Water Droplets Beep Beep Beep

Nothing.

She’d been holding right onto my chin and nothing, this wasn’t normal. It took me a moment to realize but once I did, I stumbled back. Apparently, I’d sufficiently showcased how shocked I was since the detective girl gave out into a little fit of laughter.

“Have you never seen thin fabric before?” she giggled at me, holding her hand up and pinching at it, revealing an almost glass-like transparent thin piece of fabric.

“Dear God, don’t scare me like that. What is that?”

“Actually I haven’t got a clue, rather useful though, don’t you think?”

She was smirking at me with a face so smug you’d expect to see it plastered all over the internet. Now that I mention it, her entire demeanour had shifted along with her outfit. She’d changed into a pair of plain sweatpants and an old white shirt, as dressed down as you could get. Instead of the cold and harsh image of a detective on duty she now rode dangerously close to the impression you’d get from the friendly and comfortable childhood friend trope character, soft-spoken and well-mannered, the obvious choice in almost any romance story.

That is until she spoke.

“What are you gawking at? Close your mouth, I can smell it from here.”

“Ah—”

“And you’re aware I wasn’t joking about the stripping, correct? You’ll be making your own Outfit as well, everyone who joins does.”

“Joins?”

“Well yes, I’ve already decided it best for you to join the group,” she said.

She said it with so much self-assurance that I didn’t know if I could oppose her.

“Well… First, you’ll have to tell me about what it is you do, I’ll consider joining after you clarify a few things. Like if this is a cult or not.”

She laughed, “I don’t think we’re a cult, though perhaps recently we have been trending in that direction. Before any of that though, I’ll have to assess you.”

“Assess? You mean like, a physical?”

“No, you pervert,” she seemed to be holding back another giggle, it was a stark contrast from the prior cold declines to answer my questions. As much as the change in attitude was welcomed, it still worried me a little. I would have to stay alert, “Think more like… a mental.”

“Oh, you mean, that.”

She nodded.

“Not much, really. I know that it’s a sort of connection.”

“Mhm,” she urged me on.

“I know that there aren’t many of us. In fact, you’re only the second I’ve met.”

“And who was the first?” she asked.

I paused, “An… old friend. She’s dead now.”

She stopped, dropped her head slightly as if somewhat regretful to have asked, “I’m sorry for your loss.”

“It’s alright. It was a… long time ago.”

She brought her head back up to look at me, “Very well then. I suppose I’ll be clarifying some things for you.”

“Here?” I stopped her, “With this room’s privacy rating?”

She smirked a little, “No need to worry, there have been a few modifications made to the room.”

None that I had spotted at least.

“Right to it then,” she started to pace between the two couches as if this weren’t her first time giving the rundown, “I wasn’t being entirely dishonest when I said we were simply a group of friends, we are friends. It’s just that… the circumstances in which we all met were, well, they’re familiar to you now. We each seem to possess this… ability, to see a place that no one else seems to see. We aren’t sure why, and most of us aren’t sure if we’d like to know why. Though we do all have a few things in common,” she stopped walking to look at me, “I’d be willing to wager that you don’t have a neural chip.”

“I don’t.” That was something she could only know if... “No one in the group does?”

“Not a single one of us.”

“That’s nuts, isn’t something like eighty percent of Japan chipped?”

“Ninety, actually.”

“How many people are there? In the group.”

“Only eight. Well, nine again, including yourself.”

“Again?”

“Right, the other thing I needed to address,” she paused, opting to lean against the back of the couch she’d been standing beside. “That murder last night,” another pause, she stood back up again and resumed her pacing, “I think that the girl who died was like us.”

I waited for her explanation.

“I believe so because… the man who’d been killed by the same person about a week ago, he was part of our group.”

“So you think that the murders—”

“Are targeting us, yes.”

So that was the motive she mentioned. Silence befell the room for a brief moment, both of us were taking in the information. I doubt she’d have had much time to think about it herself.

“And you don’t suspect me?” I asked.

“I don’t, though I can’t promise how the rest will feel.”

“Damn, I guess I’m kind of curious to find out.”

She gave off a grin, “Wonderful! It’s about time we get started with your Outfit then, don’t you think?”

“Uhh… Are you at least going to tell me how it works before I have to get naked?”

She grabbed at my hand again as if whenever she was wearing gloves she just had the right to hold it, “Oh, I think it’s more fun if you go in blind,” she said, leading me to stand right in front of the sewing machine.

“Are you sure? I’ve seriously never used one of these before, actually, I don’t think I’ve ever even seen one before.”

“Oh hush, I’m sure you’ll do fine.”

