Written: Saturday. June 13, 2020.
It took a while before Tom got himself to sleep. The machine didn’t really help with getting himself tired, since both of them were falling off of an infinite abyss inside of a dream-like situation caused by an extraterrestrial who could channel mind-links with other consciousness. All that was already hard to think about for Tom, but it did help in making him bored. Eventually, he came to it, and was fast asleep.
Something nudged him awake, and before he knew it, Tom was sitting inside of a classroom. Nobody was with him, though. It seemed like he was alone, as well. The hallways were empty, the cafeteria was absent of the usual nuns working to fix the students their lunches and snacks. It didn’t sink in to him yet, but he was capable of doing anything just cause he was alone. Where is everybody? He thought to himself. Where’d everybody go? Would anyone see me take this Chuckie Chocolate Milk Drink if I took one from the fridge? Nobody’s here. No eyes, no ears. Nothing. Might as well.
So Tom took the Chuckie Chocolate Milk Drink from the fridge, stood by the front of the counter to get his wallet, but then stopped himself momentarily as he realized his fault. “Oh yeah, that’s right. Nobody’s looking. I don’t need to pay for this… what if I just took another one from the fridge, though?” So Tom opened up the fridge, and took another Chuckie Chocolate Milk Drink from the fridge. Both were cold and in just the right temperature. Sometimes, if the sisters weren’t careful or mindful of their products, students would receive freezing cold tetra-packs, that were difficult to hold and much more difficult to drink out of. Merely sticking the plastic straw inside of the pack was hard enough as it is, let alone a frozen one.
“You get to dream within a dream,” Drew’s voice came from behind Tom. “and the first thing you do is grab a bunch of Chuckies from the cafeteria?”
Tom looked to where the voice came from, and saw his friend standing there. “Hey, I’m new to this, you know. I can’t think of things out of nowhere like you.”
“Did you even know you were in a dream before I mentioned it?”
“I mean, I thought it was strange for the school to not have people around, but I was more interested in seeing if I could get caught — yeah, I didn’t know this was a dream. Looks real, though. Are you real? Or just an object in my dream, or whatever you call it.”
“Yes, I’m real. Well, in dream — logic. This is a dream, so none of what we see here is real, except for the passengers. That means you and me.”
“Who else is here?” Tom looked around. Still nobody in sight. He stabbed his tetra-pack and gave the other to Drew. Drew waved it off.
“I don’t really know for sure. We don’t know what goes on in the girls’ thoughts; here or even in waking life. So we have to search this place to see if some of them are actually in the same plane as we are.”
“You lost me, man.” Tom sipped his Chuckie Chocolate Milk Drink. “Damn. There’s no taste in this place either. That sucks!”
“Get your head in the game!” Drew said to his friend. Tom spitted out some of the milk that was in his mouth in surprise. “We have to do things quick here. Otherwise, we might not ever get back to the upper planes. Or even in the real world.”
“What do you mean by that? Why wouldn’t we be able to get back up?”
“If we stay here long enough that the others wake up, especially Lady Veergha, we might end up in Limbo.”
“That’s just a movie, dude. Chill.”
“No it’s not. I’ve tried it before.”
“Tried what? Inception-ing?”
“No, idiot. Going into Limbo. I was able to stay there for about 8 years. I almost forgot I was in a dream. When I got back, it was like waking into another dream. It was real life, but I couldn’t honestly tell which was which. We don’t wanna go through with that mess this time around. We’re on the clock.”
“Yeah, you mentioned that.” Tom nodded to himself. He scratched the bottom of his chin, which had some growing stubs on it. “So if Lady Veergha wakes up before we could get back to what, the first plane? We get stuck in Limbo?”
“Yes. It’s not like Inception, really. We’re working with a different set of rules here, but just with time in general.”
“Got it. So, what do we do from here?”
“Well, first we have to find the others. Who do you wanna see first.”
“Bianca, maybe.”
“Who?”
“Nothing.” Tom started walking. “I said Amanda or June. Get off my back. I didn’t fall from the balcony. What are you saying?”
