CHAPTER 44 - PHANTOMESS ON CEREAL PLANET

Current Time

Even the best adventurers know there is a fine line between searching and finding that one is suddenly lost. And yet a fine line is by definition a line that can be followed. As the patron stepped through the forest, she is careful in measurement of her surroundings, believing in directions, heeding the zephyrs of the wood, and studying trails of fineness that were once lines. Then, with keen sight she peeked through a screen of dulcet leaves, "My word, is that the creek that I skipped across as a child? How did I find myself back here?" she asked. Phantomess went over to the boundary. Lapping over water, the sound of glossy waterfalls, made as small as dolls over myriad stones no longer teased her ears. Where did they go? In each direction the creek harbored only a solitary element, flowing towards silence. Odd, that nature would be made to put away its toys. "All the stones are gone! The entire trail is nothing but water" she griped, shielding her eyes from the light and looking both ways. Phantomess searched the prospects of the aquatic horizon, "Well, then, I guess I never found out what was on the other side. The distance is nothing, so I can easily swim across for old time's sake". Tensing, her legs embraced the pull of strain. Muscles drafted into service bounded her into the prolonged substrate. "Ah, this is good practice" the patron considered, with successive breaths at the finale of each stroke. Its momentum bent by the palms of her hands. Raising her face each time provoked the other side much closer. Phantomess could hear the water vibrating with the squeal of scallops in the depths below, their bubbles surrendered to the tide like balloons on New Year's Eve. Now she was crossing the midpoint of the creek, past where she had never dared before. Farther on, as she raised another face for a drink of air, she knew around, felt with her body that there was more than absence. Dummy impressions cast by her memory onto the level sheathe. Stones weak like ghosts with a girl leaping over. Phantomess swan between two such objects before the record faded, cooled by her own shadow. Because of course there is a child who can't balance on a stone across a creek, since everything in nature is in balance. "Not bad at all, it's going to be a proper river one day" the swimmer predicted as she evicted the rest of herself, bending clumps of grass with elbows for leverage. In the general area, which was quite clear now, a building stood with wheelchairs left in the yard, overgrown with greenery, coiling through the individual spaces in the wheels. "This place must be from early echo" she gauged. Through the doors a bookstore with circulating nurses collected bushels of literature. They led her further to a common area, pointing out the banner for her attention. "Skipping Stones Retirement Home" the patron read aloud, then looked down. Bombs of awe fired up her eyes. All the stones that she had skipped on as a child where retired, old and hoary, leaned on couches, their faces drawn by colored pencil. Nurses filled up blenders with paperbacks from the bookstore and fresh apples, until the result was soft enough for them to spoon feed the stones. For some reason, the pulp from the apples blended nicely with that of the books. The nurses did so, removing any bookmarks before using the mixer, as they were quite unnecessary. Phantomess waited as another folded blankets on a table that would be used to bundle them up after supper. Led by another to the south side of the common, they found a withered stone swaying on a rocking chair in the midst of a passage to the following room, occupying it. Disks of lichen patched his torso, and small fissures near the top where the ears would reside housed individual sprouts of grass and a single buttercup dipping precariously over the right side. Bending over, the nurse stuffed his mouth with a spoonful to sate his old tummy. Upon seeing her, he raised a crayon eyebrow, distorting the remainder of his features, "Is that you little girl? I remember when you skipped on my back every morning". "Honestly, yes" Phantomess blushed, as to the turn of fate dressed up as coincidence. It was a bit on the nose for her. "Do you remember how you used to land on my head convincingly with your left shoe? Always with your left shoe? I was three stones down from Dryfus over there on the couch. My how you've grown. Bigger than a cloud" the fellow remarked, tilting a bit to discern her height. "Of course, then you must be the one with the dome I used to balance on. We had a lot of good times together, but I didn't think I would ever see the trail all here. I never heard a complaint, so I didn't even know the stones were alive" the patron added reluctantly. Phantomess laid a hand on his side, feeling that it was softer than dough. He sighed, as a lazy crayon oval straightened into a simple grin, "We were the lucky ones". "I would think so …" she assented, watching with the corner of one eye the bob of the lone buttercup. "By the way, I'm Wagner. Lovely lady, your skin is so young and stone-like. If I could be like that again … oh my, it has been a while since I last had the creek's water curl around me … hear it is more like a river now" the old chap pined as he swayed benignly in the rocking-chair. "Actually, I think it looks much better on me" the patron joked, leaning over to poke his nose. "Hoo hoo … good. you are a nice one. To tell you the truth, I do like to think about it, and sometimes I think the rocking chair is the water, since it goes back and forth" Wagner dawdled verbally, losing cohesion. She too heard the pang of emotion, the quiet, voiceless heart-beat that comes with letting go of the past. "If it's that you're after, my patron's abilities can make you remember much clearer, just let me formulate the spell …" she