Chapter 29: The End
The shock of killing PeepTom hasn't settled in yet. Pent-up anger has finally released itself from within me and I'm not going to let guilt replace it any time soon. I can feel it; the weights, piece by piece are lifting up from my shoulders with each victory. So many of them have tried to attack me, I don't even know if I'll completely wipe them out.
I confidently walk my way up the streets listening to the now calming, soft Christmas tunes emerging from speakers built into buildings. It's so close to the holidays, yet no one is outside doing their last-minute shopping for forgotten family members. Maybe a handful of people-twenty to twenty-five of them- are roaming the side walks and strip malls, unaware of what just took place behind the mini-mart. It's not going to be long until they notice the unmoving bodies peeking from around the walls.
Or the suspicious teenage girl with a hood over her head and dried blood littering her clothes.
I keep my head down as I search for any sign of peculiar movement from my peripheral vision. Where in the world did my dad and Indigo go? Just ten minutes ago they were flipping cars and busting caps and now the streets are normal and all cars are damage free? The whole setting isn't right now that I think about it.
Someone nearby had to have heard it. I heard screams-real ones from real people showing real fear. I slow my pace down and take a small glance behind me without making much movement.
No one.
And when I face forward there's no one there either. No one in the front nor the back. Everyone's disappeared. Well, this isn't scary at all. Seeing no point in continuing my journey, I stop just as the next Christmas song kicks into gear.
Carol of the Bells.
Before anything else can process in my mind, a strong, short gust of wind swooshes past me on my left side that faces the street. Crap. The wind brings down the hood I struggled to put on in the first place and leaves my face revealed to anyone who would seem to pass me by. Although these streets are temporarily barren.
The sound of a guy chuckling from a distance fills my ears, replacing the music from behind me. Whipping around, I'm prepared to attack in my stance but nothing's there. "Rose!" The echo of Ryan's voice bounces off of the walls of the surrounding buildings and ignites a deep, destructive anger. They've got Ryan, and they're attempting to use him to get what they want. How sick.
No possible way could I find out where he stands because I know they're teasing me-taunting me. I'm not an idiot. The only way to win is to make them think you gave in. I run and clench a shaky hand through the knots in my hair and shut my eyes. A myriad against one normally doesn't work out-even for "superheroes".
The tears are on the brink of spilling over and before they can do so, I open my eyes and find the sight of a visibly unharmed Ryan Skaggs. He's okay. Immediately, my hands reach out to him and cup his cheeks for confirmation that it's actually him in the flesh. "Oh my gosh, you're okay." I yank him forward and draw him into a great bear hug, tight enough to break a few ribs and cut off circulation through his main arteries. He's reluctant, but slowly begins to hug me back.
And it hurts. It hurts a lot.
I shift, uncomfortably. "Ryan, what're you doing?" My attempt to break free fails as he only holds on tighter and more forcefully. This isn't the Ryan that I know. "Ryan," I grunt out more aggressively. "let me go." Right when the world becomes distant, he shoves me backwards and it takes all of the balance inside of me not to fall backwards.
Coming to, I see Ryan a good ten feet away and backing up with a blue glimmer in his eyes. It's not his usual blue eyes but maybe an offset color. It can't be Ryan. It isn't. "Ryan?" No more than a few moments after his name leaves my mouth, the ground shakes and from random spots, bodies burst through the cement like demonic flowers in the spring.
Dust spreads everywhere, concrete chunks are littering the street, and I'm alone. The bodies are rising from the floor slowly, but fast enough to scare the poop out of my system. I'm not even sure I have anything to poop from anymore; they scared that away, too.
I stand still, silently conjuring up a plan to escape this mess and am coming up with nothing. The dust clears and in front of me are hundreds of bodies. The same body. They're all Ryan. Hundreds upon hundreds of Ryans file up and down the street, out of line.
For brief moments everything on the road is silent; the only sound is coming from the hidden speakers. This isn't a game anymore to them. Their goal still remains the same: kill Rose. And they're doing a heck of a good job at it. If it weren't for my competitiveness, I'd let them kill me. But I hate to lose and I'm not going to start now.
