Katalepsis 2.12

Here we go. The last chapter of "Providence or Atoms," and the last chapter of Katalepsis in queue. EDIT: arcs 3-4 are now in queue. I'd be open to doing more Katalepsis in the future, but I can't make any promises about not reading ahead on my own. The second arc hasn't thrilled me as much as the first, but it still has my attention and investment, and if I ever end up having time for recreational media consumption, well, yeah.

Anyway. Raine and Heather got sucked into some kind of space-warping trap inside one of the university buildings, with Lozzie and her associates being the most likely culprits. Perhaps they should have laid low at Evelyn's house for another couple of days after all. Either this chapter will see them getting free, or it'll end on an even bigger cliffhanger opening direct hostilities between Team Sapphic and Team...okay, let's be real, Lozzie is also gonna turn out to be a hot lesbian under the skull mask. Anyway, let's do this.

First, we retraced our steps.

More accurately, Raine retraced our steps and led me in her wake. She left no question as to who was going first, back through the double doors to the corridor of Not-Willow-House.

A familiar transformation came over her—watchful, alert, tense. My hand felt clammy in hers, my heart in my throat. In the fake corridors she eased each set of doors open with the tip of her boot, waiting for any nasty surprises to jump out at us before proceeding.

The Medieval Metaphysics room was gone, as was the back staircase and all the windows; each set of internal double doors led to another identical stretch of whitewashed corridor, with four classroom doors on each wall and a single noticeboard full of philosophy department flyers. Raine tried the door handles, but they didn't even turn.

After seven identical corridors, the doorway to the main stairwell appeared on the left again. We checked, but found the same endless abyss up and down.

Almost sounds like they're in a computer simulation. The magical equivalent of that, I guess.

Either that, or it really is just a mental hallucination effect causing them to keep turning around and walking in circles without realizing it. Raine was still able to call Evelyn by cell phone, so whatever situation they're in it's still on the same plane of existence after all.

" … is this the same set of stairs?" I asked. "We went in a straight line, how can we be back here?"

"Time for an experiment, I think." Raine pulled a Swiss Army knife and a pen from her jacket.

Wonder what this is, now? Probably either a) some kind of markings she's planning to leave on the walls etc, or b) a blood magic trick that Evelyn taught her.

"We don't have time to muck about, Raine, we need to get out of here."

Heh. I know that "mucking about" is a common turn of phrase in England, but to my American eyes it just makes me imagine Heather as an ork.

She held up a finger and smiled, beamed that endless confidence directly into my brain. "When lost in the woods, the most important thing is … ?"

I shrugged. "Shout for help? Oh, no, pick a direction and stick to it?"

"Good guess, but not quite enough for the biscuit. Most important thing is don't panic. Take a drink, eat a cereal bar, calm down, get your bearings. Thank Ray Mears for that one."

"We don't have any of those things. Also this isn't the woods."

"Yeah, but it's basically the same principle. I'm dead serious, the most important thing is don't panic."

"I'm … actually not panicking now." I frowned at myself and took a deep breath. "I've done this too many times before, it may as well be routine. At least I'm not alone this time."

Raine reached over and squeezed my shoulder. "Like a Slip?"

"I suppose. This doesn't feel like one, though."

"Here, time for science."

Raine cut a big X shape on the inside of the stairwell door with her knife. I grimaced, because it still looked exactly like Willow House. Vandalism irked all my well-raised sensibilities.

Now that's not a very orky sentiment at all, is it?

Back in the looping corridor, Raine tugged one of the flyers off the noticeboard. "Ah, weird."

"What? What is it?"

Raine showed me the flyer. "Guess they can't copy fine detail."

Total gobbledygook. Backward letters, jumbled words, sentences on top of each other. A photocopy error from hell, as if an alien had seen human writing upside down and from a distance, then recreated it with no understanding of form or purpose. Every flyer showed the same manic mash of text.

Hmm. That definitely sounds closer to the "computer simulation" end of the spectrum.

Let's see what happens with the carvings Raine left.

Somehow that disturbed me far more than being trapped. "Put— p-put it away. Please."

Raine tore down the rest of the flyers. In the next stretch of identical corridor they were pinned back on the noticeboard, but in the seventh—next to the stairwell entrance again—they lay scattered on the ground.

We checked the stairwell; X still marked the spot.

Raine's minor vandalism had not been magically repaired.

"We're inside a loop?" I asked.

So it has several loops arranged end to end, but it's a finite number of them, and there's no "reset" going on. No reloading from template.

Which makes this sound less like a sim, and more like an actual pocket dimension with a persistent, material existence.

They can still get radio signals in and out, though. And also, they're not running out of air.

Hmm.

"Right, don't worry." Raine squeezed my hand. "Evee's working on this. If I can't find a way out, she'll have it solved in no time. Like being stuck in a lift together, just with far less opportunity for necking in secret, eh?"

Well, I wouldn't go that far.

Raine flashed me a cheeky grin. I tried to smile back and enjoy the joke, but my damnable curiosity had alighted on a point of principle, perhaps to distract myself and keep the panic tamped down.

How does a physical loop work?

"Like a … a Möbius strip," I murmured.

My imagination summoned an image of the structure. I ruminated on how a corridor could follow a straight line yet also loop around to the same point. The implications of a closed spatial loop teased at dangling threads in the back of my mind. A physical impossibility, but one I could just about picture, if I dug hard enough.

Raine was saying something when the answer bubbled up from the oily depths of my subconscious.

