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MIA STODDARD-BARCLAY OF DIMENSION 1-1-QT
The mother f***ing world was ending.
We’re talking red skies, lightning shooting upside down, blood rain, the whole shebang. Wind whipped in every direction like it didn’t even care anymore. Little whirlwinds picked up houses, carried them away, and tossed them wherever, but it wasn’t like any of that damage was going to mean anything. The sky cracked, the earth cracked, space itself was starting to crack; it was Armageddon, no one was going to be left behind to worry about a downward spike in property value. All 18 year-old Mia Stoddard-Barclay could do was run, haul ass down the path as fast as she could go and hope that she could make it to the cabin in time. She was the last girl on earth, or at least she was pretty sure she was, but that title wasn’t going to last long if she didn’t make it to her mother’s cabin at the end of the trail. Tears stung her eyes as the blood-rain splattered against the umbrella she held up over her head as she ran. The tears stung more than any tears she had ever cried before. It wasn’t because it was the end of the world, or because all of her family was dead… it was because it was all her fault.
The hinges to the front door nearly peeled off the wood when Mia kicked the door in. She tossed her still-open umbrella onto the floor and threw herself up against the door, struggling to close it against the rushing death-winds that blew so hard it sounded like the world was laughing at her. The door clicked and she let out a breath, a sigh of relief. The inside of the cabin was quiet compared to the world beyond the walls that was tearing itself apart. Mia wiped some blood-rain off of her hand onto her AC/DC t-shirt. She peeked out the window just in time to see the blood-rain turn into fire-rain, and a bunch of bat creatures drop down out of the crack in the sky to go around picking up all the trees. She didn’t stay by the window long enough to watch where they were taking them. She had some sh*t to figure out.
“F***, f***, f***ity, f*** f***,” she nervously hummed to herself as she crossed her mother’s old cabin—a place she hadn’t been to since she was a kid—and subconsciously rubbed the buckthorn wood ring necklace she wore around her neck.
Saying that all of this was her fault was not an understatement or some sort of half-truth. The world ending had a direct connection to Mia Stoddard-Barclay and, well, she had no time to process it, though she figured that if she somehow survived all this noise she would have to deal with that baggage eventually. The true story of how Mia single-handedly destroyed the world was far too long, and far too complicated to go over, but the important takeaways from it are: she didn’t mean to, she was only trying to stop another problem—which she kind-of-sort-of did considering all problems were stopped with the destruction of an entire universe—and she was really sorry about it. The sorry part was probably the truest of it all. The universe ending, that was a bummer, but it was the cosmically small stuff that was being taken away from her that hurt the most. Mia had to watch both of her mothers die in front of her, she saw her sister Mollie get swallowed up by a wormhole. It all made Mia ache with grief and guilt, but it wasn’t enough to get her to stop, or stand-still, or give-up. She wasn’t raised to give up. She’d beat this, survive this somehow, and live to hate herself another day.
“Come on, think, think, think, you got this,” Mia paced back and forth as the apocalypse shook the walls of the cabin. Her thumb anxiously rubbed circles around her necklace, a gift from her mother Andy.
If anyone was going to think of a way to survive the end of everything, it was Mia. She was clever, always had been, sometimes too clever for her own good. When she was five she had the hypothesis that her mother Claire and sister Mollie were werewolves, but she knew they wouldn’t admit it if she asked, so she had to test the hypothesis herself. At least, to a five year old little girl it was just a test, but her sister Mollie made the argument that sneaking flakes of silver into the breakfast cereal was more of a poisoning than a test. Mollie was never one for science. She didn’t get it. The following year was when she was pretty sure she figured out that she was adopted, though the truth of her origin was far stranger than anything a six year-old girl would be able to make up. Her moms explained that Andy was both her biological mother AND father—though it wouldn’t be until years later that she figured out it all had to do with frozen sperm from mama-Andy’s old body and eggs from the new one. The point was, Mia was smart; she was a problem solver. The world was ending and time was limited, that was the problem. So all she had to do was figure out what to do about it.
Some sort of monstrous death god screamed outside and all the chairs inside of the cabin melted into soup.
It was the end of days… things didn’t need to make sense anymore.
“Stop being stupid!” Mia chastised herself as she burned a hole in the carpet, pacing small circles in the middle of the living room, keeping far from the walls. “You killed everyone because you’re so stupid and now you’re going to die, too, because you can’t figure out how not to. GAH! Are you this big an idiot in every universe?”
Light bulb.
Mia froze mid-pace. Other universes… she could escape into another universe. All she would need is… Mia looked down into her hand that had been clutching her necklace, a personal object that she had a strong connection to. The wheels in her mind were spinning too fast to keep up with herself. She didn’t have time to let the cement dry on her plan anyway, so she darted off to the basement, hoped that there still was a basement, and did the only thing she could think of to not die.
In theory, the quantum mechanics of magic were straight forward if you knew what you were looking for. The universe was eating itself, Mia’s universe, but in the multiverse there was an infinite number of universes out there where things weren’t going tits up. But Mia had to be careful. She had to find a parallel universe where she didn’t exist, otherwise she’d be dooming that universe to the same fate, if two identical doppelgangers touched it was so-long sailor to whatever universe was unlucky enough to be hosting that connection. But in a multiverse of infinite possibilities she figured it wouldn’t be too hard to find some place where she was never born. But the hop couldn’t be completely random either, she needed a tether, something to direct her some place relatively safe otherwise there was no saying where she would end up, and plopping down in a universe where the earth was still run by dinosaurs didn’t sound much better than however she was going to die here.
