Strange Device (Rosalind + Aerroh = bessfreennnss!!)

Somewhere in the upper levels of the garage....


The twins had been dumped into a careless pile against the cold concrete, their limps oddly tangled. They did not panic when they first grumbled and shifted and pried themselves apart from their joint-form. This had happened before. Many times before. Typically, it was only the sign of a night so awesome they clearly weren’t worthy enough to remember it.

But, God did they ache. Mace sat up first, and stared at the wall they had collapsed against. She swayed uneasily, her very bones felt too heavy for her to support. She wanted to fall again, but Merick had already begun shifting about. He noticed the pool of blood they had been sleeping in, just as she noticed it caked in streaky smears upon the walls.

“M-mace..?”

The more Mace considered the blood the more the forms began to distinguish themselves, even in her bleary vision. Among the random splatters and drips—handprints, streaking down the wall. Thiers. She knew this.

Merick blurbbered something into the ground before rolling himself over. He saw the dried blood caked on his sisters face. He reached up and felt it on his too. He sat up. They both then tried to stand up, despite the fact that both their feeble bodies were shaking uncontrollably. They failed, and tumbled over each other into the empty, cracked street, their faces making friends with the pavement.

It was tempting to just give up and submit to sleep there. But their shrieks from when they had fallen over each other reverberated and echoed the stark hollowness of the place. The hollowness echoed inside of them. The ceiling was splintered and cracked. A loud rumble or an earthquake would surely cause it to crash down upon them. They shifted and gazed about uneasily. They were still bleeding, just slightly.

“Whaa…?”

Sitting up, they could see the sky beyond the ledge. And the city. They were clearly several stories up. They looked at the city, and at each other, making strange faces. They fought to their feet again, and nearly fell into their bloody wall, but used it for balance as they stumbled towards the parking garage ledge. They peered over. Something was wrong. This was a city. At one point. Where are the people? What’s with those dogs?

“OH MY GOD IT’S 1945!!!!!”

Perhaps. Perhaps. In the gutters of the alleyways beneath them, in between this garage and what appeared to be an old, abandoned cathedral, a swarm of rats, dove around and scampered through the muck, away from the dogs, and disappeared, beneath the streets. If nothing else, this much they knew was true: if this could be 1945, then most certainly, Papusza could be here. No. She was here. Papusza, their dear, departed, pet rat, was in the Pit. This, and little else, was all that was completely certain to them.

They smiled weakly at the mere thought of their Papusza, despite the fact that, as a grim sun emerged from dusty clouds and gave them a slight glow, they could see ever so clearly that their hands and arms, up to their elbows, were completely saturated in freshly dried blood. Their faces and clothes were splotchy with it too.

The dogs barking seemed to reach a crescendo that finally registered to them. They were snapped out of their strange ratty reveries and watched the dogs for a moment, uneasily. There was something in the way they howled, in the way they snarled, that chilled them to the very marrows of their bones, that caused their empty stomachs to churn. This also, they knew to be true: those creatures would utterly shred them apart if they got at all too close. They were like one, thick, howling mass, all parts of the same monster. Probably surrounding the building. They backed away from the ledge. They had to get to the roof. They had to see if they could find another soul in this waste of city, if only to glimpse at another.

Pain stung like thousands of needles as Aerroh opened his eyes to the upside down world. His thoughts were everywhere as he tried to make sense of what he was seeing through blurry eyes. The world seemed to be all wrong-looking. With hands groping around, he found himself at an obscure angle on top of something... On top of... A toilet? Aerroh blinked several times and the blurriness faded away with every blink to reveal that he was in a restroom stall. He was laying upside down on a toilet with his legs sprawled up the wall. His brow furrowed as he thought about how strange it was to be sleeping on a toilet upside down when his paranoia hit him. Ignoring protests from his aching and throbbing body, he flailed madly hitting up against the metal walls of the stall with resounding thuds.

"GAH!" he yelled as he twisted and turned to right himself immediately. His disorientation helped him to hit the floor hard knocking the wind out of him. Peering out from underneath the stall, he had seen the old deteriorating floor and walls. It was painful as he moved to lift himself up off of the floor and get out of the stall, which creaked as the metal protested movement. Aerroh listened hard for sounds of anything and heard growling faintly, probably from outside. He did a quick once over of himself and realized that his weapons were gone. This bothered Aerroh and it showed on his face visibly as his paranoia increased. The shiny metal on his wrist caught his eye and he examined it carefully with seeming intelligence before chewing on it madly to try to remove it. Seeing that it was no use, he moved stiffly out into the hallway. The sight of deteriorating walls met his eyes as he moved through the empty halls. He started to panic, not recognizing his surroundings and picked up his pace. He found his way through a couple rooms and out into the back area of the building he had been inside. The growling of dogs rushed to his ears and he knew he was in danger, especially without his weapons. A shed caught his eye and it wasn't far away. Aerroh rushed over to the shed and threw the doors open, shifting through its contents madly before finding a weapon he was at home with, a shovel. He turned, holding onto the shovel tightly, and felt a little more comfortable facing the danger around him.