One Ryan to my far right takes a step towards me. "Isn't this what you want, Rose? Me? You've always wanted me. Now look," He motions all around with his arms outstretched. "You can have as many as you want and you won't take the opportunity? We all knew you were ungrateful." One Ryan scratches like a hologram and when it's stable again, it's not Ryan, but Cora. The same process repeats almost simultaneously across the whole road; each Ryan transforms into another person that's been in my life: Zoey, Emily, Mom, Junchi, Mindy, Johnny, Mr. B, Damien.
This can't actually be them. Everyone I know can't be in on this. They just can't. All of the duplicates wear the same familiar smirk etched on their faces and there's only one person who's face I don't see and one person who's face fits the smirk.
Misty.
"So I figured this would be a little harder, but you're such an idiot, you decided to believe me when I told you I had changed the first time." I whip around and there stands Misty in all of her confidence, leaning against a shop's worn down brick wall. I knew someone with a head as big as hers had to have been lying somewhere in the mix.
"But who could blame you, right? It's not your fault you were born with an idiot of a father." She pauses and watches my eyes for a moment before continuing. "Or a freak of nature like your mother." It's not a secret on what she wants, but she's not getting it. She wants a reaction-something to feed off of to motivate her.
"You know, your silence and determination to not show me you're actually getting upset is what's telling me you're upset. You know it bothers you, Rose, so why're you taking it?" Her steps towards me just give me a better view of the demon in her eyes. She stops when's she's less than a foot from me. "Is it because you know that such a mentally disturbed family would never work out or want anything to do with you?"
Okay, the line is drawn here. Take a mental photo of this moment and save it to your scrapbooks to show your children in the years to come. Because this is the most likely the last time you'll see Misty Harper, the chick who deserves to have all of the roaches shoved up her nose and into her pea-brain, in one piece.
I bring my arm forward and plant a firm punch into her gut followed immediately by my other arm throwing a punch at her cheek, which gets a great reaction of splattering droplets of blood and a grunt. She fumbles backwards, struggling to find her balance, clutching her jaw and hunched over looking no less like the Hunchback of Notre Dame. Her already tired eyes find mine. "You psycho!"
I step forward to finish her off but she disappears along with all of the duplicates who were, just before, littering the streets. The music cuts off and the wind stops blowing. It's almost as if time literally stands still. The only indication that I know we're still moving on is from the raindrops still finding their way through gravity.
All of a sudden, a large projectile from my side view is flying towards me faster than I can process. By the time I face it and realize it's a spiraling car, it hits me and leaves my body bouncing back and forth from the concrete to the car and back.
For a moment, I lay there on the uprooted pavement in shock. She freaking busted my butt with a car in a surprise attack. If she's playing dirty, so am I.
Despite the shooting pain all over my body, I stand up as smoothly as I can, grab the back bumper of the 1976 Cadillac Coupe and search the area for a sign of Misty's fathead. Up the street, down the street, behind me; nothing. She's not there. The sinister silence continues for a few minutes, giving me time to drop my grip on the car and scrape my feet along the concrete as I drag myself to stand in the middle of the road.
I avoid the holes in the ground from Misty's over dramatic scene she created and begin walking away. If they want me, they'll find m-
I almost fall over from the ground's shaking from beneath me. A few moments later, it shakes again and again. Whatever's responsible for this, it can't be friendly and it can't be natural. Screeching from citizens fill the empty street and from atop the hill, people are running towards me at their full speed, nothing but fear picking up in their eyes.
Women carrying their children, men helping the carry the stray kids, teenagers dropping their drinks and purses in a rush to get away from whatever is chasing them. I stand still in the road and watch as they all dodge the pits and some failing to. I recognize a few faces from school pass me and I catch a glimpse at Ben on his way down. At first, he passes me, running for his life and then I feel a yank on my shoulder and I turn to face him.
"Rose, c'mon! Misty's gone-whoa, what happened?" He stops tugging for a brief moment and examines the wounds scattered across my body and once he finishes, he tugs once more. "We need to get you to a hospital right now. C'mon!" Nothing is moving me at this point; not even the toxic smells pouring out from his internal bodily fluids from his lack of hygiene.
He may be trying to save someone's life from a violent attack, but his body odor is killing them at the same time so either way, they're screwed.
The last bit of frantic wanderers make their way over the hill just as things directly behind them start to explode. I take Ben's hands off of me, never breaking eye contact from the top of the hill. "Go tell everyone else to hide and stay hidden." He objects to leave me but doesn't go to grab me again. Smart boy.
