Agents of that country were able to recover the largest share out of all the remnants of Free the Soul, and from there they extended their influence across the globe. There are some telltale fingerprints, if you know what to look for. Have you ever noticed that their use of technology is just plain… off? The inevitable result of acquiring Free the Soul’s robotics without understanding it. They clone and genetically engineer their agents in the future, just as Free the Soul does currently, but they lack the know-how to prevent the skin from turning blue.

“And, of course, there’s that country’s interest in morphogenetic powers. They acquired Free the Soul’s research on those powers and their information about future timelines, which aided that country’s rise to global power. But they’ve been desperate to acquire for themselves an actual source of powers, such as the Temsik meteorite, ever since.”

So that was why the blue agents had burnt down Akane’s house, and why they’d made that deal with Yomiel in the previous timeline. “What do we do now?” I asked.

“Keep observing,” Akane said serenely. “Feel free to try to avert any more deaths you come across; I’ll be grateful if you manage that against all the odds. But be ready to use your ghost tricks at the necessary time.”

After that I let Akane return to her conversation with Junpei and Carlos. They got to work solving some sort of puzzle in the room they’d awoken in – I gave them a little bit of help when one of the lockers got stuck, from age and wear, even after they’d correctly entered the code – and eventually acquired several vials of antidote from a case.

After that the three of them headed back to the lounge. I took a route of cores to slip right through the intervening wall and follow them. In there they met the old terrier who’d been brought with us from the Mars Mission Test Site, the one called Gab. They placed three of the vials inside the package around Gab’s neck, only minutes before they were forced back unconscious.

After that the bunker was basically vacated again, for the next hour or so. I darted about the various cores I could find, mapping out what parts of the bunker I could access. I couldn’t reach all of it, but from the lounge I could reach through the central blocks of rooms that backed onto it: to a room whose walls projected many different types of scenery behind the medical room where I’d talked to Akane, all the way to a room with a wheel of rotating beds embedded in the wall when I went down the centre, and to a strange science lab on the right. Only the comparative vacuums of the corridors prevented me from going further.

As I went about I observed as the robots used by Free the Soul got busy rearranging the space inside. Watching them at work I could see the comparison Akane had made, that these were the ancestors of the general, just, plain ‘off’-ness of that certain country’s technology.

After about half an hour into my wait I saw a strange core near the back of the facility, in an area I hadn’t been able to access so far. The core was shining brighter, bright enough for me to spot even several rooms away. I had to investigate. After passing through the room with the rotating beds I took the opportunity provided by one of the robots carrying some vials away from the medical room to hop from one side of the central corridor to the other. If this went wrong then I would be trapping myself. Even so, it was necessary.

I passed through a room that looked like some sort of miniature factory and ended up in the room at the far back. The layout was strange, even for this bunker, with the back wall dominated by this tree-like sculpture attached to a pair of sickly green pods and two golden metal cocoons. Opposite that mysterious device was a stone cylinder of a pedestal with a golden pentagon embedded in the top. Strangely enough the core for this object hovered above the surface itself. That was a disconcerting experience when I jumped into it.

And next to the pedestal was a desk table with drawers on one side and a crank-like contraption on top. It was on the floor by that table that I found the the core that had drawn my attention to this room. A stack of heavy folders had fallen off the surface onto the floor, weighty reams paper scattered around having burst from inside. And under the folders… that was Gab, crushed beneath them. I wasn’t sure why I hadn’t realised it before, but the core was that of the recently deceased.

Rewind Time – 4 Minutes Before Death

Gab had received the vials from Akane, Carlos and Junpei into the tube he carried around his neck, and watched as they had been knocked unconscious and taken away by the facility’s robots. Then he’d headed, at his aged, weary pace, into the vents that could be accessed on either side of the lounge. He’d passed through a surprisingly spacious kennel arrangement – with a soft bed, a refilling water bowl and a dispenser of food – and instead of settling there headed further into the pipe into until he emerged at a corridor deeper in the facility.

I guess he was also exploring the bunker, though by a very different route than I was.

It wasn’t long before Gab reached the room where I’d found him. At that time the files were still stacked up on the table. If I hadn’t known what was coming next I wouldn’t have thought they were too close to the edge… but as it was they were.  As Gab came past the strange pods and reached the desk he stumbled, catching the leg of the table with his flank. The stack shifted, wobbled, and then finally fell. Unfortunately that was the moment Gab stepped forward, poking his head out from underneath the table. The corner of the first file, propelled on by the weight of all the others, hit the dog’s head square on.

Trick Time!

This wasn’t a death that had been caused by the evil mastermind behind this place. It was just a freak accident, so no-one would have ensured that it couldn’t be averted. And it was a simple fix, right there. I jumped out from where Gab’s corpse had been and up to the core in the pile of folders. All I had to do was shake them off now, long before Gab ever arrived, and his fate would be changed. Saving this life was as simple as that.

Then a voice rang out. “Wait, young man! Be patient.”

Where had that come from? I was getting used to the people I was saving from death waking up far sooner than they ought to be, so was that… Gab? But if so then why weren’t we speaking face to face?

Another ghost jumped out from the starting point of this replay. After darting about the various cores around us it settled in the one floating above the pedestal, glowing a bold purple to my vision.

“You’ve… acquired the powers of the dead?” I exclaimed. How on Earth had that happened? I switched back over to the world of the dead and hurriedly examined our surroundings. There, coming from the strange tree-like structure in the corner of the room, was the familiar billowing glow of Temsik radiation. Except… it couldn’t be. Not only was this years before the meteorite had landed, but there hadn’t been even the slightest hint of Temsik radiation when the group had all been brought here.

Even now it seemed to be building, increasing bit by bit as we watched.

“It seems that is the case,” Gab replied. “I’ll be grateful for any assistance you can give me in understanding this, young man. Please explain how I can still be here after that terrible accident, and how I was able to do those magical things.”

I gave the dog the basic run-down on ghost tricks. Then I added, “It looks like that device did the same for you as that meteorite did for me.” With the explanation given I shook my head and returned to the stack of folders, once again ready to do my trick. “Not that this will matter for long, Gab. I’m gonna use my ghost tricks to make sure you never will have died at all.”

But Gab interrupted me again. “Ah, young’uns, always so hasty. There is a reason I stopped you when you went to do that before.” He jumped over to the core in the crank device before continuing. “If I have these powers because of my death in this place, surely it is to your benefit if I can use them in your aid. It would be foolish to undo that, young man.”

That was what Missile had said as well, when I’d offered to bring him back to life. But he’d had a reason. Someone he needed to protect. To ask Gab to do the same thing… Besides, there was one very good reason why Gab couldn’t do as he was suggesting.

“What about the vials Akane put around your neck?” I asked. In the future I’d jumped back from they’d been leaking a pool around Gab’s body. “She gave you them for a reason. You have to get them to the others.”

“That… is true,” Gab replied, bowing his head. “Very well, young man: you’ll have to bring me back to the land of the living.” I’d thought I’d convinced him and I was about to back to toppling the folders off the desk when he spoke again. “Then it looks like we have a four minute window before you need to save me. In that time we ought to do what needs to be done, young man.”

Even though I was right where I needed to be to avert Gab’s fate this was going to be more complicated than I thought.

The two of us ghosts entered the strange factory in the next room over, settling in the cores in the small vents near the top of the wall we’d just passed through. I contacted Gab once more.

“So what sort of ghost tricks do you have? If we’re gonna try and accomplish something before your time runs out I’ll need to know what you can do.”

“The best way I can find to describe them is that I can ‘link’ things. When I’m possessing certain objects I feel the urge to reach out to another object. Perhaps a demonstration would help?” With that Gab jumped down the wall, through a machine with a giant handwheel on the side, and into a tip of a screwdriver that had been left abandoned on the machine’s surface. “Get me closer to that machine to our left,” Gab instructed me, “and I’ll be able to show you.”

I possessed the machine Gab had jumped through. The only thing I could see to try was tricking it until it activated, so that’s what I did. A shaft lowered towards the machine’s worksurface, the tool on the end whirring up to speed. When that speedy tip caught the head of the screwdriver that sent both it and Gab catapulting across the room; they bounced off the far wall and came to a rest beside the machine Gab had pointed out.

“Good work there, my young man!” Gab said. “Now observe closely.” I watched in the ghost world as Gab, still residing in the screwdriver head, reached out much like Missile used to do. The other end of that spectral line reached towards the rotating tip of that second machine’s tool. As it touched the core there was a sound like a popping spark, waves of lightning ran along Gab’s ghost form, and he said, “Try using that machine now.”

I hopped down into the core of the machine’s control panel and tricked it on. The motors inside started to whir, spinning the tool bit at a faster and faster rate. And as it did the screwdriver head also began to turn, skipping and bouncing across the floor since nothing was holding it in place.

Once Gab’s ‘linking’ had been properly demonstrated I turned off the machine and joined Gab back up at the vents near the ceiling. “That’s an interesting ghost trick. So what other things have you been able to link?”

