Chapter 6: The Clovers Lab

"Henry, stop!" Sabine shouts lowering the pistol and grabbing the unconscious menace by the shoulders. "Help me strap her into the empty chair. If we send her away, perhaps we can undo the harm she's done."

She looks to Mikael and Stina. "Clear the kids from the other chairs. Do you guys think you can restart the machine and reverse the flow of the effect? Maybe find some knobs and levers and toggle them in the opposite direction?"

Stina nods "I can try..." she rushes to the kids and helps one of them out of the chair, propping them on the floor against a wall some distance away from the machine.

She then rushes to the panel that she tinkered with and crouches down again. "Let's see what makes you tick..." she says, following wires and circuit boards to try figure some basic functions out.

Stina feels the mental fatigue of the stressful situation, the cables she disconnected moments ago don't seem to make much sense now. Her hands hurt where she cut them, and she feels overwhelmed by a sense of confusion and tiredness.
She tries to snap out of it. Come on, girl... you can rest later... we need this NOW...

Getting increasingly frustrated, Stina works hard on the machine. She's sweating, more from stress than physical exertion, but she realizes that she really needs to lie down and rest.
Still, she succeeds in getting the machine restarted just as the others carefully remove the still very lethargic children and instead attach Dr. Sundgren to one of the chairs, the needles penetrating into her limbs and spine now.

All you need to do now, is activate the machine and hopefully, you can correct all that has gone wrong.

"Are you sure you know how to use this thing? What if it messes up the world even more?!" Henry asks, hammer still in hand. He didn’t pretend to understand anything about machinery. He just wanted things to go back to how they were a few days ago.

She rushes to what seems to be the main lever activating the thing- a bulky metal handle. "I'm not sure about anything... but trying is better than leaving things as they are. Right?"

She puts her hand on the lever and looks at the others. "Don't want to do this on my own. Let's all do it. Grab this lever..."

Sabine grabs the handle at Stina's insistence and watches for signs that the evil woman is being affected.

Mikael, unsure of exactly what they're doing, shrugs. They have no idea how to operate this machine - no clue how it functions, or whether what they are doing is going to fix anything or make anything worse. Yet, it seemed they had decided. He nods to Stina's suggest and grabs handle near where is stood. "I hope this doesn't break reality," he says with a lack of confidence. He pulls the lever, wincing as he does so.

Together, you all pull on the handle. The machine powers up, screens light up displaying information that none of you are quite sure how to interpret. Initially, Dr. Sundgren doesn't show a reaction. She's still unconscious, bleeding from her head wound.
But just as you're starting to worry you might not have done it right, you notice her briefly flickering out of existence for a fraction of a second before she reappears. Closely watching her, you notice her flickering again and again until, after a while longer, she disappears completely. You hold your breath, waiting for her to reappear, but she doesn't. Instead, the room is suddenly plunged into darkness.

Using your flashlights, you create enough light to look around again. The machine is gone with no trace of it remaining. So are the kids that Dr. Sundgren had imprisoned. It's as if they had never been here.
Slowly, the realization sets in. Even though you still remember her, Elisabeth Sundgren never existed. She never kidnapped a bunch of children, she never built this interdimensional travel machine. And, unless you're mistaken, that should mean she never changed your reality. Right?

---

You return home and, to your relief, find that everything is not as you left it this morning but as it's supposed to be. Stina might miss the amazing motorcycle she owned for just a few hours but when she enters her home, her little brother is right there, sitting at the kitchen table and munching on some fruit, not understanding why she looks so happy to see him. Sabine, who's life had been the least affected, finds the cat gone from Kajsa's home, though Kajsa, when she subtly asks about it, decides that getting a cat would be a wonderful idea. Henry's room looks just the same as it always had. There is no trace that Sonja has ever been there, none of her belongings strewn around. And while he might feel a bit disappointed that she is gone, she did at least, before the reality shift, agree to a date. So maybe he will be able to actually win her affection, rather than just being thrown into it. Mikael also finds things returned to normal. When he speaks to his mother, he finds out that his father is still in prison and his own apartment is back in existence. Part of him might have enjoyed that moment of his family being back together, but this is how it's supposed to be...

Over the next days, you also discover that everything else seems to be back to normal. All the missing children, including Jillian, are with their families with no memories of what happened to them. Erik Granfors is the same grumpy drunk as always but when you check in on him at his home, at least his wife is there as well. And even the comic book shop, The Strip, is back to its old glory.

