Every loving, endearing, romance of language he published in the newspapers about the haunted mansion had only been to lower her guard. To weaken her. To lure her. To keep it from being demolished before he got the chance to bleed her of everything she'd ever been worth.

I wasn't sure if I'd imagined you and it'd be very telling of my mental state if I was bringing sodas to something I'd imagined.

They each raised their glasses from the puddles on the table, and clinked them together in celebration. They weren't sure what they were celebrating, but more than anything it felt like they were celebrating that exact moment in time and all of the incredible events that had to take place for it to have existed in time at all.

She was an anomaly of her own universe and of his, and represented the collision of everything he'd ever known and everything he'd ever wanted to.

Standard procedure; the usual high volume of paperwork required to even sneeze on another planet.

The utopian candy shell melted away to a hard center of bizarre reality.

His brain didn't want her to go, and he was afraid his subconscious would badger it's only witness into believing she didn't have to.

These were not the aliens out beaming anyone up. If anything, they'd be the ones providing apologetic form letters to the inconveniently beamed-up.

The hatred was, in a word, monochromatic.