Gracie Abrams is eking out a solitary existence, fighting day-in, day-out against the drain of working customer service and nursing two newborn kittens in her off time. Out on her own ever since her sister moved in with her boyfriend, the burden of...
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"What do they think it is?" I asked, already dreading the answer. Aliens? Russia? Oh, lord.
"There are...theories," Kakashi smiled, and I could only imagine that my guesses had been the tamer ones. Never mind my fear that creativity and imagination weren't real—conspiracy theorists were stock full of originality. "Right now, the news keeps linking it to the storm. A storm that won't dissipate because there's too much—pollution, I guess—centered in the air."
I snorted. "Smog doesn't create portals to other worlds."
"I'm not sure if others have disappeared," Kakashi mused, holding my leg up so he could switch the shoulder it rested on. "With the situation what it is, if anyone's gone missing, it hasn't been noticed...yet. They haven't tried to go near it, with those, you know, flying things."
Ah, planes.
My mind snagged on a single word.
Others?
"What about..." I trailed off, not sure why my voice decided now was when it was going to grow difficult to use. I cleared my throat. "What about H-Hisoka?"
Slowly, Kakashi's gaze lifted, but it was stuck, again, on my bandages. I turned my cheek, staring instead at all of Bella's shelves across the room. There were so many, they appeared to be stashed in each corner just to be used as a blockade. I shied away from the thought, wishing I hadn't given voice to it in my own head.
"Gone."
I glanced down, where Kakashi's fingers had found their way to my bent knee, deftly avoiding Sintar's claws in a savage game of whack-a-mole. "What?"
Without hesitating, he said, "He's gone."
My next intake was sharp as I tried to process what that meant. It seemed we had reached the "vague answers" portion of this conversation. I'm surprised it took so long, really.
He let me think in silence.
Hisoka came, Hisoka went. It felt pointless. It all felt pointless. Senseless acts of violence, as stupid as the bikers roaming the night in search of petty vandalism.
What was the point? Of any of it?
Patty wanted to build an army. From what I'd seen, she'd learned enough about this interdimensional spell that she used it frequently. Doing research on anime because that was how the spell had worked in the first place, but who's to say those are the only stories that exist somewhere out there? She could just as easily have pulled Iron Man or Darth Vader through. Probably.
And what had we gotten? Controlled puppets, mostly. But Pride and Hisoka hadn't been as controlled. Whatever she'd offered them—Hisoka's contract—had been lucrative enough to create a truce. What had they even helped her with? What had Kakashi the puppet even done for her?
