When Eris opened her eyes, it was to thick beams of sunlight streaming through the open windows, casting an iridescent sheen over her room and making all her furniture sparkle like a million specks of diamonds.
Wearily, Eris sat up and tried to get her bearings. The first thing she noticed was how comfortable the ground was. Glancing down, the yellow and green flower pattern of her blanket met her gaze. She furrowed her forehead in confusion and surveyed her surroundings. The oak desk shoved into the corner of the room, the cabinet lodged next to it, the clustered bookshelf overflowing with bulging books and sheets of old homework sticking out, the glass globe paperweight on her bedside that doubled as a lamp…..this was definitely either her bedroom or a very convincing replica, which sparked a whole host of disturbing implications Eris would rather not get into.
She rubbed her head, trying to nurse a burgeoning migraine. She felt like if she tried to get up, her legs would give out and she’d fall headfirst into her carpet. Weird, I’m not normally this tired when I wake up. What happened?
More importantly, why did she feel so uncomfortable? Eris was rapidly becoming aware of an itchy sensation, like thousands of spiders crawling over her naked body with their spindly legs. And when she shook her head, hoping to be rid of an irritation near the base of her hairline, a light smattering of dust rained down and soiled her sheets. In fact, if she looked more closely, her entire bed was blighted with the same grime and filth. Her nose wrinkled in disgust and she pushed off the bed, only for an excruciating cramp to seize her left hand and any attempt of standing up gracefully was aborted in favor of screaming.
Eris collapsed onto the floor, the luxuriously silky-soft carpet cushioning her knees from further injury. Not that it prevented her from harming herself anyway when her legs lashed out and collided with her uncompromising wooden bed. Her screams petered off to a pathetic whimper as she curled into a fetal position, the twin ache in both her legs and her left hand disorienting her. Eris' budding migraine flared to vicious new heights, until it felt like her skull was going to break in two.
Maybe it was the pain that reminded her, but out of nowhere, she remembered the events of the previous night with crystal clear clarity. The torrent of memories came rushing back in droves, picking up where her last lucid memory had left off and filling in the blanks all the way up to answering the question of how Eris found herself swaddled up in a rough-hewn nest made from her comforter.
Eris hobbled through the alleyway in a mystified daze, groping the filthy walls with her right hand in order to cope with the vertiginous sensation that had taken hold of her equilibrium and sapped her of her vigor. She swayed uncontrollably, bearing a striking resemblance to an inebriated drunkard. Nonetheless, she trudged along mindlessly. Her body functioned on autopilot, tracing her steps with a little wheedling from Prometheus to set her straight when she wandered off the path.
From the moment Eris stepped onto the streets, she felt, rather than saw, the innumerable intensive gazes boring into the back of her skull. Even in the nascent stage of the witching hour, Parokampos was packed with hordes of people hustling to their gigs and taking advantage of the brisk night breeze for a stroll. A tattered teenage girl in a school uniform stuck out like a sore thumb, and people weren’t shy in expressing their keen interest. Luckily, nobody mustered up the courage nor the time to actually interact with her, and she was able to reach the shuttle stop with little trouble.
Catching a late shuttle and ignoring the driver’s request to examine her student ID (not that it even registered in her impaired mind), she shuffled awkwardly to the nearest seat and plopped onto the velvet cushion, sprawling her gangly limbs every which way without regard for the other passengers. She slumped against the window, enjoying the pleasantly cool glass rubbing up against her cheek and trying not to doze off.
What took place next was blurry, even by her current abysmal standards. She semi-recalled shambling off the shuttle at her designated stop by some miraculous stroke of luck and lumbering her way to her apartment. It baffled the mind how she didn’t slip and crack open her head when climbing the stairs, but she managed to reach her floor without dying. It took her several attempts to locate the correct door but after slapping her hand haphazardly against the handprint scanner situated next to the keypad, the metal barrier yielded and swung open.
The abrupt disappearance of steel underneath her hands took her by surprise and her arms, still expecting to face resistance from the door, careened forward. With a yelp, she toppled through the doorway and the unforgiving wooden floorboards rushed up to meet her. Eris laid on the floor like a particularly floppy, shapeless blob of wet seaweed, bemoaning the bruising that her chin had surely received.
She must have mustered the energy to inchworm up to her room eventually, but the actual process was all a big blank patch. Damnit, how exhausted was she? Although the conundrum of how she’d woken up bathed in a sea of cotton was solved, that still left the riddle of why she was outside during a school night. It wasn’t as if Eris possessed an abundance of friends to whisk her away from her studies, encourage her to dabble in some signature teenage rebellion, and waste the night away dancing.
