Jumble nods vigorously. "I won't, and I didn't. Do we know what direction I'm supposed to be looking in?"

I shrug, which bounces Jumble a little. "No idea. Keep your head level as I turn around and make sure you look at absolutely everything."

"Okay, then what?"

"We do it again."

Jumble frowns. "Oh. I guess that makes sense. How slow are you going to go?"

"Pretty damn slow." I glance up at the ceiling and see Jumble staring down at me. "Hey. Can you feel anything weird from the ceiling?"

"Mm-hm." Jumble confirms. "Kind of like a staticky numbness. But it's a little in that direction if you want to be perfectly under it."

She points in the indicated direction, and I carefully adjust until she stops me with a tap on the shoulder. That's the signal to start spinning. I roll my neck to make sure I'm limber enough, then lock my shoulders as I stare directly at the wall. Without moving my neck at all I scan everything that I can see from this position, use my awareness to make sure Jumble's doing the same, then slowly start to spin on the spot. Jumble squeaks exactly once, solidifies the grip her legs have on my torso, and goes right back to surveying.

One full turn takes about thirty seconds. Jumble looks down at me with an expression that asks 'am I doing this right', and I give her a reassuring smile. She grins back and reassumes her position for the second rotation as I bend my knees ever so slightly. I start to turn, scanning the exact same scenery with my exact same eyes. Nothing jumps out at me this time either.

I turn until the couch is in my peripheral vision. Something flickers there. Something person-shaped. Gently rubs my head and insistently points in the direction of the… thing.

"Is it another body?" She asks excitedly. "It doesn't look like a body. Is it done forming yet?"

The paindne-shaped grey blur on the couch angles its head up to look at us. It freezes except for some little shake-shocks that course through it, hands wrapped around… something. It's not the right size for a book. And it's way too small to be a skull. If its hands weren't mostly wrapped around it, maybe I'd be able to get a better look.

"What do you have there?" Jumble asks, beating me to it. "We can't see it if your hands are covering it."

The blur tilts its head down towards its hands, then shakily extends both of them to present us the thing it's holding. The only problem is that the blur looks like it's in two dimensions–a flat object we're looking at from the front. Maybe that's something, maybe it isn't.

I tap Jumble's leg to get her attention. "I'm letting you down."

"What? No, you aren't… oh, you mean literally." Jumble giggles awkwardly. "Yes, right, of course. I'm ready."

I kneel down to let Jumble walk off my back. She hops right off with no problems whatsoever, then hurries over to the blur with absolutely no reservations. I blink in surprise as she rounds to its side, tilts her head, and hums to herself.

"Even over here it looks like I'm staring at a drawing. Just from a different angle." She says. "The poor thing's holding a really simple folded paper flower. And they're… really, really short, Shelby. Short like a child."

My stomach twists in a way that it hasn't yet. Of course there were kids here. But… in the light of this subquest… I really, really don't like where this is going.

"You're sure? There aren't… smaller paindne? There are smaller and bigger painted danes."

I walk to the other side of the blur. Just like Jumble said, the flat plane moves with me–creating a different, but still two dimensional view. The flower in the blur's hands is much more obvious now, and from the way its head is shaped… it's looking at me. Or at Jumble. With just a grey blur, it's hard to tell which way it has its head turned.

Jumble frowns, then shakes her head. "I'm pretty sure the system standardized how big or small we can be. This is definitely a kid. Most likely a little girl from the teeth."

"From the teeth?"

"Mmhm. Come over here." Jumble steps slightly around the couch and motions for me to meet her there. "Boys lose their baby teeth from the molars to the front, but girls lose theirs from the front teeth to the back. And if you look really closely, you can see that her missing front teeth are coming in while she has a tooth right next to them that's just barely poking through the gum line."

I frown and lean in close to try and get a better look. The blur opens… her… mouth a little wider, but I can't make out much of what Jumble's saying. Probably because I haven't seen a little paindne lose their teeth for myself.

This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

"I'll take your word for it." I say. "Does that mean anything?"

Jumble shrugs. "Maybe. You said there was a body under the bed, right? What if they–"

The blur flinches and drops its paper flower. She grabs Jumble by the shirt and pulls her close, silently opening and closing her mouth as the flower tumbles along the ground.

"I-I'm sorry, I don't know what you're…" Jumble stammers, then pauses as grey droplets fall from the blur's face. "...Tears. She's crying, Shelby. Is… do you know the person who hid under the bed?"

More tears fall to the ground. The blur nods. My hatred for the system grows. I grit my teeth and walk away while Jumble tries to comfort someone who doesn't exist in the same dimensions as she does.

"The body." Pearl says. "You know that could just traumatize the girl even more."

