“M-One, we apologise for the sudden call,” A-Chan said over the phone. “But you have to go down to headquarters. It’s a Code White emergency.”

Ame’s taxi drove down Uchibori-dori Avenue, in the heart of Tokyo, running red lights and overtaking corporate sedans. Buildings were nothing more than blurs in the window to the right. To the left, the grounds of the Imperial Palace and its trees shone in the sunlight.

“We believe that an Anomaly has infiltrated headquarters,” A-Chan told her. “Both the Departments of Possibility and Consequence are locked down. Everyone has been evacuated, fortunately enough.”

The taxi took a left down Harumi-dori, speeding past the Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department, then the red brick facade of the old Ministry of Justice. It was only then that Ame noticed that the leaves on the trees had turned orange. Summer was fading, and Autumn was beginning to make itself known in the palace gardens. It was almost the end of August, after all.

“We want you to go down there and investigate,” A-Chan said in the final part of her call. “The other Myth members will follow after their event at Tokyo Big Sight; we can’t pull too many girls from that event, or else it’ll draw unnecessary attention.”

Ahead of them, past the intersection between Hibiya-dori and Harumi-dori, was the square facade and stone pillars of the Dai-Ichi Seimei Building, the former General Headquarters of the Allied occupation forces, and the current home of both the Dai-Ichi Life Insurance Company and Cover Corp.

The taxi crossed the intersection, but the driver wasn’t willing to drive over the concrete island to stop in front of the old GHQ building. So Ame ordered him to stop in the middle of the road. Rushing to get out, she pulled a crisp 10,000 Yen bill and handed it to the old driver. The amount of money bewildered him, since the  drive from Kabukicho being a relatively small distance. But she motioned him to keep the change. Ame crossed the street, getting a few looks from passerby. She should’ve changed out of her detective getup to something less eye-catching, but she couldn’t help it; her stream that morning had just ended when A-Chan came a-calling.

When she came up to the doors of the building, two men in suits motioned to stop her, but quickly gave way when she flashed her badge: A black card with a white outline of Hololive’s triangle. The lobby was small and almost empty, with only a varnished wooden reception desk flanked by two stairs. The secretary, upon seeing Ame, motioned her to go up to the second floor. At the very end of the floor, past glass office doors behind which Cover Employees pretended to be insurance agents, stood A-Chan. It looked like she had been waiting for Ame for quite some time.

The detective exchanged nods with her, and she in turn pressed a button to open the elevator. Inside, two men wearing black face-covering helmets with goggles and dark blue jumpsuits stood at attention. On their shoulders were patches of the familiar Cover Corp. triangle, and in their arms were mint condition Howa Type 64 rifles. Ame and A-Chan walked inside, and a button press sent them down into the depths of Tokyo.

“You know sending me down there on my lonesome is a bad idea, right?” Ame said, breaking the silence and low hum of elevator music.

“Sorry but there’s no choice; we have two very OoP’s projects down there,” A-Chan said, her eyes on an iPad. “They have to be checked as soon as possible.”

She was chatting with someone on the tablet, and by the speed at which she typed, it was probably Yagoo. The boss.

“Where is he now?” Ame asked, half-knowing the answer but wanting to be sure.

“Modeling new merch at the other office,” A-Chan answered, almost sighing out the words as she typed out a few more messages. The office she talked about was the fake office north of the GHQ, near Akihabara. “He’ll then have to join the others at the Tokyo Big Spot event. That’s why it falls on to me to deal with this.”

“Isn’t that last one supposed to be my line, though?”

“Then you handle telling the Prime Minister to calm down, Watson,” she snapped. “Assure our American friends at the Bureau too. You’re better at English than I am, surely.”

“Never mind,” Ame answered, folding her arms, before looking back at her after realizing something. “Wait, why are they involved?”

“One of the projects is an Object of Power on loan from New York.”

A-Chan told one of the men with them in the elevator to hand Ame a brown Manila envelope. Inside was a map and two pictures: One was what looked like those old-timey supercomputers, four cabinets of circuitry arranged in a row. The other picture showed what appeared to be a robot with one glass eye that shifted from left to right. The map, meanwhile, showed the locations of these objects within both the Departments of Possibility and Consequence, in neat blue Hololive brand stationary.

“That one, you don’t have to worry about too much,” A-Chan said, pointing at the robot. “It’s just a museum piece. But this one...” She pointed to the picture with the supercomputers. “This one, you have to make sure it’s still okay.”

“Well, what is it?” Ame asked, wondering what kind of an Object of Power a dumpy-looking computer could be. Sentient AI? Weather controller? There were Cyrillic letters under the picture. Russian mind control device?

“It’s a computer that predicts the future,” A-Chan said. “Strange that it didn’t help the Soviets that much, though. We borrowed it from the Americans last week, and if anything were to happen to this machine...”

“There’ll be hell to pay from Washington?”

“If it were only that, then we wouldn’t be sending you down there in the first place,” she said. “Its destruction may tear open a hole in reality, leading to... well, we don’t know what. Demons? Heaven? Hell?  The... what’s the term? The ‘bottom line’ is that we don’t want to find out.”

Why was it always Russian OoP’s that caused strange things to happen? Ame remembered that sentient fridge she and the other Myth members had secured two weeks ago. Just remembering how it manhandled Kiara made her skin crawl.

“All right then,” Ame said, committing the image of the computer into memory. “Just make sure it’s not gonna hit on me or anything, okay?”

A-Chan chuckled. “Don’t worry. It’s nothing like OoP-362.”

“If you say so. The moment it tries to pull any weird shit, I’m gonna give it a Watson Special,” Ame said, feeling for the revolver holstered under her coat.

“Please don’t make such jokes,” A-Chan said.

“By the way, why are you sending just me down there? Couldn’t you just  send a few rangers to secure the area?” The detective was pertaining to the men who were with them in the elevator. Cover Corp. had many of these men under their employ, all ex-SDF, trained for recovery and retrieval of OoPs and Persons of Interest. Surely, they could secure a few floors by themselves?

“I already did,” she replied, before looking Ame in the eye. “Thing is, we’ve lost contact with them. If you come across any, please bring them back to the elevator.”

“So whatever has infiltrated the facility is still down there, and is probably deadly. And you expect me to survive?”

“Yes, one way or another. I do have teams that will recover your body on standby, just in case.”

“Hah!” Ame shook her head. “Of course you do.”

So that was why Ame was being sent alone down there. Because Cover knew that no matter how many times she was killed, the detective would just get back up again. Chronal Inertia was one of the Timepiece’s properties, after all. Her body would always go back to the state it was when it was first activated. Way back in 1939.

In other words, for the last nine decades, Amelia Watson had lived as an immortal.

She did not grow old, or grow at all, even. No matter how many times she got shot, disemboweled, or crushed, she would always somehow be put back together by the laws of physics. In Cover’s eyes, she was perfect to send on these high-risk missions where they couldn’t afford to send more irreplaceable Persons of Interest.

The elevator shuddered, before making a short ping.

“We’re here,” A-Chan said before pressing a button to open the elevator doors. “Communication is jammed, and we’re still trying to figure out the cause. So, in the meantime, we’ll be tracking the movements of your Timepiece. If it stays still for more than two hours, we’ll assume the worst and send people to pick you up.”

The elevator doors open, to a long, well-lit hall. There was an almost unnatural stillness in how everything looked right. No damage, and all the tables and chairs and pictures were in their proper places. It gave off a feeling that they had not arrived in the Department of Possibility, but some alien world where they were unwelcome.

Ame shook her head at the sight. How creepy.

There were barely any signs of surprise from A-Chan, except for a slight raise of her eyebrows. She motioned the two men aim their rifles down the hall, and they were ready to fire as Ame walked out.

“Good luck,” A-Chan said, as the elevator doors closed.

Ame looked around herself. The walls had framed pictures of Cover Corp.’s previous heads, with Yagoo being the seventh. The others were heads this organization wasn’t Cover Corp yet.

According to the map, this was the landing hall for the Department of Possibility, and north of here was the supercomputer.

Ame walked into the office interiors. There was more of the varnished wooden doors with glass windows showing abandoned desks, rows of CRT televisions streaming different news channels, and ticking machines specially designed to predict the outcome of current events. A few of the offices were being renovated, however, with open vents and wall panelling torn down.

In between these rooms were Hololive merch displays, collab schedules, corkboards upon corkboards of who could collab with who. Vintage vending machines lined the hall, all branded with the faces of JP PoI’s like Pekora, Miko, Fubuki. They sold potato chips, hot cutlet sandwiches, and even bowls of udon.

The JPs were also at the Tokyo Big Sight event too. Ame wished somebody had been left behind in case of emergencies like this.

But she couldn’t stay scared forever. Ame was a good shot herself. If things came to that, she wouldn’t go down so easily.

