The ex-maid formerly known as four sat alone, not quite sure where she was. The narrator wasn’t sure either, for that matter, but they knew with certainty that she was far from the White House. She wasn’t four anymore – the minty smell of her shampoo had long since faded from her hair – but she didn’t have an identity to replace it. The narrator considered calling her zero again, unsure if the shower-based brainwashing was technically necessary to revert the maids back to their zero state. They instead opted for “Gemma or Olivia;” the author had named the two redheads early in the month, but had never used either name in a chapter, and had not decided which of the two had betrayed the other.

Gemma or Olivia looked out at the forest from the mountainside cave she was apparently in. She wondered what would happen next, a sentiment shared by the narrator themselves. The author had, after all, just spent the last half hour sketching a vague plan for the rest of the month’s stories, but the narrator hadn’t been filled in on any of those details.

Gemma or Olivia wondered how long she’d been up here, how long it had been since she had eaten. It might have been hours, days, weeks, or even months; the chronology of these chapters, while linear, was largely unspecified. It had been, the narrator surmised, a suitably long period of time for Gemma or Olivia to reassert some level of individuality, while not being so long as to raise any logistical issues.

Baaa~

Desperate for something to actually happen in the chapter, the narrator did what they did best: make an abrupt change in focus. In this case, it was to a sound Gemma or Olivia heard on the mountainside next to her. It wasn’t a particularly mysterious sound, despite the long lead-up to the reveal of its source; indeed, most readers have probably already guessed that Mooloo, the friend-shaped Lokémon that the narrator almost called a Jokémon despite changes to the space-time continuum, was improbably nearby.

Gemma or Olivia looked at the recently-but-not-improbably-recently-sheared sheep, and a crafty smile broke across her face. She had an idea, which the narrator chose to omit for the sake of creating a cliffhanger.