checking out on the prison bus [.plot.epilogue.]

Her shoes crunched through the snow, breaking the silence that all others would have heard. To her, the night was filled the sound of unquiet dead. She tried not to gather attention to herself. One or two of them could be manageable, but she had never encountered so many on this side. Her stomach turned- they had died terribly, every single one of them.

She needed to get to a place that would allow her to be heard by as many of them as possible. In the Otherside, she might be able to handle more of them at once. With this end in mind, she drifted between spirits as quietly as she could, her left hand tight around the neck of her violin, her left around the bow. She'd learned caution recently. The weal across one of her cheeks was testament to a truth hard learned. The case to her violin was on the edge of the property, along with the bulky coat that would have impeded her movement. Lucy would have to retrieve them later.

Her breath came out in puffs of steam, shaky with the cold that quickly bit through her thin, black cardigan, white button-up, and black jeans. Lucy's hair was getting longer, reaching to her mid-back in heavy, brown ringlets. She'd tried to tame them with some bobby pins, but the walk to the farm had removed them all one by one.

It was well past curfew and the distance between the school and the farm had been fraught with unseen obstacles and several instances where she had to wait out a creature moving in the dark beneath the trees. The sky was an inky black beyond the trees, the stars speckled across it barely mitigating the breath-stealing dark.

She made her way to the barn, mostly from instinct. Even if the building loomed up above her with the intimidating presence of a temple to an ancient deity. It was here that she began to hesitate. Her allies in the Otherside were scarce, far outweighed by her enemies. The power vacuum over there was reaching a head and it was getting harder to keep up with the politics, let alone the job itself.

    The haunt of winter presided over the derelict farm with an ominous, but dispassionate menace. Chilling blackness pervaded; the only reprieve being that the wind rarely intervened. When it did, however, it crept deep and permeated into bone. Tucker clenched his jaw tight as the rest of him tensed with frigidity, remaining in absolute silence. Once, and extensively, he had known a clinical cold. For all parts calculated and stale. In comparison, the autumn rains on the island had been a welcome change with hints of life, wonder, and a cycle of duty held for eons. Even the first snow, a phenomenon he had never experienced prior, was welcomed with passive interest. He had known the emotionless cold of a hospital the entirety of his life. He could ignore the chill when there were other merits.

    This is entirely different.

    It felt as though death itself hung in the air, and he failed to decide if that were due to his own knowledge of the area, and what must have occurred on these grounds, or a supernatural presence beyond his explanation. He thought he should be certain of the former, a mere trick of his own mind against him, but the latter rooted into his consciousness in some small way, plainly keeping him from dismissing the paranoia entirely. This place felt haunted and empty, the possible result of a spirit not born of malignant intention, but of detached lethality. Not that he believed in such things, but the world he had entered shy a year ago left many preconceptions to doubt.

    A hand raised to his chest and scratched through layers of fabric, not at all deliberately. The ache stole his thoughts from the cold, sharpened his senses and reminded him of where he stood. A mere ten meters from the barn, a familiar but not intimate sight, he stood alone in nothing more than Albion Hospital’s dark green nurse scrubs. Visible beneath the roughly textured fabric were thick bandages, wrapped thoroughly about his torso. He had sustained little injuries to his extremities, apart from a heavy wrapping making his left hand all but useless. The white cloth bandages served as the only real layer of warmth against this abominable cold.

    His time sequestered had led to a slight growth of his hair, no longer any evidence that he had ever had a shaved head. The three inch length remained unimpressive, and he most certainly had not bothered to do anything with it. As it was, the auburn clumps swept down towards his brow and covered his ears, shielding him from the harsher chill of that wintry breath. Tonight, he had ventured out without gloves or face mask, though very little else had changed of his appearance. That crease over the bridge of his nose remained like a scar, and it was not the only one he had, or would, collect.

    The injuries within the bandages would undoubtedly add to such a compilation. Still sore, they ached for relief he could not grant. In truth, the infections had taken weeks to subside, growing more impertinent to the hospital’s attempts every session. Eventually, as always, the strain on his body was appeased as the fever became dormant. Only then could they clean out the long established colonies of filth in his needle-like wounds, which had become inconceivably worse as the infections had widened the openings. In no way had he been discharged, either. He had plenty of therapy to return to, given the harm done to his vitals, but he was not exactly quarantined any longer. Tucker could hardly ever be described as restless, but he had felt driven to come.

    It’s almost like…

    His body stiffened and his thoughts died, contemplation ceasing in the face of the winter spirit’s touch. Perhaps coming out here had been a mistake after all.

Lucy steeled herself, flexing her fingers against the cold before lifting the violin. The cold would have been a concern for her in the past- instruments didn't like changes in temperature. But her uncle had fixed that particular problem, as well as the problem of her clumsiness, by enchanting the object a little to be somewhat more durable. She still owed him a proper thank you for that, but that was relatively low on her to-do list.

