[11.2 Spoilers] Just in Case
Author: Wildbow

[11.2 Spoilers] Just in Case | Pale

Yep, it’s Avery.  This is really hard to write.  If everything goes according to plan, you’re not going to read this.  If nothing goes according to plan then this might go up in flames when it sets my mattress on fire and you’d have nothing to read.  But in the event that things go mostly according to plan but you’re rearranging stuff in my room to find clues about where I’ve gone or what happened then this isn’t that.

There are things I still can’t tell you, even on paper, even if I’ve disappeared or died.  I know it sucks.  It’s okay if you’re angry.  I just want you to know I’ve been trying to be my best self and do good in the world and if there’s something that ends up keeping me from coming back to you guys I hope you know that at least.

I don’t think what I’m going to do tonight is directly dangerous but I think a whole lot of messiness can come from it and that might be dangerous.  So here we are.  I wanted to make sure you had something of a final word from me.

Please don’t bother Verona and Lucy too much.  If there were answers I could safely give then I’d put them here.  If you have questions, give them lots of time to answer and take ‘no’ for an answer if you have to.  Consider that a last wish or something.  They’re my best friends more than Olivia ever was.

If they aren’t around either then I don’t know.  Maybe you can compare notes with their parents, I dunno.  That’s if you have to ask.  But I think the best thing you could do would be to get out of Kennet.  Ditch the job, bring Grumble and leave.  Kennet has depths to it you wouldn’t believe and it’s beautiful and rich and awe inspiring and even funny.  It also has parts to it which are terrible and scary and intense and awful.  Whatever parts you’re thinking I might be talking about like drugs or gangs it’s really stuff that’s at least two hundred times worse than that.  I helped out with at least one of those things.

I’m going to be holding onto the best things, if I can.  Trust in that.  If I’ve disappeared at the time you read this letter then I’m pretty sure I’ve disappeared in adventure and excitement and laughter and style and glamour.  But I can’t ignore the bad stuff.

So that’s why I want you to go.  You told me once that you were really sorry that you sorta forgot I existed for as long as you did.  That you didn’t listen, that you wanted to try, you’ve said stuff like that, right?

And I’m a pretty good kid, right?  I’m easier than some of the others so that’s why I didn’t get as much attention, right?

All the not listening you did and the ignoring me and everything?  I forgive you for that and I think I understand but what I really need you to do is take all that credit and all the brownie points and all the listening and attention I’m due and bundle it all up and take this to heart in a big way:

GO.  Run.

Leave Kennet for anywhere else.

Other things:

- If an opossum shows up here or at your new digs, feed it.  She likes me and she’s cool and she deserves all the cuddles and good things.  Don’t let my siblings torment her.

- If anyone named Zed or Nicolette or Ray ask for anything or say anything then listen.

- Matthew and Edith are dangerous, I think.  They said they’d keep me safe and if you’re reading this then they didn’t.

- I’ve left a letter for Ms. Hardy.  Please deliver it.

I love you all, my messy, terrible, glorious thunderstorm of a family.  Rowan needs to step it up for Laurie.  Stop faffing about and go to school and be a guy that deserves her because she’s going to face the world at a run and you’ll get left behind if you aren’t careful.  She’s cool.

Declan needs to be nicer to girls and everyone in this family needs to make sure of that.  I’ve been thinking a lot about what sports mean to me and I really hope that if video games are the same thing for you that you can find all the enjoyment in the world in them.

Kerry you have the best laugh and I can’t remember a great moment with the family without your laugh as part of it so keep it up.

Sheridan, you had my back when it counted and I can’t tell you what it means to me, or how it changed the idea of what family is in my head.  You get so down on yourself but you’re so so so much better and cooler than you think you are.  You’re clever and funny and cool and the big problem is that you’re smart enough to think of all the reasons why not to or what could go wrong.  Keep being you and take some leaps of faith for my sake, ok?