The levels of the garage seemed to go on forever. Abandoned, disgusting, broken down vehicles were scattered about—none were actually parked within a designated space. The twins assumed the previous owners of these cars had.. other things occupying their minds. They also assumed it wouldn’t be worth the bother to take them apart and try to sell the scrap metal, given that there appeared to be a significant lack of a necessary consumer base.

They walked clutching their guts. Their stomachs gurgled unpleasantly. The hunger burned more inside of them than the cuts and the bruises that covered their entire bodies. They were trying to hold themselves off on their own blood, which was still dribbling from their noses, and was pooling up around the deep, crude stitches running up and down their forearms.

After several levels, Mace gripped her brothers arm.

“I need a break.” She said. They leaned against an old grey Volkswagen, and attempted to catch their breath. They were shaking again, whether from hunger, anxiety, bodily fatigue, or a combination of the three, they were not sure. They did know that they had maybe half a day left before their hunger overrode their mental willpower.

Mace glanced at her brother, whose face he had buried within his palms. She noticed a silver, shiny object beneath the blood.

“Merick! I like your new bracelet!!”

Merick shot up, and for the first time, noticed the strange device on his arm.

“Oh! It is interesting… You have one too!!”

“Oh my!! It appears that I do! I think I’m ready, are you ready? I don’t think there are many more levels.”

They hauled themselves back onto their feet, and charged the last two levels until they were on the roof. It was as empty as the rest of the garage. A soft breeze billowed several tumbleweeds of trash listlessly across their path. A few cars, which appeared to have already been torn apart—some were even on their sides—lay, rotting into the cement, here and there.

They stumbled to the ledge, and got their first true look of the city. Around the massive cathedral in front of them, they could manage a slight view. It was a vast wasteland, stretching on for miles and miles, into the faint glimmer of what appeared to be a sea, far beyond. The buildings whose details they could see were crumbling, partly collapsed, and riddled with bullets. Below them there was a small alley, perhaps only a few yards wide, and the cathedral across from them. The dog mass was slightly smaller this high up, but they could still hear it faintly howling, way down below. The rats were too small to see.

They gazed at this pit of a city (as much of it as they could see) for some time, not entirely sure what to make of it, or of its implications. The wind whistled in a sad sort of way, an empty sort of way. The city, they resolved, meant so much that it couldn’t possibly mean anything—at least to them. They only wanted to see another person. Just one would be enough.

They started whistling with the wind, some forgotten tune they probably knew from their childhood. What else, really, was there to do?

There was a crash, and a yelp, from somewhere nearby, below. They stopped and nearly lunged over the ledge to try to track its source. It appeared to come from the direction of the giant cathedral.

Then a figure, yes, a person, bolted from one of the side doors, so quick he was nearly a blur. He ran and disappeared into a small, tin shed.

This was all they needed to see. They began shrieking madly. Nothing discernable at first, just yelling and flailing their arms around like monkeys. The man emerged once again from the shed, clutching a long shovel. His motions jittery and twitchy.

“MMMEEEEYYYYYYYYYYYYY !!!!! MISHTTTOOOOOOO!!!!!”

The man appeared to hear something, as he began jerking around, and lifted his shovel defensively.
“He has no idea where to look.. we should throw something at him!!”

At this suggestion, both the twins peeled their shirts off their bloody skin and over their head, and clumped them into messy balls, and hurled them in the general direction of the stranger. They plopped on the ground, just over the fence which separated him from the dogs. The man starred at them for a moment, bemused, before looking up.

“Can he see us?? I’m not sure if he can see us! Merick—you’re wearing your neon orange boxers—pull your pants down!!! He won’t be able to miss those!!”

“What if I fall off the ledge???”

“Just don’t! I’m climbing up too!”

The two shuffled awkwardly onto the ledge and stood, bare-chested (albeit bloody), and Merick with his pants around his ankles, and continued shrieking incoherently.

