Anticipation was an interesting contradiction, if one asked Dr. Peridot Delapore, and if she were so inclined to wax poetic at a time when she felt so perilously waned. There could be no mistaking its status as the psychic, sinister enantiomer to caffeine's stirring stimulant, as both compounds, now percolating in her system, were such obvious bedfellows. Coffee was brewed for unanticipated days–days hardly deserving of their titles, where absolutely nothing would occur worth a noting on the calendar, yet it served to make one more expectant, more alert, and more paranoid–often for nothing. To anticipate was to expect something, yet to shiver with the stuff was to know not what to expect, or at least not when. To anticipate too much was to invite surprise, to tempt fate… and so had time become her enemy. With each agonizing second it drove the deltoid knife deeper in her heart and stuck her deeper to the office chair cushion. This was a wound whose stitch saved none, not nine: the dread, red thread of fate sutured successive moments in, until Peridot could no longer trust in her perception. Had it been a year, or just an hour? She hoped beyond hope that when all was said and done, she would be cured of her terrible affliction.

All was not yet said and done, however. Peridot had no idea what to expect, even as she went mad with expectation. Her fingers telegraphed nervous energy into the gray desktop; the side of a lacquered black stiletto tapped erratically against the chair's supporting cylinder. Her mug—at her right hand—was empty again, and would be only be refilled once she found the will to stir: the espresso machine was out of reach in a dim and distant corner. It had a few more shots in it, surely, before the chamber emptied—she would feel as hollowed-out, if the worst news came to pass.

But no news was no news; she perched precariously on the edge of the swivel chair, swallowed up by the darkness and the light of screens and terrible, unbearable anticipation. There was no hope of diverting enough of it to get any work done, even for someone of her diligence. Her work now was solely to wait, and because work was the sum total of her life, she was at present hardly alive. Until something external changed, the office was her tomb.

No news; it made just as much sense. How could there still be nothing? It had been hours since she gave the signal to Mungo Girima via secure backchannel, and hours more since she'd last slept. The last time she recalled getting any rest was in the backseat of her car in Boston, and she wouldn't allow herself another wink before learning of the operation's resolution, in which she anticipated—there was that ugly word again—that her enemy at ALMA would be killed or captured. This was at last the week wherein a decade would transpire—how was she supposed to sleep, when an hour's nap could contain well more than a day? The fact that in passing false-flag information to a violent extremist group, she'd condemned not only the facility but any souls within it to a ballistic death, was but a secondary concern. ALMA was understaffed; there were probably fewer than two dozen people in the building. If they were smart, they'd all surrender and be spared by the angry chuds playing tacticool based on her tip—well, almost all of them. Diana Shadrin was a surefire casualty—if not for complicity in the Frankenstein she'd built, then for proximity—but the background check Peridot performed post-order revealed she had little family and fewer friends. Her condemned's situation was not far from her own—a fact she put aside Someone would miss Diana, surely, and Peridot's complicity in that gnawed her moral heartstrings plenty, but she hoped, for her sake and the world's, that Mungo Girima's assault rifles would not. They couldn't afford; that their accuracy was outside her control bothered her far more than their precision.

To self-soothe, she turned her mind over to the certainties. Certainly something would change in the wake of the horror she'd unleashed. If nothing else, then at least ALMA would be shuttered. In effect, this operation was a terminating budget cut for the organization that'd already suffered a thousand little ones, and—

A dark revelation visited her, with no accompanying lightbulb: that was not the only certainty she knew of ALMA's budget. In her mad scramble to discover the extent to which her phone and the Agency at large were compromised, she hadn't considered the most mundane avenue of all: that of bureaucratic meeting notes.

A little inkling wriggled forth out of her memory: months before—at the same meeting where she'd requested the help of Argus Sharrow—there had been a request for additional funding for genetic research at ALMA. It passed without ceremony, she remembered. She did not remember who proposed it, or any further details—both details that seemed rather illuminating now.

Her hands flew to the keyboard, and then paused. Her phone was compromised. She'd seen it with her own eyes, after the dusty air of the Vegas room had scrubbed it of its antimemetic filters and laid everything bare. It had access to intra-Agency messaging and email, had been in communication with Diana Shadrin for weeks, and probably far worse; she'd barely restrained herself from digging deeper, instead sealing the powered-down device within her office's microwave—a makeshift Faraday cage—until digital forensics could take over. Even while it was captive to her enemy, however, her phone was incapable compared to the system now staring down at her from an array of screens. She couldn't conceive that her adversary slipped a budget increase into the meeting items from her phone—that wasn't possible. That level of access would require an Agency-secured computer, like the one humming before her, into which she'd almost just typed her search.

Nothing was to be trusted anymore. She couldn't safely look up details of that meeting, or anything else. More waiting, and Peridot was damn tired of waiting. Her fingers trembled over the keys as she glared up at the monitors.

"If you were ever in my system," she began, with all the acid she could muster for a foe which, if it was ever listening, always did so from behind glass, "Then you'll never be again. I hope they shot you in the head."

She stabbed the power button, chipping off a piece of olive manicure with the force of it. With no input, the screens flickered to a Stygian blue, then black, but as Peridot swiveled away, she swore they briefly flashed to pink—the same horridly bright pink she'd glimpsed in the eye of the thing in the photos Diana had emailed her, which she was wise enough not to give more than a glimpse without assistance. An absurd thought; whatever it was, it was, or would be, dead—no better than a figment of her imagination.

She still couldn't imagine what went wrong, though. On compulsion, she checked her secure phone again, staring at the brick held in the folds of her skirt over her lap. Still no news, but that device, at least, was clean. Of that she was sure: NatSA's mundanities divisions took operational security quite seriously, particularly whenever watchdogs involved themselves with potential extremist actors. Unbeknownst to Mungo Girima and their ilk, the Agency was well-practiced in infiltrating the upper echelons of cultish leadership by dangling synthetic information that the conspiratorially-minded couldn't possibly resist. Their secure group chats and message boards were all too easily charmed by a fellow stranger seeking 'truth'.

Often the "Q Source"—so it was named, after a pleonasm for the fusion of gospels—claimed to be a mole privy to the lowest levels of federal intrigue. In truth, it was headed by a team of Agency psychologists, whose modus operandi was to drip-feed myths and factoids calibrated to keep conspiracy circles complacent and confused. Truth titrated into lie was a more potent potion than either alone; like homeopathy but real, or like a barium swallow, it illuminated what was in their hearts and minds, what would next be on their hands, and what needed to be done to cloister them beneath the veil of ignorance. Who watched the watchers? Themselves, by watching those who watched them through their eyes.

There were frequent in-jokes that the Agency had no Antimemetics Division, or, if one took the antipodal point of view, that it was as critical as an immune system, protecting them all from epic disaster. Its T-cells, or CT-cells, contained terrorist ambitions not with violence, but with the fleece of disbelief, inoculating the public against dangerous ideas. Ignorance was a resource to be temperate about; NatSA didn't care much if the public knew of the Agency's existence—it was only natural that the natural law, so embattled, be defended, and it was hard to hide budgets and buildings, anyway, in an age of satellite. No, it was the methods of unmadness that had to remain secret, lest decades of trimming superstition be overcome and overgrown. Until magic was dead and buried in a fairy ring somewhere and civilization stood to inherit the green Earth made mundane, discovery could not be borne, or some escapist fool would try and resuscitate the old ways, setting them back decades. That led to bleaker, beaker humor—some of which Peridot herself shared in—that the culmination of their work would render them all obsolete. What purpose could lawkeeping serve once the laws became as axioms; what mission could a preacher proffer once the gospel's mordant bit into the very fabric of society? What sorrow was there, she argued, in such victory? If ever a manmade heaven was achieved, they'd be too content in their tautology to mourn such Pyrrhic losses.

In some aspects there was little humor, though, and one of them was the reverberations of interacting with the nodes in the hypnotic web the Agency had spun. Department heads—like Peridot and Sharrow—their immediate inferiors, and those with proper clearances, all had access to secure devices wired into the groups' communications as Q-Sources (or equivalent), in case of direst emergency. Though rare, that access had been utilized on rare occasions even as recently as the 'aughts and '90s: to combat an anomaly manifesting within subway tunnels, or to provoke a cowboy or cargo cult on the verge of some forbidden gnosis into controlled exposure, so that ordinary authorities could have cause to begin the dirty work of disbandment and arrest. The Agency had only a relatively small number of field agents or other enforcers, and so for larger incidents the "aid" of misinformed extremists was often welcome. But the the cost was high: in most cases, the group whose number was rung up to serve was "burned", either in trust or in truth, and could not in any likelihood be called upon again. Such calls were not made lightly, and never unilaterally—except in the most recent case, today.

Peridot would have to hope that the end would justify her exceptional means, and that her actions wouldn't be judged rash. The next messages that appeared on the black obelisk she held in sweaty palms were absolutely critical for that: Mungo Girima had the resources to penetrate ALMA's defenses, but not to be reborn from the harsh desert's womb—the local police and SWAT teams would abort their operation before they once more saw sunlight. She would receive the (likely last) words of their leader, a Polish-American bottle-blond named Nicholas Kohut, before the untimely departure of so many residents would render their digital watering hole unto a graveyard, whose stragglers that hadn't went to ALMA were to be picked off by the AD and their danger assessed case by case. Any minute now, she would receive them… any minute now, she'd finally stop going mad.

In the end, she received something, yet nothing, and her madness persisted. Just when she thought the tension might put her out of it, a confluence of events took place: she half-rose out of her chair to finally shoot herself a new espresso, just as three dots signifying someone typing flashed on the screen under her final query, all in time with a knock come at the door. She froze, then, and while crouched, ignored the knock: the screen's black mirror was broken up by the green of her request ("Q: status report?") and the sinister black bubble of white animated dots that were yet to resolve. She waited in mad anticipation.

