Phantom Violet Chapter 1

 CHAPTER 1: INTO THE WEEDS

She made it about a week before her first attempt to leave, and after that, it was a little over two weeks before she decided that her best bet was to request a return. The research done in her first week after awakening confirmed pretty much all of her worst fears; the experiments in exit methods that followed only made things even more miserable by showing that she was completely incapable of permanently leaving. So she decided to try to go back to the Atrium the same route it had used to send her home.

The spring grass was damp with dew from the rains during the day, and it smelled familiarly, soothingly fresh. She flopped first to her knees, then face down onto her stomach. Lying prone, she turned her head to her left; the first clovers of the season obscured most of what could be seen by her tired, cold gray eyes. Her straight dark brown hair looked even longer and stringier due to both her physical position & the dim light of the moon.

After laying still for a moment, she bent both arms so that her hands were parallel to her face. Slowly, deliberately, she dug her fingers into the wet soil; no matter how much she flexed them or how far into the turf she pushed her hands & how tightly she gripped, all she felt was dirt and root clusters. She jerked her hands free in annoyance, scattering debris into her hair. Finally, after another long frustrated pause, she sat up and stared pointedly at the ground, a silhouette of her form left by the grass she had unwittingly crushed.

“Seriously?” she said. “You spit me out here, and you won’t let me go back?”

Silence.

“There better be a good reason, cuz right now I don’t have any reason for gratitude.”

Silence.

“I don’t get it. I thought we were done.”

Still more silence. Finally, as she sat there peevishly waiting for the ground to respond, she heard a sound.

“Maow?”

She jumped slightly. “Oh, it’s you again,” she said to the cat that curiously approached her. He was a smaller cat, gray with white patches on his face, chest, front paws, & tail tip; his left ear had been tipped, and he sported heterochromic eyes, one amber & one blue. She held out her hand and let him headbutt it. “Well, at least I have you know & then…,” she said, ending with a heavy sigh.

Slowly, she got to her feet. The outfit she wore had been given to her by the Atrium upon her awakening, but it wasn’t what she would have chosen for herself & hadn’t been worn by anyone she knew. It probably would have been cute at one point, on someone else - a yellow sweater with vertical black, white, & yellow striped sleeves and faded black denim overalls - but it was all she had to wear since arriving. She knew that she couldn’t be fit to be around other people at this point, and even when she was, she looked rather conspicuous. Worse, her last failed exit attempt resulted in one of her slip-on shoes getting washed away in a flooded creek, so she had discarded the other in a fit of frustration. If it wasn’t for social training and ingrained modesty, she probably would have just resorted to nudity for lack of better options.

She walked slowly, damp grass & clover on her bare feet. This was a park, so there had to be a tall enough tree or even a bleacher stand that could afford her a better view. As she searched, the cat walked alongside her; he had been a near-constant companion to her since awakening back in the Atrium, which baffled her since by all appearances he was a totally normal cat. But at least he gave her some steady company, and that was comforting.

Finally, she saw something that would serve her needs. The stand around the park’s lone baseball diamond had been rebuilt in her time away; what had been a nominally closed ruin with concrete that crumbled under visitors’ feet was now a sturdy & well-kept new structure, with far more seating and better accommodations. She broke out into a sprint, steadily gaining momentum. With a series of deliberate jumps, grabs, & swings, she made her way to the top of the stand’s roof. Now she could survey her surroundings slightly better and determine her next move.

“Doesn’t really look like anything’s changed,” she said to herself. “But I know that’s not true… Maybe I can go to the mall, that looks pretty intact…”

“Maow?” the cat said from the ground by the stand, staring up at her with a baffled & alarmed expression.

“Don’t worry, I’ll take you with me,” she said to him. “If I’m gonna be stuck here, I don’t wanna be alone.” She jumped down from the roof, landing lightly on her feet as though hopping from a low step, then looked at the cat again. “You wanna follow me again, or should I carry you?”

The cat trotted over to her and stretched to rest his front paws on her upper legs, looking at her expectantly. His soft pads felt cool to the touch, which she found oddly calming. She smiled slightly and picked him up into her arms, where he began purring.

“Let’s get going,” she said as she started towards town. “See if we can come up with a name for you, too”

—---------------------

Some time in the late 1970s, three small New Jersey towns - miniscule suburb Independence, largely commercial Carrington, and semi-developed farmland Muller’s Mill - decided to pool their resources to compensate for the areas where they were individually lacking. This became known as the Triboro Agreement, and it created a new “town” where each of its components was gradually treated more like a neighborhood. While roughly the same in population as the nearby college city of Teabury, it covered an area more than twice its size. Naturally, like all towns, the three had their changes over time; businesses were built, shuttered, and replaced; populations aged, ebbed, and swelled; schools were consolidated, reorganized, and rearranged. But on the whole, the Triboro Area was a steady, predictable place.

The lone exception to this steadiness was the Lambert Foundation. The Triboro Area and Teabury were located in what was found to be a “weak point” between planes of reality, one of many throughout the world, and the Lambert Foundation was in charge of monitoring it & containing anything strange that might have tried to come through the proverbial cracks. It was first discovered in the late 1990s (although once the Foundation set up a research facility it was determined to have existed for at least 250 years prior), in relation to a string of incidents considered part of a much wider event. The Foundation tried to take care of the towns near their research points, as much financially & socially as in regards to protection. While they were considered to be ready for any sort of strange disturbance, the past decade had been mercifully peaceful for the Foundation employees and thus for the Triboro.

Naturally, that couldn’t last. As much as Seth Newman wished it wasn’t, that was just the rule of things. He had been part of the Lambert Foundation for over a decade, largely thanks to his late stepfather; strings had been pulled to get him a comfortable paperwork job that would always be needed, one that even had its own small office, and for that, he was grateful. But even though Seth was a lean man in good shape for his early 40s, he wasn’t build for Foundation work in other less tangible ways. More than anything, he wanted to be left alone to process his reports. He didn’t want to be pulled into petty spats between field agents or negotiate with them about what information was or wasn’t optional, and he especially didn’t want to be dragged out into the field. He was here for data analysis first and foremost.

When the branch director knocked on the open door to Seth’s office, he knew that was about to change in a very unwelcome way.

“Newman, can I see you a second?” Alan Vernon said. His thick frame, one more fitting for a former football player than a cross-dimensional researcher, filled out the doorway. His demeanor was his usual calm default, as steady as his salt & pepper crew cut. “I need you to see something.”

Seth looked up from his notes and his dual monitors, his tired hazel eyes shielded by his computer glasses. His long hair was still the same near-black that it was in his youth, worn in its usual tidy braid that ended just past his shoulders; however, the edges of his facial hair were thick with gray overtaking the darker whiskers, hence his decision to wear it in a style somewhere between a soul patch & a goatee to hide it. He carefully removed his glasses and looked at Alan in curiosity.

“Is it about the regional review?” Seth asked.

Alan sighed and shook his head. “No, it’s a video that came to us,” he said. “I think you need to see it.” Alan’s muted demeanor signaled to Seth that this was not up for negotiation. He walked over to Seth’s desk, handed him a tablet, and then turned to quietly close the door. Seth’s stomach started to sink. “Open the videos. It’s the newest one,” he said as he stood across from Seth.

Seth did as instructed and found the top file, dated for three days prior. He tapped it to open the paused screen; a view of the train tracks that ran through the region was visible, at least as much as it could be for having been filmed in the middle of the night.

“This is bodycam footage from a transit officer,” Alan explained. “They were responding to what they thought was a trespasser strike. But obviously, if we got it, things got… strange. You’ll see why I wanted you in particular to see this, but I’ll warn you, it gets a little gross.”

“Seth sighed. “Yeah, unfortunately, I’ve seen a trespasser strike before,” he said. “Not pretty.” With that image unwelcomely recalled in his mind, he pressed play on the video.

