2.3 Subject 8-92

"Finley Archer!" Timmothy greets the woman who occasionally goes on dates with him but isn't his girlfriend. "The reporter who reports on sexiness!"

She frowns at his uniform. "I'm here to interview you."

"Well of course. Like I said, you're the reporter who reports on—"

"You were a chore to find," she cuts him off. "You weren't answering your phone."

"A good friend of mine, also named Timmothy, may or may not have gotten wasted and lost my phone. It's a common mistake, though. I don't think being wasted is necessarily required for such an accident to occur. Naturally. In nature. Anyway! The gym seems like the place to be, lately." He lowers his voice, "Keeps my mind off how I'm no longer allowed to show up for work half-wasted."

Finley rolls her eyes. "Poor thing. You're so mistreated."

They move inside the gym for the interview Finley is supposed to conduct.

With the Bridgeport Crisis still happening, all of the latrine cleaners and mess hall servers were 'offered' promotions. They're being prepped for potential deployment. Timmothy feigns happiness about his new salary, and about what stricter training has done to his muscles, but when he's alone he reflects on all the bad decisions he's made that led up to this. If he'd taken school and a career more seriously, like his parents wanted, his father would have secured his future in the management track of some company, and he would not be in the military. 

Liam O'Dourke is new money with a large fortune amassed from the tech industry, but because Timmothy is just such a disappointment for a son, he's been cut off, and not even literal war has changed this.

Some of the new recruits have had political opinions to share with Finley, but Timmothy does not. He keeps an optimistic smile plastered on his face and tries to look for a silver lining in all situations.

"You aren't even a little scared?" Finley asks, once she's put the pen and paper away.

"No," Timmothy replies.

 Fear is for people who have something they care about losing, he thinks.

The increased substance abuse indicates he is scared, she thinks.

The gym's second floor has a good view, and they find themselves hanging out there. Finley tells Timmothy about how the stars vanish into a haze, drowned out by light pollution the closer one gets to Bridgeport. She describes the city to him, and he listens. Her short tale is followed by a lengthy silence. He breaks it, deliberately and awkwardly, pointing out some constellations, explaining how he knows what to look for, based on their geographical location and the time of year.

"I didn't realize astronomy was a hobby of yours," is all Finley can think to say.

Timmothy scratches the back of his head. "My Dad was really into this stuff."

"He was really into all things science," Timmothy elaborates. "Spent a lot of time theorizing about life on other planets. My mom liked to take me and my brother out camping, and she'd have us hiking and fishing until these stars came out and we'd just want to go to sleep, then Dad would lay there on his sleeping bag and start talking about the stars. He... uh... he was a total dork. He embraced the name."

"That's cute." Finley smirks at a memory of her own. "Reisa didn't want to be Reisa O'Dourke."

"So now she's Reisa Chesterfield! Good for her. I don't think my brother found anyone new yet. But... I wouldn't know. I'm not exactly welcome at family gatherings."

"That's... sad. I don't think I could keep smiling like you do, if my family abandoned me."

"I must have deserved it. They set the lines. I crossed them. They set more lines! I jumped over them. They yelled. I ignored them. They cried. I said I didn't care. What's a parent to do?"

"You don't seem so bad, Timmothy."

"Thanks, Fin. You don't have to do that." Timmothy stretches. "I deserved everything I got. Besides. I'm working for reals now... I'm getting clean... maybe by the time I'm back from this Bridgeport thing, the folks'll have forgiven me."

"Aw.."

"Until then I'll keep my distance, in case I get blown up. KA-POW."

"Don't say that." Finley laughs nervously. "That's terrible."

"I've always been terrible. Do you remember how many of my dad's cars I totaled when we were in high school?"

"Not really..."

"A fortune of them."

"Okay, mister riches to rags. I think the fighting will have stopped by the time you're ready to be sent anywhere."

They part ways with a kiss. He holds her close against him. Close enough that they can feel the shape of each other's bodies, through her layers of clothing.

"When do you get a day off?" Finley murmurs.

Finley arrives home to find her brother still awake, leafing through a tome she hasn't seen before.

"What is that disgusting nervous butterflyish-in-stomachish feeling you have?" he greets her.

"It's nothing." Her pale skin blushes so darkly, it looks painful. "What are you looking for?"

He's turning through the pages after only a glance at each one, so there's no use denying he's searching for something particular. "Stuff about dreams."

She frowns. Odd dreams. Sleeplessness. "You're not looking so well..."

