Sunday, September 18, 2016, 9:50 PM
Arts District, Los Angeles
"Mistress! The Grand President wantsh to see you, yeah!" the pint-sized demon warned as soon as it flew through the window.
"Senbei, I'm already doing the job she assigned." Marller thought her demonic friend was such an idiot sometimes.
"No, she wantsh you for another job. She's getting trés impatient." Senbei wiggled his body provocatively to emphasize the point.
"Fuck," she muttered. "Not my fault there was a damned rock concert around the corner." Impatient Hild meant angry Hild, which meant pain. Abandoning Hild's tasks meant angry Hild, with similar results.
She looked down at the two men asleep on the floor. "It's going to take forever if we actually have to talk to these freaks." The young one was wearing a blue military coat from a century back, and the other grandpa with the multicolored feather hat... yeah, she'd rather talk to Morisato's senpais.
She reached under her cape, pulled a steno pad out of a pocket, and began to scribble furiously. All she had to do was inform them about the change in scenery and tell them where to go, right? Easy peasy.
"Full throttle, Mistress!" Senbei urged.
"Yeah I'm hurryin'! Gotta finish this job... and done." For a minute, she panicked – what if they couldn't read? But then she looked at both the men, and saw ink stains on their hands. Nah, this would definitely work.
Marller threw down the note pad, the pen, and a couple sets of identity papers for the people displaced into this universe. "Come on, let's scram before they wake up." Both of them flew out the broken window, and off to the nearest portal to Hell.
He awoke first. If the kid had woken up first, everything would have turned out entirely different, but that was how these stories went, he knew. For want of a nail, he had won the race.
But before that realization, he awoke. That itself was strange, as he hadn't slept in quite some time. He lifted his body up to get a better look around the room lit by a strange orange glow. And then he realized that he had used his hands to get up. Now that was even stranger, and in quite a good way. But then, he started to feel even stranger... almost faint. Like he was being strangled.
And then he took a breath. "Oh ho ho!" He could breathe. He needed to breathe. Despite the long odds, the renowned author D. D. Drosselmeyer discovered that he was alive again. Across the room, he saw another man, younger than himself. Even in this dim light, he recognized his great-grandson, Fakir.
That presented something of a problem, since they hadn't parted on the best of terms. Fakir had completely ruined his beautiful tragedy, and then had the gall to be mad at his own great-grandfather about it! Fakir wouldn't have even met that girl in the first place, had he not dreamt up Princess Tutu. What part about "it's better to have loved and lost" did the kid not understand?
Drosselmeyer looked around some more. He was on the second story of a brick building with pipes running overhead. All manner of large steel machinery lay around, totally unknown in purpose to him, and all in some state of rust and decay. And then he found something totally lucky -- a pad of paper, with a gleaming spiral ring at the top bearing a pen.
It was a curious pen too; it felt warm to the touch, like ivory, but was somehow more plastic. Drosselmeyer wondered what the material was called. It had this ball at the end that needed some pressure, but produced a line of smooth-flowing, fast-drying ink. Truly, a marvel, but perhaps one that would take some getting used to.
He took the chance to take care of the business at hand. Now that he had hands again, writing was like riding a bicycle. He wrote a quick sentence on the first empty page he could find:
He raised an eyebrow superciliously as he wrote the word "multiverse". It was not what he was intending to write, but it seemed to be the easiest word to write. The word that wanted to be written there. Something had brought him very far away, beyond a universe. Where was here, exactly?
It took him a bit more writing to figure out that it wasn't a city of literal angels (how boring!) but the nickname of a place called Los Angeles. He hadn't written much about the Spaniards in the past, but he was a great fanatic of El ingenioso hidalgo Don Quixote de la Mancha, of course.
From the window, the streetlights emitted their eerie orange glow, which was more than enough light to see what had been written in the steno pad before he picked it up. It was in a woman's hand, but the letterforms suggested the writing had been more than a little rushed. It was a letter to the two of them, explaining what had happened to them.
"Ho ho, the gods make playthings of us again. This should make for a good story." Drosselmeyer was uncharacteristically quiet as he spoke, though. He assumed his words on the page would be enough to keep Fakir asleep, but, well, pride always goeth before the fall. He had not been alive for a century, and was not about to screw it up now.
