This is an alternate branch of the storyline continuing from [21A]

The Tall and Short Problems of a Cute Gamer Girl

[22A]
For the Primary Branch [22]

Once they made it to the highway, the strange grogginess that had wafted over Giselle started to fade and she sifted logically through the events of the morning. It bewildered her how readily they had all trusted the word of Blessin that some terrible and tragic fate was about to befall the world and they needed to run away with her as soon as possible. The inherent uncertainty and earnestness of that desire remained while she started to question why.

This was a random woman who stopped by her bedside yesterday, allegedly with the presence of her alternate self from another universe. The mood of that encounter still left Giselle bewildered and out of her depth, but the feeling of this morning was especially strange. Everyone was so sleepy and yet so eager to believe the claims of this stranger. As she sat there, Giselle felt the questions begin to pile up inside her. Cautiously, she asked an otherwise innocuous one, “ So… Blessin Cross, huh?“

“That’s my name.” Blessin merged over to the right to get into the fast lane.

“Religious family?”

The woman chuckled and shook her head. “Far from it. I chose my name.”

Giselle cleared her throat. “You chose the name Blessin?”

She didn’t look back but rocked her head a little. “And Cross. It was the 80s. I also didn’t resolve my transition for way too long. Too much confusion, can’t get no relief.”

It took a little while for Giselle to not only process that statement so far as the song Blessin was invoking and the implication behind her words. “You’re trans?”

The woman laughed. “I can’t speak for everyone but, for me, trans is a process, not a person. I made a transition from who I was to who I am. And I’m happy to say I finished quite a while ago. I’m just a lady now. Sometimes a bitch. But that’s me.”

Olivia tipped her head a few ways and expressed that she didn’t understand.

Blessin looked desperately like she wanted to gesture with her hands for verbal emphasis, but she kept them firmly on the wheel. “There are people in humanity who choose to transform with the resources that are available to them. Therapy, medicine, surgery for some, and more. That way, they don’t have to run up the enforced metric from some captured spirit forced to do the bidding of a creepy corporation to make it one-way permanent.”

Olivia quietly folded her hands and nodded. Giselle took a deep breath. How this all started. Olivia‘s sister as her first seat, the seat Rachel ordered to teach her a lesson. She kicked it and received that permanent possibility. What began as a threat doubling the days. She got a blast of it and now she was this 11-year-old girl. It brought up a wave of unease that threatened to become more. Did all that split this universe from the other one? She had no idea.

Rather than dwelling on this uncertainty, Giselle focused on what Blessin knew about the Flush with Pride Corporation. They had plenty of travel time, especially before the cats needed to stretch and use the litter box Blessin had tucked away in the back.

“Legally, the company doesn’t exist. I checked every hole for companies that try to cheat on their books. There is an email and the website you must’ve ordered from. But if you try to get in contact with all the important people then they have nothing to say about the company. However, they have one of the largest warehouses on the East Coast. I found out as much about them as I could.“ In passing, Blessin mentioned her friend Gwen, who went to a university down in Savannah. Pretty soon, Giselle discovered that not only did this Gwen go to the same university that she went to, but it was the same year. Idly, she wondered if she ever ran into her in school.

“Through a friend, Gwen learned about a custodian who works at one of the schools. They apparently had a supernatural problem related to some toiletry products they ordered. I’ve done a little cryptid searching and some ghost hunting here and there, so she figured it might be up my alley. A lot of personal details I can’t talk about but, in short, I ran headlong into issues comparable to what you’ve relayed to me. And things didn’t get much further than that.”

There were a lot of elements in that for Giselle to unpack. “What are we gonna do when we get to this warehouse? If something bad is happening or going to happen to the world, can they help us?”

“That’s what I’m hoping for. Really though, I’m hoping that every intuitive bone in my body is dead wrong that something terrible is coming. But I’m connected to the other world, and I received a clear dream. I received a message that we don’t have much time. I am sorry. I am so desperately sorry that I have to put you and your family through this. But we have to do something. We have to do something about Cerberus. I assume you feel the same way.”

Giselle clenched her jaw and looked over at the stump. “Yeah. I want him dead.”

Blessin took a careful breath. “You don’t know me very well in this reality. But I’ve gathered the other version of me and the other version of you are friends over there. It sucks that we can’t take the time for the same. But the fucker knows how strong we all are together. We need to destroy him before he takes away everything from us. I trust in that as what I have to go on.”

The still-early light fluttered through the window across Blessin’s face. Twinkling illumination, like spun gold across her bright locks, carried with sublime radiance even through an underpass. It was like this woman had an internal glow. Or Giselle was still really tired. Either way, she took that as a positive omen. Olivia, curious about the previous toilet equipment encounter involving Blessin, asked if she came across other members of her species.

“Unfortunately, Cerberus is very diligent in wiping out your kind. I had no idea he was around back then. They actually can’t wipe out the places you settle, but they can wipe out the people. Especially try to take their heads off. But your kind is very good at blocking his cold darkness with your warm light.”

Olivia appeared solemn and sad to hear that. Giselle wondered about the extent of Blessin’s involvement. She must’ve at least been attacked by something she didn’t realize was Cerberus. One of the toilet spirits might’ve protected her in the same way Olivia did. Also, it seemed clear to Giselle that Cerberus tried the same thing with her, slicing away her hand when attempting to strike at Athena within her skull.

Following that, Blessin actually had questions for them. She asked about the realm that Olivia and her kind inhabited. Olivia rotated her head in slow ovals with her eyes shut, as though searching for some sense within and beyond that eluded her. She relayed that being in human form had deeply separated her from that part of her existence.

