Mystery Lake

  [56] As Girls Miranda World

  [Author Note]: Chapters are a day late due to Christmas and illness. New chapters Tuesday through Saturday and likely returning to normal schedule next week. Title is a riff on "girls run the world".

  This had to be Christmas; come too late or too early. I got to walk out, and we got to walk out as simply girls in the best-blanketed respects. Look how my chest protrudes! Look at the shape of our faces! Look at what we're wearing! Listen to how we sound! The bathroom hand soap was a helpful aid, as I wasn't yet convinced of our smells.

  Nor was I able to shake the little, irrepressible unpleasantness sneaking around this old diner. I wasn't quite sure what it was, but Chiara's nervous alarm coincided with my own feelings. I just didn't have the confidence to add them to the evidence. And what would we do if we found something bad here? Better to play it cool until it can be understood.

  The absolute mass of food they provided fit with every cliché one should come to expect from a place like this. Plenty of eggs; I could stir for more than a minute. Mental Dalek reference there. Egg stir minute. Not that I needed all this food, but I was hungry despite my somewhat shrinky, dinky transformation. My meal should have a little punch to it. But the sensation it gave me was rather muted. Washed out and muddied like a bad signal on an old TV. Chiara meandered about her allergy, but we supported her in getting her order fixed. I was delighted that we all shared to supplement her entrée. Even though we were thrown together in this situation, splashed with unexpected drips, we were friends. Aren't we friends? Ross did a lot of scowling at Roxanne, but I understood that not even my adept mouth or his unwillingness to move beyond could quite break some feelings and holds.

  I didn't have complaints about breakfast. There were some flavor oddities, and it made sense that my senses would be off-kilter as everything about me changed. The food wasn't gritty, badly washed, or poorly cooked. Something still felt off, though, that I couldn't quite place my finger on.

  Then Layla returned, and all my nervous shivers hit me at the same moment. I tried to deal with this development rationally. It didn't mean anything. Just the kind of weirdness that Layla would pick up. But one thing was certain: This wasn't a one-way trip. For some around the table, this was an immeasurable relief. Chiara wouldn't be stressed about an inescapable girl fate. Roxanne could breathe easier. I had to resign myself.

  Just a temporary excursion. That's fine. Don't worry about it. Don't stress about it. Isn't it still such a beautiful thing that I got to feel this way at all, even just for a little while? It was a nice thing to try to tell myself and to prepare as an excuse, but it still felt like I was bleeding out from this invisible injury, and nothing had enough time to heal. I listlessly laid out the assurances we would have to make as things settled back to earth.

  Roxanne looked at me sympathetically, as if she wished we weren't so far separated across the table. Just when I thought this new development had thrown everything into a new, morose sense of reasonableness, Brock returned as simply as he had left. I had no idea what to make of this development. Maybe it meant nothing at all. Maybe all this was exclusive to Layla. Or maybe something in this place was causing it? My phone was still acting up in ways that desperately concerned me.

  Then it got worse—so much worse. It was as if this place and the world were a presentation, a play on an artificial stage with a fancy curtain to highlight the festivities and not draw attention to how thin and strange everything actually was. It went dark. The room felt like a storm cloud, wrapping and twisting all around us. And the food. It wasn't food at all, and I had to choke to get it out. I reached for Ross, who looked pale and grim.

  This was a trap—a terrible trap—that I wish I had called out through my abandoned intuitions when it all first started to feel wrong. Why do I always deny my greatest and clearest hunches?

  I had no idea what we were going to do, but Roxanne rose to the occasion. Part of me wanted her to just shut up so we could hide and not be recognized as anything. Not as if that strategy would have been helpful or appropriate. Roxanne could talk, and that skill with hopeful framing was really all we had against these awful monsters. Surgically targeted inappropriate comments. Just play along, and hope that we can get out of here.

