Mirrorhands

[mirrorhands]

Photograph - 10

A gust of stagnant air tousled Tamer's hair and threatened to aggravate his already impressive headache. His eyes were closed but the neon lights above him still easily pierced his eyelids, no matter how hard he pressed them shut. With a groan he raised his head that had rested against the window behind him and slumped forward, his elbows resting on his thighs. That was better. But not by much. "So grossly incandecent...", he mumbled. "Hm? What?", asked Madeleine, who sat across from him. He raised his head again and wrenched his eyelids open. Madeleine was looking at him from behind the screen of Lyra's laptop balanced on her crossed legs, the subway tunnels rushing past behind her. He rubbed his right eye with another groan and answered, "Forget it. Was nothing." She nodded and returned her attention to the screen with an absent-minded frown. Tamer's head felt like it was full of cotton-candy and his eyes felt like they were made of lead, but he pushed himself up on his feet anyway and stumbled over to Madeleine. She winced, uselessly stretching out one Hand towards Tamer. "Hey, careful! Don't fall!", she yelled and it stung in Tamer's ears. When he dropped his behind on the bench next to her, he noted how she scooted away from him a bit, but she was blocked by the huge bag of curiosities. Tamer leaned over a bit to look at the laptop screen. Madeleine was scrolling through what looked like a chatlog. Tamer could feel how his cheeks flushed and his entire body tensed up. "Hey, what the hell! You can't go reading Lyra's private messages!", he stammered forth and tried to close the laptop before she could see something embarrassing. Madeleine was too quick, though. She laid her hand on his face and then pushed him away, holding him at arm's length as he tried desperately to reach the computer. "Stop that! Hey STOP that, Tamer! You're gonna break it!", she shrieked, shortly elevating Tamer's headache to even more unbearable heights. He gave up, clutching his head with one hand and swatting away Madeleine's arm with the other. "Geez, you're such a fucking child," she said, glaring at him, "This is important, damnit. If we don't figure out what that thing that attacked her is soon, we can kiss her goodbye, you understand?!" That hit hard. He really felt like a child now with his silly fear of being laughed at. Madeleine wasn't looking for dirty laundry, she was on the case. Lyra was still in danger. "But, didn't you do those ritual-thingies?", he asked in a hushed voice, hoping desperately that she would retract the statement. Madeleine had turned back to the computer screen. "I did. But they won't protect her forever. We have to find out what's going on and take care of it." So this whole affair wasn't over after all. Despite the horrible fatigue, Tamer removed a Binder and a pen from his backpack and asked: "What are our leads?" Madeleine shot him a glance and began to count off her fingers, "One, we're dealing with a creature. Two, it's incredibly strong. Three, it may or may not be invisible." Tamer listed everything, but hesitated upon that last remark. "What do you mean? It's pretty obviously invisible," he argued. Madeleine shook her head. "When you saw Kat getting launched through the window, you were experiencing your initiation. Prior to that, your weirdness censor was still in full force. On the one hand, it's odd that you remember the levitation part, but on the other: We don't really know how the censor works and it might just fail in bizarre ways during the initiation. So I'm gonna stick with 'may or may not be'." Tamer nodded and wrote that down, as well. Weirdness censor. She had mentioned it before and that now that it was gone his life was bound to get more 'interesting'. Not a comforting thought, but in his current state he was oddly calm and fear didn't register as much more than a slight stomach ache that was neatly overshadowed by the cramps and bruises that resulted from his spectacular 'distraction'. "So that's it?", he asked incredulously, "How does that help us?" Madeleine shrugged. "Doesn't help a lot, no. Which is why I'm looking through her chatlogs. Probably the best course of action and I'd better do it now, before the laptop explodes." This, again, took Tamer aback a bit. "Why would it explode?", he asked. Madeleine's sigh sounded more exhausted than annoyed. "It's called the Sympathetic Redirection Ritual. Basically, if something attacks her despite the other safeguards, the laptop will take the brunt of it. It was the only thing I had that I was sure was of great sentimental value to her." "Rrrriiiight", Tamer sighed and fell back into the seat. He felt useless and helpless. Even Madeleine didn't have the answers, so what could he possibly do? Then he remembered something. There's a hard drive. Give it to Madeleine. And a plastic bag. "Madeleine! What about the bag? Did you open that, yet?", he asked. Madeleine raised her head and stared straight ahead for a few seconds before she said: "Oh right." She set the laptop down on Tamer's lap and hurriedly dug the plastic bag out of her humongous luggage. She fiddled with the rubber bands a bit and then handed it to Tamer with a frustrated sigh: "I have no fingernails." He took it and while Madeleine was taking back the laptop began removing the bands. He could feel that the object inside the bag was about ten to twelve centimetres long, straight and heavy enough to be made of metal. His mind went wild trying to guess what it could be. Another memory device? A remote control of some sort? A small taser? With the final rubber band removed, he took a deep breath and as Madeleine, with the laptop back on her lap, scooted closer, he opened the bag. The object was stuck to the bag in places, so he had to pull the plastic apart to reveal the folded up butterfly knife that was covered over and over in a crust of brown, dried blood. "Oh god", Tamer breathed. Madeleine stared into the bag for a few moments then into Tamer's face, saying nothing, her jaw clenched and her eyes bulging. He could tell what she was thinking. He was thinking it, too. "Let's... not jump to conclusions here, okay? Maybe she found it like this.", he stammered while wrapping the grisly thing back up. Madeleine shook her head. She put her hand on her forehead and took a moment to catch her breath. "No... No this is her knife. I recognise it," she whispered, "She always carried it on her in case of danger. Looks like she found exactly that." Tamer was shocked. Could Lyra actually have killed someone? Images flashed past his eyes: Lyra ramming a knife into somebody's throat. Lyra stabbing someone until she was bloody all over. Lyra in a pool of blood, broken, pleading. He shook it off. "It must have been self-defense, right?! She wouldn't...", he gasped. Madeleine put her hand on his shoulder. "Yeah... Yeah it must have been self-defense." The remainder of the trip passed in a tense silence. Madeleine kept her eyes glued to the laptop screen, but Tamer could tell from the way her eyes didn't move that she wasn't reading or anything, just staring at nothing. "Hey, Tamer," Madeleine said after a few minutes of silence, "Don't worry too much about it, okay? Just..." She gave a non-committal shrug. "Just try to calm down and get some sleep, okay?" Tamer didn't have an answer to this. He didn't think he'd sleep a lot after tonight. Or ever again. Then something occurred to him. "Wait... Didn't we pass your stop like fifteen minutes ago?", he said. Madeleine looked at him and give hima strained smirk. "Just making sure you get home okay."

