August 20, 2025

Voidhearts Chapter 5: Witness

Alicia and Felipe goes looking for a missing scavenger but find only further questions. A new plan starts to form.

Alicia yawned, getting up at fake sunrise wasn’t her favorite activity, but seeing as she had slept decently well, and Felipe had woken her up with his less than elegant attempts of leaving the bed undetected, she figured she might as well go for it.
“We need to hit somewhere that has coffee,” Alicia yawned, “I simply require it.”
“Sounds like a waste of daylight, but if that’s what it takes.” Felipe shrugged as they geared up. “We going in hard or seemingly normal with this?”
“Seemingly normal seems good,” Alicia said. “I don’t think we’ll encounter any hostiles, but you never know.”
“Alright, business casual with hidden blades, got you,” Felipe said as he started slipping into a harness holding a bandoleer of knives across his back.
“That’s business causal?” Alicia asked as she slipped on metal arm braces “I’d hate to see how Business Formal looks.”
“Oh it’s quite simple,” Felipe said as he covered his new arsenal with a plain brown cloak. “In Business Formal, I wear my peacock cape and tiara.”
“You really were made in a lab for this kind of thing,” Alicia said, flat affect giving a certain matter-of-fact weight to the jape.
“I do enjoy showing off at my best,” Felipe conceded. “If this archery business hadn’t worked out for me I think I’d make a great model.”
“You’ll hear no argument from me,” Alicia said.
“What’s it to you anyway,” Felipe asked. “You’re an influencer.”
“Yeah so?”
“You don’t really just roll out of bed and do your job, I take it?”
“I don’t,” Alicia conceded. “But that stuff just doesn’t feel important or interesting to me, y’know?”
“You’ll have to explain that to me I think.”
“Right,” Alicia sighed. “It’s a bit like… uh, a price of entry,”
“Go on…”
“Like I can do what I want to do, work out and show off what I’ve learned and achieved online, but there’s a cost to it. I got to do the unpaid labor of looking good enough for people to notice, or I’m just screaming into the void.”
“Huh,” Felipe said, seeming to not even have considered that chain of logic as an option before. “Well, I will concede you do a very good job of the qualifying work, even if you ARE a weirdo.”
Alicia couldn’t help but laugh. “Thank you Felipe. Even couched in your bitchy bullshit that compliment was lovely.”
“Oh I don’t do compliments. I speak truths.”
“Aaaand now you sound like Lex again.”
“Right, I suppose we should get going.”

There were more people out and about in the streets of Thereafter than Alicia expected outside the central cantina. Then again, with employment being a non-factor for the vast majority of the city, there weren’t really any reason to not be out and about at any time of day one might imagine.
“So,” She asked over her cup of frankly distressingly bad, but reassuringly coffee-like coffee, “What kind of person is it we’re looking for today?” The cup itself was a wonder, conjured up to last for exactly an hour of Thereafter time, seemingly made out of a light, wood-like material. It had, as best as Alicia understood it, been a result of Lex explaining the concept of cardboard, and Eltern designing a spell to, for the lack of a better explanation of things, summon a substance with cardboard-like properties that’d dissolve into nothing an hour after use. It was a decent compromise to avoid Thereafterians leaving their cups and cutlery everywhere, but Alicia also couldn’t ignore that it took time and precious magical energy away from duplicating food. The puzzle of survival kept getting more complicated by the day, and if they couldn’t ease the burdens on their existing resources, a collapse was quite possible. Alicia didn’t consider herself a worrier, but it was hard not to be one these days.
“He goes by Fern-Eater, or at least that’s what the Translation Field ends up calling him.” Felipe sad. While he wasn’t quite spiraling over disposable cups, there was a tension to his voice. He had opted for a cup of tea. “He’s of the Clear River people. Some kind of shaman or healer as far as I know.”
“Oh, so he’s a leader of sorts?”
“Not so much. People I’ve talked to about him consider him more like a… itinerant craftsman, like a wandering electrician or plumber.”
“A ronin healer,” Alicia mused.
“You’ll have to tell me the story of how you became a samurai nerd one day.”
“There’s nothing big to it really,” Alicia said as they weaved through the crowds. Unlike most of them, they had a purpose and they were going somewhere, allowing them to slip through the crowd with the dolphin-like agility of a New Yorker with somewhere to be. “Samurai, especially Ronin, are cool as shit. There’s just something to masters of violence when they chose peace you know?”
“So your main selling point of samurai are ‘they could kill you but probably won’t?’ am I getting that right?”
“That’s a bit reductive,” Alicia scoffed. “But I admire the idea that great potential for violence doesn’t have to inevitably lead to violence, and all the aesthetic pursuit like calligraphy and court tradition are neat too, even if it is arbitrary, over-elaborate frou-frou to give your warrior caste something else to do than hacking each other to pieces.”
“Plus weren’t they historically… pretty gay?”
“So it is said, mentor relationships could get a little hands on back in the day from what I hear.”¹ Alicia couldn’t help but laugh a little at this. She wasn’t exactly sure how she had gotten the reputation of Thereafter’s premier Boy’s Love Enthusiast, exactly, but she was pretty sure Lex was involved in some capacity. It would, however, be unfair to blame it entirely on Lex. Pretty boys getting it on was exciting to her, she wasn’t going to deny that. There was something voyeuristic to it, to be sure, some urge to Observe and yet be distinctly separate from the forbidden, and from what she could tell quite pleasurable, love between men.
“If it works I guess,” Felipe shrugged. “Seems weird to have an interest in a sexual act you can’t really participate in to me, but hey, I’m a simple man.”
“First of all, Coaches don’t Play” Alicia said, this part was definitely a joke but she wasn’t so sure about the next part. “And can’t is a strong word. I’m sure I could fag it up if I really put my mind to it.”
“Oh word?” Felipe asked. “Do you have a drag king persona you haven’t introduced me to for some reason?”
“Not yet, but I have been thinking about it,” Alicia said. “I went down a rabbit hole on Stud culture² some time back and I would be lying if it didn’t give me ideas.”
“Well well well Miss Thorn,” Felipe groused. “You continue to be one of the most intriguing souls on this miserable rock.”
“Flattery will get you nowhere Espino,” Alicia didn’t feel entirely comfortable dismissing the compliment outright, but a slight negation surely would be ok. “…but thank you. Anyway, are we far away from this shaman of yours?”