A horseless carriage passed by, its lights flashing through the streets of L.A.'s Arts District, leaving a fading trail of red in its wake. Drosselmeyer felt he was probably in a science-fiction story now, which was a good change of pace.
Looking back to the letter, he found a list of places where he and Fakir could take refuge in this new world. A list of tenements that housed those like him, hapless souls thrown into another universe. Or, in other words, he held a map to characters from stories, living all over the world. How could he ever choose just one residence, where there were so much entertainment to be had?
The boy, though, was kind of a killjoy. He had to come up with a way to deal with Fakir, before the kid made a nuisance of himself once again. He didn't want to write a new story around Fakir, because he already had the attention of a god, or perhaps a demon. Writing a new reality around a metropolis would be too much, and having the attention of the Powers almost never turned out well for any character. Nay, Drosselmeyer needed to come up with something subtle. Something already there, just ready for a push. He said a silent prayer to the muse.
As he thought, he saw a glint of light from another passing car reflect off of something on the floor. They were identity cards, made of the same flexible material the pen was made out of. "Fakir Ritter? Dwight David Drosselmeyer?" Someone had been having fun with their names. Long ago, he had adopted initials in his nom de plume, evoking a sense of mystery, while the repetition of "D." evoked power.
But that was somehow the spark of inspiration he needed, the meaning behind initials. He could feel a name calling to him. It was Hap, but it wasn't... it was HAP.
Dead, he could simply peer into the world wherever he liked. But alive, he had to rely on his writing, and on his muse, to peer into places beyond his sight. He needed exposition, so he wrote some.
"Oh ho ho, tele-vision! An actor can be seen from far away. What an interesting world!"
"Of course it was!" Drosselmeyer mumbled to himself, "You have to create a little tragedy to get the most out of your characters." Sure, Hap was a monster, but a monster that he could understand. In his writing thus far, Drosselmeyer hadn't pushed the text. That is hadn't tried to control the story of reality, but simply let the words flow out of his new-fangled ball-ended pen. Now, though, he needed to know his new character's motivations, so he made just the slightest adjustment to the story.
"Aha! This will work out just fine. Fakir almost lost his life when he became a tree, and remembered what he learned! Heh heh heh, I can use that as foreshadowing." Drosselmeyer was quite proud that he was prepared to protect his legacy with a lethal trap, because it led to another conundrum for his heir – another victory made Pyrrhic, another beautiful tragedy snatched from the jaws of happiness.
"What to do, though, what to do. How do I bring these two characters together? Hmm, yes, and Hap has to know that Fakir is the right kind of prey." Drosselmeyer could tell Hap in person, or trick Fakir into revealing it, but it all seemed like such a bother. "Oh I know, a prophetic dream! How will a monster like you react when what you desire is dangled in front of you, ho ho ho?"
Drosselmeyer had a bit of time to take in the view, before Hap would turn in for bed. This city was intriguing, but it was certainly best not to hang around, not with Fakir and unknown Powers lurking about. And thanks to this Marller person, he had a whole list of fun places to go, and he was excited to visit the Americas.
"If the boy really is my heir, then this should be a piece of cake for him. Well, well, I can't make it too easy on him. Suffering builds character, after all," which he followed with a big guffaw.
Finally, he sat down to write a nice little dream sequence. Those were easy to Drosselmeyer, as you can simply jump around to the next thing you want to reveal to your character, with no annoying segues. He used just enough care to make the prophetic dream not rebound on himself. He was planning to dial up his obsession with the girl a little higher, but found it wasn't necessary at all; she appeared in his dreams, alternating between fawning, subservient, and disgusted with him. Hap was already far down the path to his very own tragedy.
Drosselmeyer woke him up, so that Hap would remember his dream. And then once he was sure that Hap had taken the bait, he walked down the stairs and out the steel door to the workshop, leaving it just slightly ajar. It wouldn't do to get caught up in this story, because he had many more stories to start.