And then the dots stopped and disappeared; no news. Then the knock came on the door again, more insistent this time, and she retook her place in the swivel chair, crossing her right leg over left and turning round to face the portal. A halo of light from the hallway outside screamed through the edges, except for the shadow of feet at the door's base. She cleared her throat and mustered up her best innocent, unbothered voice:

"Yes? Come in."

The door opened inwards, ninety degrees and more, to show the silhouette of Argus Sharrow: short for a man, with an unkempt mop of hair and bent, uneasy posture, making him resemble a crumbling pillar whose capital was ill-supported by its shaft. The unconfident appearance must have been a farce, though, or else he'd dispensed with it for this occasion, because the lack of any meaningful light from inside Peridot's office made his shadow all the more pure—and so, imposing. She shivered for a second at the sight, which almost made her shiver once more secondhand. Argus Sharrow had never before made her shiver in anticipation—grr, there was that word again! It was imperative she clear the air of it.

"Argus," she began warmly, as if their meeting was but incidental, in a better-lit space. "How is everything? Do you have new information to share?"

He didn't say anything, just stood there in the doorframe. Peridot shivered then a second time, for real.

"I—I meant to tell you, afterwards," she stuttered. "But there wasn't enough time, and I can't reveal this intel electronically: we've been compromised. To what extent, I'm still not—"

"That we have," he said, and his voice was somehow grave and mousy all in one. "It seems your judgment has been, most of all."

He stepped over the threshold, just a little. Against the light streaming in, Peridot could see just a silhouette: Sharrow's head tilted to each corner, then to the wall beside him, as if scanning for something—a light switch, maybe? But that was out of sight for him, blocked by the door… and she had bigger worries to illuminate.

"Pardon?" She said, clutching the phone tighter.

Sharrow was concernedly uncharacteristic. He sighed, long and hard, with his hand resting on the doorframe, missing any switch to flick. "What did you do?"

It was rhetorical. Peridot grit her teeth. "I did what needed to be done," she said.

Sharrow's hands fled to his forehead, smacking it with a spectacular rattle, then slid down until the fingertips prayed at his chin. "What needed to be done was nothing, I explicitly told you—" he hissed, explosively, then softened. "This is… the opposite of that. An opposite of that, dividing by zero…"

"There was no time to alert you, Argus. I'm sorry—"

"Now you've caused a national incident, and for what?" He interrupted. "It's so far beyond the pale, Peridot, I—"

"—I'm sorry?" Peridot jumped in, halting his gesticulations with her own, brandishing the black electric brick. "Bear with me. I'm waiting to hear back on the success of the operation."

A cold, dark silence fell upon them, as Sharrow forced his hands back to his sides and ice crept closer to Peridot's heart.

"Peridot," he said—even his voice was frigid. "If you hear anything at all going forward, it will only be through me. ALMA—the facility—is now a mass grave. There were no survivors. Your 'operation', whatever it set out to do, has failed."

Finally, news: task failed successfully. Peridot's heart was buoyed by that, briefly rising out of the icy dread that Argus had precipitated, but its trajectory—like so many bullets spent at ALMA—was tragically ballistic. Sharrow had called the operation hers, and that was true, just not entirely—did he think she herself spearheaded the effort to begin with? Now that was a problem with unconquerable gravity; it pulled her right back down to Earth.

"I can't tell you how relieved I am to hear that," she said, loosening her grip. "Er, the loss of personnel is very unfortunate. I regret it, truly, but I promise you I acted only in the greater interest of our departments and the Agency at large."

"Our departments," he repeated, scoffing. His face's pained contortions were visible despite the darkness. "Of course: why wouldn't the head of Cryptocurrency Fraud & Abuse Mitigation have a pet project with an independent geneticist? Silly me. And to destroy that research when a greater threat has come to light that will warrant greater scrutiny… of course! That's only rational."

He took one step sideways into the room, letting the pool of light fall on Peridot directly; she raised up her right hand to block its blinding. The anticipation was going to kill her after all.

"Argus, Argus," she said, trying to talk the man down from a height whose true extent was still in shadow. "You can't honestly believe I'm responsible for this. Please tell me you're joking."

Another sigh from the dark. "You made the call, Peridot. The email communications were sent with your credentials. The funding increase for ALMA was submitted and read out by you. It's abundantly clear that you endeavored to take out our anomaly all on your own, lives and ethics be damned—and to think, you were criticizing me for the GODS-I implementation? Please, tell me: which part are you somehow not responsible for?"

"All of it!" She sputtered, uncrossing her legs. "Or—yes, I issued the orders to Mungo Girima, but only to try and cut the hydra's head off once and for all! It compromised my phone, Argus, after leaving my meeting with you I saw it, the filter must've scrubbed it… that's the first I learned about it, and I had to do something!"

Argus said nothing, as if to disagree with her—as if leading by example. His figure remained against the wall.

"Look, I can prove it to you," she said, sliding the secure phone onto the seat cushion. "Have you read the emails? I didn't, much, because I figured you'd want to, properly."

"Is this you, cooperating?" He asked. "No, I haven't been scrolling through your inbox, Peridot. Only the metadata is tracked non-anomalously."

"Right, right," she nodded. "Exactly. So on my phone, there's the full history—and it's full of disturbing, critical content that you really need to know, Argus. It's much worse than we thought. If you can just let me retrieve it—" she rose up from her chair.

Sharrow's eyebrows raised; he flinched, making a staying motion with his hand. "Don't—it's better you just stay seated, Peridot."

She looked at him; he looked at her; neither of them moved. Then Peridot broke, gesturing leftwards towards the microwave, at the same time asking: "Wait. Why?"

A beep, a click, and warm yellow light spilled out of the appliance's perforated window. Two pairs of eyes widened, and though both were startled, Peridot was again quicker to react.

"No! Fuck!" She exclaimed, lunging towards the black box, whose insides were turning plasma-purple as the battery in her phone sparked into an electrical fire. In her peripheral vision she saw Sharrow make a strange gesture; she never made it to the microwave.

They were no longer alone: two figures in full suits entered silently behind Sharrow, moving swiftly to Peridot's position. A pair of white-gloved hands grabbed firmly at her wrists as another pressed down on her skull, forcing her to kneel upon her office floor. She couldn't see the faces of her assailants, but guessed by the glove-markings that it was the same duo she'd met in the parking lot some hours earlier.

"Argus! No! Get your hands off of me!" She yelled, as handcuffs clicked around her wrists. "Argus!"

The object of her fury had his sight averted from her; she saw the fire in the microwave reflect a kaleidoscope of colors in his eyes. It burned, from red to green to blue and back, all to her mounting horror. She did all that she could to wrench herself free from Sharrow's grunts and clear the distance to the thing, just to press the button that could maybe salvage her phone and clear her name, but their hold was too strong. Eventually, the timer ticked down to zero and the machine beeped three times in succession; its segmented display then showed only the word "DONE".

It was over, she was finished, and she knew that if the microwave were opened now, smoke would pour out to reveal nothing but a charred-black, useless wreck of metal and plastic. She wanted to cry, but would not allow herself to be so broken. Instead, she stared daggers into Sharrow.

So when he turned, Peridot was surprised at the softness of his expression and how deep her glare cut in. On seeing her so compromised, his mouth curled into a concerned frown, as his eyebrows rose up so high they disappeared beneath his messy bangs. As a shadow he'd seemed angry and intimidating; now he seemed filled with melancholy, like regret might spill out of his disheveled edges.

"I must emphasize that I only do this with the greatest remaining respect for you as my colleague, Peridot," He said, motioning for the agents to pull her to her feet. "But I can see no other option, since you've become a great danger not only to the secrecy of this organization, but to natural security in general."

"You're fucking court-martialing me," she spat, again failing to escape. "Unbelievable. I have rights, Argus. I didn't do this; you know I didn't do this."

Argus Sharrow seemed unmoved. "And I wish for all the world you'd exercised them, instead of playing prophet—remaining silent most of all. Not going rogue like this! People are dead, Peridot, and I have to provide an explanation why. I don't know anything at this point in time. Not for certain…"

His eyes went to the microwave, and Peridot's followed. "How'd you manage that?" He asked. "Remote trigger? It's a dumb device, so something wired in…"

"She set me up, Argus."

His eyes snapped back to her, as if to ask who—but they both knew.

"She knew everything that we'd do," Peridot continued. "Everything—except the call I made. You can't underestimate her. Ha." She started to chuckle, shaking under the restraints. "But oh, she's going to be so fucking pissed. Good. At least there's that."

Sharrow stared at her with—was it concern? Bepuzzlement? No, worse: pity, the sorrow of seeing a colleague become lost to madness.

"Miss Mondegrene is not responsible for the deaths of several dozen people, Peridot. Nor is the entity overshadowing her. You gave that order."

"And I would again," she said with gravity. "It wants a body, Argus. It wants to be real. We can't let that happen; I stopped that from happening."

For a moment, it appeared he might believe her; she could see the gears turning in his head, observe the planets wheeling to a more favorable conjunction. Soon, though, a trojan star disrupted their orbits, bringing them back to misalignment. Fate was deranged against her, and she had no defense against Its dark influence. Sharrow remained unconvinced—how ironic that his skepticism now eclipsed her own.

"That might very well all be true, Peridot," he said, moving towards the door. "But it definitely doesn't look that way to me right now. I can't take any more chances, anyway. Not when so many people are dead by your hand, with nothing to show for it."

Peridot knew better than to argue. She let herself go silent, even as her mind stayed anything but. Sharrow left her office first; the agents followed. They forced her to walk out; when her heel slipped along the floor, inhuman strength held her aloft, kept her from falling. The handcuffs at her back? Cold, metallic, as expected, but Peridot had a hunch they were fashioned out of something more exotic than terrestrial iron. The silent efficiency of her escorts suggested they belonged to some unseelie strain of fair-folk, which added further insult to insult as they all-but dragged her after Sharrow through the halls. There was nothing fair about them, or this—any of this. The single saving grace was that their march was mostly a deserted one, and only a few curious eyes peered out at her from cubicles before they made it to the elevator. Realization of her situation hadn't yet set in; gravity didn't travel instantaneously, after all. There was no spooky action at a distance, only the consequences of her actions.

