Period Piece

You are the Warrior.

Your ears are finely tuned to the night and its every tiny tick. Near or far, every rustle and every step you can identify without sight or smell or touch. Any beast would be a fool to underestimate your intimacy with the music of the darkness.

But tonight, there is a new sound. It's low, and deep, and pounds like a heartbeat in a strange and frantic rhythm. It is joined by a voice and the sound of metal. Several sounds of metal.

Following along, the rhythm infects your body and your bones begin to buzz on their own. The beat electrifies your senses. Your movements become guided.

And you begin to dance.

Welp, I DID sort of ask for this, didn't I? I dared to taunt the dream, and this is pretty much exactly what I should have expected from a dream quest. An straight-up barroom brawl...er, close enough, anyway. And Heqet wondered why I brought this umbrella with me...

"Stick close to me, Heqet," she instructed, taking her stance.

"I promise you I will!" came the reply as Heqet leapt up into the limp hood hanging just behind Jacqui's head. "Cross my heart and hope they die, now stick that umbrella in their eyes!"

Jacqui flashed her a toothy smile and tightened her grip on the weapon. Her body connected its movements with the drumbeat, bobbing along as she watched the crowds boil with anticipation. And there, hopping up atop one of the far tables, she saw a man in the back, as a matter of fact, with eyes as red as the sun.

And he seemed to be saying something to everyone around him, but all Jacqui heard was that one part of the song that goes like:

"Alright, fellas...let's GOOOOO!!!"

Together, as one massive, writhing unit, the entire mob cascaded forward like an ocean wave made of angry human bodies. And Jacqui, umbrella in hand and Heqet in tow, dashed up to greet them in a ball of zealous fire. And, as if the enigmatic Specter had planned it to the letter, it turned into a coffeeshop blitz.

And it was like lightning.

"The wisdom of the Jedi Knights is every bit as valid as believing in an invisible bearded man in the sky with a hippie zombie for a son!" a broad-shouldered old man wearing shades indoors shouted as Jacqui deftly swept left to avoid his first blow. "Sixteen teachings and twenty-one maxims, baby!"

"Shut up, you stole that from a movie and you know it!" she growled, hooking his ankle with her umbrella and pulling him off his feet.

"That doesn't delegitimize the beliefs' structure and function!" a pimple-pocked girl with thick-rimmed glasses rebutted, coming up fast from behind. "Books, movies, ancient stone tablets, who cares where they came from!"

"Right," Jacqui sneered, catching her face-first with an extended palm, stonewalling her to the ground. "Next you'll tell me Jar Jar's their god, right?"

"Ooh, big words comin' from the pudge-baby with a frog god from a long-dead system of ancient mythology on her shoulder!" mister Denim Trenchcoat shot back, diving past her in a failed tackle.

"Wait, what do you know about--GKH!" She didn't get an answer before taking a fist to the kidney.

"HEY! ALL forms of supernatural worship have the same right to coexist, regardless of potential veracity or questions of fictional status!" shouted Modern Neo-Wiccan Girl as she dodged Jacqui's counter. "...so fuck off, both of you!"

"No wait, go back to the part about my talking frog god!" Jacqui replied, thrusting backwards to knock Pink Crop Muffintop to the ground.

"There ain't no gods!" said the Man In The Back As A Matter Of Fact With Eyes As Red As The Sun from atop his café table soapbox. "There's only man and what he believes! Religion by definition is a system of beliefs used to justify and rationalize existence! Ain't nobody said there has to be an invisible sky man lording over us all and demanding our worship!"

"This isn't getting us anywhere!" Jacqui roared back toward Heqet, barring the crowds with her umbrella. "All they're doing is shitting themselves trying to be right!"

"Shitting is also a valid religion!" came a shriek from the left, met with a swift spin kick to the face.

"Y'know what, everybody just shut up for a second!" Jacqui commanded, stomping her foot as if she expected it to create a seismic shockwave that would blast everyone away from her so she could be the one on the soapbox for a second. The blitz ignored her entirely and carried right on blitzing, but Jacqui had at least acquired the attention of a Girl In The Corner Who Was Everyone's Mourner, who could - probably - kill you with a wink of her eye. She shouted, "...hey! You!"

