Hadassah

There was a short chapter posted shortly before this one, make sure to check it out.

That evening, Erin picked up food on the way home, having no intention of going out of the apartment again. Takeout is a little difficult when riding a bike, so her choices were limited to things that didn’t jostle around too much, or have too much liquid. And she needed something cheap, because she still hadn’t bought groceries from the corner store.

She ate dinner while listening to the next apartment’s thrash techno, played at full volume. Even though the building’s structure was concrete, the walls were sheetrock, and the concrete floor and ceiling only seemed to act as a built in reverb chamber for the music. 

By the time she’d finished the sandwich, she figured she was finally in the mood to hear the other side of things. She wasn’t sorry, not exactly, but she had cooled off from yesterday. 

She cleaned up and put on some casual clothing and some sneakers, before texting a  number that she’d previously blocked just after her kidnapping by Doppelganger.

“Yeah. Hey Ashlynn. You wanted to talk? I have time now, if you are free.”

She didn’t get a response immediately, just a few minutes of waiting, before her phone buzzed again. 

“errr... Erin? fr?”

“Yes.”

“sure, but my place is uh kind of busy?”

“You can come over to mine.” 

Erin paused a moment, before adding. 

“I promise not to punch you this time unless you do try to kill me.”

“ROFL Okay, I will be over ijas.”

Back at her apartment door, but invited over the threshold this time, Ashlynn was looking around at her barren apartment while Erin made coffee. “Sheesh, you really did lose everything huh?” she asked, speaking over the neighbor’s music. 

One of the things Erin did not forget to buy was a coffee maker, one of the first things on her list. Some people had other priorities. Erin’s were coffee, a laptop, and maybe a mattress to sleep on. Everything else followed from there. “Yeah, it turns out fire is an effective way to lose all your valuables for normal people. For a ‘local’.”

“Sorry.” Erin glanced at Ashlynn. To her surprise, the rogue Protagonist seemed to flinch a bit. “I didn’t do it. But still, like, I am sorry.” If Erin had thought that Doppelganger had anything to do with her apartment fire, she wouldn’t have invited her over, but hearing the villain say it again didn’t hurt.

“Shit happens to locals.” Erin would have claimed ‘Plot happens,’ but she didn’t think she’d be allowed to say it.

“By the way, that’s, um, sure some music, isn’t it?” Erin’s neighbor had moved to something like techno-country. Erin was surprised that the Plot hadn’t made the music quieter, to give a Protagonist some space to talk, like how it made sure cell-reception was always good for the Cavalry. 

Erin shrugged. “It’s not my jam, but I can put headphones on. Was the Rave good last night?”

“The Rave? Oh! They didn’t make it. Someone had been attempting an armed robbery nearby and had some serious hardware, so they had their stand-ins play. It was okay. Word has it they will make up for it next week.” She frowned. “You know, I didn’t exactly plan to, like, swap music preferences.”

“What did you want to talk about, Ashlynn?”

“Woo, sheesh, no need to be so hot.” Erin must have had a little more acid in her voice than she intended. 

“I limped for like three days after twisting my ankle to get out of your improvised bondage, Ashlynn.” Erin was a little tired, and knew she sounded a little heated. Maybe she should have waited another day to talk to Ashlynn. Erin had spent all day mentally preparing herself for this.

Ashlynn was a little indignant at that. “Hey, if I had known you were a Cognizant, that you knew-” Ashlynn’s jaw shut tight and she sat there, fighting the same boundary that Erin and every other backdrop had lived with for years.

The Plot buzzed a moment against Erin’s skin, but seemed to lose interest just as quick.

Ashlynn let out a breath she sounded like she’d been holding. “Gods damn…” She paused to take a breath in. Ashlynn clearly didn’t quite understand the boundaries and barriers this conversation would have. If she couldn’t talk about things from her perspective, Erin surely couldn’t talk openly about Protagonists, the Plot, and related topics.

Erin started more cautiously. “Even if I hadn’t been working today, I wouldn’t have joined you to see the Rave yesterday. Especially because it was a Monday night in Meridian City. I don’t go out on Mondays and Thursdays, unless I am forced to by… circumstances relating to people like you.” Erin watched Ashlynn to see if she understood. To see if Ashlynn could make the same connections. She had no idea if the Protagonists saw the same schedules everyone else did.

Ashlynn stared at her blankly at first, as though she was a Pawn and Erin had referenced the Plot directly. Erin nearly gave up, about to move on, pulling mugs out for both of them. 

Ashlynn exclaimed with a little breath, something clicking. “Oh! You mean-” She caught herself before she went any further, “You don’t like going out on Mondays and Thursdays in particular? For, um, reasons?”

The glowing eagerness in her eyes showed how much Ashlynn wanted to say more. Erin didn’t understand. She wasn’t sure she could. Ashlynn seemed to revel in the curse that affected everyone on the planet.