Out of the carbon-filled smoke, a silhouette shines through it and no doubt it's Misty. She can't have a big dramatic moment until she walks in slow motion away from an explosion.
So stereotypical. She made the explosion on purpose, that doesn't even count for cool points.
"So where's your Thalia now?" Misty calls loud enough for everyone to hear and stop running to face her. Moments of silence pass and for a minute, I think no one will dare to say anything until a meek voice pops up.
"She'll be here! She always comes to help us!" I look towards the voice and it's a small girl, maybe six, being barricaded by her parents arms and hushed.
I could help. I really could. But if I help now, my secret's out and nothing will ever be the same for me.
As if Misty can hear my thoughts, her eyes lock on mine. "Well Thalia isn't here right now, is she? Maybe she's taking a vacation; I sure haven't seen her doing a whole lot around here, lately. How about you, Rose? Have you been seeing Thalia around? Has she been helping like she's promised?" She knows.
She knows the struggle of me putting my double life on the line and she knows that it's breaking me. I either confess it or people die because I'm afraid of my self image. I battle every possible outcome and how drastically my life will be changed in the next hour. I choose not to respond and this only gives Misty enough time to come so close to my face, I can see her pores.
She doesn't speak, only stares daggers through me. Inside I'm dying, but on the outside, no emotion is ever shown-I can't allow her to catch me weak. "Fine," she says more happily and nonchalant than it needs to be. "I'll throw the first punch." Her words process in my head and by the time I'm getting ready to block, her hook catches the side of my jaw and my body is flung on top of a lump where the ground was broken earlier followed by a shocked reaction from the crowd huddling behind us both. Pieces of wet concrete and gravel dig into my stomach and I hear her footsteps approach me from behind and stop.
"Did you like that, Rose? Is that what you wanna be called?" I can already hear her trying to exploit Thalia before the next sentence leaves her mouth. "Or would you rather tell everyone already and be called-" I cut off her words short by hauling myself onto my knees, twisting around and pushing her legs, causing her to fall flat on her back. If she thinks she'll be the one to tell everyone who I am, I'm bold enough to just do it myself. There's nothing to lose.
The rain around us seems to lighten as I stand up with hardly any scratches. Stray hair's sticking to my forehead, my shoes feel sticky and the crowd is in so much awe, they hardly notice the Christmas music fading out and in from the lightning that's tampering with the audio. Blue Christmas.
Soon, I reach Misty who's propped up on her elbows half-grinning up at me. "What're you gonna do, Rose? You gonna kick me? Punch me? Maybe you'll even smack me, who knows?" In my mind, I'm doing none of the above. Before I stood, I noticed a flagpole hanging off of the clock shop that's within enough distance. I don't break eye contact but slowly ease the flagpole out of the holder and let it hover over Misty. Her grin fades a little when she notices I'm not laying a hand on her.
"It's her, mommy!"
"I knew she'd be here!"
"So that's who Thalia was!"
"I can't believe it's her! It really is!"
"Oh my freaking gosh, I knew it!" Emily's voice overpowers many of the other cries out of my identity. Who invited her here?
Some of my classmates are snapping pictures already and showing different ways to take who I really am.
And I let it drop. All at once, the pole drops, waving the American flag down with it and when it reaches the ground, it hits the ground-Misty's gone. I feel a person appear behind me.
"Nice try. But not." Something hard and heavy hits my back and skids me twenty feet in front of me where I fall in between two buildings in a dark alley. My muscles fail to pick me up and it's as if they're being held down because I can't move. Soon enough, Misty will come over and end it all for me.
In back of me, I hear Misty yelling to the crowd, telling them who I am, no doubt. She knows I'm immobile and she's flaunting it to everyone. "Psst, Rose!" A low whisper emerges from the blackness of the alley and I look up to find Cora crouched in front of me, against a wall's shadow.
"Cora?" My voice comes out scratchy and strained. She shushes me.
"Yes, now listen: me and Ryan both got out of the basement of the building and we'll need you to distract Misty for another five minutes and edge her to the boutique at the end of the street here. Whatever you do, don't touch any of the bronze colored poles on the sidewalks, they're copper and they're rigged. Don't let Misty touch them either. Just follow the white dividing line in the road and when I say to move, move. If you get hurt, as long as it's raining, you'll heal quickly and be just fine. The acidity of the rain helps you recover. Remember, Rose: move." She doesn't give me time to ask questions before she immediately jolts up and sprints down the alleyway.