Behind two wooden doors, Ame found the core room of the Department of Possibility: Rows of ticking machines, all making a cacophonous hum, a melody of prediction. They surrounded a low stage where more CRT monitors stood, showing CNN, BBC, Fox, NHK, Al Jazeera, TikTok, secret camera feeds in various government offices, LiveLeak, the Prime Minister’s bathroom, and other places. One machine, an automatic teletype, pounded out reams and reams of logs translated into kanji from LINE, Facebook, Twitter, 5channel, 4chan, Reddit, and others, while another teletype pounded out transcripts of phone calls, Skype conversations, Discord chats, Viber chats, Telegram calls between regular people, celebrities, religious leaders, government officials, veterinarians.

All this data was fed by wire or conveyor to the room’s centrepiece -- a single 1988 NEC N2420/30 data modem, which would transmit the information to the Riken Center for Computational Science up in Kobe.

Cover had its nose anywhere and everywhere that prediction data could be gathered. That was the point of the Department of Possibility, after all: To do its best to predict the future, which could lead to the discovery of diverging timelines, and then alternate universes.

Which, ultimately, lead to the acquisition of new Persons of Interest, or “talents”.

But the setup that day was not hooked up to the modem and being transmitted to Kobe. Instead, they were hooked up to four strange-looking cabinets. This was the supercomputer in the picture. By the side of one of the cabinets, a metal plaque read Большая электронно-счётная машина-6.

“Well, it’s Russian all right,” Ame said, not understanding a word.

If this was the OoP that A-Chan wanted secured, then it looked fine to Ame. Its blue, red, and yellow lights beeped and booped in sync with the other strange lights in the room. That should be okay, right? In fact, it looked rather cute.

“Beep boop~” the detective said to herself. “Heheh.”

Didn’t A-Chan say this thing predicted the future? Unfortunately, she didn’t say how to operate it.

“Man, if I could ask for the results of the Jumbo Draw on Friday...” Winning that 700 million yen prize would let Ame keep her office in Kabukicho almost indefinitely.

Suddenly, a printer on the console of the supercomputer lit up, before printing out a row of numbers on tractor feed paper.

‘31 декабря 2022 года - 128387 - 81’ it said.

“More Russian. Tsk. Well, there’s some numbers on it. Guess I’ll just Google Translate this later,” she said to herself before ripping off the sheet and shoving it into one of her coat pockets.

“Now then, how about... okay. When will the world end?”

In response to the question that came out on a whim, the printer lit up once again, before spitting out a new sheet of paper that said ‘13 сентября 2022 года’. Though she couldn’t read the Cyrillic, Ame noticed the ‘2022’ on it.

The world was going to end in 2022? Ridiculous.

“Well that was a letdown,” Ame said, before taking the paper and folding it into another pocket. It looked like this thing was a hunk of junk, after all.

Or maybe it was right...

Ame rubbed the underside of her chin with a hand. She could look into it at a later date.

After walking out of the core room, Ame saw nobody in the main hall. Nobody in the cafeteria and recreational area either. Shouldn’t there at least be a spilled coffee mug or two, considering how fast this floor was evacuated?  

There were no signs of any disturbance, and that unsettled her.

She looked over her shoulder. Nobody was in the corridor. Just her.

Creepy.

Ame shook her head and went for the stairs leading down to the Department of Consequence. There, Cover tried to predict the costs of  possibilities, and judge which possibility was more feasible. At least, that’s what Ame knew from the brief.

The stairs led to the main room, a lobby with three hallways leading to different parts of the department: The cafeteria, the department core, and storage. Storage was where the robot she was supposed to check on was located.

The room was as brightly lit as the lobby, with shelves lining the walls. They all contained items of some sort. A Mac Computer, a Sony PSP, a German coal scuffle helmet, an arming sword, a katana, all seemingly inconsequential to the untrained eye.

But to Ame’s knowledge these were examples of experiments performed by the department, in an effort to create Objects of Power. She knew that the projects had a zero success rate so far, but it was safer to not touch them.

In the centre of the room, however, a glass box towered over the metal shelves. Inside was the robot, almost four times Ame’s height. It looked like a black metal pear, with a metal eye that slid left and right along a slit. Its right arm had a gattling gun, while its left arm had a fixed metal blade.

Judging by the hatch, this thing was meant to be piloted. Maybe it was used in some forgotten era.

But then she saw something red pouring out of its crevices. Blood.

“Ugh...”

On the side of the glass box was a white sticker label with the Cover Corp logo on it. It read ‘OoP T-05-67(-W), The Container’, with a note saying ‘Do NOT damage case.’

“How creepy,” Ame said to herself, before looking up at the robot again. Now that she noticed it, blood was seeping from all the robot’s crevices. She felt something churn in her gut, like she had just eaten bread.

This robot was dangerous. That much she could tell. And A-Chan called it a “museum piece”. Jesus.

Ame had to wonder. Why was Cover containing such a thing in a flimsy-looking case? It was made of what seemed to be glass. But when Ame touched it, light emanated from her finger, before rippling through the glass and then fading. Like a droplet of water joining a lake, creating small waves, before fading.

So the case was made of a special substance of sorts, not just glass.

“Amazing...” was Ame’s first thought. She wanted to take a picture of it, but held back. It was probably illegal.

Then again, nobody was around.

Nobody was around.

While thinking of this sentence, Ame’s attention turned to one of the boxes. This one contained a pink jewel on a golden mount. In it laid three other jewels, in the colors red, white, and pink.

It was beautiful. The most beautiful gemstone she had ever seen. Where did this stone come from? Who brought them here? They were definitely an Object of Power. Just like her Timepiece. But... how could such a glittering gem be so dangerous?

“Amelia,” a voice said from the darkness. “Breakfast is ready!”

Breakfast? What breakfast?

Ame turned to where the voice came from, but she was no longer in the storage. She was in a room, a bedroom with a wide open window. The sun was shining in, and she could hear birds. Birds chirping, flying between tree to tree along the road. A car drove by, a grey Oldsmobile Series 70.

She was no longer wearing her detective outfit. Instead, she wore a white dress. And slowly, she began forgetting what she was doing the moment before.

What was she doing? Something about... a gemstone?

“Amelia, these pancakes are going to get cold!” a woman shouted in a British accent. “Come now, don’t tarry!”

Breakfast. It was breakfast. The memories had begun flowing back to her. It was Sunday, seven o’clock. That meant they were about to go church! Right!

“Coming!” Amelia shouted, before wearing her white shoes and running out the door of her room.

Downstairs, in the kitchen, mother and father were already at the table. Father was wearing his army uniform, and his blue eyes scanned that morning’s paper while drinking coffee. Mother, on the other hand, looked a lot like Amelia herself, except for the red hair. She was wearing a blue dress, and her hat laid on her lap.

“She look wonderful, darling!” Mother beamed, holding her cheeks before she shook dad’s shoulder. “Love, look! I knew that white dress would look good on her!”

Father put down his newspaper and looked at Amelia, his square jaw curling up for a smile. “You look lovely, Amelia. Now then,” he said as his American accent cutting through the air as he beckoned toward her pancakes. “Eat up. We might make it to church on time.”

Sunday mornings were always peaceful in the Watson household. After church, they would visit the families of some of dad’s friends, or watch a film. Though they would skip if it was all newsreels, what with the dreadful business in Europe and Mister Hitler.

If Amelia was lucky, sometimes Uncle Doug would visit. He always visited on Sundays, with more stories about his exploits in the Far East, and gifts of mangoes and exotic fruits. Afterward, he would talk with father about “military matters”, while Amelia and her mother enjoyed evening tea.

That’s right. Life was always peaceful in the Watson household. But Amelia couldn’t help but feel uneasy. In the back of her mind, something was tugging at the ends of her brain, trying to tell her something.

That this was all fake.

Amelia blinked. That’s right. It was all fake. This wasn’t her life at all. It was the life of somebody else. Her life, for one thing, didn’t have a mother in it. Or a father, for the most part. Until he took her in and introduced her to his project with Uncle Doug...

So whose life was this?

Ame blinked again. She was outside, in the backyard. And the Watson family’s quaint two-story house house was burning. She was wearing a brown military jumpsuit, and in her hands was a smoking Fitz Special revolver.

Right in front of her, someone was crying.

It was her. It was Amelia Watson, in a white dress stained with blood.

“Why?” she asked, tears falling down her cheeks. “Why did you do this?”

“I...”

“I thought we were friends!”

“I’m sorry...”

“It’s not your fault, Amelia,” a voice said from beyond the void.

Ame blinked again. She was back in the storage room. There was no other sound other than the hum of air blowing in through the ventilation system.

What the hell was that? She looked around, trying to find who that voice was. But nobody was in the room but her.

‘The gem,’ Ame thought. The gem spoke to her.

The gem was an Object of Power. According to the label case, it was OoP O-04-96(-T), ‘Pink Star & The Three Princes’.

Underneath the name, the following words are written down: ‘Do NOT stare at for more than 10 seconds at a time!’

It seemed to be an OoP that somehow influenced one’s thoughts if they stared at it long enough. It showed a dream she often had at night, and would’ve probably trapped her in there too if she hadn’t noticed anything funky going on.

Ame turned her head away from the gem with her eyes closed. But an invisible force made her want to stare at it some more.

She had to resist.

She had to get out of this room.

