As I ran down the departures corridor and out on to the airfield, I called for the pilot to wait for me before taking off. To my relief, I made it on to the plane just on time! As I wandered down the plane’s aisle searching for Mum, I felt myself losing my balance as the surface beneath my feet started to move.
“Ma’am, the plane is taking off, please find your seat and strap in,” a steward advised me.
As the aircraft achieved a greater altitude, I grabbed on to the sides of the seats on either side of me as I hiked up the aisle. I was literally on the edge of my seats as I forced my way to first class where I was pretty sure Mum was seated – she was a pretty rich lady. As the plane started leveling and I could finally stay on my own two feet without fear of falling to the back of the aircraft, I managed to spot her in amongst the first class passengers. I called out to her much to the confusion of everybody nearby.
“Erin,” Mum gasped, “what are you doing here?!”
I started to tear up. I hadn’t heard that voice in so long. Even if we were to die right then and there that would’ve made my journey worthwhile. Perhaps against her better judgment, Mum got out of her seat and walked over to me, giving me a big hug.
“Erin, Sweetie, what’s wrong?” she asked.
I wasn’t surprised that she knew something was up, and I’m not just talking about the aeroplane in the night sky. She had always known when I wasn’t feeling my best.
“Ladies, please stay in your seats until we say it is safe to stand up,” the steward from before scolded us.
I didn’t have time to sit and chat, however. Without thinking, I told the steward, my mother and everyone else within earshot that the plane was going to crash.
“Relax, little one,” an elderly lady tried to comfort me, “it’s really safe. Is this your first time flying?”
The steward snatched Paul’s ticket from my hand and took a proper gander at it.
“Ma’am, you’re not supposed to be in first class,” he sighed, “I’ll escort you to your seat, just please stop making a scene.”
I protested that what I was saying was true and that I was from the future, but everybody apart from Mum looked at me like I was an eejit. As the flight attendant dragged me to the seat Paul had booked despite the stares from other passengers, a message from the cockpit played over the in-flight announcement system.
“Attention all passengers, this flight is transporting very important cargo. Will Cathleen Wilde please head to the cockpit?”
“That’s not the captain’s voice…” the steward muttered in disbelief, momentarily letting go of me in the confusion as I ran back to Mum.
“Erin, what’s going on?!” she desperately asked, realizing that something wasn’t quite right.
Just as I contemplated heading to the cockpit myself to scope the scene, a purple vortex appeared in front of Mum and I. Within it I could see a woman who looked identical to Kuro staring right in Mum’s direction.
“You’re Cathleen, correct?” she asked.
My mother didn’t say a word, causing the mysterious girl to start maniacally laughing.
“Where are my manners?” she rhetorically asked. “I’m M.S. Webber. I believe you’re a fan of my novels, aren’t you?”
Mum and I exchanged a glance, before turning back to her. Before I could utter a word, Mum asked if it was M.S. Webber’s voice that she heard over the speakers.
“My, how observant,” Webber grinned. “Now, what do you say to a free trip to Phantasia? I need your help with something…”
“Don’t do it!” I interrupted, grabbing Mum’s hand tightly as I recalled the horrors I had seen there with my own two eyes.
“My, my…” Webber shook her head. “And who might you be?”
“I’m Erin Wilde, Cathleen’s daughter,” I stated, trying to keep my cool. “And she’s not going anywhere.”
“I thought you were supposed to be in Dublin, Ireland right now?” the woman in the portal said. “No matter, you can come with your mother, if you’d like?”
“Where do you plan on taking me?” Mum demanded. “Because I want to see my family this Christmas, and I’m not going to ditch them just to follow some Chronicles of Phantasia cosplayer to who knows where!”

By this point, several passengers were fleeing from their seats and the flight attendant had rushed to the cockpit to get the captain to try to stop what he could only assume was a hijacking in progress. Webber cleared her throat and took a deep breath.
“I really don’t mean you any harm,” she smiled, reaching her right arm out from within the purple void and placing it on Mum’s shoulder. “I heard about your fan-character and I would like to talk to you about making them canon, if you’d just follow me.”
Still my mother refused to step into some sci-fi portal that she didn’t understand.
“I really am sorry about this,” Webber apologized, “but, Cathleen, you have the greatest potential I have ever seen. And right now, Phantasia needs someone like you to save it,” she monologued as a really fecking uneasy feeling swept over me. “I promise I’ll take you back when I’m done with you, but until then…”
And with a snap of her fingers, another purple vortex enveloped my mother and I, before both of the magic magenta portals vanished into thin air.
To my surprise, the plane was still perfectly fine as we left. In that moment, I truly thought that M.S. Webber would be the one responsible for the accident that occurred that day. As I later learned from Webber herself, the pilot and co-pilot had gotten so distracted trying to search for us after we vanished from the plane that they had left the pilot’s instruments unattended, resulting in the crash that took the lives of everybody onboard.

As the days passed and I realized that M.S. Webber just wanted my mother to participate in the Witch Games, I felt safe enough to begin time-travelling back to the day I had come from… and maybe a little afterwards so as to miss Christmas. Webber said that my mother would have to stay put in Phantasia until I returned just to make sure that we didn’t destroy the time-space continuum or something by returning her immediately after the 2019 Witch Games concluded when she was supposed to be missing all throughout 2020. And so, when I reached the twenty-sixth of December 2020 and Webber sent me back to Dublin through her portal, I eagerly awaited the day she would drop Mum off too. …But that day never came. The official report on my disappearance concluded that I had been mugged and put into a coma in that alleyway where I first met Kuro. Even now, I am unsure whether those events like something from my favorite novels had really happened or if it was all some sort of grief-induced Chronicles of Phantasia fanfiction coma dream or what. Naturally, nobody ever believed my story, and I myself am not quite sure that I believe it either.
…
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Mum, wherever or whenever you are… I miss you.