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“Do you guys know why there isn’t a fourth floor in this building?” Kristen noticed it a while ago but she hadn’t yet brought it up to Riz and Fig, always a small, fleeting thought in her mind with something more pressing or more exciting to push it out of the forefront. But today, in the flickering light that is slightly less flickery than usual, she does not let it fade, pinching onto the thought like the back of a cartoon character’s t-shirt and dropping it front and centre as she crouches down to inspect the elevator panel. There is the basement, floors one through three, and then five and six, but no four. “Is it like a bad luck thing, like how some buildings don’t have a thirteenth floor?”
“Huh,” Fig says, “I never noticed that. How have I never noticed that?” She joins Kristen down on the scratchy carpet, hugging her knees as the back of her skirt brushes the floor. She bumps their shoulders together, the force of it enough to send a terminally unbalanced Kristen teetering into the wall of the elevator, then gives a tiny laugh. “Look who’s the licensed private investigator now?”
“Still me,” Riz says.
Kristen looks up and catches the side of Fig’s lips turning up in response to her saying, “Woah, dude, you got licensed?” She watches the smirk grow as Riz give her a flat, annoyed look, crossing his arms over his chest.
“The nonexistence of the fourth floor,” he starts, completely ignoring any questioning of his credentials, “is one of this buildings greatest mysteries.”
Fig stands and Kristen follows, knees cracking loudly. “Have you solved it?”
The elevator dings as it reaches their floor, but no one moves to exit. All attention is on Riz, who is off to the side and pursing his lips, considering. “It’s not a one man job,” he says, rather cryptically. Kristen half expects the world to bathe itself in greyscale and for a jazzy bassline to start playing ominously through the speakers, accompanying snaps and all. Maybe some saxophone in there too?
None of that happens, predictably, but she falls into the part anyway, leaning back against the wall and tilting her chin up as she slips on a transatlantic accent and gives a condescending chuckle before saying, “Joint’s gumshoe can’t crab it alone? Fellas, we’re in dutch.”
Riz blinks. “Are you having a stroke? If this is a medical emergency then I sure hope Fig has some heals left ‘cause you know I don’t have shit.”
“I don’t know, this seems more like a mental break than a stroke. You good, Kristen?”
“Don’t be a bunny, babe. My noodle’s all silk.”
“Okay so—”
“I’m doing a detective bit!” Kristen groans, dropping the hardboiled act and throwing an accusatory hand up at Riz. “You at least should know that, god!”
He gives her another look. “Kristen, I work with clues, evidence and facts. I’m not some noir wannabe bullshitter.”
“Ugh.”
He exhales, softening before giving her a devilish smile. “That being said—on the square, I’ve ranked it, and alone? Trip for biscuits. But the three of us? Now that’s eggs in the coffee, flat!”
Kristen’s mouth drops open in delight. “Yes!”
“Excuse me, when you kids are done, may I use the elevator please?” There is an older earth genasi woman standing at the mouth of the elevator, purse subtly balanced against the doors to prevent them from closing. All three of them blink at her in surprise before she smiles politely.
Holy shit, someone else lives in this building! Kristen thinks.
“Sorry, ma’am,” Fig apologizes, bowing slightly as she dusts off her skirt and moves to exit, shuffling between Kristen and Riz to get out.
Riz claps his hands together and lifts them up to point a set of double finger guns out into the hall.“Let’s drift!”
Kristen smiles, something small and warm, just for her. “Luxury lads, dust out.”
The rumble, as it were, is this: there is no button in the elevator that will take them to the fourth floor of the Strongtower Luxury Apartments, and no stop along the stairwell, either. But it doesn’t just go straight from three to five—there’s an extra landing halfway between the two floors. And while it’s not the normal amount of distance between floors, it’s something. Riz, as a one man job, has tried to do recon without much success—everything accessible by residents gives them nothing real fast, and the maintenance keys he snagged and made copies of last year, apparently, don’t get them much either.
It’s Fig that suggests they try to get a floorplan of the building, just to see if there’s any secret compartments or hallways they’ve missed in their previous adventures. In the end, it’s not as hard to acquire as they make it for themselves.
They sneak down into the security office at midnight, aforementioned contraband keys letting them in easily. They get about five minutes of rummaging done before a disgruntled employee (another person affiliated with this building, Kristen thinks behind the terror of potentially disappointing a vague authority figure, when it rains it pours I guess!) comes in and nearly flings his coffee into the ceiling at the sight of Fig, disguise self rendering her a carbon copy of him.
“Damnit,” she mutters as she drops the spell, “I thought it was gonna be Juan on shift tonight.”
“We traded,” the guard says plainly, still breathless, before turning to Riz and shaking his head gravely. “I’m getting Horace to change the locks first thing Monday,” he says as he holds out his hand for the copied keys, fingers beckoning with finality.
“If you’re changing the locks, then why do I have to give you the keys?” he mutters petulantly. There is no response.
Kristen evidently does not hide the rolled up floorplan well enough behind her back because then the guard—Rodalfo, apparently, every day she learns something new—sighs and says if they wanted the blueprints for the building then they, as tenants, could have just emailed the super for a copy. It’s clear that none of them had even thought of that for one second because the next few moments is a silent exchanging of looks followed by a curt, “Thanks, Dalf!” from Riz as they shuffle back out into the hallway.
The next morning, over coffee and Lucky Charms (no affiliation with the magical effect) Sklonda asks them if there’s any reason why the management would have emailed her the plans for the building. None of them say a word but their faces must be enough, because she gives them a I don’t wanna know sort of look and grumbles a promise to forward them ahead to Riz’s email, no further questions.
But that doesn’t give them anything they don’t know—at least not anything relevant to the case; they do find out that one of the linen closets on the first floor they never bothered to check out is actually a tiny employee-only breakroom—so Fig claims it as a poster for her and Kristen’s room (read: Gilear’s living room) and they’re back to the drawing board, sans keys.
Absentmindedly, between bites of marshmallows, Riz sighs wistfully. “I’ll have to sleight of hand a new pair once they change the locks.”