“What?”
It’s been going on forever. This endless loop that Amanda’s in. She finds herself awake in her room. Opens up her computer. Doesn’t read the story. But still ends up walking to school and finding the stack of paper placed on her desk. This has to stop. She says to herself. Amanda doesn’t look at the pages. They were thicker than the last time, again. Always thicker whenever a week passes by in this hellish domain. And it’s been two weeks already. But it feels like forever.
She doesn’t look, and the more that she doesn’t, the voice from her side gets louder and more convincing. “You want to look at it. Otherwise, how will you know?”
“Stop.”
“How will you know what happens next? You have to read on, little girl.” There was a time Amanda was called a little girl. But that was back when she was actually timid in structure. Now that her puberty stage seemed to add twice her height and mass, not even her parents really called her little anymore. She just was a girl. A high school girl, who was taller than most, plumper than most, but not voluptuous. Guys disliked her for that. In her head, that seems like the most possible reasoning for people not talking to her all the time.
“I’m not a little girl. And I don’t need to know what happens. Cause this story doesn’t make sense. It never does.”
“How would you know, though?”
“Are you the writer? Why insist on making me read this thing, when every time I do, there’s nothing to understand about it?”
“Why understand? When you simply just have to accept it.” The voice laughed. Whoever it was, it felt as if the voice was just beside Amanda’s ears. Whispering to her to read the manuscript it’s written. It made no sense to her.
In that moment, she had an idea. “Why am I not a big part of the story?”
“Err — what?”
“Your little fan-fiction caught my attention, but only for the minuteness of scenes that I was in. Why is that?”
The voice took a while to answer. “Why? Maybe you’re just not interesting enough.”
“So you admit that this is your writing? And you want people to read what you have to say?”
“Err — no. Why would I need to do that? Plus, you’ll never know exactly what I am. Because none of this is real. But since you’re stuck here, it might as well be. I’ll make sure that when you wake up from this mind-fuck, you’ll remember exactly what happened here. And it’ll be the everlasting motive of your character.”
“See, I don’t get that part. This isn’t some game. This is real life we’re talking about here. I’m real, and you’re not. I see that now. I’m not a product of your imagination, because apparently you may not even know who I am. You’ve probably haven’t thought of a good arc for my character or whatever the fuck is happening here. That’s why you’re stuck here in this loop. See, now I know. I’m not the one who’s stuck in this paradox. You are. Cause you don’t know you’re way out of it.”
“Yes I do! I’m just stretching it a bit more to give you at least a few more moments of screen time before I get back to writing the other characters of this story, which I’m well verse on and more comfortable in writing than you are.”
“What did you say in that last part?”
“…Huh, I might’ve said too much already. Nevertheless, you can think whatever you like. But it all end up the same. You’re stuck here, because I made it so.”
“And again, you’re stuck here, too. Convincing yourself otherwise.” For a moment, Amanda didn’t hear anything. She heard nothing at all. She was alone again. But the story was still there, waiting for her to read it. “What? You’ve given up on me?”
“Who are you talking to?” A different voice appeared from her side. Amanda looked, and it was June.
“Wha — how’d you find me?” Amanda looked around. Something was on her mind. But it was now far out of her reach for some reason.
“What do you mean?” June asked her, tilting her head. “I was just…” June paused. It seemed somehow she had just gotten out of a trance or something. “Wha — what’s going on? How did I get here?”
“It might be over now. The loop, I mean. Now that you’re here with me.”
“What do you mean? What loop?”
Amanda looked at her for the longest moment, but nothing came of it. She was looking for an answer in June’s face, or by the jalousie, or the teacher’s table. Her armchair seemed to feel empty, but she couldn’t shake out why she thought that way of it at all. “…Nothing. I dunno. It was here a moment ago. But I lost it now. It’s over. For now, at least.”
“You’re not making sense, Amanda.” June said. “You know, honestly, none of this is making sense too. What are we doing inside of school? I thought we were in the middle of a field trip. Was that not real too? I don’t know what’s going on.”
