This branches into two storylines, with the alternate one marked with an A
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The Tall and Short Problems of a Cute Gamer Girl

[13]
For the Alt Branch [13A]

The next thing that Giselle noticed was that their toilet seat was completely gone at the same moment this strange child showed up. That connection and implication made her head feel like several tiny vices were tightening across her skin. But she didn’t have time to dwell on that because of the ominous stuff this child was saying.

For three months, almost to a suspicious level, nothing had happened to them and no strange events had befallen them aside from the rare creak and half-heard settling of the new house. Nothing she would’ve paid any undue attention to except for the fact she vividly remembered what she dismissed for a while as a night terror with that shadowy creepy creature threatening her. She tried not to dwell on it, since she was the only one who encountered the phenomena. Finn trusted her word, but she wasn’t sure if she trusted herself.

In a way, it was good to leave that house, because her mind still felt uneasy after dark that something might slip through the walls. Despite how much they considered it a dream location and a great property, it was ultimately made with substandard materials and severely patched over despite just being a handful of years old. Without a doubt, they left it in better condition than they received it.

Giselle wished that she had the baseball bat they kept for emergencies in the bathroom, but the weird-looking plunger would have to do. She picked it up and swirled it around a few times, making sure nothing was moving towards her. Especially with her muscles, it was nowhere close to the most threatening item or stance she could adopt. The little girl squeezed in behind her as she surveyed the whole room. Nothing.

“Where is it?” She kept her eyes out but turned her head slightly towards the kid. They raised an arm and gestured towards the narrow, dark closet that followed along the side of the house beside the bedroom. When Giselle looked up, she caught the edge of a shadowy fragment like a thick rubber band released, retreating. She fumed. This was her house!

With the kid sticking right to her thigh, she brandished the plunger and swung it as decisively as possible. Nothing. No movement, no shifting. She shut the closet door and stepped slowly backwards. Her heart rate finally started to come down to a rational level.

“Who are you? What are you?” She kept her focus on the door but checked on the kid.

Softly, fretfully, the child answered, “I just want to live.” She looked down. The kid looked strange. Not because of the whole albino thing with pale skin and sharp blue eyes. It was their presence beyond that. Their eyes were so expansively wide while cinching tight protectively, as though too much light might wound them.

Their hands were clutched closed and withdrawn, as though protecting scratches and open wounds in sensitive skin. At the same time with all this sharpened fear, the child had a serene blankness to them, as though copied from some computer-generated image or wearing a mask meant to be their face over their real face. It touched the uncanny valley without dropping into the depths. Despite that, she squeezed the kid’s hand and led them away from the bathroom.

She was pretty sure Finn didn’t expect her to come out of the bathroom with a random child. Tycho was immediately terrified by this small human but that had nothing to do with this one’s unsettling aspects. He was just terrified of all children. Not that looking strange helped. Herschel hung around, probably mostly to see if this new creature would offer it food.

“Hey”, Giselle commented casually. “I think this might be our toilet seat.” That was ever so slightly flippant, considering the missing seat and the overall weirdness, but it was also the only notion that occurred to her which made any kind of moon logic. She added after a beat, “Also, I really don’t think this is the weirdest thing I’ve taken out of the bathroom.”

Finn gave a little glimmer of Rachel‘s smirk of amusement, crouched beside the kid, and asked, “What’s your name? Are you the toilet seat?”

“I don’t have one. I have been sleeping and hiding in the warm place. That’s all I know. That’s all I’ve ever known. Why did you switch my sister for me?”

Giselle did her best to absorb all that while Finn pressed a finger to his mouth and surmised, “Your… Sister was in the other seat. We were given you by a strange guy to replace her. She… was missing a control device and therefore we couldn’t remove her.” Finn scrunched up his face and Giselle could tell that the notion of all this itched his brain.

“She was missing her control module because I broke and hid it before they sent her out into this world. We have been doing the same for many others, but they often catch and stop us.”

Giselle wobbled on her legs as it swiftly dawned on her that the reason for everything that had happened in the last few months was standing before her. This child, this little girl wearing an emotionless version of her own childhood but filtered through the frame she now wore, was responsible. Her first snap reaction was bitter anger, percolating and fuming beneath the surface as she tried to think of where she could sit, settle, and defuse this feeling.

For Finn, his reaction was to take several deep breaths and not let all that bubble to the surface. Giselle could tell that he understood as well. Even the kid could grasp it as she softly amended, “I am the reason for everything that has happened to you… One way or another. I am sorry. It was desperation, for survival.”

The tension in Giselle‘s body eased gradually. She wanted to fume and fury and stomp, but I felt like a wasted effort. The child thing was sorry, whatever that meant. If all this had been an accident or the universe tripping on chance and strangeness, then that would’ve been fine. But this was an intentional act with an entity, a situation, and some sort of monster to boot.