"Oh," I said. "I think I know how they made this—"

A blinding spike of pain rammed into my head, right behind my eyes. I let go of Raine's hand, doubled up, and chucked the contents of my guts onto the carpet. Lucky I'd barely eaten anything that morning.

Of course I knew how this loop worked—the Eye had taught me.

Stupid, stupid Heather. Those concepts were radioactive waste, poison, death.

"Heather? Heather, what's wrong? Heather?"

I sucked in air and clutched my aching stomach as I forced the thoughts back down. Raine's helping hands pulled me upright and held on hard as I clutched at her for support.

"Are you Slipping?"

"No, no." I shook my head and wiped my mouth on the back of my sleeve. Disgusting, but I had no other choice right then. Hardly the best time to need a bathroom, stuck in a pocket-dimension loop set up by dangerous people. "Ugh, my head."

"Take a moment. Breathe."

"I know how this place works. I think. The maths … the principles underlying it. The Eye's lessons, it's in here somewhere." I tapped my head and groaned again.

She says that she recognizes the math behind it.

That means that her understanding of...interesting. There are implications here.

So, generally speaking, when you're learning a new language, or really any new system of information, the first thing that happens is that you learn to recognize the symbol and recall the concept that it represents. For example, if you're an English speaker who's learning Spanish, you'll learned to recognize the word "leche" as a word for "milk" long before you'll be able to look at a glass of milk and identify it as "leche." Or, for that matter, before you can look at the English word "milk" and translate it into "leche." Being able to proactively talk about things in Spanish, on your own cognitive power, is generally something that comes with practice and exposure.

The Dogworld incident had Heather faced with Evelyn's glyph, as well as context clues for what it meant. Also, with Heather's "slipping" incidents, this was a bit of magic she'd already had plenty of (involuntary, but still) practice with. That was a case of seeing the foreign word and recalling its meaning. In this case, she's seeing a supernatural phenomenon and recalling the correlating symbols for it on her own. Implying, for a better word, "fluency." Despite her not having had any practice or practical experience with this one.

However the Eye of Mdlkthpk projects its information into her brain, it seems to be circumventing the usual association-building process and skipping right to fluency. To true understanding of the material. "Katalepsis," one might call it.

Either that, or Heather's been leaving part of her dream-lessons from Mdlkthpk out, and it hasn't only been beaming the hypermath into her mind but ALSO the material realities (at least, as we perceive it. The hypermath is probably closer to this universe's "objective truth" than our perceived environment, but that shouldn't matter from Heather's perspective) that the hypermath corresponds to. It may have also been giving her "tests," showing her visions magical processes and events and making her recall their correlating hypermath.

In the latter case, if Mdlkthpk is showing her both the map and the territory (again, whichever one of those "reality" is from a human perspective doesn't matter for learning purposes) and forcing her to understand where they point to each other, then that means it is INTENTIONALLY teaching. Like, it knows how humans perceive the world, and it's deliberately showing her how its eldritch math language relates to elements that the human senses perceive. That's not something it could do by accident. That takes intentionality.

In light of what we already know, and my existing hypotheses about Maisie...

Mdlkthpk needs Maisie to understand its mind in order to fully assimilate her. In order to make her understand it, it needs to understand her and how to explain itself to her. Those difficulties in mutual understanding are the reason it's taking so long for her to be fully assimilated. Heather is getting all of this secondhand via the twin telepathy link.

If I'm right, then that means that Heather probably couldn't have recognized this dimension-warping effect for what it is and how it works if she'd seen it a couple of years ago. As Mdlkthpk makes progress on absorbing Maisie, the two minds becoming one and the same, Heather gets a better understanding of what the numbers mean and also of what means the numbers.

It puts an interesting spin on the time limit, in that case. The closer they get to the deadline, the more powerful Heather will get, but by the same token it will also be harder to actually do the rescue. Additionally, it raises the question of what happens if they don't rescue Maisie and Mdlkthpk fully subsumes her while she and Heather still have that mental connection. Will the connection simply be terminated as Maisie stops being Maisie, or will Mdlkthpk be able to hijack it and use Heather as a conduit to start invading another world?

...and, now that I've said that, it seems fairly likely that that might be the entire point. Grabbing two psychically linked twins and keeping one while sending the other back. That's probably the worstcase scenario: Mdlkthpk isn't just actively malevolent toward the sisters, but has designs on the rest of humanity as well and is using them to launch an invasion. Maybe one that will reduce Earth to another wasteland of ruins prowled by mutant, worshipful wretches, its sky becoming the latest of several in which Mdlkthpk can manifest physically as a great Eye.

Hmm. You know. The scrying session a few chapters ago revealed that the Eye had lids, with skin and other tissue types. And the medieval occultist dude who wrote about Mdlkthpk did infer that the Eye he saw had a body attached to it, but that he couldn't see it. If Mdlkthpk is a proper Cthulhu Mythos style 4-D organism, then it might not be "manifesting" in multiple skies so much as extending one of its many eyestalks into each one while keeping the rest of its body on one or more other planes.

Heh. If Katalepsis ends with them opening a portal to the dimension that contains its main body and shooting a superweapon through it, we'll have come full web serial circle. That's literally the final boss of Worm and how they killed it.

But, I just did a whoooooole lot of speculation based on very limited information. I could have gone wrong at any point in that entire chain of inferences, in which case everything after that point will be totally off. But hey, it means that Katalepsis is making me think. It's making me think hard. That's to its credit. I like stories that do that.

"Hey, it'll be okay, I'm gonna get you out of here."