Ame was already done with her mission, anyway. The anomaly was gone (provided there ever was one in the first place) and the OoP’s were unscathed. There was no reason to stay around.

Ame left the containment room, a chill running down her back, long after its doors had closed. She tried to shake away what she had seen earlier. Those were nothing more than bad, shameful memories anyway.

She made her way up to the Department of Possibility. It was still empty, still undisturbed. She wondered, ‘where are all the guards?’ A-chan mentioned sending some teams here earlier. They could’ve been downstairs in the Department of Consequences, in the rooms she hadn’t checked yet.

But no need to handle that now. Not without the rest of Myth by her side.

Unfortunately for her, things were not going to be so simple.

When Ame came up to the landing hall again, she gasped. For some inexplicable reason, the elevator doors had gone missing, replaced by a wood panel wall.

She brushed her hands around it, looking for tiny cracks, any indication that the elevator had just covered itself.

No such thing. She felt only the fine grain of wood under her fingers.

How could this be?

It was possible that the elevator was sealed for security purposes, only to be opened when necessary.

Surely, there was another way out?

She thought about it for a while. The Department of Possibility’s core room had an internet connection. She could chat A-Chan through there, have her send a team down for extraction.

Ame turned back and walked toward the core room, hearing nothing but the din of ventilation fans and the sound of her derby shoes rubbing on the carpet.

In the core room, Ame looked around for anything that resembled a computer terminal. There was no way she could work with the Soviet computer thing, and her phone would never get reception 300 feet below ground level. Unfortunately, only the teletypes had anything that resembled a keyboard, and there was no computer monitor to speak of.

“What the heck,” she muttered. “Talk about bad luck...”

Suddenly, she felt breathing. Something was breathing behind her. Long, heavy breaths.

Whatever mouth breathed that air, it was getting closer, and closer...

Ame tried to move, but her body kept disobeying her mind’s commands.

Until one order came through.

With all of her might, the detective turned around, gun at the ready.

But no one was there.

Ame looked around herself. No one was in the room except her.

Was she just being paranoid? Maybe.

Was she scared? Maybe.

Was the anomaly still around? Maybe.

Too many maybes. Ame hated this kind of uncertainty. She needed a plan, and quickly.

No means to communicate with the outside world through the core room.

Okay, so where else could she do that?

She knew all floors at the GHQ had a Security Room. The Departments of Possibility and Consequence, however, shared only one. It was downstairs, between the Core and the department’s labs.

There, she could gain access to the surveillance system, as well as a phone that was connected to the GHQ network.

It was worth a shot.

Ame got out of the core room and headed for the stairs leading to the Department of Consequences. But as she passed one of the soda vending machines, she felt that she could use a drink.

Fishing out a few coins from her pocket, Ame stood before the vending machine which sold ‘Well, Gura!’ Grape Soda, featuring, well, Gura. She was raising her hands up in the air with a cheerful smile, accompanied by two shrimps that were just as tall as her.

“Heh, kyut,” Ame said, before hearing the ‘ker-chunk’ of her can of soda in the machine.

The detective reached for her can of soda, but she would never be able to open it.

At first, there was a flash, followed by the sound of something falling to the floor, making a muffled and wet sound. Caught by surprise, Ame fell to the floor. She blinked, before seeing a severed arm.

Her severed right arm, to be more precise.

White fingers twitched, while bone and flesh peeked out from a bleeding end.

Only then did Ame feel the sting.

She tried hard not to scream. She tried really hard not to scream. Gritting her teeth, dropping her gun, using her free hand to apply pressure to the stump of flesh that once connected shoulder and arm. Lights in her eyes came in fits and flashes, clouding her vision. It felt like she fed half her body to a meat grinder.

A figure entered her line of vision. A girl, slender, wearing a brown detective coat with a pair of shining hunting boots made of black leather. She had blonde hair that went down to her waist, and a detective hat with a ribbon on top.

The air got caught in Ame’s throat, as she realized who this was.

It couldn’t be...

The girl went over to Ame’s severed arm, picking it up with her left hand. In her right hand, a strange boomerang-shaped knife gleamed as blood dripped down its edges.

It was Ame. An alternate version of Ame, decked out in a style similar to her own.

“Should’ve been more careful, 13-25,” the girl said with the same voice as Ame, but she had an accent. British? “This was one of my messier cuts, truth be told.”

But to Ame, the monologue sounded like it was playing on a megaphone from far away. Nothing but a faded ghost of a sound. The only thing the detective could focus on was her assailant’s face. She had the same face as Ame did, but she wore hers in a more dignified, yet smug manner. Like she was looking down on her.

“Very very poor attentiveness, 13-25,” she said, while looking at the arm. As if admiring a toy. “You should always expect an ambush when you’re alone. Assuming you were not being hunted was your first mistake.”

Ame knew there were alternate versions of herself, but this was the first time she had come this close to one. Instead of a plaid skirt, she had plaid pants that hugged her thighs, closed off by the black boots that went up to her knees.

Her shirt was covered in black harness, with the side of her torso holding a holstered long-barreled revolver. Her necktie was also a bit longer than Ame’s -- 5 inches vs her 3.

As the detective jotted down these details in her head, she tried hard to resist the pain of her exposed muscle, bone, and flesh. It was a weird feeling. The burning was near her shoulder, but it felt like it was happening all over her arm. She was having Phantom Pain.

“Now then,” the other Amelia said, looking at the part of the arm she had hewn. “What does your blood taste like, 13-25?”

Ame looked up. Her what?

The other Amelia dropped the arm, before going for Ame. The detective would’ve resisted, but her left arm had already been held down. The assailant wrapped her other arm around Ame’s waist, pulling her close enough for the detective to feel her warm breath.

“Hm, looks like Chronal Inertia has already kicked in. The wound has already closed up,” she said, dissatisfied.

It was true. The burning sensation had already passed, and the bleeding had stopped. Where Ame once had an arm, she instead had a stump.

“No matter,” the other said, breath blowing on Ame’s cheek. “We can make new cuts.”

“Wait, what are you--”

Without warning, the other Amelia made a gash across Ame’s cheek with the knife.

Again, the detective had to try very hard not to scream.

The blood dribbled down as the insides burned in the open air. But before Ame could fully register the pain, something wet rain itself across the wound.

The other Amelia was licking the wound on her cheek, taking in the blood with a satisfied slurp.

“Hmmm... you’ve been eating a lot of noodles, I see,” she said, before smacking her lips. “Yellow cake, too. You should watch your diet, 13-25.”

Ame couldn’t believe what was happening. Horrified, she tried to squirm out of the other Amelia’s grasp, but all she ended up doing was rubbing herself all over her assailant.

“Wh-What the fuck are you doing, you freak?!” she cried, trying to shake her off. “What’s your goddamn deal?!”

Despite her pleas, the other Ame had a look of confidence on her face, as streaks of blood dribbled down her chin.

“That was delicious,” she said. “Now then, enough appetizers. Let’s get down to the main course!”

The other Amelia raised her kukri knife up in the air to it down on Ame’s head. But before the impact, the detective managed to free her hand and throw an uppercut at her assailant’s chin.

The other Amelia soon let out a shriek of pain as her knife clattered to the ground. She held her mouth, but blood flowed through her fingers. She soon spat out what looked like a chunk of meat.

Ame had made the bitch bite off her own tongue.

Before the other Amelia had a chance to recover, Ame made her fall to to the floor with a kick to the shin. She tried to deliver a roundhouse to the head, but lost balance because of her missing arm.

Fearing she might lose in a straight-up fight, the detective took her severed arm from the floor and ran. Passing by the empty offices, she soon heard the sound of boots coming after her.

Ame had to think fast. She was passing by the offices that were up for maintenance. Up in their open air vents, she could probably make her escape.

The detective chucked her severed arm into the vent, before climbing in herself with a stepladder. The vent was big enough for only one small person to crawl into. Would the other Amelia follow her inside as well?

No. It would be too risky for her.

But she would probably do something else before long.

Ame crawled through the vent, resisting the urge to sneeze from the dust that had gathered over years of use. She wasn’t hearing anything, though it was likely that the other Ame still couldn’t speak. Her tongue would probably recover within the next hour.

The detective had to recover too. Making it to a ventilation shaft where a large exhaust fan blew air into the pathway, Ame sat down and held her severed arm. It had already healed at the other side, leaving a smooth, white stump of flesh.

She stuck this end to her arm, and almost immediately she felt what must’ve been a hundred needles stabbing into her shoulder. Soon, the pain gave way to a kind of dullness, as blood flowed into her arm again. A minute after that, she was able to open and close her fist.

Ame sighed. At least her body was in one piece again.

But what the hell was the deal with that other Amelia earlier? Not only did she attack Ame, but she also tasted her blood! A goddamn British-sounding psychopath. She must’ve been the anomaly behind this situation, but why did she come to Ame’s timeline? And what was that business with ‘1325’?

The best guess Ame could make was that ‘1325’ was connected to her in some way. Considering that the person who said it was an Amelia from an alternate timeline, it was possible that ‘1325’ was Ame’s own number. Amelia Watson number 1,325.

The 1,325th Ame.