---

13:56 LyraNorthbound: heya how're you doing? 14:11 Huskarl: I'm okay. Thanks for asking. 14:12 LyraNorthbound: i was hoping to find you online 14:12 LyraNorthbound: i have news 14:12 LyraNorthbound: i checked out the photos you gave me 14:12 LyraNorthbound: and i realised that between all the occult crap and the boxes there are a blackboard and desks and those aluminum and plastic chairs that can be stacked 14:14 Huskarl: So. A school? 14:14 LyraNorthbound: bingo!! 14:15 LyraNorthbound: then i justsearched and asked around for elementary schools (those chairs are tiny) with underground pools and as you can imagine, there are not too many of those 14:15 LyraNorthbound: do you have time for an excursion tomorrow? i don't wanna go there alone 14:16 Huskarl: Good, because that would be insane. I'm off work at 19 tomorrow. Where do we meet? 14:16 LyraNorthbound: it's Ginko-tree elementary. let's meet at S Schöneweide. 20 stat 14:18 Huskarl: No way. Try 20:30. 14:19 LyraNorthbound: fine 14:19 LyraNorthbound: bring gloves

[mirrorhands]

Photograph - 9

"So... Why didn't you go to the hospital with her in the first place?", Madeleine asked as they walked along the greenery that stretched from the subway station to the hospital. Tamer had to give this some thought. Had Lyra told him not to? Not really. It had been more of an implication. She didn't tell him to get the plastic bag and the hard drive to Madeleine right away. But somehow that's what he'd taken away from it. It was incredibly late by now. After making his way to the meeting point, he had waited quite some time for Madeleine, who had returned home 'to get some stuff', in her words. Now she was lugging around a pretty impressive sports bag full of what seemed like pretty heavy things. She had explained a lot to him on the way here, about normally imperceptible things and rituals and symbolism. He hadn't really understood any of it, as the events had left him in an unprecedentedly fatigued state. She had been very very clear about one thing, though: She needed to perform some kind of protection ritual at the hospital, or Lyra would likely die. Every one of her steps caused the humongous bag to jingle and clunk. Tamer was very much on edge, not only because of the emotionally taxing last week and the terrifying revelation that had come to him only hours ago, but also because he was sure that Madeleine with her bag and he with the two backpacks looked like burglars or troublemakers of some sort. He snapped out of his line of thought and remembered that he was having a conversation. "I... don't really know. The police wanted to talk to me and she had told me to take her things and... Well it seemed like the right thing to do somehow. I was kinda confused," he answered honestly. Madeleine shrugged. "It doesn't really matter. I mean I was just curious.", she muttered. Tamer found this odd, but paid it no particular mind. Looking over his shoulder every few seconds to make sure there was nobody around to arrest them, he stepped into the bright light of the hospital's emergency ward. Madeleine noticed, grabbed his arm tightly. She hissed at him, "Stay cool, you're making us look like criminals!" before she briskly approached the receptionist's counter. Hanging back at the door for now, Tamer looked around the room. Several people were seated along the walls and all of them were in some state of agitation. There was a woman pressing a blood-soaked kitchen towel to her hand and a man who kept gripping his pants, his head and his (probably) wife's hand in quick succession as if he was in terrible pain. The general sense of urgency made Tamer's heart beat faster and he felt like his feet might buckle under his weight. He just wanted to go home, lie down and maybe chat with Lyra. God, Lyra. Broken, bloody, twisted Lyra. He had trouble picturing her any other way. Better not to picture her at all, he decided. And there was something else. Something that made him shiver just thinking about it, so he aborted the train of thought and focused on the present. Madeleine waved him over to the counter after she made it to the front of the queue, prompting him to awkwardly wobble to her side, trying as hard as he could to breathe calmly. When he made it there, the receptionist's sceptical glare moved from Madeleine's huge bag to Tamer. "Look, Linda here has her stuff. She was there when the accident happened.", Madeleine said in answer to a question that had drowned in the sea of worried conversation in the room. Tamer felt like he might burst into tears. He was so sick of this day and of Madeleine and he felt so guilty for letting his thoughts trail from Lyra's condition for even a moment. He felt like he had betrayed her with his whining, entirely internal though it might have been. The receptionist looked at Tamer with an intensity that made him want to sink into the ground so nobody could see his piercings, his short hair, the very slight bulge on his