For a while, it seemed like I could pretend I’d forgotten the weirdness about I-330. Seeing her just going through a regular daily routine like any normal person…. Sure, she acts a bit odd sometimes, but in a normal way. If that makes any sense. No talk about running around temples or shooting people who instantly heal themselves. Just day to day life.

Then one day she suddenly asked if I still had my key to the library. Well… yes, I did, since the termination of my employment hadn’t exactly followed official procedure (unless it’s normal to call your boss a pig and run out the door while he shouts more insults than you knew existed at you…), but I didn’t see why I-330 was asking me that….

Then she told me that she wanted me to help her break into the building that night.

I don’t know what I said in response, as my mind just sorta blanked out, but I doubt it was a coherent sentence. She slapped me on the back and thanked me for agreeing to help (I don’t remember agreeing to anything…) before running off.

Spent the rest of the day dreading that night. I tried to find her so I could tell her that I hadn’t agreed to help her, that I didn’t want to be involved with breaking into the place where I used to work, but she’d left the house. So I tried to think of how I could tell her when she got back, but I just knew that as soon as I saw her, she’d have that big, enthusiastic smile on her face, and I’d start stuttering something, and by the time I’d managed to get a full word out we’d already be at the library and it would be too late to get out….

Which I suppose means I’m psychic or something, because that’s exactly how it happened when I-330 came back around midnight dressed in full Doctor Who gear. Though I can’t say I remember the metal device around her wrist with what seemed like several tubes attached to it being from the show. Don’t quote me on that; we only just finished series 3, so I can’t claim to know what the Doctor’s outfit is going to look like later on.

Thus I found myself standing outside the local library in the middle of the night while a possibly crazy woman used my keys to unlock the door. That’s not a situation I ever imagined I would be in. At least no alarms went off; not surprising, really. Back when I was working there, I was the only one who ever remembered to set them.

I felt nervous about following inside after I-330, but didn’t want to stand around on the streets. Never realized how dark the inside of the building could get at night. I-330 didn’t seem bothered; she asked me where the storage rooms were, and when I told her, walked right into the darkness towards it. I started to follow her, but after stopped before I left the small patch of light coming in through the windows facing the street. Something about that place was just… creepy. It was like a completely different place than it is during the day.

When it was clear that I had stopped following, I-330 came back and asked if I was alright. I told her to just go on ahead, I’d wait for her there…. For a moment I thought she’d insist, but instead she told me it was alright, she’d be pack in just a few minutes.

Almost as soon as she’d left, I started regretting my decision. Sure, I wasn’t in the dark… but I was alone, and everything around me was completely black. And of course I’m cursed with an overactive imagination to fill in all the horrible details of what’s inside that darkness.

Then the street lamp which was providing me light started to flicker on and off. Screamed at that. When I looked out the window, the light flicked back on for a second, long enough for me to see someone in… I think it was a suit, may just have been a black shirt, standing underneath it, before the light flicked off again. When it came back on again, it stayed on, but the man I’d seen was gone. Then I got my second chance to scream when, while I was looking out the window to see if I could find that man again, I heard someone behind me say, “Lisa?”

It wasn’t I-330; voice was a bit too male. Turned around, and it was my old boss, from when I was working there. “What the hell are you doing here?” He asked. I panicked; couldn’t make myself speak. He repeated the question, even louder, and started to advance towards me. I thought he was going to hit me or something… until I-330 jumped out of the shadows and tackled him. Pinned him to the ground, then asked if I was okay. Apparently she’d heard me screaming.

After I told her I was alright, she let my boss get up. He immediately started shouting at both of us; what were we doing here, who the fuck did we think we were, what did she think she was doing attacking him…. I-330 just ignored it and, calmly asked him why he was in the library so late at night. He shouted that it wasn’t our business, and besides, we were the ones breaking in, so we should be answering him why-

She cut him off by again asking why he was there, but far more forcefully. To my amazement, it got him to be quiet for a moment. He sat there, really quite for a long time.

It’s been months since I had last seen him, but… he’d changed in that time. At first I thought it was only the shadows, but when I could get a better look at him, I saw it clearly. He had these dark bags under his eyes, the beginning of a ragged beard was growing on his chin, and his hair was a mess. That last detail caught me the most; the man I’d worked under had been insanely vain about his hair. I think he might have spent more time trying to get the right “long, flowing golden hair” look every morning than any girl I knew. Now it was a tangled, dirty mess.

“If I go outside, it will get me.” He was practically sobbing when he said that. Like all the aggression had drained out of him. He started to beg us for help, talking about how it would hunt him down and rip him apart with its teeth, that it was right outside the window waiting for him….

I looked out the window. Didn’t see anything there.

Which meant I was very confused when I-330 looked through the same window and whistled, saying to him, “Wow, you really have gotten yourself into a mess, huh?”

I asked what they were talking about, and I-330 said something about forgetting I couldn’t see it “yet”. What was it?

“I’ll show you.” She said, before placing her hands on each side of my head and directing my gaze out the window. I was being pointed at just another patch of shadows created by the street lamps; nothing special I could tell about it. I said I didn’t see anything, but I-330 kept my head focused on that spot. After a while, I began to feel an overpowering desire to look away. Had to look anywhere but there. I-330’s grip was firm, and stopped my attempts to turn my head. She started whispering in my ear; encouragements, telling me to keep looking. “I know you can do this. Just focus on what’s really there. Don’t make yourself ignore it; pretending it’s not there won’t make it go away. It’s there, standing outside the library. Just focus, and let yourself see it.”

