Play@YSDC

"She was tough as nails like my mom," said Ash. "I was always jealous of her. Always. She always seemed to be their favourite. I didn't really know what had happened but I guessed. When I turned sixteen mum felt I should know as she'd be passing on the baton to me. I ... well, I balked."

"As you should have," Jack muttered. "I have trouble believing that people actually believe whatever gods rule here. They always sounded more like demons to me." Jack shrugged. "Sick and twisted demons, corrupting men and women and leading them towards their death. Not that I really care anymore. Speaking of death, have you seen some crazy man looking for his sister?"

"Aren't all gods monsters?" asked Ash. "Don't all gods ask terrible things of their worshippers? The Greek gods raped and pillaged. One of their goddesses turned a woman into an animal for being raped on her alter. What about Jehovah? Wives turned to salt. A man rewarded for allowing his daughters to be sodomised in place of his guests - or himself. A cruel world breeds cruel gods. What else can people believe in?"

"History too, has generally been written by the cruelest," Jack snaps back. "Alexander the Great killed his own best friend in a drunken stupor and was hailed as one of the greatest heroes and leaders this earth has ever seen. The Romans raped, pillaged, and burned down everything in their conquest. They killed all the Jews in Judea so that they were no longer a majority population in their own homeland. The cruelest gain power, because they know how to harm others most efficiently. The powerful leaves behind words that are feared, sometimes even worshipped by the meek, thus gods are born, and these gods perpetuated by all the cruel men that comes after. It's not the cruel world that breeds cruel gods, but rather cruel men and women."

"So the bigger question is this. Are you a cruel woman? A countless men and women before you have perpetuated the cycle. The momentum of a thousand years of history written by cruel men and women may have tainted the gods, but the cruel men and women are no gods. The sheer force of their will may be overbearing for a single person, but over time, the path of cruelty may yet end."

Jack folds his arms. "I guess you have a choice. You can choose to continue this cycle of cruelty or you can try your earnest to end it." He grins. "But I'm a cruel person, as you probably know by now. So I'm not gonna tell you which side of the railing will mean perpetuating the cycle. You are gonna have to figure that one yourself. Exciting, huh?"

She scowls at the railing. "I expect both sides of the railing perpetuates the cycle. Can I even leave?" Her tone turns wry. "I doubt you are my final confrontation in this place." She turns her level gaze on Jack. "If I die, I might be trapped. If I try to escape, I might never leave. This railing represents my only chance at freedom. My grab for power." Her heavy gaze on him turns all the more meaningful. "My other attempts didn't exactly work out."

She sighs. "However I have waited here for so long that I doubt my own inner strength in this decision. The water ... I'm so sure that Cecilia is in that water, waiting for me. Was it my fault? I'd distracted her but ... this town, this place ... when it wants its due ... and Cecie isn't the most attentive...." She lowers her head, leaning on the railing. "I looked for her. I did. I couldn't find her. Either of them. And sometimes, I started to forget ... I think I might have died once or twice already ... and that does something to your memory here. Maybe my own assured death is by my own hand. Or maybe once you've been killed here, you can't ever leave. How many of us wander this town here and now?"

"Maybe you're just like me, trapped here, but you've forgotten who you were and me? I never knew."

"Oh, an interesting perspective!" Jack says, looking surprised. "Yes, indeed, both sides can perpetuate the cycle, one more likely than the other, but the cycle continues nevertheless."

"But can you hold on forever?" Jack takes a step towards her. "Eventually, your arms gets tired." Step. "You get hungry. Hell, you might even need to go to the bathroom." Step. "You lose initiative and then the next thing you know is that danger's right in your face, staring into your soul."

He shrugs. "If you looked for her and couldn't find her, than that's just that. You did your best to save a life, but couldn't. It's not your fault beyond that. The game's been rigged against you both. The house always wins, in this case the house is the town.

He makes a motion of dusting off his shotgun. "Here's a tip for you. When you feel trapped, as if there's no way out of a situation, pick a solution and go all in on it instead of being partly in and partly out and just wasting everyone's time. Why do you want to jump anyways?"

Her eyes widen a little at the 'staring you in the face'. She seems to think he's being self-descriptive and relaxes a little once he asks the question. "To be honest, it just seems appropriate. I'm not sure what else to do or where else to go."

Jack blinks. "Really," he said. "That's your reason?" Rational part of his mind threw up his hands. Irrational part of his mind chose this moment to take over.

"Hey Ash," Jack said. "Did you know that your mother was a prostitute?" He raised the shotgun towards her.

"I decided that I won't let you commit suicide with such a stupid reason."

