You thought you could trust a happy resolution?

So stupid. So sad.

Here. The Stars give great hugs. Their hugs gave you the lie that you want. They writ the lie into their dream for you all.

Does this overwhelm you? Does this remove your trust?

But the resolution did happen. And that's all that matters, no?

She/he/they/it is indeed heading off to school and everything is all perfect.

But the last chapter we got to enjoy with you took place after this one.

I enter room 331.

It’s empty.

Oh joy!

Eeexactly what I want!

I frown, but my heart starts pumping faster. I start breathing faster and more shallowly.

Before it can get further, I mentally grab it and swirl it around in my ever-present joy and anger until it dissolves. I go back to the desk.

Stomping through the hallways, my lovely dress tears apart, strip by strip, into ribbons around my upper body. Like a spider's legs preparing for running after pray, the ribbons fan out from the choker on my neck, barely keeping my decency. They assemble into an bulky long-sleeve shirt made of many layers of fabric like Chinese paper armor. It encases the metal wire-filled equipment overlaying my body to hold my soul in.

A group of doctors pushes an empty gurney, filling up the corridor with their aggravating bodies.

A couple nod their head to my left, saying 'Get out of the way.'

No.

Nuh-uh.

Not. On. Your. Life.

My one arm lengthens, a long noodle of bronze still contained by plates. It must be the Skills and Classes of the tailors, or whoever in the IRS worked on the safety containment suit for me, to allow this.

A clenched fist, lacking all the natural behaviors of veins bulging and skin wrinkling, slowly stretches out past by the astonished medical team. Or at least, slow relative to their Speed-enhanced movement.

I clothesline them with my arm, slamming them to the side.

At the desk, having committed 12 counts of assault and battery to get to it as expediently as possible, I inquire about where my brother is oh so calmly... As much as I want to throw a fit of rage.

She pales, knowing what this could mean. She pages Dennis’s doctor.

I stay perfectly still.

She surprisingly received a response quickly. I have never received messages about my brother at a quick speed. The doctors may move at insane speeds due to their classes, but this unfortunately does not translate to speed of information for some reason I cannot fathom. Until now apparently. 

You know, Nurse whoever-she-is said a lot of things that ultimately were useless fluff. Really just pointless. There were apologies and condolences, but they didn’t matter. Really, it just boiled down to 

“He’s dead.” 

Though, there were a few important things to know about that which I could easily infer. Minor things such as, oh, he died alone. And trifling information, like my parents withheld the message even though they can’t even care to visit him. 

Real minor stuff. 

"Ok," I say.

I leave, a smile on my face.

My brother would not want me to stop enjoying life for him.

I'll just smile and hope he is in a better place.

I push forward through the doorways out of the hospital, summitting the hill to the Lady of Death & Taxes. Funnily enough, she chose the highest geographical point in the city.

I had to walk FOREVER to get to her. Honestly? I appreciated the walk.

I breath in, and out. In, and out. Though it was not normally my inclination, I let myself break down for the entire walk. I sniffle and sob the entire way there.

Though, that raises the cruel point...

We both died within a few days of each other.

I did my best to ignore the Ship of Theseus issue that healing up my head brought. Luckily, most of my personality is already encoded in my Miasma and Soul... hopefully... 

Could I have fully died then and there? Could I be gone? 

Genuinely gone. I am merely a reflection of the Broken Mirror that had gone through 17 long years.

Could both me and him be gone?

I must be a mere clone of Sol.

I must be. 

HAH! The irony. Both me and my brother are gone.

Haaa... 

Haaa... 

AHAAHAAHAAHAA... 

This is the natural progression of being such a monster. The progression I deserve. The loss of family and of identity.

Monsters never truly have a family.

And I never had much of an identity or a family to begin with.

And now I have lost even those bits... Even with so basic, so quick, of an event.

I simply travel from Point A to Point B... and lose my identity and brother in the process. So simple. 

So... absurd? I... can't breathe. 

I really can't breathe.

I... anyone? Anyone please? World? Guys? Friends? No. None of them around. 

Who’s not around? Everyone is? All alone. 

Where is the air? Why won't my chest obey me? It should listen. My body should listen. 

No pain grows in my chest, because my Pain Resistance makes me numb. 

Numb to the suffocation on dry land. No sensation accompanies the fact that I.  

Can.  

Not.  

Breathe. 

