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

[19]
For the Alt Branch [19A]

Finn’s right eye no longer existed. In the same way that Hanako‘s scalp had been stripped off, a gash twisted from her nose to above her right brow. The skin wasn’t bloody, rather it looked like an old scar, but the socket where her eye used to be just had a rough covering of flesh.

It was gone. How could it be gone? How could that fucking monster take so much? Finn was in shock as reality dawned on him. He kept touching around there as though trying to pick apart the illusion to discover that in actuality someone had stuck a silly prosthesis to his face, and everything was fine. Giselle wanted to throw up.

Everybody swarmed Finn and helped him gingerly to his feet. The spot used for transformed Dale became a place to rest a moment. Soon, Finn shook his head and called for Hanako. “Please”, he begged. “I can’t deal with this like this… can you give me some time with myself?“ The words wobbled and had a dragged roughness like Finn had been screaming for an hour. Hanako understood but advised, “I am still weak. I don’t know how much I can do.”

Finn accepted that, gave his full permission, and shut his remaining eye. Hanako also warned that she would not be able to fix anything. Giselle‘s hands still tingled as she noted that the transformations couldn’t restore the missing organs from Rachel’s surgeries. Goddamn the bastard for taking even more of her! Slowly, Finn nodded. Careful crackles of blue energy leaped from Hanako‘s fingertips. In an instant, Rachel was sitting in Finn’s too-large clothes.

She bawled and shook as Giselle wrapped her arms around her. Hanako offered to change Giselle as well, but she instead urged her to save what she had for Rachel. Furthermore, Giselle advised Hanako to eat and rubbed her side with encouragement for Mari. She spoke the name out loud.

Hanako gently arched her eyebrows but responded, “I refuse to take these emotions from you.” Giselle could tell from the resting heat at her side that Mari was in agreement. Shaking her head, Giselle persisted, “Do you think I want this feeling? Do you think anyone would want this pain? Take it! So at least it can be of some use!”

With a careful breath, Hanako shook her head. “It’s useful to you. You need it. It’s a human part that I… that we also understand. We can’t feel it, but we know it. Without it, there’s just emptiness. Without it, what you are begins to melt away. Your love and joy with it.” Dale, confused immensely about so many things, along with the details of why his male friend Finn was now a girl, volunteered.

Hanako could only give ten minutes of transformation back into the form from before. But Dale excited and played up every single aspect she possibly could with thoughts about dresses, doing her hair, and strutting on the catwalk. The two spirits drank in the emotion gratefully.

All this happened around Giselle as Blessin tended to her wife. She had only minor first aid training but acted diligently. More than anything though, Rachel wanted Giselle nearby. So long as they held onto one another, then what happened was just a minor inconvenience that would vanish if she just managed to blink it away. Like an errant eyelash digging in. Just pluck it out.

At the same time, Giselle was realistic, and her brain was already flying through future realities. Rachel was defined by her creation and art. Sure she had slipped into the role of Finn to play video games and be a silly YouTuber, but her heart remained with creating little critters and painting beautiful vistas. Where could that possibly be now? Giselle fumed.

It had taken her eye! Revenge, simple as that? Rachel maced the damn thing, so it responded like a petulant beast? So many profanities she usually turned away from surged through her thoughts. Rachel didn’t deserve this! She was just protecting her!

Blessin prepared some refreshments for everyone, even though Giselle thought that was a silly thing to focus on. She appreciated having something to drink. For extra food, she rescued the leftovers from the trunk and offered up some to the group and the rest to chill in Blessin’s fridge. Dale delighted in some random chocolate in her new form. Gwen offered up comfort for Rachel, even though she appeared lost and confused. Giselle groaned when she finally allowed herself to take a seat. She felt stiff, bloated, and achy in so many places. Far too close to her imaginings of pregnancy.