She distinctly remember crouching in a musky alleyway somewhere, and she believes she also saw a sleeping man nearby. Two widely disparate observations, that when put together, escalated the situation from disastrous to DEFCON 1.
She tried to delve into the dilemma at hand, but her attempts were quickly rebuffed. Normally, Eris would have conceded the battle; clearly, her mind had seen fit to seal away this particular cluster of memories, and if the past six months had taught her anything, it was that her subconscious understood her limits better than she did. It would be unwise to test its verdict, and under typical circumstances, she would abide by its judgment.
However, this situation was far from being classified as routine. She couldn’t shake the feeling that she would regret turning her back on this exotic sensation and returning to the stale, monotonous existence Eris called life, twiddling her thumbs and wasting away until she decomposed. Tossing and turning in bed at night, the words ‘What if?’ echoing in her mind as she sought to unwind time. This was a chance to be greater, a call to action, to take up arms in service of the people, to contribute something actually meaningful amidst the boundless sea of trivial decisions and frivolous anxieties that seemed to have governed her life up to this point.
An almost epidemic wave of frenzied desperation crashed over her and she seized the chance that was so munificently hoisted onto her person with both hands. Spurred on by delusions of grandeur, Eris prodded and interrogated the psionic barrier for any structural deficiencies she could exploit. The persistent barrage weakened the structural integrity of the wall, and a crack formed. And like any overtaxed dam with a copious water buildup on the opposite side, a single flaw was enough to initiate a ripple-effect that saw the damage spread until it looked as if a cluster of arachnids had woven an elaborate cobweb to be draped over the mental fence. Predictably, it didn’t take much more for it to burst.
The barrier fell, and like a tidal wave, a deluge of memories flooded her mind. It felt like a certified monsoon blew through and crashed down with the force of a rampaging mammoth, eroding her defenses in an instant. The events of the previous night poured over her like molten lava, scorching everything in its path. Eris never stood a chance.
As the missing puzzle pieces clicked together before her increasingly nauseated eyes, she began to regret being so hasty to bridge the disconnect in her memory. Especially when the fruit of her mind’s labor revealed the unforgivable deed she had committed the night prior. Eris clutched at her head, begging her mind to stop remembering, to forget the painful recollections. She frantically grasped at the feeling of confused euphoria she’d experienced when she woke up, still in the throes of drowsiness and unsure of what had transpired, but the sense of muddled drowsiness was fleeting.
All of a sudden, an overwhelming queasiness from the bowels of her stomach made itself known. Something acrid burned the back of her throat and that was all the warning she had. Eris glued her mouth shut for dear life as she sprinted for the bathroom, kicking open the door in her haste and skidding along the ceramic tiles. She’d just slammed the toilet lid up before her digestive system decided it was high time to expel the contents of her stomach.
She projectile vomited into the porcelain basin, the unappetizing stream of semi-digested chunks and pasty yellow sludge splattering against the curved sides of the toilet bowl with the intensity of a railgun. She wasn’t exactly a novice when it came to hurling—there had been many sick days where one could be expected to find the stench of ejected chicken soup curdling in the air—but this level of fervor was a different beast entirely.
The tranquil, dewy morning air was defined by the birds chirping and heart-wrenching sobs, with the sound of guttural retching entangled within the grotesque melody. The minutes blurred into one another, but after what felt like an eternity, she’d depleted her stomach’s contents. Then Eris was merely bawling her eyes out into the toilet, the stank of half-digested macaroni making her head scream in agony and the all-consuming guilt nibbling at her soul.
Finally, long after her tear ducts had dried up, she moved. Her bones creaked like the rusted joints of an ancient, bronze automan stranded in the desert moving for the first time in a millennium. She felt absolutely dismal, ravaged both physically and emotionally. Eris flushed the regurgitated mess down the drain and hobbled over to her bed. The velvety cushioning of her comforter was a welcome reprieve from the solid, ceramic bathroom floor, but she could barely think right now. Everything was shrouded in a thick fog, like she was cut off from the rest of the world. She felt like she’d emptied out more than just her lunch; a hollow void had subsumed the place where her soul used to reside, and the vacuum ate away at her like a disease. She was….’detached’ would probably be the most apt description of her current state. Distant from the matter at hand, as if she was a spectator on the sidelines watching through murky lenses.
Eris sighed. Thinking about this on an empty stomach wasn’t going to help matters. her stomach gurgled in delight at the same time her chest clenched painfully. Those two men are never going to eat again, a droll voice in the back of her mind reminded her.
