I'm whispering a lullaby for you to come back home

“…Emmy?”

One word past Carly’s lips was like a jolt of electricity through the rest of the room. Several of the girls who’d been on the show from the beginning reacted with shock and disbelief when they heard it, as the pieces fell into place in their heads. Other newcomers, like Vivian, Ella, Amelia, and even Morgana, only reacted in confusion.

Nick was stunned into silence, as his memories came rushing back to him. He hadn’t put it together at first, but the girl in the tank top was the same woman from Carly’s challenge, her target for transformation. Or at least, someone who looked just like her.

Another Emmy.

Once the initial feeling of shock subsided, Nick’s emotions immediately turned to rage. How could Dakota do this? Bring Carly’s deceased daughter back like this, plop her down right in front of them, and call it a reward? It was sick, twisted, demented! One of the cruelest things she’d done so far!

But he held his tongue. His indignation, no matter how righteous, wasn’t his to share. Until Carly came out of her daze and actually shared her feelings on the matter, anything he had to say would be presumptuous.

Unfortunately, Carly had been rendered catatonic; a coma patient standing up.

Dakota… how could you do this? Nick turned towards her, even though he was loathe to see her face. But then he paused. Dakota’s expression was unreadable, her pale visage was completely devoid of emotion. And that’s when he realized that maybe his own perspective… maybe he was getting too caught up in his own preconceptions.

That shut Nick up long enough for the subject of his anger, the ponytailed girl herself, to open her mouth and actually say something.

“What’s going on?” She squeaked out, looking furtively around the room. She had an expression on her face like a mouse surrounded by a bunch of cats. “Where am I? How… how did I get here?”

Carly winced. A sobbing sound came from deep in her throat and her eyes started to tear up.

It was Marley who ended up saving the day. While she was shaken herself, seeing Emmy standing there, it couldn’t compare to what her sister was going through. So she managed to regain her composure quickly enough, and stepped forward, approaching the stunned girl.

“Hey… Emmy. Do you… remember me?” She asked cautiously. Marley thought it best to not bring up Carly right now, given the relationship between the two women. Assuming this Emmy was the one they had met in the challenge, of course.

Emmy’s mouth formed an “O” shape and she looked warily at the taller brunette. The resemblance was immediately obvious, but the buxom teen still looked uneasy.

“No, you… you look just like me, but… wait, Emmy? You said… that… that’s right… my name, it’s… Emmy, right…” The ponytailed girl ran her fingers through her hair, clearly uncomfortable about what was happening but at the same time, Nick saw her body relax slightly, as if on some subconscious level she was being put at ease by Marley talking to her.

“I don’t understand, what’s going on here?” Mary loudly blurted out, rising to her feet. Her freckled cheeks were flushed with confusion. “You said… is that… Emmy? But I thought Emmy was…”

“Carly…” Dani croaked out. She approached her girlfriend warily, hesitant to touch her. Her hand froze halfway to Carly’s petrified form, as the cosplayer finally let out the breath she was holding in a choked-up sob.

Emmy reacted to it immediately. Her head snapped up and her eyes narrowed in on Carly as a burst of recognition flashed across her face. In seconds she was at her mother’s side, holding her up before Carly fell to the ground.

“Mom!”

Carly twisted her head to look into the other woman’s eyes, and she saw the look of confusion swirling in them.

Emmy frowned. She let go of Carly and took a step back right at the same time Carly recovered enough strength to stand on her own two feet, and the two women looked uneasily at each other.

“Mom, I… I said that… but… are you… no, I mean…” Emmy ruffled her hair again, clutching the sides of her head like she was having a migraine. “I don’t remember… what… how…”

Carly’s voice cracked as she finally managed to speak. “You… you’re not… my Emmy?”

Of course she wasn’t. She couldn’t be! Emmy had died June 8th, 2015. The day she was born. If she were alive today, she would be 8 years old. Not 18 years old, which was about how old she looked right now.

And yet, every cell in Carly’s body was screaming at her that this was her Emmy. Her body recognized her own daughter on a genetic level, and that genetic memory was forcing her actual memories aside, trumping logic and rationality with the irrationality of a mother’s love for her child.

Emmy looked just as confused. Her eyes had a haziness in them, and she squinted, trying to comb through the fog of her brain.

