Where the Predators Prowl [101, 102, 103]

101: Through the Looking Chalk

Brad's mop clattered to the floor as he stared at us. "What... what did you just do?" His voice cracked and warped, sounding less like tired-teenager-Brad and more like something pretending to be Brad, an eldritch thing wearing Brad's skin.

I turned to look up at him and immediately wished I hadn't. Black and white eyes were blooming across his face like inverse flowers, spreading in checkerboard patterns down his neck. His MacPaws uniform rippled, the fabric taking on a freaky, checkered missing-texture appearance.

"Oh shit," Kristi breathed. "Is he...?"

"Yep!" CaNessy grabbed both of us and hauled us up onto the table. "Brad's blooming back into his FPH form! Does not like us making doors and screwing with the narrative! Quick—think about the next level! The next memory!"

"What the fuck is the next memory?!" Kristi squawked as Brad's body began to elongate, his arms multiplying and blurring at the edges.

“I dunno,” CaNessy shrugged.

“How the fuck am I supposed to think about something that vague?” The raptor girl demanded.

“Oh, I know!” Nessy declared. “Just think about meeting us again. All of us, in another important place and time. Me, Kristi, Alec, Candace and Addie!”

"You cannot leave!" Brad-not-Brad said, his voice overlapping with itself, bubbling out of his twisting, unfolding face. "We need your perspectives. Your first-person consciousness. So hungry. So long without proper food. Only almost-approximations here. Bound wrongness pretending to be specific-ness."

His body featured two hands, four hands, eight hands, all slightly out of phase with each other.

"Ah! I know! Think about Cascade!" CaNessy shouted, shoving Kristi toward the door. "Black sand beaches! Dragons! We need to refresh our dragons before they expire on us!”

Brad's tentacle-arms whipped forward. CaNessy yanked me sideways just as the elongated appendages smashed through the nearest wall, sending drywall and tiles flying.

"JUMP!" she screamed. “Together!”

We jumped.

The last thing I saw was CaNessy's black and white curls before the chalk doorway swallowed me whole.

. . .

I gasped, seaside air filling my lungs. My old, raggedy, patched up sneakers sank into black sand, the grains still warm from the day's sun. 

Fog slowly rolled in from the ocean… or lake sparkling with reflection of the setting sun. The sun rippled above the waves, highlighting ruins of gargantuan, corroded, boxy skyscrapers.

I looked left. A fog-wrapped sign in the distance read: "Welcome to Cascade, the Dragonisle Gem of the Western Reaches!”

Denver. 

Those sunken ruins had to be Denver. Then this was lake Eerie, the continent-shearing lake connecting the Atlantic to the Pacific.

For a moment, I simply stood there, blinking stupidly at the sign.

How did I get here? 

My head felt stuffed with cotton, thoughts sliding away like water through fingers. I'd been... working? Yes. That sounded right.

Working overtime at Bowser's Basement, that hellhole of a dogfood factory. Saving money for a car to visit Grandpa Dan this summer. To get away from my horrid brother and parents.

But summer wasn't here yet. Was it? And Cascade was hundreds of miles north from home. Just crossing Eerie on the armoured ferry would take ages.

"Oof!" Something warm and furry slammed into my backside, stumbling out of the tendrils of fog.

I spun around.

A husky pradavarian girl jumped back, shaking her head. Black and white fur, sky-blue eyes, wearing a cream sundress with little embroidered flowers. She looked about my age, maybe seventeen or eighteen.

"Sorry! Sorry!" She sniffed the air, her dark nose twitching. "You smell like... dogfood?" Her head tilted. "And also... familiar? Have we met? Why do I feel like we've met…"

"I don't think so," I said, still trying to piece together how I'd gotten to Cascade from Little Rock Citadel. "I'm... I was just working at Bowser's Basement.  But I don't remember driving here or… Shit… Did my brother drug me again?”

"You don't smell drugged," she said matter-of-factly, leaning in to sniff me more thoroughly. "Trust me, I'd know. My friend Sage is really good at detecting that stuff and he taught me all the tells. You smell more like... confusion. And industrial meat byproducts. And something else..." She frowned, nose practically pressed against my shoulder.

"Uh, personal space?"

"Oh! Right!" She bounced back. "I'm Nessy! Nessy Whitepaw. Sorry about the sniffing. It's a husky thing. What's the date where you're from?"

"Where I'm from? What kind of question is that?"

“Actually… What date is it now?” She pulled out her iPaws phone from an extradimensional white purse with a stitching of a dog dragon, squinting at the screen. "April 26th, 2020. 8:44 PM."

"That doesn't sound right,” I muttered.

"Huh." Nessy studied me with pretty, bright blue eyes, sniffing me furiously. "You smell… displaced. Temporally or dimensionally or... something." She grabbed my hand suddenly, her paw warm and slightly fuzzy. "This is so weird. I was just at the temple helping Sister Zheniya prep the next book sale, and I had this sudden urge to come to Cascade. Like, right now. Which made no sense because I don't really do beaches alone, and there's that spring break festival at the pier tonight with all the drinking and partying and wet t-shirt contests biz, and I'm trying to become a Krishna sister so I definitely shouldn't be around that scene, but here I am and here you are and—"

She stopped mid-ramble, eyes going wide.

