AnimeCon Harem 14: Bad Karma (Patreon)

   “Fucking finally,” Chloe muttered under her breath as she lowered her phone. “Only took them for fucking ever.”

   The spike of raw glee she felt in confirming her revenge plan was proceeding made that knot of silvery shards crunch and creak as the glass twisted inwards on itself. Her bizarro headache made her want to hiss out in pain, but even that wouldn’t distract her right now. She refused to allow it to, because her moment was coming. Bryan was on his way, and the cheating conceited prick was finally going to pay.

   Bryan? Chloe froze, her scowl twisting into a snarl. The scraping and squeaking broken pieces in her mind turned against one another in different directions, refusing to settle into stillness. Brian. BRIAN is finally going to pay.

   Cramming her phone back into the pocket of her denim cut-offs, Chloe ran her fingers through her hair to tussle everything the slightest bit out of place. She hadn’t been able to put product in it this morning and didn’t even have her brush with her this weekend, so for once in her life the difficult to tame messy of volume of locks actually worked with her instead of against her. A mirror wasn’t necessary to tell it would appear like she’d been through a struggle. She could tell from the way it sat on her head—yet another necessary minor annoyance she would put up with for as long as it lent credence to her story.

   Makeup’s already a disaster, even have it streaking down my face! Chloe mentally counted down through each of her advantages. Hair’s messed up. Can start my nosebleed again whenever with just one simple pinch between my nostrils—hah, perfect. Blood on my blouse already, great. Now just one last little thing…

   Contrary to its name, her halter top did have sleeves; decorative ones that hung down to her bicep and served only to draw the maximum amount of attention to her bare shoulders. Gathering up her left one into a wadded fistful of fabric, Chloe yanked. The garment made a small sound as something gave way, but didn’t rip like it was supposed to—instead straining and stretching out of place. Crossing her arm over herself and bracing it there, Chloe grit her teeth and pulled with more force. After an aggravating long moment where the piece seemed to only be cutting deeply into the tender part of her inner arm, she finally felt stitches give way as the thing tore.

   That HURT, you piece of shit! Chloe fumed, letting what was left of the ruined sleeve dangle uselessly. THAT’S your fault too now, Brian.

   Sending a glance towards the mouth of the alleyway to check for any sign of her soon-to-be-appearing boyfriend, Chloe started heading in a little deeper. The several stories of convention center cinderblock towered up on one side and the loading docks, dumpsters, and emergency exits for the businesses of the adjoining block rose up on the other. No one was here to spot her down the long access road squeezed in between city structures, and most importantly—the spot she’d picked out for her ‘rape’ to happen was completely out of view of the two security cameras she’d discovered.

   Their views were both fixed upon the two nearest docks, waist-high concrete slabs with shuttered roll-down doors where there was just enough room for a box truck to turn in the narrow space and finagle back to unload inventory. The nearby stacks of discarded wooden pallets wasn’t any priority for video surveillance. With a frown of distaste Chloe picked up a broken pallet from the top of a pile with plucking, reluctant fingertips and worked to leverage it over and to the side. It was heavier than it looked, probably filthy, and would give have given her splinters. The thing fell with a surprisingly loud clatter. Just beneath was ideal, because a twisted length of discarded plastic stretch wrap for wrapping palleted product had mostly kept the elements off a broad and much cleaner-looking cardboard sheet. Again as carefully as possible, Chloe picked the dirty plastic out of the way.

   Perfect. Chloe felt giddy with anticipation as she retrieved her phone once again and dialed 911.

   “911, what’s the nature of your emergency?”

   A female dispatcher answered the line almost immediately, and having not known what to expect Chloe scrambled to arrange what she needed to say.

   “Hello, um—” Chloe injected panic into her voice. “Um, my boyfriend, well my ex-boyfriend… I think he’s been following me and I’m scared and I don’t know what to do?”

   “You say you think your ex-boyfriend has been following you,” the voice repeated back to her. “And you think you’re in danger, is that correct? Are you in a public space, or can you make your way to a public space?”

