A water droplet beaded at the end of my hair and dropped down to join the darkened wet spots on the carpet of my living quarters. Calling it my room felt wrong, it lacked any personal touches I had back home, like the childhood comics I’d cut out my favorite pages from to adorn the walls. Polyzard was my favourite, a bright and colourful story about a boy who finds a wizard’s locket that allows him to transform into animals. Here I couldn’t even control the temperature. It was a bit chilly for wet hair but I didn’t have a blow dryer.
Drip. Drip. The circle of dampness grew larger.
God, I feel homesick.
That was the last shower I was going to get before the mission against Organ.
I couldn’t bring myself to leave the room to grab a dry towel. I didn’t feel like doing anything. Maybe I’d just stay like this, staring at the carpet, until it was time for us to leave.
If I had the power to turn into an animal right now, I’d become a squirrel or a raccoon or something and find a tiny den to curl up inside and forget I’d ever been human.
Instead of Polyzard, I was stuck in the world where shapeshifting was gross and dangerous and if I tried to be a squirrel I’d end up as some insensate half-approximation of an animal.
The rational part of my brain knew that these musings were just a way to cope, but I really wanted an out. Not one where I ran away and all the bad things still happened without me.
I heard voices outside my room, doing a bad job of being quiet.
“Quit shoving. You’re gonna make me spill it!”
“Knock already. Jeez. We aren’t breaking curfew or anything.”
“That would make this more exciting, hm? Gimme a kiss.”
“No way. You just ate licorice.”
“I wanted to crawl in through their window. This is lame.”
I opened the door. A whole gaggle of my friends stood outside, their arms full of pillows and bowls of candy and popcorn. Nell was riding on Tom’s shoulders and her hands were pulling up his eyebrows making him look extra surprised. Neve pushing on Daria’s face to keep her away so the only thing I could see were her comically puckered lips. AJ had looped glowsticks around his Shape, making it look like they were floating in the air. Everyone froze when the door opened and stared at me.
I stared back at them, bemused.
“Why are you all looking at me like I’m the weird one?”
“Movie night,” Kay said, hoisting a projector box above her head like it was a ritualistic sacrifice.
“That’s not an answer.”
“Movie night. Come.”
I looked down at my damp t-shirt. “But I-”
“No argument. Come. None of us were going to be able to sleep anyway.”
With the invitation stated, the procession moved on, led by a staggering Tom with Nell trying to steer him by pulling on his hair. Zola gave me an apologetic grin as he walked past.
To my surprise, Bailey and Vanessa were at the rear.
“Hi Nick!” Vanessa said, flaunting her new neon violet prosthetic with a spin. “We got special permission to come visit.”
I followed the others, walking beside Bailey. They had added a new piercing to the bridge of their nose.
“How are you?” I asked. “Doing okay without Kay and Tom?”
They shrugged. “I still see them all the time on video calls. No biggie.” They gave me a sidelong glance. “Okay, not exactly the same thing as in person. Timing my retorts to Tom is a lot easier now.”
“What have you been up to?”
“Just remote freelancing. Vanessa’s dad fixed up a camper van, so we’ve been traveling Canada a bunch. We’ve both sort of become known as consultants for Shaping-related stuff. And we started a podcast, cause it keeps Vanessa from yapping her dad’s ears off.”
“Busy then. What’s the podcast about?”
Bailey quirked an eyebrow. “Whimsy and magic. Everyone is taking Shaping too damn seriously. We try to push the needle towards wonder instead of fear. Plus, community is super important. There’s Shapers out there with none in person, so they come online. We always try to encourage them to reconnect with local communities. Giving them advice on how to talk to their friends and parents about it, that kind of stuff. You called your parents recently?”
I felt a twinge of guilt. “It’s been a minute.”
Bailey clucked her tongue disapprovingly.
“I’ve done it since Sillwood! Just… I can’t really talk to them about this stuff.”
“Why not?”
“I don’t want to worry them.”
“In my experience, parents worry either way. Might as well give them the happiness of knowing they can still be relied on for emotional support.”
I sighed. “Maybe. Does that still apply when their child is fighting literal monsters?”
The group entered the recreation room and spread the pillows around on the floor while Kay set up the projector.
“What are we watching?”
“Mortinta Amo.”
“Ohhhh! I love that one. It’s so over the top.”
I found a spot next to Daria and Neve. Neve handed me a bowl of sour candies. The pillows were warm and the conversations were lively all around me. I hadn’t noticed it before, but now I could feel the tension melting off of my body, like the glowing square of the projector was a roaring campfire.
Daria looked around. “Where’s your friend from H.E.S.P.? That straight-laced guy.”
“Mac? Ehh… We’re not on the best of terms right now.”