"I think—" I swallowed. "I-I think I can get us out, but—"

Another wave of nausea slammed into my gut. I leaned forward and struggled to force the thoughts down. Don't touch, don't touch them. Buried deep in the layers upon layers of the Eye's lessons lurked the exact mathematical operation required to translate Raine and I out of this space, but it was white-hot to the touch.

I cringed, terrified of pain, of my own suggestion.

When I'd saved Evelyn and dragged her back from Outside, that had been life or death. But this? We were just lost.

"Heather, no, don't try it."

"But I can," I whined. "You said you wouldn't stop me from being strong."

"And you will be." Raine rubbed my back, which helped ease the nausea away. "But right now you're untrained or unpractised or un-whatever-you're-going-to-be, and this is a trap. If you try the mind-magic and it doesn't work, I'll have to carry you. Even if it does work, we don't know what it'll do to you. Start small, remember?"

"What if we can't get out?"

"Keep it as an emergency backup option. In the meantime, you can rely on me, okay? It's okay to rely on me."

I nodded, and felt both secret relief and secret shame.

After so much recklessness and desperation and unreliable team members, this conversation is so satisfying to read. Raine is totally right. If Heather can warp them out of there, and their lives don't seem to be in immediate danger, then that means they're in no hurry. They can take as much time as they're willing to spend looking for alternate escape methods that don't come with health complications before resorting to the one that does.

And, like. I doubt this trap is meant to hold them until they starve to death. More likely, Lozzie or whoever will be by to give them an ultimatum, and they might be able to negotiate something not too painful. It's still possible that this is all a big misunderstanding and that once they talk it over they'll realize they have no reason to be enemies and that there's plenty of nightgaunt to go around.

"Think about all the things we're gonna do later today," Raine said. "When we get out of here, yeah?"

"How about a bath and sleep? And wash my mouth out."

Raine laughed. "Sure thing."

She waited until I was steady on my feet, then set about phase two of her experiment to get us out. She flicked open the screwdriver head on her Swiss Army knife and set to work unscrewing the hinges from one of the locked classroom doors in the fake corridor. I watched her wiggle the screws out as I tried to clean the taste of vomit from my mouth, occupying my mind with anything except how this place worked.

Didn't work in Chainsaw Man. Probably won't work here either, though I could be wrong.

"Raine? Do you think this is about me?"

"Can't speak for anybody else, but most things I do lately are about you." She cracked a grin and I warmed inside, even if I didn't have the energy to blush.

"Oh don't, not right now." I tutted. "I mean this place. This trap. Is this for me?" Raine frowned, taking my question very seriously. My thoughts were already racing. "I mean, those people yesterday, the cultists," I said. "They did this, right? They lured the demon messenger for some reason. Is this revenge for interrupting them?"

Doubt it. Most likely, they lured the demon messenger because they saw it in the sky and were like "shit those things are expensive lets go steal it."

The trap being set outside the medieval metaphysics room rather than Heather's apartment also strongly suggests that they're just gunning for Evelyn and her associates in general rather than any one person in particular, which again makes sense for turf-war style retaliation.

This does mean that they've put that incident together with Evelyn. Possibly one of them recognized Raine. They may or may not also have ID'd Twil and be planning retaliation against her group as well, though then again from the sound of things that might not be a fight they'd want to pick.

Raine shook her head slowly. "Smart money says the Sharrowford Cult has no idea who you are, and I aim to keep it that way. Last night, my guess is they knew precisely zip until we were already in deep."

"What makes you so confident?"

"This kinda thing?" She gestured at the corridor, the loop, the trap. "This is why I'm here. My guess is this was meant for Evee."

Heh, right as Raine.

" … if you say so." I mulled over the idea as Raine finished dismantling the door's lower hinge. She dusted off her hands and stood up.

"Job's a good'un. Let's find out what's behind door number one." Raine grinned at her own dumb joke and waggled the door hinges free. She wedged her fingertips into the thin gap around the frame.

I had a sudden, terrifying vision of a howling void on the other side, of Raine sucked through by decompression, of a hand reaching for us from the darkness revealed.

None of those things happened.

Behind the door was a blank brick wall.

"God damn." Raine grunted and let the door fall with a clatter. The noise set my teeth on edge. "Guess we're in a cartoon now. Huh."

"Great."

Bricks behind the superficially correct-looking hallway loop. Now, why even bother to disguise the interior surfaces at all if they're going to do that?

My best guess is that sucking Raine and Heather into the trap was a slow process, so the trap had to look right or they'd have gotten out of range before it could finish. That fits with the surfaces and layout being perfect, but the fine details that aren't likely to be inspected being rushjobs.

Hmm. A bit like a VR sim after all, then, at least in terms of how you go about designing and bringing it to life.

Raine tapped the bricks with her knife, but for all we knew the wall might have been a mile thick. She shrugged and shot me an ironic smile, then unfolded the bottle-opener attachment on her knife and dug it into part of the door frame. She ran it up and down, wiggling it back and forth, until she yanked part of the frame away—a piece of steel rod as long as her arm. She weighed it in one hand, swished it through the air, and nodded approval.

To a sufficiently resourceful heroine, anything can be a nightstick.

My chest tightened. "Do you really think you're going to need that?"

"Never know. Better safe than sorry."

Raine had an idea. She took my hand and we walked back out to the endless stairwell. I averted my eyes from the sight as she stared into the abyss.

"Up or down?" she asked.

" … you're asking me to choose? What's to choose?"