chest. "Fine.", the receptionist finally said, "Room 038, ground floor. That way. Just drop the bag off with a nurse." Immediately, Madeleine grabbed Tamer's shoulder and dragged him off to the right. "We might need a distraction in a bit", she whispered, "can you faint on command?" "Probably", Tamer uttered more deadpan than he thought he could muster. Suddenly, Madeleine shoved him back and took a quick glance around a corner. "Shoot.", she hissed, "Tamer, give me the hard drive and the plastic bag!" Tamer was confused but he obeyed, slipping the backpack off his left shoulder and opening the zipper. "Hist! Don't make so much noise, come on, faster!", she snapped. Tamer opened it slightly more slowly to reduce the noise, then hurriedly rummaged through the bag until he found what he was looking for. The items quickly disappeared into Madeleine's bag. She flattened her hair and then turned the corner. "Mister Arens! Oh my god, I heard what happened!" When Tamer followed, he saw her running toward an unfamiliar old man with tousled, grey hair and a face full of worry lines. Lyra's father, he concluded. "How is she?", Madeleine finished as she stopped in front of the man and put her hand on his shoulder. He put his hand on hers in turn and showed a short, sad smile, the corners of his mouth twitching. "She'll live. The doctor said she even has good chances for a full recovery.", he answered with a strained voice as tears streamed down his cheeks. "Her left eye is ruined, though. They couldn't save it." Madeleine set down the bag and pulled the man into a warm hug. "But she's alive.", she said, her voice cracking, too. "Thank god!" Tamer breathed a sigh of relief and leaned against the wall next to the door to room 038. She was safe. Or was she? According to Madeleine, there was still a threat but now, under the bright white neon lights of the hospital, all this ritual junk sounded a lot less believable again. What if Madeleine and Lyra were caught up in some kind of weird delusion? What if they were just crazy, crazy people? What if Lyra just threw herself through that window? He didn't remember it clearly. It could have happened. Right? No. Reality set in again. Glass is not that fragile. He had felt how hard she hit that pane. There was no way she could have summoned that much strength off the cuff. Perhaps she actually was lifted. "How long have you been here, Mister Arens?", Madeleine asked after breaking the embrace. Mister Arens wiped his eyes with a handkerchief. "Two hours.", he said glumly. Madeleine nodded with a sad, compassionate smile. "You need a walk. Why don't you take Li-" "Tamer!", Tamer interjected and earned an annoyed look from Madeleine. "Tamer... and calm your nerves a bit." Mister Arens raised his eyebrows and finally looked at Tamer. "Oh you're Tamer, then! And you have her backpack.", he said. So he'd heard about him. Tamer couldn't even answer now, as all the fear and sadness of the past hours welled up again. He just wordlessly shook Mister Arens' hand and set the backpack down next to the wall. "He was there when it happened.", Madeleine added, "You should both take a calming walk. I'll hold the fort here." Tamer knew exactly, what Madeleine was doing there and couldn't help but be impressed. Lyra's father nodded and started walking slowly down the corridor. She had played him like a fiddle. Tamer scuffled after him and as he passed Madeleine, he could hear her whisper: "I need that distraction." Tamer felt incredibly uncomfortable walking with Lyra's father. They had never met and she had never talked about him much, so the only connection Tamer had was pity. How could he not have pitied this devastated, tired, old man? He was a stranger, but under the circumstances, he acted like they had known each other forever. "You must have been through a lot.", he said in a soft, deep voice. Tamer nodded. Of course he had been. Obviously. "Yeah, it... it was horrible." They walked in silence for a minute. "So you know each other from university?", he asked. Easy questions. Good. Tamer didn't feel like he could handle much more. "N-no. Actually, I only enroled because she did. We met online." "Ah." Another minute of silence passed. "Lucky that you're living in the same city, eh?" He tried to be jocular, but his heart wasn't behind it. He was building up to something Tamer sincerely hoped he could avoid. "Yeah...", he held his breath. In his mind he was screaming, pleading for him not to ask. "How did it happen?" Blood, glass shards, Lyra's mangled body, Lyra being lifted into the air, the crashing noise, the tremor in his legs, the figure, the phantom, the face, the FACE! He buckled, fell on his hands and knees and threw up on the shiny blue hospital floor. With his last ounce of strength, he pushed himself sideways a bit. Just enough to avoid falling into his own lunch. As he lay there twitching, thankfully losing consciousness, he could hear Mister Arens calling for help.