"I'm having recurrent nightmares about people I've never seen before. I was wondering if there could be some significance to it."

"Mom said our father didn't sleep. So I don't think he'll have much to say about dreaming."

"He probably slept like any man before he was cursed," Junpei points out. "Anyway it doesn't hurt to try. I already dug out everything our mother still has of her grandfather's. The one who had precognitive dreams? Acheron Archer? He kept a lot of journals about those dreams, when he was still having them. He was trying to make sense of the experience. So I did go somewhere practical first."

"And? You didn't find anything useful?" 

Acheron Archer's psychic ability was too much for him to deal with, and he chose to block any extra sensory perception away from himself when he was only a teen. Finley cannot imagine this being a good solution for Junpei, if he intends to keep practicing with magic.

"He used meditative techniques to guide his visions, and to have more awareness of the dreams while he was in them. It got to a point where he had a sort of free will inside the visions." Junpei, by contrast, is rarely even part of his nightmares. It's more like being an observer. An observer who knows things he shouldn't, couldn't know. "I'll have to try that."

Finley sits down with her brother and puts an arm around him, intentionally annoying. "Why do I get the feeling there's something you're not telling me?"

He's not telling her he thinks the vampire woman who threatened them in Bridgeport induced these nightmares. He doesn't want Finley to get scared. "We don't have to tell each other everything."

"At least tell me what these recurring dream characters are getting up to?"

"People are hurt in the dreams," Junpei says simply.

"I had a dream about the fairy again," a little girl's voice says.

"You linger too much on the past," a man's voice replies. "That's my job."

"And my job is the future..." she replies, mocking, parroting words spoken to her before. 

"It is. Precognition is a rare ability. Even rarer to occur in someone who will have such a long lifespan to master it. You could be the answer to how I fight fate."

"Well if you can fight it... it's not fate, is it?"

"You wouldn't understand."

"I hate when grown-ups say that! I could understand if you explained it."

"Understanding is a curse much worse than vampirism, girl."

"You know someday, when I'm mature, the sunlight will burn me to death."

"I know."

"Do those big ears help you hear better?"

"Sometimes."

"Are you listening for something now? In the sand?"

 "Yes."

"What are you listening for?" 

"Shh. I can't hear her if you're talking."

"Thought you could just walk in here? This is my place! Mine! I wanttobe leftalone!" The woman assumes a fighting stance. Every fluid motion she makes brings forth a response from the environment around her. Greenery sprouts from what seemed like lifeless sand. 

 


"Leh... Le... it's me... stop... please..." The dryad's impaled victim doesn't bleed from the site of the puncture, though begins to vomit up dark red.

"You bleed funny." The other woman backs away and begins to laugh. The noise is strained and sick. "You can't really be her. Here. In daylight. Hunting your own kin. Can you? Can you?!"

Death by bamboo!

Freakish enough to jolt Junpei awake.

The woman he saw kill Chet lacked the green skin, but she was a dryad hybrid, like Accalia. He's certain of it.

Finley prefers the open space of the kitchen, when she plays with magic. Her cramped bedroom just won't do if something catches fire.

"Such interesting things you and your brother get into, when you think I'm not looking," Mab interrupts. 

"M-Mom!" Finley jumps. "I didn't think you were up! I... um. I."

"Don't point that thing anywhere near me. Where did you get it? From Accalia?"

Finley lowers her head. "Not exactly..."

Finley is a big girl now, she's decided, and it's time to stop sneaking around, practicing witchcraft behind her mother's back. And the first step to coming clean is claiming she and Junpei did this for self-defense. Surely her mother can't object to self-defense.

"You're not angry?" Finley smiles hopefully, once she's finished explaining. Her mother predictably cringed at mentions of Masterson's castle, and of the murderous fairy, but hasn't said a word to criticize.

"Being angry wouldn't do me much good," she says. "So I'll just say I'm worried."

"Momma... you don't need to be worried."

"The path you've chosen sounds lonely and dangerous." She pauses. "You have me, and you have Junpei. Hopefully it will be enough, because the rest of the world..."

"...isn't going to be as accepting," Finley finishes for her. "But they accepted you."

Headache.

Junpei can't even have the release of being unconscious. The memories or visions or whatever that aren't his won't leave him alone. His mind cannot properly rest.

What is the point? Why is this happening? As soon as he realizes he's dreaming, or sees something startling enough, he wakes up again. At this stage of sleep deprivation, the world shifts between sharp-edged and blurry, every noise seems amplified, and inanimate objects begin to look menacing.