“That’s the last of the passengers,” the officer wearing the bodycam said, his footsteps loudly sounding over his words. The only light sources were the interior lights of the stopped commuter train ahead of him and his flashlight. “Hopefully they didn’t see anything.”

He raised his flashlight towards the front of the train. Another officer was standing and facing it, while the driver was seated in the doorway. The second officer looked towards the flashlight, shook her head, and held up her finger before returning her attention to the obviously shaken driver. The bodycam bobbed before spinning away from the train.

“Poor guy,” the bodycam officer said, clearly a man prone to talking to himself. “I’d probably be upset, too. Looked like a young person this time…”

The flashlight’s beam fell onto the view of a large bluish sheet, with a few smaller ones peppered around it - the messy aftermath of a “trespasser strike”. At least the darkness hid any blood or viscera from sight, and the officer seemed to be avoiding it as well. Whatever was under the largest sheet wasn’t too big even before the inevitable end result of hitting a train, judging by the raised mound underneath it. The only sound was of the bodycam officer’s footsteps again; nothing else was moving, and like most recent evenings, there was no wind to be had.

As such, when one of the smaller sheets started to inch towards the larger one, there was no explanation for it. At first, it could have been a trick of the eye, but it moved with such deliberate intent that it had to be real.

“What the–?” the officer said.

Then the other smaller pieces moved towards the larger one in the same matter. Once they reached it, the smaller ones flattened while motion could be seen underneath the large sheet - first writhing, then very slowly rising.

“Holy shit!”

Finally, the mass under the sheet stood up enough to toss it away. The figure wasn’t clear due to the shaking flashlight beam, but they appeared to be a young woman - long hair obscuring her face, skin appearing pale due to the dim light, dressed in outdated clothes with visible pops of yellow, wearing socks without shoes. She didn’t seem to notice the bodycam officer, instead warily surveying her surroundings.

“What the actual fuck…” the officer said in quiet yet audible terror.

The figure abruptly struck both of her thighs with her fists. “Dammit!” she yelled.

“Hey!” the officer shouted. For the first time, the figure looked at him. “Freeze, right there!” He was trying to sound firm despite a clear quiver in his voice.

At this point, she stared directly at the officer, slightly startled; while still shaky, the light showed more of her face that wasn’t obscured by her hair, making her expressions easier to read. Her expression quickly went from surprise back to annoyance.

“Sorry, I gotta… try something else,” she said, barely audible above the officer’s ever present footsteps.

Before he could react, the figure turned around and kicked off to run into a sprint; however, she moved at an inhumanly fast speed, seemingly vanishing into the darkness with a single step. A small spray of dirt and gravel rose up from where she had been standing. The flashlight waved around desperately, both surveying the former scene and searching for the figure’s new location. The blankets still rested on the ground in a messy heap.

“What the fuck, what the fuck…” the bodycam officer muttered, before the recording abruptly stopped.

Seth stared blankly at the tablet screen for a moment. Finally, he placed it gently onto the desk and looked up at his boss.

“... Zombies?” he asked uncertainly.

Allan shook his head. “I don’t think so. Here, take a good look at the subject.” He picked up the tablet and opened another program. A close-up of the figure’s face from when she looked at the bodycam officer had been captured and enhanced to be more visible. “Here. Best we could do.”

Seth took the tablet again and immediately froze, staring at the picture with a twisted cold feeling in his stomach. The style of clothes might have been wrong, the skin tone might have been pastier than he remembered, and the hair might have been messier - but he could still recognize her. Same facial features, same sharp gray eyes… A face he hadn’t seen since the evening of March 5th 1999. He looked away for a moment and closed his eyes, thinking to reset his vision & double check that he wasn’t imaging who he saw; yet when he looked back, the image was the same. He swallowed hard before he spoke.

“Val…,” Seth muttered. “That… that’s Val.” His voice gradually grew louder, his words faster, as his thoughts processed. “It could be Jenn, but only if she grew out her hair and if she has freckles, can’t really see, but right now that-... I mean-... I think that’s one of my-... my stepsisters…”

“That’s why I brought this to you,” Allan said, taking the tablet back from Seth. “The database found a match, since Arthur recorded them both as part of the Flower Girls incident, but I wanted to loop in on this.” He leaned against a low filing cabinet and looked at Seth with a firm, direct expression. “I also want your help in managing this case.”

“Me?” Seth asked in disbelief. “I haven’t done any field work since training. It’d probably be better to get a more experienced person fo-”

“Seth. This isn’t a request. It’s an assignment,” Allan countered. “There’s been numerous sightings of her around the Triboro, not all of them are this… visceral. She tries to avoid people, suggesting she’s not a threat but also that she’s probably scared. It’d be better if she’s approached by someone familiar.”

“But I didn’t really know Jenn that well, and Val & I didn’t really… get along… that last year or so,” Seth said. “Just cuz we’re family doesn’t mean we’re, like, close.”

“How about if Arthur told you to do this? Because he wanted to be there if they ever came back, and I think he’d want you to go in his place.”

As much as Seth wanted to point out that guilt trips were a crass tactic, he kept quiet. Besides, it wasn’t entirely false; his stepfather spent the rest of his life hoping that some sign of his missing daughters would be found. Now here was one, strange as it was, and Arthur Pollard was long gone. Seth had promised him to keep looking despite the unlikeliness of anything, even bodies, resurfacing. So Allan’s tactic had some basis in fact. That didn’t make it any more palatable, however.

“Fine, I’ll do it,” Seth finally said with a sigh.

“Thanks,” Allan said as he walked towards the door. “I’ll have the full report for you by the end of the day.” He opened the door, then turned back to smile kindly at Seth before leaving. “Good luck.”

Seth waited until he was certain that his boss was out of earshot, then let out a loud frustrated sigh. Getting assigned to field work was bad enough; said field work possibly involving an undead relative was downright horrible. If it was Jenn, it was essentially no different than a stranger approaching her, having only spent time with her during her annual summer visits. If it was Val, it was even worse, since he knew that he would be the last person in her immediate family that she’d want to see. Her goodbye to him - or lack thereof - had made that clear, and it had stuck with him for a quarter century. No matter which twin the girl in the video was, they probably wouldn’t be too excited to see him.

“Probably won’t even recognize me…,” Seth muttered to himself. He returned his computer glasses to his face and returned his attention to his reports. A distraction was what he needed before he made himself face this new task.

—----------------

That night, at home in the house that his stepdad had left him, Seth read the case file for the sightings.

The spottings had started roughly two weeks prior. The first few were fairly tame - a couple at the local library, one at the Teabury municipal building, a couple of the girl walking along the route between Teabury & the Triboro. These had been gathered after the more prominent sightings once her appearance had been compared and confirmed against those from the second week.

During that first week, the girl seemed to be looking for something. But during the second week, the nature of the sightings changed. The trespasser strike caught on video was just the one that was filmed. Among the similar sightings of her were the following:

• Reports from two teenagers who had been fishing witnessing her stagger to shore, cough up an inhuman amount of water, throw her only shoe away into the creek, and then run off into the woods;
• Reports from a homeowner who thought they had seen a body hanging high in a tree behind their property, only to find a broken branch on the ground with a makeshift noose made from the long socks she had worn in the video; and
• Reports from a landscaping service of an unnaturally fast animal diving into their running wood chipper, with the resultant matter coagulating back into a human form from within the mulch pile before swiftly bolting away again.

Frankly, Seth was glad that there was no recording of that last one.

But as a list, they were more than alarming. Whatever the girl was, if she even was one of his stepsisters, she was able to survive nearly anything. The thought of confronting an undead, unkillable creature wearing the face of a family member was downright sickening; even if she wasn’t a typical zombie, she certainly wasn’t a human being anymore. Although there was a potential silver lining if she didn’t remember or recognize him…

The evening of March 5th 1999 always lurked in the back of Seth’s mind. Val had run away in late January, not returning home or attending school, yet she had continued to work her “beat” in the Triboro. She had been persuaded to stop hiding by an older girl who appeared to be her mentor, a stern but kind-hearted Japanese woman who wanted to make sure her “juniors” could leave without regrets. Once they were all together, Val explained that her “job” had called her away, that she wasn’t sure when or even if she’d be back home, and that she was saying her goodbyes. Her father had held her so tight that he looked like he would crush her; her stepmother cried, hugged her, and kissed her cheeks. Seth had tried to hug her goodbye, but she stood completely still as he did, not saying a word to him and him alone. And then they left.