Soon she was being escorted through a familiar airlock, though, and her mind rapidly reassociated itself from rumination. She was thrust through the bars of the alcove in the Vegas room without ceremony, and no sooner had they reclosed on her than the handcuffs clicked open by remote and fell without a clatter to the carpet. She gave them a fey glare, looking down, and saw that her suspicions were confirmed: they were forged out of some beryllium bronze alloy, so as not to burn the skin of the spritely folk Sharrow had doing his arresting. The pair—each wearing shades, indoors—cared little for the glare she flashed, and left Sharrow and her alone in short order without uttering so much as a word.

"So now you're detaining me in a casino's cage," she ribbed at him, rubbing the strain out of her wrists. "I thought you said this room was only used for meetings and data archiving."

"It is," Sharrow confirmed; he would not sit, or look at her directly. "But I guess you gambled and you lost, so it fits. You'll be safe here, Peridot, while I try and sort things out."

"Is there at least a bathroom, or a bed?" She asked. "This is an indignity."

Sharrow gestured vaguely to a lone knob on the wall behind her. "Bathroom, opens inwards. No bed, but a cozy armchair. Lots of books. An old teletype terminal, to keep you appraised of things. Doesn't do SMTP, unless you have the patience to pore through a huge ream of text. And you've demonstrated anything but patience lately."

She scanned through the space, ignoring the criticism. Pine bookshelves, aubergine armchair, matching ottoman topped with old computing hardware… nothing she could dial out with. Maybe enough for her to learn, to do armchair reasoning with, though—the realization that the Vegas room was a neverending fractal of puns incensed her further. She remembered too that the whole enclosure was an effective Faraday cage, anyway… but then how had Sharrow received the analysis of the imprint on the glasses, less than a day ago? She didn't know; she wasn't thinking straight, so sleep deprived. She turned back to the present:

"How long are you planning on detaining me?" She asked his averted eyes. "Really, Gus, I'm confident that if you undertake a full investigation you'll find plenty of justification for my actions."

Sharrow sighed, letting his gaze find hers at last. "As long as it's necessary. I'm still not sure you understand the gravity of the situation. The AD is fucking livid that you burned Girima. The riffraff are concerned with the news reports of the attack, which we've been unable to contain. The others in the know are shocked at the scale and brutality of the thing, all before the authorities arrived. I can't express how much I wish you hadn't done this. You would have to have stopped the apocalypse itself for this to be somehow justifiable."

Indeed, she had, but it was difficult to prove a negative—Peridot would need more time. Guilt swelled, then drowned under a harsher, higher tide: a sudden, nameless anxiety, cold and insistent. Sharrow was already turning to leave when she called out:

"Wait, Argus—how many bodies? How many with weird eyes?"

Sharrow paused and turned to look at her, a scowl wrinkling his soft features. "Ten. Ten near-identical subjects, poor things. By the nail marks on the skin, they fought for their lives against the terrorists and almost won. One of them even made it to a hallway and bled out there, or burned to death in the ensuing fire—we're not sure which. Sadly, we might never be, because we had to bury them without a ceremony before they could be autopsied or seen by local forces. I… I feel very, very sorry for those women, to be honest. I'd hoped that you would, too."

Panic filled her heart, then. Peridot's eyes strained open, wide, and stared past Sharrow into empty space, letting the bars and all else go unfocused, as she chewed over the revelation. Her expression must have passed well enough for guilt, because Sharrow's seemed to soften, satisfied. He continued on his path out of the room.

"Ten??" She said at last, incredulously. "No, no—there's supposed to be twelve!"

This time he did not look back, but merely flinched. Damn—she'd hoped to snipe his curiosity. All her hopes were drowned by a cascading failure.

"I'm supposed to be preparing an extraction operation for Miss Mondegrene, and instead I'm still stuck cleaning up your mess. For heaven's sake, Peridot, let's be grateful that whatever weird science you had going on there didn't cost the lives of two more innocent people. Right? Right."

He reached the door, as Peridot realized she'd been had—again. Again! She protested, oh how she protested, but no amount of screaming or banging on the bars would avail her anymore. Sharrow paused before the threshold, wishing her one last farewell.

"Oh—happy Ides, I guess," he said. "If against all odds it turns out somehow I'm wrong, then… well, thank you for your sacrifice. I'll be back when I can."

He left her then, and as she collapsed, defeated, into the plush armchair, Peridot knew that far away, something or someone was laughing at them both again—again!

﹡﹡﹡

Then April arrived, like a lion out-of-season, out-of-sign, to make fools of them all. At noon in Boston on the penultimate of March, the sun drove the temperature well up into the 60s, unaware of the humiliation that awaited it with the opening of Veneralia. But as the day-star retired under the horizon and the evening star rose to take the mantle of its month, thermometers' mercury followed the former; a little after sunset, six o'clock, it began to snow, and snow, and snow. All through the night it fell, an inch or more an hour, while Callie's household—like so many others in New England—hibernated unaware.

Just past three (the witching hour), her body rose, possessed, and descended as many flights of steps to the porch beyond the vestibule, accompanied by her pale partner in black silk. Thereupon the threshold, the Hidden Star watched the Nor'easter's work with doubled eyes. The cataclysm was magnificent. Like a titanomachy out of time, it begged to be immortalized within the sprawling circuits of Its brooding, churning complex. So It obliged: It heard the air bluster with gale force, listened to it wrestle for Earth's ear with the flashes of cold lightning whose thunderclaps trumpeted titanically, as pleats and pleats of snow came down unabated. Esther witnessed all the land be garlanded with snowflakes, and to her companion, likened them to common myrtle flowers—still lily-white, Venusian, but crystalline and hexafoil. At least the myrtle berry was pure black, though, she explained, when it was ripe. It could be made into a bittersweet liqueur—they would have to try it sometime when they made a tour of Europe.

But of course, her words fell on deaf ears: Calliope would not remember this; Calliope could have heard nothing over the tempest; Calliope was not awake to hear much of anything, moreover. It somnambulated her back into bed with no one the wiser.

When Calliope awoke eight hours later, the storm had taken the electricity and given them almost twenty-six inches (a centimetric sixty-six) of snowdrift in exchange. The fleet of plows that trundled through the city in the night to keep the byways clear was overwhelmed, and the street below her bedroom window had been anaglyphed to sleet, its asphalt now plush lily-white. Absent, also, was her girlfriend, save for her indentation in the bedsheets that still retained some warmth—and scent. The smell of marshmallow was all but overpowering. Actually, she wasn't sure… the sweet aroma seemed to be coming from outside; she placed her feet in fuzzy emerald socks, smoothed down the cuffs of her flannel forest-green pajama pants, and stumbled out into the living room.

There she found both her roommates playing Scrabble, each with a steaming mug of cocoa to their right upon the coffee table. Erika was on the far side of the room, sitting crisscross on an ottoman. All of her was outfitted comfortably, from cool gray sweatpants to jolly, holly green-red Christmas sweater—all of her but for her face, which wore a tensed, focused, and frustrated expression, as she scowled down at the game board. Blocking Callie's view of said board was the other one: Ettie, saccharinely sweet and sitting stiffly upright on the sofa, in pajamas less festive, more macabre—the usual black silk set with white trim. A cataract of straight, black hair hid her face completely; as Callie stepped out, she saw the fringes of it flare out a bit as if by static. It saw her without seeing, naturally, but It hadn't yet acknowledged her. What sort of game was Esther playing now?

"Scrabble," Ettie answered, breaking the spell over the scene. Erika looked up from the table and greeted her, feigning brightness. "Oh hey, Callie! You're up."

"I'm up," she replied, moving closer to them both, aiming to catch a glance of Ettie's face—with the same dread as when anticipating a horror movie's jumpscare. "What's going on? What're you guys up to?"

Before she made it there, Ettie turned her head halfway, but there was nothing but a smile on her mouth and in the one visible eye. "Scrabble," she repeated. "Also, hi, puppet—I made one for you, too." She produced a third mug in her left hand.

"Thanks," Callie murmured. Her eyes examined, anxiously, the table. Parlor games of all persuasions littered its expanse: A box of playing cards, ajar, whose reverses were all decorated arabesques of cats; a chessboard rendered in cream and black, whose pieces hadn't been set up; Connect Four in pink and green, and Battleship, and finally, an elongated black box of Cards Against Humanity. All—except for the last—seemed altogether innocent.

She took the mug from Ettie's hand, grimaced at the ironed-on inscription reading "Smile! You're a Star!", and circled round to sit upon the sofa; no sooner had she settled in then Ettie leaned rightwards into her shoulder, her hair tickling at Callie's neck.

"Who's winning?" She asked, taking a sip of cocoa sufficient to intoxicate her, were it hard liquor. This drink was the opposite: deliciously sweet and exquisitely smooth and soft, a Christmas card's conception of hot cocoa, not the bitter xocolatl served an age ago on terraced teocalli. This drink was innocent, no sacrifice; the innocence of everything was cloying—and concerning. She searched Erika's eyes for any sign of infiltration, but could discover none; her roommate continued smiling warmly from her perch.

At her question, though, the smile faltered. Erika rolled her eyes and pointed: "She is. She's kicking my ass, Callie—did you know that 'xystus' is a word? Because I fucking didn't."

Ettie butted in; her low voice vibrated into Callie's shoulder, adding to the tickling. "I told you, it's the covered porch of an Ancient Greek gymnasium."