The Corner Girl, who from this distance looked like a business-casual programmer from India or thereabouts, pointed to herself, nodded, then stood up and stuck two fingers in her mouth, effortlessly executing one of those shrill whistles that instantly shuts everyone up like in the movies. Well, maybe it didn't shut everyone up, but it had at least stopped the punching and biting for a moment.

All eyes shifted focus toward her as she approached Jacqui, a bubble of personal space parting the tangled crowds in her path. The closer she came, the more out of place she looked. Her face was stern and defined, hair thin and pulled back into a flat ponytail, and that dorky button-up argyle cardigan wasn't doing her any favors.

"...so you're looking for a REAL throwdown?" she asked, in a more no-nonsense business voice than Jacqui had expected from such an unassuming face.

"Believe it or not - and I can't believe it myself - I'm not actually here to fight," Jacqui replied, shaking her head. "I'm just looking for some answers."

"Oh?" Corner Girl nodded, a smile edging its way across her face. "You say that like we can't do both at the same time."

"Much as I'd enjoy takin' you down a peg, I'm kind of in a hurry," Jacqui said with a harumph. "Got a quest to fulfill and such."

"A quest, eh? Small world...I too am on a quest...".

"Oh! Could it be...?" Heqet's head poked up from over Jacqui's shoulder. "A kindred spirit?!"

"...a quest to KICK SOME ASS!" Corner Girl challenged, ripping the cardigan from her body and tossing it to the floor. Beneath it she had worn nothing but a white muscle undershirt and apparently the right to bear arms. Even Jacqui had to take a step back in marvel. Much like the cardigan on the floor, Corner Girl was absolutely ripped. Her arms were sculpted like a marble statue, or a professional boxer, or even a marble statue of a professional boxer.

"Cause she thinks SHE'S the passionate one!" crooned the lyrics behind her.

Watching her new opponent take a stance as the song bridged, Jacqui shook herself from her daze and brought herself back in tune with the music, just in time to dash forward as the chorus kicked in again.

Corner Girl was fast up top, but not deft on her feet, preferring instead to pitch her weight forward from the shoulder. Her blows were sharp and precise though, and kept Jacqui on the defensive. Even with the umbrella, this might prove to be a tricky boss fight...

"So what is your big important religious quest, then?" Corner Girl asked, making a jab from the high right. "Or did you just come here to mock Jedis and Atheists?"

Left forearm block. "Please, like these nerds need any help with that. I'm just here for God. You know where I can find him?"

"That is the million-dollar question, isn't it?" she replied, throwing up an uppercut from the left. "The question each of us asks ourselves, day in and day out, for every day we've existed!"

"NOOOooooo," Jacqui fumed through grit teeth as she dodged and hooked the umbrella handle around Corner Girl's wrist, yanking her arm out of the way. "I mean I'm literally trying to find him. Like, where does God live? What's his address?"

"...wait, what?" There was a brief pause as Corner Girl stepped back, rubbing her wrist. Several of the blitzers in the crowd began mumbling amongst themselves, confused. "...which one?"

Jacqui raised an eyebrow, but did not break her stance. "...what do you mean which one?"

"Which. One." She made a curt slicing motion as she pronounced both syllables. "The gods do not all live together in some kind of heaven-mansion, you know."

Jacqui's eyes shifted left for a moment. Heqet waved back from her shoulder perch. She turned center again. "...er...I'm just looking for God. Y'know, like...THAT God? God-god?"

"Yes, yes, you've already established that it's a god you're looking for," said a strange young man from the crowd, equipped with a handlebar mustache and a pair of Sunday overalls and pinstripe slacks, and topped off with a fast-talking Missouri car salesman voice. "So on a list of names we can effectively rule out all demons, angels, devils, cherubim, supernatural phenomena, zoological cryptids, mythological pets, major sports celebrities, and assorted lesser deities of minor pagan belief structures but that still leaves an entire pantheon's worth of gods and goddesses which without any filters is a list simply too unwieldy for pinpointing any particular places of provision!"

