So, that brings things to now more or less. We’re still working out details, I still have no idea how long my “term” is going to be, but once Judith is ready to do my assessment, I’ll have more solid information. Until then, I AM NOW HAUNTING YOU AND WATCHING YOU SHOWER! Except not really, couldn’t resist the shower crack. I never can. I do get to oversee things here, though. Which means I’ve also been able to spend a lot of time peeking in on how things are with people I left behind. You were the priority contact, though. You were there when everyone else let me down or didn’t understand. I owed you this. I’m going to sign off on this one for now, just to give you time to take this all in.

Your favorite cretin,

Helena

P.S. This paper is like… super indestructible. You can re-read this as many times as you need to until I have more to share and it won’t degrade, and will always start from the beginning and scroll along. Magic. Fucking. Paper. My. Dude!

P.S.S. Because I Forgot – I’ve gotten you some of the paper, too. It’s cool to share like that, I checked. Check your desk, under the laptop, then write back when you feel ready. When you’re finished writing back, it’ll ping me and let me know so I can pull it up on a blank sheet of paper here. Think of it as Interplanar Email. Yours will ping when I’ve written back, too, all you need to do is pick up a blank sheet and say “read letter”. MAAAGIC ::insert obnoxious gif of something magical here:: – XoXo Hel

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Seeing the scrolling of the words come to an end, Sam glanced across the room to her bedside clock. Nearly an hour had gone by. She had re-read the letter twice, taking in everything as if she could commit it to memory all at once. “Shit…” she muttered, making a small effort to move and getting immediately hit with the sensation of pins and needles in both legs. Apparently that entire amount of time was spent sitting the same way, and as eager as she was to rush to her laptop, she liked the idea of getting feeling back first.

Carefully stretching her legs out, she rubbed them down and let the contents of the letter bang around her head. Helena wasn’t wrong, it was a lot to take in. On the one hand it was nice to know that death wasn’t the end all, be all, nothingness forever trip she expected. That gave some comfort. On the other, she now wondered if she’d ever been a criminal in one of her previous lives. What if she had been a serial killer? What if she had been Hitler? If she hadn’t been Hitler, someone else had been. Were they now someone else’s assistant? Did he already come back into his next existence and start everything all over again? Maybe that was something to ask about in her letter.

Proper feeling restored, Sam stood up and set the letter in the photo box before heading out of the room and across the hall. The spare room was set up like an office/guest room, decorated with an obnoxious array of color and pattern. If she were being kind, she’d say it was “ecclectic”, but the reality was much closer to a thrift store and garage sale having a baby, and then that baby throwing up all over the room. Helena had the knack for pulling things like that together and making it work. Sam went for function over form and it showed. On one side of the room, sitting between a bookshelf and multi-tiered end table covered in decorative death-proof plants, sat her one favorite piece of furniture.

The table that served as her desk was one of those obnoxious, powder pink formica tables from the 1950’s. She’d had it ever since she moved into her first apartment and couldn’t bring herself to get rid of it. Helena often poked fun as neither of them were exactly the pastel or “pink” type, but that just made her even more determined to keep it, and it survived every move so far. The laptop was sitting on top of it, a protective mat between it and the table surface so the heat wouldn’t damage the formica. Pulling out her chair, Sam sat down and lifted up her laptop to look under it. Stacked neatly beneath it was a small stack of paper, as Helena said there’d be.

The stack didn’t seem to have too many sheets; enough to get a couple of letters started, or one long one. She should have figured that looks were more deceiving than that, though. Picking up the stack and flipping through it, what felt like only three or four sheets of paper was more like a dozen. Magic paper, indeed. The sheets felt exactly the same as the one Helena’s letter was written on, but it seemed as if the sheets condensed themselves into a lesser volume when stacked. That was convenient. She was stalling, fanning the sheets out on her desk and collecting them together again. She had a lot of questions, but which ones to ask first? Should she dive right in on the Hitler thing? Who -doesn’t- want to know what happened there? Probably not, though. She should probably wait on that one.

Fanning and collecting them together one last time, she took the top sheet from the stack and slid her laptop to the side. The mat doubled as a writing surface so she wasn’t directly on the table top, and she reached for a pen from her tray of assorted desk clutter. As she clicked the end of the pen, a thought clicked into place and she knew exactly where she was going to begin her letter.