A haze was over the town. A clinging fog obscured vision a few dozen feet from observation. Everything beyond the veil was a mere grey silhouette. Indistinct and shifting. It was a kind of day that Rena quite enjoyed. The world was now suffused with an ethereal quality. What might lie beyond the shifting cloud which touched the earth.

Rena pressed her face against the glass of the bus window, staring out at Ethereal Millvale. Rena stared, and the more she stared, body pressed against the smooth rumble of the bus, the more her mind drifted, lifted on the earthbound cloud that shrouded her hometown. An unusual time for fog. It wasn't morning. The sun should have risen to chase away the surreality, returning perfect, oppressive mundanity. 

A voice called. "You're always staring out the window like that."

A memory. 

"Staring like what?" Rena lifted her face and  turned to look sidelong at the girl sitting beside her. Anne.  

"You've always got your head in the clouds. Spacing as usual." Anne chided, with a sparkling look in her eyes. Rena had not seen those eyes in a long time. That was like a year ago.

Anne spoke again. "You're spacing so much the clouds came out of your brain. You’ve made the whole town spacey!" 

Anne was just trying to cheer her up, divert her mind from whatever it was that might have been bothering her. Rena always knew that. But there wasn't anything bothering her. Rena relished the times when her mind could drift away on clouds. Just space out. Like her head was full of cotton balls. She turned back to the window. A tree passed by, just far enough to be caught between the visible ring and nebulous oblivion beyond. A tree alone, probably in the front of some church, surrounded by manicured grass. 

Rena imagined if she could just slip beyond the veil of sight and enter that world beyond. 

"Hey, look over here." Anne tapped Rena's shoulder. She was ripped from her drifting once again. Anne was always trying to bring her back down to earth. Anne was always made for more material things. 

Rena turned to look directly at Anne now, and a hand pressed against her cheek. Anne leaned in and placed her lips upon Rena's. 

Only a second was needed to bring Rena crashing back down to earth. Anne looked her in the eyes, her hand still pressed to her cheek. Her fingers were so delicate, so soft. A single of her painted nails touched Rena's skin. The juxtaposition of the softness to the hard tip of Anne's nail was like a focal point. As if her single, perfectly shaped and painted claw would sink further into Rena's skin, drawing blood. Anne's eyes were glittering, as they always did. Turned up like a fox's eyes. Anne smirked like a fox too. 

"You're going too far, space cadet. You have to come back down to earth some time." Anne released Rena's face. 

Rena blushed. Anne always loved to tease her with public displays of affection. If this was how Anne was going to play in response to some simple dozing it meant she was growing bored. Rena would have to provide some entertainment, which she was always quite bad at. 

"So…" Rena calmed her blushing. Resolved to keep both feet on the moving earth of the bus for now. "You're gonna apply to the other internship right?" Rena basically remembered what Anne was talking about before she drifted off in the fog. In her mind she cursed herself for drifting away during a conversation. 

"No choice really." Anne replied, pulling out a spiral notebook from the small messenger bag she kept at her side. Alongside it she produced a purple mechanical pencil with a funny topper on the eraser. One of the little characters Anne loved. Chunko. A purple dog character with large floppy ears and a permanent evil grin. The top of his head was filed down to a flat plane from use. Rena knew Anne carried several other writing implements decked out with the other characters from the gang. Chunko was at most a distant side character in the entire menagerie, but Anne had a particular fascination with him in particular. 

Anne opened the notebook to a middle page and began to jot something down on a page already half filled with notes and diagrams.

"There are only a few offices researching the exact subject right now so I pretty much have to get into the one in Chicago. I'm really not trying to wait a whole year to apply again just to get rejected. I've only got so many good years left in me!"

"Well you're 22 so I'd say you have at least a hundred more good years left in you." Rena said. 

"Yeah yeah that's what they all say but in 3 years you'll be sitting on your ass doing nothing in the exact same place you're in now, then you'll wish you never thought you had more time. You gotta reach out and grab it now or else your momentum will keep you trapped in one place forever!" Anne said jabbing the point of the pencil  in Rena's direction. 

Rena always got uncomfortable when Anne talked about moving away. Rena didn't want her to leave, but the way Anne spoke was like she thought it was an inevitable conclusion. Rena had hoped the internship in Halyn would work out so they could stay close and stay in touch, but every time they talked about this Anne became dead set on moving further and further away. And yet she still talked as if nothing was wrong, she acknowledged it would be sad to leave, sure, but did she really care? 

"We just graduated. I don't think it's stifling your momentum to take a break and work on your studying for a year or two before someone accepts you. Your thesis was good. Everyone said it was good at least so I'm sure you'll get hired on somewhere sooner rather than later." Rena said while directing her gaze up and to the side, getting a glimpse of that misty world again.

"Yeah you're right but I don't really want to wait anymore. We're on the cusp of some pretty big discoveries and I want to be a part of that. Plus, like, you never know what might happen in a few years. Borders might close up and I'll be screwed. Or something crazy might happen and I'll miss my chance to actually go there. You know what I mean? Regulations have already been tightening a lot more lately." Anne places the pencil in the center of the book fold and looked directly at Rena, trying to beckon her eyes back to her own with directed looks. Rena took the bait and glanced over and met her eyes. Anne wasn't playing around anymore.

