Three hours before trial. Rookie attorney Pluto Maximus has very little time and a great many irons in the fire.

No.

Trickery is afoot in the Glistening House, where four fools find that not all that glitters is gold.

Nope.

Caught between the realms of the living and dead, Arle must change for a strange, frightening new world in what’s being called a modern classic animated series, and maybe make some friends along the way, if she’s lucky...

Hm...

Nah.

Vika takes a weary look at the little nook she calls “home”. Her eyes glaze over the cluttered desk, mostly occupied by the exposed wires and mechanical guts of a busted machine, stacked atop some envelopes. Her much more experienced friend—acquaintance, was going to fix it up himself, but Vika, like an idiot, asked if she could take a crack at it. It’s been eight hours, and she can’t even remember what the damn thing originally did.

Vika sighs hoarsely, gazing out through the little circular window near the ceiling, just a little higher up than where her head would reach if she were standing. Some days, she feels as though it’ll collapse in on itself.

Brushing some dust off her computer monitor, she scans the summary of Lies of Limbo again. She doesn’t really feel like watching anything new, so she’s found herself at the doorstep of something familiar. She remembers liking it a long, long time ago, seeking refuge in its strange setting and relating a bit too closely to some of its cast. Arle and her journey of self-discovery in particular. Maybe make some friends along the way, her tired eyes settle on.

Sure, whatever. She thinks, scrolling through the list of unlabeled episodes, glancing at and then ignoring the “legal” website’s many banner ads fighting for her attention. Old habits die hard.

“4_Episode”, a hyperlink calls to her. Vika vaguely remembers this episode being one of her favorites; it was when the first major twist had hooked itself into her memory. She wonders if it’ll live up to that comforting thought. Or maybe it was episode six…?

A sudden pulsating pain spreads from her lower back, and Vika wishes some version of herself had the mind to clear the weeks-old laundry off her bed so she could at least destroy what’s left of her back comfortably. Aren’t there dishes rotting in her sink, too...?

Focus, asshole.

She clicks the link, her office chair creaking as she leans back and crosses her legs.

The intro song is in a minor key at 190 beats-per-minute, and was composed by an anonymous artist. Vika idly recalls these facts–and a few more–from the trivia section of a fan-wiki she’d read ages ago. The popping colors of the intro animation appear dimmer through her half-lidded eyes. The video is formatted for circular displays, just as she’d dreaded, so there’s an atrocious border filling the leftover space of her rectangular monitor.

… This intro is a lot longer than she remembers.

Vika brushes her fingers across the keyboard shortcut for switching between programs, thinking, Maybe I have some messages I can read…?

Zero pings. She’s not surprised–her notifications have been dead as the Artificial Star project, and probably for just as long–but something in her aches.

At the sound of dialogue, and of Arle’s gruff, digitized voice, Vika switches back. The episode’s started. Looks like she’s angrily mumbling over an entrance exam…

This is the wrong episode. The first three episodes had an extended intro.

Fuck.

Vika can already feel her leg falling asleep. She’s made her bed, she supposes.

“Grrgh, how the heck do they expect me to just… know this?!” Arle grumbles through Vika’s headphones. “I’m not a Phantom! I can’t inhabit objects like I’m, uh…”

Arle’s little falter suddenly takes Vika back to when she was first re-watching the show. She was wearing a faded red–mustard?–no, red sweater, and the only one of her family awake. Her room door shut, her lights dimmed, she had run a finger through her brown hair, which wasn’t quite as “long” as it is now. Despite her bleary eyes’ protests, she’d decided to watch through the show again, on a school night. Vika, today, notices the defined blood vessels in Arle’s eyes. That makes her grin a little, straining the corners of her lips.

An unsteady clunk, clunk, clunk, sounds from behind her. Vika spins her chair around with a numb leg.

“Oh, hi, Tee.” She waves lazily. Her voice is raspy and deep.

Tee props themself up on their back legs, scratching their eyeless head with one of their front paws. The sharp, rhythmic SHK SHK SHK of metal-on-metal rings through Vika’s cramped room. As they scratch their head, the soft whirr of an unseen mechanism (Well, seen by Vika a few times.) marks the printing of a small piece of paper out of the vertical slot on Tee’s forehead. Tee, done scratching, prods up to Vika’s chair and cranes their head up. Vika plucks the paper out of the little slot.

What are you up to?

“Oh, just, watching some old stuff.” Vika laughs dryly. “Wanna sit?”

Tee propels themself up onto Vika’s lap, now bathed in the light of her monitor. Their scuffed metal shell is chilly against her bare legs.

Zzt. More paper. Vika dutifully picks it out.

I haven’t seen this one. What’s it about?

“You’ve watched shows?” Vika asks, perplexed. Tee shakes their pointed head.