[mirrorhands]

Photograph - 8

The subway towards Nollendorfplatz was rather full, which felt paradoxical after the almost preternatural emptiness of the campus only minutes before. Despite being uncomfortably surrounded by warm, swaying, human bodies under the yellow train car light, Tamer felt very alone. He felt like he had been set apart from regular humankind and even more so than he already had before. He got momentarily startled, when an electronic rock song started playing from somewhere close. He knew the song. Lyra had sent it to him one cozy friday night, when she hadn't been able to sleep. For a moment he saw her in his mind's eye: a bloody, broken body on the concrete. He bit his lip and shook off the image. He wiped his eyes with a sleeve and took a deep breath. He tilted his head and turned it to the sides, trying to find the source of the music. From the annoyed glances of the other passengers he quickly concluded that it came from Lyra's backpack. Hastily, he unzipped the bag and started to rummage through it. There was a dark plastic box, which he decided must be an external hard drive, a plastic bag wrapped around some unknown object and tightly closed with rubber bands, Lyra's laptop, several charging cables... He finally found the smart phone neatly tucked into a side pocket inside the main compartment. Upon pulling it out, he found the screen displaying a familiar name: "Madeleine". With a swipe of his finger he picked up the call. "Damnit, Kat! We agreed to met twenty minutes ago! Where the hell are you?!", Madeleine's voice shrieked right into his ear. "Sorry, Madeleine. It's not Kat.", he replied hastily. "What? Who is- Linda? Is that you?!" Tamer closed his eyes and sighed. "Yeah. Listen, something horrible happened. There was...", Tamer felt the tears welling up in his eyes again. He gritted his teeth. No crying. Be a man, man! "... there was an accident. Kat's pretty badly hurt.", he managed. He wasn't quite sure what to tell her. He wasn't even sure what had happened, really. There was no rational explanation readily available. Whatever he could say would sound unbelievable. The very thought of what he had seen sent shivers down his spine and sheer terror through his brain. Thankfully there was a moment of silence on the other end, which allowed him to compose himself. "... What happened?", Madeleine finally asked in an unusually high-pitched tone. Tamer took a deep breath: "I don't- I don't know... something really weird she was...", his voice broke. He just couldn't keep calm. "She was thrown through a windowpane. I don't know how it happened! I'm freaking out!", he cried. Madeleine's voice was oddly calm, when she replied: "All right, Linda, listen. You need to tell me what happened. Step. By. Step. I want details. No matter how weird they sound. Do you understand?" This did nothing to calm Tamer down at all. This assurance of weirdness suggested horrid and impossible things. He pinned the phone between his ear and his shoulder and grabbed the backpack at his feet, as he felt the train coming to a stop. When he broke free of the overly warm, noisy crowd inside the subway and stepped into the green-tiled subway station, he took a few desperate gulps of relatively fresh air. "Linda?", Madeleine asked. Tamer stumbled over to the bench in the centre of the station platform, sat down and dropped the backpack between his legs. With shivering fingers he removed the phone from his shoulder and placed his head on his hand, resting his elbow on his knee. "Linda!" Tamer raised the phone to his ear.

[mirrorhands]

Guess whooooo

[mirrorhands]

Photograph - 7

Tamer stood paralysed with fear. Lyra's impact with the window had been so hard, that he had felt it tremor in his legs. Now it was once again dead silent in the hallway. Tamer could not even blink, he was too focused on trying to spot what had launched Lyra through the window. But there was nothing there, except for Lyra's backpack and her little water bottle that had fallen to the ground nearby and was still bobbing back and forth. He woke from his shocked stupor, when he heard Lyra's faint voice from outside the smashed window and stumbled over towards it to look outside. There she lay on the concrete slabs of the courtyard, her limbs twitching and twisted into uncomfortable angles and covered in glittering shards of glass. One of her arms was quite clearly broken and her grey sweater was covered in slowly expanding red stains. She had been lucky, all things considered. The window was on the ground floor. "T- amer", she stammered in between weak sobbing. With trembling hands, Tamer opened the broken window and hopped over the windowsill. Gingerly he stepped over the glass towards her and crouched down. Her face was covered in cuts, all of which bled profusely.  She had closed one of her eyes tightly, the other one was rolling frantically in its socket. A sob escaped Tamer's throat and tears began pouring down his face. "I'm here, Lyra!" She took a deep, rattling breath and with a strained voice she hissed: "Bottle! B- Bottle! Get... the bottle, Tamer" She was clearly out of it. Completely out of it! "I'll call you an ambulance!", he yelled. Why hadn't he done that right away? What had he been thinking?! He pulled his phone from his pocket and dialed 112. "Come on, pick up! Pick up!", he pleaded under his breath. He could feel Lyra's hand tugging weakly at his sleeve and gripped it tight with his free hand. "Bottle!", she hissed again. The call was picked up by what sounded like a female voice. "Emergency Service 112, what's your emergency?" Tamer tried to control his shaking voice. "A woman just went through a pane of glass!" "What's your name?" Tamer hated that question, but this was no time to be stingy about something like this. "Linda Kaiser" "Where are you?" "Takustraße 9. In the courtyard." "I'm sorry? Could you repeat that?" "Takustraße 9! In the courtyard!" "Thank you. Don't move her. Did she go through a window?" "Yes, but on the ground floor. She's bleeding pretty bad and, and..." Tamer couldn't finish the sentence, it was just too terrible to even speak out loud. "... The paramedics are on their way. They should be there in under ten minutes. Stay put!" "Okay. Thank you." The woman hung up. One of Lyra's fingernails dug painfully into Tamer's hand. He looked down. Lyra had moved her head and looked even more crazed than before. "B- ottle!", she croaked. Tamer followed her eyes to the window and froze. Just barely he could make out a dark figure disappearing out of sight on the other side and something about this little glimpse disturbed him to the core. No way. He could no longer even try rationalising this. Lyra could not possibly have thrown herself out of that window. Something scary was happening here. Maybe the bottle was actually important. She had muttered strange words and done odd things. Perhaps it was a ward of some sort. Magic, maybe. Ridiculous, of course, but Tamer was ready to cling to any explanation other than going insane. He jumped to his feet and back into the hallway. He scanned the room with wild eyes, but he could see no evidence of the phantom. Without any further hesitation, he grabbed the tiny bottle from the ground and ran back to Lyra's side. Quickly, he unscrewed the top and carefully brought the opening to Lyra's lips. She turned her head away, took another rattling breath and hissed: "No... hands... over hands" Then, with a painful cry, she raised her unbroken arm and rolled over to the side, so both of her hands lay atop one another. Tamer quickly poured the water over them and she moved them against one another as best as she could, gritting her teeth so hard that Tamer could hear it. The water ran over her fingers and mingled with the blood and the dirt from the ground into a muddy reddish liquid. After several minutes of tense, frightful silence during which a rather noticable pool of blood formed under Lyra's torso, she forced out more words, now even more laboured than before: "my bag... there's a... a hard drive. Madeleine. Give it to Madeleine. And..." She took a few stertorous breaths. "and a plastic... bag..." After this her lips still moved, but she was incapable of actually forming any understandable words. Tamer had been crying this whole time. He could hardly see anything because of all the tears. He nodded. "I'll get it to her. I promise!" The paramedics arrived soon after, with a police car right on their heels. After the frantic ambulancemen had moved Lyra into the ambulance, Tamer was alone in the courtyard with two policemen, a mess of broken glass and a sizeable smear of blood on the concrete. Tamer answered their questions as accurately as he could, but didn't mention the levitation, the dark figure or the salt. He told them he simply did not see how she managed to get through the window. The cops took it in stride and finally offered to take him home, which he refused. With the police gone, he took Lyra's backpack and was about to leave, when he stepped on something that was decidedly not glass. He lifted his foot and saw that it was the tiny stone from the bottle. Agate.