   “I-I’m near AnimeCon, um, the convention center, but he was already harassing me there,” Chloe explained. “The staff wouldn’t do anything, so I uh, I left and I’m outside the building right now. I’m outside the building right now, but I think he’s following me.”

   “You’re outside the building, you think he’s still following you?” the dispatcher asked. “Can you give us your ex-boyfriend’s name, can you describe him, and do you know if he’s armed?”

   “He’s—his name is Brian Douglas. He’s twenty-three years old. White. Brown hair. Uh, green eyes. He’s tall. I-I don’t know if he’s armed or not. But, I’m—he’s scaring me and I think he’s following me.”

   “Okay. Can I ask for your name?”

   “Chloe,” Chloe answered. “Chloe Weschler.”

   “Alright, Chloe,” the dispatcher said. “Do you need police assistance? Where outside the convention center building are you?”

   “It’s a um, I’m right between where the anime convention ends and the next block starts?” Chloe cringed, unable to tell the woman she was in a deserted literal blind alley that already looked like the set of a crime drama. “If you can please send police, that would be—that would be great.”

   “Would that be—” the dispatcher paused for a moment. “Would that be to the west of the convention center?”

   “Um? Yes, I think so? I um—” Chloe hung up on the woman without finishing her own sentence. “How the fuck should I know which side is west, you dumb bitch? Fucking figure it out. Jesus, this is why so many women get raped.”

   Still grumbling to herself in annoyance, Chloe mentally reviewed what she’d said. The plan had always been to hang up or surreptitiously disconnect the call at some point obviously, but now she had to worry emergency services would fuck up by not finding her. I said AnimeCon. And that I was between the convention center and like, the next city row over before another block starts. Should be obvious where I am—figure it out, fucking find me.

   “Hey, you lost?” A glib voice called out of nowhere.

   Chloe whirled to find—to her mounting disbelief and outrage—some scrawny white-trash guy with five o’clock shadow on his cheeks had stepped out from a side door just one lot down from where she was. He was wearing a wife beater, and with the sides of his head shaved in what she thought of as a skinhead look. Un-FUCKING-believable how hard it is to get ANYTHING accomplished with everyone around me incompetent or interfering.

   “Fuck off!” Chloe yelled. “I am so serious—get lost, right fucking now.”

   “You’re tellin’ me to fuck off?” Something changed in the way the guy stared over at her, and he paused with an unlit cigarette halfway to his mouth. “Fuck you doin’ out here, anyways?”

   “Fuck off, take a hike shitsmear, get the fuck out of here, as in if you don’t leave right this second I am going to fucking scream my lungs out!” Chloe snarled at him. “Now. Fuckface don’t test me, I will fucking scream. You want me to scream? Fucking try me. You want to deal with cops asking you what your fucking problem is and why you’re harrassing me? Fucking try me.”

   With a chuffing sound that might have been a laugh, the guy retreated without lighting up or intruding on her with his smoke break. Chloe glared daggers anyway at the door as it swung closed behind him. That’s right. Yeah. That’s what I thought, BITCH. You’d better—

   Then the door reopened, and this time three guys emerged.

   A small pit of fear opened up in Chloe’s stomach at seeing the trashy guy leading out friends and looking completely uncowed by her threat. Behind him an enormous guy decked out in a ballcap and football jersey followed, along with a greasy dark-haired guy in a sweat stained button-down shirt and an even more foul apron, possibly indicating the door they’d came out of led to one of the bars or sportsclubs on the adjacent row facing away from the convention center.

   “That her?” The scuzzy-looking line cook asked, jerking a chin in Chloe’s direction. “From yesterday?”

   “Nah, told you—that was this fucken Valkryie chick,” the lumbering guy murmured in a bassy rumble. “Tried to go all apeshit on us.”

   “Different chica, same fucken attitude though,” the trashy one in the lead grinned at her, revealing nicotine-stained teeth. “What’d you say, cunt? ‘Don’t fucken try you?’”

