Casey’s Wednesday night time loop
Date: 2025-11-05 22:23
(Casey’s Wednesday night time loop)
[Wed Nov 5 2025]
At a large house
It is about 60F(15C) degrees. The mist is heaviest At Plymouth and Lake/span>“Watched you zip by the front door like three times.” Casey tells Teagan as a matter of fact. Amusement in her eyes. She becomes more serious then as she turns her attention towards where she senses this disruption to be.
The three wake simultaneously in different rooms of the pale stone house, each experiencing a jarring moment of disorientation. Teagan finds herself on a cushioned window seat in what appears to be a library, though the shelves stand empty. Jakem sits upright on the floor of a dining room, the long table beside him set for a meal that isn’t there. Casey opens her eyes in a bedroom with no furniture except the rug beneath her.
Through every window, the World Tree dominates the northern skyline, its branches glowing faintly against the star-filled darkness.
The house is silent except for a rhythmic sound echoing from somewhere deeper inside: tick, tick, tick. Not the normal forward march of a clock, but something subtly wrong about the rhythm. The temperature feels pleasant, around 60 degrees, though the air carries that strange mix of autumn leaves and honey-sweet ambrosia.
As awareness fully returns, each of them remembers: they came here together to investigate reports of temporal disturbances in this Highgate residence. The last thing any of them clearly recalls is entering through the front door and then… nothing. A gap. And now they’re separated, the house dark around them, with that backwards-ticking clock somewhere in the halls.
A grandfather clock chimes once from what sounds like the central hallway. The sound reverberates through the stone walls, and for just a moment, the temperature drops noticeably before returning to normal.
The time on their phones, if they check, reads 22:22.
Casey puts a hand to her head as she wakes up on the floor on the rug in the bedroom. It wouldn’t be the first time she got so black out drunk or even roofied and ended up in a strange place. She sits up, furrowing her brow with clear confusion. It takes some time for the pieces to come back together. “Where did everyone go? Hello?!” she calls out into the house.
Jakem hmmm’s as he looks over the dining room table, stomach growling “Shit, did someone eat my food while I was? Oh wait, I wasn’t asleep.” He looks about “Well guess the other two pissed off.” he gets up and starts to examine the culterly. “There’s usually a spirit or something around here.” he says, reaching into his duffle bag. “I need to invent a proton pack or something.” he grumbles. “Oh well, you’ll have to do for now.” He says, reaching in to retrieve a small, very realistic looking doll; one enchanted with the shard of a ghost. “Find your big brother.” he orders it.
“What smells goo-” Teagan blinks her eyes open from where she leans against the window in the barren library, eyes coming into focus on the World Tree outside. She frowns as she turns and stands upright, memory sinking in steadily. She makes her way out of the library, hand on the doorway. About to call out even as Casey does. “In here!” She calls back in the other woman’s direction before turning to head in the direction of the clock, drawn deeper into the house.
TICK-tock, TICK-tock, like time unwinding itself.
Footsteps echo as Teagan moves toward the central hallway. The hardwood floors make no creaking sounds beneath her feet despite their apparent age. As she rounds a corner, she spots the grandfather clock standing against the far wall. Its face shows 10:22, but the hands are moving counterclockwise. The pendulum swings in perfect rhythm, but backward.
Casey emerges from the bedroom into a corridor lined with more of those tall windows. Through them, the World Tree’s branches seem to shift slightly, though there’s no wind. The honey-sweet scent grows stronger near the windows.
The three can now hear each other’s movements through the house. They’re close enough to converge on the central hall where the clock stands, its backwards ticking filling the space with temporal wrongness.
The temperature remains steady at 60 degrees. For now.
Jakem heads to the central hall, sometimes following, sometimes dragging the messenger doll. “Oh hey you two. See any ghosts?” he asks “Or spirits, or weirdness in general?” He asks, while accompanied by a miniature Kai, roughly a foot tall.
Jakem uses a messenger doll/span>Kai [A]Frolic[Beats C, E, H, J, O] Hopping on his sold-separately scooter, drives in a circle before popping a wheelie.
