TPOCT Round 5.2

She couldn’t run any more. Fire in her lungs, blood and adrenaline singing through her veins, legs buckling under overexertion, and the treacherous thought winding up from the depths of her mind to choke out all else: What’s the point?

But Lee walked on, driven by nothing but for the insistence of the Sundog and Aras. Chaos’s tendrils followed, swallowing everything behind them in a dark writhing mass, relentless but never quite reaching them.

She came to a stop, again, and Aras tugged on her arm, again. This time she rounded on him. “Give it a rest,” she snapped. “Just… stop. Besides, Chaos will take his time. That’s how he is. He wants to savor his revenge.”

Pulling up the collar of her shirt, she wiped the sweat off her brow. “I’m out of ideas. Done.”

The Sundog whined and nudged her in the back. She put one foot in front of the other, nearly tripping over herself in the process but gaining just enough momentum to stumble forward a few more steps.

“You brought us into existence, Lee, and you’re telling me you can’t think of anything?” Aras’s eyes darted back towards the Chaos goo stuff to check its progress, but Lee knew she was right. Every time, they would just outrun it, only for it to close the distance between them before they could fully recover.

“I didn’t ‘bring you into existence,’ I barfed out some dumb ideas onto paper and the Publisher—Chaos—whatever—did the actual existence part.”

Aras closed his eyes and drew in a deep breath. “Let’s keep moving.”

Lee checked her phone. No signal. No Ivy, either. They’d lost contact with her a few hours ago. A technopath without access to technology. If she weren’t already swamped by a sense of impending doom, Lee would’ve taken that to be a bad sign. The tight knot in her stomach wrenched a little more. What had happened to her?

The Sundog came to attention, ears pricked towards the upcoming corner. Aras reached for his gun. Lee sighed.

A tiny brown blur took the turn at top speed, scrabbling for purchase on the tile. “Lee!” it said in a familiar voice. “I thought I heard your voice!” It stopped at their feet and squinted. “Oh my god. Aras? Sundog?”

Wagging its tail tentatively, the Sundog lowered its head to sniff at the thing. The creature literally squeaked in delight. Aras and Lee also leaned down to examine it.

“Oh my god,” said Lee. “Ireny? You’re a weasel? Why—is that a tiny suit?”

“Yeah, my watch broke and I’m kind of stuck.” Ireny waved her paws in the air. “Though it doesn’t hold a candle to whatever the hell is up with your watch?”

“I’ll explain, but,” Lee gestured at the Chaos-stuff steadily overtaking the corridor, “we can’t exactly sit down and chat.”

Ireny and the Sundog bumped noses. Some unspoken agreement passed between the two, and Ireny sprang up onto the dog’s head, paws easily finding purchase in the fur. “Who’ssagoodpuppy?” she cooed, nestling behind the Sundog’s ear as they walked into the depths of the Facility.

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“Chaos? Are you sure? What a ████ing douchebag. Oh, and nice to meet you,” Ireny said to Aras. “I’d shake your hand, but as you can see…” She shrugged, then began grooming her paws.

Aras inclined his head. “Likewise.” He was taking this ‘my friend is a talking weasel’ thing with surprising aplomb. Given what they’d been through so far, maybe nothing seemed terribly surprising any more. Unasked questions still lingered in the air, but he seemed to have abandoned them for more immediate concerns.

Lee’s rundown of events had been punctuated by indignant squeaking noises. Ireny scrambled up and down the Sundog’s back as she related her own rounds, and Lee had to wonder: how much of Ireny’s brain had the weasel taken over? She had never seen Ireny so animated before, all rapid gestures and bristling energy. Bouncing was not part of her friend’s normal body language, nor was chittering part of her vocabulary. Her disbelief at the existence of Lee’s characters had been unusually short-lived as well, though whether that was due to Lee’s inability to read weasel facial expressions or to Ireny’s increasingly mustelid-sized attention span was up for debate.

Still, Ireny managed to get her story across without bursting at the seams. “I’m not going to risk destroying my watch right now. Don’t want to be stuck as a weasel forever, as cute as it is.”

“And I don’t know what’ll happen to all of us if I break mine,” Lee added. “But while we try to figure that out, we’ve got to warn Scarlette and Jay—well, we’ve got to find Jay first, and then warn her.”

The Chaos tendrils drove them on. Finding Ireny gave her a second wind. They’d always made a good team; maybe, just maybe, they could figure something out together that Lee couldn’t on her own.

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They met Ivy the next floor up. Ireny squeaked a greeting as the Sundog barked its own. The knot in Lee’s gut untwisted a bit as she let out an explosive sigh.

Aras didn’t say a word, just ran up to Ivy and embraced her. She hugged him back tightly.

Ireny uncurled herself from atop the Sundog’s head and stood up on her hind legs, whiskers twitching. “Wait, have they always been this close?” she asked Lee in a low voice.

“No. It just… sort of happened. I don’t think I’m in control of their story any more. Haven’t been for a while,” Lee said. She waved at Ivy. “Tell me some good news.”

Ivy looked up, and Lee’s relief dissipated when she saw that the light had gone out of the hacker’s eyes. She looked as worn as they all felt.

“I don’t know what to tell you, Lee. It was all just a setup. The Publisher—Chaos—wanted me to think I was a step ahead, but he was just using us to experiment with the portals. He’s cut me off completely.” Ivy ran her fingers through her hair. “I was so close to figuring out how to get us home.”