“Aww. That’s sad. Was it because we were having too much fun on that last mission?”
“Kind of. But it’s complicated. Every time he gets too involved I get so mad because he wasn’t there when I needed him and now that I feel more competent and can stand on my own, he’s all up in my business. Maybe I’m just being salty. I really do still care for him.”
“Is it because he’s treating your friendship how it used to be?” Neve asked, popping a popcorn kernel in her mouth.
I pinched a strand of hair, squeezing the water out of it. “That’s probably a part of it. Him being the leader of our squad was a bad idea but somehow he convinced the Director. I can’t shake the feeling that he thought I’d like the idea and then was confused when I made it obvious that I didn’t like it. Luckily he isn’t going to be a part of my squad for the mission tomorrow.”
Neve squeezed Daria’s hand. “I get that. Sometimes you need to be okay with letting go of old friendships. People change and grow distant. That shouldn’t mean that the memories you made together meant nothing.”
I stared at the blank screen, remembering the late night sleepovers from my childhood.
“Yeah.”
Conversations grew quieter as the opening credits rolled. I hadn’t seen the movie before, but it was made clear pretty quickly what kind of movie it was when within the first scene a character was disemboweled on screen in gory detail.
AJ and Vanessa cheered loudly. Neve made a face and endured the rest of the scene with half-closed eyes.
The plot followed a woman who was pursued by her psychotic husband who had died and become a lich. He kept bringing up the past in an attempt to control her and make her doubt herself as she fled from location to location. The husband left a trail of bloody victims in the wake of his pursuit. The woman was trying to find a way to destroy the phylactery, a magic box that contained his soul but she couldn’t damage it.
I glanced over and saw that Daria had fallen fast asleep. Neve gently moved her over and tucked a pillow under her head. She noticed me looking and smiled.
“She’s always like this,” she whispered. “Can’t sit still for two minutes and when you finally convince her to watch something, she falls right asleep. It’s infuriating.” Her tender tone didn’t match the words.
“Are you nervous about tomorrow?” I asked.
She clutched a pillow to her chest and briefly closed her eyes as someone had their head torn off onscreen by the lich’s ghastly strength.
“Fucking terrified. I just know Chase is going to be there. He scares me so bad. The things I saw him do at that asylum… They haunt me to this day.”
“I can imagine,” I murmured.
Tom and Nell were hucking popcorn at each other from across the room. No one was giving the movie their full attention, but that wasn’t the point.
“I don’t know how Daria and you and Nell do it. How do you keep a level head when everything is so awful and terrifying?”
“Keeping my feelings locked up tight is my specialty,” I joked. “But seriously, I don’t think your reaction is something you need to change. If anything, Nell and Daria and I are the weird ones. We like Shaping a little too much.”
“I’ve had to resign myself to that,” Neve said softly, turning to watch Daria’s sleeping face. “I don’t think Daria is ever going to just settle down and have a quiet life with me. So I have to keep following her down dark tunnels and hoping that she’ll give me some time to breathe at the end.”
“You could always wait for her to come back.”
“That’s the thing, right?” Neve said with a sad smile. “I know that she would come back. I don’t have to get involved at all. But I can’t bring myself to do that either. Daria deserves to have me by her side, no matter how much of a tough girl act she puts on, she’s a softy at heart.”
We settled back and the conversations died down as the finale played out. In perhaps the most impressive use of practical visual effects in the whole movie, the protagonist removed her own skin to create a facsimile of herself as bait. The lich-husband sank his claws into the puppet and speared through his own phylactery, causing green lightning and ghosty-spirit stuff to come spilling out. He gave a death howl and the audience whooped and hollered as his body contorted into a tiny ball that was then booted by the bloodied protagonist.
Using the vestiges of the lich’s leftover power, the hero changed their body, taking on some of the features of their dead husband. With a new identity they started fresh, bringing the broken phylactery with them as a keepsake. In the final scene, some green smoke curled out of the phylactery that looked like claws and they just laughed and blew it away with puffed up cheeks.
The movie ended and people continued to snack and talk. Kay started up a new movie and the night continued.
I didn’t say much for the rest of the night, but my hair had dried and it was warm and I felt safe. Movies played against the back of my eyelids with dreamy quality. Nothing really made sense, but the vibes were perfect.
—
The light of dawn warmed my face and I opened my eyes in a squint.
Everyone was lounging around on pillows while the first bells began to ring, signalling the beginning of preparations to leave.
I breathed in deeply and sat up, testing the tightness of my body.
We could have had ten more movie nights like that and it wouldn’t have been enough. But staving off the bad vibes couldn’t last forever. Neither could power stay in the same corrupt hands forever.
Organ had a reckoning coming to them.