The crew ended up drowning their sorrows at Major Chicken.

  Matthew’s platinum General Experience membership card gave him a colossal discount on pretty much everything, so the group ended up ordering a bunch of family buckets. Those at least didn’t try to eat them back.

  Matthew arrived late to the table, having spent the last fifteen minutes on the phone with each of his parents and rigorously checked their stories. He almost wished he hadn’t, because he might have been able to sleep tonight otherwise. Even Maggie had decided to stay with them instead of storming off like she always did.

  “So?” John asked him the moment he sat with the group at the booth, settling right between him and Kari.

  “So we apparently never owned a house,” Matthew replied. “I’m officially homeless.”

  And that was by far the least concerning part of this whole fiasco.

  “Does this happen often?” Sasha asked with a frown on her face, her fish salad still intact.

  “The running away part, or the disappearing house one?” Matthew asked with a flat tone. He wanted to crack a joke to alleviate the mood, but couldn’t muster the energy for a good one. “The former is routine, the latter is new.”

  “Especially in broad delight,” Kari muttered while sipping from her soda can. “Did your house turn into a Dungeon when you weren’t looking, Matt?”

  “I would have noticed,” Maggie insisted, her fingers gripping a chicken tender. Their childhood friend group used to visit Major Chicken every week in the past, but from the look of it this heretic hadn’t eaten here in years. “That spooky black Flux thing was something else.”

  John nodded slightly. For once, he seemed too unsettled to taunt anybody. “We didn’t cross into any pocket dimension. I’m sure of that.”

  “Could the house have been drawn into a Dungeon then?” Petro asked. He alone among the group seemed to handle the event with stoicism. The more Matthew hung out with him, the more he seemed like the strong silent type. “I’m not familiar with these things, but if they can kidnap people, then why not places too?”

  “Normal people would have noticed the house’s disappearance if that were the case,” Kari countered. “Dungeon victims are always reported as missing people. Meanwhile, Matthew’s old place has vanished from all the GPS-related apps I examined. It’s gone.”

  “My mother couldn’t recall the place either,” Maggie muttered. “What’s the new story now, Matthew?"

  Matthew sipped his own soda, if only to water his mouth. A shame. He usually loved the sweet influx of raw concentrated diabetes in his veins, but he couldn’t bring himself to enjoy it tonight.

  “Which one?” he asked.

  A short silence followed as his words sank in. Maggie stared at him in disbelief before repeating, “Which one?”

  “According to Dad, we used to live in a small apartment on Consul’s Hill. Mom, though?” Matthew scoffed, his mind still struggling to accept it. “Mom said we sold our place in Old Town when she and Dad split.”

  “Their stories don’t match?” Kari inquired, her eyes widening in surprise.

  “That’s never happened before,” John noted with a frown of concern forming on his face.

  Matthew could only nod in response. A timeshift always rewrote normal people’s memories until they matched the new history. He had grown used to his parents correcting him about past details and teasing him about his lack of attention.

  However, it was the first time they recalled different versions of the same event.

  Matthew had already informed Crypto about the disaster through their navigators, and the Association manager already sent Liv and the Doc to investigate the site in response. The former’s Key allowed her to enter photographs and reconstitute details from them, and the latter had kept a few Flux-shielded photos of Matthew’s house as part of his research. Those had been designed to resist timeshifts and apparently survived whatever that black particles did to scrub the place from everyone’s collective memories.

  The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

  Matthew wondered what was that strange dark substance that consumed his home. It looked like Flux, but the Crawlers had only ever encountered seven colored variants. There was no place for black in their sorcery framework.

  Then again, mankind only discovered the magenta color in 1858…

  While the rest of the team pondered that mystery, Matthew glanced at Amélia, who hadn’t participated in the discussion yet. He saw her toss a few tenders into her bag, followed by the noise of crushing jaws. She seemed to find the activity soothing.

  “Did you give Handy a stomach?” Matthew asked her.

  “Yes,” Amélia confirmed with a small nod. “It likes meat.”

  Maggie snickered. “Does it shit too?”

  Amélia froze for a moment. “I knew I had forgotten something...”

  “I can give it a butthole anytime,” Matthew suggested in between chicken bites. “Him? Her?”

  “I’m still flexible on that part,” Amélia replied with a small giggle. “Does yours need to eat too?”

