YESIPLANTOEDITIT!
And I need to find the prologue.
But... I have a terrible affliction called 'childhood' which means that I rarely get internet access.
So I'm going to have to post the first quarter of chapter one on here and get back to it later- SO TERRIBLY SORRY I DON'T HAVE MORE! DON'T HATE ME!
The shimmering through the darkness was all that alerted Him to His existence.
The shimmering quickly gre, or perhaps He simply moved closer to it, until it took up His entire vision, up to his perepheries.
After the brief 'emotion' he'd come to label as 'surprise' at this New thing in His domain - or so He believed the darkness was as such - He quickly accepted its twisting pale shapes and plethoras of... bright... things that were somehow different from the darkness around him.
He was entranced, and, eventually, found that He could 'move' the 'picture' around if He really urged it to move.
After an unbelievably long time (classified as thousands of years to a member of the human race,) He noticed something changing.
Now there were larger shapes, similar in the... differentedness to the first shapes.
These newer shapes created larger, more convoluted prisms and objects that had clear, shiny... things on the sides of them.
This happened four times, and at the end of the fourth time, the screen exploded.
"Oh dear," He thought to Himself. "Where did all of the pretty shapes go?"
And, after untold mellinia of studying His photographic 'memory', he reached an answer.
"This will not do at all," He mused to himself, finally mastering the complicated structure that was language. "I need to save those creatures!"
Finally arriving at this conlusion, He devised a Plan and thought it.
“That’s not going to work.” He said for the fourth time in a row.
The ‘he’ in question was Luke. He was floating four feet above my unmade bed.
He wore a skin tight white T-shirt and some black pants, but, as black as they were, his hair was blacker. He had red sneakers (comparable to metal when it’s really hot), and a long, sloping brow led your eyes down to his own mismatched eyes – one green and one brown – and then to his thin red lips. His nose was a little larger than average, but not by much.
“Shut up. I don’t care if it won’t work, I’m still trying.” I had awoken in this mansion fourteen weeks ago. Or maybe it was a castle – I couldn’t tell, the rooms were always switching themselves around. I had found my way to the rather spacious attic – all of it was one room – and had been sleeping in there for the past two nights. Luke was just some sixteen year old who had been following me for the past two and a half weeks. I wasn’t sure why.
“Still, it won’t work. Why don’t you sleep a little, you’ve been trying to do this for the past day. I think. God, why did you have to hole up in a windowless room?” He asked me. I was using a hammer to batter at the wooden wall.
The attic was crossed with numerous timbers, creating a sort of spider’s web that made it kind of hard to get from one end to the other. Both ends had doors, and, the day before, I’d woken up to see Luke walk through the back door only to come in through the front door. Apparently the same room can be moved so that it was connected to the exact same place or something like that in this god forsaken mansion.
How had I even ended up in here, anyways? I’d gone to sleep that night and just awoken in here. The mansion had been a nightmare – the people that were in here with me were prone to be violent. I had no idea why. Maybe it was because of my appearance? For some reason, when I’d been transported to this place, I’d taken the form of an anthropomorphic wolf – bipedal, mind you – and maybe I freaked kids out or something. Luckily, I had some serious strength and reflexes now, so I was mostly unharmed by them.
And they were deadly. I mean, this one kid could trap you in an alternate dimension just by taking a photograph of you. Her name had been Jekylls and she’d been insane. She’d also been my friend for the first six or seven weeks in the mansion. Then another one called Jeremy came along and severed her with a recorder – the instrument. Then he tried to kill me. I was, of course, able to dodge and lost him through the maze of rooms.
“Still, I don’t care. I am sick of this goddamned place. I am sick of waiting for my death. And do you really have to show off your gravity nullification powers? It distracts me.” I said to him, priming the iron hammer for yet another hit on the wall. I heard breathing come suddenly from behind me – sensitive ears – and whirled around, only to find Luke hovering about an inch above the ground and holding my hammer hand. He was strong – almost as strong as me.
“Stop wasting your energy. I’ve been here for almost a year.” He sighed and dropped my hand. Seeing claws and grey fur coating it still freaked me out. “I know that there’s no escape aside from death. Currently.” I sighed as well.
Luke slowly drifted to the ground and walked normally back to my bed, lying down after pulling his sneakers off and pulling the red sheets over himself.
I stood there with a grimace. He was right; there was no escape from the prison.
Prison. Was that what this place was? A prison for people who were different? It seemed like everyone I’d met (including myself) had some strange ability or something else.
Where was this place, anyways? The windows always looked out upon rolling hills somewhere on top of a cliff – you could see the tree coated, precarious drop off in the distance from some of the windows – that was blanketed by forest and jungle. Sometimes, I could see animals out there. Sometimes, they came up to the window.
Sometimes, they weren’t animals.
Sometimes, they were blackened shells of humans, with gaping mouths and eyes that glowed red like coals and embers. There fingers would be melded together into some sort of blackened glove.
Maybe the mansion was here to protect us from the world, as well as protect the world from us?
Whatever the mansion’s purpose, it was still a prison.
So sorry for the little tiny start to the first chapter.
I hope you're interested in the story now, though, because it's going to be a wild ride.
Hang on tight.
XD
**And yes, I reuse characters. It's fun.
****I need to reserve some places. Yes, it's going to be long.
Stupid minecraft website thingy won't let me double post, though. T_T
The story above PROBABLY has a ton of errors I will freak out over tomorrow. T_T.
Reserved (And this should be enough at 33 Microsoft Word pages per Post, AKA, like, what? 20,000 words a post? Maybe? Maybe more. Whatever. Feel free to post now, though...
T_T...
Le sigh.)
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
OnceInALongTime: "You confuse me, Mage. Amazability should be a word so I could describe your words."
Oh my god. I cannot edit the top post because my dad restricted it from me. ARGH!!
Anyways, here is TAG as it is now. If anyone wants to resize all of the Mem. Things to size twenty for me, I would appreciate it. Oh! And, if you spoilered it, I would be even mohr happay.
Sorry I can't do that. I am on my phone, and it would take me more time than I have.
The shimmering through the darkness was all that alerted Him to His existence. The shimmering quickly grew, or perhaps He simply moved closer to it, until it took up His entire vision, up to his peripheries.
After the brief 'emotion' he'd come to label as 'surprise' at this New thing in His domain - or so He believed the darkness was as such - He quickly accepted its twisting pale shapes and multitudes of... bright... things that were somehow different from the darkness around him.
He was entranced, and, eventually, found that He could 'move' the 'picture' around if He really urged it to move.
After an unbelievably long time (classified as thousands of years to a member of the human race,) He noticed something changing.
Now there were larger shapes, similar in the... differentedness to the first shapes. These newer shapes created larger, more convoluted prisms and objects that had clear, shiny... things on the sides of them.
This happened four times, and at the end of the fourth time, the screen exploded.
"Oh dear," He thought to Himself. "Where did all of the pretty shapes go?"
And, after untold millennia of studying His photographic 'memory', he reached an answer. "This will not do at all," He mused to himself, finally mastering the complicated structure that was language. "I need to save those creatures!" Finally arriving at this conclusion, He devised a Plan and thought it. It happened.
He noticed something wrong with his plan after a little while. He thought the correction. It happened.
His last thought was ‘Huh. What is that curious sensation?’
Then he was gone – just another memory in the cosmic ocean of them.
“That’s not going to work.” He said for the fourth time in a row. The ‘he’ in question was Luke. He was floating four feet above my unmade bed and wore a skin tight white T-shirt and some black pants, but, as black as they were, his hair was blacker. He had red sneakers (comparable to metal when it’s really hot), and a long, sloping brow led your eyes down to his own mismatched eyes – one green and one brown – and then to his thin red lips. His nose was a little larger than average, but not by much.
“Shut up. I don’t care if it won’t work, I’m still trying.” I had awoken in this mansion fourteen weeks ago. Or maybe it was a castle – I couldn’t tell, the rooms were always switching themselves around. I had found my way to the rather spacious attic – all of it was one room – and had been sleeping in there for the past two nights. Luke was just some sixteen year old who had been following me for the past two and a half weeks. I wasn’t sure why.
“Still, it won’t work. Why don’t you sleep a little, you’ve been trying to do this for, like, the past day. I think. God, why did you have to hole up in a windowless room?” He asked me. I was using a hammer to batter at the wooden wall. "Those things aren't that disturbing."
The attic was crossed with numerous timbers, creating a sort of spider’s web that made it kind of hard to get from one end to the other. Both ends had doors, and, the day before, I’d woken up to see Luke walk through the back door only to come in through the front door. Apparently the same room can be moved so that it was connected to the exact same place or something like that in this forsaken mansion.
How had I even ended up in here, anyways? I’d gone to sleep that night and just awoken in here. The mansion had been a nightmare – the people that were in here with me were prone to be violent. I had no idea why. Maybe it was because of my appearance? For some reason, when I’d been transported to this place, I’d taken the form of a… werewolf? I stood on two legs and kind of resembled a wolf in the fact that I had a muzzle and claws and such. Maybe I simply freaked kids out or something.
Luckily, I had some serious strength and reflexes now that I was this… thing, so I was mostly unharmed by them. And they were deadly. I mean, this one kid could trap you in an alternate dimension just by taking a photograph of you. Her name had been Jekylls and she’d been insane. She’d also been my friend for the first six or seven days in the mansion. Then another one called Jeremy came along and severed her with a recorder – the instrument – just by pointing at her with it and playing it.
Then he had tried to kill me.
I was, of course, able to dodge and lost him through the maze of rooms. “Still, I don’t care. I am sick of this goddamned place. I am sick of waiting for my death. And do you really have to show off your gravity nullification powers? It distracts me.” I said to him, priming the iron hammer for yet another hit on the wall. I heard breathing come suddenly from behind me – sensitive ears – and whirled around, only to find Luke hovering about an inch above the ground and holding my hammer in his hand. He was strong – almost as strong as me.
“Stop wasting your energy. I’ve been here for almost a year.” He sighed and dropped the hammer.
Ugh, I thought to myself; seeing claws and my grey fur coating it still freaked me out.
“I know that there’s no escape aside from death. Right now.” He continued
I sighed as well.
Luke slowly drifted to the ground and walked back to my bed (I’d dragged it up with me,) lying down on his stomach and stretching out after yanking his sneakers off and pulling its white sheets over himself.
I stood there with a grimace. He was right; there was no escape from the prison. Prison. Was that what this place was? A containment building for people who were different? It seemed like everyone I’d met (including myself) had some strange ability or something… else.
Where was this place, anyways? The windows always looked out upon rolling hills somewhere on top of a cliff – you could see the tree coated, precarious drop off in the distance from some of the windows – that was blanketed by forest and jungle. Sometimes, I could see animals out there. Sometimes, they came up to the window. Sometimes, they weren’t animals.
Sometimes, they were blackened shells of humans, with gaping caves for mouths and eyes that glowed red like embers in a dying fire, their curled fingers melding together into some sort of blackened, charred glove that had some small semblance to a hand.
Sometimes they pounded the thin glass that separated them from us. Sometimes they opened their maws and sucked on it. They didn’t breathe – no breath fog ever coated the windows – but they did moan. Or we assumed – we never really heard them.
This lead to some disturbing thoughts – maybe the mansion was here to protect us from the world.
Perhaps it was here to protect the world from us.
Whatever the mansion’s purpose, it was still a prison.
Luke began snoring. It was a rather loud and ever so slightly unpleasant noise – a sort of reverberating cave grumble. Or maybe it was like an earthquake.
I sighed again and sat down, checking my black watch as I did so.
“Grr… three hours until the Change,” I said. “Why does it always take so long?” I stretched out on the cold wood floor and closed my eyes like Luke had suggested.
Unbidden, images flashed through my mind of Clara.
/\/\/\
Mem 2, 801,203 8:50 PM 375 Planet Side. Mansion 2, Sector A, Room 19.
“Twerp.” He said, before I shoved him off of me and through the dark opening that was a doorway on the other side of the room.
“Me: One. You: Zero.” I said to myself, slowly rising to my feet and brushing imaginary dirt off of my red shirt.
The room I was in was technically called the attic, but everyone else in the building simply called it ‘Room 19.’
Apparently, they’d received word from some sort of mystical human with a ‘long mustache’ that ‘The attic shalt be called Room Nineteen. Rabbits. Give me rabbits.’ This intrigued me, as the room had no relation to the number nineteen.
I had awoken in this place only a month ago. The soft light in my canopy top bedroom had slowly filtered itself away to the glaring midday sun that came through the window of this fortress’s observatory. I’d kept mostly to myself since then – I was… different. Everyone else was normal – they were giant wolf like creatures – but I was furless and pale, with only a small bit of hazel colored hair on the top of my head. Plus, I had long and limber limbs that stretched out and had little muscle on them, blue eyes instead of the normal – yellow or green – and, the worst, I had a small triangular protrusion coming out of my face, unlike the normal extension that all Wolfen had. If I was not a Wolfen, why, oh why, did I have the memories of one?
I lived – past tense – in a tall tree house, like every other Wolfen in this Mansion. I remember having a tail, fur, teeth, even my hair was Wolfen in aspect.
So what happened?
“We’ve seen one like you before.” One of the respected Wolfen had told me, before proceeding to say, “He disappeared. Just like you will.”
That was about a week ago. The grey beast had then tried to kill me with incredibly hot hands that had glowed red, then white, while he’d swiped at me.
I’d escaped by making him so dense that he literally collapsed in on himself – not black-hole style, it was instead, to put it nicely, a rather gory sight. Before then, I hadn’t known about my ‘ability’ as the others called them. But I knew about it now.
The Wolfen that had just attacked me had kept muttering things about ‘The group.’ And ‘Kill them all.’ Or something of that sort. I, of course, had activated my power and reduced him to a whimpering mess on the floor. He’d not been as weakened as I’d believed, though, so he’d leapt up at me and shoved me to the ground before I’d been able to decrease his density and hurl him through the door. And he’d called me the twerp! Unbelievable.
The attic was a mess of different assorted bed mattresses, dolls, and floating candles that glowed without fires. What wasn’t covered with one of those things was, instead, covered in broken wooden beams and uprooted beige carpeting.
It was one of the most horrifying rooms I have ever been in – but it had its uses. Like hiding. Or practicing my ability.
“Hey… where am I?” Came from someone to my left all of the sudden.
A robust Wolfen wearing a black T-shirt with some god forsaken band’s logo printed on it crawled out of the door that had just appeared there, collapsing on a red mattress that was conveniently in his way.
As he rolled over the mattress and into better lighting, I could see that he was, in fact, not a Wolfen. He… he looked like me.
“Woah!” I screamed, jumping back and tripping over what I presumed to be a wooden beam. I fell down and hit my head on something hard, passing into the non-blissful realm of unconsciousness.
“Ergh…” I yawned, slowly awakening from my prolonged nap. Luke was already up and standing on the ceiling, staring up at me.
I jumped up and yelled at him.
“DON’T DO THAT!”
He just calmly… looked down at me. His eyes were still closed, though.
He was obviously sleepwalking or something…
“This can not get any creepier,” I said to him, “Without Kalycko bursting in here or something.” Luke calmly stood there and ‘watched’ me as I moved around. It was… really creepy. I eventually left the attic, hoping that The Change had occurred already.
It had.
The left door led me into a small room that was painted light blue – cyan – all over and had a small iron hatch on the floor. The iron hatch, upon closer investigation, presented itself to be locked with a silvery padlock that required some sort of small key to open it.
I’d never seen the room before, and I’d explored the place inside and out. First sleepwalking (and Uber Creepy) Luke, now this hitherto hidden room – perhaps I was dreaming? Perhaps not.
Although, coming to think of it, the room did seem a little fuzzy. And… was that a shower or a wall?
My eyes snapped open to the sound of Luke snoring gently and dangling his arm about an inch away from my head. He was floating himself three feet above the ground while asleep. Showoff.
My dream had encoded the real world situation into my sleep – how… interesting. I slowly slid back, under his arm and careful to not disturb him, and got up.
Oh gods my back hurts, I thought, stretching my arms above my head and attempting to not groan. My back finally popped and relieved the tension that had built up during my stay on the ground.
“’Morning…” Luke said, awakening at the disturbing sounds my back had made. He twisted himself around and levitated to his feet. “Sleep well?” He asked me, motioning to the floor.
“What do you think?” I asked in reply. “And… why do you follow me, anyways?”
He shrugged.
That was all that I ever got – noncommittal shrugs or grunts. I wasn’t going to push him for an answer. Yet.
“I think it just Changed a few minutes ago,” Luke said to me, motioning to a door on my left. “You know, if you want to get out of the attic or something ridiculous like that.”
I remembered something about a door from my dream. Something about that door – the one Luke had motioned to. Was someone Else trying to tell me something? Was another being trying to influence my thoughts with his ability?
There was no way to know. Perhaps the room behind the door would hold something like the hatch I’d seen – maybe it was a trap.
That, however, was something that I didn’t have to just wonder about, and, so thinking, I calmly walked over to the door and opened it.
“Hello! Glad you could join us!” A starry faced reptile thing in a green dress said to me, pulling me into the room. Everything went black as I fainted.
/\/\/\
Mem. 4 801,203 376 2:33 AM planet side. Mansion 3, Sector A, Room 21.
I awoke in the small room. The roof, as always, was almost as low as my head. The entire area was painted sickly shades of brown that were not all that unlike a dog's diarrhea after, perhaps, some sort of beige paint binge. It wasn't too terribly sickening, though. The smell couldn't have been more unlike a dog's diarrhea - minty and fresh, permeated by occasional pangs of rosemary, and/or cooking jasmine rice.
I rose from my uncomfortable position on the carpet and yawned.
"Good morning, world!" I said, mentally sighing to see that I was, in fact, still alive. "I wonder what pointless BS you'll do today!"
I looked back at the miniature oak door - it was a little smaller than me. It was, like everything else, a repulsive shade of beige. Where would it lead to today? Only one way to find out.
I crept over to the small frame so that anyone who was possibly on the other side wouldn’t know I was there until it was too late. The door swung open on well-oiled hinges to reveal the mansion's pantry. Joy.
At least there was no one trying to kill me right now. Not that they'd succeed; it was immortality’s only upside.
The pantry was filled with numerous, wide shelves - all of which were painted white and stacked high with cardboard boxes of various labels. Many of the boxes labeled 'Ramen' had been ripped apart half a year ago, leaving the marble floor covered in large brown swaths of cardboard and smaller plastic wrappings filled with multicolored labels and drawings of noodle bowls.
I bent down to study a smaller cardboard box that was stationed underneath one of the shelves. It was labeled only with the word, 'CAUTION' and nothing else.
"Caution what?" I said aloud to myself. Flaunting my immortality like some idiot god, I opened the package by turning it upside down and removing the clear pieces of tape on the (now) top flaps of the box.
"Nghh..." I groaned and forced my eyes open to see a large room that was filled with people. Well - not a lot of people, and none of them were 'human.'
"Good morning." A feminine voice said to me. "Welcome to... our group."
They were… humanoids, like me. That doesn’t mean that they were humans, though.
One was like a reptile - he reminded me of a raptor (the dinosaur kind) mixed with a human. Not surprisingly, he had no hair. He also had no protruding ears, at least not that I could see. He was, instead, covered in green scales and had bright red spikes down his back.
These were easily visible due to the fact that he wore no shirt.
Or pants.
Instead, he was wearing a small... leather loincloth? Ugh. It was brown and tied around his back, just above his tail.
The scales over his stomach were milky white – perhaps reflecting their softness? And he had some sort of… marking in the middle of it. The marking was kind of like half of a heart mixed with half of a dagger and smeared ever so slightly. Perhaps it was a tattoo?
Sitting on one of the room's two blue chairs was a guy covered in red-brown fur.
Just like me.
He glanced over at me as I stared at him. Contrary to the reptile/dinosaur/human thing, he had a lot of detail evident on him. His eyes were yellow, yellow like dandelions. His hands were long and tapered to the small black nails on the ends of his fingers. He had a long white mane that was reminiscent of a pony’s flock of hair running down the back of his head and underneath his solid leaf green t-shirt. He wore long shorts that were light blue and had white palm leaf imprints over them. It took me a second to realize that they were made out of swimming trunk fabric and were, therefore, most likely a pair of swimming trunks.
“Yo’ dude.” He said to me, bumping his head up a little bit.
I glanced at the probable source of the female voice – the reptile girl thing that had pulled me in. I could tell she was a girl for fairly obvious reasons. Her scales were blue, and, not surprisingly, I suppose, she was wearing an actual shirt – pink – and had some blue jeans on. She didn’t have spikes, but, instead, she had one single giant spike near the top of her back. It was a slightly lighter shade of blue than her regular ‘skin.’ She had crystal blue eyes and an aura of optimism.
“You… uh, you fainted or something.” She said to me, holding her hand out. I hadn’t realized that I was on the ground until then, so I gratefully accepted here hand. She lifted me up with surprising strength for her small frame.
“Um. Erg! It’s really awkward when we integrate new members into this group thing,” she said, looking down at her feet (which were like human’s feet apart for the fact that they were blue, scaly, and had white claws instead of toenails.)
“Sorry, dude, Tiffers gets nervous around new people.” The other wolf guy said to me as I stood there awkwardly looking at ‘Tiffers.’
“Ah. Um… well… what do you want me for?” I asked them, looking around the room (it was painted red and had a yellow carpet. The furniture – two loveseats covered in plush fabric and one long couch coated in leather substitute – was all blue) for Luke. Despite us being unwitting acquaintances, he had been with me for a while.
“Where is that guy that I came in here with?” I asked, screwing my face in a slightly puzzled manner.
“He’s human.” The girl said, snapping her head back up and regarding me with suddenly threateningly cold eyes.
“Humans aren’t allowed here.” She said to me.
I gulped. Surely they hadn’t… killed him, had they?
“HEY!” I yelled, banging my fists against the door the scaly had just sucked Jake through. Despite my strength, it was no use.
“Gods! And they wondered why I was always such a pessimistic person.” I muttered aloud to myself, slinking down to the bottom of the door and listening to murmurs. The one thing I had actually liked in this place.
No – not ‘thing’ but ‘person,’ and ‘place.’
