[ WP ] Write the third episode of non-existant series . Make us curious about what happened before episode 3 , and what happens after .

Alice made a pass for the door as she climbed down onto her parent's roof through a broken window in her room. She shattered that window three nights past, after a fight with him she could n't even recall the purpose of. She sighed and lit her pipe, inhaled deep and choked back a painful cough that left her nearly short circuiting in memory of a time her and Banner were smoking in their apartment. She had ripped the bong so hard that exhaling had nearly knocked the oxygen pockets out of her and she remembered laughing with him afterward about the hit they called `` the black hit.'' 
 
 *Good memories. If only they were all that sweet. * Eventually she realized she'd been sitting on the roof for three hours. Not exactly crying but not exactly in total haywire, either. Reminiscing? She wondered if she'd ever have anything even remotely as sweet as him again. *If only he knew*. The thought stole her prosthetic heart out of her chest and crushed it in a hydraulic press. *I need to wake from this nightmare and get back inside myself. Who am I? * She felt as if she were a sapling, slowly spreading roots through people's lives and entwining themselves in places where they'd only eventually be dug up and severed off. 
 
 Truly, this human boy felt almost apart of her natural, programmed identity. As if when she left him, he escaped with her Personal Identification Serial Codes, her Emergency Shutdown Protocol, and the blink-182 poster she kept on the wall as a memoir of a pseudo-human identity she had actually grown fond of. It was all she could do not to think of that *thing* that had visited her last night after the ritual. The hole in her head should have left a gaping, oily pockmark of a wound yet it seemed to have closed up on its own overnight. *Odd*, she thought. Snapping to her senses, she forced herself to calculate the outcomes of her decision and thought for the first time that maybe what she was about to do was a huge mistake. That tingling fear that rises up your spine and sends low voltage pulsing faintly up the back of your neck when you hear a strange noise downstairs began to eat at her and suddenly she realized her high had been stolen away. Ever thankful for a functioning pair of aluminum lungs and cannabinoid receptors in her central cortex, she smiled to herself and let out a long sigh. 
 
 `` Alice? You're going to fall and break your neck and your little puppy will probably miss you if he has n't forgotten you exist already. Hey! Get down from ther- Oh my god it smells like a skunk sodomized another dead skunk up here! Are you crazy?! Your dad is going to beat you senseless if he finds out you're getting high out there!'' Her step brother startled the fuck out of her and she could n't tell if it was her anger or paranoia programming that began welling up inside. *Goddamn my head hurts. That thing could've at least re-plated the wound or given me an aspirin or something. Have I ever brought aspirin down to The Ivory Coast? Does aspirin even have any affect on me? * She could feel her memory starting to devour itself again and she knew at that moment that she would n't be able to keep it together much longer. 
 
 `` I'll be done in a minute- just get out of my room'' she said to Jake. Her step brother had been in her life for about two or three years, at this point she could n't remember exactly how long. She was n't engineered for long term human relationships and the love she felt for Banner mixed with the guilt that he did n't actually know a thing about her clouded her Random Access Memory. 
 
 *I have to stop thinking like that. I ca n't keep doing this to these people*, she thought. 
 
 When she heard Jake shut the door to her room, Alice climbed back through the broken window and back down into the room. She stashed the bong in her mesh weed bag and stuffed the bag under an ever-growing pile of dirty clothes she kept in the closet. A dirty pile of clothes which had one of Banner's favorite t-shirts resting on the very top. She felt her eyes begin to oil and threw herself facedown on the bed and leaked until she could n't see straight. Of all the things she had ever been forced to do in her life, she never thought she'd have to leave the boy she loved to offer herself up as a sacrifice to the Taking Tree. Tomorrow's descent to The Ivory Coast was almost less frightening than the thought of leaving Banner and, consequently, her human body behind. 
 
 // 
 
 He sighed and kicked at the waves rushing around his feet, wondering if he'd ever feel anything but emptiness ever again. Lacking much empathy for anyone himself, Banner could n't bear the thought of bothering anyone he knew with the pain of Alice's departure from his life. He knew he'd have to sort this one out alone and so he found himself doing just that, at the secret beach Alice had shown him, seemingly a hundred years ago. *The Ivory Coast, we used to call it. It was her favorite spot*, he recalled, though he never quite understood why. 
 