Starting to get a bit concerned, I continued my protest. Was I really supposed to just learn how to use a sewing machine on the spot?

“I have full faith that you will,” she answered, “Now close your eyes.”

Analyzing the mechanism in front of me one last time, trying at least to get a grasp of how it worked, I finally let my eyes close and took a deep breath.

“Oh just splendid! This is truly my favourite part.”

Right as I was about to ask for how long I was supposed to keep my eyes shut, I felt a light pressure against my nose. When I opened to look in response, I was no longer standing in that large room.

* * *

It was damp, all that I could hear was the faint dripping of water somewhere off in the distance. The drips were slow and equally spaced, though their echoes didn’t seem to last the same amount of time, as if it’d been differently sized droplets that were falling. I felt as if there must be a meaning hidden within the sound, for how irregular it was. Though I hadn’t the faintest clue how to decipher something of the sort.

There wasn’t anything around, or at least I thought there wasn’t for a good while. It would be more accurate to say that it was just very dark and my eyes hadn’t yet adjusted to the light, or lack thereof. Faintly forming in front of me was the shape of something, certain of it being a thing I was, though what it was I wouldn’t be able to tell anyone, let alone know for myself.

The water dripping steadily became more prominent. It was the only sound other than my breath and heartbeat in what seemed to be a massive space; if the echo was any indication of the size. I suppose this was what she had meant by going in blind. Upon second glance, I noticed that the shape in front of me was actually changing. At first, it had been hard to see through the hazy outline but with each drip of water, the shape shifted.

Curious, I listened once again to the water droplets. Each drip sounded the same, yes, but really, it was the echo that held all of its information; it told of the size of each droplet. Once that realization hit my brain, so too did all of the extra information that the echoes had been hoarding. Slowly, words became discernible through the overlap in each drip’s shadow; words with a familiar voice: the detective’s.

The more she came up in my thoughts, the more I felt it ridiculous that I hadn’t yet a name to call her by. I would have to get a name after I was out of here, no matter what. With that settled, I listened closely for her voice in the echoes. Drip. Drip. Drop. Drawn. Drought. Draft. Drawl. Germinate. Dress. Genes. Drink. Jump. Dribble. Jigsaw. Dreams. Jaffa cakes. Derivate. Jingle. Dew. Juxtapose. Digital. And so on and so on and so on. I kept listening to the words, each helped to form a more vivid image in my mind of the shape in front of me. The edges slowly gained clarity, the fuzzy-wuzzy, hazy-wazy, wibbly-wobbly, you get it, was slowly being sharpened into a fine line between nothing and something.

That something was also turning into a recognizable shape, one that I myself could nearly put to words. To tell the truth, it was tip of the tongue levels of frustration, to the max. I stopped listening to the detective’s words for a moment, trying to grasp at what this something was called, it had a name I was certain. It was the name of some clothing, an outfit, it was…

And then everything went black again.

* * *

I don’t remember the conclusion I had come to, perhaps I hadn’t even had the time to think it once it had come. Instead, I awoke on the floor, my cheek nearly merged into the rough concrete that I was laying on. I’d been asleep. The first thing I could hear was the sound of the television, it seemed to be playing a movie in a language that I couldn’t understand, maybe Spanish. I groaned, peeling my face from the ground and forcing my vision to focus on a far-off point, though there wasn’t one in my immediate vicinity, I’d passed out right in front of the sewing machine.

“Look who’s finally awake!”

I heard an unfamiliar voice coming from behind me, I leaned on one arm to get myself sitting upright, turning to look at who’d been speaking to me. What greeted me was the wildly grinning face of a man I’d never met before. He had scruffy hair on top of his head and a scraggly layer of it across his face, his limbs seemed to shoot out from his body like trees of an enchanted forest sprouting from the ground in every which direction. Hiding the core of his body was a patterned Hawaiian dress shirt and a pair of loose egg-white shorts. He was sitting on one of the couches, leaning over the back of it and staring right at my face, enough to make me a bit uncomfortable. The detective that I’d met earlier was standing next to him.

Upon shifting my head slightly to the left, still in the process of waking up, there was a large cube sitting right beside me. I wasn’t sure who’d put it there or what it was but it must’ve been difficult to carry going by how big it looked. At the bottom of the cube, two cylinders shot off in either direction, and two more again near the middle, craning my neck upwards, I noticed one last cylinder sticking upright out of the cube’s top. The one on top almost resembled a head, and on either side arms and legs, as if it were some crude attempt at turning a box into a human. That was when I realized it was a human, only about two or three times the size of a regular one.