"NO! Fuck, I mean, like..." she splayed her hands in front of her, clenching her fingers as if to grab an idea floating just in front of her. "Like...when people talk about God in the bigger sense, like..the almighty God? The 'God' of such common phrases as 'God dammit' and 'Jesus fucking Christ', y'know??? Isn't there, like...a God who's just named 'God'? C'mon, Heqet, back me up here!"

"The god named 'God'?" Corner Girl snorted, cracking her neck and taking her stance again for round two. "That would be like naming your frog 'Frog', wouldn't it?"

"Sure as sunshine!" the frog whose name was actually Heqet for those paying attention - good for you guys, have a cookie - confirmed with a nod. "Historically, religious disciples do indeed call their god by the same word that means 'God' in their respective language, as a signification that said god is the ultimate God of all the gods that ever godded throughout their mythological history!"

"...sounds like the kind of god I'D call 'Mary Sue'."

"Ha ha! That's a new one!" Heqet's eyes sparkled luxuriously as she resumed her plot thread. "But the interesting and unfortunate thing about using that approach is that it allows the base religion and the historical legends of the god in question to be altered and reformatted based on the preferences of its participants as time moves on! Because the god is just called 'God', it's easy for certain holy texts to get a teensy bit lost in translation, not knowing which God is which! And legends start overlapping and slowly changing the fundamental beliefs from the inside out! Can you even imagine? A group of believers just taking an existing package of canonical story material and twisting it to their own modern sensibilities to form a unique division of the same belief structure, but under a different--".

"Heqet."

"...yes?"

"You know I love your random rants, baby," Jacqui said, smoothly, "...but we got company right now, and you need to shut it the fuck down for a second so the grown-ups can talk, mmkay?"

Heqet glanced up at all the speechless faces in the throngs of nerds she'd just out-preached by a veritable landslide. "...oh! We'll be right back after these messages, then!"

"Good girl." She took a deep breath, exhaled, then resumed her stare-down with Corner Girl. "Now then...what the hell were we talking about again? Whose turn was it?"

Corner sighed, one hand on her hip. "I think that was your turn, but you know what? I don't know if I am feeling up to it anymore."

"Aww what? Don't tell me you're packin' up the gun show already..."

"Yep, I think that's all she wrote," she continued, retrieving her discarded cardigan again from the floor. "The mood is all ruined now."

Jacqui took a glance around. The coffeeshop was wrecked from the window to the wall, the fight music had long since faded out behind them, and the crowd of holy crusaders encircling the arena had died down to banana milkshake levels of excitement. What had formerly resembled a wave made of writhing human bodies now resembled a coffee shop full of sheepish college students who had just been awakened from a horrible spell in a Disney movie.

"I think…" Corner Girl continued, pulling her arms through the sleeves, "...you are perhaps not ready to fight me yet."

"Bullshit," she countered, brandishing her umbrella wickedly.

"No, no, not like that," Corner shook her head disdainfully, heading back to her namesake corner. "I mean, you seem to know virtually nothing about religion. I am not even sure YOU know what you are looking for. You are probably worth like 0 EXP to me, and I don't have time for people like you."

Unsure how they'd so quickly arrived at this point in religious conjecture - and even less sure why it really mattered - Jacqui's eyes continued darting back and forth, as if still in combat mode, trying to read the atmosphere. This didn't feel like victory, and it didn't feel like defeat. It felt like the misty limbo between the two, the sad middle-ground of an outcome that never came to fruition.

...it felt like believing in Heaven all your life and ending up in Purgatory.

"...well shit," Jacqui finally said, to no one in particular. "Alright, so I guess I'm not on y'all's level when it comes to that pseudo-intellectual philosophy shit, but hear me out, alright? I DO have a quest. And right now I'm runnin' on borrowed time trying to get it fulfilled. I dunno how long this dream's gonna last, and I don't wanna have all this buildup just to wake back up in a pool of my own blood with nothin' show for it, ya feel me? So any clues, any suggestions, any typical NPC townsperson dialogue you can offer would probably help. And I promise to stop whoopin' your asses with this umbrella if you do. Got all that?"

Silence.

"...right. Any takers?"

Awkward silence.

"Anybody at all?"

A hushed ripple of whispers and murmurs. The sound a raised eyebrow makes when it's expecting a response and nobody knows how to break the bad news.

