Chapter 236: 237: Peridot

“Wow… you’re real!” says the strange girl, bewildered. “Are you alright?” she asks again a second time.

Fresh nervously looks up at the stranger, standing in front of herself. Dusting herself off, Fresh gets up, grabbing her broom. Should she make a break for it? “I’m alright, thank you,” replies Fresh, turning away to both wipe off and also hide her own face.

She blinks. Wait… Isn’t her face hidden anyways, because of the hat?

Fresh looks over her shoulder, staring at the black-haired, brown-eyed girl standing there. She’s a head shorter than Fresh is, pale, scrawny, bookish with freckles and not in the least frightened of her. “Hey, can you see my face?” asks Fresh.

“Uh…” the girl squints her eyes together, tilting her head from side to side, staring at her face. “No, the top-half is all shadow. Like… totally. It’s like someone erased your face with a marker. That’s so weird…” she says, lowering herself down onto her knees, staring up towards Fresh from below. “Ah!” she corrects herself. “A marker is a tool to draw with,” she explains, having expected some question to come. “Oh. Wait. No, you already know that. Sorry. Bad habit,” she says, apparently being a talker. “Man! You look so cool. I want a hat like that too!”

Fresh narrows her eyes. The girl knows about witches, but isn’t afraid. She knows about markers, which don’t exist in this world. Her fingers twitch. Is this the hero? She figured it would be a man, given the guard’s conversation from before, but…

“How do you feel about ice-cream?” asks Fresh. Nobody from this part of the world could know about ice-cream, at least not yet.

“What…? Ice-cream?” asks the girl, a little taken aback. “Eh.” She shrugs, her face is clearly confused.. “I prefer normal chocolate. Why?”

“I see…” sighs Fresh. “No reason.” It’s confirmed. This girl is from another world, likely her own. It looks like she’s found the hero then.

So… a curse? What kind of curse? She hopes it isn’t a mean curse. The stranger seems nice. Being chosen as a hero must be rough. As the hero, this girl is for sure the center of attention in a lot of ways, which isn’t great in this world. At least Fresh got to stay ‘a secret’ after her rebirth.

“I got your message!” she says, excitedly, looking at Fresh and stepping closer. “It was so weird, I was like… kind of dead, but then I wasn’t, you know?” she explains. “And then somebody really bright was talking. But then at the same time I saw you to the side and I touched your hand and then I was like -” she holds her fingertips to her head and then pulls her hands outward, making the sound of an explosion. “- It was so wild!”

“Oh. That’s cool,” says Fresh, faking a smile as she nods, lifting a finger from her waist subtly towards the girl. “You’re the hero, huh?” she asks. Apparently, her message from the west did work. She has been recognized. Fresh hopes that the girl will understand, if she knows about her circumstances. Though, she really just hopes that she will be able to forgive herself for this. Maybe if she tells herself often enough that she did it for her friends, she’ll manage somehow? But she isn’t sure if that’s true.

“Uh…” the strange girl looks away. “No. Actually…” she says, apparently somewhat let down as her head and shoulders drop, her gaze lowering to the floor. “That’s my brother.”

Fresh’s eyes open wide and her finger shoots back down. “Your brother?” she asks, surprised.

“Yeah, uh…” the not-hero rubs her head. “It’s hard to explain. Well, no. I mean… you died too, right? I saw.” Fresh nods. “Well, it’s uh… a little dark, but my brother and I died in a car crash,” she explains.

“Sorry to hear that,” says Fresh. “Did a truck get you?” she asks, already knowing.

“Sure did. T-boned us good. It uh… it hurt.”

“Sorry,” replies Fresh, rubbing her arm. “I’d like to tell you that it’s better here, but…”

“Yeah…” says the stranger. “Anyways, we got ‘other-worlded’, which seemed great at first,” she explains, walking away, apparently not in the least threatened by Fresh’s presence. She sits down on a chair, by a small desk covered in drawings and scribbles. “I guess you know what that’s like? I thought this was going to be my big second-chance, you know?”

Fresh leans against the wall of the balcony, not wanting to step inside too far, in case she has to make a quick escape. “Yeah, I know.” Taking a second, she rubs the lantern to make amends for almost dropping it and then hooks it back onto the broom. There is an audible scratching sound. Looking up, she sees that the stranger has decided to forgo the social-etiquette of a conversation and is now drawing, or at the very least scratching her pen over the sheet of paper in front of herself.

