Queen's Gambit Chapter 32

Draconic Fortune (Noelle)
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https://pastebin.com/nRP4AD5i
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https://pastebin.com/Z1HejS29
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https://pastebin.com/nc3Jpna3
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https://pastebin.com/ZUzduK8f
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https://pastebin.com/A3JdE5Fu
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https://pastebin.com/w7QUsyeT
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https://pastebin.com/x1cjQ1PA
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https://pastebin.com/gsutf9Xq
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https://pastebin.com/SHG9LpXu
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https://pastebin.com/Lickn82a
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https://pastebin.com/7pWU0VJU
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https://pastebin.com/RNpJC0Hi
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https://pastebin.com/6rDfF0e2
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https://pastebin.com/iiPxkCYk
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https://pastebin.com/d6SzZFE9
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https://pastebin.com/Q3pYfAzV
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https://pastebin.com/ge6wha0s
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https://pastebin.com/gjZipZ52
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https://pastebin.com/CSUXvJk4

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Draconic Fortune

Chapter 20

Horror Show
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Going to sleep didn't solve it.

Noelle woke up to banging and cracking sounds. And a deep, disturbing droning that dug itself down into her marrow. The banging continued, and was clearer the more it went on. The crackling was her window breaking up, due to a large clawed arm with pink scales clenching itself into a fist and smashing it open.

A monstrosity that resembled what Susie's corpse would have looked like if she had one, with what little of Kris' was left after he jumped to his death, grafted onto it. And with every time it hit the window, more of the glass came out and strew itself in-between the shaken-up cats.

"Leeet gooo!" The half-slurred screams from the monster should have woken up all her neighbors. The panic no longer kept her from moving with the monster so close. She threw off the blanket, grabbed the only one of her cats she could immediately see, made for the exit door and opened it to leave as quickly as she could. With Jingle, her black cat in one hand and grabbing her way along the railings with the other, she made her way downstairs. Without looking back once.

She already knew the sky was covered in clouds as it was every day, but what took her by surprise when she sprinted out the front door, was the fog that filled the outside now. It was so thick, she could barely see two crossings ahead as she ran further into the center of hometown.

With some distance from the monster, she took a breather. But after only a few seconds of gathering her strength, she lost her grip on Jingle. The cat sprang from her arms onto the pavement. "Wait, come back!" With light steps, it made its way over the street, down to the church. Whenever Noelle tried to catch up, the cat barely escaped her grasp and rushed ahead a little faster. This chase saw them passing the church, making a turn to the right, right into the graveyard at the edge of the forest.

Or rather she expected there to be a forest, but there wasn't. But starting where the graveyard ended, there was only a cliff. The trees, the grass, everything just stopped all that there was south of the graveyard, was barren rock, the edge of which led down into a bottomless pit. And the rock beneath the graveyard didn't reach far down either. The air was clearer here.

In the distance, across the white fog that shrouded even the area below, she could see a further outside part of Hometown she tended to cross on the way to the city. And this edge stretched all the way to both sides with no end in sight. It was as though everything around her was just a chunk of rock floating above the same abyss she could only see from here.

"Jingle?" The cat circled around a tombstone. She didn't recognize the name on it, but after a few rounds, it stopped. "Pspsps...come here." She tried to beckon it to get back into her arms. Instead of doing that, the cat sat down where it was.

It took her a few moments to realize what was happening then. The cat was melting. More and more of it vanished and became a black puddle on the dried up earth. And to make what she saw even more bizarre, the black liquid moved on its own and reshaped itself into a pentagram. With one of the points pointing her way, making it resemble a head with horns.

"What...what just happened?" She was so dumbstruck by the sight of it all that she took a few steps back. The other conspicuous thing still on the graveyard, was a cross. A very crudely made cross, fashioned not from properly cut logs or bars of wood, but sticks and branches wrapped together with ivy vines. A skeleton hung upon the cross, with its arms bound to the sides by its wrists to make it look like someone was crucified.

But the skeleton itself was an oddity, stuck between two things it could have been and being neither. Antlers peeked out of the top of its skull like those of a deer monster. But it wasn't the skeleton of a regular deer. The antlers were clearly the short and stubby ones of a deer monster, not the large, elaborate ones of an actual deer, and it had hands and human forearms. It was what it would have looked like if deer monsters left behind a skeleton the way a human did.

She was shaken up by a sudden, clearly audible cracking sound. It came from the pentagram. Something about it had changed. There was a hoof mark in the ground in the middle of it, dug right down as if an insane force was applied making it. The kind of hoof mark a deer monster like herself left behind on the ground, but it was so deep, the force would have necessitated being several times as heavy as she was.

