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Previously: "Rain Delay"  It's two o'clock before you are able to talk with Sydney again, for church and Sunday lunch took up the morning and early afternoon. And when you talk it's by phone, with you telling her that you want to be one of Autumn's teammates, at least long enough to pick out the rest of the "Brotherhood." "Does that seem weird?" you ask her. "I don't want to jump in totally blind." "No, that doesn't seem weird, Will," she says. "At least, I don't think it's weird, and I don't think— Uh." She catches herself. "Can I call you back? In, like, thirty minutes? Maybe sooner?" So you hang up, and try to fight off another of those creepy subdermal ripples like you got yesterday after the movie. * * * * * It's ten minutes when you hear back from Sydney, and it's by text, asking to meet you at the basement to talk about things. You beat her over there by a good twenty minutes, of course. And when she arrives, she is not looking like herself. "So, tell me what you think!" Autumn Mattera gushes as she hops from the junky little car she drove up in. Despite temperatures in the mid-60s, she is dressed in a t-shirt and very short shorts that show her slim legs practically from her hips to her ankles. She twirls as she dances over to you, with her long, dark hair whipping around her head and slapping her in her grinning face. When she hops to stop in front of you, she smiles up at you and clasps her arms around your waist. It gives you an instant boner. "Wow, that didn't take long," you stammer. "To change, I mean." She giggles. "Let's go downstairs and give things a spin." She clings to your side as you make your way down the steps into the basement, and when you reach the big table she pushes you up onto it, and stands between your outspread knees. "So, I never heard from you last night," she says. "I figured you were busy." "Well, yeah. I went out to the Warehouse. But I still expected to hear from you." You stiffen, even as your wood turn spongy. "Why did you go out there?" "I had friends going out there. Yeah, Los Scorchicos was playing, and they like them. So I had to go too." "I could'a gone with you," you say, more out of jealousy than anything else. "Sure, and I was waiting for you to call and say you were ready with the new masks." She plays with the sides of your shirt. "And then the guy I was with, I could've, you know, taken him out to my car for a little— And I would've met you outside, and then when the guy I was with went back inside with me, it wouldn't have been him anymore!" She grins. "It would have been you." She pushes her palms down the sides of your hips, down the sides of your thighs. Now your wood turns to iron. "I, uh, didn't know that's what you wanted me to— But hang on. The guy you would've been with? Who's that? I thought it's me you're supposed to be with!" "Yeah, well, you didn't know my plan, because she got awfully cute." "Who's 'she'?" Autumn makes a face. "Sydney McGlynn." * * * * * And so it comes out. That girl you went to the movies with, and made out in the basement with, and started polishing masks with— That wasn't Sydney. That was one of those pedisequoses. Autumn Mattera, enslaved under a mask of Sydney McGlynn. Your girlfriend—your real girlfriend—was the girl sitting next to Aaron Whatsisfuck in the movie yesterday, and who drove off with him when it was over. "I didn't want to prejudice you, Will," she explains. "After I got into Autumn's mask—" "And when did you do that?" you demand. She is trying to be very affectionate as she explains, but you're having none of it, being more than a little miffed at learning you were making out with a magical robot while she was off canoodling with that hoodie-wearing dork. "Friday night. After she got back from the party at Maggie Crenshaw's. I got her out to my place, and I made a mask of her and I put it on her, and then I had a long talk with her about how long she'd be out, and what would probably happen when she got home. Then I let her go to the party but I told her to leave early and come meet me, and I switched out with her then." That's pretty close to what "Sydney" told you yesterday, except for leaving out the bit about eventually switching faces. "And I did it that way," she continues, "because I had a hunch I wouldn't have her memories when I put on the mask, like I didn't when I put on the mask of your friend Caleb, and I wanted to be safe. And I didn't until I woke up yesterday morning, when—" She steps back and twirls for you again. "And then we made plans for the movie!" "Why didn't you tell me? Why didn't—" You choke a little. "Why didn't that thing you left behind tell me?" Her expression darkens. "Don't call her a 'thing', Will. She acted like me, did what I would've done with you. The only trouble was that she got, well, 'cute' with you. I told her not to tell you what I'd done, to just play me, unless you asked directly if I'd switched with Autumn. And you didn't, and apparently she said just