“His place should be right down here,” Felipe motioned down a street. “On the right hand side.” Alicia could tell he was tensing up, there was a stiffening of his steps, as if his body was preparing for some action on the less pleasant end of the spectrum.
“You seem nervous; Should I be worried?”
“Probably not,” Felipe said. Alicia couldn’t help notice he said it through grit teeth, although it was more a sign of concentration, she figured, than fear. “But this whole case has me on edge.”
“How so?”
“People don’t just disappear in Thereafter. There’s just not all that many places to go…”
“Yeah, we had a hell of a time figuring out where Keegan could have gone, I recall” ³
“God damn that whole thing was a mess.”
“You can say that again.”
Felipe didn’t take the bait to make the obvious joke. Alicia couldn’t help but take this as a sign.

“Figures it’d be one of these,” Alicia said as they approached the block. The “house box” designs that were so common as to be Thereafter’s signature buildings. They weren’t too cramped to Alicia’s experience, but they were cloyingly utilitarian, not to mention they had a lot of dead angles when trying to make a safe entry.
“One of these days we’ll be looking for someone in one of these and some ex-militaman with a crossbow will turn us into pincushions,” Felipe speculated darkly.
“We can invert it if you think that’d be safer?” Alicia asked.
“Huh?” Felipe asked. “As in… go from the top to the bottom? That might be a bit safer actually. What are you planning?”
Alicia took a deep breath. “Clench up.”
“What do you… oh shit!” Felipe quipped before Alicia grabbed him by the harness and bound to the roof in a clean Deep Song-powered jump. “Mother of God, you’re just all kinds of stingy with the warnings huh, Crazy?”
“I like to keep it fresh,” Alicia said with a wink. There was something fun about winding up Felipe. Not that she enjoyed the whining so much, but there was a certain plaintive note to his voice that felt like it fit the man. It wasn’t all that different from finding a newborn kitten’s clumsiness endearing, Alicia figured. Felipe was just the kind of man that was better if he was doing a little bit worse, put plainly.
“Fresh is a word for it. Anyway this guy lives on the third floor.”
“Is that UK or US style third floor?”
“It’s the post-apocalyptic fantasy realm style third floor.”
“So this is to say you don’t know?”
“I suppose it does.”

On what Alicia would call the third floor of the building, they found the door with the shaman’s name on it.
“Fern-Eater, there we got it.” Felipe said.
“You know, I don’t think clearing the stairs downwards felt all that much better than going up,” Alicia said, unprompted.
“It did not,” Felipe’s tone wasn’t harsh exactly, but there was an edge to it. “And there were more of them to boot. Are you going to help me with this door or not?”
“Help is a nice word for it,” Alicia said before punching a hole in the door where the lock once was. “There we go.”
“We probably should ask Eltern or someone to fix that once we’re done here,” Felipe looked at the area of door that simply wasn’t.
“Let’s ask Lex,” Alicia suggested. “I don’t want Eltern all up in our business, and Lex needs to get out a bit more anyway.”
“Yeah…” Felipe sighed. “It’s not exactly roses between us and them at the moment, is it?”
Alicia couldn’t say much about that. No, she corrected herself, it wasn’t that she couldn’t as much as it was that she didn’t want to. She shook her head.
“You and the Deepspeaker seem to be doing alright though.”
“What?” Alicia wasn’t incensed as much as she was confused. Where did this sudden pivot come from?
“Oh I meant nothing by it,”
“Kinda sounded like you did if you ask me.”
Felipe shrugged.
“I just mean to say I see what I see and know what I know, is all.”
“Of all the times for you to get cryptic on me… ah forget it,” Alicia entered the apartment, a strange anxiety zapping through the back of her head.