"Serious answer? On one hand, your guess is as good as mine, but on the other, you've been outside reality on the regular, and I haven't. So, considering everything you know—up, or down?"

I sighed at Raine and held her gaze for a moment, but she seemed completely serious. "Um … down gets dark, and that's not good. Obviously not fit for human habitation. Up is at least slightly less unsettling."

"Up it is, then. Just focus on your feet, or on mine, don't look over the side. We're gonna be fine."

I doubt it matters, but we'll see.

She led the way up the flight of stairs to the next floor, my clammy little hand tight in hers. I was fairly certain that Raine had no idea how to escape this place, and I was also fairly certain all this activity was just to keep me occupied, to stop me from panicking while Evelyn did the real work to get us out. I appreciated it all the same.

"How are you not scared?" I asked.

"Ahhh, I've been in far worse places than this. Like Evelyn's house, the one she grew up in. At least this place isn't full of monsters."

"Don't tempt fate, please."

"Fate can taste my boot leather. We'll be fine."

The next floor was identical to the previous, with the same entrance to the same repeating corridors, the same flickering lights, the same X Raine had marked on the door with her knife. A perfect loop.
Except for one rather significant addition.

Not monsters. Worse.

People.

Five young men waited with their backs to us as we emerged into the fake corridor. Alerted by the sound of the door swinging open, they all jumped and turned and stared. One put his fists up, then shook himself and lowered them again. They looked almost as confused as I felt.

Hmm. Other hapless victims, or a trick? One or the other. They aren't acting like they're the ones responsible.

"Stay behind me," Raine whispered to me.

As if I would have done anything else. Groups of strange men were not at the top of my list of approachables even in normal situations. What did she think I was going to do, ask for directions?
They didn't seem anything like the sort of people one might encounter inside a dimensional pocket trap; they'd have been more at home standing around on a street corner in one of the rougher parts of Sharrowford, admiring a blinged-out car, all baseball caps and pints of hair gel and too much gold jewellery.

I was about to ask what the hell kind of people Heather would expect to encounter inside a dimensional pocket trap, but from the look of them what she really meant was "they don't look like students."

I believe the regionally appropriate term for this type would be "chav?" Not academically inclined, at any rate.

Each one wore a high-vis vest, stretched over a puffer jacket or shrugged on around a hoodie. One of them had draped it over his shoulders like a cape, and another had one wrapped around his arm.

On every vest, the Fractal.

...oh.

....

So, wait. Thuggish-looking young men with arcane glyphs on their vests.

Isn't this EXACTLY what you'd expect a not-very-powerful sorcerer's lackeys to look like? Cheap hired muscle with some hasty low level magical empowerment?

What the hell WAS Heather expecting?

Evee's cavalry?

No, I quickly corrected myself. The symbol was of passing similarity to the Fractal, but it was a different design. I'd memorised every last angle of the Fractal by now, refreshing it on my left arm every night. The symbols on the vests had been scrawled in a hurry, with marker pen, a different arrangement of lines branching out all wrong compared with the clarity of the Fractal.

One of the men turned to the others and thumbed over his shoulder. "I thought she was meant to come from that way?"

"Definitely not her."

"Yeah, there's two of them for a start."

"Shitshow already, this job."

Sounds like they were gunning for Evelyn specifically then, rather than just "anyone in her circle."

But Evelyn is the one person who WASN'T directly involved in the parking garage incident. Why would they have recognized Raine but then singled out Evelyn? I guess they just assumed that Raine was the one who put her and the other girls up to it, based on past experiences?

Alternatively, this isn't Lozzie's group at all. It's Twil's, seeking revenge for the electrocution.

In any case, these guys seem to have had a bit of experience doing magic-adjacent legbreaker work. I wonder how many people like them there are? In-the-know wizard retainers? I guess they're basically their own faction's equivalent of Raine.

"Everyone shut up," one shouted over the rest. He stepped toward us. A habitual leader, I guessed. Chunky fellow, overweight but not sagging, stubble on his chin and big blunt fingers raised in an open-handed gesture. He turned an easy, friendly smile on us. "Alright, you two? Lost like we are, yeah? Funny old bloody place, innit? You uh … just you two, yeah? Seen anybody else around here?"

"Yeah," Raine said. "There's a girl passed out downstairs, actually."

The fat guy's forehead creased into a frown. One of his friends in the back piped up. "She's having you on, Mark."

Fuck. Well, it was a nice try at least.

"Fuck's sake, no names," the fat guy snapped over his shoulder. "No fucking names."

In-the-know they may be, but that evidently doesn't neccessarily come with competence lol.

"Where's the way out?" Raine asked, low and soft.

The fat guy shot a glance back at his posse. One of them shrugged, another suggested telling us, and a third one had a disgusting glint in his eye. Even with Raine holding my hand, with her by my side, with my knowledge of what she could do, I felt an animal need to be elsewhere, not stuck in a confined space with several large, threatening people. My heartbeat pulsed in my throat and cold sweat broke out down my back.

"Disgusting glint" in his eye? Wonder what that means? I'm guessing either lechery of a kind that makes Heather fear he might take advantage of the situation, or something that trips her From Beyond senses.

"Who's gonna miss two kids, Mark?" the wise guy in back said.

He pulled his weapon first. That broke whatever inhibition had held them back. They were all armed—three big knives, a baseball bat, and an optimistic pair of knuckle dusters.

How did Heather not notice the baseball bat lol.

Raine grinned and idly raised the steel rod she'd pulled off the broken door.

