Ray Timeline

I've heard it said that "Dogs are dumb." They keep trying the same thing over and over again with no results or the same results. It's like when we keep trying to get that stick through a doorway, but fail each time. Since going through forwards doesn't work, we decide to go in hind legs first. That fails as well. We can't figure it out. There's an opening, right? So, the stick must be able to go through it. After all, we go through it all the time. Why can't that stick go through as well?

I admit it. I was one of those dumb dogs. Miss Kamila would giggle at how I could never get that stick inside that doggie door. But that was a younger, less intelligent version of myself. Now that I'm older, I see that I should've looked at the situation from a different angle.

But I'm not referring to a simple problem of a stick being stuck at a doorway. I'm referring to saving the ones I care about. Me and my Powers of the Dead are formidable, but they're never quite enough. Miss Kamila gets shot dead. I follow the man in red. He leads me on a chase which leaves a trail of death. Miss Lynne is dead at the Junkyard. The man in red meets the dark couple at The Chicken Kitchen. The police show up. A detective with a blue cap is possessed by the man in red, but to everyone else, he turns on his green-haired colleague and then turns the gun on himself. Using the chaos, the trio leave Point X. I tried to use my Ghost Tricks to save the detectives' lives, but there's just nothing useful to swap to make my efforts effective. After failing so miserably, I jump back onto the man in red's tie. Somehow, he doesn't notice me. I don't question it and just continue to woefully observe. Miss Kamila's father is executed at the Special Prison. Uncle Cabs arrives too late and begins to cry in that dark, lonely courtyard. The man in red appears standing on top of the wall. The two have a terse conversation and Uncle Cabs soon finds a bullet in his chest. Courtesy of being possessed by the man in red. They're all gone now. I stay with the man in red until he is betrayed by the foreign organization. His spirit is trapped in the sinking and destroyed submarine. His corpse, robbed of its Temsik Meteorite fragment, is floating in a capsule with that robotic giant. I possess his corpse and go back once more to ten years in the past.

But there's a method to my "dumbness". I'm studying the ten years as they unfold. I can't change every sequence, but as I'm making little changes, the events are altered to certain degrees. They're not always good changes. Sometimes, the people I care about die in different ways. For example, this time around, Cabanela isn't killed at the Special Prison, but he's killed in the Junkyard's office. Why there? He learned of a new detail that he hadn't before: the Temsik Meteorite. Through very meticulous planning, I arranged that Cabanela would meet Pigeon Man. Using each other's expertise, they would shed more light onto the matter. Of course, that meant that Pigeon Man was now at risk as well. I truly hated that I brought him into the mix, but it was for a good reason, I assure you. And my Miss Kamila. She ends up being kidnapped by the crooks with blue skin. She was confused with the wrinkled man's daughter. I am not happy about that, but I feared that interfering would ruin the course, so I begrudgingly let it happen. So, each time that I returned to that day in Temsik Park and watched the events unfold and made changes when necessary, the events change more. My hope is that I can influence them enough so that everyone's doom is averted somehow. It's my only hope.

But one time, I never believed that such a change was possible. The man in red brought a companion. A cat. He usually kept papers in a suitcase when meeting Lynne, but this time, he had a cat carrier. The thing is, I don't know what changes that I made to influence the man in red to bring a cat with him. In any case, his cat was killed by a stray bullet when Lynne misfired. (And speaking of Miss Lynne, the man in red had altered his strategy. He seemed to want to frame Lynne instead of outright killing her. Strange, but there was opportunity there.)

I realized that this cat could be the key to solving my eternal problem: assistance. The cat had died within the fragment's radius and obtained Powers of the Dead. If he could help me, I know that I could save my loved ones. However, in true cat fashion, he refused and ghosted off through the phone lines.

Well, that was rude.

But that's okay, there's always next time. I think I know the trick to make cats listen. You have to lie to them. I've seen it done when Miss Kamila got a stubborn white kitten to get inside a carrier. She made it look like a box. The white cat didn't even notice the difference! My Miss Kamila is a genius. I will follow in her footsteps. For her sake and everyone else, I have to.

The same sequence follows once I go back again, but this time around, I tell the cat a lie. (I stop myself from chuckling. He's taken the form of his owner because that's the first corpse he saw when he regained consciousness. A little payback for rudeness never hurts. Heh Heh.) The cat only has until tomorrow morning before he disappears and that Miss Lynne is the key to everything. (She wasn't really, but still, he'd have been lost forever if he didn't follow her around.)

Off the cat goes through the phone lines. And I feel the changes occurring as he follows the trail of disaster. Miss Lynne isn't killed in the Junkyard...but I sense that she's died several times through other means. That girl has terrible luck. Miss Kamila is kidnapped again, but I'm not worried about her. I know that things will turn out right this time around. Cabanela arrests Miss Kamila's father and brings him to the wrinkled man's office to stall for time. I feel bad that my meddling with events made Cabanela seem like a nonchalant jerk, but alas, even I can't fully predict how my influences change things. He's really a good person, but I do wish that he hadn't been so secretive. It would've helped his reputation immensely.

The cat follows the trail until leads him to the bottom of the sea. I've never wriggled so much. I feel like that happy puppy that I once was.

The cat succeeded. He erased his owner's death which then erased all of the turmoil of that dark night.

As I fade away, I can proudly look back and say that my "doggie dumbness" was a good thing. I kept trying over and over. All I had to do was look at things from a different angle. If all dogs could look at the doorway and the stick from a different angle, we wouldn't be labelled as 'dumb'. We'd turn that stick sideways to make it fit.

I guess that makes me a dog genius then. Heh Heh.

o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o

A/N: I'm playing Ghost Trick again and it's eternally good!