Olivia Craft had been fully prepared to give a fake last name to the smiley Security officer and the robot-boinking businessman, but fortunately they hadn’t asked. She had still taken care to walk an extra two blocks down the road before turning around and coming back to her apartment from a side street. As a self-professed digital citizen, doxxing was no joke. Even Security’s encryption wasn’t absolute – all it took was one stalker with security clearance and her real name and address could be online forever. Even if it wasn’t used for years, any data left online would inevitably be exhumed and used as kindling at the slightest hint of internet drama. She tried to avoid anything that would attract too much drama to her streams, but not everyone on the internet was sensible or even sane. She’d seen too many streamers burned by rumour-mongers, gossips masquerading as news, and opinionated forum lurkers for perceived indiscretions or imagined slights to take any chances. Anonymity was the only safety that existed on the net.
When she finally arrived home after her circuitous return trip, the terror from whatever she had encountered, and her guarded caution she had kept up around the Security officer and the businessman had both begun to fade, being gradually replaced by a rising tide of exhaustion. She instinctively crawled into bed, and tried closing her eyes, but not only was the cursed artificial moonlight still creeping around the edges of her heavy curtains, stubbornly keeping her awake, but as she lay in her dark room curled under her heavy sheets, the terror from before had started to creep back in. No matter how tired she felt, closing her eyes felt like one of her senses being cut off from the world again. After scarcely 5 minutes (or was it 30?) she gave up. Turning on every light in the apartment went some ways to reassuring her that her world wasn’t a black nightmare. A steaming honey-lemon tea was another warm comfort, and besides it also helped soothe her still-aching throat.
By habit she had found herself in front of her computer. She hadn’t scheduled a stream for today, since she wasn’t sure how late her meet-up with Alice would last, but after idly clicking an announcement video for Ghost Mint’s upcoming concert, then clicking through to an ongoing live stream by Limi, she found herself absentmindedly loading up her own virtual avatar. She liked Limi, a soft-spoken girl whose virtual avatar had hypnotic green eyes, and round, fluffy ferret ears. Apparently they both occasionally watched the other’s streams, but both were too cripplingly introverted to reach out to set up any kind of collaboration. Seeing the chat streaming by as Limi casually played through Fishing Simulator felt relaxing, familiar. She must have joined at the tail end of the stream, though, for it felt like barely any time had passed until Limi was closing down her stream for the night. As the video went dark, Olivia found herself instinctively setting up a stream of her own. With no announcement there wouldn’t be all that many people watching, but that was fine. It would be a comfort all the same.
“G’evening everyone. Your shining star in the dark of night, KiraKira☆Kiara. Yaay.”
Her viewers were barely a quarter of what they usually were, but replies still quickly filled the chat box.
“Guerilla stream?”
“You sound super rough.”
“Kiara sick?”
Despite the tea, Olivia was aware her voice was a mess. She’d have to be careful not to talk too much, or it would definitely get worse. Her job was talking, she couldn’t risk a throat injury from pushing herself too far. “Yeah, sorry, it’s been a pretty bad day today. This’ll be a chill, relaxing stream, just some casual Animal Planet, so sorry if it’s nothing too exciting.”
“Oh no, are you okay?”
“Please rest if you need to.”
And a flood of ? emojis filled the chat. The concern was cute, if a bit cloying, but once she settled into the game, the comments inevitably turned to trying to get her to make increasingly bad decisions, and Olivia felt a small smile return to her lips. She streamed until morning, and with the warm light of the sun reassuring her the world was not a black void, she was finally able to fall asleep.
She awoke to her doorbell ringing insistently. She glared accusingly at it from under her covers. The sun was still brightly streaming through her windows, what kind of time did they think this was? When the insistent ringing changed to heavy pounding, she was finally awake enough to realize that anyone that devoted was probably not just trying to sell her on the newest candidate for the local council. She was worried for a moment (what if it was some angry drunk who had stumbled to the wrong door?), but when she checked her door cam, she found a surprisingly familiar face, although not one she was pleased to see – it was the smiley Security man from the night before, now considerably less smiley. Opening the door before he put his fist through it, his smile briefly returned as he recognized her. “Hey, Olivia right? I’m guessing you didn’t get the alert, but you’re in an evaluation zone. Your muster point is subway station A402, about 10 minutes north. You good to get there on your own?”
