AnimeCon Harem 14: Outside Help pt 1 (Patreon)

   Losing Brian, even temporarily, was bad enough—it was as if Kelly had been shown a glimmer of hope and then immediately had it snatched away. She’d only just really come to terms with having him in her life, of him becoming her rock, someone that she had deep feelings for, a guy she would openly admit to being in love with. Then, scant moments later he was seriously hurt, and of course she was responsible. Because everything that touches in on my trainwreck life turns to ruin too.

   Having hope yanked out from underneath her yet again wasn’t a new experience to Kelly, but this time it hurt so much more. In the half hour afterwards she’d been almost manic, babbling half-understood explanations to the other girls and running this way and that, grasping for a sense of control and stability when both were already gone. The idea of being separated from Stephanie soon on top of all that almost made her want to give up.

   I can only even PRETEND to be strong right now because she’s here, Kelly leaned in and pressed her forehead against Stephanie’s cheek as they both shed tears. I’m gonna lose it as soon as she’s gone. I’ll, yeah I’ll be with Emily and still have her, but I’m physically, mentally, EMOTIONALLY exhausted and it’s not like I can just drop a major breakdown on Emmie and expect her to be able to pick up all the pieces. Not like she’s any better off, right now.

   As much as she just wanted to hold Stephanie and Emily close and not ever let go right now, they were running out of time. With a reluctance so strong it actually managed to frighten her, Kelly disengaged from the embrace and pushed herself back to arm’s length. Love was fucking scary—her body almost seemed to physically need the safety, comfort, and intimacy of being pressed up against them. These girls that she loved. Pulling away from them felt like having blankets stolen away on a bitter winter morning, it felt like the withdrawal pangs of recovering from an addiction, it felt like ripping off bandages to expose an ugly unhealed wound to the whole world.

   Fuck, this hurts. Just want Brian back, to have us all get away together, so we can be okay. For however long we need, and just—fuck everything else. Almost want to figure out how to throw another send or two back. To just slap some sense into the Kelly of a few hours ago, who was still dragging her feet on all of this. Stupid fucking cunt.

   “Alright—Emily, I need to borrow your phone,” Kelly said, trying not to reveal anything in her expression. “I can contact the healer peoples, I think, but I’ll need a separate thing open to check on some details that I’m… not too exact on right now.”

   “Sure, yeah,” Emily agreed without a second thought, pulling out her phone and unlocking it. “Here. Browser tab here’s in private mode. If you need it put through additional proxies or anything, lemme know and I can set that up.”

   “Private mode should be fine,” Kelly accepted the device from Emily. “Thanks. This should… well, hopefully it won’t take long. Be back in a couple minutes.”

   “Fingers crossed,” Emily gave her a serious nod, then exchanged a worried look with Stephanie.

   Kelly wandered some distance away, holding up Emily’s phone in one hand and her own in the other—her screen had picked up a diagonal crack in the screen at some point, but otherwise appeared to be functioning fine. Her shoulders were stiff with tension as she stepped further on and finally chose a distant waiting room seat to drop into. Collecting her thoughts was impossible. When she tried to organize the step by step important points she would need to somehow convey to this total stranger, all of it sounded absurd, outlandish, and insane. Reaching out to this other cabal of magic people she only even became aware of in the future seemed like a desperate hail mary play—not to mention how complicated their relationship would always be.

   That’s… yeah, just how it is, though.

  Taking a deep breath, Kelly carefully positioned a phone to rest on each knee, stretched her fingers out above them both, and got to work. With a stab of her finger she promptly closed the browser Emily had opened for her, and then she navigated over through the menu screen to open up Emily’s address book. The girl had a lot of contacts, and with stroke after stroke of Kelly’s fingertip she paged downwards, scrolling through the names until she found the entry she was looking for.

   MOM CELLPHONE

   The number she read there was carefully entered over into Kelly’s phone, she double and then triple-checked that it was correct, and then Kelly exited the address book and thumbed the power button on Emily’s phone, putting it back into standby. This was it; if this negotiation didn’t work, they were basically out of options. It should work, but every aspect of the situation felt touchy and invasive, now. Slowly exhaling the deep breath she’d taken and struggling to calm her fraying nerves, Kelly lifted her own phone to her ear and called Emily’s mother—Mrs. Rivera.

   After the fourth dial tone, a resonant female voice answered.

   “Hello?”

   “Hello, I’m trying to reach… Actress, I have an—this is urgent,” Kelly said. “It’s an emergency.”

   “Hold for thirty seconds while I secure this line,” the woman’s voice turned cold.

   There was a rustling sound from the other end, and then the audio cut out completely. Kelly pulled the phone away from her ear and saw that seconds were still elapsing on the call, so she was still connected—until at 00:26, the display stopped, and then her screen went white.

rr_control.c:7411:gs1:GSS state transition timer 017 expired recovery disabledcarrier_err_fatal_intr_handler

Subsys-restart : resetting the SlG- carrier modem crashed .subsystem_restart_wq_func

   “When I end this call, your phone will restart,” the woman’s voice returned despite the frozen screen. “Some data will be lost. Now, who are you, and what’s so fucking important?”

   “My name is Kelly, I’m with your daughter at the hospital near AnimeCon,” Kelly rushed to explain. “Emily’s fine. Brian is seriously injured and can’t be moved, and the Masters will be here for him soon. The rest of us are withdrawing now, we are leaving a countermeasure behind but it’s—she’s iffy. We need help getting Brian stabilized and mobile and away from here before they take him from us.”