“Lots of weirdness,” Teagan answers over her shoulder to Jakem as she stops before the grandfather clock. She looks it up and down. “Firstly, this clock is moving backward.” A pause as she works on popping open the lower part of the clock with the pendulum. “Well, firstly was waking up in an empty library, so I guess this is secondly?” She shrugs and gets back to trying to get at the pendulum in the clock.
“Weirdness beyond waking up on the floor?” Casey ask Jakem with an unimpressed glance at the stupid question. She shrugs her narrow, bare shoulders and adjust one of her arm warmers to fit without wrinkles.
The femmes attention goes to the clock, she motions to it then says, “Why do I get the sense this clock is kind of central to whats going on?”
they’re rising instead of falling.
As the three gather around the clock, a whisper echoes through the hallway. Not English. Not any language they recognize. It sounds like wind through a doorway, or the moment between sleeping and waking given voice.
Jakem’s doll-Kai suddenly jerks its head toward a doorway to their left. The doorway frames itself with those carved lintels showing intertwined vines and small winged figures. Through it, they can see what appears to be a sitting room with a single armchair facing away from them.
The clock chimes twice. 10:20 on its face now.
The temperature drops noticeably. Maybe 57 degrees. The whisper comes again, clearer this time, from the direction of the sitting room. Still incomprehensible, but carrying an emotion: longing.
On the wall beside the clock, they notice for the first time a series of framed sketches. Charcoal drawings of impossible doorways, thresholds that lead to nowhere and everywhere. Each signed in the corner: “M.V.“
“Probably because it chimed when we woke up even though it wasn’t on the hour or even half hour,” Teagan tells Casey. She glances up to the charcoal drawings as she works on forcing the clock itself open. “C’mon, lemme iiiiiiin- oh, were those there before? Anyone know an Em-Vee?”
Jakem gestures to the doorway “Kai senses a ghost or spirit thing in there.” He says, not having noticed the clock’s unusual aspects yet. He shivers, pulling his heavy coat around himself as if it were freezing temperatures. It’s not, in fact he should be comfortable in such a coat, but he’s clearly not. “Oh, cool, are those Escher drawings?” He asks, still not noticing the clock, even after Casey pointed it out, moving up to examine the impossible doorway sketches.
“It’s not ringing any bells.” Casey replies to Teagan. The femme stays within the general group but moves close enough to one of the drawings to reach out and touch a doorway with her finger tips. “Creepy. Aren’t they?”
“Marion.“
The temperature drops again. 54 degrees now. Cold enough that breath might start showing.
Teagan manages to open the clock’s lower panel. Inside, the pendulum swings backward, but there’s something else: a small object wrapped in cloth, tucked behind the mechanism. It appears to be a paintbrush, well-used, with dried paint on the bristles showing colors that shouldn’t exist together–gold that shifts to silver, blue that bleeds into a color there’s no name for.
Jakem’s doll-Kai tugs insistently toward the sitting room doorway. The armchair inside remains motionless, but now they can see something on the floor beside it: more sketches, scattered as if dropped in haste. And on the chair’s armrest, a hand. Pale. Fingers too long. Not quite human.
The clock chimes three times. 10:17 now.
Through the windows, the World Tree’s glow pulses once, like a heartbeat.
The whisper comes again from the sitting room, clearer: “Not yet. Please. Not yet.“
“Gotcha!” Exclaiming in triumph, Teagan gets the clock open. While she reaches in to try to hold the pendulum still or even reverse its momentum so that time begins rolling forward again, she spots the paint brush and retrieves it from its wrapping. “Someone stashed a paintbrush in here,” she says. She leans back out, looking around at the whisper. “Who said that?”
Jakem grunts at the Kai doll, glancing down “Geez, I just wanted to snag one of the drawings, hold your horses Kai.” he rolls his eyes and looks to Casey and Teagan “Kais, am I right?” he asks. His attention finally turns back to the room, calling back to Casey “Dibs on the one that turns you backwards as you pass through it.” he calls before stepping past the threshold of the sitting room. “Now’s a perfect time, and if we wait any longer, it’ll only be earlier.” Jakem says with a crooked grin to the empty armchair.
