“Betty!?” Ash nearly jumped out of his seat.

  “You don't have to yell! I got the coffee pot as soon as I could!” She set the pot on the table hard enough to jostle the cup on the saucer. The nametag that Ash had remembered, the open mouthed cat, had her name there clear as day just like before.

  “No no, the coffee is fine,” it wasn't fine, it was lukewarm mud, but he continued, “but what are you doing here?”

  “I work here? Just like the last time you saw me? Maybe you don't need the extra caffeine…,” she eyed the cup, about ready to take it away from him.

  “That’s not what I–” he stopped himself, wondering if there was any point in explaining to her how strange this situation was. He shook his head before choosing another angle of questioning. “Am I the only person here today?”

  Betty frowned as she crossed her arms, already looking defensive. “Hey! I’m still working hard here! Even if we only have four customers today...” Her cross armed defense fell as she put one hand on her hip instead.

  “Four?” He thought to himself. “Is everyone else already here somewhere then after all?”

  Ash looked out to the sea of tables, not spying any other customers at least from where he was sitting. “Don’t take this the wrong way or anything,” he reached for the coffee, the cup was warm, “but I don’t see anyone besides us here.”

  “Do you need glasses or something?” Ash was thinking that he might, but he didn’t feel like bringing it up. “They’re right over,” she turned to point towards a table, but stopped as she looked over at a mass of empty seats, “wait, when did we get so many tables?” She trailed off as her arms uncrossed and one of her hands clutched at the coffee pot she brought here.

  “Is she like me? Did she die recently?” Ash’s thoughts latched onto the word “die” as he felt a chill that the coffee he was holding couldn’t warm.

  “This can’t be right,” Betty shook her head, “I need to talk to Gatsby…” She started to turn away from the table, and as soon as she did Ash stood up. “Betty wa–” before he could utter more than a single word, the lights cut out with the same electrical hum. Ash had gotten used to being plunged into darkness, but typically the lights only shut off for a few seconds before they came back on.

  This time the darkness remained, a chilling void that covered the whole diner in silence. It immediately reminded him of the creeping ink from outside, and made him hope that there was no way for it to reach the inside of the diner.

  “Betty?” Ash called out into the dark, but earned no response. He then flexed his fingers, trying to summon his security. For just a brief moment, the space around him lit up with a flash of light, and disappeared just as quickly when his revolver firmly rested in his hand.

  “Think this through,” Ash focused as his right hand tensed. “If this is like my situation, the diner is this way because of Betty, and she’s more than likely already dead.” An electrical hum cut through the silence as a single light in the diner flickered back to life, very far from Ash’s table. The single bulb burned bright enough to cast its light in a large circle around it, giving Ash a barely visible path towards it. Ash looked at the ground, trying to find his condiment trail where he last left it, but in what little light could reach him it was nowhere to be found.

  “No point in starting another trail, it’ll just be confusing.” he said to himself as he started slowly approaching the light, with no other real way forward. “In my stream, the lower floors were blocked off, and every door besides mine and the one to the roof were locked.” He mulled the thought over, thinking about what all these tables and flickering lights could mean for Betty, and if figuring that out would give him a clue to make navigating her stream any easier.

  He inched closer to the light, his surroundings becoming brighter as he walked slowly and carefully. “I don’t really know much about her, I don’t even know how she could have died without anyone realizing.” Ash thought back to the last time he was in the diner, the real diner, and how much business there actually was. He was there for an hour, drank half a cup of coffee, ate a plate of mostly burnt pancakes, and only saw two other people come in and be seated.

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  Thinking back on it, he didn’t remember seeing any other waitstaff either, just Betty. “She might be the only person who works here, other than Gatsby himself…” Ash honestly wasn’t even sure how long the diner had been around for; it was here when he moved to Broolhaven three years ago. As far as he could remember, it had just as many customers three years ago as it did today.