Seth knew exactly why Val wanted nothing to do with him. It was why she had run away in the first place. But he wasn’t the one who stole and destroyed her belongings or tormented her during school; surely, she had understood that just because he had asked his friends to back off, there was no guarantee that they’d actually do it. It wasn’t until Val and Jenn were declared legally dead in 2000 that he stopped trying to rationalize everything. He had failed as a brother by not standing up for her better. She had gone off to die hating him for that, and Seth eventually could no longer try to blame anyone but himself for it.

That, more than the prospect of strenuous field work or potential physical risks, upset him the most about this assignment.

The house was still similar in setup as it had been before Seth inherited it, and that included the family photos that decorated it. He glanced at the one hung on the living room wall from the wedding, when Arthur Pollard got remarried to Janet Newman; it had been a fairly informal one, since neither had wanted a big showy ceremony. Then an awkward young teenger, Seth stood by his stepfather’s side in his best & least comfortable dark gray suit. The twins, then preteens, stood next to his mother in simple lavender dresses holding simple bouquets. That had only been the second time that he had met Jenn, whose mother was reluctant to let her leave Illinois for too long, for reasons he never really understood. And when Jenn did visit, she spent most of her time catching up with Val - they were twins, after all.

He then looked at the enhanced still from the video. Despite their best efforts, the researchers couldn’t do much to improve the lighting, and there was still a blurriness that made picking out finer features difficult. This ruled out the best indicator - Jenn’s freckles - as a means of identification. The twins had been differentiated by three traits that Seth remembered - haircuts, athletic level, and freckles. But hair styles could easily be changed, and given the situation, Val could have come to mirror Jenn’s more athletic build with time & training. The girl had a relatively average but fit build as far as he could see, and even with the flashlight, her hair had grown out long enough to become long & stringy and to obscure a lot of her face.

There was no other recourse - to identify the girl, to see if she actually was one of the twins, Seth had to find her.

—-----------------

“Here ya go, kitty,” she said as she popped open a small can of cat food. She never thought that she would reach the point where she had to steal food, but in this case, she was doing it for someone else’s benefit, so she felt it was justified. She placed the can in front of the gray & white cat that continued to shadow her. “It’s called ‘seafood de-lite’, so… it’s mystery fish.”

The cat gingerly sniffed the food, then he started to eat it. His audible purring brought a full smile to her face - the first sincere one she could remember having since she had returned. She watched him eat and took in the new scenery as she enjoyed her companion’s contented sounds.

When she had decided to hide out at the mall, she had expected to lurk in the crowds during the day, hide away at closing, and then rest & eat if necessary overnight. However, once she got to the Triboro Mall, she was greeted with an empty husk, one that had been shuttered for a considerable amount of time. The three anchor stores still had visible stained scars from their nameplates on the exterior stucco; the best way to gauge which had closed first was by how faded the scarring had become, an “honor” held by the Penney’s. The interior was barren aside from long dead potted plants, random sprays of weeds & mold, and a cluster of tenant-less kiosk carts gathered by the dry and rusted central fountain. Very few remnants of the old inhabitants were left - some shops has screw holes in the shape of their long gone signs, a few had scattered bits of stray inventory or sloppily stored decorations, and neglected fixtures & stacks of food court furniture appeared at random. Any light came from the outside courtesy of the yellowed skylights, which meant that most shop interiors & the anchors were plunged into darkness most of the day. At first, she found it to be typical of her return so far, in that it was another part of her old life consigned to the past, but after settling in & making sure that no one else but her cat friend was there, she found it oddly peaceful.

Granted, it was a peace that could occasionally be disrupted by urban explorers wanting to tour & film the Triboro Mall’s ruins, a practice that she found slightly baffling, but they were easy enough to avoid.

She continued to watch the cat eat, and as she did, a strange thought came into her mind. She couldn’t remember ever feeling hungry since she had been sent back here. There were foods that appealed to her on a sensory level of a good smell or a taste she knew she enjoyed, but she hadn’t felt the fatigue or the gnawing stomach rumbles that would compel her to find something to eat. She hadn’t been terribly thirsty, either, nor did she feel any physical effects that could be connected to dehydration. The more she thought about it, the more it just served to underline how inhuman she had become. She sighed in frustration at this revelation, trying not to disturb the cat’s eating.

“Gotta get a name for you, kitty,” she said, leaning her chin against her hand as she rested the elbow against a piece of a former counter.

“Mmmr?” The cat looked up at her. He licked his lips, sat up, and curled his long striped tail around his front feet as he stared at her. The post gave the white patch on his chest a heart-like shape.

This started a chain reaction in her mind. She studied the cat’s features a bit closer, eventually noticing a strange marking inside of his tipped left ear. A small tattoo was there, consisting of a capital letter “O” & a number “4”, but the curve of the ear made the number look more like a vague letter. The accidental initials, agility, strength, heart on his coat… it all churned in her mind until it finally coalesced into the image of the perfect namesake for her feline friend.

“Owen,” she said definitively to the cat. He looked at her with what she read as a puzzled expression. “That’s your name - Owen. You remind me of him.” She held out her hand to the cat for a moment. “Sound good to you?”

The cat - Owen the cat - leaned over the food can and headbutted her hand until she started petting him, prompting more loud purring. That had to be an affirmation, she decided.

“Aww… good boy, Owen,” she said as she smiled again. “I guess that’s why I’m here, to take care of you. No wonder you kept shadowing me.”

As she sat there, letting the cat curl up onto her lap as he purred, she felt - however briefly - like a normal human being again. She decided to enjoy it, no matter how much of a lie it ultimately was.

Then, as usually happened with her, her mind wandered down a random new path. “I wonder who’s in my old house now,” she said as much to herself as to Owen. “Let’s scout it out tomorrow night, buddy.”

—----------------

Normally Seth liked work focused on research and reporting; it made time pass quickly and gave him a sense of accomplishment without the hazards of field work. But this research was different. This was only being done to postpone inevitably going into the field himself. Even more so, it was also uncomfortably personal, even as it showed itself to be of a much wider scale than he had ever anticipated.

The case Seth had been assigned had also become one of the modern world’s strangest mysteries: over a hundred girls aged 12 to 21 had last been seen circa March 5th 1999. They had mostly done what Val had done - said their farewells, then left and were never seen again. A handful had unfortunately been found deceased, but their deaths had all been determined to have occurred prior to that fateful date. But the rest? Nothing had been found - no hideout or cult compound, no bodies, no random sightings; these girls were all just… gone.

Naturally, this sort of situation intrigued a lot of people otherwise unaffected by it. Entire swaths of people online had made it their business to try and uncover the truth behind their disappearances. Social media hubs like various Discords & subReddits, summary & update videos with lively comment sections, even old-fashioned email mailing lists - all populated equally by those that had known the missing girls and those who fancied themselves to be heroic sleuths, all trying to piece together what happened to them after the 5th. Due to their common descriptions & alter egos, the girls as a whole had been nicknamed the “Flower Girls”. Every single one could transform at will into a floral-named superhero of some sort, tasked with fighting strange creatures that attacked randomly & were incapable of being harmed by any common weaponry. And as was common with fictional superheroes, they had largely concealed their identities from their loved ones until the night of their collective goodbyes.

That revelation had to have been a shock to so many of the girls’ families. It certainly had been to Seth when Val first transformed in front of him, having no choice but to do so to protect him from one of those creatures. She had trusted him enough to keep her secret, which he did; he wasn’t as familiar with superheroes at that point as she was, but he knew that they had secret identities for valid reasons. No one else found out until January 1999, when she was forced to transform by circumstances that he still wasn’t sure could have been prevented. That was the last time he had seen her until March 5th.

