Life is Strange: Fractured Paths

She showed up the following evening, having driven nearly nonstop down the coast.

The knock came just after 7 p.m.

Eli opened the door to find Lyla Park standing on his front porch, holding a backpack, a thermos, and the kind of look only people who'd seen too much too young carried around like armor.

"You didn't tell me it was this serious," she said.

Eli stepped aside. "I didn't know how to explain it."

She walked in without hesitation, glancing around the living room. "Still smells like lemon cleaner and takeout. Comforting, in a weird way."

"Dad's at work," he said. "He doesn't know everything. Just that Nari's gone."

Lyla dropped her stuff beside the couch. "You look like you haven't slept."

"I haven't."

She gave him a once-over. "Good. Means you're still taking this seriously."

They set up at his desk. Lyla pulled out her laptop, external hard drive, and a battered notebook filled with handwritten notes and highlighted printouts.

"You archived everything?" she asked.

"Game folders, screenshots, even crash logs," Eli said. "The video file's still there too. I haven't touched it."

Lyla nodded and plugged in her drive. "We'll make a clean copy first. I want to isolate the file and run it through spectral analysis."

He blinked. "You can do that?"

"I host a podcast, not a book club."

As Lyla worked, Eli leaned back, trying to ignore the ache behind his eyes. "So, what is this cult? The Path of the True Flame?"

Lyla flipped her notebook open. "Started as a fringe Christian sect in the late '90s. Doomsday-adjacent. Obsessed with purity, fire symbolism, and 'preparing chosen vessels for ascension.' They don't stay in one place long. Every few years, they rebrand and move towns. Like malware in human form."

"And Nari's supposed to be a 'vessel'?"

"They think kids are more spiritually malleable. Easier to 'purify.'" She tapped a grainy, black-and-white photo clipped into the notebook, showing children in white robes walking toward a bonfire. "They believe children can carry divine light."

"That's messed up."

"It's more than messed up. It's ritualistic. And it's deliberate."

Eli pushed away from the desk, pacing.

"I keep thinking maybe I imagined it. The teleport. The game-changing. The voice. But then I remember how I felt when it happened. I wasn't dreaming. I moved. I was in the garage, and then I wasn't."

Lyla looked up at him. "Describe it again. From the moment you took the photo."

He did. The flash. The weightlessness. The silence. The way everything dropped away was like falling between frames.

"It's like... skipping a cutscene," he said.

She nodded slowly. "That tracks with what Sean described about Daniel. It wasn't time travel, not exactly. It was like space rewrote itself to make room for him. He didn't bend time. He bent reality around his will."

"So what, I've got the same power?"

"No," she said. "It's similar. But it's also yours. Daniel had telekinesis. You have... displacement."

"Teleportation."

"More like... spatial resonance. You're jumping to places you're emotionally or energetically connected to. That's why you ended up at Cliffside Park. You and Nari always used to hang out there, right?"

He froze. "Yeah. We used to look for seaglass after school."

"There you go."

The laptop dinged. Copy complete.

Lyla ran a script and isolated the strange video file—flame_intro_v3.avi—in a quarantined window. She muted it and scrubbed through slowly, frame by frame.

"There," Eli said, pointing. "Pause."

The screen showed a single frame from the video: Nari's flower drawing. But something new was layered over it now, a translucent figure.

A robed silhouette, arms outstretched, hovering behind the drawing like a shadow cast backward.

"I didn't notice that before," Eli said.

"It wasn't there before."

She zoomed in. The figure's face was blank, but faint marks, almost like runes, lined its chest.

Lyla's voice dropped. "I've seen this in another case. A girl in Fortuna disappeared three years ago. Her drawings started changing, too, with messages hidden in the colors. You're not the first."

Eli looked at her. "But maybe I can be the last."

She nodded. "That's the plan."

He swallowed hard, feeling the edges of fear start to sharpen. "I want to try again."

"What?"

"The teleport. I want to see if I can do it on purpose."

Lyla studied him for a moment, then closed her laptop. "Okay. But we're doing it safely. Controlled. Like a test. And if anything goes sideways, you come back."

Eli nodded. "Deal."

They stood together in the garage a few minutes later, the same place where everything started.

Eli raised the camera. Took a breath. Closed his eyes.

And jumped.