Kinda' spooky.

You fall to your knees, gasping to catch your breath. While part of you knows you don’t have to, your instincts are overwhelming here. Looking around as your chest heaves, you can see you’re in a strange space. The floor is defined, alabaster white tile glinting with the sickly green that fills every other space instead of walls or ceilings here. Black dances through it, unwelcome and foreign to the space as its natural colors try to overwhelm it. Nearby, you can see Atlee stumbling, trying desperately to keep her balance as she adjusts to being put into this scenario more off-guard than she was expecting. All the same, behind her, a massive, green polyp throbs like a beating heart in the alien sky.

“What the fuck did you DO?!” she screams, bent slightly while she focuses on recovering. You **** yourself to stand while you still have the chance, the bane inside her pulsing furiously as its seemingly-infinite limbs burrow into Atlee’s back and what seems like nowhere in the distance. “You lying little bitch, I knew this was a trick!”

“Really shouldn’t have fallen for it, then, huh?” you taunt, gathering shadows around you. You know you have to fight her here, find a way to free the sisters, but you have less than no idea on what to do next. All Kenneth said was “remember you’re not alone.” While the thoughts of your friends help, it seems more imperative to get ready for the enraged onslaught building before you. “Besides, you tricked all those girls, never got a little curious about what that felt like?”

Wordlessly, a spear-headed tentacle thrusts across the empty space between you as she glares furiously. You move your shadows to bat it aside, but it takes all of them just to defend against the one. ‘Shit, that’s not good …’ you think in utter horror as you watch more of them slide into striking stance behind her. Giving up on brute-forcing your way past them, you move as fast as you can as they rain down on you. While you manage to avoid most of them, a large gash splits your right leg open, blood cascading freely down your ankle, and another impales your left shoulder. You try to command it to stop, but here, not only do you bleed, you can’t seem to heal. You reprimand yourself for thinking so physically. This is headspace, not the real world. Of course things are different. Keep fighting like they aren’t, everyone loses.

You let your mind swiftly dance from the word “heal.” Kenneth said something about physics and metaphysics being nearly the same outside of the mortal world. Searching for ideas, you plunge into memories, seeing if you need to mimic the action. Nothing through recovering from surgery, nothing from putting a bandage on a cut you got cooking, but a positive tingle from your mother helping you get back to the car when you were little and skinned your knee. Jumping off that point, you focus on the first time you admitted you needed to see a psychiatrist for your depression, the first joke that made you laugh after your grandmother’s funeral, Eva and you watching shitty Asylum movies for two days straight after your last break-up. Looking back at your wounds, the blood’s vanished and they’re closed.

Unfortunately, Atlee has no shortage of blinding rage to draw on as she storms forward, tentacles lashing and thrusting forward in a storm of bladed fury. You spill backward, barely avoiding a series of spearheads that crack the tile beneath you with their ****, trying to figure out how to strike back or defend yourself. Remembering how angry you were when Atlee told you what she had planned for you the night you killed her produces a powerful reaction, a black lance flying from your shadow. It handily rips asunder the tentacles in its way and slams into Atlee, driving her back.

The hideous wound it leaves, skin flayed off much of her chest and a hole punched clear through it, doesn’t even last five seconds. Violent, green energy crackles over it, healing her instantly.

“Oh, come on, that’s just not fair!” you groan. As she calls on the bane’s power to keep herself whole, you notice something flickering near it. You can’t make it out from here, but you can see humanoid shapes, tendrils slipping behind them, coming into focus.

“You would have been PART of something, Jaquelin!” she intones deeply, loudly, filling the space between you. Calling up more anger doesn’t seem to do much when you try to defend against the sweeping slashes of tendrils with sharp edges running all along their sides. “Isn’t that what you always wanted, with your bleeding-heart politics? To feel like you belong? What kind of fucking immature impulse for rebellion possesses you to resist that?” You scream as one of the tentacles that easily slices through the bursts of shadow bites into your left arm, which is a fairly disconcerting thing to see falling away from your body.

“I don’t want to be part of something that hurts people!” you spit back, grabbing your severed limb and making a break to get some distance on her. Tile stretches out beneath your feet, expanding the area as you run, but you feel like you’re hardly getting ahead of her. That suspicion doubles when you see a spearhead thrust just past you, forcing you weave under it to avoid the next three. “This isn’t, like, some humanitarian aid project or a civil rights movement, it’s you trying to own people, just like you always have. Does anyone in there really have a say, Atlee, or do you just try to make them think like you until it there isn’t a difference?”