Something was itching in the back of Amanda’s mind. This feels rather… a stretch. But why, though? I dunno. It just feels like it. She shook her thoughts out of her head, waiting for it to work. “We need to get out of here.”
“I was about to say that.” The door opened in front of them. It revealed two silhouettes. Both were tall in stature. Tom and Drew. It was Drew who had opened the door and spoke up. “We need to go. Like, right now.”
“How’d you guys find us?” Amanda asked.
“What’s going on?” June looked confused.
“No time to explain.” Drew answered back to both of them. “The dream is collapsing.”
“It seems your friends have found each other.” Lady Veergha said to her companion. “Those two boys were clever…well, the other one was. He’s a bit experienced with the sixth dimension. I didn’t think your kind was capable of that.”
“Yeah, well,” Toby looked down on the lower plane and observed his friends. “Just another new thing you learned about us, I guess.”
“Listen,” Lady Veergha said. Toby looked up to her. “if I remain in the form I was when all of this is over, I want you to take care of that form until you find a way to fix me.”
“Can’t you just make yourself turn back — “
“There have been only a few moments when I had no control whatsoever to what happens to my body. In all honestly, I have no complete certainty to how it all works. That’s just the reality of what the Volgans do to us. To their prey.”
“Korria…”
“If I do this right, Tobias, that would mean that your friends, including you, would be able to receive a singular ability from me, at random. A little gift and head start to the coming battle. I may not be able to help much once we ascend back to the upper plane. But that depends on just the two variables you need to expect from my plan. The variable of me returning to my usual sort. And then the other variable, with which I’ve already tasked you on what you should do in case of if being the scenario.”
“You’ll get back to your natural form, Korriavania.”
“Your optimism is of little value, Tobias.” Lady Veergha’s eyes started glowing a faint light by the center of her pupils. “But it is much appreciated. No, you must remember all I have said to you moments ago. It is not a request. It is my order.”
“Korria — “
“Good luck, Terran Tobias.”
And then light was all there is once again.
It took a while before Tom got himself to sleep. The machine didn’t really help with getting himself tired, since both of them were falling off of an infinite abyss inside of a dream-like situation caused by an extraterrestrial who could channel mind-links with other consciousness. All that was already hard to think about for Tom, but it did help in making him bored. Eventually, he came to it, and was fast asleep.
Something nudged him awake, and before he knew it, Tom was sitting inside of a classroom. Nobody was with him, though. It seemed like he was alone, as well. The hallways were empty, the cafeteria was absent of the usual nuns working to fix the students their lunches and snacks. It didn’t sink in to him yet, but he was capable of doing anything just cause he was alone. Where is everybody? He thought to himself. Where’d everybody go? Would anyone see me take this Chuckie Chocolate Milk Drink if I took one from the fridge? Nobody’s here. No eyes, no ears. Nothing. Might as well.
So Tom took the Chuckie Chocolate Milk Drink from the fridge, stood by the front of the counter to get his wallet, but then stopped himself momentarily as he realized his fault. “Oh yeah, that’s right. Nobody’s looking. I don’t need to pay for this… what if I just took another one from the fridge, though?” So Tom opened up the fridge, and took another Chuckie Chocolate Milk Drink from the fridge. Both were cold and in just the right temperature. Sometimes, if the sisters weren’t careful or mindful of their products, students would receive freezing cold tetra-packs, that were difficult to hold and much more difficult to drink out of. Merely sticking the plastic straw inside of the pack was hard enough as it is, let alone a frozen one.
“You get to dream within a dream,” Drew’s voice came from behind Tom. “and the first thing you do is grab a bunch of Chuckies from the cafeteria?”
Tom looked to where the voice came from, and saw his friend standing there. “Hey, I’m new to this, you know. I can’t think of things out of nowhere like you.”
“Did you even know you were in a dream before I mentioned it?”
“I mean, I thought it was strange for the school to not have people around, but I was more interested in seeing if I could get caught — yeah, I didn’t know this was a dream. Looks real, though. Are you real? Or just an object in my dream, or whatever you call it.”