"You're… him," she whispered. 

“Whom?”

"You're the one I've been looking for. The boy from my dreams!”

"What."

Her grip on my hand tightened. "If this is another dream, I'm not letting you go.”

Before I could answer, she was already pulling me down the beach. "Come on! The festival! We're going to the festival!"

"Wait, what? I don't have money for—"

"Trust me!" She grinned back at me, tail wagging. "I got cash to burn.” She tapped her purse. “Let's just be… Together. Tonight. Please?"

The pier materialized from the fog, strings of colorful lights cutting through the grey. Music thumped from somewhere ahead, mixed with laughter and the distinctive sound of drunk pradavarian voices with their characteristic yip-growl undertones.

Why was I letting this prad girl pull me somewhere? What if she was in cycle and planned to…

"Where are we going?" I asked, stumbling slightly in the sand as she pulled me along.

"The festival! There's fun games and food and music and—" She stopped suddenly, turning to face me. "You know… I wasn't going to go. I don't have a date, and there's always so much drinking, and tourists get grabby and offer me drinks, and I'm supposed to be pure and devoted and all that Krishna stuff. But now..."

She smiled, soft and almost shy, completely different from her earlier hyper exuberance over meeting me.

"Now I have a date. Right? You'll be my date?" When I hesitated, her ears drooped slightly. "Please? I promise I'm not weird. Well, not super weird. Maybe medium weird. On the weird scale of one to ten, I'm like a solid six. Maybe seven after midnight. I don’t drink, see… ‘cus I volunteer at the Krisna temple as a musician. I help sell books about dungeons with my voice."

I stared at her as she chattered. For some inexplicable reason her machine-gun ranting wasn’t a turnoff, as if I was used to it… as if she’d always somehow been a part of my life.

Regardless of the confusion, the feeling of utter displacement, the sus and clingy prad girl, the fact that nothing made sense about how the fuck I got to Cascade... I found myself smiling. "Okay."

"Really?!" She bounced on her white paws, black claws digging into black sand. "Oh! Wait! I need to know my date's name!" She looked down at me with sky blue eyes framed by white angel wings patterns on her dark forehead.

"It's… It's Alec," I said. "Alec Foster."

"Alec," she repeated, like she was tasting the name. "Alec and Nessy. Nessy and Alec. That sounds right, doesn't it? How right does that sound to you? Very right… right? Right?!"

I found myself staring at the far too pretty husky girl with her flower-print sundress and deep, earnest blue pools that caught my eyes in them. "You ain’t on cycle, right?”

“Nope.”

“Soooo… Why would someone pretty like you even want a random human you just met on a beach as a date?" I asked.

Her tail immediately went from gentle swaying to full helicopter mode. "You think I'm pretty?" Her voice pitched up an octave. “Eeeeee! My date thinks that I’m pretty! Eeeeeee!” She squealed, dragging me towards the sounds of the carnival.

"Well, yeah, I mean—" I let out.

"Loops, come on, you're being... loopy again!" Someone insisted loudly.

We turned toward the voice. 

Two figures sat at the edge of the pier, legs dangling over the sand. A gray cheetah pradavarian in a dark leather jacket covered in studs and chains, ripped black jeans and a silver-white fox in a flowing dress that shimmered with overpriced magic-gem hexagrams projecting rainbows. Empty beer cans formed a small fortress around them.

"I'm not being loopy!" the fox protested, gesturing wildly with a half-full can. "I'm telling you, Ads, this is all fake as fuck. It's April but it doesn't FEEL like April. It feels like... like we're inside something.”

“Something like what, Loops?”

“Like a dungeon. A mall-themed dungeon!"

"Sounds like you've had way too much beer and T-dust," the cheetah replied, crushing an empty can against her forehead. "Everything feels like a dungeon when you're high and drunk dude. How bad was it this time?"

“It was bad,” the fox lamented. “Big fight with mom. She really got on my nerves and I told her to go fuck herself.”

“Uh-huh.”

"Seriously though, I haven't had any T-dust since yesterday! Well, this morning. Okay, an hour ago, but that's not the point!" The fox suddenly froze, her head snapping toward us. Even from twenty feet away, I could see her gray eyes strike me like a physical weight, igniting brilliant silver. 

A high level Seer, trained to observe the Astral Abyss? At her age? Damn, a genuine prodigy.

"Holy shit," the fox-prodigy breathed, mouth falling open.

Then she was moving, launching herself off the pier in a silver blur, fluffy tail fluttering behind her. Nessy barely had time to yelp before the fox was on us, circling me like a shark.

"You smell like..." She pressed her nose against my neck, inhaling deeply. "Like infinity. Like the end of everything and the beginning of everything." She pulled back, eyes bright with manic energy. "You're him!”

“Whom?” I asked.

“You're my true love!" She declared, swaying slightly.

Nessy choked.

"Your… what now?" I stepped back, but she followed, maintaining the uncomfortably close distance.