You think I don’t know that? Piss off! She walked over to the door and clicked her fingers. The doors dutifully retracted into the wall, covering up the room again when she was on the other side. She eyed the room a few yards away warily; Amelia should be at school right now, and her parents were definitely at work.
Despite that, Eris found herself tip-toeing through the hallway, cringing whenever the wooden floorboards creaked. Once downstairs, she headed straight for the pantry and snagged a granola bar, ripping open the cheap plastic packaging and snarfing it down in seconds. Immediately, she pounced on another one, consuming it in a longer albeit still short period of time. The third one disappeared into her gullet like its predecessors, and it was only at the fourth bar that she assumed some semblance of manners.
Her guilt was screaming at her, demanding to know how she could be starving when she murdered someone, but the voice was drowned out by the enthusiastic and content sight her stomach let out as its ravenous hunger was finally sated. Now that she was no longer hungry enough to eat a horse, the obvious question was what to do next.
Eris' immediate thought was to come clean and confess to the authorities. If she plead self-defense, her age could grant her some leeway. She might be let off with some time in juvenile detention and heavy community service. All in all, it was far from the worst option presented to her. But then she thought about all the prejudice and bigotry that not only she, but more importantly, her family would receive from people and every instinct in her body repelled the suggestion vehemently.
If she drew attention to herself for murder at such a young age, eyes would inevitably turn to her parents and condemn them for their poor parenting. They might even look to Amelia and wonder if it was only a matter of time before she also fell off the deep end. Some scumbags might dare to go after Alice as well.
She couldn’t do that to her family. Not after everything she’ve already done. Eris resolved to figure out another way to fix this problem, but the first thing she needed to do was change out of her current, debilitated clothes. She couldn’t bear to suffer through the intolerable itching for a second longer than was necessary, and even if she didn’t have time to take a shower, she had time for a quick wardrobe change.
Dashing upstairs, she entered her room and flung open her closet doors. Fingering the rows of clothes she possessed, she shuffled through in search for a spare uniform. Finding one, she quickly discarded the uniform she was wearing and gently tucked it under her bed. Then she donned the new uniform, all while carefully avoiding glancing into the full-body ivory-framed mirror leaned against the wall.
Eris made to leave but a stray thought stayed her hand. She vaguely recalled crawling back home, but there was an addendum to the memory that was only now making a resurgence. She scrutinized her armoire which had been shoved clumsily into the corner when she’d been rearranging her room and subsequently forgotten. She usually steered clear of the armoire—preferring to employ the closet instead, which was far less of a burden to manage the contents of—but the left door was slightly ajar. As if someone had been in a rush to stash something before they fainted.
Trepidation arose inside her as she inched closer to the armoire. Had the armoire always been this tall? She shook her head to and fro, hoping to dislodge the very incongruous, silly thoughts that seemed to have found a secret passageway into the innermost private chambers of her cerebrum. She inhaled, trying to attain some semblance of clarity. When the fog in her mind began to settle, she flexed her hand, swallowed her reservations, and swung open the door.
Eris found what she’d expected to see: the missile launcher half-buried under a stack of spare clothes. What she hadn’t predicted was that from the moment she’d flung open the doors, the weapon had wasted no time in unleashing a salvo of persuasive suasion torpedoes, intent on ensnaring her consciousness. A veil of dense clouds descended upon her mindscape like the gates of a castle, slamming into the ground with a heavy clang! Everything went blank, and all she could think was how beautiful the weapon looked, how precious it was, how cool she would be with it cradled in her arms….
A frigid gust tore through the gates, sending them crashing to the ground and rending the false sense of security she’d been lulled into without mercy. A strangled gasp slipped out as she was immediately deposited back into reality; the mist surrounding her vanished with a puff and the environment rearranged itself, crystallizing into her armoire and room once more. Eris staggered, slumping against the wardrobe’s door as she tried to reorient herself. Her thoughts were unbearably sluggish as she attempted to process everything that’d just happened, but it was like her systems couldn’t flush out the vestiges of the stupor fast enough to keep up with current events.
Saying she wasn’t tempted to close the armoire and abandon the apartment would be a lie, but she couldn’t just let the missile launcher find a new home in her wardrobe. Leaving the missile launcher swaddled up in her baby clothes was analogous to marching into the GDM’s district headquarters and leaving a statement confessing all her crimes. If she fancied enjoying her eighteenth birthday as a free citizen, then she needed to dispose of the missile launcher on her lonesome.
Fast as a viper, her hand darted out and in one fell swoop, managed to snag the coat that the missile launcher was resting on top of. The weight of the weapon caused the fabric to immediately dip, leaving her holding a bulging sack. With a nimble dexterity that came by perhaps once every second blue moon, her fingers flew across the wool until she’d succeeded in tying shut the top. The effect it had was readily apparent; the weapon’s call waned after being sealed off.