The sudden emergency crushed any response she could have offered, and she only nodded mutely. “Great. Grab whatever you need, but quickly. I need to make sure you’re on your way before I move to the next area.”
Once the Security man was safely out of sight, Olivia threw a change of clothes, her back-up drive, and her phone into her backpack. Her phone was dead – that explained how she’d missed the evacuation alert. Giving a final look around her apartment, Olivia hastily crammed a back-up phone battery and an emotional support Justice Detective plushie into her bag as well before running out her door towards her stairs. A blur at the corner of her eyes confirmed Shark was following her. There was a certain relief in that knowledge. Any relief she’d been feeling, though, vanished as she saw the reason for the evacuation order. A Security van was parked on the street, coordinating a half dozen evacuees, and beyond that, from the far edge of the park on the outskirts of the Central District was a smoldering pillar of black smoke and orange flame.
She waved at the Security man, confirming she was out of the building, and he briefly waved back, before turning his attention back to his phone. From the phone, a voice squawked out, “That’s the last of them from this area, next closest is in the park, near the old shrine, but… I think that one we can safely ignore. Next is 200 meters west – one’s not moving, probably didn’t hear the alarm, another is moving, but slowly – they may be in a wheelchair or injured…”
Olivia didn’t hear the rest. One near the old shrine, one they wouldn’t bother with. Alice had mentioned she sometimes dozed off in her meadow (dozed off, even that was elegant, Olivia was certain her falling asleep would be better described as passing out). What were the chances? But she couldn’t shake her sense of dread. Shakily, she lifted her phone, plugged in the backup battery, and sent out a quick text. The wait for a response was agony, but it was less than a minute before Security began to pack up – they’d want to see her moving on before they left. So she swallowed her misgivings and for the first time since she’d bought the phone, she brought up the ‘Call’ application. Each unanswered ring increased her sense of dread, and after the fourth ring and a business-like answering machine asked her to ‘leave a message for Alice Underscore after the tone’, her mind was made up. She was at the back of the small group of evacuees making their way along the street that bordered the park, and they were just passing one of the park entrances to their left. The group was already turning down the street to the right – four blocks down was a subway station that was their evacuation shelter. Security had driven past already, moving up the street to find the next group of people who had missed the alert. If Olivia was going, it was now or never.
Olivia hadn’t realized just how much her choice had already been made until she spun left and started moving towards her park. As soon as she had turned away from the evacuation route, her feet were already running. Through the wrought-iron entrance gate, along the paved path, she ran. Her heart was pounding, as much from the unfamiliar exertion as it was from the worry clawing away at her, pushing her onwards. She didn’t stop, she ran past the gardens, under the ornate lampposts, finally coming to the overgrown path leading to the crumbling stairs. She finally let herself stop running, taking long strides as she struggled to pull enough air into her lungs. She could feel sweat dripping from her brow and the back of her neck. She could feel it soaking into her back where her backpack rested against the warm fabric of her sweater. Her legs trembled, and felt like they were near cramping. Olivia was not in good shape, but she had made it, to the same clearing she had met with Alice just one day and an eternity ago. Alice hadn't noticed Olivia arrive - her gaze was transfixed by the inferno claiming her favourite place in the world. Green consumed by red and black. Birdsong and the rustling of trees in the wind replaced with a harsh, snapping roar. The gentle scents of the grass, the pine trees, and the small flowers of the meadow overwhelmed by a biting scent of smoke.
