Where the Predators Prowl. 86. Optometry

86. Optometry

“First stop and the nearest destination. The optometrist on the second floor. We’ll grab the Crossview Spectacles, then move on to the theater for dimensionally-sheared tickets,” Candace outlined. "I’ll switch us to second person if we encounter any FPHses.”

“You can manage the second-person switch, right?” Kristi eyed me.

“I can manage it,” I said. “Only one note on me, not an entire garden.”

The raptor let out a worried exhale as Candace quickly went over the mall-diving prep.

The mannequins Calvin had given us stood behind each of us, their monitor-faces displaying blank, occasionally flickering screens. 

"You think these whack conceptoid shop owners will actually honor their social media offers?" Addie asked.

“Even where Entropy rules supreme there’s still some order,” Nessy sniffed. 

“Entropy comes in slow-moving supermassive waves here,” Candace affirmed. “Each wave fucks something but the backend of reality gradually reasserts things. Yeah, it reasserts them wrong, but.. It reasserts them nevertheless.”

“Reality has a backend?” Addie arched an eyebrow. 

“Every earth is a dungeon,” I said. 

“Systemfall breaks things but it also gradually fixes them,” Candace added.

“And what if a reality-fuckin’ wave catches us?” Kristi asked.

“The next big wave won’t come for a while,” Candace clarified. “I can see it building up in the Astral. We’ll be long gone before it comes. It’ll be Calvin’s problem, not ours. Let’s go.”

We advanced up the stairwell. The First Person Hunter wasn’t there anymore.

The slightly warped front doors parted with a sigh, releasing a gust of stale air that tasted of plastic, mildew and incredibly questionable flavours fused to other flavours.

The lobby stretched ahead of our group, the marble floor cracked and rippling like disturbed water. Various storefronts lined the walls, many displaying mannequins in various states of dismemberment or conceptual fusion. Signs and billboards flickered overhead, spelling out messages and ads that rearranged themselves when viewed directly, potentially attempting to adjust themselves to our shopper-ness expectations.

"Everybody stay sharp," Kristi murmured, clutching the decimator like a life preserver, feathers fluttering up.

“Relax your rapta-livarr! And de-stresso!” A blood-red ad flashed at her, making the raptor twitch. “Only three easy payments of 19’99 and you TOO can attain inner peace!”

Kristi growl-huffed at the advert, clearly not interested in inner peace.

The mall directory stood at the center of the lobby slightly past the entrance, a massive abstract statue-thing that rotated slowly in three and a half dimensions. Candace approached it cautiously, pawing at the edge.

"Aight. Optometry’s on the second floor, north wing," she read, pointing to a pulsing red dot on the constantly warping and wobbling map.

We moved toward the nearest escalator, which jerked and shuddered, moving 3 steps forward and then 1 step backward.

The storefronts around seemed to turn to follow our movement, twisting dimensionally, their entrances always facing us regardless of our position.

“Shouldn’t we… have, I dunno, flown to the shop on the glider?” Kristi wondered.

“Nah,” Candace shot the raptor down. “No flying vehicles allowed.”

“How would they stop us?”

“Don’t know,” Candace replied. “But I’d rather not break too many rules unless we have to. We're trying to make friends here, not be a rowdy gang of hoodlums."

"Right." I said.

"Also... don't look directly at any of the stores we haven't friended yet," Candace warned as we reached the end of the escalator. "They might take it as an invitation or an offence.”

The second floor felt slightly more stable than the first, featuring walkways constructed of brushed steel and glass. Upside down trees bloomed from the ceiling, the leaves fluttering above us, paper mache flowers opening when we passed below each.

"That looks like the place we need," Nessy pointed. "The Nameless Optometry."

The optometrist's shop glowed with a soft blue light. Its windows displayed rows upon rows of glasses of various quirky shapes. 

My hand-eyes noticed a disturbance in the air, a shadowy thing crawling out of one of the shops comprised of a thousand limbs.