The one thing that I had wanted for the past three years of my life was to draw furries perfectly. Then I up and appeared in this hellhole. I had thought about committing suicide, but Jake’s serendipitous appearance had prevented that – I had only wanted to have talent in drawing, but a live furry just appeared in the one place that I would have hated but for him.
I didn’t mind that he barely noticed me. He didn’t mind me stalking him.
And now he was gone – vanished into another room with a locked door and…
“That was a scaly.” I said. The thought sunk into my mind.
Holy crap. There are more like him…
A smile began to grace my lips until I realized that Jake was unique and not some trading card that I could mess around with until I got bored of it.
The murmurs stopped in the room behind me; the door swung open.
“Huh,” I said, standing up and looking behind me. The room that was there now was not the room that had been there. It wasn’t really a room at all, actually.
It was just darkness. Oh, and a rather bedraggled zombie-like human.
“Oh. Hi there. Do you want to kill me?” His ragged voice permeated the darkness as I strained to make out the details of his ragged clothing on his ragged body.
“Heh. I guess not.” I said to the man standing in the pool of light outside of the darkness that had eaten me.
It had started with my foot and wound its way up my leg, eventually engulfing my entire lower body. It gave me a strange sense of disconnection. After another minute or so, I was immersed in it and felt a tug in my gut. Then nothing.
Not even an emotion.
Then the man had opened a doorway of light into the space I was in, blinding me enough so that I couldn’t make anything about him out. Maybe it was a girl.
“Erm… hi?” Yes. His voice made me certain that the man was a male human.
“Oh dear. It talks. This cannot be good at all,” I tittered to myself.
“Do you want to talk to Mr. Squiggles? He’s my pet –“ Titter, “- Sandwich. Don’t worry – if you are nice to him, he won’t eat you and regurgitate you for his babies,” I said. “Maybe.”
“Erm.” The man quickly shut the door. I could hear him shoving something onto it.
Good. That would take care of him, I thought to myself, and continued trying to deduce where I was.
/\/\/\
Mem. 5, 801,202 2 12:59 AM planet side. Mansion 3, Sector A, Room 1.
“Okay…” I said, distrustful of Elagio’s ideas.
“No, really! It should shatter the glass and… well, freedom!” He said, smiling. His face was basically a bucket of sunshine mixed with rainbow unicorns and little girls’ birthday cakes.
Okay, not literally. His face was, in reality, simply prone to over exaggerating his emotions. Not that I minded. He was good company, especially in this… this… well, this place we were in.
Elagio was tall for his age, not that someone at his age grew anymore; he was nineteen. And he was the nicest nineteen year old guy that I have ever known.
We had just met yesterday, yet I had already taken a liking to him.
He wore a Mariner’s baseball cap around, as well as a white t-shirt and blue sport’s shorts. He had really muscular legs, and he’d told me that he could do four hundred sit ups in a row. His biceps were bulgy, too, but, surprisingly, he was not tan. He was extremely pale and had blue eyes – definitely not the normal ‘jock stereotype.’
And he wasn’t a jock. He’d never touched a football in his life.
I didn’t know what he did. I didn’t care.
He seemed to enjoy my company.
“You know, I’ve never seen your hair!” I said, giggling as he shrugged and took his hat off to reveal dirty blond hair that stood straight up in a buzz cut sort of way. Then he put his hat back on.
“I got this haircut, like, three days ago…” He trailed off and realized, once again, where he was.
“Do… do you think we’ll ever get out of here?” He asked, shoulders slumped down.
I nodded. “Just fire that… thing up.” I motioned over to the metal device that had so many wires over it that it looked like my hair in the morning. Elagio and I had built it – well, Elagio had told me where to put everything. I really had no idea what it did other than break things.
We’d dragged it into the kitchen today. It had taken two days to build, the first day we were here, and yesterday.
Yesterday, though, we’d awoken to find all of the rooms in the building moved around into different places!
What had led to the bathroom yesterday morning now led to the kitchen. Luckily, we’d slept in the same room as our machine, so we hadn’t lost it in the middle of the night.
I sighed. The kitchen was a wreck – the counters were arranged like a backwards F and had hotdogs and celery out all over them, not to mention buns for the hotdogs, ketchup for the hotdogs, and Ranch dressing for the celery.
The floor was covered in half dried milk that was starting to smell, and the stainless steel, two sided sink had been filled with – get this – potato peelings.
It was not pretty.
The walls were smeared with mashed potatoes (I thought) and burnt garlic hung down from the red ceiling. The ceiling was most likely not naturally red.
We’d come to the conclusion that a seventeen foot tall giant had teleported into this room yesterday and couldn’t teleport out. So he pulled random assorted vegetables and disgusting other things out of the numerous drawers that were now scattered around the floor and smashed them together. Then he’d taken the stainless steel fridge, ripped it out of the wall outlet, and poured everything into his mouth – some of the stuff didn’t make it, though, and he had hated the hotdogs because he was a vegetarian (or something.)
Then he’d escaped by fixing his teleportation device and teleporting out of the room.
A few gremlins came pouring in from the giant oven that was right next to the sink and put the fridge back in its place after taking potatoes out of the drawers and skinning them with their bare claws. They’d found the tomatoes’ hideout and, fearing mutiny from the hidden fruits, smashed them to bits on the ceiling before finally torching the rest of the garlic for conspiring against them with the tomatoes.
They left them hanging on the ceiling in order to deter more vegetable mutiny.
We’d had a good laugh coming up with that little story, actually. We really had no idea what the hell had happened to this place.
I looked back over to Elagio. He was standing stock-still and sweating.
Something moved out of my periphery. I glanced over to see…
“OH MY GOD!” I screamed, ducking down so that I wouldn’t have to see the horrible twisted and burnt remains of some sort of… semi-humanoid creature that was clawing at the window and staring into our souls with its lava-like eyes of death and destruction.
“Um,” Elagio said, finally getting down with me onto the disgusting floor. “I think we should dismantle the machine. That glass seems to be keeping us from being slaughtered right now.” His voice trembled.
Elagio looked at me like I was insane. “Are you sure that he won’t be able to get us up here?”
I looked at him in a sideways sort of way.
“…No. But… there’s a good chance that he won’t be able to track us through that twisted path I lead you through,” I said to him. “At the very most, he’ll get to the farmhouse thingy. That river should’ve totally wiped our scents.”
Elagio shuddered.
“That thing… ugh. Half wolf, half man… why? Why are we here?” His usual optimism had diminished to nothingness.
The attic was a large room, stretching across the entire width of the mansion/building – or so we assumed. It had two doors, one at each end. Both of them thick and oaken.
Neither of them with locks.
“We’ll hole up in here for a while. Maybe he’ll be bored with us after some time?” I said to him, sitting down.
“CLOSE THE DOOR, SARAH!” Elagio yelled at me, as if I wasn’t already racing for it.
But I wasn’t fast enough – Yerelmew was already opening the massive mahogany double doors that lead into the giant ballroom of sorts.
I screamed as his white, furry arm came into view. As well as his… hands. His hands with their deadly heat and black, terrifying claws.
Then everything stopped.
Stopped, like… like the clock that governed the smallest units of time had just broken.
Everything faded to black and white. The foldable chairs that were surrounding me stopped falling down as I pushed them, but, instead, moved as if they were in zero gravity – linearly floating through air.
“Erm…?” I said. The sound I emitted was nothing like ‘Erm.’
It was more like ‘Uh…’ but carrying on for a lifetime. And the sound stayed in place even as I moved.
So… sound didn’t travel like they should… light seemed to be screwed up…
And then there was only Elagio, standing with his machinations. Even in this situation, I marveled at how skilled he was with mechanics – all three of his robots were sentient and powered with air. They were clones of each other, albeit they were each in a different color scheme. One was red, another was green, and the third was a sort of tan brown.
They, and Elagio, were all that stood between Ramsee and The Heart.
We were in the mansion’s kitchen. Again. Just like that day that it all started, so long ago now. The horrendous mess that had been littered throughout the entire room had mysteriously vanished by this time, and the shelves had been restocked with herbs of all kinds (my mind identified garlic, sage, and dill pickle) as well as vegetables. The fridge, however, had been replaced with a cheese cabinet that was mysteriously empty. And the counters had rearranged themselves into an upside down L formation, each end pointing towards one of the doors of the room.
Ramsee was, per usual, clothed in a black robe that seemed to be a part of him. The clothing completely obscured his face, leaving the only skin visible that of his hands.
Erg. His hands.
They were creepier than Yeremy’s instruments of death (aka his clawed, furred, paws)
They formed sharp spikes instead of normal fingers; they were red like the tomatoes in the cupboard behind him. And his fingernails were long, disturbing protrusions of the sort that gave you nightmares.
He was unkillable.
“Ramsee… why are you doing this?” Elagio yelled at him. I was still lying, stunned, on the ground.
Ramsee had played a tape of what sounded like mathematical equations… and I’d been rendered weaker than a baby.
Seriously, I could barely breathe. Elagio – he’d wanted to help me, but The Heart was more important than either of us.
“Why should I not do anything? Power power power! Power!” Ramsee hung his head, a ghostly trail of laughter escaped from his veil and chilled me to my bones.
“He he he he…” Ramsee said, grasping something within his garb.
“Here’s a gift from… Clara!” He yelled, throwing an invisible force against Elagio and his machinations (they were skinny creations, with steam pipes protruding from every possible place on there bodies. For all that, though, they were humanoid in nature and shape.)
The steambots (as Elagio called them) exploded in showers of superheated dihydrogen monoxide, obscuring my vision, as Elagio flew backwards onto a counter. I heard a yell, and everything began to fade to blackness.
[ERROR: Mem. 5 has become too corrupt after this point to translate accurately. What follows is a rough interpretation.]
[As of 801,204 454, 9:52 PM galaxy wide correspondence, this memory has been REDACTED.]
My steambots exploded as Elagio threw something at us, and their steam exploded outwards in violent force. It clouded my vision as I flew through the air, skidded across one of the marble countertops, and slammed into the window that was right next to the door to The Heart.
The Heart. A mystery wrapped in an enigma coated with intricate designs and puzzles, all part of a grand riddle.
The Heart. My worst enemy… yet something I needed even now. Something we all needed.
“Ela…g…” I heard Sarah’s voice from somewhere to my right.
Then… silence.
The steam was suddenly gone, and so were my steambots. Elagio was no where to be seen, and…
“Sarah?!” I yelled, getting up and wincing in the pain that pierced my back suddenly. “Ergghh…” I whimpered, noticing that nothing… nothing was left of our battle just a few minutes previously.
Where were they? Had Sarah frozen time and abducted Elagio? But… I thought that Elagio had disabled her with some crazy sounding magic spell.
She must have gone out of this room… I thought to myself, realizing the implications.
Her ability came with a limitation – she couldn’t travel outside of the room she was in without severely weakening herself. And if she had already been weakened…
I stumbled through the top door, to find myself in the Grand Hallway – a long corridor that was lit with numerous rather luminescent orbs that floated close to the ceiling and had at least five doors lining it, all labeled with a number followed by a letter followed by another number. It had a red carpet of ambiguous design on the ground, and the walls were painted an off color of white.
If Sarah had taken Elagio somewhere, she would have dragged him through here… and returned in order to not be killed instantly by him. However… that would lead to -
I glanced to my right, only to see Sarah collapsing inwards on herself – trapped in a different time zone for her eternity, yet dissolving to darkness in my time zone.
“No!” I screamed, watching the last portion of her pale face collapsing into that odd shade of blackness that existed only in the absence of everything.
Her blue eyes were the last things I ever saw of her.
“So…” I started, staring at the furry grey mammal that had just fainted in our doorway. He was wearing a red, short sleeved shirt and long blue jeans that (somehow) allowed his long light grey tail to pour out.
He looked similar in physique and attributes to Clarence.
“So what?” Clarence said, like he’d read my mind. Or maybe he was just responding to me.
“So… you’re the smart one. What should we do?” I asked him in a slightly mocking manner.
Clarence was a Wolfen, and proudly displayed this through his covering of red-brown fur, longish snout, and ears. Not to mention his long white mane that stood up from behind his neck all the time, and perky ears that stretched out in reminiscent nostalgia of his wolf ancestry. He seemed to think that swimming trunks were cool; the pair he wore was icy blue, with white… leaf imprints over them. Why he would choose such a design was beyond me, as leaves were so rare and… uncouth. They were nature’s dirty little gift to Reptians like me.
His shirt was a mossy color of green, kind of like the fern leaves of my native habitat yet somehow utterly unlike them.
“Dude. Chill. He’ll awaken soon enough. I think. Tiffers,” He looked over to Tiffers in order to procure confirmation.
Tiffers was a Palatican, and covered in pale blue scales to prove it. She also had the scariest yet most calming ice cold blue eyes that I had ever seen. Her fin stuck out from her currently pink shirt (why, oh why, did everyone else have to wear one of those disgusting things? Always grabbing your body as if it owned it…)
She was rather curvy – curvier than most other Palaticans. Not that I cared…
“Yeah, yeah. He’ll be fine. Must’ve... been shocked.” She said. “Who was that… human out there?” Her humanoid hand (oddly, considering that she’d evolved completely and utterly separately from humans) motioned towards the door that she’d slammed into his face. I had only gotten a glimpse of him but he’d seemed to be black haired, and disgustingly pale, like all humans.
Blegh, humans. The most vile creatures to have ever walked on Earth. Always trying to kill each other or some other innocent creature.
We’d learned about them in history class. Apparently, they’d once dominated the planet that we lived on. But then they’d all left (after, of course, destroying its native life and decimating its atmosphere.) to go colonize some other place, and good riddance.
Some of them stayed behind – no one knew why, but rumors had been running that they’d been conducting research on genetic sequences and modification, in order to combat the world’s climate (and decidedly human-antagonistic animals) through controlled evolution.
Or so the grapevine had said a few days before… I arrived here. What was going on back home? I assumed that this mansion (nightmare) that we’d appeared in was on another planet, hence the lack of my species or humans with us. And the non-lack of burnt up monsters of terrifying death and doom.
But… where had Palaticans come from? Were they aliens from another planet, sent here by whatever cosmic force sent me and everyone else? And Wolfen… where did they come from?
And why was everyone… humanoid? Why could I understand the aliens?
“-ello?” Cut through my frantic thought processes. “Dude. You zoned out. Again.” Clarence had come over to me from his corner in the wall and was attempting to distract me by waving his arm in front of me.
“… You’re still no-“
“WHAT?!” I yelled at him, annoyed that he’d cut off my stream of consciousness. “I was getting closer and closer to the truth behind this annoying hunk of unbreakable wood, idiot.”
“Hey, hey, hey. I know you guys aren’t in love, but no need to kill each other every time you happen to glance at one another in the same second.” Tiffers cut in, standing between us for good measure.
“Right. Right right right,” I said. “Um. We need to work together. That’s right.”
“Yes. How else are we going to escape from these mansions?” Tiffers said, nodding in my direction. She was always trying to be the voice of reason – and she was fairly good at it.
The fact that she could make an army to kill you in about five seconds probably helped too.
Tiffers could bring any object that was smaller that her… to life. The inanimate-animate objects were loyal to her (if not completely bound to follow her orders) and would protect her to death.
You did not want to confront her in a kitchen – sharp knives plus intelligence plus method of movement plus you equals instant death.
“Plus, those humans are always scheming against us – I don’t know how we would have survived without you telling us about the dirty creatures,” Tiffers said just to me.
Meanwhile, whilst this had been happening, the door had been making odd noises, as if it was being hit.
“Clarence, play the tape for this room. Move it to… um… move it to limbo,”
Clarence pulled a palm sized black rectangular prism out of his pocket. It looked rather like one of the ‘cellphone’ things that we were taught about in Human History class – but those were incredibly ineffective. Mass communication teleportation devices (Madies) were far more effective, as they transferred your thoughts and understanding directly to another person, allowing for instant communication and linking of ideals.
He wacked the thing against his leg, causing it to emit a high pitched squeal before saying something like “Function X, X and three minus B Change over X and X, plot point and end function at second point.”
Ginko was… weird. But he was effective.
There was a loud whirring noise and the room shook slightly. Then there was silence.
“Okay…?” I said, trying to wrap my head around what was just said.
Tiffers, with the help of Shikes (the raptor dude) had just finished explaining a bunch of history about humanity to me. I, meanwhile, had been utterly and completely confused. Humans… I used to be human, but…
We hadn’t evacuated Earth, the sun wasn’t slowly blowing up due to failed science experiments, and the galaxy was not populated with humans trying to kill eachother.
It sounded like they’d made up a future for humanity in general.
And where had they come from? A reptile girl – I didn’t think that we had those on Earth – and another reptile guy…
Not to mention the furred beast over there, still on his chair. He was like me, yet had no memories of being human, at least, none that I could see from what he’d told me.
In fact… they seemed pretty racist (speciest?) against humans. This meant that I’d have to keep my human memories a secret, lest they try to murder me in my sleep.
See, I’d decided to stay with them, even if only because they had accepted me as a ‘Wolfen’ as Clarence called us.
Although I didn’t think I was really Wolfen – I had human memories…
But what if whatever or whoever teleported me here… had switched my memories with someone else?
“Right. It’s seven seven, now,” Tiffers said after checking her blue wristwatch (hitherto unnoticed by me) “Or, at least, it is by galaxy wide time. I think… let’s see…” She fiddled with two or three buttons on the side closest to me.
“Mmm… yeah, it’s… woah.” Tiffers said. “PLAY THE TAPE! CLARENCE! MOVE US TO ROOM ZED NOW!” She began screaming.
“Hehehe…” I giggled to myself, groping the darkness for the glass sphere that I knew was there somewhere.
I had gone to sleep after deducing my location through a few tricks I’d learned during my thousands of years of existence, like feeling the fabric of reality around me, or deducing my location in space and time. Through those methods, I had found myself in Room zero, informally known as The Heart of the mansion.
I had slept like a cockroach in a dumpster for once.
“Yes yes yes… yes.” I muttered to myself, mentally checking the time again.
Seven o’ seven AM planet side. And galaxy wide, too.
The Coincidence had arrived. Which meant…
“Oh!” I said, bumping into the invisible glass orb that was at the exact center of the mansion.
I had fled into the next room, afraid that the insane guy in the weird… darkness would break through the door and try to kill me with ‘Squiggles’ or something.
I had found myself in the kitchen (very nice, Japanese style, the L shaped countertop was crafted from bamboo, and the sink was made of hollow bamboo too. All of the bamboo stuff was light brown, and had a stringy texture to it. There was also metal box (most likely a fridge) in the corner near the sink.) and looked around in the fridge (which was empty,) which led me to root around in the numerous cupboards beneath the counter and find quite a few tomatoes.
Tomatoes were disgusting.
I ate them anyways.
Then I went to sleep, only to be awoken by a deep rumbling throughout the entire mansion as… something halted.
A feeling ran through me, one that I couldn’t adequately explain. It was… negative, and kind of like desolation.
I checked the wall clock – a large white circle with a black plastic borderline on it that was mounted on the wall, directly above the door I’d come in from – and it’d said seven o’ seven and thirty seven seconds after.
“Oh dear.” I said, noticing the second hand slowing down and stopping at the forty and three second mark.
“What…?” I asked myself, walking to the door that would take me back to the attic – I had a feeling that the creepy insane man that I’d seen last night had something to do with the rumbling and the loss of power to the clock. Or… clocks.
In fact, it seemed to be slightly colder in here – was the mansion heated? Was all the power fading?
I opened the (bamboo) door to see a swirling back vortex of nothingness at my feet.
I loudly swore and slammed the door shut, stumbling back towards the window.
I said a very bad word in order to articulate my anger at having been thwarted.
The Coincidence… why had I forgotten to check an hour ago? I had known it was coming up today and that it began either the end… or the beginning.
And now we were stuck out in… god knows where.
“Tiffers…” Clarence started, hitting another black case against his leg. “It won’t work.”
I looked at him. I looked at the floor.
“There’s… something I should tell you. Well, I should have told you.” I started in a rather sorrowful way.
“Do you remember Aeonic?” I asked him.
“…Who?” Clarence and the new guy – Jake – said at the same time. Shikes simply shook his head and sat down on the floor, next to where Jake was sitting.
“I didn’t think so. He… erased your memories.” I said. “Remember the day we met?”
Clarence smiled, “Yeah, and I tried to kill you in the kitchen?” His laugh trailed off. “Why?”
“Um… we didn’t actually meet that day. I had known you for a few weeks before then. But we met Aeonic, and he… he erased your memories because, apparently, the path we were going down would lead us to destruction. Then he told me that we had to stop someone on The Coincidence… which just happened a few seconds ago. And we didn’t stop anyone.” A sigh escaped my mouth.
“What? I… this sounds made up. Why didn’t you tell us before?” Shikes joined in.
“I couldn’t. He told me that if I told you before The Coincidence, well, you’d be killed.” I sighed again, and looked at my feet. Jake was looking at me with a puzzled expression on his face.
“Was… wait… you had to stop someone?” He asked me.
“Yes. Someone who was immortal and wanted to steal some power or something from the mansion thing we are – well… were – in.” Jake laughed.
“The only reason I’m kind of believing you is because we were teleported here by something or someone and have strange abilities that we use to kill other people. If that wasn’t true… heh, yeah.” Jake said. Clarence nodded in agreement.
Shikes rolled his eyes and said, “So… due to your forgetfulness, we’ve doomed everything or something?”
I laughed in bitterness. “Yeah. I guess. And… I don’t think we can get back to the mansion right now.”
Clarence glared at me in his own special sort of way – peering into my soul and searching for something.
“Right. Heh, you know, you’re not the only one with secrets.” He grabbed the air above him and pulled a head sized, white glass ball that seemed to suck the light of the room into it.
What the?! I hid my surprise well, and apparently so did Shikes. Jake, though, he gasped and sputtered.
“How… what?! Where’d you get that?! How did you… ugh! I give up.” He said, pointing at the thing and hanging his head in frustration.
Clarence snorted and grinned.
“A girl with blue eyes gave this to me two days ago. She told me that I would need it. Then she dissolved into dust. I’d forgotten about it until just now – I had actually thought it to be a dream.” He looked back down at it in his hands. “Actually, I’m not sure that it isn’t a dream still. Pinch me, someone.”