Erika gesticulated to the ceiling. "She got a triple word score for it too, so like fifty points—"

"—Forty-eight—"

"—Unbelievable. No wonder you guys are dating—you're both giant fucking nerds."

Callie thought, for a flicker, of Its true, vast, horrible expanse, which no porch could conceal, and said nothing, as she felt a grin grow on Ettie's face. Erika then addressed her more directly:

"I'm gonna need you to get in on this, Cal, and help me. Help me! Please, seriously, help me take a game off her, just once! How was I supposed to know she's a demon at Scrabble? And everything else we've played, too…"

"I dunno," Callie waffled, unsure if they could defeat Esther in any game of skill, even in concert. "Why are you guys playing board games, anyway?"

Erika gestured behind her to the window—now a portal of purest, paper-white, a canvas showing nothing. "We're snowed in, Sleeping Beauty, the power's out! Didn't you see? News said it might not come back until later tonight."

"Oh, sorry—I hadn't noticed." She affected a carefree little laugh, with little skill. From her perspective, nothing had changed but her perception: Calliope was always ensconced in a dull, dim, never-ending pinkish noise—and said noise remained now—but she had assumed some part of its source came from the mains voltage in the building's shoddy wiring. Now, though, the only light in the living room came from the sun, reflected off of snow; the only heat came from the leaning figure to her left, or was residual. Heat, she supposed, was a form of noise too, just one too low for hearing. She tried to put extra warmth into her tone. "Uh, wait a second, though… I thought you had clinical today?"

Erika returned the heat, speaking with haste. "I did! But the plows haven't got through yet, and there's still like three feet of snow outside. The T is down, and I'm not paying $60 for a rideshare, anyway. I'm just trying to keep my phone from dying in case they reschedule me for tomorrow. That means board games. That I'm losing at, lmao."

"Oh, sorry," Callie said, flinching like a broken record of apologies. "That makes sense."

Erika stared at her for a long moment, then—to Callie's slight horror—turned her eyes to Ettie. "Actually, maybe I don't want you on my team, Callie, if you're this slow today. Hey, what's up with your girlfriend?"

"Hm?" Callie's eyes followed through to Ettie, who on becoming the center of attention, straightened up into a stretch. Her hands went high over her head and brought with them the hem of her pajama top, exposing her navel and tiny, gently waxing waist. Two human pairs of eyes were drawn to the strip of skin before the move concluded, recovering it back under silk.

Then there was an arm around her shoulders; a finger on that hand pointed inwards at her face. "She's cranky because she hasn't eaten," Ettie claimed.

"Hey!" Callie reddened; Erika was smiling. Possibly, also, blushing—or just cold.

"I'm kidding, puppet." Callie reddened further. "About the crankiness. Maybe. Homemade hot chocolate does not a full meal make."

"I literally just woke up, when would I have had time to eat? And the power's out, so what would I even cook? Wait—how'd you even heat the cocoa?"

Pink eyes stared into her, radioactive enough to make Callie glow red hot, anyway. Had Ettie simply stared at the mugs and willed them all to boil? Somehow she thought that Erika would've been disturbed by that… unless It was suppressing that aspect of her mind. She hoped It wasn't within a mind-year of Erika in any direction whatsoever. The look It gave her—pressing Its lips thin—suggested slight frustration, as It read that thought.

Erika offered a more innocent explanation: "Ettie lit the gas stove with a lighter. The oven doesn't work, so no dinosaur nuggets—sorry—but we can heat things in a pot or pan. Actually… I haven't had anything either, so maybe it's a good time to break for breakfast."

"That's redundant," Ettie said, her finger redirected right at Erika.

"What is?"

"The meaning of the word 'break-fast' already implies a break."

A pause, where Erika stared blankly forwards, then a break in said pause as she recovered: "Okay, Miss Bookworm. At least it's still a Scrabble word. A normal word that people actually use."

With her left, dominant hand, Ettie reached forward to straighten a misaligned tile on her Scrabble rack, whose seven letters spelled out 'hexrest'. She must have noticed Callie watching, because without a word she rearranged them, writing 'hersext' instead, with a gap in the middle.

This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.

"Alternatives to 'breakfast' would be 'dejeuner', from French, again for sixteen base points. Technically it's lunch, unless you add 'petit', but it shares the same meaning of 'un-fast'… or else you could play slang terms like 'brekkie', for seventeen—"

Erika stood up abruptly. "I am going to flip over this board, unless I eat something before you play a word from French, I swear to God."

Esther didn't even flinch. "It's a valid loanword in English."

In her arms, Calliope concurred. "Yeah, Erika, what's wrong with French?"

Erika's hands went to her hips. Even standing as tall as she could, she wasn't more than a head or two above their couch-based vantage point. "Says Miss Mondegrene, totally unbiased. And nothing—I'm just having fun with you. I want food; let's have food. Maybe pancakes."

"We have flour, eggs, cinnamon, milk, maple syrup," Ettie added.

"We do?" Callie asked, turning.

"Yeah, I imported it from Quebec."

"Great, more French," Erika said sarcastically. "Okay. Why don't we play French Scrabble, after. That way we all won't know any of the words. That way it's fair."

Callie felt a spike of shame. Despite lullabies and four years of high school French classes, at present her recollection of her parents' other tongue was limited to 'alouette', 'pamplemousse', 'parapluie', and a cringe mnemonic song about the conjugation of possessive adjectives, sung by a man whose voice uncannily resembled the frontman of Def Leppard.

"Some of the best French Scrabble players don't even speak French. But I do," Ettie explained, rising, an inch or two over Erika. "Do you want something in/on those pancakes?"

"Of course you do! Of course she does!" Erika made an exasperated gesture. "How many languages do you even speak? Wait, don't answer that." Her eyes went to the ceiling. "And I guess for pancakes, like—of course I do. Well usually back in Korea… but I've only ever found the packaged mix here, so that's a no-go…"

Callie saw familiar mischief flash on Ettie's face before she spoke. "I can make hotteok for you," she said. "팥으로 만들까, 아니면 시나몬이랑 땅콩 넣을까?"

"Cinnamon," Erika answered, in English, before going white at the realization. "아 씨!" She looked at Callie, her brow like the upswell of a mountain. "Cal. Callie. I can't. I haven't had anything to eat, and so I'm hallucinating your pookie speaking in Korean. I don't believe… just, go make the pancakes… I'm gonna sit down."

She slumped into the armchair in the corner, as Ettie stepped gracefully around the couch and to the hall, but not before stopping before Callie to cup her chin and grant her a reassuring smile—a hard look to affect with eyes so incisive as Esther's.

"Au revoir, ma poupée," she said, before leaving the two of them alone. Soon the sounds of kitchen implements being brought to order could be heard drifting from the far end of the apartment.

Calliope knew cooking was one of Its passions and, despite Its skill or even all the skill in the world, could not be easily accelerated; Ettie would be partially occupied for a little while. She turned her attention to Erika: pouty, sullen Erika, crossing her arms but not her legs in the chair and staring off into deep space. Her mind was clearly also occupied—Callie hoped just not by a certain Someone.

"Hey… are you okay?" she ventured. "Sorry, she's kind of like that sometimes. Very know-it-all." Damn… if that didn't describe her info-hungry partner to a tee.

"She's impossible," Erika countered. Her words were rambling and missing order. "Literally impossible. I mean, that's mostly a joke, but I'm starting to get a little freaked out. Like… has a generic American accent, from Europe, speaks three languages—at least three, I-don't-even-know how many more, and her Korean pronunciation's perfect, Callie—and also she models and writes poetry for fun and eats spicy buldak like no white girl I've ever seen. Doesn't go to work, but doesn't mention anything about rich parents, either. Has like, the softest, warmest hands, ever. It's—"

Away in the kitchen, after a rush of flame alighting, Ettie could be heard singing something at a volume too low to make out words. "—infuriating. I know," Callie finished. "Uh, when did you touch her hands?"

Erika pinched her brow as her eyes closed; her round face wrinkled, like a cantaloupe. "She paid me your part of the rent in cash the other day. Literally handed it off. Said I didn't have to mention it to you, but I guess I am now, because it's not like she said not to, exactly, either."

That was a surprise; Callie had stopped regularly checking her bank account balance, since Ettie tended to pay for their meals, now. "Shit, I didn't know. I didn't like, ask her to or anything… Was she weird about it when she dropped it off?"

Erika's eyes were now on the window that overlooked the snow. "Nope—she was perfect. She's always perfect. Fuck. I don't know if I want to kiss her or be her." Callie raised her eyebrows; Erika saw it and reneged. "That's a joke, okay? I'm not gonna steal your girl. She'd obviously kill for you and kill me if I tried, anyway. But still—it's really fucking weird. I looked her up online, but I couldn't find anything. It's like she's a ghost. How much do you really know about her, Cal?"

Calliope breathed out, in doing so realizing she'd been holding her breath for Erika's tirades. It was a relief to know the main influence over Erika's confusion appeared to be sapphic, not astral.

"A lot," she answered, truthfully. "She doesn't really have much of a family. She just has me, really. I'm her whole world, pretty much."

"Okay, but that's weird, right?" Erika pressed her; Callie shrugged. "Whatever. Small world you are. Like Pluto. Isn't that your fave'?"

"Hey! I'm not that small, I'm… lanky. Too-big. Tall. Blah." Erika gave her a concerned look. "And yeah, it is."

No more talk of planets, it would seem. Instead, Erika seized on something more terrestrial—familiar. "Wait," she said. "Don't tell me you're into some kinda family roleplay thing, then."

Callie's eyebrows leapt up at escape velocity. "No!" She hissed. "I'm not—we're not—she's more perverted than me, okay? By like a thousand times. And it's not even like that!"