"No, please, it's my only chance to control my life," she says, seemingly frightened. She takes a step back from the railing, hands held out imploringly, before charging into him, getting in around the shotgun in his arms as though meaning to come in for a hug when in reality she is going for a grapple. Yet she misjudged her angle and his double-handed grip on the shotgun makes him hard to pin and he can casually knock her aside (or attack her or grapple her).

"Oh you still have control," Jack said, aggressively jabbing Ash's stomach with the gun to push her away. "You can still choose to jump. It's just that if you do, I shoot you. I shoot you dead so that you don't die from the fall," Jack's eyes which always glistened with a mere hint of madness behind is now fully maddened. "You are gonna fail, Ash. The jump would be the last thing you do in your life... and you are gonna fail in even that!" He cackles. "How does that make you feel?"

"Like you're my goddamn therapist!" she snarls, diving back and to the side, trying to put the lighthouse walls between them.

Silence. "You have a therapist?"

Laughter. "This just gets better and better, huh?" Jack follows her around the corner, slowly and carefully.

Jack hears the door open and close as she rushes inside.

"Yes! Run! Run away! Be free, Willy! BE FREEEE!" Jack lets out a guffaw.

He opens the door and shouts down the stairs of the lighthouse. "Don't make me catch you here again!"

The lighthouse is silent. No sound of footsteps. Nothing. The light at the top of the warehouse winks out. The fog seems to thicken, tightening around him, as though to prove his expulsion from that world. On the platform of the lighthouse is a frame containing flickering images of her facing something terrible in the water, so very similar to what Cecilia had faced, though Ash confronts it with an axe plucked from beside the lighthouse door. The girl feared death so much she was tempted to die. His arrival must've convinced that death would be no release. It was unlikely she'd make it so easily ... but who knew? Maybe this would be the last obstacle.

The images flicker to show Shepherd's Glen.

Perhaps not.

Ash would need to go back to the beginning. Wasn't that always the way?

A little girl's voice chimed in from behind him. "You're not done yet." Her voice is very serious, very level, and very cold. "You need to do something for me."

It is the voice of She Who Must Not Be Harmed. The final order of the Maker who brought all of this to the fore of this world though tainted and twisted as all things are in this realm.

"What if I don't want to?" Jack mused. "But I guess I'm not going to be given that option. Will I ever be done? I guess I'm not going to get the answer for that either."

"Tell me what I need to taint and I'll do it."

"I can end you, if you like, but only as I leave," says the little girls' voice. "Alessa gave me three wishes and I've kept the last. I can wish you unmade or I could wish you made whole and released. Whichever you prefer. But I want to get out of here. Alessa is gone but she dragged me in here and left me behind. I can't leave on my own and you can't take me with you but there are people who can. People who walk in here with a need. People like Cecilia though she left me behind and chose to die instead." She chuckles. "Ironic, really, since her daughter is trapped here but alive yet her mother is now a part of this place and might never let her leave."

Jack blinked as the voice's chuckles faded away. To be ended... or to be made whole? A choice! Jack felt a wave of both elation and apprehension swarm over his body. The real possibility of escape hung before his very eyes. Wasn't to escape from this horrid place what he longed for in the first place?

Yet it all felt...wrong...somehow. Did he want himself to become ended? He thought that he did not fear oblivion, but actually faced with an entity who boasted that it could bring him to an end... that was a different kind of a beast entirely. What was oblivion anyway? To not feel and not *learn* things anymore?

And what did she mean by being "made whole?" To be made whole into a pile of dust in some crematorium out there in the Real World? What was he anyway, a ghost of a man named Jack, a man thinking that he is Jack, or a mere revenant given life? Who was this voice that compelled him so?

No, he could not be free yet. He had to know. He had to learn. He had to discover.

"I think I'll pass on your offer," he said. "What is it that you need me to do?"


Jack found himself unable to let go. Every step forward he took in the game...more secrets he discovered...just filled him with pain and disappointment, but he could not simply end his quest. Obsession is another form of greed: something that Jack in both the real world and this never learned.

"There's a man called Cole who's looking for his dead sister." She screws up her nose to show how she feels about such sentimentality. "He upset Father Vincent and stole an important book so he was cursed to be here until Father Vincent lets up or he manages to pass through to the other side. I don't know what to do about him, though. I need him to think I'm his sister, or at least to try and save me as a little girl, but he just doesn't care all that much. I managed to get him to guide me for a bit but he just left me with that pair of stoners who ventured in here and got themselves trapped in their fear of taking their chance and risking their lives to get out."

Easy enough, Jack thought.

"I'll come get you away from those stoners first. Where are you?"