In an inadvertent attempt to piss off the building management even further, the next thing they try is the elevator itself—Fig’s idea, reasoning that Rodalfo’s reaction meant they were for sure hiding something, and where better to look than the root of the problem itself? But that is short-lived, because all three of them failed to consider the security camera in the elevator, so it’s about fifteen seconds after Fig pulls out a screwdriver and puts it to the panel of the elevator buttons that their ride begins to take them down to the first floor where Juan is waiting for them, unimpressed.
Their next lead is the vents, but that returns nothing but a sopping wet Riz and a thin, broken, “I don’t wanna talk about it,” and that’s it for that one.
After that they try the garbage chute, which produces a very similar outcome, and after that Riz (understandably) rules out anything that he’s the only one small enough to do.
Their detective work wanes slightly as they head into the week, school and whatnot keeping them busy. It’s more the whatnot than the school, assorted Gilearisms and a brief period from Tuesday morning to Tuesday afternoon in which they think Gorgug has found his dad for real. It’s an exciting day for everyone, so exciting that Kristen finds she’s too tired to sleep that night. It’s cold outside so she takes her wandering to the halls of Strongtower, idly looking for clues and actively looking for snacks.
It seems that Riz has the same idea, because when Kristen gets to the vending machine he’s already there, leaning down to grab something from the opening.
“Hey man,” she greets quietly. Despite that, Riz nearly leaps out of his own skin, smacking his head on the machine in the process. Kristen holds back a laugh as he melts to the carpet, hand still inside the vending machine. He blinks up at her thickly as she says, “You okay?”
“Uh—yeah, yeah, sorry. I—”
“Woah, you’re good, dude,” Kristen assures. She sits down beside him, leaning against the corner of the vending machine as his eyes track her journey. She can’t help but feel like he’s watching her as if she might attack at any second; she supposes that’s just what she gets for two in the morning Riz, tonight. He cautiously pulls a bag of ketchup chips out of the machine—odd choice, not one she’s seen him make before, but respectable nonetheless; those things are good— and Kristen zeroes in on a fresh-looking burn mark on his hand.
“Yo, what happened to your hand?”
He looks down at his hand, then back up at her. “Spilled my coffee.”
Kristen tsks, frowning as she picks up his hand to examine it. “Jesus, that’s—Riz this is super fresh, did this just happen? What happened to not drinking coffee after sundown anymore?” She gives him a disappointed look—the bad kids have been trying to curb his habits ever since he accidentally admitted he’d gone three days without sleep while working on the missing girls case earlier in the school year, and for the most part he’s been complying with their wishes. “You gotta take care of yourself, man. I know Fabian suggested it as a joke but I’m pretty sure Adaine has a spell locked and loaded to charm your coffee machine into not working after a certain time.”
Maybe he got a breakthrough on the fourth floor and was staying up to investigate it? But then why wouldn’t he just tell Kristen and Fig, and then they could work on it together? A pang of insecurity rings through Kristen and she wonders if maybe he thinks she’s just not good enough at investigating to work the case anymore. Like, what if he just gave her a chance because she’s the one that brought it up, but now he’s tired of all her crappy ideas and lack of progress? What if she’s not trying hard enough, letting it get cast to the wayside for school and whatnot? What if—
“Okay.” Riz’s voice is so small and watery that Kristen has to do a double take, bubble of self-deprecating thoughts fully popped by her surprise. He sounds wounded, almost, and he has a face to match, big eyes and wobbly little frown. “I’ll—I’ll work on it.”
Oh. Kristen feels all the breath woosh out of her as she smiles, tells him it’s all good. There’s almost a laugh, but she swallows it down. Maybe, they all still have a bit of trouble believing they really have each other, in their corner caring for them. Maybe, they all feel a little insecure sometimes, and just need to be reminded of how much they’re loved.
Kristen smiles. She is not being shut out of the investigation, and Riz is just being Riz. “Good,” she says, and if her voice is kind of choked up, Riz doesn’t mention it. “I would heal you,” she adds then, nodding down to his hand, “But I haven’t actually slept yet so I don’t have any spell slots. Tomorrow morning?”
His smile dips, just for a fraction of a second, almost imperceptible. Kristen hasn’t even processed the change before he says, “Sounds good.”
They part ways shortly after that, Riz giving her a curt nod as he scrambles not to the elevator but to the stairwell with a handful of ketchup chips—again weird, but correct—and leaving Kristen to gather her junior mints and get herself back up to Gilear’s. She stays up a while longer, wandering her head rather than the halls. It must be an interesting journey, because when she falls asleep her mind continues it, dreams of ketchup chips with locks on the bags that only open with stolen keys. Who would ever lock a bag of chips?
The next morning she asks just that and Gilear tells her about how one of the spellcasting teachers brings him a bag of chips every time he’s in the break room because she “wants to see the weird way he eats them”. This causes Fig to run down to the vending machine to get a bag of chips—salt and vinegar, two bags just in case—just to see if there’s anything remarkably weird about the way he eats them after all. When she comes back, Riz walks in the door with her, mug of coffee cradled in his hands.
“Gilear, you’re having chips breakfast,” Fig says.
He sighs. “I suppose it’s better than chips dinner.”
Kristen doesn’t get to find out whether the way he eats them is weird or not because shortly after he begins (to her eye, mostly normally, or as normally as Gilear can do things) she notices Riz’s hand, still holding his mug, is no longer burnt.
“Hey! Your hand’s all better.” It didn’t look like an injury he could just sleep off, but maybe Sklonda has a decked out medicine kit or something.
Riz rolls his eyes. “This is only my second cup, I’m not gonna have the shakes from this little caffeine.”
“That’s not—”
“I told you guys I was trying,” he says matter-of-factly, “Got a whole five and a half hours of sleep last night, too.”
“And we’re proud of you for that!” Fig chimes in from the kitchen.
Gilear’s crunching stops. “Of me?”
“No, I was talking to Riz.”
“Oh, okay.”
