The scent invaded Lisa's nostrils before she even opened her eyes—thick, floral, clinging to the back of her throat like a sickness. Lavender. Always fucking lavender.
She came to slumped against the 7-Eleven counter, her cheek pressed to cold linoleum. No strawberry syrup this time. No familiar hum of the slushie machine. Just the steady drip-drip-drip of an antique IV bag hanging where the calendar should be, its contents the same unnatural purple as the bruises beneath Lora-1's eyes.
Across the store, a child sat cross-legged on the checkout counter, crayon scratching against paper. Rabbit-0. The original. His too-small fingers moved with mechanical precision, filling page after page with the same stick figure—a woman with a knife, a medic's scar, a missing left eye. Over and over.
"You figured it out," he said without looking up. His voice sounded like wind through dead leaves. "That's why it hurts now."
Pain lanced through Lisa's skull as her third eye—the one that hadn't been there last loop—split open beneath her hairline. Hot blood trickled down her temple as the memories crashed over her in waves:
—Lora Prime in a white coat, not tactical gear—
—a needle glinting with purple liquid—
—the lie "This will make you forget" whispered against her forehead—
—5999 loops of chasing a ghost that was always herself—
Rabbit-0 held up his latest drawing. A stick figure sprawled in a pool of crimson crayon, labeled "MOM" in shaky block letters.
"You killed her first," he whispered. The crayon snapped in his grip. "That's why the loops smell like her."
The door exploded inward.
Lora-42—no, Lora-1, her barcode glitching between iterations—stormed through the wreckage wearing a tattered lab coat over body armor. Her flamethrower coughed sparks.
"Don't look at the pictures!" she roared, tackling Lisa just as Rabbit-0's notebook erupted into a kaleidoscope of horrors:
—Dead children dangling like puppets—
—Wraith gnawing her own fingers to the bone—
—Lisa herself pressing a lavender-filled syringe to a child's arm—
Lora-1's scalpel bit into Lisa's throat. "The only way out is to stop remembering."
Lisa drove her forehead into the medic's nose. "Fuck that."
She lunged for the notebook—
—and set it ablaze with the Zippo she'd stolen three loops ago.
Rabbit-0's scream wasn't human. It was the sound of servers crashing, of timelines collapsing. The crayon in his hand melted into three terrible choices:
A. A key
B. A bullet
C. Her own severed hand reaching back through time
Lisa chose D.
She plunged her knife through the burning pages and into the floor.
The world shattered.
Glass rained upward as the 7-Eleven peeled away like a cheap facade, revealing the nightmare beneath:
An endless warehouse stretched into darkness, its vaulted ceilings lost in shadow. Thousands of cryo-pods glowed like fireflies, each containing a frozen Lisa mid-scream. The walls crawled with Rabbit-0 clones scribbling equations in human blood. And at the center, suspended in a tank of lavender-hued fluid, floated Original Lora's corpse—her mouth stitched shut with wire, her barcode tattoo still smoking where someone had tried to burn it off.
A single monitor flickered above the control console:
**LOOP 6000: FINAL CANDIDATE**
Rabbit-0 materialized beside her, his eye sockets gaping and empty.
"You were supposed to forget," he wept, black tears cutting through the grime on his cheeks. "Every time you remember, it resets them." His tiny hand pointed at the cryo-pods. "All of them."
The truth hit Lisa like a bullet between the eyes:
This wasn't a prison.
It was a triage center.
And she was the only one not screaming.
Lora-1's voice echoed from everywhere and nowhere: "Pull the plug or join them. Choose."
Lisa reached for the cryo-controls—
—as six thousand pairs of eyes snapped open behind frost-streaked glass.
---