The living room was dark and moldy, the wood not having felt the human touch for what seemed like centuries. The girl's feet tapped across the boards, a heart pounding creak playing out with each step. The lantern she held in her hands flickered, as if any sudden breeze would put it out at any minute. That fear became reality, as her only light in the decaying house went with the wind, and, at the same time, she heard a knocking coming from the door to the outside.
"Who's there?" The girl asked, her voice quivering in an undying terror. She stared at the door, not daring to get any closer until she was met with an audible answer. She was not met with this, though, as the knocking just played out again.
She said not a word. Everything was quiet.
She waited.
And waited...
And-
"BOO!" Pearl suddenly shouted, her outburst receiving the exact reaction she hoped for: quick screams and yelps of pure shock value. On the other hand, Scott, Cleo, and surprisingly Etho were fully prepared for this trick of hers, and Pearl herself howled with laughter.
"Haha! Gets 'em every time! Oh, if only Martyn could see your faces right now!" The scarlet-hooded woman exclaimed, wiping a tear from her eye. Martyn had chose to stay home from the trip, purely because he didn't feel like going anywhere that day.
"Alright, Pearl, that's enough, you're scaring the kids," Scott said sarcastically, his spiteful gaze and comment clearly directed at Jimmy, who had obviously just jumped his way further into his bound's arms. The blonde gave him a quiet growl and a spiteful gaze back, but thankfully that was as far as their interactions ever got since the first day.
"Etho, how did that not get you?!" Bdubs asked, turning to the fox.
"Old friend used to pull that all the time," Etho explained. "It stops being scary after the third,"
"Agreed," Cleo said, having watched Pearl use the trick several times before.
"At least mine was actually scary," Pearl said proudly, turning to the zombie.
"We've been over this Pearl, just because people scream at it doesn't mean it's scary," Cleo said. "Besides, I thought the fear of imminent death was right up your ally?"
"Your's was about the moon crashing into a planet," Pearl argued. "The moon is literally in my name, I could totally survive that."
Cleo rolled her eyes and smiled, always amused by whatever batshit crazy thing would fly out of Pearl's mouth during any given conversation.
As the noise died down and the ambience of the crackling fire and humming of whatever bugs decided to be out that night returned, the group reduced themselves to small talk. Somehow, this ended up leading to a bigger conversation about the fountain.
"So we already know it's the 14 of us," Joel pointed out. "Why haven't we all gone to this thing yet?"
"It's not that I don't think it won't do anything significant," Cleo said, "it's just that I don't trust Watcher stuff... No offense Grian."
"None taken," Grian said. Although he never said it out loud, and wouldn't for a VERY long time, he never trusted the Watchers that much himself. Kicking him out of the sky was a very good reason for that, but he couldn't admit that to anyone anyway.
"But it said it would return something that we all lost," Tango said. "You don't just lose something on purpose, so it's not like it'll give us something bad, right?"
"You have to be careful with the way Watchers word things," Etho warned. "They'll tell you one thing and mean something completely different. I don't think that part's up to them, I think it's just because they have to speak in rhymes, so they can't say exactly what they mean all the time,"
The ex-Watcher nodded in agreement. "Most people don't understand that bit. Good Watchers don't lie on purpose, but even I tried the rhyming scheme once and I couldn't get my point across. And Doc just told you guys the straight up legend, he didn't even give you the exact rhyme, did he?"
Impulse shook his head no.
"Yeah, he just said 14 people who've lost the same thing to the same force," Jimmy pointed out. "You think there could be a mistranslation somewhere in there?"
"There's definitely a chance," Grian agreed. "In fact, that's not even a rhyme. And only Watchers can speak in our actual language, so there's certainly room for someone to misunderstand the whole thing,"
"Then why don't we just... go and see," BigB suggested. "If we can't figure it out from the story, we can just test it right at the fountain,"
"Great idea, do you wanna go first?" Cleo asked.
BigB backed up uncomfortably.