Mom & Dad, most of this letter is for you but to give you another paragraph: I have no regrets.  You did nothing wrong here, to play into my disappearing or whatever else happened.  All my memories of growing up and the hours-long round trips to Olivia and homeschooling and birthday parties and everything are just so jam packed with good memories I know that if I get the chance I’m going to want to do a lot of the same things for my kids way down the road so take that for what it’s worth.

Sorry this is so rambly.  It’s so hard.  Every sentence makes me want to write two more that contradict or explain and I can’t do either so I’m going to make this a big messy letter and hope it’s better than leaving you with only questions and wondering.

Give my love to Grumble.  My heart feels like it could explode with love for him and yet writing a single paragraph for him is way too hard and I think you get why so maybe you can explain it to him if he needs an explanation because I can’t.

Love you all.

Dear Ms. Julie Hardy,

A beautiful woman once told me I was on the cusp of losing my connection to humanity.  I nearly drifted away from everything and you were the person who reeled me back in.

Verona has said that she thinks every adult is unhappy and she wonders what there is to look forward to.  She seems to act and think like she doesn’t want to grow up because she has no role models and I think if things had happened in a different way and I hadn’t had you as a teacher and mentor than I might have agreed with her.

I don’t know what would have happened if you hadn’t been my teacher but I’ve seen how Melissa crumbled.  I have a friend who lost all faith in the system and outsiders when her cousin was unjustly imprisoned.  I’ve seen how hard my friends take it when things get rough because Verona can get into thinking the world is dismal and Lucy can get into thinking the world is hostile… and the world is definitely both of those things a lot of the time.

Lucy told me I’m cool because I can keep my cool.  I think me at my best isn’t as great as either Verona or Lucy at their best and I get super anxious sometimes but because you reached out I was able to avoid my rock bottom and I can hold out against some of the worst the world has been able to throw at me because you reached out.  Knowing that there are people who care and reach out has made such a difference I can’t put it into words.

I’m sad we haven’t talked any recently and we didn’t talk much at the end of the term but I understand.  I hope you don’t mind that I got the help I needed when I needed it and that a talk with Mr. Lai or whoever sitting in the background would feel like it took away from that or would make it too artificial.  I’m finding my support and resources elsewhere and I’m trying to reach out to others like you did to me, mostly in small ways.

Thanks for everything.

Verona Hayward has sent you a link to a gallery: [Link]

It’s password protected?

Ok, hmm.  Use this one instead: [Link]
But keep that link. 😉

???????
Ok?
Oh!  Paintings and sketches!  Cool!

Raided my room while stopping by my house.  Check out #52

It’s Sir!
Showed him and he doesn’t care.
Hey are you good?  Are you enjoying the beach?  Settled in and starting to enjoy the vacation?

I’m back and at Lucy’s and I’m not very settled and stuff’s going on so I may not be settled for a while.
If I can escape the chaos do you want to hang?  We can hang out with Sir and chat art orrrr
We could hang out and you can take your shirt off and I can draw you orrrrrrr
We could hang out and we both take our shirts off and we can pretend we’re confused about who is supposed to be painting who before finding something else to do
Up for whatever.

All of the above?

Bold!  Good man I can respect that.
We’ll find a way to make that work.  I gotta figure out what’s happening in other life areas though.
I am 100% down so if I don’t get back to you or disapear for a while it’s not because of cold feet or because I don’t like you it’s because other stuff is getting in the way.

Jeremy dude,

I told Lucy and Avery and a woman called Miss to pass on a password for a gallery I sent you.  You’re my designated replacement if anything happens and that gallery has the big rundown.  Yep, you thought you were getting to know me?  That was all the tip of the iceberg, buddy.

If you don’t remember me then that’s probably because, (like the place my name refers to) I don’t really exist (anymore?).  But the text should – I took a few steps for that.  Quick rundown: I’m Verona, classmate or ex-classmate, creative.  We were/are friends of a bizarre cat and art involved nature.  There was bathing-suit-area-touching and I didn’t run screaming.  You had your moments of being awkward and your moments of being cool and I was 100% down for being the passenger to that roller coaster so thanks.  You had some damn manly moments for a guy who’s supposed to only be starting on the road to becoming a full fledged man.