So there have already been 1,325 timelines.

1,325 mistakes.

“No, it is not your fault, Amelia,” He said. “It is not your fault.”

Ame shook her head. What the hell? This wasn’t the time for that.

The detective tried to refocus her thoughts, thinking of the number 1,325, and her pursuer.

Her pursuer, another Amelia, was armed with a knife and a rather large gun. Ame dropped her gun earlier, leaving her nothing but two syringes of Watson Concoction. She was clearly at a disadvantage.

Part of her wanted answers. Did she do something to upset this other version of herself? Did she take anything? Was she just trying to kill Ame for the hell of it? Was she even an Amelia in the first place?

The possibilities were practically endless, and the only probable way to get answers was to ask her directly.  

But that would be dumb.

It wasn’t as if Ame could just walk up to her and say, “Heya. Why are ya chasin’ me for huh? Huh???” She would just get shot.

Ame would survive it, of course.

But the other Ame would survive any hits too.

So what was the point of all the hostility? Trying to kill each other was pointless.

Ame thought about it for a while. But the further she thought about it, the more uneasy she felt.

Could it be that the other Amelia had a means to actually kill her?

But if that were the case, then why didn’t she just kill Ame earlier? Instead of chopping her arm off, she could’ve lopped off her head instead? And when the other Amelia “tasted” Ame... she could’ve also killed her then.

Just thinking of how that fiend licked her earlier sent a shiver down the detective’s spine. Was she doing that for kicks? Was she a vampire? Or was it just some sort of intimidation tactic?

And she sounded like she knew Ame so well, saying ‘13-25 this’ and ‘13-25 that’.

So obviously she knew her from somewhere. But where? The only time Ame ever interacted with any other Ame from another timeline was...

The detective paused at her realization.

“No,” she said, shaking her head. “It can’t be.”

It’s not your fault, Amelia.

Impossible. It couldn’t be Her.

Why did you do this?

It just couldn’t.

I thought we were friends!

How could that even...?

“It’s not your fault, Amelia,” Dad told her after the test. “It’s not your fault.”

“I’m sorry,” she said, tears falling onto the Timepiece in her hands. “I’m sorry...”

No, no, no, that’s just... impossible.

Can’t be. Couldn’t be.

But what if it was?

And She had come here for vengeance?

Ame sat down, watching the shadows of the exhaust fan dance along the walls of the ventilation shaft. She was waiting for the cloudy waters of her mind to stay still, until the sediment sank to the bottom, leaving clear water at the top.

It was the stress. The stress of the situation was getting to her, making her come to false and unsubstantiated conclusions.

She had to escape. There was no way she could win against that other Amelia in a straight fight.

Then, she would look into this, get some real research done, find out who she really was.

But how could she escape? The elevator was sealed shut.

No emergency stairs either.

She could stay still for the next two hours and wait for A-chan to send people down here.

But by then, the other Amelia would’ve already found her.

The detective took out the map again, studying it for any clues. She was currently somewhere in the northeastern vents. To the west, there seemed to be a shaft with a maintenance ladder that led to the upper floors.

That was where Ame needed to go, and it looked like she could crawl all the way there. Perfect.

But as she climbed into the vents, the detective noticed a cloud of purple smoke heading her way. It smelled like coconuts.

She didn’t know what the purple smoke was, but in the back of her mind it signaled one thing: Danger.

“Oh shit.”

Ame went back into the ventilation shaft, looking for a way to get out. If she breathed that stuff in, she was a goner. She began kicking the center of the fan with all her strength, hoping it would give way.

“Come on, you stupid fan!” she cried as she kicked it with the heel of her shoes. “Open! Up! ALREADY! FAAAAHK!”

The smoke cloud was getting closer, the scent of coconuts stronger. Suddenly, she felt that this smell was familiar somehow.

It was the scent of Watson Concoction.

“Gas-type Watson Concoction what the FUCK?!” she screamed, kicking the fan harder. “I AM NOT! TRIPPING! BALLS! HERE! AAAAAAAAAAAAA!”

One more kick, and the fan gave way, bringing Amelia down with it. Her shoulder made a dry but loud crack as she crashed into a desk below. The pain burned, and Amelia struggled to get on her feet.

“Ow, ow, ow... oh god... fuck...”

When she stood up, she saw the damage: her left arm was twisted outward, and her hand had snapped to the side. Nothing a few snaps in place couldn’t fix, but it was going to be painful. She had to hurry, before Chronal Inertia set in and physics did the snapping for her -- a much more painful ordeal.

But before she could do anything, Ame heard steps from outside. She was in one of the offices, and that crash would’ve definitely made a sound.

No time for cracking back bones, then. Ame stood up, pressing herself next to the door, opening it just a little to see if anyone was outside.

She heard breathing. Behind the wall she was leaning on, somebody was leaning on it too.

Ame couldn’t resist. “What. The hell. Is your deal?”

The person behind the wall did not answer.

“Who the fuck hurt you, huh? I’m just hanging around in my timeline, minding my own business, and then you show up!”

Again, no answer from behind the wall.

“What, cat got your tongue? Oh wait...”

Ame remembered the piece of bloody meat that fell on the floor with a sploosh.

“I forgot you bit your tongue out! Well then...”

Grabbing a paperweight on a nearby shelf, Ame took a deep breath. She would open the door, knock into the other Amelia’s head, and hopefully put her down for the count.

With no other words, the detective opened the door, swinging her paperweight to the left where the other Amelia should be.

But there was no Amelia there. She wasn’t even in the Department of Possibility anymore.

She was in a restaurant. A restaurant with white walls and potted palm trees. She had never been here before.

A group of people were gathered around one table: Gura, Calli, Ina, Kiara, A-Chan and even Yagoo. With them were brown-faced chefs and waiters with huge smiles on their faces. On the table: A huge plate of what looked like thick noodles coated in a brown sauce with meat and vegetables.

“Magandang tanghali po!” they said to her in unison. But Ame had no idea what they just said.

Before she could say anything, the people at the table began singing.

“Happy birthday to you~!” they began. “Happy birthday to you! Happy birthday, dear Amelia~! Happy birthday to you!”

The detective blinked. It wasn’t her birthday. “Wuh...?”

Despite her confusion, the crowd cheered, and two waiters next to Ame fired pistols into the ceiling.

“Wait, what the fuck?!”

The crowd cheered again, and the brown-faced waiters had Ame sit at the center of the table. Gura was on the left, while A-Chan was on the right.

“Ameee!” the shark cheered. “Happy birthday!”

“Yes, happy birthday, Ame-san!” A-Chan chorused. “We got you your favorite noodles!”

She was talking about the noodles coated with brown sauce on the table, but Ame had never seen this dish before in her life. It looked and smelled good though.

She tried to form a sentence with her mouth. Any sentence. “What... what is...?”

“Ame, shush!” Gura said, putting a hand over the detective’s lips. “The special performance is about to start!”

The lights in the room dimmed, and a spotlight was pointed at the door Ame came from, which had been covered with a red curtain. From behind the curtain, a Smol Ame emerged. She was slowly stepping forward while swinging her hips, her arms going up and down in a jerky manner to the tune of jazz music.

For some reason, this drove everyone in the room wild. Everyone except Ame.

This Smol Ame danced, if you could call it dancing, to Ame’s table. There, she took a seat, and smiled at the detective.

“HeY BiG bItCh,” she began in a raspy parody of Ame’s own voice, but the pitch suddenly went up and down at random intervals. “I GoT gOOd nEws. ThAt BL mAnGA yOu’Ve beEn ReAdiNg? It’S gONna bE an ANimE SoOn.”

Ame heard these words. She knew these were words that were coming out of Smol Ame’s mouth, but her brain couldn’t process what those words meant. She’d forgotten what the word ‘good’ meant. Or ‘news’. Or ‘BL’.

The Smol Ame hopped off her chair, before resuming that jerky dance of hers in the spotlight.

Suddenly, two more figures emerged from behind the red curtain. A tall white man with blond hair wearing a military uniform, and a red-haired woman with blue eyes wearing a black dress. They were arm-in-arm, and smiled at Ame.

As they approached the table, a spark of recognition. “Mom? Dad?”

“Happy birthday, Amelia!” Dad said as he handed Ame a small box-shaped thing wrapped in red ribbons. “Your mom got some time off from the London Theater, so she dropped by.”

“Darling, I’m very sorry for dying of cancer,” Mom said in her British accent, as she put a hand to Ame’s. “You should’ve never been at that dreadful orphanage!”

The detective opened her present, and in it was two books. ‘The Mysterious Affair at Styles’ by Agatha Christie, and ‘The Hound of the Baskervilles’ by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.

Both covers featured Ame, one where she held a candle in the darkness, and the others where she was looking up at a cliff while Bubba stared down at her menacingly.

The detective failed to come up with any meaningful words in reaction.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” one of the waiters said, holding a ladle as a microphone. His words echoed in the room as if he was using a real one. “Our special performance tonight! The one, the only... the Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers! The Gaijin Shogun himself! Put your hands together for General Douglas MacArthur!”