Shikes punched him in the snout.
“OW! Dude! What the hell?!” He fell back onto the ground, spilling the glass orb onto the carpet.
“What? I thought you wanted me to punch you.” He said, winking at me.
“Stop it. STOP IT!” I yelled. “Don’t you understand what is going on? We could be stuck here! You transported us into Limbo, Clarence, and we might not be able to get out again.”
Jake had gotten up and was now at the door. “Limbo?” He opened it up, only to find a solid wall of darkness beyond it. Occasional auric blots of light would appear and then fade to pixilated motes before disappearing completely.
“Woah.” He said, stepping back. “We are stuck.”
Shikes looked guilty for the first time since we’d met. Clarence held his ball close to him and sighed.
“Well… I guess that… um…” I started.
“Shut up, Tiffers. You’re always trying to be democratic. But look what you’ve gotten us into now. And you didn’t even tell us what was going on until just freaking now. I thought that we were a group, that we were here for each other! Yet… I knew I shouldn’t have trusted you.” Shikes walked towards the door and Jake, opened it, and stepped out.
“SHIKES!” I stared at him, waiting for him to fall to his death in the Void of Limbo. He didn’t. He just stood there.
“What? Can’t you guys see this?” He said, motioning towards what he was standing/floating on.
“See… what?” I asked him.
He sighed.
“The floor. What? Do you see, like, a black expanse of nothingness that would kill me if I fell through it? I’m not suicidal, and, although you did mislead us, I don’t think that we should split up. I’m upset, but… well, we’ve been through too much just to break up because of one mistake – no matter how big – on your part.” He sighed again.
“Plus, if you died, I wouldn’t be very happy. Yes, I would care if you died too, Clarence.” He said.
Wow. That was the most I had ever heard him say at once.
And… did he just admit that he and Clarence were kind of friends? Was I dead?
“So… come on, people. We’ve got to see if we can find anything out here to help us. The room will be easy to find again.”
I tentatively took a step towards the door, only to be shoved out of the way by Clarence.
“What are you trying to do here?” He said to Shikes. Jake was slowly edging away from both of them, and Clarence was slowly edging towards Shikes.
“Trying to do… what are you talking about? I’m trying to save us.” He said, leveling his gaze with Clarence.
“Right. Sure you are. You, you… you of all people. You shouldn’t… she… but… she lied to us, you… how?” He stammered, losing steam as he began to realize that he really had nothing to put against Shikes.
“She lied, yeah, but we’re a group. You kept something from us. Does that mean that I should hate you? I mean, I kind of hate you, but you’re part of the group. So I can’t hate you. It’s called putting aside differences for the good of the whole.” He said, looking at the ‘ground.’
Jake was standing beside me. “What the hell is going on?” He whispered to me as Clarence stared at Shikes.
“I… I don’t really know. All that I am sure of is that this room is stuck in Limbo because of me, and we might be able to escape out there, by walking.” I said to him.
Clarence took a tentative step outside of the doorframe, wobbled a bit on the darkness outside, and yelled, “It’s safe, I think.” To us.
“Hey. Tiffers. I think… look at this.” I’d been screwing around with my glass orb for a while, as we walked around in Limbo and looked for some way out. We’d really just been slowly spiraling outwards from our room. It was only a few hundred feet away, but barely visible in the gloom, albeit the fact that it was the only source of light for possibly miles in any direction.
The ‘ground’ was soft and spongy beneath me, like I was walking on a spider’s web. It also freaked me out – what if it crumbled beneath me and I began falling for all eternity?
Anyways, I had been fooling around with the sphere (which had actually become a light source in the darkness) when I’d noticed a slight crack in it – so faint that I had to run my fingers over it numerous times in order to make sure that I wasn’t just imagining it.
I held the cube out to Tiffers and had her feel the part where the crack was.
“Woah. What… what do you think that could be?” She said to me.
Jake came up from behind me, and Shikes stood at the front of us impatiently tapping his foot.
“Gimme,” Jake said, forcibly taking it from me – he was freakishly strong, I noticed.
“Hey…! Be careful. It could be a nuclear device.” I said to him as he felt for the crack and poked at it with his claw.
“Huh.” He said, as a small rectangular prism popped out of the side he’d poked. It seemed to be a compartment for… something.
“Give me your… that rectangle black thingy,” He said.
Of course! I thought to myself. Gods, I’m an idiot. Still… why would it accept just that? I pulled it out of my pocket and gave it to him.
The black thing didn’t fit (it was really hard to see in the blackness, too.)
I mean, it was too small.
Jake grinned, put it in, and slammed the compartment shut anyways.
A high pitched whining noise pierced the darkness. “Function X, X and Y minus ACBD Change over X and X, plot point and end function at second point.”
“Wha-“ Jake said, looking at me and disappearing in a flash of white light.
“Oh my go-“ Tiffers – the closest person to him said before disappearing in a flash of white light as well.
Then it was my turn – I began to feel really warm. Until, that is, I suddenly felt very cold as the darkness around me coalesced into… a kitchen. It had counter tops that were made of bamboo and a large metal box (most likely one of those human things – a refreezingerator or something like that.)
There was also one of those disgusting creatures in here as well. A split second after I arrived, I realized that he was the guy that had tried to get into the room we’d been in earlier.
He had really dark hair that was… kind of combed in a sort of… it was like… well, it looked like a spike – kind of. Not really. Not like that ridiculous hair style that some of us Wolfen had were we would grow our hair out and then put it in some sort of unicorn spike thing. More like a straight, neatly combed spike that ran down his head. He also had mismatched eyes – his left one was green and his right one was brown – and thin red lips. He was really muscular for a human, though.
I appeared in a bamboo kitchen – like, all of the counters were made of bamboo and organized in an L shape.
And Luke was there too.
“Jake!” He said, running over to me and awkwardly hugging me.
“Erm. Yeah. Hi.” I pried him off with one arm, holding the ball in the other.
“The… there’s blackness… how did you…?” He stuttered.
“I don’t know. This ball did something, though, and teleported me here.”
“Woah – that… that looks like a Mansion Heart. Where’d you get that?” He asked me. “Never mind that – I think… I think someone has broken the Mansion Heart that runs this place – everything has begun to break down and it is beginning to get really cold in here.”
I noticed that he was shivering, now. “Yeah. Um. What is a Mansion Heart and why have I never heard of it before?”
Then the ball in my hand began to vibrate and radiate a bright aura of light then.
“What the heck?” He asked me, looking at it.
The compartment I’d slid the black (tape?) into slowly emerged from the sphere. Then I realized that it was… different.
It looked skinnier, and had a hole at the end of it that was completely black.
Smoke emanated from the hole, and the thing spun around in my hands until I was forced to let it go – but instead of falling, it flew directly towards Luke, passed through him without damaging him, and then phased through the door that had been behind him.
A moment later, the clock on the wall behind Luke began to make a ticking noise, apparently starting up again.
It jerked forwards to seven o’ nine and twelve seconds, then began to run normally.
“Huh.” I said, sitting down on the counter behind me.
“So, what happened?” Luke asked me. And that’s what I was telling him about – at least, until Clarence barged into the room with a flash of light and nearly backed into me in order to not get near the human.
/\/\/\
Mem. 13, 801,203 523 7:30 AM planet side. Mansion 3, Sector A, Room 20.
“Woah.” I said, wobbling a bit as I materialized in a medium sized room with a domed ceiling and a door that was made of glass. It wasn’t a square room, but was, instead, cylindrical. The walls were painted brow-gold, while the ceiling was… well, painted. It was painted with… stars, constellations, galaxies. Whatever you wanted to call them. In fact, there was a metal cylinder that looked an awful lot like a telescope outside of the glass door.
There was an oaken desk that was overflown with numerous large books that were all on astronomy, many of which looked as though they weighed twenty or thirty pounds, and all of which had many yellow note paper things sticking out of them at various points. Next to the desk was an empty bookshelf. Both of them were made of a dark, hard looking wood, and the bookcase had numerous pull out shelves that resembled the ones I had designed for my job, back on Earth.
The floor was tiled with… marble? Yeah, the tiles were yellow marble slabs, and they cut off abruptly in a circular design near the middle of the room, presumably a staircase or something.
I noticed that there was a small pocket book opened on the desk, opened to a page with a green note card instead of a yellow one.
“Huh.” I said to myself, wondering where the hell I was exactly.
Looking at the book, I realized that it was actually a diary and… today was apparently day 523.
“Holy crap,” I said. “That’s… what, a hundred and fifty days…”
“Wait… what? We shouldn’t be here…” Someone said – a girl, most likely. In fact…
I spun around to see Tiffers standing in a halo of light.
“Um. Yeah, so… what do we do now?” I asked her, completely and utterly puzzled.
“Wait,” She said very calmly, before disappearing in a flash of white light. Again.
“Oh for the love of…” I sighed.
Then, thinking better of what she’d just said, I sat down on the desk’s padded wood chair and began to read the diary, beginning on ‘Day 1.’
I briefly re-assembled myself in a room that was at the top of a spiraling staircase situated in the middle of the place, only to hear Shikes say, from in front of me, “A hundred and fifty days…”
“Wait… what? We shouldn’t be here.” I said to Shikes’ back. Light was still radiating off of me, I expected it to fade quic – oh, wait.
“Man!” I muttered under my breath as Shikes whirled around, relaxing only when he saw that it was me.
“Um. Yeah, so what do we do now?” He asked.
“Wait –“ I said calmly, before dissolving again.
“CRAP!” I yelled at Jake, materializing in front of him.
“Oh. Hi, Tiffers.” He said to me, blinking in surprise.
“Woot!” Someone said (Clarence?) from my right. “I can’t believe you were right, Luke, I think that… mm… let me…” I turned around to find myself in a kitchen that was made of bamboo, with two doors and a large refrigeration unit. Clarence was, indeed, sitting on the bottom part of the countertop (it was in an L shape) and Jake was sitting in the middle of the L, facing me. The human – Luke, I assumed – was to my left and leaning against the wall, half asleep.
“Erm – hi…” I said, wondering about how I could tell them Shikes was in the future. “So, you know how Shikes… like…” Clarence was suddenly at my side.
“Did he die…?” He said solemnly. I shot him a look.
“No, gods no. He’s in the future – like, a hundred and fifty days from now. Day five hundred and twenty or something like that.” I said. Jake tilted his head and gave me a questioning look, just in time for Luke to interrupt.
“Sorry to spoil the drama, but aren’t you going to like – throw me out again? Or at least try to?” Jake shot him another look – not wondering like the one he’d given me, but more like he was threatening him. Luke ignored it and rolled his eyes.
“What? No – actually, let me talk to Tiffers about that.” Clarence said. He put his arm around me and basically dragged me back to the far corner (far as in far from Luke.)
“You know, we would have left here without ever finding you but for Luke, he was all ‘Dude, maybe your friend will show up, cause you showed up after Jake…’ so I was thinking, could we allow him to travel with us?” He asked me. I sighed.
“You know how humans are!”
“Yes – but… well, he seems really nice, if a bit snippy at times.” He said back to me.
“Does it mean much to you?” I asked him.
“Well – he can change the gravity of things around him, which is a rather useful ability to have now that Shikes is gone, and with him, his wall running.” I looked up on the ceiling, recalling Shikes’ interesting ways of fighting.
Apparently, Reptians were trained from birth to fight with swords – just because they feared a human invasion. Shikes was rather good, especially when he was literally running up the walls around you.
“Well… fine. Fine, you win. But one misstep…” I drew my thumb across my throat.
I quietly resumed my duties as my Warmth was renewed, making sure that everyone inside was warm, had food, and didn’t get slaughtered by the Derlics outside.
Ahh… nuclear fission was so much better than unreliable bioreactions.
Speaking of which – what happened to that man that had stolen my Heat?
I quickly sorted through my rooms and found his Auric Imprint. It was black, with a small patch of white near his lower back.
He was still holding my Warmth, drawing and teasing something out of it.
Why? What could he do with it? The most he could hope for is to make it explode, as if it were a seventy octillion megaton thermonuclear stellar explosion device.
Or, I clarified for the Memory Transcriptor, an amazingly powerful device that would obliterate the planet, the star, the nearby planets, the nearby stars, and the slightly farther away stars. Perhaps even stars farther away than that.
In other news, I thought to myself, it could power me for just over nine hundred trillion years if I operated at full capacity.
I really hoped he didn’t detonate that thing by accident, but there was nothing I could do but mix the rooms up a little bit more than normal.
“Oh. Um… I’m really sorry for startlin’ you,” He said to me, perhaps noticing that I was waking up. “I, uh, I was in a room with… these… blue people that were fighting over something… and… where am I?”
I was surrounded by stacks of books on biology, quantum physics, and oceanography. One of them was open right next to my face – I could read the front page of it.
‘…which means that it doesn’t have to exist unless you see it, unless you use mathematics to describe it. Weird, right? Well – it gets weirder. Ever hear of teleportation? Well, it’s theorized tha-‘ and the rest was out of my field of vision. I strained to get into a better position to read the page, but epically failed as my muscles gave out in a fit of bitterness.
“Oh… um… here,” The tall man said to me, propping me up on something that was hard and wooden, but with soft little bits behind the wood.
“Ergh… what the hell happened?” I asked him, moving my jaw as one of the muscles clenched up.
“Well…” He stood over me and looked down. He was taller than I’d thought he’d been. He looked to be… maybe twenty years old. Or nineteen, one of the two. He had a rather looseness of expression that served to tell me that he was kind, accompanied by rather frighteningly pale skin and quite muscular legs and arms. He had blue eyes, and wore his blonde hair in a sort of wild mess of randomness. It came down past his eyes.
Currently, he was wearing a black t-shirt, accompanied by long blue shorts that looked to be made from nylon or polyester – completing his sporty look (aside from his paleness.)
“Well, you fell onto some sort of hard wooden platform and passed out. Then you became really really heavy and started shrinking in on yourself – maybe that’s why you can’t move – while I tried to move you. In fact, you weren’t movable.” He sat down on one of the wider and shorter stacks of books. “Not for a day, at least. Then, finally, I was able to move you away from that place – it didn’t seem very safe, like, it had three doors and those creepy wolf guys would walk in periodically and try to kill me.”
“Oh. Um. I see you’ve been busy –“ I coughed, “Um. Busy researching stuff…”
“Oh. Yeah. I… I was bored. And there’s no fiction in this area of the library, but I was afraid to move you again, just in case you became super heavy or killed yourself again.” He paused, as if waiting for something. It came to me.
“Oh! Yeah – “ I jerked over as I managed to move my arm, toppling down and sliding over some books. “Erm…”
“Yeah.” He re-positioned me, and I told him about my density changing abilities.
I hadn’t known that I could change my own density, though, so that was useful. Although… it was not knowledge that I would’ve wanted to almost die for.
“Yeah. So… my name is Elagio.” He said to me. “You’re the first human I’ve seen since I woke up here four days ago.”
“Yeah – my name is Reese. You’re the first human I’ve seen since… oh, how many months has it been now? Um. Some time, at least. Thanks.” I said to him.
I was hungry. Again. I briefly considered teleporting myself to the two human males that were conversing quietly right next to myself, or teleporting them to me. Then I considered against it. They were an interesting pair that I had been stalking through sector C for a while now. One – the one that could walk – was wearing a black shirt and some weird looking shorts, while the one that had to be carried was wearing some torn blue pants and a brown sweatshirt with ‘Loltroll’ inscribed on it. They were both pale and disgustingly fleshy… so unnatural. Although, still, it was kind of fun to just observe the human’s behaviors.
It was fun, how I could see ghostly shadows of everyone else in the other sectors of the mansion – things that no one else could see. Oh… the things I could do. I once teleported myself to Sector A whilst being chased by a group of blood thirsty male Wolfen, all of whom I had aggravated when I’d stolen some of there food.
Then I’d teleported a large box right in the middle of their pathway, one from my sector, and trapped them there.
Speaking of which… could I teleport objects from other sectors to my sector?
I looked through (literally, as it was see-through) the standing man’s backpack, located a pack of sardines, and teleported it out.
Yes! Success! That knowledge would sure help me out in the future when I wanted to eat.
The air that had been putting pressure on the space suddenly rushed in and made a loud bang in the other sector – one that I chose to not hear, as was not relevant. I simply enjoyed the sardines I’d procured as the guy that could walk jumped up and whirled around to see… nothing. Nothing aside from his backpack now toppled over and barfing its contents up over the floor – gears, pistons, miniature levers, pipes, screws, cogs, all the works were down there.
“Man…!” He said. I could hear him because I chose to.
The other man said, “What? What happened?” And slowly rose off of the ground. Now, what human had I seen do that before?
“I don’t know… did you hear that bang? Like someone fired a gun?” The black shirt said to the brown sweatshirt.
“Yeah – but… huh. That’s strange.”
I giggled and sat down, next to the floating brown sweatshirt man, priming my repertoire of pranks that I could pull on them.
Oh! I had it.
“Hello. Please press zero if you want to contact Customer Services. If you have a problem and you want to contact a different branch, press one. If you would like to speak to a director, press two. If you want to report yet another UFO sighting, press one-oh-one.” And I teleported the sound waves into their sector.
I had to suppress my giggles as they both jerked at the same time.
“What the heck?!” The brown sweatshirt said, trying to stand up and succeeding. Ah. So that’s why he was floating himself.
“I am sorry, but ‘What the heck’ is an invalid statement. Please press nine to reset now. Or, if you want to escape, press ten now.” I said. My god… this was funny.
“Okay… should we go with it?” The red shirt said to the brown sweatshirt when he heard me.
“Sure. Why not,” The brown sweatshirt said to him. “The worst that could happen is that we die horribly as someone randomly decides to target us for some reason or another, like for the fact that we are in a building full of psychomaniacal wolf humans that all seem to want to kill humans or something for food!” He said with a fake smile on his face.
Ah, human sarcasm. How beautiful.
“I am sorry, but sarcasm is an unacceptable form of payment. Please press nine to reset now. Or, if you want to escape, press ten now.” I said again. Trying not to giggle at their boggling eyes.
“What. The. [Transcriptor has censored this word.]” The black shirt said to the brown sweatshirt. Wait, didn’t they just introduce themselves? Crap – what where their names again?
Flajio and… and… Jesus or something like that.
“I am sorry, but swearing is an unacceptable form of payment. Please press nine to reset now. Or, if you want to escape, press ten now.”
“TEN!” The brown sweatshirt said. I giggled.
“I am sorry, but there is no number ten on the number pad. Please wait as – error. Error. Error.” I said, then made explosion noises.
“What…?” The brown sweatshirt, I mean Jess, said.
“Hello. You have – oh, never mind. This is getting boring.” I said, teleporting them to my sector, without their books.
I almost cackled to myself when I came across the wires. I was in one of the warehouses, most likely the third one, as it said ‘Section Three’
The fact that I didn’t really know brought me back to the unpleasant knowledge that I had no idea of where I was in actuality, just that I had woken up here with memories of my life from before – a high school, a blue truck, and concerts. It was… rather blurry.
And the fact that I had these weird light green scales all over – not to mention weird yellow spikes down my freaking back. I even had a little tail – albeit that it was a stub. And the scales around my stomach/under my tail protrusion thing were almost white. It was so weird.
I was like a crocodile – even my eyes were crocodile themed, with yellow irises and large black pupils.
And the weirdness didn’t stop there. As soon as I had awoken here… I could suddenly understand how electronics work. I knew how to build a quantum computer. I could create a teleportation device. I could write a program to see the freaking future.
But I had no supplies – well… I hadn’t had any supplies.
But then I’d found this warehouse. This warehouse with all of its little wires, monitors, speakers, gates… everything I needed for my electronics.
Everything except for a freaking generator, at least. Too bad I had no idea how to build one of those… why, freaking why couldn’t I figure out how to power my computers and stuff off of air? So much easier, honestly.
“He-“ I said, waling out of where I had been hiding in the shadows of one of the immense bookcases in this immense library. Then the two humans disappeared. “-y… what… why does this happen to me every ti-“
I found myself curiously weightless, then I weighed a hundred tons, then I was normal and… they were here again, but next to what looked to be a male Wolfen with pure white fur all over (except for the portions of his fur that were covered in light gray dots.) And he had a long, rather fluffy tail that was currently twitching in annoyance.
He was already looking at me, as if he’d known I was there before I’d known I was there, and I could see that his eyes were mismatched – one was blue, and the other was green. His nose, in contrast to his fur, was as dark as space, and so were the small black bands around each of his ears.
“Ah, hello… there.” He said to me, rolling his eyes and motioning for me to follow him.
“GRAH!” One of the humans shouted – I thought his name was Elagio or something like that.
“What?! Oh, yeah, I’m a Wolfen. Don’t worry, I don’t plan on killing you or even being mean to you. I’m not really like that. I’m in it ju-“
“GRAH!” He shouted again, and tried to pull the other one (Reese?) with him. Reese stood still.
“I’m pretty sure that he’s friendly, you know…” He said. I was, by that time, caught up with them.
“Yeah – not all Wolfen are bad, you know. Some of us are very nice….” I said, then remembered that I didn’t look a thing like a Wolfen.
“Erm. I mean, some of them. Sorry – I used to be a Wolfen. I don’t know why I’m a Reptian now.” I said.
All of my life, all seventeen years of it, I had studied human history, always hoping that someday, somewhere, I’d be able to see one and talk to it.
And here were two of them, but they were deathly scared of Wolfen.
“Er- what the hell?” Elagio said, looking at me. “You’re definitely not a Wolfen… more like… a… dinosaur thing. Gods, this place is messed up.”
“Yes. Whatever. The point is, Flajio,” The white Wolfen said, “I want to help you get back to your species’ mansion – which is the third one, I think.” He said, giggling.
“I say this because I want to go there too, but I can’t get there without you two.” He paused to absorb their blank expressions, as well as mine.
“You… none of you know what I’m talking about, do you? Ugh.” He sighed. “Okay, see, there are four distinct species that currently coexist here – I know this because I can see all of the rooms and… well, it’s hard to explain. But, over there, yes, to your right, there is another Reptian. He’s carrying a book and reading it as he paces around. He doesn’t exist here, but he does – like… he’s in a parallel universe. Same spot, but… different dimension, I guess. And I can see them.”