Rain falls harder and faster, healing my wounds and physical pain. With a lot of struggling, I stand to my feet and walk out to where Misty stands teasing a middle-aged man who looks scared and helpless. Once the crowd sees me, they back up a few steps and Misty turns around, forgetting about the man she was previously taunting. "So she lives."
With my sleeve, I wipe off some of the drying blood from the corner of my mouth and spit a mixture of saliva and blood to my side. "Shut up." The fury inside of me rises to the surface and I guide my arm out to the side and swing it with a force in Misty's direction. I don't know what exactly I grabbed until I see the Cadillac Coupe hurdles in the air, colliding with Misty and crashing into the strip mall shop behind her. Only half of the car goes through, leaving the back end hanging out with a back tire uncontrollably spinning and smoke surfacing from the hood.
On the floor lies Misty with a brand spanking new brown bruise decorating half her face and blood coming from fresh wounds. Let's just not talk about her hair. Every movement, you can tell, holds a piece of anger in her. When the first hand smacks down on the pavement, it's scary. The second one she slams down isn't any less frightening, either. Once she's stood all the way up, she adjusts her poise and glares at me through blue eyes.
So many things are happening at once and by the crowd's faces, I know I'm not the only one feeling this way. It's almost as if they, as a whole, can't decide on how to react at the moment. Some are still excited from the fact that it's me and some are so horrified they can't help but to stay and watch what happens in hopes of being able to tell the story to their kids someday or for kids to tell the story at school and gain their cool points.
Not too much time passes before Misty takes off in a run for me, yelling at full volume and disappears after two fast steps, reappearing to my left and tackling me sideways for a few hundred feet where we both clash and bring up pieces in the untouched concrete. She ends up laying on top of me and quickly pulls herself up and takes a few steps backward, sweeping a sweaty stray hair from her face.
She pants, almost out of breath. "You think you're so cool, don't you, Rose? Because you get me with surprise attacks." She takes a second to take a few breaths. "You might be able to hurt me, but you can't fight everyone. Not everyone's on your side, Rose." She stretches out her arm to the side.
Out from a shop door comes Mindy, mean mugging me and looking perfectly strong. She can't be a part of this. "Hello, Rose." Her arms cross.
"What is going on?" If one of my best friends can turn on me, what else is there I'm being lied to about? She smiles at me and unlocks one of her arms to gaze at her ring.
"Nothing that wasn't bound to happen. Now stand up." Moments pass and I don't do as she commands and she stops observing her ring again to glare at me again in the scariest way I've ever seen Mindy. "I said stand!" I collect myself mentally and rid of all the thoughts that haunt me.
Like, why is all of this happening to me? Where did I go wrong or what did I do to deserve this? Why is no one helping me? Don't they see I'm about to die-their town hero dead and no one's trying to stop it.
When I'm up and standing, Mindy fast strides her way to me and greets me with her hand holding her ring. After the punch is done, it's obvious that's no ordinary ring. The Amethyst birthstone is in there somewhere-I know that feeling. Instead of getting up, I stay down. What's the point? They seem to love me when I'm on the ground so I'd rather just stay here and take it.
There'es no way I could get Misty down the end of the road anymore, it's impossible, we're too far up and she has backup. I have a friend who's in no condition to help me. I hardly feel the heavy rainfall after a while. I become numb to almost all of my senses. Right when everything gets quiet, a deafening high-pitched, familiar screech surrounds us and the Christmas music is overridden by it.
Out of the dark clouds, a figure bursts through and slams into the space in front of me, leaving a gray cloud from the impact. The silhouette is shapely, showingit's a girl and she's crouched down with one hand and slowly stands. The fogginess dissolves, the screeching stops, and from the looks of it through the rain, it's Indigo.
"Okay, Rose, enough of the fun and games, get up." How many times are they going to make me freaking stand? Indigo stares at me until I'm standing erect and then she holds out her hand to the side. "Hand me the Amethyst stone, Mindy." I look over and sure enough, Mindy is digging into her pant pockets and pulls out a purple, sharp crystal-like object. "Goodbye, Thalia."
The stone is drawn backwards.
I guess today's a pretty nice day to die, isn't it? Dark, rainy, streets torn apart, friends to be targeted soon after I'm dead, what else could I want?