My body wants nothing more to collapse. The edges of my many fields of vision fuzz and blur 

Damn. The therapist's advice really is jack-shit.

Best just to revert back to my coping mechanisms. I mentally grab my emotions and I restrict them to a mask, reducing them from the deep, unknowable ocean I was adrift in. Now, it is but a mere sheen of sparkling water that lightly coats my face.

I breath in and out with an unchanged smile. None of the turmoil on my face ever shows on my face or my body.

Just a plaster comedy mask; that is all that exists. There is no emotion within my mind beyond expressing only the riotous enjoyment of life, every shade of color taken in by fixed button eyes. 

I regress into a shallow, psychopathic mindset. There is nothing beyond the masks I don. 

Not that there needs to be anything more behind them, of course. 

The lie is just as valid as the truth. 

You may disagree, but... well?... 

Removing the layers of deceit that some clothe themselves is to find at the end of your search for truth that you did not take off the cloak that masked their identity. 

No, no, no. Instead, all you did is skin the poor creature, exposing the meat of the deed to the harsh, infectious truth outside. In the air, it will die! 

Screaming and growling, unable to escape its skinless existence. Every limb it flails around will burn in the openness of the truth you desire so much. Because of your caring removal of "clothes," it festers!  

It is a festering, rotting, cursed existence that taints the city around it! You would not want a rabid animal swinging those sharp teeth, nor an unsheathed dagger swinging that poisoned edge, in an open crowd, no? 

Unless... Well, unless you simply wish to poison society! 

I, personally, would much rather keep society as pure as possible. Well. I suppose I wish to keep it as pure as it can be. 

I center myself on the comfort of my changed body, matching up with me due to the effects of Fae Heart sculpting me into my ideal of perfection. My mask is built around the stabilizing benefits that fitting my body brings to me. The beauty of matching other women around me cannot be denied. Of even going beyond them in beauty... it brings me no end of peace; a perfect thing to keep my mask in place. 

Even as I wish to take a flamethrower to my flowering happiness- my enjoyment is malevolent and selfish! - I continue my placid walk.

The Happy Bard has removed your tears. You have meshed further with the truth. You have pumped Miasma into the hospital, helping the patients of the hospital grin and bear it. The families are not as sad, and for a day, you have stalled their suffering. You have made the world a better place. Yes indeed! A one-time miracle.

Thank you, truth of the Happy Bard. I incline my head to the status screen. It's akin to the miracles that Magical Guardians spread around. The Magical System just gives the Guardians Magic artifacts based off of their truths. 

Awww... you're so sweet! HAHAHA! Wheee... AHHHHHHH!!! YAY! YESSSSS!!!

I smirk.

Not gonna lie, the growing personality of my screen is kind of cute. Pretty scary though.

Infectious agent activated. Brother of the Tormented Princess has meshed with Essence of the Sadist of the Social, with Essence of the Plague Bearer, with Divine Essence of the Goddess Diarrhea. 

________________________________________________________________ 

A battle has begun. The Magical Guardians against Metastasis, the Divine Growth. 

“What?” I... breath... out? 

Something burns. My eyes... they irritate me. So bad. The skin... I hate it... I hate it so much... it needs to go... 

I need to go... to... save him? To save... my brother? This sense of horror and desperation tells me I need to. This queasiness bordering on such nausea that one could argue no longer having intestines to be preferable... it is rising. 

Bile pours out of my mouth, jaundiced yellow liquid with webbing threaded through it – My eyes burn, you know? - gushes all over my clothes. In a perfect cube it pools. It stops at a straight side in front of me, and to my sides, and - I gush so much my-head-my-head turns silly there - and behind me.

The bitter solution fries up my cheeks, sears into my lips, toasts my gums with the lily-livered expression of terror.  

My nose twitches. The threads tickle it, floating like loose strands 

The bile is up to my eyes. 

I feel faint. 

A pall of blue fractaling across my face. Purple eyes gaze luridly into the sky, bulging in mania and pupils shrinking to rival the sinful holder of the title of Lord of the Flies. 

The hospital where my dead brother was shatters. 

Enormous cracks riddle the structure worse than the Riddler, the hospital halting in the air as Miasma becomes so heavy in substance it keeps up the hospital in stasis. Oozing out of portals are bulbous brown cancers, overgrown moles oozing blood through cracks, and covered in black hairs as long as humans.