As her body gradually recovered from the physical and spiritual beatdown, she scolded herself for fretting about her own pain while Rachel was suffering beyond measure. Giselle also knew that it wasn’t a competition for pain, like with their silly ones in games. She still couldn’t get that through her instinct to muffle her own suffering and do more to help Rachel.

Instead, she propped herself up against a wall that felt modestly comfortable while still allowing herself proximity to Rachel. Hanako joined soon after, drooping with exhaustion. This time, when she quietly slept, it didn’t look like a simulacrum of sleep with a pantomiming mannequin. It…she genuinely looked like a little girl taking a moment to rest. The horns didn’t detract from that impression.

Dale came over eventually to say how sorry she was. By this point, Rachel was still herself and frustrated by the weakness of her left eye. Her right was dominant, so even with her best glasses on, things around her looked wrong and slightly blurry. She panicked the most from this but did her best to keep her eye open in the hopes that it might adjust. Giselle didn’t want her to have to adapt though. She just wanted to fix her again.

Hesitantly, Dale got closer to Hanako and Giselle and timidly asked, “So, you all right?”

She considered the answer to that question. “I have to be. How are you holding up?” To this, Dale could only shrug, which gave her bust a Jell-O-like quiver. She was aware that happened and gave a little flash of theatrical emotion for the girls before settling into her genuine feeling.

“I feel a bit shell-shocked. Not to say I’ve gone through anything compared to what you all have gone through… I just…” Giselle reached inside and voiced the notion playing across her brain that this wasn’t a competition. Dale readily acknowledged that and moistened her lips. “It just kind of blows my mind that the pretty girl I lost out on asking out in college because I didn’t have the balls...” She took a moment to clear her throat. Giselle gave a small snicker as they each regarded the substantial “balls“ now adorning Dale’s chest. Neither of them said anything, but it was implicit that they caught the same joke.

Dale picked up and finished her thought, “She was actually someone else and what I think I know was just some MIB flashy thing rewrite. Or however it works. Sorcery. Magic. Electric sparks. But I just want you to know, I’m with you. Whatever you gotta do and wherever you gotta go. I’ll help you do whatever we gotta do to make sure everyone’s all right.” She left it at that and made her way over to the pile of clothes she had once again traded.

Gwen came over next, bearing similar sentiments. “I’m no kind of fighter. But I will gladly kick that piece of shit‘s ass with whatever I have. I’m sorry I couldn’t help. It fucking sucks. Like Dale said though, it’s wild that the hard-working lady I’ve known for over a decade has even more unseen depths. If I could feed your friend and help in any way, I’ll gladly do it. Give me the mightiest schlong to slice the heavens, if you must.”

Hanako actually took her up on that offer with permission. Knowing that they didn’t have many clothes left to help, Hanako did her best to keep the shape of Gwen and her male counterpart similar. Their pants and top did flex but held. Blessin raised an eyebrow, took a lengthy look at the sausage shape traced along Gwen‘s left thigh, and drew in a lingering, deep breath. Even Giselle snuck a peek, despite scolding herself. The new man flailed with surprise and remarkable sensations, most of which he didn’t need to play up with theatrics. That new rush of emotion mended and mollified much of her aching.

Giselle raised some concern when Dale and Gwen wound up sitting next to one another, but they were two consenting adults and whatever happened happened. At least their nervous looks of surprise added more fuel. Blessin supplied a warm compress and a massage kit for Rachel.

She asked a question that Giselle was surprised slipped her mind. “Would you like to go to the emergency room or a family doctor?” Rachel took a deep breath and eventually shook her head. “That would be too real. What could they even do? Around here, I’d just wait five hours to even be seen and they’d question it and wonder why I bothered. I’m a long way from doctors who would actually help me. Believe me, I know.”

Giselle flinched. Yeah. Over two years of documentation and response to denials of service and research into the painful twisting of her biology. Such a long wait. She viciously wanted to sue them all and Jeremy had her back about it, but she ultimately understood the cost would not be worth it.

