This is an alternate branch of the storyline continuing from [23A]

The Tall and Short Problems of a Cute Gamer Girl

[24A]
For the Primary Branch [----]

Three months. Three months? Three months… Three fucking months?!? Giselle tore herself out of Blessin’s grasp.

“You planned this! You know more than you’re saying! From that other you or whatever. Don’t you dare keep it from us!”

Giselle‘s efforts and anger felt like the shrill, useless efforts of a little kid crying in the darkness. Blessin didn’t waver. “I wish I could’ve planned this. I would’ve asked someone to bring bolt cutters. I would’ve gotten the door code ahead of time. There’s nothing I can do about the past now. There’s nothing any of us can do but survive. We keep living until we can meet our other selves and destroy the monster that’s ruined this world and our lives. Hate me. Please hate me, but hate me and survive.”

Even though her hands wanted to stay in raised fists, Giselle didn’t have the energy to keep them up and maintain the sharpened feeling of anger faintly wafting from her. She stomped away furiously and only turned around when she heard the sharp sound of a palm slapping flesh. Checking, she saw Blessin stiffly and unflinchingly wore a growing red mark across her cheek. Rachel squeezed her hand into a fist, then let it go slack.

The confrontation slowly eased as Olivia clasped Rachel‘s hand. Herschel clung to Olivia‘s legs and looked up with the frantic hope that his kitty cuteness might make everyone happy again. Blessin’s cat just hopped onto the nearest counter with her head raised, as though promptly giving her scritches was the most important task in the world. Quietly, Blessin obliged.

Bitterly, Giselle walked away from the group. The chamber sprawled out like some immense ride attempting to simulate the day above. Morbidly, Giselle felt but refused to acknowledge something terrible happened above them or was still happening. Humanity was being ravaged in the same way as Olivia and Athena‘s quiet but luminous species, and for the same cruel, pointless reasons. Giselle focused a ready measure of eager love for her little guest hosted in her body.

The micro town laid out before them felt in some ways bigger than some small towns Jeremy could remember. Exploring quietly, she had an inkling of the intent. The hard edge of her innocuous and silly moments of not remembering well was researching dementia and Alzheimer’s therapies.

She'd seen movies about places that simulated social experiences in a controlled environment with patients wandering through a safe version of a town where nurses and caregivers played roles. Thinking about her experiences guiding Olivia through junior high, she realized this was a version of that but for nascent radiant entities with uncertainty about human emotions and experiences.

The small-scale market had prop food but the room just beyond it contained an immense storage vault and walk-in freezer. Checking the dates, she soon ascertained that supplies had been added as recently as three days ago. Shelf-stable foods along with a huge sprawling quantity of canned and preserved goods took up the vast majority of the vault. It easily looked like enough to last a small community for several years. Giselle nervously gnawed on one of her fingernails. A quiet, precisely labeled booklet informed her of expiration dates and which foods to consume first in the event of a full lockdown.

She hunted for fresh cherries and grapes and took them around to a small, fake café. Olivia found her first as she rinsed and set out a large plate with the fruit. Her hand stretched while her eyes sought permission, Giselle quietly nodded and urged her to try them. Olivia swooned and swirled over the sweetness. Rachel eventually found them and quietly ate too. Blessin stayed away. Sandwiches from stored bread and deli meats came next. Through the confusion of the day, no one could really remember what and when they had last eaten but Giselle felt hungry enough to eat a monstrous sandwich like she did when Jeremy.

Olivia had questions and thoughts about condiments but nowhere near as much concern as with cafeteria food. Rachel reassured her that the stores had a variety of food including curry. This relaxed her and brought on a fair smile.

As for Blessin, she loitered around and did some exploring of her own but didn’t approach the others. There were plenty of residential areas in the complex and they could easily avoid one another for the time they had to stay in here, but Giselle and Jeremy were the kind of people who liked to resolve things peaceably.

Whenever Rachel and Jeremy had a fight, and they had some pretty epic fights on actually serious topics aside from issues of the toilet seat, they made a solemn promise that no matter what it was they would settle it before they went to bed, so they didn’t go to bed angry with one another. They knew that negative sentiment festering for so long over and over would only get worse and worse if not dealt with.

Rachel sulked about the fact that Blessin didn’t deserve a quick apology or resolution, especially because she was certain that the woman wasn’t being sincere with her about why they were here and everything she knew. At the same time, however, living in the same space and having to share food and resources would be better if they actually talked to one another. Giselle refused to take the first step though. Rather, she retrieved Herschel from his nervous explorations and decided to pick out a residence for them.

There were several units with truncated spaces pressed together on multiple floors. Even though she could find only small differences between each, Giselle gravitated towards a central location that overlooked the entire area and had easy access to food and water.

Around a small water fountain, the area provided a tiny school, a narrow but friendly little library with plenty of physical books along with digital devices containing extensive catalogs. Computers existed individually like elementary school labs from so many years ago. Oddly enough though they simulated the experience of the Internet with mock pages and archived content. The most recent archive Giselle could find was actually the same as the last food shipment, three days ago.

The oddest feature that she ran into was a multi-colored ring with the same tones of blue and gold as seen in the protective light insulating the monsters from getting further, along with several other shades. The ring appeared vaguely like an auditorium drifting down then creeping back up, but seemed to have no visible purpose despite several computers situated nearby it. Blessin seemed particularly interested in investigating it.

Despite everything supposedly going on outside and above, the simulated world around them drifted from perfect day into settling dusk. The prickly distance eventually relaxed when Blessin came over and revealed she discovered the history of the Flush with Pride Corporation. She set up a projector inside the one-screen theater provided for them.