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Olivia opened her mouth to call out, but stopped. For the first time, at the edge of the meadow, she got her first clear look at the blaze, and it took her a moment to process what she was seeing. At the edge of the park, at the very center of the glowing flames turning trees to charcoal and glittering off the mirrored windows of the central district's skyscrapers, was a towering, hulking figure. Over a dozen stories tall, it was vaguely human shaped, but skeletal in a way that suggested whoever had crafted it had forgotten about veins and muscles and organs and simply wrapped a skeleton in scorched skin as black as pitch. The blackened, charred skin pulled away from its mouth, leaving it in a permanent rictus grin, and twin horns crowned the figure’s skull. Olivia had played enough games that there was no other word to describe the figure but ‘devil’, but the fantasy of games was something that was never meant to intrude on reality. People didn’t have health bars, coins didn’t float in the air over the path you were meant to follow, and monsters didn’t exist. And yet, impossibly, the devil was there, slowly advancing into the park, each step bringing a trail of fire and charred destruction.
Alice’s face was a jumble of emotion: fear, horror, loss, despair – but another emotion was there as well, slowly rising to the surface: rage. A savage, burning fury, overwriting the loss, overwriting the sadness and despair. Olivia had never thought it possible for Alice to make such an expression, but it slowly warped her features until only pale fury remained. And in that moment, all the light in the sky vanished. The world plunged into a sudden eclipse, all that was visible was the feeble lights of the unprepared city, and a glittering sea of stars above.
Then the stolen light of the midday sun erupted all around them. It swirled like a vortex, streams of light twisting like snakes, crawling over the trees as a mass of veins, merging into writhing tentacles of light. Splitting into infinitesimal glittering threads. All of it at once, a thousand disparate stands all twisting and writhing to their own rhythm, stretching the full breadth of the huge park and beyond, into the city that had been thrown into a midday night. And among them, Alice was little more than a shadow, a black silhouette among the glittering vortex of light and the deep, nearly black navy sky of midday. And yet, when this tiny silhouette moved its arm, gesturing to the burning devil in the distance with only a slight tremor betraying her boiling anger, the tendrils of light obeyed, and sped off to the demon. The devil noticed their approach, and for a moment the air around it cleared as even the smoke was vapourized, but no matter the heat, the torrent of photons cut through as if it wasn't there.
The tendrils of light shot forward, striking like a provoked nest of vipers. They ripped through the demon's limbs, body, head. The disassembled parts quivered in the air, snatching the severed pieces from the air and melding back together. The light took the shape of a huge fist raised above the very skyscrapers, which fell through the air with such force it splattered the head and chest of the devil against the ground. Again, severed body parts and the pulverized jam of its body quivered, trying to return together, but that only provoked the tendrils to strike again. And again. And again. Tentacles, fists, blades, and raw beams of overwhelming light – there was no logic to the forms the light took, just raw, naked hostility. Again and again they pummeled the burning devil, heedless of the intense heat warping the very air around it. Again and again, tearing the devil to pieces, then when the pieces struggled to return together, the tendrils splintered into tiny probing threads and tiny piercing needles and struck again. Again and again, until nothing but scattered atoms remained, and they no longer tried to reassemble.
Awkwardly, belatedly, the artificial moonlight of Central Tower flickered to life, bathing the dark city in a pale blue glow, as if confused by the discrepancy between the clock and its light sensors. The silhouette returned to the elegant, familiar, and yet deeply unfamiliar Alice. Time slowed to a crawl, and Olivia’s gaze locked on Alice's eyes, hyperaware of their movement as they slowly turned to the side, moving micrometer by micrometer, from the smoldering remnants of the devil's inferno to the edge of the meadow where Olivia stood, rooted to the spot by fear. Don't turn. Don't look. Don't notice me. Olivia's terrified prayer repeated in her mind did nothing to stop the movement of Alice's eyes, and in an instant that stretched to eternity they inevitably locked with Olivia's own. "Oh, I'm sorry. That must have been frightening."
Alice's tone was as calm and polite as ever, but there was a coldness to it Olivia had never heard, and her eyes… her eyes were a yawning, empty abyss. It was like she wasn't even registering that what she was talking to was human. Like she was apologizing to an insect she could have stepped on and never noticed.