“Yes, I’m real. Well, in dream — logic. This is a dream, so none of what we see here is real, except for the passengers. That means you and me.”
“Who else is here?” Tom looked around. Still nobody in sight. He stabbed his tetra-pack and gave the other to Drew. Drew waved it off.
“I don’t really know for sure. We don’t know what goes on in the girls’ thoughts; here or even in waking life. So we have to search this place to see if some of them are actually in the same plane as we are.”
“You lost me, man.” Tom sipped his Chuckie Chocolate Milk Drink. “Damn. There’s no taste in this place either. That sucks!”
“Get your head in the game!” Drew said to his friend. Tom spitted out some of the milk that was in his mouth in surprise. “We have to do things quick here. Otherwise, we might not ever get back to the upper planes. Or even in the real world.”
“What do you mean by that? Why wouldn’t we be able to get back up?”
“If we stay here long enough that the others wake up, especially Lady Veergha, we might end up in Limbo.”
“That’s just a movie, dude. Chill.”
“No it’s not. I’ve tried it before.”
“Tried what? Inception-ing?”
“No, idiot. Going into Limbo. I was able to stay there for about 8 years. I almost forgot I was in a dream. When I got back, it was like waking into another dream. It was real life, but I couldn’t honestly tell which was which. We don’t wanna go through with that mess this time around. We’re on the clock.”
“Yeah, you mentioned that.” Tom nodded to himself. He scratched the bottom of his chin, which had some growing stubs on it. “So if Lady Veergha wakes up before we could get back to what, the first plane? We get stuck in Limbo?”
“Yes. It’s not like Inception, really. We’re working with a different set of rules here, but just with time in general.”
“Got it. So, what do we do from here?”
“Well, first we have to find the others. Who do you wanna see first.”
“Bianca, maybe.”
“Who?”
“Nothing.” Tom started walking. “I said Amanda or June. Get off my back. I didn’t fall from the balcony. What are you saying?”
“What?”
* * *
It’s been going on forever. This endless loop that Amanda’s in. She finds herself awake in her room. Opens up her computer. Doesn’t read the story. But still ends up walking to school and finding the stack of paper placed on her desk. This has to stop. She says to herself. Amanda doesn’t look at the pages. They were thicker than the last time, again. Always thicker whenever a week passes by in this hellish domain. And it’s been two weeks already. But it feels like forever.
She doesn’t look, and the more that she doesn’t, the voice from her side gets louder and more convincing. “You want to look at it. Otherwise, how will you know?”
“Stop.”
“How will you know what happens next? You have to read on, little girl.” There was a time Amanda was called a little girl. But that was back when she was actually timid in structure. Now that her puberty stage seemed to add twice her height and mass, not even her parents really called her little anymore. She just was a girl. A high school girl, who was taller than most, plumper than most, but not voluptuous. Guys disliked her for that. In her head, that seems like the most possible reasoning for people not talking to her all the time.
“I’m not a little girl. And I don’t need to know what happens. Cause this story doesn’t make sense. It never does.”
“How would you know, though?”
“Are you the writer? Why insist on making me read this thing, when every time I do, there’s nothing to understand about it?”
“Why understand? When you simply just have to accept it.” The voice laughed. Whoever it was, it felt as if the voice was just beside Amanda’s ears. Whispering to her to read the manuscript it’s written. It made no sense to her.
In that moment, she had an idea. “Why am I not a big part of the story?”
“Err — what?”
“Your little fan-fiction caught my attention, but only for the minuteness of scenes that I was in. Why is that?”
The voice took a while to answer. “Why? Maybe you’re just not interesting enough.”
“So you admit that this is your writing? And you want people to read what you have to say?”
“Err — no. Why would I need to do that? Plus, you’ll never know exactly what I am. Because none of this is real. But since you’re stuck here, it might as well be. I’ll make sure that when you wake up from this mind-fuck, you’ll remember exactly what happened here. And it’ll be the everlasting motive of your character.”