I shut my eyes as I feel her body shift in movement and I know she's about to send the dagger-shaped Amethyst stone into my side, so I wait. I wait for a while-a long while, and nothing comes. Taking a peek, I see she's staring directly at me, eyes wide open, still clutching the stone. Slowly, without a breath, she looks down at her stomach and there lies a forming circle of red with a piece of metal sticking out.
"Don't ever touch my daughter." Mom? "Only I'm allowed to touch her like you're trying to and the last time I did that, she was being spanked." Oh my gosh, she managed to save my life and embarrass me at the same time. Way to go, mom.
She stands off to the side in her pencil skirt, matching blouse and short heels, fury in her eyes and posture. Indigo strains to look at my mom, drops the weapon, and doubles over on the ground where she then turns into a cloud of blue dust. "Mom, what're you doing here?"
"Saving your hind-end after your school called saying you skipped." Well if I do live, I'm grounded.
"Mom, you can't be over her-"
"Stop! Stop! She's lying, Rose!" Seemingly everyone's head darts over towards the area the explosion from earlier happened. Limping and covered in dirt and dust is Mindy? I do a double take and see the Mindy in front of me and then back up the road. It's not an illusion. "She makes duplicates of people!" As Mindy nears, I see strings and twine hanging off of certain areas of her body. They must've tied her up.
My eyes meet Misty's and when I take in her appearance, she's clearly flustered and scared. Mindy's feet hardly make it to me before she's trucked from the side by the fake Mindy and they lie on the ground, tussling and throwing punches. I can hardly tell the fake from the real from the new bruises they're giving each other.
Reality hits and I realize I'm able to help them but when I turn around to tell my mom to get away, she's already in a tassel of her own with her own personal duplicate. My eyes search for Misty and when they land on her, the backs up against a brick wall across the street and soon enough, I'm feet on front of her.
For seemingly hours, we stare at each other, waiting for the weak to back down. "This isn't over yet." Misty growls at me with her usual demon-resembling smile. So there's this thing called a toothbrush. . .
For some reason, Misty starts to calmly walk in my direction and I back up as she does. Something tells me not to get too close to her; the girl's a walking shrink. Behind her, coming out from the solid brick wall as if it weren't ever there, is another Misty. Followed by another one and another one. Handfuls of Misty's pour out of the depths of the walls and ground and some even out of thin air. IT's an army of them.
"I'm pretty sure you could take out one person but have you tried maybe fifty or so of that person at once?" Her eyes darken at me along with her voice dropping to a deep baritone that could have only been pulled off with PeepTom. "Didn't think so." All at once and in seconds, the Misty's all transform into Mindys, Zoeys, Moms, Dads, Ryans, Coras and so on. All of the people who are and were closest to me are now standing before me. I know they aren't the real people but the reincarnations still remind me of them and it's that much harder to attack them based on their appearance. They're dead-on alike.
Sporadically, they take charge and various repeats of the same person head in my direction. Thinking quickly, I stretch my arm out to the nearest large, heavy object: a junk food concession stand. In a swift motion, it sweeps over a heap of the people leaving behind only blue dust in its tracks and just as fast as they disappeared, another wave of clones appear out of thin air. Misty thought this through.
This whole time, she was the ring-leader for the ruining of my life and I never stopped being stupid long enough to realize it. Thinking back, the signs were all there. The ring incident, her being missing, the cousin, her keeping her being alive a secret, my cell phone not working. . . She's been working on a stunt like this one for a while, I can tell.
Instead of all of the duplicates targeting me, they all disperse and take on the crowd and anyone else they can get their hands on. At some point I catch a glimpse at some of the clones fighting their own clones; they leave me with Misty.
After we both take in the sudden chaos that's occurred, we make eye contact and to be truthful, she looks way better in the physicality department than I do. I look like a hot mess. Easily, she swoops down on her stride to where I am and picks up a metal remainder from the car we totaled earlier.
"So here's the secret, Rose. The secret you've been dying to know and the secret you're going to die after finding out that I'm sure you've pieced together by now: it's just me-all of this." She maneuvers the car piece around us. "The people, your 'enemies', they're all just me. You see," She licks her crusting lips as the rain falls harder and a Zoey (real or fake, I can't tell) is hurtled into a pile of trash bins behind her. "The day I stayed after school in Ms. Pollock's class to help clean up as a part of one of my punishments, I got a little curious and started mixing some crazy powders together. Well, clumsy 'ole me got scared when I heard her coming back into the room and spilled whatever I was mixing together on my thigh.