   All three of them were simply sauntering over towards her. The cracked and worn pavement between her and them continued to shrink even as Chloe’s furious rage at them interrupting began to feel muted and distant. Alarm was taking hold, these random fucking assholes didn’t seem intimidated by anything she’d said at all, and the nervous urge to simply bolt started to creep its clammy way up her body.

   “Back off,” Chloe warned them, feeling the pit in her stomach worrying itself into a deep sort of dread with each step they took. “I mean it. All of you. Get the fuck away from me—take one step closer, and I’ll fucking scream.”

   “Naw, naw,” he sneered, continuing forward without hesitation. “You said try me, and I’m gonna fuckin’ try you. Fuck you gonna do ‘bout it?”

   “Don’t even,” Chloe demanded, involuntarily taking a step backwards as they drew ever closer to where she was standing. What do these wannabe thug SHITRAG lowlifes even think they’re going to do?! Brian’s going to be here any fucking minute and I DO NOT have time to deal with this! “I swear to God—if you don’t back the fuck off, I will scream my fucking lungs out. Stop. Stop!”

   “Aw yeah? What’s that gonna do?” The guy drawled out. “Scream. Do it—see what happens.”

   “I-I already called the police,” Chloe hissed out, backpedaling another step. “Leave me alone.”

   “Uh-huh, okay,” Trashy guy obviously didn’t believe her. “Bitch—get down on your knees.”

   The three were close enough now that she could smell cigarette smoke, sweat, and fryer oil on them, and they were spreading out, the big guy moving to step between her and her way out of the alley, the other two fanning out as they approached in case she impulsively acted on any of the bright ideas to run that were now racing through her mind.

   As she searched from face to face in disbelief and growing terror, for surely this was some kind of sick fucking joke going too far—what she saw made the haphazard ball of shattered mirror inside of her clench into a sharp snarl. Line cook was closing in on her left, and he looked tired and pissed, there was just a kind of hate in his eyes. The big guy in the sports jersey cutting off her escape on the right looked unamused and unsympathetic, and trashy guy in the wife beater was now leering so close that he could almost make a lunge for her.

   Chloe panicked, her fight or flight response activating on instinct—the mad dash carried her long legs four entire steps before the enormous guy blocking her exit simply leaned into the direction she was sprinting for and extended an arm. Before she even realized what had happened she was in blind pain and careening over to smash into the painted cinderblock of the convention wall. She bounced off, and sprawled out across the ground in a tumble.

   An instant later the pain hit her all at once. Having smashed right into the guy’s thick arm at full tilt pressed all the air out of her lungs, colliding with the wall a split second later stunned her almost senseless, and all at once it was as if every part of her that came into contact with the pavement was scraped raw and screaming pure murder at her. She’d never—ever hurt like this before, and as she tried and failed to curl up her shaking limbs against her body into a ball she realized she was going into shock.

*     *     *

   “You got a send. Obviously. Was it a warning? Advice? A heads up on something, different perspective on something? C’mon, Kelly—give us the deets,” Emily insisted. “If it’s upsetting you that much it has to be important and we need to know what the fuck is going on. Where Brian is. What the fuck happened.”

   “Deets?” Stephanie asked in a weak voice, not tearing her concerned expression away from Kelly for even an instant.

   “Deets, the details,” Emily waved away Stephanie’s askance question with a dismissive hand. “C’mon, Kelly—fucking spill!”

   Emily wanted answers, but so far Kelly had only seemed absolutely determined to take Stephanie by the hand and tug her along. They’d traversed down the aisles of the vendor’s exhibition hall and back out into the lobby, they kept pace with the out-of-sorts scene girl as she clomped up the escalator, the moving stairs not bringing them up fast enough, and they struggled along after her now in the long stretch of upper level concourse leading towards the Atrium.

   “Initially… Chloe tries to fuck us over in a big way,” Kelly said, finally slowing to a walk. She appeared to deliberate so that she could carefully choose her words. Or perhaps she was out of breath—Emily already felt that obnoxious side-stitch returning just from trying to keep up.