Maybe the most important: you sent me a lot of cat pictures too and that’s a surefire way to game this system.  You could have screwed up most of the stuff I just talked about and if you sent me cat pictures and if I thought you could take okay care of Avery and Lucy then I’d be like “who else!??”  Theres no other consideration as I see it.

On that note?  I’m writing this under the assumption that they’re there.  Avery Kelly and Lucy Ellingson.  No other end result is okay in my books.  If they aren’t there and it’s just Miss who is giving you this password and you’re trying to decide whether you should get on board or if you’re already on board but you’re wondering how much you want to get into the Kennet stuff in particular?  Don’t.

Not without Avery and Lucy.  Don’t.  It’s not worth it without them.

That’s all the thought I’m willing to spare to that!

Here we are.  Quick and basic rundown.  There’s stuff in the files and images.  It’s scattered and some isn’t super well explained but you should be able to figure out who to ask to fill in the blanks.

Practice:
In school I realized a teacher can’t turn down or turn away your assignment if you stick to the rules and terms they set for it, along with the universal rules where you know you won’t get away with stuff.  This is all basically that.  You need to know and pay attention to the rules to get around them or throw the people in charge for a bit of a loop.  and you need to get around them because the people making and setting up the rules are older and powerful and they’re set in their ways. This is how you screw them up.

It’s not all that easy.  There are forces who’ve been studying and messing with rules since before your family was the Cliffords and actually knowing and figuring out the rules is a whole thing that can take generations to work out.

You have the tools I think.  You’ve got a good heart and a good head.  You’ll need to rejigger things.  Put that artist part of you front and center first, okay?  That part of you that can look at the page and look at a tree and figure out how to use the tool you’ve got to make that tree into something that sits on the page.  Some of that’s skill and some of its practice and some of its interpretation.  Everything that goes into art matters here.

I’d give you the rundown on how I think and how I do things but that would take forever and I think you’ll get the gist of it if you go through my spell notes and pictures of things.  Low down, dirty reality is that if you’re reading this and I’m not around anymore then my approach wasn’t all that hot, was it?

You know how I’m a bit weird?  You’re going to be dealing with a lot of weird types and if you can figure out how to think from a certain angle where you’re treating them like you treated me, I think you and them will get along well enough.

Care and Feeding of Lucy Ellingson and Avery Kelly:
I liked the headline but because I wrote it I gotta let you know the feeding part: Lucy gets into stuff like pepperoni sticks and sour foods and things that make you go WOAH (except garlic and onions apparently) and it’s all intense and crap but when you get down to it I think she likes sweet and savory stuff most.  Avery is a vegetarian and she can eat next to anything you could call food, now, but I think what matters is that it comes from a place of care. She likes fruity flavors and mellow stuff.

If Lucy’s down and out and needs nourishment to get back in the game then a chance to have a savory home cooked meal or a sweet treat she can spend a bit enjoying would do it for her.  For Avery, just the fact that you notice she’s down and out is important and then you can hand her a sports drink or something and she’ll be up for more.

Silliness about food aside?  Lucy pushes and Avery pulls away so be ready to get in there.  Otherwise it’s going to be more like you’re on your own while they’re miserable.  They’re so good for each other but it’s going to be a little while before they figure out how to manage the push-pull.  Until then, if it’s not my job anymore, it’s yours.  You don’t have to but it’d be appreciated and I really do think it will help things.

Lucy is a bit tough to get to know but it’s super worth it.  Stay consistent, show her respect, listen.  Listen listen listen.  There’s a lot of stuff that’s tricky for me when it comes to her even after being her best friend for a while but I think that’s some of the same stuff that you’ll be really good at.  Being reliable.  There’s also some stuff that comes so naturally I can’t even think of it but so long as you listen and treat her with respect it’ll be cool.  Just give it time.  A lot of guys have left her in the dust for reasons that were and weren’t their fault and that’s going to be a thing that you gotta work out.