“The truth is, young man… I haven’t been able to. I get the feeling I’ll know ’em when I see ’em, but… Up until now I haven’t been able to leave this corner of the bunker.”

When I looked closer, I noticed that Gab’s movements between cores in the world of the dead weren’t as far-reaching as mine. He wasn’t able to reach from our side of this factory to the other.

“Looks like I’m going to have to help you across,” I said. I jumped over to the crane hook on one end of the room and brought it into the centre. Once it was in position Gab jumped through it to the other wall.

“Ah! I haven’t been so sprightly in many a dog-decade!” he exclaimed.

Then we were out to the corridor. There the robots were just beginning their march to reorganise the bunker for the next event, and that gave us our path onward.

Fate Changed!

As we moved through the facility I asked Gab, “So what are we going to try to accomplish before bringing you back to life? I’m guessing that any links you make won’t last once we avert your death.”

“To my shame, that is true,” Gab replied. Even so, he continued speaking with an upbeat confidence. “One idea was suggested to me: your ghost tricks have some connection to telephone lines, do they not? Perhaps the two of us can ensure that any such device is in working order before you continue.”

“That sounds like something worth doing, so let’s – wait, wha-? How did you know about my ability to go through phone lines?”

“I was informed by the young lady Akane,” Gab said, “when she last spoke to me.”

I scowled. “That sounds a lot like she knew something like this was gonna happen. You know, you’re taking all of this very well in stride.”

“I’ve seen a lot in my long life,” the dog replied, “and experienced a great many things. Why, my young man, if I was as easily spooked as you’re suggesting I would never have made it through the Great Fireworks Display of July 2025. Now let’s carry on before our time runs out.”

We headed through the lounge – I helped Gab out along the way, moving the cushions on the sofa and the bottles at the bar to give him a route forward – until we reached the exit door. After passing through to the other side we found a spacious warehouse, with many large metal crates stacked on top on each other around a central elevator and a good number of cores to jump through.

There wouldn’t be any phones in the bunker: the entire point was that the people were trapped there. If there was going to be a phone it would be out here.

We found the phone after crossing all the way through the floor, in small office embedded in the wall away from the towers of crates. Unfortunately, that meant neither Gab nor I could reach by just hopping across.

“Don’t worry, Gab. I’ve done this sort of thing before.” I jumped about among the various cores I could, testing out the tricks each one provided. “We’ll just have to puzzle our way across.”

“Very well, young man,” Gab replied. “Let me know where my powers are necessary.”

As I was playing around with the things I had available my attention was drawn to a small plastic quarter-turn pipe, lying loose on the floor. All I could do with it was flip it up, and only for a few seconds before it rolled back flat again, but something about that simple action attracted me. Maybe it was the fact that when I did so the end pointed towards the office with the phone.

When I looked around once more I spotted a small drip coming from the ceiling, near the rim of the opening. I paused time as the next drop of water fell and… yep, there was a core I could jump into while it fell. It dissipated the moment the water hit the top of a stack of crates, far away from where we were, but it gave me an idea.

“We need to get that water to fall here.” I pointed out the quarter-turn pipe that I’d noticed.

“Very well,” Gab replied. “Lead the way.”

It took us several attempts to get it right: certain parts of the puzzle were complex, and that made the timing tricky. But it didn’t matter because each time we failed we just had to try again with the next drop, as though the drip had reset. First I shifted a sheet of corrugated metal on top of the crates to redirect the drop as it landed. That sent it skimming into a nearby pipe; Gab then had to connect the bottom of that pipe to the top of the next so the drop would keep on falling. Then, after I tricked one last tube into place above the quarter turn and then made a route for Gab up to it, we’d accomplished our goal.

I tricked up the quarter-turn pipe and then, an instant later, jumped into the water drop as it fell toward me. A second after that I was flying towards the window of the office.

Once inside I jumped to the telephone. Strange: it wasn’t working, like it wasn’t connected or something. Gab had been right to suggest coming here. I didn’t understand why it didn’t work, but when I used my ghost trick on the module below the phone the familiar warm sensation of the phone line returned. I couldn’t use it yet, but I was reassured to know that it was there.

Getting out of the office turned out to be much easier than getting in: a forklift truck had been parked near the office’s door. And though I didn’t know how to drive I didn’t need to. I just possessed it and tricked, and let it run until it crashed. Wasn’t like it could kill me.

Fate Changed!

The two of us headed back into the bunker, Gab saying, “See what patience gets you, young man,” as we went. As we returned to the factory room Gab made to pass back through it to the room where he’d died, but something gave me pause.

“Looks like the robots are doing a lot of stuff in that room.” I indicated the one just around the corner.

When Gab returned to me, jumping back across the crane we’d left in the centre, he took a look at the greater-than-usual line of robots filing in and out and then said, “I would assume that room has been chosen as the location for the next event. If we weren’t so gosh-darnedly constrained by the time limit we would be able to stick around see the people brought out to wake up in there.”

“If they’re still setting it up then…” I hadn’t yet been able to get my head around the puzzles that the kidnapper was inflicting on the people brought from the Mars Mission Test Site. All I’d understood was that they’d been so tightly designed that I wasn’t really able to interfere with them using my powers of the dead. Maybe it’d be different if we tried it now. “Let’s see if we can do anything to improve their chances.”

“Lead on, young’un,” Gab replied. “This’ll be the last chance you have to use my help, so please use it wisely.”

The room the robots were preparing was divided into two parts, a quarter of it walled away behind a thick wall with steel shutters over the windows. When I jumped through to have a look on the other side I found several vents leading in, and though there weren’t the cores I needed to reach the far ends of them I could see the minuscule beginnings of fires, just waiting to roar into a blaze.

When I returned to the main section I found that the robots had nearly finished putting all the components of the puzzle into place. Only one part was left to put into place; I was shocked to see that it was a small but weighty handgun. As the robot currently holding it turned around another robot entered carrying bullets in several orderly rows, propped up on a tray like the waitresses at the chicken restaurant held them.

Those bullets gave me a practical banquet of cores to possess and I jumped into them, investigating each one in turn. “Huh. Some of these bullets look weird.”

“Give me the details, young man,” Gab said.

“About half of them are empty inside. That’s definitely not how they’re supposed to be.”

The robot holding the gun reached out a hand and carefully picked up the first bullet along. As it went to load it into the cylinder of the revolver I hurriedly paused time. I needed to confer, and I had a feeling that when the bullet entered the gun it would be too late.

“I wonder if the whole deal with this is a game of random chance,” Gab suggested. When I asked how that would work he said, “If I have this right, the bullets that are empty can’t do any harm. So they’ll be putting it up to luck whether they get a safe bullet or a dangerous one. I was supposed to be a lucky charm for the participants of the Mars Mission, but I don’t think that’ll be enough.”

“Then we’ll have to change that right here,” I said. “Make sure they only get the safe bullets.”

Gab paused: for a moment the fur in his spiritual image seemed even more bedraggled than when he’d been alive. “We don’t know how smart those robots are. If we interfere with the one loading the bullets then they’ll notice and fix everything we try to change.”

That was a situation I had more than enough experience with. “Then we’ll just have to do it under their noses. Using your abilities and mine we can do it. In this last second before the bullet enters the gun!”

I cast my gaze about for something Gab could use to link with. None of the cores of the room seemed to fit the bill. For a moment I was frustrated but I pushed past it: I was used to there being some sort of solution if only I looked hard enough. And there was… something, at least, half-way down the torso of the robot loading the gun and getting more and more exposed as it turned its chest around. That bolt hole, missing its screw and with an inviting looking core, might just be what I was looking for.

“Gab!” I called out. “Can you connect that to the loading hole of the gun.”

In the land of the dead I watched as Gab jumped to the gun and then reached out. When his other end reached the hole I’d pointed out the reassuring sparks of lightning announced the connection.

Now it was my turn. I picked out a bullet near the edge of the tray – one of the empty ones – and tricked it until it toppled and started to roll. When it reached the edge I waited for the right timing, as the robot’s fingers inched ever closer to the cylinder of the gun, then I knocked the bullet over. It landed tip first in the hole that I had identified, then vanished through Gab’s link into the chamber of the gun. At the same moment the bullet that the robot was attempting to load replaced it, tumbling down to the floor before bouncing away out of sight.

From the robot’s perspective the bullet had been loaded normally. We knew better.

We had to do that five more times, until the gun was entirely loaded with bullets of my choosing. They were all empty, all safe. As the robot placed the fully-loaded gun in a chained box and began hoisting it up towards the ceiling Gab and I retreated from the room, our job well done.

Fate Changed!

As we left the preparations for the next event behind us a feeling of urgency crept up on me. That unerring sense of time that I possessed whenever I was averting someone’s fate was counting down those final few seconds.

“I must be on way to the room with the pods,” Gab exclaimed when I told him. “Let’s hurry, young man. I’m not sure my head is hard enough to go through that again.”

All we had to do was move. One of the robots leaving after preparing the next puzzle got us in the right position in the corridor to jump over to the factory. Then we raced through the hanging crane, up to the vents near the top of the other side and through to the cores of the final room.