“It’s a little more complicated than that.”

Everyone turned to Dakota. The host had finally spoken for the first time since presenting Carly with her “gift”, and it took Marley everything she had not to jump across the room and punch her in the face. Of all the cruel tricks-!

“Dakota, what’s going on here?” Nick demanded. Like Marley, he felt a driving urge to slap Dakota for this sick little show.

If Dakota was at all bothered by the hostility radiating from Nick, she didn’t show it. After all, hostility from the man she loved had become all too common in recent days. She calmly crossed her arms over her chest and stared at Carly and Emmy with an even expression on her face. “What’s going on here is that Carly has been given an amazing reward for working so hard to accrue all those donations in one day, that’s what.”

“…Okay, I’m lost,” Vivian said loudly. “How is a teenage girl a reward?”

“What, you didn’t get rewarded like that on all your trips to Epstein’s island?” Kim sneered venomously at her. It was one of the darkest “jokes” she’d ever told, but given the temperature of the room right now, it made a sick amount of sense for her to lash out like this, at least in her own mind.

“Emmy was… Carly’s daughter, right?” Morgana asked warily. All that had happened before she had come onto the show, but she had picked up a little on the topic. Enough to know better than to bring up the subject of Carly’s lost child.

“That’s right,” Dawn confirmed with a tiny nod. “And she died… when she was only a baby.”

Vivian turned pale. For once her smile left her face, and she looked like she was going to throw up.

Even Amelia’s composed countenance was momentarily shattered. Her eyes widened and a gasp escaped her lips. “Good lord…!” She clamped her hand over her mouth.

Nick just shook his head.

“We’ve been over this before already,” Marley said, balling up her hands into fists as she glared venomously at Dakota. “Some fake Emmy from another reality isn’t going to replace Carly’s… my niece. To do something like this and call it a reward, that’s just sick!”

“What fake Emmy?” Dakota crossed her hands over her chest. “What other reality?”

Marley didn’t even know how to respond to that.

Dakota seized her opportunity amidst the moment of silence and pressed on. “The woman before you is Emmy. Carly’s Emmy.” She tapped her cane on the ground. “She’s not a copy, or a version from an alternate universe. Carly, that’s your prize for getting to 10000 BP on your first go of donations. You get her back.”

Carly thought her heart was going to stop beating.

“No, no, no, that doesn’t make any sense!” Dani protested, shaking her head. “Emmy, she, she was just a little kid! I mean, she was a baby, when she…” She cut herself off and glanced warily at Carly, unable to say it. Carly still looked dazed though; she might not have even heard her.

“I was a little kid when I died,” Dakota bluntly reminded everyone. She ran her hand over her body as if to say “But look at me now.”

Nick frowned. “Dakota, that’s not the same thing and you know it!” He spat. “You… when you came back, you were… I mean…”

There was a difference between what had happened to Dakota, and what was happening here.

…Right?

Dawn frowned. She turned to Sylvia, the only person here who might be able to shed some light on the situation. “Sylvia, is she telling the truth? Is that really Emmy?”

Dakota looked over at Sylvia, who sank into her seat slightly. She didn’t like being put on the spot like this, and she definitely didn’t like her position as a former host being used in this way! She only liked when it was used for the cool stuff, like transformation consultations and sexy times!

“…It’s possible,” she finally admitted. “Dakota’s cane can bring the dead back to life. But… the producers, they would never allow something like this… I don’t think, anyway… Usually, you would need a wish for something that powerful, but the season isn’t over.”

“Usually you would,” Dakota agreed. “But you’re forgetting that this is my domain.” She twirled her cane. “The producers decided to oblige me, to a certain extent.”

She looked at the flustered and confused Emmy.

“If you’re wondering why she’s so quiet, it’s because she’s a bit like a newborn faun right now,” Dakota explained, walking towards the ponytailed girl. Emmy bristled at her approach and Marley and Dani immediately planted themselves between her and the approaching host.

Dakota frowned. With a wave of her cane, the two women suddenly found themselves sitting down in chairs, well out of the way. And when they tried to get up, they found they couldn’t

Emmy was all by herself now when Dakota got to her. The host reached out and placed her cold hand on the teenager’s rosy cheek. Emmy shivered and tensed at the touch, but only for a moment. Then she relaxed, and let out the breath she’d been holding.