“FPH incoming,” I elbowed the fox.

“Shit.” Candace froze. "Bind perspective!”

The world tilted sideways.

. . .

You see yourself standing there, perceiving your body through the mannequin's monitor-head cam while still inside your flesh. The sensation makes you want to claw your eyes out. Including the seven extra ones on your arm. 

The FPH pauses, confused by the sudden shift in your perception.

Observed from this incredibly ghastly POV, the blurry, many limbed, shadowy entity refocuses itself. It appears as a man in a checkered suit, featuring drawings of eyeballs in each square. The man is holding a human head in his hands and instead of a head, there’s a camera blooming from his neck. A coaxial cable stretches across the floor and vanishes in the ceiling. The checkered pattern appears to be covering the entire figure of the man, not just the suit. It’s like he’s made from a ‘missing-texture’ mesh. The black and white eyeballs flicker on and off.

“Huh, where did they vanish to?” The camera-head-man utters with a bothered expression on the head held between his checkered fingers. He walks over to you, cable wiggling on the floor like a snake. “Excuse me, second person friend. Have you by chance observed a first person of interest in this locale?”

“Nope,” you reply.

The checkered man nods, the cable snaking behind him as he turns in a half-circle. The human head in his hands blinks rapidly.

"Strange. My face-cam detected five first-person perceptions. Must be a flesh-glitch. Hard to find quality first person consciousness these days."

He pats the head, which emits a disturbing human tongue click. "Call me if you see any nice, juicy first-person perspectives. We pay well for referrals."

The checkered man offers you a checkered card with a barcode on it. You accept it and stuff it in your pocket. The FPH shuffles away, dragging his cable across the floor. When he rounds the corner, Candace breaks the binding with a snap of her claws.

. . .

I lurched back into my own perspective, gulping down air and struggling not to throw up bile. Nessy reached out to steady me, petting me softly. 

"Fucking hell," Kristi hissed. "Let's grab the damn glasses."

We entered the ____ Optometry, the bell above the door jingling ominously. Inside, rows of eyeglasses lined the walls on shelves that curved at physically wrong angles. The lighting pulsed subtly, making the shadows shift and crawl.

"Hello?" Candace called.

The air rustled. From behind the counter emerged... a writhing mass of spiders, each one wearing tiny eyeglasses. They moved as a single shape, forming a vaguely humanoid figure. Dozens of them held miniature scalpels, needles, and optical measurement tools between their hairy legs.

"Welcome to the Nameless Optometry," the spiders spoke in unison, their voices a chittering chorus. "We've been expecting you. Your comments indicated interest in our Crossview selection."

Kristi jumped back, nearly bumping into a rotating display with a growl.

"Fuck, it just had to be spiders," Adelle muttered, fists clenching.

"Hi!" Candace stepped forward, fluffy tail wagging. "Yes, we're looking for Starscape Crossview Spectacles. Got any in stock?"

The spiders shifted, rearranging themselves slightly into a giant, pointing hand. "We have several models available. Would you like to try them on? We can adjust the fit... personally."

"Adjust it how?" The fox asked.

"We adjust the eye-flesh to fit the glasses," the giant hand made from spiders answered.

"Yeah none of that," Kristi growled.

Nessy joined Candace with a somewhat nervous smile. "We aren't buying the glasses for ourselves to wear, it's for... a ritual, so we won't be needing adjustments. Your shop has excellent reviews."

"You checked our reviews?" The spiders sounded pleased, several of them adjusting their tiny glasses. "Most customers don't bother. They just scream and run."

"Their loss," Candace chirped. "Hey, why did the spider go to the optometrist?"

The mass shifted questioningly.

"Because he had eight eyes but still couldn't find his glasses!" Candace delivered the punchline with a fox grin. It was a mild joke at best.

A strange clicking sound emerged from the spider mass. Possibly laughter.

