October 7, 2021 - Greenwich Village, New York City, United States

After a sleepless night, Ella felt like she was going through the motions. She went to class, spent some time doing math for her grad work, and ate food without noticing what she was eating. Her fellow doctorate students all noticed it but figured she was just hungover and that assessment was reinforced when she excused herself in the afternoon.

Ella actually had determined she would go back to the castle to get answers. Something had happened there, and, in an extreme act of denial, she had avoided thinking about it until last night had brought it back into focus. Having a plan made her suddenly relax, she would go back during the window when the subway wasn’t running, so she would be up super late.

She headed back to her dorm, set an alarm, and was finally able to catch some sleep now that she had a plan.

If no plan survives contact with the enemy, plans certainly would not survive contact with the fantastical. Ella, in her hiking boots and pants, was searching through the subway tunnel at four a.m. cursing. The place where she swore the tunnel had been was gone. No hint of a break in the walls.

There were service rooms, cutouts for workers to stand in when trains went by, but no tunnel, no strange lights, nothing. Ella walked up and down the tunnel over and over, checked both sides, even went past the next station eventually just to confirm, cursing.

When she finally gave up, the morning trains had started and the early would-be-passengers were a bit surprised to see her come out of a tunnel and climb onto the platform with them. Her head was down, and she barely made it back to her bed to collapse on it.

“I am going crazy…” she muttered to herself pulling her sheets over her head.

Ten minutes later, she got out of bed and started stripping the now very dirty sheets, her having not stripped off her boots or anything. She went to the laundry room, tossed them in, and sat down on the laundry machine to think.

She wasn’t in enough denial to think she could continue to ignore these things. There was the very real evidence of her changed eyes. Charlie had told her that she had disappeared the previous night. Something had happened. Just what was the question. Ella could either just try and ignore it, assume she was delusional, or just go with the flow.

Well she didn’t feel delusional but probably nobody did. Or maybe they could be delusional about being delusional, although that felt more than a bit tautological. Well, she was not planning on the funny farm, so that was out.

Deciding she was not crazy was perhaps a bit on the ridiculous side, even she recognized that, but she didn’t really see another option. She was even self-aware enough that her desire to not think herself crazy might just have something to do with the narcissistic sociopath of a mother she had been born to.

“Rolling with it, it is then,” and she hopped off the laundry machine, “or maybe just too much molly.” She grabbed her bag and tried to work on picking a dissertation topic.