Had Jenn shared this ability as well? There were sightings of similar “Flower Girls” where she had lived, but outside of their father, her name was never mentioned in connection with the other missing girls. What evidence he did have suggested that she was, but it was bothersome that he didn’t have definitive information about her role. Especially since Seth had never seen or heard of her transforming during her summer visits, even during the period when Val had been active. When the wake had been held several years later, it had been for both twins; he still remembered standing warily on guard next to his mother as the girls’ mother desperately tried to pick a fight with her ex-husband, while he had been too numbed with postponed grief to respond.

The twins’ mother had always struck Seth as strange - overprotective of Jenn to a bizarre degree, downright ignorant & dismissive towards Val, and always eager for a confrontation. The last records he could find of Deborah Pollard were from shortly after the wake - an arrest & conviction for attempted murder after attacking a neighboring family. Strangely, there were no official reports of her ever trying to file a missing persons case for Jenn; Seth chalked this up to probably not wanting to involve the police, since any experience she might have had with them would be less than cordial. There were just too many uncertainties on Jenn’s branch of the Pollard family tree regarding her involvement, and Seth knew of no one reliable that he could ask for any clarification.

Then, during his lunch break at work, an idea popped into Seth’s head - check his attic.

After the wake, Arthur had stashed some of Val’s personal effects in an old metal foot locker and tucked it away in the attic. They were things that were too sentimental & individual to Val to give away to charity, but having them within reach would have caused him more pain. Seth was sure that the locker was still up there somewhere, and he was pretty sure that one of the items in it was Val’s daily journal. That night, once he was home, he had to find it.

That way, hopefully, Val herself could enlighten him with some clues.

—-------------

After his evening routine of dinner, dishes, & dog walking was done, Seth climbed up the narrow staircase to the attic. One advantage of this older style of house was having an attic that was larger and used a normal doorway & staircase for entry, so he had plenty of storage that was easy to access. His only real complaint was the sparse lighting, since the sun still set relatively early this time of year; that, however, could be supplemented with a flashlight. With his dog following close behind him, he made his way to the far corner of the attic and then located the dust-engulfed foot locker.

Underneath some of Val’s favorite clothes & unfinished embroidery projects, Seth found the journal. It was one of several, but the older ones had been removed from the fabric cover that Val had made and looked like ordinary composition notebooks. The cover was a little faded in color & brightness due to past exposure to sunlight, but the bold cool colors & geometric pattern were definitely reminiscent of Val’s sense of style. He gingerly opened the strap, held in place by a purple heart-shaped button, and flipped through it. The last entry was from January 1999, just as he had suspected, but he would save any further reading for a more comfortable environment. He loosely returned the strap to its place and stood up, ready to settle into the living room to read.

“Okay, Beefy, let’s go,” Seth said to his dog. The dog - a proper mutt with the thick black & white coat and curved tail of a Husky, the square face of a Rottweiler, and the drop ears & disposition of a Labrador - looked up from the corner where he was sniffing and walked briskly to the stairs. “Good boy.”

Beefy’s calm demeanor abruptly changed halfway down the staircase. With a low grumble, he took off in a charge straight to the first floor. Once there, he started barking in a fierce, protective manner. Seth ran after him as best he could, only slowing to set the journal down on the end of the first story stair’s shelf. Whatever could set Beefy off like that needed his full attention.

Seth finally caught up to Beefy in the kitchen. The dog barked wildly, hopping on his front feet, his hackles raised as he focused on the back door. Seth couldn’t see any person’s silhouette, so he carefully walked over to the light switch for the exterior doorway and flicked it on, hoping it was nothing too serious.

It was a cat.

A random stray cat was on his ground-level patio, perched on the wire shelf where Seth would put his potted plants come warmer weather. The dim light and its fluffed-up posture obscured most of its appearance, aside from its one tipped ear and the light reflecting off of its wide eyes. It was trying its best to look “big” - back arched, tail frizzed out, and so forth - but it was also clearly afraid of the large loud dog that had spotted it. Seth was more impressed than anything that Beefy had noticed it from such a distance, even if he thought the commotion was unnecessary.

Part of him wanted to go outside and see if the cat had a collar; if it was a lost pet, it would be best to return it before it could get hurt. But if it was a stray or a neglected pet, that could snowball into a whole new complicated mess. Another part of him knew that if he so much as touched the doorknob, Beefy would be out there chasing the poor thing before he could react. It was already thoroughly spooked, so even if Seth tried to help it, it would probably just bolt off anyway, if not attack him.So he decided that the best option was to startle the cat by banging on the door.

Right before he could swing to hit the door, however, the cat changed its posture. It straightened its back, looked away from the door, lowered the fur on its tail, and then jumped down & trotted away into the night. It wasn’t a run that would suggest it was still scared, nor was it one that it would have done had it suddenly seen some prey to pursue. It just… left. Beefy ran to the side window, still barking, in a vain attempt to keep following it.

Seth sighed and turned off the outside light. “It’s gone, Beef, calm down,” he said to his dog as he patted his head. Beefy stopped barking but still kept sneaking little peeks at the window, just in case. “Enough cat antics. I’ve got work to do.”

—-------------

“So… I guess this is my sanctuary now,” she said as she laid on her back, staring up at the broken skylights over the Triboro Mall’s long abandoned food court fountain.

The tiles on the fountain’s floor had long ago been smashed so that the copper pipes could be salvaged, and aside from a few thrown around at random, the once plentiful tables & settings of the former food court were gone. The lucky ones had been relocated to awkward stacks against the walls, where only a few had been tipped over and spilled by either trespassers or gravity.

She lazily draped one arm over her face and another over her stomach. “It’s no Batcave… but I guess it’ll do…” she mused.

Her initial scouting efforts for her childhood home had been a bust. She had barely gotten a peek into the interior before she heard a dog barking and had to hide. At least she could see that the garden was well maintained, much more so than she ever remembered it being. What little she saw of the interior through windows looked unchanged from her youth, although she did wonder if that was mind filling in blanks to read it as such. But she didn’t feel like being spotted, let alone bitten by any dogs, so she called over her companion and left as stealthily as she could.

The dog would prevent any further investigations, that much she knew. Even if she went back in the dead of night just to look inside from the yard a little more, it would know, and it was a very loud barker. And she wasn’t about to try going during daylight. So the only real bit of nostalgia for the town that she wanted to revisit was off the table.

“Y’know…,” she said, largely to herself. She doubted her cat cared too much about what she had to say. “It’d be nice to know why I’m back here…” She listened. Silence. “C’mon there’s gonna be a reason…” More silence. “I know you can hear me…” More silence. She sighed heavily. “This is so stupid…”

A sudden clattering broke the silence. She sat up and looked over at the former Cajun spot with low-level annoyance. That sound only had one possible source.

“Owen, you goober cat,” she said as she stood up and started towards the sound. “Get outta there. It’s full of grease and broken glass and… stuff.”

Anyone else would have never tried to walk across the former food court floor while barefoot; years of filth had layered upon the once-white tile, and sharp bits of broken ceramics & glass and stray shards of rusted metal were littered all around the area. But if she had learned one thing over the past couple of weeks, it was that she no longer had any reason to fear injury from such a setting.

Pain? Yes - but not injury. And maybe, on some level, she deserved to feel it.

A short brisk walk and several annoying lacerations later, she was at the former storefront. She picked up her cat from next to a pile of tarnished steel serving dishes and a foul-smelling puddle of rancid grease. Owen let out a squeak of protest as she adjusted her hold on him to see his face.

“Don’t act like I’m squeezing you…,” she said. “Seriously, not even rats are gonna want that.” He wiggled in mid-air, back legs trying to kick some part of her; finally, he gave up and angrily turned his head away from her gaze. She sniffed and grimaced. “Now you’re all stinky, too. You’re lucky there’s no water here.” She held him close to her chest with her left arm and started trying to wipe off the grease with her right sleeve. “You’re too cute to be stinky, but I’m already gross, so let’s just - hey!”

