Echo wasn’t sure how she got to this point, as she was still fixated upon rubbing her neck stump, but the only other thing she knew other than that strange sensation was that she was being led somewhere by someone, presumably Heather, but it’s not like Echo could tell, and that the feeling of that person’s touch was wonderful.

    “*Ugh* C’mon Echo! I’m trying to get your head back, stop rubbing your neck stump!” Heather grunted from Echo’s mouth to death ears as she pushed her friend’s headless body towards the machine situated outside of the arcade. To most normal people, seeing their friends head explode would typically put them in a near catatonic state, but thankfully being in a state of chaos was where Heather was most prepared, as her life was almost always a mess anyways.
 
    Sapphire had been kind enough to recommend a couple of different options about games where heads could be won, but Heather highly doubted Echo was coherent enough to hold a hammer, let alone hit a target with the precision necessary to win a head on her own, and the duck game was pure luck, and Heather didn’t have hundreds of dollars to let Echo keep pulling ducks until she won a head. No, the crane game was definitely the best option if she wanted to help her friend get her head back.

    The machine itself was rather unassuming. It looked like any normal Jumbo sized crane game: essentially a large class cube with a joystick and pay slot on the front and a claw composed of three hooks that looked as though they could hardly carry their own weight when closed let alone hold something between them. Lining the floor of the machine was a large variety of body parts of different types, shades, and genders. Heather spotted a couple of glimpses heads thrown in the mix, but none that seemed like it would actually be retrievable by the claw, but the she spotted it. Near the back right corner, a head that looked both slightly feminine (it was rather difficult to tell, as all of the heads in the machine were bald) and on top of everything, so it could be grabbed by the claw.

    Heather inserted two dollars into the dollar slot of the machine and began lining up the claw above the head. She had the foresight to place Echo’s head on a nearby trash can so that she could see both angles of the claw without having to move. Once the claw was dead over the head, she almost pressed the button, but remembered that Sapphire had said that Echo had to earn the head herself. ‘Oh, I’ll just have Echo press the button then,” she thought. However, try as she might, she couldn’t release her grip on the joystick.

   “I’m extremely sorry miss, but you’re friend has to be the one to earn the head, from start to finish. That machine only lets one person play at a time,” Sapphire said, suddenly appearing behind Heather, causing her to jump slightly.

   “Oh… Okay, thanks for telling me. Wish I knew that before I paid the two dollars,” Heather said out of her own mouth, slightly peeved. She moved the claw into the middle, over nothing in particular, and dropped it, resulting in an agonizingly long period of time for the machine to reset itself.

   “Again, I’m extremely sorry miss, I’ll make sure to properly provide warnings next time,” Sapphire said, bowing her head slightly as she walked off again.

   ‘Well now, how to go about doing this then, since Echo can’t see at all…” Heather racked through this quandary with twice the processing power of a normal person, before she came up with an idea. Grabbing Echo’s hand, she placed the money in the machine and wrapped it around the joystick.
   
   In Echo’s land of darkness, the brief moments of ‘thoughts’ went like this: ‘No… want touch… need her touch… what’s this?” She reached out, trying to find her mystery toucher (Heather), but was distracted, as the person began touching her back. Of course, without a brain, Echo was unable to recognize that the touching was supposed to be a drawing of the aerial view of the machine, with an x for where the head was. All she knew was that the feeling of the mystery touch was making her horny (probably due to a lack of inhibitions caused by missing head) and there was a phallic shaped object in her hand.

    Heather had to look away as Echo began to awkwardly stroke the joystick up and down. “Uggh, this isn’t working at all!” Heather moaned to herself. She went back to the drawing board, wracking her brains to try and figure out how to get it through to Echo. ‘“Aggh!” she said, a small burst of pain ran through her two heads. “Ugh- what’s happening,” she asked aloud.

    “Miss, are you alright? I heard you say ouch?” Sapphire ran from inside the arcade.

    “Yeah, it’s just, I had a minor headache all of a sudden…” Heather said.

    “Oh, that’s probably your mind finally adjusting to your second brain and trying to acclimate the two sets of data into a single set.”

    “What do you mean?”

    “Well, for example what’s your name?”

    “It’s Echo… No wait! It’s Heather! I mean…” despite knowing her identity moments ago, she now felt as though she was actually both people. For instance, she distinctly remembered grabbing lunch with Veronica two days ago, but also that she was somehow in the library studying at the same time… “Oh no…”

   “Again, I’m extremely sorry if this is an inconvenience to you, but it should only be a few more minutes, and you’ll completely forget that you were two different people.” Sapphire said, giving her a kind smile.

    ‘Great, now I’m losing my mind to. C’mon think Echo! I mean Heather! There has to be some way to get through to Echo!” Her brains were running at one hundred miles per minute. ‘Wait!’ Echo’s brain thought, ‘The Hand!’

    Figuring out what Echo’s brain meant, Heather reached into Echo’s backpack, producing the hand that she had won from the milk can game. While she may not have realized it at the time, Echo actually had seen the hand move. Heather made quick work of attaching the wrist of the hand to Echo’s neck (her palm facing towards her front.

    ‘Oh?’ Echo ‘Thought’ “What?’ the addition of some extra tactile response was odd, especially due to the odd anatomy, she wiggled the fingers of her new hand, before feeling the hand be grabbed by her unknown provoker. Her touch was absolutely overwhelming. Suddenly, the hand jerked forward. Echo, her body working on instinct, moved her hand in a similar fashion, moving the joystick forwards. What followed was a series of jerking movements that did not help in lowering Echo’s arousal, before eventually, the movements stopped and the hand instead squeezed her head-hand. Echo followed suit, squeezing the joystick and accidentally pressing the drop down button on top.

   Heather waited in baited breaths as she watched the claw descend directly over the female looking head. The claw landed and… missed completely ‘No!’ she thought. But, amazingly, as the claw retracted, one of the prongs managed to hook into the head’s nostril, lifting it up precariously by it’s nose. ‘Yes!’ The head dropped into the prize bin.

    Suddenly, Echo could think clearly once more, “What the?-” she said in an unfamiliar voice, the sudden influx of sense completely overwhelming her for a brief moment.

    Heather pulled Echo’s new head out from the prize bin, rushing to say, “Echo! I know you just got back, but I need to trade back your original head, it’s starting to screw with my mind.”

    “O-okay?” Echo said. No sooner had Echo said the word, than her point of few (and Heather’s additional point of view) suddenly shifted back to her original head.

    “Oh! Thank god, It’s just me again…” Heather said, slightly disoriented that she still had two heads, but glad it was only her personality in her head.

    “Um… Heather? A little help please?” Echo asked. Her body had came over and picked her up, and was currently struggling pulling against the hand on her neck. “I can’t seem to get it off.”

    The girls spent the next couple of minutes pulling in vein on the hand, to no avail. “Ughh,” Heather said, “Look, just… have that hand hold your head for now, let’s go to that medical tent that Sapphire was talking about and see if they can fix that and this,” she said, pointing to her second, bald head.

    Head to the Medical Tent <Convergence Point>
    

Read one of the other paths:
    1.) Veronica and Spencer (Tunnel of Love)
    2.) Lindsay and Susan (Gift Shopping)