An indistinct sound escaped Olivia’s lips, so small and frightened Olivia didn't even recognize the voice as her own.
A single step back, a broken twig, impossibly loud, and Olivia was running. Unlike the dread and exhaustion that had prodded her along as she had run to the meadow, all that propelled her away from the meadow was fear. A dizzying, delirious fear, reducing her body to an unthinking automaton with a single objective: escape. It was only once she stepped past the threshold of the park, and she found herself facing her familiar street bathed in calm afternoon sun that the terror of pursuit began to subside, that her body deigned to return a measure of control to her. The sudden night had faded, and as she walked the familiar steps back to her apartment, each step seemed to bring back just a little more sunlight, and as it did it smoothed away the adrenaline, quieted her thudding heart, until finally, standing in her familiar doorway, with a familiar warm blue sky behind her, more than anything she felt exhausted.
Dropping her bag to the floor, she struggled half-heartedly to pull off her sweat-drenched clothes. It felt like a Herculean effort, but eventually she had managed to change into a fresh set of pajamas. Dry, and back in her familiar room, with comforting daylight streaming through her window, she flopped into her bed, fully intending to do nothing but shut down and sleep. But sleep didn’t come, and she found herself standing again minutes after lying down. She stalked over to her computer – maybe watching some streams, or even starting another stream herself would take her mind back to a place of normalcy. But she irritably shut the computer down before it had even finished booting up. She went to pick up her phone next, maybe music or watching a magical girl series from her bed? It was only once she saw a drop of water hit the phone screen and she blinked to try to clear her suddenly wet, blurry vision that she realized the ache in her chest and the stinging of her eyes. Aware of Shark’s hazy shadow at the edge of her kitchen space, she spun back into her bedroom, slamming the door a little harder than she intended, and fell into her bed. Her body shook, and she tried to muffle her sobs in her pillow, which was soon wet with her tears.
It wasn’t just the aftereffects of fear, although that certainly didn’t help. She hadn’t known Alice for all that long. She was under no illusions that Alice undoubtedly would have secrets and buried layers of her personality she hadn’t seen yet. But Olivia still felt she had seen enough of her, spent at least enough time to reach out. To try and be friends. She had wanted to be friends! And yet the way Alice had looked at her… As if she was dust, nothing at all, barely worth noticing in the first place. It had been a long time since Olivia had opened herself up to anyone that much. She shared the minutiae of her life, her goals and aspirations, and her passions and what she loved online, probably overshared, but KiraKira Kiara was still ultimately a character. A mask she wore to speak to the world. And her viewers all wore masks too. It was a relationship of surprising honesty, but it was still a relationship that stopped at the barrier between the net and the real world. She loved her chat, but they weren’t friends.
Friendship is a battle of willpower. The quote came to her mind, unbidden, but it firmly refused to leave. In Hana Double Zeta it was said by the protagonist, Hana, as she tried to befriend an enemy witch, Zero – and there had been no shortage of jokes online that her version of befriending involved massive laser beams and overwhelming firepower. Of course, in the world of magical girls, it worked flawlessly, and Zero became the co-protagonist in the next season, Hana Double Zeta Zero. Olivia didn’t have magical laser beams, she couldn’t fly, but she still wanted to be Alice’s friend. Despite everything, she didn’t want to give up on that. Friendship was a battle of willpower.
Her fingers trembling, she pulled up her text conversation with Alice. The last message had been her asking where she was and if she’d heard the evacuation sirens. The message before that was simple, “Got it, see you at 7 tonight, then ??.” How much emotion Olivia had put into that smiley face! The sense that they were finally starting to connect, and all the nervousness but also the warmth and almost giddy excitement that accompanied that. Was it possible anyone reading that simple message could understand even a fraction of the emotions that had gone into it? Had Alice understood, even a little? Still trembling, but with her mouth set in a determined line, Olivia typed a single message. She didn’t trust herself to add anything more, but there was one message she absolutely wanted to communicate: “I want to talk with you again.”
SEND