[mirrorhands]

Johanna and RedQueen~

[cattun]

froehliche-apokalypse requested mirrorland! So I… made something up. Mirrors always make me think of Mirrorhands…

[drugtripglasses]

even in the same second

moirails4lyfe

[cattun]

Oh look, it’s Noah!

[cattun]

Oh shit, it’s some Klein, too!

In my head she kinda looks like a Desi version of Bellatrix.

[cattun]

Probably the last picture Klein smiled in

Oh no, now I made myself sad

[chenisthebestkitty]

Shutter.

[nichtschwert]

Photograph - 6

Tamer had spent the previous week worried sick. He hadn’t been able to have a word with Lyra since the night after the “date”. She hadn’t attended lecture for a several days and refused to reply to any of his messages . His first thought had been, that he had made a horrible mistake and that she hated him now. How could he ever have allowed himself to wear those rose-coloured glasses? How could he have believed that she would respond well to being hit on by someone with his body? When the uncertainty had become too heavy to bear, he had talked to Madeleine. 'It's not you, probably. Not only, at least', she had said, 'You just have to understand that Kat is kind of idiot with people. She's ashamed and being really childish. Give her some space. She'll come around.' This, of course, hadn’t done much to ease his mind, but at least it had given him a speck of hope to cling to. So he had waited five days, checking his phone, his email account and his chat clients every few minutes. Meanwhile, Katarina had returned to university, but he had given her the space he thought she needed. Nothing had come of any of it. Finally, his patience ran out. It had been a mistake to take a seat in the back row for this lecture. He could see the back of her head, with her unkempt black hair moving and twitching like some kind of really crazy cat. It was distracting to such a degree, that he couldn’t concentrate on the lecture at all. In fact, he couldn’t remember anything discussed in class over the course of the entire  previous week. The situation was completely impossible. He shoved his laptop into his backpack and hurried out of the lecture room. As he lingered in the hallway, he felt a bit uncomfortable. It was clear that Lyra didn’t want to confront him and here he was about to force the confrontation on her. If Madeleine knew what she was talking about, this confrontation would be good for the both of them, but it still made him uneasy. Fifteen minutes later the other students began filing out of the lecture room, but only two actually made it to the hallway, before Lyra darted out, her head held low. Tamer immediately picked up a fast pace and briskly walked after her. “L-Lyra! Wait! Can we talk?”, he stammered. She actually jumped a little and her already tousled hair suddenly stood on end as she stopped dead and slowly turned her head to face him. She looked decidedly uncomfortable, almost half-crazed, even. Tamer shook off the shock of her appearance as much as he could. This conversation needed to be had. Still, his nervousness was now compounded by her harrowed appearance. "I’m sorry to ambush you like this, really! B-but you’ve been avoiding me all week! Can we please talk about this?!", he pleaded. Lyra’s expression seemed to calm a bit. She closed her eyes for a second and breathed. When she opened them again, her eyes still had dark circles around them and she still looked tense, but no longer appeared to be about to run away. Her voice quavered as she replied: “Okay, but not now.” Tamer was decidedly worried now. Lyra had never been the most outgoing person and had been aware that the situation was seriously bugging her, but this kind of emotional turmoil could not be explained away with a botched date. "Lyra are… Are you okay? Did something happen?", he asked. Lyra’s eyes went wide, like she was about to run again. “Nono, I’m fine!”, she yelped, “I just have somewhere to go right now. Really important!” She turned and started to walk again, so Tamer walked along. “So let me go with you at least part of the way. Come on, I want us to be cool.”, he insisted. ”Fine, we’re cool, Tamer! See you later, okay?” Tamer couldn’t possibly just let that slide. In the past she had always talked to him, when something bothered her. Well, all right, not always. Probably not even most times, but definitely sometimes! "Listen, Lyra! I… I didn’t mean to trick you last week or anything. I-if you don’t want to get involved in… in that way, that’s okay and everything and we can just go back to being normal friends and please tell me what’s wrong I want to help you, I really really do!”, he prattled forth. Her face was mostly hidden by her hair, but he could still tell that she looked aggravated. This whole thing was not going the way he had hoped and he already deeply regretted confronting her like this. Then she suddenly stopped and turned around again. “Damnit, Tamer, this is not a good time! Can you please just back off?! We’ll chat tonight! I promise! Now leave me alone!” Her words echoed through the deserted hallway and for a few seconds it was absolutely silent. Tamer became oddly aware of his surroundings, as his mind recoiled from the harsh rejection. What little light from the the setting sun made it through the big windows on their left was completely overshadowed by the bright neon lights and it dawned on Tamer that despite the late hour, the hallway should not have been this empty. Where had everyone else gone? He was however quite glad that nobody had been arround to witness this altercation. His throat felt so tense that he had trouble breathing and his face felt hot. He felt like crying, but he decided that that would have been a ridiculous overreaction. She would talk to him. Tonight. Online. Okay. That would have to be good enough. He wracked his brains for a good answer and hoped he would be able to speak without sobbing. Then Lyra’s jaw suddenly dropped open and she quickly turned away, covering her face in her hands. She was visibly shivering. A chill ran down Tamer’s spine at this behaviour. It was as if she had