There the alive Gab was, halfway across the open space, one paw raised in the frozen time. I leapt back into the stack of paper-filled folders. Then just as I was about to knock them down Gab – the one that had followed me as a ghost all the way across the bunker and back – spoke to me.

“Thank you, Sissel,” he said.

“I was always gonna try to save your life,” I replied.

Gab shook his head, a weary, deliberate turn of his neck. “Not for that. Thank you for giving me the chance to do something heroic, one last time. I’m an old dog now, and I never was a big one. And… It’s seemed to me that the only role in this incident for animals such as you and I is as passive observers. I’ve felt it in my bones from the moment we were all brought to this place. Thank you for giving me some hope that isn’t the case.

“And good luck, young man.”

I tricked the folders off the edge of the desk. They crashed against the floor right in front of the dog’s nose; the sound acquiring a strange timbre as it reverberated off the strange treelike structure. And Gab reared away, frightened but very much alive.

Fate Averted!

When I returned to the present Gab was waiting for me. That, or he’d left and returned in the interval while I was catching up with the present. Now that he’d had his death undone he had a core that I could talk with.

“Hop aboard, young man,” Gab said, gesturing with his nose towards the canister around his neck and its oh-so-useful core. Once I was aboard he carried me out of the room, freeing me from the area and the set of cores I’d thought I’d get trapped in. After heading back through his complex of vents we arrived back in the lounge. From there I bade Gab goodbye and headed to the room the robots had been preparing for a puzzle, ready to watch as Sigma, Diana, and Phi tried to solve it. I curled up in a core near the ceiling, comfortable in the knowledge that none of the bullets in the gun were real.

I spent the next few hours trying to prevent the incinerator from activating, and failed.

o-0-O-0-o 

It took me the good part of an hour to climb back up to the bunker from where the incinerator had dumped all the ash, sweeping me and the cores I was using along with it. At the end of an arduous path up the plumbing I emerged through the floor of the room with the wheel of beds. They were once again embedded in the wall, and it was only as a ghost that I could know that Sigma and Diana were sleeping there.

I wandered about the paths of cores that I’d mapped through the facility, at least those parts of it I could access. Anything could have happened since I’d last seen it, and I needed to find out what. As I passed through the lounge I got a clue, when I saw that the great exit door had shifted slightly since I last saw it. And I got my answer when I headed all the way over to the left of the bunker.

I found Carlos and Junpei. Both were dead, in a room still choked with gas.

No Akane. What had happened to her? I hadn’t passed her while exploring the rest of the rooms. And I’d have known of she had been stored with the other unconscious people.

When I returned to the lounge Gab was waiting for me, pawing expectantly at the side of the sofa. When I connected to him he already knew what I was going to ask. “Looking for Akane, young’un? The exit door opened for her a while back, and she headed out. You should go after her.” He paused, sniffing at the immaterial of the spirit world. “Be gentle with her, will you? She didn’t exactly look steady on her feet when she walked out.”

“I’ll see what she has to say about what happened here,” I replied. I looked over at the door: despite Akane’s departure it looked as impassible as when I’d first seen it, at least for the loving. “It’s a shame you can’t come with us.”

“Don’t worry about me. I still have responsibilities to the two still here.” The old dog waved me on with a bat of his paw. “Now get after her, young man!”

After offering my goodbyes I did so, slipping through the door to the warehouse on the other side. It was just as it had been left after Gab and I had passed through except for one important change: the platform elevator at the centre had risen all the way up to the hole in the ceiling.

So Akane had gone that way. I leapt into the core in the control panel and brought the platform back down. Then, after flipping the controls to send it back up, I jumped into one of the crates that was onboard.

On the surface I found a desert. Just endless sand in all directions, under the bright sun and still air. It really was the worst sort of place for my powers of the dead to operate. Only one thing let me continue forward: a trail of random items, left nestled in the sand at intervals just inside my jumping distance. The first object in the line was a visored gasmask, ominous for reasons I couldn’t quite explain.

I hopped along the trail, taking me far enough along the featureless sand that I could barely even see the hole I’d come out from anymore. Only the fact that this was the only way I could go gave me any reason to think that it was the right way. But this way was, in fact, the right one. That trail of breadcrumbs had been left for me for a reason.

I found out that reason when I reached the end, and found Akane’s lifeless body with blood seeping from the gash in her neck.

Rewind Time – 4 Minutes Before Death

I wasn’t going to learn anything from this replay of the cause of death. Akane had waited the entire four minutes, sitting motionless at the end of her trail of breadcrumbs, and only slit her own throat once all that time had passed.

If I was going to understand why this had happened I was going to have to ask.

“What on Earth happened back there?” I exclaimed.

Akane smiled faintly. “There are so many things that could refer to. If you specify which I’ll give you an answer.”

“Argh, any of them!” I exclaimed. “You left Carlos and Junpei to die, for one.”

Akane turned her head away from me, in the spirit world. “I… There wasn’t anything else I could do. That room was filling with carbon dioxide, and Zero only provided one gas mask. Only one of us could survive, whatever we did. Junpei and Carlos… decided to put it on me.”

I’d been through enough attempts to save lives in the bunker to know that was plausible.

“Then explain to me what happened with the incinerator. Gab and I made sure that all the bullets in the gun there were fakes. And it didn’t matter. They didn’t shoot the gun and Phi burned.”

“So you tried that,” Akane replied. “I truly am sorry that it didn’t work. It was the result of an unfortunate entanglement of possibilities. The future I met you in followed from a particular outcome in that scenario. The fact that you were back here to alter the bullets in the gun ensured that Diana would choose not to use them.”

“You’re talking about this like everything was inevitable,” I said, narrowing my eyes at her.

She shrugged. “In some ways that is so, and in some ways it isn’t. On the one hand I am more aware of alternate possibilities, and the timelines they create, than just about anyone on Earth. At the same time the future influences the past, creating certain tendencies that require effort to overcome. As one such example: my last time through these events I also escaped alone, even though Sigma and Diana are still alive. I never understood why they were unable to leave Ward D and meet me at the centre, even once the X doors opened.”

I interrupted her with a sharp gasp. “Huh? Sigma and Diana were in the same bunker you were. You left them locked in there.”

Akane’s lips tightened, and the look around her eyes went tense. “What do you mean?”

I explained to the all the various areas I’d found in the bunker, especially that one where the unconscious people were stowed in that wheel of beds that folded into the wall.

“I… I can’t believe it,” she whispered. “The other wards really were hidden there. If I’d known… I can’t believe I left them behind.”

Anyone who saw her face would have known Akane was telling the truth.

“Could I change things, so that they…?” Akane muttered to herself, before resolutely shaking her head. “No. I’ve come too far. I have to see this through to the end.” Technically speaking it wasn’t really possible in this form of communication in the spirit world, to be directing attention anywhere else; nevertheless, Akane now turned her focus back towards me. “It’s time that we do what I brought you back here for.”

Could I really just blindly do what Akane said, when her reason for bringing me through this place wasn’t to save the people who’d died in that bunker? When it was for something I’d yet to find out? Such suspicious thoughts wouldn’t get me anywhere, just like they wouldn’t have gotten me anywhere with Lynne. I resolved to hear Akane out.

“What’s going on here? Why are you dead in this desert?” I asked Akane.

“As you probably feel quite a bit keener than I do,” she explained, “this bunker is located in the middle of nowhere. I have no way back to DCOM, or to any other place of civilisation. If nothing happens then I will die of thirst right here, if I’m not baked to death before that can happen.”

“So you need my powers of the dead to do something about that. Why did you kill yourself before I got here? Anything I can do while averting your fate I could have done anyway. Why didn’t you just wait for me to show up?”

“I need to be able to come with you,” Akane said. “It is likely that I will need to explain things based on whatever situation that we find. Don’t worry about the fact that nothing will change here. When we’ve ensured that someone will find me I’ll–”

“Let me guess,” I interrupted. “You’ll let yourself know, and change what you’ll do.”

“Very well. Sissel, lead the way.”

Trick Time!

As I jumped us back along the line of discarded objects I’d used to reach Akane she said, “As I was coming up here I heard a phone ringing. Hopefully whoever it was will still be trying to call here.”

“So that’s why you suggested to Gab that we should fix it.” It made sense, but it was still disconcerting to see that Akane had foretold what was needed so far ahead of time.

We continued until we reached the elevator. I couldn’t activate it from up here. My only option was to have something fall down the natural way, which I did by opening the door of the largest crate on the platform and having the domino effect propel a smaller wooden box.

Akane looked queasy as I leapt into that core and rode it down, but I knew we’d land intact.

Once back in the warehouse I had to let time pass while waiting for the phone. Luckily it only took a minute before the ringing was heard from the small office. It wasn’t anywhere near as difficult to get into the office this time as it had been when Gab and I had tried. The forklift I’d used to get back out was still embedded in the nearest crate: I just hopped in and threw it into reverse, crashing it into the wall where I’d found it and denting the back as much as I’d done the front.