I looked back to where he’d pointed. It was down one of the library’s numerous corridors. I saw nothing.
“When I say I can see them, I mean I can see them. You can’t. And I can teleport him to here right now… but I can’t teleport myself to him, not unless he’s in this mansion… and… Urgh!” He paused and looked at me as if I could help him. “It’s too hard to explain. Just follow me unless you want random Wolfen trying to kill you. I mean, you want to be with your own species again, right?”
Reese said, “But… I’m not really a human. I used to be a Wolfen… but when I came here, I changed.”
“Right, but you look human, so… the Wolfen won’t be able to tell the difference.” Alex said.
Then he went on under his breath, “Always so goddamned speciest against humans for destroying the planet… but it’s just in your nature.”
“Okay! Let’s follow you, but only if you allow me to hold onto you at all time,” Reese said, smiling in a fake sort of way. Ah yes. Human sarcasm, beautiful.
“… Okay…” The Wolfen agreed.
“Really? Oh. Cool. You realize that if I didn’t like what you were doing, I could dissolve you just as suddenly as you could say ‘H-,’ right? So… don’t try anything.”
Dissolve…? What?
Elagio looked at me. “What about the… um… Reptian, what about him?”
I looked at the floor. I really wanted to go to their mansion! I imagined it… dozens of different humans to study and ask questions of.
“I… I really want to come. I studied human history for over five years! I love you guys! Please! I won’t make any trouble… and… uh… I can do this…” I reached out and touched one of the giant bookshelves, concentrated, and aged it a few thousand years.
They watched a one-foot sphere of it decompose into dirt in the span of two seconds.
“Woah. You can… turn things into dirt?” The Wolfen said to me.
“No – I can age them. Or… reverse age them.” I stuck poked the very edge of the pile of dirt and reversed the aging I’d just done. It quickly resumed its position in the bookshelf. Then I reversed it some more, to find it turning into a part of lumber, then a part of a tree with sap in it, then minerals from the soil.
“Holy… wow…” Elagio said. Reese just stood behind him with his mouth hanging wide open. I could picture a fly going in his ear and out of it.
“Um. Yeah. She can come, right wolfy-dude?” Elagio asked the Wolfen.
“Sure. Um. Let’s introduce ourselves…?” He said. “My name is Alex. Call me Alex, okay?”
“Yay! Alex!” I said. “My name is Romeo.”
Elagio’s eyes bugged out of his head as he tried to not laugh.
“Yes, I know that it’s the name of that famous guy in Romeo and Juliet, but it’s a female name. Jeese. Your name isn’t very much better.” I said.
“And how would you know that? You don’t know my name.” He retorted.
“I heard you mention it to Reese there. Elagio… heh, so stupid.” I squinted, then winked.
“I’m joking.”
“Okay… so… come along group, before the Wolfen in this sector – and there are a lot of them – catch our sent and try to murder us.” Alex said, leading us to one of the giant gold gilded double doors of the library. “We need to head to the Heart of the mansion, and, from there, we can travel to The Heart of the third mansion.”
The Heart? What? I mentally questioned.
“Oh, and don’t freak out if you suddenly appear in a slightly different room that still looks kind of similar to the room that you were just in, that would simply be me teleporting you either out of the way of danger, or to an easier route.” Alex said before pushing one of the heavy doors open to reveal the ballroom.
“So… like, it will switch soon?” I asked Jeremy, one of the humans that had somehow gotten into this building.
“Hah… let me check.” He always loved to show off his mastery of the instruments. So, of course, he materialized a translucent violin (his favorite instrument) from the middle of the air.
We were in the ballroom, numerous metal foldable chairs littered the place, and, along with the fact that the floor was made of yellow marble tiles, it looked like one of my school’s numerous Gathering Areas. In fact, everything except for the five or six balconies that stuck out around the top of the room, everything was the same – down to the wooden stage that was dark red, hard, and sturdy as a planet, with its immovable purple curtains and concrete foundations.
“Grr… why do you always have to do that so extravagantly? It’s not as if it does anything.” I said to Jeremy, growling even though I was not really a Wolfen any more.
Jeremy was a brown haired kid (very long haired, too. Like some sort of ‘hippy’ that I’d had to study in human history class, back when I was Wolfen) with a rather small frame that had little muscle on it, as well as little fat. He had freckles over his face and a rather effeminately small nose. A small amulet that depicted a silver sun with a sword through it hung around his neck, and, to complete his ‘look,’ he wore a white jacket and blue jeans.
“I don’t see you complaining when I end up saving our arses, you know.” He said, pulling a translucent violin bow out of the air and dragging it over the violin and producing a pitch that was almost too high for me to hear.
A rather large, multicolored shimmering wall appeared in front of us. It was a timer made of light or something.
“Right.” I said, look at it. It was counting down from two seconds.
There was a slight shift in the screen, and we both knew that the rooms had shifted again.
“Okay. Let’s go!” Jeremy said, walking towards the giant gilded gold doors that had just appeared.
“Why over here?” I asked him.
“…Because, like I said numerous times, we need to go to the library and meet up with a group that gets created there.” He said.
How he knew these things through just playing instruments… I’d never know.
“Right.” I said, waiting for him to open the massive slab of wood.
/\/\/\
Mem. 16 801,203 377 8:19 AM planet side. Mansion 3, Sector A, Room 17.
“Grr…!” I growled again. “Where are they?” I asked him.
“I… I don’t know. Lets… maybe…” He stumbled through words, for once not being certain of everything he was saying.
“Maybe I got the location incorrect. Um…” He said.
“Whatever. I’m going to go back to the ballroom and see if they’re in there, conveniently awaiting us.” I said to him. And I did.
Jeremy came with me, so I guessed that he wanted to stick together, because, honestly, he relied on my ability when things got messy.
Suddenly, we were in a slightly different version of the ballroom – it was slightly higher, had chandeliers, actual benches lining the walls… and a space in the middle for dancing. The balconies were made with finely sculpted marble fences around them, and the stage was like that of a performer’s stage, red curtains with dark wooden platforms.
“Hello.” A white Wolfen said from in front of me. “I see you have a human following you.”
I looked back to see Jeremy, as well as a girl reptile creature (she looked suspiciously like me, but light green instead of blue, and with numerous spikes down her back instead of one single spike.)
And there were two more of the humans – one was tall and muscular, with mismatched eyes and a black shirt, and the other was limber and had hazel hair, with pale skin (paler even than the first human) and blue eyes. He was wearing what appeared to be a brown jacket.
“Okay… Alex, why…?” The muscular one asked. The white Wolfen responded – making him Alex.
“Because. More humans means more likelihood of getting to the correct mansion. And, if I’m not mistaken, this here is Mash. He can remove atoms from molecules on a massive scale – like, he could make hydrogen and oxygen gas from water.” Alex said.
“What? How did you know that…? And seriously – my name isn’t, well, I don’t go by Mash. I go by M.M.” I said. Honestly, ‘Mash?’ Who the heck calls their son ‘Mash?’
“Ah yes… anyways, shall we continue?” He asked. Jeremy gave me the eye.
“I told you we’d join a group. And now we’re going to join. So, hah!”
“Um… where exactly are we going?” I asked Alex. “By the way – the human back there is Jeremy.”
“Yeah – hi Jeremy. We’re going to get back to the human mansion because I want to get over there and it’s really hard to orient yourself without two of the mansion’s native species with you. So come along now! We’re going to… well, The Heart of this mansion. If we can find it… the downside of having a group of people with me is that it gets harder to see the other sectors and The Heart of the mansion.” He said.
We followed them, with me taking up the end of the line.
“Why, why, why? Why are we climbing these endless stairs, Rose? Honestly!” I said to the girl with the red hair, red shorts, and red t-shirt in front of me. She was smaller than me – about five feet and five inches – and fairly skinny. She had the endurance of a freaking marathon runner, though.
“Because, Sapphire, we need to get to somewhere relatively inaccessible from the other rooms. Wherever these stairs lead to are probably safer than anywhere else.” She said, not even panting even though we’d been climbing stairs for the past forty minutes.
I’d lost count of the giant gray stone slabs after the seven hundredth one. And my legs burned like heck right now.
The only reason I wasn’t doubled over, gasping for breath was probably because I was buffing myself for plus two hundred percent stamina, but that was going to change to something else in about seven minutes.
“Okay. Come one, let’s stop for a… a little.” I said, trying to not pant and gasping in the middle of it.
Rose slowed down and said, “Fine… fine. Let’s sit down right here, I guess.” I went up to her slab and sat down on it, marveling at the expert craftsmanship of the place. The entire thing was like a tower for stairs – there was a central cylinder that held all of the stair pieces in place, and numerous princess-tower windows circling the outside. Of course, they were filled in with that unbreakable glass.
But still, the view was amazing – I could see for… wow.
“How… whew… how, how high up are we, Rose?” I asked her. She looked at me with her big brown eyes.
“Oh, let me just check my altimeter!” She said. “How the heck should I know, Sapphire? I can guess – seeing as though I can barely see the individual trees from this height, I’m thinking a few thousand feet.”
Erg… Rose could be really annoying at times.
“Right. Um.” I started. “So… how far do you think we have to go? This place looks the same after every step and I’m bored.”
Rose gave me her best ‘Oh my god. Ergh!’ look and told me, “We probably have quite a ways to go.”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah. Right. Um… so, what… what are we going to do once we reach the top?” I asked her.
“I don’t know. Now, obviously, you have recovered enough to make general queries of me, so get up and run more.”
“Ergh,” I groaned as I got up, “Fine.”
We began walking again.
The only reason I stayed with Rose is because she made me want to stay with her through her auric manipulation. If I had my way, she’d be alone for the rest of her stay in hotel Transylvania, or wherever we were. But she always made me want to stay.
So frustrating.
/\/\/\
That's all for now folks! Please give me feedback, as this is for Nanowrimo and I have not reviewed it at all.Oh my god. I cannot edit the top post because my dad restricted it from me. ARGH!!
Anyways, here is TAG as it is now. If anyone wants to resize all of the Mem. Things to size twenty for me, I would appreciate it. Oh! And, if you spoilered it, I would be even mohr happay.
Sorry I can't do that. I am on my phone, and it would take me more time than I have.
The shimmering through the darkness was all that alerted Him to His existence. The shimmering quickly grew, or perhaps He simply moved closer to it, until it took up His entire vision, up to his peripheries.
After the brief 'emotion' he'd come to label as 'surprise' at this New thing in His domain - or so He believed the darkness was as such - He quickly accepted its twisting pale shapes and multitudes of... bright... things that were somehow different from the darkness around him.
He was entranced, and, eventually, found that He could 'move' the 'picture' around if He really urged it to move.
After an unbelievably long time (classified as thousands of years to a member of the human race,) He noticed something changing.
Now there were larger shapes, similar in the... differentedness to the first shapes. These newer shapes created larger, more convoluted prisms and objects that had clear, shiny... things on the sides of them.
This happened four times, and at the end of the fourth time, the screen exploded.
"Oh dear," He thought to Himself. "Where did all of the pretty shapes go?"
And, after untold millennia of studying His photographic 'memory', he reached an answer. "This will not do at all," He mused to himself, finally mastering the complicated structure that was language. "I need to save those creatures!" Finally arriving at this conclusion, He devised a Plan and thought it. It happened.
He noticed something wrong with his plan after a little while. He thought the correction. It happened.
His last thought was ‘Huh. What is that curious sensation?’
Then he was gone – just another memory in the cosmic ocean of them.
“That’s not going to work.” He said for the fourth time in a row. The ‘he’ in question was Luke. He was floating four feet above my unmade bed and wore a skin tight white T-shirt and some black pants, but, as black as they were, his hair was blacker. He had red sneakers (comparable to metal when it’s really hot), and a long, sloping brow led your eyes down to his own mismatched eyes – one green and one brown – and then to his thin red lips. His nose was a little larger than average, but not by much.
“Shut up. I don’t care if it won’t work, I’m still trying.” I had awoken in this mansion fourteen weeks ago. Or maybe it was a castle – I couldn’t tell, the rooms were always switching themselves around. I had found my way to the rather spacious attic – all of it was one room – and had been sleeping in there for the past two nights. Luke was just some sixteen year old who had been following me for the past two and a half weeks. I wasn’t sure why.
“Still, it won’t work. Why don’t you sleep a little, you’ve been trying to do this for, like, the past day. I think. God, why did you have to hole up in a windowless room?” He asked me. I was using a hammer to batter at the wooden wall. "Those things aren't that disturbing."
The attic was crossed with numerous timbers, creating a sort of spider’s web that made it kind of hard to get from one end to the other. Both ends had doors, and, the day before, I’d woken up to see Luke walk through the back door only to come in through the front door. Apparently the same room can be moved so that it was connected to the exact same place or something like that in this forsaken mansion.
How had I even ended up in here, anyways? I’d gone to sleep that night and just awoken in here. The mansion had been a nightmare – the people that were in here with me were prone to be violent. I had no idea why. Maybe it was because of my appearance? For some reason, when I’d been transported to this place, I’d taken the form of a… werewolf? I stood on two legs and kind of resembled a wolf in the fact that I had a muzzle and claws and such. Maybe I simply freaked kids out or something.
Luckily, I had some serious strength and reflexes now that I was this… thing, so I was mostly unharmed by them. And they were deadly. I mean, this one kid could trap you in an alternate dimension just by taking a photograph of you. Her name had been Jekylls and she’d been insane. She’d also been my friend for the first six or seven days in the mansion. Then another one called Jeremy came along and severed her with a recorder – the instrument – just by pointing at her with it and playing it.
Then he had tried to kill me.
I was, of course, able to dodge and lost him through the maze of rooms. “Still, I don’t care. I am sick of this goddamned place. I am sick of waiting for my death. And do you really have to show off your gravity nullification powers? It distracts me.” I said to him, priming the iron hammer for yet another hit on the wall. I heard breathing come suddenly from behind me – sensitive ears – and whirled around, only to find Luke hovering about an inch above the ground and holding my hammer in his hand. He was strong – almost as strong as me.
“Stop wasting your energy. I’ve been here for almost a year.” He sighed and dropped the hammer.
Ugh, I thought to myself; seeing claws and my grey fur coating it still freaked me out.
“I know that there’s no escape aside from death. Right now.” He continued
I sighed as well.
Luke slowly drifted to the ground and walked back to my bed (I’d dragged it up with me,) lying down on his stomach and stretching out after yanking his sneakers off and pulling its white sheets over himself.
I stood there with a grimace. He was right; there was no escape from the prison. Prison. Was that what this place was? A containment building for people who were different? It seemed like everyone I’d met (including myself) had some strange ability or something… else.
Where was this place, anyways? The windows always looked out upon rolling hills somewhere on top of a cliff – you could see the tree coated, precarious drop off in the distance from some of the windows – that was blanketed by forest and jungle. Sometimes, I could see animals out there. Sometimes, they came up to the window. Sometimes, they weren’t animals.
Sometimes, they were blackened shells of humans, with gaping caves for mouths and eyes that glowed red like embers in a dying fire, their curled fingers melding together into some sort of blackened, charred glove that had some small semblance to a hand.
Sometimes they pounded the thin glass that separated them from us. Sometimes they opened their maws and sucked on it. They didn’t breathe – no breath fog ever coated the windows – but they did moan. Or we assumed – we never really heard them.
This lead to some disturbing thoughts – maybe the mansion was here to protect us from the world.
Perhaps it was here to protect the world from us.
Whatever the mansion’s purpose, it was still a prison.
Luke began snoring. It was a rather loud and ever so slightly unpleasant noise – a sort of reverberating cave grumble. Or maybe it was like an earthquake.
I sighed again and sat down, checking my black watch as I did so.
“Grr… three hours until the Change,” I said. “Why does it always take so long?” I stretched out on the cold wood floor and closed my eyes like Luke had suggested.
Unbidden, images flashed through my mind of Clara.
/\/\/\
Mem 2, 801,203 8:50 PM 375 Planet Side. Mansion 2, Sector A, Room 19.
“Twerp.” He said, before I shoved him off of me and through the dark opening that was a doorway on the other side of the room.
“Me: One. You: Zero.” I said to myself, slowly rising to my feet and brushing imaginary dirt off of my red shirt.
The room I was in was technically called the attic, but everyone else in the building simply called it ‘Room 19.’
Apparently, they’d received word from some sort of mystical human with a ‘long mustache’ that ‘The attic shalt be called Room Nineteen. Rabbits. Give me rabbits.’ This intrigued me, as the room had no relation to the number nineteen.
I had awoken in this place only a month ago. The soft light in my canopy top bedroom had slowly filtered itself away to the glaring midday sun that came through the window of this fortress’s observatory. I’d kept mostly to myself since then – I was… different. Everyone else was normal – they were giant wolf like creatures – but I was furless and pale, with only a small bit of hazel colored hair on the top of my head. Plus, I had long and limber limbs that stretched out and had little muscle on them, blue eyes instead of the normal – yellow or green – and, the worst, I had a small triangular protrusion coming out of my face, unlike the normal extension that all Wolfen had. If I was not a Wolfen, why, oh why, did I have the memories of one?
I lived – past tense – in a tall tree house, like every other Wolfen in this Mansion. I remember having a tail, fur, teeth, even my hair was Wolfen in aspect.
So what happened?
“We’ve seen one like you before.” One of the respected Wolfen had told me, before proceeding to say, “He disappeared. Just like you will.”
That was about a week ago. The grey beast had then tried to kill me with incredibly hot hands that had glowed red, then white, while he’d swiped at me.
I’d escaped by making him so dense that he literally collapsed in on himself – not black-hole style, it was instead, to put it nicely, a rather gory sight. Before then, I hadn’t known about my ‘ability’ as the others called them. But I knew about it now.
The Wolfen that had just attacked me had kept muttering things about ‘The group.’ And ‘Kill them all.’ Or something of that sort. I, of course, had activated my power and reduced him to a whimpering mess on the floor. He’d not been as weakened as I’d believed, though, so he’d leapt up at me and shoved me to the ground before I’d been able to decrease his density and hurl him through the door. And he’d called me the twerp! Unbelievable.
The attic was a mess of different assorted bed mattresses, dolls, and floating candles that glowed without fires. What wasn’t covered with one of those things was, instead, covered in broken wooden beams and uprooted beige carpeting.
It was one of the most horrifying rooms I have ever been in – but it had its uses. Like hiding. Or practicing my ability.
“Hey… where am I?” Came from someone to my left all of the sudden.
A robust Wolfen wearing a black T-shirt with some god forsaken band’s logo printed on it crawled out of the door that had just appeared there, collapsing on a red mattress that was conveniently in his way.
As he rolled over the mattress and into better lighting, I could see that he was, in fact, not a Wolfen. He… he looked like me.
“Woah!” I screamed, jumping back and tripping over what I presumed to be a wooden beam. I fell down and hit my head on something hard, passing into the non-blissful realm of unconsciousness.
“Ergh…” I yawned, slowly awakening from my prolonged nap. Luke was already up and standing on the ceiling, staring up at me.
I jumped up and yelled at him.
“DON’T DO THAT!”
He just calmly… looked down at me. His eyes were still closed, though.
He was obviously sleepwalking or something…
“This can not get any creepier,” I said to him, “Without Kalycko bursting in here or something.” Luke calmly stood there and ‘watched’ me as I moved around. It was… really creepy. I eventually left the attic, hoping that The Change had occurred already.
It had.
The left door led me into a small room that was painted light blue – cyan – all over and had a small iron hatch on the floor. The iron hatch, upon closer investigation, presented itself to be locked with a silvery padlock that required some sort of small key to open it.
I’d never seen the room before, and I’d explored the place inside and out. First sleepwalking (and Uber Creepy) Luke, now this hitherto hidden room – perhaps I was dreaming? Perhaps not.
Although, coming to think of it, the room did seem a little fuzzy. And… was that a shower or a wall?
My eyes snapped open to the sound of Luke snoring gently and dangling his arm about an inch away from my head. He was floating himself three feet above the ground while asleep. Showoff.
My dream had encoded the real world situation into my sleep – how… interesting. I slowly slid back, under his arm and careful to not disturb him, and got up.
Oh gods my back hurts, I thought, stretching my arms above my head and attempting to not groan. My back finally popped and relieved the tension that had built up during my stay on the ground.
“’Morning…” Luke said, awakening at the disturbing sounds my back had made. He twisted himself around and levitated to his feet. “Sleep well?” He asked me, motioning to the floor.
“What do you think?” I asked in reply. “And… why do you follow me, anyways?”
He shrugged.
That was all that I ever got – noncommittal shrugs or grunts. I wasn’t going to push him for an answer. Yet.
“I think it just Changed a few minutes ago,” Luke said to me, motioning to a door on my left. “You know, if you want to get out of the attic or something ridiculous like that.”
I remembered something about a door from my dream. Something about that door – the one Luke had motioned to. Was someone Else trying to tell me something? Was another being trying to influence my thoughts with his ability?
There was no way to know. Perhaps the room behind the door would hold something like the hatch I’d seen – maybe it was a trap.
That, however, was something that I didn’t have to just wonder about, and, so thinking, I calmly walked over to the door and opened it.
“Hello! Glad you could join us!” A starry faced reptile thing in a green dress said to me, pulling me into the room. Everything went black as I fainted.
/\/\/\
Mem. 4 801,203 376 2:33 AM planet side. Mansion 3, Sector A, Room 21.
I awoke in the small room. The roof, as always, was almost as low as my head. The entire area was painted sickly shades of brown that were not all that unlike a dog's diarrhea after, perhaps, some sort of beige paint binge. It wasn't too terribly sickening, though. The smell couldn't have been more unlike a dog's diarrhea - minty and fresh, permeated by occasional pangs of rosemary, and/or cooking jasmine rice.
I rose from my uncomfortable position on the carpet and yawned.
"Good morning, world!" I said, mentally sighing to see that I was, in fact, still alive. "I wonder what pointless BS you'll do today!"
I looked back at the miniature oak door - it was a little smaller than me. It was, like everything else, a repulsive shade of beige. Where would it lead to today? Only one way to find out.
