They all noticed that something was wrong when Waterloo Bridge wiggled like an oversize worm removed from its dirt.
Jack felt the movement as her building shuddered, jumping upwards as tables and chairs went flying. As she looked around in confusion, a second shudder hit, and she saw the Strand jump like a rug somebody had tossed up into the air. A brown paper bag went flying towards the ceiling, and through it, the dampened bottom leaving a wet mark on the plaster.
Shaking her head and glancing around her to make sure nothing else was going flying into the air, she grabbed her phone off her desk and dialed Ramsey's number. The signal was patchier than usual, but Ramsey's voice was clear through the static.
"Ramsey? Did you feel that? I saw a bag go floating through the ceiling-"
"Yeah, everything's going weird to say the least. You should probably head to my place, I'll be there as soon as I can make it."
"Mhm, yeah. Do you know if it's safe to take the Underground?"
"I'm not betting on it. Waterloo jumped for god's sake, I don't think it's a good idea to be near anything that could be dangerous like that."
Ramsey tapped the end call button on the keypad and slid the phone back into their pocket, looking up and around at the London skyline. Thick tendrils of black smoke were creeping their way from building to building, tying things together like a smoky sourceless spiderweb. People all around them were shuffling back and forth, staring into the sky at a spot just over 45 degrees closer to the horizon than the sun by Ramsey's guess, eyes fixed on a singular point that somehow seemed to have five sides to it, but they weren't dwelling on the impossibility at the moment. The people that weren't staring at the point were wandering the quite literally twisting streets, chanting in languages they didn't even try to comprehend or rambling on about a broken world. One man with an out-of-place Boston accent was yelling something about the Canadian Revolution of 1969, but the actual content of the speech was lost in the chaos.
Ramsey began pushing through the crowd, attempting to make their way towards the Berwick and Noel intersection and the apartment Jack was also headed towards. The streets continued to shift beneath Ramsey, with things appearing outside their field of view. Pale worms began to emerge from cracks that didn't exist, wriggling around the oblivious, thralled people as the few that were whatever counted as lucid while being under this influence smiled like their mouths were being cut wide open. One worm fell through a cloud of smoke and landed on Jack's head as she hustled towards the apartment on the opposite side of Soho, causing her to shriek and run straight into one of the few alleyways that hadn't been twisted into a spirally endpoint.
As she tried to calm herself, she yanked back her sleeve and stared at her watch and immediately look away as the hands were melting off. She pulled her phone back out of her back pocket and switched it on to check the time.
"11:10? I have not been walking for three minutes, I'm already in Chinatown!”
“Time is not on your side!”
An older woman yelled from somewhere Jack couldn’t see. Assuming that that sentence wasn’t meant for her, Jack took off her watch and dropped it behind a garbage can that was attempting to rotate itself in opposite directions on all three axes at once before starting moving again. As she arrived in front of Piccadilly Circus, a path cleared in front of the enthralled people. Horses trailing black smoke blazed last the newly parted crowd, and Jack swiftly covered her mouth with her jacket. A vaguely carriage shaped shadow began to eclipse the crowd, with the chants and ramblings turning to screaming as it passed people buy. Jack was about to peek out and look at what it was before she got tackled, hard.
“Jack, do not look at this thing. Don’t!”
Alice’s voice was startlingly clear to Jack, and it was then that she realized that every other sound was being obscured by something she couldn’t grasp. Her first instinct was to think of it as white noise, but her brain refused to admit it was there. She could place the people that weren’t affected by it, but try as hard she she could, eyes squeezed shut, trying to focus on the screams around her, the most she could make out was a faint wet wriggling beneath her and Alice’s panting. The noise of the parade soon passed, and the two stood up.
"Jack, I know you're confused, but we need to get out of here now."
"I-yeah, I know, I was going to Ramsey's apartment to meet up with them."
"Ramsey's still lucid? You're certain?"
"Nobody else seems normal at all," Jack nearly yelled as she gestured around her. Alice nodded and adjusted the ballistic vest Jack hadn't even noticed her wearing. The smoke had slowly been descending to street level, and Jack noted small tendrils trying to obscure a circular logo in the center of the vest. She simply pointed at it, but Alice both metaphorically and literally brushed it off.
"Don't worry about it, it doesn't matter. Ramsey's place is at Berwick and Noel right? Let's get moving." As Jack nodded and started moving again, Alive followed close behind, removing an encrypted comms device from her pocket silently and punching in Ramsey's and Jack's names. "Ramsey Orwell and Jacqueline Wernham Wells," she whispered to herself as the Foundation logo spun to indicate the names had sent. "You two aren't going to remember this mess at all."