As I jumped from there towards the wailing phone Akane said, “I know that in timelines where Free the Soul achieved their aims, they arranged for the survivors to be rescued. It’s time to see why that didn’t happen in this one.”

Then I reached the phone, the buzz of the connection tingling through me as I settled into the core. I threw the receiver off the hook myself, and then listened.

A voice I didn’t recognise came through. “Brother? My Brother, is that you? Please, for the sake of the purified world, answer us!”

Beside me Akane said, “Let’s head to the other side. Even if this isn’t the right way to save me I want to see what’s going on there.”

I didn’t need to be told twice. One act of will and we were racing through the cable, leaving the bunker behind us for good.

Fate Changed!

We arrived in a giant command centre, entirely staffed by identical blond men. Some stood near the back carrying military equipment, others stood on a podium examining the projected images that took up the entirety of the far wall, yet more sat in rows at computers; all of them wore the same black robes. One of them had been the one making the call to the office outside the bunker. As he placed his phone back down he raised his head towards another blond man standing beside him.

“It’s no good, Left,” he said, expression tense. “There was something, but… not our Brother.”

That other man lifted his gaze towards the distant ceiling. He raised his voice to address the entire room. “Gentlemen, it is confirmed. I never wanted to give you this news, yet it is the truth and the Truth. Our holy mission has failed. Our Brother… is dead.”

If he said any more I never found out. Anything he did was drowned out by wails, screams, and curses. Over to one side one of the younger-looking blonds pulled out a handgun and the man next to him had to wrestle it away as he tried to turn it on himself.

In that pandemonium Akane directed my attention towards another communications console, like the one we’d arrived through. The man sitting there had been approached by one of those who’d been standing at the back wall, and once I’d jumped between the various computer screens and hanging banners to get close I could hear what he was saying.

“Contact our men at the Mars Mission Test Centre. No-one who knows anything of our disgrace must be allowed to live.”

The seated man nodded acknowledgement, then picked up his phone. Looked like I was going to be given another chance to jump.

The other end of this line was in the same building as the reception Akane had first brought me back to, though much farther in. In this dark, cramped, and out-of-the-way room four more of those blond men waited, stances tense like they were ready to pounce. As the leader hung up the call they lifted up their guns and filed out onto the bright corridor outside.

I found out what their intentions were immediately, as did the woman just a little way along when they shot her in the back.

When I paused time in order to move towards her body’s core Akane spoke. “Do you believe you can save these people? If you think so, please do make the attempt. I will still be here when you are done.”

And she was, once I finally gave up.

“What is wrong with this place?” I hissed. “Inside that death-trap of a bunker, I can sort of understand. But for all these deaths to be impossible to avert, it’s just not right!”

“You’re learning what I learned at this moment in time,” Akane replied. “A sufficiently focused and powerful intent can override even our powers. These killers are of a different quality to those you faced from that foreign country. Not more skilled, you could say, but more prudent. Less inclined to overextend. I am saddened that they left no openings for you, but I am not surprised.”

“Okay then,” I said, hoping it was possible for a kitten to look stern. “What are we looking for here, if we’re not going to save these people?”

“We’ll know it when we see it,” was her only reply.

I jumped into the leader’s gun so that the soldiers would carry us with them. That forced us to watch as the men found other workers and experimenters in the Mars Mission Centre and gunned them down as well. When the squad reached the reception Akane had brought me back to and fanned out across it, one of their bullets shattered the display case in the corner; I couldn’t help but note as the red Mars rock tumbled out and smashed into pieces on the floor.

I was grateful, then, that we heard something other than unpreventable death to draw our attention sooner rather than later. One of the engineers associated with the Mars Mission project saw that the assassins were coming when they appeared further down the corridor chasing after a receptionist. The engineer’s skin wasn’t blue, but the desperate prayers she muttered in her shock were in the accent of the foreign country. When the soldiers had passed she ran away and into an unmarked room.

“Follow her,” Akane commanded.

I had to take a roundabout route to leave the gun and reach that room, diverting through an observatory on the other side of the corridor. When I caught up with the engineer she was receiving something that had been taped under a desk in the far corner. It turned out to be an earpiece, as I found out when the woman yanked it out and pressed it against the side of her head.

From her expression in the spirit world Akane’s relief and curiosity were evident. “You should jump in. It won’t be the same as a phone line, but you should be able to use it just the same.”

I took her word for it, bouncing from the wall I’d come in through via the computers on the office desks to reach the woman’s ear. When I landed there… the sensation was weird, but I could hear both sides of the conversation just as I could with a phone call.

“It’s all gone to shit!” the woman whispered into the earpiece. “You’ve gotta get me out of here.”

“Standby,” said the voice on the other end.

There wasn’t time for anything else to come through. As the woman waited for a response the door was rammed down by the shoulder of one of the men from Free the Soul, and shortly after that the woman from that foreign country was riddled with bullets.

“Quickly!” Akane interjected. “Before they kill the connection as well.”

With Akane’s words propelling me onward I dived into the current connection, only able to hope that I’d get to the other side as I would along a phone line.

On the other end of that ‘phone call’ we arrived in another control centre, this one smaller, sparser, and shabbier than the one we’d passed through that belonged to Free the Soul. I wouldn’t have had any idea how to tell where we were, but Akane seemed convinced that we’d arrived in a base belonging to the foreign country.

“I had good reason to believe that the agents of that country were observing the Mars Mission Test. Still, it is good to have that confirmed.”

I found that the only place I could jump to from the receiver was to the computer of the person that had been talking to the agent at the Mars Mission Centre. I jumped into it, ready to look around the new site we’d found ourselves in.

And then time unfroze, even though I hadn’t willed it. “I am truly sorry to do this, Sissel,” Akane said.

Through my connection with her information came flooding, information that I had no hope of comprehending. Without intending to or understanding what I was doing I was suddenly tricking away at the computer’s keyboard. Soon an image of a map appeared on the screen, it zoomed in on an area of desert, and then a glowing marker appeared over one otherwise unremarkable point.

My spine arched and my fur spiked back. “What… what did you do?”

“Exactly what it looks like,” Akane replied. “I showed them where the underground bunker is located.”

That… didn’t make any sense. “I thought we’d come back,” I said, as the person sitting in front of that computer gasped and called over their colleagues, “to prevent the foreign country from picking up all of Free the Soul’s technology and resources. Now you’ve shown them where to look, you’ve done the exact opposite!”

“Yes. I have,” Akane stated bluntly. “If I do not let anyone know where I am then I will die in that desert. In all the various timelines I have attempted, this is the only place we can reach using your powers of the dead. If I had not brought you back here in order to have you help me do this, we would never have met in the first place.”

By now the people who were looking at Akane’s map were already excitedly giving instructions to those around them, and near the back of the facility a vehicle’s engine revved to life.

“So that’s it, then?” I said bitterly. “We just make sure history played out as it did.”

Akane stared at me, silently, until it became uncomfortable. “Not quite. Keep exploring this place. There may yet be something that will change that outcome.”

As the conversation ended I returned my awareness to the room around us. A shiver ran throughout my entire soul at the way Akane was relinquishing control over my powers of the dead. Even with that I had no way to go but to carry on looking around, with the deadline closing in.

Fate Changed!

I plotted out my route further into the building, hoping that there really would be something at the end of it that would change my opinion on what was happening. After reaching the end of the line of computers I jumped into the flagpole over that side. Then I knocked the pole down – and the flag of that country with it – in order to cross the gap to the other side.

Once I reached the wall at the far side I passed through it. Though the room I gone into was pitch black the core I’d jumped into was a light-switch: I turned it on. This room, next to the control centre, turned out to be an expansive warehouse. I would have no idea where to begin cataloguing everything that we’d found, but as I panned my perspective around Akane’s smile brightened.

“That! I thought there was a chance that might be here. Get us to it, and I’ll explain to you what it is.”

I headed over to the shelf she had indicated, then shook boxes and spun handles to create a route up. On reaching the top shelf I found the item Akane had pointed out: it looked like a wooden coffin, far too small for a person. I tricked it open.

Inside I found a dead rabbit, still whole as the day it had died, encased in a block of ice.

“They really did scavenge even the smallest thing they could find from what we went through. They must be desperate,” Akane said, rather too smugly. “This was the result of a piece of research my organisation did, into a concept necessary for a certain thing we did a long while ago. Use your powers of the dead on it, and you get a chance to accomplish something from this place.”

I batted one paw in the air. “You do realise that I can only avert the fate of someone who died in the last day, right?”

“That shouldn’t be a problem,” Akane replied. And indeed, deep inside the ice the rabbit had a core I could use. “Have you ever heard of something called Ice-9?”

As Akane explained it this was a special type of ice crystal, which spread when in contact with other ice and therefore could perfectly preserve anything that came into contact with it.

“That rabbit will take you back to where you need to go,” Akane continued. “Now, there’s one very important thing you need to remember. When you get back there, do everything in your power to ensure that Junpei chooses the number eight. Whatever you need to do to convince him, do it.” Then, after I’d sheepishly explained that I didn’t know my numbers, she added, “The symbol with two circles, one on top of the other.”