   There was nothing but silence in response for almost twenty seconds, long enough for Kelly to feel cold sweat forming along her back.

   “How much does Emily know?” The woman’s voice finally asked.

   “She doesn’t know about you,” Kelly answered. “All the rest—we’re kind of making up everything as we go along figuring everything out with the charm stuff. I only know about you because my talent is precognitive. Sort of. Different future Kellys can send me memories, and um, many of them have the potential to be accurate. We think. A lot of them contradict.”

   “How many of you are there?” The voice asked. “You should have a healer.”

   “We have—there’s five of us girls, sort of, and then Brian,” Kelly said. “It’s complicated. We have, um, one of us is an empath, that’s the closest we have to a healer. Nothing that can physically get him back on his feet for now, we don’t think.”

   “How bad is it, and who or what do you think your countermeasure is against the Masters?”

   “Bad, uh. Cracked skull, possible eye damage, broken ribs, concussion, smashed wrist,” Kelly blurted out. “He’s not conscious. He got the shit kicked out of him saving his ex-girlfriend from being raped. Long story, and somewhat my fault, because every single future Kelly sent me opinions on what to do about it. His ex-girlfriend got uh, she got put on the blood magic path this time through by accident though, so—she’s our countermeasure. Also oh, uh, magic doesn’t work on her. At all.”

   “Jesus Christ,” Mrs. Rivera swore. “Chloe? Brian’s ex-girlfriend?”

   “Yes,” Kelly confirmed. “Chloe.”

   “Okay,” the woman paused for another long moment. “Keep Emily safe, stay well clear of the Masters. I’m sure you’re aware already, but they’re not people any of you should be messing with. Don’t meet them, don’t talk with them, do not make any deals with them. Understood?”

   “Understood,” Kelly agreed. “Does that—should we have Chloe steer clear too, then?”

   “Magic doesn’t work on her?”

   “It doesn’t at all, her thing is like a mirror,” Kelly said. “Right now she’s also stronger and faster than a uh, then a normal human. Her heart’s still beating, but she will need blood soon, though, so if we—”

   “Keep her there with him as a deterrent, then. But, do not let things escalate. Not in a hospital, Christ. Tell her to stall for time, we should be there for Brian in—well—give us four hours.”

   “Four hours?” Kelly’s pulse felt like it stilled at the news. “Um. I thought, I thought that you, that um, Emily and Brian and you lived only like, an hour away from here?”

   “I do, but you’re going to need Nurse, not Actress, for this, correct? Contacting her as we speak, four hours will be the best we can do. Is that a problem?”

   “No, that’s—thank you,” Kelly’s shoulder sagged as she felt a rush of relief. “Thank you. Sorry. I just assumed—well, the memory stuff my future self sent me was kind of a bunch of shorthand, it’s all messy and incomplete. Thank you. Anything you want in exchange for your help, just, please—name it, and I’ll do anything I can to pay you back for your help. Thank you, thank you.”

   “How is she handling it? Is Emily okay with all of this?”

   “She is. Everything except for Brian getting hurt, and then… yeah, absolutely anything at all to do with Chloe, she’s hated. She does not care for Chloe. Otherwise, I think she’s had a really great time, with all of this. She loves it.”

   “Okay. That’s… okay. Thank you for not telling her about me. I’d appreciate it if she found out about all of that through… through the natural course of things. You did the right thing by contacting me. Brian’s a great guy, so this little favor will be on the house, okay? Stay clear of the hospital, we’ll meet Chloe there within four hours. Then after that we’ll have her contact you with any further news. You said your name was Kelly?”

   “Yes, ma’am,” Kelly said.

   “Sorry about your phone then, hon. You might still have your contacts after this, but that’s the best you can hope for. Take care, now.”

   “My—?” Kelly began to ask, but then her phone went dark and silent, having shut itself off.

   To her surprise, she didn’t really feel anything about maybe losing the contents of her phone. One way or another she was starting a new life here, and maybe it was better to simply leave some of that baggage in the past. Clutching both phones, Kelly stood up from the waiting room seat, and at that signal Emily and Stephanie both hurried over to her.

   “Is it—are they coming?!” Emily demanded. “What’d they say?!”

   “Four hours,” Kelly held Emily’s gaze for a little longer than intended as she worked through to process the big connection that she was—for now—hiding from her. “She said if Chloe is immune to magic, she needs to stay and stall the creeps when they show up, but the rest of us need to bail until her say so.”

   “Four hours?!” Stephanie’s heart seemed to break all over again. “But—”

   “Can we trust the healer peoples?” Emily scowled. “What’d they ask for in return? It didn’t seem like they had a lot of questions, that was barely a few minutes. And, four hours?! Come on. At that point, the creepshow will probably fucking already be here!”

   “We can trust them,” Kelly insisted. “Four hours is the best they can do, and yes—the creeps, ‘the Masters’ will arrive first. Chloe is… she’s going to have to stall them.”

   In unison, the three girls turned to look over at Christine, who had been hanging back with a wary, lost expression. The brilliant red eyes darted this way and that, as if everything around her was now new and alien to her. She stood tall and graceful, with tensed shoulders that were just a little too perfectly still, and with her silvery tangle of hair Christine seemed beautifully out of place in the borrowed gray sweat clothes.

/// Next section might take a bit, I've been rewriting it a lot. Or might switch over to RE:TT next, not sure.