“Emmy, dear, tell me, what do you remember?” Dakota asked. “About your life before coming here?”

“Uh… ah…” Emmy’s mouth flopped open and closed and she looked around the room. Her eyes finally settled on Carly and her heart skipped a beat. Then she snapped her eyes back to Dakota and shook her head slightly.

“I… I don’t…” she admitted. “My name, it’s Emmy… I know that… I know how old I am, and…”

She looked at Carly again and mumbled out the rest. “I know that my mom is… right over there.” Her cheeks burned crimson and Carly felt like she was going to melt.

“That’s because you died so young,” Dakota said softly, stroking the confused girl’s cheek. “Of course you don’t remember anything else.”

“Wait, you mean… she’s like a baby or something?” Rose made a sickened face.

“You put a little girl in the body of an adult?” Kim felt like she was going to throw up.

Even Holly looked uneasy. She scooted her chair back from her seat and shook her head. “That’s a little too much, even for me.”

“Bringing a newborn baby onto the show is out of the question,” Dakota sniffed. She glanced at Mary. “…Unless it happened the natural way, of course.”

Normally Mary would have gotten flustered. But she was too put off by what was happening to react like that.

“Otherwise, a baby would just complicate matters,” Dakota said, waving her hand. “Carly certainly wouldn’t be up for doing sexy times when she has a baby to take care of, after all. And as for Emmy, well… she was already here. In a manner of speaking.”

Marley gasped. “That’s right… the challenge… so that wasn’t…?” She looked over at Sylvia, who sank even deeper into her seat.

Sylvia cleared her throat and looked down. “…The producers… they wanted… to turn Mimi into a copy of Emmy, so they held onto Emmy’s soul. But when Mimi was eliminated and became Marley, I thought… I would have expected them to send Emmy where she was supposed to go…”

“Heaven,” Mary interjected, glaring at Sylvia as if she was daring her to say otherwise.

Instead, Sylvia said nothing.

“After we made a new body for little Emmy’s soul, I fastforwarded her a little bit,” Dakota said calmly, as if she wasn’t describing a horrific action. “Mentally matured her to be 18 years old, since we have to meet certain decency standards here, and to facilitate the age-up we also created a whole fantasy life growing up, developing, becoming a mature and rational adult girl. …Then we wiped her memories, and-”

“You wiped her memories!?” Carly exclaimed. Hearing that finally, finally completely broke the numbness she’d been feeling, and she lunged at Dakota, grabbing the host by the collar of her dress and shaking her. “Why!? How could you!?”

“It was part of the deal,” Dakota said coldly. “You wanted your daughter back. The producers said you could have her. But this is the catch. You don’t get a little baby. You get a fully-grown woman. Tabula rasa. You can raise her however you’d like. As Sylvia will be happy to inform you, it doesn’t matter if she has no memories of life before this island. She’s still a fully-fledged person. And I think you’ll find that she’s more of an adult than you realize.”

Nick suddenly felt Dakota’s eyes on him. He bristled.

Carly stared in stunned shock at Dakota. Her grip on the host loosened just enough for Dakota to slip free, and that dark-haired woman took a step back, brushing herself off.

“This is your prize, Carly. She’s your Emmy. You can’t raise her exactly the same way as if she were a newborn, but she’s still your daughter. And if I were you, I’d start thinking about saving up for that college fund.”

Carly’s hands dropped to her sides. She turned and looked at the ponytailed girl who looked so much like her, who every part of her was saying WAS her little Emmy, but all grown up.

“If it helps,” Dakota added, “you can imagine that we brought her from the future.”

It didn’t help. Carly wasn’t sure if anything would help. Or if she even needed any help at all.

This was her Emmy, after all.

“Sis…” Marley’s voice cracked. She was starting to tear up as well. She didn’t know how to feel about what was happening right now, but the look on Carly’s face…

She looked so… happy.

Dani swallowed. She fought back the urge to smile; it didn’t feel right to do something like that, and yet, if this really was Emmy, then…

Carly approached her teenage maybe-daughter cautiously, like she couldn’t believe she was real.