Drosselmeyer walked past the other old industrial buildings, some of which had since become studios and apartments for the young bohemians. He passed a building, much like the place where he had woken up, that had been converted into a sports bar, with just enough time to order before last call. But he kept walking, towards the railroad tracks he had seen, to follow them to the heart of the city. And from there, onward to the most fun places to be.
"He he! It's good to be alive!"
Hap parked his sports car, and looked up at the brick-clad building. It was exactly like his dream. Perhaps his host had been here before, but it seemed a little unlikely for a British actor to slum it in this particular neighborhood. Perhaps it was something more, a side-effect, or a new ability unlocked by traveling between the worlds. Some kind of precongnition, he hypothesized.
As a man of science, the null hypothesis had to be the former. And what could disprove it? Something else he had seen in his dream. Someone else. He felt the hard steel of a handgun in his pocket, and cautiously pried the steel door open.
He flicked on a torch... flashlight. His dimensional alternate seeped through into his consciousness, just a little. He looked through the building, slowly, methodically, but it just had a scattering of old machinery. If he had to guess, it was an abandoned metal shop. He wasn't expecting to find someone down here; instead he followed his dream up the metal grate stairs.
He shone the light around, and found the body of a young man in a blue military-style jacket, crumpled against a wall. "Holy shit," he said under his breath. He walked forward to get a closer look, and clipped the edge of an old wrench as he passed. It clattered to the floor loudly.
He reflexively moved his hand to his sidearm, but then slowly let the tension out of his body. The black-haired kid in the corner hadn't even reacted. Was he dead? Or in the process of dying? Hap moved in closer to take a look.
The boy had a pulse, but it was slow. He pinched a little, but the boy didn't wake up. He lifted the boy's eyelid, and shined a flashlight into it. "Totally wasted, eh?" If the kid was this intoxicated, it wouldn't be a reach that he had had a near-death experience. And if he was this far gone, who would be surprised if he simply disappeared?
He reached into the boy's jacket pocket, and pulled out an ID card. "Fakir Ritter. Barely old enough to drive, and you're already like this." He pondered the meaning of faqir for a moment, recalling that it was a kind of holy man. A man who could knew the way for the spirit to enter the next world. It could be coincidence, but all together?
Hap felt he had enough evidence to neglect the null hypothesis. His dream had shown him something, and too many things had come true. If his premonition had shown him anything, it was that it was time to collect data again, and this boy could be the key. "Kid, I think you're going to be a really good subject." There was no answer, but he didn't expect one. "Let's get you somewhere safe." He did not mean somewhere safer for Fakir.
Hap tied Fakir's arms and legs together with an old frayed electrical cord he found on the floor of the metal shop, and lifted him in his arms. He carried Fakir gently down the stairs, and laid him on the back seat of the car. Hap took a handkerchief and wiped the building's door where he had opened it, did a quick check of his belongings, and let the door click shut. The car roared to life, and Hap drove back to Beverly Glen.
The first rays of dawn began to fill the room, soon accompanied by the roar of a passing city bus. In the relative quiet after, a small rustle came from the rafters of the industrial building. A yellow duckling glanced down from atop some a trio of pipes to an unfamiliar floor. "Qua?"
From the way she had woken up, it felt like she had been in torpor, not just asleep. But it didn't feel nearly cold enough to need to rest that deeply, so why? And where was she?
Entchen glided down to the second story's floor, glanced around a bit, and saw nothing that seemed familiar to her. Just some machinery that had a tenuous resemblance to Drosselmeyer's clock tower, the only thing in her experience that came close to this house of metal and brick.
With a hop and a little assist from her wings, she went up to the window, and took her first look outside. What she saw was astonishing: a city as far as the eyes could see, with massive buildings in the distance, and streets and trees laid out in a big grid. She felt like Drake van Winkle, waking up from a long slumber to see how the world had changed.
She didn't have a fancy name like the man from that story; she was simply Entchen, the German word for duckling. It was a funny name during that brief time she was a human, to be sure, but she lived in a funny town. And had a cat for a ballet teacher. Honestly, a lot of weird things happened. And one very good thing.