With a strong kick of his back legs and an angry gurgly meow, Owen broke free of her grip and dashed over to the far side of the fountain. Her irritation faded as she saw his ears and gleaming eyes peeking just above the broken ledge, and she found herself smiling again. She walked over to a fallen metal chair, placed it right-side-up, and sat down on it; it would no doubt take her a bit to re-earn his trust, so she might as well wait.

That was when it hit her.

It was a horribly familiar feeling. She slapped both hands over her mouth and doubled over, wide-eyed. A piercing, cold pain resonated out from her very core; it made her limbs both weak & agonizingly sore, and a screeching noise with no source overtook her senses. Her body tensed with pain, unable to move or relax. Her brain felt as though it would rupture through her skull and her heart would do likewise with her chest. An equal mix of chills and uncomfortable sweating flushed over her. She smothered the urges to scream or vomit, writhing desperately in her semi-paralyzed state on the stiff chair.

Then, just as abruptly as this feeling had hit her, it ended.

Weakly, she let her arms drop. She breathed heavily, peppered with coughs, as the lingering pain & screeching faded. She knew what this meant - that was her answer. And that made her feel even worse.

“Dammit…,” she muttered. “Can’t believe this…” A few stray tears - possibly of frustration, possibly of pain - rolled down her cheeks. “That’s really all I’m good for now…?!”

“Mrow.”

She looked down, still catching her breath. Owen stood by her feet, looking up at her with what seemed to be a worried expression. He stood on his hinds and gently placed his front feet on her knee; she gingerly picked him up and let him settle on her lap.

“Well, at least I have you to protect,” she said as she stroked the cat’s soft fur, avoiding the greasy patches. His purring managed to soothe her enough to think clearly again. She had to make a plan of action, but the attack made it clear that she had to start hunting again.

—------------------

Two days had passed since Seth had started to read Val’s journals. No new sightings of the mystery girl had been recorded, either by surveillance devices or via eyewitness accounts. There certainly hadn’t been any incidents like the ones listed in the case file, thankfully. Unfortunately, his investigative avenue of the journals only succeeded in making him feel worse about March 5th 1999. At first, he had expected to just be worn out by field work, but as things were now, it felt to Seth that he was almost being punished, being forced back into a terrible place that he thought he had outgrown.

The entry for July 17th 1998 was the one that kept replaying in Seth’s mind:

7/17/98 - Had to transform in front of Seth. Now he knows. I hope he’s too scared of my powers to pull any shit. I know I can’t trust him, thanks to his asshole friends. But I couldn’t just let the beast eat him - I don’t want Dad & Janet to be sad or to get mad at me. It’s not like he’d do the same for me, but I actually want to be a good superhero, so I can’t pick & choose who I protect. Jenn is coming to visit next week but Dad said that she could bring her boyfriend, so I’ll need something to do to stay out of their way. Maybe I’ll just increase my nightly patrols.

Val had been right - Seth’s high school friends had been pretty awful, in particular to her. But despite what she thought, he had tried to shift their focus or ask them to back off; they just hadn’t bothered to do it. He ultimately broke off from them entirely shortly before his graduation in June 1999, having realized that his association with them had cost him others’ respect and that they never actually respected him in turn. He couldn’t bring himself to challenge Val’s image of himself as an untrustworthy coward, because there was really nothing he had to counter it.

Had he changed at all over the last twenty-plus years? He knew that he had a cowardly streak, his aversion to field work. He couldn’t honestly say that he had outgrown it, either; in fact, in some instances, that cowardice & fear of failure was the only reason that he was still alive. And just like then, he was steamrolled over by others frequently instead of having his wishes & opinions respected. As far as Seth could see, he was a pretty stagnant excuse for a person.

The later entries did his mental state no favors. The journal was the only place where Val expressed anything negative, having kept up a placid front around everyone from classmates to family. The only time that front had cracked was when a jacket that she had hand-embroidered for months had been stolen by one of Seth’s social circle. She came home in tears that day, and when he tried to ask her what had happened, she angrily snapped at him. It wasn’t until Val was gone that he realized why - she had wanted him to protect & stand up for her like a proper brother, and the fact that this theft had happened illustrated how he had failed in her eyes. That was the last entry in the journal - January 12, 1999.

Two days later, a follow-up attack was Val’s breaking point, and it would be the last anyone in the family would see her until March 5th.

Seth shifted his mind as best he could to Jenn, but that proved to be fruitless. He never spent much time getting to know her, as she was limited to summer visits that she preferred to use to catch up with Val. After all, despite some differences, they were still twins, and they had spent the first decade of their lives together. He remembered Jenn being a perkier & more open girl than her sister, and this somehow always resulted in Val being a bit less guarded in turn. But the note about the boyfriend reminded him that their final visit together hadn’t been like that. Val had tried to show her cheerier side as she usually did, but she also seemed down about having to avoid being a third wheel. And considering that all Seth could remember about Jenn’s boyfriend was “some ginger guy” and absolutely nothing else, he found this attempted avenue of thought to be futile again. Jenn was, functionally, a stranger.

A chime sounded from Seth’s computer. A new email, marked as “high priority”, sat at the top of the inbox; it had come directly from Allan, so even without the priority marker he knew that it had to be important. The subject on it was “Case #123551-42511545 - NEW SIGHTING”. With only a moment of hesitation, Seth opened it and read it carefully. He desperately needed a lead - and a distraction.

Good afternoon,

We’ve gotten a lucky break in this case courtesy of two local urban explorers. They uploaded a video of the old Triboro Mall taken last night, and our case subject appears in it. She seems to be hiding from them but still watching them. If we’re extra lucky she might still be camped out at the old mall. Below is a link to the video, set for the time where she starts to show up.

Hopefully this will help progress the case.

Thanks,

Allan Vernon

Seth sighed and clicked on the link to the web video. The familiar YouTube interface opened a video starting just past the six minute mark. Intentionally garbled electronic remixes of easy listening music played over the dusky footage of the long abandoned mall interior; he found it only marginally preferable to the sounds of footsteps and idle chatter. It was definitely not the sort of view he’d do voluntarily, but the numbers showed that plenty of other people enjoyed it. And maybe Seth could see the appeal a little bit - even though he wasn’t a mall kid, he still got a mild sense of nostalgia seeing the ruins of familiar old storefronts.

Then, he saw a flash of color dart in between shadowed areas. The same bright yellow as the outdated outfit the girl had worn in the bodycam video. Shortly afterwards, a smallish cat of indeterminate coat color followed the flash, moving just slow enough to be caught on camera. The two young cameramen laughed a bit, talked about the cat’s ear & something called “TNR”, then continued on their way. Most of the video passed without incident, although there was one more scene where a cat was spotted walking along the second floor safety railing; this led to a discussion of whether it was the same cat they had seen earlier or if the mall was housing a feral colony. Finally, the video ended with a montage of ads (printed & televised) highlighting the Triboro Mall in its heyday.

It wasn’t much, but that brief glimpse of the girl’s outfit really did feel like a lucky break. Now Seth just had to figure out the best time to approach the mall to find her and hopefully get some answers.

—---------------

Moving around during daylight was hard; everything about her current state kept her from blending into crowds, and it wasn’t like the Triboro Area had a lot of them anyway. Still, she knew that the ones responsible for her sharp pains wouldn’t limit themselves to nocturnal activity, so she had to carefully make the rounds in places she thought that they could target.

After a few days with neither sightings nor warning pains, she felt ready to write off the attack. No signs of the Seeded Beasts were found where they were most likely to hunt - any dead vegetation was naturally occurring and nothing that resembled their ferocious monstrous forms had been reported. Those were the only things that had ever caused those warning pains, although they weren’t usually as intense as the most recent one, and even at her lowest moments, she never hesitated to fight them. She was the only one who could, after all, and she never wanted the stain of failure to do so attached to herself.