"That's what I thought," Cleo smirked.
"I'll do it!" Bdubs said. "I've been dying to know what this baby does since day one!"
"You sure?" Impulse asked, mildly concerned for his partner. Bdubs vigorously nodded in response.
"So that's how we're doing it?" Scott asked, not very fond of the idea.
"Hey, he said he wants to," Pearl said, shrugging. "I say let 'im."
"Then it's settled!" Tango said. "BigB, Grian, Pearl- sorry, not Pearl, Cleo, tell your soulbounds when we get back, tomorrow we're doin' this thing!"
"Isn't tomorrow check-up day?" Jimmy asked.
"Shoot, yeah, you're right," Tango said.
"They said check-ups wouldn't last that long, how about we just meet up at the fountain right after?" Impulse suggested.
And that was the plan they agreed on.
—
Katherine awoke to a disturbance. Not a physical one, no not at all, but a feeling that something was off. This happened more often than she liked to admit, as most of the time, she couldn't find any sort of real disruption to match her feeling. But her past insisted that these feelings of hers were more than just feelings, as they always should be.
You see, Katherine grew up in Star Island, though it was more like a peninsula. Usually Star people are weak in comparison to regular humans, which was a severe oddity in most species since humans were typically seen as the bottom of the barrel in physical power. The few exceptions to this rule were Star-Bornes, which were pretty much like gods, so when Katherine started to show signs of average human strength, the people of her village rejoiced. She enjoyed helping them with any problems they had, and pushed to further her strength even more so. But she was somehow the rarest of her kind, a Star person that was not weak, but not nearly as strong as a god. This made her run through every test in the book, but no matter how she looked at it, she wasn't human. She was Star, through and through. She started to believe her lack of extraordinary ability would make her fellow townspeople disappointed, since they expected her to be much more powerful one day.
Eventually, she resorted to begging a wizard for help, and so he gave her one power: a power that would only show upon a sacrifice. Katherine had no clue what this meant, and she wouldn't until just a few years before now, when, during a fight, her attacker stabbed her in her left eye. The eye healed of course, as that was the gimmick of Star people: any injured body part would regenerate back perfectly well, but it wouldn't heal quickly, nor would it heal back any stronger. But when she was finally able to take the bandages off, her eye was no longer a nice shade of pastel purple. In fact, her iris was no longer round either. Her eye was in the shape of a bright yellow star.
This granted her with a few things. For one, that eye had perfect night vision, which she used to look around her dark room now. It glowed in the dark too, which has helped people find her in dark places as well. The eye also gave her the ability to read emotions off of others, a soft outline of color surrounding everyone she could see with it, and that's helped her immensely, as it was always troubling for her to recognize body language in determining mood. The last thing it gave her was foresight. She wouldn't actually see anything, but when troubling or otherwise concerning events were happening or going to happen soon, she would get the feeling that something was wrong as a warning. And this happened so often to only amount to nothing she could actually find that she began to think that it was just her mind acting up.
Her eye trailed around the room before landing on a paper she had hung up on her wall. She had a few posters, most of her wall being lined with shelves for her unnecessarily large collection of plushies, but this paper always stood out to her, because it wasn't a poster like the rest.
It was a missing poster. Her girlfriend's face was on it. And it's been on her wall for the past 3 years. She was told that an old researcher who worked for the company would have some answers to her whereabouts, but that researcher had ended up going missing as well. She managed to link all of it to a specific place on the island, and how to get to that place was, as far as she knew, only for her to know.
The gut feeling of future anxieties was starting to get to Katherine again, so she laid herself back down on her bed and curled around her 2 foot sheep plushie. Maybe it wasn't necessarily plushies, but the warm, embracing feeling of being held always kept her calm. Eventually, she lulled back to sleep, under the belief once again that her foresight was just slipping up and that nothing was really wrong.
