Period Piece

You are the Warrior.

And your whole world is on fire.

The sky has cracked apart and the fury spews forth in spasming fits of illuminated chaos, a ghostly flash and an echoed roar. Heaven itself splits the trees in anger and terror. What once brought light and solace becomes a greedy wall of pain and devastation. Heat seals your eyes, smoke shuts your lungs. Nightmares come alive.

But, crawling forward on your stomach, a malicious comfort sparks a smile upon your face. For this new and terrible hell is not your burden alone, but the burden of every Warrior, every Creature...and every Beast.

Flames, be beckoned. Raze the world down to the dirt. Not even the inferno can hold back the Warrior's determination.

But, conversely, if Heqet had been rubbing off on her at all during their short but beloved time together, then the more optimistic outlook would be that Charlie was just a big old drama queen, and that the train they'd been riding was indeed the train they'd intended to take before it became the horrible wreck of twisted metal and burning leather it was now.

...welp, optimism ahoy.

"Whoo!" Heqet cheered as Jacqui pulled herself back to her feet, scrambling to get away from the billowing, burning chaos. "What a rush of excitement I'm feeling right now! Wow, physical, carnate bodies sure are strange! My innards are pulsing with a thrilling exhilaration entirely of their own accord! Is that normal? Do YOUR internal organs 'pump' like this during cataclysmic danger too?"

"That's what we call 'adrenaline'," Jacqui answered, followed by a series of coughs as she stumbled her way out of the heat zone and into the refreshing safety of a line of trees. "It's how us physical-body people can haul so much ass when we're in danger. Heh, 'danger'...".

Heqet blinked at her curiously. "Is...danger funny now? Oh! Are we doing that human thing where we 'laugh in the face of danger'?"

Jacqui shook her head, letting loose a small cloud of stray ashes. "Nah, I just mean, like...it's all just a dream, right? I'm running away from dream fire like it's real and can actually hurt me...".

"Hmmm..." the frog harmonized, taking point on her shoulder once more. "For a dream that can't hurt you, your body sure is reacting like it doesn't want to be hurt!"

"Whatever, it's just a...natural instinct or something!" Jacqui brushed it off, the fires of the wreckage glowing softly in the lens of her glasses. "It's...involuntary."

"Ooooor, maybe it's not a dream after all?"

Jacqui sighed. "That joke's gettin' old, Heqet."

"Adorable and jolly as I am, Jacqui, I have to point out that not everything I say is a joke!" Heqet's tone was intentionally serious, but the distinct flavor of customer service in her voice betrayed those intentions and came off almost passive-aggressive-sarcastic. "If this is a dream and your body is just an astral projection, then why is it out of breath, or pumping with adrenaline, or experiencing abdominal cramps?"

"It's...well, I-I mean...fuck…" she grumbled back, begrudgingly putting a hand to her lower stomach. "...y'know what, let's debate the metaphysical bullshit later and just focus on getting away from the fire for now."

Heqet gave her a smug-ish look.

"Don't give me none of that," Jacqui warned, bopping her on the nose with one finger. "I just...I'm getting smoke in my eyes, that's all. C'mon."

The bubble in Heqet's voice waned hesitantly. "...what about our new friend, Charlie?"

"She's...probably fine," Jacqui lied, having lost sight of her after wrestling her weapon away, ramming a knee into her stomach, and chucking her almost weightless body into the train seats just before the whole thing went - possibly literally - to hell. "She seemed like the kind of person who could probably handle herself, if you know what I mean."

"Handle! Ha! I get it!" Heqet giggled, only stopping when Jacqui gave her a stern glance. "...hmm, and what about our self-aspired demon, Specter?"

"Fuck 'em," came the answer without a moment's hesitation. "Maybe if we're lucky, they died in the crash. Good riddance either way. If we never see that freak again, it'll be too soon."

Jacqui immediately regretted thinking that. She'd more or less just signed a guarantee stating that now it would indeed be too soon before they ran into Specter again. By the logic of Dreams and Luck and Procedural Storytelling, she'd basically just aimed the barrel of Chekov's gun right at her own face.