Eris hastily composed herself, swung the bundle under her arm, and strode down the stairs. A part of her desired nothing more than to plop herself down on a couch and remain seated until her parents returned home, where she would spill all her secrets. Maybe even have them comfort her and hold her again, like before the Animus Incursion. It was appealing, to be able to cast off any responsibilities and go back to being a kid, but she didn’t deserve that right. Nor could she simply dump her burden onto her parent’s shoulders. No, she had to resolve this herself, and she wasn’t going to accomplish that lounging in her house.
She fought the urge to cast a final mourning glance over her house. This isn’t going to be the end. she vowed, but her voice rang weak. Hunching her shoulders, she walked over to the door and opened it. A blast of brisk, glacial air splayed her hair flat against her forehead. Feeling her face swiftly fall numb, she quickly released the door and let it shut behind her with an ominous click. Trying to shake the feeling that she’d just doomed herself, she abandoned the automatically-locking door and set off for the nearest shuttle.
Like the night before, Eris received a couple of scattered leery stares, but for the most case, she was ignored. Seeing a student skip class or be late to school wasn’t out of the ordinary. Yet every noncommittal glance felt like an accusation burrowing past her skin, a wayward twinkle in the eyes of the teenage boy sitting opposite of her feeling like an unspoken warning. Despite her underlying worries that the shuttle’s alarms were seconds away from flashing red and signaling the authorities to the shuttle screaming for her arrest, the shuttle chugged along without a problem. Before long, it slowed to a stop in the station next to her school.
Ducking her head, she squeezed through the crowd that had assembled around the shuttle door, murmuring half-audible apologies as small grumbles of dissent arose. Eris pressed her hand onto the glass plate next to the door repeatedly until finally, with a hiss as air slipped through the sudden slit, the doors began to slide open. The instant a gap large enough for her to fit appeared, she slipped through and nearly crashed into someone who had been waiting mere feet away on the other end.
Narrowly avoiding a collision, she spun around the person and proceeded to walk in the opposite direction of her school. The entrance to the alleyway possessed a magnetic allure that drew her eyes to it like a moth to a flame, but she resisted the temptation to escape back into the shadows. No, she didn’t stop until she turned the corner and pressed her back up against the wall, feeling some of the impulse abate marginally–just enough so she could eye the bundled up missile launcher through new lenses.
What had she been thinking, to return to the scene of her dastardly crime? Before, she’d smuggled the weapon onto the shuttle with her solely because she had no intention of leaving damning evidence where her family lived. Other than that, there hadn’t been much cognitive power behind the decision and it was sorely showing. She needed to figure something out, and quickly. Loitering outside her school’s gates was bound to backfire spectacularly sooner or later.
The beginnings of a plan began to cobble itself together, and Eris' mind raced as she contemplated all the possibilities that would satisfy the need to liberate herself from this cumbersome weapon and also tickle her own selfish desires. If she remembered correctly, it was only a couple of miles from here, and it should contain all the tools she needed to complete the task she had in mind. It was also off the grid (or at least as ‘off the grid’ you could get in Parokampos), and it was fairly secluded. Even if the worst came to pass, she could cloister herself away and fortify the defenses to—Okay, maybe deciding to go full renegade against the police isn’t a good idea, but the rest stands true. Besides, it’s not like she can do anything with his corpse anyway. Even if it’s still there, she can’t exactly give him a proper burial without raising a shitton of eyebrows.
There was a not-insignificant part of her that questioned if the true aim behind wasn’t to atone for her crime, but to indulge in her selfish craving to dismantle the missile launcher. Eris would be lying if she said that she wasn’t tempted by the once in a lifetime opportunity, but there really was nothing she could do for him. Realistically, she knew and accepted that. So why did she feel like a horrendous pit had opened up in the bottom of her stomach?
You know why. You’re scum—you judge people for abandoning those in need, but at the slightest chance of satiating your thirst for knowledge, you do the same.
Something in her chest clenched, and her breath caught. Eris inhaled deeply before exhaling; the trapped air within rattled her ribcage. Unconsciously, she bared her teeth. “No,” she murmured, low and dangerous. “I am doing this for the betterment of everybody. It’s the only logical course of action. Doing anything else would be foolhardy. This is how I'll fix things.”
How many times will you need to say it before you start to believe it?
Opening her eyes, she strode through the busy streets unflinchingly, hoping to project a nonchalant aura by pointedly not looking anybody directly in their eyes. Of course, the effect was somewhat ruined by the fact that the tips of her ears were burning bright red, but it didn’t really matter. She picked up the pace and booked it out of there.
