When I hear the keening, I know it's all over for us. This is unfortunate to some degree, well, it would be more so if any of our actions had any kind of consequence besides continuing to degrade Red's mental state (oh yeah, I'm so sorry that you've acquired unlimited, nonconsensual control over all of our lives, must be such a burden on your feelings), but admittedly at the moment I'm having a hard time giving a shit.

I look over the child curled on the bed with this intense ambivalence. I know better than to pity the thing she's becoming but she tucks in her body around itself and holds her hands to her stomach so tenderly you can almost feel the pain coming off of her in waves. She must think it's coming from her belly, and I have no doubt that it hurts, but I can see where the real problem lies: Adaline's face splits at the edges, a thin oily smile tracing under the chin and wrapping about her neck. Her eyes are cut where the antlers will go through.

I'm not surprised that this is her "sickness". I am shocked it's taken her Veritas several days to activate. She must be mulling it over. Either that or she really can't control it.

It would make sense. I've heard her screaming about it before as she goes.

I put my hand on her head. She puts a finger white as bone against my hand and tries to push me off, to ill effect. Instead, Angel comes in, alone, and plucks my hand off.

"Where's Red?" I ask. I already know he's off searching for Elle with Dylan. It's just fun to screw with Angel, who thinks she knows better than anyone. Plus, their tension has been... well. It's been a few restarts and a pain in my ass.

Angel opens her mouth, reproachfully, and then says, "That doesn't matter right now. I'm here to care for Addie." She runs her hands through the poor girl's hair, then wipes oil from her neck off on the bedsheets. Adaline's face wrinkles with mild discomfort, teeth glinting like tiny, blunted knives in her mouth.

"She looks well tended to," I note.

"Nothing we've tried has done anything," wails Angel, distressed, as she turns on me. "Stop making jokes, you inconsiderate-- bitch!"

I shrug. Angel's fun to rile up, her recent 'fling' with Red has been aggravating, and I think I owe myself an opportunity to push her around. "You just assumed we all had human physiology, didn't you? You have no idea what she is or why she's reacting like this, so you've been popping her full of pills."

Angel's face turns into an indignant scoff. "What's... what on earth do you mean by 'physiology'?"

"Funny. I forgot that despite talking a big game, you have no clue what you're talking about. I could dangle large words over your petty little head all day and you'd grasp at them like a child trying to clasp butterflies in its tiny, grease-covered, putrid hands." My face smirks upwards.

Angel's eyes widen. "You don't understand anything."

"Oh, yes? Acquiesce." I say with a flourish.

Angel stutters. "W-what?"

"Hyperventilate."

She demonstrates. Attagirl.

"I know you act like this because no one in the group likes you, honey, but I'm very stressed right now trying to care for a sick child and I'd appreciate it if you took a step back." Angel pulls herself closer to Adaline, gripping the skeleton-slack body and lifting her up into a parody of a sitting position.

"She's not a toy, Angel. Put her down." I sneer.

"I know how to handle her." Angel looks back into my eyes, a determined presumptuousness bright as the sun burning out through her.

Adaline coughs from her neck. Skin grows outwards, new teeth emerging like fingers from the rift as the skin curls out into a snout, her old face shifted upwards as antlers shoot out of what used to be her eyes. The rest of her body becomes serpentine, covered in a dusting of fur, and her bony limbs are coated with slick muscle. Clothes tear away as she bursts forwards out of Angel's arms, her massive jaws opening and clicking shut around Angel's head with a snap that silences the almost empty room.

Trace, emerging in the doorway, fucking screams.

Adaline's Veritas, whose small, blank eyes, have just reappeared as her former facial area has disappeared from view, fixes me with a hungry look. I have offered myself up to her-- usually by reacting a few seconds too late-- who knows how many times. If being jolted backwards through time was bad, awakening from death is so much worse. My heart quickens with mortal fear.

I shoot a stray ember towards this room's balcony, where it hits one of the mirrors and leaves a pretty little singe mark. Adaline goes after it, snapping, giving me a good two seconds to react. Mimsy dashes out the door behind me... Red's out right now with the other "big kids"... I grab Trace by the shoulder and yell, "Run."

"I could-- she needs me--" Trace stutters, hands shaking as Adaline buries herself under collapsed drapes in the other room.

"Hey, maybe for sustenance, but you're not going to calm her down." I say, grimly. Not that I don't appreciate that an effort was made, but Trace, you can be pretty stupid sometimes.

"She'll be okay, won't she?"

Uh, no. Not in this timeline. Adaline turns in the other room. I can hear her clicking digits against the wall. "Sure." I push Trace towards the door. "Fucking go, okay, kid?"

Mary and Damien burst onto the scene just as Mimsy shifts into her own Veritas, her horns scraping the doorframe and either side barely allowing the massive hellcat. I'm surprised Mimsy's bothering to help at all when she could run away, something she's relentlessly skilled at, but I'll take the extra ten seconds. I stare both the middle kids in the face and point towards the balcony.

"Go find Red," I hiss. Damien doesn't wait for further instructions, thankfully-- he turns into a sparrow and takes off.

"They're... they're dead?" asks Mary, an almost opaque expression dancing in her eyes. Whatever our creators did to Mary, they must have totally screwed her in the head. It's almost hilarious when it isn't pathetic or an endangerment to the whole group.

"Go. Find. Red." I say. "He has powers none of you could even dream of that he only tells the big kids about. His Veritas will come in and absolutely deck Addie."