...not that I can't handle myself if it comes to that, she mused, smiling confidently to herself. Not to suck my own dick here, but I think I'm doing pretty damn well on this quest so far. Granted, all I've really had to do is beat the shit out of a few nerds and solve a couple of weird 80s music references, but I'm keepin' up just the same. Haven't rolled a critical fail yet!

...'cept of course, now I have no idea where the hell we are or where the hell we're supposed to go, but I guess I can't be perfect at EVERYTHING...

Taking a moment to collect her bearings, Jacqui smartly realized that they'd found themselves in some kind of dark and extremely expensive forest. And yes, "expensive", not "expansive", was truly the correct word for it. Dreaming up a forest this vast and this detailed could not have been cheap on the part of her brain processors. Trees of a hundred different makes and models branched out in every direction, a pun not lost on her snickering subconscious, and they loomed or towered over her in a variety of heights. Most tellingly though, none of these trees were "mass produced" or copy-pasted. Each tree she was currently definitely dreaming up was individually rendered, their every detail finely composed, right down to the configurations of their leaves and the random chip patterns on their bark.

...and THAT was the weird part, considering Jacqui had always lived in an area with no more than a maximum of two, maybe three trees in sight at any given time.

"...full disclosure, Heqet, I have no fucking idea where we are now." She made a slow but thorough 360-degree survey before training her attention back to the crackle and roar of the twisted wreckage. "Like, not even a single reference point here."

"Oh-ho! Cracking new territory, are we?" Heqet bounced with the usual amount of glee. "One of my favorite parts of adventuring! Where to, O fearless leader?"

"I just told you, we're lost," Jacqui replied, restlessly juggling her directional options. "The dream started off in a place I knew, but we've reached the point where it's just making shit up as it goes now. For all I know, that train really DID take us straight to hell, and we're no closer to Everywhere than we were at the café...".

"Hmm, well..." the frog half-sang back, "...it sure looks like our progress has been upset and impeded! We seem to be in need of some localized, inevitable pathfinding!"

Jacqui may have been in bodily pain, but her brain was still sharp. "...uh, yeah, that's right, we sure are! We could really make good use of some good old-fashioned hocus-pocus bullshit magic right about now!"

"I wonder!" Heqet continued, wiggling her rump in anticipation as the fading firelight furnished a glimmering sheen around her luminous golden eyes. "I wonder if perhaps I were to just dig down deep enough, maybe I might be able to produce, on my own, some kind of...tool or magical object that could assist us by highlighting the general location of our next objective!"

The campy, silly grin was infectious. "Say, now, Heqet, aren't YOU imbued with just such a magical object, planted oh-so-thoughtfully right on one your embarrassing body parts?"

"Why Jacqui, I DO have just such a magical object planted oh-so-thoughtfully upon my body!" Heqet replied with a wink. "I can't imagine why that would be considered embarrassing, but then again, I don't speak for human physiology and customs, do I? I have no shame!"

"Well what are you waiting for, then?" Jacqui said with a snap of her fingers. "Turn around and let me see that ass, girl!"

Beaming with shameless pride, Heqet somersaulted off Jacqui's shoulder and into her open palm, proceeding to flex that mythological muscle and swifty produce their map to salvation. The arrow surfaced, spun itself around in a circle, slowly uncoiling back and forth before settling on what anyone could only assume was the correct direction.

"The mighty ass has spoken!" Jacqui announced, holding out the amphibian compass in front of her as she began walking the walk toward their next objective, grateful that the direction it had mandated was still opposite of the burning piles of ruin and death behind them.

"Mm-mm! Can't you just smell the adventure!" Heqet hummed, taking a deep whiff of the midnight air. "The open road before us, the flickering light of the flames behind us, and the smells of sulfur and sweaty metal all around us...ahh, it's so invigorating, isn't it!"