Eris was burning sunlight, and she didn’t want to see if her inexplicable streak of dodging the police would continue well into the evening. Unfortunately, it wasn’t long before her adrenaline ran its course and blinding agony spliced the side of her abdomen. An emphatic ‘fuck!’ tore out of her throat before she could stop herself, drawing even more unamused glances. Still, she couldn’t help it when it felt like someone was gouging a yawning hole out of her midriff with their bare hands. All too soon, she was reminded why she had forgone an offer to track the track team without hesitation.
Nursing the mother of all stitches, she hobbled through the district with a far more sedate gait than she would have liked, but any more strenuous activity and her lungs would implode. Although she was still making good progress, she was haunted with the enduring fear that she would hear sirens pierce the din any time now. And the solitude of walking alone was beginning to get to her; the guilt she was barely keeping at bay continued to gnaw on her, chipping away her crudely constructed assurances. Her resolve didn’t waver, per say, but it definitely fidgeted. she shook her head, gently slapping her cheeks a couple times.
As she walked, the thought of Zoe popped into her head. As annoying as that was, it forced Eris to confront what she’d learned about Zoe from the Custodian. If someone in her close proximity was a Potential, one of the only people who fit that bill was her former best friend. At first, she thought she was capable of deluding herself into feeling happy for Zoe, but that was a blatant lie. She knew she wasn’t the best judge of others’ character, and she hardly possessed the right to disparage people of their once-in-a-lifetime opportunity simply because she was jealous. She could accept that for most people, and stuff the roiling pot of jealousy into a tiny box that would be smothered under a mountain of restraint and goodwill. For most people.
The current Zoe—the new and improved Zoe with dozens of like-minded friends and boys who hung off her every word—didn’t share the same honor in her mind. The mere thought of her becoming a Custodian was aggravating beyond belief, especially when Eris remembered all the times she’d rolled her eyes condescendingly when the latter went on a Custodian rant. Someone like her didn’t deserve that privilege.
No. Zoe didn’t deserve that power, and she didn’t want it. Maybe destiny hadn’t intended for Eris to be a Custodian—its cruel machinations had instead placed someone who wanted nothing more than to be special next to somehow who couldn’t help but be special—but that didn’t mean she was destined to be reduced to sitting in a seat in the spectator stands. Before Custodians, there were still heroes of exemplary valor and courage who carved their story into the bedrock of humanity, whose signature could be found between the lines chronicling humanity’s greatest achievements.
Maybe she could be one of them.
The sun reached the crest of its climb and bathed her in its light, illuminating the way forward. The industrious sector faded out of view behind her, and with it, the racket. There was a noticeable shift in the atmosphere; a brewing tension pressed down on the interscapular region between her shoulder blades, unforeseen ridges digging deep into her flesh.
It was no small relief to see the familiar structure looming in the distance. Menacing fences kept a formidable vigil, solitary sentinels safeguarding their charge. Stout and tempered steel bars kept any would-be interloper out, but she had the advantage of being in the know. she locked onto a particular segment of the fence where the bars bent at an awkward outward angle, deviating from the scrupulously measured intervals of four inches spaced out between the rest of the rods. Not by much, but it was enough to fashion as a makeshift hole.
Once Eris popped out the other side, she didn’t waste a beat. Leaving behind the antiquated hedge, she faced her next opponent: an obstacle course comprised of dozens of inoperable heavy-duty vehicles. Abandoned by their drivers in fluctuating states of disarray, some showed their age via moldy moss encroaching onto the dented shell encasing the construction equipment, while others were a hair's breadth away from crumbling apart due to the egregious amount of rust that had piled up. Almost like a second coating of orange-brown paint had been layered over the once-electric yellow makeup, the rot was so apparent, so comfortable in its place, that it was hard to imagine there’d ever been a time it hadn’t been present.
She stormed through the makeshift junkyard, navigating the slapdash mess with the professionalism of an expert hide-and-seek player. Within minutes, she’d maneuvered her way to the side of the building, craning her neck to an uncomfortable degree to peer at the eaves blotting out the sun. The primary entrance—a gargantuan rolling service door made of thick aluminum—was firmly grounded. Her scrawny arms would snap before she could get it to budge, and she wouldn’t put it past him to install an alarm to go off when it detected movement.
Instead, she charted a course for the side of the building. Turning the corner, she grabbed onto the handrails and used it to propel her forward. Upon reaching the mouth of the L-shaped accessible ramp, Eris didn’t hesitate to start climbing the running slope. Pivoting on her heels and continuing onward to the left when prompted, she traced the grooves notched into the worn walls absentmindedly. The texture underneath her palm made an abrupt metamorphosis into smooth steel, and she paused in front of the door.