And with that, the tall figure of a man in a khaki military uniformed emerged from behind the red curtain. He chewed on the end of a long corncob pipe and wore a pair of dark aviator sunglasses despite the dim lights.

Seeing the man, Ame sat still, not knowing what to do. Even as a sort of heat began to gather behind her temple.

“MacArthur has arrived,” the general said, before taking the ladle mic from the waiter. “Tonight I shall repeat those words I spoke to you so many years ago...”

For some reason, the general began singing.

“And now, the end is near,” he sang. “And so I face that final curtain...”

As MacArthur continued his performance, another person sat before Ame at the table. It was her, the other Amelia, with her long hair and sharp eyes.

“Enjoying your birthday, 13-25?” she asked, with a soft smile on her face.

“What... What the hell is this?” the detective replied.

“My friend, I'll say it clear... I'll state my case, of which I am certain...”

It was only then that Ame realized she couldn’t move in her seat anymore. As if an invisible force was keeping her there.

That was when she realized that she never got away from the gas-type Watson Concoction.

But it was already too late to resist.

“You shouldn’t really cause too much of a fuss, 13-25,” the other Amelia said. “Father is singing for your birthday.”

“What are you...?”

“I've lived a life that's full... I've traveled each and every highway...”

She was talking about the man talking on the stage with a ladle for a mic and ridiculous shades. To Ame, the very idea of that man being related to her in any way was incomprehensible.

“That motherfucker is not my dad,” she said, pointing at the couple at the other table. “My Dad is over there! With Mom!”  

“And more, much more than this...”

“What I see over there,” the other Amelia said, “Is a woman who put her own acting career over her daughter, and a foolish coward who betrayed his country.”

“... I did it myyy way!”

If not for the invisible force, Ame would’ve already slapped her conversation partner in the face. “How... How dare you talk about them like that?”

“Yes, there were times, I'm sure you knew...”

“It’s true though, isn’t it, 13-25?” She then fixed her eyes at Ame’s own. “He betrayed his country like how you betrayed me.”

“... When I bit off more than I could chew.”

So it was her.

“But through it all, when there was doubt...”

“Shocked, 13-25?” the other Amelia asked, enjoying the look of terror on the detective’s face. “You know this day would come sooner or later.”

The blood began to drain from Ame’s face. “I was just... I was just--”

“Following orders? That’s your excuse?” The other Amelia shook her head. “Surely, you could do better than the Nazis, 13-25.”

“I ate it up and spat it out!”

The general was getting on Ame’s nerves. He sang ‘My Way’ in an exuberant but drunken fashion, slurring his words. It was like listening to nails on a chalkboard.

She remembered how that same voice told her, “Burn it all down, Amelia. Let’s see what happens.”

It was all his fault!

“Now then, 13-25,” the other Amelia began as she reached out her hand. “Give up your Timepiece.”

Ame couldn’t take it anymore. The heat behind her temple had reached boiling point. That awful singing of his had gone on for far too long.

“I faced it all! And I stood tall...”

“13-25, how are you... how are doing that?”

The other Amelia sat speechless as the detective somehow broke through the Watsobn Concoction’s mental conditioning, standing up from her chair before pulling out a Fitz Special revolver. With one hand, she aimed this revolver straight at General MacArthur’s chest.

“And did it MYYYY WAYYY!”

The trumpets went off, followed by the sound of the snare drum, and then the crack of a gun.

And another.

And another.

And another.  

MacArthur clutched his chest, before falling onto the floor in a heap of blood, old bones, and aviator shades. As Gura, A-Chan, and the rest of the audience roared in applause, Ame ran for the door behind the curtain. The other Amelia gave chase.

“Give up, Amelia Watson!” somebody with her own voice shouted through a megaphone. “There’s nowhere to run!”

The detective’s vision was being sucked into a red-violet haze. She was running down the corridor of a house in West London, the wooden plank walls blurring past the corner of her eye. The hall was long, seemingly never-ending.

“Are you... where are you from?” a child’s voice asked from the void.

“I’m you from a different timeline!” a fool replied. “And it’s gonna be awesome!”

She was so innocent back then. They were so innocent back then.

So naive.

So completely, irrevocably naive.

“There’s no use running, Amelia Watson!” the voice of the megaphone rang through the house’s walls. “You have to burn it all down!”

“General, I don’t know if that’s necessary,” her father said. “I think it is safe to say that the mere interaction between Subjects A and B is enough to prove that paradoxes are not real.”

“Major Watson, Major Watson. We need her to do something more than just talk to Subject B,” The General said. “We need her to rewrite history here. Have her burn that house to the ground. I want to see that branching timeline theory of yours in action.”

The further she ran down the hall, the more charred the walls started to become. Until yellow flames licked, seeped, and burned through them, giving off intense heat.

“Surrender now, Amelia Watson!” the voice from the megaphone shouted from deep inside herself. “It’s not your fault!”

“It’s not your fault, Amelia,” Dad said, as the house burned. “It’s not your fault.”

“I’m sorry...” the fool said, tears falling onto the Timepiece in her hands. “I’m sorry.”

At the very end of the burning hall, a door. A door Ame smashed herself into, leading to nothing but an open sky. The wind howled as she fell, her arms and legs failing about helplessly in freefall.

Soon, she hit the ground. Or, rather, the sand. Miraculously, the impact felt more like falling into a bed than into a desert. She was unscathed.

The detective got up and studied her surroundings. It was a desert where giant gears and sand-caked clock faces jutted out toward the open sky.

Confused, the detective shook her head. She had never seen this place before. Had she gone completely off the deep end? Confined to the nonsensical thought generations of a drugged mind?

Just as she was about to be convinced of her own insanity, she saw a bench in the distance. She walked toward it, and noticed a sign that said ‘BUS’ on it.

A bus stop? Ame couldn’t understand it. In the middle of the desert?

Getting nearer, she noticed that someone was sitting on the bench. It was yet another Amelia Watson.

Ame took a deep breath, putting herself on-guard. The only other alternate Ame she’s ever met put her in this concoction-induced nightmare. What if this one was a psychopath too?

But the sound of Ame’s shoes in the sand must have disturbed the other Ame somewhat, since she jolted out of her slumber.

“Whuh...!” The other Ame blinked, looked around her surroundings with eyes half asleep, before settling on the detective. “You surprised me. Waitin’ for the bus too?”

The fuck was she talking about? There were no roads leading to and from this bus stop. “I... I don’t think you’re gonna a ride out here.”

“Nah, the bus always comes,” the other Ame said, before lifting a small dog onto her lap. “It better! I mean, I gotta get Bubba over here another DHPP shot! Ain’t that right, Bubba? Ashushushushushu~”

The Bubba this other Ame had looked exactly like Ame’s own Bubba, but a lot more happier. Figures. Ame never really had much time to spend with Bubba, always entrusting her to Okazaki-san from the ramen shop back in Kabuki-cho.

“What’s your name?” the other Ame asked, before making a sheepish smile. “Oh, right, it’s Ame too. Heheh.”

Then, all of the sudden, the other Ame made a strange, hi-pitched sound. It sounded like a hiccup, but at the same time the detective had a hard time believing a person could make such a strange sound.

“Sorry, it’s a bit of a condition,” the other Ame said, as if sensing Ame’s bewilderment. “Nothing life-threatening though! The viewers like it too. Oh, wait, are you like, a vtuber too?”

So this Ame’s shtick is having a really bad case of hiccups? Huh. “Yeah, that’s right.”

“Wooow! Does that mean you work for Hololive too?”

Instead of saying anything, Ame showed the other Ame her badge. The other Ame looked at it as if studying some sort of alien artifact.

“Heeey! Why don’t we have these things? These little cardy things. They’re kyuuut-uh~!”

The detective wondered how the other Ame could be so excited over a card.

“It’s a long story,” she said as she pocketed the badge. “Hey, do you--”

“*hic*”

“... Right. Do you happen to have something like, uh, Watson Concoction antidote on you or something?”

“A Watson Concoction antidote?” The other Ame gasped. “You’ve been trippin’ on W-C?!”

“N-No! Another Ame g-gassed me with the stuff and now I’m in some sort of Watson Concoction samba I can’t get out of!”

“Really? So you’re, like, saying that this whole thing is not real, and I’m not real too?”

Ame thought about that. “Well, yeah, that’s the logical conclusion. I mean, my brain’s probably frying itself right now so I’m hallucinating all this.”

“But that’s weird,” the other Ame said. “Cause’ I’m real though. I’m a real nig-- Oh, shit.”

“Pardon?”

“Nothin’. But yeah! I’m real, and Bubba over here is real too! Maybe...” The other Ame gasped again. “Could it be that you’ve, like, taken in so much concoction that you’ve reached enlightenment?”

“The what now?”

“You know, enlightenment! And, and, and, listen, because of your enlightenment, we’re talking telepathically through timelines! Isn’t that cool?”

“More like impossible, really,” Ame said, before shaking her head. “You know what? I’m just gonna... just gonna sit over here, if that’s fine with you.”