But where was Fakir? She had been with him, alongside the canal and the windmill, and then she was here. She looked all around the building, running hither and yon, but couldn't find him. "Quack, quack, quack!" she called, over and over again.
Eventually she made her way into the corner of the upper room, and found a brass button. She knew right away that it had come from Fakir's jacket. But the rest of him was nowhere to be found. She sighed with longing.
She could not give up hope, though. No, Entchen would never give up hope. She grasped his button firmly in her beak, and flapped out from the broken window onto the pavement below.
Arts District, Los Angeles
"Mistress! The Grand President wantsh to see you, yeah!" the pint-sized demon warned as soon as it flew through the window.
"Senbei, I'm already doing the job she assigned." Marller thought her demonic friend was such an idiot sometimes.
"No, she wantsh you for another job. She's getting trés impatient." Senbei wiggled his body provocatively to emphasize the point.
"Fuck," she muttered. "Not my fault there was a damned rock concert around the corner." Impatient Hild meant angry Hild, which meant pain. Abandoning Hild's tasks meant angry Hild, with similar results.
She looked down at the two men asleep on the floor. "It's going to take forever if we actually have to talk to these freaks." The young one was wearing a blue military coat from a century back, and the other grandpa with the multicolored feather hat... yeah, she'd rather talk to Morisato's senpais.
She reached under her cape, pulled a steno pad out of a pocket, and began to scribble furiously. All she had to do was inform them about the change in scenery and tell them where to go, right? Easy peasy.
"Full throttle, Mistress!" Senbei urged.
"Yeah I'm hurryin'! Gotta finish this job... and done." For a minute, she panicked – what if they couldn't read? But then she looked at both the men, and saw ink stains on their hands. Nah, this would definitely work.
Marller threw down the note pad, the pen, and a couple sets of identity papers for the people displaced into this universe. "Come on, let's scram before they wake up." Both of them flew out the broken window, and off to the nearest portal to Hell.
He awoke first. If the kid had woken up first, everything would have turned out entirely different, but that was how these stories went, he knew. For want of a nail, he had won the race.
But before that realization, he awoke. That itself was strange, as he hadn't slept in quite some time. He lifted his body up to get a better look around the room lit by a strange orange glow. And then he realized that he had used his hands to get up. Now that was even stranger, and in quite a good way. But then, he started to feel even stranger... almost faint. Like he was being strangled.
And then he took a breath. "Oh ho ho!" He could breathe. He needed to breathe. Despite the long odds, the renowned author D. D. Drosselmeyer discovered that he was alive again. Across the room, he saw another man, younger than himself. Even in this dim light, he recognized his great-grandson, Fakir.
That presented something of a problem, since they hadn't parted on the best of terms. Fakir had completely ruined his beautiful tragedy, and then had the gall to be mad at his own great-grandfather about it! Fakir wouldn't have even met that girl in the first place, had he not dreamt up Princess Tutu. What part about "it's better to have loved and lost" did the kid not understand?
Drosselmeyer looked around some more. He was on the second story of a brick building with pipes running overhead. All manner of large steel machinery lay around, totally unknown in purpose to him, and all in some state of rust and decay. And then he found something totally lucky -- a pad of paper, with a gleaming spiral ring at the top bearing a pen.
It was a curious pen too; it felt warm to the touch, like ivory, but was somehow more plastic. Drosselmeyer wondered what the material was called. It had this ball at the end that needed some pressure, but produced a line of smooth-flowing, fast-drying ink. Truly, a marvel, but perhaps one that would take some getting used to.
He took the chance to take care of the business at hand. Now that he had hands again, writing was like riding a bicycle. He wrote a quick sentence on the first empty page he could find:
Quote:
Fakir, exhausted by his travel across the multiverse, lay asleep, and would not wake until hours after dawn.
He raised an eyebrow superciliously as he wrote the word "multiverse". It was not what he was intending to write, but it seemed to be the easiest word to write. The word that wanted to be written there. Something had brought him very far away, beyond a universe. Where was here, exactly?
Quote:Drosselmeyer walked to the window, and extended his gaze to the western horizon. There, shining through the night sky with brilliance beyond that of thousands of gas lamps, were the boxy skyscrapers making up the skyline of the City of Angels.