Finally the man saw the twins. Actually, just merely saw would be something of an understatement. He blinked a few times, trying to register whether or not the two figures standing on the ledge, who were, within thirty minutes of waking up, apparently giving the entire Pit a strip tease, were actually there. This gaping process took at least several minutes. They looked like fraternal twins—since one was clearly (and shamelessly) something of a lady, and the other, a guy, with all his brilliant, neon orange boxer glory. Then their eyes locked. And he nearly stumbled forward. A pull. Something coming from this strange device in his arm. Something pulling him towards them… and something, he knew, he just knew, was doing likewise unto them…

Aerroh was holding the shovel before him defensively. There were shrieks and howls beside the dogs growling just outside of the fence. They echoed around him off of the buildings causing him to twitch with paranoia and look around himself. The shrieks stopped, confusing him, making him wonder if the monsters were already upon him. His knuckles whitened beneath the gloves from gripping the shovel so hard. Moving objects caught his eye, falling just inside of the fence. After a moment he realized that they were clothes and it amused him for a brief moment before he looked up to see two shadows moving around. Aerroh stared at the figures for a long moment, recognizing neon orange on a person, and then that there were two people jumping around and shrieking madly on the parking garage roof. Aerroh seen that there was a man and a woman and that they looked the same. He watched on has they stripped off their clothes and yelled at him. They locked eyes and Aerroh suddenly felt the urge to go to them, as if they were what he was looking for even though he didn't know he was looking for anything.

Aerroh looked over and seen that he'd be able to get into the garage from the alley way between the cathedral and garage. He went over to the fence, picking up their clothes and looking down the alley. The dogs were coming down the alley towards him and upon seeing him started running his way. Aerroh gritted his teeth, ready for the fight coming his way, and jumped the fence, running the short distance to the garage as the came at him snapping and growling. He knocked away one with his shovel, sending it into the pavement with a yelp. Another jumped at him as he jumped for the window-like opening into the garage. The dog hit and knocked him off balance, sending him scrambling into the wall and then over it.

"BAD DOGGIES!!!!" Aerroh yelled as he started running, not waiting for them to join him in the garage. There were some already swarming up to the top, undoubtedly toward the man and woman because of their yelling. As he ran up to the next floor, the dogs jumped, following him into the garage and inevitably up towards the top where he was heading. Aerroh was moving fast but the dogs caught up, causing him to dodge as the jumped at him. He swung his shovel hard, connecting with one dog and sending it to the ground. One jumped on his back, causing him to yell and flail about madly.

"NOOOOO!!!!! GET OFF!!!!! GET OFF!!!!!! I DON'T WANT FLEAS!!!!!!" he screamed as he rolled onto the ground hard, making the dog hit first. He knocked it loose but more swarmed him, so he swung madly at them. Aerroh caught one in the face with his boot as it tried to bite him and fended another off. He swung hard and knocked a couple more down, giving himself a small opening. He took his chance and bolted off again, climbing his way up to the top of the garage.

Upon running out on the top, the man and woman were trying to fend off the pack that had gotten to them. They were defending themselves well but were overwhelmed with the numbers. One dog started for the woman as he closed the distance. Aerroh jumped as it lunged at the woman and brought his shovel across into its face hard with a satisfying snap. He was proud of his kill but there were more dogs still and an unsure idea of how to escape...

There were still several beasts—creatures the likes of which none of them had ever seen before. Merick and Mace stood there, holding their boots and chips of cement they had managed to salvage from the ground, and shuddered a sigh—perhaps now they actually had a chance..

The man didn't stop for a breather, not that he really had much of an option. The three other dogs rounded on him, growling menacingly. He started swinging his shovel, whacking as many of them at a time as he could. He could handle them, one or possibly two at a time, without much of a problem, but more than this presented a problem. There was one, whose existence he seemed to have forgotten completely, and while he swung at the other two, clawed him up the back. Merick hurled a chunk of cement towards the fray, aiming for one of the dogs. He missed, and instead, the chip clocked the man in the hip.

“Oh….”

“YOU IDIOT!!!” Mace yelled at him, before diving at one of the dogs herself, the one that had momentarily buried its claws in the man’s back. She gripped it around its strange tail and yanked. It whirled around at her, and she thwaped it in the face with her boot. To the dog, this was likely more insulting than anything. She tried to hit it again, but it caught the boot in its mouth.

She jumped back, and she and her brother stumbled back into a corner, simultaneously tripping over the cement chips they were trying to grab. The dog followed them, slimey, thick, gooey strings of saliva dripped off its enormous teeth. It barked and lunged forward, but Merick managed to throw a block and actually hit his target for once. The brick collided with its face, and the dog squealed and jumped back for an instant, momentarily deterred. They both took this as an opportunity to hurl other random objects at it: some large rocks, bricks, broken pipes, the remains of a steering wheel.