   “Have her uh, her last hurrah. Tries to lure Brian to meet her ‘so she can apologize,’ pleads like she’s hurt and frightened by everything. When she’s actually setting him up for rape charges, she’s gonna try to make it look like Brian rapes her when he goes to meet her. It’s a total setup.”

   “Awesome!” Emily beamed. “Finally. So, now we have deets from the future and can just shut that down, right? Flip the script on her? There’s like, no chance Brian would have even gotten baited into that in the first place, right? Like, originally? Not after everything she’s done, right?”

   “That is… correct,” Kelly swallowed. “She gets a hold of Brian via your phone, but Chloe does not originally manage to convince Brian to go out and see her.”

   “Okay? So…?” Emily’s look turned quizzical. “Why the send, then? If we get things right anyways the first time?”

   “Things go right for us, but not for Chloe,” Kelly took a deep breath. “Chloe already has a bloody nose, tears her clothing a bit, to ah, to make it look like she’s been, y’know, sexually assaulted. To set the scene, she, well, she picks just the most perfect spot for a rape here in the area. Problem is, that winds up being the same alleyway thing where Steph almost, uh. Got taken advantage of. Chloe runs into the same guys Steph did, I think, ‘cept there’s more of them this time, and they’re extra pissed off because of whatever with Rebecca yesterday, too. I guess. They find Chloe there with her outfit already torn, she’s typical belligerent Chloe towards them, and. Yeah. Chloe was setting up a fake rape and she, um. She gets beaten and then gang-raped for real.”

   Stephanie’s breath seized.

   “...Fuck,” Emily tensed. “I—just, fuck. I mean, I hate Chloe, but that’s… real fucked up. I wouldn’t want her to ever actually get raped. Right?”

   “Right,” Kelly nodded. “So, obviously after knowing that, we intervene with my uh, my ability. My send thing. The first few sends, they’re all about that. Only, they don’t turn out well.”

   “It doesn’t work out?” Emily frowned. “Does—”

   “Works to prevent the actual rape and save Chloe,” Kelly clenched her teeth. “That’s easy. But, then Chloe always fucks us over, hard. Sticks to throwing the bogus rape charges on Brian.”

   “Shhiiiiiitt,” Emily groaned. “What the fuck. Fucking—of course she does.”

   “Yeah,” Kelly scowled. “So, I guess in the first iterations Brian gets there ahead of time, prevents Chloe from actually getting raped. But then, it’s just as planned for Chloe, and she’s able to successfully pin fake rape charges on him. Brian’s life completely gets ruined by her accusation alone, he loses his job, falls into this deep fucking depression—it changes him.”

   “Does—” Emily began to ask.

   “You think oh, maybe it wouldn’t be so bad, because he has us, and we’re with him no matter what,” Kelly continued on over Emily’s attempted question. “But no, it’s still really, really fucking bad for him, because Chloe just never fucking lets it go. She’s fixated on ruining him in every way that she can. It gets worse. It gets way fucking worse. Preventing the rape from happening is easy, it’s the rest that’s super messy and almost always fucks up. When we first try and run out as a group to stop it, right as it’s happening—”

   “Wait wait wait, time out,” Emily stopped her. “That’s so stupid, couldn’t we just, like, shoo Chloe out of that specific dangerous area way, way ahead of time, then avoid her and dodge all her drama with future knowledge? Trying to—”

   “That works, sort of, sure,” Kelly said. “To prevent the rape. Save her, without her ever even realizing. But that doesn’t help Christine stop being Chloe, that’s just avoiding what’s actually wrong.”

   “Then—but, b-but why would they send this warning so late?” Stephanie seemed completely baffled. “That’s completely just, well, thoughtless! If we knew all this further ahead of time, no matter what, the earlier we know all of these things, the more options we have! We could call security, or police, or—”

   “Because the various conflicting different groups of us in the futures have been trying to… metagame this perfect outcome for what must be an unspeakable number of iterations. If we get the warning too early, our predicted path goes off the rails and the timing of what happens—all of that goes up in the air and is no longer useable information.”