She sprang up and squeaked with surprise when she saw another mark crush itself into the ground roughly her way. But giving it a closer look showed the direction pointed towards the crucified deer skeleton instead. A third hoof mark appeared, and then a fourth. Something was leaving them behind and making its way to the skeleton.

Noelle was taken by surprise when it arrived and had to cover her ears, as the shrill scream of an insane woman erupted all around her. It made her head spin and shook the ground. Then with a smaller but similarly terrifying force, something hacked away at the base of the cross, breaking it off and bringing it to a fall.

To make it worse, bringing down the cross and cracking the skeleton's ribcage wasn't enough for it. More hoof marks appeared on the ground and this time, they were coming right for Noelle.

She ran. She didn't even know where to run, she just ran. It all seemed so real, but she had read and heard about how people with hallucinations were completely convinced that what they saw was real. She couldn't go home, she wasn't safe from the monster at home, so she called up her shrink instead. "Why of course I have time for an extra session, why don't you come on by?" This was the only place the monster didn't go to. Maybe there, she was safe from whatever that thing on the graveyard was as well.

"Now to summarize, on top of Krusie, there's now a kind of - invisible - deer ghost as well?"

"So, what do you think this all means?"

"I have some ideas on what it means, but in the end, none of it is real. It's a coping mechanism for things you haven't admitted to yourself, but that deep down, you know very well. Tell you what..." He grabbed a special device for printing out custom receipts. "...let me prescribe and give you some of these right here. They are THE go-to treatment for psychosis-induced hallucinations. Just take three a day, and the moment you start doing so, the big scary monster will go away. As will any ghosts or bottomless pits."

"Wa- wait..." Not long after handing her a jar of pills, he was already pushing her back out of his office and she panicked at the thought of going out there again. "They're still out there."

Doctor Alphonse sighed. "They're in your head. Until you actually take the pills, just repeat after me again and again: None of this is real."

"None of this is real."

He repeated himself just to be sure: "None of this is real."

"None of this is real." She already felt better. At least enough to have the courage to walk through those doors. Out into the foggy world, where Susie's and Kris' merged corpses already waited further down the walkway.

"None of this is real. None of this is real. None of this is real." She repeated the mantra, again and again. But that didn't stop it from stumbling her way. It was okay. As long as she kept walking in the other direction at the same pace, it wouldn't catch up. So sure enough, she headed the other way and once in a comfortable pace, got out the pills. Maybe it was better to start taking them sooner, rather than later.

She stopped to not have an accident with them. When she was done swallowing it, she was startled by how much progress the monster had made catching up with her. Of course they wouldn't work instantly, she had to digest the first pill for it to work.

As she wandered through the city, she got the impression that she was taking less breaks to look around. Gradually, she realized it wasn't her taking less breaks, she was taking any breaks the monster would let her have before it caught up. It was the monster that didn't leave room for as many breaks as much as it used to.

Even several hours later, the creature was still there, continuously following Noelle. She figured that maybe, it wouldn't start working until she had gone through more than one pill. Her hallucinations had progressed pretty far after all. She swallowed a second pill and gave it some time. As time went by, she realized that something changed again.

She wasn't just not stopping and taking breaks. She was marching - pacing through the streets non-stop. Not because she wanted to, but because she had to in order to stay out of the monster's reach.

The last few days, this hadn't been the case. If she didn't know any better, the pills didn't make the monster go away. They made it go faster. They exacerbated the problem rather than to solve it. This couldn't go on forever. There had to be a way to put a stop to this. Still marching to not get caught, she stared at the jar. Well, he did say to eat three a day. Maybe the third time was the charm. A third pill was going to solve it. At least she hoped so.

It didn't solve it. Soon after taking the last pill for the day, Noelle was running under heavy breaths from the walking corpse just to keep away from it. Every step of the way, it was reaching out for Noelle with both Susie's arms and Kris' one arm.

She ran as fast as she could, for as long as she could. But what was bound to happen eventually in her fear and exhaustion, did happen. While crossing one of the many streets, she tripped over the edge of the walkway and fell on the pavement. She was in pain from the fall, but the only thing she could think of, was the creature that soon grabbed hold of her and turned her around. "No - nononono stop! Leave me alone!"

It showed no intent to do such a thing. It responded with the same words it always repeated. "Let go!" All three of its arms held her in a tight grip and straddled the struggling, whinging deer while the limp head began to move on its own, raised itself and got into position to put her through the same moments that scarred her all over again, for a perceived eternity.