“Then how–okay, whatever,” Vika sighs. “This is, uh, a show called Lies of Limbo. It’s about a girl, Arle, who fell off a tree and woke up about to enter Heaven, but then she gets zapped to this monochrome forest.” Vika’s fingers automatically start fiddling with one another as she talks. “For reasons that aren’t explained, uh, ever, the show was canceled for being too dark for its target audience,” She swallows some air, and a tangent along with it. “She ‘didn’t qualify for residence’ and must work her way to a ‘good’ afterlife. So the show is about her not really gelling with how she’s expected to act, and she slowly finds herself and people who accept her along the way.”

Whirr, snip.

Sounds like something you'd like.

“The fuck would you know, dickhead?” Vika chuckles. Her throat feels like sandpaper. She turns back to her monitor for a second.

Whirr, snip.

I wasn’t trying to be mean, you know.

Vika hums dissonantly and keeps watching.

“But yeah, as I said earlier, the show was marketed as being for kids, but its allusions to death and the afterlife–which, weren’t really allusions if I’m being honest–led to a bunch of pissed off parents clamoring for its cancellation.” Vika’s fingers stop moving. “And, they won, I guess.”

Whirr.

That sucks.

Vika narrows her eyes more than they already are. “You’re wasting toner.”

Whiiirr.

Snip.

TTTHHHAAATTT SSSUUUCCCKKKSSS.

“Shut.”

“Hey, Kiddo,”A voice offscreen calls. “What have you got there?”

“Wouldn’t you like to know, Charon.” Arle groans.

“Hmm, an entrance exam? To the, ah, illustrious School for Fledgling Souls?” Charon, a dark, ghastly apparition, appears over Arle’s shoulder without much warning. “Word of advice, kid: Dooon’t bother going to school.”

“Oh, she’s one of my favorites in the show,” Vika says through a smile she doesn’t really feel. “She’s annoying as shit, for one thing.”

Whirr. So that’s where you get it from.

“Yeah.” Vika says bluntly.

“I can’t just not go to school, dummy.” Arle retorts. Vika frowns slightly.

“Actually, I remember hating this development.” She confesses, not really to anyone in particular. The rest of her words gush out like water through a broken dam. “The whole thing with the show is that Arle is supposed to conflict with societal standards–which, to the episode’s credit, she does in the beginning–but then–uh, spoilers, if you care at all–she just, she fucking goes to school anyways!” Vika throws her hands up in frustration. “It’s like–it’s like the show wanted to critique institutions and arbitrary social norms, but had to prioritize being marketable–Look, I know this a kid’s show for kids, but it’s still fucking stupid,”

Vika gasps for air, whatever fresh air might be lingering in her cramped little apartment.

“And it doesn’t help that once she gets into the school, oh, she fits in juuust fine. Like wow, Arle, good on you for making friends you can actually keep.”

She sighs angrily over the children’s cartoon. Her grumbling thoughts are interrupted by the sound of machinery clicking and spinning in her lap.

Snip.

Are you doing alright?

Vika watches her hands hold tee's fresh polaroid. She blinks slowly.

“Yeah, yeah I’m fine.” She nods stiffly, turning back to the episode. “Just fine.”

A different kind of whirring reverberates through her lap, like a cat’s purr. Tee’s cold metallic plating grows warmer and warmer against her legs. Vika never had a cat–the closest thing she had to a pet was a keychain game–but she’s nonetheless reminded of being twelve years old–the same age as Arle–and the time she spent desperately begging for a cat, a dog, a fucking rat at one point.

Vika runs a hand over Tee’s warming shell. She remembers going to school every day, but she doesn’t remember having tried very hard. She remembers being told that the world, the many worlds out in the star-speckled Reaches, is big, so very BIG, and being the only one who thought that was scary, and all she knows how to do now that she’s old enough to do anything is get smaller and smaller.

Vika drops her arm off of Tee, dully noticing a numbness overtaking it. This is what she’d set herself up for: a child who refused to play by the damn rules grew into a slightly bigger child, a reclusive animal afraid of her own shadow, afraid of others’ shadows that appear big and brooding, an animal that only goes out into those big worlds to buy takeout when the delivery cables are down for maintenance. Vika’s eyes glaze over.

“Just let me know if you need anything else, okay, Arle?” Charon’s digitized voice rings out. “I may be a dropout, but I’ll, y’know, do my best to help you how you want to be helped.”

“Thank you, Charon!” Arle beams. Vika notices a scoff building up in her throat, the only part of her body that doesn’t feel numb.

The outro sequence of Lies of Limbo is a short slideshow of scenes following the main characters drawn in diverse art styles; one is in a forest of white trees, another in a monochromatic school, all of them focusing on Arle and someone else. Sometimes it’s Charon. Other times it’s one of Arle’s many friends. The colors dance across Vika’s bleary, blurry eyes.

A stiff chuckle escapes her. Yeah, today was pretty alright, she thinks to herself, as she loads up the next episode.