Sleep wasn’t really an issue - she had found that she didn’t need it and anymore that she didn’t enjoy it - so she had managed to stealthily patrol any areas that were likely to be targeted twice during the day, then twice at night. It also allowed her to familiarize herself with any changes in the area’s layout. But after a few days of this with no results or answers, she decided to retreat to the ruins of the mall.

One thing she did do while making her rounds was stock up on supplies for Owen; he still needed to eat & drink, and she didn’t like the thought of him living on sparrows & mice or needing to wait for rain to drink. So she carefully observed when she could swipe a can of cat food here or a bottle of water there from delivery trucks. If she got really lucky, she would occasionally find things set out as trash that were perfectly fine except for dents or damaged labels. Thanks to careful planning, she had managed to find him plenty of water & at least two weeks’ worth of food to keep him comfortable. Now they could stay in the sanctuary of the mall for a while.

“See this one, Owen?” she said as she entered one of the empty storefronts. Her cat squirmed a little in her arms as she walked, bracing one front paw on her shoulder to steady himself. “This was an arcade. I used to play some fun stuff here, like Darkstalkers 3 and that good Golden Axe sequel… Looks small without all the games, though…”

She knew that logically a cat wouldn’t care about her nostalgia, but giving Owen a little tour helped her pass the time. She wasn’t someone who was ever in the vein of a stereotypical “mall rat” as commonly thought; she never could afford the fancy clothes from the popular boutiques and never really wanted to in the first place. She liked to go to the bookstores or the music stores if she had the spare money, then get a little snack at the food court, then enjoy herself in the arcade. But she could also remember that the arcade closed long before the rest of the Triboro Mall and had last been seen as a gated-off storage spot. So what few visits she got to make dwindled to nothing. Still, the mere act of reminiscing to her disinterested companion gave her a faintly warm feeling that she appreciated.

“Wanna go see the weird fountain?” she asked her cat. Owen stared back at her with his pupils wide and what appeared to be a concerned expression on his face. “Maybe there’s something left there from the parakeets they used to have there…” That was unlikely - the parakeets had been liberated from the mall when she was a toddler - but it sounded like something that might pique the interest of a cat. Assuming that the cat understood.

The “weird fountain” was a short walk away and located in what was supposedly the center of the mall. Maybe it had been when it originally opened, but the additions first of the food court & later of an ill-fated fourth anchor had made the layout strangely lopsided. It made the maps of the mall resemble a hand holding up a middle finger, with the fountain positioned roughly like a ring. The fountain was a long rectangular shape, with seats and planters framing it. The bars that had once been part of the large birdcage it replaced had been awkwardly cut, relocated to the center of the sunken floor, and made into a spindly sculpture of now dry & corroded pipes. Even when they had been running in what the mall had tried to describe as a “hydro-art installation”, she had thought it looked strange & sloppy at best. At worst, it looked as though the tops of the bar-pipes could impale someone. Like the food court fountain, this one was long dried; however, due to its lack of value to the scrappers, it had been left largely intact. The most damage came from the leak in the skylight above it, thanks to a barely perceptible missing sliver of greenish-yellow glass.

She placed Owen gently onto a seat now covered with a soft coat of moss. “Here ya go, boy,” she said. To her mild surprise, he took an interest in the planters; while the greens that had been planted there during the mall’s life were long dead, a scattered collection of wild grasses & weeds had set up home in them instead. Owen started to determinedly chew on some of the grass, ignoring her petting him. “Really wonder what happened to this place,” she idly said, no longer caring that she was talking to herself. “Hmph, guess it’s like everything else since I woke up. And everyone else…” She briefly thought about flopping down onto the bench, but then she remembered the water damage and stopped herself. Instead, she stood where she was and listened to Owen’s purring as he continued to devour grass.

Idly, she turned her gaze to the warped floor, which had also started to grow its own blanket of greenery. A familiar cluster of deep green heart-shaped leaves grew near her feet; it had pushed its way through the debris and settled into stray dirt between tiles just deep enough for it to take root. She gently poked at it with her big toe.

“Huh. Of all the plants…,” she muttered. She stepped away from the cluster to keep it safe. “I guess they were right - we were just a couple of weeds…” She sighed and laughed one rather joyless laugh. “Well, joke’s on them, cuz look who’s still here… just like a week.”

Then, it happened again - the pain, the sensory malfunction, the searing cold. It wasn’t as intense as before, but she still fell to her knees & wrapped her arms protectively around her body. However, it didn’t pass & fade - it lingered, a nagging discomfort that she couldn’t ignore. As she glanced around the mall, she knew that meant only one thing.

“You’re in here, aren’t you?” she said between rough breaths.

She glanced at Owen, who had stopped eating grass long enough to notice her. But just past him, on the second floor, just on the edge of her vision, she saw a flashlight beam from within the former Sears. She was used to strangers walking through to tour the ruins, but this was not the time that they should be here. Whoever was there this time would be easy prey.

“Dammit,” she muttered as she pulled herself back to her feet. Rusty as she might be, she still had to do her duty.

—-----------------------

Any of the vague nostalgia Seth had felt watching the video of the Triboro Mall faded as soon as he entered the structure. Partly, he blamed himself for deciding to visit after work, just as twilight was making the already imposing building look even more ominous. But he also felt like exploring it on a bright Saturday morning would be a waste of a weekend, overtime be damned. He had made a point to dress in light-colored clothes that were layered for protection, and he had dug out a pair of work boots that seldom wore due to their sturdy soles. He brought his extra-strong flashlight with a long steel handle, useful for both illumination & self-defense. He even wore a safety mask, as he had seen others suggest doing so to avoid any black mold or asbestos. But being in the mall itself - traipsing around the long neglected second story of the former Sears, its beige design disrupted only by trashed display racks & fallen ceiling tiles - generated a sense of unease that couldn’t be nerfed by any amount of deliberate preparation.

The only sound Seth heard for the longest time, aside from his own breathing, was that of the floor creaking beneath his footsteps. It had clearly been ages since someone had walked on the upper floors, and each one sounded louder & less secure than the last. He swept his flashlight around in quick, deliberate movements; it was the best way that he could illuminate his immediate area to spot any potential threats or tripping hazards. This was not the sort of environment where he would ever have gone voluntarily.

Entering the second story and using that to scout the perimeter had been his plan. He knew that the only places where there wasn’t second story access were the food court & the stubby area that replaced the former theater area with the fourth anchor, and thus he could get a decent view of two stories at once for the majority of the structure. But once inside the building, some nagging sensation kept telling Seth that the floor could fall out from underneath him at any moment and that he really, really, really should leave as soon as feasible. It was taking all of his willpower to ignore that voice and pay attention to his surroundings.

Finally, as he neared the entrance to the mall, its gate long ago torn loose and left in a heap of jagged metal on the floor, Seth heard talking. It was on the first floor and wasn’t too loud, and try as he might, he couldn’t make out any actual words. But the voice echoed through the open courtyard of the mall clear enough for him to recognize it.

It was the girl from the bodycam video. He’d found her.

Any sense of trepidation - with who or what he might see, with the physical conditions of the mall - vanished as Seth sped up his pace. Running was out of the question; it might give his presence away, and besides, the boots weren’t built for it. So he walked as quickly as he could manage, aiming his flashlight close to his feet to provide some illumination. He had almost made it to the corner of the second story railing when she came to him. She just… appeared, crouched on the guard rail & balancing herself with her extended right arm. The only logical way that she could have gotten there so quickly was to jump, but sure she couldn’t be able to reach that height so easily.

“I’m sorry, but you gotta get out of here,” she said. “It’s too dangerous right now.” She hopped off the guard rail.