I crept over to the small frame so that anyone who was possibly on the other side wouldn’t know I was there until it was too late. The door swung open on well-oiled hinges to reveal the mansion's pantry. Joy.
At least there was no one trying to kill me right now. Not that they'd succeed; it was immortality’s only upside.
The pantry was filled with numerous, wide shelves - all of which were painted white and stacked high with cardboard boxes of various labels. Many of the boxes labeled 'Ramen' had been ripped apart half a year ago, leaving the marble floor covered in large brown swaths of cardboard and smaller plastic wrappings filled with multicolored labels and drawings of noodle bowls.
I bent down to study a smaller cardboard box that was stationed underneath one of the shelves. It was labeled only with the word, 'CAUTION' and nothing else.
"Caution what?" I said aloud to myself. Flaunting my immortality like some idiot god, I opened the package by turning it upside down and removing the clear pieces of tape on the (now) top flaps of the box.
"Nghh..." I groaned and forced my eyes open to see a large room that was filled with people. Well - not a lot of people, and none of them were 'human.'
"Good morning." A feminine voice said to me. "Welcome to... our group."
They were… humanoids, like me. That doesn’t mean that they were humans, though.
One was like a reptile - he reminded me of a raptor (the dinosaur kind) mixed with a human. Not surprisingly, he had no hair. He also had no protruding ears, at least not that I could see. He was, instead, covered in green scales and had bright red spikes down his back.
These were easily visible due to the fact that he wore no shirt.
Or pants.
Instead, he was wearing a small... leather loincloth? Ugh. It was brown and tied around his back, just above his tail.
The scales over his stomach were milky white – perhaps reflecting their softness? And he had some sort of… marking in the middle of it. The marking was kind of like half of a heart mixed with half of a dagger and smeared ever so slightly. Perhaps it was a tattoo?
Sitting on one of the room's two blue chairs was a guy covered in red-brown fur.
Just like me.
He glanced over at me as I stared at him. Contrary to the reptile/dinosaur/human thing, he had a lot of detail evident on him. His eyes were yellow, yellow like dandelions. His hands were long and tapered to the small black nails on the ends of his fingers. He had a long white mane that was reminiscent of a pony’s flock of hair running down the back of his head and underneath his solid leaf green t-shirt. He wore long shorts that were light blue and had white palm leaf imprints over them. It took me a second to realize that they were made out of swimming trunk fabric and were, therefore, most likely a pair of swimming trunks.
“Yo’ dude.” He said to me, bumping his head up a little bit.
I glanced at the probable source of the female voice – the reptile girl thing that had pulled me in. I could tell she was a girl for fairly obvious reasons. Her scales were blue, and, not surprisingly, I suppose, she was wearing an actual shirt – pink – and had some blue jeans on. She didn’t have spikes, but, instead, she had one single giant spike near the top of her back. It was a slightly lighter shade of blue than her regular ‘skin.’ She had crystal blue eyes and an aura of optimism.
“You… uh, you fainted or something.” She said to me, holding her hand out. I hadn’t realized that I was on the ground until then, so I gratefully accepted here hand. She lifted me up with surprising strength for her small frame.
“Um. Erg! It’s really awkward when we integrate new members into this group thing,” she said, looking down at her feet (which were like human’s feet apart for the fact that they were blue, scaly, and had white claws instead of toenails.)
“Sorry, dude, Tiffers gets nervous around new people.” The other wolf guy said to me as I stood there awkwardly looking at ‘Tiffers.’
“Ah. Um… well… what do you want me for?” I asked them, looking around the room (it was painted red and had a yellow carpet. The furniture – two loveseats covered in plush fabric and one long couch coated in leather substitute – was all blue) for Luke. Despite us being unwitting acquaintances, he had been with me for a while.
“Where is that guy that I came in here with?” I asked, screwing my face in a slightly puzzled manner.
“He’s human.” The girl said, snapping her head back up and regarding me with suddenly threateningly cold eyes.
“Humans aren’t allowed here.” She said to me.
I gulped. Surely they hadn’t… killed him, had they?
“HEY!” I yelled, banging my fists against the door the scaly had just sucked Jake through. Despite my strength, it was no use.
“Gods! And they wondered why I was always such a pessimistic person.” I muttered aloud to myself, slinking down to the bottom of the door and listening to murmurs. The one thing I had actually liked in this place.
No – not ‘thing’ but ‘person,’ and ‘place.’
The one thing that I had wanted for the past three years of my life was to draw furries perfectly. Then I up and appeared in this hellhole. I had thought about committing suicide, but Jake’s serendipitous appearance had prevented that – I had only wanted to have talent in drawing, but a live furry just appeared in the one place that I would have hated but for him.
I didn’t mind that he barely noticed me. He didn’t mind me stalking him.
And now he was gone – vanished into another room with a locked door and…
“That was a scaly.” I said. The thought sunk into my mind.
Holy crap. There are more like him…
A smile began to grace my lips until I realized that Jake was unique and not some trading card that I could mess around with until I got bored of it.
The murmurs stopped in the room behind me; the door swung open.
“Huh,” I said, standing up and looking behind me. The room that was there now was not the room that had been there. It wasn’t really a room at all, actually.
It was just darkness. Oh, and a rather bedraggled zombie-like human.
“Oh. Hi there. Do you want to kill me?” His ragged voice permeated the darkness as I strained to make out the details of his ragged clothing on his ragged body.
“Heh. I guess not.” I said to the man standing in the pool of light outside of the darkness that had eaten me.
It had started with my foot and wound its way up my leg, eventually engulfing my entire lower body. It gave me a strange sense of disconnection. After another minute or so, I was immersed in it and felt a tug in my gut. Then nothing.
Not even an emotion.
Then the man had opened a doorway of light into the space I was in, blinding me enough so that I couldn’t make anything about him out. Maybe it was a girl.
“Erm… hi?” Yes. His voice made me certain that the man was a male human.
“Oh dear. It talks. This cannot be good at all,” I tittered to myself.
“Do you want to talk to Mr. Squiggles? He’s my pet –“ Titter, “- Sandwich. Don’t worry – if you are nice to him, he won’t eat you and regurgitate you for his babies,” I said. “Maybe.”
“Erm.” The man quickly shut the door. I could hear him shoving something onto it.
Good. That would take care of him, I thought to myself, and continued trying to deduce where I was.
/\/\/\
Mem. 5, 801,202 2 12:59 AM planet side. Mansion 3, Sector A, Room 1.
“Okay…” I said, distrustful of Elagio’s ideas.
“No, really! It should shatter the glass and… well, freedom!” He said, smiling. His face was basically a bucket of sunshine mixed with rainbow unicorns and little girls’ birthday cakes.
Okay, not literally. His face was, in reality, simply prone to over exaggerating his emotions. Not that I minded. He was good company, especially in this… this… well, this place we were in.
Elagio was tall for his age, not that someone at his age grew anymore; he was nineteen. And he was the nicest nineteen year old guy that I have ever known.
We had just met yesterday, yet I had already taken a liking to him.
He wore a Mariner’s baseball cap around, as well as a white t-shirt and blue sport’s shorts. He had really muscular legs, and he’d told me that he could do four hundred sit ups in a row. His biceps were bulgy, too, but, surprisingly, he was not tan. He was extremely pale and had blue eyes – definitely not the normal ‘jock stereotype.’
And he wasn’t a jock. He’d never touched a football in his life.
I didn’t know what he did. I didn’t care.
He seemed to enjoy my company.
“You know, I’ve never seen your hair!” I said, giggling as he shrugged and took his hat off to reveal dirty blond hair that stood straight up in a buzz cut sort of way. Then he put his hat back on.
“I got this haircut, like, three days ago…” He trailed off and realized, once again, where he was.
“Do… do you think we’ll ever get out of here?” He asked, shoulders slumped down.
I nodded. “Just fire that… thing up.” I motioned over to the metal device that had so many wires over it that it looked like my hair in the morning. Elagio and I had built it – well, Elagio had told me where to put everything. I really had no idea what it did other than break things.
We’d dragged it into the kitchen today. It had taken two days to build, the first day we were here, and yesterday.
Yesterday, though, we’d awoken to find all of the rooms in the building moved around into different places!
What had led to the bathroom yesterday morning now led to the kitchen. Luckily, we’d slept in the same room as our machine, so we hadn’t lost it in the middle of the night.
I sighed. The kitchen was a wreck – the counters were arranged like a backwards F and had hotdogs and celery out all over them, not to mention buns for the hotdogs, ketchup for the hotdogs, and Ranch dressing for the celery.
The floor was covered in half dried milk that was starting to smell, and the stainless steel, two sided sink had been filled with – get this – potato peelings.
It was not pretty.
The walls were smeared with mashed potatoes (I thought) and burnt garlic hung down from the red ceiling. The ceiling was most likely not naturally red.
We’d come to the conclusion that a seventeen foot tall giant had teleported into this room yesterday and couldn’t teleport out. So he pulled random assorted vegetables and disgusting other things out of the numerous drawers that were now scattered around the floor and smashed them together. Then he’d taken the stainless steel fridge, ripped it out of the wall outlet, and poured everything into his mouth – some of the stuff didn’t make it, though, and he had hated the hotdogs because he was a vegetarian (or something.)
Then he’d escaped by fixing his teleportation device and teleporting out of the room.
A few gremlins came pouring in from the giant oven that was right next to the sink and put the fridge back in its place after taking potatoes out of the drawers and skinning them with their bare claws. They’d found the tomatoes’ hideout and, fearing mutiny from the hidden fruits, smashed them to bits on the ceiling before finally torching the rest of the garlic for conspiring against them with the tomatoes.
They left them hanging on the ceiling in order to deter more vegetable mutiny.
We’d had a good laugh coming up with that little story, actually. We really had no idea what the hell had happened to this place.
I looked back over to Elagio. He was standing stock-still and sweating.
Something moved out of my periphery. I glanced over to see…
“OH MY GOD!” I screamed, ducking down so that I wouldn’t have to see the horrible twisted and burnt remains of some sort of… semi-humanoid creature that was clawing at the window and staring into our souls with its lava-like eyes of death and destruction.
“Um,” Elagio said, finally getting down with me onto the disgusting floor. “I think we should dismantle the machine. That glass seems to be keeping us from being slaughtered right now.” His voice trembled.
Elagio looked at me like I was insane. “Are you sure that he won’t be able to get us up here?”
I looked at him in a sideways sort of way.
“…No. But… there’s a good chance that he won’t be able to track us through that twisted path I lead you through,” I said to him. “At the very most, he’ll get to the farmhouse thingy. That river should’ve totally wiped our scents.”
Elagio shuddered.
“That thing… ugh. Half wolf, half man… why? Why are we here?” His usual optimism had diminished to nothingness.
The attic was a large room, stretching across the entire width of the mansion/building – or so we assumed. It had two doors, one at each end. Both of them thick and oaken.
Neither of them with locks.
“We’ll hole up in here for a while. Maybe he’ll be bored with us after some time?” I said to him, sitting down.
“CLOSE THE DOOR, SARAH!” Elagio yelled at me, as if I wasn’t already racing for it.
But I wasn’t fast enough – Yerelmew was already opening the massive mahogany double doors that lead into the giant ballroom of sorts.
I screamed as his white, furry arm came into view. As well as his… hands. His hands with their deadly heat and black, terrifying claws.
Then everything stopped.
Stopped, like… like the clock that governed the smallest units of time had just broken.
Everything faded to black and white. The foldable chairs that were surrounding me stopped falling down as I pushed them, but, instead, moved as if they were in zero gravity – linearly floating through air.
“Erm…?” I said. The sound I emitted was nothing like ‘Erm.’
It was more like ‘Uh…’ but carrying on for a lifetime. And the sound stayed in place even as I moved.
So… sound didn’t travel like they should… light seemed to be screwed up…
And then there was only Elagio, standing with his machinations. Even in this situation, I marveled at how skilled he was with mechanics – all three of his robots were sentient and powered with air. They were clones of each other, albeit they were each in a different color scheme. One was red, another was green, and the third was a sort of tan brown.
They, and Elagio, were all that stood between Ramsee and The Heart.
We were in the mansion’s kitchen. Again. Just like that day that it all started, so long ago now. The horrendous mess that had been littered throughout the entire room had mysteriously vanished by this time, and the shelves had been restocked with herbs of all kinds (my mind identified garlic, sage, and dill pickle) as well as vegetables. The fridge, however, had been replaced with a cheese cabinet that was mysteriously empty. And the counters had rearranged themselves into an upside down L formation, each end pointing towards one of the doors of the room.
Ramsee was, per usual, clothed in a black robe that seemed to be a part of him. The clothing completely obscured his face, leaving the only skin visible that of his hands.
Erg. His hands.
They were creepier than Yeremy’s instruments of death (aka his clawed, furred, paws)
They formed sharp spikes instead of normal fingers; they were red like the tomatoes in the cupboard behind him. And his fingernails were long, disturbing protrusions of the sort that gave you nightmares.
He was unkillable.
“Ramsee… why are you doing this?” Elagio yelled at him. I was still lying, stunned, on the ground.
Ramsee had played a tape of what sounded like mathematical equations… and I’d been rendered weaker than a baby.
Seriously, I could barely breathe. Elagio – he’d wanted to help me, but The Heart was more important than either of us.
“Why should I not do anything? Power power power! Power!” Ramsee hung his head, a ghostly trail of laughter escaped from his veil and chilled me to my bones.
“He he he he…” Ramsee said, grasping something within his garb.
“Here’s a gift from… Clara!” He yelled, throwing an invisible force against Elagio and his machinations (they were skinny creations, with steam pipes protruding from every possible place on there bodies. For all that, though, they were humanoid in nature and shape.)
The steambots (as Elagio called them) exploded in showers of superheated dihydrogen monoxide, obscuring my vision, as Elagio flew backwards onto a counter. I heard a yell, and everything began to fade to blackness.
[ERROR: Mem. 5 has become too corrupt after this point to translate accurately. What follows is a rough interpretation.]
[As of 801,204 454, 9:52 PM galaxy wide correspondence, this memory has been REDACTED.]
My steambots exploded as Elagio threw something at us, and their steam exploded outwards in violent force. It clouded my vision as I flew through the air, skidded across one of the marble countertops, and slammed into the window that was right next to the door to The Heart.
The Heart. A mystery wrapped in an enigma coated with intricate designs and puzzles, all part of a grand riddle.
The Heart. My worst enemy… yet something I needed even now. Something we all needed.
“Ela…g…” I heard Sarah’s voice from somewhere to my right.
Then… silence.
The steam was suddenly gone, and so were my steambots. Elagio was no where to be seen, and…
“Sarah?!” I yelled, getting up and wincing in the pain that pierced my back suddenly. “Ergghh…” I whimpered, noticing that nothing… nothing was left of our battle just a few minutes previously.
Where were they? Had Sarah frozen time and abducted Elagio? But… I thought that Elagio had disabled her with some crazy sounding magic spell.
She must have gone out of this room… I thought to myself, realizing the implications.
Her ability came with a limitation – she couldn’t travel outside of the room she was in without severely weakening herself. And if she had already been weakened…
I stumbled through the top door, to find myself in the Grand Hallway – a long corridor that was lit with numerous rather luminescent orbs that floated close to the ceiling and had at least five doors lining it, all labeled with a number followed by a letter followed by another number. It had a red carpet of ambiguous design on the ground, and the walls were painted an off color of white.
If Sarah had taken Elagio somewhere, she would have dragged him through here… and returned in order to not be killed instantly by him. However… that would lead to -
I glanced to my right, only to see Sarah collapsing inwards on herself – trapped in a different time zone for her eternity, yet dissolving to darkness in my time zone.
“No!” I screamed, watching the last portion of her pale face collapsing into that odd shade of blackness that existed only in the absence of everything.
Her blue eyes were the last things I ever saw of her.
“So…” I started, staring at the furry grey mammal that had just fainted in our doorway. He was wearing a red, short sleeved shirt and long blue jeans that (somehow) allowed his long light grey tail to pour out.
He looked similar in physique and attributes to Clarence.
“So what?” Clarence said, like he’d read my mind. Or maybe he was just responding to me.
“So… you’re the smart one. What should we do?” I asked him in a slightly mocking manner.
Clarence was a Wolfen, and proudly displayed this through his covering of red-brown fur, longish snout, and ears. Not to mention his long white mane that stood up from behind his neck all the time, and perky ears that stretched out in reminiscent nostalgia of his wolf ancestry. He seemed to think that swimming trunks were cool; the pair he wore was icy blue, with white… leaf imprints over them. Why he would choose such a design was beyond me, as leaves were so rare and… uncouth. They were nature’s dirty little gift to Reptians like me.
His shirt was a mossy color of green, kind of like the fern leaves of my native habitat yet somehow utterly unlike them.
“Dude. Chill. He’ll awaken soon enough. I think. Tiffers,” He looked over to Tiffers in order to procure confirmation.
Tiffers was a Palatican, and covered in pale blue scales to prove it. She also had the scariest yet most calming ice cold blue eyes that I had ever seen. Her fin stuck out from her currently pink shirt (why, oh why, did everyone else have to wear one of those disgusting things? Always grabbing your body as if it owned it…)
She was rather curvy – curvier than most other Palaticans. Not that I cared…
“Yeah, yeah. He’ll be fine. Must’ve... been shocked.” She said. “Who was that… human out there?” Her humanoid hand (oddly, considering that she’d evolved completely and utterly separately from humans) motioned towards the door that she’d slammed into his face. I had only gotten a glimpse of him but he’d seemed to be black haired, and disgustingly pale, like all humans.
Blegh, humans. The most vile creatures to have ever walked on Earth. Always trying to kill each other or some other innocent creature.
We’d learned about them in history class. Apparently, they’d once dominated the planet that we lived on. But then they’d all left (after, of course, destroying its native life and decimating its atmosphere.) to go colonize some other place, and good riddance.
Some of them stayed behind – no one knew why, but rumors had been running that they’d been conducting research on genetic sequences and modification, in order to combat the world’s climate (and decidedly human-antagonistic animals) through controlled evolution.
Or so the grapevine had said a few days before… I arrived here. What was going on back home? I assumed that this mansion (nightmare) that we’d appeared in was on another planet, hence the lack of my species or humans with us. And the non-lack of burnt up monsters of terrifying death and doom.
But… where had Palaticans come from? Were they aliens from another planet, sent here by whatever cosmic force sent me and everyone else? And Wolfen… where did they come from?
And why was everyone… humanoid? Why could I understand the aliens?
“-ello?” Cut through my frantic thought processes. “Dude. You zoned out. Again.” Clarence had come over to me from his corner in the wall and was attempting to distract me by waving his arm in front of me.
“… You’re still no-“
“WHAT?!” I yelled at him, annoyed that he’d cut off my stream of consciousness. “I was getting closer and closer to the truth behind this annoying hunk of unbreakable wood, idiot.”
“Hey, hey, hey. I know you guys aren’t in love, but no need to kill each other every time you happen to glance at one another in the same second.” Tiffers cut in, standing between us for good measure.
“Right. Right right right,” I said. “Um. We need to work together. That’s right.”
“Yes. How else are we going to escape from these mansions?” Tiffers said, nodding in my direction. She was always trying to be the voice of reason – and she was fairly good at it.
The fact that she could make an army to kill you in about five seconds probably helped too.
Tiffers could bring any object that was smaller that her… to life. The inanimate-animate objects were loyal to her (if not completely bound to follow her orders) and would protect her to death.
You did not want to confront her in a kitchen – sharp knives plus intelligence plus method of movement plus you equals instant death.
“Plus, those humans are always scheming against us – I don’t know how we would have survived without you telling us about the dirty creatures,” Tiffers said just to me.
Meanwhile, whilst this had been happening, the door had been making odd noises, as if it was being hit.
“Clarence, play the tape for this room. Move it to… um… move it to limbo,”
Clarence pulled a palm sized black rectangular prism out of his pocket. It looked rather like one of the ‘cellphone’ things that we were taught about in Human History class – but those were incredibly ineffective. Mass communication teleportation devices (Madies) were far more effective, as they transferred your thoughts and understanding directly to another person, allowing for instant communication and linking of ideals.
He wacked the thing against his leg, causing it to emit a high pitched squeal before saying something like “Function X, X and three minus B Change over X and X, plot point and end function at second point.”
Ginko was… weird. But he was effective.
There was a loud whirring noise and the room shook slightly. Then there was silence.
“Okay…?” I said, trying to wrap my head around what was just said.
Tiffers, with the help of Shikes (the raptor dude) had just finished explaining a bunch of history about humanity to me. I, meanwhile, had been utterly and completely confused. Humans… I used to be human, but…
We hadn’t evacuated Earth, the sun wasn’t slowly blowing up due to failed science experiments, and the galaxy was not populated with humans trying to kill eachother.
It sounded like they’d made up a future for humanity in general.
And where had they come from? A reptile girl – I didn’t think that we had those on Earth – and another reptile guy…
Not to mention the furred beast over there, still on his chair. He was like me, yet had no memories of being human, at least, none that I could see from what he’d told me.
In fact… they seemed pretty racist (speciest?) against humans. This meant that I’d have to keep my human memories a secret, lest they try to murder me in my sleep.
See, I’d decided to stay with them, even if only because they had accepted me as a ‘Wolfen’ as Clarence called us.
Although I didn’t think I was really Wolfen – I had human memories…
But what if whatever or whoever teleported me here… had switched my memories with someone else?
“Right. It’s seven seven, now,” Tiffers said after checking her blue wristwatch (hitherto unnoticed by me) “Or, at least, it is by galaxy wide time. I think… let’s see…” She fiddled with two or three buttons on the side closest to me.
“Mmm… yeah, it’s… woah.” Tiffers said. “PLAY THE TAPE! CLARENCE! MOVE US TO ROOM ZED NOW!” She began screaming.
“Hehehe…” I giggled to myself, groping the darkness for the glass sphere that I knew was there somewhere.
I had gone to sleep after deducing my location through a few tricks I’d learned during my thousands of years of existence, like feeling the fabric of reality around me, or deducing my location in space and time. Through those methods, I had found myself in Room zero, informally known as The Heart of the mansion.