The surface of the violin made her flinch away from the cold. The contrast between it and her skin was too distracting at first, but she had a job to do. Preferably before the dead registered her presence. So much was her focus that she had wandered out here without noticing the other living being out there with her.

The first scrape of her bow across the strings left a painful note lingering amid the silence of falling snow and the cacophony of a thousand ghosts being ripped away from this plane and dragged to the next.


The Otherside was always tinged with the clammy chill of the dead. It wasn't like the biting cold of Life, which reaffirmed one's status as still metabolically active and capable of feeling such a difference. There were no seasons, but the environs did shift as the collective view of humanity changed.

Between one breath and the next, Lucy's perspective transformed from the cold farm to the darkest Wood in the Otherside. And, all around her, were the ghosts of those who had died violent deaths. And... somebody else. Despite the fact that she was on much more solid footing on the Otherside, her confidence faltered when she spied the unwelcome guest and she took an inadvertent step backwards.

This was a mistake. The ghosts were starting to pay attention and she didn't need them to turn on her.

Her Otherside self stood straight, clad in a dark crimson dress that clung to curves normally hidden by more demure garb in Life. She lifted the version of her violin that granted her some power in this plane, the gesture carrying more weight to it with the accessories woven into her hair and hanging from her waist. Hundreds of facsimiles (or were they) of tiny bones hung off her person, and equally small, bright red flowers contrasted against her hair.

"Why were you out at the farm? Who are you?!" Her voice was firm and insistent, which was so complete a reversal of how she spoke in the Living that anybody who knew her would have been taken aback. "Answer me now," she said, worrying that the souls around them would take advantage of her distraction to attack them, "Or I'll-" She broke off the threat, unable to come up with something suitable and trailing off awkwardly as a result.

    One moment, a deathly winter chill. The next, a chaotic dance of streamers, or fog, or something. The transition may have passed unnoticed, for all that it had been seamless, but the stark contrast from one vision to the next brought a terrible sense of warped perception. Tucker could only liken it to vertigo. He did not stagger, nor tremor, nor yell. He merely absorbed; stared straight into the Otherside as the ethereal fury of hundreds swarmed around him. It was not fear that bound him but a simple awe.

    Souls? Is this the Afterlife? Am I dead? Is dying this… easy?

    They were angry. And melancholy. And indifferent. Many did not notice him, or care that he existed. Their attention seemed more pointedly elsewhere, though in this place ‘where’ seemed an ambiguous concept. As if to answer the conundrum, “Why were you out at the farm? Who are you!? Answer me now, or I’ll…”

    Tucker turned by instinct, his body, or spirit, or whatever he currently happened to be, moved as he willed it to move, not noticeably different from the other other-side. In his own place stood an auburn haired man, alike in many respects to Tucker Avari as he is, but wearing, rather than the green of Albion and bandages of recent injury as before, a white, indistinct patient gown. A rash of angry pock-like scars decorated his bare arms and barely concealed backside. More recent injuries, those obtained weeks before and sure to develop scars of their own, were suspiciously absent. In their place was something else. A miasma, as no other word could aptly define it, coated both hands, which remained at his sides. Nothing dripped off that thick, gray-green sickly fog, nor wisped away into the air around him, but it certainly seemed like it would take the chance if given.

    His gaze set firmly on Lucia. He had turned, not just his head, but his whole body to face her with a resolute and immovable expression. He had been misplaced and she knew exactly where. Or so his intuition told him. Unlike the drifting spirits, both with and without purpose, she held corporeal form. She, most unmistakably, was alive. There was no doubt in him on that. The mystery and intensity of her visage, however, confounded him to some degree, and he turned his attention towards himself before replying.

    For a long, silent moment (but for the whispering screams of dozens dead) Tucker Avari stared at his hands, having risen them to his own view. Relief briefly flashed in his eyes, though it quickly fled to be replaced by surprise. His hands turned over, one side and then the other, while he observed the dark miasma enshrouding them. Now, here, Plague seemed an infinitely more appropriate moniker. Tucker returned his gaze to match the other’s.

    She is the source of their agitation. Alive. Knowing.
    I think I am.
    If this is the Afterlife, where are the gods? The demons? Ah, Styx.

    “Are you Charon?”

Sade felt a growing irritation with herself. She'd done so well for so long, without any extra embrassing slip-ups. Now, not only was she on the verge of losing control of the situation, she'd made a colossal and egregious error. She had been careless about her surroundings out at the farm.

And, once again, there was a living person tagging along with her in the realm between realms.

