The Ripple Effect

Extermination

Acacia Taylor woke up on December 10th to the sound of her mother's voice. The girl was finally over her panic that she was thrown into a few days prior. She had promised the night before that she would try to go to school since her strength was starting to come back, but the girl lacked the motivation to do so. She was afraid to return to school for the chance that she might run into the alternate reality again and meet a surge of pain like the one she hit on Monday. Acacia slowly sat up and took a deep breath before starting her usual morning routine.

As always, the girl started her morning by picking out an outfit to wear for the day and then changing into it. After that, she went downstairs to make and eat her breakfast before going back upstairs to brush her teeth and get her backpack from her room. Once she got her backpack, the girl went back downstairs to go wait in the car for her mother. Soon after Acacia got into the car, her mother walked into garage and got into her car to begin driving Acacia to school.

The ride to school was another peaceful one as the car ride was perfectly silent. Acacia didn't want to talk to anyone but while she sat in silence the idea of her getting hit with a wave of pain again began growing larger and normally lead to Acacia pushing herself into a state of terror. When she arrived at school, Acacia turned to her mother and told her the time which she wanted to be picked up before leaving the car and walking to her first period class.

Acacia was earlier than usual so when she got to her first period class there wasn't anyone inside. The girl walked to the back of the class to take a seat in her assigned spot. After she sat down in her chair, the girl turned to her backpack and took out her usual book. Something on this morning felt off to Acacia. Everything seemed normal and she felt (so far) as if she was still in her own reality, but something felt strange ever since she stepped foot on the campus. Acacia tried to ignore it and simply turn to her book, but upon opening it the girl saw that every last drop of ink that was supposed to be on the page was gone. The girl flipped the pages in a panic but found that every last one was blank.

"I don't understand," she said out loud, closing the book, "This doesn't make sense anymore. I thought I was in my world. Maybe I am, but things have been affecting me on such a grand scale that I can't even tell anymore. Whatever I did to point all of the universe's guns at me must have been something really stupid and whatever it was is probably too far gone to make up, but do I really deserve this? Do I really deserve to feel excruciating pain? Do I really deserve to get my pass time sabotaged? Do I deserve to be invisible to people?

"You know, maybe I do. Maybe whatever I did to distort reality was such a huge push that it can't go without punishment. Maybe whatever I did threw a pebble out into the world and just now the ripples are finally reaching me. Maybe in order to recompense for my sins I have to vanish and deleting someone from existence is a complicated process. But I can't help but to wonder if I deserve it-if I truly and honestly deserve it. Weeks ago I wouldn't have even considered the fact of the world trying to attack me on a dimensional level, but now it's throwing everything it-"

And with that Acacia went silent. She sat there in her chair with her eyes and mouth open wide with pain and tears already dripping out of her eyes. The girl was unable to do anything but sit there in her chair with not a single living soul in the room and suffer from a burst of pain unlike that of which she felt days before, but rather thousands of times worse. The pain felt like what Acacia imagined getting lava poured on you or getting hit with a cannon ball at point blank range would feel like. All of it was focused on her chest and all of it was too awful for words. As the pain coursed through her, her body's reactions began to throw her heart into overtime. As her body tried to deal with the random sensation and threw itself into a panic the worst thing that could happen did. The girl fell out of her chair onto her side, not able to comprehend everything going on, not only due to the assistance of her random searing pain but also by the stroke that struck her.

With no one to help the girl and no way for her to yell out, Acacia Taylor lied down on the cold tile floor until she eventually died. Minutes after her death, her biology teacher walked into the room. But rather than noticing the dead body at the back of his classroom he took a seat at his desk and began getting things ready for his lecture. As Acacia Taylor lied on the floor dead, she was being eliminated from reality. No one would notice her, and days after her death no one would remember her. Everyone would forget that she was ever a person which they had known.

As far as her parents knew, they didn't have a child. As far as her classmates and teachers knew, the new transfer student never existed. As far as anyone knew, there was no such thing as a fifteen year-old girl who recently transferred schools because of her father changing offices three states over named Acacia Taylor, because to everyone else in the world she never existed.

When Acacia Taylor destroyed the regulator between dimensions she made it seem as if the world had one too many of her, and one too many of another person. In doing this, the multiverse decided that it would need to get rid of those two by anonymously deciding which ones were most valuable. Unfortunately for this Acacia, she wasn't the one who was valued. To get rid of her, the multiverse linked the valued Acacia and the inessential Acacia's pain together whenever the valued in took a large amount of pain, then amplified it to double that of which the valued felt before giving it to the inessential in hopes to kill her. Every time the pain was distributed to the inessential Acacia, the girl would be made invisible to everyone else so if by chance the pain did kill her the multiverse could discard her without any problems.

But, while dealing with this inessential Acacia, the multiverse would occasionally reach problems. These problems would lead to dragging Acacia into another parallel world on accident. As a defense mechanism, this dimension would try to make Acacia believe that she never traveled to this new world so she would never grow suspicious of extermination. Luckily she never did, and the elimination of the girl was carried out with limited flaws.

The interesting thing, however, was that the inessential Acacia's universe wasn't deemed entirely obsolete. The other person who there was now one too many of in the inessential Acacia's universe was chosen as the valued one. The multiverse would be taking a different approach to eliminating this extra person, however. This extra person would have to be dealt with in a different fashion to assure that another extra would never appear and so that regulations between universes would never be destroyed again. For if this extra person managed to reach Acacia Taylor again, drastic measures would have to be taken.