You turn your attention to Marlow as you retrieve your cell phone. "How long ago was this picture taken...?"

"I'd say..." he takes a moment to mull it over. "'Bout seven years ago?"

"...So the ex-librarian would be coming up on her late twenties, early thirties," you mutter. You take a picture of the photograph; your phone's not great to begin with, so the already poor image quality is even worse in digital picture-of-a-picture form.

You had hoped further decontextualizing the image from the original photo would make the former librarian easier to notice, but that does not appear to be the case. Still, she's clear enough if one actively looks for her--clear enough that you could show the picture to others if need be.

There's a brief pause; Kate slowly looks to you... and eventually speaks up. "You're going back in tonight... aren't you?"

You start to think about it... but there's not really much to think about. "I have to check on the countdown," you tell her. "I probably need to stop the countdown but I'm still figuring that part out."

Kate nods.

Hesitates.

"I'm uh..."

Jesus Christ is she hesitating.

"I... I'm pretty sure it's my turn, but I'm taking the night off. I'll still help with the house and shit, but like--" You're not used to seeing her this... reserved. She finally forces it out. "--I don't know man, last night fucking sucked."

You're... genuinely taken aback. "What the fuck happened...?"

"It didn't..." She takes a breath. "It didn't put us in the dungeon. It put us somewhere else. Look, I think we should let Marlow in on all this. He's the most anti-establishment motherfucker I know, the dream should be normal if you're there, and I don't know if Cici made it out of last night any better than I did. You need to take somebody, and we can train Marlow."

You stare at Kate for a moment, struggling for what to say. "Kate, I--"

"You need to take somebody," she repeats. "Don't go in there alone."

You slowly turn to Marlow, who has fallen quiet but is hiding his confusion well.

Your first instinct is that you should consult Cici.

...But you quickly realize it'd be a pointless gesture, as you don't really have much of a choice.

What you're doing is dangerous--the entire situation is, in a variety of ways. If Kate's right and Cici doesn't feel up to it tonight, you have no alternate accomplices. You also agree with Kate: going in alone is too risky, and that's probably true even without her knowledge of whatever happened last night.

Further, if Cici claims to feel up to it but you don't offer any alternative (aside from calling the whole thing off, also too risky when there's a literal countdown involved), then you're not going to be convinced that she isn't just giving into the pressure and forcing herself into the dungeon against her own will. If you have other options, she can be open and honest about what she wants to do, versus what she feels like she has to do.

You could get Cici's opinions on other alternative accomplices, but the longer you wait the less time the involved party has to think the issue over. Ambushing someone with your nightmare dungeon and only minutes to mull it over would be a dick move; every second you spend even thinking about this is a second that Marlow can't be weighing the risk with all the information needed.

If you want to dungeon tonight at all, you kind of need to drop the bomb on him ASAP.

It's been like five whole seconds of total silence. You're pretty sure it's your turn to talk. "Marlow, we... we know shit there's crimes against knowing.

I think. I'm pretty sure.

We're doing dangerous shit. It's... it's probably fucking us up mentally, it's so illegal we're still trying to figure out how illegal it is, and at least one person has exploded. Franklin might be in jail for something adjacent to what we're doing. We don't know. That... it's the whole problem, we don't know. Our whole fucking world's getting flipped upside down one day after another. What I know about myself and what shit is and how things work is like, a different dimension entirely from what it all was a week ago and it just. Keeps. Fucking. Going.

We have learned... so god damn much, and we still don't have the slightest fucking clue what we're getting into.

I don't even know what it IS. It's a house but it's becoming more than a house but it was never just a house, it was getting used as some kind of fucked up nightmare door to The Trauma Zone if that's not a NEW feature. We might be losing our minds. Every paradigm is shifting without a clutch and I don't know who I am anymore.

Jesus Christ, Marlow, you have kids.

I don't know how I could have even started to fucking ask you to jump into this god damn hole with us. I am so sorry."

Nailed it.

Kate looks stunned.

Marlow...

Marlow smiles. Just a faint... mirthful smile, perhaps the first time you've ever seen one not attached to a portrait of Santa Claus.

He says,

quite simply,

"Things... man was not meant to know."

Marlow continues.

"That's what Franklin called it.

He said the real truth, the... the biggest truth...

he said the truth is a light that never warms.

Gave me a... a big speech, like you just did. He told me everything the truth had taken from him, all the damage it'd caused, how it brought nothing but misery to know and only helped him realize how... how insignificant he was. He made the point that I can't unlearn something--it's permanent. You learn something, it's there forever. Real fancy speech and I'm not doing it justice. I'll grant ya, yours was pretty good too."

He pauses. Sniffs.

"...And hell, I bought it. He knew some shit I didn't about the shit I didn't know, so I walked away. I trusted him, and I let it go. Franklin knows something big, he assures me it doesn't help and it just messes you up, and I go on livin' my life. I didn't figure I needed to know everything. I don't know how to make my own beer or drive a tank, and we're all better off for it. I get it.

Franklin's been in jail a lot. Like... man. He's good at it. ...Somethin' about this time feels different. The way the cops are acting, the charges, the way it's all being handled, none of it adds up. It could be a hundred things--the guy's got some skeletons--but I don't know what it is and instead of finding out or doing something about it, I'm selling toys to an empty room. Now, maybe Franklin being in jail has something to do with all this, maybe it don't. I dunno. Could be a coincidence."

Kate finally starts to smile. "...But if you believed in coincidences, you wouldn't be a conspiracy theorist."

"You're damn right," Marlow says. "My friend needs my help, and I already turned away from this shit once. I'm a different man now. I'm getting old, I'm not afraid of the truth anymore, and my family's well aware I'm gonna die doing something stupid. God willing."