Trapping her head in a pillar of flame that shot out of Susie's mouth. The pain, the feeling of suffocation, going through getting the right side of her her face burnt off never numbed her experience of it. Each time felt every bit as excruciating as the last.

"Aaaaaaaaah!" With a panicked scream she shot up. She had woken up back in her bed. She was wearing her outdoor clothes and the clothes were fine. And her face, when going over it with her hand, didn't feel much different from before either.

What had changed since last she was in here, was the apartment itself. The window was still broken from last time Krusie broke in here. Shards of glass lay everywhere. Every metal or ceramic surface was covered in rust and the message 'Why would you do this to us?' was smeared over and over again onto every corner of the walls with human blood.

And she could already hear the throaty breathing and droning from her dead girlfriend climbing up the wall outside her window. She wasn't safe in her apartment any more. She had to run. Run to the only place that was safe. Today, she could stay with her shrink for a full session, since there was an actual regular session scheduled for this morning. She just had to get there.

Krusie gave her no room for rest. Not long after Noelle sped into the fog outside, she could already hear the monster burst through the same front door and run after her.

Noelle ran and ran and ran and ran and ran. By some miracle, she braved the obstacles she came across as she ran by foot from village to town to village into the city and to where she needed to go to get to Doctor Alphonse's office. When finally, those doors slid shut behind her, she collapsed on the floor from exhaustion. All her joints were in pain from overuse, even her arms. The secretaries had to help her up on her feet and almost carry her into the room in the back.

His smiling therapist lay across the leans of his chair, watching with glee as the women placed the twitching deer on the couch. "Good morning. Good to see you appear on time in spite of our recent irregular encounters. How have you been faring?"

Noelle lay there with her face buried in the soft cushions and didn't bother to lift it when answering. "Not good!"

"Why? Did my medication not have any effects?"

That got her angry enough to push herself up and sit upright again. "The pills didn't work! They don't make her go away, she only chases me faster if I take them!"

The goat buried his face in his hand and sighed. "We've been over this, your monster isn't real. Remember the mantra."

"It killed me! Twice!"

"And yet here you are, talking to me."

His responses only egged the already aggravated deer further on. "That's because I...I...Wait...what if any of this isn't real?"

"At last, yes, the monster isn't real."

She shook her head. "No - no I mean everything here. Cars crash into the monster and turn into wrecks, the monster is as real as everything around us. But what if none of it is."

This bothered Doctor Alphonse enough to sit in his chair properly. "Oh goodness, this isn't going in any produc- Look, Mrs. Holiday, let's take a few steps back. Obviously your hallucinations are a way of coping with some kind of discontent. What I don't understand is: Why?"

"What do you mean?"

"Why are you discontent with your life? Isn't this the life you wanted? I mean what did you want at the very beginning? You wanted to be with Susie, you got to be with Susie. You got exactly what you wanted. As far as I understand, this is the life you dreamed of. The self-satisfaction from getting what you wanted led to your inaction and self-isolation. Everything in your life - as you live it right now - is an outcome of your relationship with Susie. So this is the life you wanted. And yet here you are, going to therapy over three times a week with no sign of improvement."

"It - it wasn't supposed to go this way."

"And yet in some iteration, it always does. This life of yours may not be a good one, but it is exactly the one you wanted and it is the one you chose. If you think you could have done better, the only limiting factor here was yourself."

She felt disgruntled hearing him talk about her life like that. "Hey! It's not like my life is over!"

The black goat burst out laughing. "Oh dearie, I think at this point a little reality check is in order. I've long suspected to know where your hallucinations come from. It's a coping mechanism. You aren't happy with your life because it is in an objectively bad and irretrievable spot. You're enduring the consequences of some horrendous life choices and this Krusie thing is your subconscious trying to bring that to the forefront!"

"I meant - things can get better, if only the monster was gone!"

Her shrink shook his head. "Dear, dear, let's examine the situation again. You live alone in an apartment. You have no marketable skills and are much too old to start over in a new field, so welfare is your way to go for the rest of your life. Your personal life is dead in the sand. You're long past the wall. So much so it's not that any children you'd try having at this point would turn out autistic or with a range of defects, you're so far gone you can't have any anymore. No job, no looks, no prospects for children, even if you faced the music, no man would want to be with you at this point."