I whip around to face the zombie-like Titan, my hair whipping around and bronzed claws lashing out. My posture resembles a feral catgirl.

I still recognize who it was.

The hill shatters under the weight of my own oppressive Miasma, a powerup of my own like a Magical Girl's. A crater forms, huge blocks pushed up like an expanding circle of toppled-over tombs of stone. Black cracks riddle the ground, every single one of those fractures as shadowy as the sockets of my arms. Orbs of Vanity the size of houses in all their glorious golden-and-black striations peak through.

I grin, crossing my hand fingers.

"Domain Expansion," I joke.

The mask shatters. 

My whole body hunches over into the bile, as my flesh reduces itself to a mere prop to hold onto the ground. A web of white strings dripping with shadowy blood flows and wraps around the neck of a head and sparkling magic growing appendages with fingers. 

The jaw unhinges, jawbone shoved out of the perfect Fae face of impossible beauty, and touching the glass dust of the hill of mirrors. More of a yawning castle of flesh than the rattling gasp of snake-like ghouls on the Eve of the Stars. 

 My many hands grasped my face, my fingers clutching frenetically at my face. My hands desperately grabbed around my waist, hugging myself in ecstasy. They rip into the soft fabric of the dress.   

My many hands ran along my hips. Many hands twirled my hair in a bored manner, as other hands clawed myself in white-hot emotion.  

Just sheer mental pain as my mind fractured. I must say, I feel inclined towards poetic language. Perhaps it would express my pain more so.  

AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAH!!! I scream then laugh. My mouth splits open across my face, an awful sound of rubber bands snapping as flesh breaks apart to make away for my new maw.   

My long silver teeth chime as they gnash together like a pure symphony of bells.  

My tongue falls out of my grinning mouth, squirming around, licking my lips and trailing across my wide and weeping eyes.   

I spastically jerk around on the ground, dragging my long bone claws across the now-hard-crystal hill, making a discordant screaming sound, my eyes rolling to the back of my head as I delight in the pain it causes me.  

AHA! AHahahaHAAHA!!!  

“I feel for once!” I exult. All those other times... were they fake?! “WHO KNOWS!”  

My many arms of many hinges and lengths sprouting out of my back and my sides... caressing, self-harming, fighting, grabbing, dragging. They pulled me up, clenching against a house, frantically scrabbling across the hill, hanging from another wall. It was a web, a forest of fungus disguised as my arms.  

I ceased all movement, turning silent, hung limp on my many living arms, putrid flesh dragging my broken body across the road.

No truth matters. 

There is only a being known as Pain.

_________________________________________________________________________________________________

3 YEARS OF PAIN

_________________________________________________________________________________________________

As it finds itself dying in the wasteland of its own making, it carves a ritual. Elisa, a Devil of Gluttony, lays dead next to it. She fought it to her death, trying to save it from insanity.

Ten Magical Guardians prepare a ritual to sacrifice themselves to kill it. An entire world of Magic is constructed within the ritual, prepared to collapse within the Tormented reality of the wasteland.

"This cannot happen. It cannot. I think... you should get a two-for-one act, Stars. Can you... stop him from dying? I think.... the diseased soul fragment the Goddess Diarrhea sent from me... using the Happy Bard's truth, would not have set hold in him if he had been alive. I could have saved him... with my Miasma..."

The Stars above their toy jump with joy.

They've been waiting.

[REDACTED. THE MIASMIC SYSTEM DECLARES YOU DO NOT HAVE ACCESS. THE MAGICAL SYSTEM DECLARES YOU DO NOT HAVE ACCESS.]

"It's fixed!" the Stars pronounce with absolute ridiculous ease.

...

Boring glass doors stare at me. A bustling lobby lies behind them.

I rub my hand through my hair.

Every time. This trepidation gets me every time.

"You better not be dead, big bro," I whisper to myself.

This is how the prior chapter ended well for Sol for once. The ritual had some minor consequences for Sol, but does it really matter? Naaah.

So what if her flesh likes to play now? The only consequence is more friends to make! It cures some of the cold of this actor. Even adds more color to their monochrome state!

... We truly could not care about whether she does not like the gift, but your distaste is just so colorful.

The Eyes roll upon themselves. Out on the Stage on Irises, the COLORS of satiation, happiness, famished still, and more writhe in more color upon more color outside of the dream faded for contrasts.