Only three days. Three days since the most chaotic five hours she's experienced in nearly 11 years. She was a free spirit. She could go where she wanted. She could let go of the care anytime she wished.
So why couldn't she just leave and be done with it?
Why spend three days looking for a sign with the name on the card?
Was it curiosity? Was it a sense of chaos? Opportunity? What could it have been?
She couldn't figure it out right now, and frankly, why would she wish too?
Chaos wouldn't create itself afterall.
In one of the damp, gray filled forests of the tail of Landfish island, in a swamp of mush-like stagnant water surrounded by a strange calm with the creatures around her, she found a sign.
"Anamdead's Contracts and such." Said the wooden sign with a small arrow carved into the side, pointing to a series of stones to be skipped over above the gray bubbling sludge of a swamp that bubbled with both heat and air without meaning or pause. The fog, to her, became a series of grayed clouds with a series of lights in the form of a small rainbow colored dot in the middle of the fog.
What was this? Verity was close to having the thought before she shrugged her shoulders. Only, whether she came close to suspicion or actual surprise, she would hardly be able to tell anyone. Her legs left the ground as she levitated over the concrete-like swamp's water and forward she moved, never angling her body as most things that could even come close to having an effect would more than likely move past her anyway.
5 minutes was the journey. The light in a palette of gray foggy matter that continuously continued to jibber on and on until the concept of color became more obscene for the vague resemblance to the blackened clothing she wore now. The rainbow light grew closer and closer. Her eyes would've hurt slightly if she was not already dead, and yet she felt a welcomed challenge in the world of inducing fear.
"You sometimes just need to take someone's fear and dangle it as bait. Slightly far away from the eyes, but not beyond. Also, stop looking at the plasma vat." Memories of what her former boss and self proclaimed best friend, Bellatrix, would tell her to stop talking to her in the same five subject matters that Limbo provided came to mind. So she floated around as the light began to dim, the shape of a wooden box could be seen in front of her as she grew closer.
A caravan? A wooden caravan of rusted violet wood held together with multiple vines. The caravan had two entrances. One on the wider side, one on the narrower side with a set of stairs. A small wooden sign laid on the door of the wider side beckoning her inside as her grin grew more and more. "OPEN" it read. How could she not take the chance to wander in and see what kind of games she would be able to play?
This was Verity after all, she who had haunted those who go by the alias of "Gods" to their knees. She has scared two full kingdoms in Nations 4 and 5 and into a grand war spanning two decades. She who, to some, created the bare concept of chaos purely for the sake of a laugh.
Verity opened the caravan's front door to find a room the size of a large yet cozily short restaurant with a set of stairs. The walls were carved into a smooth pattern of multiple small cobblestone-like stripes centered around small squiggles as they moved around. She could see a massive kitchen entrance, a set of double swinging doors and multiple stoves with red and white walls. Lords know how many rare ingredients were stored and refined every single day. She could see a small center hole in the wall showing not another room but a small office with a white sheet covering the back wall. A small desk with a few books laid upon it was also noticed.
The ceiling was a series of exotic yet harmless shrubbery as if constantly under the shade of any type of tree imaginable in the middle of the spring.
"So, this is Anamdead's Contracts and Such, yeah?"
The cherry oak wooden room began to spiral around her eyes, almost as if it were singing directly to her. As if the fauna had come to life and a vine could feel trickling up her back.
Until a certain voice could be heard not but a few feet away.
"Oh, it's you. Hello." says the old man with his face stuck in a small book.
A book with multiple symbols on the front, multiple magic circles were formed on the cover and flew around the pages themselves. It blurred the lines between book and grimoire as he slammed the book onto his desk and got off his chair with a skip in his every step. A walks up to her as if she was but an old friend he hadn't seen in centuries or more as he moves his hand to shoo the vine away.
"Thank you, Frank."
It was him again, Arthur Anamdead. He was smiling as if Verity, only now turning to see the sentience in the vines of this strange plant, was a unique form of beast that he had never seen with his own eyes before.
"Who even are you old man?" She asks raising an eyebrow
"Arthur. I thought we had met before, Ms. Clarity."
"Verity."
"Right."
Her eyes wandered around some more.
How could a shop this size fit inside such a small caravan? What else could he do? What kind of thrills could she bring about tonight? To Verity, these questions reigned in her head as echoes through a small void of noise, as all noise remaining was taken out of the room they were currently in.