“No, I don’t go out on Mondays and Thursdays in Meridian City.” Erin poured coffee for them both. “I am not the only one, either. Lots of people actively avoid those evenings. Do you want half and half or sugar? Wait.” Erin looked around her kitchen. “Sorry, I forgot to buy sugar. I just have half and half.”

Ashlynn motioned negatively, though whether it was to the addition of half and half or to Erin’s distraction, she couldn’t tell, because Ashlynn carried on. “So you aren’t alone? Like, you know others?”

Erin poured herself some half and half and brought both mugs to the table, the black coffee in front of Ashlynn. “Yes.” Erin paused, thinking about what she wanted to say exactly. “While the filter is an annoyance to you, it is dangerous to… everyone else that’s... not like you and the other… not locals.”

Erin wondered if the Plot, when it wasn’t active, did keyword search filtering, basically censoring conversations between locals and Protagonists.

Well, not many were like Ashlynn, as far as Erin was concerned. She was more like Rex than Tyson: a villain Protagonist, something that never happened. Erin didn’t hold Ashlynn in much more regard than Rex, either, but Erin was starting to need answers. Erin worried there were way more like Rex and Ashlynn out there.

Ashlynn seemed to be thinking along the same lines. “Oh there aren’t many like me. I think I know what you mean though. Like Mistel and her Cavalry, you mean.” She seemed to think about this a moment before frowning and shaking her head. “I don’t, like, get what you mean, though. How could it be dangerous?” 

Ashlynn asked this as if the Plot hadn’t already made millions of people into Pawns to fill the Plot, with an estimated ninety percent of all people having experienced being “Puppeted” directly.

“The filter sometimes falls on people permanently. Over their entire life. They become-” Erin couldn’t speak, the Plot buzzing lazily but forcefully against her skin again. So Erin still couldn’t use the words that the backdrop use. She had been trying to say the word “Puppets.” Erin continued, “They lose the ability to speak up. Permanently. And the filter controls them.”

Ashlynn frowned. “No, that doesn’t make sense. Cognizance is binary; Once fully realized, you should be immune to the filter. Either you notice the inconsistencies and subtle power of the filter, or you never realize we are here. It can’t be stolen from you. The filter can’t kill people.”

Erin wanted to scoff at the word ‘subtle’. She followed a different tack. “Supervillians. Family members, and close friends to… people like you. Janey, someone you refused to kidnap. They are permanently filtered. No brains left. No one to talk to. They don’t even know the filter is there, they are just… part of the filter, to make the world seem ‘normal’ for people like you.”

“It can’t work like that.”

“Haven’t you noticed how easy things are for you? How dumb the gang members and cultists you conned were? How no one can question the secret identities of the Superior Seven in New York City or the Cavalry, ones that are super obvious?”

“I’m not sure it’s that obvious…” She frowned, and Erin hoped that she was connecting the dots. “I mean, I haven’t really noticed. I can’t exactly look things up outside and the filter doesn’t help me. Like I said, I’m not exactly supposed to be here. So I am stuck on slow-time like you.” 

Erin had to swallow back anger for Janette, and to a lesser extent for people like Detective Grant or the Red Street Raiser pawns. Not only that, but lots of people died because of the very presence of the Plot, by losing their will to live like Greg did, months ago. She needed to change tack.

“You… and people like you, came here expecting Cognizants and a filter. Right? How many people would you expect to be Cognizants?”

Ashlynn frowned, “I mean, it's not my field, but maybe a couple billion to save and uplift?” Erin blinked, noting that was nearly a fourth the population of Earth. Then Ashlynn continued, “In the whole ‘verse, I mean. Earth is small.”

Erin put her coffee down, hand shaking. “The universe?”

“Well yeah, humans are hardly the only ones out there. And, like, numbers vary, I think. Maybe a dozen billion, at most.”

“So… what if the filter was suppressing everyone, because it’s got a quota to limit to? Could it… filter everyone simultaneously?” 

“That’s impossible. I told you, Cognizance is binary. Its a variable that always has been binary, in every 'verse.” Ashlynn said. She continued to say, with a little laugh, “I mean, suppressing everyone would defeat the whole purpose anyway because it would take too many resources. I mean if it were that bad, then the ‘filter’ wouldn’t able to keep up with all the other functions...” Ashlynn seemed to pause at that, as if thinking about ramifications she couldn’t speak about. 

She pressed. “Its how it works here, Ashlynn. All of us are being fi-” Erin’s phone buzzed on the counter. When she saw who it was, she put the coffee mug down.

“Everything alright?” 

Nothing would ever be right again. 

Erin worried that The Ferret somehow knew who was in her apartment at that moment, as the phone buzzed again.