seen something terrible… right behind him. "Don’t turn around!", Lyra croaked, "Just run! Run straight forward! You hear?!" While this was disturbing, Tamer felt that Lyra was simply trying to get rid of him, for whatever reason she had. So he began walking forward, his head spinning from impotent anger and utter confusion. ”Greetings to you.”, Lyra muttered behind him. He heard her opening her backpack and rustling around inside it, probably looking for something. He turned around. There she sat on the ground, in the middle of the hallway. She had a tiny ziplock bag in her right hand and was pouring salt from it into the other. ”Do that to no man which thou hatest. Let there be a contract of no harm. The contract shall run out in 123 minutes.”, she said. Then she tossed the salt from her hand over her left shoulder. A horrible revelation crept up in Tamer’s mind: Lyra wasn’t simply awkward and a little weird. Lyra was completely, disastrously insane! Dumbfounded, he watched her close the salt bag and grab a small plastic bottle of water from the backpack. There appeared to be a tiny, colourful stone at its bottom. She hesitated as she spotted him. She mouthed a word, but he couldn’t read it. Lyra gave a surprised shriek as she was suddenly lifted up from the ground. For a moment Tamer felt faint, like he was dreaming or losing his mind. Lyra hovered there for about a second and then crashed through the window beside her with an ear-battering noise.

[nichtschwert]

Photograph - 5

After that fateful evening that - in Katarina Nguyen’s mind - marked the death of the last bit of public respect she had had, she convinced her father that the first block of lecture had been cancelled and stayed away from university all day. She felt she couldn’t handle a confrontation with certain acquaintances and rationalised her absence from lecture away as a necessary break for important paranormal research. When she woke her laptop from standby, the chat client immediately began to barf forth messages from the previous night - written in her absence. She clicked them away without reading them and closed the client. No more distractions. She opened her file with the notes from yesterday’s experiment. Only four people had volunteered, hardly a representative number. The few friends she had who were aware of her paranormal studies would have gladly participated, but Katarina had purposefully barred them. It hadn’t been the point of the experiment to understand what effects the anomalous photograph would have on people. That question could be rather easily answered: It inflicted psychological trauma. Whether this was due to some kind of bizarre, paranormal effect or simply the unnatural hideousness of its subject remained a mystery, but one whose solution could wait. The actual objective had been to see how the uninitiated would react to it. Most people were somehow unable to perceive or process the paranormal. They would simply walk past the impossibly tall Man-under-the-street-light whose head sports a gory mess where a face should be and would afterwards describe him as rather big, if pressed. And if you were to ask about his features, they would simply say that he had “one of those faces”. Katarina was rather fond of the theory that human brains had a built-in filter, that would simply filter out everything that was decidedly alien and anomalous. In fact, she thought, it might be possible that that filter was an evolutionary advantage, since those whose filters didn’t work, like herself, seemed to attract paranormal trouble. Yesterday’s experiment, at least, didn’t contradict her hypothesis. Upon prolonged exposure to the photograph, the test subjects had suddenly completely blocked out the image and their own apparent discomfort rather quickly. This was useful information. It meant that now they had an item that would allow them to pick out initiates from a crowd. It was a rather crude, dangerous and ambiguously unethical method and the longterm effects were still unknown, but Katarina was sure it would come in very handy in any confrontations with other groups of paranormally gifted people. Since her experimentation notes had yielded everything they could, Katarina turned to the stack of photos on her desk. Karl Ehrlich had thoughtfully handed over the entire package he had received from the copy shop. While flipping through the pictures, she took careful notes of all the occult trappings in them. She recognised several symbols, but they had been arranged in unfamiliar patterns and combinations. The wavy triskel above the sun cross would have suggested the grim vision ritual, but the tempohedron was missing and instead there were symbols she had never seen before. She knew for certain that the blueprints on the wall in one photo were definitely part of a passage in darkness and the mirror with the triangle on it had been prepared for a mirror surveillance. Whoever had set up the basement, the photos depicted, had an incredible amount of knowledge in the field. After noting all this, she flipped through the stack again, this time with more attention for the room itself. It did indeed look like a basement, judging from the windows, the overflowing shelves and the piles upon piles of crates, boxes and other dusty, unused things, but the floor was apparently not, like the walls, made of bland concrete. Instead it was covered with dark brown tiles. In some pictures, however, the tiles were actually blue. And in one of them, shot at an upwards angle, there was a blue-tiled wall as well, but above and beyond it the regular concrete basement wall could again be seen. A pool, Katarina finally concluded. It was a basement room with a swimming pool inside it. From the looks of it, it had not been used for actual swimming in a long time and instead repurposed as a storage room, at first and a paranormal workshop, later. There couldn’t be that many basements like this. Finding it would still be difficult. Katarina was nontheless very pleased with her deductions. She could feel that she was one step closer to solving the mystery.