I had slept like a cockroach in a dumpster for once.
“Yes yes yes… yes.” I muttered to myself, mentally checking the time again.
Seven o’ seven AM planet side. And galaxy wide, too.
The Coincidence had arrived. Which meant…
“Oh!” I said, bumping into the invisible glass orb that was at the exact center of the mansion.
I had fled into the next room, afraid that the insane guy in the weird… darkness would break through the door and try to kill me with ‘Squiggles’ or something.
I had found myself in the kitchen (very nice, Japanese style, the L shaped countertop was crafted from bamboo, and the sink was made of hollow bamboo too. All of the bamboo stuff was light brown, and had a stringy texture to it. There was also metal box (most likely a fridge) in the corner near the sink.) and looked around in the fridge (which was empty,) which led me to root around in the numerous cupboards beneath the counter and find quite a few tomatoes.
Tomatoes were disgusting.
I ate them anyways.
Then I went to sleep, only to be awoken by a deep rumbling throughout the entire mansion as… something halted.
A feeling ran through me, one that I couldn’t adequately explain. It was… negative, and kind of like desolation.
I checked the wall clock – a large white circle with a black plastic borderline on it that was mounted on the wall, directly above the door I’d come in from – and it’d said seven o’ seven and thirty seven seconds after.
“Oh dear.” I said, noticing the second hand slowing down and stopping at the forty and three second mark.
“What…?” I asked myself, walking to the door that would take me back to the attic – I had a feeling that the creepy insane man that I’d seen last night had something to do with the rumbling and the loss of power to the clock. Or… clocks.
In fact, it seemed to be slightly colder in here – was the mansion heated? Was all the power fading?
I opened the (bamboo) door to see a swirling back vortex of nothingness at my feet.
I loudly swore and slammed the door shut, stumbling back towards the window.
I said a very bad word in order to articulate my anger at having been thwarted.
The Coincidence… why had I forgotten to check an hour ago? I had known it was coming up today and that it began either the end… or the beginning.
And now we were stuck out in… god knows where.
“Tiffers…” Clarence started, hitting another black case against his leg. “It won’t work.”
I looked at him. I looked at the floor.
“There’s… something I should tell you. Well, I should have told you.” I started in a rather sorrowful way.
“Do you remember Aeonic?” I asked him.
“…Who?” Clarence and the new guy – Jake – said at the same time. Shikes simply shook his head and sat down on the floor, next to where Jake was sitting.
“I didn’t think so. He… erased your memories.” I said. “Remember the day we met?”
Clarence smiled, “Yeah, and I tried to kill you in the kitchen?” His laugh trailed off. “Why?”
“Um… we didn’t actually meet that day. I had known you for a few weeks before then. But we met Aeonic, and he… he erased your memories because, apparently, the path we were going down would lead us to destruction. Then he told me that we had to stop someone on The Coincidence… which just happened a few seconds ago. And we didn’t stop anyone.” A sigh escaped my mouth.
“What? I… this sounds made up. Why didn’t you tell us before?” Shikes joined in.
“I couldn’t. He told me that if I told you before The Coincidence, well, you’d be killed.” I sighed again, and looked at my feet. Jake was looking at me with a puzzled expression on his face.
“Was… wait… you had to stop someone?” He asked me.
“Yes. Someone who was immortal and wanted to steal some power or something from the mansion thing we are – well… were – in.” Jake laughed.
“The only reason I’m kind of believing you is because we were teleported here by something or someone and have strange abilities that we use to kill other people. If that wasn’t true… heh, yeah.” Jake said. Clarence nodded in agreement.
Shikes rolled his eyes and said, “So… due to your forgetfulness, we’ve doomed everything or something?”
I laughed in bitterness. “Yeah. I guess. And… I don’t think we can get back to the mansion right now.”
Clarence glared at me in his own special sort of way – peering into my soul and searching for something.
“Right. Heh, you know, you’re not the only one with secrets.” He grabbed the air above him and pulled a head sized, white glass ball that seemed to suck the light of the room into it.
What the?! I hid my surprise well, and apparently so did Shikes. Jake, though, he gasped and sputtered.
“How… what?! Where’d you get that?! How did you… ugh! I give up.” He said, pointing at the thing and hanging his head in frustration.
Clarence snorted and grinned.
“A girl with blue eyes gave this to me two days ago. She told me that I would need it. Then she dissolved into dust. I’d forgotten about it until just now – I had actually thought it to be a dream.” He looked back down at it in his hands. “Actually, I’m not sure that it isn’t a dream still. Pinch me, someone.”
Shikes punched him in the snout.
“OW! Dude! What the hell?!” He fell back onto the ground, spilling the glass orb onto the carpet.
“What? I thought you wanted me to punch you.” He said, winking at me.
“Stop it. STOP IT!” I yelled. “Don’t you understand what is going on? We could be stuck here! You transported us into Limbo, Clarence, and we might not be able to get out again.”
Jake had gotten up and was now at the door. “Limbo?” He opened it up, only to find a solid wall of darkness beyond it. Occasional auric blots of light would appear and then fade to pixilated motes before disappearing completely.
“Woah.” He said, stepping back. “We are stuck.”
Shikes looked guilty for the first time since we’d met. Clarence held his ball close to him and sighed.
“Well… I guess that… um…” I started.
“Shut up, Tiffers. You’re always trying to be democratic. But look what you’ve gotten us into now. And you didn’t even tell us what was going on until just freaking now. I thought that we were a group, that we were here for each other! Yet… I knew I shouldn’t have trusted you.” Shikes walked towards the door and Jake, opened it, and stepped out.
“SHIKES!” I stared at him, waiting for him to fall to his death in the Void of Limbo. He didn’t. He just stood there.
“What? Can’t you guys see this?” He said, motioning towards what he was standing/floating on.
“See… what?” I asked him.
He sighed.
“The floor. What? Do you see, like, a black expanse of nothingness that would kill me if I fell through it? I’m not suicidal, and, although you did mislead us, I don’t think that we should split up. I’m upset, but… well, we’ve been through too much just to break up because of one mistake – no matter how big – on your part.” He sighed again.
“Plus, if you died, I wouldn’t be very happy. Yes, I would care if you died too, Clarence.” He said.
Wow. That was the most I had ever heard him say at once.
And… did he just admit that he and Clarence were kind of friends? Was I dead?
“So… come on, people. We’ve got to see if we can find anything out here to help us. The room will be easy to find again.”
I tentatively took a step towards the door, only to be shoved out of the way by Clarence.
“What are you trying to do here?” He said to Shikes. Jake was slowly edging away from both of them, and Clarence was slowly edging towards Shikes.
“Trying to do… what are you talking about? I’m trying to save us.” He said, leveling his gaze with Clarence.
“Right. Sure you are. You, you… you of all people. You shouldn’t… she… but… she lied to us, you… how?” He stammered, losing steam as he began to realize that he really had nothing to put against Shikes.
“She lied, yeah, but we’re a group. You kept something from us. Does that mean that I should hate you? I mean, I kind of hate you, but you’re part of the group. So I can’t hate you. It’s called putting aside differences for the good of the whole.” He said, looking at the ‘ground.’
Jake was standing beside me. “What the hell is going on?” He whispered to me as Clarence stared at Shikes.
“I… I don’t really know. All that I am sure of is that this room is stuck in Limbo because of me, and we might be able to escape out there, by walking.” I said to him.
Clarence took a tentative step outside of the doorframe, wobbled a bit on the darkness outside, and yelled, “It’s safe, I think.” To us.
“Hey. Tiffers. I think… look at this.” I’d been screwing around with my glass orb for a while, as we walked around in Limbo and looked for some way out. We’d really just been slowly spiraling outwards from our room. It was only a few hundred feet away, but barely visible in the gloom, albeit the fact that it was the only source of light for possibly miles in any direction.
The ‘ground’ was soft and spongy beneath me, like I was walking on a spider’s web. It also freaked me out – what if it crumbled beneath me and I began falling for all eternity?
Anyways, I had been fooling around with the sphere (which had actually become a light source in the darkness) when I’d noticed a slight crack in it – so faint that I had to run my fingers over it numerous times in order to make sure that I wasn’t just imagining it.
I held the cube out to Tiffers and had her feel the part where the crack was.
“Woah. What… what do you think that could be?” She said to me.
Jake came up from behind me, and Shikes stood at the front of us impatiently tapping his foot.
“Gimme,” Jake said, forcibly taking it from me – he was freakishly strong, I noticed.
“Hey…! Be careful. It could be a nuclear device.” I said to him as he felt for the crack and poked at it with his claw.
“Huh.” He said, as a small rectangular prism popped out of the side he’d poked. It seemed to be a compartment for… something.
“Give me your… that rectangle black thingy,” He said.
Of course! I thought to myself. Gods, I’m an idiot. Still… why would it accept just that? I pulled it out of my pocket and gave it to him.
The black thing didn’t fit (it was really hard to see in the blackness, too.)
I mean, it was too small.
Jake grinned, put it in, and slammed the compartment shut anyways.
A high pitched whining noise pierced the darkness. “Function X, X and Y minus ACBD Change over X and X, plot point and end function at second point.”
“Wha-“ Jake said, looking at me and disappearing in a flash of white light.
“Oh my go-“ Tiffers – the closest person to him said before disappearing in a flash of white light as well.
Then it was my turn – I began to feel really warm. Until, that is, I suddenly felt very cold as the darkness around me coalesced into… a kitchen. It had counter tops that were made of bamboo and a large metal box (most likely one of those human things – a refreezingerator or something like that.)
There was also one of those disgusting creatures in here as well. A split second after I arrived, I realized that he was the guy that had tried to get into the room we’d been in earlier.
He had really dark hair that was… kind of combed in a sort of… it was like… well, it looked like a spike – kind of. Not really. Not like that ridiculous hair style that some of us Wolfen had were we would grow our hair out and then put it in some sort of unicorn spike thing. More like a straight, neatly combed spike that ran down his head. He also had mismatched eyes – his left one was green and his right one was brown – and thin red lips. He was really muscular for a human, though.
I appeared in a bamboo kitchen – like, all of the counters were made of bamboo and organized in an L shape.
And Luke was there too.
“Jake!” He said, running over to me and awkwardly hugging me.
“Erm. Yeah. Hi.” I pried him off with one arm, holding the ball in the other.
“The… there’s blackness… how did you…?” He stuttered.
“I don’t know. This ball did something, though, and teleported me here.”
“Woah – that… that looks like a Mansion Heart. Where’d you get that?” He asked me. “Never mind that – I think… I think someone has broken the Mansion Heart that runs this place – everything has begun to break down and it is beginning to get really cold in here.”
I noticed that he was shivering, now. “Yeah. Um. What is a Mansion Heart and why have I never heard of it before?”
Then the ball in my hand began to vibrate and radiate a bright aura of light then.
“What the heck?” He asked me, looking at it.
The compartment I’d slid the black (tape?) into slowly emerged from the sphere. Then I realized that it was… different.
It looked skinnier, and had a hole at the end of it that was completely black.
Smoke emanated from the hole, and the thing spun around in my hands until I was forced to let it go – but instead of falling, it flew directly towards Luke, passed through him without damaging him, and then phased through the door that had been behind him.
A moment later, the clock on the wall behind Luke began to make a ticking noise, apparently starting up again.
It jerked forwards to seven o’ nine and twelve seconds, then began to run normally.
“Huh.” I said, sitting down on the counter behind me.
“So, what happened?” Luke asked me. And that’s what I was telling him about – at least, until Clarence barged into the room with a flash of light and nearly backed into me in order to not get near the human.
/\/\/\
Mem. 13, 801,203 523 7:30 AM planet side. Mansion 3, Sector A, Room 20.
“Woah.” I said, wobbling a bit as I materialized in a medium sized room with a domed ceiling and a door that was made of glass. It wasn’t a square room, but was, instead, cylindrical. The walls were painted brow-gold, while the ceiling was… well, painted. It was painted with… stars, constellations, galaxies. Whatever you wanted to call them. In fact, there was a metal cylinder that looked an awful lot like a telescope outside of the glass door.
There was an oaken desk that was overflown with numerous large books that were all on astronomy, many of which looked as though they weighed twenty or thirty pounds, and all of which had many yellow note paper things sticking out of them at various points. Next to the desk was an empty bookshelf. Both of them were made of a dark, hard looking wood, and the bookcase had numerous pull out shelves that resembled the ones I had designed for my job, back on Earth.
The floor was tiled with… marble? Yeah, the tiles were yellow marble slabs, and they cut off abruptly in a circular design near the middle of the room, presumably a staircase or something.
I noticed that there was a small pocket book opened on the desk, opened to a page with a green note card instead of a yellow one.
“Huh.” I said to myself, wondering where the hell I was exactly.
Looking at the book, I realized that it was actually a diary and… today was apparently day 523.
“Holy crap,” I said. “That’s… what, a hundred and fifty days…”
“Wait… what? We shouldn’t be here…” Someone said – a girl, most likely. In fact…
I spun around to see Tiffers standing in a halo of light.
“Um. Yeah, so… what do we do now?” I asked her, completely and utterly puzzled.
“Wait,” She said very calmly, before disappearing in a flash of white light. Again.
“Oh for the love of…” I sighed.
Then, thinking better of what she’d just said, I sat down on the desk’s padded wood chair and began to read the diary, beginning on ‘Day 1.’
I briefly re-assembled myself in a room that was at the top of a spiraling staircase situated in the middle of the place, only to hear Shikes say, from in front of me, “A hundred and fifty days…”
“Wait… what? We shouldn’t be here.” I said to Shikes’ back. Light was still radiating off of me, I expected it to fade quic – oh, wait.
“Man!” I muttered under my breath as Shikes whirled around, relaxing only when he saw that it was me.
“Um. Yeah, so what do we do now?” He asked.
“Wait –“ I said calmly, before dissolving again.
“CRAP!” I yelled at Jake, materializing in front of him.
“Oh. Hi, Tiffers.” He said to me, blinking in surprise.
“Woot!” Someone said (Clarence?) from my right. “I can’t believe you were right, Luke, I think that… mm… let me…” I turned around to find myself in a kitchen that was made of bamboo, with two doors and a large refrigeration unit. Clarence was, indeed, sitting on the bottom part of the countertop (it was in an L shape) and Jake was sitting in the middle of the L, facing me. The human – Luke, I assumed – was to my left and leaning against the wall, half asleep.
“Erm – hi…” I said, wondering about how I could tell them Shikes was in the future. “So, you know how Shikes… like…” Clarence was suddenly at my side.
“Did he die…?” He said solemnly. I shot him a look.
“No, gods no. He’s in the future – like, a hundred and fifty days from now. Day five hundred and twenty or something like that.” I said. Jake tilted his head and gave me a questioning look, just in time for Luke to interrupt.
“Sorry to spoil the drama, but aren’t you going to like – throw me out again? Or at least try to?” Jake shot him another look – not wondering like the one he’d given me, but more like he was threatening him. Luke ignored it and rolled his eyes.
“What? No – actually, let me talk to Tiffers about that.” Clarence said. He put his arm around me and basically dragged me back to the far corner (far as in far from Luke.)
“You know, we would have left here without ever finding you but for Luke, he was all ‘Dude, maybe your friend will show up, cause you showed up after Jake…’ so I was thinking, could we allow him to travel with us?” He asked me. I sighed.
“You know how humans are!”
“Yes – but… well, he seems really nice, if a bit snippy at times.” He said back to me.
“Does it mean much to you?” I asked him.
“Well – he can change the gravity of things around him, which is a rather useful ability to have now that Shikes is gone, and with him, his wall running.” I looked up on the ceiling, recalling Shikes’ interesting ways of fighting.
Apparently, Reptians were trained from birth to fight with swords – just because they feared a human invasion. Shikes was rather good, especially when he was literally running up the walls around you.
“Well… fine. Fine, you win. But one misstep…” I drew my thumb across my throat.
I quietly resumed my duties as my Warmth was renewed, making sure that everyone inside was warm, had food, and didn’t get slaughtered by the Derlics outside.
Ahh… nuclear fission was so much better than unreliable bioreactions.
Speaking of which – what happened to that man that had stolen my Heat?
I quickly sorted through my rooms and found his Auric Imprint. It was black, with a small patch of white near his lower back.
He was still holding my Warmth, drawing and teasing something out of it.
Why? What could he do with it? The most he could hope for is to make it explode, as if it were a seventy octillion megaton thermonuclear stellar explosion device.
Or, I clarified for the Memory Transcriptor, an amazingly powerful device that would obliterate the planet, the star, the nearby planets, the nearby stars, and the slightly farther away stars. Perhaps even stars farther away than that.
In other news, I thought to myself, it could power me for just over nine hundred trillion years if I operated at full capacity.
I really hoped he didn’t detonate that thing by accident, but there was nothing I could do but mix the rooms up a little bit more than normal.
“Oh. Um… I’m really sorry for startlin’ you,” He said to me, perhaps noticing that I was waking up. “I, uh, I was in a room with… these… blue people that were fighting over something… and… where am I?”
I was surrounded by stacks of books on biology, quantum physics, and oceanography. One of them was open right next to my face – I could read the front page of it.
‘…which means that it doesn’t have to exist unless you see it, unless you use mathematics to describe it. Weird, right? Well – it gets weirder. Ever hear of teleportation? Well, it’s theorized tha-‘ and the rest was out of my field of vision. I strained to get into a better position to read the page, but epically failed as my muscles gave out in a fit of bitterness.
“Oh… um… here,” The tall man said to me, propping me up on something that was hard and wooden, but with soft little bits behind the wood.
“Ergh… what the hell happened?” I asked him, moving my jaw as one of the muscles clenched up.
“Well…” He stood over me and looked down. He was taller than I’d thought he’d been. He looked to be… maybe twenty years old. Or nineteen, one of the two. He had a rather looseness of expression that served to tell me that he was kind, accompanied by rather frighteningly pale skin and quite muscular legs and arms. He had blue eyes, and wore his blonde hair in a sort of wild mess of randomness. It came down past his eyes.
Currently, he was wearing a black t-shirt, accompanied by long blue shorts that looked to be made from nylon or polyester – completing his sporty look (aside from his paleness.)
“Well, you fell onto some sort of hard wooden platform and passed out. Then you became really really heavy and started shrinking in on yourself – maybe that’s why you can’t move – while I tried to move you. In fact, you weren’t movable.” He sat down on one of the wider and shorter stacks of books. “Not for a day, at least. Then, finally, I was able to move you away from that place – it didn’t seem very safe, like, it had three doors and those creepy wolf guys would walk in periodically and try to kill me.”
“Oh. Um. I see you’ve been busy –“ I coughed, “Um. Busy researching stuff…”
“Oh. Yeah. I… I was bored. And there’s no fiction in this area of the library, but I was afraid to move you again, just in case you became super heavy or killed yourself again.” He paused, as if waiting for something. It came to me.
“Oh! Yeah – “ I jerked over as I managed to move my arm, toppling down and sliding over some books. “Erm…”
“Yeah.” He re-positioned me, and I told him about my density changing abilities.
I hadn’t known that I could change my own density, though, so that was useful. Although… it was not knowledge that I would’ve wanted to almost die for.
“Yeah. So… my name is Elagio.” He said to me. “You’re the first human I’ve seen since I woke up here four days ago.”
“Yeah – my name is Reese. You’re the first human I’ve seen since… oh, how many months has it been now? Um. Some time, at least. Thanks.” I said to him.
I was hungry. Again. I briefly considered teleporting myself to the two human males that were conversing quietly right next to myself, or teleporting them to me. Then I considered against it. They were an interesting pair that I had been stalking through sector C for a while now. One – the one that could walk – was wearing a black shirt and some weird looking shorts, while the one that had to be carried was wearing some torn blue pants and a brown sweatshirt with ‘Loltroll’ inscribed on it. They were both pale and disgustingly fleshy… so unnatural. Although, still, it was kind of fun to just observe the human’s behaviors.
It was fun, how I could see ghostly shadows of everyone else in the other sectors of the mansion – things that no one else could see. Oh… the things I could do. I once teleported myself to Sector A whilst being chased by a group of blood thirsty male Wolfen, all of whom I had aggravated when I’d stolen some of there food.
Then I’d teleported a large box right in the middle of their pathway, one from my sector, and trapped them there.
Speaking of which… could I teleport objects from other sectors to my sector?
I looked through (literally, as it was see-through) the standing man’s backpack, located a pack of sardines, and teleported it out.
Yes! Success! That knowledge would sure help me out in the future when I wanted to eat.
The air that had been putting pressure on the space suddenly rushed in and made a loud bang in the other sector – one that I chose to not hear, as was not relevant. I simply enjoyed the sardines I’d procured as the guy that could walk jumped up and whirled around to see… nothing. Nothing aside from his backpack now toppled over and barfing its contents up over the floor – gears, pistons, miniature levers, pipes, screws, cogs, all the works were down there.
“Man…!” He said. I could hear him because I chose to.
The other man said, “What? What happened?” And slowly rose off of the ground. Now, what human had I seen do that before?
“I don’t know… did you hear that bang? Like someone fired a gun?” The black shirt said to the brown sweatshirt.
“Yeah – but… huh. That’s strange.”
I giggled and sat down, next to the floating brown sweatshirt man, priming my repertoire of pranks that I could pull on them.
Oh! I had it.
“Hello. Please press zero if you want to contact Customer Services. If you have a problem and you want to contact a different branch, press one. If you would like to speak to a director, press two. If you want to report yet another UFO sighting, press one-oh-one.” And I teleported the sound waves into their sector.
I had to suppress my giggles as they both jerked at the same time.
“What the heck?!” The brown sweatshirt said, trying to stand up and succeeding. Ah. So that’s why he was floating himself.
“I am sorry, but ‘What the heck’ is an invalid statement. Please press nine to reset now. Or, if you want to escape, press ten now.” I said. My god… this was funny.
“Okay… should we go with it?” The red shirt said to the brown sweatshirt when he heard me.
“Sure. Why not,” The brown sweatshirt said to him. “The worst that could happen is that we die horribly as someone randomly decides to target us for some reason or another, like for the fact that we are in a building full of psychomaniacal wolf humans that all seem to want to kill humans or something for food!” He said with a fake smile on his face.