Ame sat down on the opposite side of the bench. The battery acid immediately drained from her legs, and she could actually breathe. Despite sitting on what was actually a hard wooden bench, the detective had never felt so comfortable before in her life. She closed her eyes, and heard the soft gush of wind brushing on the sand...

“*hic*”

... and that. Whatever it was. How the heck did that other Ame make that sound?

It was so unnatural, and yet, dare she say it? Kyut.

“I don’t know what to do,” Ame found herself saying. She didn’t know what train of thought the sentence followed, and her mouth was running on automatic. “There’s another me with my face. But I ruined her life, and she hates my guts.”

“Are ya sure about that?” the other Ame asked.

“Positive. She’s followed me all the way here. I’m sure of it.”

“Humans are kinda complicated, you know. What they show isn’t, uh, necessarily what they’re actually feeling inside. Like Bubba over here. Sometimes, she gets really cranky and ya hafta uh be patient because she’s actually sad that I don’t spend that much time with her.”

“You say humans are complicated, but you’re talking about a dog.”

The other Ame chuckled. “Eheh, yeah, that’s kind of a stupid example. But, you know, humans are like that too. Tell me, what did ya do anyway? To the other Ame, I mean.”

“I...”

“Wow! You are very pretty!” the Girl told the Fool. “I can’t wait to tell mother and father all about you!”

“Your... what?”

“Mother and father!” the Girl said to the Fool. “Don’t you have a mother and father?”

“Y-Yeah, but...”

“I ruined her,” Ame said.

“That sounds heavy,” the other Ame said. “Is it really that bad?”

“Why?” the Girl asked the Fool as her house burned. “Why did you do this?”

What else could the Fool say? Orders were orders. Gunshots were gunshots. Dead parents were dead parents.

“I...” The Girl shook as tears fell down her cheeks. “I thought we were friends.”

“The worst,” The detective said, before looking at the other Ame. “Unforgivable, even.”

“Come on, there’s no such thing as an unforgivable sin.”

“Yes there is,” Ame said with certainty.

“Maybe... you can’t forgive yourself? I mean, that’s where you’re supposed to start, right?”

“And why should I, huh? You don’t know how it feels, to do the things I’ve done.”

“I don’t,” the other Ame said. “But... that doesn’t really matter now, does it?”

She was right. 100 percent right. Ame just couldn’t come up with the right words to say it.

“Hey.” The other Ame was pointing at something in Ame’s hand. “Is that the gun? The one you used?”

She was talking about the Fitz Special revolver in the detective’s hand. Ame didn’t know when she pulled it out, but it was there in her hand, on her lap.

“Yeah.” She held the gun in front of her face. The cylinder was fully loaded.

“Tell me. How did it feel?” the other Ame asked without looking at her. “When you... When you did it.”

Ame held out the gun and looked down its iron sight. “Easy... Frighteningly easy.”

“Throw it in the trash bin next to ya.”

Ame looked to her right, and suddenly there was a metal waste bin next to the bench.

“Just let your hand drop to your side, and the gun will slip off,” the other Ame said as she stroked Bubba.

Ame did as she told, and the gun fell into the metal bin, making an iron clatter as it hit the bottom.

“So what’s this going to do?” she asked.

“Not much, but it’s a start. Take it slow,” the other Ame said. “You can’t just snap things away. *snap* Like that.”

Seeing the gun at the bottom of the trash bin didn’t make the bad feelings or the bad memories go away. But it did make Ame feel lighter somewhat. “Yeah, I guess you can’t.”

“Just talk with her,” the other Ame said. “There’s no sins that can’t be atoned for. There’s always hope.”

Ame shook her head. “I dunno about that.”

The detective then heard the sound of wheels rolling on the sand. Turning around, she saw a commuter bus stop in front of the bench, the two-door kind that went around Tokyo.

“Well, looks like our bus is here,” the other Ame said as she stood up, holding her Bubba in her arms. “Oh yeah! Drop by again if ya wanna hang out. Don’t be a stranger! Or else I’ll ground pound ya!”

Ame then watched as the bus drove away, its yellow and brown silhouette fading into the shifting sands.

As it disappeared, something began to drag the detective’s arms and legs gently. It was the call of sleep, pulling her eyes down, until she drifted away into the sands as well.

When she woke up, it was dark. It smelled of old paper and... blood?

Ame looked around herself, finding herself surrounded by piles of paper. It seemed to be a storage room of sorts, or the bottom of a trash chute. She looked up and saw an opening in the ceiling that stretched all the way up to God knows where.

Judging by the disheveled piles of papers she sat on, she probably fell down the chute and landed here. A draft blew down hole, and she felt awfully chilly.

But why was that?

She looked down at her body, only to discover that she was wearing nothing but her black underwear and thigh-high shocks.

“Whuh-wha? Wh-Where did my clothes go?!” she asked as she dug around the piles of documents for anything that resembled a shirt or a skirt or a coat. Nothing. There was absolutely nothing resembling a shirt, a skirt, or a coat.

What she did find, however, was a kukri knife caked with blood. There was also her Timepiece, tied to the bottom part of the knife’s handle.

And next to those two items was a severed arm, lying on the floor like a discarded twig.

Ame blinked once. Ame blinked twice.

What the fuck happened? Did she do this?

The detective picked up the knife, the clock, and the arm off the ground. The arm was a right arm, white and clean, with the point of amputation at the bottom already healed. But Ame noticed one strange detail: The Control Sigil for the Timepiece was on the upper part of this arm.

So it would seem that Ame had, somehow, cut the other Amelia’s arm off with her own kukri knife. How exactly that happened eluded her. She then fell down the trash chute, and woke up some time later.

“Huh,” was all the detective could say. “Well, what the heck am I gonna do now.”

What else? It was time to talk with the other Amelia. Just like what the other Ame said. This nonsense had gone on for long enough.

What the detective thought was a trash room was actually a records room in western end of the Department of Consequence, next to the cafeteria. When she came out, the air-conditioning made her shiver all over. Why did she get rid of her clothes in the first place? It must’ve had something to do with the Watson Concoction she got. That was some really powerful stuff. Much more powerful than the kind she used, which merely induced visual hallucinations.

Ame checked the core room of the Department of Consequence, a place lined wall to wall with tape drive computer boxes. They were all NEAC 2203 computers, the earliest ones of their kind ever made in Japan. Each computer spat out a ream of perforated paper that fed into punch-hole readers connected to a large FACOM 230-78 supercomputer, a hulking CPU with four closets and a console that beeped and glowed in a blue-red hue. Its wires were like tendrils and roots that slithered across the floor to teletypes that clacked and spat out reams upon reams of data. On top of the machine, a neat mass of CRT monitors tuned in to every vtuber’s live-stream, past, present, and future, to be digested by the clacking CPU into readable data through a process Ame couldn’t begin to imagine, let alone understand.

This was the purpose of the Department of Consequence: To come up with the potential costs of the options presented by the Department of Possibility. Working in tandem, these two departments allowed Cover Corp to not only reach alternate universes, but remain ahead of happenings in the current universe and take advantage of them. All with the help of Objects of Power.

However, the other Amelia was not here. Disappointed, Ame walked out of the room. The endless clacking proved too grating for her ears.

But when she turned around, the other Amelia was there, looking at one of the NEAC 2203 computers. With her single arm on her chin, she watched the computer’s tape drive spin as if it was the greatest show on Earth.

The detective wondered how her alternate self did not notice her upon entering the room. Was this a trap of sorts?

“Hey!” Ame shouted through the incessant clacking of automated relay switches and teletypes. “I’m over here!”

The other Ame was still watching the computer. Probably couldn’t hear her.

“Yo!” Ame put two of her fingers together and whistled with them. “I’m right here, hey!”

The other Ame finally turned her head around. When she saw Ame, she jumped back a bit, startled, before pulling out her gun with her left hand. She shouted something back, but Ame only heard the clacking of processor units.

“What?! What did you say?!”

The other Amelia shouted again, but the cacophony of clacks eviscerated whatever message she had.

This wasn’t working at all. Ame shook her head, before stepping forward while beckoning the other Amelia to get out of the room. Only then was it silent enough for both of them to hear one another.

“You’ve caused me enough trouble, 13-25,” the other Amelia said behind her gun, her words sounding like pure venom. “Give up your Timepiece. I’ll give you a quick death.”

“Yeah, sure.”

Ame threw the knife, her Timepiece, and the severed arm at the other Amelia’s feet.

Instead of shooting her, though, the other Amelia looked down at the objects with her mouth agape. “Wait... what?”

The detective was as confused as she was. “What do you mean ‘what’?”

“You’re... you’re going to give up?” The other Amelia asked. “Just like that?”

“Uh...” Ame shrugged her arms. “Yeah.”

“Whuh... N-NO! You can’t do that! Not after all this!”  

The other Amelia crouched and threw back the Timepiece, the kukri knife, and her own severed arm at Ame’s feet.

“Take them back!” she said, a hint of desperation in her voice. “Run around a bit and let me chase you. Come on, now!”

“No,” Ame said, shaking her head. “I’m not gonna run away.”

“But why?!”

“’Cause... I wanna talk,” she said. “I wanna talk.”