Finally, just when the tension was about to snap again, Corner Girl sighed loudly, slamming a palm on the table in front of her. "FINE. If nobody else is going to volunteer...".

She stood up, glanced up at the ceiling for a moment, then plucked a thought out of the ether. "You said you are just looking for 'God', right? And you don't know anything else about him? Or...her, or whatever?"

Jacqui nodded, guilty but not ashamed.

"Then here is the skinny," she continued, eyes closed in concentration. "There is no one God. God is a different God to different people. And you can't find God on a map, because God is outside the map. God IS the map. God is everywhere. You want to find God, you've got to look everywhere. Omnipresent, omniscient, omnipotent. The three Os. That is why when people think of God they think 'OOOH'."

Her eyes flashed open again. "I am not repeating that. I hope your frog friend was listening if you were not. Now please, I have an app to write."

And with that, she waved Jacqui away and re-took her seat, quietly tip-tapping away on her laptop. The other pro-caffeine patrons slowly dissipated, resuming their respective glowing discourses among one another, leaving Jacqui with nothing but a gaping hole in the place formerly occupied by plot development. She didn't even have the company of her enigmatic new enemy, Specter.

But she DID still a transdimensional spirit frog on her shoulder and the feeling of a blender set to "purée" in her lower abdomen. Always count your blessings, kids.

With a disheartened and irritated groan, she took a seat at the booth, motioned Heqet off her shoulder, and prepared to dissect the remaining pieces of the dream-clues she'd apparently dealt herself.

...she let her forehead smack against the table in defeat instead.

"...what's got you down, cupcake?" Heqet prodded, gently pushing her nose up against Jacqui's fingers.

"I fucking hate riddles..." came the mumbled response from beneath the frizzy bush of hair.

"Well, riddles ARE an integral part of questing," she replied cheerfully, her golden eyes bright enough to form the centers of universes. "To use your own preferred phrasing, in this case I think this is a 'God-damned' riddle indeed!"

Jacqui snorted, but didn't get up yet. She'd never had a lucid dream before, but she'd always imagined them to be way less boring than this. Who the hell gives themselves a riddle inside a dream they apparently have subconscious authorship over?

...never mind, don't answer that, she told herself.

"Alright, fine, so...what then, we just gotta examine the clues, right?" she said, painstakingly pushing herself back upright. "If that's the case, I want another coffee to appease my inner demons before we get started. Yo, barista boy!"

"Yes?" came the instant, singsong response from across the floor, beside the still-unmoving body of Fedora Chubsman.

"Another medium roast vanilla drip with a shot of caramel and a shot of raspberry, no foam, room for cream," she said, tossing her empty cardboard cup across the room at him. "And why's it so quiet in here? Put on some music or something, will ya? I can hear my own thoughts echoing, and not because my head's empty."

"Music, of course!" the android of a person replied, effortlessly snatching the cup from the air before flipping it into the refuse bin beside him. His fingers danced briefly over the touch-screen register and a familiar refrain emerged from the speakers overhead. "The kind of music that just soothes my soul!"

"...wait, I know this song," Jacqui said, preemptively muting whatever remark Heqet had been about to unleash by holding a finger up to her lips. She cocked her head to one side, bobbing slightly to the rhythm as she tried to identify the title of the track from its opening notes alone. Heckit just stared back at her in patient bewilderment.

"...just take those old records off the shelf..." she said with a sigh, just beating the vocals to the punch. "What is this, '80s night in Dream Land or something?"

"...are you...asking me?" Heckit spoke up, with some minor hesitation, talking around Jacqui's finger.

"Hm? Nah, just talkin' out loud, don't worry about it." She removed her finger and retracted the hand. "Alright, let's recap. What'd that girl say again?"

"She said a lot of things!" Heqet said, placing her hand on Jacqui's. "I'm sure you remember at least some of it, don't you?"

"Well, I asked her how to find God," she sighed, tapping the table with her finger as if pinpointing on a map. "And she gave me a bunch of vague bullshit about how God's real except when he's not, and how he's everywhere and also nowhere."

"Mm-hmm! Mystic words of wisdom indeed!"