It took him a bit more writing to figure out that it wasn't a city of literal angels (how boring!) but the nickname of a place called Los Angeles. He hadn't written much about the Spaniards in the past, but he was a great fanatic of El ingenioso hidalgo Don Quixote de la Mancha, of course.
From the window, the streetlights emitted their eerie orange glow, which was more than enough light to see what had been written in the steno pad before he picked it up. It was in a woman's hand, but the letterforms suggested the writing had been more than a little rushed. It was a letter to the two of them, explaining what had happened to them.
"Ho ho, the gods make playthings of us again. This should make for a good story." Drosselmeyer was uncharacteristically quiet as he spoke, though. He assumed his words on the page would be enough to keep Fakir asleep, but, well, pride always goeth before the fall. He had not been alive for a century, and was not about to screw it up now.
A horseless carriage passed by, its lights flashing through the streets of L.A.'s Arts District, leaving a fading trail of red in its wake. Drosselmeyer felt he was probably in a science-fiction story now, which was a good change of pace.
Looking back to the letter, he found a list of places where he and Fakir could take refuge in this new world. A list of tenements that housed those like him, hapless souls thrown into another universe. Or, in other words, he held a map to characters from stories, living all over the world. How could he ever choose just one residence, where there were so much entertainment to be had?
The boy, though, was kind of a killjoy. He had to come up with a way to deal with Fakir, before the kid made a nuisance of himself once again. He didn't want to write a new story around Fakir, because he already had the attention of a god, or perhaps a demon. Writing a new reality around a metropolis would be too much, and having the attention of the Powers almost never turned out well for any character. Nay, Drosselmeyer needed to come up with something subtle. Something already there, just ready for a push. He said a silent prayer to the muse.
As he thought, he saw a glint of light from another passing car reflect off of something on the floor. They were identity cards, made of the same flexible material the pen was made out of. "Fakir Ritter? Dwight David Drosselmeyer?" Someone had been having fun with their names. Long ago, he had adopted initials in his nom de plume, evoking a sense of mystery, while the repetition of "D." evoked power.
But that was somehow the spark of inspiration he needed, the meaning behind initials. He could feel a name calling to him. It was Hap, but it wasn't... it was HAP.
Dead, he could simply peer into the world wherever he liked. But alive, he had to rely on his writing, and on his muse, to peer into places beyond his sight. He needed exposition, so he wrote some.
Quote:
Hap drove home from a Hollywood party, his blood alcohol just barely under the legal limit to drive a car. His agent had made him attend, since it was a big event and lots of directors and producers would be there. Lots of big roles to be had, if he played it right. It was briefly fun to meet some other celebs, but tiring to play the part all the time. He didn't want another part right now.
They call it method acting, when an actor gets so deep into a role that they start to lose themselves. To truly inhabit a character, all the way down the the subconscious. But what happens when the actor no longer inhabits the character, but the character inhabits the actor?
The moment they wrapped last week, shooting the very final scene, something happened. Brit fell from the balcony, but only because she was no longer just Brit. She was OA, too. And so she had momentarily forgotten what Brit was doing, causing the actress and showrunner to fall and be rushed to the hospital.
And that was when Hap found out that he was Brit Marling's husband, Jason Isaacs. Or rather, on jumping to this universe, he found himself inhabiting the body to the man who had played his role for television.
"Oh ho ho, tele-vision! An actor can be seen from far away. What an interesting world!"
Quote:
But he wasn't just a role, he was a soul. He was Hunter Aloysius Percy, the man who had gone to medical school, who had become obsessed with near-death experiences. He was the same person who had found his test subjects, and designed the experiment to bring back knowledge from beyond the pale. His subjects went to the very brink of death, time after time, and had finally done it. He had finally done it.
They found a ritual that allowed one of their number, Prairie, to escape her captivity, though she called herself OA by then. But the ritual, the dance movements stolen from death, could not only send a person across space, but across entire universes. And proudly, Hap was the one whose experiment discovered it. He considered himself a new Prometheus.
