Being the Finalized account of the events of
23 November 1991, London, England
Earth 42.13/ Apple Sigma-3
At last Lucille had reached step two of her plan. Granted, step two was now step three, and technically it was also part of step one— and if this sentence seems tortured imagine how every atom of Lucille felt.
Ms. Grott’s office. The locus of the web. If there was anything that would draw the Devrosian Mite away from her prey it was someone being here.
Lucille searched the desk and drawers. It had to be here somewhere.
Ah, there it was. In the bottom drawer, a mass of psychic webbing, dense enough to be seen with the naked eye.
She glanced at her watch; it was time. She grabbed the psychic mass and waited for the Mite to detect the threat. This was the Rubicon.
She could hear the Mite say “I have something to attend to…” to a past Lucile, or possibly a future one, though she hoped no more iterations were necessary. She braced herself.
Ms. Grot entered the office and looked at Lucille. “Here twice? That’s very dangerous for your lot isn’t it?”
“You have no idea. It’s the most dangerous thing possible, but I’m not scared off by a little danger.” Lucille locked eyes with the monster. “So imagine how incredibly not-scared I am of a Devrosian Mite .”
“Oh, really?” Ms. Grot had already begun to shed her human disguise.
Sometimes an author will describe a monster as too terrible to describe, or beyond imagination. They will call it impossible or unfathomable. Perhaps this is true on some occasions, but oftentimes the author is underestimating language or over estimating their mastery thereof.
On an unrelated noted, The Devrosian Mite can be described as such: Its body resembled several thousand banana slugs that had ran afoul of a child vying for their merit badge in knot making. It had eighteen legs each resembling a a barnacle-encrusted sickle. It’s head was like a hairless lupine with sixteen eyes, another dozen sensory organs resembling cobweb covered radio telescopes, and a mane of angler bulbs. Now, to account for it existing in dimensions beyond human perception, imagine looking at such a creature through a kalidescope with random facets blacked out .
“Yes. Really.” Lucille said sounding so unimpressed that she might as well be watching paint dry. In slow motion. “Would you would dare attack me while I’m holding your core.” She feigned a squeeze of the psychic mass.
The mite tried to hide its frustration at the human’s nonchalance. “And you wouldn’t destroy my core so long as children are in my web.”
“Then we are at an impasse.”Lucille contemplated the core, turned it over in her hand like a child who’s found a pretty rock.
“I don’t see how.” The Mite chittered closer. “You’re here to save those children. You’d sooner die than fail, and you will.”
“‘And I’ll’ what?’ Save the children?” Lucille cocked her head.
“What? No! You’ll die!” The Mite was losing patience.
Lucille wasn’t planning to help find it. “Yeah. I will die. but not sooner than those children are free.”
The Mite rotated its head “Well then perhaps I will eliminate that option.” It hurried back to the door. If it could not let the children’s terror marinate any longer, it would sooner feast on a poor harvest that lose her meal altogether. It slipped through the door and—
Found itself in it’s office. “ On my door?” It spat. “ That takes some doing.”
Lucille just smiled and winked. “Like you said, I’m going to die. Might as well make it splashy.”
“Who are you?” the Mite narrowed a dozen eyes and a myriad of other sensory organs at the human, or at least apparent human.
“What does it matter who I am? All that matters is I’m the woman who’s going to save those children. I’m the woman who’s going to stop you--”
The Mite took the monologue as an attempt to try the door again, perhaps Lucille was too distracted too—
No, back in her office.
“-and I’m also a woman who is very good at multitasking.” Lucille checked her watch. “Well, actually…. I suppose that about does it.”
The Mite, by now accepting she would never be privy to whatever plan Lucille had, figured that she might as well take another shot at impaling the woman on her pincers.
Lucille simply raised the hand holding the Mite’s psychic core. Momentum ensured that the mite had no say in matter. It stabbed its own life source.
“Nooooo!” The psychic mass crumpled, the Mite’s screams worsened and then, along with the building, began to fade. “You wouldn’t! You haven’t!”
Lucille paced over to the window. “I have. Really you knew there was at least one other me here, out there, with the children. You also knew they hate you, fear you. You made sure of it, in fact it’s sort of your thing. How hard do you think it was to lead an escape?”
The Mite was too unstable to respond with more that a hiss and gurgle.
“Eight and half minutes. Thanks for trying to leave by the way. It let me skip you forward a few minutes.” Lucille made a dash through the window. From the outside, the orphanage looked like a burning photograph, warping and flaking away.
There, another identical woman. Lucille walked towards her from the rapidly disappearing building.
“Well then,” the prior iteration of Lucille asked her. “How did it go?”
“As well as one can hope,” Lucille said. “Best close the split, eh?” She offered her hand to her doppelgänger. The other reciprocated. Then, there had only been one Lucille the entire time.
The temporally reconsolidated Lucille doubled over in pain.
“Are you okay?” Colin was the only one to ask aloud, but all the rescued children’s body language echoed the question.
“I’m fine. Time is just…catching up with me.”
“Because there were two of you?” Alex asked. “But… now there’s only one.”
“You remember?” Lucille asked
“Hard to forget,” Colin said
From the looks on the other children’s faces, they found forgetting far easier. “You two never cease to amaze. Time-proofed memory. Yes, there were two of me, but ‘here’ only exists once. Something of a no double parking rule.”
She took a closer look at Alex’s face. Underneath her left eye was a scar. A scar from a burn. A scar from a burn that never happened.
“I don’t understand.” Alex said.
Lucille furrowed her brow. She wasn’t sure she understood either. “It takes some explaining I suppose. Child services will be here any moment to take you all back home, somewhere safer than an alien web. But….”
“But what?” Colin asked.
“Well, time’s still settling, readjusting. If say… two very gifted children were to time travel away from the situation, the police might not notice, and those children might be free to apprentice under a traveler of space, time, and beyond?”
“What? Us?” Colin gestured to himself and Alex.
“Like I said, time’s catching up with me. I don’t have long, but if I ration my time carefully I just might set you on the right track”
Sirens in the distance. Alex turned to Colin. “Sounds better than another orphanage to me.”
“Yeah.” Colin nodded “Are you…adopting us?”
“Not legally, no. I’d be a terrible parent. But I’m told I’m a good friend.” She held out her hand, the other resting on the knob of a wooden door that had not been there a moment ago. “Shall we take a walk?”