AN: I said maybe no chapters, well, here I am, with another chapter.
PS: Thanks for the feedback review, NoNameNoLife, it helped me recenter this story. While the wholesome and filler chapters were good, I think it's time to advance the plot some more instead of just character interaction. I'll try not to fall too deep into the romance trap, but romance is kinda tied to plot.
Anyway, this chapter was about 5k words, but I decided to devide it in two. If you want the next part TODAY, then we'd have to negotiate.
How about 5 powerstones, from the time of release of this chapter till the end of the day.
That's all from me, enjoy the chapter (there will be another author note at the end, please read that. Important.):
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The morning sun felt like a lie. It always did now in this town.
Boyd sat in one of the diner seats, near the window, as the jukebox played one of the Beatles' songs, "What are you doing?"
The song was way too cheerful and unfitting to be played in the nightmarish town. But no one minded it as they had gotten used to it randomly playing. Boyd's one hand wrapped around a mug of coffee that had gone cold an hour ago. Dark circles shadowed his eyes- he hadn't slept after returning from the forest. Couldn't. Every time he closed his eyes, those things would screech.
Donna and Father Khatri sat across from him, and his wife sat by him, waiting. A handful of others lingered nearby, pretending not to listen while hanging on every word.
"Found nothing," Boyd said finally, his voice rough from exhaustion. "No resources, no way out, no answers." He paused, jaw working. "Just trees. Miles of them. All the same, all wrong."
"Nothing at all?" Khatri asked gently, already knowing the result of the search before it had started. He had no hope for it, but if it kept the newcomers busy, he let it happen.
Boyd's fingers tightened around the mug. "There was one thing. A tree with a hole in it. Big enough to fit a person, maybe two. But that's all." He rubbed his face, the scrape of stubble against his palm loud in the quiet. "How are the new hiding spots coming?"
"Good," Donna said, relief evident in her voice at the change of subject. "We've finished four, working on a fifth. Should have it done by tonight."
"We need more," Boyd said immediately. "At least ten total. Spread them out, make sure no one's using the same spot two nights in a row."
"Boyd-" Khatri started.
"I know what you're going to say," Boyd cut him off, his voice harder now. "That we don't have the manpower, that people are exhausted, that we're already stretched thin. I know. But if those things figure out where we're hiding, we need options. We need-"
A hand touched his arm, gentle but firm. Boyd's words died in his throat.
Abby Stevens, her presence so quiet he'd almost forgotten she was there. Almost. His wife had barely spoken since they'd arrived in this place. She moved through the days like a ghost, going through the motions of survival without really being present.
"Abby?" Donna leaned forward, concern softening her usually sharp features. "You okay, honey?"
Abby blinked, surprised by the concern, but she simply smiled and nodded as if it was nothing. Even Donna and Khutri, people who didn't know her fully, knew something was wrong. She was a former Marine, a soldier, someone strong in mind and body, even when she was old now.
A few days ago, she had this fighting spirit, ready to take on the whole world. But now, now, she was just a husk of her former self. She didn't say much, only stared blankly at the walls, as if she could hear them.
Her light in the eyes had completely died down. Muted. Like someone had turned down the volume on her soul. "I'm fine," she said, her voice flat and mechanical. "Just tired."
The lie was transparent, painfully obvious. Boyd felt it like a physical weight pressing down on his chest. He'd watched his wife disappear piece by piece since arriving here, watched the light in her eyes dim a little more each day. At night, when she thought he was asleep, he'd catch her staring at the ceiling and then at the walls, lips moving in silent conversation with people who weren't there.
Or maybe they were. In this place, who could tell anymore?
Khatri opened his mouth, likely to push gently for more, but Boyd caught his eye and shook his head minutely. Not now. Not here. Abby needed space, needed time. That's what he kept telling himself, clinging to the hope like a lifeline. Time would help. It had to. She just needed to adjust to this nightmare, and then she'd come back to him. She had to come back to him.
The alternative—that this place had already taken her, that the woman sitting beside him was just a shell wearing his wife's face—was too terrible to contemplate.
Boyd's gaze drifted to the window, a habit now. Always watching, always checking for threats that could come from anywhere. Movement caught his eye- a figure, small and purposeful, moving between houses with the kind of determination that suggested a specific mission rather than aimless wandering.
Levi.
Boyd watched as the young man paused at the entrance of one house, glanced around like he was checking for observers, then slipped inside. Minutes passed. When Levi emerged, he didn't head back toward the town center. Instead, he moved to the next house and repeated the process.
He didn't look like he was stealing; there was nothing in his hands or in his pockets. Boyd frowned, and his gaze made Donna and Khutri look in the direction as well. "What's he doing?" Boyd muttered, more to himself than anyone else. But something about the pattern nagged at him. Methodical. Deliberate. Like following a trail, only he could see.