And then Gilear starts choking on a sharp chip and their collective attention is turned toward the spectacle of him having his shit wrecked by a fifteen year-old with a plus zero to strength giving him back blows. And that’s the morning, which stretches into afternoon, because when they tell the story to the other bad kids, Gorgug starts to get self conscious about the way he eats chips and Fig decides they all have to eat chips in front of each other, just to make it fair.
So on and so forth until the weekend rolls around again. There a couple more ideas in the mix that don’t make it off the table when they sit down about the case once more: rappelling down from the roof again, crawling through the inside of the walls, and the basement.
“Honestly, I don’t think I’m ready to go back down there after what happened with Gilear and the pool,” Fig admits, frowning in apology.
Kristen shakes her head, shuddering at the memory. “Me neither. Fuck that.”
“Agreed,” Riz says, exhaling visibly, “Plus I don’t think it would add any value to the case. There’s no clues that suggest the basement has anything to do with it.”
Once that’s settled, they decide to go back to recon—physically, they have a pretty good handle on the building. They know where all the doors lead, how all the rooms and hallways are laid out. They know the ins and outs of the space, but they don’t necessarily know the history of it. The building is old—fifty years or so—so there might be something hidden in the story of its construction. Riz sends an email to the super asking for everything they have on past records and then they head to the library for the day, flipping through microfiche sheets of old newspaper scans and skimming the Local section for anything about the history of the town from the past fifty years. Again, they find a lot of pretty interesting stuff, but nothing particularly helpful.
When they get home they have an email from the super with the original building plans, which feels like something. Kristen opens it on her laptop and connects it to Gilear’s TV which, admittedly, is not that bigger than the laptop, but it is bigger. The plans have some handwritten notes that are nearly indecipherable scribbled all over them, and some obscure, half-faded symbols with a just as indecipherable legend.
They also learn that the original building—the one whose floorplans they now have—is actually twenty years older than they thought, but it burnt almost entirely to the ground sixty years ago and the developers decided to demolish the rest and build it from scratch again—thus the slight discrepancies in the floorplan from Rodalfo and the one from the building super, and the fact that there was nothing in the papers; they just weren’t looking back far enough.
“This is something,” Riz decides as he stares up at the screen, the sharpest of his teeth poking out from his growing smile. His fingers fly over the keyboard of Kristen’s laptop, manipulating the images so that they lay exactly on top of each other, semi-transparent so they can see exactly where the builds differ.
“They made the hallways bigger,” Fig notes as she traces her finger along the screen. “Why do you think that is?”
Riz shrugs. “Maybe new fire code stuff? I dunno. They moved the stairwell though, look—” he points at the south stairwell on their floorplan, a bumped out section where in the original plans, the wall had been flat. There’s one of those weird symbols in the middle of it, one they haven’t decoded yet. “That’s so weird, they had to build a whole new part instead of just putting it where it was.”
“Maybe they were making room for more units in the old spot? More tenants, more money to cover rebuilding costs?”
Riz hums. “Yeah, maybe. Hey, do you guys think this symbol means ‘window’, then? If its against an exterior wall.”
“Maybe? But that’s the only one of that one, I can’t imagine there would just be one window. Maybe it was a special window? Or some sort of back exit?”
Fig clears her throat. “Hey, do you guys think the original pool was haunted too?” This immediately gets them off track for about two hours, and by the time the discussion is finished (verdict unclear, they’ll have to do more research, but it’s a good chance since the basement was presumably unaffected by the fire) it’s well past any reasonable sort of bedtime.
They pick it back up at school the next day, once Kristen has used a couple of her gifted magic jacket coins to print some copies of the plans in the library. Riz has a couple more points of interest about the pool thing, and that gets Kristen thinking back in the direction of the fourth floor, a minor non-religious revelation: what if the fourth floor is a magical thing, too? It seems so obvious that it feels insane they hadn’t explicitly considered it before—of course the fourth floor could be magic. The pool is magic! Up until recently, Kristen thought the whole rest of the building was magic too, and hiding the other residents from her sight.
This leads her back to the library, and when she drops the stack of historical magic books onto the bad kids’ table, Fig and Riz light up with curiosity.
“Do you have a lead?”
She smiles. “I might have a lead.”
It turns out that might is a definitely, because ten minutes later Adaine joins them and asks what’s up. After a couple minutes of hardboiled banter that is sort of unintelligible even to Kristen, Fig puts all of them out of their misery and explains that they’re looking into old magic symbols and sigils to see if they can find anything on the old floorplan that would suggest a reason why the fourth floor is either nonexistent or Strongtower’s best-kept secret.
Adaine gives a half-impressed huh! and plucks one of Kristen’s printed copies out of the centre of the table. A second later, she says, “Oh, cool, your building has a portal!”
Kristen blinks, Fig rears back, and Riz slams his hands on the table as he shouts, “Our building has a what?!”
“A portal,” Adaine repeats nonchalantly, punctuating it with a crunch as she bites into a baby carrot. “Right ‘ere.” She puts the paper down on the table and points to the symbol they thought was a window, by the wall of the now-stairwell. “Portal! I don’t think I’ve been up the stairs at your guys’ place, but I feel like it would have to be pretty noticeable? Have you guys seen it?”
“No,” Kristen informs, near-incredulous. Give it to Adaine to split the case wide open in ten seconds. Kristen plays a sick sax riff in her head—Adaine’s like a little bird with its seed, only this canary’s singin’ a tune of humiliation.
Riz shakes his head as if this whole thing has personally wronged him. “How do you know its a portal? I saw a symbol for portals in here a couple pages back and it looked completely different. Are you sure?”
Adaine leans over the squint at the book, then tsks and shakes her head. “Yeah no that’s a portal symbol, but this—” She drops her finger onto the floorplan again as she clicks her tongue, “—was drawn up in the fifties. And this—” She slides over to the stairwell, landing on the little swirl of the apparent portal. “—is the short-lived, long since defunct official architectural symbol for portal that was only used—and even then not widely—between fifty two and fifty four.”