"So it burned and whatever other crap and just like you, I started to get these weird symptoms. I began to disappear and reappear in random places. I'd take on the form of other people and objects uncontrollably-I couldn't help it but I finally figured out all I needed to know to control them and keep them in check, just like you. A few weeks later I managed to make another form of what I conjured up the first time and I left it hidden in Ms. Pollock's cabinet." Her eyes bore into mine even deeper with more emotion and her teeth grind as she states her next line. "The same day you took Ryan out to Purple Moon. Remember the peculiar security guard?"
So she was there. She was with me the entire time and who knows wherever else she was stalking us throughout the many months. Misty Harper is the lowest form of life in this world. Lower than the cockroaches. The piece of metal in her hand begins to distort as she applies a great amount of pressure on it.
"I wasn't able to grab it since Ryan decided to help out Ms. Pollock in her last period and directly after school, she had a doctor's appointment. I couldn't let the stuff I made just sit there overnight so that night, I broke into the school only to see Ryan sneaking into the school after hours too. And if you saw your future husband sneaking around, you'd get curious too, right? Right. So I followed him. But obviously not as myself, that'd be too risky. I went as my Uncle Zachary who's in jail at the moment for breaking and entering. I needed that substance-I needed that power you were oh, so willing to take from me, Rose. And that's when I saw you in the lab, taking what was never yours. Ryan saw you too and I got so distracted from you being such a klutz, I lost him. So I did the only reasonable thing: I duplicated and tried to attack but you got away."
Ryan saw me in the lab, Misty put her own blood into prison, Ryan was in the school for a reason I don't know, and Misty was about five different people in one day. There has to be some type of medically correct name for that and it's not schizophrenia-it's worse. Something that probably has to deal with terminal illness.
Right now, I need to not let her words get to me and get her to where Cora told me to go in the first place. Any time wasted is time I could use to save innocent lives. Even if it's going to cost my own.
The car piece lowers towards my face and at any point in time, it'll crush me as it's already beginning to do. The pressure holding to my face is too great to maintain homeostasis right now and I let myself snap. I quickly remove myself from under the weight, get myself from under Misty, and I begin flying and sprinting down the street on the dotted line like Cora ordered me to. Even in life or death, she's still bossy.
A load groan from Misty is heard from my increasing distance and I can see the boutique getting closer and closer in my view. It's not that far away anymore. This might work. It might actually work. The amount of bronze poles become unnaturally large in quantity and it's no doubt the work of Cora and her oversized brain.In the boutique, a small face is peering from the front window, almost unnoticeable. Two of them.
Ryan and Cora. They're preparing.
Less than 500 feet away and Misty catches up. I'm tackled and my mobility is lost.
The adrenaline is gone from my veins and I'm not sure I have any more. Or at least enough to take one more agonizing attack. The rain is letting up and it's now only sprinkling-not enough rain to cause a fast healing process either.
Misty's blows start to numb me. Her face becomes distorted and unidentified objects are having their violent way with the destruction of my already mutilating body. It's too late. I'm done with. Why suffer any longer? My face drops to the side and I see a mortified Cora inside and a Ryan that's now standing up, fist balled. From the looks I can identify on Cora, she's telling me she can't go through with the plan until I move. But I can't move. It's at times like this when you come to a realization that life really is short and there's no controlling how you die or when you die. You'll just die.
I barely lift my hand from the ground to Cora and mouth for her to carry on with the plan. It's no use. Once my vision is almost gone, I much start hallucinating because I see Ryan burst through the glass front and stare at Misty like he's actually doing something significant just as the explosions begin firing off.
Then it stops. All five of my senses have left me and I'm here helpless in the middle of the street.
*author's note: guys. can i please let you know i DID NOT and HAVE NOT read any part of this book since july and that if there are ANY typos, plot holes, things that absolutely make no sense because i'm a lazy bum and didn't even proof read this chapter before adding on, let me know HONESTLY. or if you're confused on something. just tell me in a PM or in the comments. thanks for sticking around :) i'm pretty sure this chapter is uber long and don't worry, there will be an epilogue. or a short short short chapter. okay bye! :)*