“I thought I was gonna get some super cool thing or gimmick to start a new life,” she explains. “One that’s…” She scribbles over the page for a while, not finishing her sentence. It’s quiet for a minute with Fresh just standing there while she draws. The girl sits upright, looking around as if she had just zoned out for a second and only realized where she was again. “Sorry!” she says. “- One that’s more…” She slaps the pen down, rubbing her fingers through her head in frustration. “- I can’t find the word.”

“Happy?” suggests Fresh, knowing what she’s getting at.

“Yeah,” she replies. “Sure. Happy. You know, one that doesn’t suck?” Fresh nods, understanding that for sure. The girl lifts up a bunch of new drawings of things from their old world. Appliances, gadgets, cars, weapons, all the ideas she had apparently recreated to show off here. “Anyways. Turns out I was just a tag-a-long. Like always,” she says, dropping all of those pages into a waste-bin next to the desk and picking up the pen a second time. She has very active hands and kind of a spacey brain, apparently. “Nobody here cares about me or my ideas. They’re all just interested in my brother,” she sighs. “Like always. I might as well have just stayed there. At least we had electricity.”

“Sorry, that’s rough,” says Fresh, looking over her shoulder and back down the balcony. It looks like the ceremony hasn’t begun yet. The irony isn’t lost on her, as she stares down into the night, apparently also more interested in the girl’s brother more than her. “Listen, this isn’t one of those kinds of worlds,” explains Fresh, bringing some Jubilee into her personality. “You need to be tough as shit, or you aren’t going to make it,” she explains, very clearly. “I need to know, did your brother get my message, or just you?” she asks.

“Just me,” says the girl, scribbling. “Like I said. Nobody cared, not even… I don’t know, ‘god’ or whoever that was.”

Fresh frowns, looking at the dejected figure. She realizes that the girl is probably even more upset now, because she had made clear that her message wasn’t for her, it was for her already and, apparently always, favored brother. “Not interested in going to the party?” she suggests, looking back down at the scene below them. “It looks like a lot of fun,” says Fresh, turning her gaze back to look at the very tired eyes that stare her way. There are bags with a weight beneath them that had no business being there on such a young face.

“It’s not for me,” she says. “It’s too…” the girl racks her brain for a moment, pulling on her hair a little. “- loud? Fun? I don’t know. I don’t do parties,” she explains. Fresh’s eyes open wide at that first, familiar statement. “I just kind of get stuck and hide in a corner until I find a way to go back home, you know?”

Fresh knows what she has to do now. She doesn’t really want to. But she knows that she has to and so it’s either going to be on her own terms, or on the fountain’s. This final statement has sealed the deal, in a spiritual sense. Did the fountain really plan this far ahead? Did it know about the two of them arriving here, rather than just the hero by himself? It must have, since she has come prepared. But…

Fresh turns her head away, narrowing her eyes. That means the fountain knew that the girl would get her message too… that means…

- That means that the fountain knows about her deceit. About the crystal she made in the west. It has known this entire time. It was never a secret of hers. It was the fountain’s plan all along.

“Anyways, it was cool meeting you. I always wanted to see a real witch,” says the girl. “I won’t tell anyone,” she mutters, not bothering to look up from her drawings. “Not that they’ll listen if I did.”

Fresh crosses her arms, wondering what else it is that’s bugging her for only a moment, before realizing it right away. “Are you gonna give up that easily?” she asks.

“Huh?”

“So what if this isn’t the world you wanted it to be?” asks Fresh, adjusting her hat. “Live like it is anyways!” she exclaims, clenching her fists. “This is a new world, a new chance to be a new you!”

The girl stares at her for a while, before turning back to the desk, not able to hold eye-contact for longer than a few seconds. “That’s easy for you to say,” she says. “You got some great body, some class that nobody else has, a god watching your back and a whole bunch of people who care about you.” She sighs. “Must be nice.”

“I didn’t have a class or a friend when I arrived here. I got those on my own!” argues Fresh, unable to counter the other points. “With or without the fountain.” She turns around, stepping back out towards the balcony, about ready to leave. The hero should be outside any minute now.

But her feet stop. The fountain isn’t letting her leave. Not until she’s fulfilled her goal of being here, in this tower, with the hero’s sister.

“What’s your name?” asks Fresh, still not having received a reply to her last statement. “Your new name?”

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“It’s stupid,” groans the girl.

Fresh shakes her head, looking back over her shoulder. “Everyone has a name like that here. What is it?”

“Peridot,” says the girl, looking down at her paper but not scribbling anymore. She’s just kind of playing with it.