  It was much easier to see now as Ash grew even closer to the light, in fact the glow was getting a little blinding. “If they haven’t been getting customers, how have they been open so long?” Ash kept asking himself questions that he had no way to answer, and eventually just resolved himself to ask Betty if he could track her down again. “Actually, is it rude to ask a dead waitress how her restaurant is still open?”

  Ash finally reached the table, and illuminated underneath the intense glow was a sheet of paper, or on second glance some stitched together napkins, and a short stubby pencil laying beside them. There was something written on the napkin stack, but it was actually too bright to see, so Ash picked up the piece of message and turned away from the bulb to make out the words on the paper. Hastily scrawled in pencil was:

  “HELP

  THIS PLACE SUCKS

  MENU IS TRASH AND THE COFFEE IS SALTY????

  -A”

  “Guessing that’s Abbey, she really did get here first, but I guess the scouting didn’t go very well…” Ash put the napkins back down where he found them, but also picked up a ketchup bottle to make a mark on the table to note that he was here. He couldn’t just put an A again denoting his name, since he realized his and Abbey’s names started with the same letter, so in a few ketchup squeezes he wrote ‘Ash’ below Abbey’s letter. He figured a big red mark on the table would draw more attention than just a few extra words on the napkin pile.

  “Are we trapped here until we find a way out?” Ash thought back to the last time he left a soul stream, and the only thing he remembered was accepting the job to become a Diver before waking back up in his own bed. Was he never inside of the soul stream physically? Is his body passed out on the side of the street right now? He made a quick mental note that he needed to read the book Forin gave him as soon as possible. There was so much about the soul sea, and individual soul streams, that he still didn’t know.

  As Ash looked around the illuminated table for any extra clues, he noticed a few paces away there was a table that was knocked over, with its chairs broken apart, wooden fragments littering the white floor. He walked over to investigate further, one hand still clutching his only means of defense in this foreign world. With his free hand, he grabbed the side of the knocked over table and tried to give it a shove, but it didn’t budge. The table only had a single pillar in the center for support, which clearly wasn’t secured to the floor if it was knocked over, but the table itself weighed a ton.

  “Whoever or whatever knocked this over must have been pretty strong,” Ash thought back to his conversation up on the roof about soulseekers, but he never actually had the chance to look at one up close. If they were strong enough to hunt down wayward souls, they were probably also strong enough to throw some heavy tables around, Ash thought at least. He remembered Vandal’s barrier, and how confident he seemed in its abilities, but to his knowledge there wasn’t anything like that here that could stop soulseekers from getting in.

  “There weren’t any inside of my apartment, at least I think. They were all outside, just kind of roaming around...or flying...” The grip on his bonded gun only grew tighter as he thought about coming face to face with whatever could throw these tables around, soulseeker or not.

  As he looked back up he saw a gentle flicker of light in the distance, not a massive glow like the bulb behind him, but at the very least another landmark. He quickly approached it, hoping it didn’t burn out or flicker away before he could reach it, and as he moved forward in the barely lit darkness he noticed that more than one table along the way had been knocked over.

  As he got even closer still, he didn’t just see the diner’s poor assets destroyed, he could hear it happening. His right hand started to shake as he tried his best to use his left to steady it, but as he got closer he could see something familiar in the distance. A fiery head of red hair was dancing around the flickering light, with the owner slamming what looked like black cloaked arms into the surrounding tables.

  “Abbey!” He called out into the distance, hoping he was close enough to be heard, but she didn’t react. “Abbey!” he called again, louder this time, echoing off of the tables that were thankfully spared from her rampage. This time she stopped, holding still as he saw her red hair shift while she looked side to side, before finally turning around and spotting Ash. She held one of her cloaked hands over her eyes as she peered into the distance before she suddenly broke out into a full arm wave.

  Seeing a second friendly face in this coffee and condiment filled maze was enough to make Ash’s heart feel a little lighter, even if they didn’t know each other well yet. As he hurried over to where Abbey was standing he got the feeling that this investigation would start going a lot smoother, or at the very least a little less lonely.