The fairy flits down the corridors, evading both white-coats and black-coats.  

In his 'true form' he's tiny, smaller than a golf ball. From a distance, he's a little purple light.

POP!

"Snapdragon," he greets the female fairy. "What are you doing here?"

Their faces almost touch. They don't have the same rules about personal space as their human captors.

"They often call me here to give my opinion on curiosities they've caught," Snapdragon replies, regarding him skeptically. "Such is not the case for you, love. What are you doing here?"

"Checking on you. It's not healthy to stay near the laboratory specimens. It'll make you sad." He glances left and right, always disturbed by the stark whiteness of this facility. "Can you come home, soon?"

"Are we calling our cell home now, Larkspur?"

"Don't be difficult. It's late. Our daughter wishes to see you." His wings twitch rapidly, causing a faint humming noise. "You're worrying me."

Snapdragon smiles at his concern, but her eyes are sad. "Take a look at the child behind the glass."

Larkspur glances at the unconscious girl. The 'glass', not really glass but some special polymer, is two inches thick; its center is filled with small empty gaps, air bubbles arranged in designs, symbols that form a hex and block all energy, all senses except sight. Larkspur's magic cannot get through it. "Glowing skin," he observes. "Mark on her neck. She is a vampire." He turns his attention back to Snapdragon. "Can we leave now?"

"It doesn't strike you as odd? That they would be holding a vampire child here?"

"Not at all. The humans may be testing a new cure. Can we leave now?"

"You may. You should."

Larkspur chirps, an exasperated noise. "Fine."

He turns sharply to look at the girl again. "Fine, fine, fine. You win. What troubles you about this vampire?"

Snapdragon drifts closer to her mate and nuzzles his neck. "She survived that mistake with the reanimated mummy release." Mistake. Right. "They brought her in to have a look at her. Under certain conditions, her telepathic abilities exceed what we know about vampires' limitations. They believe she's approaching precognition."

"Precognition? From telepathy?"

"Consider the metaphor that the mind is as a machine. It follows its programming. Reacts to stimuli. If one could see all of the moving parts in a mind, one could make a predictive model based on it."

"The model would fall apart as soon as a variable outside of the control environment interacts with the subject. Not only would one have to have knowledge of every mind, one would have to have knowledge of all things in the universe."

"Recall that elves could do this unconsciously," she says. "Commune with the universe itself."

Larkspur opens his mouth to say something critical about the elves, but then closes it without speaking. Once there might've been a point to being angry with them. That point is long gone in a vanishingly remote past.

"I did not tell anyone this..." Snapdragon smiles faintly. "But I think she's one of them."

"What?" Larkspur is startled out of his thoughts. "You mean... a hybrid elf? Why would an elf mate with a vampire? That makes no sense. Is that even possible?"

"It does seem strange. But when I was in the sealed room with her, I could sense the energy inside her."

"But a hybrid? I didn't think they allowed that."

"It has been so long since anyone has seen one. Perhaps they turned to hybridism to save their kind."

He blinks a few times, innocently puzzled. "But she's... a vampire."

"Can we only be one thing? Are they the number they assigned you, or are you also my Larkspur?"

Larkspur stares harder at the child in the room. Is she sedated, Junpei wonders, or sleeping?

Junpei knows things he didn't know before. Things these fairies know. In a distant past, humans called these creatures 'the fair folk'... not because they were thought beautiful or equitable, but because speaking of them in an insensitive way could incite unimaginable wrath. Now they call Larkspur by a string of numbers, have found ways to take away his magic when they want to, and only allow him to live as an instrument to help them protect their interests, to help protect this fragile human civilization they've crafted against any paranormal threats that may arise. The humans say he is by nature careless and immoral, too dangerous to be allowed to live free, as he and Snapdragon did for a long time before they were captured and told these things.

"I'm sorry," Snapdragon says softly. "I have upset you."

"I've no opinion on what they do with this vampire," he says, as he hugs her from behind and traces three delicate fingers along the edge of her jaw.

The easiest thing to do would be to go now, back to the place they rest at night, before someone grows suspicious of them roaming this facility. The fairies are playful; it isn't strange for something to catch their eye and delay them, but eventually someone always comes to tell them where they are supposed to be. Snapdragon concealed the truth about the vampire child, told them she could sense nothing amiss with her, that their theories were incorrect. It's possible her deception will go undiscovered. It's also possible it won't... 