He leaned forward with an indifferent gesture. "Even if at this point, you turned around, struggled to climb up the hill of betterment, you would only repeatedly trip and tumble down into the fiery pit of failure. Your life is for all that matters, over. Living with the torment of a lonely shut-in, wandering the streets aimlessly, therapy sessions to cope with it and the looming realization that all of it is your own fault."

"Not to mention haunted by the literal ghosts of those whose lives you got in the way of. All there is to your life from here, is a few more decades of just this, day-in, day-out. And if I were you, I would pray to whatever is out there that no such thing as hell exists, because if it does, I'd wager your personal hell would be just more of this. Living alone in the trist, grey streets of a foggy town, hunted and killed over and over by a creature made up of those your well-justified guilt is directed at."

"Shut up!" She shouted at him. "Stop!"

"Please, don't shoot the messenger. You can't blame the devil for holding up a mirror, when it is what you see in it, that draws your ire."

He actually did have a mirror ready right under his chair to pick up and point to her. Looking into it, Noelle ran her hand one more time along the burnt half of her face and took in the greying out blue of her fur. "No - no. It can't be."

"It is."

"What if none of this is real?"

Dr. Alphonse sighed. "Your monster isn't real. Your life is."

"No I mean everything. This is all wrong."

"Well yes, your life has indeed gone the wrong way I'd say."

"No!" She hook her head and became angry over him constantly dragging this away from what she meant. "The monster is just as real as everything around us, but what if nothing is? What if - oh god!"

Strong bangs against the wall, accompanied by a familiar droning of the same two oft-repeated words, preceded the arrival of the hulking monstrosity that has been terrorizing her for the last few days. "Oh god no! The monster! Nothing can stop her!" It no longer had any trouble entering the one place in the world Noelle thought safe.

The psychiatrist sighed. "Again, the monster isn't real."

"It is!"

With a few punches with her dragon claws, Krusie burst the door out of the frame and broke through the wall into the room. With a long step, it entered and crushed a glass table under its foot, littering the floor with its shards. The doctor didn't react to the noise at all, he kept his face buried in his palm. "All right, I'll indulge you. This monster of yours - is Krusie with us in the room right now?"

Noelle got up and backed off to the other end of the room, but she still found to scream at him: "YES!"

"All right all right, no need to get so worked up. Describe it again." Noelle had little nerve to do so, she couldn't get over how disturbing Kris' half-squashed face looked with blood dripping along every inch of where his semi-intact half ended. Swiping statues off the racks, cracking tables and chairs, everywhere the creature went, it destroyed everything in its path. "How am I to know if it's real if you can't even describe it?"

"It's destroying everything here! Look at the table!" While slowly circling the room, dodging the monster's attempts at grabbing her, Noelle made her way to the shattered glass table, picked up one shard and pointed it at her psychiatrist. "How not-real does this look to you? What am I holding?"

"You're holding thin air, the table is fine."

"The table is NOT fine!" The doctor went back to pointing the mirror at her. "No - no, this is all wrong. How can something like this thing exist? If it's destroying everything, it's real." In-between dodging corpses' swipes, she caught a glimpse of herself in the mirror. "It's all wrong, my colors are wrong! I'm not blue! I'm brown or orange."

The goat folded up his arms and shook his head. "Tsk, tsk. No, you've always been blue."

"No! And you - none of this is real! Look at yourself! You're black!"

The doctor tilted his head her way. "Do you have a problem with black people?"

"There are no black boss monsters! Boss monsters always have white fur and white horns!"

Still completely calm, seemingly unaware of the continuous battle happening in his office, the psychiatrist pulled up his wallet to open a set of photos of him, a female black boss monster and several smaller ones. "I'm guessing my wife and children right here are not real either then?"

"No! I'm not buying it anymore! I'm not blue I - the dark world! I was blue in the dark world!"

"Oh goodness, now we're starting with this 'Dark World' nonsense again."

"I'm still in the dark world, aren't I? That's why - " She noticed something. "Susie is pink - that's wrong, she's supposed to be purple! This isn't real! You - you were in the dark world, too! This is all you! This is some weird dark world...magic...thing!"

Now, with a little resignation in his voice, finally, the doctor's demeanour changed. "If I really can't persuade you otherwise any more, perhaps it is time."

"Wait - time for what?"

The shrink got up from his chair, straightened his white bow tie, stepped over the rubble and stopped in the big hole in the wall that was once the door to his office. "Time for us to go of course. Come along, I'll drive."