Riz’s eye begins to twitch and Kristen breathes a silent, disbelieving laugh as Adaine smiles at them, excited as ever for an opportunity to be a fucking nerd. “How on earth did you know that?” she asks.
Adaine makes a vague I don’t know sort of sound and shrugs weakly as she pops another baby carrot into her mouth. There’s a ruckus across the courtyard that they all take a moment to track—some girl shrieking as her friend jumps on her back, both of them collapsing into the grass and giggling into each other, a quick reminder that the world is still turning around them—and then their collective attention is back on the map. A portal, Kristen thinks, still only half-believing it. Goofy.
While Riz weeps for his private investigator cred going down the toilet, Fig reaches over to steal a carrot from Adaine’s tupperware. “Adaine, you miraculous son of a bitch. Wanna come in the portal with us?”
“Yeah, I wanna fucking come in the portal with you.”
They do it on Friday night, just in case they can’t get back from wherever it leads for a while, then there’s a little time allowance so there’s less chance of them missing school. Kristen can’t help but feel that this would be an Aguefort Adventuring Academy approved extracurricular activity, but the anticipation throughout the week is fun, anyway.
It’s cold in the stairwell as they climb—from the first floor, it’s more dramatic this way, and after all they’ve done it feels like it deserves the drama—but Kristen cannot distinguish the temperature shivers from the excited ones. It’s not even been two weeks since they first started on this case, and yeah, they have no idea what’s beyond the portal or who put it there, but it still feels like a huge thing to have gotten this far on it—especially since she was the one that prompted it. That meant Riz and Fig thought her idea was worth pursuing, for this long and with this much dedication, and more than that, it was worth pursuing with her.
(Up until this year, all of Kristen’s friends consisted of people from youth group, and even then, they never hung out outside of church activities. For a long time, she thought that was all she would ever get.
Now, backpack full of vending machine snacks and rainbow sock full of magic jacket coins, she knows that’s not true.)
“Is it just a blank concrete wall?” Adaine’s voice is skeptical as they arrive at the landing between the third and fifth floors, the four of them staring disappointedly at what is, yes, just a blank concrete wall. “That’s boring,” she mutters.
It is boring. There’s no other way of spinning it—it is a concrete wall, blank, stretching from wall to wall with a couple scuffs and pockmarks scattered across the surface from years of use. There are no signs, no graffiti, and no indications that it is anything other than a completely ordinary wall. Boring. Seemingly very non-magical.
“That’s dumb,” Fig whines, “I feel like it should be more, I don’t know—” She removes her bass from its spot slung over her torso—brought along just in case things got bloody—and hefts it up, gently tapping the end of it into the middle of the wall. It makes a dull sort of thunking sound and Fig scowls for a second until the guitar is promptly ripped from her hands, sucked into the surface of the wall with a ripple that undulates for only a moment before it goes flat and unmoving once more.
A beat, and then Fig: “Holy fuck!”
“Not a blank concrete wall, not a blank concrete wall!” Adaine squeals, half-terrified, half-delighted.
Kristen reaches out to test the surface for rigidity once more before realizing what a terribly stupid idea it is. Adaine grabs her hand and pulls it back, lacing their fingers together as Riz breathes, sort of delirious, “Okay, so was management just banking on no one accidentally falling into or touching this wall and getting sucked into the portal, or?”
“It took my fuckin’ guitar!” Fig yells, lament echoing up through the rest of the stairwell and back down, wobbly and distorted. Kristen watches her face scrunch up not in anger, but determined anger, which is so, so much worse.
“Fig, don’t—”
“I’m goin’ in,” she announces, pushing her sleeves up to her elbows and leaping into the wall before anyone can stop her. But no one has to, because she just hits it and stays there like a cartoon character. “Aw, fuck,” she mutters, voice gravelly as her face is plastered up against the concrete, much like one’s face would be if one leapt into a solid wall—but the delay only lasts a second before the surface begins to shudder and swallows her into the portal, too.
“This is the coolest thing that’s ever happened to me,” Riz mutters under his breath before turning back to Kristen and Adaine, still clutched to each other. “Well, see ya.” He gives them a two-fingered salute and kicks his heel back into the wall, bright anticipation in his eyes before he gets sucked backwards and out of sight.
“Alright,” Adaine huffs, triggering Kristen’s fight or flight response.
“You go first.” She giggles involuntarily as she pulls Adaine tighter, allowing for absolutely zero progress on her request. “Wait!” she gasps, “Don’t go first! Then I’ll be here alone!”
“Oh my god.”
“Sorry! I’ve just never been sucked into a portal before!”
Adaine gives her a flat look. “You were literally brought back from the dead on the first day of school.”
“Not through a portal in the building that I live in.”
There is a long sigh as Adaine tilts her head down to rest on Kristen’s. “How about we go together?”
Kristen stares at the wall. It’s just a wall. “Okay.” She keeps staring at it as Adaine shuffles over, still holding Kristen’s hand as she reaches her other one out to the surface of the concrete. Kristen watches it begin to ripple as Adaine turns back to face her, almost in slow motion, as the portal begins to open around her. Then she watches the curious anticipation on Adaine’s face turn into betrayal, because what do you know, now Kristen is watching herself drop Adaine’s hand.
You know, like a coward.
Adaine’s lips are just starting to curl around some incredulous exclamation as she is sucked into the portal, frozen in her indignance one second and gone the next. Kristen groans, alone in the stairwell. Now she has to go alone, which is so much worse than going with Adaine would have been. She stares wistfully at the stairs leading down to the third floor, remembering much simpler times (five minutes ago) when they were all gung-ho and ready for adventure. Now she’s alone, and they’re god knows where.
She sighs again, walks up to the wall, and slaps it.
When she gets to the other side, the first thing she sees is Adaine and Riz writhing on the ground in pain.
“Whoever made this portal is not a right gee!”
“You said okay to going together, you fucking liar!”