Ah, human sarcasm. How beautiful.
“I am sorry, but sarcasm is an unacceptable form of payment. Please press nine to reset now. Or, if you want to escape, press ten now.” I said again. Trying not to giggle at their boggling eyes.
“What. The. [Transcriptor has censored this word.]” The black shirt said to the brown sweatshirt. Wait, didn’t they just introduce themselves? Crap – what where their names again?
Flajio and… and… Jesus or something like that.
“I am sorry, but swearing is an unacceptable form of payment. Please press nine to reset now. Or, if you want to escape, press ten now.”
“TEN!” The brown sweatshirt said. I giggled.
“I am sorry, but there is no number ten on the number pad. Please wait as – error. Error. Error.” I said, then made explosion noises.
“What…?” The brown sweatshirt, I mean Jess, said.
“Hello. You have – oh, never mind. This is getting boring.” I said, teleporting them to my sector, without their books.
I almost cackled to myself when I came across the wires. I was in one of the warehouses, most likely the third one, as it said ‘Section Three’
The fact that I didn’t really know brought me back to the unpleasant knowledge that I had no idea of where I was in actuality, just that I had woken up here with memories of my life from before – a high school, a blue truck, and concerts. It was… rather blurry.
And the fact that I had these weird light green scales all over – not to mention weird yellow spikes down my freaking back. I even had a little tail – albeit that it was a stub. And the scales around my stomach/under my tail protrusion thing were almost white. It was so weird.
I was like a crocodile – even my eyes were crocodile themed, with yellow irises and large black pupils.
And the weirdness didn’t stop there. As soon as I had awoken here… I could suddenly understand how electronics work. I knew how to build a quantum computer. I could create a teleportation device. I could write a program to see the freaking future.
But I had no supplies – well… I hadn’t had any supplies.
But then I’d found this warehouse. This warehouse with all of its little wires, monitors, speakers, gates… everything I needed for my electronics.
Everything except for a freaking generator, at least. Too bad I had no idea how to build one of those… why, freaking why couldn’t I figure out how to power my computers and stuff off of air? So much easier, honestly.
“He-“ I said, waling out of where I had been hiding in the shadows of one of the immense bookcases in this immense library. Then the two humans disappeared. “-y… what… why does this happen to me every ti-“
I found myself curiously weightless, then I weighed a hundred tons, then I was normal and… they were here again, but next to what looked to be a male Wolfen with pure white fur all over (except for the portions of his fur that were covered in light gray dots.) And he had a long, rather fluffy tail that was currently twitching in annoyance.
He was already looking at me, as if he’d known I was there before I’d known I was there, and I could see that his eyes were mismatched – one was blue, and the other was green. His nose, in contrast to his fur, was as dark as space, and so were the small black bands around each of his ears.
“Ah, hello… there.” He said to me, rolling his eyes and motioning for me to follow him.
“GRAH!” One of the humans shouted – I thought his name was Elagio or something like that.
“What?! Oh, yeah, I’m a Wolfen. Don’t worry, I don’t plan on killing you or even being mean to you. I’m not really like that. I’m in it ju-“
“GRAH!” He shouted again, and tried to pull the other one (Reese?) with him. Reese stood still.
“I’m pretty sure that he’s friendly, you know…” He said. I was, by that time, caught up with them.
“Yeah – not all Wolfen are bad, you know. Some of us are very nice….” I said, then remembered that I didn’t look a thing like a Wolfen.
“Erm. I mean, some of them. Sorry – I used to be a Wolfen. I don’t know why I’m a Reptian now.” I said.
All of my life, all seventeen years of it, I had studied human history, always hoping that someday, somewhere, I’d be able to see one and talk to it.
And here were two of them, but they were deathly scared of Wolfen.
“Er- what the hell?” Elagio said, looking at me. “You’re definitely not a Wolfen… more like… a… dinosaur thing. Gods, this place is messed up.”
“Yes. Whatever. The point is, Flajio,” The white Wolfen said, “I want to help you get back to your species’ mansion – which is the third one, I think.” He said, giggling.
“I say this because I want to go there too, but I can’t get there without you two.” He paused to absorb their blank expressions, as well as mine.
“You… none of you know what I’m talking about, do you? Ugh.” He sighed. “Okay, see, there are four distinct species that currently coexist here – I know this because I can see all of the rooms and… well, it’s hard to explain. But, over there, yes, to your right, there is another Reptian. He’s carrying a book and reading it as he paces around. He doesn’t exist here, but he does – like… he’s in a parallel universe. Same spot, but… different dimension, I guess. And I can see them.”
I looked back to where he’d pointed. It was down one of the library’s numerous corridors. I saw nothing.
“When I say I can see them, I mean I can see them. You can’t. And I can teleport him to here right now… but I can’t teleport myself to him, not unless he’s in this mansion… and… Urgh!” He paused and looked at me as if I could help him. “It’s too hard to explain. Just follow me unless you want random Wolfen trying to kill you. I mean, you want to be with your own species again, right?”
Reese said, “But… I’m not really a human. I used to be a Wolfen… but when I came here, I changed.”
“Right, but you look human, so… the Wolfen won’t be able to tell the difference.” Alex said.
Then he went on under his breath, “Always so goddamned speciest against humans for destroying the planet… but it’s just in your nature.”
“Okay! Let’s follow you, but only if you allow me to hold onto you at all time,” Reese said, smiling in a fake sort of way. Ah yes. Human sarcasm, beautiful.
“… Okay…” The Wolfen agreed.
“Really? Oh. Cool. You realize that if I didn’t like what you were doing, I could dissolve you just as suddenly as you could say ‘H-,’ right? So… don’t try anything.”
Dissolve…? What?
Elagio looked at me. “What about the… um… Reptian, what about him?”
I looked at the floor. I really wanted to go to their mansion! I imagined it… dozens of different humans to study and ask questions of.
“I… I really want to come. I studied human history for over five years! I love you guys! Please! I won’t make any trouble… and… uh… I can do this…” I reached out and touched one of the giant bookshelves, concentrated, and aged it a few thousand years.
They watched a one-foot sphere of it decompose into dirt in the span of two seconds.
“Woah. You can… turn things into dirt?” The Wolfen said to me.
“No – I can age them. Or… reverse age them.” I stuck poked the very edge of the pile of dirt and reversed the aging I’d just done. It quickly resumed its position in the bookshelf. Then I reversed it some more, to find it turning into a part of lumber, then a part of a tree with sap in it, then minerals from the soil.
“Holy… wow…” Elagio said. Reese just stood behind him with his mouth hanging wide open. I could picture a fly going in his ear and out of it.
“Um. Yeah. She can come, right wolfy-dude?” Elagio asked the Wolfen.
“Sure. Um. Let’s introduce ourselves…?” He said. “My name is Alex. Call me Alex, okay?”
“Yay! Alex!” I said. “My name is Romeo.”
Elagio’s eyes bugged out of his head as he tried to not laugh.
“Yes, I know that it’s the name of that famous guy in Romeo and Juliet, but it’s a female name. Jeese. Your name isn’t very much better.” I said.
“And how would you know that? You don’t know my name.” He retorted.
“I heard you mention it to Reese there. Elagio… heh, so stupid.” I squinted, then winked.
“I’m joking.”
“Okay… so… come along group, before the Wolfen in this sector – and there are a lot of them – catch our sent and try to murder us.” Alex said, leading us to one of the giant gold gilded double doors of the library. “We need to head to the Heart of the mansion, and, from there, we can travel to The Heart of the third mansion.”
The Heart? What? I mentally questioned.
“Oh, and don’t freak out if you suddenly appear in a slightly different room that still looks kind of similar to the room that you were just in, that would simply be me teleporting you either out of the way of danger, or to an easier route.” Alex said before pushing one of the heavy doors open to reveal the ballroom.
“So… like, it will switch soon?” I asked Jeremy, one of the humans that had somehow gotten into this building.
“Hah… let me check.” He always loved to show off his mastery of the instruments. So, of course, he materialized a translucent violin (his favorite instrument) from the middle of the air.
We were in the ballroom, numerous metal foldable chairs littered the place, and, along with the fact that the floor was made of yellow marble tiles, it looked like one of my school’s numerous Gathering Areas. In fact, everything except for the five or six balconies that stuck out around the top of the room, everything was the same – down to the wooden stage that was dark red, hard, and sturdy as a planet, with its immovable purple curtains and concrete foundations.
“Grr… why do you always have to do that so extravagantly? It’s not as if it does anything.” I said to Jeremy, growling even though I was not really a Wolfen any more.
Jeremy was a brown haired kid (very long haired, too. Like some sort of ‘hippy’ that I’d had to study in human history class, back when I was Wolfen) with a rather small frame that had little muscle on it, as well as little fat. He had freckles over his face and a rather effeminately small nose. A small amulet that depicted a silver sun with a sword through it hung around his neck, and, to complete his ‘look,’ he wore a white jacket and blue jeans.
“I don’t see you complaining when I end up saving our arses, you know.” He said, pulling a translucent violin bow out of the air and dragging it over the violin and producing a pitch that was almost too high for me to hear.
A rather large, multicolored shimmering wall appeared in front of us. It was a timer made of light or something.
“Right.” I said, look at it. It was counting down from two seconds.
There was a slight shift in the screen, and we both knew that the rooms had shifted again.
“Okay. Let’s go!” Jeremy said, walking towards the giant gilded gold doors that had just appeared.
“Why over here?” I asked him.
“…Because, like I said numerous times, we need to go to the library and meet up with a group that gets created there.” He said.
How he knew these things through just playing instruments… I’d never know.
“Right.” I said, waiting for him to open the massive slab of wood.
/\/\/\
Mem. 16 801,203 377 8:19 AM planet side. Mansion 3, Sector A, Room 17.
“Grr…!” I growled again. “Where are they?” I asked him.
“I… I don’t know. Lets… maybe…” He stumbled through words, for once not being certain of everything he was saying.
“Maybe I got the location incorrect. Um…” He said.
“Whatever. I’m going to go back to the ballroom and see if they’re in there, conveniently awaiting us.” I said to him. And I did.
Jeremy came with me, so I guessed that he wanted to stick together, because, honestly, he relied on my ability when things got messy.
Suddenly, we were in a slightly different version of the ballroom – it was slightly higher, had chandeliers, actual benches lining the walls… and a space in the middle for dancing. The balconies were made with finely sculpted marble fences around them, and the stage was like that of a performer’s stage, red curtains with dark wooden platforms.
“Hello.” A white Wolfen said from in front of me. “I see you have a human following you.”
I looked back to see Jeremy, as well as a girl reptile creature (she looked suspiciously like me, but light green instead of blue, and with numerous spikes down her back instead of one single spike.)
And there were two more of the humans – one was tall and muscular, with mismatched eyes and a black shirt, and the other was limber and had hazel hair, with pale skin (paler even than the first human) and blue eyes. He was wearing what appeared to be a brown jacket.
“Okay… Alex, why…?” The muscular one asked. The white Wolfen responded – making him Alex.
“Because. More humans means more likelihood of getting to the correct mansion. And, if I’m not mistaken, this here is Mash. He can remove atoms from molecules on a massive scale – like, he could make hydrogen and oxygen gas from water.” Alex said.
“What? How did you know that…? And seriously – my name isn’t, well, I don’t go by Mash. I go by M.M.” I said. Honestly, ‘Mash?’ Who the heck calls their son ‘Mash?’
“Ah yes… anyways, shall we continue?” He asked. Jeremy gave me the eye.
“I told you we’d join a group. And now we’re going to join. So, hah!”
“Um… where exactly are we going?” I asked Alex. “By the way – the human back there is Jeremy.”
“Yeah – hi Jeremy. We’re going to get back to the human mansion because I want to get over there and it’s really hard to orient yourself without two of the mansion’s native species with you. So come along now! We’re going to… well, The Heart of this mansion. If we can find it… the downside of having a group of people with me is that it gets harder to see the other sectors and The Heart of the mansion.” He said.
We followed them, with me taking up the end of the line.
“Why, why, why? Why are we climbing these endless stairs, Rose? Honestly!” I said to the girl with the red hair, red shorts, and red t-shirt in front of me. She was smaller than me – about five feet and five inches – and fairly skinny. She had the endurance of a freaking marathon runner, though.
“Because, Sapphire, we need to get to somewhere relatively inaccessible from the other rooms. Wherever these stairs lead to are probably safer than anywhere else.” She said, not even panting even though we’d been climbing stairs for the past forty minutes.
I’d lost count of the giant gray stone slabs after the seven hundredth one. And my legs burned like heck right now.
The only reason I wasn’t doubled over, gasping for breath was probably because I was buffing myself for plus two hundred percent stamina, but that was going to change to something else in about seven minutes.
“Okay. Come one, let’s stop for a… a little.” I said, trying to not pant and gasping in the middle of it.
Rose slowed down and said, “Fine… fine. Let’s sit down right here, I guess.” I went up to her slab and sat down on it, marveling at the expert craftsmanship of the place. The entire thing was like a tower for stairs – there was a central cylinder that held all of the stair pieces in place, and numerous princess-tower windows circling the outside. Of course, they were filled in with that unbreakable glass.
But still, the view was amazing – I could see for… wow.
“How… whew… how, how high up are we, Rose?” I asked her. She looked at me with her big brown eyes.
“Oh, let me just check my altimeter!” She said. “How the heck should I know, Sapphire? I can guess – seeing as though I can barely see the individual trees from this height, I’m thinking a few thousand feet.”
Erg… Rose could be really annoying at times.
“Right. Um.” I started. “So… how far do you think we have to go? This place looks the same after every step and I’m bored.”
Rose gave me her best ‘Oh my god. Ergh!’ look and told me, “We probably have quite a ways to go.”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah. Right. Um… so, what… what are we going to do once we reach the top?” I asked her.
“I don’t know. Now, obviously, you have recovered enough to make general queries of me, so get up and run more.”
“Ergh,” I groaned as I got up, “Fine.”
We began walking again.
The only reason I stayed with Rose is because she made me want to stay with her through her auric manipulation. If I had my way, she’d be alone for the rest of her stay in hotel Transylvania, or wherever we were. But she always made me want to stay.
So frustrating.
/\/\/\
That's all for now folks! Please give me feedback, as this is for Nanowrimo and I have not reviewed it at all.Woops. My phone posted it... A few times.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
OnceInALongTime: "You confuse me, Mage. Amazability should be a word so I could describe your words."
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I wrote some stuff.
YESIPLANTOEDITIT!
And I need to find the prologue.
But... I have a terrible affliction called 'childhood' which means that I rarely get internet access.
So I'm going to have to post the first quarter of chapter one on here and get back to it later- SO TERRIBLY SORRY I DON'T HAVE MORE! DON'T HATE ME!
Mem. ERROR, ERROR, ERROR, ERROR. ERROR, ERROR, ERROR.
The shimmering through the darkness was all that alerted Him to His existence.
The shimmering quickly gre, or perhaps He simply moved closer to it, until it took up His entire vision, up to his perepheries.
After the brief 'emotion' he'd come to label as 'surprise' at this New thing in His domain - or so He believed the darkness was as such - He quickly accepted its twisting pale shapes and plethoras of... bright... things that were somehow different from the darkness around him.
He was entranced, and, eventually, found that He could 'move' the 'picture' around if He really urged it to move.
After an unbelievably long time (classified as thousands of years to a member of the human race,) He noticed something changing.
Now there were larger shapes, similar in the... differentedness to the first shapes.
These newer shapes created larger, more convoluted prisms and objects that had clear, shiny... things on the sides of them.
This happened four times, and at the end of the fourth time, the screen exploded.
"Oh dear," He thought to Himself. "Where did all of the pretty shapes go?"
And, after untold mellinia of studying His photographic 'memory', he reached an answer.
"This will not do at all," He mused to himself, finally mastering the complicated structure that was language. "I need to save those creatures!"
Finally arriving at this conlusion, He devised a Plan and thought it.
It happened.
“That’s not going to work.” He said for the fourth time in a row.
The ‘he’ in question was Luke. He was floating four feet above my unmade bed.
He wore a skin tight white T-shirt and some black pants, but, as black as they were, his hair was blacker. He had red sneakers (comparable to metal when it’s really hot), and a long, sloping brow led your eyes down to his own mismatched eyes – one green and one brown – and then to his thin red lips. His nose was a little larger than average, but not by much.
“Shut up. I don’t care if it won’t work, I’m still trying.” I had awoken in this mansion fourteen weeks ago. Or maybe it was a castle – I couldn’t tell, the rooms were always switching themselves around. I had found my way to the rather spacious attic – all of it was one room – and had been sleeping in there for the past two nights. Luke was just some sixteen year old who had been following me for the past two and a half weeks. I wasn’t sure why.
“Still, it won’t work. Why don’t you sleep a little, you’ve been trying to do this for the past day. I think. God, why did you have to hole up in a windowless room?” He asked me. I was using a hammer to batter at the wooden wall.
The attic was crossed with numerous timbers, creating a sort of spider’s web that made it kind of hard to get from one end to the other. Both ends had doors, and, the day before, I’d woken up to see Luke walk through the back door only to come in through the front door. Apparently the same room can be moved so that it was connected to the exact same place or something like that in this god forsaken mansion.
How had I even ended up in here, anyways? I’d gone to sleep that night and just awoken in here. The mansion had been a nightmare – the people that were in here with me were prone to be violent. I had no idea why. Maybe it was because of my appearance? For some reason, when I’d been transported to this place, I’d taken the form of an anthropomorphic wolf – bipedal, mind you – and maybe I freaked kids out or something. Luckily, I had some serious strength and reflexes now, so I was mostly unharmed by them.
And they were deadly. I mean, this one kid could trap you in an alternate dimension just by taking a photograph of you. Her name had been Jekylls and she’d been insane. She’d also been my friend for the first six or seven weeks in the mansion. Then another one called Jeremy came along and severed her with a recorder – the instrument. Then he tried to kill me. I was, of course, able to dodge and lost him through the maze of rooms.
“Still, I don’t care. I am sick of this goddamned place. I am sick of waiting for my death. And do you really have to show off your gravity nullification powers? It distracts me.” I said to him, priming the iron hammer for yet another hit on the wall. I heard breathing come suddenly from behind me – sensitive ears – and whirled around, only to find Luke hovering about an inch above the ground and holding my hammer hand. He was strong – almost as strong as me.
“Stop wasting your energy. I’ve been here for almost a year.” He sighed and dropped my hand. Seeing claws and grey fur coating it still freaked me out. “I know that there’s no escape aside from death. Currently.” I sighed as well.
Luke slowly drifted to the ground and walked normally back to my bed, lying down after pulling his sneakers off and pulling the red sheets over himself.
I stood there with a grimace. He was right; there was no escape from the prison.
Prison. Was that what this place was? A prison for people who were different? It seemed like everyone I’d met (including myself) had some strange ability or something else.
Where was this place, anyways? The windows always looked out upon rolling hills somewhere on top of a cliff – you could see the tree coated, precarious drop off in the distance from some of the windows – that was blanketed by forest and jungle. Sometimes, I could see animals out there. Sometimes, they came up to the window.
Sometimes, they weren’t animals.
Sometimes, they were blackened shells of humans, with gaping mouths and eyes that glowed red like coals and embers. There fingers would be melded together into some sort of blackened glove.
Maybe the mansion was here to protect us from the world, as well as protect the world from us?
Whatever the mansion’s purpose, it was still a prison.
So sorry for the little tiny start to the first chapter.
I hope you're interested in the story now, though, because it's going to be a wild ride.
Hang on tight.
XD
**And yes, I reuse characters. It's fun.
****I need to reserve some places. Yes, it's going to be long.
Stupid minecraft website thingy won't let me double post, though. T_T
The story above PROBABLY has a ton of errors I will freak out over tomorrow. T_T.
OnceInALongTime: "You confuse me, Mage. Amazability should be a word so I could describe your words."
OnceInALongTime: "You confuse me, Mage. Amazability should be a word so I could describe your words."
T_T...
Le sigh.)
OnceInALongTime: "You confuse me, Mage. Amazability should be a word so I could describe your words."
I suppose I will get around to editting it sooner or later. For now, I will simply introduce the (slightly odd) prologue.(Unless I'm apprehended.)
OnceInALongTime: "You confuse me, Mage. Amazability should be a word so I could describe your words."
Anyways, here is TAG as it is now. If anyone wants to resize all of the Mem. Things to size twenty for me, I would appreciate it. Oh! And, if you spoilered it, I would be even mohr happay.
Sorry I can't do that. I am on my phone, and it would take me more time than I have.
Mem. ERROR, ERROR, ERROR, ERROR. ERROR, ERROR, ERROR.
The shimmering through the darkness was all that alerted Him to His existence. The shimmering quickly grew, or perhaps He simply moved closer to it, until it took up His entire vision, up to his peripheries.
After the brief 'emotion' he'd come to label as 'surprise' at this New thing in His domain - or so He believed the darkness was as such - He quickly accepted its twisting pale shapes and multitudes of... bright... things that were somehow different from the darkness around him.
He was entranced, and, eventually, found that He could 'move' the 'picture' around if He really urged it to move.
After an unbelievably long time (classified as thousands of years to a member of the human race,) He noticed something changing.
Now there were larger shapes, similar in the... differentedness to the first shapes. These newer shapes created larger, more convoluted prisms and objects that had clear, shiny... things on the sides of them.
This happened four times, and at the end of the fourth time, the screen exploded.
"Oh dear," He thought to Himself. "Where did all of the pretty shapes go?"
And, after untold millennia of studying His photographic 'memory', he reached an answer. "This will not do at all," He mused to himself, finally mastering the complicated structure that was language. "I need to save those creatures!" Finally arriving at this conclusion, He devised a Plan and thought it. It happened.
He noticed something wrong with his plan after a little while. He thought the correction. It happened.
His last thought was ‘Huh. What is that curious sensation?’
Then he was gone – just another memory in the cosmic ocean of them.
/\/\/\
Mem. 1, 801,203 376 5:53 PM planet side. Mansion 3, sector B, room 19.