But that is not all. When you return to school, you spot someone in class that you never would have expected: Mark Mäkinen, the student who died the previous year at the hands of the robots of the Totem Clan, is just attending school as if it was no big deal. You realize that not only the influence of Elisabeth's machine has been undone but all the deeds throughout her life, including all that the Prophets did. Checking in on everyone involved, you find that Louise Tannenbaum is living in her strange house no longer by herself but together with her mother, Michaela, who no longer has been killed by Järnek.
Järnek himself is not principal of your school and most students seem to not even recognize his name. From Mia, you learn that her father is a scientist at the Loop. He also seems to be good friends with a female colleague of his, Dr. Natasha Lintov, the woman who in your reality changed her name to Liv Himmelshöjd but who here still goes by her birthname. While their involvement with Krafta and the Loop makes you worry for a while, it does seem like they never delved into dark and dangerous experiments as they had in your memory. They seem to just be leading ordinary lives, untouched by Elisabeth Sundgren's corrupting influence...

Tried as he might, Henry couldn’t fully repress the memory of the brief alternate reality that he had inhabited. Every moment spent with Sonja was also a moment wondering if this night, or this action might have been one taken by alternate Henry and Sonja on the path to their arrangement which he had stumbled into accidentally.

Still, it wasn’t her fault, and they seemed to like each other well enough. And how could be even bring any of it up. Even if she had known something was off at the time, in that alternate place, all of that was gone now. Reversed for everyone but the unlucky few that had put a stop to it.

He tried to keep close to them, for as long as circumstance allowed. He would probably follow Sonja off to whatever corner she ended up in for her studies. Maybe that meant sharing a new place with a few of the others, if he was lucky and the stars aligned, but it also might mean the inevitable break up of the group that had saved the world.

The moment she enters her kitchen, Stina runs to hug her protesting little brother Max. He is annoyed at the sudden surge of affection (Stina is not a touchy-feely kind of sister), but Stina is too happy to refrain herself.
The huge knot of anxiety she has felt at the pit of her stomach since pulling that lever, only really disappears as she sees Max alive and bothered like he would always have been in any given ordinary day.
It had been agony until that point, the permutations of her many possible mistakes overlapping in her mind like a house of cards ready to crumble.

She surprises herself not missing the motorbike. She would have thought that her dream bike was pretty high on her priorities.
Except that, when Max disappeared... her priorities had somehow changed. Despite herself, she now does not feel the same emptiness within her for the bike's absence that she had felt when Max had gone.

But now, looking at Max pulling faces and pushing away her hug - in such a natural, vital reaction - she feels grateful, for having managed with her friends to push that emptiness away, for now.
That emptiness, she knows, will surface again in her life, like it does in everyone's life. And it will take many forms. Dealing with that emptiness will be part of growing up, painful as it will be.

She looks at Max again, and ruffles his hair.
Not today, she thinks. Perhaps soon... but not today.

Finally. Sabine and Kajsa graduate and in the summer they move, as expected to Stockholm. They keep in touch and make trips back to visit, those friends who didn't move out when they did, and Kajsa's parents. Settling in an apartment, they get a cat and enjoy the summer without any world-threatening events. They both enroll in university and pursue their dreams: Kajsa with being a model and Sabine becoming a rock star.

Mikael returns to a reality where his father is in jail, his mother is distant, and Mikael's friends are all that remember a world in which the Prophets had existed and worked their schemes.

Because she was never impacted by the Ugliness, Kristina had never grown close with Mikael again, and though Mikael was shaped by his experiences, she was not - she remained the person that existed prior to that ordeal, more concerned with herself than the world around her. Seeing her at school, he had thought about approaching her, but when he heard her quietly making fun of 'Pimples' to her friends, he decided against it.

Mikael finished high school uneventfully and tried to keep his friendships from degrading as everyone went their separate ways after school, eventually wondering if he had dreamt the whole thing.

Sure! Maybe he follows after a short time, once he gets some of his affairs in order. He'd love to keep the band going!

It's not all sad, there surely is a lot left out from my post that is good. I wanted to highlight those aspects because it gives more weight to the decision we made - not everything was made better by our decision, though it was likely the best thing to do. The personal sacrifice in exchange for saving lives and such makes it feel more heroic in a way (more so if he considered this outcome before the switch was thrown).

I'll add a portion of his outro from our first story together:

"Many years later, Mikael would go on to start a company developing mobile technology designed to help track and locate missing children. He would proudly say that his devices contributed to saving the lives of dozens of kids in the first couple years of production. When asked what drove him, he would explain: "My friends and I went through a traumatic event when we were kids, a kid in our school was killed. I still feel the effects of that every day in my life, still think about it all the time. I remember what it did to his family, I remember the faces of everyone when it was announced, and I never want another parent or friend to feel that pain. So really, I do what I do for one simple reason: empathy."

Adding: "Oddly, any journalist that tries to fact check that story finds no record of the mysterious death."