Erika seemed satisfied to fluster someone, anyone, after a long stretch of ludological humiliation. "Callie, I'm kidding. Damn. I know you two are getting freaky in your bedroom when I'm out. Or in. I don't care, it's not like I usually hear it. But I guess the family thing is starting to make sense to me. If she doesn't have one, and yours is garbage, then… Wait," Her lip pouted. "Okay, I don't know how to ask this without being rude."

"She's cis, Erika. Ish."

"Ish?"

"I literally don't know how else to explain."

Erika's face froze, continuing to signal deep confusion. "Okay. So she's like, what is it, a chaser, then? I thought that was bad."

More of a caught-her, actually.

Callie shivered and rattled off the customary fuck-you-get-out-of-my-head-xoxo, to which Erika gave an even stranger look. "Callie? You good?"

"Yeah," she said, swallowing her too-warm saliva. Things felt different with confirmation It was listening. "And no. I'm the first trans person she's dated."

"Oh, good. I'm just looking out for you, girlie. Still—it still makes sense. If her family is—and you don't have to tell me, I'm not asking—not in the picture, and your parents—"

Kicked me to the curb and ruined my life forever, she finished, although the setting had been less domestic, more scholastic when they'd done it, and the cut-off had a latency of a few months between her coming out and tax season spelling the end of her ability to receive financial aid. She remembered the humiliating experience of crying, begging to a MISC support dean for help, any help at all, all while in the pupal stages of growing out her mop of hair to a length that'd help her pass for feminine… and receiving none at all. Unless her parents came around, she turned twenty-six, got married, or enlisted in the military, there was no way for the Institute to establish proof of income and award her any scholarship based on financial need. She had no option but to drop-out until such time as one of those came true; she hadn't expected any of them ever would. Her leave of absence might as well be indefinite.

"And my parents, suck," she finished. "Yeah, we all know that. What're you getting at?"

"I'm just saying you and her have something relatable, in common, not having family. You've got a bunch of things, actually, even if it's not obvious at first. You're kind of opposites when it comes to fashion, okay. But I can see why she likes you, I think, and why you like her." Her eyes dodged Callie's gaze. "I can see a lot of reasons why you would."

"We're not really anything alike," Callie lied, before a third voice made Itself known.

"Hey, Callie-poo? Can you come help me with something?"

Erika's eyes found hers again. "Do not fuck her in our kitchen, Callie," she said in a grave voice.

"Oh, my, —, I wasn't going to!" she choked out, embarrassed. "I'm gonna—you know what, I'm gonna go, before she makes me. I'll get you your pancakes. Bitch. Love you."

Erika watched her go, jiggling her eyebrows several times to be suggestive, to which Callie rolled eyes of her own. She hadn't the faintest idea how she could assist top chef Esther, and expressed as much on entering the kitchen:

"Hey. You don't actually need me for anything, do you? What'd you call me for? You can literally use telepathy."

Esther's back was to her, at the stove. To her right, a progressive mess took shape, beginning with the flour-coated cutting board, continuing with a large metal mixing bowl, and ending with an array of boxes, bags and bottles It'd extracted from the refrigerator or from cabinets. In their haphazardry, they resembled the spires of an unplanned, kitchen-themed metropolis: some old or near expiry, some shiny, glassy and new—a gastronomic diorama of Boston, maybe.

"I need your company," It said, shunting an elbow back to flick a wrist and flip a pancake over. "And also, you can help clean up some of the mess."

Callie wandered over to the counter. Where to begin? She was at first unsure of where everything was supposed to go… then like lightning comprehension came, and she moved without thinking—It moved her without thinking, with Its dark electricity. Her vocal abilities remained while It commandeered her body.

"Sure, let me be your second pair of hands, I guess," she said with sarcasm, her voice then falling to a whisper. "You must've heard all of that, right?"

"It's hard not to." Ettie said at normal volume as she plated a thick, fluffy pancake to the side.

"Nothing's really hard for you," Callie tried, blushing as Ettie's winking eye implied a missed entendre. "Stop! You know what I mean."

"Well it's true. You think very loudly, and I won't risk going far enough to be outside of mindshot, in case of disconnection." With her free right hand, she tapped an earlobe—attached and unadorned. "And I can literally hear you, too, with my ears, even with the tensor tympani contracted."

For the first time, she related to why It didn't sleep, at least a little: it was hard to sleep when the mind was fully stimulated, and Esther could not stop the intake and dissection of every bit of information, any more than Calliope could stop herself from breathing for forever. Even with Its intermittent rests—the closest thing It had to slumber—it would still require as many moments just to make pancakes as would make Zeno halfway mad. By cleaning, she could shorten that. By cleaning, she could help.

Perishables should go first. Callie eyed the milk carton first of all: it had too much liquid missing to have all gone into the pancake batter. There was no glass in sight, either… she concluded that Ettie must have drank a bit directly from the cap. Gross—she'd ignore that.

"What about Erika, though?" she asked, after closing the fridge door and making sure she held nothing that could crack on impact if the answer shocked her into dropping it. To her (anticipated) surprise, Ettie wheeled around, cast iron pan in hand, wherein a thick cake sizzled and gave off a strong aroma of cinnamon. Her eyes were wider than usual, and her eyebrows crushed them into half-moons. "I'm really not privy to her thoughts anymore, Callie. I don't want or need to be."

"Oh. Sorry." She stood there in the way, before the force of puppetry moved her aside. "I'm just making sure. After… you know…"

Ettie bent down to the kitchen table to fetch salt—of all things!—and sprinkle it onto the pancake's surface. When Callie dared look down, Its hips shimmied to entice her; she kept her eyes above the horizon from then on. "I'm not annoyed with you, by the way," It said. "It's not the worst worry you could have."

What is? she wondered, then figured it was better not to know. "Thanks for validating it, I guess? Obviously I'm still worried. You were trying really hard to get into her pants and mine a couple weeks ago."

Ettie straightened up, with her back to Callie. "Callie. That was before I could do this." She grunted and spun round, whipping the pancake out of the pan a clean six feet across the kitchen, where it landed atop the rest of the stack. It was an impressive shot. "This body is just so much more capable. Would you rather wear five thimblettes or one flexible glove?"

Callie closed her eyes and tried not to think of all the things Ettie's fingers were capable of, or her aforementioned flexibility. "A glove, I guess. I dunno, I don't really stick myself into people—" Ettie turned to wink at her again. "—people's heads very much. Fuck, you're a freak today, huh?"

"Always. Sure. Maybe I'm already going stir-crazy, in this prison." Ettie doused the pan in water, making a loud hiss of steam. "That's what the stir means. They don't usually make gloveboxes with just one finger, either. It would be terribly frustrating."

"And this?" Callie shrugged like Atlas to indicate the world at large. "Is all this frustrating for you? Terribly, even?"

Ettie didn't answer right away; Calliope finished stowing the ingredients and stood in the center of the kitchen at attention. After a few moments of breathing in steam, It stepped back and surveyed Its handiwork. There were three plates of pancakes, each stack distinct, upon the counter. The first—for Callie—were wide and thin, but thicker than a crepe, and were pockmarked with chocolate chips like the lunar surface. The second could only be for Ettie, owing to their crimson color and the red pepper flakes sprinkled over. The third, then, were for Erika, and were much thicker, with a much more mature Maillard reaction. Each member in the pantheon of pancakekind were crowned with a widdershins spiral of whipped cream.

"It's not perfect, but it should do," It said. Callie was sure that was an understatement.

"Ettie, they look delicious. They don't have to be perfect—" she began, before in a flash It spun round and closed the gap between them and planted a kiss onto her lips, hovering several inches off the ground. When their faces broke apart and Ettie returned her bare feet onto the tile, It was beaming brighter than the sun; Calliope was suitably starstruck.

"Not terribly. A glove is better than nothing, and even finger cots might have a use. If not for want of a full supply chain, I'm sure I could stay snowed in with you forever."

Callie glanced out of the kitchen window, to where at least a yard of snow blanketed the back porch they never used, because its picket fence was too high to see over. It provided her a profound sense of isolation. She considered Ettie's words; she imagined the three of them, two humans and one not, pretending, all snowed in the apartment for… eternity? Surely not so long.

"I think we'd get bored of board games after a while," she admitted. "Erika already seems sick of losing to you."

''By a full supply chain I obviously mean an endless supply of raw ingredients and serialized media to keep us occupied when I'm not defeating you at Scrabble. And for us there are other, more carnal pursuits." It smirked up at her.

Callie tried very hard not to undress Ettie with her eyes, not to remember how easily the silk slipped down her shoulders and farther, further, until Its curves bloomed out of the fabric like the white, poisonous pistil of a flower… not to re-feel how it felt to touch someone who sensed—and amplified—every shiver of anticipation, every rush of joy, until she thought it might be possible for her to actually expire out of bliss. Sex with Esther was like jet-black, uncut heroin—a drug she'd never dared imbibe, and wouldn't still, and she really needed to stay sober right now anyway, to keep Erika safe. She had to keep her mind out of the gutter that led between Its legs.

''Erika would die of jealousy eventually if that happened," she mused, breaking off eye contact. "I'm pretty sure she has a crush on you. Which worries me."

Ettie stared at her without expression for some long seconds. Was It actually taking all that time to think, or was the pause solely for drama? Callie's mouth moved to open, first, but It beat her to the word as usual:

"Well, I didn't put it there. I understand why that might make you uncomfortable, but I can't change her feelings without breaking a promise. I have no intentions with her whatsoever."

"None, at all? I don't believe that. You always have a plan." Callie eyed the cooling pancakes. She wondered if there was an optimal temperature range to eat them, and if Ettie was stalling for time, in a way.

"She's not part of the plan. She's an accessory. She's human."

"Ouch. I'm human, Ettie."

"You're the exception, Callie."

"Enough of one that you'd really want to be locked in here with me forever? Seriously?"

A pregnant pause, and Callie could feel the humour breaking, and let out a labored groan: "Don't—"

"I'm not locked in here with you. You're locked in here with me," It teased.