[nichtschwert]

Photograph - 4

Katarina closed the apartment’s door behind her as silently as she could and peeled her shoes off her feet. She snuck across creaky floorboards through the darkness to the living room door, pushed it slightly ajar and found that her father had fallen asleep in front of the TV. She felt that was for the better. She didn’t feel like spoiling a nice evening with paternal confrontation. Carefully, she pulled the door closed and felt her way to her room. Since she was about to go to bed anyway, she only lit the desk light. She was in an unusually good temper and sleepy in a rather cozy way. She set up her laptop on the desk and hit the power button. When she returned from the bathroom, her mouth still minty from the toothpaste, she perched herself on the chair and moved a bunch of files to her encrypted external hard drive. Her chat client flashed. She clicked the tab. 00:13    Foxhound:        Hi, Kat! <3 She quickly typed a response. 00:14    LyraNorthbound:    good evening After a few seconds, foxhounds answered. 00:14    Foxhound:        So how was your date? <3 Katarina stared at the screen in confusion for a minute. Fatigue made it hard for her to process the message. 00:15    Foxhound:        You do know it was a date, right? ò_____ô Katarina sat in silence. A horrible realisation slowly formed inside her sleepy mind. 00:18    Foxhound:        Holy shit, you didn’t know! O_____O 00:18    Foxhound:        What are you, fifteen years old?! A date. A date? No way! Katarina’s hands slowly crept up and cupped her mouth. The previous evening replayed inside her mind: Tamer wearing a shirt. Tamer trying to pay both her cinema ticket AND her food at the restaurant. Tamer commenting on her hair Tamer clutching her shoulder during the scary movie Tamer looking so happy Katarina set down her head on her laptop. 00:20    LyraNorthbound:    üß´´´´´´´´´´´´´´´´´´´ä 00:21    Foxhound:        You have got to be KIDDING ME 00:21    LyraNorthbound:    HOW WAS I SUPPOSED TO KNOW?! 00:21    Foxhound:        It was SO obvious! >_____< 00:22    Foxhound:        Just by the way she always LOOKS at you, it’s obvious! 00:22    Foxhound:        And then cinema. It’s tired and old, but still OBVIOUS! 00:22    Foxhound:        Let me guess… You just didn’t expect this kind of attention from a girl. 00:23    LyraNorthbound:    TAMER’S NOT A GIRL 00:23    Foxhound:        Okayokay, she LOOKS like a girl. And that’s what counts. =____= 00:23    Foxhound:        *he 00:24    LyraNorthbound:    WHY DIDN’T YOU WARN ME 00:25    Foxhound:        Who am I, your mother? 00:25    Foxhound:        I mean I was a bit confused. Never thought you were the type to… 00:26    LyraNorthbound:    to what 00:26    Foxhound:        to go for a girl. But I figured it was SO OBVIOUS Ò___Ó 00:27    Foxhound:        Even you couldn’t possibly be that clueless I thought but here we are 00:29    LyraNorthbound:    what am I going to do 00:29    Foxhound:        You’ll have to tell him. That was exactly the answer Katarina had been afraid of. She wished she could just act like this had meant nothing, but now that she knew, she had to confront Tamer about the misunderstanding. She grimaced as her mind painted images of Tamer’s lips, Tamer’s legs, Tamer’s… 00:31    TheTamer:        You get home okay? :3 Katarina felt her face go red. Her windpipe seemed way too narrow all of a sudden and she had to fight back the tears. She was so ashamed. She clicked back into the conversation with Foxhound. 00:31    LyraNorthbound:    OH GOD HE’S ONLINE WHAT DO I DO 00:32    Foxhound:        Relaaaaaaaax. It was a misunderstanding. Just let her down eaaaasy. 00:32    Foxhound:        *him dammit An idea popped into her mind. Tamer wasn’t the most social type. Maybe he had not realised the implications either. Yes! Maybe his intentions had been entirely platonic and foxhound had completely misread the entire situation! It was a slim chance, but Katarina was determined to cling to it. She highlighted the other chat window. 00:33    LyraNorthbound:    yeah, thanks for askin :) 00:33    LyraNorthbound:    uh can i ask you a question 00:34    TheTamer:        Of course! 00:37    LyraNorthbound:    was this evening 00:37    LyraNorthbound: a date? Katarina started chewing on her thumb nail. Please don’t write anything stupid, Tamer. Pleeeease, she thought. 00:38    TheTamer:        Would you like it to be? She slammed her laptop shut, jumped off the chair and threw herself face first onto the bed. For a moment she hoped, the building would spontaneously collapse and kill her painlessly. It seemed like the least terrible fate. 00:40    Foxhound:        Kat? 00:45    Foxhound:        Kat, what happened? 00:47    Foxhound:        Jeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeesus, Kat! 00:48    Foxhound:        You can deal with the fucking Black Carriage and THIS scares you? 00:49    Foxhound:        Kaaaaaaaaaaat >_________<

