Three (Plus Eleven More)’s a Crowd

The third person we were waiting for turned out being a face that might be familiar to some of you: Alicia Owly, a small girl around my age. In all honesty, as surprised as we were to see her, she was equally surprised to see us.  Turns out that she’s working for EAT, who sent here here (Last doesn’t know if it’s the doing of her EAT, our EAT, both, or even the same EAT). Working for EAT. Not serving EAT. She’s very insistent about that, which Last understands.

Apparently she also has a Dying Man shard (a piece of the Dying Man, I think?) inside her, called The Shining One, or Shine. I don’t really understand how the Dying Man works, so I was really surprised when she referred to the shard as a “she.”  Crimson laughed at that, telling me to be more open-minded about it. I was more surprised to find out that Shine is apparently “friendly.” Alicia says that Shine does have some healing properties, and she herself has combat experience so she’s able to pull her own weight.

That makes fourteen of us—sixteen if you count Shine and the Manufactured Newborn, though I don’t know how much we can rely on Fears.  It’s a pretty big number, but it doesn’t seem that big when you keep in mind that we’re trying to kill the Rake.

We’ve been really redoubling our efforts the last few days. I’ve been training with pretty much all the Masks, as well as Alicia, Angel, and the Inspector.  Last announced yesterday that he, Crimson, Angel, and the Inspector had managed to come up with a plan, but also insisted that we’re not allowed to share on our blogs so that we “don’t end up blowing it.” He has a bit of a strange insistence on that, with half being not accidentally tipping our hand to our enemies, and half being what he refers to as “narrative causality.” He’s convinced that for the Core Theory to work, narrative structure is incredibly important. Not only do we need archetypes, but we need to turn our lives into a story—and revealing the plan before it’s been enacted causes it to fall apart because “the story we’re acting out resists redundancy and other such shoddy writing.”

Half of what he says makes absolutely no sense to me. It’s like he’s speaking an entirely different language.

We’re just about ready, though. We’re leaving tomorrow to go where we need to be. Fourteen of us. Fourteen people taking on the monster in the dark.

Wish us luck.