Jacqui sniffed disapprovingly. "Why couldn't they be words of clarity instead? Why's everything gotta be about riddles and figuring shit out? What's the world got against givin' straight answers and gettin' shit done in a timely and efficient manner?"

"I think it has to do with the destination and the journey being two separate things!" Heqet croaked back. "You don't learn if you don't learn how to learn what you've been trying to learn first!"

Jacqui replied with an asynchronous blink, then tapped Heqet's back with her finger. On cue, she involuntarily leapt forward, crashing on her belly in the process.

"Whoa!" she squeaked, then shuddered. "That was new!"

Jacqui had to suppress a giggle. "Sorry, didn't know if that would work on your new frog body or not. God, you're adorable."

"Thank you! But I would definitely prefer some warning next time so that I can properly consent before you cause my body to react on its own accord!"

"Yeah, good point. Sorry." Her head tilted as she noticed something else. "...I think your compass is showing."

"Oh! How embarrassing!" She swore she could see Heqet blushing as she tried unsuccessfully to crane her neck-less little head backward to get a better view. "...or not really, I suppose! Which way is it pointing, anyway?"

Before she answered, Jacqui realized that Heqet's magical butt-compass should, ideally, point them in the direction they needed to go, thus rendering Corner Girl's riddle unnecessary and stupid. But, as if the dream had realized this too and would not tolerate the sudden convenient and miraculous solution to the riddle it wanted her to solve, an invisible metaphysical finger flicked the end of the compass, spinning it around in circles. Fuck.

"It's pointing...uh, nowhere," Jacqui tried to explain, watching the arrow twirl like a broken clock with a brand new electric motor installed. "It's just goin' total apeshit, spinning around and around."

"Oh...really?"

For a second Jacqui almost felt worried, as Heqet had yet to show any other emotion than rainbow glitter sunshine. But, sure as a rain cloud gives way to a rainbow, that second passed quickly.

"...oh, of course!" Heqet bubbled gleefully, bouncing in place. "For a moment I was worried my arrow might be broken, but nope! That still makes perfect sense when you think about it! Ha ha!"

"Oh yeah, sure, of course it does," Jacqui snarked back, hoping not to lose sight of the sarcasm in the blinding sunshine. "Of course it makes sense, why would it not make sense?"

"Would you like me to explain?" the frog said with a grin and a joyous somersault.

Jacqui folded her hands together and through patiently grit teeth said, "Yes Heqet, I would like you to explain. Please tell me why the symbol tattooed on your ass is not pointing anywhere?"

"A BETTER question," Heqet answered, raising a digit, "...would be 'WHAT is it pointing at?'"

Jacqui shrugged, absentmindedly digging a finger into one ear.

"And a better ANSWER would be 'it's not pointing ANYWHERE, it's pointing…'?" Heqet gestured back to her leader expectantly.

If not for the ongoing chatter of college-aged, self-proclaimed philosophers and the familiar strains of poppy, anthemic guitar chords overhead, the sound of a clock ticking would be the only other sound filling the space Jacqui took before answering. "...to another fucking riddle? Dammit, just tell me what it is already."

"It's a riddle I'm certain you can crack!" Heqet rebounded with an almost infuriating degree of patience and positivity. "If you listen closely, you can probably hear the answer bouncing around in your head right now, just looking for a way to get out of your mouth!"

Dammit, Jacqui thought as her eyes narrowed and her fingers clenched. Why's it always so hard to solve a riddle when someone else is expecting it of you? Does she mean I already have the answer? Then what the fuck am I supposed to do to get to it? Reach deep inside, listen to my heart, then pull an answer outta my ass and realize that I've been carrying the truth inside me this whole time? ...wait, ew. Bad mixed metaphor there...

She made a fist and stared at it. Maybe it IS a simple answer and I'm just overcomplicating things. What does my gut tell me? ...her guts replied that they still felt the way a broken garbage disposal sounded. Okay, never mind, fuck that then.

Okay, what about my heart, then?

She drew in a deep breath and meditated for a moment, cheesy as the thought sounded. One voice in her heart seemed to still insist that this was all just a lucid dream, and that she should somehow have the power to rewrite it as she saw fit. But another voice, smaller and tucked deeper inside, told her just the opposite, that she should STOP trying to control everything and just play along with the story. See whatever lesson her mind was trying to teach her. Clearly it must be something important for it to go through all this trouble rendering the dream quest for her, right?