Jakem uses a messenger doll/span>Kai [B]Charm[Beats A, C, K, H, M] With a cutting remark, the doll points out a flaw in some poor soul with an amused smirk.
Casey wrinkles her nose at Jakem, “Kai’s.” her tone sage and agreeing to something without explanation. The femme moves along to seek out the source of the voice even if it means separating from the group, she calls out on her way, “Hello?”
they’re all of the same person. A woman with kind eyes and paint-stained hands, rendered in loving detail. Each drawing shows her in different poses, but in the most recent ones, she looks tired. Ill.
The figure speaks without turning. The voice is neither male nor female, carrying harmonics that suggest it exists in multiple places at once: “She’s dying. Right now. This moment. I can hear the threshold opening for her and I cannot–I will not–“
Casey, moving through the house calling out, finds herself in a hallway that shouldn’t exist. The doors here are all slightly ajar, and through each gap, she can see the same room: a hospital room. In a bed, a woman with paint-stained hands lies still, machines beeping steadily. The same woman from the sketches.
The clock chimes four times. 10:14.
Temperature: 51 degrees. Getting uncomfortably cold.
Jakem glances back behind him, assuming Casey was following after. She’s nowhere to be seen “Huh.” He turns back to the armchair “Can’t be this moment because this moment’s about to be that moment. And if that moment’s in the past, that’s even farther from the moment she dies.” he explains casually as he approaches the armchair. “So you see; death is a happenstance of moments, but without knowing the order of each moment, you’ll never know if the next is death or life.” he says as he moves to attempt to seat himself comfortably in the chair, crossing his legs and adopting a repose of sorts. “Now if time were to move forward… Then there’s be something you could stop wouldn’t there? But it’d have to be nice and reliable.”
Holding the paintbrush, Teagan stands as she gives up on rewindi- er, forwarding the clock. She moves to follow Jakem, looking over the paintbrush as she does. “If you don’t let the threshold open, then she’ll just continue to suffer. That’s not fair to her, is it?”
“Everything you just said confused me.” Casey laments to Jakem as she struggles to follow along. She peeks in one of the doors to see the woman inside. With a hand she pushes on the door to try and open it a little more to see if it lets her. For now she doesn’t try to move into the room even if she can.
Marion in that hospital bed, the machines showing a heartbeat growing weaker. “This door I cannot bear to open.“
Jakem finds himself unable to sit in the chair. He passes through it as if both he and it exist in different moments.
The paintbrush in Teagan’s hand grows warm. Images flash: Marion teaching Liminal about art, about how endings make beauty possible. “A painting is only finished when you stop,” Marion had said. “Otherwise it’s just endless revision.“
The clock chimes five times. 10:11.
Temperature: 48 degrees. Breath visible now.
Through the windows, the World Tree’s glow intensifies. They have perhaps six minutes before 22:45.
“She taught me that mortals create because they end,” Liminal whispers. “But I cannot–I will not–“
Jakem looks to Teagan with a tilt of his head “The painting won’t be finished unless someone finishes it. I suppose that someone is the person with the paintbrush.” he says as he rises up off the floor and dusts himself off. Ooof. He glares at the doll who appears to be making fun of him, then looks to Casey “Huh, oh sometimes you ramble to see if your rambling matches the ghost’s mood. The words don’t have to mean much; but people will put meaning into nonsense, and the meaning they infuse into tells you a lot about them. But this bloke’s simple. Something inevitable is about to happen, and he’s convinced himself he can stop it.” He grins to Teagan cruelly “And some poor sucker just got stuck with proving him wrong.”
There’s a look at Jakem and Teagan aims a kick his way. Or maybe to kick the Kai-doll his way. Perhaps both. It’s a two-for-one special. But she does circle to try to see Liminal, holding up the paintbrush: “A painting is only finished when you stop.” She quotes the memories that she’s seeing. “She will be forever unfinished if you leave her this way. I don’t think she’d want that.”