“It’s a union of purpose. I wouldn’t expect you to understand.” You turn in time to see that, despite running, she’s almost on you. If anything, you’ve been wasting time. Another storm of tentacles rushes at you, forcing you to go on the defensive. Winning during states in debate, making it up the hill without training wheels, that particularly devastating comeback you managed when that skinhead asshole insulted Eva last year, things that make you feel solid, strong, invincible. A half-dome of blackness interposes itself between you and the oncoming ****, warding it away from your more **** body.

The stunned reaction Atlee has to your defense gives you time to experimentally focus on healing thoughts again, relief flooding over you when your arm mends, sliding back into place when you hold it up to your shoulder. You flex it a few times and become briefly distracted by why it feels like flexing your hand if you don’t really have a physical hand to flex here, which almost gives Atlee a chance to slam a singular, sudden attack through your face.

Stumbling as you barely avoid it, you can see the flickering beside the bane’s horrid, pulsating form is solidifying. Rows of girls stand on leveled platforms, stock-still and displayed in identical dresses and make-up. For the most part, they remain eerily still, but every few seconds one’s face will twist into a scream or abject sorrow, trying to push past the storefront arrangement Atlee’s **** them into. Whenever they do, the tendril attached to them glows, forcing them back into static silence and stillness.

All of the tendrils plugged into Atlee’s human shelf glow, however, when she spreads her tendrils in a massive net, stretching past limits of length they’ve been bound to before. Short bursts of rage at news from the White House manifest as a rapidly-expanding void that chokes out the ones headed in behind you while you maintain your defensive front against the rest. Shadow melts into the ground, slithers under Atlee, then explodes into encircling arms of blackness that bind and attempt to suffocate her, pinning her tentacles at the base where they’re easier to hold down.

You realize as the tendrils attached to the sisters thrum with life and Atlee musters strength that seems to effortlessly shatter your offensive that she’s drawing from the memories and souls of her captives. Green, hateful weapons shatter your shadowy bindings, forcing you to focus entirely on the defensive. Atlee leaves no space for you to strike back as you’re required to engulf yourself in a dark shield to keep her murderous intentions at bay. Even then, the weight of her hatred is incredible, amplified by the minds of the people she’s locked away inside their own heads. You can’t keep this up forever.

“Drop it, and I’ll kill her quick, Jaq,” she offers, her voice as angry as it is disappointed. “It’s going to take a while to break it down, but I always win here. Even without my sisters helping me, I’m not alone. You are.” The bane glows and throbs in time with her words, emphasizing its power to try to cow you. “You put up a good fight, better than I thought you would if this happened … but it’s over. No one’s coming to save you.”

Out of the corner of your eye, you see a shape manifest behind the bane, equally larger-than-life, and grapple it. It’s … Jesus fucking Christ, it’s the Monopoly Guy with what looks like an ether rag. The green thing seems to be trying to alert Atlee, but the Monopoly Guy seems very focused on keeping it quiet, face locked in the same expression you’re used to seeing on the board game’s box even as he restrains a being of pure malice and domination.

“I’m not alone,” you sigh. “Never am.” As you speak, something horrible moves behind the doll-like set of ensnared sisters. It’s only humanoid in the vaguest sense, empty, white eyes the only break in its jet-black form. It’s hard to see what it’s doing, but as it moves behind each girl, the green light dims in the tendril linked to her, and she falls limp.

“Please don’t tell me you’re relying on the power of friendship here,” she taunts with a sneer as her countless limbs squeeze and lash at your shield. “Even if they could help you here, I’m certain the numbers advantage is still with me.”

“I mean, they help,” you allow as another girl falls over behind Atlee. “But not what I meant. See, I don’t GET to be alone. Not since all this happened. That’s why it had to be me. Andy and Eva are alone, in the peaceful sense. Kenneth could have beat you, easy, but not without hurting the girls. Me … well, I have a plus one. And since you have a plus baker’s dozen or so, it only seemed fair.”

“What are you …” Atlee stares at her tendrils as she realizes their blows aren’t really testing your defenses anymore. They sputter off them uselessly, and while she still has the edge in sheer, unadulterated rage, enough you don’t want to make yourself ****, it isn’t enough as the display model version of Valerie collapses, Atlee’s little collection in ruins. She turns, seeing what you’ve been seeing, though the figure that did it is now nowhere in sight. The Monopoly Guy tangling with her bane seems in particular to give her pause, which, fair. It’s a fucking weird sight. “What did you do?” she hisses furiously, her next strike hard enough to crack the bubble surrounding you. You wince, not having expected quite that level of **** to still be possible without her back-up. You strain to keep her away as she storms at you again, tile’s cracking, spitting up glossy shards as she pushes you back even inside your little haven.

“Me? Not much!” you answer, voice exasperated and exhausted. “But if you’re under the impression we’re alone out here now … I’m glad I have a shield, that’s all.”