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Memory Death The good news was that not many people at all cared about Override’s armor suddenly disintegrating. Someone even offhandedly remarked “Oof, I’ve been there before. At least you were smart enough to keep some clothes on underneath.” The bad news was that Arcturus was not one of those people. She had had her phone out before Override’s suit had even fully disappeared, ready with her camera. She said, “I’d been wondering…” as she scurried off, finally leaving Victor alone for the time being. Perhaps her leaving was good news again, so, to round out the whole good news/bad news sandwich, the one of the reasons so many people weren’t looking Victor’s way was that something worse had happened to someone nearby. Someone had collapsed. “Heat must have gotten to them,” was the first comprehensible thing somebody said about the situation. Even if it was not true, people were acting like it was, clearing some space (even in the crowded environment!) and calling over one of the more wind-based fliers to keep the air circulating. “Ugh, he’s even got a nosebleed, too,” someone said. “And I thought I was having a bad day. Anyone got any tissues?” Also, perhaps less importantly but still notable, someone else asked, “Is that guy one of yours? I don’t recognize him. Where’d he come from?” Prophecy at 1420Mhz Thessa and Tidebinder made good time on the return trip to Project Rubicon, though they were slowed, of course, by Tidebinder constantly working, pushing the steam away from the pair. As she was quick to explain, she’d interpreted “away” as “past the Shimmer,” but also “It’s easier than you might think. It’s easier than I thought it would be, anyway. Once we’re on top of Project Rubicon and I can see more steam at once, that should take care of most of it.” As soon as she said those words, though, a lone figure stepped out of the fog. Tidebinder recognized it immediately, and her face hardened. “Back from the dead, huh? We put so many cape powers into that thing -- basically every bit we could scrape together. Of course you would sneak yourself in there as well.” Caesar’s ghost said nothing. “I knew the Project was going to end like this from the moment you first proposed it. I could have said something and I didn’t, but I’m not sorry. You wouldn’t have listened anyway. How’s that for respect for the dead?” Caesar’s ghost did nothing. Tidebinder used her power to throw the ghost back into the fog. She turned to Thessa, noticeably more relaxed. “We’re almost there, I believe. I’m ready to put this whole day behind us.” Blood in the Labyrinth Atropos put her hands up in social self-defense. “Hey, first of all, if this is an ‘I don’t think I’m smart enough for detective work,’ complaint, that sort of thinking just isn’t acceptable, okay? You’re plenty smart. That said, second, I mean, we can guess what happened to them. They were fighting and then the fog came in and that introduced even more things they had to fight and they got overwhelmed. Simple as. So you’ll probably get what you want out of this. And if it is one of these fog doubles we’ve been hearing about, like, you’ve probably got more experience than anybody with these things. Why wouldn’t we call you up?” The two made their way to the kitchen through the still-open staff door. It was a bit of a hike through there to the other side of the casino, where the restaurant was, but the back hallways were well laid out and it wasn’t like there wasn’t signage. When they made it, Atropos took a moment to take out her knife and give it a few flicks -- no fancy tricks this time, only what was necessary to open it and keep it ready. Then she looked back at Sibyl, nodded her head, and pushed open the door. The kitchen could hardly be called a kitchen anymore. Steam leaked in though the outside door, giving everything a hazy quality to it, but even through that blurry filter, one could see the lack of functional kitchen appliances. One could see the lack of utensils. One could see the massive hole in the floor where it seemed all of these things had disappeared to. Floating over the exact center of that hole was an oddly-shaped doppelganger. It was not oddly-shaped in that it was not humanoid -- the pairs of arms and legs were still recognizable in form and location -- more that it was a blockier form, like the steam was not only replicating a person, but whatever was surrounding them, like ill-fitting clothes or some sort of mechsuit. Atropos couldn’t help but laugh. She might have made a snide comment, too, if the steam-thing didn’t raise one of its arms and aim a repulsor blast right at the pair.