Avery is great but I think you know that.  Keep her company.  I think that’s the big thing.  If Lucy has a thing about guys in her life then Avery’s got a thing about friends- she’s pretty open about it but her best friend ditched her and I think there’s a kind of skittishness to her that you really have to push past.  Almost the inverse of Lucy, you know?  Make the effort.

Tash is one of the odd people I reference.  She’s cool and she’s super on my wavelength in a similar way to how you’re on my wavelength so keep an eye out for her.  I think she gets lonely so keep her company.  She’s about three years older than us she’s super cool enough I wouldn’t blame you for getting a crush on her.  😉

Other Junk:
A friend named John told me that I should write something like this letter so all the things left unsaid and the plans I’d want to make are handled.  There’s a last part and I wish I could do the research and figure stuff out to lay out a plan for you but that might have to wait.  Long and short is if you want to do me a solid you can distill my echoes and bring me back in some form.  If you can collect any and all echoes early then quality loss will be less bad and you can make a decision about things later.  I’m asking you and not Lucy or Avery because I think your head will be clearer and you can objectively look at them and decide if a shadow of my former self would be nice or if it’d wreck ’em.

If you bring me back as a composite echo and someone wants to take me as a familiar to help clarify me further then I’m down.

If not or if that’s weird then don’t sweat it.  Thanks for being a friend.

Take care of my people, k?  I think my parents can fend for themselves, at the very least, but my friends are going to need some help.

There are three letters here.  Personal ones for you and Booker and one I’m calling ‘business’, trimmed down.  I’m going to start with the personal.  Business you can save for later reading or give to the police or whatever it is you want to do.  A lot of what’s in there is covered here.

As I was contemplating writing this I got misty eyed and you knocked on my door and asked why.  I told you some of my music gets emotional but that was misleading.  It’s because I was imagining the look on your face when and if I don’t come home.  I’ve seen that kind of look before.

Imagining you finding this letter and reading it.  What words could I even put here?  What would make it better or okay?

Every time I try to think of something that would help it goes in the other letter.  You can read that and follow every step but it doesn’t fix anything does it?

I’m still not home.

I count myself as one of the luckiest people I know.  I remember stories about dad with Barbie and Ran, and it makes me think that a parent can be good but nobody’s perfect but when it’s family that imperfect gets piled up together day after day because you spend so much time with them while you’re growing up.  I think dad ran into that.  The pile-up of the small things with family.  I have classmates who have sick moms and classmates with drunkard parents.

I got lucky because home was the place I could come back to to unload the small things, instead.  This was pretty close to perfect.

Except I haven’t come home to unload this time, if you’re reading the letter.

There’s no way to write this letter and also keep secrets.  So keep in mind that this part of the letter can’t go to the police.  It has to be the business letter only.

Magic is real.  All of the little things that don’t add up about me being gone don’t add up for a reason.  I and Verona and Avery were each brought in to fill a spot for the local monsters, so they could say they had someone in place.

As I write this letter I am planning to go confront a woman named Edith James and her husband and possible co-conspirator with some pretty heinous things.  It’s not a drug problem that’s filling up the emergency department’s waiting room, it’s the aftermath of something they did that I think they did out of greed, killing something big that was supposed to keep the balance.

I don’t think Edith can hurt me but I do think that challenging her is going to shake things up a bit and make a lot of nastiness come out of the woodwork.  I’ve had too many close calls this spring and summer and a lot of those close calls came from us being on the sidelines of some awful things.  Except for some brief moments we were never really front and center against all the bad stuff.  We stood on the sidelines and rushed in to try to push things and change the direction of stuff.

This time we’re confronting it dead on and that’s scary.  It feels like every time I’ve survived or gotten away with a hurt elbow is stacking the deck against a time in the future where I won’t.