Her fingers slowly unclenched from their fist formation, and she exhaled deeply as the next song began pouring out of the speakers above. When she opened her eyes, Heqet was still staring back up at her, eyes shining with unconditional heartfelt belief.

Heh.

I guess if some transdimensional imaginary dream frog believes in me, then maybe anything's possible, right?

A subconscious bobbing of her head and an automatic recitation of the words "just a small town girl" bought her back into the moment. "...sorry, what were we doing again?"

"The arrow on my back!" Heqet supplied helpfully. "What's it pointing at?"

Jacqui pursed her lips and took a blind stab at it. "...a...moving target?"

"No, not exactly! There was something very specific the muscular woman told us earlier that'll probably spoil the whole riddle!"

Jacqui dug around for Corner Girl's words in her mind, but the song overhead was too familiar, and the lyrics kept jumping in the way of her thoughts, demanding they be processed instead. "Uh, let's see...she said God's 'outside the map' and also that he 'IS the map', didn't she? So maybe...he's just a city boy?...er, no, I mean, he's gotta be in some kinda...like, pocket dimension or something, right? 'Outside the map'? 'Cause he's not here, not there, not ANYWHERE, he's..."

She stopped short. As the song continued overhead, and Jacqui's lips silently mouthed along to several very important lyrics, the chains of mystery encircling the riddle finally went slack, and then shattered completely.

And Jacqui smiled.

And just below her, gazing up in bottomless hope from her position atop the table, Heqet smiled too. "A penny for your thoughts?"

She turned sharply to meet Heqet's gaze. "God is 'OOOH', right?"

"OOOH?"

"Omniscient, omnipotent, and omnipresent," Jacqui clarified, counting out each one on her fingers as she remembered the words. "That means he, like, transcends space and stuff, he's literally 'everywhere'!"

"Yep! That sure is the definition of 'omnipresent'!"

"But!" she continued, leaning even closer and shooting up an index finger. "Riddles like this aren't meant to be taken literally, right? They're not just supernatural fairy magic bullshit, everything can eventually be explained by science!...or, y'know, science FICTION, at least."

"Hmm..."

"Imagining for a second that he's even real at all, not even God can be immune to time and space, he's gotta have a way to move THROUGH them," she explained, grin spreading farther and farther across her face as the puzzle pieces snapped together. "So, if he's 'omnipresent', if he's literally everywhere, then there's gotta be some kinda pocket dimension sort of thing that he moves through to get there. Like that British guy and his flying phone booth or whatever."

"...hmm???"

"We just have to find out how he gets in and out of that dimension," she said, rubbing her chin. "There's probably a door or something somewhere."

"Hmm, hmm...".

"But! More importantly!" she added, banging a fist against the table. "I know where we can start looking. I figured out the stupid-ass riddle and I know where we're supposed to go next!"

"Hmm!"

She held up two fingers, point A and point B. "GOD is 'everywhere', right? So your compass is POINTING everywhere...which means 'everywhere' is where we have to go!"

"...hmm?"

"But again!" she shouted, riding high on the fumes of triumph. "It's a riddle! You're not supposed to take it literally! The magic is all in the phrasing!"

"HMM!!!"

"We don't have to literally go EVERYWHERE, but I will bet both my tits there's a PLACE called 'Everywhere' that we can go to!"

"Jacqui, I'm afraid my body might literally explode out of sheer excitement if your next line isn't the answer to the riddle!" Heqet replied, boiling over with anticipation. "Tell me, how are we going to get to a place called Everywhere?"

"Your coffee, my lovely." A fresh cardboard cup of coffee appeared on the table beside her, the ambiguously-human barista exiting the stage as silently as he'd arrived.

Jacqui pushed herself forward until her nose made contact with the frog's, her own eyes gleaming like precision-cut topaz in the golden glare of Heqet's, and in a low, almost sensual voice, she pointed to the song still playing above them and whispered along with the chorus:

"...we take the Midnight Train going Everywhere."