Donna's gaze stayed on him as Levi talked to the people on the porch and then entered another house, her expression unreadable. "Searching, probably. That kid doesn't know how to sit still." She muttered, remembering his first day, and he was already digging.
She had to admit, if he didn't have a dead wish, Levi would have already been leading the town instead of Boyd.
Boyd didn't say much further; instead, he took a sip of the cold coffee, grimacing at the bitter taste.
They sat in silence for a moment, the cheerful Beatles song filling the space between them like a cruel joke. Boyd watched Levi emerge from yet another house, this time heading toward the outskirts of town, toward where there were no more houses. He passed by the old gas station and didn't seem to stop.
"Should we-" Donna started.
"Leave him," Boyd said, surprising himself with the decision. "If he finds something, he'll tell us. If he doesn't..." He shrugged, the gesture heavy with exhaustion and the weight of too many responsibilities. "We can't babysit everyone. Not here."
Abby's hand tightened on his arm, her fingers digging in just slightly. Boyd glanced at her, hoping to see some spark of his wife returning. But her eyes were fixed on the window, tracking Levi's movement with an intensity that made Boyd's skin crawl.
"Abby?"
She didn't respond. Just watched. And in the reflection of the window, Boyd could have sworn he saw her lips moving again, forming words he couldn't hear.
He looked away, unable to bear it.
Outside, Levi disappeared behind a tree, on the far edge of town, and didn't come out.
Levi's POV
The sixth house felt exactly like the first five, one of them belonging to Miguel's family, where he was currently staying.
Levi stood at the top of the basement stairs, one hand on the railing worn smooth by decades of use, the other gripping his flashlight hard enough that his knuckles had gone white. The beam cut through the darkness below, illuminating the same depressing tableau he'd witnessed in every other house he'd searched today.
Dirt floor, packed hard by time and moisture. Check.
Ancient refrigerator humming in the corner, the sound slightly off-key and unsettling. Check.
Scattered boxes of forgotten belongings, water-damaged and rotting. Check.
Support beams in identical positions. Check.
Thirteen steps down. Always thirteen. Check.
It was wrong. Not just similar- identical. Like someone had used the same template for every basement in town, copying and pasting the same layout with disturbing precision. The dimensions were the same. The placement of every beam, every piece of junk, every stain on the floor- all of it matched perfectly from house to house.
No one was brave enough to go to the basement because of the darkness, and there were some exceptions. Some people that he talked with had gone downstairs and put their own things away. But when excluding that, everything else, all the items, the fridge, all of it was in the same positions as the other untouched houses.
No natural neighborhood looked like this. Even planned communities had variations, quirks, and individual touches. But here? Here, it felt deliberate. Staged. Like a movie set built by someone who'd forgotten that real life was supposed to be messy and random.
"This isn't normal," Levi muttered, his voice swallowed by the heavy silence of the basement. He descended slowly, each step creaking under his weight. The sound echoed wrong, bouncing back at odd angles that made it seem like someone was walking behind him when there was no one. Levi checked. Every step of the way down.
He didn't forget about the woman that he had seen last night, her face and tear-streaked face. And he thought it might have been her, but nothing. No one was behind him. So, he pushed the thought aside and searched.
When he had gone to the basement with Miguel to settle some items, questions arose when he saw the white fridge. Inside was empty, but it buzzed and was working.
And then a question popped into his head. Where was the electricity coming from? Ariana had told them that her hair dryer wasn't working when plugged into the sockets, but when she plugged a lamp from inside the house, it worked.
But what was stranger was that the fridge in the basement didn't follow any other appliance rules in this house. It was on and buzzing, even when it wasn't plugged into a socket. With help from Miguel, they had moved it into another corner, but no cables coming out of the white fridge. But it was still on.
To Levi, it meant something, bad or worse, he didn't know for now. But this feeling was connected to something. And every instinct he had screamed that the answer was here, in these houses. Underground. Hidden in the bones of this cursed town.
Levi finished his search of the sixth basement, finding nothing new, nothing different. Just the same eerie repetition. He climbed back up the thirteen steps, emerging into the house proper, and checked his mental list. He'd covered the main residential area. Time to expand the search.
Outside, the morning air felt crisp against his sweat-dampened skin. He glanced back toward the diner, catching a glimpse of figures in the window. Boyd and the others, probably watching him. Wondering what he was doing. Probably thinking he'd lost his mind.
Maybe he had.
But he couldn't stop now. Not when every nerve in his body screamed that he was close to something important.
Levi walked past the old gas station, its rusted pumps standing like skeletal sentries. Beyond it, the town proper began to thin out. Fewer houses. More trees. The forest pressed in like it was trying to reclaim what had been taken from it.
And there, barely visible through the overgrowth, a structure that didn't belong.
