Pinkgothic played:

Dread and Rapture

"I could easily help you cheat."

For the first instant, she was only aware that she'd been woken from her slumber, consciousness groggily complaining about that sluggish haul from its cosy confines. Her right cheek nuzzled against the smooth ground and her arms lay loosely beside her head, giving her a perfect view of one soft-skinned limb. Nothing immediately unusual occurred to her about it, even as she flexed her fingers, still not quite wanting to acknowledge the voice that-

Her eyes closed again as she forced herself to rein in an instinctual squeak, it catching tensely in her throat instead. Breathe, Elizabeth. Breathe.

A moment later the hidden syllable leapt forth despite her efforts, something touching her shoulder, touchinghershoulderohgodWHY. Her heart similarly happily hammered against her ribcage. A part of her sarcastically remarked that she should be happy she'd had the restraint not to scream. That wouldn't be adequate at all. Would it?

Spidery fingers kneaded their way into now-tense shoulders with absent-minded affection, their owner crouched beside her, behind her field of vision as was customary. "Sequentially take a probing poke at each one of you until I find the one in seclusion," he added, elaborating on that initial statement, tone full of delight.

Yes. Yes, he could do that. Whether that resulted in a later catastrophe, on the other hand, depended greatly on how such an act of sleuthing was summonned. She battled with herself as so often, seeking that elusive calm. Usually she found it more quickly, but he was fishing for something today, or seemed to be, and her mind stubbornly refused to budge back down from the edge it was on.

Breathe.

"Would you like that?"

The casual tone of voice felt as deceptive and dangerous as it had months ago, before she'd discovered its occasionally contextually more distressing sincerity. Sincerity was all she had, though. "I don't know." That was sincere. She was weighing her options, wrapped in a numb horror.

"Of course, the server is cheating, too," Dread revealed, thumbs pushing themselves along her spine through her shirt.

The little constructed bubble of childish terror popped abruptly, leaving her stare at her arm perplexed instead of the product of stubborn tension. The urge to twist herself under his attention to stare at him found itself rudely squashed. The curiosity of course remained. "Cheating?"

"From what I can tell, you've been split into two groups," Dread informed, matter-of-factly. "Different occurrences, different interior design, different deco," he continued, deliberately leaving the specifics out of it.

Two... groups? "...wait, so there's more than one replacement?" she echoed the thought dumbly, narrowing her eyes at her wrist as if it were somehow responsible for this bizarre revelation.

"Apparently," he observed, tone faux-neutral, letting his hands creep up to her shoulders to grasp them lightly.

Elizabeth's usually rather pristine mindscape darkened considerably for a moment. Motherf-! She stopped herself, useless gaze now a therapeutic glare. That explained a few things. Or rather, that had the potential to explain a few things - obviously she'd not been walking through the world looking at things as if they'd been split into two groups, but she'd had more than one candidate in mind and this explained how that could happen quite adequately.

It also nurtured paranoia - she didn't have to head back to the world with her new insight and watch it unfold in practise to know that would happen. Now everyone was a suspect... simultaneously.

Was that really going to make anything easier?

"My offer stands."

Goddamnit it all straight to hell.