Silence hung between them for a few moments, until the other Amelia lowered her gun, and shook her head.

“Goddamn killjoy, you are,” she said.

The other Amelia folded her arms. She looked like she didn’t know what to do with herself. After another minute of silence, she clicked her tongue before speaking.

“Well then, you said you wanted to talk,” she said. “So talk. Out with it.”

Ame thought for a while about what to say. But her mind couldn’t come up with words that were meaningful enough. So instead, she let her mouth move on its own, hoping for the best.

“I’m sorry,” she began. “For killing your mom and dad. I said that I was following orders but, I... I could’ve just refused.”

No response. But it wasn’t because the other Amelia didn’t believe what she said. But, rather, she was waiting for more.

“I think... I think I envied you,” she continued. “When I saw that your mom and dad were still together, I couldn’t... I couldn’t help but be jealous.”

“You were jealous of me?” the other Amelia asked, skeptical.

“My mom died, I was thrown into an orphanage, and when I ran away to my dad, the army used me. For this stupid thing,” she said, giving the Timepiece on the floor a light kick with her foot. “And you had a loving family. Of course I was jealous.”

Again, no response.

“So...” Ame spread her arms. “Do what you want. Take my Timepiece, kill me, whatever. You have the right to do it.”

When she said these words, Ame closed her eyes, trying to clear her mind. She thought about the stream schedule for that week. Who would take over from her? Or, rather, how would Cover announce it? That she graduated? That she took a vacation? Medical hiatus?

Probably a graduation. No graduation stream, though. Would people speculate about it? Most definitely. She could already see the threads on /vt/, speculating whether she was pregnant or such. Motherfuckers.

But she didn’t really have to worry about any of that now, did she?

No. It was time to repent. Time to rest.

If only she could sit on that bus stop again. That was a really comfortable bench.

“NO!” someone cried out in the darkness. “You are NOT taking this away from me!”

Ame opened her eyes. “What?”

The other Amelia had spread her single arm to the side. On her arm, under her coat, hung a row of Timepieces. There were so many of them that it looked as if the other Amelia was spreading a golden wing. Upon closer inspection, some of the Timepieces were scratched. Others were charred, half-exploded. And others were caked with blood.

To Ame, the image was surreal, assaulting her senses with images of different Amelias being gunned down, crying for mercy.

“What... why do you have those...?”

Something was rising in her throat. Disgust mixed with horror rippled in her stomach.

“I’ve killed so many others just to get to you,” the other Amelia said. “Once I get your Timepiece, I will reach the theater, and my wish will be granted...”

The detective had so many questions. But only one question was solid enough to turn into a coherent sentence.

“How did you...?” She felt like she was falling on her own words. “What have you done?”

“I come from a very special group of Amelias,” the other Ame said, a dark smile forming on her lips. “The world is about to end next month, don’t you know that? So we’re working to avert it. By reaching the Theater. It just so happens you can’t have salvation... without breaking a few Timepieces.”

“You’re taking Timepieces from other Ame’s, and... I don’t understand.”

“It should’ve been easy for me to just take your soul out of that Timepiece and leave you dead,” she said. “But now I realise... that I will never be satisfied. Not until you fear death!”

In fury, the other Amelia took Ame by the arm, dragging her to the storage room of the Department of Consequences. She threw Ame to the floor, before going to the shelves and picking out two Objects of Power: the katana and the arming sword Ame saw earlier.

The other Amelia tossed the katana to Ame, while she held the sword with her left hand.

“What the hell are you doing?” Ame asked as she got on her feet. “This is pointless!”

“If you don’t fight me, I swear I will kill every single Amelia I can in this multiverse!” she cried, before pointing the sword at her. “Now, en garde, God damn you! EN GARDE!”

There was no choice. The other Amelia had made her threat clear as day. Unsatisfied with simple surrender, she wanted to sate her bloodlust. Or, at least, feel like she had earned her revenge.

Ame couldn’t believe any of this. Like, what did she know about holding a katana anyway? She picked it up, nearly caught off guard by how light it was. Like holding a ballpoint pen. Maybe that was the strange property that made this thing an OoP.

The detective held the blade in front of her with both hands, just like in the movies.

One second. Two seconds. Three seconds passed. Neither she nor the other Amelia made a move.

Then, at the last minute, she rushed in, attempting a strike at Ame’s hands. But before the blade made contact, the detective jumped back, before countering with a strike of her own at the other’s shoulder.

“Big mistake, 13-25!”

Before the detective knew it, the other Amelia stepped out of the way and smashed her boot into Ame’s stomach. Something cracked, maybe a rib or two. The battle had just started, but the detective was already on the backfoot, and only a well-timed roll saved her from a finishing blow to the head.

Though she regained her footing, Ame knew her adversary had an overwhelming advantage in melee combat. If she were to draw close, the other Amelia would simply outmaneuver her and end the battle then and there.

In other words, she was too skilled to handle head-on, and Ame had to improvise.

But with what?

Before she could think of anything, the other Amelia lunged forward, her sword pointed at Ame’s chest. But in the nick of time, Ame pulled her katana up, locking her enemy’s sword at the hilt, merely three inches away from her right ear. With all the strength she could muster, Ame pushed the other Amelia back, before running past her.

Somewhere in these shelves, there had to be something she could use.

Her eyes caught themselves one of the boxes. It was the gem from earlier. The Pink Star and Three Princes!

If she could get the other Amelia to look at it, maybe she could stop her somehow.

“Don’t you know you shouldn’t let your guard down in a fight, 13-25?!”

The other Amelia had caught up to the detective. Before she could even raise her blade in defense, her enemy’s sword already sliced down the air, and then into the joint of her shoulder.

Once again, the other Amelia had sliced off Ame’s right arm. She tried hard not to scream, but the pain was too much.

“That’s it, 13-25! Scream!”

Ame struggled to regain her senses. At least enough to throw herself onto the shelf, and toss the box of gems onto the floor.

“What is...?” was all the other Amelia managed to say, before the stood still, transfixed by the gem on the floor.

Ame looked away from the gem, stepping away until her back bumped into a box that held the robot from earlier. Just like then, the point where her back made contact with the box rippled across its surface.

The gem should keep the other Amelia busy for a while, and she had to find something to tie her up with. Just a few moments ago, Ame wanted to give herself up. But knowing the things her alternate self had done, this wasn’t something she could let pass. She had to be captured, put in containment, and interrogated.

Ame was about to move when she noticed the other Amelia’s head began to twitch. Her face shifted from a state of blankness to a contortion of anger and confusion. Whatever the gem made her see, she did not like it at all.

“No...” she said, slowly shaking her head. “I don’t love her! I don’t! I don’t! I DON’T!”

What did she say?

In one swift movement, the other Amelia brought her sword down to the earth, smashing the gem into what must have been a hundred or so pieces. She took a few deep breaths, her expression distorted by anger, before she fixed her eyes on Ame, and lunged forward.

A strike was made. But instead of a fatal blow to the head, the arming sword pierced the surface of the box three inches away from it.

She was crying. The other Amelia had closed her eyes, and she made soft, gentle sobs.

“First my parents, now my revenge... What else are you going to take away from me?”

Softness. That was the sensation that first registered in Ame’s mind, as the other Amelia pressed her lips upon hers. Nothing was coming to mind. Not registering, not receiving. Only the sensation of tingling on her lips.

Ame blinked. It felt... good?

But why did she do that?

Humans are kinda complicated, you know.

No transmission, no processing. Only confusion that felt good. Only warmth, and the feel of hot breath on one’s ears.

“When I’m done with you,” she said, “I won’t share your heart with anybody. It’s mine to eat. Mine, and mine alone.”

Before Ame moved her mouth to respond, a great shattering came from behind. The box containing the robot had been damaged by the sword, and was beginning to crumble.

Ame and the other Amelia watched as spider webs spread across the glass, before breaking into fine specks of powder.

With the box gone, the eye of the blood-covered robot glowed red, before shifting toward Ame and her alternate self.

“What the hell...?”

Before any of them could react, the black machine raised its arms and let out a deep, monstrous roar. Out of its blood-stained crevices, violet tentacles wriggled out. Whatever those tentacles were, it was obvious that they possessed the machine.

It was a monster. An actual monster underground by Cover! There was no way two girls missing opposite arms would be able to take on such a beast. She had to get out of there.

Ame was about to leave, but her other self merely stared at the creature. The shock on her face was palpable.

“Aren’t you...?” was what the other Amelia seemed to be mumbling, but that was all the detective could read.

Should she just leave her? Ame thought about it, before deciding that she could never live with herself if she did such a thing. Even if she was a killer, even if she could regenerate, there was just something about being killed by this thing that screamed danger.

“What are you standing there for?!” the detective cried as she took her by the hand. “Let’s GO! Come on!”

Both Amelias ran out of the storage room, as ‘The Container’ rampaged, toppling shelves and destroying walls in its wake.

As they neared the staircase, the other Amelia cried, “Get your Timepiece! Get my arm!”

Both of them stopped to pick the items off the ground.

“Any ideas on how to deal with that thing?” Ame asked.