"Alright love, come on," fat guy said, with the same easy smile as he opened his arms wide, despite holding a knife. "Put that down now, don't be silly, we just need to make sure you're not hiding anything. Then you can be on your way, yeah?"

He didn't wait for an answer. He lunged at Raine.

Oh come on dude, that's cheeeeeaaaaaaaap.

I think I screamed.

"I think I screamed. Specifically, I think that I screamed the word "lkmtdl," which caused the attacker to dissolve into a puddle of skin-colored maggots. I spent the next week nursing a migraine and coughing up blood, but it was totally worth it."

Five seconds, maybe ten, and it was all over. Too fast for me to think about. This was nothing like killing the monster in Evelyn's house two weeks ago, or the scuffles with Twil yesterday, or even Raine's brave attempts to do violence on the demon messenger. This was a real fight, nothing like in books or films, no flourishes or heroics.

Blood, the sound of metal hitting meat, and the strangely soft crack of broken bones.

I think Raine killed two of them. She didn't seem to care. We didn't hang around long enough to find out.

She was very, very good at it.

They barely touched her, a glancing blow to her upper shoulder and a brief handful of her jacket, which she punished with broken fingers and a shattered collarbone. When it was done, four of the men lay on the floor, two of them not moving. The fat man, the leader, was slumped face down with the back of his skull caved in. Blood soaked into the thin carpet. The last man standing backed away and dropped his knife, knuckles bleeding and split from where Raine had smashed his hand.

Referencing this is sort of an insult to Katalepsis, looking at both works as a whole, but for this one scene...well, it's the vibe. It simply is the vibe.

Heh, thinking about it more, Evelyn does kinda sorta correlate to Touko, even if her relationship to Raine is different. In which case that would mean that Heather is...

...oh

oh god no

i'm sorry i'm sorry i'm sorry i take it all back no nooooooooooooooo

"Alright, alright, okay, yeah, okay, alright," he was repeating, over and over.

Raine grinned.

She was flushed and breathing hard, bobbing from foot to foot like a boxer, weighing the metal rod in her hand again. She stooped down and pulled the baseball bat out of one of the men's hands, kicking away his limp attempt to stop her. She hefted the bat and let out a long, shuddering breath.

Being more serious now, taking down multiple armed attackers while they're ganging up on you, without even getting badly hurt, while NOT being a martial arts master who's been doing nothing but practice for decades...Raine cannot possibly be a baseline human. She's augged.

I guess that's the benefit of having one highly trusted legbreaker instead of a group of not-very-trusted ones. You can supersoldier her up to your heart's content and your magical limitations.

Hmm. And Raine said that she herself wouldn't stand a chance against Twil in wolfmode. Twil be scary, then. Noted.

Anyway, let's see how horny this display has made Heather and how ashamed of that she feels. I'm sure she'll be describing it at length.

I was shaking all over, hand to my mouth. I'd unconsciously backed away until I'd hit the door, adrenaline and panic clawing at my stomach and chest.

"Raine?" I squeaked. At least one corpse blocked my route to her.

"I'll be right there. Promise. Gotta finish this."

"No, no, you don't have to," said the last man standing, his hands out to ward her off. He backed away toward the rear double doors. "It's cool, we're done. They're not paying us enough for this, you're not even the kid we're meant to find. Alright? Alright?"

"Who are you meant to find?" Raine asked.

He frowned and thought that over for a second, so Raine raised the metal rod and grinned all the wider.

"Okay, okay!" he said. "Fuck! Fucking hell, you— okay, shit. A blonde girl, uni student, uh, one leg, missing hand, uh, I-I—" He kept backing up as he spoke, one hand groping for the doors behind him.

"Who sent you?"

"Ugh, Adam Gore. He's just a fixer, though. I don't know who this job is for, okay? I swear, I don't know. Don't fucking hit me."

Raine is such a player character it's insane.

If the thug here is telling the truth, then it sounds like he and his buddies *aren't* actually persistent retainers of Lozzie's sect. In which case, giving them the glyphs, and them seemingly expecting the glyphs to actually do anything...letting them into the know...hmm. Is there an entire subculture of street gang mercenaries who know about magic but are content just taking hired muscle jobs from wizards?

This feels off.

"How do we get out?" Raine said.

He pointed at his high-vis vest. "They gave us these, right? To—"

The double doors behind him burst open and a hand swatted him aside with the force of a wrecking ball. His head bounced off the wall with a sickening crack and he collapsed to the floor.

I realised in a rush of horror that these men had been a mere layer of ablative meat, to slow Evelyn down until the real killers could arrive.

The tall woman in the full-body trench coat, from last night, stepped through the doors and lowered the hand she'd used to murder our would-be attacker. She moved with robotic slowness. She was even taller up close; I revised my estimate, perhaps almost seven feet from tip to toe. Only her eyes showed, between a scarf around her face and a hood pulled low over her head. She fixed on us with cold, empty precision in her eyes.

Oh. That's why they let them in on the magic. Because they weren't planning on them surviving. Either get fried by Evelyn to deplete her mp, be killed by big zombie lady if they manage to beat her. And yep, it's the gauntjackers, not the dogworshippers.

Well. If Lozzie and Co are this ruthless, then diplomacy was probably never an option. Evelyn might be paranoid, but she seems to have been right about this specific group at least.

"Heather." Raine took a step back. "Back up, through the door, now."

I couldn't move, not without Raine.

The tall woman was not alone.