—
"Helloooo?" A voice called out, but not a familiar one. Impulse opened his eyes to the world he nearly forgot about, the one tinted green and in his dreams. He groaned in annoyance, realizing that, without any service out here, Bdubs wasn't able to give him the white noise.
"Woah! I didn't think you'd actually hear me," the voice said. "You look new here, are you okay? Does anything hurt real bad, I know some other ghosts that're like that,"
Impulse went to grab his pillow and shove it over his ears, but very quickly remembered he couldn't grab anything like this, so he just sat there hoping whoever it was would go away.
"Oh, sorry, am I being rude? I'm not really used to meeting new people," the voice apologized. "I'm Shubble! Some people call me Shrub, but I don't know you so it's Shubble,"
Another bit of silence from Impulse.
"Did you just die? Is that why you're being quiet?" Shubble asked.
"...I'm not dead," Impulse finally answered.
"...right," Shubble said, not convinced in the slightest. "So do you just come here on the weekends or something? Stop by the old post-mortem realm for funsies?"
"I keep having this stupid dream and I would like it if I could just wake up," Impulse said.
"You've actually been here before? How come I've never seen you? Oh wait, don't answer that, I never check the houses around here," Shubble said. "Has anyone else seen you? I know some house-dwellers."
Impulse almost went into another spout of silence, but he decided against it this time. Maybe talking would help him wake up faster?
"Yyeah, there was this one guy, he kinda freaked me out though..." he said, finally turning to face the ghost talking to him. She was way shorter than he expected, with long black hair flowing down to her back. She had a red and white spotted beanie, sort of resembling a red mushroom, pulled atop her head. Tan overalls went over a pastel green shirt, and her knee-high boots matched the mushroom patterns of her beanie. She seemed to have light blue wolf ears poking out of her head, tilted down to avoid being inside the beanie, but otherwise had no other animalistic traits. Both of her eyes were a soft yellow, but her left one looked particularly odd to Impulse for a reason he couldn't quite put his finger on.
"Was he tall and lanky? Wore a suit and tie? Had a British accent?" Shubble asked. Impulse nodded in response.
"Oh, that's just Mumbo," she confirmed. "Sorry about him, his face got really messed up when he died and he doesn't like to talk about it with people. He's nice! Just a little off the rails, but I mean, most of us are so..."
"How many more of you are there?" Impulse asked, sitting up. The blades of grass ran through his ghosty hands, literally.
"Too many more to be honest," Shubble said, shaking her head in a sort of disappointment. "It's just a little sad to see all these people here when you know there's a real afterlife to be had."
"Wait, this isn't the afterlife?" Impulse asked. Shubble thought of her next answer.
"Yes and no," she finally decided. "This is an afterlife, but it's not a particularly nice one. The afterlife is seriously an umbrella term, there's so many places for things to go when they die,"
"Interesting..." Impulse half muttered.
"The goal for most humans is above the clouds from what I've heard." Shubble explained. "My people always saw the best afterlife deep underground, but I can't go to either of those while I'm stuck here, same for everyone else."
Impulse got a sudden pang of pain in his head, causing him to inhale sharply through his teeth. Shubble looked over at the rising sun.
"You said you thought this was a dream, right?" She asked. "You're only here when you're sleeping?"
"Yeah..." Impulse said, the headache fading but not quite going away. It was starting to make him lightheaded.
"I'll make you a deal before you go," Shubble said, "my old highschool was Undergrove High, and we had a school newspaper online. I got into a Plant physiology club the first year we had one, and it was all over the paper, so if you can find the first picture they had of the whole club, you'll spot me, and you'll know I'm real,"
"Why do you all want me to know I'm not dreaming so badly?" Impulse asked, his arm shaking as he was suddenly losing the strength to prop himself up. "Wouldn't it just be easier to let me keep thinking this was a dream?"
"Because if you're the right person we've been looking for, we need your help,"
With that sentence, which he barely understood over his wooziness, Impulse collapsed and woke up to the sunrise, back in the sleeping bag he shared with Bdubs.