It can’t be that bad if they’re still providing commentary, but Kristen doesn’t have much time to think about that because then she too finds herself at a much lower altitude. There is half a second of delay before she feels it, but then she’s on the ground with a white-hot pain searing in her wrist and shooting up the rest of her arm, condensing to a pinpoint at the back of her skull in pulsating waves. Because, turns out, whoever made this portal is, as previously stated, not a right gee—quite frankly more of a fakeloo if you ask Kristen herself—and apparently whatever part of you touches the portal gets ass blasted into infinity before returning to the rest of your physical being again, resulting in severe bodily harm. She can only shudder at the thought of how Fig, pointedly nowhere in sight, feels.
Kristen heals herself, Riz, and Adaine all at once and it is only after they slough themselves off the floor that they realize, belatedly, they are standing in the hallway of the fourth floor of the Strongtower Luxury Apartments.
“It’s still just your building?”
Riz and Kristen whip around to glare at Adaine, both a little crazed, at the exact same time. “It’s the fourth floor,” Riz spits.
Kristen huffs an exhale of a laugh, arm crackling with phantom pain. “It’s everything, Adaine.”
“Okay,” she says reasonably, “We should probably find Fig then?”
Conveniently, Fig rounds the corner of the hallway just then—same floorplan Kristen’s used to, but slightly to the left somehow; the original floorplan maybe? she notes distantly in the back of her head, well aware this is not the time—and gives them a blood-filled smile as she drops to her knees, cradling her bass to her chest. “Got my guitar back,” she says, “I think my body is broken.”
It seems like a pretty accurate judgment based on how the outside of Fig looks—she jumped at the portal with the entire front of her body pressed up against the wall so Kristen can only imagine what Fig feels like on the inside. She sighs into a watery smile as Kristen heals her, and for a second Kristen thinks she’s just going to lie there on the carpet for a hot minute, but then a new voice joins the conversation and they all turn to meet it.
“Hey guys, do you think maybe you could keep it down? We’re actually trying to hold a meeting right now, so.”
Kristen looks blankly at the elven woman standing at the end of the hall, slightly-apologetic-but-mostly-annoyed sort of smile on her face, clearly waiting for a response.
“How did you get here,” Fig croaks, making the woman blink several times in a row, head rearing back just slightly in surprise at the class of response, obviously not what she expected.
“I’m sorry?”
“Is this the fourth floor?” Riz asks, “How did you get here?”
She tilts her head. “Yes? And the… elevator? The stairs don’t go to this floor, so—”
“Interesting, that’s—”
“Isn’t that a fire hazard?” Adaine interrupts.
“Of course the stairs don’t go here,” Fig mutters to herself, and this is the moment Kristen realizes they probably look full insane. She sees it on the woman’s face, too, just a split second before Fig gets up and walks back to the wall they fell out of. One moment she’s putting her hand to the peeling wallpaper and the next she’s gone.
“What—did she—she just—” the woman sputters for a couple seconds until Fig tumbles back into the hallway, wheezing Kristen’s name weakly as she rolls around the carpet.
“On it,” she says, her first words since the woman appeared, and throws a heal over Fig’s way.
“Thanks.”
“I’m sorry, you guys are gonna have to—”
“Yeah, we’ll go,” Riz says, very normally, getting up to dust himself off and then pulling Fig upwards and dusting her off, “Thank you for your time and sorry for the disturbance.” He pushes Fig ahead of him and links his arms with Kristen’s and Adaine’s, dragging the four of them down the hall and brushing past the woman in the direction of where the elevators should be.
“You’re welcome?” The woman’s voice is already fading in the distance as Riz ushers them forward through the hallway. Kristen cranes her neck to take it all in—it feels the same as the Strongtower they know, the same feel of the hallway and the same twists and turns, doors in the same spots—but the look is all wrong. It’s older, even more outdated if that’s possible. Where their Strongtower has a dingy yellow wallpaper that’s seen better days, this place has an indiscernible kind of brown that Kristen realizes, with a mounting distaste, was probably originally a pale sort of blue or green, aged and rendered unrecognizable by years and years of cigarette smoke and who knows what else.
They blow past a long line of doors as Riz mutters to himself, looking back over his shoulder every couple of seconds. Kristen squints to make out the words on the placards over the doors—that is something they don’t have—and she catches one door that says Meeting Space 04 and another with Rec room and before she can say a thing, Riz catches the dawning realization on her face and gives her a crazed look.
“They have amenities. We don’t have amenities.”
They come to a stop in front of the elevator and Riz jams his finger into the down button, releasing Adaine’s arm as he does it. Kristen watches her eyes glow with a ritual identify in the making.
“Fourth floor,” Kristen says distantly, transfixed by the placard bearing the floor level beside the elevator. “We actually found the fourth floor—and they have amenities.”
“Are you thinking what I’m thinking?”
When the elevator hits the ground floor Riz heads straight for the management office. Lounging over the desk is nearly a carbon copy of Juan, but here he has frosted tips.
“Hey, has this building ever fully or partially burnt down?”
He laughs, flashing a row of perfectly white teeth. “Only if you count the time I forgot to put water in my ramen and put it in the staff microwave!”
“I don’t.”
They convene in the stairwell, whispering voices echoing as they go over what they know: the Strongtower Luxury Apartments burned down in the 60s, then got rebuilt in the 70s, and that reconstruction is what they live in. There is a portal—in their version, the south stairwell. In this version, the fourth floor hallway. This version has never had a fire in the building, excluding Juan’s ramen incident(s). This version has a fourth floor full of amenities that don’t exist in their version. This version would have all evidence lead them to believe that they are, somehow, standing in the original Strongtower Luxury Apartments—which stands exactly where their Strongtower Luxury Apartments stand, at the exact same time.
“So it’s a parallel universe,” Kristen decides, “our building just has a portal to a parallel universe.”
“Precisely.” Riz smiles. “And that parallel universe is the one where Strongtower never burnt down.”
Adaine’s eyes give one last flash of blue before her spell finally ends and she nods heftily. “Yep. That is where we are right now.”
Fig bristles, strumming an excited chord on her guitar. “Cool.”
