Yet Another Short Story

I wrote this up in about half an hour. It stars Alice, Bob, and Claire as well as some crap I picked up from a garage sale yesterday, and hopefully asks more questions than it answers. Fill in the answers yourself.

Contains copious literary and mythological references, and is rather purple for my style.

"I'm so bored," Alice said, kicking her heels up onto the leather couch. 

Bob looked up at her thoughtfully. She rolled her eyes. Not once in the thousand years she had known him had he ever changed his expression. 

"Perhaps," he said, "perhaps if you took those ridiculous glasses off you'd be able to see something to do, for once."

Alice huffed and pushed her sunglasses onto her forehead. "They are not ridiculous! You have no taste, sweetie."

She had purchased the large, black-rimmed dark spectacles at a drugstore back in the Nineties. Since then, she had never taken them off, except to shower. They were as much a part of her as her golden eyes or curvy figure. Despite the time that had passed, Alice looked almost just the same as she had all those millennia ago, when the universe was born. The same heart-shaped face and jutting chin; the same beautiful but cruel eyes; the same tiny, perfect nose. Her hair was new, however. After seeing a picture of two celebrities in a magazine, she had dragged Bob to the salon and forced him into getting his hair cut with her. 

She fluffed her flowing black locks with one hand while Bob looked at her, his eyes briefly showing the despise he felt after the haircut incident. 

"What?" she asked, tossing her head. "It's just one of my many quirks! How would you like it if I took that little sword away from you?"

Bob's fingers curled around the hilt of his wooden dagger. Wooden, yes, but no less dangerous. The dagger had been carved from the wood of Yggdrasil, soon after Lif and Lífþrasir climbed down from its branches. In China, it had been inlaid with a red dragon by Guan Yu himself. Bob had come into possession of it shortly after Alice had demanded that her new friend Charles right a book about her. He recalled this because Alice had insisted that all references to the vorpal sword be removed from the text, although one had slipped by. 

"I would not like that."

"Bet you wouldn't."

Alice drew herself up from the couch like a cat and crossed to the large bay window, which looked out on the city of New York. Bob returned his attention to the television. 

"How much longer?" Alice whined, flicking her sunglasses back onto her nose.

"I don't know."

"I think you do know, but you're just not telling me!"

Bob set down the magazine he had been reading in order to massage his eyelids. They had been over this a million times, at least. Bob knew as much about the Great Death as she did, but Alice wasn't ready to accept that. 

"When is Claire coming back?"

"I don't know."

"Yes, you do!"

"I honestly don't."

Alice stomped her foot in frustration and tossed her head again. Bob rolled his eyes. 

She skipped across the rug again to toss herself onto the couch. She opened a drawer in the side-table and took out a silver box.

"Alice, don't," Bob said, with the barest hint of frustration in his voice. Alice stuck her tongue out at him and set the box in her lap. 

"I'll do what I like with my box," she said, but didn't open it.

She knew she shouldn't, not until the Great Death. Then she, Bob, and Claire would all open their boxes at the same time, and only then would they know what great secrets the boxes hold. All they knew was that they and the boxes represented Ego, Superego, and Id. Bob and Claire had tried to explain to Alice what that meant, but basic psychology was pretty beyond her. 

Bob slid a hand onto the shelf below the coffee table. On it was his box—a dark brown affair, with gold and red inlay. It was substantially bigger than Alice's. As he picked it up, he glanced up at the light on the wall. It was simply a brass box with amber-colored glass in and a lightbulb behind it, but to Alice, Bob, and Claire it was their signal for the Great Death. If Claire couldn't open her box right after the light went off, then eons of struggle would be for naught. 

Bob had a right to be nervous. He had suspected for a while now that the Great Death was growing close, and with the recent disappearance of both Claire and her box? It couldn't be a coincidence. 

Alice, meanwhile, had let her mind drift to the painting on the wall. It showed three silhouetted figures in greeny-blue garb poised in front of a large orange sphere. A sun going supernova. The one on the right held her hands over her head, cupped around a small yellow box. The one in the middle, a man, stood with one hand over his eyes and the other hand brandishing a sword carved to look like flames. The third likewise shielded her eyes, but her other hand gripped a stoppered glass vial containing a pearly elixir. It was hard to see her, because the light from the supernova had begun to eclipse her, although the other two were sharply outlined. 

"Bob, look," Alice whispered, slightly hysterical. "Bob, look at the picture! Look at Claire!"

Oh, guess what! You know how one of my tags says, like, "If I had a sword," right? Well, now I totally do, lawls. 'Cept it's made of wood and is technically a dagger.