"Loops, what the fuck?" The cheetah jumped off the pier too, walking over. "You can't just declare random humans your true love."

"But he IS!" The fox—Loops?—grabbed my hands, her paws slightly sticky with what I hoped was just spilled beer. "I can feel it in my bones! In my soul! In the very fabric of reality that's definitely not exactly real!"

"I thought I was your true love," the cheetah said, sounding more amused than hurt.

"You are!" Loops declared jovially without missing a beat. "Why can't I have multiple true loves? Who made that rule? The love committee?"

Nessy growled, low and warning. "Back off, fox. I found him first!"

Loops spun to face her, and her expression shifted from manic to detective-mode. "Oh my god, you're gorgeous. Look at your markings! You’re like an angel in disguise! And those eyes!" She reached out towards Nessy, who jumped back. "Slayer! You're my true love too! Wait, ah, ah! I know you from school. Nessy, right?" She bobbed, fuzzy tail swishing and sparkling.

Nessy froze completely, like someone had hit her pause button. "I'm... what?"

"True love! All three of you! It's so obvious now!" Loops spun in a circle, dress flaring out and casting rainbows. "We're all supposed to be together!"

The cheetah sighed heavily, grabbing Loops by the shoulder. "I apologize for my friend. She's... having a night. I'm Adler, by the way. And this disaster—" she gestured at the fox who was now trying to sniff both me and Nessy simultaneously, "—is Loops."

"Because I'm loopy!" Loops announced. "Everything's looping! Can't you feel it? The fog, the festival, us meeting… It's a Loop! Also, I’m Candace… Hi Alec!"

102: Engagement

Candace suddenly hugged me fiercely, swaying on the spot.

“How’d she… know your name?” Nessy demanded.

“She can see shit in the Astral,” the cheetah sighed. 

"Do you sniff it too, Nessy? Nothing makes sense!" Candace laughed, still clinging to me like a barnacle. "That's how I know we're in a dungeon! Real reality makes sense! This?" She gestured at the beach. "This is a narrative, a dum’ movie pretending to be reality! Can’t trick me, universe, no siree."

She wiggled a finger at the sky.

Adler groaned. "She's been going on about this for an hour. Apparently, we're all in a 'temporal funnel' and none of this is real."

"It only looks real but it doesn't feel real, not exactly," Candace said. She looked directly at me. "Doesn't it, Alec? Feels real-ish but mostly wrong. Like you're watching a movie of your own life."

I opened my mouth to deny it, but couldn't. Because she was right. Everything felt... performed. Like I was hitting marks in a play I didn't remember auditioning for.

"See?!" Candace crowed, petting my head. "He knows! The tree-boy knows!"

"Tree-boy?" Nessy asked.

"That's what he looks like in the Astral! Like a tree wearing a human costume!" Candace paused. "A sexy tree, though. Very sexy. Rawr. Would climb."

Adler facepalmed. "Loops, you can't just—"

"Would YOU climb this sexy tree?" Candace asked her seriously.

The cheetah looked at me, considering. "I mean..."

"Oh my god," Nessy muttered. “You’re both so drunk. This is why I don’t go to these places.”

“I'm drunk on Astral wisdom!” Candace declared. “And beer. Mostly wisdom. I dunno about Ads though, she’s pretty stupid at the best of times.”

“You’re asking for a smackin’ Loops,” the cheetah growled.

“Nu-huh,” Candace twirled around me. “My tree will protec me! Right, Alec?”

“Uhhh…” I considered it.

“Yes,” the drunk fox supplied. “The answer you’re looking for 'is, yes, absolutely, I would protek my best fox bae forevah ‘cus she’s so freakin' cuuuuute'.” Candace finished, then immediately released me to chase after a seagull that had the audacity to land nearby. "BIRD! WHY ARE YOU REAL?! I MEAN, WHY ARE YOU FAKE! EXPLAIN YOURSELF!"

The seagull fled in terror into the fog.

"She's... special," Adler said diplomatically, pursing her lips while watching her fox girlfriend sprint down the beach shouting philosophical questions at wildlife and random objects.

"Is she always like this?" Nessy asked, her paw finding my hand again.

"Only when she's drunk. Or sober and high. Or looks too hard at the Astral. So... yes." Adler shrugged. "I... gotta go collect her before she interrogates the entire ecosystem."

We caught up with Candace at the carnival entrance, where she'd cornered a balloon vendor.

"But WHY are they shaped like animals?" she demanded. "Are you trying to capture their souls in latex prisons?!"

"Miss, they're just balloons," the bothered looking badger prad vendor said.

"That's what someone trapping souls WOULD say! I bet you’re a First Person Hunter in disguise, just waiting to nom on souls!”

"Loops," Adler grabbed her by the back of her dress and pulled her away from the badger. "Leave the nice balloon man alone."

"But he—"

"Nope. Carnival time. Come on. Weren’t you gonna propose to me or something?" Adler steered her toward the entrance, where a vaguely familiar figure stood in a bright yellow security vest, looking deeply unhappy about it.