“And if I do that, it’ll actually change things?” I asked.

“We can only hope,” Akane replied. “Now, it’s time for me to go and let myself know we’ve done everything we can here. See you in the next timeline.” With that her mental image faded away.

Fate Averted!

The warehouse belonging to the foreign country hadn’t changed when I returned to the present. There was only one thing for me to do. I pounced into the rabbit, ready to see what was on the other side.

o-0-O-0-o

Rewind Time – 4 Minutes Before Death

The rabbit, currently sitting in a boxy coffin in a messy, junk-filled study, had been perfectly preserved in what Akane had called Ice-9. It would have stayed that way forever, but on a higher floor something happened to change that fate.

In a walk-in freezer on a higher floor the three people trapped there – Akane, Junpei, and one white-haired guy I didn’t recognise – caused an explosion to dislodge the ice seal on the door. They didn’t see any problem with that. But the effects of the explosion reverberated through the pipes of the refrigeration system – the leak from one of which had trapped them in there – and eventually reached the secondary cooling system of the rabbit’s coffin. Those reverberations reversed the crystallisation process that Akane had explained to me, converting the special ice-9 back into the normal, everyday sort – at least until the refrigeration system got it back under control. That temporary blip was what had allowed the rabbit to count as deceased for the purposes of my powers of the dead.

As the replay continued I ignored the rabbit and focused my attention on the three who’d escaped the freezer. They joined another woman who’d been waiting for them in the kitchen outside and, after shivering themselves warm, hurried on to solve the rest of the puzzles that filled that room. With all four of them going all over the place, trying out different things with all the various items on hand, it was difficult for me to keep track of them. But the one thing that stood out to me was the safe Junpei opened just before they escaped.

When they got out the four of them raced downstairs and reunited with another group in a wide open room filled with bare, almost skeletal frames for beds. On the far walls were three steel doors, each with a symbol painted on them. And one of them was the symbol Akane had told me to look out for: the ‘8’.

I would have wanted to keep watching further, to see these people go through the next lot of doors or at least see how they went about choosing. But then my time ran out; the frozen rabbit died and that was all the replay I got.

Trick Time!

I raced up through the levels of the building as fast as I could. Since I had no intention of averting the fate of the frozen rabbit I would only have these four minutes to make whatever changes I could. What was it Akane had said? I had to do everything I could to make sure Junpei picked ‘8’ when the time came. I’d have to get to the kitchen and see what I could use to make that nudge.

So: up through the screens hanging from the ceiling of study, then I scampered my way along a corridor of cramped bedrooms until I reached what looked like a small church. I hopped around using the pictures on the walls and the benches in the open space until I reached the coffin laid near the front. Popping the lid of the coffin with a ghost trick sent the fabric laid over it rippling up towards the ceiling, and I used that to head higher.

The next floor I found was entirely filled with water from floor to ceiling, somehow, and I instinctively recoiled. But the only way up really was through the water so I forced myself to continue. I found a discard plastic bottle, crushed by the weight of the water, and forced in back to its original shape. When it had floated all the way to the ceiling I vaulted on upwards with a yowl of relief.

That put me in the wide open room full of bedframes, the one Akane and Junpei would end up in. I was nearly there. Only the columns scattered across the middle of the room gave me any access between floor and ceiling. But that didn’t matter because all those beds meant I could go anywhere on the floor plan that I wanted. I ascended, one last time.

Then I was in the kitchen, emerge though the sheen of ice on the freezer floor. Junpei, Akane and the other guy had already exited into the larger room, in the time it had taken me to climb here. Once I unfroze time they would be racing to solve the puzzle. And while I would have loved to get in contact with Akane and have her slow them down I hadn’t yet ever saved her life at this point in time; she had no core I could make use of. I had to leave the hints and nudges towards ‘8’ before they escaped and moved on. The safe with the number buttons: that was my target. I found that I was able to move from the freezer to the central island by hopping through a chunk of pork Junpei was carrying, but moving around that island was only possible by opening up the doors of certain kitchen cabinets to cross slightly too large gaps.

I’d have to be careful here. If I gave these people the idea that the kitchen was haunted then the message I was trying to send would go over completely differently than how I intended it. I waited until the other woman’s back was turned before opening the door I was currently it, then picked the moment when everyone was focused on an oven to slip around the corner.

When I arrived at the safe I knew I wouldn’t have been able to use it if I’d had to do anything complex with it. If I’d had to solve the puzzle the people in the room were challenging, for instance, I wouldn’t have had a chance to enter the solution: I couldn’t read the numbers on the keypad. But I didn’t need to do anything that complicated. I tricked the ‘8’ button until the screen was filled up and considered that a job well done.

By then the people were approaching the safe. I could hope that the message I’d left was clear enough, but I wanted to try for more. This was where I was glad that I got a replay whenever I was averting a fate. I knew where these people were going.

I headed back to the lower floor, to that wide open space full of beds. The three doors with symbols on them still stood proudly in the wall opposite. One of them was the ‘8’, the other two were wrong. I zigged and zagged through the ceiling to the light above the closer of the wrong doors and – though it was more an act of sheer irritated will than a proper ghost trick – shattered the bulb. Then to the other door, to do the same thing.

When Junpei, Akane and the others arrived at this room they found the three doors, two bathed in shadow and the third standing out. Looking at Junpei’s eyes you could see the exact moment that combined with the message I’d left him earlier and he decided to go with the door with an ‘8’.

And at that moment reality shifted. Where Akane had been standing there was now just an image. An image that was perfect to every detail, that was true, but no more substantial than a spirt hovering among the flesh and blood humans. Even worse, at the centre of that image of Akane was a core of the deceased.

“What the hell?!” How could a person just vanish from existence like that? I dropped what I was doing and darted over towards Akane – the image of Akane, her spirit, whatever it was – spiralling down the nearest column and jumping across the beds. As I made the very last jump into the core in Akane’s body the image of her turned towards my viewpoint and spoke to me, even though time was frozen for the world of the living.

“If you want to know what’s going on, that’s simple. I have, in this moment, just died.”

o-0-O-0-o 

Rewind Time – Four Minutes Before Death

Why did these grand finales always take place on sinking ships?! Seriously. If this went to hell I was going to end up soaked through: even as a spirit that wasn’t going to be pleasant if it was for all eternity.

Deep in the depths of that sinking ship was a nine-sided room that eerily reminded me of the incinerator that had killed Phi. Four young children were trapped in that room: a boy and girl I didn’t recognise, a younger version of the white-haired man I’d seen before, and finally what had to be Akane as a little girl, the youngest I’d see her yet. They hammered with their fists on the steel walls and on the window of the thick door that closed off one end of the room, to no avail.

But help was coming. A Jowd-like man in a bright yellow jacket was crawling his way through the vents that ran through the ceiling above, until he reached a hatch in the wall near the ceiling of the incinerator. After opening it up and calling out to the trapped children, the man lowered a rope made of bedsheets until it reached all the way from the opening to the floor.

First the new girl was hoisted up. Then it was Akane’s turn: the white-haired lad helped Akane onto the rope and supported her as she began her tentative climb. But as she made her way up the rope something slipped out of her pocket. A small wooden doll tumbled to the floor, unnoticed by Akane and both the boys who had yet to make their climb.

As the white-haired boy – last of the four to ascend – reached half-way up the rope the thick door of the incinerator groaned and then gradually slid to the side. Under it came a well-dressed man, a scowl spreading across his face and he took in the space empty before him. Then he looked up. He let out a rage-filled cry of alarm as he saw the last child and the man who was lifting him into the vent. He fiddled with the control panel near the centre, turning off the incinerator and damping down the flames that were just then beginning to splutter to life, before leaving the way he’d come,

The children and the man who’d rescued them crawled through the vents until they reached an exit by a rickety spiral staircase. They raced up, desperate speed in every step.

But when they were halfway up Akane noticed that she was missing the doll that she’d dropped in the incinerator. When the others got ahead of her she took the chance to slip away and started heading back down. It wasn’t long after that the Jowd-like man realised she had vanished and started heading after, but she’d already gained a considerable lead on him.

So when Akane reached the corridor at the bottom, she was alone. Alone, that is, apart from the well-dressed man who’d been in the incinerator. He snuck up behind her and grabbed her arm. The rescuer and the other children could only watch as he dragged Akane into the incinerator. That man then exited through another door which he locked behind him, leaving Akane inside.

A grid of symbols appeared on the screen of the control panel inside the incinerator, and Akane rushed over to look. But she had no better luck comprehending it than I would have done. After another minute the jets into the chamber ignited once more, and Akane burned.

What… What had happened there? How did that have any connection to what I’d been through so far? How had I met Akane as an old woman if she burned to death as a child?

Akane was there, in our rendezvous in the spirit world, to give her explanations. Her mental image was still the young adult that she’d been when I spoke to her last in one of these, or maybe it was just that she was similar enough in age when I’d found her through the frozen rabbit that she looked the same to me.

