Seventh Umbral Era

[Rattlesnake]

((Kelsey Brewer continued from Inverted Hostility))

Kelsey hadn't said goodbye yet.

"Hey," she said to a mechanical eye in a liminal space, a transition from where she shouldn't be to where she couldn't. A stretch of ground barren of life, of warmth and soul and instinct, and all the more blessed for it.

"Uh, Cinny, Aurora, Lazercat..."' she trailed off, feeling vaguely sheepish as with great gravity she recounted the constructed handles of people who existed to her as voices and lines of meandering text. As avatars with with their drag-and-drop selection of features and dress, pre-selected bundles of code worn over their personalities like hand-stitched puppets. Who they were when nothing was real, not even their names, and everything was genuine.

"Don't think I forgot about you if I didn't happen to call you out first, by the way, just, you have to pick an order, right? And there are so many things to think about."

She cast her gaze aside.

"Well, a lot of it's just nothing. Boredom, cold. Hunger. Fear. I don't know—I mean, someone could just come up to me right now, and, I don't know, start swinging. Or pop out behind a rock or a tree or just fucking take aim at the little black dot on the mountainside a mile off, and that's it. Any time. That's a lot of it."

She sighed and shrugged but didn't pause.

"And maybe you don't really want this. You don't want me to make it so real. Like, here's you fuckin' face reveal. Here's someone you knew just a little part of, whatever I let show through online. Curated or not, whatever. And now you can see how the wind messed up my hair, you get to know how I shivered and cried and thought about my own death. Here's that voice in your ear, now see how they're suffering, all the pain they're feeling. Or felt, before this whole thing ended, Gods rest my own fucking soul if you're listening to this whenever now is for you, when I'm nothing but a stain and a memory. Maybe you don't want to be called out like this personally and know that I thought about you, and that I decided to rope you into this. And maybe someday you'll forgive me for hoping, just a little bit, that you won't be able to stop thinking about me, just for the idea that a little part of me can still journey on with you. Even if it's the worst part of me, because it's the only part I could think of how to save."

She was so deeply, utterly cold, and sweat pooled at the nape of her neck and beaded at her temples.

"I think what I was saying was, I'm sure Pandaemonium will be fun, and you might be down one slot where you used to have someone funny and cool with the best glams who played a bitchin' Gunbreaker, and you might need to fill it before the tier releases, and well, you have m—you have my permission to find a replacement. I know by the time you do hear this, or read about it, or have someone tell you this exists, or however it is this gets to you, things will probably be decided, one way or the other. Just remember I said you could, ok?"

"And, Mo—"

She tried again, and felt her mask clinging wet against her cheeks in the silence she produced.

She didn't wave or nod or make any other signal as she turned aside and the wind kicked up again and bore her along with motes of frigid accumulation in their teeming millions of unaccounted uniqueness off to parts and places unknown.

She wouldn't say goodbye yet.

((Continued in 28 Ghosts IV))