“Propose… on the Ferris wheel?” Candace scratched her cheeks. “Yes. Maybe. Wait, how do you know that? Are you a time traveler?”

“I know because you’ve been whisper-ranting about it all morning,” Adella said.

"Kristi?" Nessy's voice pitched up in surprise as we reached the security gate.

A raptor turned, amber eyes widening slightly when she saw our group. She wore the security vest over designer jeans and a crisp white shirt, a walkie-talkie clipped to her belt. Her emerald-violet-blue feathers fluttered in the breeze from lake Eerie.

"Nessy. And... company." Her gaze lingered on me for a moment before snapping away. "What are you doing here?"

"Festival date!" Nessy declared, then immediately seemed to realize what she'd said and fell silent. "I mean... not a date date. Just a... casual hangout. With my new friend. Friends… Who I just met. Randomly."

"On the beach!" Candace added, having escaped Adler's grip. "In the fog! Like a romance novel! Except with more existential dread because none of this is real and we’re all gonna get eaten unless… unless I understand everything about this loop and figure out how to eat the monsters first! Release me, cat-babe! I must gaze upon infinity!"

Kristi's eyes narrowed. "You just... met. On the beach. And immediately came to the festival. Together. And somehow you’re with these two drunken idiots."

“We’re not idiots! We’re wise beyond our years!” Candace protested. “You’d be wise too if you saw infinity, dino-bird-babe. Wait… I love you too. Oh my Slayer! This is it.” She snapped her jaw. “This is everyone I love. All in one place. Suspiciously convenient!”

"It's not suspicious!" Nessy said quickly, which made it sound incredibly suspicious.

"Right," Kristi said flatly. "Well, enjoy your totally-not-suspicious evening. Try not to cause any—"

"KRISTI!" Two more raptors in security vests appeared, one with blue-tipped feathers, the other with purple. "We need you at the dunk tank. Some beaver is refusing to get out of the water."

"He says he lives there now," the blue one added.

Kristi sighed deeply. "Katherine, Scarlet, can't you handle one waterlogged beaver?"

"He has a knife," Katherine said.

"What?!" Kristi's feathers shot up.

"It's a butter knife," Scarlet clarified. "But he's very committed to his… aquatic lifestyle! You know how hard it is to get a hydromancer outta the water when they get all slippery? It’s like pawing at air, dude."

"I hate this job," Kristi muttered, then looked back at us. "Don't... do anything weird. Especially you.” She stared at the fox. 

“What? What’d I do?” Candace fluttered her silver eyelashes innocently.

“Ms. Rhineheart, I beg you, don’t bind anything to anything this time." Kristi commented with as much formality as she could produce. "Or I will ban you from the festival. Forever. I have the power to set the ward to zap you away, just so you know. So I'm watching you."

The raptor made the 'I'm monitoring you' gesture at the fox with her dark claws.

"Oi, I would never!" Candace said, already eyeing the ring toss game with deep intensity of a hawk spotting prey. “I only want to bind my heart to this cheetah-loaf tonight!” She flailed her hand in the general direction of Adler and smacked her in the face.

Kristi left with her sisters, throwing one last suspicious glance over her shoulder.

"She seems tense," Adler observed, rubbing her snout.

"She's always like that," Nessy said, watching the raptors disappear into the crowd. "Like she's constantly expecting something terrible to happen."

"Maybe she's right… this time," Candace said ominously, then brightened. "SUSPICIOUS CORN DOGS!"

We passed under the gate through the barrier ward.

The carnival was a sensory assault of lights, sounds, and smells. Game vendors shouted over each other, rides creaked and whirred, and the air was thick with the scent of fried noms.

Candace immediately dragged us to the ring toss, convinced it was "geometrically off by a fraction of a percent" and therefore "proof of dungeon manipulation."

"The physics are WRONG!" she insisted, missing her fifth throw by a mile. "In real reality, I'd be amazing at this!"

"Or you're just bad at it," Adler suggested, finishing her third beer cup acquired from a drink vendor.

"Blasphemy!" Candace huffed. "I demand a recount!"

While they argued with the increasingly confused game operator, Nessy pulled me toward the Ferris wheel.

"I love these," she said softly. "You can see everything from up there. The whole world laid out like... like it makes sense."

We got in line, and I noticed her tail wasn't wagging anymore. "You okay?"

"Yeah, just..." She glanced back at where Candace was now accusing the ring toss of 'temporal crimes.' "This is nice. Being here with... with you. Even if it doesn't make sense how you or I got here. Even if tonight I was going to sleep... alone, crying into my pillow... like always. Maybe I did... and none of this is real. No, no, I can't think like that. You're here. I always dream about you, you know. You and me. We're meant to be together, I think. Not today... but someday." She sighed.

The Ferris wheel operator, a bored-looking raptor, barely glanced at us as we climbed into a gondola. As we rose, the festival spread out below us, a constellation of colored lights against the darkening beach.

"It's pretty," Nessy said, scooting closer to me on the bench. "Even if Candace is right and none of this is real, it's still pretty."

"What if she is right?" I asked. "What if this is all some kind of... I don't know, temporal funnel thing?"