“This,” she said, her eyes solemnly downcast, “is what I’ve spent my life trying to fix. I built my organisation so that I would have the resources to correct it. In the timeline you came from, I succeeded.”

My whiskers bristled. “You… succeeded? Then what was all this about? Why did you need to bring me back here for?” I looked toward the incinerator, where the fires consuming the young Akane were frozen in time. “It looks to me like we’ve managed the exact opposite. We’ve set it wrong again.”

Akane sighed, almost wearily. “That facility we came from, where you influenced Junpei to choose door 8, was my solution to this problem. The idea was to create a scenario where the layers of the Nonary Game couldn’t know whether they were interacting with me in the flesh or just a morphogenetic image of me. An entire scenario where it would be undetermined whether I was alive or dead until the last possible moment. That was necessary so I could send the information I needed back in time to this moment. That was how I escaped the incinerator in the timeline you came from.

“The problem was what I needed to do to acquire the resources I needed to build that facility. We were children. The only advantage I had was my knowledge of the future. We knew that the company that experimented on us and got me killed, Cradle Pharmaceutical, would become incredibly successful. So we gambled on that success. That’s where the money to build that facility came from.”

“What’s the matter with that?” I asked, hoping a shrug came across properly with a feline body-plan. “You use what you’ve gotta use, right?”

Akane nodded. “That was the case. But it came with a certain flaw. In order to make that gamble we had to invest in Cradle on the stock market. That gave them even more resources to work with as well. And, more pertinently for the timeline you came from, it gave more resources to their backers, Free the Soul. Everything you saw them accomplish in the future they did with the help of my investments.” I didn’t quite get how the ‘stock market’ was supposed to have caused that, but the general pounce of Akane’s explanation was coming together.

And as it did something joined us in the spirit-plane where we were conversing. It started as the usual shimmering teardrop of an unconscious soul and then, almost hesitantly, resolved into the image of the young girl Akane had been back then. She looked between the other Akane and me and spoke with a trembling, fire-rasped voice. “W-Where am I? What happened to me?”

“Don’t worry. We’re going to put things right,” the young adult Akane quickly interjected. Then she whispered to me, as much as that was possible in the current medium. “How is she here? Is it possible for there to be two versions of me coming from your powers?”

I wasn’t sure. In fact, I would’ve said that it was impossible if I wasn’t looking at it right that moment. As I explained to Akane, I’d had the ghosts of the recently dead joining me on my attempts to save other people, but two versions of the same spirit hanging over my shoulder as I worked was something I’d never seen before. “So, I don’t get this any more than you do.”

“Two different ghosts, huh.” Akane glance over towards her youngest version, a glint of bashed realisation in her eyes. “I’ve changed so much, I suppose.”

“Of course we have.” At that moment a third female voice joined us. It was the old lady Akane, the one I’d met first, and she’d arrived in my space completely unperturbed by the presence of her two younger counterparts. She turned to the young adult and said, “The morphogenetic field has made us many things. Should we be surprised at this result?”

In some ways it was a relief to learn that this surprise was her power weirdness rather than mine. “So this is what you were investigating Temsik for, in the future? You wanted to bring me and my powers back here.”

“That’s correct,” the old lady Akane said. “I’ve spent my entire life dreaming that there would be some other way to get out of this situation, some other way to save my life.”

The middle Akane cut in with, “Then the aftereffects of the scheme I used would never come to pass. I wouldn’t be responsible for everything that followed anymore.”

Back to Akane-the-eldest. “Imagine my joy when I found someone whose morphogenetic powers let them go back in time to just before a death. Not just that, but” – she smiled knowingly – “one whose powers acted by manipulating small objects.”

And then the young girl, who’d been following our conversation with wide eyes, spoke up. “I’ve been trying so hard, for so long,” Akane said, a tear rolling down her cheek. “I’m so tired. Please… Please help me.”

Very well. Let’s do this.

Trick Time!

I started from the centre of the incinerator, where the young Akane had burned to death. And… there was nowhere for me to jump to. The four kids were in the incinerator, but that didn’t give me any cores I could use.

“What am I supposed to do from here?” I asked the trio of Akanes.

“Wait for it,” the middle Akane replied. “The right moment will come.”

My ghost stayed coiled up, ready to strike in any direction. “Sure. But remember we only have four minutes.” As I was waiting a thought came to me. “When we’ve done this before, you’ve been able to communicate with the Akane whose life I’m saving, change her actions. This was all caused by you going back for that doll you dropped. Can’t you just tell yourself not to do that?”

The eldest shook her head. “If only I could. This incident was the formative experience of my life. It was what let my morphogenetic powers bloom for the first time. Everything I’ve attempted to change that decision has failed, as though by definition.”

“I can’t leave it behind!” the young girl Akane chimed in, stamping her foot with a certain finality. “It’s an important present from Jumpy.”

I rolled my eyes. “That’s off the table, then. Let’s see what else we can try.”

The four of us watched as the Jowd-like man arrived – the middle Akane confirmed to me that he was also a detective – and began hauling the children into the vent. When it was Akane’s turn the doll dropped once more… and it had a core. I jumped in as soon as it was close enough.

I tested out my ghost trick while in it. The wood creaked and groaned – it wasn’t supposed to move like this – but with a force of my will the doll rose to its feet.

“Wait… this is what you wanted me to do?” I exclaimed. “When you said you were glad that my ability lets me manipulate small objects, this is what you meant?”

“As you just pointed out,” Akane-the-eldest replied, “leaving behind that doll was the root cause of everything that followed. If we cannot change my response to losing it then we must move the doll until it is no longer lost.”

As I tested out the doll’s movements I was worried for a moment that the two boys, still standing on the floor of the incinerator, would spot it moving by itself. Then again, them realising the doll had fallen would have solved all our problems right then and there; naturally they were too focused on the bedsheet rope and their way out to notice.

Then the well-dressed man arrived. When I panned my viewpoint across I could see him staring angrily through the window. It wouldn’t be long before he opened up the incinerator’s door and barged on in.

“Watch out!” the youngest Akane exclaimed. “That guy – Hongou – he knows about special powers. That’s why he was doing these experiments on the children here. I don’t think he’s looking into powers that affect the physical world, but if he sees you moving he’ll get the idea.”

That was going to be tricky. I had to get through the door as he’d be coming through, or he’d close it behind him and I’d be trapped inside. Combining that with the need not to be seen by him… I forced the doll into motion, step by tentative step, towards the door. As it began to slide open I leaned the doll up against the wall on that side. I could only hope that Hongou would run right past without looking.

When he did just that I slipped around the teeth-like door frame and leaned the doll up on the other side. It was only just across the hallway to the doorway that led to the spiral staircase, but when I looked across the distance I could tell that it was too far. In a few moments the well-dressed man would emerge: the doll would be halfway across the shiny empty floor and would be seen immediately. Instead I nestled the doll into a crevice beside the door and waited.

When Hongou came out, his face contorted with rage, he spent a while outside the open incinerator door glaring up and down the corridor. Time was passing. I could pan up to follow the Jowd-like man and the children’s passage through the vents if I chose. Eventually Hongou left, to fetch who-knew-what, and I tricked the doll out into the corridor and towards the door on the other side. I shifted the wooden doll to a quadrupedal gait as it went. It felt more natural, somehow.

Then I was through the door and into the staircase. The four children and the detective were somewhere above me, climbing. “Is this far enough away?” I asked, even as I knew that it wasn’t. If it had been the fate would already have been averted.

“When I get down here,” the young adult Akane explained, “we’ll still be close to the incinerator. Hongou comes back this way; we know that. He needs only to look in here and I’ll be caught again, with the same result.”

“Then I’ll need to climb to meet you.”

But how to do that? Just walking the doll was taking all of my concentration. To actually get it up the stairs, I’d need to make it take far more complicated actions. Not that climbing up these steps was possible to begin with. Not only was each step twice as tall as the doll was high, but they were just simple metal platforms with gaps in between. One mistake and the doll would throw itself into empty air and fall all the way back down. I’d have to find another way up.

I left the core of the doll. As it flopped down on the floor – to an aborted gasp from the girl Akane – I rose up through the railings of the staircase to the next landing, where a row of wooden planks had been stacked up against the side. I jumped into the one at the end and tricked, tipping it over and sending it sliding down the stairs I’d just climbed. There: that formed a ramp the doll could climb, even with the awkward way I was piloting it.

So that got the doll to the first bend. I couldn’t just repeat the trick I’d just used, since there wasn’t any conveniently placed plank on the next level up. And I did need to go higher: already Akane was making her break from the group, ready to come back down. Time was running out. I frantically jumped between the cores I could access, looking for something that would work.