"I don't want the humans to have this child," she says finally.

"They would put a precog to a lot of use," Larkspur says grimly. "But what can you do? What can any of us do?"

"She's the only one of her kind we have come across in centuries."

"So?" Larkspur sighs, making an exaggerated show of doing so. "She is small. That means they have a breeding population, no? Good for them."

"A wiser fae once told me each species is integral to this world's function."

"For all we know, there are thousands more like this one."

Snapdragon shakes her head. "To lose even one species would be to lose their magic, to lose one piece of what is ultimately a whole. I don't know what the humans will do to this girl. She is not dangerous now, but when they're done with her... she could be. I cannot let this happen. This is the single greatest threat we've assessed, do you understand me?"

"You cannot be serious. They had us try to contain a djinn."

"The elderfae and the djinn both feared what the elves could become and once worked together to lay waste to the elven cities. The humans only flourish in the absence of order our parents created."

"I don't want to talk about our elders. We never understood them and we never will."

"You are deliberately missing the point, love..."

"Plenty of species are no longer here, Spapdragon. Extinction and entropy are the way of the mortal realm. Perhaps if we are lucky, we will still be here once it is gone."

Snapdragon jabs a finger at his shoulder. Her wings are a flurry, carrying her up a few inches off the ground. "How are you so complacent with what's become of us?! They use us against our own kind, asking us to choose treachery or death, and you... you act as though this is a game!"

Larkspur's wings unconsciously move him backwards. He tries to tell her with his wounded expression alone how unfair her accusation is.

She takes a deep breath, willing her anger to fall away. "Go... 'home'... Larkspur. I don't want them to think you had a hand in this."

"I will not," he says.

"You know I have to help this child escape..." Snapdragon whines. "I made a promise."

"I know you have a foolish idea." An idea she won't be swayed from, no matter how hard he tries to reason with her. "But you don't have a plan. I will fix this for you."

She shrinks back. "You would... help me?" 

She regrets yelling at him now, pushing him to this. If they're caught...

"You are my Snapdragon. I would always help you." 

Larkspur smiles with an almost wicked glee as he searches for something.

Like everything else Larkspur has displaced, the disc appears in a puff of lilac-colored dust, which he brushes off. "You will be impressed with this one."

Snapdragon cranes her neck to get a better look at the device.

"They had someone trying to make a time machine. I stole this prototype!"

"Time... machine?" Snapdragon tests the words on her tongue, but she can't guess what they mean.

"I replaced the original with a look-alike that didn't work. You see, this small thing can move a person forward in time. This dial tells it how far. The scientist was hoping to make a person go backwards, eventually, I think."

"Back...wards?"

"Yes. But that's impossible, wouldn't you think? They have a concept, called a timeline. Everything that happens is recorded on it, and still happening, somewhere else, somewhere we can't see... it's... hard to explain. But it's only an idea, it doesn't really exist. 'Time' doesn't exist, as a physical thing. At least not so far as I can tell. Traveling back in time would mean rearranging all things in the universe, and putting them back together in a way identical to a way they were before. Even if you had something to tell you how things were before, where would you find the kind of power to change everything?"

"Both problems do seem insurmountable."

"But I have this, and it goes forward." He indicates a button on the disc's side. "If I touched this, I'd disappear, and show up again at the time set."

Snapdragon stares at it. "Where would you be when you're disappeared?"

"Of that, I'm not sure." He explains he used it before, set to a few hours, and the 'trip' seemed instantaneous. He didn't lose consciousness. So he's going to call it a successful test. And he was pretty sure it would work; the scientist was very excited to show the device off. The scientist had finally perfected a force-field to prevent damage to the time traveler. Apparently an early version of it had test animals phased back into the existence right into other objects, and that had killed them.

"You must have gotten this scientist in a lot of trouble," Snapdragon considers the scientist and their hard work, ruined by a bit of fairy mischief.

"Yes. I made it seem her test was a failure, and altered her research so it won't be reproduced."

"You are lucky, they didn't figure out what you did."

"Luck had nothing to do with it."

"Larkspur..." she murmurs, hesitating. "Why didn't you use this to try to free yourself?"

"It only takes one person..."

"You would remain enslaved, for me?"

"Would you have left me behind?"

Her expression wilts. "No... never."

"Then why do you ask?"

"I'd only... always hoped you'd take a way out, should one arise."

"Not without you. Not ever."