“That there’s Holt,” the voice came from the scruffy man on the couch, “I heard Lain gotcha all acquainted with the facilities.”

The detective girl, supposedly named Lain, elbowed him in the arm.

The man flinched back a little as if afraid she’d hurt him further, “Name’s Maria, by the way, you been out cold there a couple hours, y’know that?”

“Feels like it,” I answered.

Finally, Lain spoke, “I honestly hadn’t a clue how long you’d sleep for. My apologies if you’re missing something important.”

“I’m good, haven’t been busy in years,” I dragged my hand along the front of my face.

“Would you mind standing up? I haven’t seen your Outfit since you finished it.”

“Since I finished it?”

“Since you finished it. I told you that I had faith.”

Now that she’d mentioned my Outfit, I remembered why I was passed out in front of the sewing machine in the first place. Or more accurately I made the connection in my head just then, the memory was still foggy. Glancing down at my torso, I looked to be wearing a beige sweater and a short pair of shorts, shorter than any I’d worn before. I could also feel a tight fabric on my hands and up my arms, presumably, the same one the detective—I mean Lain, had been wearing.

I stood up to comply with her request.

“Hmm, looks to me that I was correct. We’ll call you Little Fledgling.”

It took a second to register, “What?”

“Your name, well of course just Fledgling should suffice,” she said.

“Fledge! That fits, don’cha think?” Maria added.

“You took it upon yourselves to name me, did you?”

“Oh cut the act kid, you can’t guess for yourself that my name isn’t Maria?”

“At the time he insisted on Santa,” Lain added, “I’m sure you can see how that turned out.”

Santa? Oh. The Santa Maria, the boat.

“Do you all have names in two parts?” I asked.

“All but the Kaiser,” said Maria.

“Who’s that?”

“Damn you was right Lain, he does ask a buttload o’ questions. That’s the man you can thank for settin’ all this up,'' he motioned to the room around us.

“Oh, I haven’t yet explained that,” Lain interjected.

“Huh? What on God’s blue Earth was ya doin’ then?”

As the two started to bicker between themselves, I noticed another unknown figure sitting on one of the nine chairs that had been present. It was a girl, considerably younger than Lain. She sat silently, looking down at her own feet. Right when I was about to look away, she peeked over her shoulder at me. She had a cute round face and clear piercing eyes but upon noticing that I was watching her she quickly turned them back to her feet.

“Have you ever brought in a new member? Do you actually know how many questions they ask?” Lain looked like she was about to hit Maria again.

“Care to introduce the girl?” I decided it best to force their topic to a change.

“Oh, that’s Haruka. Say hello Haru,” Lain encouraged.

Haruka didn’t even show signs of having heard the suggestion.

“And that one behind ya’s Panda,” Maria pointed with his chin.

I turned to look, and sure enough, behind me on the pile of fabrics laid a small boy. He couldn’t have been much older than a decade. He was fast asleep.

“We’re only waiting for Kaiser, Char, and Muse. Then we’ll all be here,” Lain explained.

“Is there some reason everyone's meeting?” I asked.

“Well, yes. I explained it to you before you made your Outfit.”

“The murders?” I guessed.

Lain gave a confirming raise of her eyebrows.

In my peripheral vision, I noticed that when I mentioned the murders, Haruka, the girl sitting alone, turned her attention back over to our conversation.

“Do you have to wait for them to get here?” I asked.

“Well, not entirely. But we should at the least wait for Kaiser and he’ll probably be the last to arrive anyways. Honestly, I’m surprised that Muse of all people is taking so—”

THUMP. THUMP. THUMP.

Instantly the room went silent, my attention shot to the source of the noise.

THUMP. THUMP. THUMP.

It was the front door. Its metal clang reverberated for a few seconds after the third thump. It sounded desperate.

“We should—”

“SHH,” Lain hushed me without taking her eyes off the door.

It must have been at least two minutes of stillness from the last thump before anyone said anything. Maria broke the silence.

“We gotta check.”

With his suggestion, Lain and I crept towards the entrance. Somehow we both knew our jobs without a single word of exchange. She would unlock it, I would open it.

Beep.

Beep.

Beep.

Beep.

Beep.

Beep.

Beep.

Beep.

Click.

The thing opened much more easily than I’d been expecting for such a large metal door, why wasn’t it heavy? The reason behind it opening so easily then fell right against the concrete by my feet. Head first.

“MUSE!” Lain screamed.

Before I could tell what was happening, Holt had rushed up to the man’s body, placing two of his fat fingers along its neck.

“No pulse,” he said.

There was a long streak of blood running down the hallway, and ending at the door. Muse was dead.