I found my answer in a chain that had come to rest on a cross bar that formed part of the scaffolding of this stairwell. First I possessed one end and tricked it across the gap to another part of the scaffolding, then coiled it around that part. That should keep it steady as I did what I needed to do next. I headed higher to the core I found up there, which happened to belong to a dilapidated iron rim. When I tricked it loose it fell down towards the scaffolding, then rolled along the bar until it got wedged. I tied the end of the chain, then headed to the core at the other end. My tricks at that end allowed me to dangle it down to where the doll was waiting. I wrapped that end around the doll, then back up to the rim. It took several tricks in a row to free it once more, but when it did it went crashing down the shaft, and the pulley sent the doll hurtling upward.

“Persevere, Sissel,” the eldest Akane said. “You’re nearly there. You just have to meet me halfway.”

Everything I’d done in the previous timeline had taught me there was always a solution. That hadn’t always held true in what Akane had showed me but, well, she’d brought me back here for a reason. I felt it like a guiding impulse in my whiskers. Though, I did flinch a bit when I saw what that solution was going to be.

“Come on, Sissy! You can do it!” exclaimed the young Akane.

I couldn’t resist those puppy-dog eyes. It looked like I was going to get soaked after all.

On the other side of the staircase’s railing was a pipe, running up the wall and with hinged caps at the top and bottom. With some careful manipulations of the doll’s limbs I had it climb into the bottom end of the pipe, then tricked the cap closed beneath it and sealed it tight. Then, as a ghost, I ascended.

The sinking ship was already beginning to suffer for it. The back-passages behind the stairwell were already filling with water. The wall in between was weakening, and the cracks in one part of it had become distinct enough to have a core. I leapt into that core and tricked.

The cracks burst through. As I dropped I had to jump into the doll, before the falling rubble carried me away. Then the water followed. It filled up the pipe and the wooden doll floated up. When it reached the top I threw it over the lip and onto the nearest part of the stairs.

“Where’s Akane now?” I asked my chorus of Akanes.

“I’ve gone past us!” the youngest exclaimed in alarm. With a guilty pride, she added, “I’m always driven when I know what I want.”

When I looked it was true: the girl Akane on the ship was already below us and going further with every step. That… wasn’t going to be a problem. It was always easier to move down than upward. That was why, when you went out, you sought out the highest place you could find and perched there. I moved the doll to the edge of the step it was on, aimed, and pounced.

It landed right in Akane’s arms as she rounded the next corner. She gasped in surprise, then hugged it tightly.

“You did it!” cheered the version of the young Akane beside me. She hugged me in the spirit world like the real version was hugging the doll.

The young adult sighed in relief, all the tension in her spirit body leaving at once.

The eldest just closed her eyes in a serene calm. “Finally. It’s over.”

And then a white-sleeved hand shot up and grabbed Akane’s ankle.

“No! It’s Hongou!” the middle Akane cried out. “He must have heard what we were doing in here!”

The Akane in the real world was screaming as well, squirming and wriggling and still keeping the doll tight to her chest as she tried to escape. It didn’t help. As in the original scenario the man who held her just tightened his grip, pulling her off balance and down toward him. When he’d got them level on the same step Hongou wrapped his other arm around her throat and began his inexorable drag down towards the incinerator.

The Jowd-like detective came vaulting around the central pole.

His fist caught Hongou square across the face. The well-dressed man buckled under the blow and careened back down the stairs; as Akane began to tumble as well the detective wrapped his arms around her. They fell through four full rotations of the stairs, but the detective kept the girl protected in his bulk the entire way.

When the two boys and the other girl caught up with them the detective and Akane were dazed and bruised, but alive.

Fate Averted!

And then my image of the ship went dim, and all that was left was me and the three Akanes in an empty plane.

“I’m… alive,” the youngest Akane said. “You did it, Sissy.” And then she faded away back to the land of the land of the living.

The young adult Akane offered me a small bow, then giggled. “I’m looking forward to seeing a timeline where I don’t have to do those heinous things to survive. Let’s see what it brings.” She vanished as well.

The old lady Akane just said, “I’ll see you there.” And then I was alone, hurtling towards the present.

o-0-O-0-o 

After all that, and another spell of dizziness, I found myself back in my home city, in Akane’s town house. I’d arrived in the shed at the back, my ghost settling in the core of that small steel safe, but now the safe’s hatch was closed and locked once more and Akane was nowhere to be found.

I jumped rightwards into the kitchen. There was no longer any sign of the charred marks that had been the aftereffects of the sabotage and assassination attempt. Instead the pale wallpaper was perfectly clear. One of the hanging pots, that when I’d last been here had formed part of my path across, was now stowed away and so I had to trick the oven on to boil a kettle that sat on top. A bit nerve-wrecking, given what the oven had done the last time I was here, but in the end the stove worked just as it was supposed. When the kettle came to the boil, started whistling, and then blew its lid onto the floor, I was able to drop down into it and use that to reach the cabinet. From there I opened the cabinet’s door and jumped into the lamp in the next room over.

Once in the living room I found that the hatch to the concealed basement was raised. I hopped my way across the room: into the nearest blind which I then raised, across a collection of framed photographs laid out differently to before, lowering the right-side blind and then into the core at the tip of the hatch.

I still hadn’t seen anyone inside the house. I returned to the land of the living and let time flow again to see what was happening. And at the exact moment I did so the hatch began to close. I couldn’t quite believe it was on purpose, but there was only one purpose it could be if it was. Lowering the hatch gave me access to the cores in the basement.

And that basement was full of people, almost crammed to the brim. The Pigeon Guy was back, with bird of course, sat down and monitoring one of the computer terminals with a relaxed expression on his and the bird’s face. Behind him was an older man in a black broad-shouldered greatcoat with a false eye and wispy greying hair; he was jovially bickering with an equally elderly woman in a sky-blue long jacket, whose hair was so perfectly uniform in whiteness that it was obviously dyed, probably to stand out against the black flower pinned in it.

When I jumped through the monitors to reach the other side of the basement I came across old man in a blue collared shirt and tie who was holding up a young boy with dirty-blond hair so he could see one of the ceiling-mounted screens. And there, in between that man and a soft pet bed where my body lay snugly curled, with a ring on her finger and a core in her body like all whose lives I’d saved, stood Akane. As old as when I’d first met her, and alive.

Fate Averted!

It was more comfortable to jump back into my body before doing anything else, and I pressed a paw against Akane’s shin as I connected soul-to-soul with her. Since she was the only one here I’d saved I should only have been able to talk to her. I wasn’t surprised when the others joined the conversation anyway.

“So this is the cat you were telling us about, Kanny,” Junpei said.

“Hey, Sigma.” Those two had managed to transfer their bickering seamlessly into my spirit-world medium. “You know, there are other uses for the morphogenetic field than going ‘kitty, kitty, kitty, kitty, kitty,’ inside my head. Have you considered trying one of them?”

Well, that just had him going ‘kitty, kitty,’ inside all the rest of our heads, too. What could I say? I appreciated the attention.

But even through all that, Akane’s words to me came through clearly. “Welcome to a new timeline, Sissel. And thank you. You’ve accomplished everything I could have hoped for.”

[blvshed]

i'm thinking about dipping back into discord rping just because it's more low maintanance than tumblr and that's definitely something i need in my life rn. below the cut are some ideas i'd be interested in, so please drop a like below if you're down or hit up my dms if you'd like to plot something else! most of these are m/f, but can be switched with f/f.

period/royalty plot where they're the king and queen who were forced to marry for the sake of their kingdoms. they can't stand each other, bicker all the time, but they get crazy jealous if anyone else flirts with the other and their arguments always seem to turn into fucking. muses of mine i'd use: isabelle, dahlia, callum, dante, elodie.

cruel intentions based plot between a step brother and sister where they've got a bet going that one of them can't fuck someone saving themselves for marriage and if they can, they'll finally fuck each other. but wait a minute, the bet isn't starting to matter so much as their teasing and jealousy reaches new levels. muses of mine i'd use: viviana, lily, joey, kamila (vamp or non vamp verse).

a plot where a son/step-son is talking to his mom/step-mom about how worried he is about his lack of sexual experiences. he asks if he can practice on her because she's the only woman he trusts and she agrees bc she'd do anything for him and woops, she actually enjoys herself. muses of mine i'd use: isabelle or sylvia but maaaaybe lorna.

divorced couple where they've been divorced for five years, both of them have new serious relationships but they're now cheating on their new partners with each other. and it's a lot of jealous and "does she fuck you like i do?" but also them not really seeing it as cheating bc they were married first woops. muses i'd use: any.

any sort of greek mythology plot. especially love hades/persephone, ares/aphrodite, zeus/hera. i have a verse for sara as persephone and isabelle as hera, but would happy to make characters for the others.

twincest. non-identical twincest though pls and thank you. muses of mine i'd use: any.

a little bit of this with most of my chars.

plots where one is fucking the other in front of all their friends, maybe even letting some of their friends get in on it. maybe he lets his his friends fill her free holes while he's using his favourite one and tells her what a beautiful little cum slut she is. <3 muses i'd use: any.