They heard a loud whimper and squeal of defeat from one of the dogs the man was fending off. They glanced over to see him ripping his shovel from the ribcage of one of the dogs. The other looked severely weakened. But they also noticed that the dog facing them was somewhat bigger than the other two. And the objects they threw at it now just seemed to bounce off its face.

It lunged again, and this time they had nothing to protect themselves with. It clawed them both across the chest and threw them to the ground. They fumbled about in the debris, desperately searching for something to defend themselves with. Mace grabbed another broken pipe and jabbed it at the creature. It growled, dismissively, but took a small step back.

Mace dropped the pipe. Both were already empty and now were losing way too much blood. She looked down, the shiny device in her wrist glimmered a little, it was at this moment that she realized it wasn't a bracelet. She keeled over into her brother, clutching her gut. Merick’s vision was going blurry. He tried to look around the creature to catch a sight of the other man, but his head hit the ground too hard.

Aerroh seen the two dogs and swung hard, trying to get them both in one swing. The dogs he hit in front of him let out yelps of pain while the third dog, which he didn't see, clawed its way up his back. He stepped forward to brace himself from the momentum from the dog jumping on him so that he didn't fall forward. A moment later he felt a sharp pain in his hip and lost his balance any way, falling to the ground with the dog on top of him. It buried its claws in his hip, snarling and snapping at him. He heard a womans voice yelling at someone.

"YOU IDIOT!" The dog suddenly whipped around off the top of him at something, snapping and growling at a new target. After it was completely off of him, he took check of his body, attempting to get up. Pain shot up his side but he got up to face the dogs that came at him. One snapped and he hit it hard, sending it to the ground with a pain filled yelp and a cracking sound from its ribs breaking. He brought the shovel around, using its momentum to send the other one to the ground but followed on top of it, shoving the shovel deep into its ribs. Aerroh ripped the shovel out and turned to see the man and woman collapsing to the ground with the bigger dog advancing on them. They were bleeding and passing out.

He advanced on it quickly while it was preoccupied with them and brought the side of the shovel down into the back of its neck as hard as he could. It yelped in pain as he yanked it out and brought it down hard again. The weird dog turned on him and snapped but Aerroh jumped back and struck again. He kept going until the dog fell to the ground unconscious. Satisfied with it being unconscious, he turned to the man and woman, knowing he had to stop the bleeding but also get them out of there.

Aerroh used their clothes that he picked up to put pressure on their wounds and wrap them before moving them. He knew he couldn't carry both, so he used the cement chips to bust a door off of a rusting car, making it into a make shift sled. Aerroh loaded them on it, using parts of his torn shirt as ropes to pull the sled. After he made sure he had what looked like all of their stuff, he began to move, heading to the stairs in hopes of avoiding the dogs while he had his cargo.

When the twin’s regained consciousness several hours later, the sun had set and they all were shrouded in complete blackness. They blinked—trying to register whether or not the events of the past few hours truly happened.

It was the pain that rid them of their doubt. And the hunger.

Rags that were once the shirts on their backs were now wrapped tightly around the wounds in their abdomens. Apparently, they had stopped bleeding, but they were still dizzy. They rubbed their bellies and lightly traced where they felt the dogs claw-marks were. They remembered how deeply and ferociously it had cut into them, that the mere force of the impact had thrown them to the ground. How was it that they had not been completely eviscerated, that they were currently not laying in a pool of their own innards? Well. They supposed that this is likely how it would happen in a parallel universe. Or 1945. Whichever.

In one swift motion, they forced themselves to sit up. Patiently, their eyes adjusted to the blackness. They were still somewhere in the bowels of the parking garage—in an exit, it appeared, with descending and ascending cement staircases before them, a dirty, foggy floor-to-ceiling window to their side, and a questionable elevator behind them.

They heard a figure, then, clomping up the stairs. Their hearts jumped a beat and they shmooshed themselves together, the way they would always do as children, wasting hours upon hours attempting to morph into one, and presently, when they were frightened. But their panic was short-lived. The man from the shed, who had saved them from the dogs, shambled up into the bleary light, dragging his shovel loudly across the ground and staring at his feet.

The man reached the top of the stairs and, upon noticing their sitting upright, blinked and stared at them. They made awkward eye contact for what seemed to be several moments.

The twins finally broached the silence, blurting the one question that now held all significance to them:

“Do you have any food?”

The man shook his head. His messy, dirty black hair shuffled with it. He had dark circles under his eyes. He looked ill.

“I was looking for food. But I couldn’t go far.”

“Did you get lost?” one of them ventured.

“No. I just couldn't go far.”