...Well shit.

"I... guess that about settles it, then," you reply. "...Does anyone want food?"

Kate lifts her head, yelling toward the back of the store. "HEY, EZRA!"

You hear some shuffling in the distance.

The sound of a box falling, a little closer.

And then, Ezra dramatically emerges.

"Yes, my dear?"

Kate gives a nod toward Marlow. "Can he take a break? We gotta talk some business."

"Oh, I don't know," Ezra replies, gesturing toward the rest of the store. "We're just so busy. I supPOSE I could beat back the unending hordes of desperate clientele myself, at least... for a little while."

Marlow nods, and smiles. "Thanks Ezra."

"Oh!," while you're thinking about it, "Ezra! Is the lady in the background of this photo the one you sold those dream rings to?"

You hold up Marlow's photo.

Ezra takes it.

He squints. Tilts his head.

Holds the picture up at a different angle.

"...I don't see any background ladies. It's just a photograph of Mr. Tuck's family."

"Keep looking," Kate says. "We'll be back."

The "Old Fashioned" Burger Joint does, in fact, offer conventional breakfast items on its menu. ...Well, with conventional being relative. It's huge. It's sloppy as hell. It is the food you imagine truck drivers eat. It may in fact be turning you into a truck driver. The sausage alone has probably taken two years off your natural lifespan, and the pancakes--

Jesus, the pancakes.

No one should ever need that much pancake.

It is, once again, quite loud in here. You explain to Marlow the very loosest gist of the situation: that your house hides rooms and produces fucked up nightmares, nightmares custom tailored to you that are consistent, shareable, and operate on their own system of rules. You mostly rush through the bare minimum so he can sort of hopefully follow the conversation you really want to be having:

"Okay," you finally sigh, "so what the fuck happened last night?"

"...We got an error message. Something about a mastermind."

Mastermind...? "A mastermind and their accomplices," you mutter. The Master Mind. God that's silly.

Kate continues. "We didn't wake up in a striped room... and we didn't wake up in the flooded puzzle room. I don't think we were in the castle at all, but fuck if I know. Cici started freaking out about... I don't know, she was rambling about snowglobes, I was too busy freaking out because we were in Hell."

"Hell...?"

Kate leans forward, grabbing a salt shaker and placing it in the center of the table. "So imagine every time you're not staring at this salt shaker, it changes. Like, the metal turns into plastic. Or the salt turns into pepper. Or the whole fucking salt shaker turns into something that wants you to die and I mean right the fuck now. I don't mean when you look away, I mean the second your entire focus isn't on the fucker you can catch it mutating out the corner of your eye.

Every. Fucking. Inch. Every corner and both eyes, like the whole god damn place was... crawling. Doors turned into walls, walls turned into monsters, monsters would just... disappear sometimes. ...Turn into statues and shit."

You have briefly stopped eating to stare at Kate. "Jesus."

"Oh," she says with a bitter, performative grin, "trust me it gets better. So, we flew until we were fucking exhausted, shit's coming out of everywhere, we're trying to watch every direction at once, there is... no fucking rhyme or reason to anything, no structure, just big pillars and chunks of whatever it fucking feels like shooting off into infinity--we find one place, ONE, that SORT of stays the same for five fucking minutes. It was like a... an office... hunting lodge... pirate ship. Like half of one. Anyway, we were like defense and tactics and shit and got overran in minutes. A thing that was mostly shaped like a starfish fucked a schoolbus tried to say my name and then ate me."

...

"It fucking ate you?"

"Took me into its jaws," says Kate, "and tore me apart with its teeth. Yup."

There's a long silence.

Kate fishes a Brainsate out of her jacket and pops it into her mouth.

"I can confirm," she concludes, "that my little puppet body's full of meat. It's full of blood and... little organs. I don't know why it is, I just... now know for a fact that it is. I know if I go back in with you it'll be the normal dungeon and shit'll be fine, but--fuck, man. It--"

She pauses, her gaze having drifted back down to her breakfast.

"...It sucked. Hard. It's like having a panic attack, but instead of feeling like the whole world's attacking you it's actually doing that. Nothing's safe, there's nowhere to run, there's no landmarks, there's no path or goal or... anything. It just... it fucking overloaded us. Your dank-ass church dungeon's a tropical vaykay compared to double accomplicing."

"I gotta ask," Marlow chimes in, "but puppet body...?"

"Everybody takes different forms in the dream," you tell him. "There's... some kind of bullshit personality based tarot gimmick to it, I don't know. Kate's the Devil, she's a half-demon looking doll creature, Cici's the Sun, she's... a bird. ...That kind of looks like the sun I guess. I look like me in the dream since apparently I'm a mastermind, whatever the shit that involves."

"You mostly look like you," Kate adds, "...give or take some proportions."

"You still want in on this?," you ask Marlow.

His face tightens. "Well, now I'm gonna wonder what this thing'd turn me into, so... yeah, I think you're stuck with me."

Fair enough. You turn back to Kate. "What happened to Cici...?"

"I woke her up," Kate says, finally lifting her gaze from the table. "I had to slap her as hard as I could, but I wasn't gonna let her be eaten."

"Is she alright...?"

"Yeah," Kate replies with a short, dry laugh, "I don't hit that hard and Cici's jaw could stop a truck--"

"No, I mean--" You have to pause to regain your composure-- "Mentally, is she doing okay."

"Seemed like it," she says. "She acted more shook about being late for work than she was about... well, all the other shit. It might not've all settled in yet. Or she fucking snapped, I dunno."