Noelle didn't pass up an opportunity for a car to help escape from this thing and ran past him to gain some time to brace for the monster's next attack. She lured Krusie in more circles to pass time as Doctor Alphonse slowly made his way to the stairs. Once he had some fair distance and was closer to the ground level, she lured the monster into an opposite corner and made a break for the stairs to quickly run all the way to the basement, where the doctor was already waiting for her with the door to the garage pulled open.

When the monster broke through the same doorframe, the doctor somehow walked away from the ordeal unharmed. She tried hiding behind several cars, but somehow, the monster just knew where she was, without seeing her and stepped onto the cars, crushing the hoods and the rest of their frames with every step. She drew it away from Doctor Alphonse, who got into his own, turned on the engine and kept the door to the other front seat open. "Are you coming?"

When Noelle found a window in-between the monster's attacks, she made a run for it, got in the car and slammed the door shut and shouted at her shrink: "Quick! Let's go!"

The doctor rolled his eyes. "All right, all right. No need to make a fuss." He pulled out of his parking space and with a few concise turns, was well on his way to the surface and away from the creature. For a moment, Noelle sighed with relief at having escaped this thing and being granted a few minutes of normalcy.

That was until they actually exited the garage and got outside. Some of the fog had dissipated, but the surroundings it hid from her had changed as well. The same rust covering all metal surfaces in her apartment, now covered a lot of the buildings and roads as well.

Giant circular rifts were torn into the sky, and through them, loose ends of blood vessels hung over the city with a constant stream of blood spilling into the streets. And where she expected the sun to shine through to make for a credible source of bright light, a darkness 'shone' through the clouds instead. Turning the daylight everywhere else into more of an enigma.

"Now then." He began. "Could you please go back to where you explain where your discontent with your situation comes from? This hollow existence you live here, isn't that what you wanted?"

There were long pauses in-between them talking, partly to keep an eye on the road, partly for Noelle to watch what was unfolding outside. But occasionally she did break the silence before it lingered too much. "No!"

"It's the life you chose. You chose to confess to her and start that relationship. And now she's dead and - supposedly - chasing you through town for the rest of your life."

"That's why I don't believe you any more. This is some kind of dream, isn't it?"

One of the more nearby rifts in the sky had something happen to it. Noelle noticed that something apart from blood came through. It was Susie. Well, not Susie exactly, it was another 'Krusie', a second monster.

"Can't you at least acknowledge that you got everything you wanted? That you aren't just a victim of happenstance? That perhaps, you made a bad decision?" It wasn't the only time another monster would appear. All the rifts they passed had more Krusies enter the world through them, register Noelle's presence and try to pursue the car.

"What's that supposed to mean?"

"I mean you had a perfectly fine love life - and most likely a family life - lined up for you. Within your grasp, reachable without any effort. All you had to do, was to want it. But you threw it away for this. All so you had a new 'daddy' to latch onto, since the real daddy wasn't feeling so well. Don't you think that somewhere along the way, mistakes were made?"

"What are you- "

"You know exactly what I'm asking. Why did you throw away what you already had - for this?" She wasn't even sure where he was taking them, but from the route she could tell it was going to the suburbs around the city.

"It's the twenty first century. I'm forward thinking. It was time to try out something new."

Donnie burst out laughing just before taking a familiar turn onto the roadway straight to Hometown. "'Forward-thinking..." Nothing was said until he pulled in next to the church. He sighed. "Eight-teen thousand years."

"What?"

He went ahead and spun around, walking backwards to face Noelle on his way. "For eight-teen thousand years, the light world has had advanced civilizations, spread across almost the entire world. And a lot longer than that if you include the stone-age. Eight-teen thousand years of trial and error, and you think you're the first one? You really fancy yourself some kind of pioneer? Do you legitimately think you were the first to come up with that? On an entire planet's worth of people who had eight-teen thousand years to try before you? "

Finally, she caught him. She pointed at him and tried to hit his chest with her finger to dig into it. "I knew it! This is all you somehow! This whole place!"

Now that the mask was slipping, the devil rolled his eyes. "Yes, lightner. We're still in the dark world. Welcome to my little horror show. All in stunning 3D and dolby surround. You got me. This place is in fact not Hometown. It is called the 'Vision of Sloth'. Now, where was I?"

He scratched his chin. "Ah right. The part where you think your idea of being with Susie was this 'new' thing. The part where you think pursuing dysfunction is an intellectual achievement. Don't think I didn't pick up this constant air of superiority when you paraded your relationship with Susie around with the few people - myself included - who still bothered to put up with you. We all did. It's part of why you're all alone now."