The twins wanted to nag him about this. But they knew, he was as clueless as they were. The hunger in their bellies ached even more than their fresh wounds. If they were still enough, they could swear they could feel their stomach feasting on itself. Suddenly, their attention turned to the metallic devices jutting out of their arms. They focused on them for a moment. It appeared lifeless. Just a hunk of metal. But they could feel it, subtly at first, like it was throbbing, sending little waves up the nerves of their arms and throughout their entire bodies. They imagined these steady impulses were thin and neon green, like little radioactive light threads diving and darting throughout their system. They saw food. Only blocks away.

They looked up at the man again.

“Do you feel that?”

Aerroh had left the man and woman, twins from what he had seen, in relative safety while he attempted to find food. He hadn't gone to far before he started feeling sick and turned back. It saddened him to not be able to get any food for them because he knew that they should eat after losing blood. He clomped his way back up the stairs, none too subtly, with the shovel dragging behind him. Upon enter the level he left them on, he seen the two of them sitting up. Aerroh blinked several times before it dawned on him that they were awake and functioning. An awkward silence filled the air between them before they started asking questions.

"Do you have any food?" they asked. Aerroh shook his head with his messy, dirty hair moving with the momentum.

“I was looking for food. But I couldn’t go far.” he answered them.

“Did you get lost?” one of them ventured. Aerroh was unsure of how to explain it to the but tried any way.

“No. I just couldn't go far.” He realized that they wanted to ask more questions but didn't. While they inspected the metal thing embedded in their arms, a vision occurred to him of food just a couple blocks away. They looked up at him suddenly.

"Do you feel that?" they asked. Aerroh nodded his head and moved over to a ledge, looking out at the city streets around them. He tried to spot which street it was that he had seen in the vision. Once he located it, he turned to the twins and pointed in that direction.

"That way! The food is that way!" His stomach growled in agreement. The twins just looked at him for a moment so he went over and gently tugged them to their feet.

"Come on, we have to dodge the doggies..." Aerroh led them down the stairs, where they would be safe for at least that moment. When they got to ground level, he led them, hiding behind cars while sniffing the air and straining his ears for the vicious dogs that were roaming around. They made their way across the garage to the side that would lead out in the direction of food. Aerroh turned to the twins and assessed them quickly before looking around. He retrieved two loose pipes and handed them to the twins.

"Wha-what are we supposed to use these for?" he asked. The answer was obvious to him but he seemed to feel like they would do nothing.

"Use these to protect yourselves," he said smiling a little, "Don't loose them!" He looked around again and found a couple metal trash can lids, giving them to the twins as shields. Stepping back from them, he grinned manically as if he had made a master piece work of art and nodded to himself.

"What? You're... nevermind." The twins looked at him oddly, as if he were doing something novel but he didn't really seem to notice. Scooping out the street, he quietly hopped over the small wall that was between them and the streets. He motioned for them to follow, so the twins crawled over. The street looked clear but that meant nothing at all. Those things were everywhere earlier and their growls still echoed around. "Perhaps they are occupied?" he thought. Aerroh thought he could vaguely hear other people. Shaking his head to shake away the thoughts, he moved close to the next building in hopes that if they were attacked, they could escape inside of it. Aerroh's stomach growled simultaneously with the twin's stomachs.

"Shut up, you're going to give us away!" he hissed at their stomachs. He picked up his pace causing the twins to work harder to keep up in their injured conditions.

"Hey! Slow down! We've lost blood, are tired, hungry and can't go that fast!" the man said in complaint to the increased speed. The woman smiled amused. Aerroh slowed his pace just a little but led on in the shadows of the buildings.

The Rosalinds, naturally, saw no real use for these hefty objects—things that hung like milestones from their bony arms, since (as far as they could tell) they were in no immediate danger; these weapons seemed to serve no real purpose other than to torment each other with. But, this, unfortunately, proved to be a… bad idea. Considering that when Mace thought it would be humorous to whap her brother in the back with her shield, he nearly cracked his head open on a nearby light-pole.

The inherent humor they found in having a stranger dress them up as Knights in Ghetto Armor wore off quickly too, and soon they were dragging the pipes and the shields carelessly behind them, stumbling after their companion—who was becoming more and more dog-like to them by the second, as they watched him sniffing the air and craning his ear towards the silence. This didn’t bother them. Their only friends growing up happened to be dogs. And even in their present, they firmly believed that animals abound in more personality than people.

Their armor was bothering them though, and after several blocks, Merick groaned loudly, complaining of his weary and useless limbs, and tossed his shield into the street. It clanged and crashed loudly, and all three of them froze mid-step. They listened intently to the silence that surrounded them after the echo of the crashing metal. But miraculously, no dogs came.