“As a matter of fact, I do, 13-25,” she said, as she pulled out something from under her coat. It was her own Timepiece, the golden cover etched with dents and scratches. “Now I need you to run interference and--”

The Container burst through the storage door, letting out another guttural roar, before pointing its gattling gun at both Amelias. It was angry, and it was going to tear them apart in a storm of lead.

There was no dodging a gattling gun. Oh well. Ame closed her eyes, expecting the worst, and hoping her body would be found soon.

But a moment passed, and she felt no pain. Not even a pinprick.

She opened her eyes. She was on the floor now, and the other Amelia was on top of her. The girl’s face was pale, and a line of blood flowed from the edge of her lip.

Ame immediately turned her onto the floor, and it was only then she saw her Timepiece in her hands, covered in blood and riddled with bullets.

The detective had a feeling of what was happening, but it was impossible! Amelias didn’t die. They couldn’t die. Chronal Inertia made sure of that.

So why...?

“Hurry...” the other Amelia said, meekly. “Take... my soul. Take it before I...”

The other Amelia cried out in pain.

Ame couldn’t understand it. It was clear that her alternate self was going to die. And her damaged Timepiece was related to this.

As the detective wavered, the black machine slowly made its way toward them. Probably to deal a finishing strike.

“How the hell am I gonna do that, huh?” she asked.

“Just... touch your Timepiece to mine.”

With death fast approaching, Ame touched the Timepiece that hung on the kukri knife with the Timepiece in the hands of her other self.

Warmth. That was what Ame felt as her Timepiece made contact with the other. She felt a faint, warm energy pass through her chest, before flowing into her core.

As process took place, the light faded in the other Amelia’s eyes. Soon, the light faded from her Timepiece as well.

“Okay...” Ame looked at her watch, which gleamed in the light. “What now?”

Take my arm, a voice said from behind.

She loooked at the direction of the voice. Where the hell did that come from.

Take my arm, it repeated.

It was the other Amelia! Somehow, she was talking to Ame. But she was dead! How could that...?

Take it!

“Okay, okay!” Ame cried, before taking the other Amelia’s severed arm. Gritting her teeth, she plugged the appendage into her shoulder. The pain was sharp, like stabbing herself with a knife. But as it faded, the joints reconnected and she could move her fingers again.

Now run if you want to live!

“Coulda told me that before I plugged your arm in, you know!”

Before she could run, though, The Container had already reached her. Had she not rolled away at the last minute, it was her that would’ve been cut in half by the monster’s blade, not the concrete floor.

Without looking back, the detective ran up the stairs to the Department of Possibility. The black machine chased her like a mad dog, roaring as it climbed after her, destroying the stairs in the process.

She could’ve run to the air vent ladder she wanted to get to earlier, but the monster blocked that path before she could slip past it. This forced Ame to run for the department’s landing hall, where the elevator was still sealed.

“Seriously, if you have ANYTHING useful to say, now’s the time!”

Close your eyes, the voice said.

“Huh?!” The monster was standing a few meters away, roaring, and she was about to be backed against the wall. Blinking could be fatal. “Why would I do that?”

Trust me!

“You tried to kill me earlier! Granted, it’s justified. But then you killed a boatload of other Ames! Why should I trust you?!”

Just do it!

“AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!”

The detective did the unthinkable and closed her eyes. As expected, it was dark.

But soon, there was light on the horizon. A glowing yellow light.

Reach out for it, the voice in her head said.

Ame followed the instruction, and soon the light swallowed her vision whole.

The sounds of the monster’s roar was gone, replaced by the low din of something spinning.

A movie projector?

Open your eyes, the voice told her.

Ame did as instructed, and she saw that she was in a movie theater. Behind her was a projector, and before her was the screen. It was playing a movie.

It showed her standing before The Container.

I didn’t think it would work, the voice said. I needed only one more soul to reach this place. Yours. But it seems my soul would be used instead.

“What... What is this place?” she asked.

The root of all Timelines, the voice said. The Theater of Fate.

“I... I don’t understand.”

Just reach out your hand again. Reach out, and pull.

Ame raised her hands toward the projector. As she did, the movie began playing faster and faster, before it became a blur. From this blur, sparkles emerged, and through those sparkles, a multitude of arms.

They were the arms of different Amelias.

“The heck is... what?”

Pull already. Come on, now.

Ame looked at the arms, before clasping one that was covered in a yellow-colored glove.

Now, pull!

With all her might, Ame pulled, and out came an Amelia wearing armor. The figure flew toward her, and when it made contact with her body, the detective felt the same warmth she did earlier.

Open your eyes.

Ame did as she was told, and she was back in the Department of Possibility, facing down The Container. But instead of her bare skin, she was now covered in yellow armor. In her right hand was a shield, and in the other she held a lance with a trigger.

Even if she had never seen these things in her life, she somehow knew that she was wearing Mark XIX Armor produced by Cover Corp., issued to a “Clearance Department”. It had jet engines in the back, and she was supposed to charge in with shield and lance. The lance was named “Bubba”.

This is the power many Amelias have been seeking for a long time, the voice said. Power from alternate timelines, to prevent the end of Time itself...

So this armor, these weapons... These were things she wielded in an alternate timeline?

Yes. Amelia 769, from a world invaded by demons. But you do not need to know more than that. The only thing you need to do is to wield her weapons and destroy the enemy!

As if her body had its own mind, Ame pressed a button, and a helmet soon covered her vision, filling it with targeting reticles, a speedometer, and all sorts of data. The reticles all pointed at The Container, before showing the words ‘Locked On’ above it.

The jets in the back of her suit roared as she charged, the Lance pointed forward to pierce the enemy in one blow.

To Ame, it all felt like she was being taken on a ride, in a vehicle that moved on its own. Her body moved as if it had its own mind, and even her lips and voice, as she cried something out just as she was about to hit the monster.

“TIIIIME CRAAAASH!”

Mere inches from the machine, time itself froze. Before she knew it, Ame had already stabbed the monster with her lance approximately 32 times. It said so in a hit counter in her helmet.

As a final blow, she then stabbed the named “Bubba” into the monster’s gut, before jumping away, and letting time flow once again.

All at once, the monster was crushed by Ame’s attacks, and the lance embedded in its core exploded. The monster’s violent end painted the walls violet, leaving nothing but a black husk swimming in more violet blood.

“Target eliminated,” were the words that showed in Ame’s helmet.

Suddenly, the armor and the shield began to fade, leaving the detective in her underwear, and the kukri knife with her Timepiece tied to it.

“Seriously... what the hell just happened?”

But this time, no voice answered her. Just the silence of the landing hall of the Department of Consequence.

Two hours of waiting later, the cavalry had arrived. Late.

The elevator doors opened, and a bunch of rangers poured out with their guns at the ready. A-Chan also walked out, wearing a bulletproof vest. Behind her were Gura, Kiara, Mori, and Ina.

Ame herself was sitting on top of what remained of The Container, smoking a cigarette. It was a pack of Mori Slims, and they tasted a lot like Virginia Slims. She was looking at how her right arm now had an even lighter complexion than her left arm. Guess that Brit Ame spent a lot less time in the sun compared to her.

“Ameee!” Gura cried as she ran to the detective. “I’m so glad you’re alive!”

When Ame noticed Gura, she immediately threw the cigarette away, before hopping off from her perch and embracing the little shark.

“We were so worried about you!” Gura cried in that voice of hers. “I’m sorry; we only got here just now! There was a really bad gridlock from Tokyo Big Sight, and it was too rainy to use the helicopter.”

“Holy crap, Watson,” Mori began as she looked at the violet-splattered walls, then at the black robot husk. “What happened here?”

“Yes,” A-chan chimed in with a stern expression. “What did happen here, M-One?”

“Why are you in your panties?” Kiara asked, her head tilted to the side.

Only Ina was silent.

What the heck was she supposed to tell them? Where would she even start? “Guys, I... You know what, I’m just gonna write a report or somethin’. I’m really, really, really tired right now.”

“I’m sorry, Ame-san,” A-chan said. “But you have to talk with the boss. He wants a sitrep.”

The detective sighed. This was not something she wanted to deal with after all the crap that happened. “Fine. But can I at least have a shower first? And, like, clothes?”

A-chan gestured to some of the rangers, who immediately went to Ame and covered her in Cover-brand blankets. She was about to go with the rangers into the elevator, when she felt someone tug at her arm softly.

It was Ina, and she had a concerned look on her face.

“Did... did she suffer?” she asked.

“Sorry, who are you talking about?”

“Um...”

She let go of Ame’s arm.

“Nothing,” she said, before looking away. “Never mind.”

Ame regarded her for a bit, before continuing her walk to the elevator. But just before she entered, the detective looked back. Gura and the others were following her, but Ina was looking at the husk of The Container with arms folded.

Was the robot somehow connected to her?

Ame simmered in her thoughts as she got into the elevator. In her mind, she was thinking of three things. What happened to the other Ame? What was that ‘End of Time’ thing she was talking about? and what was up with Ina?

So many questions, yet so little time.

Would she be able to answer them all? Only time will tell.