LNH/LUNA: The Liminals #10: Solitude

[Jeanne Morningstar]

THE LIMINALS
#10: "Solitude"
A hauntological tale by Jeanne Morningstar

====

MAY 2020, SEVERAL WEEKS AFTER THE PREVIOUS ISSUE:

So it was all over now: the Brotherhoods were defeated, Simplicity had 
been vanquished, and all was well. Except it really wasn't. Once the 
medical staff had figured out they hadn't been infected, they ended up 
going back into quarantine. They'd rolled out a first wave of vaccines 
so people had a bit more freedom to get around the HQ if they masked and 
took reasonable precautions, but it still wasn't to where she needed it 
to be and she didn't know when it would be. Dee had said that issues set 
after the cure had already been posted, but that was never a perspective 
she'd be able to understand. Here and now, the sabertooth virus still 
hadn't been cured, and Victoria was still stuck in her room, alone.

She'd been thinking a lot, lately, about her little adventure in the 
club. [See Liminals #2]. Even there, she'd been isolated, absorbed in 
her mission, but she'd still felt like she'd been part of something 
bigger. She wondered if she'd ever get to have an experience like that 
again. She'd been feeling like she'd just about to reach out to touch 
the external world... and then it had been ripped away from her.

She was tired. She'd been talking nonstop with her friends online, but 
she needed to feel Alice's touch. Alice, even though she was more 
extroverted, was taking this a bit better; she'd spent a lot of her 
early life online and her first relationship had been with someone she 
only ever knew through the net. Victoria had always felt herself cut off 
from life and other people, she needed touch and presence more.

Would this ever end? Or would it end up like the Real World? A world 
where the pandemic dragged on forever, where the crowd would go on like 
everything was normal while people were dropping like flies around them. 
Even the Looniverse couldn't have something that horrible or absurd... 
right?

Her past had already been ripped away from her. Now she was worried her 
future would too.

She didn't have any way to affect the world outside. She couldn't do 
much about the future. But she could do something about her past.

She still had the book, the graphic novel that Library Lad had given 
her. [Bite-Sized Tales of the LNH #19–Footnote Girl] The one that held 
her past, or part of it. She'd been afraid, unwilling, unable to 
look–stalled out by the loss of her own and her Writer's motivation. 
She'd been afraid that as much as it hurt she didn't know, she'd hurt 
more if she did. But something was different now. Maybe it was the fact 
her Writer had finally got their motivation back, maybe it was the 
aftereffects of that pink, sparkly wave of motivation. Maybe it was the 
fact that she already felt like she had nothing left to lose.

Everything hurt now. So why not?

She pulled the book off the shelf slowly turned through its pages. There 
were words written on the cover and the pages, but they slipped away 
before she could read them, as if they were in a language she didn't 
know. She saw disconnected images, faces she felt she should have 
recognized but didn't. Some panels were blanked out, others were covered 
in moving patterns of static.

There was one figure who she was sure meant something to her. A woman 
who was fat, had messy dark hair, wore a kind of futch outfit with jeans 
and a bomber jacket. She was wielding a staff into battle against a wave 
of robots. She seemed to know perfectly who she is, which gave her a 
deep power, something Victoria found comforting–but she didn't know why.

The book trembled in her hand. She felt almost like she was about to cry 
but she knew the tears wouldn't come. She closed the book and slipped it 
back onto the shelf.

Somewhere in the distance, she heard cold laughter.

She turned around. Nothing was there. In fact, the room was filled with 
an overwhelming sense of absence and emptiness. Instantly, she 
panicked–she *needed* to get out, right now, before this emptiness ate 
her alive.

She reached for the door handle, panicked again, realizing she needed to 
put on the mask–

But it didn't matter. Her hand passed through the door.

She'd fallen into her Limbo state. This was always her greatest 
fear–that if she were left alone long enough, she'd just fade away.