The man whirled around.

“What happened??” he demanded, in a hoarse whisper.

“Sometimes we cannot control our limbs.”

Slowly Mace lowered her weapons to the ground, and then began whistling, awkwardly, staring upwards. The significance of this was utterly lost upon the stranger. He listened again—despite this uproar, nothing appeared to be coming their direction. He opted to let it pass. Hopefully, there would be no need for their weapons.

“Let’s just keep going. We’re not far.”

They began walking again, the twins managed better without the extra weight, easily keeping up with the man’s stride. But their stomachs began grumbling, and to distract themselves, they began jabbering, quickly, and with increasing volume. The man tried to shush them. But this backfired.

“You seeee… zis is impossible. In Romanistan, we have no library voices. Probably all because we live outside for zillions of years, and always we have to yell over the wind and stampeding horses and rain and the caravans and the… volcanos. You know?”

“Va. We Gypsies are always the life of the party—”

“We ARE the party.”

“—But any Eastern European will tell you, we make terrible neighbors.”

“And zis is because all we ever want to do is uhn tiss uhn tiss uhn tiss uthn tiss…”

“But we just know how to make fun. And what is wrong with that? Do you see problem?? I don’t see problem..”

“You guys…. The doggies…” The man attempted again, completely overwhelmed by this random burst of exuberance from his companions. He had found himself straining to understand their bizarre accent and their quickened speech instead of listening for the possibility of an ambush. Anything could have happened to them on that last block and none of them would have seen it coming, and this unnerved him.

“Oh right. Sorry.” One of them said, and they walked in silence for about half a block.

“We’re almost there…” the man murmured, even though they all knew this, and didn’t really need to say it.

“Have you a name, friend??” Mace blurted (in her non-library voice).

The man opened his mouth to answer, but Merick could no longer contain his silence either, “You can call us Rosalind. Or Rosalind and Rosalind. Or Merick and Mace. Or Guido and Nina. But we don’t never really use those names anymore. Okay. Never mind. Don’t call us Guido and Nina. Cos we won’t answer.”

It was hard for Aerroh to follow their seemingly bizarre accents but he did his best. They were quite noisy which would cause problems later but Aerroh wasn't always the quietest. He blinked several times processing and finally answered.

"Where's Romanistan?" cocking his head to the side curiously.

"I'm Aerroh!" he pointed and himself and replied excitedly, as this was the first time they seemed to actually want to interact with him. This sudden burst of energy and excitement caught them off guard from the alert man who had been leading them down the street. In his excitement he didn't bother to keep his voice down, but it didn't really seem to matter as nothing attacked them still. They made their way into a small store off to the side and Aerroh started sniffing around. He yielded results for them quickly as he found a small box with just enough food for the three of them to eat. Aerroh divided it evenly among them happily.

"Here! Food time! YEAH!" he said excitedly as he plopped himself down on the dirty floor in a clear spot. Aerroh basically shoved it all in his mouth, chewed briefly and swallowed in one go while the other two helped themselves to spots on the floor and ate like they hadn't in three days. Maybe they hadn't... Aerroh wasn't sure how long they had actually been here but he didn't care now that he had some companions.

"So, what do gypsies do? Are we friends? If not yet, can we be friends now? Can you do any tricks? Do you remember where you were before here? What are you doing here? Me, I don't know where I was, why I'm here, or anything! I can do tricks though!" Aerroh spoke really fast and energetic as he asked his questions and gave random answers. He stopped completely for a split second to listen outside and in the building before looking at Merick and Mace and waiting for their answer. They smiled at Aerroh, whose eyes were shining with excitement.

"Oh! Oh!," he interrupted before they had a chance to answer, "Where are we going to hide? We should find somewhere, maybe high, to hide!" Merick and Mace watched and listened as he changed subjects rapidly and were unsure when he fell silent, waiting on them to answer. After some brief moments of silence, they spoke to him, answering his questions.

The food was suspicious, having a strange odor about it that didn’t seem quite.. natural. But none of them really had the luxury to be picky. Merick and Mace mercilessly began smashing open cans of dried fruit, pickled fruit (though, did opt to overthrow the rancid lettuce), shredded through bags of stale French loaves, and dry pretzel sticks. They did, instinctively, wave off several slices of dried beef Aerroh offered them, which, even in their state of almost complete starvation, seemed utterly undoable to them. Something in them told them their digestive system had not known meat for quite some time, and to try to ingest some would likely have consequences more dire than going entirely without any nourishment.

