"Do you remember who it was that died, or maybe just disappeared, shortly after Leah arrived in town?"

"Died? Disappeared? Huh. Well, like I said, my parents left right around then. I'm trying to remember when Kent got deployed... I think it was before that."

"And you saw your parents leave?  They didn't just leave you a note?"

"I remember them packing and telling Haley to stay out of trouble. I don't remember them actually getting on the bus or the train."

"Would you remember if anyone else who'd been in Pelican Town, wasn't in Pelican Town anymore, for any reason, shortly after Leah arrived?"

"I don't know... would I? Seems like if I didn't remember a thing, I wouldn't know I didn't remember it!"

"It's more that I'm asking if the town is small enough, and gossipy enough, that you know everyone in it, and would expect to notice anyone going from there to not-there..."

"What are you trying to say?"

Emily's eyes narrow.

"Do you think Leah murdered someone and took their place?"

Emily looks completely ready to believe it.

"Leah's awake.  It sounds like she's from a reality like mine, though there might be more than one reality like that."

"She likes Pelican Town the way it is."

"She asked me to, quote, stop waking people up."

"For Leah to already know what that means, you'd expect her to have done it to somebody else already."

"WHAT?"

This is worse than Emily imagined. If Leah is awake, then who knows who else might be awake too? Maybe Emily is one of the only stupid non-people in this town.

No, wait, Haley is definitely not more of a person than Emily. So at least there's that.

"I don't understand what is even going on here. Why does she want things the way they are? Why wouldn't she want us all to be alive for real?"

"Because reality as I know it is horrible and unpredictable and your ankles might suddenly stop working, and sometimes somebody hands you an enormous complicated form to fill out and if you don't fill it out right your life is over.  Here Leah can just work on her art and get paid for it and nothing and nobody bothers her.  She's terrified of anything that might make her life more complicated than that.  This would be completely totally utterly understandable if you'd ever lived in my reality's version of Zuzu City."

It sure seems like Oliver and Leah have a lot in common.

Maybe they should just go be not-alive with not-ankles and not-paperwork together forever and leave Emily out of it.

Emily's strongest impulse is just to run away and hide and cry and then figure out her own new complicated life without so much complication in it.

But she's not quite ready to give up on Oliver yet. She's wildly unsure about him, but he's come through for her and been kind to her a bunch of times by now, and she wants to try kissing him again, and being around him has made her life so much richer and better.

Maybe she can get him away from town, where she can think about how she wants to play all of this without being afraid that Leah's going to pop out the door at any moment.

"Can we just buy our seeds like we came here to do and go back to the farm and think about all of this? Together?"

"That would work better if, one, I hadn't just run out of a conversation with Leah right in the middle, and two, if I wasn't worried she was going to kill you.  Also me."

"KILL US?"

"Leah knows what it means to wake people up.  It seems hard to figure that all out just from her observing you while you were both in Pierre's store.  The obvious way for Leah to obtain that information would be by waking somebody up, accidentally, before she realized what it would mean."

"Where are they?"

"Though, uh, to be fair, there's also a totally innocuous version of this where they got on a bus to Zuzu City to try being around other awake people and politely not disturb Leah."

"Are you completely sure people can't just go back to sleep? Why do they have to be dead?"

"I guess Leah could've persuaded them to go back to sleep by telling them a horror story about the monster in the woods that eats and slowly digests awake people.  This would also be sort of bad, in my book, and I'd worry that she'd kill someone it didn't work on."

"I have no idea why a horror story would make people go back to sleep. That sounds terrifying and if someone told me a story like that and I believed it, I would not go back to sleep, I would start hunting monsters and laying monster traps."

"What if she just... didn't keep talking to them, and then they forgot?"

"Or maybe my parents are the ones she woke up."

"Or maybe other people in town are also awake. You haven't met everyone yet."

"Those sure are some very nice things that could be true!"

"Well, except that I doubt awake people need to be talked-to, to stay awake.  When you're awake you can talk to yourself like that.  It's sort of one of the defining features of self-awareness, having conversations entirely inside your own head."

"I dunno, maybe. I'm not sure there's enough time in the day to think very well if you're not talking to someone else. And if Leah won't talk to you, and everyone else only says the same boring things they always say... I think maybe it could be hard to get very far in your thinking."

This is something Emily has been worried about. She managed to do a little thinking on the pier by the ocean when Oliver was in talking to Willy, but not much; from Emily's perspective, he wasn't gone very long at all. If she can't talk to Oliver, she might have to do all her thinking with Gus, and she would really like to avoid that.

"Proposed next actions.  Go to Gus's tavern while maintaining timeslide.  Warn Gus that if you or I end up dead or disappeared it's because Leah is awake and she killed us, and he needs to hide his own awareness until he's ready to take her out.  I haven't mentioned Gus to Leah and I don't think she's seen him."

"Come back to Pierre's.  I talk to Leah and resume asking her questions where I left off, acting if possible like very little time has passed."

(By the way, Oliver's currently looking all determined and emergency-managy if anyone finds this a sexy attribute in a male.)