It looked like a storm cellar at first—the kind you'd see in tornado country. Two weathered wooden doors set at an angle into a small mound of earth, almost completely hidden by wild grass and creeping vines. But something about it pulled at him with that now-familiar rope-around-the-ribs feeling.
Levi approached slowly and stood at the door. To his left, he found something else that wasn't in his nightmares. Or it was, and he had forgotten it. Ruins. He knew the cellar and its place, but not the ruins. Levi frowned and walked towards it, his skin crawling as he stood in front of the arches of the ruins, destroyed.
He looked around it without stepping inside, his mind racing as it tried to remember his nightmares and if there ever were ruins here. But nothing. If he knew he'd end up in this town for sure, he'd pack his laptop with him as well. The internet or any other signal might not work, but he'd have access to his video and written journals about his nightmares. With that, he could confirm the existence of the ruins.
Listening to the pull, he returned to the storm cellar.
The moment his attention shifted back to those weathered wooden doors, the wrongness hit him like a physical blow. It was different from the basements- those had felt staged, artificial, like a badly built stage set. This felt ancient. Malevolent. Like the earth itself had opened up to swallow something it shouldn't have, and now it was waiting to do it again.
The air around the cellar was colder, heavy with a pressure that made his ears pop. Static electricity danced across his skin, raising every hair on his body. A sane part of him said it was all in his head, but the other part told it to shut up. This was real, no matter how much he refused to accept it. Just like how he was pulled to Ariana yesterday.
The doors were old-much older than anything else in town. The wood was warped and gray, but not from weather damage. It looked drained, like something had sucked the life out of it over decades or centuries.
His stomach turned. Every survival instinct he possessed was screaming at him to turn around, to run, to get as far from this place as humanly possible. The pull was still there, insistent and demanding, but now it felt different. Not like guidance. Like a hook buried in his chest, reeling him in whether he wanted to go or not.
At the edge of his vision, movement.
The boy in white materialized closer than he'd ever been before. Those too-large eyes were fixed on Levi with an intensity that was almost painful to meet. The boy's head moved slowly from side to side, more emphatic than before. Desperate.
Don't.
Turn back.
Please.
The silent plea was so clear Levi could almost hear it. The boy took a step forward, one pale hand reaching out as if to physically stop him. His expression had shifted from warning to something that looked like mad, frustrated.
Whatever was down there, even the boy in white didn't want him to see it.
"I have to," Levi whispered, though his voice shook. "I need to understand." The boy's expression changed- from frustrated to grief to something that looked almost like pity. His hand dropped to his side. For a moment, he watched Levi panting and then just disappeared right after.
The forest went dead silent. No birds and no insects, not that they were present in the first place. But not even the wind made a sound as it danced through the trees' branches, and the leaves whispered. Even the distant sounds of the town seemed to vanish, leaving Levi alone with the storm cellar and the thundering of his own heart.
He should run. Every fiber of his being knew this was wrong, that crossing this threshold would change something fundamental. That some doors, once opened, could never be closed again.
His hand wrapped around the rusted metal handle anyway.
The metal was ice-cold, so cold it burned. Frost formed under his palm instantly, spreading outward in crystalline patterns that looked almost like screaming faces. His breath misted in the air despite the morning sun beating down on his back.
Levi pulled.
The door didn't open so much as give, like it had been waiting for him specifically. The hinges made no sound—not a creak, not a groan, nothing. That silence was somehow worse than any noise could have been.
The moment the door swung open, the pull intensified a hundredfold. It felt like someone had tied a rope around his ribs and yanked, hard enough that he stumbled forward. His foot found the first stone step, worn smooth by countless footsteps over who knew how many years.
And the moment his boot touched that stone—
—a boy's voice, young and terrified, raw with tears and absolute desperation: "ELOISE! ELOISE, COME BACK! PLEASE!"—
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IMPORTANT Author Note:
This section is about the original plot of the show. Spoiler, at the end of season 3, the audience learn that Jade and Tabitha are connected and that they are "reincarnations" of the first people that lived in the FromTown. And Miranda/Christopher were just their past lives.
The reason I bring this up is cause I hate this twist because it didn't make sense, as it felt like they just decided to throw it there for shock value, and personally, I won't write about it cause it goes against my beliefs. I don't believe in reincarnation, and I don't want to write about it.
I personally liked the chosen/duality concept much more. Christopher and Miranda were "chosen" and could have saved everyone if they had worked together. But, like previous loops (previous loops of newcomers into FromTown), they didn't work together.
They instead got in each other's way or didn't believe or help each other, which reset the loops, i.e., monsters killed everyone, and the town brought new people to replace them. This led to Christopher not believing the boy in white and instead working with the smiling monsters to kill everyone. Which brings us to the Jade/Tabitha loop in the original show. So, instead of the show's concept, I'll work with mine.
That's all from me. Hope you guys enjoyed this chapter.
Take care!