   “Then—no, wouldn’t the futures change along with that to give updated predictions?” Emily was at a loss as to what the problem was. “I mean no matter what, if what we do here in the present becomes their past, they always know how it happened. Right?”

   “No, the timeline shit doesn’t connect like that at all,” Kelly refuted. “Doesn’t work that way. The timelines that send to us, nothing we do affects them. They stay off separate as their own thing. When we send shit to new timelines, none of that changes our timeline. What’s already happened here has already happened, and nothing can change or reverse that.”

   “So what’s the difference between—” Emily hesitated. “How would—? Wouldn’t the…? Nope, I’m stumped. Gonna need to sit down with a white board or something and map that shit out, ‘cause I’m still not getting it.”

   “Futures we affect, can’t affect us?” Stephanie spoke up. “Is that how it works? For all of the, um, instances of us in the timelines?”

   “Yes,” Kelly nodded. “Basically. That.”

   “Then, what’s even the point of—” Emily grimaced as she tried to wrap her mind around it. “No, still doesn’t make sense. Doesn’t that mean, like if we’re just a single iteration, then doesn’t that mean we can only receive future knowledge only once? Or…fuck, no, I don’t get it.”

   “Okay, so… I… I…” Kelly faltered as she attempted to begin her explanation. “I’m—let me start over. I got a send from the future. The future I got a send from was not the original future. They’re an alternate timeline, because they got a send and acted on it. Changed things. As did the timeline that sent to them, and the one that sent to that one, and so on for an indeterminate amount of timelines before that—all of them doing slightly different things. We’ll send our take on things to the next timeline, and yeah, I imagine it just keeps continuing on like that to new timelines.”

   “Were we…?” Stephanie paused, narrowing her eyes at Kelly for an unusually long moment. “Were we still following the course of the original timeline before we got this send, or are we a cumulative product of each change from the previous timelines? I’m sorry, are you—”

   “We’ve received three sends in total so far, so—ever since we got the first one, we’ve veered off the course of the original timeline,” Kelly quickly explained, tensing and seeming to grow nervous. “Yeah. The first two sends I got were mostly just about me, were uh, course correcting my attitude so that I didn’t bail on you guys, I guess. I likewise sent out my own version of the first send I got, to the me in a new timeline after our timeline, to—yeah, to help push her into rooming with Brian and you that first night. As a passing it on sort of gesture. But, as to the cumulative thing—”

   “Kelly—are you stalling us?” Stephanie lurched to a stop, not budging an inch when Kelly tried to continue pulling her forward. “I can feel what you’re feeling, Kelly. You’re—this is—you’re stalling us? From what?”

   “Sorry,” Kelly said with a deep sigh, staring back at Stephanie without releasing her grip on Stephanie’s wrist. “Have to. Can’t let you get hurt. You always run over there soon as you find out, you almost always get hurt, and now—now we’re a good distance away and it’s probably already too late to do anything.”

   “Too late to do anything about what, exactly?” Emily felt her hackles rise. “Isn’t Brian—I thought you sent Brian to stop the rape. Isn’t that like, implied from fucking everything you’ve been saying?”

   “Brian stops the rape, but he uh—they don’t just scatter and flee when he shows up,” Kelly admitted. “There’s three guys, and when he intervenes there’s a fight, and…”

   “A fight and?” Stephanie demanded.

   “They beat the shit out of him,” Kelly said, rushing to speak as fast as possible as Stephanie struggled to break free from her grip. “They beat him really, really badly, he always wound up in the hospital. It’s happening right about now.”

   “Kelly—”

   “So, we just—we stopped letting him go at all, we ah, we tried literally everything else,” Kelly growled. “Everything. Tried putting Rebecca on blood magic, instead of the lovers kind we’re all in on, since back here where we are now she isn’t set on this same track with us yet. So that she could rush in with superspeed vampire bullshit and just solve everything. It didn’t work out, people fucking died. We tried to call in favors from people we only even meet way way on in the future, we tried walking Emily through her powers early, so she could do something—”

   “Let go of me, Kelly,” Stephanie warned, bracing her feet and pulling harder. “Let go of me!”