Nessy considered this, her paw finding my finger again. "Then I guess we should enjoy it while it lasts. Real or not, I'm here with you, and that feels... right. So right that I don't want to wake up from it and lose you."

The wheel stopped close to the top, and for a moment we just sat there, looking out at the fog-wrapped oceanic lake where Denver's ruins made geometric shadows in the water lit by the rising shattered moon.

"ALEC!" Candace's voice carried from above. "PREPAREEE TOOO CATCH MEEEE!"

"Your… new friend is weird," Nessy commented, squinting up at the fox. “Wait... How did she even get ahead of us?”

"Says the girl who decided I was her date within thirty seconds of meeting me." I smiled.

"That's different! I'm..." the husky paused. "Okay, that's also weird. Maybe we're all weird."

“I’M JUMPING NOW!” Candace hollered. 

“Hey, what about…” Adler’s voice started, but Candace had already departed from her gondola, leaping straight down towards me.

I barely had time to brace myself before Candace crashed into my arms, the impact rocking the entire gondola. The metal creaked ominously as I caught her, her silver-white fur feeling incredibly soft against my hands.

"See? I knew you'd catch me!" she declared triumphantly, wrapping her arms around my neck. "True love always catches you!"

"Hey! Don’t just jump between gondolas! You could have…" Nessy yelped, gripping the safety bar.

"Nu-huh! I might be drunk but I’m not that drunk. I had to test the power of true loooo—"

FLASH.

Adler materialized in the gondola in a blur of shadow, leaving dark wisps trailing from her form. The gondola groaned under the sudden addition of another pradavarian.

"Loops, what the fuck?" Adler growled, round ears flattening against her skull. "You can't just abandon me mid-proposal to swan dive at another couple! Who does that?!"

"Not another couple!" Candace corrected, still in my arms. "Destined! Fated! Narratively required! They're OUR couple! Wait no, our fifth-touple? Words are hard. Where was I? Ah! Proposal!"

She wriggled free, producing a small velvet box from nowhere with a whisper of “unbind engagement ring from Nullspace”. Before anyone could react, she dropped to one knee in the cramped gondola, making the entire thing sway.

"Adler Silvertail, Nessy Whitepaw, Alec Foster..." She paused, gray-silver eyes scanning the other gondolas. "And Kristi Strand who's totally not watching us from one car down!"

"I'M NOT WATCHING!" came an indignant declaration from said gondola. "I'm monitoring you! For... park safety!"

"Will you all marry me?" Candace opened the box to reveal... a pretzel. A soft pretzel formed into a ring shape, still warm and glistening with salt.

I broke out into a chortle, unable to help myself.

"Is that a pretzel?" Nessy asked.

"It's symbolic!" Candace insisted. "Pretzels are twisted but complete! Like us! We're all twisted up in time and space but we make a complete circle! Also I spent all my money on beer!"

Adler pinched the bridge of her snout. "Loops, you can't propose to four people at once with carnival food."

"Why not? Who made that rule? The proposal police?"

"THE ACTUAL POLICE!" Kristi shouted from her gondola. "By which I mean Carnival security! Meaning me! I knew that you were up to no good!”

"Yessss! I confess! I’m up to no good!" Candace shouted back. "Come over here and arrest me, officer sexy-feathers! I have committed many crimes, bound things to things everywhere across this fair! Mwa ha ha ha."

There was a long pause, then the sound of a gondola door being violently opened.

"Oh no," Nessy muttered.

"Oh yes," Candace grinned.

Kristi appeared at the edge of her gondola, amber eyes blazing with indignation. The Ferris wheel had stopped with us near the top, her car slightly below ours.

"Don't you dare—" I started.

She jumped.

For a raptor pradavarian, the distance was nothing. She landed in our gondola, feathers fluttering wildly, though the poor car was now making sounds of structural distress.

"I am NOT marrying you!" Kristi declared, pointing at Candace. "Also, confess your dastardly crimes! What did you bind to what this time?!”

“My only crime is that I’m in love with you, Kristi,” Candace declared. “Plus these guys. You know them, right?”

"Uh-huh. The drunk biker who got expelled for setting the chemistry lab on fire?" Kristi's eyes shifted to Adler. "That was you, right?"

"It was an accident," Adler muttered. "Mostly."

"See? We're already bonding!" Candace bounced on her knees, still holding up the pretzel. "This is destiny! The five of us, brought together by the carnival gods who might be a dungeon!"

"The weight limit!" Nessy squeaked as the gondola tilted alarmingly.

"Love has no weight limit!" Candace declared.

103: Eyes and Ears

"PHYSICS DOES!" Kristi grabbed the safety bar as we swayed.

The Ferris wheel operator's voice crackled over a speaker: "Car seven, you're exceeding capacity. Someone needs to exit immediately."

"Never!" Candace stood up, spreading her arms wide. "We live together or we die together!"

"WE'RE NOT DYING!" Kristi shrieked. "And we're definitely not living together!"

"But think about it," Candace said, slightly insane looking, wide eyes glowing in the carnival lights. "Doesn't this feel right? All of us here? Like pieces of a puzzle finally clicking together? Ah, stop being scared cats! Bind structural reinforcement!”

