"For the last time, I'm not your Mal-truck or whatever. I don't even know what that means."

"Silence, Maltriarch," one of the figures hisses.

Gretchen huffs. "No, I will not silence. Do you know how stressful of a week I've had? I think I deserve a freaking Friday afternoon chilling with my girlfriend, but NO! My notebook is stolen by imps, and now I'm kidnapped by a literally shady group of weirdos who can't tell their Antichrist from a stressed-out college student!"

The toy gun swings in her direction once again. "I will shoot."

"Good luck with that thing," Gretchen sighs, leaning back in the chair.

There's a weighty pause. Within the patch of haze, the gun bobs from one spot to another, as if it were being examined. The little red button on the empty bright yellow water gun is pressed. Surprise, surprise... nothing happens. The toy is violently flung to the floor. A series of overlapping whispers emanates from the figures, and Gretchen rolls her eyes.

She should probably be a little less antagonistic, but honestly? She's so done with life right now that the stupid sentient patches of haze may as well shoot her with a real gun. At least then, she may get extensions for the metric crapton of homework waiting for her. She got sick last Monday, so sick she barely even remembers beyond a blur of snot-filled tissues and miserable suffering, and two weeks later she's still trying to catch up.

She tugs half-heartedly at the suppressor cuffs holding her hands together and watches idly as the other three figures in the room draw more symbols on the walls. Well. "Drawing" is a term she'll use loosely; they're hovering near the walls, and symbols are just appearing. The shadowy figures are really just floating patches of darkness that kinda look like people if you squint. They don't have distinguishable hands. Or faces. Or anything, really.

'This is all your fault,' she thinks angrily at Tasia. 'I told you not to mess with that book.'

'I already said I was sorry, okay?' Tasia responds. 'I'm working on trying to find you.'

'Well, work faster. Our Netflix time is rapidly approaching. You're lucky these cuffs don't work on projection.'

'You're not exactly helping, chickadee. You haven't given me much to go on.'

Gretchen bristles. 'I'm sorry that I was so busy being KNOCKED UNCONSCIOUS and KIDNAPPED that I couldn't see where these weirdos were taking me.'

'Okay, jeez. Touchy.'

'Oh my god.'

'...I really mean it, though, chickadee. This is, what, the fourth time? I'm sorry this keeps happening.'

Gretchen's annoyance abates (slightly). Is getting kidnapped incredibly inconvenient? Sure, especially when it happens multiple times. It's not like Tasia ever means for this to happen, though. Gretchen wouldn't normally be so snarky; she's just been having a really bad week.

She didn't think anything of it when the odd quartet of shadowy figures started showing up in her favorite study spot. She'd just assumed they were a new group of interdimensional students, since the school prides itself on inclusivity of students from other planes of existence. The alarm bells should have started going off when she realized they never actually had backpacks or studied. They would just stand in the corner and creep everyone out. She, however, was more focused on the homework that had managed to swamp her.

This Friday afternoon was supposed to be a minor breather. She and Tasia were planning to have a short Netflix marathon to celebrate making it through the week, before Gretchen would work on Physics and Tasia would continue her quest for the source of the imps terrorizing people on campus (and hopefully find Gretchen's linguistics notebook in the process). But of course, the world just hates Gretchen's guts this week, and that's why she's currently tied to a chair in a dark room with the aforementioned shadowy figures.

Consequences of having a superhero girlfriend with a little too much curiosity about old books full of Latin necromancy spells, Gretchen supposes.

She should probably stop complaining. She's not dead, unlike the guy whose body campus security had to fish out of a tree last week. (It was blamed on the imps, but Gretchen suspects that's not the case). The suppressor cuffs on her also aren't actually suppressing her mental abilities, so they're pretty much just normal handcuffs. That's something she can use to her advantage.

"So... where are we?"

'Wow. Points for subtlety,' Tasia comments.

'Shut up and find me.'

'Fine,' Tasia chuckles. Gretchen ends the connection, and her mind falls quiet.

"Basement," one of the figures answers after a long silence.

"Well, yeah," Gretchen says, looking around at the cold stone walls and the ominous symbols painted on them. "I figured, but I mean the basement of where?"

"Your place of reckoning," the figure says ominously.

The first tendrils of fear start to worm through Gretchen's ribs. "What... who exactly do you think I am?"

"You are the Maltriarch. Reborn to wreak havoc on the earth."

"Why would I do that? What makes you think it's me?"

"You made your first kill. You've released your imps to cause chaos. Your energy reeks ill intent."

Gretchen stares. "I've never killed anybody."

"LIES!" comes the responding hiss. "You have taken your first life, and you must be stopped. We have been thwarted before, Maltriarch. It will not happen again, we are sure." The four of them move away from the walls and in a semi-circle around her.

"Thwarted? What...?"

The figures start chanting, and Gretchen pulls frantically at her bonds. The symbols on the walls start glowing. A wind starts up starts up out of nowhere.

'Hey, Tasia? Um. Could you hurry?'

'Yeah, sorry. What's going on?'

'They keep calling me a Mal-truck or something, and now they're chanting and they drew a bunch of stuff on the wall that's glowing and I'm kind of freaking out.'

Gretchen's stomach does a funny, flippy thing, and she starts feeling lightheaded. She's not sure if it's because of whatever the figures are doing, or because of Tasia's demand.

'What?!'

'Kill them. Do it. All you have to do is want it to happen and it will.'

'Tasia-'

'I'm not going to be able to protect you from them forever. You gotta learn to do this.'

'I... wait...'

'Chickadee, come on-'

'Did I kill that guy from last week?'

Tasia doesn't answer, which is all the confirmation Gretchen doesn't want. Panicked, she ends the connection again and wildly searches for something she can use, to get her out of this situation, anything, other than just... willing the figures to die. Everything is clicking into place and she hates it. The weird symbols in her linguistics notebook that she doesn't remember writing but just assumed were part of her notes about the International Phonetic Alphabet. The other times she was kidnapped, though seemingly unrelated.

The fact that she doesn't remember most of the day she was... sick.

In the end, it happens accidentally. All she'd thought about was making the figures stop and give her time to think, and then they'd just dissipated in an angry screech. She sits in the chair and cries, watching as the tears make darkened spots on her jeans.

When Tasia appears, neither of them speak. Tasia frees her from the handcuffs, and they walk back to their dorm in silence. The Netflix marathon doesn't happen.

Disclaimer: This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author's imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.