All Your Fates (Currently editing/updating)

Prologue: I Killed Another One, Pepper ~ Carrie Cutforth

psssst... did you remember to vote? it makes my heart sing when you do!!



Music track list:

Pump Up The Volume ~ Mars;

Pump up the Jam ~ Technotronic

****

Pepper's POV

So I'm back.

Yay.

Or something like that.

I hadn't planned on coming back. Not after that...thing -- that demon, alien, man with radioactive powers, whatever -- destroyed the lab in front of my eyes.

I can't really explain how he, Gabriel Rath (though I doubt that's his real name), did it.

I was in the lab testing out the triangulation with Chladni plates based on David's notes, which were quite extensive. I had just set up the three stations: pillars with Chladni plates and requisite sound systems affixed. Of course, I improved on the design. David's got a brilliant mind -- there was never any doubt about that. I knew when Atticus threw around the word genius the first time he called me to come in he wouldn't do so lightly. But David also has a mind that often overlooks the practicalities. Like the way he forgets to eat or pay his rent or shower during the pursuit of his grandiose plans. Singular minded, I think they call it. Or tunnel vision.

Like the way he overlooked stabilizing the current using DC as opposed to AC.  A stable current means sustaining a stable frequency. Which means sustaining a stable reality. Duh. But that answer was far too simple for David to grasp. No, instead the answer had to relate to that crackpot seafoam theory of his. Oh well. I prefer him not listening to me on this point. As long as David doesn't listen, he won't be able to seek her out in other worlds with that insane idea of his. I prefer him sticking to killing mice (more on that later but I digress).

So there I was in the lab, setting up the plates, solving all his instability issues with simple math and a $45 dollar electronic part that I picked up at Target, and slitting the throats of giant teddy bears – the first sacrificed animals on the altar of this experiment, hung upside down to bleed themselves dry of their beanbag stuffing.

And then I waited around for David to surprise him, but damn...he was so slow and not answering his cell, which was irritating to say the least. So I cranked it up without him using a simple app I created on my IPAD.  

I pressed start on my app, and the three stations started to play at their set frequencies: a bizarre chorus of mechanical "hawwwwwwwws." I could see the sand on the Chladni plates start to form each of their distinct patterns, but no movement on the floor with the polystyrene beads. So I pumped up the volume but not before putting on giant ear protecting muffs on -- the type construction workers wear when operating jack hammers.

Pump up the volume, pump up the volume, pump up the volume...dance, dance!

The entire room began to vibrate, and the smaller objects in the room started to bounce as louder and louder I cranked it from my IPAD. And as if by magic, the beads started to rise and form a giant bubble in the room – just like in all of David's schematics. I laughed out loud. It was too silly to be real.

The bubble almost looked like a giant snowflake if a snowflake could be spherical. I walked towards the bubble and held out my hand up to it, feeling the polystyrene beads in the air vibrating against my palm. It tickled and I smiled in wonder, like a child witnessing their first snow.

What will happen if I put my face in? I wondered. Will it suddenly appear in the plane of someone else's existence, grinning like the Cheshire Cat?

And as I mused and watched and began to find myself sucked in by the forming vortex of patterns, I realized I was seeing not polystyrene anymore but crocheted strings that seemed to be made from the light of a rainbow prism. And I felt my body draw and swing, being compelled...beckoned even...towards the light.

I must have been too mesmerized to have noticed Gabriel in the room. Only suddenly he had pushed me aside and was in the center of the bubble, now sparking hot and blue with lightning. The bubble began to contract its elastic electric current around his godlike figure that seemed to radiate with fire as it pinned him down towards the floor before he managed to throw it off his shoulders and rise like a Titan breaking out of stone, the force of the movement throwing the sonic bubble out away from him, rippling towards me, smashing all objects against the walls and hurtling me back. I felt my back hit the counter and my body folded in half towards the floor.

The polystyrene beads showered on top of me as the sonic pitches died down into a chilling electric choke. It was then I noticed the cord to the whole outfit was unplugged, and I realized it had unplugged before Gabriel had even entered the bubble because there he was still in the middle of the room.

What.

The.

Fuck.

Then the "demon" was over top of me, his legs straddled on either side of my body, while his large hands clutched the front of my blouse and drew me up to him as if I was just a marionette on a string.

"This doorway must stay closed!" Gabriel spat into my face, and when I looked into his eyes, I could feel them burn on me with bright orange flames flicking around his irises. And as he stared at me I felt my bones set on fire inside of me, and I began to believe they were really beginning to liquefy into molten lava. I started to frantically slap at my body as if I could extinguish these internal flames inside my bones as one as easily smothers out clothes on fire.

And suddenly Gabriel had set me roughly on the counter, and turned away, swearing in languages I didn't understand as my body started to rapidly cool and my spine feeling skeletal again. Occasionally, he muttered my name and always with the word "tricks" along with it.

Then he left the message for me to pass along to David, before warning me to "get out of town," like this was some kinda fucked up surreal Western...with wizards and shit.

But despite the terror that strikes my heart whenever my mind strays to that moment...I couldn't stay away from him any longer. From David.

Don't get me wrong. It's not a burning desperate need to be united with my one true love and all that bullshit. I just knew deep down he needed me and I had to be there for him because I think we're something....something like friends and something like lovers...or somewhere there halfway in the middle.

And that stupid twit had to go back in after some other David like he mattered. There is only one David I care about and it's the one whose heart you stamped to pieces. Well good riddance. I hope you never come back.

When I finally did return, I found David exactly as expected: in the lab between fits of manic laughter and tears punctuated with melancholic lethargy. His eyes were worn red wired and squirrelly, his cheeks gaunt and hollow (he had stopped eating again), and he now sported full grown mangy beard...and...well, was emanating a funky odor I'd rather not describe.

I walked into the lab, now revitalized, and sparkling in stainless steel (Atticus must have scored some more sponsorship) and there in the middle of the room, inside a triangulation of electric dead Chladni plate stations, David was hunched over a flat and limp mouse. He looked up at me with bleary eyes and said, "I killed another one, Pepper." And with that, David scooped it up and tossed it into a bin that smelled foul with death and rats long after the lid snapped shut.

That was it. No: "Hey, how are you;" "I missed you;" "Glad to see you." No, the only thing he had to say to me was: I killed another one, Pepper.

If I had been in more of a temper I would have probably have punched him in the stomach and high-tailed out of there right there and then. But the long bus ride had made me tired. And his big brown eyes were those of such a little lost puppy, and if I'm going to be honest with myself: I'm a little in love with the guy. Or maybe I'm just fixating over one lustful moment in the shower that didn't really mean anything other than two people seeking solace to stem loneliness and boredom and boost one's vanity if only for a day or two, trying to make more meaning out of something that hasn't any. Pathetic lovesick girl that I am.

So, I pushed aside my dejection and pushed him out of the lab despite his protests, forcing him back to my hotel where I ordered congee to be delivered, and then spoon-fed him while he rambled wildly about how he was so close to a breakthrough.

And he continued to ramble while I cut his hair and I drew a bath but settled down after I scrubbed his back and shampooed his dirty mop four times, rinsing it with a warm cup of water like one would bathe a baby. All the while silently cursing myself for positioning myself as a mother figure to him. When will I ever learn?