"It...certainly is something," Jacqui concurred vaguely, taking a moment to huff out what she hoped were the last fumes of smoke for tonight.

"What do you suppose we'll find up ahead at our next destination?" Heqet asked dreamily.

The way this dream's gone so far, I'd say another goddamn riddle and another preachy wackjob to fight, was Jacqui's first thought. Seems to be par for the course tonight...

"I bet we're getting close to the Big Showdown itself!" Heqet answered her own question, with every bit as much exuberance as she'd asked it.

Hmph, I'm already starting to wonder if we're EVER gonna reach the "big showdown" at this rate, she continued. If I know anything about dreams, it's that they always start to fall apart around the third act, and everything just starts melting into random chaos after that. Brains just don't have enough energy for the job. Ten bucks says this story gets so far off the rails before we get to God that it becomes its own art film. I mean fuck, we just went though a literal derailment in the plot. And if that ain't foreshadowing, then I'll eat my own bra.

"I hope you'll still be able to throw down without your umbrella, Jacqui!" Heqet carried right on, eyes still pointed forward like headlights. "Ha ha, what am I saying, you're ALWAYS ready to defend your honor in combat, aren'tcha?!"

...so what actually IS the plot of this dream, anyway? Is this just my brain selling me a cheap, sex-and-violence entertainment flick like I know I'd like, or do I really, truly have some deeper meaning that I'm trying to subconsciously tell myself about?

And if it's supposed to mean something, then why is the whole dream just a series of cheap potshots at religious nuts? What would that have to do with anything? I'm agnostic, I'm not supposed to care about shit like that...

Maybe this is what it's like when people say God talks to them...like, what if there IS a real God and he's just trying to get my attention or something? No, that's stupid, what the fuck would he want to talk to me about? Try to get me to come back to church? Hell no! I said I'd never go back to church after The Accident, and I'm damn well stickin' to that!!!

"...Jacqui? You still with me back there?"

The words made her stop, blinking away the memories as she re-entered awareness.

"...wha??...oh...uh, yeah, I'm okay."

"You sure?" Heqet pressed, genuinely concerned but unable to mask her eagerness for the continuance of the quest. "Don't tell me you've already let this temporary setback in our adventure dull your sparkle!"

"Nah, it's...it's not that..." she brushed it off, but let it settle back on her shoulder anyway. "I'm just...gettin' lost in my own thoughts back here. Second-guessin' the quest, I guess."

"Wow, what a tongue twister!"

"Shut up." Jacqui cracked her neck and ducked beneath an outstretched branch. "I'm just...not sure I understand what this quest is supposed to be all about anymore."

"Oh, is that all? Try not to worry about it, then!" Heqet chirped back, as if it were just that easy. "The puzzle never looks complete until you have all the pieces sorted out!"

"I sure fuckin' hope so," she sighed, shaking her head and paying closer attention to the ground as the firelight receded behind her, leaving her with only freckled predawn moonlight to work with. "Right now it's like...the more I look at it, the LESS sense it makes."

"Hmm...maybe you just need to talk your way through it! Perhaps there's some kind of spiritual guide in the shape of a cute blue frog out there that you can bounce your thoughts off of!"

"Heh...you ARE cute...". Jacqui took a deep breath, grasping at the air with her fingers for the correct words. "...well, I guess...I guess it kinda boils down to a matter of expectations. Like, back when I realized what the hell Specter was talking about back at Purgatory, I was in fucking stitches. A quest for vengeance against God himself for cursing women with periods, accompanied by an adorable talking frog? Comedy. Fucking. Gold! I could already tell this was gonna be the most fun I'd had in a dream in a long, long time!"

"I feel a 'but' coming on..." Heqet said, making sure her own 'butt' was staying turned on.

"...BUT..." Jacqui admitted, rubbing her forehead with her palm, "...now, I just...I'm not sure. I'm not sure if this dream is really living up to the, ahem, 'high standards' of comedy I usually hold myself to...".

A hint of apprehension swaddled the fringes of Heqet's reply. "Oh...you're worried that maybe you aren't getting out of this dream what you're putting into it?"