articulated, preparing the quirky tremor of magic between her fingers. "Don't bother lady, I've got too many nice memories, but what I could use right now," the fellow bargained, sharing a goofy, hopeful crayon smile in the midst of a timeworn rockface, "is some beautiful hair like yours". At that the nurse leaned over, whispering in her ear, "looks like you have this handled, give him a wig and he'll be happy. I'll be out back on the patio with the others if you need me". Phantomess grunted at being left at such a disadvantage, then looked about for easy resources to complete the request. Looking over her shoulder, she saw through the bookshelves at one of the orderlies munching up fruit and books into a blender. "Ah ha!" she declared, procuring one of them for immediate use. By the buttons it specifically explained which varieties blended well together to make a rich medium. Honeycrisp went well with non-fiction, and Golden Delicious of course married only with volumes relating to art history. Deciding on the second route, Phantomess took a wicker basket, collecting the necessary articles, then tore them down into pulp in the chamber of the mixer. "Wagner, here" she prompted, holding a bowl of the stuff with her return, "do you want blonde?". His soft, doughy stone body wobbled in anticipation. Nodding once, the chair rocked forward, just at the right angle for her to go about applying the mushy slosh over the dome of the old chap's head. After sculpting it evenly on both sides, and carefully rubbing it into supple scalp, the newcomer took a step back to watch it set, casting a hand mirror for the customer's review. "Golden Wig!" Wagner clamored with elation. The features of his crayon face straightened, erasing the cruel mockery of years. "Lovely lady, this makes me so beautiful! Everyone, take a gander at my flowing locks!" the fellow called, eliciting gasps of awe from the room in a buzz of more than typical elderly commotion. The patron knelt down to his level, and could not take her eyes away from the moment as he was confounded in joy. Emotion washed over her face, replaced by tears, "can this be it? After all these long eons, can this be what I've been searching for?". From the past, the phantom memory returned, and the pressure from skipping the stone radiated from her left foot up through her entire body, "and your name wasn't Wagner. That must be something the nurses imagined. I named you Rigel Ricky". "Now I remember that" he replied, as the bulwark of thought collapsed, like a paltry building frame harassed by the wind. How could one person be so enamored. "Everything is beyond good. Ricky, I want to seal this moment forever, I feel transfixed, my body is becoming … a solid" the patron uttered, feeling her hands slowly petrify in blissful rigor mortis. Pillows of time cradled her body. The fellow's brow relaxed in swift acknowledgment of her plight. "No, skipping girl, you can't stay here … don't stare like that ... look past me" he instructed, the words begging time to restore its course. Keen human sensations chiseled at the dense singularity of her being, pain at first. Threads of nerves pulled in sequence, forcing half-second diversions of Idea and Catcher. Fireflies landing on him, denoting his presence as he slept in the grass of the park at night. Then Echo and her father Claudius who was the human variation of Sam during that age, simple as a pole of mirror light. Phantomess could budge her fingers. Nature continued, breaking her apart as more thoughts bullied down the incline of her soul, harder than a landslide. Then came all the others, and Kinetic Filigree and the Metacoma and the portioners and the Reflectants and all the curious things she had witnessed forcing their way back into locations of mind, the storehouses of conception as ecstasy chapped her lips dry. Even the lady she had slapped in the face one time out of spite. In her whole field of view the goofy smile continued, until she could see at the edges of his soft body blurs of unfocused substance. With effort she rose from the kneeling position, the substance resolving itself into the geometry of the room. Pain multiplied back into an ordinary collection of physical senses. It chilled the stone inside, crushing it to dust. After a moment of rest, she looked over the breadth of the other room across from the elder's commons where … a ribbon undulated. Phantomess moved her body, around the rocking-chair to the other side. Closing the distance, she diverted her attention to the photo-reel, midway between the bottom of the floor and the ceiling. "Not bad, our connection must have produced this shard of nostalgia. It should weaken and fade in just a minute" the patron calculated, seeing the image of the river printed on the flowing surface. First, the picture of her following a certain trail of stones across the creek appeared on one side. Then, imitating it, the reflection bulged from below. Patiently waiting for it to subside, her eyes rested on a particular stone, watching as her younger self and her doppelganger hit it with a shoe at the same moment from both sides. "What?" she emitted quietly as the object switched on like a lightbulb. Soon the path that the girls took intensified the trail, each sphere deepening with proto-celestial light. Lines followed suit, connecting them. Adjusting, the Ribbon turned on its side, bringing the familiar outline into the remote context of the retirement home and its room beside the commons. "Don't tell me, is that the Big Dipper! Dad taught me them as a kid but I never thought …" the newcomer began, crafting meaning from the guile of nature's unknowable limits. Gaping wider than a hungry maw, the rectangle dragged her in. Thrown, a grain … a tiny grain hidden in darkness in the center pulled the hapless girl past strange gulfs. "I'm losing" Phantomess thought, blacking out.