Arthur, as oblivious to the mispronunciation as one would be to a pebble on the road, noticed the wandering eyes and a small sparkle shines in his eyes, to which he takes out of his eye and uses it to light a torch.
"Ah yes. Spatial Expansion I call it. And this is my little DASHOPPOE, that's Dimensionally Altered Spatial Home Or Portable Phenomenon One of Either."
Arthur barely took a step forward before instantaneously transporting himself but five inches away from Verity's face. One step, and in less than a blink of Plank Time, the old man was by her side at a respectable distance with a notepad asking as many questions as could pop into his head.
"Now then, I've been meaning to ask before going further, how did you get such information about that pastor, Boggy?"
The spiritual manifestation of the soul tilts her head to the side, memories static as an image vaguely enters her head as she snickers.
"I've never met him a day in my life. Boredom struck and chaos needed to be made. The fact he was really a fake? Pure coincidence."
"Hmm."
He folds his arms into his coat, his face riddled with concern, almost to give a small bit of a riddle in his face itself.
"That's a nastily dangerous word, coincidence. Ties one down to a predetermined fate too tightly."
A strange silence breaks between the two as space itself felt as if it were expanding itself to further the distance between the two, the old man looked to be floating away as his posture never changed.
The void came back to her head. Darkness surrounded her as he began to float away.
"CaN yOu PiCtUrE yOuR etherealselF aS Anything buT The ImAgE yOu MAde?"
A whisper into her head directly, beyond the ear and past the canal of the cilia passed directly into the formerly pink and soft matter of the frontal lobe in her brain, a very polite whisper, but one nonetheless. One that led to suspicion, one that would have almost led to self doubt. She was the queen of fear, at least by her own accord. She knew what made people tick, yet why was this voice playing in her head like an old hearing of an orchestra outside of an orphanage's window?
As her head turned, the entire room became a blinding yet comforting light as the void dissipates like a vaccine towards bacteria.
"Foolish Timor. I knew I left you somewhere around here."
Arthur wanders over to a table behind Verity and picks up a strange watch-like device. One with an almost melted design, a one eyed blackened skull rotting as if it were an apple about to fall from a grand tree. Arthur looks at it with a sense of wonder in his one working eye as he puts it back in his pocket.
"Now then, Ms. Verity, as the boy called you before, how May I help you today?"
Verity looked around the shop, six words popped in her mind as a masterful decoy. Surely, this would make it so the old man would drop his guard and she could see what memories of the past she could use to mess with this old shopkeep.
"I'm….. here to apply for a job."
"Oh?"
Arthur had looked at Verity more intently than before with a smaller albeit stronger sense of curiosity. Verity's eyes went wide as her pupils moved around on suspicion. It was almost as if a demonic presence was nearby and she was not afraid but apathetic of allowing herself to ask.
"Tell me." The old man slaps a table in the dining room before guiding her to join him in a little walk.
So they walked. They walked down a long, wooden hallway just next to the kitchen itself. The gods alone knew how long the hall appeared at first with only a single speck of brown-ish matter at the end of it all. It has been about 5 minutes, but to the ghost it felt more like 30 until they finally came to the end of the hall passing through multiple rooms all marked with labeled door; "Wind Room", "Box Room", "Paste Room", "No Room Room", "Chemistry Room", "Stella's Treasures Room, Move this room soon." The latter writing being not of his own. The two come to a stop as Arthur raises his hand.
In front of the two were a set of dried oak doors with a sliver of light in between the two of them. The doors are patterned with multiple spirals, with layers of flower and crudely drawn star-like patterns surrounding each and every curve. They were mundane yet eldritch all at once, raising questions about the type of tree this entire shop is even made out of.
"Tell me, what is your dream?"
Arthur opens a set of twin dried oak doors that creaked loudly as he opened them.
Dream Cloud Fruit Trees, Skeletal Butterflies floating about, Cinnamon Honey Bees, a lake of pearl clear, almost luminescent water. There was a sky that seemed so real she could infinitely float upwards and never reach the stratosphere with the clouds playing as if they were singing a ditty together. Cloudy, yet hardly gloomily so.
"Who on… wherever this is are you?" Verity couldn't help but ask in a sense of amazement and slight concern.
The old man smiles.
"My friend, I am a shopkeeper. And my dream is to create a space of true equality."