The biometric scanner parked next to the door was positively medieval—bulky, slow, and hampered by the limitations of yesteryear’s technologies—by today’s standards, but it should suffice. Eris grimaced as she slapped away a stubborn cobweb clinging to the scanner, exposing a cracked black screen.
Her hand lingered a couple of inches above the glass and for the first time since she let the rage consume her, she felt apprehension tickle the edge of her mind. While formulating her plan, she didn’t factor in the possibility that he may have locked her out of the system. She didn’t think he would have, but then again, the past six months had shown her that she really hadn’t known anyone she loved as well as she thought she did.
She huffed. Overthinking this wouldn’t help. She pressed her palm flat against the screen, suppressing a shiver at the unexpected chill, and waited as the neon green line zipped up and down, analyzing the creases in her flesh and the unique pattern of her veins (another feature denoting its nature as an older model; the newer variants was capable of scanning your hand at a distance by dousing you with a healthy dosage of invisible rays in milliseconds). As the seconds ticked by without any sign of it slowing down, the wariness from before began clawing at her mind with increased fervor. Before she could spiral though, the line vanished and the screen flashed a brilliantly emerald green.
A slight click pierced the air and the door popped open, releasing the months-old zephyr that had been trapped inside. she staggered back, hand instinctively coming up to block her nose from the offending miasma. It was no surprise the funk was so rancid when considering the high humidity levels, possible leaks, and a lack of ventilation.
Gingerly heaving open the door the rest of the way, Eris took her first steps inside her uncle’s warehouse in over a year.
A confusing bundle of gratitude, shock, felicity, and above all, a baffling amount of relief, wormed a path to an alcove under her heart, filling her with gooey warmth that was usually reserved for hugs and snuggles under the blanket while binging subpar horror movies with her sisters.
Her eyes burned and she hastily brushed away the half-formed tears with her sleeve. “Must be the air in here,” she murmured. Her mousy voice rang empty in the colossal warehouse, sounding oddly lonely as it bounced off the walls and faded just as fast. The silence that met her was deafening in its own right. In a flash, Eris reverted back to a six-year old girl, wearing shoes too big for her feet as she scurried after her uncle like clumsy puppy, shamelessly squirreling head pats out of her uncle’s disgruntled employees and being a general nuisance to the overall productivity of the warehouse.
But she’d been loved.
Eris took a deep, pacifying breath that did little to suppress the swell of emotions, but it helped her gain a modicum of control over her mental faculties. She refused to allow her past to be her folly, to impair her vision. But as she marched across the warehouse, the LED light fixtures flickering on one by one when she passed underneath, illuminating her path with shafts of brilliant luminescence, she saw phantoms darting around shelves and spectral giggles echoing in her mind.
She stared at the spectacle with something resembling longing before averting her eyes. Eris continued her advancement, keeping her gaze downcast with a resolute steadfastness. Glowering at the concrete floor felt a bit silly, especially when it had done nothing to earn her ire, but everything else was too….raw.
She bypassed the storage section with all the racks and bins, and made a beeline for the back of the warehouse, where the modular office was tucked into the corner. Her uncle had opted for a much more hands on approach with managing his work, believing his position didn’t exempt him from the backbreaking work he subjected his employees to. As a result, his office often went unused. It'd seen the most action whenever she popped around for a visit. On many occasions, her uncle had left her in his office with some wrenches, screwdrivers, and measuring tape to amuse herself and ensure she didn’t make a sudden appearance in front of a moving bulldozer.
Eris maintained her feud with the floor until she approached the office. Kicking the rusted door open, she ambled inside and slowly, reluctantly, lifted her head. her heart throbbed, a rush of melancholy memories circulating around her. For just a fraction of a second, an infinitesimal instance in an endless procession of wasted moments, she wavered in her course.
Then the disquiet passed. Remember why you’re doing this. Remember who you’re doing this for. A fresh batch of indignation blazed through her at the notion that she’d nearly capitulated to fate’s iron fist. Ferocious fury coursed through her veins and she caught her second wind. She commandeered an lopsided table, set it against the wall for extra insurance, planted the missile launcher on top, and got to work scavenging the office for any supplies. Eris came short of her most hopeful estimates, but managed to scrounge up a tattered and moldy cardboard box from underneath her uncle’s desk.