Kristen feels the sound of it reverberating inside her chest like a heartbeat. Technically, they’ve solved the mystery. The fourth floor is here, in a universe where it never didn’t exist in the first place. That’s their answer, but in finding that they’ve also found a million more questions. Why did it burn down in the first place? Who put the portal here? Why the fuck didn’t the builders for the new Strongtower feel like giving them amenities? How come they didn’t find the portal sooner? Do the residents of this Strongtower know about it? How much changed in the ripple effect, do they still all know each other in this universe? Do they still live here?
The heartbeat is a spoiled, giddy thing.
“I s’pose we don’t quite got the lay as much as we thought, huh?”
Riz shrugs. “I ain’t got no kick about that, sweetheart.”
“Oh, I’m hitting on all eight about it. Lousy with lack of kick. Guess you’re fixin’ to sneeze a slant round the joint then sneak?”
“Sure thing, tomato,” Riz winks at Kristen with twenty times his natural amount of charm and she blushes, half-snorting at both the compliment and his sudden suave bravado. “Don’t wanna take the bounce or get clipped. You never know what kinda trouble boys and heeled hoods are cheesin’ round waitin’ to give us lead poisoning.”
Kristen nods knowingly. No need for them to stick around and wait for daylight—and not the sunshine kind.
(Meanwhile, an aside to this mess:
“Do they even understand each other?”
“I don’t know.”
“Adaine, can you use comprehend languages on them?”
“Y’know, I thought about doing that, but I’m not sure it would work.”
“Okay, well while they’re doing that, I’m gonna go see if I can find my parallel universe self.”
“Sweet, I’ll come with.”)
Kristen and Riz eventually realize Adaine and Kristen have left them alone in the stairwell and they find they’re not too far behind anyway, the door to the third floor shutting just as they get to the landing. It’s their turn to blindly follow as Fig strides down the hallway, a funhouse mirror image of the same mundane scene they watch every day. It’s like someone put a filter over everything, or stripped it down as if this version was hiding underneath all along. It’s very jarring—possibly one of the most jarring things Kristen has ever experienced, but that title is lost as swiftly as it is awarded when Fig fits her key into the lock of her and Gilear’s apartment and opens the door to its current residents.
“Fig? I thought you were home already.” Gorthalax’s voice stops Kristen short of the door. She clutches to Riz’s arm with one hand and latches onto Adaine’s shoulder with the other, the three of them perched Scooby-Doo style along the wall, Fig the only one visible in the threshold of the door, her side profile showing a dropped jaw with something twitching back and forth between a delighted smile and a horrified frown.
“I, uh, no, I just went to grab something from the vending machine,” she says awkwardly, nowhere near the top of her deception game. Below a ten, for sure.
“What’d you get?” Gorthalax asks brightly, somehow completely oblivious.
Fig stares down at her empty hands. “It wasn’t working.”
“Did you change?”
“I—”
“Oh, hello, daughter.” Gilear? Gilear. Kristen rests her chin on Adaine’s shoulder as if that’s going to give her any sort of better vantage point or info on why Gilear and Gorthalax are in the same apartment. Gilear echoes Gorthalax’s question. “Did you change? Are we back in the punk phase, now?”
Fig laughs nervously, her mouth working open and closed around an excuse that isn’t there until there is the sound of a door opening within the apartment, then her eyes go wide.
“Yo, what the fuck?” It’s Fig’s voice, but it doesn’t come from Fig herself.
The Fig that did not speak— their Fig—spares a terrified, pleading glance at Kristen and their friends. Gilear speaks. “Am I—Gorthalax, darling, am I having a stroke?”
And that helps exactly none of that, their Fig letting out a squeak of horrified surprise. Gorthalax, darling. Kristen lets go of Riz and Adaine to slap both hands over her mouth as she hits the wall and sinks to the floor. Gorthalax, darling?!
“Not unless I am too, Gil.”
“Dads, what the fuck, do I have a twin you didn’t tell me about?”
Fig slams the door and walks over to Kristen, Adaine, and Riz, then without a word she picks Riz up and shakes him upside down until his keys fall out of his pocket. Then, she reaches down to collect them and goes to the next unit over and shoves them into the lock. Adaine pulls Kristen up off the floor as Riz scrambles over to his apartment, squeezing in beside Fig as she opens the door.
The other Fig is opening her door just as their Fig and Riz slip out of sight into Riz’s apartment, and she is looking at Kristen and Adaine with an expectant sort of confusion. “You guys go to my school,” she breathes, “Right? Did you see that?”
Kristen is almost too busy trying to find and categorize all the differences between this Fig and her own—the clothes, obviously, punk rocker chic replaced by a sensible cardigan and leggings, little gold hoops hanging from all the piercings in her ears; distress on her face that is a slightly different flavour than Kristen’s ever seen on her; a cup clutched in her hand that has a distinctly alive and healthy oyster; and actually she might be a little taller?—that she nearly doesn’t hear Adaine’s phoned-in, not-even-an-excuse-excuse of, “Nope! We gotta go, bye!” as she drags Kristen down the hall into Riz’s apartment.
When they make it through the door, pulling it firmly shut behind them, the familiarity of the unit is almost more chilling than the stark un familiarity of the last.
This world’s Riz is sitting at the kitchen table with his mom, the both of them—and their surroundings, down to everything but the floors and wallpaper, the same outdated scheme as the hallway—the exact same as the actual Riz and Sklonda, as far as Kristen can tell. There’s a pile of scattered papers and files between them, a pair of steaming mugs. Both of them are just staring at the four intruders, eyebrows raised in a way that leans more to This might as well happen rather than What the hell are you people doing in our apartment. Other Riz takes them all in, then addresses the one who broke into his apartment in the first place. “Oh, are you other Fig?”
She raises her chin, crossing her arms. “No, I’m real Fig. Your neighbour is other Fig. This may come as a surprise to you, but we came through a port—”
“Yeah, we found the portal on our first day here,” Other Riz hums, waving Fig off dismissively. Old hat.
“What the hell?” Riz mutters, more to himself than anyone, but it gets his own attention.
“What, you didn’t?”