That was especially the case since Cerberus cracked her protective shell. Giselle fretted until Olivia explained that thanks to everything she had done and her experiences in school and with life, what was exposed wasn’t raw. It still needed time and development, but she intimately felt what emotions and human feeling had developed.

In just a few days, Giselle found it remarkable that the emotionless little doll that came out of her toilet and asked if she wanted her had richly developed into such a presence. She tried to seek Athena for some clarity on what she may have witnessed as a spirit. The little one was warm, but Giselle didn’t feel the innate connection she sometimes did.

“I’ve gathered a bit secondhand, from my earlier experiences. It sounds like a delicate twilight fashioned in the shadows. Like the persistent ruddy sunset of a world tidally locked around a red dwarf. But instead of a light side and a dark side, there’s only the cold oblivion of darkness and the frail effort to cling to the distant smoldering candle of warmth. The outline of people exists, as visions and dreams traced like the faintest chalk on a blackboard. They live in a vibrancy of colors… silver, violet, radiant blue, green, shimmering gold, and even ones beyond what we know of the visual spectrum. And the monsters never stop hunting them. It’s a space of life between oblivion, like a hydrothermal vent with faint bioluminescence at the depths of the ocean. It’s beautiful and horrifying and I’m glad you two were able to escape.”

Giselle admitted that was a heck of a lot more information than she or Olivia pieced together. Long wet tears streaked Olivia‘s eyes as she eagerly confirmed that that was exactly what it was like. Blessin leaned again on her intuition and pressed she was glad to listen to the stories of entities like Olivia and Athena. Olivia expressed vague sentiments and emotions with struggling coloration, broad strokes of memories searching for their core elements.

The conversation continued like this until it faded before Olivia‘s tears and the wobble of warm and cold within Giselle could turn to a malaise. Light instrumental music eventually filled the space as Giselle focused on her phone. There were so many people to call and so many hours of travel before them.

Lily and Gerald were the obvious ones. She automatically dialed their number.

“Hello, sweetie! My goodness, this is early for a Sunday call! We haven’t even made it to church yet. Are you okay?”

God, there was so much to tell them and so much she couldn’t tell. “Yeah. Yeah yeah yeah. Everyone’s fine here. We actually happen to be taking a day trip up north. Crazy, huh?” Giselle framed it as someone Rachel knew happened to be up around the Maryland/Virginia line.

Lily passed that along to Gerald, who reminded her that they had some family up in Maryland. Nothing about what she said raised Lily‘s suspicions, although Giselle could tell that her mom noticed tension in her voice… even though reality stated that she had to be her aunt now.

To keep things from dipping too much into territory where she had to lie, Giselle focused on the fact that she had a silly little theater date yesterday. Her parents joked about how soon they were going to have to walk her down the aisle with how she was collecting so many suitors. She let loose a genuine giggle at this.

She didn’t say too much about Dennis except to allude to the idea that he kinda looked like the son they never had. Lily had a clear notion about that, her son. The melancholy that it had to be an imagining carried through the phone. Her son would definitely be really tall like her grandfather, and he was sure to start out with blonde hair but shift to something dark in puberty like her brothers. Absolutely, he would be frantic and a total workaholic like her but have a deadpan goofy sense of humor like Gerald. Giselle desperately had to tighten her mouth and tense her eyes to keep from sobbing into the phone. She didn’t have a spare hand.

Vehemently, she wanted to talk to her parents for so long and say so many things but, aside from the craziness that just recently popped up, she as Jeremy was already so very open with them. Whatever needed to be said was understood and whatever she couldn’t say she trusted that it would also be known. And so, they just exchanged a calm goodbye with the implication that they would talk again soon.

All the other conversations that Giselle could’ve had were twisted and made distant by her self-inflicted transformation. None of her friends from college would care if she called and all of her professional friends never met her. Perhaps she really didn’t matter to them, she reflected darkly. Remove her from their lives, and everything continued on just like it was.

At the first rest stop to allow the poor cats the chance to turn around and use the litter box, Rachel made a series of calls home with just as much fervent emotion as Giselle‘s call. Her excuse was a relative of her adopted daughter in Maryland and no questions followed.

During the lull, Giselle passed along all the cryptic but also encouraging words that Blessin shared with her. Rachel came to a conclusion that made her own skeptical, scientific mind cringe as much as Giselle‘s.

“She must have some sort of psychic ability. I have a feeling that I desperately want to trust her, and I can’t shake it. It’s stupid and I know that something is happening. But intuitively I just want to trust her. I hope that, wherever she’s leading us, it really is for the best and we’ll come out on the other side free of that bastard who stole your hand.”

There were kitty accidents along the way, but they managed to clean them up. Blessin hated when they crossed over to Virginia because state troopers and cops camped out at every underpass and ramp looking to hunt down someone doing something technically illegal.

They arrived at the warehouse during the peak of the day with the late summer heat bleeding through the air conditioning. No one was parked in the vast surrounding parking lot and the sliding gate, a 10-foot spiked behemoth, was locked with a metal chain and a sturdy padlock.

Blessin clutched her head. “Bolt cutters, dammit.” This required a side stop to a hardware shop to pick up just the equipment. All the area around the warehouse was marked by towing zones. They considered a parking structure nearby but the length of the walk and what they would have to carry was too much. It took everyone fighting hard to snap the padlock. Once the fence slid aside, they parked both cars as close to the entrance as possible.

There was so much to possibly bring in, but they left most of it in the cars for the time being. Holding her breath with visible tension, Blessin brushed back her hair and told the group, “Here we go…”

[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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