   “You were right about warning us too late, normally supposed to have gotten the send about this when I was snowballing magic stuff back and forth with Emily. The version of us that sent to us, this time? Sent at the worst possible time. Didn’t want to let us even try to stop Chloe from being raped. Because of how badly things go, how horribly Chloe fucked them over, in their timeline. Because—”

   Stephanie slapped Kelly across the face hard enough to turn her head, but even that wasn’t enough for Kelly to release her grip.

   “Because—their plan was for me to just keep out of it so that none of us get hurt this time,” Kelly let out a humorless chuckle. “To just let Chloe get raped. Gang-raped. Sent me all the worst memories they could so that I’d understand where they were coming from. All the fucks up. All the suffering we went through. You getting hurt, over and over. Brian getting hurt. Everything going wrong, in all the different ways. But, I just—I’m my own fucking person and I’m not afraid of making shitty calls. Not going to let Chloe, or anyone, be fucking raped because of my inaction. Just—no. They don’t get to make that choice for me!”

   “You don’t get to make THIS choice for me either, then!” Stephanie screamed.

   Those words seemed to strike Kelly in all the ways the slap failed to, and Kelly recoiled, hunching inward on herself for a moment, releasing Stephanie’s wrist and sending the pair stumbling in opposite directions.

   “If Brian’s getting hurt, then I want to be there with him! With him!” Stephanie cried, her eyes already wet. “No matter what happens to us!”

   “This—this is the way Brian wanted it!” Kelly stammered out. “He doesn’t want you hurt! I don’t want you hurt! But they—we, we wouldn’t let him keep going and rescuing Chloe on his own. Because of you insisting. Because of Emily insisting. Brian wouldn’t let you go and get hurt, then we wouldn’t let him go, and it all rolls into the stupid fucking bullshit cycle we’re in where none of us even understand what the fuck’s going on anymore! So, I made a judgment call, and now we have to—I have to live with it!”

   Stephanie glared at Kelly through her tears for a long, tense moment, and then she turned and sprinted away down the convention concourse.

   “Shit. Shit,” Kelly swore.

   “Brian’s getting hurt, right now?” Emily asked in a daze, taking several hesitant steps after Stephanie before stopping and whirling to face Kelly again. “That can’t be. It doesn’t make sense. He was fine. We were just talking minutes ago, and he was fine. And. Why would they send you something too late? Why would they have bothered sending anything at all, if they wanted the outcome where we just don’t help Chloe? Doesn’t add up. Kelly what the fuck is going on.”

   “Complicated,” Kelly blew out a slow breath. “Send wasn’t really about us, since they’ll never see how it winds up going. I want to think it was just to ease their conscience, but then I really hate thinking that they’re a version of us. We should… go, I guess. We won’t get there in time anyways. Should probably go the other way, even—pick up Brian’s car, if you have the key. Ambulance will probably beat us there anyways, we’ll just… pick up Stephanie if she doesn’t ride with them. Or meet right at the hospital.”

   “Brian’s—Brian’s really getting hurt?” Emily repeated.

   “Yeah.”

   “Then,” Emily stared down at her own palm, too stunned to feel like any of this was real. “Gonna slap you too. Just so you’re uh, aware. I’m gonna fucking slap you as hard as I can.”

   “‘Kay.”

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/// Now crunched and recrunched these sections so many times I'm no longer confident they make any sense. Will reevaluate tomorrow morning based on what readers think, I guess. This was the fifth version of the explanation, and I wound up just cutting up huge swathes of it? Because I'm not sure I'm up for rewriting this a sixth time, think it's starting to get worse rather than better, make less and less sense. Been stuck on this part FOREVER and I'm eager to just push on through so I can get to the Brian POV.