RIPPLE ( peter parker.. ) ✔

003. Bumps on Memory Lane..

Agatha cursed under her breath while she stumbled into a home much like the one she currently had, only emptier and filled instead with dust. Through it, she coughed and stagnate in her hazy steps, trailing her decomposing fingers on the bare walls and leaving behind trails of dark ash, as if her own skin was charcoal and her, a sloppy artist, making constant mistakes often tagged to a beginner. It did not take her long to try and grasp those walls with the whole of her palms, it didn't take as long for her wrist to tremble and fail and in that last second before collapsing to the ground in an uncontrolled fall, to turn her back towards the wall and brace herself for getting seated by the impossible pressure of gravity.

After a lifetime of vitality, she was finally feeling the years catching up to her. "And all because of those-," a cough interrupted her, "Wretched Avengers! That stupid league-"

Cough after cough scratched the insides of her throat, interrupting each try of speaking proper sentence through new-born tears with the reminder that it was simply puerile to drown her sorrow in any thing more physical than hiccups of tears. That was when, from the smallness of this picture, be it sad or simply far too odd, the image begun panning out and Wendy's eyes unfocused from this centerpiece in order to become aware of the frame the scene was held into. A garden of mirrors multiplied around this action she watched from a quiet, faint place, strikingly familiar and yet... not quite similar to the Multiverse's Road she was so used to before Peter showed up in her life.

"Where am I?" Self-awareness returned to her as fast as it took her blurred mind to remember him and then, immediately spiral into a case of existential crisis. Something told her she was crawled down in a spiral, on the floors of Agatha's basement whatever she was witnessing now was but a projection of what was happening behind the cracks of her thoughts, a materialization, because simply feeling the process would have killed her.

Then a voice hushed her.

The same voice she heard earlier, from deep within her mind, a sound that was not her own, it was one and the same with the voice which spoke to her sixteen years ago, when she saw the consequences her presence left behind in Universe 1 and needed an explanation to understand. The corporal apparition of the sound though, had Wendy looking to her right at a figure cloaked in an eerie material, neither floating nor obeying by physics' laws to just lay normally on a body she had an unexplainable hunch was almost skeletal. Perhaps the figure fragment visible through a side profile alluded to that because the only parts of this person which were visible hid under the shadow of the hood: thin, dry lips, hanging skin on a pointy chin filled with wrinkles and hanging its shame under a nose covered in ridges and frailty, rounded just from the many times it has been blown in its life.

The being, because Wendy started doubting it was even a person at all, had raised their hand to their mouth, pursing those lips and blowing out a hushing sound, like the ghost librarian from Ghostbusters herself had given them lessons on how to act, what to do, upon the rare chance that they meet a person and they want to make a good first impression. They skipped the part in which everything they'll do will given Wendy Weber unexplainable chills. 

With slowness in their movement, she watch how the fragile-looking hand, a ghost in its own, returned by their side. Unlike the slow-motion of that peculiar moment, considering she saw the scene they were looking at through a gateway, in fact, quite like the one she watched the demise of Universe 1 through, Wendy inquired in her usual quickness, a promptness of speech coming with her inherited hurry; after all, she was just leaving, against her will, at the very moment Agatha Harkness threatened Peter with being skinned alive and her with a spell still in the process of being cooked.

"Who are you?"

The being inhaled deeply. It breath was drawn from the light which refracted all through the mirrors, which answered immediately in a thrill of glass hitting on glass, to the movement demanded by this cloaked presence. "Keep quiet and just watch," they exhaled.