The first thing she did once she got home from her day job was to check her 'don't get kidnapped again' system: the subtle mark in the gravel, the slight extra twist in the doorknob, her emergency go-bag, the hidden bookcase gun, the hidden bedside table gun, and—most importantly—the hidden toilet gun.
Once, after a long hike's worth of daydreaming, Shilloh had decided that if she were murderously inclined, she would probably try to kill someone while they were on the toilet. You know, reduce risks by getting them with their literal pants between their literal legs.
There were certain downsides to her burst of brilliance, though. First, the toilet gun was too easy to fiddle with when she was bored. Which could lead to the most embarrassing gunshot wound story ever. Also, though people absolutely were going to come and try to kill her at some point—Witness Protection could only get you so far—the gun forced her to contempte that inevitable attack each time she had to poop. Which was a real downer. Some might even say it was a… bummer.
She was too tired to do more than snort at her own pun.
On autopilot, Shilloh continued the 'don't get kidnapped again' check, saw everything was in order, and blinked at a clock. The numbers didn't change, no matter how many times she blinked.
Hopefully, she had time to eat and take a nap before leaving for her second job.
In the end, there was no such luck. She barely managed to shove a protein bar in her mouth and be pissed about it. Not only were protein bars expensive, but she also had ingredients in the fridge that were going bad.
As she chewed, she swapped out the contents of her pack. Her cartography tools went onto the floor and a desktop that her grandmother would call a 'maelstrom of papers and primordial chaos.' However, Shilloh called it a mess of papers in exactly the spots they were supposed to be. If her drawers couldn't always close, then it was for a damned good reason. Plus, she lived alone. Who cared? Only God could Judge her if she had to put half the contents of her desk on the floor when she needed to draft a final map. And, what with God being so distracted bringing about The End of Days, she was probably fine on that front.
She refilled her pack with cheap snacks for dumb tourists and extra emergency gear. A few other items were tossed in her car just in case the hunters forgot something important. In her experience as a guide, clients were guaranteed to forget something they 'absolutely needed.'
That was one of her favorite things about her side gig: how often rich people forgot that each step on a trail took them further from their overindulgent lives. Many amateur naturalists or photographers had offered her an absurd amount of money to run back to town for a pack of cigarettes or the ointment they had left in their car. Sometimes, she would wander a quarter of a mile off, set up a hammock, sleep for half an hour, and then get paid a few hundred dolrs in tips for something that had been in her pack the whole time.
She did one final visual check of the cottage before heading out. Shilloh lived farther out into the woods than was safe for most people. Especially since she couldn't afford a wizard to ward her property. She had settled for barred windows. The bars weren't pretty, but they were made of mixed metals with special alchemical treatments, and some small protections were warded onto them.
Despite them, her cottage was still comfy-looking. It was mostly kitchen, with the second rgest space dedicated to bookshelves, a comfortable armchair, and a couch that sacrificed looks unto the altar of nap-ability. She also had a desk and drafting table in the corner, but the sofa and firepce always drew her eye.
There was also a homemade cat tower that saw use when snow brought in her outdoor cats. Beyond the reading area and kitchen was a bedroom that perfectly fit her dresser and bed while only partially impeding the arc of a door leading to the cottage's bathroom.
It was cozy and hers, and goddamn it all if she wasn't going to keep promising to install a barn door on the bathroom before putting it off for another year. That was the privilege of home ownership, and she'd worked hard to afford her procrastination.
Even sleep-deprived and hating life as she did at that moment, Shilloh loved her little cottage. It was filled with lots of warm colors with some vivid spshes of brightness, candy skulls, fuzzy bnkets, framed sketches of poisonous pnts, and a few Halloween decorations that were too pretty to ever pack up.
She just wished she could spend some actual time in her house.
Instead, the exhausted woman returned to her truck without having removed her boots or changed into less sweaty clothes.
As she walked out, she raised a hand to touch an old wooden pque over the door. It reminded her of Grandma. That woman had probably had whole years where she wished she was only as tired as Shilloh felt.
The pque said 'Death, Taxes, and the Apocalypse(s).' There was a matching one at the family farm. Grandma always said it was the modern 'Live, Laugh, Love' and then cackled even though no one else understood the reference.
The old biddie was tough as nails. She also had a talent for both telling stories and for setting monsters, machines, and quasi-holy abominations on fire. Which was a good combination.
Shilloh's knees ached, but she tried to remind herself that she was lucky. Compared to what Grandma had told them about what M-day was like, she had it easy.
Grandma's had been a young woman working at the hospital, and it had been early in the morning for her timezone when The Vault opened.
Between one breath and the next, she remembered an entire separate life that she had lived in a magical world. Over there, her body had looked different, the nguage had been different, and her husband had been different. Who she was though—the soul of her—had been the same.
She remembered that her other self was a mage who knew the magical word for combustion. In her past life, she had been too poor to learn many words or much in the way of syntax. A life getting rich by making rituals as a wizard had been beyond her.
