Chapter 4b: Red and Orange

1 day before Chapter 4a:

A rundown house lay in the poor downtown area of Tetris. Tarp had been fastened over the windows, the wood along side of the house had long ago rotted. The short chain link fence around the property had been rusted and warped with the passing of time. Inside the furniture was scattered and few, the houses ripped and peeling wallpaper covered with tape and cork boards. All over the house were cork boards, with all sorts of newspapers clippings and scrawlings written across them. It was almost a comical parody of a conspiracy theorist house with the thumb tacks and multiple colored strings connecting the cork boards across the house. In fact the occupant of the house had to sleep on the ground as to avoid getting tangled in all of the intersecting and passing strings. Yet as cunning as a spider intricately building her web, she had barely left herself enough space to move and live in her house. Opening her eyes slowly, she rose and maneuvered out of her house. She had worked it out now, it all made sense in her head. "All I need is a bit of fresh air." She mumbled to herself, as she often did. The solution had come to her in a dream. "Aliens, it must be aliens…" Ruling out the government long ago in her initial investigation, Ell had come to the conclusion aliens must have been causing the chaos within her city. And to her, it had now become her duty to find these creatures and stop them.

As a young girl, Ell had always been inquisitive. Perhaps too much so, as she found it hard to make friends growing up. After all, who would want to be friends with someone who is always questioning and wondering things that frankly no one paid attention to or even cared about. That's until she had met Oeh and Jay in high school. They actually had the patience and time to listen to Ell's rambles, and through them Ell learned to become a bit of a better person. She learned to let others speak their mind and not always intensely question them. Throughout high school Jay and Oeh were able to discover the true side of Ell, a girl with an insatiable thirst for knowledge and wonder for the unknown. Oeh thought that Ell had a mindset that would lead her to great things.

That was until after the golden years of high school had been over. Contact between Ell and her two only friends had slowly drifted. They had gotten jobs, starting pursuing other hobbies. Ell managed to find a job as a computer worker, infrequently working for whatever company would take her. After a few long term employments with big companies she was able to afford a home in downtown Tetris. It only took her a few months to fill the house with her increasingly renewed interest in conspiracy theories. With only her job and the few and far between talks with Oeh, Ell had let herself drown in the world of the (im)possible.

In the present Ell had barely factored in that time had passed. It had become routine habit to let the days blur into weeks into unknown amounts of time for Ell. If she ever wanted to know what day it was, she would check her computer. Though she rarely checked her computer except for when she was on job, less time for the government to triangulate her location through her proxy servers. The government...triangles...her mind flashed with an idea she had brushed off perhaps too easily. She had managed to walk to the edge of downtown Tetris, not even noticing how many loops she had done around the entire district. She walked towards a bus stop, taking a seat on the bench and looking up at the moon. "Why did it take so long for me to think about it? The entire of my afternoon, spent on another possibility in this case. Population control. Damn you council of Tetris, I'll dig up your secre-" She had to stop talking outloud, reminding herself the council of the town may be very well listening on to her words, or her mind at the very second. The counsel, of course, was a theory Ell was so close to confirming she treated it as a fact that it existed. This council being a secret organization of the highest known public figures in the town of Tetris. Mayor, local business owners, anyone prominent had to be in counsel. She had discovered suspicious overlaps in laws, political moves, business ventures, and secret meetings between unknown third parties that in her mind they were real. Closing her eyes, she focused her head into a blank void so the counsel couldn't further peer into her thoughts. Yet just a minute after her eyes shut Ell had fallen asleep on the park bench right on the border of downtown Tetris and the central city.

Blinding flashes of orange and red. A deafening explosion. A shockwave that sent the flimsy bus stop and the flailing figure of Ell flying backwards. Her eyes snapped open as her head collided with the ground, her already groggy vision getting blurred from the head trauma and blood from the top of her head. Weakly getting to her knees, she screamed "SON OF A BITCH!" terrified and filled with rage that she couldn't even hear her own cry of pain and rebellion. She staggered, all of her work taken down in her house. She coughed as smoke filled her lungs as she attempted to enter downtown tetris, aiming to recover anything from her house. Her gait had become so unsteady she fell to the ground, gasping for breath with her head bleeding heavily. She stared at the sky as she faintly heard the roaring flames, mourning screams, and a bit closer barks of commands. Looking up, the last thing she saw was the figure of rescue workers sprinting her way with a stretcher. She couldn't even mumble her warnings of the counsel trying to stop her as she felt herself being lifted on her stretcher. Closing her eyes and trying to clear her mind, she didn't feel herself clearing her mind into the void. She felt the void clearing her mind.