The calculations were already running through Mia’s head as she took the stairs down to the basement two at a time. The house above her wept and cracked as doomsday pulled at its foundations. There wasn’t much time left. The earth was going to be gone soon, so she had to work fast. She jumped down into the dirt floor of the cellar and bolted to her mother’s chest sitting in the brick corner. Thank the gods it was still there.
The plan was incredibly complicated, but also sort of simple in a way. She searched through the chest full of old books and found the necronomicon buried at the bottom. Relief washed over her when she saw it was still there and she yanked off the buckthorn necklace around her neck. She knew a spell that would work, the necklace would be her tether, and the necronomicon would be the energy source. In theory, she had everything she needed, er, almost everything. The energy would come from destroying the old, cursed book, so she still needed something to get that done. She dug around in the chest again and found one of her other mother’s old knives.
“Good enough.”
The house ripped free from the foundation, disappearing above Mia and leaving her alone in a house-less basement. She had seconds at best. It was now or never.
“Ade, due, Samedi,” she chanted, clutching the buckthorn necklace in one hand while the other raised the knife high up above her head. “Give me the power, I beg of you!” She brought the knife down over and over again, stabbing into the face of the skin-bound book. Death moans of the dying planet screamed around her and the book she stabbed started to bleed and leak out blinding white light as its energy eked around the oozing blood. “Ade, due, Samedi!” She chanted again, still stabbing, “GIVE ME THE POWER, I BEG OF YOU!”
Mia looked up as the crack in the sky spread to the space above her. She watched as two behemoth hands stretched their tree-length fingers through the crack and the face of a massive monster poked through from the other side, whatever the other-side was. It had a face of bone and stone, and only had sunken cavities where its eyes should be. The creature opened its beaked mouth and cried out, stretching its neck through the crack and into the dying universe. It came to eat what was left. It was unmeasurable in size, yet Mia felt like it was staring right at her. All the while, the damaged necronomicon burned hot in her hand, pulsing with light like it was getting ready to explode.
“Not today, f***er,” Mia smirked.
BOOM!
The book exploded in a contained ball of bright white light that expanded over the basement before collapsing in on itself. The light evaporated as quickly as it appeared and when it was gone, so was Mia and the necklace. All that was left behind was the knife and the tattered pages of a now useless book. At the end of the world, all books were useless. The pages floated around the air, wafting down to the dirt floor, and the hell-beast in the sky came down and swallowed the earth as the universe continued to shrivel up and die.
DIMENSION 6969 -- YOUR REGULARLY SCHEDULED UNIVERSE
Andy Barclay was out of town. She never really had a town, not anymore, but sometimes it was just easier to say she was out of town. By out of town we mean, Andy Barclay was not currently wherever Claire Stoddard was. Recent events had made it so that they tended to congregate around Claire’s sister’s home in Texas, which was all great and positive news since it meant Claire was finally able to spend more time with her daughter Mollie. Andy didn’t mind Texas, she loved spending time there, she loved Claire’s family, but she wasn’t there 24/7. Sometimes… she was out of town.
A day or two earlier, Andy had left Erin’s house to go get something important done. It involved werewolves, and a cult, and some sort of moon juice thing, the details of all of that weren’t terribly important, but Andy said she would get it done for them, so she went off to get it done. She didn’t leave much behind—a bag of clothes maybe, a toothbrush—but there wasn’t a ton of Andy Barclay hanging around in Claire’s bedroom there at the house when she wasn’t there. There was one thing, though, something deliberately left behind, something she left for Claire so that she would think of her when she went away. It was a small buckthorn wood necklace. The wood was nice, carved in a circle and strung on a simple string. It had belonged to Mia Allen, the body Andy currently inhabited, and it was something Andy had grown kind of attached to in the time since she got the new flesh. Because it meant something to her, she wanted to leave it behind for Claire to hold on to, so she could give it back when she returned. So, before she left, Andy hung the buckthorn necklace on the knob of the top drawer of the dresser drawers in Claire’s bedroom. She didn’t know how long it would take Claire to find it there, or if she even would, but for now there it hung.
All in the house was quiet.
The buckthorn necklace started to shake, rattling up against the dresser. It was subtle at first, a simple shimmy, but eventually the wooden circle vibrated with an unearthly energy and glowed white-hot.
BOOM!
The middle of the circle filled with that white light and blasted its energy into the floor at the foot of the bed. It created a portal that burned through the ground, tearing up wood and pipes and wires, and something dropped down through that portal and landed in the living room below with an awkward thud, and just like that… BOOP, it stopped, and the necklace went back to being a necklace.
The redheaded kid that dropped down from the hole in the ceiling let out a groan as her bones cracked when she moved. Everything felt… well, it felt like she just fell through dimensions. She looked down in her hand. She was still holding her end of the buckthorn necklace. She pressed her other hand to her chest to make sure her heart was still beating under her AC/DC t-shirt, and once she was sure she wasn’t dead she let out a sigh of relief and chuckled.
There was a hole in the ceiling above her, which was not ideal, but she was alive. Mia Stoddard-Barclay was mother f***ing alive! She threw her hands up to cheer and celebrate, but that’s when she noticed that she wasn’t alone in the room. Mia turned around and saw that she had a crowd, some faces familiar, some not, though her eyes immediately fell to the face she recognized most of all. Claire was front and center, her arms crossed over her chest.
Mia’s eyes darted around the room. This was going to take some explaining.
“Ummmm… hi?”
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