Casey rubs the exposed skin of her arms to try and warm herself up. She looks increasingly concerned by the temperature causing such discomfort. The femme looks to Jakem and Teagan, seeking answers from them. “SO what are we going to do?”
windows showing every threshold they’ve ever maintained, including the one they’re refusing to open now.
“You don’t understand.” Liminal’s voice cracks with very mortal grief. “I am transitions. I am passages. Every second that flows into the next, every door that opens, every breath that becomes the next breath. But this threshold…” They gesture toward the hospital room Casey can see through the impossible doors. “This one takes her away forever. There is no passage back from death. Not even for gods.“
The clock chimes six times. 10:08.
Temperature: 45 degrees. Genuinely cold now.
Through the windows, the World Tree begins to pulse rhythmically. Four minutes until 22:45.
“If I hold this moment,” Liminal whispers, “she never crosses. She never ends. Isn’t that mercy?“
In the hospital room Casey watches, Marion’s heartbeat on the monitor grows more irregular.
“Ah,” Teagan says, stepping closer to Liminal. “You know, liminal spaces are some of my favorite things? Dawn. Twilight. Airports.” She holds the paintbrush out toward the concept. “But the thing about liminal spaces is they’re only that because they’re transitory. If you keep her here forever, she’s no longer in transition and she’s no longer yours. You’ll lose her either way.”
Casey answers back with a shake of her without taking her eyes off the woman in the hospital bed. “No, forever stuck aware but unable to move on is a hell.” she pauses to hug herself. She’s not dressed well for the cold. “The only mercy is death. No pain, no awareness.”
Jakem shrugs a bit at the ghost “We were dead for billions of years before this, we’ll be dead for trillions more after. Death is the default state. We’re used to it, this is a flash in the pan, this life we live. You’re holding her in that flash, but why? Death wasn’t so bad. Do you remember it being bad, before you were born? I don’t.” he sooths.
young and old, present and absent, here and elsewhere. But their eyes are unmistakably human in their pain.
“She taught me about beauty,” Liminal says, voice breaking. “About how mortals make meaning precisely because they end. She painted doorways for me because she understood what I am. And now…” They look at the paintbrush in Teagan’s hand. “Now I must be what I am. I must open the door I cannot bear to open.“
The clock chimes seven times. 10:05.
Temperature: 42 degrees. Shivering cold.
The World Tree’s pulse quickens. Two minutes until 22:45.
Liminal stands, and suddenly all the impossible doorways Casey saw align. They all lead to the same place: that hospital room, where Marion’s heartbeat grows fainter.
“Will you…” Liminal’s voice is small, un-godlike. “Will you walk with me? I don’t want her to cross alone. And I…” They look at the three mortals. “I don’t want to let go alone.“
“You must,” Teagan agrees, shoulders rising and falling with a small shrug. “And if this is a transition-” Her head tilts slightly, “Then she ends up somewhere, doesn’t she? So in theory… maybe you’ll see her again. But you won’t know unless you let this happen.” She tucks her hands into her sleeves now that Liminal has the paintbrush, shivering as she nods along. “Yeah, I’ll walk with you.”
Jakem smirks a bit, retrieving the doll as it tries to retreat “Oh yeah, we’d love to accompany you to the very precipice of the afterlife.” he says jovially, comically dragging the doll along with as it desperately tries to escape, moving to follow up behind Teagan and extending a hand to Casey.
“I’ll walk to the door, not through it. Not yet.” Casey says gently as she goes along with everyone to accompany Liminal on the next steps.
00 on its face.
Then forward. 10:01.
Liminal places the paintbrush gently on Marion’s chest and opens the final door. The one they’ve been holding closed.
Marion’s heartbeat flatlines. The sound echoes through the house, through the World Tree, through every threshold Liminal maintains. But this time, it’s not breaking. It’s completing.
The monitor reads 22:45.