I didn't say anything this time.

"Sam had to help Frodo!" Nessy declared once again, hands spreading wide in front of me. "We're going to Mount Doom! Well, not really Mount Doom…"

I waited for her to finish her LOTR-themed rant.

"Was Sam… a dog?" I asked after she fell silent.

"You bet your ass Sammie was a hobbit-sized dog!" Nessy nodded. "The bestest friend Frodo could ask for!"

"A very lovely analogy. You're right, Nessy," I said. "You have a heavy burden to carry. Like Sam carrying the One Ring for Frodo."

"Yass! You totally get it!" She clapped. "We should buy a TV here and have a LOTR dvd marathon!"

"I do," I agreed, keeping my tone as soothing as I could make it despite my pounding heart. "You've got a very heavy burden to carry, Nessy. Just like Sam carrying Frodo, or maybe even carrying the Ring itself for a time. It's a huge responsibility, returning those artifacts to Mount Shelf, especially when… when you're so tired."

Her tail gave a weak wag, the manic grin softening slightly into something closer to genuine exhaustion. "It's… hard," she admitted, her voice dropping a fraction. "I am tired, yes… But, the store… She keeps me motivated! Responsible! Managerial!"

"These artifacts," I continued, gesturing carefully toward the compass around her neck and the bracelet on her wrist, "they must be weighing you down, Nessy. Not just physically, but… spiritually. Like the One Ring. Making your journey harder. They want to be returned home. Right?"

"Yes, yes. They want to go home to their shelf to be sold properly," Nessy nodded. She touched the compass instinctively, her brow furrowing. "And they… they do feel heavy," she added. "And noisy. The compass keeps wanting me to go find… glory? And the bracelet makes me want to just… run. Run away from everything. So many Zoomies. All the zoomies!"

"Maybe you give me all of them to carry?" I asked. "You'll be a better manager if you don't have to carry that stolen property and get distracted by their whispering or whatever, right? You can lead me to wherever their shelves are. You already gave me the watch."

"Right," Nessy nodded. "Better management, yes. Good and true. Okkay! Here."

She pulled off the compass and hung it onto my neck. Then, she slipped the glass-bead bracelet onto my right wrist as the left one was already occupied by the watch.

The moment the last artifact settled onto my skin, a wave of something hit me. It wasn't physical, not exactly, but a surge of mental noise, a cacophony of conflicting impulses. A sharp, almost painful yearning for glory pulsed from the compass like a ghostly hook trying to latch onto my thoughts, trying to figure out what I wanted in life in terms of desire.

Simultaneously, a frantic, jittery energy buzzed from the bracelet, urging me to move, to run, to accelerate away from this tense standoff, to vanish into the infinite aisles.

And beneath it all, the cold, calculating presence of the spider-watch ticked, a subtle awareness of time's potential elasticity, its capacity for repetition, for trying something again and again and again… until its user was sucked dry of their blood and soul.

As I felt each of them competing for my attention, each call became clearer to me, better understood by me. Another similar sensation suddenly became obvious to me.

The blue vest I was wearing. The badge.

They too were attempting to influence my mind, trying to gradually turn me into a perfect employee that would become reborn as 'manager'. Like a butterfly, bursting from a cocoon of a lowly employee–to pin a gray everwatchful eye to me, to bind me forevermore to this place.

I felt dizzy, momentarily sidelined, the world tilting as the three artifacts, the vest and badge warred for dominance over my thoughts. Nessy's manic grin seemed to swim in front of my eyes in and out of focus.

She pulled out a large, metal thermos with a letter G on it from her backpack and sipped it. It smelled strongly of coffee.

"Can I have some of that?" I asked. "Damned things are definitely competing for attention in my head."

"Ah ye, totes," she nodded, offering me the thermos. "Here."

I sipped the sleep-depriving coffee. It slid across my thoughts like a knife. Another influence.

Optimization. Perfection. Clarity. Purpose. Understanding.

I suddenly felt like I could calculate very large numbers in my head, like I could count every dust mote in the air. Like, if I focused long enough on Nessy I could count exactly how many white and how many black hairs she had on her cute, husky face.

The coffee was powerful, but the artifacts were just as persistent, fighting for attention beneath the sharp clarity of pure, absolute focus like an ocean beneath the ice.

Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.

Focus. Pure and absolute. Focus inward. Understand what I am.

I wasn't Alec. I wasn't really linear.

Like lightning illuminating a dark landscape, the shared dream flooded back. Not just the memory, but the feeling of it.

The endless junkyard. The monstrous lynx. Nessy cowering. And me… blooming. Expanding. Becoming a forest of hands, a tree of infinite selves rooted against the onslaught of the Lynx.

I'm not linear, the thought echoed, not as a single idea, but as a chorus resonating through countless branches of consciousness. I'm liminal! I'm a tree of Alec-ness!

The realization acted like a personal barrier, or perhaps more accurately, like an infinitely complex filter. The artifacts' influences washed over me, but they found no single point of purchase, no unified consciousness to hijack as my thoughts suddenly bloomed, fractalized, multiplied.

Ten, one hundred, one thousand, one million, an infinite number of desires were presented to the Compass of Glory.