“Are you… really my Emmy?”

Emmy opened her mouth, but the words got caught in her throat. “A-are you…” her voice cracked. She swallowed and wiped the wetness from her eyes. “Are you really… m-my mom?”

That was enough for Carly. Before she even knew what was happening her arms were already around the flustered girl, hugging her tightly to her chest.

Emmy hugged her back tightly and both women started to cry. They weren’t the only ones. There wasn’t a dry eye in the room. Ella was sniffling, Morgana was bawling, and Vivian didn’t even pretend to be putting on a tough face, smiling through her tears.

Amelia removed her glasses and wiped her eyes. Nick couldn’t remember the last time he had seen his stepmother cry, but he couldn’t blame her. They had all been swept up in the outpouring of emotion from the two women as Carly hugged her daughter tightly. The girl she’d grieved for almost a decade had been returned to her through magical means. She wasn’t perfect, it wasn’t the same as if she’d never lost her at all, but she was Emmy, and that was enough.

The rest didn’t matter.

“I’b so habbby!” Gina blubbered, ignoring how her tears smeared her tough makeup.

“W-wow, Gina, you crybaby… didn’t know you’d be able to react like that,” Kim teased her roommate, smiling through her own tears as she wiped at her eyes over and over again.

Only one person wasn’t crying, and it was Augmented Synthetic Humanoid Assassin. As wet as her eyes may have been as she watched the two of them embrace, she held back her tears, clenching her fists as she gazed enviously at the two of them.

Dakota took the opportunity to excuse herself while the focus was still on the reunited mother and child.

But as she turned to the door, she was stopped.

“Where are you going?” Sylvia asked.

Dakota bristled.

Sylvia was surprised that she had stopped; she halfway expected Dakota to ignore her and just keep walking, as usual. But then, Dakota had her cane, she could have left whenever she wanted. Maybe a part of her wanted to be stopped on her way to the door.

“This is a happy moment,” Sylvia said quietly. “Carly and Emmy are reunited, and it’s all thanks to you. You don’t have to go.”

Dakota sucked in a breath of air and then let out a long sigh as she turned to Sylvia, showing her disgraced former-successor just how tired her golden eyes were.

“You don’t understand at all, do you?” Dakota asked coldly. “You heard what I did. You think they’re going to be happy about this by the end of the round, when they see that what I brought back wasn’t as cut and dry as a bouncing baby Emmy?”

“You still brought her back,” Sylvia countered. “That’s better than her being dead.”

Dakota didn’t have a response to that. So she deflected instead. “Emmy was her reward,” the host coldly replied. “She earned it. I didn’t have that much to do with it. You’re just projecting that onto me, because you’re **** to see me as a sympathetic, caring, maternal figure with a weakness for the bond between mother and child.”

She stepped closer to Sylvia, radiating cold dismissal. “I’m not.”

Sylvia nodded slowly. “Right, yeah… I know…” With a sigh, she looked down. “I guess it’s because of the transformation, huh? Otherwise she never would have been able to see Emmy again unless she won the whole show.”

“So you understand,” Dakota said, rolling her eyes disdainfully. She turned to leave again. “About time.”

“…Only, one thing I just thought of,” Sylvia called after her.

Dakota’s hand stopped on the doorknob. Her face, unseen by Sylvia’s eyes, turned dark.

“…Carly wasn’t supposed to get that transformation last round, was she?” Sylvia pointed out. “You vetoed the one she would have gotten, to make sure she got this one. I guess it’s a good thing you did that, huh?”

The others hadn’t put the pieces together. Maybe they never would. But they hadn’t been on the other side of the cane. They hadn’t made decisions like the decisions Sylvia had made so many times in the past, decisions exactly like this one.

Dakota’s silence radiated with fury.

“It was sweet of you, Dakota,” Sylvia said quietly. “If you did that, I mean. Which you didn’t, of course.”

“…Sylvia, don’t delude yourself into thinking that some small part of me secretly wants to be a mother to you,” Dakota said coldly. “I can’t do that.”

A wave of sadness rolled across Sylvia’s face. But she held firm. “Can’t?” She mumbled out. “Or won’t?”

The question agonized her as it passed her lips.

Dakota left without giving her an answer.