Even more frustratingly, he didn't actually answer her question. It was fairly obvious from his rather unique aura or what-have-you, he was most certainly a student from the school. Her eyes narrowed at his reference to one of her more notable antagonists (he wasn't an outright enemy anymore, but his association with Lucy was tenuous at best and cold-war-like at worst).

"No. Unlike that individual, I'll give you one more chance to explain what you were doing before I seriously mess up your day. I am also, obviously, not male. Who are you?!?" Her suspicion was well-founded, given her interactions with others who had wound up in the Otherside.

Most notably, Victor, who had transformed her from the tool of higher beings to a free-thinking ferrier with gifts of her own right. But then, Victor had also been an incorrigible cad who always managed to make things significantly worse before making them better.

The spirits around them, while maintaining certain qualities that marked them as deceased, were much more tangible here. And capable of doing things to both herself and her unexpected guest that neither of them would appreciate. "Sacchaeus's ashes," she muttered under her breath, breaking her gaze away from the boy clad in a hospital gown in order to glance around their surroundings.

This allowed her to dodge a spirit's form as it hurled itself at her. This was not the time for idle conversation. Raising her instrument, she played a short melody. The tune hit the ears funny, but it congealed into a strange binding for the more... active spirits.

    The girl before him conveyed an honestly surprising familiarity with the name. Well, he had asked for a reason. Somehow it had not occurred to him that she would derail his preconceptions so easily. Either she was Charon (what did he know about mythical figures and their preferences for gender identity?) or Charon remained a fairy-tale. Her response belied something else entirely. Implications clear, it bothered him on some level, though he could not say that he felt altogether out of his scope. He could reconcile it, given time.
    That whole line of thought brought a new concept into question. One way to test it, he thought with an unusual sense of humor.

    "Plague." Did the Horsemen exist? Would she know them? It was a small gamble that might serve to prod more interesting information out of her. She was clearly unsettled and not thinking clearly. She just might let something slip, "The living name me Tucker."
    That'll make things a little less awkward if we ever get back to the island.

    For a moment he had focused on her, but she broke away to deal with some unruly sorts and he left her to it. Not his responsibility, after all. His own attention returned to his hands, flexing his grasp as though he might grab at the strange aura flowing between his fingers. It escaped him with little swirls like an agitated fog leaving him a bit put out with the display. He had to portray some semblence of control if he were going to play as a Horseman in this encounter. Would she abandon him in here or eject him back to the island if she discovered the ruse? Neither prospect was welcoming.

    It didn't feel any different. It was simply there. As if it always had been. A subtle part of him.
    Nothing special. Just there.
    Yet, it never had been before. Well, that was not strictly true, seeing it now -feeling it now- he could recall that that feeling had always been there with him. So suddenly obvious and illusive all the same. How could he have missed it all this time?
    Attempting to shape the fog by his own will proved an infuriating lack of bond with his ability. Oh, he mused, that's how. Even looking at it, he couldn't quite figure out how to connect with it. At long last, somewhat in resignation, he returned his attention to the girl whom had taken up a performance to soothe (or incapacitate) the spirits.

    "Are you a piper of a sort, then?"

1. He was definitely a Foresta School for the Gifted attendee.

That much, at least, she could rely on. Her gift was based on proximity and normies just didn't have lingering miasma around their hands. Even the name he gave himself smacked of something a high schooler would invent for his alter-ego. But, what did she know? It wasn't like she sought out the company of the other students at the school.

He mentioned a name she might have heard once or twice, long ago, but didn't carry any weight due to familiarity or importance to her situation. He could very well be what he said, and still mortal; the similarity to herself and that one immortal kid on campus would make it within the realm of possibility. But what in the Twilight's Wood was she supposed to do with that information?

2. He was a distraction she definitely did not need, given the current set of circumstances. She continued to play, relying on instinct to prevent tragic mistakes as she tried to pin the boy down enough to the figure out what to do with him. She could leave him here while she took care of business, but there were denizens of this place that would make short work of any newcomer... or he'd find a way to screw with the natural order of things.

And, with a name like the one he gave himself, she was definitely not going to trust him.

She scowled at his assessment of her ability, shaking her head once, tersely. "You're thinking pied piper, but it's not the same. Think Hermes- one of his alternate jobs, psychopompous, carried through the mechanism of Orpheus." She clamped her mouth shut, realizing that he'd managed to get her to admit something through rash reaction.

After gritting her teeth in frustration for a moment, she changed the subject. "Look, I don't have time to take you back- this lot won't stay cooperative for long if we don't get moving. No stupid questions, no trying anything untoward, no wandering off and getting yourself negated, and no telling people about this place once we're back in Life. I can, and will, make your existence an uncomfortable one if you force my hand."

She turned, still playing the fey melody to cement the binding. Once she stopped, it would wear off after some short time (time itself was difficult to measure here, tricky and arbitrary at best) and she would have a much harder time sorting these souls out.