Life took an interlude. Then … dumb crunching sounds accompanied the sleeper from changing position in the gentle grass. Turning, depressions could be felt faintly against the upper back. Phantomess wiggled in the bed of crumbs, finally shaking off enough grogginess to notice the broad uninterrupted landforms of the planet that lay before her. It was mostly … cereal themed. Arches of milk marked the places where the ground was more replete with the dust of oats, where empty boxes came to accept an entire volume, forming a hardened brick which they would lay elsewhere in half-completed monoliths. Raisins hopped out of their bowls, flocking to the shadows of trees, where they congregated, reversing the process by which they desiccated out in the sun, becoming grapes that the boughs accepted once more by the action of certain birds, individually picking them as they fattened. Near them, a basil tree slowly shed its leaves. Drifting down, they came to open bowls encircled around the base of the trunk, drying into flakes of cereal. Phantomess, after coming to went towards one of the arches. In the sky, bowls of cereal flattened into plates. Suddenly shifting in expectation of a spill, the patron instead experienced only a brief start as the liquid and contents did not escape from the edges, pouring over her, but continued on a direct trajectory to an adjacent locale. "Come on now, this place belongs on the face of a cereal box" the patron contended. Filaments of dust, woven so tight as to be nearly imperceptible to the eye held up a box of great proportions. Directly below it, a white ceramic bowl awaited the tipping that would allow a cascade of pieces to come tumbling down. "Catcher my dear … Ah, this is so much … do you remember that beautiful geode I would pour your cereal into every morning … do you still like it that way… maybe it wasn't so healthy, but you used to love that sort of thing … wait, he is a patron now … and this bowl … my life is larger than a bowl, even if it has all the best memories drowned in milk and sheltered in a layer of breakfast. I've been afraid of this for so long, of being … obsolete. Everyone becomes that. No one can get older without that" the goddess determined, tallying the years. As she did her arm became lighter, then her torso. Transparent-ness crept over her body, as the light etched the silhouette of the Phantom, delineating it with elegant rigor. Now the filaments, although thin were clearly noticeable, their every movement adjusting the position of the rectangular box, pulling back the lid with the snapping of certain threads. Fear evaporated, and as it did, she glided to the midpoint between the two as the waterfall of material commenced. Pieces crossed through the insubstantial body, creating trails of bold solid light. Slowly the box tipped, letting out the pieces in measured modesty at first. Trail by trail the hollow became filled. Phantomess was face up watching the waterfall. Peeking over her outline, she saw trajectories of the pieces transverse, drawing lines of natural radiance. They wouldn't stop, layering into her volume. "It's tipping" the patron spoke, heralding the stronger cascade. As the operation came to an inevitable crest, the element became organic, freeing her from the phase. Descending, Phantomess came to the margin of the bowl, resting while the filaments quivered. Eventually, scanning the location above the box, she perceived how they tied themselves around an end of a cloud, pinching off a spheroid that floated down as a bubble of milk for the bowl. Now it was raised to the right level. Following the last few remaining contents came a blur, then an unexpected thump splashing down onto the bowl. Phantomess was busy consolidating her energy, and hardly acknowledged it. A chunk of something, hidden at the bottom perhaps. Unconcerned, she considered the rush bearing through her veins, making even the sight of greenish fields addictive, even the farthest parts, those of sage and lackluster gray. Lashing, it's impulse waned, and the force of it fastened itself to the muscle of her chest as reason prevailed over chemistry. Exploration! Then, an irregularity met her ear, heralded by the crunching of stray pieces near the base of the bowl, modest footsteps quietly approaching in the grass. "If you think that there isn't blood on your hands, then you are sorely mistaken. It was your offense against us that caused this war. Although Chalk-Dust now presides in the envelope of the SOTA, we will find a way" said a voice. Phantomess turned around to see. Before the cereal bowl, an ebony solider stood, draped in typewriter armor. Quite cunning that the trail had managed to salvage a dream avatar of Decker, pouring her from the box. "Really, we should have known you would be frightened. Having come from the realm so early, to witness how your own dream had changed nature. That is a thing that is difficult to accept. I would not have, if I had listened to my counterpart life. Spells for most were useless back then, merely wishful thinking. I