It's not often that the both of them are completely out of clean laundry, but the fact is that on this occasion they were both extremely busy at the same time and it didn't click that the other one wasn't doing laundry either until both their closets were bare. Aaaaaaand it's almost two in the morning.
And this is what leads to a pair of twins hauling an enormous laundry bag to an all-night laundry in the wee hours of the night.
The creature looms over them for a moment
and opens its mouth
and there is light
END OF CHAPTER 1
Zeke isn’t in a great mood.
Popular media told him, once, that things could always get worse - that no matter what happened, there would always be somewhere lower he could go, some lower pit in a prison, some deeper melancholy, some stronger woe - but he’s getting kind of skeptical, honestly.
He’s surrounded by something grey and plain - the courtyard of the old French sugar factory, of sorts, not that he can really tell.
In one part of it: Zeke. Close by: a woman who doesn’t remember her name. On the other end: something very, very green.
‘Buy a laundromat and the lot for it’, they said. ‘It’ll be valuable management experience and you can hand it off to someone else after a few months’, they said. ‘You’ll end up being transported into a weird limbo, with only an amnesiac and an elder god for company, by your sole part time employee’, they definitely did not say.
The greying sugar factory around him is, and has been, fairly still; Zeke hasn’t been. He hasn’t left the main courtyard, but within that main courtyard he’s been running in circles and doing calisthenics and weightlifting with improvised materials and so on. He’s spent hours rambling at the woman with amnesia about personal anecdotes, and occasionally letting her get a word in edgewise. He’s grumpily refrained from flirting out of ethical concerns. He’s avoided looking at the green elder god thing, he has no idea what’ll happen if he does that again.
Even so, he’s still incredibly bored.
... and then two unconscious chicks fall out of the sky.
This isn’t actually the most bizarre thing that’s happened to him this week. Unfortunately. At least it’s interesting.
”... uh.”
The amnesiac doesn't notice this happening until they hit the ground, having been curled up and brooding on her problems, such as being an amnesiac. When she hears the thud, though, she looks up and startles, then gets to her feet and hurries over to them. She checks their vitals and examines them for injury with a casual competence that suggests some kind of history of medical training, then looks up at Zeke.
"They're alive. I don't...think they broke anything, or got concussed."
“That’s... nice, I guess? - should I, like, put them behind something? So they don’t look at the thing when they wake up.”
"I guess. I don't see the same things you see when I look at it, but I don't know what they'll see. I'll help."
And so the unconscious people who fell from the sky can go be unconscious in a slightly safer place!
And Zeke can pace around and occasionally poke one of them on the shoulder.
And sees a man - who really looks like he ought to play football professionally - with a television cord trailing out of the back of his head! And architecture. And possibly the woman with amnesia.
“I’ve been thinking that for a while, so, like, props to you for saying it out loud? - hi, I’m Zeke, I don’t know what the fuck either.”
“Yeah, I got the memo a while ago, it’s super creepy and it connects to the green... thing... do you know a ton about what’s going on?”
"I just wanted to do my laundry and then there was a skeletal demon."
“I just wanted to fulfill the condition on my trust fund and then there was a creepy guy named ‘Jan’, and, like, who names their kid Jan, right, and then he cheated and made me look at a weird elder god and now I’m stuck in purgatory or something. So, you know, mood.”
“... did I, like, not mention the name before? - I didn’t, I guess. The creepy guy was totally named Jan Forester.”
"That name sounds familiar. And--important. The way the green thing feels important, but more--real."
“That’s... gonna be honest, I have no idea what I’m supposed to do with that information. Maybe your memories are coming back, or something.”
"I can't remember anything from before I woke up here. Not even my own name."
"I don't think so...but it's hard to be sure. There's so little down here to remember."
What’s Zeke, chopped liver?
”- except for the weird green elder god,” he says, instead. “The weird green elder god is totally memorable but I super don’t recommend, like, looking at it or interacting with it, just a heads up.”
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