Strange anxiety, unfortunately, was to be something of a theme of the day, as well as the apartment itself. It wasn’t that the place was ransacked, exactly, but it was also pretty clear that it was not a lived-in space any more. Open cupboards and closets told the tale of a hasty retreat, and while there were a bunch of things left behind, mostly tools and various pieces of clothing, there was a distinct sense that anything, and everything, that could speak about the occupant in specific had either been taken, destroyed, or hidden from a cursory search.
There was also, Alicia figured, the slight oddness of the windows being covered by an eclectic collection of blankets and sheets, as well as the words “Please Don’t Look For Me” written in some bright red liquid on a bare living room wall.
“Huh,” Alicia said as she took it all in. It took a while, in part because she wasn’t quite sure what she was looking at. “I guess he doesn’t live in here any more, huh.”
“Yeah I’m starting to suspect,” Felipe said as he stepped around in the room, as if there were a better angle to understand this odd scenario hidden around somewhere. “Ya think that message there is blood?”
“Hmmm,”Alicia leaned closer to the message. “No, I don’t think so. Blood turns brown when it dries. It has to be some other liquid.”
“That’s a mercy at least,” Felipe sighed. “This is enough of a horror movie set-up as it is. The vibes are bad in a major way.”
“I think of this more as a Film Noir crime thing myself,” Alicia said as she moved one blanket to look at the view. “But this set up is weird, not going to fight you on that one.”
“You think he was paranoid about people watching him? On account of the covering the windows and that?”
“Hard to be sure,” Alicia said, peering out of the window at a number of angles. “It doesn’t look like spying would be a problem, but I guess it’s a thing you could be paranoid about… “
“Is the Void visible from those windows?”
Alicia stretched her neck. Most of the “view” such as it were was neighboring apartment buildings, but there was a small slice of “sky” where she could let her eyes meet the enormous emptiness that Thereafter floated through. “Just about,” she relayed to Felipe. “It wouldn’t exactly give you agoraphobia, but I guess if you really hated looking at it, y’know?”
“Yeah that tracks,” Felipe said. “Some of the people I talked to about this whole thing mentioned avoiding looking at the dome or the void directly. I’m guessing that’s what’s going on here.

“That’s all well and good, I suppose,” Alicia said as she let the blanket fall back over the window. “But that message,” She motioned for the not-blood. “I can’t make up my mind about what I think about it.”
“I feel that,” Felipe said, pensive in a way the athlete seldom was. “I don’t know if it’s a translation field thing, but the wording feels a bit simple don’t you think?”
“It’s not Shakespeare,” Alicia conceded. “But then again you don’t exactly want to over-complicate the warnings you leave behind.”
“Oh, you think it’s a warning?” Felipe asked. “I kind of viewed it more as a… I don’t know, a request or a plea I guess.”
“The ‘Please’ does maybe make it less dire-sounding, no idea if that’s the kind of stuff the translation field would pick up on though.”
“It would I think.” Felipe said. “It’s actually pretty good at detecting tone and, uh, vibe and whatnot. Euphemisms and turns of phrase not so much.”
“Oh yeah that’s right, I keep forgetting y’all get translated all the time.”
“You do get used to it,” Felipe shrugged. “And you’re getting translated too, when you talk with Thereafterians.”
“That’s true,” Alicia said. “I don’t think of it much though. People seems to understand me just fine… with a couple of notable outliers lately.”
“You’ll have to tell me about those at some point… anyway this was a waste of time huh?”
“Not a total loss,” Alicia said as she gave the last couple of drawers a thorough search for any information of note. “I think we can be decently sure that whatever it is that is happening, it has happened to Eating-Ferns too.”
“Right,” Felipe didn’t work very hard at hiding how unimpressed he was by this. “So what do we do? Keep looking?”
“Let’s split up,” Alicia said, a plan was starting to form as she spoke. “You keep following this guy’s lead, and I’m going straight to the source.”
“What, the Council again?”
“No,” Alicia was smiling, despite it all, despite herself, really. “I’m going to join the Scavengers.”

Author’s Notes: My writing time has been limited due to a health issue deciding to make itself into a health problem these last couple of weeks, but it’ll have to get worse than it is to stop me from writing. I feel like I learned some things about Alicia in this chapter, which is always an exciting thing to happen to a person you made up in your brain. I chose to interpret this as a sign of the subconscious work my brain does on the characters and their story, rather than the more worrying read of them being tulpas and getting rowdy.

Catch you next time when Alicia makes some new friends, some new rivals, and works herself closer to the mystery of the Void.

VSD