Mary's expression completely reverses. "He what?"

"Do you want to see his Veritas?" I ask.

Mary is already out the balcony as a falcon.

Now all the bystanders are out of the way, I can take care of business. The meat shield gives out around here-- Mimsy might barely fit through the doorway, but Adaline wedges her out like it's nothing. Mimsy flies towards the wall and goes through it, plaster raining down around us as her body lies crippled in the next room over. She begins to stain their carpet red just as I hear yelling in the distance. I'm already prepared for several humans to die, which doesn't matter, because Red will save them too.

Hate waiting around for him. Hate that we have no other way to deal with this. Hate, hate, hate... spite fixes me in the eyes, its teeth loosely bound near the edges of the maw, like its mouth is a great tear in the fabric of its flesh. It has giant black antlers, covered in fur and blood, and a long body like a weasel. Two long, rabbit-like ears twitch as they take in all the noise, and its nose quivers delicately, still leaking oil. It is her, down to every murderous detail, and I can see her in each trembling step. All the brutality is a cape she wears perfectly about herself, just cloaking her human form.

It lunges. I punch it under the jaw and manage to make it bite its own tongue, which causes it to keen again (it makes this awful ayyyyysss noise, human pitched down by several octaves) before it rounds on me. I narrowly avoid its jaws by ducking and rolling to the left towards the huge hole in the plaster. Mimsy still hasn't recovered. Adaline can hit me once and it's over, but this thing will not go down until I am dead.

To put it bluntly, I am outmatched. No-- right now I'm outmatched. I know someone a lot stronger than I am who'd be happy to help. Slowly, I recede back into my own mind, letting my second self come to me. It's almost like speaking to another entity, a great serpent writhing in the back of my mind, its body made of electric smoke and poison. Its pale eyes watch me like Adaline's, its irises lighting up in rings, and I sense its tongue slide across its scales, as if wiping blood from its maw. The visualization grows more solid until the beast goes through me, lunging to strike and merging its consciousness with mine just before I would, hypothetically die.

As if I could.

Blue fire smoulders in my mouth. Adaline hits a hard row of scales rather than streamer-soft human flesh and I retaliate by shooting a fireball where she stands. The beast scurries out of the way, and as I rear up to my full height my horns hit the ceiling. I push through this, breaking the next level, and sense more meaningless clay fall around me. If only to tear this whole building down. I set the room ablaze. The architecture is practically crumbling around us already, wavering dangerously in the onslaught of heat. My tail, which is to say, a good quarter of my body, sweeps the back of the room and hits a small lump. It could be furniture. It could be Mimsy.

Hunger fills me. Adaline goes for my chest and fails, again. I lean down to her level and let forth a long draught of smoke so hot it burns cold, might being the only language understood between beasts such as ourselves. I can hear humans screaming through my almost negligible hearing. I have my teeth around Adaline's limp body when a familiar sound pierces the wreckage. "Kali! Stand down!"

Mary's Veritas is guarding him with two swords. It's a shame, really. All of that power could be put to better use, but we're all stuck here looking after the weakest.

"AM I YOUR DOG, RED?" I call down to him, well aware that he can hardly grasp the magnitude of my speech.

"Kali," he cries. "The building is going to fall in."

Course. I might have gone overboard. I can't regret that. I can't even regret. I call myself down, walking through the ashes, Veritas strength still draped around me. I can feel all her anger receding back into the apathy that holds me like shackles, but it has to be enough to speak with him one last time.

"I took care of it," I tell him, making sure that he can still see the point of my teeth. "I took... I..." I begin coughing from the smoke. I want every bit of safety my Veritas offers me back, but I'm standing in a burning room and we're about to restart. I look weakly towards Mimsy, and Red practically collapses into me.

There is an unrestrained desperation in his face that is almost appealing to the part of me that passionately hates him, but his grip is so weak and his ash-covered hands and bloodied face betray his lack of invincibility. His eyes glow gold, which reflects in the deep pools of water and building around his eyes. "We're in a situation, aren't we?" he says. "K-Kali, you know... the kids said that my Veritas had some 'special power'. What did you mean by that?"

Our room is crumbling. Adaline's body goes down onto the next floor. The people who weren't taken out in my rampage, likely just by the shifting of my giant serpent body, are training guns on us. This is the kind of bullshit only a time traveller can afford. "Red. Can we talk about this later?" I ask. "I don't know if you've noticed, but--"
Panicking humans are fleeing. Down on the next floor I hear a baby scream, which is one of the few times in the last few months I've visibly flinched during the wreckage of... well, us. "Kali, everything's going to be fine." Red's voice is honey-sweet. I hate when he gets like this just as much as I'm relieved, because it's when all pretenses drop. He will lie straight to your face, manipulate you in any direction, say anything to pry out information... when a timeline is screwed, Red could give less of a fuck. He watches Mary go down with a blank, pitiless expression, then looks back to me, surrounded by flames. "Just tell me and I'll fix everything."

"I don't know. I was just hoping you might." Crocodile tears roll down my face. I grab him and begin to sob, "Red, we can't lose anyone."

He cries too, because he's a disgusting cheat. I want to bite his face open. "I know," he says. "I'm sorry."

Things go gold. I shrug and let the timeline take me, heart broiling with rage-- the worst part of it all is that I know better than anyone that he's telling the truth.