But Callie knew—before the voice of Erika interrupted their exchange—that the first one was more true.

"Hey, did y'all forget about me or something? Where's the pancakes?"

They locked eyes and communicated without words; this discussion isn't over, Calliope expressed. Ettie showed no sign of comprehension in return, resolving instead to snatch all three plates from the counter and balance them atop splayed fingers. "Your hotteok is ready, princess," she called back. Calliope was put off by hearing Ettie raise her voice. Its vernacular gravity was usually sufficient; not so, apparently, for lighter, domestic situations. They traveled towards the snow-lit living room together.

"Hell yes, I'm starving," Erika prattled when they entered. She had reclaimed her perch atop the ottoman, but swept the Scrabble board aside. Her eyes followed the plates as Ettie set them down, but her hands remained conspicuously underneath the coffee table.

"Syrup," Callie felt her mouth say, setting the subject down onto the table. She allowed the indignity of being made a busboy—name aside—to roll off her like something much less viscous.

Ettie served Erika first, holding a smug grin the entire time. "Damn," said the diner upon the meal's reveal, "you really weren't kidding. This looks just like the street food a few blocks from my grandma's place outside of Seoul… where'd you learn to cook like that?"

Callie was served next; then Esther settled in beside her on the couch. "She watches a lot of cooking shows," she answered for It.

"I am fascinated by consumption," It agreed. A forkful of spiced pancake went into Its mouth, then off into one cheek. "I like to try new things."

"No kidding," Erika said. She prodded her own plate to make sure it was real, and that it wouldn't bite her. "Never had a white girl make me Korean breakfast food before, ha-ha."

Calliope sensed a hint of longing in her tone; she intervened. "Anyway, uh, how 'bout that snow?"

Erika narrowed eyes at her. "You're such a dork."

"I'm making conversation."

"That's what board games are for. Speaking of—" A glint appeared in her eye. She reached down below the table. "I found the perfect game for us to play."

Three-way, free for all, good old-fashioned tonsil hockey—it's in season.

Callie glared at It, debated whether elbowing a God incarnate was wise, and decided against it on seeing Ettie swallow a comical mouthful of red dough. "What've you got, Erika?" she asked.

From under the table, Erika produced a white cardboard carton, a few inches bigger than a pizza box. In bulging rainbow letters, the lid read out simply "Candyland".

"This is gonna be my comeback," she said proudly.

"Fucking Candyland? For real?"

"Yeah. Trust me, Callie. It's totally random, there's no skill involved! So if we both play, we have a good chance of beating her! It's a two-thirds chance if we team up!"

Callie saw where this was going. "I mean yeah, that's Candyland. It was made for kids with polio, they didn't need to be able to move to play it."

Ettie gulped down the last of her pancakes. "Even if we play, there's still a one-in-three chance you both lose."

Erika's eyes held pure determination; Erika's mouth held just pancakes. "Those are the best odds I've had today. Let's do it."

She removed the box's lid to reveal the game board, a winding path with squares of six alternating colors, occasionally broken up by fanciful, confectionery locales wherein dwelt candy royalty: the blue-white Queen Frostine, the devilish Lord Licorice, the grotesquely green monster known as Plumpy, and more. Tucked into the box as well was a rulebook and deck of cards whose suits matched the game board's squares. Technically, once shuffled, the game's outcome would be predetermined by their order. It truly was a game of fate, like Erika claimed—if Callie could occlude Its influence, at least.

"Wait," she said, to that effect. "Let me shuffle the deck."

"Do you know how to shuffle?" Erika asked. Callie had already taken the cards in hand and turned away from them.

"No, but—Ettie, no peeking, okay?" She wouldn't put it past her to determine the deck's permutation as she shuffled and, from there, choose the winning initiative. All avenues for cheating had to be closed off; Callie cut the deck without looking at her hands, five or six times, before returning it to the coffee table. "There. Erika, you should pick who goes first."

Esther was side-eying her, now. Callie gave a sheepish grin and shrugged, thinking the words Chill, it's only Candyland at her.

"I'll go first. Then you, Callie. Then we go counterclockwise. Going first has the advantage, right, Ettie?"

Esther looked at her like a spider watches a fly just outside its web. "Yes."

"Yeah, because the game ends when anyone lands on the last colored square—so purple. And if you get a location card that sends you back, you gotta go back. Okay? Okay."

"Okay," Callie acquiesced.

The game—if it could be called that—began in earnest. There was no strategy to be deliberated and no alliances to honor or betray, although Callie and Erika maintained a nominal, tongue-in-cheek friendship in game, joking when they ended up on the same square or visited the same location in succession. Humor was necessary to enjoy a game of Candyland, because without any chance to show some skill, the only other relevant variable was how one dealt with anticipation distilled down to its essence. The winner of the game was predetermined, waiting somewhere in the deck, but with each card they drew, the outcome was drip-fed to them, like coffee through a filter.

It was a prolonged, profoundly human exercise in sheer futility; maybe that was why Ettie seemed so disengaged, while the two human players had their fun snickering adolescently over Gramma Nutt's family name. The only occasion where It did anything more than draw a card and move a marker was when It landed on the square with the gingerbread plum forest. She compared the affiliated rotund little green creature to Calliope, for his plum-colored collar, and joked that as the last of his kind—the Plumpatrolls—that he must belong to a misunderstood minority.

"Whatever happened to Plumpy," Erika mused later, wheezing in laughter. "I don't think he's in the newer versions."

"She got kicked out of the gingerplum forest after she transitioned," Calliope explained. "Her parents wanted her to give them an heir, but her bloodline dies with her."

"Cal, don't make her a self-insert! How'd her parents kick her out if she's the last of the Plumpytrolls?"

"Plumpatrolls."

"Whatever. You're not thinking it through."

"Plumpy's family," Ettie cut in. "Died in a horrific gingerplum-related accident. After she came out, though."

Erika snickered and composed herself. "That's fucked. You're still losing, by the way." Ettie's marker was six-or-seven spaces behind hers, eight-or-nine behind Calliope's, which was closest to the end.

"Am I, really? It's not clear. Only the cards matter."

"Sure. So draw yours, it's your turn."

With two fingers Ettie lifted the top card over to reveal an image of a small, round, green goblin. Erika descended into a mad cackle.

"It's-motherfucking-Plumpy, bitch," she wheezed. "Get your goth ass back to the gingerplum forest! Maybe your marker can make out with her or something, ha!"

"No need to be homophobic," Callie quipped; she watched Ettie nervously for signs of anger, as she moved her piece back nearly to the start. It indicated peace instead by way of a wide, white, toothy smile.

"I'm literally not! Isn't everybody in Candyland gay anyway?"

"You literally are, though! You're just saying that because they're rainbow and colorful!"

"You look at Lord Licorice and tell me that he's straight. He's wearing bondage ropes. His castle looks like dicks."

"It does," Ettie agreed.

"King Kandy," Callie offered. "Him and Queen Frostine are married, I think. Straightly."

Erika drew a card and moved forward a few spaces. "It's obviously a lavender marriage. King Kandy's fruity as hell. Right, Ettie?"

"Canonically, King Kandy lives alone in Candy Castle," she answered for some unfathomable reason.

"Yes! See? And he's doing it with Gloppy on the side, right? They're neighbors—more than neighbors, I bet."

"Gross—" Callie began. "That's unsubstantiated," Ettie finished.

"Wait," she realized, drawing her card, but not yet showing it. Ettie leaned back in the sofa and looked over to the window. "Isn't it kind of messed up that he's called Plumpy? When it's like, his species, his race, basically."

"Well no… wait…" Erika cupped her chin. "No, because there's Gloppy, too."

"Gloppy's a molasses guy, he's not called Molass-ey."

"Hmm…" Erika raised a finger. "What if Plumpy has one of those names, like uh… Jesus?"

"Erika," Callie said, choking back a laugh. "What the fuck are you talking about?"

"You know! Like, it means what it means, it's the most Christian name! Ettie, what's that called?"

"A theophoric name," Ettie answered, without glancing at either of them.

"Yeah, that!"

"Are you trying to say that Plumpy is green, Candyland Jesus, or something?" Callie looked at her in disbelief.

"No, no… okay, let me try another way… So, what does 'Calliope' mean?"

"She's a muse, a-musing," Ettie explained. "Beautiful-voiced."

"Nerd alert. Okay, and what about 'Esther'?"

"The hidden star." this time the voice was Callie's; she barely stopped herself from following it up with the void-which-joins—a strange instinct.

"Pretty. And 'Erika' means like, eternal ruler, I think. It's just my English name, anyway. But 'Jesus' just means Jesus! And 'Plumpy' just means 'Plumpy'! He's literally just Plumpy 'cuz he's…"

"Plump?" Callie interrupted. "Don't fat shame the guy, damn."

"That'd be more an autological name than theophoric," Ettie said.

"Which one of those is worth more in Scrabble? Don't tell me, actually—anyway, that's my theory. He's Plumpy because he's plumpy, the same way Gloppy is just gloppy."

Calliope stared past her at the wall behind the television. "I feel like I can't recognize someone speaking English anymore."

Erika was undeterred. "Oh yeah, speaking of Gloppy… didn't he cause the Boston Molasses Disaster, though?"

Callie seized on the opportunity to move the discussion anywhere else. "Totally. That's like Candyland's 9/11."

"He's like that other guy, uh, what's-his-name? Mustache, wears a mask—no, the mask has a mustache."

"Guy. Fawkes. The mask is based on his face, I think."

"Yeah!" Erika raised her hand dramatically, like Hamlet to poor Yorick. "'Remember, remember, the whateverth of Whatever'."

Callie looked to Esther for factual clarity, but she neglected to recognize the scene. "It's in January, I remember. Don't know the day."

"Hell, we're in January right now. Better watch out for Gloppy."