“Do you have a class, Peridot?” asks Fresh.

She shakes her head. “Not yet. They want me to become some kind of supporter or something,” she sighs. “They won’t even let me be in his party though. Not that I want to. That dick.”

“And do you want to be a supporter?”

“Hell no!” answers Peridot with surprising, sudden energy. Her tired eyes light up a little. “I thought I was gonna be some kind of cool, chosen hero,” she explains. “For all of five minutes.” The girl shrugs, throwing her latest scribbles and the rest of the paper all into the trash before getting up, scooting her chair noisily away as she heads out past Fresh towards the balcony. “I want a sword and a cape,” she says, sighing and resting her arms on the railing, looking down at the party below. With a flick of her hand, she throws the pen off into the night.

Fresh nods, placing her broom between her legs and rising up a foot into the air.

“Wait!” says Peridot, but she doesn’t follow up with anything else. Apparently she just didn’t want her to go. Fresh sighs, staring out over the illuminated night that stretches on before herself for as far as her eyes can see. It’s not like she wants to wait, or go, but there really isn’t any way around it. The witching-hour is just about here and it’s time to get to work. Her feet lower themselves back down to the stones.

“How badly do you want happiness?” asks Fresh, fighting through her somber mood.

Peridot looks up at her. “Really bad. More than anything else that I’ve ever wanted!” exclaims the girl, leaning in towards Fresh so close that she can smell her. “I feel like I haven’t seen the world in color in years!”

Fresh slowly closes her eyes, hovering for a second. “Give me a coin,” she says.

Peridot’s eyes open wide. “A… coin?” She stops. “Is this a thing?!” she asks, growing excited again. “Like with the fountain and you?!” Fresh nods, not able to bring a smile to her face. Peridot sprints back inside, throwing everything off of her desk as she digs around, coming back with a single, gold Obol, holding it up to Fresh without any questions at all, being familiar with the memory of Fresh’s arrival into this world.

Fresh shakes her head. “Peridot, listen,” she explains. “This is sell-your-soul stuff. There’s no going back once you go left at the crossroads.”

“I don’t care!” says Peridot, leaning in and holding the coin closer, her hand shaking, her eyes wide.

Trumpets blare from down below. The music begins to come to a stop. Fresh looks over the railing and watches as the people start to gather at the central stage. It’s about time. “I don’t know what’s going to happen,” says Fresh. “But it’s probably dangerous and I’ll bet that you won’t be able to stay here or with your brother.”

Peridot presses the coin past her hand and against her stomach. “I don’t care! Take it!”

“If you get something ‘evil’, you two might end up trying to kill each other,” says Fresh, wanting to make the small-print exceptionally clear. “You’re going to be alone and hated and misunderstood. It’s going to hurt.”

“I DON’T CARE!” exclaims Peridot, forcing the coin into Fresh’s hand and closing the girl’s fingers around it herself. “At least then people would look at me, at least then I’d have a chance, like you did!” she says. “If I jump off of this tower right now, not one of those people down there is going to spend five seconds looking my way! I don’t have a Jubilee to help me out!” cries Peridot, a few droplets splashing down from her face. As those tears strike the ground, Fresh can hear the whispering commands of the fountain come from them.

She takes a deep breath, feeling the warm metal in her grasp. She reaches into her bag with her other hand, taking out the large, red apple, soaked and permeated for days in the black-water of her inventory. Even now, despite all of that, it looks perfect. Pristine. Holding the golden coin against it, she closes her eyes and focuses on the ability that the fountain is whispering to her about.

The apple’s skin turns from its rich, red tone to a bright, shimmering gold. But the body of the fruit remains soft and supple beneath her fingers. Fresh hands the apple to Peridot, her fingers not able to let go of it, until something forces her to let go. She makes a concentrated effort not to look at the item’s status screen. She doesn’t want to know.

Peridot takes the apple with tears in her eyes. “W- Will I be happy?” she asks, breaking through her cracking voice.

Fresh shakes her head. “I hope so,” she says. “Good luck, Peridot. Stay safe. Work hard.” The broom rises into the air as the lantern guides her into motion. It’s time. She tips her hat forward, turning her gaze out ahead and down towards the stone platform.

The broom moves, trumpets blare, the gigantic doors of the keep open wide and the crowd, thousands large now, erupts into a cheer louder than anything she has ever heard before.

Somehow, despite all of that, Fresh still manages to hear the wet, crisp crunch of a bite from up behind herself.

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