The experiment had not been for the faint of heart, but great tasks seldom are. Hap had no compunctions about how he kept his subjects imprisoned in a cave. He hadn't even killed a single one of them, except of course for the few minutes at a time it took for the subject to collect data. Smaller minds might call it torture, but such a powerful scientific breakthrough, piercing the veil of death itself, was worth the pain of so few people.
"Of course it was!" Drosselmeyer mumbled to himself, "You have to create a little tragedy to get the most out of your characters." Sure, Hap was a monster, but a monster that he could understand. In his writing thus far, Drosselmeyer hadn't pushed the text. That is hadn't tried to control the story of reality, but simply let the words flow out of his new-fangled ball-ended pen. Now, though, he needed to know his new character's motivations, so he made just the slightest adjustment to the story.
Quote:
Driving alone, he pondered what he really wanted, and spoke to himself, "There has to be a way out of this universe!" He didn't know it, but he was just one of a multitude of refugees from other dimensions, and he was just as stuck as the rest of them. But hope springs eternal, and he had a plan. "I've got to set up another experiment."
He sighed, though. In the last universe, he had been a psychiatrist, but here he had no easy access to the hidden pasts of others. He could pretend to be one, but that was an easy way to land in jail; as good of an actor as Hap was now, he was far too meticulous for such a dangerous plan.
It was intriguing, how fast he had taken up the knowledge of the body he inhabited. He had seen Prairie do it in Nina's body, and had managed to extract more than he ever thought possible from Jason, his host. He wondered if he was even human any more, or if he was like her. Maybe by now, she really was OA, and he was simply HAP. "At least I have her." If they were two of a kind, it meant that she would always be his, no matter which universe she ran to.
One test subject, though, wasn't enough. He needed five. Five who could remember what they learned beyond the mortal realm.
"Aha! This will work out just fine. Fakir almost lost his life when he became a tree, and remembered what he learned! Heh heh heh, I can use that as foreshadowing." Drosselmeyer was quite proud that he was prepared to protect his legacy with a lethal trap, because it led to another conundrum for his heir – another victory made Pyrrhic, another beautiful tragedy snatched from the jaws of happiness.
"What to do, though, what to do. How do I bring these two characters together? Hmm, yes, and Hap has to know that Fakir is the right kind of prey." Drosselmeyer could tell Hap in person, or trick Fakir into revealing it, but it all seemed like such a bother. "Oh I know, a prophetic dream! How will a monster like you react when what you desire is dangled in front of you, ho ho ho?"
Drosselmeyer had a bit of time to take in the view, before Hap would turn in for bed. This city was intriguing, but it was certainly best not to hang around, not with Fakir and unknown Powers lurking about. And thanks to this Marller person, he had a whole list of fun places to go, and he was excited to visit the Americas.
"If the boy really is my heir, then this should be a piece of cake for him. Well, well, I can't make it too easy on him. Suffering builds character, after all," which he followed with a big guffaw.
Finally, he sat down to write a nice little dream sequence. Those were easy to Drosselmeyer, as you can simply jump around to the next thing you want to reveal to your character, with no annoying segues. He used just enough care to make the prophetic dream not rebound on himself. He was planning to dial up his obsession with the girl a little higher, but found it wasn't necessary at all; she appeared in his dreams, alternating between fawning, subservient, and disgusted with him. Hap was already far down the path to his very own tragedy.
Drosselmeyer woke him up, so that Hap would remember his dream. And then once he was sure that Hap had taken the bait, he walked down the stairs and out the steel door to the workshop, leaving it just slightly ajar. It wouldn't do to get caught up in this story, because he had many more stories to start.
Drosselmeyer walked past the other old industrial buildings, some of which had since become studios and apartments for the young bohemians. He passed a building, much like the place where he had woken up, that had been converted into a sports bar, with just enough time to order before last call. But he kept walking, towards the railroad tracks he had seen, to follow them to the heart of the city. And from there, onward to the most fun places to be.
"He he! It's good to be alive!"
Hap parked his sports car, and looked up at the brick-clad building. It was exactly like his dream. Perhaps his host had been here before, but it seemed a little unlikely for a British actor to slum it in this particular neighborhood. Perhaps it was something more, a side-effect, or a new ability unlocked by traveling between the worlds. Some kind of precongnition, he hypothesized.