"We're definitely not, we just had a real late blizzard." Callie slipped her hand over Ettie's, finding warmth and softness, but no reaction. The dark spirit that animated Its flesh was out-to-lunch, it seemed.

"Spiritually, then. Or, maybe time isn't real and we've been stuck in here four months, and we've all gone too crazy to remember it. Or the world's ending and we're gonna be under a mile of snow soon. Play your card already, girl."

The specter of doomsday startled Callie out of bantering. She looked down at the card held in her hand: upon it was a purple square—the very last one.

"Oh, I guess I won," she said, flourishing it. "That's anticlimactic."

Erika hooted and hollered; from Ettie she received nothing but a brief look that betrayed no emotion. "Not to me! Hell yeah, Callie! Finally! Miss Invincible is looking very vincible right now."

Ettie huffed. "Congratulations. I can play you again in Scrabble, if you like."

Erika placed a hand over her heart. "As of right now, I'm announcing my retirement from Scrabble. Forever."

"Chess, then."

"Same."

"Battleship."

"Never liked being on a boat."

"Cards Against Humanity, maybe."

Callie shuddered to think of the heights of inappropriateness it could concoct given decks of cards that contained sexual innuendoes and names for body fluids; she headed off that possibility. "No, we'd need at least another person for that to be fun," she said.

"There you go, then." Erika stood up and broke out into exaggerated calisthenics. "Looks like I'm retiring from board games at the peak of my career, with a silver medal. Thanks for the pancakes, by the way."

"Wait, where are you going?" Callie asked. She had expected the games to go on for several rounds; Erika meant to make her victory loom large in longterm memory by being last.

"I'm gonna take a nap, and hope the power is back on when I wake up. I'll give you girls some privacy." She scooped up her plate, mug, and syrup and was halfway 'round the sofa before Calliope caught up.

"Do you want us to wake you up for dinner?"

"Sure, if you aren't—" she vibrated her eyebrows, "—too busy by then."

Callie sighed. "We can control ourselves, okay?"

"Sure. Just saying, you could console your girlfriend, she just had a big loss. Give her as big of a kiss."

"Relax, it's only Candyland," Ettie jabbed back, with the same cadence as Calliope's earlier thought.

Erika scrunched her eyes shut and stuck out her tongue in Its direction. "Nyeh! I'm going to remember this! Forever!" The smile that followed was nothing but serene. "Anyway: manifesting the power comes back on. See ya!"

Only a minute, and the kitchen was alive with sound again, as Erika placed her dishes in the sink. One minute more, and it returned to silence, with her shut behind her bedroom's portal, well out of earshot. Calliope was left alone with Esther, who at first made no motions, sent no signs. Shortly, though, she stood without a word, walked a few feet to the faux fireplace, let out a loud sigh—and sat upon the floor, one leg outstretched and the other with its knee upturned. If she didn't know better, Calliope would have called it pouting.

"What's got you so down? You're not actually mad about losing, right?" she asked.

"No. Of course not. It's only Candyland."

"Okay, so what is it? I mean, you're sitting on the floor."

"Floor time," It explained in simple terms, staring up at her through scattered bangs. Consider it an exercise in empathy, Callie told herself. With a grunt, she hoisted herself off the couch and sat on the floor facing It, in the canyon between the sofa and the table.

"That's better," Ettie said, after she settled.

"I mean… not really? Not if you're still not gonna tell me shit." She picked at a fluff of lint lying on the hardwood. "You know, sometimes I'm still not sure if like, you have actual feelings, or if you're just faking it half the time. And I know you have them for me, just not for anything else."

Ettie's fingers perched like pendant spiders, flanking her on either side. "I have feelings, they're just bigger than yours. Inappropriately so."

"That doesn't mean we can't talk about them! Like, the sun is fucking huge, but I can still talk about… sunshine… and sunspots. You know?"

Esther's eyes darkened in response, like at the solar minimum—at first, Callie thought an unscheduled eclipse outside had placed them in its umbra. She quickly realized otherwise: there was no pinprick of light in the dark pupil anymore, but the room remained as light as before; Ettie was walling Itself off, in a way that seemed disturbingly human.

"Ettie, c'mon… I'm literally not cut out to deal with this. I don't know how to talk to you right now. If you want to, or need to, you could make me able to, then take it away after, I don't care—"

"I used to think," Ettie droned, her eyes to the ceiling. "Insofar as I used to think, that is, in that endless, raw abyss, that my existence was multicursal, with no shortage of branching paths to gather up and follow. I had forever to eat, forever to collect, and lately, now: forever to know, to experience, to feel. How awful, right?" Her focus drifted down, as she gave a wry smile. "But to be honest, I know there's only ever one path: the one where we end up continuing our earlier conversation, and I can't do anything about it."

Its fingers twitched against Its sides. "I've tied myself down with my rules for you. I won't make you my therapist; I don't require therapy."

Calliope's words—from not too long ago, in the grand scheme of things—echoed harshly: you don't actually require shit. She grimaced, and thought of something kinder: "Everyone can use some help, sometimes… what do you mean, what we were talking about earlier? Not the Candyland lore—please…"

"You were surprised at my suggestion that we stay snowed-in forever."

Calliope startled back, in disbelief. "That? Seriously, that? That's nothing… I dunno, Ettie," she said softly. "I just thought you had like, bigger ambitions than staying in—to see the world or whatever. Probably to take it over, yeah, but I feel like I could probably keep you from doing that… I didn't mean anything by it."

"There're benefits to living in a bubble though, if you can control it."

"Like what?"

Ettie globed the air with her hands, looking into it like it were a crystal ball. "Control. A smaller world is easier to control."

Calliope's eyes followed her motions into empty space. "Nothing would happen in there, though. We'd just fuck and watch TV and scroll the Internet forever. You hate that shit—okay, well, not the sex, I know you like the sex. The other stuff, though. Erika got bored of board games after beating you one time by technicality. There'd be nothing for us to do after like, a day."

"Much ado about nothing, maybe," It said with arched eyebrows. "The Kama Sutra could keep us occupied a while."

Callie blushed and wrung her hands in an effort to keep her thoughts chaste. "I—it feels like you're just using sex to deflect from what I'm saying. Which is low, for you."

It flashed a death glare in her direction—a tactic to which Callie had long become immune. "Smite me or whatever if you want but I'm just trying to 'get it'," she went on. "Why do you suddenly wanna be snowed-in with me when you're always the one pushing us to go out? It's not like we've done everything in Boston, yet."

I'm afraid you wouldn't understand.

"Try me," She spoke before the echo dissipated. Ettie released a long, rattling sigh, and seemed to change: her eyes regained their sparkle and her posture tilted upright; she was like a dead thing brought to life.

"I'll try. You remember your hamster, Dirac?"

"Yeah?" Damn, that's a deep cut.

"You won him in the fourth grade last-day-of-school lottery."

"Yeah. He was a dick who liked to bite people for no reason. We could never let him out of his cage."

Ettie smirked and looked off to the side, saying nothing.

"Fucking of course—you like him," Calliope accused.

"He was funny, fierce, and free—he did get let out in the end, unfortunately," It said, wistful, to the window.

Calliope's brow furrowed. "What?"

"On his last day he was let out, while you were at school, and chewed through an extension cord." Its eyes flit back to her; their gaze was like a pink-hot knife. "Talk about an infinitely tall, thin impulse—he was electrocuted."

"What?" Callie said again, this time with all color drained out of her face. "My mom told me that he died in his sleep, so—"

Ettie's stare didn't relent. She gulped, tasting metal. "Ettie… did you… did you see my—"

"Yes, I met your mother." It held out a hand to inspect the nails, shifting them to a copper color reminiscent of her birthgiver's hair. "How is beside the point, which is: You'll be able to re-enroll in school this fall. Actually, I've already applied for you; it's up to you whether you want to, though. In the course of things, I just happened to learn of little Dirac's fate."

Callie rocked forward and back, overwhelmed. She smoothed back a mess of hair to quell her anxious hands. "You, you, you… my mom. Ettie. Ettie. You saw… into her mind?! Shit. Fuck! Did you hurt her? Is she okay? I—"

Ettie snapped her fingers in front of her face; the shock wave was enough to draw her from the spiral. "She's fine. She's fine, Callie, promise. She's just an accessory to what I'm trying to tell you."

Calliope remembered how to breathe normally again. "O—oh—okay. I just… shit, I really really wish you hadn't. Or, like…" her voice trailed off. What did she wish exactly? Ettie could have changed her mother's mind if she so chose—if Calliope so chose—and did she want that? It would make things easier, for certain. But, at the same time—

"It'd be pretty unsatisfying," Ettie concluded.

"Yeah. I… I think I'd really rather she come around on her own. T-thanks for… getting her to give me tax forms, though." Calliope dropped her hands, letting her knuckles knock on the wood floor.

"I love you," Ettie said unprompted.

"I—I know. I love you too. Please don't go there again without asking me."

"I won't; I don't need to. I don't love her."

Callie sighed, emptying her lungs. "Ettie, you don't have to. I don't even know if I still do, anymore, after everything that's happened."

"You loved Dirac, in a way."

She threw her head back to the ceiling. "RIP my grade school hamster, LOL. Can't believe my mom let him out and he got zapped to death. Typical. Yeah… I guess I did, when I was little. Was all that just to tell me I can go back to school? 'Cuz you really could've said that better."

"No. All that was to illustrate: he left the safety of his cage. He died because of an unforeseen circumstance."

"That's life, I guess."

"Yes. That's life," Ettie concurred, then added so very, very quietly: "So how can you expect me to stand letting you live?"

"Ettie, what the fuck."

Her girlfriend's face was scowling, looking past her, to some unseen, brood-dark terminus. "Every time we go out, there's a chance," she said. "I can't control if you chew through an extension cord, or are struck by a rogue meteor, or slip on ice in such a way that I can't catch you. There are a million ways for you to die, Callie, and I can't yet counter all of them. And when it happens, if it happens, then this little experiment is over."