I nod. "I'm aware of that. But this screams 'thing we have to do to finish the quest'. Would you put it past the system to force us to make this happen?"

Pearl pauses for a moment, then sets her mouth in a grim line. "No, I wouldn't. Be ready for the most messed-up moment you can possibly think of, then double how bad it could be and be ready for that."

I nearly burst into the bedroom and lunge for the phasing spot. Tingles work their way into my shoes for a second before I sink to my stomach and stare under the bed. The body appears instantly in the exact same spot as I left it. One long arm stretches to reach me, but before it can, I rise to my feet and slowly back away. It follows.

Through the hall. Into the living room. Right up to Jumble, who still has the blur holding onto her for dear life. I nod. She returns it and carefully steps back, moving with the blur until the poor child notices the arm. Soundlessly, she opens her mouth to scream and jumps away. The arm freezes. Fingers scrabble at the floor in desperation, and fleshy impacts echo down the hall as the body uses its elongated arm to drag itself ever closer.

Jumble grimaces, but doesn't say a word. Neither do I. We both stand here, watching with heavy hearts as the body drags itself around the corner–and into the blur's field of view. The blur's silent, open-mouthed scream ends abruptly as she closes her mouth. With what looks like a titanic effort the body raises its mangled, nearly mummified head and struggles to mumble words that don't come out as much of anything.

The blur runs to the body without hesitation. She throws back her head and opens her mouth to wail in a way only kids can, but no sound leaves her strange form. They embrace, as awkward as you'd expect from a should-be-dead body and a two-dimensional blur child, then… stop. Both of them still like a paused movie.

And the construct starts to move.

Jumble double-takes when she sees. "Shelby?!? What's it… no. No! It's going to kill them again!"

I pull out my Class Card and send it a debilitating message. The construct freezes up, its body wracked with electrical jolts, and stops completely. Jumble sighs in relief, but I'm just standing here confused as all hell.

"What the actual… what are we looking at?" I mutter. "A blur and a body with horribly wrong proportions are about to get attacked by an amalgamated construct. And from the looks of it, said blur and body are parent and child who seem to be the 'previous tenants' sparky mc asshole killed on behalf of the system."

Jumble nods slowly. "I'd say you described it perfectly."

"Yeah, but… why?"

I gesture at the scene, and no more words come to me. The blur and the body don't make any sense. There's no reason for the system to keep them around. So they have to be… recreations just for the purpose of the quest. They… they… might be here just for the construct to kill them. So it can give us the last anomaly. We've scoured this damn place and only four out of five have shown up. It kind of makes sense.

Everything in me is utterly disgusted at the idea, but it makes sense. What doesn't make sense is why the construct has pressable teeth and a body that's bigger on the inside. And why the quest made this subquest so damn complicated for what's probably going to be a smaller reward than we got for outrunning the stain.

"Shelby?" Jumble taps my arm. "Should we just look away?"

I stare at the scene for a few long seconds. "We can't. There's a reason this is here, and looking away undoes all of that. Maybe we just… I don't know."

(Message Expunged)

The construct lunges for the pair before the notification clears from my vision. I summon a shield in the split second it takes the plastic bastard to reach the pair and send it between them. It shatters at the lightest brush of the construct's hand without so much as alerting me that it took any damage.

"Shit, no!"

It happens. I'm too slow. My coin is in my hand. The projectile hums against my skin. Both the blur and the body fall into pieces as the construct swipes at them with hands that morph into scythe-like plastic blades. Jumble winces, but keeps her eyes on the bloodless display of violence. I grip my coin hard enough to hurt and force myself to witness what must've happened hundreds of years ago play out before my eyes.

(Event Witnessed)

(Assassination of Someone Who Listened.)

(Not The First.)

(Not the Last.)

(Just One of so Many.)

The message taps onto my vision slowly. As if someone was actively writing it out as it's being sent. I clench my fists as an uneasy sensation worms its way into my gut; this doesn't feel like the rest of the quest. It feels extraneous. Nothing appears as the construct slinks back to its spot and returns to its pose. And the message fades away, leaving an empty spot in my messenger tab as if it never existed in the first place.

I turn to Jumble, who sports a troubled expression much like the one I suspect I'm wearing. "Did you get that too?"

She nods slowly. "It didn't feel like the rest of the messages. Almost like… hm. I can't put my finger on it."

"Neither can I." I sigh as a weight settles in my gut. "Whatever that was… it wasn't a part of this subquest. Either it's a hint to the bigger quest as a whole… or we just stumbled on something brand new."

Jumble starts to nod again, then inclines her head. "Euro just found the last anomaly. Let's use it and see if that gives us any explanation for why we had to see that."

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