The urge was turning into pain, like a burning in the back of my skull. Tried to close my eyes, but I-330’s hands moved quickly to hold them open. The pain kept building, almost beyond what I thought I could bear, when it suddenly stopped. I was still looking out the window at the same patch of shadow, but now…. What had looked like the silhouette of a light post was now a black tail; the shadow of a car had become a snout; a pair of red brake lights reflected on glass was now a pair of red eyes….

Right outside the library, steadily pacing back and forth in front of the window, was a huge black dog. No. That doesn’t convey the size of it well enough…. It was impossibly huge. It would have towered over all of us.

I-330 gently let go of my head, but I didn’t stop looking at that thing. Wasn’t even paying attention to whatever she was asking my boss, except to think that her tone sounded way too cheerful for that situation. What was that thing? Heard I-330 ask me if there was a back exit we could leave through; I nodded, still paying more attention to the monster outside than to her.

Broke out of it when I-330 grabbed my shoulder and told me it was time to leave. She’d gotten what she’d come for (a manila envelope… still hasn’t shown me what’s inside it), so she didn’t see any reason to stick around. As she started to lead me away from the front of the library, my boss shouted that we couldn’t leave him alone with that beast.
He… he was right. I couldn’t stand him or his harassment when I worked for him. But when I looked at that thing outside, baring its huge teeth at the window…. I don’t think I could leave anyone alone with something like that.

I-330 seemed to have a different opinion. She laughed at his pleading, and said, “You know, I’ve only run into that monster a few times before. But every single time I did, the person it was following deserved everything that happened to them.” And then she just started walking away, like she didn’t care. I didn’t understand how someone could be like that. Seeing someone so desperate, begging for you to save his life… and then to just walk away. So I… um… I shouted at her. Shouted that we couldn’t abandon someone asking for help like that. Shouted that she didn’t have the right to decide what someone deserved have happen to them.

I think we were both surprised by my outburst. Neither of us spoke for a while; I was too shocked by what I’d done to say anything, and I-330 seemed, for the first time since I met her, speechless. Her eye had gotten really big, and she was opening and closing her mouth like she wanted to say something but couldn’t think of anything… actually a lot like how I probably look whenever she says something that catches me off guard. She turned away from me, and for a moment I thought she was angry. But then she turned back, with a huge smile across her face.

“Right!” She said, “Time to save some people! Because that’s what we do!”
Then she asked my boss if he had a car nearby, which he said he did. Told us both to get ready to run to the back door when the time came. When I asked her how we’d know when that time would be, she told me that “it would be pretty obvious.”

After saying that, she threw open the front door and stepped outside. “Yo! Doggy!” She shouted at the huge beast. “Remember me? Looking forward to another round?”
It watched her as she stepped out and walked into the street. Thought she was completely insane, but she looked so self assured, as though nothing bad could possibly happen to her. A low growl was coming through its fangs, loud enough that we could hear it inside. I-330 didn’t seem fazed by it; she pointed her arm towards it; the arm with the weird metal wrist thing I mentioned earlier. Sparks started to come out of the end of one of the tubes on the wrist device… then the tube flew off towards the black dog, exploding like a firework when it hit.

That seemed like a good time to run, so I grabbed my boss and sprinted for the back door. Didn’t care about the dark then; hard to worry about imaginary fears when a very real one is right outside. Once we got through the door, my boss led me to his car, parked half a block away. Could hear that monster’s howling echo across the streets. Started to worry about I-330; she’d been acting confident, but I didn’t think confidence was going to be enough against that thing.

Reached my boss’s car, and he started fumbling with his keys. I looked back to the library, hoping to see I-330 coming…. And those hopes came true, as she soon was sprinting towards us, shouting to get the car started. A mass of shadows, vaguely dog-like in appearance, was close behind her. Boss got the car doors open, I jumped inside, he started the engine; I-330 paused long enough to shoot another tube towards the monster before leaping in a door I opened for her, and the car shot off.

Soon as I could see it vanishing behind us, I had to ask I-330. What was that thing she had on her wrist?
“Well, it’s supposed to be a hands-free flare gun….” She said, “Though admittedly, I’ve only… twice used it for its intended purpose. Normally I just shoot things with it.”
Oh. Okay. That still makes no sense, but I’ll go with it.
That’s also when I noticed she was bleeding really badly from a cut going her stomach, but she dismissed it as “not even a scratch.” You’re right, I-330. It’s not a scratch. Scratches generally don’t look that painful. Nor do they bleed that much. But she shrugged off everything I said about how serious it looked….

Since my boss was at the time remarkably open to suggestions, I-330 had him drop us off at my house. She gave him a short lecture once there. Telling him that the “Black Dog” would hunt him down as long as he lived; he could either keep running forever, or “confront the issue.” He didn’t look too keen on that last option. So I-330 gave him some money, saying it should last him a few weeks, along with a list of places friendly towards “people in situations like yours.” He left right after that; don’t think he wanted to stick around this city much longer.

I should have questioned I-330 more about WHAT THE HELL I had just gone through, but I was too exhausted. Not used to that much adrenaline after midnight. Collapsed in my bed, and slept for a looooong time. When I woke up, I-330 was gone. Hope she’s alright…. That cut did look bad, no matter what she said about it.

And that was how one of the most eventful nights I’ve ever had went. As soon as I-330 gets back, she’s going to have a lot of explaining to do.

-Lisa