Both Riz’s scoff at the same time, only a tone apart. From that moment on for the next few minutes it is a scene that Kristen can only describe as an amateur drama class mirroring exercise on steroids. The initial incredulity passes and both of them fall into a delayed twin state of shock, soft and mildly disbelieving. They both know exactly what is going on, here, but that doesn’t make it any easier to process. Kristen knows Riz doesn’t have much family besides his mom, so maybe this is like the closest he’ll get to meeting the brother he’ll never have. Or maybe it’s nothing like that, what does Kristen know?
“Nice to meet you,” they say in tandem, giving a smile at the novelty of it. “I have some… literature… if you’d be—okay seriously I know we’re the same person but are we really just going to say the same—applesauce! Fuck, what?” Everyone in the room is wearing the same bewildered expression, including the Riz’s. They exhale a laugh and shift their weight to opposite sides, shaking their heads slowly. “How the hell did you—well I guess we’re me, it’s not that unlikely. I suppose the butterfly effect doesn’t do much for some and a then does a lot for others—” Both of them look pointedly at Fig, then back at each other with a shrug. “Is dad still dead in your—?” The hope rises and falls in sync on both their faces and Kristen starts to feel dizzy. “Oh. Well that sucks. Still cool that you’re here, though.”
“Oh my god.” Sklonda cuts the freakshow short with a pointed exhale, concerned smile strained as she looks between the Riz’s. “You are my son in every universe.”
Riz snorts. “Hi not mom,” he says warmly.
“Hey kiddo.”
There are more words exchanged, awkward and fond, along with offers of water or coffee or whatever, but Kristen can’t be completely sure because she is currently connecting the dots inside of her head, and she’s doing it like this:
This Riz and Sklonda know about the portal, have since they moved in, which is likely many years ago, if their timeline is as consistent as it’s been with Kristen’s Riz. Which means they’ve probably been through it, because they would have no reason to research the building’s history and floor plans if they weren’t missing a floor, which they aren’t. And so if they didn’t find out about it that way, then they probably found out about it in practice. It could just be a known thing in this universe, but if that were true, then the lady telling them to be quiet in the hall wouldn’t have looked so freaked when Fig went back through the portal again.
So this Riz and Sklonda have been through the portal. This can be safely assumed. Last week, Kristen saw Riz by the vending machines and when she tried to talk to him, he seemed sort of jumpy. And that’s not out of the norm for Riz—she’d probably say it is the norm, he’s a fundamentally jumpy guy—but there had been that thing with the burn on his hand that she’d chalked up to her being overtired and seeing things. But now, with this context—and yeah, the fucking mark on this Riz’s hand— she comes to a realization, string pulling tight between dots.
“You!” she yells, the chatter coming to a halt as she throws up a hand to point at Other Riz accusingly. “The vending machine, in the middle of the fucking night last Tuesday slash Wednesday. That was you!”
He smiles, guilty. “We don’t have the ketchup chips here.”
Kristen’s Riz pauses with a mug of coffee halfway to his lips. “What?”
Other Riz explains, somewhat sheepishly, that their universe, for whatever reason, doesn’t have ketchup flavoured chips. But their universe does, so sometimes he’ll sneak through the portal, usually in the dead of night just for posterity, and clean out the vending machine in their Strongtower so he and his mom can have a good supply before they have to venture back again.
“They’re good,” is all Other Sklonda has to say.
Other Riz and his dad had been checking out the amenities shortly after they moved in—obviously something Kristen’s Riz and his dad didn’t do, since they didn’t have any fucking amenities— and a particularly rowdy piggyback airplane journey had sent them both through the portal, Other Riz landing unscathed in his father’s very molecularly sore arms. They’d come back to do a full exploration with Sklonda (and a medicine kit) that very night, and through what Other Riz describes as Badass Goblin Badasses Reconnaissance Technique, quickly gathered all of the relevant details about the whole burned down/not burned down portal situation. Since then, they’ve been using it to their sneaky advantage whenever they so pleased.
“How many times have I talked to you thinking it was my Riz?” Kristen asks, for not the first time this school year feeling like everything she knows is a lie.
“Just once,” he assures quickly, “That was the only time. I actually—I had no idea we were friends in your universe. But you seemed to think we were, so I just played along.”
“Are we friends?” Adaine is hopeful, Fig nodding along. Kristen watches Other Riz blink in surprise as he looks between them and Riz.
“Oh are you—well, I guess obviously if you guys came here together you’re friends. But, uh, no? I mean you guys go to my school and Fig lives next door with her dads, but we’ve never really talked beyond that first detention, I guess.” He looks kind of awkward about it, talking into his coffee rather than to them directly. “I have, though, my friend Penny. She used to be—well she’s missing, now—”
“We’re trying to find her too,” Riz says, “All the missing girls. We’ve been working on it.”
Other Riz smiles encouragingly. “Well that’s good. I’m glad to see you still have Adaine, she’s missing here.”
“What?”
“No!” Fig grabs Adaine by the shoulders and pulls her close to her side. “I won’t let them get you.”
Adaine gives her a flat look, but the fondness seeps through as she deadpans, “Thanks.”
They chat a little longer about the difference in social minutiae across universes, the conversation growing so natural that everyone sort of forgets they’re talking to what is essentially Riz and his mom’s clones. After a while Other Sklonda gets up and starts clearing mugs, a subtle suggestion that perhaps storytime should be coming to a close soon. Adaine seems to pick up on it before the rest of them, citing that their Sklonda is probably getting worried.
Other Sklonda likes that, giving a wry smile as she says, “I know I would be.”
On their way up the elevator back to the fourth floor, Fig hums conspiratorially. “Okay, so who put the portal here?”
Kristen offers, “Maybe no one, maybe they just built the building around it?”
“It’s definitely manmade, it was in the plans,” Adaine counters.
Riz nods. “Yeah, it had to be on purpose. And it—it was in the original plans, but it leads to the universe where the building burnt down, so whoever did it had to somehow know that was going to happen.”