"I'd be dumb to not know who the little girl is," Junpei says to himself. "And I remember the yellow fairy. But why am I seeing this?"

"Careful not to break the fourth wall TOO much," a sleepy-sounding voice warns. "It'll get unstable."

Junpei watches the voice's owner float by. "Fourth wall?"

"You might collapse the dream. You'll wake up, if you can't go with the flow."

"You're the first person in this place who seems to know I'm even here. Who are you?"

"You called me here... I guess I'm whatever you called me."

"You're Acheron?" Junpei identifies him. It wasn't too difficult; Junpei has seen pictures. "Did I bring your spirit here? Or is this just... me dreaming?"

"Would you have reason to trust my answer, if I gave you one?"

"Good point." Junpei almost laughs at the absurdity. "I wouldn't."

Acheron gives his descendant a hard stare. Shy and guilt-ridden in life, death has stripped him of any reason to be either of those things. "Junpei, right? Son of my granddaughter."

"That's right. Maybe you saw me in a precognitive dream? Now I see you in my nightmare. Funny how that works out." Junpei looks back to the fairies. They're motionless. A stopped film. "Did you do that?"

"You did that."

"Cool. How do I just make it stop so I can get some rest?"

"Who really knows?"

"You're a lot of help."

Acheron doesn't seem offended. He stops swimming around. His feet find the floor. "This is happening because you've been given several people's lifetimes of information to process. Chet is an older, more powerful and more experienced telepath than you will ever live to be. She knows very well what madness results when someone gets lifetimes of information all at once with no filter. She was smart enough to psychic in a few blockers for you. You're being drip-fed the plot, Junpei. You're sorting through it unconsciously and the important details are trying to present themselves to you in a way you might comprehend. A way that is calculated by you and unique to you. Chet wants you to do something for her, you see, but you won't do it unless you see things from her perspective. That's all this is. You can fight it, or you can hear her out."

Junpei isn't sure if Acheron is touching his mind, or if Acheron is just a part of his mind. "I don't think anyone could blame me for assuming Chet is not prioritizing my best interests, since she was willing to risk harming my brain by shoving all this information into it."

"Mm-hm."

"It would make sense to try to shut this down."

"It would."

"But I can't help but feel she has her reasons. Maybe those reasons are more important than my comfort and safety."

"I'm sure they are, to her. No one goes through this much trouble with no reason."

"I think I should hear her out."

"Because you are curious, or because you believe that's the morally correct choice?"

Junpei is stumped by that one, because both are true. "I don't know. Can you help me?"

"Perhaps."

"What do I do?"

"Search for an ending."

"I've been trying!"

"Explore every angle."

"How?"

"Well... it's your dream, Junpei."

"It's Chet's dream. She put this in my head."

Acheron frowns sympathetically. "I wish I could help you get over that mental hurdle."

Acheron tries to show Junpei how to read further into the people populating his dream. "You already know how to do this," Acheron insists. "You've been doing this the whole time."

"Or Chet was," Junpei protests. "She's the one who put these fairies' memories in my brain to explore in the first place. But at the same time, Chet is unconscious, and sealed in that room. How could she know about what the fairies are saying outside of it?"

"These two are called Larkspur and Snapdragon because that's what they swear they were before their parents gave them life," Acheron announces, demonstrating technique, reaching into the core of their minds and bringing up the stream of experiences that led to this moment. 

 "You mean they're actually flowers?"

"They're fae."

"Okay. I don't care about fae reproduction..."

"What the fae mean to each other was the catalyst for all the suffering in this world. But you aren't ready for that story."

Snapdragon steels herself for her next actions. "I will awaken the girl, and give this to her. I want you to get out of here. Out of sight. There's no point in us both risking punishment."

"Then don't mess this up! And it'll be fine."

"I wish I could trust things to be fine."

Larkspur tried to back away from Snapdragon's hypnosis, but he wasn't quick enough. She hasn't done this in so long, he'd almost forgotten she possessed this frightening ability.

"Forget you took the little machine," she instructs. "You looked for me here, but you didn't find me, so you went to search elsewhere. You don't know anything about a missing vampire child. You never saw her."

What's happening now is probably for the best. Still, he stares into her eyes, resisting, on principle, for as long as he can.

With Larkspur gone to search for her elsewhere, Snapdragon enters the child's cell and weaves a spell to wake her. The foul-smelling purple fumes Snapdragon creates force the effects of sedatives out of the girl's small body.