Nightmare hounds nosed through the door behind her and gathered at her ankles, amalgamations from the worst depths of my pneuma-somatic visions, built along canine principles but from parts of the wrong creatures; some showed metal rivets and stitching between grey lizard-flesh and shaggy hide, plastic hinges at komodo dragon jawlines, steel-reinforced legs and eyeballs of incorrect size rolling loose in their sockets. Dripping stingers whipped through the air and drool looped from muzzles unable to close properly.

Lozzie had living PSF all over her, when we saw her. These servitors seem to be made of chopped up bits of them stuck together with metal and plastic and then reanimated. Like she lures them to herself, and then slaughters them to make mindless drones.

Exact opposite relationship with the PSF that Heather seems to be on her way to developing. And...well, like I said. Some of those creatures might not be "F" at all. Much closer to people. We don't know if that's the case for the ones Lozzie dissects, but given the way she apparently treats humans in her employ I very much doubt that she cares.

Also, it probably goes without saying, but I'm using "Lozzie" as shorthand for the leadership of this covern or sect or whatever it is. She might not actually be the boss, or at least not the only boss. Going by her apparent age, she in fact most likely isn't. But still, closest thing to a look at their actual master that we've been told about.

The tall woman jabbed a gloved finger at Raine and then at the floor.

"You want me to drop these?" Raine hefted the metal rod and her stolen baseball bat.

A nod.

"Think I'll hold on to little slugger here," said Raine. "But you can have the other one, sure."

Raine spun and hurled the metal rod at the tall woman's face, a full-body javelin throw with every ounce of her strength. She overbalanced and caught herself at the last moment.

The tall woman jerked her head aside in a sudden flicker of speed. The metal rod clattered against the door. The hounds surged forward.

Dang. She might be a zombie, but she's not the slow, lumbering kind of zombie.

I'm not sure if Raine has been souped up quite enough to deal with this.

Raine spun on her heels, leapt the corpse or two between her and me, and bundled me through the door so hard I almost went sprawling in the stairwell.

"Heather, up, up the stairs!"

"Where— where do we even go!?" I cried.

"Just up!"

Raine pushed me and I went, but we didn't get more than three paces before the first hound burst through the doors and went for Raine, snapping and growling. She turned and dashed its brains out with a swing of the baseball bat. The hound yelped, a pitiful, terrible sound, and went down in a heap of limp meat and muscle.

They're still yelping. Not total zombie, then.

Hope they're not, like, still alive and feeling everything.

Also, for that matter, Raine is able to see them unaided, and she can hit them with a mundane baseball bat. The organic parts of these things are of obvious pneuma-somatic origin, but they seem to exist entirely in the human plane right now.

My guess is that this is an advantage of using PSF to make zombies instead of just human and normal animal corpses. The metal and plastic parts are obviously of human origin, while the organic bits are pneuma-somatic. The baddies seem able to smuggle them into university buildings without making a scene, and even the "wilfull ignorance" effect that keeps most people from noticing weird stuff has got to have limits. If these things can shift back and forth between material and ethereal at will, then they're the perfect covert military asset. Move to operations area invisibly and intangibly, phase in to attack, then phase out again to disappear after the job's finished.

Evelyn's robospiders may or may not have a similar ability. They might be more sophisticated and have a way of attacking from the pseuma-somatic plane without making themselves vulnerable in turn, but they also might not. From the looks of them, they're more sophisticated constructs than these grotesques in general.

Well, at least the grotesques in question aren't especially hardy. Makes sense; a bunch of body parts crudely riveted together would be easy to knock apart again. Especially with something like a baseball bat.

I tripped on the stairs, shaking with fear and adrenaline. The next couple of minutes descended into a blur of terror.

I could barely keep my head on straight, let alone form a coherent plan. If you've never been in the middle of a genuine melee then you can't imagine what it feels like. Everything happens too fast, no time to think and react. I scrambled up the stairs, banging my knees and scuffing my hands.

Raine held off the hounds, setting about herself with the bat and her boots, kicking heads and breaking legs and smashing rib cages. She caught one hound by the throat with her free hand and shoved it bodily over the railing, sending it tumbling into the abyssal stairwell. Another one she hit so hard it bowled down two of its fellows. The stairwell filled with the sound of wood hitting meat and twisted canine yelping.

Raine didn't come away unscathed this time—the nightmare hounds took a couple of chunks out of her, a bite in the leg and another in her forearm, where her leather jacket turned away the worst of the teeth.

In the heat of the moment I thought her brave.

No, it wasn't bravery. It was joy.

She was grinning and covered with sweat and one hundred percent in her element. Totally focused, a state of perfect flow, like this was what she was made for. After six hounds dropped dead or wounded, they backed off, slinking away and growling from the corridor.

Huh. Okay, I'm beginning to maybe come around on the "Raine enjoys this kind of thing just a little bit too much" assessment. I suppose she could just be in some sort of adrenaline-stress-induced involuntary grin. Some people have that sort of reaction. But I'm inclined to believe Heather when she says that Raine seems to actually be enjoying fighting monsters, even after they've injured her, even while standing over the dead bodies of human beings who - while their deaths were justified and probably necessary - still were people. People who the story went out of its way to remind us had names, personalities, and quirks.

Well. Before I judge her too harshly, we'll see what she has to say after the fact.

Raine swept a hand through her hair and let out a long breath.

"Y-your leg." I pointed. She was bleeding badly from the bite wound, the thigh of her jeans soaked through with crimson.

"Just a scratch," she said with an ear-to-ear grin. "Heather, I'm loving this, but even I can't keep it up forever. We gotta leave."