would have been fearful also, to find everything different. But you denied what was right in front of your face. Chalk-Dust paid a heavily for that contempt. More than three fifths of your fleet of Arcadian Cruisers. I saw them gutted and boiling with flame, slashed by the Mausoleum's spell-lasers, beaten to dust by patrons and fighters and infantry. Don't you think I know what it means to admit you are wrong?" Phantomess rendered, sharing the motion of her words with that of her body as she drew nearer. "No, you don't even know the difference. Even after all that has happened. We believed you were ambassadors! You came to me, giving us words of encouragement until I trusted you to fire that bow and arrow at me as I closed my eyes. During it all, you knew I was your Reflectant. Then what we had … was just a lie!" Decker advanced rhetorically, and as she did the cogency in the rigid voice brushed a metamorphosis of pixels across the landscape, quick as ripples that subsided without conscious transition back to their rudiments of physicality. "Laurash, not even you could change that story. I remember holding it, and firing just as you instructed me. Right at the apple. It wasn't my instinct to leave you there alone. But after walking into the new territory, you must have sensed that you had more responsibility then the realm itself. Instead the alliance fought against that burden. To be exact, Hogarth was the one that started this, at the Decagon. You followed his words to the letter. Although I will leave that up to historians to sort out in retrospect" she answered, putting into service the Scilysts's first name. "This is why I left in the first place! My parents beat me, they were abusive. I ran away to the city and found the arcade where I found a new family where I belonged. All the time I thought I was making the choices! Of course, these humble ambassadors could not ever cause us any grief. Everyone thought that, even me. Hogarth's speeches sounded foolish to begin with, but we followed his whispers to their source. To the shore at the bottom of the old well. Then I find, ambassador, that you were hiding something. Did you do it thinking, if we didn't know … that we would listen, that you could shape us fully? Mother, that was the worst blow of all" Decker protested, hot with barren anguish, the keys upon her armor chattering away. The Scilyst struck a fist in her palm to mark that moment with the memory's echo, the sincerest form of incredulity. As her daughter brought that image into clarity, with fuzzy pixels becoming the walls of a house, character came into view, made brutish by swift, prevailing repeats on a smaller form. Phantomess closed her eyes. … evading the scene ... going back to the days of the trail. Creaking open the door after a full day of routine, there stood Sam, in his prototype of Claudius, and Echo. Skipping had been faster through the afternoon approaching supper, as she was distracted by the morsels of yellow clay that had accumulated by the banks of the creek, while appendages of sapphire chewed through from below like corkscrews. Drooping pancakes of translucent gelatin overlaid the branches of the willow trees about the circumference of the house that day. Later on, they would be picked by the feeble tendrils of an anemone hiding in the doghouse. Peering through the door, the two were at it again, fighting over what, "she would become". Later on, her mother had admitted that Claudius never wanted to see her as a patron. He wanted her to live outside of the foray of politics. Perhaps that is why they never instructed her on the matter, until the day she dreamt of skipping across the trail, and saw that it had aged into the trail of realms, stretching across space. Phantomess opened her eyes. Prime Arcadians arose from the milk-bowl and hovered on either side of Decker, reinforcing their alpha. "There was never a right time to tell you" the patron conceded as her daughter's sight bore down with the weight of silent grief. "For the time being, Chalk-Dust has been welcomed in the interior of the SOTA, and they will be restful. The locals need not understand the true magnitude of the Couple's omission, and your selfish crimes, but I will be quiet, and wait, until the moment comes, and we can carve a way to freedom. The game never ends" she promised, letting the Arcadians second her word with angry, vociferous displays of pixels across their screens. By exposure to the Scilyst, the bowl itself had turned to marble. Finished with the display, and hot with disappointment, she turned about towards the milk, to where there would be passage by dissolution back to the starting point. Phantomess watched her daughter turn and go. Although she had said everything in the interest of the present circumstance, something about it didn't sit well. Emptiness melted through her chest, displacing the sensation of organs, making the fear that they had amassed for so many years subside in single action. From the impulse came tremors of electricity, finding a route through her