CHAPTER 74 – The Show Must Go On (2)

Saturday night, Eppie taxied through Chinatown, got her cast removed by a very impressed Wang Sifu, and took her first full-body shower in a week, taking advantage of the fact that her roommates were gone by Friday night, and would not be back until Sunday afternoon.

She ate a two-course meal worth of Chinese by herself at a Cantonese diner, sent Zara and Lim the news of her clean bill of health, then took a taxi home to finally do something she’d been planning for some time.

On her bed, she sat in the lotus pose, calmed her mind, then readied her body.

“[System], show me my [Potential].”

First, let’s get a glimpse into the future. “[System] use [Roulette], spend 9900 [Causality].”

Dozens of epitaphs flooded her head.

Eppie squinted

Is this because I have a wealth of [Causality]?
Is the system telling me that the power of friendship is the power to theatre?

“They have their exits and their entrances,” she mouthed the next line from memory.

What’s worse, like [Perfect Pitch], there was a trigger function as well. It was a [Trait] to be turned on and off—meaning like [El Duende] and [Pitch Perfect], it was bound to be a [Causality] black hole.

A few thousand [Causality] rolled by, offering naught but aphoristic wonder, until—

She almost fell out of bed.

HOW THE HELL IS THERE NO JUDE?!

This world had The Beatles.
She had heard their songs, the sound was very familiar.

It had taken her a while punching lyrics into Google to finally find them, but when she did, there was no doubt that Paul McCarron, John Lenden, George Harwood and Colin Hanton had left their enormous footprint on the history of music. Of particular interest to her wasn’t the OG trio—but Hanton.

Hanton was, in her original world, the original fourth member who was later replaced by Ringo. The band name as a result, was a play on Lennon’s original idea of the “Quarrymen”, becoming “The Quorum”.

The divergence, Eppie guessed, was because Colin, the “fourth Beatle” never left the band in this more optimistic reality, and the Discography of Lennon, McCarthy and Harrison had been subtly altered as a result.

There was even a Yuki! And heartbreakingly, a band break up, and also a Chapman. In his deposition, Chaplin had told the court that he wanted to murder someone “as famous as Lenden,” but in his manifesto, he had also stated that it was because of Lenden’s infamous “no religion,” sentiment, expressed in a 1966 interview with the lead singer that, “The Quorum” had the quorum on “God” when it came to popularity and fame. Chaplin even had a copy of The Catcher in the Rye!

Songs, as clumps of immense [Causality], and as Eppie had learned through Kellie’s Umbrella, likely possessed their own Karmic Gravity Well of sorts.

Nonetheless, why wouldn’t there be Jude?
Eppie performed the usual google searches, but even with tricks of the trade, all she could infer was that Lennon was a decent enough father to his first child. There were even archival pictures of the two hanging out with the band. This meant that, Paul would not have needed to drive out to comfort Julian, and thus—no Jude.

And the bigger question was—

WHY JUDE?

Like, who was the song for? Que Sera was for Eppie. In the Pines was for Mio. Dream a Little… Zara? Ue wo Muite Arukō was for Kiritani Sensei. Umbrella changed Kellie’s life, and finally, When Doves Cry (choral) was for Mio, and it doubled as a salvation mechanism for Kelvin Grant.

If so, who was Hey Jude for? Hey Chelsea? Hey Lucy? Hey… William… Don’t make it sad? Let’s sing-a-along and make Mio better?

Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.

Eppie made a gagging sound.
Before her thought process could be taken further, the [Roulette] made its final cycle of vertigo known to her.

“… Whoa—” Another mystery.

And she knew that it wasn’t the popularised version, but the original, because the singer was the “poor girl”, a ruined woman, warning her younger sister from the same fate. Rather than a gambling house, the “House of the Rising Sun” was a bawdy house.

What was the portent of this song then? She didn’t know anyone of that persuasion—or did she?

In the two hours it took her to meditate upon her future, she had already gained more [Causality]. Nonetheless, much like Umbrella, every song had diminishing returns.

Her next order of business was to spend [200,000] or so [Causality] on self-improvement.

This was something she had been dreading for a while because the last time she had to top up her [Strength], the costs had been in the thousands, then tens of thousands.

What this meant was that each point-buy wasn’t individually scaled—her total amount of [Causality] spent upon improving her baseline [Potential] was on an exponential tangent!

First, Eppie decided that the dangers she had thus faced necessitated at least a single point into [Strength], [Agility], and [Vitality].

She read the pop-up.