  Writhing around sexually felt so phony, but I wasn't going to hold back. Just put on a show for them. Just screw with them as much as possible. And it seemed to work. They got turned off; they were disgusted. Not an escape, not yet, but at least some fashion of fighting back against these terrible things. I asked the kind of uncomfortable questions I always did at the most inappropriate times. Of course, Roxanne didn't have a methodology for what she was doing, and that irked Ross a little bit as well. The world felt small, so sadly and desperately small. And it was shrinking ever more by the moment. We fell into a trance, and all that saved us was that man in black from before.

  He wasn't human, or even close to it, despite presenting such a normal face. The mood in the air more than proved it. He was something made of dangers, both intangible and inescapable. It felt good to make those torturous Hollows face the kind of suffering they had thrown at us. I didn't care what happened to them as long as we never saw them again.

  Making sense of what came after was quite a curious conundrum. No building, but remnants, stripped to the foundation. Was it like some mystical and magical version of virtual reality where we thought we were seated happily and eating decent food? And what about the bathroom? Putting it all together was difficult. Some of it could easily be hand-waved with a magical explanation, but I wanted to understand, even though I knew that I couldn't.

  Getting back to the car was a relief, and I supported Chiara as she struggled to steady herself against the impossibilities feasting on our souls and minds. That freaky man in black slunk his way over to us. He was too close, and I wanted to do or say something about that, but I didn't know what. A shark bit through a monster, and that shark is just chilling nearby. Neither creature was appealing, but the shark wasn't hungry for you right now. All I could do was brace myself and send good feelings to Chiara to be strong.

  Blinding tension remained like several screws driven into my forehead, and no simple return let them ease up. It took something out of me, and the others clearly felt the same. I wanted and needed to close my eyes and just sleep away the nightmares after that. But I was the co-pilot. If Chiara couldn't sleep, then neither could I. We had to be diligent. Sleep later; let the tension drop after.

  They were motions; this was just running away, trying not to scream. Denial in its clearest form. Put as much distance between us as possible and all the things that didn't make sense. I tried to deepen that shelter by sifting through my musical options. Roxanne would call my collection an eclectic set. When you want to make cinema, it's always good to have a wide variety of options for musical language. I often retained a lyrical background, nervously characterizing the most mundane moments. Bombastic ballads bouncing and celebrating more activity than the normal qualities of life deserve.

  This book was originally published on Royal Road. Check it out there for the real experience.

  Nothing I could find in my collection or that I could pull out of Chiara's felt like it would add anything good to this nervous moment. I wanted to make things better. I wanted to help everyone forget. But I'm not good with this sort of thing.

  We arrived at the place the man in black had suggested. We stopped moving. My guts still wanted to scream about everything and anything that had happened lately. But we all held it together as Layla shared the best of herself with us. That goofball, that precious goofball. All we could really do was continue to live. The world doesn't make sense; it continues to smack you down even when it has no reason to. And don't forget the beautiful things that come your way.

  Outside, it actually felt like we were stepping into the real world. My body sashayed, jiggled, shifted, and showed off despite my not wanting all that. And we were appraised. Not a bad thing, but some deep inkling in my soul wanted to do the Alyssa thing and splash the world a little. Whistle about yourselves.

  Layla and Chiara cuddled with more courage than I could find in myself right then. It was beautiful, it was special, and I wanted to celebrate it. Little moments like this helped make everything feel okay again, even if it wasn't.

  That much was clear when we walked into the truck stop, and my eyes refused to land on the depths of it. I had to look back and make sure this wasn't another illusion. Too many illusions, too many doubts. Splitting the difference between looking in and looking out was the most I could manage. I wanted to be a better, stronger person, but sometimes just being yourself is a lot to take on.

  Roxanne looked desperately tense in the bathroom while the others did their silly things. Layla was meant to be here; we were just bathroom guests. I shouldn't have dwelled on that silly notion, but I still felt like a lesser even with great bounties and shapes surrounding me.

  I felt exhausted, and Roxanne looked even more so. I knew she wasn't all right, but I had to ask. In the usual Joel way, she didn't give me an answer but defaulted to small comforts. I lamented the weirdness of this day. None of the events since the lake really truly soured this for me. How could they? This is what I have wanted all my life. Challenges came with the territory. These were actually less bothersome horrors than trying to live an average day. Tangible threats instead of intangible, existential dread.