As a man of science, the null hypothesis had to be the former. And what could disprove it? Something else he had seen in his dream. Someone else. He felt the hard steel of a handgun in his pocket, and cautiously pried the steel door open.
He flicked on a torch... flashlight. His dimensional alternate seeped through into his consciousness, just a little. He looked through the building, slowly, methodically, but it just had a scattering of old machinery. If he had to guess, it was an abandoned metal shop. He wasn't expecting to find someone down here; instead he followed his dream up the metal grate stairs.
He shone the light around, and found the body of a young man in a blue military-style jacket, crumpled against a wall. "Holy shit," he said under his breath. He walked forward to get a closer look, and clipped the edge of an old wrench as he passed. It clattered to the floor loudly.
He reflexively moved his hand to his sidearm, but then slowly let the tension out of his body. The black-haired kid in the corner hadn't even reacted. Was he dead? Or in the process of dying? Hap moved in closer to take a look.
The boy had a pulse, but it was slow. He pinched a little, but the boy didn't wake up. He lifted the boy's eyelid, and shined a flashlight into it. "Totally wasted, eh?" If the kid was this intoxicated, it wouldn't be a reach that he had had a near-death experience. And if he was this far gone, who would be surprised if he simply disappeared?
He reached into the boy's jacket pocket, and pulled out an ID card. "Fakir Ritter. Barely old enough to drive, and you're already like this." He pondered the meaning of faqir for a moment, recalling that it was a kind of holy man. A man who could knew the way for the spirit to enter the next world. It could be coincidence, but all together?
Hap felt he had enough evidence to neglect the null hypothesis. His dream had shown him something, and too many things had come true. If his premonition had shown him anything, it was that it was time to collect data again, and this boy could be the key. "Kid, I think you're going to be a really good subject." There was no answer, but he didn't expect one. "Let's get you somewhere safe." He did not mean somewhere safer for Fakir.
Hap tied Fakir's arms and legs together with an old frayed electrical cord he found on the floor of the metal shop, and lifted him in his arms. He carried Fakir gently down the stairs, and laid him on the back seat of the car. Hap took a handkerchief and wiped the building's door where he had opened it, did a quick check of his belongings, and let the door click shut. The car roared to life, and Hap drove back to Beverly Glen.
The first rays of dawn began to fill the room, soon accompanied by the roar of a passing city bus. In the relative quiet after, a small rustle came from the rafters of the industrial building. A yellow duckling glanced down from atop some a trio of pipes to an unfamiliar floor. "Qua?"
From the way she had woken up, it felt like she had been in torpor, not just asleep. But it didn't feel nearly cold enough to need to rest that deeply, so why? And where was she?
Entchen glided down to the second story's floor, glanced around a bit, and saw nothing that seemed familiar to her. Just some machinery that had a tenuous resemblance to Drosselmeyer's clock tower, the only thing in her experience that came close to this house of metal and brick.
With a hop and a little assist from her wings, she went up to the window, and took her first look outside. What she saw was astonishing: a city as far as the eyes could see, with massive buildings in the distance, and streets and trees laid out in a big grid. She felt like Drake van Winkle, waking up from a long slumber to see how the world had changed.
She didn't have a fancy name like the man from that story; she was simply Entchen, the German word for duckling. It was a funny name during that brief time she was a human, to be sure, but she lived in a funny town. And had a cat for a ballet teacher. Honestly, a lot of weird things happened. And one very good thing.
But where was Fakir? She had been with him, alongside the canal and the windmill, and then she was here. She looked all around the building, running hither and yon, but couldn't find him. "Quack, quack, quack!" she called, over and over again.
Eventually she made her way into the corner of the upper room, and found a brass button. She knew right away that it had come from Fakir's jacket. But the rest of him was nowhere to be found. She sighed with longing.
She could not give up hope, though. No, Entchen would never give up hope. She grasped his button firmly in her beak, and flapped out from the broken window onto the pavement below.
"Kitto daijoubu da yo." - Sakura Kinomoto