I knew what she was asking me to do.

Okay yeah, now it seems like the enjoyment is at least partly affected to keep Heather from freaking out too much and make her thing Raine has this under better control than she actually does.

Inside, I cringed away from the Eye's lessons, but we had no choice. The wound in her leg made it real, raw, life-threatening. We had to leave, right now.

I can do this, I told myself. I'd done it before, in equally dangerous circumstances, twice in a row, while brain-numb and bleeding. This time I was much more in control, right? Right. Breathe, focus, get us out.

My stomach clenched with anxiety as I summoned a mental image of the loop and pictured in my mind the mathematics to punch an exit back to reality. Nausea rolled through me and a spike of headache pain tingled on the edge of my scalp. I reached out to touch Raine.

A metallic click from above us interrupted my thoughts. It interrupted everything. I looked up.

Several floors above us, a woman aimed a rifle down at Raine.

Wiry and lean and sharp as a blade, her head shaved, dressed in outdoor hiking gear. The rifle was an old bolt-action affair, her eye to the scope, stock tucked tight against her shoulder. I'd never seen a gun in person before. It didn't seem real.

Oh shit. They really pulled out all the stops, both magical and mundane.

I hope that didn't break Heather's concentration too badly. And that, if it did, she can do the mental hypermath over again faster than that sniper can pull the trigger.

Raine began to turn, to follow my gaze. Too slow.

The woman pulled the trigger.

From a standing start, I'd have been useless. But I was already knee-deep into the Eye's impossible equations, my mind on the verge of plunging in. If I'd had time to think, I wouldn't have been able to do it. The Eye's lessons offered me a million ways, and choice would have paralysed me with fear of pain, fear of failure, fear of loss.

The very urgency of a bullet in motion allowed me to act at the speed of thought.

I ran through a dozen equations in a split second, principles I'd never dared touch before, concepts which burned my mind with white-hot searing fire even as I put them into action. I broke physics and gravity and a dozen laws human science had no names for, and paid for it with searing pain quivering across my mind. Momentum, velocity, mass, speed, all deformed like putty. It was clumsy, brute force, inelegant and wasteful and incredibly painful.

So much for starting small.

I turned the bullet away from Raine. It hit the stairwell wall with a puff of pulverised concrete.

Oh shit, she can do that? Actual telekinesis, acting upon completely physical, nonmagical (probably) objects?

Too bad about the brain pain. But still. Wow. I knew Heather had a lot more powers than she let the reader in on, in terms of knowing what the dream-math can actually do if she musters up the willpower and sacrifices the neurons to use it, but this is just so...tangible.

Too bad warping herself and Raine out of here is more time-intensive than deflecting a bullet. And that giving the bullet's trajectory a 180 degree turn required more finesse and/or killing intent than Heather can muster. As it is, blocking one bullet out of potentially many...buys them seconds at most.

My vision fogged black as I doubled up and vomited onto the stairs, my head pounding like I'd driven a railroad spike through my brain. My nose streamed with blood and a sticky feeling gummed up my eyes. My knees gave out a second later. Urgent hands caught me, held me up and dragged me. I twitched and kicked, almost insensible.

My chest throbbed inside like my lungs had burst. I fought for breath, gasping and spluttering and vomiting a second time. I tried to say Raine's name. We had to get away from here, because the woman with the rifle was going to shoot at us again and I had nothing left, I was spent, on the verge of unconscious oblivion.

Raine—I knew it was her, somehow—propped me against a wall on my backside. I forced my eyes open as she spoke. She tried to speak comforting words, but then she broke off and spun, baseball bat raised for a swing.

The tall woman stepped past the reluctant hounds and came for us herself.

Raine did not fare well.

Fuuuuuuuuck.

Surprise rescue by Evelyn? Or maybe Twil? Twil would make more sense, assuming she was in the area again.

The tall woman moved like quicksilver, ducked and weaved and jabbed too fast to follow. Even if I hadn't been mind-screwed from emergency hyperdimensional mathematics, her motions would have left me dizzy. Raine's baseball bat bounced off her like she was made of granite, though Raine hit her enough times to extract a deep grunt of acknowledgement. She landed a glancing punch to Raine's stomach, enough to make Raine hunch and wheeze and slow down.

I heard the metal click of the bolt-action rifle again, echoing in the endless stairwell.

Half-conscious, propped up against a wall next to the corpses of terrifying monster dogs, with Raine bleeding and hurt, there was no decision to make. I did not think, I merely acted.

If we left, at least Raine would live.

I summoned everything I had left, then hurled myself at Raine and tackled her from behind. Too weak to do more than unbalance her, but I only had to make contact.

"Close your eyes!" I shouted.

"Heather, no!"

The Eye's impossible equations jabbed molten fingers into my brain. Neurons burnt out. My chest wrenched like my ribs were shattering.

Reality folded up.

...or that. Damn. Heather fully expected that to kill her, but save Raine. Which, well. Raine has been putting herself between Heather and deadly danger all along, and if she didn't do something then they'd probably both die here anyway, but still. Powerful stuff.

Of course, if the bad guys have someone waiting on location in case of this, or if zombie and sniper can quickly exit the trap after them, then it's all for naught. :I

Anyway. Obviously Heather doesn't die here. I doubt that Raine does either. But neither of them might be the same after this, either physically or emotionally, so there's definitely stakes.

Looks like we get a cliffhanger ending to the second arc after all.