But a single word was enough if you were willing to bend your will towards truly plumbing the depths of it. Which was all mages were, people who profoundly understood a word or two and could pull a lot out of them.
It wasn't gmorous, but Grandma had never cked gumption in any of her lives. Working at the medieval equivalent of a garbage dump, causing trash and things that should not have been combustible to combust, had been a reliable way to put food on the table.
This world—the modern world—went to hell pretty quickly after she remembered all that during an early morning shift at the hospital. Grandma had been a bit disoriented after finding her other self, but being a woman of science, she decided to test these recollections.
She had been very dazed when making that decision, she liked to remind them. Luckily, she was skilled enough to stop the oncology lounge from burning for more than a minute or two.
It was less fortunate that people all over the world were also finding their other lives. Even that bitch Meri from radiology could suddenly turn into a puma. Which was just fucking rich; Grandma would always scowl because the only thing she had ever pounced on in her life was a bottle of wine and an excuse to tell everyone how she was going to move to Honolulu once her rich aunt finally died.
It was even less fortunate that all the wizards who had created The Vault, who had worked on packing the blueprint of their world into an interdimensional life raft that crashed into the modern world and spilled out magic, had all died. Maybe they had died making The Vault. Maybe they died in the pnet-shattering eldritch apocalypse that had been foretold, the one they had hoped to flee from in The Vault.
No one knew either way. No one ever showed up on earth to say. Which was odd because souls had never stopped leaving The Vault. Even now, decades ter, people would grow enough as a person that their soul would come to match someone's soul left in the The Vault. Then they'd find their other self. That happened to Shilloh even though she had been born well after M-day.
To make things even more confusing, the old world had not been one of photographic evidence and sterling journalism. Superstition, a world that made travel perilous, and a thorough disregard for literacy meant the old world was still a mystery to most. One city's folkloric beast was day-to-day truth on the other side of a mountain range.
Still, life will go on. Sure, the wizards fleeing a total apocalypse in their old world had caused a marginal apocalypse by inserting themselves into Grandma's world. But everyone adapted to the death of an old way of life and the birth of a new one retively quickly. Then, a few years ter, the second yer of The Vault opened. The Cyrptos came then. Both the quasi-natural beasts and the ones that manifested wherever magical currents grew too thick and too charged.
That second apocalypse was very bad for the world. Good for Grandma, though. Monsters burned, and there was a good living in combusting the ones that would not have otherwise been combusting without her presence. As an added bonus, her asshole modern husband died.
The third apocalypse was not better or worse. Just different. It was a breakout by things that should not have been released for decades yet. Grandma got through it. Mom did, too. Governments sorta came back. Sorta. Enough that they forced a stalemate with the incomprehensible eldritch jailbreakers from the third wave. Which was useful enough that Grandma wasn't as pissed about the taxes coming back.
Death, Taxes, and the Apocalypse(s). That's all a girl could rely on. Shilloh gave the sign one st affectionate pat and tried to stride through the door with confidence. She wasn't dead, and the next yer of The Vault probably wasn't bringing a new apocalypse today. That meant the only thing she really needed to worry about was taxes. Even the slow-motion arrival of the apocalypse hadn't stopped the endless need for cash, and that's exactly what this evening would help her with.
On the way to her car, she gnced at a bucket full of veggies not quite ripe enough for her own dinner. A deer and a cute little fawn had been coming around for the st week or so. She had left the bucket for them so they could eat without getting into her herbs or any of the more dangerous things behind the house.
"Fraulein!" she called, "You better not have eaten that fawn!"
There was no answer. But when she got to the driver's side of her truck, Fraulein was waiting for her. She was sitting on a stone to the side of the battered old car.
Fraulein looked like a bobcat today. Probably nineteen or twenty pounds and with a subtly spotted fur that highlighted the dangerous grace of her. Yesterday, she looked much more like one of the big Lynxes from up north. She had been at least ten pounds heavier with different fur and more pronounced tufts on her ears.
It didn't matter though. No matter how she decided to look, Shilloh could always recognize her friend.
"So? Did you eat that sweet little fawn?"
The big cat just blinked at her.
"I promise I won't be mad if you did."
No response.
"Heifer. I bring your zy ass scraps every week. The least you owe me is the courtesy of a response."
Fraulein looked to the side, fascinated by the sound of woods through the trees.
"Fucking cats," Shilloh muttered. "Also, why wouldn't you sit on the hood of the car? I parked in the sunlight so it would be warm for you."
Fraulein looked at her car, its thick covering of red dust, and then back at her.
"Well fuck you too! It's a working car. What do you expect?"
Fraulein gave her a long, slow blink. In a cat, it was a sign of trust and affection.
"That cutesy bullshit doesn't work on me."
The next blink was longer and slower.
"I said it doesn't work!" she lied.
Fraulein slinked to the door of her car and looked up at her with all the majesty of a queen sitting atop a bejeweled dais.
Shilloh grumbled something about a 'prissy bitch’ but still opened the door so the bobcat could hop into the passenger seat and start licking her paws.
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