“Maybe someone from this universe who wanted to preserve the original?” Adaine tries. “But if they have the ability to, to time travel, why not just stop the fire in the first place?”
“Ripple effect, maybe?” Kristen leans against the wall of the elevator. It’s weird, seeing an actual button for the fourth floor. Throws off the whole flow of the panel.
“Probably,” Fig says. “It feels kinda…” she laughs to herself, snorting slightly as she kicks her heel against the wall. “Like what kinda person would go through all the trouble of creating and maintaining a portal? Who’s that chaotic?”
Riz exhales a laugh, raising an eyebrow as he adds, “Who’s that stupid?”
There is a beat as the words puncture the air around them, then they all slowly turn to look at each other, dawning realization breaking over the horizon of their minds at the exact same time.
“Oh my god.”
Riz presses the button for the ground floor.
The Aguefort Adventuring Academy of this world looks and feels pretty much the exact same as the one of their world, except here, when they knock on Principal Aguefort’s door, he answers it.
“Ah! Hello children, yes, what can I—” Aguefort is halfway through his own question when he stops cold, eyes widening and head tilting at the abridged version of the bad kids. “You four aren’t—you aren’t the you of here! You’re the you of your here, which is my elsewhere!”
Kristen watches, from her peripheral vision, Adaine blinking in surprise as Riz opens his mouth, unphased. “Did you create the portal in the Strongtower Luxury Apartments?”
Adaine recovers from her surprise and clears her throat in the time it takes Aguefort to process the question, adding, “Do you know you killed yourself in our universe?”
“To save me and our friend Gorgug? Also your tea is poisoned I think.”
“Also if you did make the portal,” Fig says, “did you make it so you can steal ketchup chips from our vending machine like other Riz?”
Aguefort smiles politely, looking each of them in the eyes as he folds his hands together over his desk, preparing his thoughtful answer to each of their questions. They wait for him to speak, even though he’s really taking his time with it—which is understandable, they are overwhelming him with information here; he might not even know about the portal or the other universes where ketchup chips exist. When he does begin his response, this is what he says:
“No comment.”
Then, like a reasonable and sane person, he smashes his teacup onto the ground and disappears in a puff of smoke.
Kristen sighs. “Guess this universe isn’t that different after all.”
Back on their side of the portal, they stop at the vending machine before going back up to Riz’s apartment.
“I’m just really in the mood for ketchup chips now,” Fig says as she reaches into Adaine’s jacket for some loose gold pieces. “You guys want anything?”
Kristen is halfway to asking for some junior mints when Riz gasps.
“Oh hey, Mr. Gukgak, Ms. Faeth, friends,” the super, a half-orc woman with choppy bangs and a bright smile, greets warmly, “You kids doing alright tonight?”
“Super good,” Riz says distractedly, “Did you know this building burnt down in the fifties?”
She smiles, raising her eyebrows and tilting her head in that way an adult does when a kid tells overexplains the lore of their favourite cartoon without giving them any actual tangible information. “Yes I did,” she says. Kristen might find it condescending if she didn’t seem so genuinely nice—well, she might still find it condescending anyway, but the nice thing makes it so she doesn’t mind too much. “In fact, that’s why there isn’t a fourth floor anymore. The builders were too superstitious—” she enunciates the word as if it’s their first time hearing it—“to include it again. Isn’t that something?”
“Well actually—” Fig starts and stops, deflating at Kristen and Adaine’s immediate skeptical looks. Kristen is fifty-fifty on this lady knowing about the portal or not, but either way it’s probably not a good idea to let her know they’ve been through it.
“Sorry, what was that?” The super is looking attentively at Fig, now.
“Oh, me?” Fig’s smile is uneven, flattening out as she falls into detective mode. “I was just saying that, actually, it’s more common for buildings to not have a thirteenth floor due to superstition.”
The super smiles. If she had stickers, Kristen’s pretty sure she would be handing one out right now. She wonders how old this woman thinks they all are. “That’s right,” she coos, “Smart young lady, you are.”
Adaine lets out a quiet noise of distaste before bowing slightly and saying, “Well thank you so much for your time, Madam…”
“Ms. Sparklebeam,” she says, amused.
“Ms. Sparklebeam,” Adaine parrots, “thank you so much for the interesting information! Our mom wanted us right back upstairs, so we better not keep her waiting.”
“Of course not. Have a good night, kids!”
They gather their snacks, exchange polite smiles, and hurry on past her to get to the fourth-floor-less elevator. As soon as they’re out of earshot, Riz deadpans, “Our mom?”
Adaine rolls her eyes. “That woman thinks we’re kindergarteners, it was easier than explaining me and Kristen are our own parents’ rejects.”
“She’s gonna think our parents are dating,” Fig says, giggling in delight at Riz’s immediately distressed expression.
“No!” he shouts, “No one should ever think that!”
The bickering continues as the elevator brings them up to the third floor, then all the way through the hall and into Gilear’s apartment. Kristen doesn’t offer much commentary as Adaine and Riz snicker at Fig checking the place for any sign of her preppy doppelganger and her two darling dads. She thinks of a couple cracks she could wedge into the conversation, but she doesn’t find she feels all that inclined to share. She’s more than content to just sit back and listen, that warm, full sort of feeling she’s been prone to lately settling over her like a blanket. She pulls it up to her chin and gets comfy—as comfy as she can on the uneven futon that doubles as her and Fig’s bed—as she watches Fig use the same breath to both talk her herself into and out of setting up Gilear and Gorthalax.
“Maybe we should just stop trying to set up anyone’s parents,” Riz laughs.
“But I’m cursed with this knowledge now.”
Adaine gasps. “I totally didn’t even think about curses. What if there is a curse?”
“What if we just ask the super?” Kristen says, her own voice surprising her. Her friends turn to her at the same time, flow of the conversation slowed to a near stop as the hilarity of the entire thing seeps back in. She cracks a smile, and says, “Maybe we should just ask, next time.”
Riz snorts as he looks at her. “Might save us a bit of trouble,” he says, but his eyes are a different story. Those are saying, I like the trouble.
Kristen likes it, too.