>>3246304You awake on a couch in a warmly decorated room, which from the looks of it seems to be a living room. Immediately across from you is a table, which is absolutely covered with medical equipment, which in turn are covered in no shortage of blood. Vaguely remembering the context which brought you here, you assume it to be your own, but physically you feel excellent. No residual pain wracks your body, though your anxiety levels still remind you that something is very, very wrong. Despite this, the blonde girl standing directly behind where your head rests on the couch seems so serene she orders on euphoric. Her presence startles you, and you jolt slightly before she puts a calm, steady pressure on your chest with her delicate hands. She then pulls out another syringe and injects it into your arm, cooing softly.
"It's okay. I know, I know. You're still scared about what happened. I can explain everything. I'll tell you a story. Our story."
"Right now, we are located in timeline 61033. But that's not where our story starts. Our story starts in timeline 705342. I was a private investigator, and you were my everything. You were the stay at home part of the dream team, and I worked cases to pay for our comfy little apartment. It looked a lot like this one, actually." She wistfully looks around the office before her.
"But there's a problem with being an investigator. Holmes only taught me how to deal with cases once the crime has already been committed, not before. So I didn't see it coming when Ina-…when the Ancient Ones decided that the stars were right to take control of Earth. Every one of those stupid little purple monsters turned into something that could devour a city in a night. Anyone who slept more than a half hour at a time would die in their sleep from fear of what they would hear in their dreams. The worst part of all is that they shattered the timeline, so I couldn't rewind, my only option was to jump away."
Though the girl before you appears to be trying to give enough exposition for you to follow her, she offhandedly mentions names and details that she seems to think you know despite this being your first meeting. But your sudden recovery from the mysterious sickness you were afflicted with leads you to believe she isn't insane. Or…not *just* insane.
"But I couldn't jump just yet. I needed to find you, bring you to a safe timeline. But I searched and searched and searched and searched and searched and searched and searched and searched and searched and searched and searched and searched and searched…." As she drones on this single phrase all emotion seems to drain from her voice, and the pinkish tint to her blue eyes seems to swell and darken, eventually becoming a dark tide of nothing but blackness punctuated only by an unnatural shade of some color that you struggle to find a word for.
Snapping out of her stupor after a few moments, she claps her hands to her mouth in horror before running over to a nearby cabinet. She pulls out a pill bottle and a filled breaker, the latter of which she swirls quickly before grabbing an eye dropper. She dry swallows a handful of pills and then administers a single drop of the liquid inside the beaker into each eye. Turning back to you, she smiles sheepishly before sitting herself down on the couch.
"Sorry. I spent so long in that place looking for you I got sick. I forgot to take my medicine because I was busy looking after you. I'm sorry if that was scary." She smiles sadly and pats your chest.
"Anyway, I couldn't find you at all, which could only mean one thing: One of the other Amelia's I signalled for help must have rescued you. But going in and out of a busted timeline like that is hard, so there might have been some complications, which is probably why she wasn't able to call and tell me where she hid you. She probably dropped you by accident when she made the hop."
You consider a much more reasonable explanation to why she was unable to find you in the midst of the hellish apocalypse she is describing, but you decide to hold your tongue. Convincing this girl that her lover must surely have died in this alternate timeline strikes you as a bad idea, as she seems to shake like a leaf even while describing the narrative where you come out of this ordeal alive.
"Time stuff can get weird, so you probably just ended up getting some memories from this world's version of you when you landed, and that got your head all fuzzy, and it made you think you were single. Don't worry, I don't mind about the cheating, I'm just happy you're alive. Besides, I took care of that bitch."
