"So how do you guys know Dr. Finch?," you ask. "I don't take you for scientists. ...Or politicians."

You really just need them to keep talking. You've almost got it figured out; asking about Leopold Finch is faint on the list of suggestions in your mind, but you're saving the really big suggestions for when you get a better grasp of things.

...That, and you're personally pretty curious how he plays into all this, even if the drifting voices in your head are less so. This is at least the second time his name's been dropped--Marlow and Afu mentioned him being in some kind of old snuff film, and that what's-its-name incident. It could be a coincidence, but... no, no nothing is probably a coincidence at this stage.

"Well," replies Haunt, "we don't know him per se--"

"Haunt," interjects Darkness, "for god's sake it's not a sharing circle, don't just tell her what we--"

"--She's supposed to find us in the dream," says Haunt, talking louder over the puppet's protests, "not go on a wild goose chase looking for Dr. Finch. Everything we know about what he knows about Human Survival Instinct and the Choir has been stated in public talks--"

"She's not even supposed to be here!," declares Darkness, sitting straighter on her wooden throne. "If you just keep feeding her information like this you're going to screw everything up--"

Yes, fight among yourselves.

Stall for more time.

Haunt and Darkness both sound familiar, the more you focus on it--but they also don't ... sound, like anything. Nothing does. There is no sound here. It's... the idea of how they talk--

God damn this place is weird.

It's not real. It's not entirely unreal. You don't have a physical body; even if you had eyeballs in a skull attached to a living brain, you don't think there's any photons here to give you a definition of how anything should look. There is mana here--and you have mana, but not your normal reservoir. Further, your ability to actually manipulate that mana is limited compared to the dream world--as though the system that normally regulates all the videogame bullshit is disabled.

Or more likely, the system is absent.

You're between.

Things in the dungeon are normally representative. Your body there is based on some combination of your ideal self and your actual self image. The brutal medieval environment is a blend of your feelings about society and the world of Crush Souls, a world that you spend a great deal of time pondering and that you understand better than your own real world. The monsters in your dream dungeon are personal horrors given form. All of this is known.

The dream makes those shells. The dream presents their imagery to you, and provides you the methods of interacting with them.

Here, there is no shell and nothing to form that shell.

Everything is raw. Exposed, like bad wiring.

Whatever the three Grandiose Paradoxes actually are, they're operating on the outskirts--beyond the dungeon, outside the dome, exterior from everything you know on either side of existence fantastical or otherwise. This room, as much as it can be said to be a room at all, is somewhere far down the road from reality proper but not yet hitting the city limits of the nightmare zone.

This is bad, because you're in a lawless oblivion and unsure of what that leaves you capable of.

It's also good, because you can see... feel... er, detect the absolute of things. You know this place is between worlds--you are 100% confident in that. You can't be fooled by your own sight or a mana fueled veneer. You simply... know. You grasp the truth of this reality so firmly in your mind that the only thing remaining is indisputable fact, like squeezing coal into diamond. Not a fact proven by evidence or merely accepted by you personally, but the very concept of fact laid bare. The core of your being is witness to pure, unfiltered truth.

You're curious how many more diamonds you can squeeze out of this metaphorical coal.

"ENOUGH!," booms Hunger, silencing the bickering of the other two. "YOU ARE BOTH IDIOTS. MY ETERNAL FOE PLAIRE STEVENS IS PLAYING YOU."

"Playing me?," snaps Darkness. "Playing ME?!," she repeats more vehemently, twisting around in her seat so hard she almost tumbles out of it. "Nobody plays ME, I am the one who does the playing! I'M the brains of this operation, Hunger, you're just the BEEF! And Haunt is... well, Haunt is here, too."

"I like to think I'm the heart and soul keeping this group together," states Haunt. "You two are too blinded by ego and rage, respectively, to function without me."

...Darkness a Marionette, when angry, sounds an awful lot like a smaller wooden Hunger the Beast. Haunt Butterfly, when her adequacy is challenged, starts to sound like Darkness a Marionette. They've either been around each other a very long time (they did describe themselves as ancient enemies of man, after all) or there's something even weirder going on.

And each of them sound familiar in their own way but most of your whole memories are trapped in your real body and all you have are fumes, and the wild ideas floating in from... uhhhhh

"You're the weakest one here, Haunt," Darkness replies, "by a sizeable margin."

"YES JUST KEEP SPILLING OUR SECRETS, MS. BRAINS OF THE OPERATION."

"When you think about it," Haunt begins with a small toss of her silver hair, "being the weakest physically makes me better than you both, given what we know of how strength is defined. The power has simply gone to your heads."

"NO," replies Hunger, "THE POWER HAS CLEARLY GONE TO MY MUSCLES."

While the three continue to verbally eat each other, you begin to feel around for what this Choir thing is about. You almost miss it entirely, as the thoughts flowing in from the Choir blend seamlessly with your own--but here, with so few thoughts of your own left to have, the Choir has no cover.

But they're not left exposed. They're not here, in this room--

They're somewhere else and you're tethered to them, much the same way you're tethered to both your physical body and your dome-contained dream palace.