  “Only my Flux.” Matthew’s Articat was more or less an animated drawing fueled by his sorcery, while Amélia’s creation was a fully functional living creature. He wondered if it would survive Disbelief if they passed it off as a weird cryptid or a doll. “Speaking of Flux, did anybody take a good look at the black stuff that ate my place?”

  “I did,” Kari confirmed. “It looked like Flux to my Key, but nothing like I’ve ever experienced. Staring at it gave me a headache… like I was staring at something that wasn’t supposed to be there.”

  “Me too,” Matthew said. Merely trying to recall it blurred his vision. “It all began with that ‘made in Ostende’ line."

  Uttering the name alone caused him pain. It sounded incredibly familiar in Matthew’s mouth, yet he couldn’t remember where he heard it; attempting to do so only worsened his headache.

  The name had something to do with his missing memories. He was sure of it now.

  “Ostende…” Sasha repeated, her eyes squinting. “Oost means east in Dutch, and Ende is end in Flemish, so East End? What could that mean?”

  “I don’t recall any city called Ostende,” Kari said.

  “Maybe it doesn’t exist anymore?” Petro suggested. “Like that Bielefeld place?”

  “That sounds plausible,” John said. “This country used to be called Belgium a few timeshifts ago, if you can believe that.”

  After a second spent processing the existential dread that came with this revelation, Sasha snapped her fingers. Her eyes had widened with that oh-so-universal ‘eureka’ light. “It was an error in the script!” she said. “Has anyone tried to write a book and gone over multiple drafts?”

  “Nope,” Matthew replied, being too lazy for editing.

  “If you had, I can guarantee that a few errors would have slipped through between rewrites,” Sasha replied. As an aspiring writer, she probably had more experience with such things than anybody else here. “Now, if I understand correctly, history keeps altering itself with these timeshifts to rationalize Dungeon-related disasters.”

  “And it’s been happening faster and faster over the years,” Kari muttered to herself, her eyes widening. “Incoherencies slipped through!”

  “Like my parents’ memories?” Matthew guessed. “Wait, is that why my house vanished? Because they couldn’t agree on who owned what?”

  “It probably contributed,” John confirmed. “Disbelief works by establishing a consensus of the minds that then reshape supernatural events into mundane ones. Two people misremembering the same place must have messed it up.”

  Kari crossed her arms and pondered the matter. “I think John’s hypothesis that your house was a naturally unstable place rings true, Matthew. Hosting one of the first Dungeons probably weakened the place’s spatiotemporal stability.”

  “Since none of us can remember this ‘Ostende’ place, then it means the hangers Matthew found predated the latest timeshifts,” John suggested. “Your house probably accumulated so much time-displaced trash that it eventually collapsed under the weight of Disbelief.”

  “A wave of violet Flux always precedes a timeshift,” Kari recalled. “That black Flux stuff could be a last resort measure that follows afterwards. Soap scrubbing the errors clean.”

  “Like a spacetime waste management agency?” Petro asked.

  “Hey, whose house are you calling a spacetime junkyard?!” Matthew protested. Though now that he heard himself, it did sound halfway interesting…

  “What bothers me is that it disappeared long after a timeshift and in broad delight,” John said, blatantly ignoring Matthew. “That kind of supernatural event can’t usually take place outside of Dungeons. Disbelief should have negated it.”

  “We couldn’t find any leads on the first Dungeon either,” Kari complained. “But since Matthew could remember changes in 2015, then he had already developed a Key back then and probably encountered it.”

  “We do have a lead,” John countered. “This ‘Ostende’ existed before the earliest timeshift that we can remember, and since they affect areas where a Dungeon reaches maturity–”

  “If we find this Ostende, we will find the first Dungeon,” Sasha guessed. “I love a good mystery story.”

  Kari nodded in confirmation. “We should be on the lookout for other mutable places like Matthew’s house too. We could find other clues that survived the timeshifts in them.”

  That sounded like a good plan, but Matthew couldn’t shake the dark feeling growing in his gut. Something told him that what happened to his house was an ominous warning, like birds flying away from an incoming tsunami.

  Disbelief should have prevented Tarantulas from leaving its Dungeon too, yet it crawled out of one twice, Matthew thought. He had a pretty good idea why both of these disasters happened so close to one another. Disbelief is slowly weakening.

  The Dungeons had been destabilizing reality for years, one anomaly at a time.

  How long until it couldn’t take it anymore?

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