 The Ivory Coast was a peculiar section of a beach, seldom anyone ever went there but Banner and Alice. A spot so secluded, secret, and far away from where either of them lived that a two hour drive was considered a quick trip, three or four if you left at traffic hour. They used to come here nearly every weekend and get high under the strange Tree that grew about twenty feet tall, right in the middle of the sand. During high tide the Tree escaped the lapping waves by maybe six inches, if Banner had to guess. He always found it remarkable that the Tree always seemed to narrowly escape getting wet. As if the Tree cared whether or not about the potential of getting wet. Yet after all these years, he'd never seen a drop of water on it despite it growing in the middle of a beach with angry waves nipping at it for half the day. *Suspicious*, he muttered to himself. 
 
 He turned to look at the Tree, all dark brown and splotched with green where the moss had been growing on it over the years. Banner thought he could see her face, lit up by her perfect smile, shining green-grey eyes staring back at him with all the love and innocence in the world somewhere in that Tree. It was at that point he felt the flood gates ready to burst in his own eyes. Eyes that never changed, eyes that seemingly reflected the only thing he seemed to feel these days. Scorn. 
 
 *I ca n't believe I never considered the fact that she could just up and leave someday. Did she cheat? Was it that fucking Kevin kid? Who names their kid Kevin?! * he seethed. That familiar pseudo-anger-helplessness returning as it always did. *Three years. Three of the best years of my life and she just decides one day she does n't love me anymore*? 
 
 He turned his head a little too abruptly away from the Tree, hearing and feeling his neck crack as he groaned in a satisfying pain. Realizing he'd spent far too long already staring blankly at this Tree, he fumbled in his pocket for his car keys and made his way back towards the area he and Alice always parked at. It had grown dark and the sound of the waves would have been peaceful if he was n't already drowning in his own head. 
 
 Suddenly a thunderous **BOOOOOOM** shook the sky with the fury of an atomic blast accompanied by a blinding flash of white light and the Tree uprooted itself, standing up on what appeared to be four hideous legs that could only be described as root-limbs, dripping some sort of dark liquid from soil-line to the trunk. The Tree turned towards Banner and he realized that in the very center of the Tree, ten or so feet up, Alice's facial features seemed to have superimposed themselves on the bark, creating a hideous amalgamation of once-gorgeous human flesh and the bark of what had been a regular ( if suspiciously placed ) tree just moments before. 
 
 Terror struck Banner and he found that his legs simply would n't budge. He stood there with his jaw firmly anchored in the sand beneath, unable to think, unable to move. Barely able to breathe. The Tree abomination crept forward and he thought he could hear creaking, like the protest of a door's old hinges as the Tree moved toward him at the pace of a combat wounded turtle.. creeping closer and closer. As it drew nearer, he saw that the liquid coating the root-legs could n't have been blood, for it was now visibly evaporating off the tree and swirling up towards his ex-girlfriend's face in a dark crimson mist. 
 
 Alice's features contorted into a painful looking smile and suddenly the bark that had framed her face began to consume the girl within, rough brown texture laced with splotches of green, reclaiming the space Alice's face had taken up just moments before. The crimson mists swirled up towards the branches of the tree, mingling with the moss, spiraling up towards the crown as her face vanished from the center of the Tree. 
 
 About that time Banner came to his senses, feeling the piss running down his left thigh and trickling down his foot, mixing with the tide beneath. He set off in a dead sprint towards the car and looking over his shoulder as he ran, he was able to see the Tree as it began to hover off the ground; roots coming undone from the earth, large amounts of sand displaced everywhere. The Tree was hovering. *This fucking Tree is hovering. I'm losing it. This is n't happening. This is n't happening*, his panicked thoughts echoed as he watched the Tree rise higher into the air, roots ten feet off the ground now and rising, rising, rising.. 
 
 And then it vanished. Poof. Gone. Stolen out of thin air by whatever force of nature governed over this type of thing. Banner could n't believe anything that was happening. He thought it must be some kind of sleep paralysis. He thought he must be trapped in some kind of sick, twisted nightmare. But no, he definitely just witnessed his ex-girlfriend's face trying to escape from the heart of a Tree that moments before had been *walking* towards him. He fainted shortly after that. 
 
 - Credits roll.