  Ross tried to talk to me. I could tell he was really working at it. His eyes didn't know where to go, and his body was barely sitting despite being firmly planted in the seat. He tried the kind of nervous things that I knew from a dozen different attempts at conversations. The boy sort of talks to a girl, trying to come up with something deep and involving. It was fascinating to witness it from the other end. How much we had switched. I could play oblivious. Not that I wanted to make it difficult for her or him. But I finally felt relaxed and at ease. I did my boldest action of the day. If she or he found nerves after such clear messages, there was really nothing I could do about it. It was kind of fun.

  He found his way into a subtle courtship.

  "I like you."

  A little bit blunt, and it seemed clear that we were way past that point, but the nascent romantic feeling filled me with both familiar and unfamiliar energy. I wanted to smile as brightly and boldly as a Layla. I wanted to beam with Ross, but he acted like this was too much. I understood. I teased him with subtle smiles. It was fun.

  I couldn't just have fun; I had to find a Wi-Fi connection. Only a scrappy little segment of data showed up, but I was able to use it to the best of my ability. I furthered my research and the segments of lore that Miss Clifton had left for me. I tried every search term, but the scraps were enough to lead me somewhere, and I couldn't wait to share it with the rest of the group.

  I didn't expect the Roxanne who arrived after her shower. I caught the implication that something more than a shower was going on back there, but I wasn't one to call it out after all I'd done.

  A different sort of Roxy showed up, though. This one seemed like a girl who had always been a girl, not bothering to hold a mask between us and her soul. If I didn't know better, she would have had to be more gender-twisty than I could ever claim. The tension between her and Ross hurt. I picked this group of people, I threw all of us together, and I am responsible for every moment of tension and discomfort. I led the orchestra out of focus.

  Fortunately, once again, rather than the bonds between us tangling, twisting, and tearing, outside forces brought us tension. A suggestive and sexually messed up jerk implying weird and uncomfortable things. I wanted to growl at him, but everyone else around flashed him enough fierce hatred, even Ross, that we felt protected from his nonsense. We forgot to gas up, though, and that didn't occur to me until we were quite a ways away and I was ready to share my cobbled-together Internet discoveries with the rest of the group.

  Remedying that with the reduced Internet connection was another frustration. We could've turned around and snagged that sliver. The bastard wouldn't still be there. But we couldn't turn around, even though it felt strangely impossible to give a reason why. At the time, it made sense. We can't turn back because... well, just because. Such a strange idea to poke and probe.

  Move forward, keep going; you need to put some distance. And that's all there was to it. Fairies. All those fairies on our minds, all those mystical things implied. Talking about it felt like inviting them to notice us but ignoring them was wrong too.

  What can you do?

  [On the ScribbleHub version of this postscript, I usually have a question at the end of the chapter to help with suggestions for where this story should go but these are flashback chapters. Feel free to leave questions about the flashback focus character and what you might like to know more about them. Back to the main narrative soon. There will only be one major and one minor flashback section for the rest of the story with the remaining characters who haven't had long segments of exploration. I'm just a week ahead in my writing and I am wide open for possibilities. I especially encourage readers to suggest any character traits, tropes, and other wish list items that they might like to see for a spooky scene. I also have some fun, musical, and awesome ideas for where this should go. A lot of the ending is figured out but need to get there. This is not as complicated at Yuri Worlds but it's still decently long. The tone this time is comedic but creepy, emotional but sweet. As always, vast details, especially types of characters, character names, and more are wide open beyond the central group. Feel free to add any idea which doesn't show up in the options. Also, if you see any random typos or uncapitalized starts of sentences, please pass them along. I am currently using Quillbot to assist with speedy editing, but it’s not 100%. These early chapters are shorter but they'll get longer soon. This is a more relaxing romp after the tense stuff. Thank you for reading!]