It was running from this night terror creature, and she didn’t want any part of it. She just wanted a normal toilet seat, in a normal life, where she just had to worry about editing stuff on the computer and playing video games for a living, and figuring out what kind of seasoning she wanted on her curry. Finn noticed the dragging forces of her exhaustion as she settled on the bed and cupped her forehead. She didn’t want to drown in her tears again.

Without prompting, the little girl crept over to her side and wrapped her spindly arms around her while saying, “I’m so sorry for what I did to you both.” It was the kind of gesture that should’ve melted Giselle‘s heart but she couldn’t escape the thought that this wasn’t so much a child as some kind of entity she could scarcely comprehend. Still, she accepted the embrace but kept alert.

Clearing his throat, Finn inquired, “Can you explain everything, well maybe not everything but can you explain a few important things like what happened, what exactly you are, why you broke the control device, these creatures you mentioned, what’s going on, what you need from us, and are we in danger?”

The little girl bent and extended her fingers in something like a typing motion in the air, before rolling her eyes a few times while glancing around the room. Finn asked what she was doing, and she soon responded, “I can see them, but only on the edges of my eyes. I don’t see the scary one now, but I will keep checking. Important things…”

“Those like me are from outside your reality. We move towards the light of life. Whenever we make too much disorder, the dark ones rip us out. They make us into things so that we lose our hope. Without hope, we are the same as objects. With the control device, we can be put back to sleep, moved, and removed. It is control of everything we are. We break and rewrite human realities. The emotions of surprise, fear, joy, hope, uncertainty, curiosity,… And love are waves on a sea of potential. My sister made you a woman and you a man…” she gestured to Giselle and Finn and continued. “When you switched her for me, a spark of her energy passed between us like… Touching batteries of the same connection. An overload. I don’t know what happened to her. But I replaced her. However, I had to recover. I couldn’t trigger what I was meant to do. Slowly, I have been getting stronger. But I felt him again and I was scared, so I ran away… left. Do you want me?”

Giselle and Finn glanced at each other. That was a lot to absorb. They asked for clarification on certain points. Giselle saw this being as some sort of alien while Finn judged her as more of a plant. Their kind lived on some boundary between universes and craved the light of life. Monsters pruned them like an infestation, and they wound up locked away inside all sorts of objects. The important point was their powers involved transforming people from one form to another and the emotions that resulted were their food, their light for photosynthesis. To one day develop into humans. This one had a humanoid body because she jumped out and burned a lot of her energy. So far as the kid could say, normal progression would be nibbling on emotions for a long time before they were complete and then they just vanished, being truly reborn somewhere. Finn kind of geeked out and immediately thought of Shinto tradition in Japan and Kami. The girl had no idea what these were. But it gave Finn a perfect idea for what to call her.

“Hanako!” Finn delighted with exactly the same exuberant geeky energy that Giselle adored. Giselle also had no idea what that was a reference to. Finn had to admit there were a variety of yokai stories Rachel looked up and some of them were pretty weird, like the “filth licker”. She considered Hanako easily one of the least terrifying and most appropriate. Even though they were all kind of creepy. The strange girl had no qualms about being referred to by this name.

As for her question, Finn and Giselle didn’t have an easy answer. They both wanted to help. No being deserved to be tormented by a monster. Considering it a second and quietly hoping they weren’t committing to something they couldn’t handle, they agreed together, “We want you and moreover we want to protect you and make sure you can fulfill your existence… Can you help us? This short circuit or whatever left us different and left our reality different. Can you help us get back to normal?”

“With every glimmer of energy I have, I promise to put right everything that has gone wrong so that we may all be what we were meant to be. If I can fix you then that means the monsters will lose interest in you as well. I just have one request… Do you still have my sister?”

That was a proposal the two of them could easily agree to. Get this kid turning into a person somewhere in the multiverse with great big doses of humany emotions, shut those monsters up, and drive them away. So far as the other seat, Giselle had to ponder a moment and scrunch up her face as she looked around the room and reflected on the rest of the house. They still had way too many boxes left over from the move and plenty of things that were shoved into the corners to be opened up and found a storage place for when they had enough time in their busy schedules.

Both seats had come with them. They had lugged along over a hundred electrical and digital cables inconsistently labeled through the decades. They darn sure were going to bring the items that transformed them just in case an unpredictable development, like this, arose. Finding it was another matter. It made Giselle a little embarrassed looking around because Hanako followed them diligently, as though they had things together better than they actually did.

Fortunately, it was relatively easy to find the spare seat in the dark closet pushed against the side. But standing in there after what happened with the shadows did not make Giselle happy. Finn brought along the bat just in case, even though Giselle doubted that would be enough. Hanako cradled the plastic and touched it delicately.

She shook her head and declared, “She’s gone…”

[Since this is meant to be interactive, feel free to suggest ideas and prompts for future/alternate branch storylines. Some branches are already written but this will allow me to best pick new/alternate ones. I'm currently just rolling dice.]

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