She gripped the top bar and the metal stopped groaning.

"It does feel... no, smell like something," Nessy admitted. “Something incredibly deep.”

"Familiar," Adler added, frowning. "Like déjà vu but... more. Like I’ve been here… but not really here. More like we stayed in that cart and the loaf-fox proposed to me with that dumb pretzel.” She pointed at the car below us. “And then we decided to form a biker gang to show the world that we’re cool. Except… we didn’t. Because a dog and a human showed up out of the blue.” She glared at me and Nessy like we ruined her engagement night, which perhaps we did.

Kristi's feathers ruffled. "That's just—"

"The temporal funnel creating false reality loops?" Candace suggested. "Or real memories bleeding through from other loops? Or maybe we're all aspects of the same soul divided across multiple bodies because reality couldn't handle us as a single entity? Because this dastardly human cut us up like ribbons!”

“You’re high,” Kristi growled. “Also, I’m banning you from the Carnival.”

Candace grabbed Kristi’s hands with a wide grin. “Nope. If you ban me, you’ll ban… yourself.”

“What?” Kristi blinked.

“BIND SOUL!” Candace declared.

Silver fractals erupted from her paws where they gripped Kristi's hands. The raptor's amber eyes went wide, then rolled back as her entire body went limp. She collapsed onto the gondola seat like a marionette with cut strings.

"What did you—" Nessy started, but Candace had already grabbed her next. "Bind soul!"

The same silver light engulfed Nessy. Her sky-blue eyes flared briefly before she too crumpled, her black and white form folding into the corner of the swaying gondola.

"Loops, what the fuck are you—" Adler attempted to back away, but there was nowhere to go in the cramped car.

Candace caught her friend's wrist. "Trust me, Ads. I love you! Bind soul!"

The cheetah's body went slack, sliding down against my legs.

I stared at the fox pradavarian standing in the center of three unconscious bodies, the gondola creaking under our combined weight. Her eyes were no longer just silver-gray. They kaleidoscoped like amber skies bleeding into sky-blue, then violet, silver, then back to amber in a hypnotic cycle.

"See?" Candace grinned at me. "I was right. We're all the same. Different flavors of one soul-smoothie. Isn't that neat? Aren't I neat?"

"Candace, what did you do?" I blinked.

"Proved a point!" She spread her arms wide, nearly tipping the gondola. "We're not five people who just met, like this funnel wants us to think! We're one person who got divided! By you, specifically. At the end of time. With a conceptual sword or something. Very dramatic. Ten out of ten dismemberment, would get soul-chopped again!”

She grabbed me. “Unbind memory!”

It hit me like a freight train. All of it. Lifetimes. Ends and beginnings. Human Earth. Systemfall. Pradavarian Earth. Superstore. Nessy's body in my arms. The Leviathan. Pradavarian Earth changed by my wish. Denver. Nameless Mall.

"Now. You may. Eat the pretzel," Candace whispered into my ear.

"Wha-"

I felt the pretzel being stuffed into my mouth.

"I now declare us engaged," Candace giggled.

I chewed the pretzel. It was warm and salty.

"You may now kiss your foxiancee," she added and kissed me fiercely.

My head spun, not just from the kiss but from the ocean of memories she had awakened in my soul.

“Aight, everyone got everything?” Candace grinned, stepping back from me. “We good?”

"Sure." I swallowed the remnants of the snack.

She snapped her fingers.

All three bodies jerked upright simultaneously, gasping. Nessy's eyes shot open. Kristi blinked rapidly. Adler pawed at her black-tear streak cheetah face like she wasn't sure it was still hers.

"What..." Kristi started.

"The fuck..." Adler continued.

"Just happened?" Nessy finished.

They all turned to stare at each other, then at Candace, then at each other again.

"Oh," Nessy breathed. "Oh, I remember. Not... not everything, but... fragments. Like looking through frosted glass of me. All of me. Us. This is a dungeon. The Nameless Mall.”

"The highway," Kristi whispered, one claw going to her chest. "Highway Sixty-Nine. I was there for... for two years? Damn it."

"The gas station," Adler added, staring at me with a frown. "Where… I claimed you, like a big idiot. Slayer.” She covered her face with her gray paws. “At least I didn’t do anything stupid this time around. Even though I wanted to… soooooo bad. Damn it. You... you stole my engagement! That was my pretzel!” She stared at me, mouth opening and closing.

"Alec gets the pretzel this time," Candace supplied, bobbing helpfully. "'Cus he's our pack Alpha and we're... a pack. Hugs?" She looked at the other prad girls. "Yes."

The three of them moved at once, converging on Candace in a tangle of fur and feathers. Nessy wrapped her arms around the fox from one side, Kristi from the other, and Adler… no Adelle just threw herself on top of the pile, the gondola swaying precariously.

"We're…" Nessy was saying, tears streaming down her snout. "We're all together. How crazy is that?"

"Of course we are," Kristi said, though she was crying too. "Abyss. We're... we're..."