There was no need to panic, she told herself. She could control this 
now, more or less; she'd done it before. She breathed steadily in and 
out and tried to pull herself back to reality, as she had whenever she'd 
gone into the Limbo state in battle.

She felt her being grip something, but it was like a smooth wall and she 
slipped away again into nothing.

All right. She could still get out. She could reach Alice, or Dee, or 
someone else with spiritual senses somehow. She could still get out.

She stepped right through the doors. You don't learn to appreciate 
things like the solidity of doors, she thought, until they'd gone away.

On the other side was the hallway, still as eerily empty as it had been, 
but it was different. It was blurry, derezzed, covered by a haze of 
image artifacts like a ps1 game.

As she walked down it, not really knowing where she was going, she saw 
others walking by. Some were net.heroes, others were people dressed in 
old-fashioned clothes, all carrying on conversations in disconnected 
babble that didn't quite resolve into words. There were other things, 
too, which she could see at the edge of her vision which seemed to 
vanish when she looked at them.

"Hey," she heard someone say. It took a moment to realize this was 
someone talking to her.

She turned around. There was a little girl, almost four feet tall,who 
wore a torn white dress. Her oval, pallid face was framed by long, 
stringy black hair. Around her eyes were what might have been messy 
black goth makeup or ectoplasmic goop.

She also happened to be floating in midair.

Victoria's first impulse was to run, but she thought she somehow 
recognized this figure. "You're... Wait, wait, hold on, I'll have it in 
a minute. You're one of those characters who showed up for the big 
fight. You're ah... Small-Attention-Span-For-Nonsense Lass? No, that 
can't be right.."

The ghost cackled. "I'm Scary Ghost Lass, silly!"

"Oh, that's right."

"This is what I wear when I'm off duty. Like it?" she said.

"You look nice," said Victoria. "I'm just wondering, how can you see me?"

"I'm a ghost. Boo!" she said for affect, and spun around, her hair 
forming a web around her in the air. "I can see all kinds of things that 
are dead, or aren't alive or aren't real like you'd understand but are 
still here. This place has a lot of 'em. See, here's one–the ghost of 
Flatulence Lad."

Victoria saw a vague, somehow familiar blobby humanlike presence 
floating by.

"Hi!" said Scary Ghost Lass.

"Hi!" said Flatulence Lad. He was then launched away into the distance 
by a massive fart.

"He's pretty nice," said Scary Ghost Lass, "but not much of a 
conversationalist. Some of the ghosts are a lot harder to get along with."

"So... how many ghosts are there here?"

"Lots! Most of 'em are from before the LNH, though. See, this place used 
to be a hotel. Hotels are mega haunted. Lots of murders. Lots of 
traumatic residue that leads to poltergeists and stuff."

"Right. That's where Stephen King gets half his plots from."

"And there's other stuff too," continued Scary Ghost Lass. "This place 
is a dimensional nexus–a magnet for all kinds of weirdies. Ab-natural 
beings, spirits, geists, ghasts, figments, parenthetical people, beings 
there's not even a name for...  See, there's one."

What looked like another little girl was walking toward them, wearing a 
green gingham dress, except that she had a 19th century Kodak for a 
head. "Hiya!" said Scary Ghost Lass, waving.

"One. Seven. Five. Two. Three. Four. One," said the being in a 
monotonous, mechanical voice.

"I'll figure out how to talk to her eventually. Anyway, there's a bunch 
of that are kind of not real. Some of 'em are even in the Legion, like 
Invisible-Intangible Inaudible Lass, the Intangible Legion, Figment Lad..."

"Do you think one of them could help me?" said Victoria.

Scary Ghost Lass shook her head. "Most of 'em don't know the others 
exist. They wouldn't be able to see you. And probably whatever's causing 
this would make it hard for your friends to see you too."

"Hmm." As distressing as this was, now Victoria was a bit more relaxed, 
able to turn back on her mechanic brain and think about it as a problem 
she could solve. "I could try to talk to one of the sorcerers. Like 
Occultism Kid–"

"I never go to their room. Not with the Door Warden in the state it's in."

