Little Alfredo's

[Ignore this if you've already read it, I'm an idiot and accidentally posted it to the ancillary volume. The new chapter for today (Jan 30th) is Highway Star.]

Around midnight, Natasha blew out the glassfront of Little Alfredo's with a weak gust and into the diner stepped the two. "I'll handle it if cops show up, which they probably won't because it would mean they actually respond to crimes."

Iris nodded. "Phantom: Timeline."

She crouched down and focused for one hour. This time, she chose about -40 days from present. She looked around and saw Natasha cooking some meatballs on one of the burners, keeping all of it touched so that Phantom would not revert their meal.

"Hey, I figured if you wanted pasta, it'd take you ten seconds, so." Natasha served her a plate as Iris nodded and went to one of the tables with her. "So, anything you want to know before you move it forward?"

"Did you see anything useful?"

"Yep."

Iris ate, then resumed her timeline forward. Several sets of civilian clothes & cellphones shifted about the tables: she wondered if she had ever forced some unlucky wag nude and decided to filter those out. The diner's door repeatedly opened and closed, and evening lights grew steep in her reflection as the crickets began their reason outside.

Two corpses walked in and were led to their booth. The first was a young man who had been chopped into shuddering pieces. His face was twisted; his eyes were on the side of his face and his lips were in his hair. The other a young woman who was missing the back half of her head.

"A couple?" said Natasha.

"Possibly."

"Gross, straights. I'm getting away from this."

Iris smirked. Natasha went to the kitchen, and a few seconds later: "Hey, poisoned wine is in here!"

"The same bottle?" shouted Iris back.

"It's the only one like it!"

"You mind if I play it forward?"

"One sec... Okay, go ahead!"

Time resumed. Natasha relayed that one of the chefs had poured it into three drinks for a specific table, then handed it off to the man's corpse to dispose; perhaps he had worked here. Natasha came back in as the 2 corpses sipped at 2 glasses, yet Iris saw the third glass flicker and realized there had been a third person sitting there; a living host whose aura she could not make corporeal here. She saw them solely as an odd difference of air, an outline that disappeared what it carried and touched.

Natasha spoke. "How many shifts did you say you detected with the bottle?"

"Five. That was just my intuition with Phantom."

"Well, give the spider a kiss, because it's five. I filled it up to half again and they poured in all of it. Adding in the poison from the apartment, that's all of it."

"He uses half a bottle on one woman and half a bottle on three people, though?"

"He poured one for himself at the apartment."

"Right, I just suppose..." Iris glanced over the table. "…I suppose one is a host, but it still seems odd. Must've only given the host a minimum dose. Maybe to mask the taste or which drink..."

"Probably was working for him."

"Right. They poisoned this man, and they disposed of his body in the usual fashion. But what I can't figure out is the woman. They poison her and they chop half of her head off?"

They went over to the woman and examined her. There were tears in her sleeves and signs of a struggle across her arms. Her face and hair were wet, and streams of froth were leaking out of her mouth and nose. As she looked over the man, she noted that there were heavy marks of drug use under his sleeves.

She thought he had gotten what he deserved. She had a special revulsion for addicts, for how they reminded her of her uncle's alcoholism. It was not that he was an abusive nor angry drunk, yet when he would come home late, too drunk to be trusted alone, it had always fell to her to take care of him until he was sober. It had made her feel like she lacked a life of her own, and she resented how her family's image was represented by his self-degraded condition; she thought him weak-willed, and an urge had struck her to create a different end for herself, the results of which are becoming known to you now. What this could be was not for Iris to judge; that it represented something different was enough for her.

But in her view of her uncle, she thought that by gathering the general hatred into the hatred specific, she could transfigure a person; that if she loathed her uncle for being an addict enough then perhaps he would no longer be one.

"…looks like she resisted." muttered Iris. "But I still don't understand…"

"Why it had to be this brutal? Yeah, I get you. They could've just shot her. Instead, they poison her, chop half her skull off, and drown her. Look at the froth around her mouth: that's a sign of drowning."

"Even I can't tell what order that was in. She wasn't drowned here, though."

"I don't feel like rooting around in her lungs to check." Natasha shrugged. "The only way I'd put my fingers that deep in someone is if we were dating."

"So never?"

Natasha slumped like it was lethal. "B-By choice!"

"Uh-huh." Iris grinned. "And the other one died to a Revenant. Let's try the office next?"

"Well, wait. So, you can't reverse a corpse to see the path it took, right? Only in Timeline?"

"Right. But that does give me an idea. Normally, Phantom can't revert corpses... but it can still revert clothes, I'm thinking."

"Oh shit, yeah. Try it."

Iris placed her hand on the woman's shoulder, and tried to revert her clothes back along the same path she had once walked.

She frowned as Phantom did not reply. "...er." She tried it again. Thinking it was being recalcitrant, she moved her spider to her chest and stroked it, then tried to reverse the timeline. She could move there. Yet Phantom could not revert the clothes from her. "I... it's not letting me. I don't understand why."

"Guess that would make it too easy." said Natasha. "But I think I know what it is. You know how the male host came in with his death wounds? How the other woman was moving mutilated? I think Phantom considers everything on them at the time of death to be their corpse. That's why you can't revert it."

"...fuck. You might be right."

Natasha pat her shoulder. "Makes sense, right? It's stamped at time of death. You can't revert before that using Phantom."

Iris sighed as she looked over the woman. Wanting to regain some pride, she placed her hand on her clothes and accelerated a hole through them. "Technically, that was post-death, but I'm thinking you're right. Only Timeline can revert the corpse pre-death."

"Yep. That does mean she died the same day she was here, though, right?"

"What makes you say that?"

"Well, I'm not sure how it works, but wouldn't she be wearing two sets of clothes? One for today, then the ones she was wearing when she died?"

"Possibly, or she was wearing the same clothes both times."

"Maybe."

Iris nodded. "Alright, let's try the office next."

"Are you good with computers?"

"Phantom treats them the same as any other machine."

Natasha grinned as they walked up to the office. Iris sat down at the computer. She used her regular ability to search for when he had accessed payroll information and recreated that state, then jotted down his address. "Don't see anywhere to access the security cameras, though I doubt a place like this has any. He might've been truthful."

"We can ask the guy when we visit him, if he isn't in the hospital."

"Speaking of." Iris placed her hand on the phone beside the computer and felt its past states. "When did we talk to him?"

"Think we got here around 2, maybe."

Iris shifted it to around there and played it forward; the door opened and the phone soon raised, though she stopped before the number was entered so as not to alert the other end. She looked to Natasha expectantly, both proven right but subtly apologizing to her for what she had done earlier. It was not the man she cared about, but her mentor, for at this time her empathy still only spun for Natasha and Amelie.