"That's funnier than you might think," the spiders replied. "We lose our glasses constantly. It's a professional hazard."

While Candace and Nessy charmed the spiders, I scanned the shelves for the special glasses. My arm-eyes proved unexpectedly useful, each independently focusing on different display cases.

"The Crossview models would be... unusual, correct?" I asked. "Showing places that don't exist locally?"

"Yes. Third shelf, back wall," the spiders directed.

It didn't take a long time to locate the glasses.

"These?" I picked one star-shaped glasses set carefully.

"Yes. Those are our dimensional specials. Try them on if you dare."

I put the glasses in front of my many eyed arm. Through the lenses, the shop disappeared, replaced by a vast cosmic void filled with distant megastructures dotted in red lights.

"They work," I confirmed "We'll take all five."

"Excellent," the spiders chittered. "Now, about payment..."

Several hundred spiders brandished their tiny scalpels more prominently.

"Do you take card or cash?" Candace asked, looking a bit tense.

"We typically accept retinal deposits," the spiders explained, reshaping their mass into an approximation of a giant eyeball. "One eye per pair is standard."

Kristi growled, gripping her rifle slightly, ready to shred the spider-eye.

"Hold up," Candace intervened. "I have a better offer. I'm a Binder. I could provide a service far more valuable than mere eyeballs."

"What service?"

"I noticed your shop doesn't have a strong conceptual anchor," Candace explained. "It lacks a name plus the mall itself lacks a name, which limits your customer flow to random dimensional null-drifters."

"This is true," the spiders admitted. "The Namelessness hampers business terribly. Our last client was forty-seven years ago."

"I could bind a True Name to your shop," Candace offered. "Something that would echo across dimensions, drawing in swank customers!"

The spiders huddled together, conferring in hushed clicks and chittering.

"Acceptable," they agreed after a minute of hissing at each other. "Name us, Binder, and the five Crossview Spectacles are yours."

Candace smiled, silver fractals dancing around her paws. "I name this shop 'Parallax View Optometry' and bind it to the concept of clear dimensional sight in the name of Infinity Paradox Proxima!"

Silver light flashed across the store. The shelves straightened, the lights stabilized, and a new sign materialized above the counter: "Parallax View Optometry - See Beyond What Is!"

"It feels... substantial," the spiders marveled, rearranging themselves into a giant thumbs up. "We haven't felt this real in decades."

"Pleasure doing business," Candace winked. "Hey, ummm… What if we extended our partnership?"

“In which way?”

“A Quest to name this entire mall,” Candace waved a white paw outside of the shop.

The spiders shifted, hundreds of tiny lenses glinting. "You think that you can name the entire mall?"

"Why not?" Candace grinned. "Think about it. A named mall draws more customers to all stores, including yours."

"Such a task would require..." The spiders calculated, legs tapping against each other. "Significant cooperation from many stores."

“I think that we can manage it,” I said. “Candace is a skilled binder.”

"You know the mall better than we do,” Nessy added, “Could you help us navigate to the other stores? We need ingredients for dimensional chalk ritual."

The spider collective vibrated for a minute. Then, to our surprise, the mass began to split down the middle, dividing into two smaller blob-shapes.

"We accept your proposal," the first spider-cluster announced. "Half of us will accompany you."

"Visit again!" the remaining, reduced man made from spiders called, moving behind the counter. "Next time, perhaps a fitting for contact lenses? They go in so much more easily than they come out!"

The door swung shut behind us, the bell jingling.

"One down, six to go!" Candace shoved the glasses into a bag. "Movie theater next!"

"Yay," Kristi let out, glancing at the spiders following us.

“Do you have a name?” Candace asked the shifting, lanky, spider-shaped figure.

“We do not,” the spiders replied.

“I’ma call you guys Murdoch,” Candace grinned. 

“Why… Murdoch?” The spiders wobbled.

“Dunno,” Candace shrugged. “Is a cool name.”

“It is acceptable.” Murdoch stated.