The compass on my chest began to spin wildly, unable to focus on a single desire. It spun so rapidly that it felt overheating, burning on my chest.

The compass pulsed on my chest, demanding a single, linear target for glory. My mind, branching and replicating, offered it an endless fractal landscape of potential glories—infinite desires blooming into infinite variations, an endless garden of ambition. The needle on the compass spun frantically, caught in an impossible loop, unable to choose a single direction amidst the overwhelming potential. It whirred audibly against my chest, a frantic buzz of indecision.

I didn't stop what I was doing.

My thoughts and desires multiplied in my head, blossomed with more branches, more roots, more slightly different Alecs who made different decisions, desired slightly different things.

The glass of the compass began smoking. Then it cracked and shattered, the glass detonating outward. The red and blue arrow flew and struck the floor, innards of the compass comprised of springs and gears spilling out.

"W-huawh?!" Nessy choked.

The bracelet vibrated, screaming 'run away, escape, accelerate'! But where? My tree-self was rooted here, yet simultaneously exploring every possible path outward, every branching timeline, every potential escape route dissolving into more possibilities. The urge to flee became a diffused hum, lost in the rustling leaves of my boundless awareness. The jittery energy dissipated, unable to galvanize a self that existed everywhere and nowhere at once.

And so, I accelerated without moving. Stood still while thinking and breathing fast. Fast. FASTER. Vibrated in one spot. Vibrated so hard that the air around me ignited.

The glass eyes on my right hand spun madly, burning through their power of acceleration, unable to find purchase on my soul. They, too, overheated, burning my wrist. One by one, the glass eyes cracked, popped, shattered.

The blue hooks of the vest demanding corporate obedience became engulfed with the endlessly multiplying roots of my soul.

As I vibrated, ran without running, moved without moving, the air around my body reached a temperature of a thousand of degrees in a flash. My clothes ignited, the vest burning. A eye-like thing that didn't quite grow tried to open and screamed as it burned to ashes.

The G-Superstore badge melted, howling and cursing in fax-noises.

I was a human torch now. Burning. Dying. Reconstituting as my top layers fried away.

The spider-watch attempted to rewind me but it too failed, its [SAVE POINT] needle no longer able to find purchase on my ever-expanding, blooming soul.

Nessy leapt away from me, eyes wide in panic.

The watch howled, unfolded into a spider. It leapt off my burning wrist and rushed away from me, wobbling like a drunken sailor. I took a single step forward and crushed it under foot, blasting heat in all directions, my boots melting.

The thermos in my hand overheated, most of the coffee boiling away in seconds, turning to vapours and escaping into the distant skylight-covered ceiling overhead.

The final beads of the bracelet shattered, detonating and my endless acceleration ceased.

The bent, superheated, warped metal thermos fell from my fingers, clattering to the floor, the remainder of coffee spilling across the warped plastic tiles.

The infinite tree of my thoughts powered by the coffee collapsed, detonating into sparks.

Pain hit me then. Spontaneous combustion hurt like hell. I burned through the remnants of my reconstitution to restore myself to my human, linear, singular form.

Blinking and groaning, I found myself standing on a blackened spot of the floor, completely naked. Nessy stared at me with wide eyes as did the shopping-cart bound raptors.

Then she blinked at the thermos on the floor.

"No… no, no, no! My endless coffee! I need it to stay awake!" She cried, going down on all fours. She started to lick the remaining coffee spilled across the melted floor.

As she was distracted by this activity, I grabbed the Chloroform+ bottle from her backpack pocket. Unscrewing it quickly, I turned the Chloroform bottle over and poured it directly onto her head. It ran across her fur, mixing it with the coffee she was lapping up.

Nessy paused mid-lap, a confused look crossing her face. "Alec?" she murmured, shaking her head slightly, droplets flying. "What arrrr… you… You spilling on me… fuzzy… Ugh… feel weird…" Her nose twitched, catching the pungent chemical scent now saturating her head fur. Her eyes rolled back, and with a soft sigh, she collapsed onto the blackened floor, succumbing instantly to the concentrated fumes. She curled into a ball, fast asleep amidst the spilled coffee and charred residue of my spontaneous combustion.

Breathing heavily, naked and still reeling from the artifact battle and subsequent rebirth, I took a moment to steady myself, screwing the magic chloroform bottle shut.

With a sigh, I carefully slid the backpack off Nessy's shoulders and slung it onto my own. It felt heavy, probably filled with whatever strange supplies she'd purchased from the store during her five-week caffeine binge. Then, I took off her blue G-Supercenter vest. The gray eye glared at me as I pulled the fabric away from her still form. I removed her employee badge from its clip, the plastic feeling a touch colder than normal plastic should.

With Nessy temporarily neutralized and her corrupted gear removed, I looked around the equipment shed, dropping the badge and vest onto the floor a few steps away from the sleeping husky-girl.

My eyes scanned the infinite shelves packed with bizarre tools until they landed on a pair of heavy-duty garden shears with long, sharp-looking blades hanging on a hook near the entrance. They looked mundane enough for me to wield.

I looked around for some clothes and found gardening overalls hanging on a hook a few meters away from the shears. I walked over to it and pulled it on.

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