The Tale of Tara and Emiko

XXXVII. Kailey

Emiko was visibly shocked. Her eyes widened, her breath quickened, and she leaned back in what had to be fear. Tara, however, resumed petting Mochi after a short moment of stillness.

"Three hundred years..." Emiko murmured. "I-no, we've been trapped for three hundred years..."

"Well, not all at once," Tara noted. "There's quite a lot of overlap, no?"

"Why is Tara unfazed?" Cliff whispered.

"Oh, I don't know, maybe because I don't trust this?" Tara asked sharply.

"Why wouldn't you trust Kailey? She's very trustable! Except for caffeine. Do not trust her with caffeine. But still, if I had to pick anyone to trust, she'd be at the top of the list," Astoria said.

"Yeah, because you know her personally. All I've known of the great Kailey Lumin comes from the tabloids and the headlines," Tara argued.

Emiko was still a lump on the floor, mumbling incoherently.

"You want proof?" I asked suddenly. A little impulsive, sure, but can you blame me?

"Yes!" Tara yelled back.

"Uh, can we not scream? Mochi's sleeping," Cliff muttered, gesturing to the fluffball in a food coma.

"Oh," Tara said. "Sorry. It's just, you know, kinda hard to believe it when two of the most powerful people in existence, who are just kids, by the way, tell you that you've been stuck in a time loop of sorts for three centuries with zero proof."

I made a buzzer noise. "Wrong! There are people much more powerful than me, some of which have even bested me in combat. And there is proof that this is all real and not some overly elaborate, made up joke."

"Proof?" Emiko asked. "Like...evidence that I'm not going crazy?"

"Exactly!" I snapped my fingers, conjuring up a small digital screen. "How about chronological order, okay? Keeps things organized." When no one answered, I clapped my hands. "Brilliant! Let's see if this jogs your memory.

"First off, we have you two in Elite, that high school Emiko cheated into," I said.

"Oh, I remember that!" Tara replied, her face lighting up for half a second before it sunk into a scowl. "What was in that drink?"

"Actually, nothing," Emiko said. "I think my plan was to have you just sound incredibly unbelievable. Sorry," she muttered.

"Well, that does make sense," I continued. "Next life, Tara was an assassin with really long hair, and Emiko was an outcast seer killed by Tara in...the Multistory Maze? What the heck? I've been trying to access that for months!"

"Wait, really? I thought it was normal for people to have another dimension used solely for murder in their basement," Tara mused. When she noticed everyone was looking at her weird, she laughed sheepishly, saying "That was a joke! I'm joking! ...please don't hate me..."

I sighed. "None of us are gonna hate you for something that was out of your control. Even without the fact that you've accessed the labyrinth of the void, it's linked with another few lives we'll get to in a second. Next, we only had recordings of your voices, which is really weird, because from the descriptions of the radio it seems like you're in a time period of the past yet you encounter some sort of...giant kraken?" I frowned. "That's weird."

"No, no, it's fine. That was a mix of fantasy and flash fiction, very short," Astoria said, pointing to the Genre subheading on the screen.

"Alright, if you say so," I said, swiping to the next page. "In some storybook-based kingdom, Emiko was a princess slash bounty hunter with two younger brothers that we never see again for some odd reason, and Tara, you were another well-known bounty hunter who got one of the brothers kidnapped."

Tara's eyes widened. "Not on purpose!" she protested.

"And after that?" Emiko asked quickly.

"Oh, um...here, this is the one I mentioned earlier. High schooler Tara and princess Emiko from two very different worlds were brought together by a powerful being that called itself the Narrator, who claimed to be making a utopia with its reality-warping powers," I said.

"That was with Selene, right?" Tara asked. "Who ended up stabbing me for you?"

"Yeah, sorry," Emiko muttered.

"Oh!" Astoria shouted, making us all jump. "Whoops, didn't mean to shout that loudly. But it was high schooler Tara who died in the creation of the Maze and ended up blackmailing assassin Tara with her dead sister's spirit in a story that somehow seems to come before the Narrators and yeah, that's totally not confusing at all...." She trailed off. "Cliff, is this making any more sense to you than it is for me?"

"Huh?" Cliff said, startled. "Oh, um...no. No, not at all."

That's suspicious, Mochi thought. I sighed.

"It kinda makes sense to me," Emiko said with a shrug. "You kinda had to be there to understand it."

"So you are remembering!" I replied. "And just to help your conscience a bit, none of these betrayals are your fault alone, no matter how much you think they are. They're you, but in another life. That was then and this is now. We still have a chance to fix this."

"Just let us know if you need a moment to breathe or anything, since I'm sure this is in some way slightly overwhelming. Trust me, all of us have been there sometime in our lives."

"I know," Emiko said. "I just feel...weird. You guys are little kids! We're the ones with the responsibility-we should be the ones comforting you, not the other way around."

"This is your story, not ours," Cliff said. "And if my sister, stubborn as she may be, says she's going to fix it, you can bet your Spirits she's going to fix it."

"Sure, we're kids, but we've had our fair share of misfortunes and trauma too. Don't ever think you're alone in this, okay?" I asked, softly smiling.

Tara and Emiko nodded.

"Great," I said. "Now let's hurry this up a bit, the word count for this chapter is getting dangerously high, and I'd rather not get called out for rambling on and on again. Next life, you two were dragon tamers. This is also where I first found you, a few months ago, I think."

"A few months?" Emiko asked. "I thought it was a few lifetimes."

"No," Astoria replied. "There's an overlap, remember?"

"But if you know what happened in every life, then shouldn't you be able to predict what's going to happen now? And maybe fix it?" Tara asked.

"Well, there's the problem. All the other stories were consistently inconsistent. We have no way of knowing what could happen, if anything. For all we know, my interference on the Monarchy's ship might have ended the cycle right then and there, and all we're doing here will be rendered useless," I said. "But better to be safe than sorry, so our goal is to keep you two from dying. Or ruining each other's lives, or killing each other, or anything of the sort that could cause you to get sucked into another world."

"Both of you, let us know if you need to talk about this, okay?" Astoria asked, handing them each a slip of paper. "That's our numbers," she explained.

"Stay friends," I added. Fingers crossed.