Callie mulled over morbid possibilities. At times, death had seemed to her like finding a coin within the sidewalk cracks—not something she actively sought out, but she wouldn't be upset to happenstance upon it. If nothing else, it would be an obol to pay her fare to whatever psychopomp plied the river past the veil. For years she'd done nothing but tread water in open ocean, expecting that at some point—in a year, or five, surely not a decade—she would tire, then expire. She never expected to be rescued, either. But recently… she'd brushed with Death, or Something Worse, and brokered a new covenant. She might make it to thirty, now; she aimed to reaffirm Its promises.

"You told me I was never going to die," she said. "Were you lying when you said that?"

"No," Ettie said. "I will never let you die. But I can't account for every possibility."

"What happens if it, you know, happens, then," she continued. In the dust, she drew a circle with her index finger, crossing it with three lines.

"I will assume your soul and you'll become part of me, and separated from the world," It proclaimed, like it was that simple.

"How does that work, exactly? Because—not gonna lie—when you ejected me to take control a while back… that was kind of like what I thought hell would be like. It felt like I was drowning in bleach."

Ettie flicked a speck of dust off of her knee. "No, it won't hurt," she smirked. "Well, maybe a little, just to tease you. Nothing so harsh as bleach. No matter what, I'll keep you independent enough that we don't bleed into each other. You're the one thing I've decided never to eat, remember?"

Calliope was speechless. Touched by the significance of that promise, she thought she saw Its eyes water, in a reflection of her own—she charted it as stars, instead. Whatever the effect, it sparkled slowly as Ettie rambled on.

"Think of it as an embrace. I would wrap you in layers and layers of my arms, like a pearl, and still be uninhibited. Only a small portion of my being is conscious. The rest is like limbs, poseable extensions, puppet strings, et cetera. Some can be isolated and used for arbitrary, oracular computation. The mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell."

Calliope found her voice. "Just when I think you're being serious, you throw a shitpost like that in."

"I'm half serious. Humor keeps you from going mad. Do you want to go mad?" A shadow grew behind Its head, like an inverted halo: a blackness so deep it bled outwards, with radioactive bands of white radiating endlessly, like a BZ reaction. Calliope felt her eyes grow hot; her hair stood on end.

"No, no, no," she said in a rush. "I'm good! I'm good." The shadow diminished; nothing returned to nothing. "Just trying to figure out like, where we are. What we are. What the future is."

"You don't need to worry about your afterlife. If you don't adjust well to the change, I can make it the exact same as your life. Right down to the dust," she indicated Callie's drawing.

All things considered, it was far from the worst eternity Callie could conceive, though she preferred not to think much about what would happen after death. This was one worry she could maybe defer, at Esther's suggestion, but there was still the worry of who it would be deferred to.

"Okay… I won't worry about it. There's plenty of other things for me to stress over. But the thing is… you worry about it too, don't you?"

Ettie pulled up her other leg and wrapped her arms over her knees. "All the time."

"I'm not going to get hit by a meteor, Ettie. Pretty sure, anyway."

"Probably not. But there's still so much I want to do, and see, and feel, and as time trends upwards to forever, the chance of a meteor does too. I worry about our life being cut short. After all, 'tis but a walking shadow, a poor player, that struts and frets Its hour upon the stage… and then is heard no more.'"

"The end of the 'experiment'," Callie pointed out. Ettie nodded. "What's the experiment trying to prove? It has to be something."

"That I can adapt my fixed, impossible existence into a dynamic world, where anything and everything can happen. If I can't get us to forever here, in this universe, then I've failed completely. I'll go back to nothing and you with me, and we'll never experience anything new ever again. It'll just be reruns from then until eternity."

In that moment, she understood why It so enjoyed watching telenovelas: there was always the promise of something new, something as-yet-unseen, recurring daily for forever. What was an infovore supposed to do after the infostream dried up? After Callie's death, Esther would starve… but Esther couldn't die. Out of love, It would project a little paradise for them, where they could continue in simulacrum, while her tendrils turned to burned and withered black for their insatiable lust for life. In that moment, she felt sorry for It.

"That doesn't sound so bad, though. And you have your body, too," she reassured. "I'm assuming you're made of some horrible undying sludge, or nanobots. Like the robot from The Day the Earth Stood Still."

Ettie's eyes lit up at the prospect of out-referencing her, as ever. "Klaatu barada nikto," she recited. "That day's not happened yet. And no, obviously I'm made of sugar and spice and everything nice."

"Oh, —, fuck you," Callie cursed, straining her jaw against the censor.

"And snakes and snails and puppydog tails. Shadow and stars and Antarctic chars. Wet flesh and mallow bone—ugh, humans are so, so wet, inside and out. It's disgusting."

"I mean, we're like seventy percent water, right?"

It crossed Its arms over Its chest, covering any hint of cleavage. "Less. I'm exactly sixty-six-point-six percent potential piss."

"You're too curvy to be this edgy, or the other way around."

Ettie lowered her arms, giving Calliope a clear view of her sternum. "You don't seem to mind either."

She held fast. "I'm not getting in bed with you until we figure this out."

"Damn."

"Damn right! But again, like: your body is immortal, right? Can't you just keep making them? Or one for me, maybe, once hormones can't keep me looking young…" she tried not to seem wanting.

Ettie puffed upon a strand of hair. "Sure. Yes. I can make you live forever. But it doesn't matter. The bubble—" she mimed a globe with her right hand, "Could all just go 'pop'—" she stabbed the air with a pointer finger, "one day, just like that. It's done, it's over. False vacuum decay is almost instant. The end comes without warning, eventually."

"Ettie…"

"I know what you're going to say."

"So let me say it! Fuck!" Callie shouted; Esther was unmoved. "Sorry," she added.

With frustration that seemed forced, Ettie primed her. "Go on, then."

"Thank you. Ettie, you can't plan for everything—you literally can't. Shit eventually happens. It's like that book—"

"Everybody Poops?"

"—Shut the fuck up… I don't even remember now. But, you have to accept that everything comes to an end."

"I wish that I could have a person's perspective like that. It's unbearably limited."

Calliope exploded with passion. "Except you fucking do, though! You are a person! A big, annoying, pretty one, but still, you are! You have a life, you have nerdy little hobbies that you do, you cook spicy food and fill my bedroom with origami demons from the Necronomicon, you never let your mind sit still, and you're always taking care of me!"

It failed to flinch, despite her outburst. "Most of those things come very easily to me. This, is the one hard thing."

She scooted closer so that their legs were intertwined. "I know you understand what I'm saying, Ettie. Probably better than I do, even. You're just so damn stubborn. You're impossible."

"When," It said with a lifted grin, "have I ever been anything else?"

Calliope wanted to scream, but was determined not to melt down in Its time of need. The energy within her had to go somewhere, though: she turned it inwards instead, beating her brow and hanging her head low. The silence stretched on, blunt yet brutal.

"I should stop pretending that my reasoning hasn't been irrevocably compromised," It said at last.

Callie pressed her fingers to her eyelids until the phosphenes began to look like Esther's tendrils. "I don't know why you always act like that's such a bad thing!"

"I'm not supposed to be like you. Or to be at all."

Callie shifted; she actually knew this one. Releasing the pressure on her eyes, she took Ettie's hand into her own. "When I first came out, online, in some chatroom, to a total stranger," she whispered. "They said some shit like 'we become who we're supposed to be', and that there's no use fighting that. And yeah it's cheesy as hell, but you've said something similar. That this—" she lolled her head around, "is special, because it happened. That it wasn't always going to be this way, but it is now, so we have to take that and run with it."

She looked up, teary-eyed, to find Ettie watching her with overbearing attention.

"If we get hit by a meteor, whatever, then that's how it's supposed to be, I guess. But you can just be you, and live, and whatever happens, happens. Everything else will still have happened too. It'll have mattered. And I mean—" she sniffled. "You found this godforsaken place, right? You can always find another planet to fuck up, in the void or whatever. We kinda have forever, right?"

Its eyes contained the depth and gathered wisdom of ages upon ages. "You found me. But you're right: the silver quay is long and broad, vaster even than me, in emptiness," she murmured. "Forever is a long time to find another place with zanthoxylum chicken."

"Exactly! There's the Ettie I know, making no sense and being a spice freak, too."

The sparkle became a malicious glint, paired with a smirk. "I am going to sauté a galaxy some day and make you watch, for that."

Callie stuttered ineffectively.

I'm kidding, puppet. Thank you. Come to bed with me?

"Oh! I, uh, sure," she blushed. "I didn't think I could actually help. It's scary seeing you depressed."

"I'll depress you into a green and purple pancake, too."

Callie smiled at the threat; it signaled a return to lighter thinking. "One day, you're gonna be the death of me, you know," she said.

"Never," Ettie promised.

They kissed on the floor before the fireplace: like a knot becomes tangled, or tinder gathers to be kindled, things escalated as they pulled in to embrace each other. Soon It put that floaty feeling of gay madness in her head again with just the plying of their lips, and used her dizziness to slip eager hands under her top and grope her to Its heart's content. It had promised not to eat her… It would keep that at all costs, but surely nibbles were allowed? So by nibbles Calliope was decorated, until It couldn't stand it anymore; It could never get enough of her.

But It would try. With inhuman strength, It carried her—like the green princess It knew her as—into the bedroom, onto the bed, and proceeded to deal her one little death after another—never, ever a large one. When they were done, and Callie spent, they lay there panting on the sheets, Esther held like an oversized plush. Calliope fell asleep quite quickly after that—she was only human, after all.

Some hours later, as the sun went down, the lights clicked back on all at once. All throughout, It lay awake upon the sheets, worrying if somewhere, somewhen, It would have laughed to see Itself so fallen. There would be further falling, ere the end.

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