Seth slowly raised his flashlight to get a better view. Sure enough, she was wearing the same outdated yellow & black outfit as the girl in the bodycam video, aside from now being barefoot. She had a visible griminess to her slightly pasty fair skin, and her long dark brown hair was clearly greasy from a lack of bathing. Her expression was firm - a stern face with a slightly flat nose, cheeks with no freckles, and steely gray eyes under furrowed thick eyebrows. His breath caught in his throat. He finally had his answer.

“... Val…?” Seth asked, although it was more of a barely audible vocal crack.

The girl furrowed her brow even more, then shook her head slightly and spoke firmly. “Look, dude, you gotta go! I’m not kidding.” She pointed behind him insistently at the Sears doorway. “Take your light and go, so you’re not hurt. Please.”

Seth swallowed har. He spoke a little clearer, albeit with a bit of a tremor in his voice. “Val… it’s you…”

“Look, you don’t have time for this,” she said, louder and just a bit more panicked. “You need to leave before… shit!”

Before Seth could react, she rushed at him. With a surprisingly strong push, she knocked him well into the empty storefront and onto the floor. Once he looked up, he saw her grabbing at something he couldn’t see around her throat before she was abruptly yanked backwards & out of view. As he scrambled to his feet, he heard first a loud crash punctuated by a cry of pain, then a slightly wet heavy impact of something striking banging metal. He rushed over the corner of the guard rail, looked down, and froze.

The girl was face down on the first floor; she had been tossed from where she had been standing into the remnants of the horrible jagged sculpture that was part of a long-dry fountain. The pipe-like bars held her body up, skewering her at awkward & painful angles. He forced himself to look away from the sight only to see a sizable dent in the wall directly across from his position. Broken parts of the steel guard rail were scattered on the floor. The wall, the bottom of the fountain, the ruins of the sculpture - everything had at least a splattering of blood on it, with a large pool gathering under the girl’s broken body.

“She was quicker than I thought,” an unfamiliar young woman’s voice said. It echoed throughout the Sears wing with no visible source. “Ah well… You look like you could use a distraction.” Footsteps rang out from the opposite side of the second story, followed by the sound hitting the railing beside Seth, then two steps striking the floor.

Finally, the source of the voice gradually melted into view. The speaker was a young woman, not much older than the girl who may or may not have been Val, with a lean, wiry, yet well muscled build. Her outfit was a short dress that at first appeared simple, but the random variegated pastel shades of blue, purple, & pink kept shifting in a manner unnatural for any sort of fabric. Leather-like white belts hung in a trio loosely over her hips, while similar material was used to create wristbands that wrapped her lower arms. Her hair was a strange shade of grayish green, pulled back in a tight severe bun with no loose strands; clusters of familiar round bunches of four-petal flowers were tucked into the base of her bun, all long dried out & wilted into brownness. A short pair of low-heeled ankle boots in the same white material as the belts finished her strange ensemble. But what unnerved Seth were the new girl’s eyes. Even though she had a calm expression, her eyes were unnatural - solid blackness with pale blue pupils - and carried in them a manic dangerous energy. He instinctively braced himself.

“I was asked to scout the area, stop any threats, but that was a little… anticlimactic,” the strange woman said. The sound of metal shifting & breaking echoed from the first floor, but Seth forced himself to ignore it. He knew he couldn’t risk looking away from her. “So how about you direct me to a decent offering? That way, I won’t have to do that to you…” She gestured casually toward the wrecked area across the way.

It had been a fairly long time since Seth had to use his field work skills, but when they needed to kick in again, they did. He steadied himself and kept his eyes locked on the woman, refusing to signal any sort of reaction. As soon as she moved one step forward, he swung the flashlight in her general direction. It didn’t matter what part of her he managed to hit; he just needed to create an avenue for an escape.

Unfortunately for him, the part of her that the flashlight struck was her open palm. She looked at it for a moment, almost appearing confused, before she wordlessly tightened her grip. The flashlight shattered into a mess of broken metal, plastic, and ruptured batteries.

She looked at him, face still calm but eyes still wild, and opened her mouth to speak. Before any sound could be heard, a corroded piece of pipe with a chunk of concrete flew towards her head, a giant makeshift plumbata. She ducked to avoid it, giving Seth just enough time to find cover in the nearest storefront. It landed with enough force to shake the second story and shatter its own concrete base.

“Seriously, Hydrangea, that’s the best you got?” the voice of the girl who may or may not be Val said in an audibly angry tone.

Seth peered out warily from his hiding spot. What he saw some part of him knew to expect from the case file, but witnessing it in person was still a complete shock. The girl was alive, perched and ready on the guard rail. A gaping bloody wound in her torso was visible but seemed to shrink ever so slightly as time passed; stray pieces of metal & debris were embedded in her limbs, while a small trident-like piece of piping was lodged in her forehead. She pulled the piping free with an audible grunt of discomfort and threw it in her opponent’s general direction. After witnessing such a scene, Seth found himself desperately hoping that he was mistaken about her identity.

The opponent - Hydrangea - hmphed as she dodged the projectile and charged at the girl, only for her target to effortlessly leap over her head-first. She landed in a somersault and immediately turned to be face-to-face with her foe.

“What are you?” Hydrangea asked, both unnerved and annoyed.

“I’m still VIOLA SORORIA!” the girl yelled. The last two words carried an unnatural echo.

A brilliant violet-tinted burst of light emanated from where she stood, then cleared away in an instant. Her sloppy brown hair had changed into thicker hair, green as grass, in long straight pigtails except for layered face-framing bangs. A thin gold diadem rested on her now-healed forehead, while clusters of violets decorated the tops of her pigtails. Her worn yellow & black ensemble had also transformed - now she wore a luminescent blue-violet blouse with a pointed hip-cape over a soft tinted white skirt. The top had sharp vest-like points trimmed in gold, gold buttons with military-esque white braided bands running between them along the center of its length, and angled tails that reached past her knees over her back. The skirt, however, was a softer material that appeared to be white tinted with just a hint of blue-violet and that rippled gently; a pair of similarly soft frilled shorts in blue-violet peeked out from beneath the hemline, creating a layered effect. Loose thick straps hung over her upper arms from the shoulders of her top, clearly more ornamental than anything, while blue-violet fingerless gloves with a gold trimmed white band adorned her hands. Boots in blue-violet with white laces and a thick medium-height heel came up just below her knees. A while collar with gold trim - a cross between a choker & a mock turtleneck - was worn around her neck and over her top; its ends also came to points on both the front & the back, and a strangely empty round golden frame of small size was centered on her throat. Finally, a brooch made of what appeared to be vibrant petrified wood and resembling a larger variation of the flowers in her hair rested at the area in the center of her chest where the collar & top met. Any remaining wounds had seemingly vanished, and she stared down Hydrangea with a strangely confident expression.

Seth’s heart started to sink. He had seen this outfit before, all of three times - once when she had rescued him from some sort of monster, once when she had reached her breaking point, and once when she had refused to say goodbye to him. This girl - the girl in the strange outfit, the one who survived that terrible fall, the same one who had survived a chipper-shredder & a speeding train, the one readying to fight the unearthly opponent who had tried to ambush him - was very definitely Valerie Pollard.

—----------------

As much as she didn’t like to admit it, even to herself, Val Pollard had always enjoyed a good fight. Aside from sewing, pretty much all of her main pastimes - wrestling, superhero comics, & fighting games - were guaranteed to have a good scrap or two. The influence of those hobbies was probably why she had embraced her chance to be part of the Phantom Garden - to mix it up, get cool powers, and help people in the process.

It was striking to her how naive such thoughts ultimately were.

She hadn’t wanted to come back; she hadn’t wanted to transform again. Yet here was an opponent - one of them, no less - and she was not happy about it. Not happy about her targeting a civilian, not happy about getting ambushed herself, not happy about making her yank bits of fountain out of her own head. And the best treatment for this kind of unhappiness was to pummel the stuffing out of its source.

The last time Val had seen Phantom Hydrangea had been during the retreat. At least she no longer had the temerity to wear the Garden’s uniform after turning against the Atrium; after that day, she was no longer worthy of that honor, even in comparison to Val & her failures. It was a change that would make Val’s job that much less infuriating.