“See, I don’t get that part. This isn’t some game. This is real life we’re talking about here. I’m real, and you’re not. I see that now. I’m not a product of your imagination, because apparently you may not even know who I am. You’ve probably haven’t thought of a good arc for my character or whatever the fuck is happening here. That’s why you’re stuck here in this loop. See, now I know. I’m not the one who’s stuck in this paradox. You are. Cause you don’t know you’re way out of it.”
“Yes I do! I’m just stretching it a bit more to give you at least a few more moments of screen time before I get back to writing the other characters of this story, which I’m well verse on and more comfortable in writing than you are.”
“What did you say in that last part?”
“…Huh, I might’ve said too much already. Nevertheless, you can think whatever you like. But it all end up the same. You’re stuck here, because I made it so.”
“And again, you’re stuck here, too. Convincing yourself otherwise.” For a moment, Amanda didn’t hear anything. She heard nothing at all. She was alone again. But the story was still there, waiting for her to read it. “What? You’ve given up on me?”
“Who are you talking to?” A different voice appeared from her side. Amanda looked, and it was June.
“Wha — how’d you find me?” Amanda looked around. Something was on her mind. But it was now far out of her reach for some reason.
“What do you mean?” June asked her, tilting her head. “I was just…” June paused. It seemed somehow she had just gotten out of a trance or something. “Wha — what’s going on? How did I get here?”
“It might be over now. The loop, I mean. Now that you’re here with me.”
“What do you mean? What loop?”
Amanda looked at her for the longest moment, but nothing came of it. She was looking for an answer in June’s face, or by the jalousie, or the teacher’s table. Her armchair seemed to feel empty, but she couldn’t shake out why she thought that way of it at all. “…Nothing. I dunno. It was here a moment ago. But I lost it now. It’s over. For now, at least.”
“You’re not making sense, Amanda.” June said. “You know, honestly, none of this is making sense too. What are we doing inside of school? I thought we were in the middle of a field trip. Was that not real too? I don’t know what’s going on.”
Something was itching in the back of Amanda’s mind. This feels rather… a stretch. But why, though? I dunno. It just feels like it. She shook her thoughts out of her head, waiting for it to work. “We need to get out of here.”
“I was about to say that.” The door opened in front of them. It revealed two silhouettes. Both were tall in stature. Tom and Drew. It was Drew who had opened the door and spoke up. “We need to go. Like, right now.”
“How’d you guys find us?” Amanda asked.
“What’s going on?” June looked confused.
“No time to explain.” Drew answered back to both of them. “The dream is collapsing.”
* * *
“It seems your friends have found each other.” Lady Veergha said to her companion. “Those two boys were clever…well, the other one was. He’s a bit experienced with the sixth dimension. I didn’t think your kind was capable of that.”
“Yeah, well,” Toby looked down on the lower plane and observed his friends. “Just another new thing you learned about us, I guess.”
“Listen,” Lady Veergha said. Toby looked up to her. “if I remain in the form I was when all of this is over, I want you to take care of that form until you find a way to fix me.”
“Can’t you just make yourself turn back — “
“There have been only a few moments when I had no control whatsoever to what happens to my body. In all honestly, I have no complete certainty to how it all works. That’s just the reality of what the Volgans do to us. To their prey.”
“Korria…”
“If I do this right, Tobias, that would mean that your friends, including you, would be able to receive a singular ability from me, at random. A little gift and head start to the coming battle. I may not be able to help much once we ascend back to the upper plane. But that depends on just the two variables you need to expect from my plan. The variable of me returning to my usual sort. And then the other variable, with which I’ve already tasked you on what you should do in case of if being the scenario.”
“You’ll get back to your natural form, Korriavania.”
“Your optimism is of little value, Tobias.” Lady Veergha’s eyes started glowing a faint light by the center of her pupils. “But it is much appreciated. No, you must remember all I have said to you moments ago. It is not a request. It is my order.”
“Korria — “
“Good luck, Terran Tobias.”
And then light was all there is once again.
End of Chapter.
* * *
* * *
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