The video that played looked like any company’s random sizzle reel touting achievements and downplaying issues. They used to be called Quantum Helix. Their goal seemed to be to explore parallel realities in the interest of applying quantum immortality along with object collection and inter-commerce. The video proposed the idea of sifting through the infinite multiverse for assumed worlds where something as desperately common as plastic buttons or dandelions might be immensely rare and the residents of said universe could have a surplus of something valuable to trade over here.

The technical stuff involved Casimir plates with a precisely attuned electromagnetic field pulsing at set frequencies which allowed the connection of a single point to points along different realities. But the early problems involved proto-wormholes emerging and destroying themselves like swarms of bubbles.

They eventually managed to get something stable, but it reminded Giselle of a website she once ran across. It pulled random strings of letters representing the URL of images hosted on a site. Because all of the URLs had to be a certain string of letters, it was easy for the website to randomly grab whatever was hosted. It unsettled her because, just by pulling up a random URL, she had access to an image someone posted on the Internet. About 95% of everything that popped up randomly was either a broken image deleted or never used or a URL that didn’t work at all.

Interestingly enough, the same results occurred with the corporation. Instead of random Cyrillic screencaps of Russian kids saving their League of Legends victories, Quantum ran into weird perversions of reality without any foothold to communicate or establish the kind of ambitious trade they had in mind. Not even a stray dick pic or random boobs.

Unfortunately, it seemed they bumped into something else. A massive reality full of radiant entities that eagerly took on whatever form they exposed them to. Place some next to gold bars and you have a group of beings trying to emulate those gold bars. However, the creatures took a special shine to humans and human nature, developing and growing from exposure to human emotions. They also revealed reality-warping powers and transformational qualities.

The Company looked poised to have all the power of this reality at their fingertips, but the entities had minds of their own and soon, instead of precious resources that they could attempt to sell to buyers, immense oodles of toilet products overwhelmed them. This warehouse became a stopgap measure to house the entities until they could hawk them for some sort of profit. It wasn’t long after that though they discovered the awful truth that a dark predator pursued the fleeing radiants. And they were immensely powerful, endlessly numerous, and the only way to hold them back was to use the radiant entities as a shield. At this point, Olivia bolted from the theater and ran out. Meanwhile, Giselle felt a twisting, raw headache press into her forehead. Despite the desire to go and comfort Olivia, she waited through the end of the video.

There wasn’t much else. The leadership and staff automated and outsourced much of the running of the company and then decided to nope out of here using their wormhole generator to find a reality that wasn’t saturated by the dark creatures. Some stayed behind with the bunkers fortified against them but, considering what they had seen, it seemed like that plan had gone awry.

As the video wrapped up, Giselle snuck out and eventually found Olivia sitting on a nearby patio in a fetal position with her legs tightly cradled by her arms and her head buried. Gingerly, she sat next to her with her hands folded in her lap.

Olivia gasped quietly but needfully, as though drowning. She whimpered, “I made a mistake…”

With everything lately, Giselle felt like she could eagerly point to a dozen places where that sentiment applied to herself. But no way did Olivia earn that. Vehemently, Giselle expressed that Olivia did nothing wrong, that she had fought against the monsters and… so many other things. She caught Giselle there though.

“It’s gone. It’s lost. Everything I did and everything I could do. Everything any of us could do around here. The darkness and the cold hunted me and the one I love with all my heart for as long as we’ve existed. I protected Athena as though she were everything. And yet I never gave myself to anger when you hurt her unaware. You have nothing to apologize for. But the people who made this place… make me wanna turn away from everything human and vanish back into the shadows.”

Slowly, Giselle brought her stump arm around Olivia, and she listlessly accepted it. Words came haltingly to Giselle as she struggled to work through what she wanted to say.

“There is good in this world… Was…NO… there IS good in this world and it survives no matter how much darkness crawls out of the nastiest holes to try to destroy it.”

Olivia looked over at her like a beaten animal with the light quietly fading from its eyes. Holding her emotions in check, she recounted the amazing things that her parents did at their church and the way that so many people she knew helped in their communities and with strangers. Without judgment or ego, she reminded Olivia of what Jeremy and Rachel raised for the local Children’s Hospital. And then she shared little stories that she held in the back of her mind to keep herself going when the world seemed so broken in the last few years.

Especially, she regaled Olivia with a story of a kindly man from Libya who adopted countless children abandoned by their parents because they had terminal illnesses or sicknesses with expenses to great. They just dropped them like expensive pets with too many problems. And this man, all by himself, made sure these children had someone who loved them in their most vulnerable time. He named them and held them and told them that he loved them. Even if it meant he would only hold them for a few hours, a few days, weeks, or however long they had. He devoted himself to love, against whatever tides flowed in the rest of the human race. And he wasn’t alone. Because love is never alone. Even though it may feel that way, even in the darkest moments. Love always lives in hope and hope persists and grows and swells and reaches beyond the nightmare of the darkness.

Giselle found herself sobbing as she desperately recounted all this to Olivia, as though trying to convince herself at the same time as her friend. Olivia pulled her close as the warmth in her head shown like waves on the shore of a sunlit day. Before either of them knew it, Rachel enveloped them. Herschel looked on nearby with wide concern. Blessing lingered far away, as though a frail spirit playing out her frozen path.

Quietly, Giselle said that they needed help in organizing and accounting for all the materials in here starting tomorrow, so they could figure out what to prioritize and how the power worked. She asked Blessin if she could help. The figure far away swallowed and mulled that before sharing a faint smile and nodding. Then she drifted between the houses and was gone.

With an imperceptible load freed from her shoulders, Giselle gently got to her feet and resolved to finish unpacking and getting settled. They had time. Time most of all, even. But she wasn’t going to waste three months of waiting being sad.

[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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