arm, and she lifted it, calling out to Decker to slow her leave, "you have to grow up, not everything is a game". Phantomess waited, the Scilyst's back to her. Unspoken detachment condensed the air, and hustled the field between them. Gusts of cereal dust lapped over the verdant green intermittently. Fingers of light extended from the contours of the arches in the distance, tethering the architecture to the ground. Decker glanced back, acknowledging her for a second. The patron felt it, then watched as she retreated back into the milk with the prime arcadians, all except one, who was too weary and laid to rest besides the bowl. Idle, and saturated in pixels, the machine's square diminished until receding to black. Then came an involuntary sputter, a cone of essence. Phantomess shielded her sight from the pixel sparks. Firstly, she noticed a leg stepping out of the fray. Then its accompaniment, a body, as is typical of that subject. Examining the man, the patron considered the novel build, a mannequin of ice, and labored to evoke the origin of his face. Behind the thin mask a wine-glass sat frozen at the center of the cranium. Information that they had archived on the game, each of Decker's feared combatants, and all the memories seemed at once to leak from an aperture in her thoughts. The patron felt like one caught without blood on her hands, when it is sorely expected. "Tall stranger, where am I?" he asked, unaware of history that may sweep by while in slumber. Behind him, the machine became bloated, spreading the planes of metal. "Many years after the battles of Anota Geomanda, as well as those with my people, the Echoians. Cynthia fled in defeat, her ambition was not enough to alter the course of the game. Tell me, sir elemental, why were you hiding in there?" she wondered. "Ennie, and don't be so fast to convict me. I had to get away. For a time, I was a companion of the gamer. Eventually I fell under the enemy's control, and found a way to separate myself by crawling into this arcadian" he confessed, sheltering his reputation from the progress of their dawning conversation. "How did you get to be so cold? You must have a close bond to her" she pressed, expecting the mellow air to whet his limbs with sleek perspiration. They were however, secure in their solid state. "For many years I lived on an iceberg so that I could feast on the ice, one morsel at a time. Being tied to one sensation was the only thing I felt was right. Perhaps you think it's absurd. There are people with different habits, you know, even those in plain sight. A friend, coworker. Family, even. Using saws of magic, I cut perfect pieces for chewing. They were so pure and delicious. But one day I fell into the water, and was rescued by those who would become my friends. They never mocked my appearance, or spoke much of when they knew me last. except the Albino Maiden" he briskly imparted. "Did you know her?" Phantomess posed, wanting more on the Scilyst's second after Gerald's downfall. "They used to make so much fun of her when we were in middle grade. Just because she couldn't see trees. Everything else was fine, but they were invisible to her. How simple is it, even as an adult, to laugh at another's blunders? The other kids thought so, and they would call her out every time she walked by coincidence into one. Little did I know that I of all people was a focus of her attention. During one afternoon I saw they had carved our initials on one of the trunks. She couldn't take it, and made them deal that if she was brave enough to climb the thing, they would leave everything to rest. It was supposed to be quite a simple task. But they goaded her on, seeing she was getting to the thin part of the branch. I made out the blur just as it fell, and hurdled towards the spot in front of me. Cynthia, who had written the carving was ruffled by the failure. Albino Maiden was in my arms for a second. Cynthia had only sought to make use of it all for sport. But we were just kids, and went separate ways. I developed an addiction to ice, Cynthia became addicted to sensation, and the Maiden to the ceaseless flow of the game. "Did they mean that much to you?" she pursued, seeing how the rousing had made him candid for a period. "Everyone drifted on their own course. So, nervously, I started eating more ice, to take the cold away. I loved how brittle they were, each cube, after they began so faultlessly and smooth. Although, in hindsight, I guess I was addicted only to the past" he sighed, encapsulating the dullness of it all, the apprehension that cuts through everything by the quality of its stubbornness. Ennie lifted his head, taking in the swaths of individuality in the guise of nature, looking past her to where there were good things afoot. Boxes and Bowls communicating their geometry through the language of cereal. Schools of sky-fish singing with the "glug" that comes when milk pours from the gallon. Below, forests sullied with cereal dust wolfing the impurities into their eager canopies. Yet in the distance, long, wide plains of