"Eh, kinda...I guess I just expect better of me," Jacqui continued, plucking a maple leaf off a low branch as they passed by. "I mean, take a look at all the weirdos we've run into along the quest so far. Every single one's just been a slight variation on the same bull-headed religious stereotype. It's like I'm fightin' cartoon characters. If this is just a party dream, then it's startin' to get a little stale. And if it's supposed to be a deeper meaning kinda dream, then I ain't learnin' jack shit."

"Hmm..." Heqet mused, rather blankly for an expert on the subject of deeper meanings.

"I mean, I get how the process works," she explained, frustration starting to leak through the cracks. "I try to tell people that I'm looking for God so I can bust his balls, then they get super offended and tell me I'm doin' it wrong. Then they try to force me to do it THEIR way, and BOOM. Throwdown time. Sound about right?"

"It's an accurate summation of our adventure so far, yes!"

"So what am I supposed to be learning from that?" she demanded, angrily now. "That me and religion just don't mix? That I might be willing to listen if people maybe didn't try ramming their ideas straight up my ass? So far the only thing I'm gettin' out of this dream is that I was right on the fuckin' money when I decided to be agnostic! If this is supposed to be a life-changing quest for infinite cosmic whatever, then why isn't it the least bit challenging?!"

She huffed loudly, and paused in her tracks, glaring down expectantly at her spirit guide.

"...Jacqui, it sounds like you WANT to be challenged," Heqet offered, in a voice shy yet determined to help. "It sounds like you're expecting an answer from this quest, and you're using the 'dream' explanation as a simplification to understand the dialogue you're trying to have with yourself!"

Jacqui sent an asynchronous blink back at her. "...what, you still think this ISN'T a dream?"

Heqet burped reproachfully as she rotated in Jacqui's palm to face her. "...I know you asked me not to bring it up again, and I really want to respect your beliefs - especially in light of what you said earlier! - but, as a spirit guide, I'm irrepressibly bound to make you question your beliefs!"

"Of course you are."

"It might be easier to attack the big questions if you first eliminate the possibility that this world is all about you!" Heqet insisted - no, not insisted, more like...amiably encouraged. "Here, I'll help break the immersion! Look around how clear and sharp this world looks! Think closely about how flawlessly you can understand people's speech and read written language! Focus on how vividly you can feel things like pain and excitement! If I know my subconscious theory like I think I do, then I've got some pretty strong doubts that humans or any other life forms can render all of these things in a single dream at once! You CAN'T be dreaming all of this!"

"...c'mon, Heqet, give me a break here," Jacqui sighed. She was definitely not in the mood to have her mind blown at the moment, especially when her uterus felt blown enough already. "I mean...it COULD still be a dream, couldn't it? Dreams are like...all that stuff is just...simulated, you know? You're not ACTUALLY in pain or danger or whatever, it's just your body remembering what those things feel like."

"Okay, let's roll with that for a minute!" Heqet said, raising a froggy digit. "Let's assume this is all a simulation! The world you're living in isn't REAL per se, but that doesn't necessarily mean it's all inside YOUR head! Get it?"

Another heavy sigh as Jacqui resumed her march.

"I'm sure you've heard a theory like that at some point in your life!" she encouraged, hands getting more and more animated as she spoke. "The theory that life exists inside a machine, or a jar on the shelf of some God! In some cases, the universe is nothing more than a fabrication of someone ELSE'S reality, right down to the time we were born, the circumstances we live with, and even the thoughts in our heads! Can you imagine? What if I only THINK I've existed for untold eons because that's how my memories have been rendered within the simulation! What if you're only questioning your quest because that's how you've been programmed to react to it? What if our thoughts were all pre-rendered, spoken outside of ourselves through a mysterious mouthpiece neither of us can talk back to! Isn't that an interesting angle for a reli--"

She stopped when she felt Jacqui's finger press her lips closed. "Heqet, if you talk any faster, your lips are gonna fly right off your face and off into the night sky."