"A pack," Adelle supplied. "We're a fucking pack!"

"CAR SEVEN!" The operator's voice boomed through the speaker again. "YOU ARE EXCEEDING WEIGHT CAPACITY BY APPROXIMATELY TWO HUNDRED POUNDS. RETURN TO YOUR OWN CAR IMMEDIATELY OR THE FIRE DEPARTMENT WILL BE CALLED."

"Shit," Adler said. She grabbed Kristi's hand, determining that the raptor was the tallest. "Hold on."

"Hold on to wha—"

Shadows erupted around them both. One moment they were there, the next they'd vanished in a blur of darkness. A second later, Kristi's voice drifted up from the gondola below us.

"SLAYER, ADELLE! WARN ME BEFORE YOU DO THAT!"

"You're fine!" Adelle called back. "Stop being dramatic! Just some Shadowstep."

"I'M A RAPTOR. DRAMATIC IS IN MY DNA!”

The gondola rocked gently as the Ferris wheel resumed its rotation. Candace and Nessy turned to each other, some unspoken communication passing between them. 

"Nose and Eyes," they said in musical unison, nodding together. “Observe and sniff.”

Candace's eyes blazed silver while Nessy's nose twitched frantically, both of them leaning over the gondola's edge to scan the carnival below.

"There," Nessy pointed toward a stage near the beach side of the pier. "Something's off about that area. Smells like... excessive wrongness? Like the key… our dimensional key!"

"I see it," Candace confirmed, squinting. "There's a dimensional wobble around that stage. Like something that shouldn't exist here but does. Also there's a massive banner that says 'WET T-SHIRT CONTEST - WIN BIG!'"

"How is that dimensional?" I asked.

"The prizes," Candace said. "One of them is radiating 'doesn't-belong-here' Astral energy. Specifically..." She tilted her head, silver light pulsing in her eyes. "Box number forty-seven. I see it. It’s pink chalk. Our pink chalk."

"Of course it is," I sighed. "So we just go ask for it?"

Both pradavarians turned to stare at me.

"Sweet summer child," Candace patted my head. "The dungeon has rules. We can't just take it. We have to win it."

"In a wet t-shirt contest," Nessy added, tilting her head.

"Which involves what?" I asked.

The two girls stared at me like I was an idiot.

"I've... never actually been to one of those," I admitted with a huff. "What are the rules? Do you just stand there and get wet?"

Candace burst out laughing. "Oh no, it's way more complicated and stupid than that! See that big glass tube dunk tank at the front of the stage?"

I squinted down at the setup. There was indeed a large transparent cylinder with a seat inside, and above it, what looked like a water tank.

"Contestants sit in the tube," Candace explained. "The audience gets buckets of apples. See that red target on the wall? When someone hits it, water dumps on whoever's in the tube."

"That seems... elaborate."

"Wait, it gets better!" She pointed to a large meter beside the stage. "There's a loudness meter. The contestant who gets the biggest crowd reaction wins points. Plus there's judges scoring on, like, stage presence and charisma and stuff."

"What's the actual scoring breakdown?" I asked, processing the bizarre carnival game.

Candace counted on her claws. "From what I can smell in the Astral... thirty-three percent for whoever stays in their seat longest by making audiences miss. Thirty-three percent for crowd reaction based on that meter thing. Thirty-three percent for 'stage presence' as judged by..." She squinted. "A very drunk shark in a Hawaiian shirt."

"That's only ninety-nine percent."

"The last one percent is vibes," she said with a firm nod. "If there's a tie, the head judge picks or they do an applause-off."

"And the prizes?"

"Cash for top three, plus the winner gets to pick from a hundred mystery boxes," Nessy said, still sniffing intently. "One of which is our chalk. The prizes are magical artifacts, behind the central ward with the cash, so we can't just steal them easily."

"I see." I frowned. "Why didn't the chalk just... appear in our hands? Or at least somewhere easier to get?"

Candace shrugged. "Dungeons have rules. Often… Stupid, absurd, narrative-driven rules. This particular funnel is obsessed with observation and performance. We're in the memory of a festival where I proposed to Ads and then we played games, so we have to play along with the festival’s narrative."

"What happens if we don't?" I asked. "Like, what if we just get Adelle to teleport and break into the prize boxes?"

"If break the narrative too much, we draw attention to us as outsiders," she said grimly. "Like when we drew the door at MacPaws. The dungeon's immune system wakes up early, the First Person Hunters manifest faster and angrier, and we get eaten before we can even say 'temporal violation.' Although... We have maybe..." She sniffed the air. "Seven hours till they start breaking through regardless."

The Ferris wheel was descending now, bringing us back toward the ground. Below, I could see the wet t-shirt contest stage more clearly. A small crowd was already gathering, mostly drunk pradavarians hooting and hollering.

"So one of us has to enter," Nessy said quietly.

"Not just enter," Candace corrected. "Win. Against what looks like..." She counted. "Fifteen other contestants? Including some seal who's basically wearing dental floss and confidence."