Upon closer inspection, the box was revealed to boast a respectable assortment of gear: pliers, screwdrivers, scissors, both box and open-end wrenches, a utility knife, chisels, and other tools of a miscellaneous breed. Nothing that possessed moving parts, but it would suffice. On her way back, a flash of brown caught her peripheral and she spun around. Eris was promptly bowled over by a tidal wave of childhood nostalgia so potent that it completely paralyzed her.
There, sitting crooked on top of a cabinet, was a frayed, tawny teddy bear. Saying it’d seen better days was a brazen understatement. The bear was the archetype of shabby, with its stitching coming loose and tufts of stuffing poking out from small tears. However, to her, it looked absolutely perfect the way it was.
If the warehouse and the office had been a trip down memory lane, the sight of her old cuddling buddy was the equivalent of getting doused with a swimming pool’s worth of hypermnesia. As if the peculiarity of it being here wasn’t enough—she thought it had met the tragic fate that had befallen so many of her childhood toys and became buried in the back of her closet—now she had to contend with the spiraling effect it had on her. Already, she felt herself begin to sink back into the brume of forgotten dreams. It was only through sheer force of will that she pulled herself back from the brink.
Eris pointedly turned on the heel of her feet and made to leave, but on a whim, she pirouetted around again. Maybe it was because she was feeling a little maudlin after having reunited with the bear, or perhaps it was residual guilt from essentially abandoning the stuffed animal and not sparing it a second thought. Anyhow, it was a mistake.
The moment she made eye contact with the bear’s own glinting beads, she lost. A decades-worth of tea parties and bedtime stories passed between us in a heartbeat. The little bear’s imploring eyes seemed to be carrying a beseeching message, asking if she could bear the weight of leaving it a second time. She sighed, and before she could reconsider, she wrangled the bear by its scruff and hauled both the cardboard box and the stuffed anime back to the table. Leaving the box on the ground—she wasn’t looking to blow out her back trying to heave the ludicrously hefty package on top of the table—she positioned the bear on the corner with its floppy ear drooping over one beady eye.
“Stay,” she warned, pointing her finger at its snout threateningly. Turning to focus her attention on the missile launcher, she dutifully ignored the trickle of cold sweat tracking down the back of her neck as the bear’s flinty thousand-yard stare pursued her every movement with inhuman concentration. Was it strange to be intimidated by a mangy sack of cloth and cotton? Was it a sign of budding psychosis?
Focus, she reminded herself. Eris opened the substitute sack, exposing the weapon for all the world to see. Reverently, she stroked the missile launcher’s sleek casing, fingering the immaculately smooth metal for any opening she could exploit. It was almost criminally bare, stripped down to its essentials and then some. Her scientific side complained that the logistics of the weapon didn’t compute—as far as she could tell, it was a technological marvel that it even functioned—but a larger part of her was salivating at the prospect of stripping the missile launcher down.
She finally located a panel on the belly of the cylindrical device, cleverly tucked away to the point of being nigh-undetectable. Taking hold of a screwdriver in her left hand, she got to work loosening the screws until she could pry the panel off. It was with her heart in her throat that she set the sheet of metal aside and peered into the bowels of the armament.
Similar to the exterior shell, the interior carried on the minimalistic theme and ran with it. Four wires—blue, red, green, and yellow—extended across a rudimentary circuit board. Underneath the circuitry was a faint, multi-hued glow, the only element that suggested the existence of a power source. The sheer absurdity of it all was stretching her suspension of belief to the breaking point. No matter which angle she approached the missile launcher at, no matter how hard she wracked her brain, there was no conceivable way the weapon could operate with just a few wires and a low-budget circuit board. It was an affront to her self-established status as an avocational engineer, and flew in the face of everything she’d learned in school as cardinal truth.
With perhaps more zeal than was professionally recommended, she threw herself back into dissecting the missile launcher, attacking the weapon with a vengeance. Eris had to slow her pace down considerably to accommodate her injuries, but she was methodical in her approach. She began her operation by nudging the wires this way and that way, hoping to craft an easy access point to the circuit board underneath. The wires were stubbornly reluctant to move, already sliding back into place to cover the circuitry by the time she’d moved on to another cord. If she had more pliers on hand, she could hold the wires in place but unfortunately, she was running low on….pretty much everything.
In the end, she resorted to crossing her fingers and clipping the cables. Eris extracted the severed wires and plopped them into a small pile off the side before diving into the circuit board. Almost immediately, she realized there were no special gimmicks or unique modifications applied that differentiated it from the cheap, mass-produced, printed circuit boards that her school bought in bulk. Hell, the CPU PCB in her computer was leagues above this joke of a processor.