Heqet giggled, stretching her lips to talk around the finger barrier. "Sorry Jacqui, even if my purpose is to help YOU with spiritual matters, I can't help but indulge my own curiosity sometimes!"

Shaking her head softly, Jacqui couldn't help but curl her lip in a faint smile. "...you know, I should be annoyed that you're going off on your own tangents instead of helping me, but you're too cute to get mad at."

"It's a blessing and a curse!"

Jacqui snickered, then turned her head skyward, wishing she still had her trusty umbrella on hand. "...okay, fine, I'll bite. Let's go ahead and assume I'm NOT dreaming. Let's assume I'm not in charge of this world. This is not my beautiful house, this is not my beautiful wife, et cetera, et cetera. If I'm not to blame here, then who's REALLY pulling the strings around here?"

"Well Jacqui, as far as I can tell, there's only one other recurring character we've run into so far along our journey," Heqet pointed out helpfully, as if she were a simulation designed to spout specific dialogue at certain key moments in the plot.

"Yeah? You think Specter's the one to blame?"

"Well I certainly think they're our most prime candidate for investigation!" She again turned herself around to face Jacqui, the arrow correcting itself as she did. "Specter carries a very suspicious aura around them, and, speaking from a supernatural point of view, they make my weirdo frog stomach VERY queasy! I think we should take great caution to avoid wasting any further lungfuls of breath in speaking to that self-proclaimed demon troublemaker ever again!"

Jacqui raised a questioning eyebrow. "Whoa there Heqet, am I detecting just a little twinge of hostility in there?"

"...uhm...m-maybe?" Heqet replied with a roll of her head. "As I said, Specter makes my stomach do weird things...I've never been inside a physical body before, so I don't know how to explain the correlation of these physical responses to the surges of inexplicable emotion I feel in tandem with them! But I CAN and WILL say that Specter sure does increase this body's blood flow rate and makes my whole brain tremble with trepidation!"

"HA! Almost sounds like you're in love with 'em."

"Oh dear," Heqet burbled with worry. "I certainly hope not! Is love an emotion that can be controlled through physical stimuli? Jacqui, you have a corporeal body, do YOU know if there's any way I can disable that physical-mental interaction so I can prevent it from affecting my judgment or toying with my thought processes?"

"Nope," Jacqui snorted. "Welcome to daily human life. But, uh, if you DO ever find a way to do it, you let me know, alright?"

The worried humming Heqet made in response continued until the thick of the woods around them spaced out and opened up into a grassy clearing, at which point the humming turned back into actual words: "...oh wow, NOW we're cooking with sacrificial altars!"

Towering above them, in even greater gaudy grandeur than the train station, stood a mighty and impressive church, to mixed reactions from the two of them. It was built like a huge castle, with gigantic columns of some deep red-colored stone pinning it on all four corners, and a massive bell tower in the center crowned by a golden cross rising up at its forefront. Enormous stained glass windows perforated the walls on all sides, gently illuminated by the distant glow of moonlight and possibly by fire from the distant train wreck. The whole ensemble clashed harshly against the natural autumn backdrop of the infinite trees all around them, standing out like an erection at a beach.

Looking over the eyesore from top to bottom, Jacqui blinked and felt inclined to don the cape of Captain Obvious, "...who the fuck builds a church out in the middle of nowhere?"

"Nowhere?" Heqet counter-questioned curiously. "Is that where we are? Wouldn't that be the opposite of the 'Everywhere' we were intended to arrive at? Oh no, did we really take the wrong train after all?"

"How could we have?" Jacqui answered, shaking her head in disdain at the ridiculously intricate maroon brickwork on the church's walls. "We followed the arrow, didn't we? I'm just askin' who the hell builds a goddamn palace like this way out in the middle of the woods?"

"Ours cannot be to question!" said Heqet, eyes already shimmering with anticipation. "What stands here before us is clearly our quest's next objective! Let's take a look inside!"