...The Choir are somewhere else entirely, neither in your native reality nor in the dream. Somewhere distant, and faint--your attempts to follow the connection only lead toward vaguer and less familiar truths you can't even start to decipher in any meaningful way. You're more interested in what the Choir is doing--have they been giving you ideas this whole time? You're put off by the implication that some mysterious outside force has been manipulating you, but at the same time...

at the same time, your instincts since moving into the house have been crisper than they've ever been in your life. You assumed it was mostly down to desperate times and the change in environment, but if anything, having your whole life uprooted to throw yourself into this fucked up nonsensical magic bullshit with a bunch of strangers should be making your depression and anxiety worse. Plus--as you've noticed--most of these ideas being floated into your mind are so in line with your current goals that you never noticed they might not be yours. They could all be your ideas if the mood struck you right. The Choir could just be a bunch of parallel timeline yous, or future yous, or hypothetical yous. Anything's on the god damn table at this point--

but the argument's starting to die down.

You have a pretty solid grasp of where you are, and what you are while you're in here.

It might be time to take some of those bigger suggestions.

"--I HATE EVERY ONE OF YOU," concludes Hunger the Beast. "I HATE PLAIRE STEVENS MORE THAN ANYTHING BUT YOU ARE BOTH TOP CONTENDERS FOR SECOND PLACE."

"That makes zero sense," says Haunt--

You interrupt. "Why do you hate me?," you ask, fighting back a smile. You can both smile and resist the urge to do so, which is probably a good sign as far as this whole actualizing the concept of your own existence in a questionably perceivable plane thing goes. You continue. "I don't hate you. ...I'm actually pretty envious of those abs."

"THAT'S EXACTLY IT," Hunger practically sputters beneath her mask. "YOU COVET, BUT YOU DO NOT TAKE. YOU DESIRE, BUT YOU DO NOT ACHIEVE. YOU CAN'T. YOU ARE INCAPABLE. YOU ARE BROKEN. YOU WHIMPER AND ROT, A HOLLOW HUSK PROPPED UP IN FRONT OF A COMPUTER WHILE THE WORLD PASSES YOU BY. WHEN YOU CAN HELP IT YOU BLAME SOCIETY; WHEN YOU CANNOT HELP IT YOU BLAME YOURSELF. YOU COULD BE ME. YOU COULD BE THIS POWERFUL BUT YOU ARE HELPLESS. YOU ARE MADE HELPLESS. YOU HAVE AMBITION BUT IT IS STIFLED BY YOU AND WHAT THEY MADE YOU AND WHAT THEY'VE DONE TO YOU. YOU ARE A TURTLE PLACED IN THE ROAD AND IT MAKES ME MISERABLE TO WATCH YOU CRAWL ACROSS THE ASPHALT ONE SECOND AT A TIME. THE MORE I UNDERSTAND ABOUT YOU PLAIRE STEVENS THE MORE I WANT YOU TO BE SOMEONE ELSE ENTIRELY. ANYONE. YOU HAVE BEEN GRANTED NUMEROUS BOONS IN SHORT SUCCESSION AND YOU HAVE EARNED NONE OF THEM. YOU ARE BOTH INCREDIBLY LUCKY AND TREMENDOUSLY UNLUCKY, YOURSELF AN INFURIATING PARADOX UPON WHICH SO MUCH NOW HANGS IN THE BALANCE. YOU ARE FIT TO BE PITIED AND I HAVE NONE TO GIVE YOU. YOU DON'T DESERVE A CHOIR. YOU DON'T DESERVE A MAGIC HOUSE. YOU DON'T DESERVE ALL THESE NEW FRIENDS. YOU HAVE EARNED NOTHING. NONE OF IT WILL MAKE YOU HAPPY BECAUSE YOU KNOW THIS AS WELL. YOU CAN'T EVEN ENJOY IT. YOU DESERVE TO BE PUNCHED IN THE FACE, REPEATEDLY, BY SOMEONE WITH ENORMOUS FISTS. I, HUNGER THE BEAST, FEATURE SUCH FISTS AND I AM STRONG ENOUGH TO BEAR THE RESPONSIBILITY. THE RESPONSIBILITY OF PUNCHING YOU IN THE FACE UNTIL YOUR HEAD EXPLODES AND YOU HAVE DIED."

... Jesus Christ, alright

Even Haunt and Darkness are taken aback, despite their best efforts to hide it.

"...So if I took what I wanted," you begin, "you'd like me more?"

"MAYBE," Hunger replies. "But probably not."

You sniff. Loudly and performatively, because it's not like you need to breathe in here.

You extend a hand, fully realized but not necessarily materialized,

and flip the bird to Hunger the Beast.

And then you make a run for it.

Straight into the crowd, and more specifically,

straight for Darkness a Marionette's fancy captain hat.

You realize your mistake quickly: you, too, are between.

Not quite the boss-killing action hero you dream of being,

a little too much of a pudgy (yet irritatingly thin) nerd who lives on a ramen and potato-based diet and rarely runs.

Not exactly one or the other, but you kind of really need to be one and not the other to pull this off.

And even then

You get about four and a half steps forward before Haunt Butterfly backhands you with such speed and such force that it instantly kills you.

(Or whatever realized body you could be said to possess in this unreal space, you're getting kind of worn out by this abstract pseudo-psychic non-existence shit anyway.)

You are Plaire Stevens, a 21-year-old from Addersfield, Misuschaqua, and you are hosting a potluck in your recently acquired haunted house. Everyone appears to be having a good time.

It's about 8:42 pm.

You have a small nosebleed.