Toby the gargoyle was very clear on the importance of looking after Michael and his new weapon. Not that I needed telling. But we'd all had a long and confusing day and needed some rest. I suggested we meet up at the Wicker Stop in the morning to catch up.
My flat was nicer than I remember it being. I've always had this feeling of impermanence. Like at any moment my true nature was going to become known to the wrong people again and I'd find myself having to move on. It's happened enough times before, after all. But this timeline's version of me seems to have felt a bit more secure. Enough to actually put up some pictures and get some nicer homewares. The go bag was still under the bed, but some of the stuff had been taken out. It was nice.
Next morning, Adam had some idea about having me using my magical talents to summon our memories from this timeline, which pretty much everyone else agreed was a terrible idea that would probably make our brains disintegrate. We were all gradually catching up on things. Adam, it seemed, was now the newer arrival to the group and had never been in the Foundation. I started googling family members, which was easier once I remembered that all the Agneses were now Agathas.
But then Agnes and Mary showed up, and I got a surprise hug that I still don't really know how to deal with. They had a job for us. Some things never change. Missing teenagers out hiking, and claims of a sighting of the lake cryptid known as Bownessie. Of course we had to help. That's what we do. That's what our alternate timeline selves had been doing for quite a long time.
The Strava app proved useful, as one of the missing teens, Amy Baker, had been using it before she went missing. The data looked a bit weird, but it was a starting point. She'd been out by the lake, and had been moving towards it, and then turned and moved away from it, following a very strange path.
We talked to a fisherman down by the lake, and also a photographer out trying to get pictures of Bownessie. I found a necklace on the ground with the initials AB. We were definitely in the right place, so now we just had to find the hedge maze we'd been hearing about which supposedly only appeared at night. It certainly wasn't there in the late afternoon, so we went back to town for a pizza and came back after dark with head torches and fishing line. Michael remembered the story of Theseus and the minotaur and we wanted an escape string.
Not that escape strings are helpful when the maze is in some kind of alternate dimension reached by looking at the lake and turning around. And turning around and running certainly seemed like a sensible choice when some kind of horrible lake monster with an implausible amount of teeth put in an appearance. Amy's strange route away from the lake made sense now. The others had heard the sound of a child in pain at the edge of the lake. I'd just seen Michael disappear, and followed him.
I flew up to take a look at the layout. Or at least I tried to. What actually happened is I opened the wings and suddenly teleported into the air, which took everyone else by surprise, and the hedges got taller so I still couldn't see.
Back on the ground, the fishing line was going nowhere helpful, and we needed to get out. Some horrible zombie child ran across the path, and straight away I knew I needed to protect Michael. Which manifested in the form of a suit of red and white armour that I was suddenly wearing. Something very weird was happening to me and I was way past being able to hide it from the others.
I'm not sure how Adam got out, but the rest of us had to navigate our way through, eventually emerging without having to fight any more zombie children. We found him outside, making sure the photographer from earlier didn't do anything stupid. We were just wondering what to do next when Elizabeth turned away from the lake and disappeared again.
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