Infinity Mirror Part One: Tressa

In which we encounter our own reflections. Featuring: a new voice, a new place, an old situation.

Episode description: Mabel's back for season five! Remember that big competition we held over the break? You don't? Let us jog your memory.

Episode Overview
A new sacrifice arrives in the Manor By The Sea.

Trigger Warnings

 * Distortion, static, glitching, unreality, poison, mention of death.

Episode Summary
The episode begins with Becca De La Rosa and Mabel Martin announcing a competition they ran, in which one listener would be randomly selected to stay overnight at the house which inspired the show. In Infinity Mirror's canon, the house was referred to as belonging to Becca's grandmother.

Next, we hear from the winner of the competition and the main character of the season: Tressa Davies. She seems incredibly nervous, but explains the rules of the competition: she has to record the night she stays in the house, and she has a list of topics she needs to talk about. The first two things on the list are to tell the audience about herself and to head upstairs and to look in a. certain room before describing what she sees. As she's heading upstairs, she says the following: she's from Ithaca, New York, is a college dropout who formerly studied medieval history, and she has cats. She has no idea what she wants to do with her life. As she walks up the stairs, she explains that she has a condition called Nemaline Myopathy, so she might take a while to get up the stairs due to her difficulty with mobility.

In order to have something to talk about while she goes up the stairs, she goes to the third question on the instruction seat, which asks about a time in childhood she'd understood true fear. She talks about a time when she was six-- she found a yew tree and met a big black bird who offered her some berries from the tree. She ate them, realized she was going to die (every part of the yew tree, discounting the red covering of the seeds, is poisonous), but her mother found her and got her to a hospital. She survived.

She reaches the top of the stairs and finds a typewriter, which unscrolls a paper so she can see that it reads “A BLACK-EYED BIRD WITH A MOUTHFUL OF BERRIES TRIED TO SING HER DOWN UNDER THE GROUND.”

The episode ends.

Continuity
''' Please note that this section contains spoilers for later episodes of Mabel. Continue at your own risk. '''


 * This is not Tressa's first appearance. She can be heard in the walls of the House in Aurora Silver is Willing to Wait.
 * Black birds have been used in reference to Anna Limón and Lily Martin.

Trivia
'''Please note that this section contains spoilers for later episodes of Mabel. Continue at your own risk.'''


 * "Becca" and "Mabel" are both trapping Tressa in a very familiar way.