All the smugness and laughter was now gone and the lingering spite hiding beneath had taken its place. "Something as simple, as self-indulgent as trying to supplant the dive into the scary depths of a real relationship, by pursuing self-gratification with another girl instead. Do you really think you're the first one to come up with that? Do you really think this is this brand new, never-before-seen, groundbreaking, stunning and brave idea that no-one has ever had before you?"

He couldn't keep himself from laughing. "I mean it's only the most overused cliché in ALL of early twenty-first-century entertainment. Do you really fancy yourself that much of a genious for 'coming up' with it?"

They made their way to the graveyard and the cliff that lay to the south of it. The cross with the deer skeleton was back up. Not only that, it was no longer alone. Next to it, a second cross with a second humanoid deer skeleton had been put up, arranged so that the skeletons would hold hands. "No, 'boys are icky' is neither deep, nor complex, nor educated, nor 'groundbreaking', it isn't even in any way mature. It frankly sounds more like getting purposefully stuck at the developmental level of a five-year-old. And it certainly does not make you intelligent, educated or bright. Let alone a genious."

In front of the two skeletons was a third one, a smaller one. Also with a deer monster's antlers instead of those of an actual deer. They were arranged with a hexagram drawn beneath them, connecting the three through one of its two triangles.

The devil didn't stop heading for the edge of the abyss until he was right in front of the crosses. "Don't get me wrong, you may have once been something akin to a genious, long ago. When you were still young. When you had your life together and your future lined up. When you exceeded on a scholarly level and yet - school track team, voluntary organizing of school events, expertise in five different genres of computer games, playing cards, fortune telling, divination, occult knowledge, in-depth knowledge of foreign religions, foreign myths and tales, scripture, modern written fiction, you name it."

He spread out his arms and spun around. "You wanted to know it all, you knew most, and you always soaked in more knowledge like a sponge. That was academic rigor. That Noelle was a genious! What I'm looking at right now, is a mentally hampered cat lady with an over-inflated ego. A sad existence, only kept from completely breaking down in tears through an astounding level self-delusion."

As he went on, Noelle realized with dread creeping up her back, that from in-between the trees north of the graveyard, an army of Krusies came slowly lumbering their way. All with their lifeless dragon heads dangling down from their necks. "Do - doctor..."

She pointed to the monsters, but that only set him off more. "Yes, yes I can see them, stop worrying about it."

"So - so you control them?"

"What? No, you misunderstand what this is. This is a vision of your future, but it is your vision. Not mine. In the scope of this little film reel, I'm merely an actor reading his lines. The producer and director is none other than you. I don't control them. You do."

"B-but...why would they do this to me?" She ran her hand along the scars on her face.

"It's your subconscious trying to bring your consciousness to a realization you already made deep down. It's like I told you in the beginning. Always ask yourself: 'Why are old things old?' Or rather, ask 'Why did old things last long enough to become old to begin with?'."

He slid along the ground on their path to their destination: the edge of the cliff. "Why did all cultures around the world - from the religious traditions of the west all the way to tribal and mob laws in the Caribbean, rarely or not always in contact with one another, just happen to come up with roughly the same ideas and philosophies on how society should be run?"

And once there, he stopped and spun around in place, and the smugness on his face was back with a vengeance. "The answer is because those ideas are good, they lead to good outcomes and thus endure whereas their alternatives are forgotten. In your here-and-now, you look back at eight-teen thousand years of trial and error, an entire planet's worth of it. Yes, you can safely assume that at this point, every possible philosophy or lifestyle has been tried out. The ones that are 'old' are merely the ones that didn't lead to their adherents perishing."

The monsters came closer. And this time, they surrounded Noelle. There was no way out. They reached out for her, grabbed her by her arms and lifted her up. "In all those thousands of years of trial and error, you lightners have long settled on what are good life choices and what are objectively bad life choices."

The Krusies carried her closer to the edge of the abyss and her shrink followed them to keep talking. "So traditional rules aren't some obscure, vaguely evil entity oppressing you just because it can. They are much more like a friend telling you not to jump off a cliff, because they've seen the mangled carcasses of those who did before you. But of course you thank this friend by spitting them in the face and deciding to do it anyway."

When the terrified doe gazed upon the endless reaches beneath the slab of rock that this place was, that mischievous grin appeared on the devil's face again. "You chose to jump off that metaphorical cliff, Noelle. NOW DO IT WITH A LITERAL ONE!" Without further ado, the Krusies struck out and tossed Noelle off the cliff and into the cold windy descent into nothingness.