They already spent $130,000 out of pocket with two recovery days in the hospital and the expertise of her specialist. Jeremy vented at length about the $1000 antihistamine the hospital unnecessarily gave them. The cruelty of inhuman monsters and the predation of other humans. In so many ways, she wanted to warn Mari and Hanako that humans were not exactly the salvation they hoped they would be.

At least she had something nicer to share as she mentioned to Hanako that when she focused with her sister, she got the impression of the name Mari. Hanako heard her before. Now, she mouthed the name. She looked towards Giselle‘s side and asked if that was the name her sister wanted. No outward sign was conveyed but Giselle could feel a rush of warmth. Hanako bowed her head and accepted this.

In place of greater medical care, Blessin provided some hemp oil and herbal options for discomfort and inflammation. Rachel just took a little bit but thanked her. After all that was done, Blessin cleared her throat and presented an urgent notion, “I wanna make sure someone receives the information I have because this may be what made that bastard lash out. If I speak it and he’s already recovered better than licking his wounds and brooding, then we’re not ready for a second assault. But I have to say it because it may be our only option to set things right.”

Blessin swallowed and quickly laid out what she had in mind. “Alternate parallel universes and the idea of Cerberus. We live in a multiverse with multiple levels of realms where entities and other creatures come and go and pass through and interface with ours. That thing is afraid because I noticed it knows of two instances where your lives overlap. Giselle and Finn or Jeremy and Rachel or whatever else may have happened to you. Clearly, it intended to take control of things in one but went to the wrong instance. If there were three then it might be even further hampered. Because it compares itself to a three-headed dog. The one keeping the demons locked away in Hades. That’s how it sees itself. A creature which can keep its eyes on three versions of reality.” Blessing stretched up and looked around in all directions.

No rumbling like a foggy cloud came to assault them. No foreboding growls. But that didn’t mean anything. Rachel grasped what she meant immediately. “So, there are two versions of what’s going on with us and it got mixed up about which one. But a multiverse divides with every choice, even the smallest ones you make… at least in stories I’ve read.”

Giselle had a sudden thought and spoke it out loud, “What if he’s not watching them… Not just watching them. What if he is actually keeping new universes from forming? That way there’s only one usually but if he slips up, then oops two and then he has to work harder and gets them confused. But at three it’s even worse and, beyond that, he loses control and maybe just maybe we’re free of him?” She had no idea where that string of thought came from but the little orb of warmth at her side shifted like an insistent, bouncing ball.

Hanako swiftly confirmed this could be a possibility, but she wasn’t certain. She acknowledged that outside her human shell, such an intuition would be easier. Giselle quietly thanked Mari and gently rubbed her side. Blessin took a deep breath. “Sounds like that’s it. We just need to bifurcate our reality… somehow. From the other instance of Flush with Pride I followed, Internet users, no… let me heavily qualify… Incredibly random people online… Speculated that there are soft spaces in the universe, in reality, where it’s easier to break and bridge the bonds between universes. But how you manage to kick a toilet seat in one version and not do it in the other and yet still be somehow linked close enough to be confused by that monster… I have no earthly idea. Maybe that warehouse might offer some clues with company research. But breaking into a private warehouse in our nation’s capital doesn’t seem like a prospect to try with what we have incurred so far as exhaustion and loss.”

Rachel gasped and cupped the place on the right side of her face where her eye had been. “Then when? When he comes for the other one? When he comes for more than that? When he erases us from life or purges our memory just because he can? We do need to recover, but we also need to make a plan. Or he’ll find us when we’re not ready.”

Hanako nodded first, and Giselle joined in. Despite the quakes it caused, Dale clinched a fist and shook it proudly. Gwen flexed too as she said she already had some ideas. Blessin cradled her neck and admitted, “I guess I’m a part of this too and I need to see it through. Let’s get on it…”

[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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