openness. So blatant as to force the mind to place in weakness a lonely model of some feature. Coveted by the orange glimmer of Dubhe migrating from beyond the clouds. "Don't concern yourself. What you know has already became part of you" Phantomess bid, seeing by the way he turned the chalice in the background of his right eye, the other without. Righting his posture, a symmetry asserted itself. Like the newcomer the patron felt herself in the direction of his gaze, turning to transparency by the compulsion of it. "Wait a second, is this just a breakfast planet?" Ennie pouted, being dislocated in thought by the daftness of what was now quite obvious. All of their coordinates were uncertain. Phantomess felt barbed by the easy question. Awkward reasons lumbered away, bits of petrified and rotten wood, planks of distortion, revealing at the cusp of mind a gap in understanding. Doubt shook her, making her tall frame tremble. Mild electricity seized the patron, until she snapped back, bracing to counter it, "Is there a … future breakfast?". "Yes, it's called lunch" Ennie answered. He took the chalice from of his head and poured it in the milk bowl, waiting for the liquid to bubble and frisk with young, sprightly redness, allowing the medium to be repaired of its tabula rasa. Making herself useful, the patron went about the nearby trees to retrieve sticks, then whittled them with a spell to chopsticks for the two of them as the newcomer made a circle to summon ingredients. "Let me show you a lunch tactic I learned from my grandfather. keep it in confidence" he enjoined, submerging articles of sushi that he prepared into the cauldron. For a minute they let them bob about, soaking in ruddy wine. "Here, use the chopsticks" she urged, leaning over the side. Phantomess tasted the moist sushi, the rice grains ripe with fermentation. "Newcomer, what you say is just a tactic is really a maneuver" she noted, taking another. Below their feet the metallic receptacle hummed with depleted stamina. Normally alive with peppy color, it's monitor assumed a monotone gray, made fouler by stray threads of pixels that dashed across, "Before I go, Echoian, pass on a word for me. Beware of the Beta Arcadians. They are our offspring, but they are drawn to ethics of darkness". Phantomess nodded her head in gratitude while the old console unraveled, its metal plates slipping apart. Such a report would require both of them to forge contingency plans. "Excuse me Ennie, please be kind to this new planet" she asked, bidding adieu repentantly as a gust of happy dust wove its way through her hair. A ghostly charisma overtook her body, easily, like a reflex, and she jumped into the air to follow the path of the Prime Arcadian spirit as it disunited from the game. "Here we go, back through the cereal bowl" she thought, trailing behind. Although … it had different plans, quickly diving in another direction, straight towards the ground. Transitioning through spatial membranes, the patron found herself alighting on a hill of murky glass. Flight seemed impossible, given the conditions of the area, so she trekked onwards. Banter in the distance led her to a trio of wanderers, who explained the true aspect of the hill. "Tiny lady, we are actually in my parent's attic, and this hill is just a lightbulb of a lamp" Crilli explained, as Delk and Mell waved cheerfully. Delk went on to explain how the room was full of them, connected by threads of dust. Then Mell Lonestar interrupted, illustrating how they had walked across them many times. Coming upon the edge of the hill, blatant fear halted her motion. The filament across was thinner than a simple bridge. Phantomess walked back a meter, breathing hard with the fact of the matter, that they would be traversing a filament and its hypothetical counterpart, the lines that connect constellations. Delk and Mell came to cool her down. Without noticing her reluctance, Crilli began across the rope. So lithe, courageous. The patron's chest settled, seeing the unerring balance that drew her closer to the other side. "Keep going, your descendants may find that they are personifications of the thread, and learn a way to fight the Beta Arcadians" the patron mouthed, whispering voicelessly. When that was done, the four of them jumped off the lightbulb back onto the attic. Delk brought them back to her place, where they dyed their hair blonde with book apple sauce. In the corridor, her brother fell for the Brussel Sprouts in the closet trick again, making them laugh harder than what was necessary. Returning outside, the patron bid adieu and noticed that as she walked a silhouette of herself was left behind. A bay leaf from a bay leaf tree broke off and entered it, the cavity where the heart would be, and melted, pumping bay leaf blood throughout. She went to the shade of the tree and sat down, eating a bowl of dried bay leaf cereal. After slurping down the last dregs of green milk she looked up at the tall lady standing over her. "That color makes you look much younger" it observed, tossing the bowl.