Carmen shrunk away as Brian snapped at her. She had been expecting him to snap at her for being useless and having made no actual progress - she would disagree and say not finding a ghost anywhere was progress towards leaving this place! - but that wasn't the case. She wondered if his own searching had turned up nothing and, with how insistent he was on finding someone or something in here, was getting angry at her. As such, Carmen did as he asked, not wanting to unjustly yelled at again, and meandered about and away from the man for a few moments. She wanted to leave as fast as possible but he would probably yell or shout at her if she just exited on her own, and so she needed to take a different avenue to get him to leave.  "S-so, do you know where we should look next?" Again, Brian jammed his hands in his pockets and shifted one of his hips as far away from Carmen as possible. "I said leave me alone, didn't I? What, you want to strip search me or something? I just came down here to make sure you didn't fuck anything up." "Eh? Ew..." Carmen's face scrunched in genuine disgust as the notion of strip searching him came up, and then shrunk back once again as Brian verbally retaliated at her. She didn't meet his eyes, her own darting from side to side, as she felt the need to put up the barest defense for herself. "Well, I uh...didn't mess anything up." The girl paced around ground floor as she attempted to keep the appearance of searching, without actually attempting to find anything.  "B-but I can't find anything s-so...do you think we should leave this place?" "Yeah, sure, whatever." Brian said, continuing to match his rotation with Carmen's meandering. "You leave and go tell Shiki we didn't find shit, and I'll stay here. I'll pack up or something." The girl's eyes lit up as Brian seemed finally willing to leave this haunted house, and immediately made an about face as she began to make her way to the door. The place had been nothing but dust and cobwebs and she had wanted to leave since the moment she got here. More than normal, too! She was just glad that Brian finally agreed to -  "Huh?" The girl stopped in her tracks, frozen in place as she realized something was off. Brian had been adamant about there being someone here in need of saving, a real person and not a ghost, and had even called her crazy over it! He wouldn't so wishy washily tell her she could leave without first calling her crazy again and finding some way to defend the fact that they had found nothing. More than that, though, she had been ignoring the elephant in the room this whole time.  A voice that emanated from Brian that reminded her of Cathy Langhorne, a girl she knew in middle school who had taken to being a menace in Carmen's life because she had spoken every so often to a boy that Cathy had liked. A truly unnerving monster. Yet Brian didn't seem to notice or care about it. Something was wrong. And so, struggling to push her voice out her mouth, the girl had finally asked,  "um...by the way...did you ever find that um...person?" "What person?" Brian snapped. It took a moment's consideration for him to realize what Carmen was talking about. "Yeah. It's fine. I figured it out, no thanks to you. I said you could leave now, right?" Carmen started to tremble, tapping her fingers nervously together, as she realized her fears were both rationale and sensible. Again.  "O-oh...so was it...th-the ghost, then?" Brian brought both hands to cover a single portion of his hip, an even more defensive stance. "What can I say to make you get out of here? I said it was fine! Scram! What part of 'leave me alone' didn't you understand?" "S-sorry! I'll be uh- " the girl turned away and didn't look directly at him. Brian was a jerk. This was a fact. However, even this level of aggression and hostility was unusual even for him. She hadn't done anything worth being yelled at about, and couldn't help but feel like if she didn't ask these questions he would have normally yelled at her for being a useless, cry baby, scaredy cat who couldn't find her way out of a bathroom and needed to be dragged along to do anything. And even if she didn't know how much he cared about saving other people, he at least always forced her along to go to the end of a job. Even fake Brian was more supportive in that endeavor than he was being right now. So, she figured that the ghost that was yelling at her was the culprit.  Carmen considered leaving and getting Shiki for help, but the ghost really wanted her to leave so she could only imagine something really bad happening to Real Brian if she went along with it. The girl's muscle's tightened as she realized she'd have to figure out something all on her own. He didn't seem interested in talking and she felt like he'd charge and punch her if she asked any more questions, which was definitely no something she wanted. She glanced over and couldn't help but notice how he kept holding onto his pants like someone who had forgotten their belt and was desperate to keep their trousers from falling off at any cost. All of this struck Carmen as incredibly suspicious, and the girl felt more and more like she were she to leave something terrible would happen to Brian. And then something terrible would probably to her. If nothing else Shiki would probably get angry with her and the girl wanted to deal with an angry Shiki even less than an even more than normal irritable Brian.  The girl's eyes darted to every which direction they could. Her breathing hastened. Her legs trembled and her fingers clenched the flashlight tighter. She hadn't made a move yet but she sweated like she was under a 90 degree, clear skied sunny day. She wanted to leave. "I'll...just..." She didn't want to leave haunted by a ghost. She didn't want to make Shiki mad. And she didn't want to leave Brian to die.   "Arrrrgh!" In a manic frenzy, like a sobbing warthog, Carmen charged Brian and threw her entire body at him to tackle him. "Stop telling me to leave!" 

Tonight I dreamed i was at a card shop looking at all the new releases and saw that Pokemon released Commander cards (like in the commander format of MTG). They were all black with a C instead of the HP. The rules was that you started the game with you poké-commander in a special spot, it cannot be attacked and cannot inflict direct damage to other pokemon. Instead it only have moves with passive/supporting ability. Also, you had to discard the energy cost to use these moves (a bit like XYZ monster in ygh).  Anyway I tried to represent what I saw in my dream (I only saw these two cards and I don't know if Commander could evolve)