Eris vented her dissatisfaction out on the circuit board. Now that she knew it wasn’t some ‘holy grail’ of engineering, she tormented it without any of her usual finesse and made short work of it. Even while caught up in the throes of anger, though, she had the sense of mind to avoid carelessly detaching the circuit board without first checking for any running connections that may prove to be a fire hazard. The last thing she needed was for an open current to shock the living hell out of her. Luckily, everything was pretty isolated—closer inspection revealed that the four wires she’d already withdrawn hadn’t even been coupled to anything, which had her seriously contemplating throwing the weapon out the nearest window—and removing the circuit board turned out to be a straightforward procedure.
She wrested it out of the stomach of the missile launcher, tilted it over to inspect the origin of the herstifying radiance, and laid her eyes on the most magnificent sight she’d ever been privy to.
The panel had been screening an uncut gemstone that looked like it’d been extracted from inside the Earth’s crust and directly transported inside the weapon. She was completely spellbound; the jewel seemed to absorb the visible light around it and reflect it back as kaleidoscopic fractals dancing across the room with abandon. The multi-hued lights changed shades every second like it couldn’t decide on one, beaming a bonafide rainbow across the room. Flecks of white shone in the crystal, and starbursts of luminosity dazzled the eye, exploding like a dying star into millions of specks that streaked across the sky, trailing clouds of stardust like pencil markings.
As Eris neared, a heady rush of anticipation and excitement made her heart skip a beat despite herself. She deftly snatched up a pincer and tweezer, flourishing them like a shield and a spear. She skittered closer to the gemstone, eyeing the seemingly empty space in front of the jewel warily. Eris extended the tweezer until it was centimeters away from the jewel. To her chagrin, the tool was shuddering in her grip, a byproduct of the tremors that seized her arm. Her breath rattled in her chest, unable to escape, and with a start, she realized she was frightened.
She exhaled hoarsely through her nose and lowered the tweezers and the pincers until they were all but scraping the jewel. Nothing happened. The stress lines on her face smoothed over and a choked laugh bubbling up her throat with virgin relief. Eris opened the pincers as far as they could go and positioned it around the jewel before circumspectly allowing the pincers to close around the gemstone in a vice. The steel held out for now, but she didn’t think it was a good idea for the pincer to be touching the jewel for any longer than was necessary.
What she would have done next was a mystery even to herself, because at that moment, she made an aborted half-turn that saw her bumping into the table. It should have been a minor inconvenience at best, not even succeeding in breaking skin, but the corner of the desk made contact with the pincers. It was a small shock, but her fingers were already worn out from its previous tribulations.
The tool slipped through leaden fingers, briefly cartwheeling out of control before the weight disparity dictated that it correct itself, charting a linear course homing directly onto the ground. Eris made a mad lunge and managed to catch the handle by a hairsbreadth, pinching the pommel between her thumb and index.
She didn’t even have time to feel relief before the gemstone decided to jump ship. The claw popped open and unceremoniously deposited the jewel. Human instinct overrode logic, and it was a primal impulse that propelled her into action. The native disposition towards not wanting to see something hit the ground blotted out any pretense of rationale, until she didn’t even register that she’d begun to move.
In the back of her mind, Eris was aware that she hadn’t magically lost control over her body. She could have stuck a pin in her loony plan and retracted her left hand before she lost it. Let reason prevail again and shut down any fantasies of a higher calling. She knew she was risking shattering the delicate equilibrium brokered between the opposing angels and devils on her shoulders by accepting this deadly poison and blissful fruit wrapped in one.
But she was so tired. Tired of feeling alone, tired of coming home to empty dinner tables and silent scorn, tired of being constantly reminded of her failures and her own inadequacies every time she faced a mirror. She didn’t want to spend her evening holed up in her bedroom while scrolling through Zoe’s feed, seeing her friend continue living her best life without her. She hated having to shoulder through the intrusive stares, the hushed whispers that cut through the school halls like glass, and the poorly concealed loathing that her own sister felt towards her. Waiting at the door long into the night, hoping to catch a glimpse of her parents for the first time in a week. Watching as her family fell apart, helpless to prevent it yet burdened with the knowledge that she was responsible.
Eris wanted, no, needed to escape this stifling existence, to free herself from the noose that had a death grip around her very soul. To wake up one day and be able to say that her spirit was intact and whole, to say that she was fine and not be lying to herself. She couldn’t live like this anymore; she was choking on this strife, this misery that was as material as a storm. She wasn’t strong enough to handle the weight that had been thrust upon her. She was too weak. Too broken. She was dying, and she needed a lifeline before she drowned.
Her left hand wrapped the gemstone, and everything changed.
hohum! im having fun