"Mm." The demon that guarded the previous Occultism Kid's door was no 
doubt still grieving for the previous Occultism Kid, who'd departed the 
universe for parts unknown. And negotiating with a demon in that state 
would not be easy or fun.

"So, the way I see it," said Scary Ghost Lass, "your best bet is to go 
to a part of the LNHQ that has a lot of built-up spiritual energy and 
try and use it to slingshot you back to reality."

"Okay," said Victoria. "But, if I understand how this all works, that'd 
be a place where something traumatic happened, something that left a 
powerful psychic mark. Which means a pretty nasty poltergeist, at best."

"Pretty much," said Scary Ghost Lass. "But that's your option. The other 
one is... you could just try and wait this out, make it work for you. 
Like I said, there's people who are just like that, and they struggle 
sometimes but they can live with it."

Victoria thought about it for a moment. Maybe it was better to let go, 
to relax the constant effort it took to hold onto her being. She knew 
something awful was waiting for her here in creation's shadow, but maybe 
it was better to let it take her now and not spend her whole life 
running from it, knowing it would get her in the end.

But she shook her head. She gripped her hands into fists, relieved she 
could still feel her fingers. "I have a girlfriend. I have friends. I 
have a life I want to get back to. It may not be much, but it's 
something. I fought hard for it and I'm not going to let it go."

"Good," said Scary Ghost Lass. She smiled a wide smile that in most 
contexts would not be very reassuring.

"Wait," said Victoria, "first, one question.  You wouldn't happen to 
have seen a furby anywhere, would you?"

"Huh?"

"Never mind. Just a weird dream my friend had once." [See issue 
1–Footnote Girl]

Scary Ghost Lass led her through walls and across hallways, into a part 
of the LNHQ she'd never seen. Here, the wallpaper was a red, Arts and 
Crafts-ish pattern–a bit old fashioned even in its time, this was the 
Net.ropolis Grand Hotel. Many said the LNHQ was alive, and Victoria 
wondered whether it too had its secrets, its painful memories it kept 
hidden away.

They stepped, quite literally, through the door into numbered 1408. The 
wallpaper was cracked and faded, the bedframe and tables dusty–this must 
have been a time after the LNHQ had fallen out of use as a hotel, when 
it was between superhero teams.

The door creaked open. The two women who walked in were breathtaking. 
One was a sharp-eyed woman who wore a nattily tailored suit. Her gaze, 
framed by meticulously styled shoulder-length hair, turned around the 
room, wary and hawklike. She was not beautiful, perhaps, but deeply 
powerful, deeply compelling.

The other was a blonde–not just a blonde, someone who looked like an 
embodiment of the pure idea of The Blonde. Her dress and her long hair 
flowed like a river as she moved. She was the kind of woman who's be 
right at home walking into a cynical cigarette-smoking noir detective's 
office, the kind of woman you could kill or die for.

They were dressed in clothes of the 1940s and they looked like they’d 
stepped off an old movie screen, incongruously colorized

This must have been when Boy Lad held court here. No doubt there were 
many things he didn’t know about; the LNHQ is huge and no one really 
knew whether Boy Lad’s version of the LNH even had any other members. 
Some questioned whether Boy Lad himself ever existed or was just a 
legend—but in a world made of stories, was there a difference?

The two women sat down on the bed together and kissed for a short moment 
before drawing apart. They began a discussion, which turned into a loud 
argument about... something. Victoria still couldn't make out any words. 
The brunette grew more and more harsh and insistent; the blonde's voice 
reverberated with emotions. Then the blonde's quivering hand drew 
something out of her purse–a gun. The brunette moved to pull it out of 
her hand, they struggled on top of the bed and then–there was a flash of 
light. The gun had gone off, but Victoria couldn't see who it shot.

Then the room was exactly as it had been, and the door opened, and the 
two women entered again...