“What? You mean he was playing us all along?” Lee ground her teeth, then turned around and flipped off the creeping black mass behind them.

“If it’s not only about stealing characters,” Ireny said, kneading the Sundog’s head with both paws, “what the ████’s the point of all this? The tournament, the watches? Everything?”

Ivy gaped at Ireny for a moment, but her brain must have decided it was too tired to deal with the fact that a weasel was talking to her. So she continued, as if having conversations with small woodland creatures were an everyday occurrence:

“The Facility is its own pocket dimension, right? It’s located between your world and the worlds you’ve created. The Publisher could bring people from your world into the Facility, and with the creators as vessels, he could bring people from the other worlds in too.

“He tried to bring characters into the Facility without the watches, but he needed several tries to perfect the process. Nool was incomplete because he was one of the first attempts. And then we showed Chaos how to do it, and he’s loose in the Facility now. But that can’t be his ultimate goal. He’s still searching for something.”

“████,” said Ireny. Four sets of eyes turned to her. “He’s trying to get into other worlds.”

“████,” echoed Lee, and suddenly it felt like all her internal organs planned to vacate her body via her nose. “Just like in TBOS. We don’t have half the firepower we had for that one, and it wasn’t as if our own world was at stake—”

“Chaos is your creation, isn’t he?” Ivy looked from Lee to Ireny, imploring. “Shouldn’t you know how to stop him?”

“You guys’re putting an awful lot of faith in me,” Lee muttered, as Ireny said, “Yes and no? We sort of borrowed him from someone else and expanded on him. We weren’t the only ones, either. There were a lot of versions of Chaos floating around back then. And it’s not like we can just kill him off for plot reasons.”

“We don’t need to kill him.” Aras cast another glance down the corridor. “We just need to stop him. Trap him here.”

Ireny tapped her chin with a paw, looking as thoughtful as a mustelid could manage. “I think our best bet is to try and find a main control room. Leafy pinpointed a signal coming from the roof. We should go there.”

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The rumbling started in the walls.

By the time they reached top floor, it had worked its way up their feet and into their bones; deep, rhythmic reverbs that pounded through their skulls like laughter. Chaos-stuff oozed out of the walls and the ceiling, merging and convoluting until it barely resembled a face.

You’re so close, the black mass jeered. You might have even begun to see a faint glimmer of hope.

Lee pressed her hands over her ears, as if that would be any use. Chaos’s voice clung on to her brain, and it took every bit of concentration to stay on her feet.

It wouldn’t have been much of a story if I’d shown up right away, would it now? Your friend—Jay, was it? She saw it too, before I swallowed her characters.

The blood seemed to rush out of Lee’s head. “Why the ████ would you—she didn’t have anything to do with you!”

Call it dramatic irony, if you will. Chase a dream, only to forget what brought you here in the first place. Fight in my tournament for the promise of fame, only to become a part of me when you lose. Forgotten.

Ireny bared her teeth. “Any chance you’ll forget I was ever a weasel and turn me back to normal?”

Chaos’s mouth twisted into a smirk. Quite the predicament, isn’t it? I haven’t even gotten to the best one: lock me up, only to later provide to me the means to free myself.

Go on. Make your last stand. It’s what protagonists do, isn’t it? He spat the word out like a poison.

“Shut the ████ up,” Lee growled. In her peripheral vision she saw Ivy powering up her glove. She heard Ireny’s squeaked protests as the Sundog plucked her off its back and gently deposited her on the ground.

Aras drew his gun. “We’ll hold him off for as long as we can. You need to get to that main control room.”

“You’re not serious.” Lee stared. “No wait, you’re serious? Don’t be stupid. He’s just trying to bait us.”

“Don’t you think we know that?” Ivy shot back. “We can’t just let him destroy our world and everyone in it.” She broke eye contact and said, softer, “And what happens to Keis if Chaos gets his hands on you?”

“Yeah, and I don’t think ‘letting a Lovecraftian horror loose upon New Jersey’ would look good on our resumes. Even if I’d call it an improvement.” Ireny tried to grin, though her carnivore teeth made it look more creepy than anything. “Look, I know it’s probably a dumb idea, but our chances get worse the longer we wait.”

It made sense. It really did, even as her thoughts flew by a mile a minute. That didn’t stop Lee’s gut from telling her that it was a terrible idea, and that they needed more time to come up with a better plan, but in the limited time they had Lee knew they didn’t have any other options.

“Fine. Fine!” She held out a hand to Ireny, who scampered up her arm without hesitation. “Let’s go save the world or whatever the hell we’re doing.”

Aras smiled for the first time since he’d stepped out of her mind into the physical world, a quirk of the lips tinged with wry humor. Last stands weren’t generally included in his modus operandi, and he knew Lee was perfectly aware of this fact. But all he said was, “Good luck.”

To Lee, it felt like one of those moments where she was supposed to impart some profound parting words. Writer to character. Words to inspire and remember. She gave them a final look over, trying to commit every last detail to memory. From Lee’s shoulder, Ireny gave a tiny salute.

Nothing came to mind. So instead, Lee gave the Sundog a farewell pat on the head and said, “Sic ‘em.”

Lee clenched her teeth, turned, and ran.