"...you gotta be shitting me," Jacqui replied incredulously, a single shaft of light glinting off the solid gold accents encircling the windows and stabbing her right in the eye. "You're tellin' me my big important quest, whether it's my own subconscious dream or some crazy simulation bullshit, is tryin' to get me to go to church now?"

"Weeeeell," came the stretched reply, with Heqet holding her hands apart to measure its length, "...you DID say we were looking for some kind of portal to God's mysterious pocket dimension, didn't you? Well, if you ask me, an extremely decorative church out in the middle of an enchanted forest sounds like the ideal place to house just such a thing! And you SHOULD ask me, since I'm your spirit guide!"

The sparkle of her amphibious smile was so flashy and bright that it should have been accompanied by a visible comic book sound effect. But now Jacqui felt a tight hesitation. Her heart insisted she should trust the frog without question, but in her gut she felt a natural revulsion toward the place.

"...I don't like this, Heqet," she admitted, crossing her arms. "I really didn't give a shit where we went up to this point, but this? This isn't okay anymore. I mean, there's a REASON I don't go to church. Several reasons, actually."

"They're probably very great reasons," Heqet agreed without question, looking up at the ornate metalwork on the front door clasps. "Churches are considered holy places not only because people find great meaning within their walls, but also because they will inevitably repel certain other people that the church's members might find abominable! It's no wonder that you, a self-proclaimed agnostic, would have reservations about entering such a place! That kind of exclusivity is exactly what makes churches the powerful tool they are!"

Jacqui's brow ruffled. "...huh. Well, I guess it should've been obvious that a quest to find God would end up taking me to a place like this eventually, but...I dunno, I think this might be where I draw the line. Dream or simulation, I just...I really don't think...ugh, fuck."

"I'll say it again Jacqui, it's okay to have reservations!" her companion replied, hopping back up to shoulder height so as to rub her head against Jacqui's cheek. "Churches are places of great potential energy, and that energy works in both positive AND negative lights! If you feel it would be, say, traumatic, or maybe even dangerous for you to enter this place, well, that decision is yours and yours alone! I'm just here to direct your quest!"

"I'm not scared," Jacqui added with a stab of defiance.

"I am!" Heqet replied with a certain joyful terror. "I don't even know what religious denomination I belong to in this plane of existence, nor what deity I'll be perceived as if we enter! If I represent, say, some malevolent evil from the imagined hellscape of whoever's religion this church abides, I could be drawn and quartered, or crucified, or burnt at a stake, or have my fancy new corporeal innards slowly removed while I have to watch! Yikes!"

Jacqui bit her lip hard, trying not to laugh at the absurdity of Heqet's imagination, but on some inner level also dreading that she might be onto something. There was a definite fear misting around inside her. Not a fear that she, Jacqui Bourdelon, Blasphemer and Sailor Mouth Extraordinaire, Collector of Monster Boy Pornography Novels, The Mighty Vaginaborn: Bleeder of The Clam herself, might be seen as an abomination in the eyes of the church, oh no. She was perfectly content to live as an abomination in the eyes of the church. But she'd never been the same about churches ever since...The Accident. And if this church - dream, simulation, whatever - was anything like the churches back in the "real world"...well...

...then I'd better be prepared to either repent for my sins or start shoving 'em down God's throat the minute I walk through those sexy mahogany doors, shouldn't I?

"...Heqet."

"Yes, my queen?"

Deep breath. "I'll do it...but only if you stay close to me."

"When do I NOT?" she replied with a wink.

"...for your own safety, of course," she added quickly.

"There's no one I'd trust more for that!"

Jacqui nodded, puffed out her chest, and stepped up to place a hand on the front door. If God was waiting inside, she'd be ready to fight. Umbrella or no umbrella. Twisted-knife uterus or not. For Heqet's sake. For her own sake. And for the vengeance of all those who suffered menstruation's curse.

She gripped the handle.

She exhaled.

And she pulled the door aside, letting the rush of so-called holy air billow over her in cascading waves of impending sacrilege.