This part of the subject made Rena the most uncomfortable. She barely even wanted to think about it. 

"OK but…" Rena cut off, breaking eye contact. 

"You're gonna tell me you wouldn't go? Really? Didn't you once tell me you'd take your chances jumping into a vat of toxic waste? Just for shitty x ray vision?" Anne's coy smile returned. 

"Yeah I probably said that but if you presented me with the actual vat of toxic waste I definitely wouldn't fucking jump in!" Rena countered. 

"You totally would!" Anne pushed a bit on Rena's shoulder, teasing. "You'd mutate into a 30 foot blob monster and love it!"

Rena grew weary of this, especially since it was just another diversion for Anne to avoid talking about something she knew made Rena deeply uncomfortable. 

"Yeah no I wouldn't do it if I had to become ugly how many times do I have to say that?" Rena rolled her eyes. "Besides that would never happen. You're talking about actually going there and jumping into a fucking hellmouth or something." 

It was Anne's turn to roll her eyes, though she kept her fox-like smile. 

"I've explained it to you more than enough times for you to know that's not how it works." 

"People die going there all the time. How is it not like that?" Rena was looking sullenly into Anne's eyes. 

"Because you don't need to go all the way in to research it, you know that. You don't even have to go to Gehenna proper. There are tons of research institutes in the surrounding areas and cities. Which you know because I've told you approximately 70 times now." Rena agreed in her mind that this was true, although the amount of times was probably closer to 20 in reality, they had been over this many times, and Rena knew there was no logical way to disagree. 

Anne put her hand on Rena's forehead, and placed her spiral notebook with the pencil clamped between its pages on the seat cushion beside her.  

"You want to know just as much as I do, I know you do." Anne said, moving her face closer to Rena's. Rena pulled back from the contact and the discomfort of the conversation. 

"Not really, no. You definitely want to know a lot more than me." Rena replied, resting her head on the glass again, but trying to look at nothing. She chose the ceiling of the bus. 

"You want to know a lot more than most people, or else you wouldn't have taken 3 semesters of Hell Factor Studies classes." 

"OK yeah that's true but my grades weren't very good which means I definitely don't care that much." 

"Oh knock it off you silly goose!" Anne removed her hand from Rena's face, along with most of the pressure. Rena returned to a normal sitting position. "You've been interested in Hell your entire life. Just as much as you've been interested in those silly superheroes. And I'm the same way. I don’t know why you act like the danger is some big problem all of a sudden when you'd chase thunderstorms carrying lightning rods if there was a decent chance of getting a power from it." 

All the years of confiding in Anne all of her most embarrassing desires and interests regarding super powers seemed to bite back at her after graduation, after her girlfriend actually started talking about getting internships at researching companies studying Hell Factor and how much she wanted to fly away across the world to the very mouth of Hell itself and dive in. After she started seeing good reception and professors telling her she should genuinely pursue her dreams and that she could go far. No one ever told these things to Rena. Except for Anne of course. Nobody said that Rena would amount to much, and Rena didn't expect anyone to. She barely applied herself in school and didn't even commit to a major until the last possible minute. College was just a way to get away from parents, get somewhere new, possibly find some purpose in life. But she never found any. At least she got a few good friends and a relationship with a cute girl who genuinely liked her and she liked back, who was weird in a lot of similar ways and Rena could confide all the weird stuff in. But now it was all crumbling away. Rena knew Anne wouldn't leave Millvale. Rena knew Anne could not stay. 

It was true, Rena knew, that the potential dangers of studying Hell from the distance of several hundred miles was negligible. If it were herself going out there she knew she would have little problem going to that cursed city of Gehenna herself if it meant getting closer to some sort of greater truth. But that way was not open to Rena, it was open to Anne however, and Rena feared more that she would never see Anne again than any potential danger. Rena feared that Anne's momentum would carry her far away and to great heights while Rena remained alone, stuck, never accomplishing anything. 

It was inevitable. Anne's momentum would carry her to Ohio, to join that university most closely studying Thaumaturgic phenomena at a bore hole 10 thousand feet deep into the crust of the earth, and the facilities and instruments to study from it. Then, given her success there, which everyone thought likely, Anne would go to Gehenna, location of the only Hell Gate at least partially open to public research. From there, who knows where she would go. What she would accomplish. 

"You know I hate to see you moping like this. Look, we're almost there." Rena glanced to the side to see that classic smile. "I'm still here now. I'm not going anywhere." 

Anne pushed past Rena a bit to look out the window, at the bowling alley coming up past the bus station. The bus slowed to a walking pace, hydraulics hissing to a stop. 

Today the alley stood as a clouded monument within the sea of fog. The bright Runner Ball sign shone like a red beacon in the mist. Just like that time a little more than a year ago. Rena wished Anne were still here.