Merick and Mace only half heard the questions Aerroh began rattling off at first. The three had plopped down on the dirty ground with their food, which held next to all their focus, until they had nearly completely devoured it. Once they had tipped that point of knowing they were not going to die within the next three minutes if they didn’t get more food in them, they began eating more slowly, chewing over their food as they did the questions. It would appear obvious to wake up somewhere strange and immediately wonder where you were, how you got there, and where you were before, but in fact, these questions had not been addressed by the twins until that moment. The starvation, and the nearly getting ripped apart by giant, mutant dogs probably had something to do with that.

When the silence became too thick with awkwardness, one of them finally muttered, “Yes, Aerroh. We’re friends.” The voice trailing off into thought.

This much they knew was true: they knew who they were, completely. They knew they were twins, they knew their names, the names of all their deceased relatives, their pets, the cities they had lived in, the languages they had spoken at home and within those various cities they had lived. What was missing were the concrete memories, particularly of the last decade, that explained why they knew this.

In fact, the further they crawled back in their history, the less vague everything became. There were a few random, yet vivid memories they had of themselves as children. As musicians. As dirt poor, shoeless Roma kids wandering the streets of Moscow. As early sufferers of the turbulent and chaotic mental disorder they would later learn to call Manic Depression. But then, strangely enough, the experiences of the members of their immediate family were shockingly clear. Painfully clear. No, not just the experiences, the actual memories themselves, snaking back before their infancy, before their physical birth.

At first, it appeared that only the lives of their mother, Lida, their father, Gosha, and their great Aunt Keja had somehow been imbedded in them. But then, the flood, and it all became impossible to distinguish: the siblings that died before they ever met them, all the aunts and uncles who had either been locked away or had done away with themselves long before the twins ever reached this mortal plane—of whom, they had only ever been told rumors, or stories vague enough only to produce nightmares. But there they were, all of them. Every. Single. One. Of. Them. Their entire Wall of Ancestors, smashed collectively into their skulls.

They did have one memory that was theirs, from what appeared to be sometime within their early adulthood. A Doctor’s office—a cold, sterile, hollow of a room. The man sitting across from them was loudly and obnoxious praising himself on the extensive and oh-so-comprehensive file he had managed to compile on their family history and lineage, given that Gypsies so notoriously and aberrantly avoid the concrete classification necessary for any proper member of society, and who exist, apparently, with the sole aspiration of being a genealogists worst nightmare. It was a feat of Olympian proportions that this man had managed to trace their lineage aaalllllllllllll the way back to the slave exodus from Moldavia—and he sure as hell wasn’t going to let them under-appreciate that.

It wasn’t much of an accomplishment, the twins had told him, given that nearly half their ancestors had crashed and burned within the very Institution for the Mentally Insane within which they now resided, and couldn’t avoid landing on a file or a record here and there. Their Doctor gave them a snarky look and retorted that, from within his vast field of medical knowledge—of experience collected from over 50 years of practice and research—theirs was by far the absolute worst, most fucked up, gene pool he had ever encountered.

Keja. Maybe seventeen. Wandering the dirt streets of some plowed over, rural village of Poland, only weeks after the end of the war. Unbearably thin, bald, freshly tattooed. Completely alone. The dark was solid, thick, and pastey, and she was stumbling through a dense, grey fog. Blearily she searched for some sign, a configuration of the twigs, a scrap of cloth, that would point her towards some camp. But there were none. There was nothing. Even if there was—she could see not a thing save a three foot radius beyond the grey. She gave up. Dragged her blistered, bleeding feet across the width of the road, and collapsed, in what she presumed to be the middle. Prayed for a truck. Keja lived the rest of her life firmly believing that she had never gotten up off that road. That fog, though perhaps invisible to the untrained eye, never lifted. Never.

…And what good, the twins now wondered, somewhat bitterly, would this do them now? Once again, they found themselves staring at the metal in their arms. Surely, this strange device had something to do with it. They picked at it, somewhat anxiously, and found it seemed to have been fused down to the muscle, and with their nerves and bloodstreams. Not merely some crude attachment that could be hacked off or sawed away, but a contraption connected to the very fibers of their being. How.. frustrating.

They could not measure the time silence had filled the space between them and their new friend. When they looked up he was still staring at them, curiously. The very last thing they felt like doing was talking. Quite frankly, all they really wanted to do was find some dark corner to curl up in and submit to their plummeting spirits. But. They could recognize the responsibility to another when it presented itself. Mentally, they heaved against the will their mood would have them obey, and groped for the language to express their unfathomable understanding.

“We remember a little..” they started, “It is like a puzzle. And half of it is missing. The important part. So we don’t know what we’re looking at.”

“What do you know?” Aerroh inquired.

