Life is Strange: Forces of Nature

Episode One: Tachypsychia (2)

Part Two: This One October

Max woke up standing in the middle of her dorm room at Blackwell, not really doing anything. Well, she assumed she wasn't doing anything prior the Takeover, as she dubbed it. She was facing the couch and standing. She wasn't paused in mid stride or something that gave her any indication of what she was doing.

Max's dorm looked the same as it had in the other timeline. Her guitar was by the couch, Lisa was still watered and by the window, and her photo wall was B.N.; Before Nathan. Wait, her photo wall...

There were new photos on the wall, making it bigger than it had been. The amount of film Max would have had to use to get her wall of photos like that would had to have been astronomical. And there was one thought in Max's head: What the hell happened here?

She couldn't remember anything. She... She was at Chloe's funeral. Woke up there, at the lighthouse with the sun shining like everything was fine with the world when it wasn't without Chloe. The butterfly appeared and then Max went to her dorm to drown her sorrows in cheap beer like she knew Chloe would have done. A last testimate.

Blurs and images assaulted her brain. Frank, Nathan, and Rachel. Junkyard... No, Two Whales. Wait, that wasn't right. Her head pounded. Less like a time spell and more like a hangover, if TV had gotten them right. And boy did she feel like throwing up.

Did she screw around with time? Again? After she promised herself that she wouldn't? Fuck, it felt like it. She could feel the differences in the air. It was faint; Max wouldn't have noticed it if she spent more time there. The feeling was already starting to ebb away, like her leg waking up after falling asleep.

Why... Why did she go back? Max spun in a circle and flopped on her bed. The action was normal, or at least felt like it was. Familiar, she guessed. It felt safe, before everything that happened. And it only made her freak her out more.

'What the hell happened, Max?' She thought to herself. 'Did we go back in time again? Did we mess something up? Did... we erase everything again? Did we- I-... Did I erase Chloe?'

Max felt her mind seize and her heart clamp down on itself. No. She wouldn't overreact just yet. She couldn't. If she somehow fucked up a timeline so much that Chloe was hurt- or... or worse... She couldn't take fucking up another Chloe. She couldn't deal if she had to kill her, again.

She needed to think. Needed to remember what had happened. Her mind was empty until she opened the floodgates. The murky memories flooding her brain until it was an incoherent mess puddled inside. And then she started to go through them one by one.

The funeral was slow and painful for her, especially being confined between Warren and Kate. They were trying to be helpful, trying to be there for her. But she didn't want to be with her friends. She wanted to be with Chloe. So she ran up to her room as soon as the funeral was over, only stopping at Frank's RV to buy some booze off of him.

The next hour or so was a mix between drinking and sobbing and cursing the world and her reality. The reality that she finally landed in. The reality without Chloe.

Max felt horrible in a dress. There was something revealing about it that sent chills down her spine. Not to mention it was a black dress worn for the girl she loves' funeral. So she changed into jeans, a T-shirt, and her hoodie. It still smelled of rain and of Chloe. She felt like she didn't go through all that shit and had just met Chloe. As if she was still in that punk's room, listening to Bright Eyes on the Hi-Fi and watching her blaze.

Her bag was sitting by her desk, as normal as it usually would have been. That was when Max felt it. A surging feeling coming from the bag that jumping into different realities gave to her. She was more than a little tipsy when she reached for the bag and most of its contents spilled onto the floor. Max initially rushed to pick them up but soon slowly started to reminisce as she gazed into the pictures of the Week That Never Was. The pictures somehow came back with her.