"What was that?" whispered Victoria, at last. Acting as if she didn't 
want the figures to notice her, even though she knew they never could.

"That," said Scary Ghost Lass, "is the kind of haunting that's caused by 
a traumatic experience being like, imprinted on the place it happens."

"Like the old woman on the Net.ropolis subway," said Victoria. [See The 
Adventures of Easily-Discovered Man #46]

"Yeah. So you can watch but there's nothing you can do to change it."

"Sounds familiar." Victoria laughed bitterly. "So how is this going to–"

Something was different this time. There on the table lay an old, 
distinguished-looking book with a green cover, faintly luminous, like a 
hand-drawn animated object on a cel background. She walked to the table 
to pick it up.

Once again she heard cold, distant laughter.

A mighty wind filled the room. She was knocked back onto the floor and 
she felt the faint echo of pain.

The room felt as if it had turned sideways, and she was now on the 
bottom of a steep cliff. The wind held her down, and all the while the 
argument was going on around her. She wished more than ever before that 
she could just fade away.

But she knew she could not afford to turn back. Inch by inch, step by 
step, across an eternity of frustration and terror, she pulled herself 
up. At last she gripped onto the book–

And there she was, sittining her quarters, as if nothing had happened, 
holding the book that had not existed a minute ago.

She flipped through its worn, foxed pages and saw that it was a book of 
poetry. She read a few lines for herself–

     Longing is like the Seed
That wrestles in the Ground,
Believing, if it intercede
It shall at length be found.

She flipped to to the tile pages and read:

     The Poems of Emily Dickinson

     Quantum Variorum Edition

     Neo-Qwertian University Press, 2157

She saw that there were symbols on the side of each page and pressing 
them shifted the text between different versions of the poems. Pressing 
another toggle changed the book from a venerable tome to a shiny trade 
paperback.

In the frontispiece there was a written message in wide, somewhat messy 
handwriting. It did not change. It read:

     Vic–

     This book is for you to hold onto in tough times. It is a key that 
opens up another world.
Take good care of it and it will take good care of you.

     Love,

     Mom

And at last, the tears came.

====

Next: Every time a bell rings... (For real this time!)

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NOTES

I wanted to write an issue checking up on MPL after the events of HHS, 
and soon I will. But this issue's concept came and smacked me right in 
the face, so I had to do it first.

When I wrote Another LNH Title #14, back in the initial stage of working 
on HHS #50 in 2020, I didn't know that not much would have changed or 
progressed with the pandemic in two years. Drew had set up that the 
sabertooth plague wouldn't end immediately after the event, and I didn't 
want to play along with the narrative that the pandemic is "over" so I 
would linger a bit longer in that post-event story, pre-cure period. I'd 
also been reading a lot of horror as the pandemic went on and wanting to 
write a ghost story, and a Victoria-centric story in this period felt 
like a natural way to do that.

It will take a bit before my LNH writing is caught up with this year. A 
lot of the issues I'm working on now deal with the near-term aftermath 
of HHS's ending, which means the timeline will be stuck in 2020 for a 
bit... which is sadly appropriate.

Finally, I want to thank Rob Rogers for the work he's been doing on 
Adventures of Easily-Discovered Man, which provided a lot of inspiration 
to me. I'm always surprised and delighted that series is still going. I 
also drew a lot of inspiration for this issue from Jamie Rosen's 
beautifully weird Invisible-Intangible-Inaudible Lass mini.

====

Victoria: me, usable with permission
Scary Ghost Lass: Amabel Holland, free for use
Flatulence Lad: Gary St. Lawrence, not reserved
[REDACTED]: [REDACTED]


-- 
Jeanne "Comrade Bruce Wayne: Gossip Girl" Morningstar
Chief Procrastinator, Commission of Ecumenical Translators

It is a foul bauble of man's vanity. Away with it!
--Count Dracula, throwing a mirror out a window, _Dracula_ by Bram Stoker