enough of the right things the right way that you didn't catch on." I had a pretty strong hunch, you want to tell her. But instead you ask (again!) why she played it that way. "Because I didn't want to prejudice you," she says yet again. "I thought that if I showed up as Autumn, with Aaron or with some other guy, you'd jump to be him, just to be close to me again, when that wouldn't really be who you wanted to be. And see?" she concludes with a cocky little lift of her chin. "That's the way it worked out! Turns out you didn't want to be Aaron!" "I wouldn't have wanted to be that little twerp anyway!" "Well, maybe not. But you did some thinking last night, like maybe you wouldn't have done, if you'd known where I was already. So—" She steps up between your knees again, and lays her hands on you again, and you now you relent and let her. "The other girl tells me you want to play on the same team as me!" * * * * * So you explain to her your thinking: how you don't want to leap blindly into some other life, even if you have a chance of escaping it later, but want to get a look at possible other bodies up close, and from inside one of the girls that you're going to convert anyway. "That makes sense," she says. "But I can already tell you who one of your guys is going to be, probably. Nathan Elliot." "Who's he? And how come he's probably going to be one of them?" "Because he's Jenna Burr's boyfriend, and she's probably going to be one of our girls. So it only makes sense. Here." She takes a fat phone out of a slim pocket in her short-shorts, and scrolls and taps at it until she arrives at a photo album, and shows you a picture of a half-dozen very healthy looking girls grinning over a table in a restaurant. There is only one guy with them, and you recognize him from a couple of your classes: a tall, beefy guy with short but thick brown hair, striking gray-green eyes, and stubble down his jawline and on his chin and mustache. He looks at least twenty-one years old. "And that's Jenna next to him," Autumn says. The girl with the long, thick, dirty-blonde hair is more "handsome" than beautiful, but in her own striking way is as good-looking as her boyfriend. "She's one of the alphas on the team. If we don't add her to the Brotherhood— Well, it'll be our own stupidity." You don't like feeling bullied, so you insist on talking about who the other candidates on the softball team would be. "Well, Maggie for sure," Autumn says. "Me of course, and Jenna. Probably Mandy Tiller?" She points to a girl with a crooked grin and dark hair that just touches her shoulders. "Ella Jaynes?" That girl looks a lot like Jenna, except that her hair is darker and straighter, and her face more feminine. "Those five, I think, unless we want one of the junior girls or sophomores." "What about her?" You point to a girl at the end of the group who is slim and prettier than the others that have been pointed out to you. "Oh, Haley? Her too, maybe. Except she's real quiet. Maggie, Jenna and Ella have to be on the Brotherhood for sure," she says, now elevating Jenna and the other girl to sure things. "They're just kind of central to everything. If we're talking about the seniors. I think Mandy should be the fifth one." You mull this. It sounds like Sydney has war-gamed this out far enough that you don't really need to look at anything from the inside. Yet you hesitate to surrender to her judgement without forming one of your own. Though the easiest course would be to accept "Nathan Elliot" as your escape route—his part in your future sounds inevitable—you are also strongly attracted to two other choices: To inhabit (at least briefly, before turning it over to Sydney) the body of his girlfriend Jenna, so as to get a really good look at him. Or that of one of the other girls she has picked out, for the reasons you gave her earlier, and which still seem good to you. * "Impersonate Jenna Burr" * "Impersonate one of the other girls" * "Assume the identity of Nathan Elliot " How the Poll Works To vote in this poll (the Free Poll) click on one of the choices below. To give even more weight to your choice, click on one of the links above (the link you'd like to see continued) and use the "Tip the author!" form at the bottom of the chapter to send the author GPs. In the final vote tally, each vote in the Free Poll will be worth 1/5 the average of the GPs contributed during the round. GPs voted for losing choices will be refunded in full to those who voted. GPs voted for the winning choice will be divided among those who voted for losing choices, in proportion to their share of GPs voted for losing choices. In other words, if you vote GPs for a losing choice, you will get your GPs back and will likely collect a dividend proportional to the size of your GP vote. If you vote for the winning choice, your GPs will count as a kind of commission payment for seeing that storyline continued. This poll will close on Wednesday, April 23, at 12:00 PM Eastern Time. |
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