“So… want my intro?” Val asked with a deliberately false smile.

Hydrangea scoffed. “Out of everyone, of course it’s one of the weeds that survived.”

“Well, weeds are hearty - as you saw,” Val responded. She held out her left hand in front of her body; a jolt of electricity struck her palm and took the form of her trusty stringless silver archer’s bow. Another spark from her right hand shifted into an arrow of pure electric energy, which she smoothly notched & aimed. “Now - tell me why you’re here.”

“Hmmm… no,” Hydrangea replied, hand to her chin in a mocking pose of thought. She swiftly whipped her hand down to her belts and pulled one loose, wielding it like a whip. She snapped it a couple of times towards Val’s head, driving her back via instinctive reaction. “I have work to do, so go away.”

Splotches of Hydrangea’s body began to disappear, in a manner similar to her earlier arrival, until she was completely gone. Val had seen this before - Hydrangea had control over color, which let her easily camouflage herself. Even in heeled boots, she was a master of stealth; it was only due to experience that Val knew to look for the faint ripple of her outline, and even then, it was frequently hard to spot. Combined with the lingering head pain from the mere presence of her corruption and the haze of stirred-up debris in an already dimly lit area, Val found concentrating on following here to be more difficult than in the past. She needed to find another way to track her.

First up, sound. “I think you’re taking the ‘phantom’ part of Phantom Hydrangea too literally,” Val said loudly.

“It’s Huntress Hydrangea now,” Hydrangea petulantly replied. Her words echoed tightly through the Sears wing of the mall; this meant that she hadn’t moved into the body of the building or any storefronts.

So it was up to Val to prevent that from happening. With a flair of her fingers, she summoned multiple energy arrows to her right hand. Then she began firing them at the corners that led out of the Sears wing. Over & over again, bunches of four & five arrows struck the walls and floor until they created a faintly glowing jagged frame. She then began doing the same to the former Sears entrances on both floors, then the storefronts, moving with deliberate focus & speed. She absolutely had to limit the space available to Hydrangea, and she also had to think of others. That middle-aged man was still in here, and he had already almost been attacked twice. And if Hydrangea even thought of laying her hands on one hair of her cat’s precious head, Val would lose it.

Potential exits secured, Val resumed listening. She pointedly jumped up onto the guard rail again, both to hear better and to be a more tempting target. A ripple of motion in the dust of the first floor caught her eye; it was both too large and too indistinct to be Owen, and no normal person could camouflage themselves that well. She fired off a few arrows in front of the ripple, then to either side of it. It kept moving until roughly the eighth arrow hit, when it jerked in place. The movement suggested that Val had at least pinned Hydrangea by her flashy new dress. A few vocal grunts of frustration echoed from the first floor around the ripple.

However, almost immediately after this realization, Val felt something sting her left shoulder with an audible ‘snap’. She reflexively dropped her bow, which dissolved into faint specks of light, and stumbled backwards off of the guard rail onto the second story floor. More loud, painful snaps sounded around her. She had half-expected this; Hydrangea might have been pinned down, but she wasn’t disarmed. So long as she could access those new belt-whips of hers, she’d use them. And she certainly did - cuts from the impact on Val’s face & limbs kept appearing no matter how much she tried to protect herself. Worse, the belt-whips were just as invisible as their wearer, so there was no way she could dodge them. No matter how far back Val stepped, the whip snaps kept coming. It would have been impressive if it wasn’t so painful.

Finally, she fell onto the floor and against a display window. The whip snaps continued to strike the window around her until the glass gave way; shards rained down on Val’s head, more irritating than anything. That was enough for her today. She held her left hand in a sideways V-sign over her brooch, while pointing her right one in the same way towards Hydrangea’s general direction.

“Violet Voltage!” Val yelled.

Instantly, currents of electricity arced in pale lavender tendrils between the sprays of energy arrows. Each one seemed to spark at once, creating an electrified wall that illuminated the ruins of the mall. A shriek emanated from the first floor, from the area where Hydrangea had been pinned. Once Val was positive that her opponent had been stunned, she lowered her arms; the electricity gently dissipated, taking the energy arrows along with it.

Val slowly stood up to look over the guard rail. Below her, she could see Hydrangea trying to push herself up off the floor, her face hidden from view by her now loosened hair; wisps of smoke drifted off of her body, but she otherwise appeared unharmed. As she labored to raise herself to her knees, a strange inky shadow began to spread from underneath her. It formed a perfect circle around her, then the edges began to ripple & bubble slightly. She turned her head upwards to stare at Val directly in the eyes. As much as she was trying to look hard, there was a certain glint of desperation & disbelief in them.

“You can’t stop us, Phantom Violet,” Hydrangea said, her slightly surprised tone choked by her rough breathing. Gradually, she began to sink into the inky black circle. “We need to finish our work here.” Before she vanished entirely into the circular void, she flashed a weakly mocking smile at Val.

—-----------------

Seth waited until it seemed that everything outside had gone quiet. Then, just as he thought it was clear, he heard something slam into the wall hard enough to shake the floor. Val’s voice was heard making angry nonverbal exclamations as the hits happened again and again and again. As Seth stood up and readied himself to leave his cover, it clicked - she was mad enough to be punching the walls. Even if she didn’t recognize him, it still wouldn’t be the best time to address her directly. First rule of dealing with angry people, as he knew well, was to never approach them until they weren’t visibly angry.

Suddenly, the punching stopped.

“Owen… Owen!” Val’s voice yelled, now sounding more anxious than angry. “Owen… here boy! It’s okay now! … Pspspspspsps…” The sounds echoed and trailed off to another section of the mall.

Seth reached into his pocket, pulled out his phone, and turned on the flashlight, using it as best as he could as a substitute for his much better broken light. The glimpses of the damage done - from the broken fixtures to the charring along the halls & doorways - told him that he’d need to come back during daylight hours with Foundation personnel to document everything. Hopefully that visit would be a little less intense. He decided it was best to call it a night and return to the safety of his home.

“... over now, okay? See?” Val’s voice rung out from the first floor, now sounding very sweet & cute.

Despite being nearly to the Sears doorway, Seth’s curiosity got the better of him; he ducked down seemingly out of view to see why tone had so wildly changed. In her arms, Val held a cat. It was clinging to her shoulder and looked faintly worried. It was hard for Seth to see many details about it aside from its one tipped ear. Just like the cat in his yard. And the one in the video. And in several of the case file photos.

“I promise not to do that again like that, boy,” Val said as she stroked the cat’s back. It nuggled its face against her neck. “Aww… I’m sorry, baby…” She then looked up to the general area of where Seth was hiding. “If I were you, I’d get out before the cops show up. Someone’s bound to be calling them,” she said firmly.

Seth stood up and walked to the end of the guard rail; despite touching it lightly, it groaned from the pressure. He stared at her as calmly as he could. Did Val even recognize him? What was he going to say? Twenty-some years and not once had he mentally prepared for a moment even close to this. It would be hard enough if she looked like she was supposed to, an adult like himself; yet, here she was, practically just as young as when she left, to nothing of her newfound… endurance. He sighed and gradually walked over to the long-stilled escalator, making his way to the first floor. He finally stopped and faced Val from a safe distance. She looked at him with an almost blank expression, making it impossible to gauge what she may have been thinking.

“If you turn around and head that way, there’s a door on the right you can use,” she said. “Just look for the old sign marks for Taco Bob’s. Okay?” She continued to cradle the cat as if it were a baby.

Seth nodded slowly and followed her directions, but not before he collected himself enough to speak. “Thanks, Val…” he said softly. Then he added in a louder voice, “Thanks.” He walked silently through the mall, hearing nothing but his own footsteps against the dirt-encrusted floor. Before turning towards the exit, he looked back one more time; he just had to see for himself, one final confirmation.

Val was gone, as silently & suddenly as she had appeared.

Seth let out a long, slow sigh and headed towards the exit.