It didn't take the two of them long to make it to Ramsey's apartment. Alice knocked on the door and Ramsey yanked it open, a cricket bat in hand. "Get inside, come on." Both of them slipped through the small gap between door and doorframe and Ramsey shut it, yanking the deadbolt stuck and turning around.
"Do you have any clue what's going on out there? Because I really have no idea-" Ramsey began to speak, but Alice cut them off.
"You remember the whole thing about Ojai Syndrome?"
"Sort of? Wasn't that the thing in America with the poisoned books?"
"Not entirely." Alice's comms device buzzed in her pocket, and she spun around to pull it out. The message on the screen was short and clear: "Bring to Soho Square. Will be removed from city and amnesticized. Do not expose to 1425." She shoved it back into the pocket and turned to the other two, who were staring at her in confusion.
Ramsey was about to speak up again, but a sudden low rumble cut them off. Racing over to the window looking out along Berwick Street, all of them could see the road quite literally rolling beneath them, shifting along like a conveyor belt and coming out slightly more distorted each time. Only Alice could accurately make out what was changing below them, but she was distracted by the sudden long, thing shapes that seemed to come out of nowhere high above them, striding along the strands of smoke moving from building to building like a spider with an unseen body. Eyes widened, she ran back to the door and pulled a small handgun out of a hidden holster within the vest.
Jack noticed. "Alice, what the hell are you doing? Where did you get a gun?"
"Yeah what were you going to say about Ojai Syndrome again?" Ramsey added.
Alice turned and sighed. “The books weren’t poisoned, they were basically magic. The people that I work for have apparently fucked up getting them out of England, and London is phasing into another plane if existence.”
“Don’t you work for Sketchan Corporation Pharmaceuticals?”
“Yes. Look, I need to get you two to Soho Square before this,” she gestured towards the window, “gets any worse.” A tendril of smoke slithered past all of the windows the apartment had as if on cue, and it felt like the atoms themselves within the apartment were getting pushed closer together. Alice yanked the door back open and stepped out, checking the hall with her gun, before sprinting down the stairs with Ramsey and Jack close behind her. Once they got down to the street, it was clear things had definitely gotten worse.
“Where is everybody?” Ramsey muttered. Only a few people were still standing around, with most of them being held in place by thinner tendrils of smoke that seemed to originate from nowhere. There were one or two lucid people sticking their head out of their windows, but after Alice slammed the door to the building open they had all retreated back inside like scattered coral polyps. Jack tried to look up and immediately winced and spun away, digging through her purse to find some sunglasses. Alice saw and looked up, squinting at a sky that was now pink and a sun that was both clear and blue at the same time. “Full planar shift,” she murmured before a groaning from behind her made all three whip around.
A partially visible man, dressed in a well-off looking suit, was standing on the curb just a few feet from them. Alice immediately trained the gun on the parts of the man’s head that she could actually observe, automatically ignoring the parts that had been completely blotted from her perception without bothering to wonder why he was only partially visible. Ramsey began glancing around the street, but they didn’t see any other partially visible people. Alice turned towards them, and Ramsey nodded at her, whispering.
“I think we’re clear.”
That would immediately be proven wrong by the man lunging towards Alice, screaming in a language that didn’t seem phonetically consistent as he made a swipe for her throat. Alice dodged it easily, since he’d telegraphed it with a scream, and immediately fired directly into the man’s head twice. Both bullets were embedded in the pavement a fraction of a second later, and the man’s body hit the ground before Jack and Ramsey could yell in panic.
“Holy shit!” “Oh god no!”
“We really need to start moving. It’d be safer for all of us once we’re in the square.”
“Are you going to rescue all the other lucid people?” Jack sounded angered and scared at the same time somehow.
“Rescue?” Alice scoffed at her. “This isn’t some sort of video game. I’ve been trying to find you two because I know you haven’t been exposed to the book—“
“Did you know it could do this?” Ramsey gestured towards the highest concentration of smoke, the royal parade route. Despite being several blocks away, the smoke was rising up like a malicious beacon towards the sky like it was right in front of them.
"No, and frankly, we can't give a shit about that right now!" Alice grabbed Jack's arm and pulled her along, and Ramsey followed close behind. "London is falling into another plane of existence, and you two have to be out of a handful of people with high enough cognitive resistances