If my feeling is right then that’s probably what happened.  We confronted wrongs head on and it shook things up and I or we paid for it.

The business letter says a lot of this stuff but it’s going to point the way without filling in the explanations.  It says I hung out a lot with Edith and Matthew and that they took us camping and made us keep secrets.  Edith is suspicious, so is her husband, and the cops should push hard.  She and Matthew can’t really lie so the longer pressure is applied the harder it will be for them to dodge around it.  The problem will probably be keeping the pressure on.  They or their friends can use tricks to distract or make it easier to forget they’re a concern.  If you’re insistent then you can break through that.

I used similar tricks to help keep you from noticing what I was doing and getting into so don’t blame yourself for not catching it all.

I’m going to give you a list of names and contact details on the back of this sheet.

Zed has agreed he’ll fill you in if someone needs to.  He knows most of the story and it’s easier for him to answer your questions than for me to explain everything here.  Imagining you going through my stuff and uncovering it all with a terrible look on your face is making this too hard to write.

If you want to uncover what I was doing there’s a diagram on the wall under my posters.  Removing that will make it easier to find some of my notebooks and things and it might help find me, depending.  Destroy it, don’t paint over it.  You have to be looking for it or you really could pack up my room to move and not notice it even as you paint over it.  It’s that kind of stuff.  Most of it is to keep trouble out of our house so be careful.

What I think will happen is that Edith or someone or something that’s helping her may try to get rid of us somehow.

If that happens then these letters will help.  You can probably push police to deal with them but there’s a chance Edith and Matthew won’t say anything.  After that the cops will probably get distracted by some subtle magic type stuff and the investigation won’t go anywhere.  Avery and Verona may be able to do something but they might not make it either if I don’t.

As a last ditch effort if the cops fail and Avery and Verona are gone you can contact a man I listed on the sheet.  His name is Samaniego and he organizes people who hunt monsters like one of the ones I’m about to fight.  Let Zed know we’re doing this, he’ll reach out to those we trust most to extract them before anything happens: anyone who’s stayed and still cooperating with everything here after Avery, Verona and I are gone is as good as complicit.  Zed can help pick out the ones who aren’t.

Arrange for Samaniego to come and make sure Zed manages the extraction before Samaniego arrives.  You’ll want to time it so that when Samaniego arrives you will be at the location on the map in bright noon when the monsters are weakest or asleep and pull down the charms and wards.  As many as you can.  Be prepared to run and then leave.  You’ll be close to your car and you can get in and drive away.

You tear down the wards at the same time he and his people come in and you leave.  He’ll go after the monsters.  The bad ones and the ambiguously bad ones.  And you leave.  You’ll leave town, leave the job.

A few hundred or thousand people across Ontario have died and they didn’t even get to be remembered afterward.  Their vulnerabilities were preyed on and they were killed in a series of horrible, violent nights that went on for nearly a decade.  Many of those in the know seemed to think it happened naturally, a ritual starting on its own, but it was made with greedy intentions.  Everyone who died was erased and their families and classmates and friends forgot they existed.  I stopped that process from happening but I don’t think I can bring those people back.

I don’t want this to end without there being justice.  If I was capable of accepting any other answer then I think this might be the point I gave up.  I could let Edith win, I could choose the option where I didn’t risk me dying and you having to find this letter.

I can’t.  I can’t let the people who would do that get what they want and take any more power or get any more influence.

That’s why I’m going, even if there might be collateral damage.  It’s why I’m writing this letter as a just-in-case.

It’s also why you may have to call Samaniego and ask him to clean house.  If it comes down to it you can give him this letter.  He goes after people like me who know magic and he goes after the monsters.  Then on your way out, car hopefully packed, you can kick down the protections.  It won’t make it any easier for him to get in, but it’ll make it harder to deal with him at the same time everything else comes crashing down.  Make sure you aren’t in Kennet when it happens.

Be safe, I love you, I love Booker, and I love Verona and Avery.

This can’t end without justice of some sort.