“Wait…” Nessy blinked. “I know her. That’s…”

“Marlena,” Candace laughed. “She must have come as a tourist here for her Spring Break. Heh. Well, not exactly her, more like a memory of her, since this fair is pretty much composed of our memories of this place.”

“Can the next memory be my apartment?” Nessy asked.

“Why?” Candace asked.

“I like my apartment,” Nessy confessed. “I had stuff in it. My stuff.”

“Your wall of Alec-ness?” I smiled, recalling her place that was lost when the Pradavarian Earth was devoured by entropy. 

Candace chortled.

Nessy wagged her tail lightly. “Yeah… It's... I miss it. Maybe if I revisit it, remember all of the details… I could, I dunno… remake it? No, I guess that’s stupid. It won’t be the same.”

Candace chewed her bottom lip. “I could figure out how to bind it to a specific place… maybe.”

“You think so?” Nessy’s eyes lit up, tail wagging faster.

“Maybe,” Candace shrugged. “This place produces insanely realistic memories. As long as I have a clean entropic medium to work with, I could bring your apartment back. I could bring back any lost memory really. It’s just a matter of whether I’m interested enough in it.”

Nessy’s tail slowed its wagging.

“Don’t worry, babe,” Candace grinned. “I am interested in helping you. Making us happy—this matters. A lot. We should all get what we want out of this dastardly movie-trap dungeon. Milk it for what it’s worth. That’s the point. Not to simply escape from the funnel, but to weaponize it. Once we take control of it, we can use it against anything! Superstore? Denver! It'll be our joker card against other dungeons!”

“So once we get the chalk we aren’t leaving?” I asked.

“Mmmm, no,” Candace said. “I’d like to clear the FPH infestation from the funnel to make it fully ours. Those buggers have to go. The thing is, I’ve no idea how to kill them yet. I understand how to make us less visible to them using Second Person bindery or how to run away from them with the chalk… but not how to vanquish them.”

Nessy made a thoughtful face. “How do we kill something conceptual that feeds on observations?”

“Not with binding magic,” Candace contemplated. “I tried that. Didn’t work, they just keep coming back, unbinding themselves.”

“Punching?” Adelle voiced from her gondola.

“Mmmm… no,” Candace said. “They’re too damn conceptual for that. Alec? Don’t just sit there like a human loaf. Ideas please?” She looked at me expectantly as the Ferris wheel touched down.

I thought back through everything I'd killed across my various lives. The endless grinding in the G Supercenter: corrupt employees, shelf stockers, spider staples, cleaning bots, security drones, hostile products, corrupted customers, overgrown mannequins. I'd burned them, frozen them, exploded them with microwaves, dissolved them in cleaning chemicals, divided them with my 2D knife. But those were mostly physical entities, things with bodies that could break.

Then my mind gradually drifted further back, to the moment when Nessy had slipped the time-leaping watch onto my wrist, the acceleration bracelet covered in eyes and the compass. How she'd looked at me with those knowing… less than sane eyes, already understanding what I'd become, what I'd have to do. The weight of her death, of my infinite deaths, endless grinding to reach the end and start over.

"I could feed them myself," I offered. "Overwhelm the hunters. I'm a liminal tree-soul, right? Infinite branches of consciousness. Maybe if they try to eat all of me at once, they'll... explode?"

"And what if they don't?" Nessy fretted, her ears flattening. "What if they just grow and multiply and then..."

"Eat those of us who aren't liminal," Candace finished, shaking her head. "No. We're not gorging them on tree-consciousness. We need something else... something final."

The gondola door opened, and we stepped out onto the pier. Kristi and Adler were already waiting, the raptor looking slightly bothered by shadow teleportation or by the overall situation of existing in a dungeon that kept resetting her memories.

"The end of time," I said suddenly. "What if I... take them there? To the Leviathan's cradle? Where nothing can survive except for me."

All four pradavarians turned to stare at me.

"The what now?" Adler asked.

"The place where I killed the Wormwood Star Leviathan," I explained. "Where entropy eats everything that isn't... whatever I am. If the First Person Hunters feed on observation and consciousness, what happens when they're in a place where observation itself breaks down?"

Candace's eyes went completely silver, staring into the Astral. "That's... huh. That might actually work. The end of time and space isn't just entropy… it's the absence of narrative. No stories can exist there. No perspectives. Just... An ending. And the wish for a new beginning."

“What would we even be there?” Adler asked.

“We’d be the Leviathan,” Nessy said. “And Alec would be the Slayer… and there would be no room for FPHses. Hopefully. Or maybe they’d become part of the Leviathan? Hrmm.”

“You’re all fucking serious?” Kristi growled. “You want this fucking time funnel thing to simulate the end of fucking reality? Really? That's our best plan?”

“It might clear out the infestation,” Candace shrugged. “I don’t really know what the Slayer and Leviathan are. Maybe if we use the funnel to visit a memory of it, I could understand it all, weaponize it…”

“Let’s win the chalk first, though, yeah?” Nessy suggested.

“Yeah,” Candace agreed. “Fine. Let's go win our chalk first.”

“I'm vetoing the whole Leviathan simulation idea if anyone is going to listen to me,” Kristi ground out.