A pause. A sigh. Their eyelids grew heavy and weighed upon their eyes the way they would whenever their bodies lost enthusiasm for the subject matter at hand when it simply became too much of a burden for their heart to handle. They only hoped, with all sincerity, that their curt reply wouldn't offend their new friend.

“Things we’d prefer we didn’t.”

Aerroh could tell that it hurt his new friends to think about the things that were still there in their memories, so he decided to change the subject for them.

"Aw, I sowwy!" he said with a sad face. He looked down at the strange metal device in his arm and ran his fingers along it. Concentrating on it, he felt like it was feeling back at him. Licking it, he tasted the metal, which he found to be warm like his body.

"This thing is weird, it wouldn't come off when I tried to chew it off earlier," he said, keeping at his attempt to change the subject, "When I think about it or at it, it feels like it thinks back at me." To Aerroh, this didn't sound psychotic at all, but to those who would speak with him he sounded insane. The twins looked at him for a moment before examining theirs once again. They seemed at a loss for words so they answered in simple sentences, which didn't bother Aerroh at all.

"Yah." they said. Aerroh thought about the device and where they were as well as where he had been before but only came up blank. He couldn't remember anything of importance that would shed light on the situation. He stared at the device for a moment before having a random, maddened outburst.

"STUPID PIECE OF JUNK!!!!!" he started yelling suddenly, slamming the metal on his arm into the ground with force, "WHY DON'T YOU COME OFF!!!!!! WHAT ARE YOU FOR ANYWAY!!!!!" He tried to smash it off but realized that he didn't even put a dent in the thing. Just as quickly as he had the sudden energetic outburst he sat down quietly with his legs crossed, rocking back and forth with a manic smile on his face. The twins just looked at him with raised eyebrows and sat there quietly. There wasn't much to say to Aerroh and his random outbursts.

"I hope those dogs didn't give me fleas," he continued calmly, "Because it's a good thing this thingy- or at least I think it was this thingy- showed us where the food was. I was starving!" Merick and Mace looked at each other and then back at this truly psychotic man who wasn't making much sense. They decided on another simple sentence to tide him over.

"Yah. Das true," Mace said, "I think it twas too."

"Yah." Merick said in agreement. Aerroh nodded and continued.

"So, it must be to show us where food is! Oh! And to keep us together!" Aerroh said. He smiled looking thoughtful before frowning again.

"But... Who put them on us? I don't remember it before here. Is all they do is show us food and keep us together? And why?" he questioned out loud but to no one in particular. The twins seemed to think about the same questions and they sat there in silence wrapped up in their thoughts. After a while, Aerroh spoke.

"These devices... They're so strange..." he said. The twins stayed quiet and merely nodded at their new, weird friend spoke to fill the silence. Aerroh didn't waste much more thought on it, picking up that his new friends were quite exhausted and set to work blockading the windows and doors. Once he was done he went back over to them and plopped down on the floor close by without touching them. He smiled at them manically and they responded each with a raised eyebrow in question. He curled up into a ball on the floor with his shovel next to them but didn't fall asleep. The twins watched him as he lay there awake even after they made a pile of themselves where they were. After a while they realized that he wasn't going to sleep and the dark circles were because of what he obviously was. An insomniac who never slept. They also noticed that he wasn't actually laying still but that his body, upon closer inspection, was shivering, constantly moving. Aerroh's energy seemed to radiate from him a little as he lay there.

"There's nothing we can do about it now," he said, showing his elongated, canine-like teeth as he smiled at them, "Looks like it's my new best friends and these strange devices!"

Despite the fact that the Rosalind twins had spent the great majority of the day (or perhaps several) unconscious, they found themselves sprawled out amongst the rubbish, weary and exhausted, while Aerroh darted around the room, barricading them inside and closing off the exits. And they only realized how pitifully useless they were being once he sat down across from them, smiling, in a broad, strange way. Clearly, their laziness didn’t bother him. Or exhaustion, as it would be. Both physically, and in every other way imaginable.

They lolled their heads to the side, so they could face them. They made eye contact.

“Or are we all the strange device?” Merick proposed, quitetly.

Aerroh rocked back further and slower, starred up at the ceiling for an instant, and said, “Yeah. Probably.”

They knew this first level, shack of a building probably wasn’t the safest place in the world. But. The twins were completely incapable of moving, as it turned out. They couldn’t find it in themselves to be frightened—as it was clear Aerroh wouldn’t be going to sleep anytime soon.

His attention had wandered since their last, small exchange. Mace managed a faint, “Woof!” and his focused darted towards the twins again. They smiled weakly, and assured him that they would find a high place tomorrow, when they woke up, before drifting away, into blackness and silence.





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