[youropinion-iswrong]

ghost trick character's genders

along with some other hcs relating to them! warnings for ghost trick spoilers and mentions of dysphoria, surgery, and pregnancy

everyone's under the cut 👍

sissel: he's a cat he doesn't know what a gender is, BUT. he was a female cat during his ten years living with yomiel (hence why he was named after yomiel's fiance). after thinking he was yomiel for a while he just. kept seeing himself as male afterwards and everyone else did too. this cat accidentally got his gender transed

lynne: a sillygirl. a sunshinegirl. a boyfriendgirl. a deadguygirl. perhaps even a puppygirl. just nonbinary woman works too though. does no sort of physical transition

missile: dog

jowd: trans man, started transitioning in like his early-mid 20s. decided to pause his medical transition to carry his and alma's child despite his dysphoria, he wouldn't do it again but he's never regretted it. now is on t and has top and bottom surgery

alma: trans woman that's also a man but not and doesn't have any gender. oh and a bit multigender. usually not genderfluid though. don't worry about it do you want chicken she's ordering some for her family. started having Gender Weirdness as a high schooler and eventually was peaceful with her gender not making sense to anyone else, because it doesn't need to! fluctuating dysphoria but the body is usually worse than social. has been on and off e throughout the years and has bottom surgery

kamila: a budding sapphic who eventually blooms into a butch lesbian. yes as her gender. also has many xenic girl varieties like her sister and general gender weirdness like her mom

cabanela: yeah i have no idea what's going on here. he simultaneously feels Very Cisgender and Very Transgender to me. idk what he is we just need to acknowledge he kind of sucks more. and that can include him being cis. either way he does drag and this is important to his gender despite not being a woman in any way

pigeon man: trans man, started transitioning within the year he quit his job at the police force. he's only binary in the sense that he doesn't give a shit about finding labels besides "man". on t with no surgeries and doesn't plan on any. everything about his transition in all three timelines is identical to the minute somehow.

yomiel: it's... complicated. he was a trans man who came out in his mid-late teens, and was on t with top surgery when he died. he had a bit of a thing about being a Normal Binary Passing Man, but being dead and unknowable with no human friends and a disconnect from his body for ten years really fucked with that. like all social conventions, he has trouble readjusting to gender in the new timeline, but he's started reconnecting with femininity and exploring more labels. mainly just says he's transmasc, still taking t.

fiansissel: trans woman with extra woman and a side of fries and dip. sorry i don't have more for you girl you have the potential to be so interesting just by being in love with yomiel but that's the *only* thing you had the time to be ingame

other random chars: memry is transfem, emma and the minister are painfully cis but supportive, amelie is a demigirl, park guy is some sort of nonbinary in an insane dollar store soda flavor way, bailey and his 'friend' are both cis but in a hand-wavey "not unpacking that" way

[siverwrites]

L, N, P for the alphabet ask?

L - Say something genuinely nice about a character who isn’t one of your faves (chars you’re neutral on are fair game, as are chars you dislike)

Zin is pretty friendly and laid back and probably a comfort to have around when you know him? Him big in a monster filled world. Plus the comfort of having a bracer around.

N - Name three things you wish you saw more or in your main fandom (or a fandom of choice)

More Lynne, more Alma, more Pigeon Man and Lovey-Dove love. Sometimes you just gotta go for simple desires yeah?

P - Invent a random AU for any fandom (we always need more ideas)

Soft-post-apocalyptic Ghost Trick. As in like Breath of the Wild style so away from all the grit and violence of a lot of post-apocalyptic settings. I don’t know how the heck these things would work together in any sensible way but it’s the first thing that came to mind and this question did say random.

Temsik around in some piece of the world. Strange location that... A small population of Temsiked animals in the area...

Alma’s alive because screw fridged wives. Jowd’s hermiting somewhere in some cave for some reason, maybe he thinks he killed her. Maybe manipulator made him think he did. But Cabanela, Alma and Kamila are wandering in hopes of some day finding him or some word of him. Lynne and Missile are protectors of a village they end up in for a while. Some amnesiac kinda really dead guy ends up coming. Uh things. This is super half-assed literally whatever comes to mind is being written here. And mysteries happen because of Manipulator.

I don’t know!

Fandom Meme

[centralroyalebat]

CHARS JUH

Anastasia - Lily James - Rússia (herdeira)

Maria - Eiza Gonzalez - México (herdeira)

Ingrid - Amanda Seyfried - Alemanha (herdeira)

Dionisius - Daniel Sharman - Grécia (herdeiro)

Eleanor - Katie Mcgrath - Irlanda (rainha)

Diana - Kiera Knightley - Inglaterra (abdicou)

Amahle - Tessa Thompson - África do Sul (princesa)

Katerina - Madchen Amick - Ucrânia (rainha)

Poliana - Odeya Rush - Bulgária (princesa)

Lindsay - Elena Satine - Estados Unidos (rainha)

Pedro - Tom Holland - Brasil (príncipe)

Iris - Gal Gadot - Israel (rainha)

Astrid - Katheryn Winnick - Islândia (rainha)

Caroline - Anne Hathaway - Estados Unidos (duquesa)

Willa - Anna Kendrick - Estados Unidos (condessa)

Lucius - Bill Skarsgard - Ucrânia (príncipe)

Édith - Eva Green - França (rainha)

Anna-Marie - Chloe East - Mônaco (princesa)

Louise - Oona Laurence - França (princesa)

Esther - Millie Bobby Brown - Inglaterra (princesa)

Lisbeth - Summer Fontana - Irlanda (princesa)

Felix - Alex Hogh Andersen - Islândia (herdeiro)

Gabrielle - Amber Heard - Irlanda (conselheira real)

Alice - Emily Bett Rickards - Holanda (rainha consorte)

Lyanna - Marie Avgeropoulos - Polônia (princesa)

Anita - Lindsey Morgan - México (princesa)

Eaton - KJ Apa - Polônia (príncipe)

William - Taron Egerton - Escócia (príncipe)

Victoria - Margaret Qualley - Irlanda (princesa) *irmã da rainha*

Khamal - Ekin Koç - Império Otomano (rei consorte)

Kamila - Sarah Shahi - Império Otomano (herdeira)

Gael - Matthew Daddario - Mônaco (herdeiro)

Davina - Kylie Rogers - Polônia (princesa)

Killian - Sebastian Stan - Romênia (herdeiro)

Henry - Tom Hiddleston - Escócia (rei)

Mia - Ginny Gardner - Hungria (herdeira)

Marco - Jesse lee Soffer - Itália (guarda-real)

Christopher - Luke Mitchell - Austrália (herdeira)

Klaus - Josh Dylan - Alemão (príncipe)

Desmond - Colin Donell - Nova Zelândia (herdeiro)

Louis - Joseph Morgan - Inglaterra (duque)

Nolan - Robert Downey Jr - Hungria (rei)

Arya - Jameela Jamil - India (duquesa)

Daniel - Ezra Miller - Andorra (herdeiro)

Odile - Brittany Snow - Alemanha (princesa)

Olivia - Katie Cassidy - Holanda (duquesa)

Leonardo - Tom Ellis - Itália (príncipe)

Aisha - Priyanka Chopra - Índia (rainha)

Agnes - Scarlett Johanson - Finlândia (conselheira)

Freya - Taissa Farmiga - Noruega (princesa)

Margot - Emily Blunt - Austrália (rainha)

Antonio - Oscar Isaac - Guatemala (rei)

Lorena - Skyler Samuels - Holanda (princesa)

Mary - Kate Siegel - País de Gales (rainha)

Peter - Chris Hemsworth - Austrália (duque)

Lori - Tiera Skobvye - Ucrânia (Princesa)

Livya - Christina Aguilera - Bielorrúsia - Princesa

Gustav - Paul Rudd - Suécia - Duque

Halldór - Tom Hardy - Islândia - Duque

Kisa - Liv Tyler - Suécia - Herdeira

Lisandra - Jessica Brown Findlay - Portugal - Princesa

Damon - Chace Crawford - Andorra - Príncipe

Nadia - Lily Rabe - Noruega - Rainha

Alexander - Evan Peters - Finlândia - Herdeiro

Rosalie - Adelaide Kane - Georgia - Princesa

Gaspard - Colton Haynes - França - Príncipe 

Charles - Sam Clafin - Suíça - Príncipe

Emily - Phoebe Tonkin - Romênia - Princesa

Mavi - Britt Robertson - Estônia - Herdeira

Zafyr - Berk Cankat - Império Otomano

Lisya -  Meryem Uzerli   - Império Otomano - Dama de companhia

Areen - Anatasia Tsilimpiou - Império Otomano - Dama de companhia

Kareena - Gülcan Arslan - Império Otomano - Sultana  

Hatice - Selma Ergec - Império Otomano - Sultana  

Alana - Riley Keough - Eslovênia - Princesa

Xavier - Froy Gutierrez - Ucrânia - Príncipe 

Elise - Lena Headey - Eslováquia - Rainha

Peter - Hunter Parrish - Eslováquia - Príncipe 

Dante - Grant Gustin - Romênia - Príncipe

George - Kit Harington - Inglaterra - Duque

Nyeong - Charles Melton - Coréia do sul - Herdeiro