When Chet wakes, she is terrified to see a green-skinned, winged woman looming over her.

She's given the time machine prototype. She's told to use it to escape this place, and not to ever, ever let anyone else get their hands on it. 

Chet is confused. Where is she supposed to go? Her family was slaughtered, then she was brought here.

Snapdragon brings Chet out into the hall and locks the door behind her. 

 

Chet clutches the object like a security blanket. She didn't cry for long.

 

She's quiet, now. Vampiric.

 

She presses her thumb over the button when Snapdragon asks her to.

One shot through time later... and very little has changed.

But Snapdragon is gone. The hallway is empty.

Snapdragon might've hoped going so far into the future would place Chet in a time where this facility is defunct. Such isn't the case. But, at least, no one will be looking for the escapee here.

There's someone else in the test room Chet occupied, technically hundreds of years ago, though as it seems to her, only moments ago.

There's something disastrously wrong with him. The marks creeping across his skin are a writhing, pulsing thing. Chet thinks of flames consuming a piece of paper. Then there's the issue of him bleeding, and those piercingly white balls of energy in place of his eyeballs...

A rational person might consider this man scarier than the fairy Chet was so frightened of, but she can tell he is in pain, and trapped. Trapped in the same cage she was trapped in. "Hello? Can you see me?"

Sound doesn't penetrate these panels.

She bangs her hands against the glass.

There's just enough vibration that his expression twitches, and his eyelids widen, and she assumes he's looking at her, though she can't tell where his pupils might be, so it's impossible to know.

Her attention drifts to the other objects in the room. Some are fine. Others are caught in a defiance of gravity, elegantly weightless. Some of the blood from the floor rises, in tiny droplets.

"You are a lava lamp," she says.

The man gets to his feet.

"I'll get you out!" Chet promises. She feels the fear creep back into her voice. Maybe this person is contained for a reason. But her own experiences cause her to push away those concerns. Their captors did cruel things to her, and they must've also done cruel things to this person.

The door opens from the outside. Snapdragon knew how to get in without tripping the alarm system, Chet has no such knowledge.

The alarms sound. The lights in the hallway change to a glaring red. The captive man slips out of the test room just in time to see a bunch of armed security people rushing towards him.

"Hello," he greets them. His expression is... technically a smile.

The one in front makes demands. "Step back into your unit, Riko. It's for your own safety."

"I'm not interested in my own safety." Riko watches cracks form on their armor, and on the walls. 
 
"Confirmed!" a woman hisses into her communications device. Her helmet's visor scans Chet like a big laser pointer. "I'm not reading a tag on the girl. We're engaging subject 8-92." Her helmet splits in two, and falls off, leaving nothing to cover her terrified face. "Requesting lethal force authorization!"

The confrontation ends badly.

Chet has seen death before. She watched her family suffer. This is different. The spilling of human blood arouses some unwanted extra feeling within her: an excitement, buried somewhere beneath the terror of the carnage she's witnessing. She cannot look away.

The threat is gone, for the moment, and the man they called Riko squats down and watches the child, as she sinks to her hands and knees, into one of the growing pools of blood. Riko could have gotten out of here without hurting anyone, but this didn't occur to him until now. Contempt overrode any common sense. He wills himself not to look, when the bodies turn ghostly and the reaper appears for the souls of the dead. The little girl doesn't seem interested in Grim either. 

"Well," Riko says. "You're hungry, aren't you?"

She doesn't answer him. The smell of blood is thick in the air, intoxicating. Slowly, she lifts her hands from the tile floor and licks her reddened palms clean...

Junpei's thrashing around in the physical world provides an exit from the nightmare, when his foot cracks painfully against the wall. Having picked up on his distress, Finley is already in the room.

"Are you going to tell me what's up?" she complains.

Junpei manages to give her one unamused look, for the invasion, then can't hold back any longer and turns away to vomit over the side of the bed.

Finley recoils, backing towards the door. "What? Blood?!" Junpei isn't bleeding, but he's focused on the word. The last images from the nightmare seep into Finley's brain.

"I could... taste it..." Junpei rasps.

Finley's expression melts into pity. "I'll... I'll get you some water..." She rushes to the kitchen before he can protest.




__________________________________________
Etc.: So the hockey puck... was... a time machine???

Larkspur + Snapdragon = Foxglove???

Acheron doesn't seem like the Acheron we knew! Is he just a construction of Junpei's mind, or is something else going on here???