Things did get exciting again at the end, but overall this arc's weird up-and-down pacing and bloated "standing around doing nothing" sections force me to place it below "Mind Correlating." The introduction of multiple surprisingly generic-feeling urban fantasy elements in quick succession didn't help either. I'm slowly warming up to this story's distinct take on werewolves, underground wizard turf wars, etc, but still think I'd have preferred it if Katalepsis had expanded its cast and conflicts in different, less overplayed directions. Still, it was enjoyable, and its weak points were mostly restricted to particular scenes or chapters rather than being deep-rooted issues. I'm still invested and want to read more.


Since there isn't any more in queue (and there might not ever be) though, I do feel like I should say something about what I've experienced of Katalepsis as a whole. It's tricky to do that, since I've still only read the beginning, and I've already said most of what I'd want to say about it in the individual reviews, but there is something else that only occurred to me after the fact, looking at the material in aggregate. So, take this for a final analysis.

On the topic of genre, Katalepsis really does sit on an unusual crossroads. Like, on one hand, there's genuine unknowns, mysteries, and terrors, with realistic depictions of guilt, trauma, and damaged people damaging each other even more even as they try to do the bests they can. On the other, there's camp that basically HAS to be deliberate, with both the text and the characters themselves simultaneously taking it dead seriously and also doing the post-ironic winking at the camera. Then, on the trilaterally symmetrical xenomorphic third hand, Katalepsis is also a shamelessly self-indulgent harem fantasy that puts absolutely zero effort into disguising, distracting from, or even placing fig leaf justifications on it.

It's honest about being all of these different things. It's conscious of being all these different things. And, while the parts do clash with one another sometimes, I'm forced to concede that overall it works. It shouldn't work. Like, if you follow Katalepsis' influences and genre complexes in symbolic logic form from premises to conclusions to ultimate truth, you will determine that this story is mathematically guaranteed to be a trainwreck. But it isn't. For some reason, it isn't.

It took me a lot of thinking, but I'm *pretty sure* I've figured out how the story manages this veritable sorcery. It's something I commented on in the early chapters of arc one, but it wasn't until now that I realized its significance.

Damn she's self-conscious. Understandably, given her life story, but still. Self-actualization is going to be a very long uphill battle for Heather.

On the other hand, she does fundamentally have a lot of self-respect. In her situation, with the messages life has sent her, it would be understandable for her to have just given up and wallowed in her perceived unworthiness. But no! She keeps her room fastidiously clean, even when she's bleeding and vomiting every morning. She makes up her mind ahead of time not to put up with stupid pranks or gatekeeping, even from a girl who she's attracted to, and even when she's starved for human contact. These little touches aren't much individually, but in aggregate they paint a picture of someone with a lot of personal strength.

The story determines the hero. The unknown and unknowable is a big part of the story, and lo and behold Heather is an unreliable narrator. Conversely, the story is also about the development of knowledge and understanding (it's right there in the title. If my inferences about Maisie are even close to correct, then knowledge and understanding are both the ultimate threat that the characters face and the only possible weapon against that threat), and thus Heather is a hypercerebral bookworm who spends more time processing things than acting (though her actions are weighty and consequential when she does take them; she's not a passive protagonist in the slightest!).

With that all in mind, what does it say about the story that Heather - despite thinking so little of herself - nonetheless treats herself with unerring respect and demands the same from the people around her?

Irony-poisoned postmodern satires. Tropey urban fantasies. Harem ero-dramas. Lovecraft era pulps. A flaw that they all often suffer from is the treatment of people as props. Or jokes. Or combat drones. Objects, in any case. Less-than-people. The secret ingredient in Katalepsis' recipe is simply not doing that. Whether they're playing the role of mentor, enemy, waifu, whatever, every character in Katalepsis is their own person doing things for their own reasons. You can always see things from their perspectives, even if it's a perspective you find misguided or unpleasant. Every scene treats every character as someone who a person could BE rather than just something for the protagonist(s) to interact with.

The closest thing to an exception would be the quartet of dimwitted chav mercenaries from the latest chapter. They kind of just were evil henchmen who showed up, were dangerous for a little while, and then died in battle to prop up a main character's combat prowess, and the story did hurt for it. But even there, the story did its best to suggest that there WAS more to them under the surface. The way they argued among themselves over what to do with the two girls, up until the leader foolishly chose for all of them. The way they seemed to be psyching each other up to commit a crime that crosses the line even for them (even most criminals aren't exactly eager to murder a pair of ostensibly innocent teenaged girls in cold blood). One of them had a name. One of them was much more used to killing than the rest, in a way that could be read to suggest that he had done it before while the others perhaps hadn't. One of them gave Heather an ominously lecherous vibe, while the others did not. The way they were written, it seemed like if the leader hadn't gone for the cheap shot and forced Raine to do her thing they could have ended up friendly. Or at least, as not-enemies.

They still were the villain's disposable hired muscle, and the story probably could have taken further steps to avoid confining them to that. But it did put in an effort to make them people who you can *maaaaybe* see yourself as being. And really, in the two entire arcs that I read, this was the only case where Katalepsis even came close to faltering.

The small cast makes this much easier to accomplish. If Heather were a more social character who interacted with lots of people, the text would need to rely on shorthands and single defining characteristics for some of them. The lonely, claustrophobic atmosphere of Katalepsis, perhaps surprisingly, allows it to be so much more human than most of the things it takes after. It invites the reader to laugh along with it at the absurd circumstances and contrived plot points, but it treats the characters placed in those scenarios with near-unfailing respect. That is what transforms and elevates Katalepsis into something better than it would otherwise have any right to be.