[nichtschwert]

Photograph - 3

Katarina was conflicted. Her hand inside the envelope shook slightly. Both from the excitement of actual paranormal discovery and the fear of accidentally ruining someone’s life for the sake of that discovery. She looked more closely at Tamer’s form. His shoulders looked tense and his hands clutched the sides of the chair just underneath his wide hips. His legs  were clamped tightly together. But his facial expression was fairly neutral as far Katarina could tell. She wasn’t sure if Tamer was more disturbed or more excited. Maybe Katarina’s scientific zeal had hopped like a spark and ignited Tamer as well? The rather poetic metaphor aside, Katarina noticed how her excitement gradually outgrew her worry. Tamer had agreed to it, right? It was a calculated risk. They both knew about it. Well, Tamer didn’t know that he might end up passing out from sheer terror, but hey close enough, right? Right? Madeleine’s words echoed in Katarina’s mind. Don’t you dare hurt her. She wouldn’t go all the way. Just show the photo for a whole second this time. It would be okay. People recovered from worse stuff than this. Pushing her final shred of uncertainty away, she pulled out the picture, held it for a second and immediately regretted it. As she pushed the photograph back into the envelope, she watched with growing horror as Tamer’s face distorted into a disturbing grimace. His eyes went glassy, his jaw had dropped so far that it looked like it might pop out of its joint at any second. For a moment, Tamer’s entire body twitched and jerked and just as suddenly as this terrifying seizure had begun, it simply ended. Tamer’s eyes focused, his mouth closed, his body relaxed and his eyebrows settled into a confused frown.

Katarina wasn’t breathing. She couldn’t. Fear kept her completely paralysed. Her hand clutched the envelope so tightly that it got crumpled and her knuckles showed all white. Tamer blinked once, twice and said: “Are you pulling a fast one on me?” Katarina couldn’t speak. Her chest was cramped up so hard that she couldn’t get out a single word. "What?", Tamer asked, with a worried expression. Katarina slowly forced her lungs to take up air, then exhaled and carefully set the envelope down on the table. To hide her shaking hands, she set them down on her laptop’s keyboard. "What did you see?", she asked as calmly as she could, with her heart beating against her throat. "Nothing.", Tamer answered, "You showed me an empty photograph." Katarina quickly typed that into her “reasearch-notes” file and closed it without bothering to iron out the typos that had resulted from her shaking fingers. “Thank you, Tamer, that’s all I need for now.” She couldn’t even look at him. Why had she done that? Why did she have to push it so far? Tamer was one of her best friends and who knew how much damage this little stunt had done? How could she face him? She placed her hands on her keyboard once again, determined to act like she was doing something important on her computer until he’d leave and was shocked when she noticed that Tamer had actually approached her table and was standing right in front of her. Now there was no excuse anymore. The feeling of guilt lay so heavy on her gut that she thought she might throw up any second as she turned her head and faced him. She was a little relieved when she found that Tamer was avoiding her gaze and instead looked at her laptop  with a sheepish smile. “Uhm, Lyra… We don’t really spend a lot of time with each other in person, so uh… There’s a good movie on and maybe we could, like… go watch that together?”, he stammered.

Katarina tried to breathe slowly. So far nothing about Tamer’s demeanour seemed weird or off. She wasn’t really a cinema-going person, but hell, after what she had just done, the least she could do was spend some time with the guy. Especially, seeing how he had actually managed to suggest something like this in person despite his crippling shyness. She nodded slowly. “Okay, Tamer. Uh… When?” Now Tamer finally looked her in the eye with an expression of cheerful surprise. “How does today sound? 18 o’ clock?”, he asked. She thought about this. She didn’t have any particular plans for this evening and she had been working pretty much nonstop for the last few days. "All right! What are we watching?" Tamer grinned. “Well since you are into all this spooky stuff, I thought we should go watch Ends of the World! It’s about this dude who finds this whole continent full of horrible weird stuff!” Katarina tried not to show how much she hated the idea of watching a horror movie. She needed to keep up the facade of just being interested in scary stuff. The fewer people knew she actually took all this seriously, the better. “Awesome.”, she said with as much enthusiasm as she could muster.

[nichtschwert]

So I figured imma draw Katarina Nguyen.