“That’s not going to work.” He said for the fourth time in a row. The ‘he’ in question was Luke. He was floating four feet above my unmade bed and wore a skin tight white T-shirt and some black pants, but, as black as they were, his hair was blacker. He had red sneakers (comparable to metal when it’s really hot), and a long, sloping brow led your eyes down to his own mismatched eyes – one green and one brown – and then to his thin red lips. His nose was a little larger than average, but not by much.
“Shut up. I don’t care if it won’t work, I’m still trying.” I had awoken in this mansion fourteen weeks ago. Or maybe it was a castle – I couldn’t tell, the rooms were always switching themselves around. I had found my way to the rather spacious attic – all of it was one room – and had been sleeping in there for the past two nights. Luke was just some sixteen year old who had been following me for the past two and a half weeks. I wasn’t sure why.
“Still, it won’t work. Why don’t you sleep a little, you’ve been trying to do this for, like, the past day. I think. God, why did you have to hole up in a windowless room?” He asked me. I was using a hammer to batter at the wooden wall. "Those things aren't that disturbing."
The attic was crossed with numerous timbers, creating a sort of spider’s web that made it kind of hard to get from one end to the other. Both ends had doors, and, the day before, I’d woken up to see Luke walk through the back door only to come in through the front door. Apparently the same room can be moved so that it was connected to the exact same place or something like that in this forsaken mansion.
How had I even ended up in here, anyways? I’d gone to sleep that night and just awoken in here. The mansion had been a nightmare – the people that were in here with me were prone to be violent. I had no idea why. Maybe it was because of my appearance? For some reason, when I’d been transported to this place, I’d taken the form of a… werewolf? I stood on two legs and kind of resembled a wolf in the fact that I had a muzzle and claws and such. Maybe I simply freaked kids out or something.
Luckily, I had some serious strength and reflexes now that I was this… thing, so I was mostly unharmed by them. And they were deadly. I mean, this one kid could trap you in an alternate dimension just by taking a photograph of you. Her name had been Jekylls and she’d been insane. She’d also been my friend for the first six or seven days in the mansion. Then another one called Jeremy came along and severed her with a recorder – the instrument – just by pointing at her with it and playing it.
Then he had tried to kill me.
I was, of course, able to dodge and lost him through the maze of rooms. “Still, I don’t care. I am sick of this goddamned place. I am sick of waiting for my death. And do you really have to show off your gravity nullification powers? It distracts me.” I said to him, priming the iron hammer for yet another hit on the wall. I heard breathing come suddenly from behind me – sensitive ears – and whirled around, only to find Luke hovering about an inch above the ground and holding my hammer in his hand. He was strong – almost as strong as me.
“Stop wasting your energy. I’ve been here for almost a year.” He sighed and dropped the hammer.
Ugh, I thought to myself; seeing claws and my grey fur coating it still freaked me out.
“I know that there’s no escape aside from death. Right now.” He continued
I sighed as well.
Luke slowly drifted to the ground and walked back to my bed (I’d dragged it up with me,) lying down on his stomach and stretching out after yanking his sneakers off and pulling its white sheets over himself.
I stood there with a grimace. He was right; there was no escape from the prison. Prison. Was that what this place was? A containment building for people who were different? It seemed like everyone I’d met (including myself) had some strange ability or something… else.
Where was this place, anyways? The windows always looked out upon rolling hills somewhere on top of a cliff – you could see the tree coated, precarious drop off in the distance from some of the windows – that was blanketed by forest and jungle. Sometimes, I could see animals out there. Sometimes, they came up to the window. Sometimes, they weren’t animals.
Sometimes, they were blackened shells of humans, with gaping caves for mouths and eyes that glowed red like embers in a dying fire, their curled fingers melding together into some sort of blackened, charred glove that had some small semblance to a hand.
Sometimes they pounded the thin glass that separated them from us. Sometimes they opened their maws and sucked on it. They didn’t breathe – no breath fog ever coated the windows – but they did moan. Or we assumed – we never really heard them.
This lead to some disturbing thoughts – maybe the mansion was here to protect us from the world.
Perhaps it was here to protect the world from us.
Whatever the mansion’s purpose, it was still a prison.
Luke began snoring. It was a rather loud and ever so slightly unpleasant noise – a sort of reverberating cave grumble. Or maybe it was like an earthquake.
I sighed again and sat down, checking my black watch as I did so.
“Grr… three hours until the Change,” I said. “Why does it always take so long?” I stretched out on the cold wood floor and closed my eyes like Luke had suggested.
Unbidden, images flashed through my mind of Clara.
/\/\/\
Mem 2, 801,203 8:50 PM 375 Planet Side. Mansion 2, Sector A, Room 19.
“Twerp.” He said, before I shoved him off of me and through the dark opening that was a doorway on the other side of the room.
“Me: One. You: Zero.” I said to myself, slowly rising to my feet and brushing imaginary dirt off of my red shirt.
The room I was in was technically called the attic, but everyone else in the building simply called it ‘Room 19.’
Apparently, they’d received word from some sort of mystical human with a ‘long mustache’ that ‘The attic shalt be called Room Nineteen. Rabbits. Give me rabbits.’ This intrigued me, as the room had no relation to the number nineteen.
I had awoken in this place only a month ago. The soft light in my canopy top bedroom had slowly filtered itself away to the glaring midday sun that came through the window of this fortress’s observatory. I’d kept mostly to myself since then – I was… different. Everyone else was normal – they were giant wolf like creatures – but I was furless and pale, with only a small bit of hazel colored hair on the top of my head. Plus, I had long and limber limbs that stretched out and had little muscle on them, blue eyes instead of the normal – yellow or green – and, the worst, I had a small triangular protrusion coming out of my face, unlike the normal extension that all Wolfen had. If I was not a Wolfen, why, oh why, did I have the memories of one?
I lived – past tense – in a tall tree house, like every other Wolfen in this Mansion. I remember having a tail, fur, teeth, even my hair was Wolfen in aspect.
So what happened?
“We’ve seen one like you before.” One of the respected Wolfen had told me, before proceeding to say, “He disappeared. Just like you will.”
That was about a week ago. The grey beast had then tried to kill me with incredibly hot hands that had glowed red, then white, while he’d swiped at me.
I’d escaped by making him so dense that he literally collapsed in on himself – not black-hole style, it was instead, to put it nicely, a rather gory sight. Before then, I hadn’t known about my ‘ability’ as the others called them. But I knew about it now.
The Wolfen that had just attacked me had kept muttering things about ‘The group.’ And ‘Kill them all.’ Or something of that sort. I, of course, had activated my power and reduced him to a whimpering mess on the floor. He’d not been as weakened as I’d believed, though, so he’d leapt up at me and shoved me to the ground before I’d been able to decrease his density and hurl him through the door. And he’d called me the twerp! Unbelievable.
The attic was a mess of different assorted bed mattresses, dolls, and floating candles that glowed without fires. What wasn’t covered with one of those things was, instead, covered in broken wooden beams and uprooted beige carpeting.
It was one of the most horrifying rooms I have ever been in – but it had its uses. Like hiding. Or practicing my ability.
“Hey… where am I?” Came from someone to my left all of the sudden.
A robust Wolfen wearing a black T-shirt with some god forsaken band’s logo printed on it crawled out of the door that had just appeared there, collapsing on a red mattress that was conveniently in his way.
As he rolled over the mattress and into better lighting, I could see that he was, in fact, not a Wolfen. He… he looked like me.
“Woah!” I screamed, jumping back and tripping over what I presumed to be a wooden beam. I fell down and hit my head on something hard, passing into the non-blissful realm of unconsciousness.
/\/\/\
Mem 1, 801,203 8:57 PM planet side. Mansion 2, Sector B, Room 19.
“Ergh…” I yawned, slowly awakening from my prolonged nap. Luke was already up and standing on the ceiling, staring up at me.
I jumped up and yelled at him.
“DON’T DO THAT!”
He just calmly… looked down at me. His eyes were still closed, though.
He was obviously sleepwalking or something…
“This can not get any creepier,” I said to him, “Without Kalycko bursting in here or something.” Luke calmly stood there and ‘watched’ me as I moved around. It was… really creepy. I eventually left the attic, hoping that The Change had occurred already.
It had.
The left door led me into a small room that was painted light blue – cyan – all over and had a small iron hatch on the floor. The iron hatch, upon closer investigation, presented itself to be locked with a silvery padlock that required some sort of small key to open it.
I’d never seen the room before, and I’d explored the place inside and out. First sleepwalking (and Uber Creepy) Luke, now this hitherto hidden room – perhaps I was dreaming? Perhaps not.
Although, coming to think of it, the room did seem a little fuzzy. And… was that a shower or a wall?
My eyes snapped open to the sound of Luke snoring gently and dangling his arm about an inch away from my head. He was floating himself three feet above the ground while asleep. Showoff.
My dream had encoded the real world situation into my sleep – how… interesting. I slowly slid back, under his arm and careful to not disturb him, and got up.
Oh gods my back hurts, I thought, stretching my arms above my head and attempting to not groan. My back finally popped and relieved the tension that had built up during my stay on the ground.
“’Morning…” Luke said, awakening at the disturbing sounds my back had made. He twisted himself around and levitated to his feet. “Sleep well?” He asked me, motioning to the floor.
“What do you think?” I asked in reply. “And… why do you follow me, anyways?”
He shrugged.
That was all that I ever got – noncommittal shrugs or grunts. I wasn’t going to push him for an answer. Yet.
“I think it just Changed a few minutes ago,” Luke said to me, motioning to a door on my left. “You know, if you want to get out of the attic or something ridiculous like that.”
I remembered something about a door from my dream. Something about that door – the one Luke had motioned to. Was someone Else trying to tell me something? Was another being trying to influence my thoughts with his ability?
There was no way to know. Perhaps the room behind the door would hold something like the hatch I’d seen – maybe it was a trap.
That, however, was something that I didn’t have to just wonder about, and, so thinking, I calmly walked over to the door and opened it.
“Hello! Glad you could join us!” A starry faced reptile thing in a green dress said to me, pulling me into the room. Everything went black as I fainted.
/\/\/\
Mem. 4 801,203 376 2:33 AM planet side. Mansion 3, Sector A, Room 21.
I awoke in the small room. The roof, as always, was almost as low as my head. The entire area was painted sickly shades of brown that were not all that unlike a dog's diarrhea after, perhaps, some sort of beige paint binge. It wasn't too terribly sickening, though. The smell couldn't have been more unlike a dog's diarrhea - minty and fresh, permeated by occasional pangs of rosemary, and/or cooking jasmine rice.
I rose from my uncomfortable position on the carpet and yawned.
"Good morning, world!" I said, mentally sighing to see that I was, in fact, still alive. "I wonder what pointless BS you'll do today!"
I looked back at the miniature oak door - it was a little smaller than me. It was, like everything else, a repulsive shade of beige. Where would it lead to today? Only one way to find out.
I crept over to the small frame so that anyone who was possibly on the other side wouldn’t know I was there until it was too late. The door swung open on well-oiled hinges to reveal the mansion's pantry. Joy.
At least there was no one trying to kill me right now. Not that they'd succeed; it was immortality’s only upside.
The pantry was filled with numerous, wide shelves - all of which were painted white and stacked high with cardboard boxes of various labels. Many of the boxes labeled 'Ramen' had been ripped apart half a year ago, leaving the marble floor covered in large brown swaths of cardboard and smaller plastic wrappings filled with multicolored labels and drawings of noodle bowls.
I bent down to study a smaller cardboard box that was stationed underneath one of the shelves. It was labeled only with the word, 'CAUTION' and nothing else.
"Caution what?" I said aloud to myself. Flaunting my immortality like some idiot god, I opened the package by turning it upside down and removing the clear pieces of tape on the (now) top flaps of the box.
A blackness dropped out and ate my foot.
/\/\/\
Mem. 1 801,203 377 5:43 AM galaxy wide. Mansion ?, Sector ?, Room ?.
"Nghh..." I groaned and forced my eyes open to see a large room that was filled with people. Well - not a lot of people, and none of them were 'human.'
"Good morning." A feminine voice said to me. "Welcome to... our group."
They were… humanoids, like me. That doesn’t mean that they were humans, though.
One was like a reptile - he reminded me of a raptor (the dinosaur kind) mixed with a human. Not surprisingly, he had no hair. He also had no protruding ears, at least not that I could see. He was, instead, covered in green scales and had bright red spikes down his back.
These were easily visible due to the fact that he wore no shirt.
Or pants.
Instead, he was wearing a small... leather loincloth? Ugh. It was brown and tied around his back, just above his tail.
The scales over his stomach were milky white – perhaps reflecting their softness? And he had some sort of… marking in the middle of it. The marking was kind of like half of a heart mixed with half of a dagger and smeared ever so slightly. Perhaps it was a tattoo?
Sitting on one of the room's two blue chairs was a guy covered in red-brown fur.
Just like me.
He glanced over at me as I stared at him. Contrary to the reptile/dinosaur/human thing, he had a lot of detail evident on him. His eyes were yellow, yellow like dandelions. His hands were long and tapered to the small black nails on the ends of his fingers. He had a long white mane that was reminiscent of a pony’s flock of hair running down the back of his head and underneath his solid leaf green t-shirt. He wore long shorts that were light blue and had white palm leaf imprints over them. It took me a second to realize that they were made out of swimming trunk fabric and were, therefore, most likely a pair of swimming trunks.
“Yo’ dude.” He said to me, bumping his head up a little bit.
I glanced at the probable source of the female voice – the reptile girl thing that had pulled me in. I could tell she was a girl for fairly obvious reasons. Her scales were blue, and, not surprisingly, I suppose, she was wearing an actual shirt – pink – and had some blue jeans on. She didn’t have spikes, but, instead, she had one single giant spike near the top of her back. It was a slightly lighter shade of blue than her regular ‘skin.’ She had crystal blue eyes and an aura of optimism.
“You… uh, you fainted or something.” She said to me, holding her hand out. I hadn’t realized that I was on the ground until then, so I gratefully accepted here hand. She lifted me up with surprising strength for her small frame.
“Um. Erg! It’s really awkward when we integrate new members into this group thing,” she said, looking down at her feet (which were like human’s feet apart for the fact that they were blue, scaly, and had white claws instead of toenails.)
“Sorry, dude, Tiffers gets nervous around new people.” The other wolf guy said to me as I stood there awkwardly looking at ‘Tiffers.’
“Ah. Um… well… what do you want me for?” I asked them, looking around the room (it was painted red and had a yellow carpet. The furniture – two loveseats covered in plush fabric and one long couch coated in leather substitute – was all blue) for Luke. Despite us being unwitting acquaintances, he had been with me for a while.
“Where is that guy that I came in here with?” I asked, screwing my face in a slightly puzzled manner.
“He’s human.” The girl said, snapping her head back up and regarding me with suddenly threateningly cold eyes.
“Humans aren’t allowed here.” She said to me.
I gulped. Surely they hadn’t… killed him, had they?
/\/\/\
Mem. 3, 801,203 376 9:03 PM planet side. Mansion 3, Sector B, Room 19.
“HEY!” I yelled, banging my fists against the door the scaly had just sucked Jake through. Despite my strength, it was no use.
“Gods! And they wondered why I was always such a pessimistic person.” I muttered aloud to myself, slinking down to the bottom of the door and listening to murmurs. The one thing I had actually liked in this place.
No – not ‘thing’ but ‘person,’ and ‘place.’
The one thing that I had wanted for the past three years of my life was to draw furries perfectly. Then I up and appeared in this hellhole. I had thought about committing suicide, but Jake’s serendipitous appearance had prevented that – I had only wanted to have talent in drawing, but a live furry just appeared in the one place that I would have hated but for him.
I didn’t mind that he barely noticed me. He didn’t mind me stalking him.
And now he was gone – vanished into another room with a locked door and…
“That was a scaly.” I said. The thought sunk into my mind.
Holy crap. There are more like him…
A smile began to grace my lips until I realized that Jake was unique and not some trading card that I could mess around with until I got bored of it.
The murmurs stopped in the room behind me; the door swung open.
“Huh,” I said, standing up and looking behind me. The room that was there now was not the room that had been there. It wasn’t really a room at all, actually.
It was just darkness. Oh, and a rather bedraggled zombie-like human.
“Oh. Hi there. Do you want to kill me?” His ragged voice permeated the darkness as I strained to make out the details of his ragged clothing on his ragged body.
/\/\/\
Mem. 4 801,203 9:15 PM planet side. Mansion 3, Sector A-B-C-D Room 0.
“Heh. I guess not.” I said to the man standing in the pool of light outside of the darkness that had eaten me.
It had started with my foot and wound its way up my leg, eventually engulfing my entire lower body. It gave me a strange sense of disconnection. After another minute or so, I was immersed in it and felt a tug in my gut. Then nothing.
Not even an emotion.
Then the man had opened a doorway of light into the space I was in, blinding me enough so that I couldn’t make anything about him out. Maybe it was a girl.
“Erm… hi?” Yes. His voice made me certain that the man was a male human.
“Oh dear. It talks. This cannot be good at all,” I tittered to myself.
“Do you want to talk to Mr. Squiggles? He’s my pet –“ Titter, “- Sandwich. Don’t worry – if you are nice to him, he won’t eat you and regurgitate you for his babies,” I said. “Maybe.”
“Erm.” The man quickly shut the door. I could hear him shoving something onto it.
Good. That would take care of him, I thought to myself, and continued trying to deduce where I was.
/\/\/\
Mem. 5, 801,202 2 12:59 AM planet side. Mansion 3, Sector A, Room 1.
“Okay…” I said, distrustful of Elagio’s ideas.
“No, really! It should shatter the glass and… well, freedom!” He said, smiling. His face was basically a bucket of sunshine mixed with rainbow unicorns and little girls’ birthday cakes.
Okay, not literally. His face was, in reality, simply prone to over exaggerating his emotions. Not that I minded. He was good company, especially in this… this… well, this place we were in.
Elagio was tall for his age, not that someone at his age grew anymore; he was nineteen. And he was the nicest nineteen year old guy that I have ever known.
We had just met yesterday, yet I had already taken a liking to him.
He wore a Mariner’s baseball cap around, as well as a white t-shirt and blue sport’s shorts. He had really muscular legs, and he’d told me that he could do four hundred sit ups in a row. His biceps were bulgy, too, but, surprisingly, he was not tan. He was extremely pale and had blue eyes – definitely not the normal ‘jock stereotype.’
And he wasn’t a jock. He’d never touched a football in his life.
I didn’t know what he did. I didn’t care.
He seemed to enjoy my company.
“You know, I’ve never seen your hair!” I said, giggling as he shrugged and took his hat off to reveal dirty blond hair that stood straight up in a buzz cut sort of way. Then he put his hat back on.
“I got this haircut, like, three days ago…” He trailed off and realized, once again, where he was.
“Do… do you think we’ll ever get out of here?” He asked, shoulders slumped down.
I nodded. “Just fire that… thing up.” I motioned over to the metal device that had so many wires over it that it looked like my hair in the morning. Elagio and I had built it – well, Elagio had told me where to put everything. I really had no idea what it did other than break things.
We’d dragged it into the kitchen today. It had taken two days to build, the first day we were here, and yesterday.
Yesterday, though, we’d awoken to find all of the rooms in the building moved around into different places!
What had led to the bathroom yesterday morning now led to the kitchen. Luckily, we’d slept in the same room as our machine, so we hadn’t lost it in the middle of the night.
I sighed. The kitchen was a wreck – the counters were arranged like a backwards F and had hotdogs and celery out all over them, not to mention buns for the hotdogs, ketchup for the hotdogs, and Ranch dressing for the celery.
The floor was covered in half dried milk that was starting to smell, and the stainless steel, two sided sink had been filled with – get this – potato peelings.
It was not pretty.
The walls were smeared with mashed potatoes (I thought) and burnt garlic hung down from the red ceiling. The ceiling was most likely not naturally red.
We’d come to the conclusion that a seventeen foot tall giant had teleported into this room yesterday and couldn’t teleport out. So he pulled random assorted vegetables and disgusting other things out of the numerous drawers that were now scattered around the floor and smashed them together. Then he’d taken the stainless steel fridge, ripped it out of the wall outlet, and poured everything into his mouth – some of the stuff didn’t make it, though, and he had hated the hotdogs because he was a vegetarian (or something.)
Then he’d escaped by fixing his teleportation device and teleporting out of the room.
A few gremlins came pouring in from the giant oven that was right next to the sink and put the fridge back in its place after taking potatoes out of the drawers and skinning them with their bare claws. They’d found the tomatoes’ hideout and, fearing mutiny from the hidden fruits, smashed them to bits on the ceiling before finally torching the rest of the garlic for conspiring against them with the tomatoes.
They left them hanging on the ceiling in order to deter more vegetable mutiny.
We’d had a good laugh coming up with that little story, actually. We really had no idea what the hell had happened to this place.
I looked back over to Elagio. He was standing stock-still and sweating.
Something moved out of my periphery. I glanced over to see…
“OH MY GOD!” I screamed, ducking down so that I wouldn’t have to see the horrible twisted and burnt remains of some sort of… semi-humanoid creature that was clawing at the window and staring into our souls with its lava-like eyes of death and destruction.
“Um,” Elagio said, finally getting down with me onto the disgusting floor. “I think we should dismantle the machine. That glass seems to be keeping us from being slaughtered right now.” His voice trembled.
/\/\/\
Mem. 5 801,202 5 7:56 PM planet side. Mansion 3, Sector A, Room 19.
The attic.
I sighed.
Elagio looked at me like I was insane. “Are you sure that he won’t be able to get us up here?”
I looked at him in a sideways sort of way.
“…No. But… there’s a good chance that he won’t be able to track us through that twisted path I lead you through,” I said to him. “At the very most, he’ll get to the farmhouse thingy. That river should’ve totally wiped our scents.”
Elagio shuddered.
“That thing… ugh. Half wolf, half man… why? Why are we here?” His usual optimism had diminished to nothingness.
The attic was a large room, stretching across the entire width of the mansion/building – or so we assumed. It had two doors, one at each end. Both of them thick and oaken.
Neither of them with locks.
“We’ll hole up in here for a while. Maybe he’ll be bored with us after some time?” I said to him, sitting down.
/\/\/\
Mem. 5 801,202 8 7:55 PM planet side. Mansion 3, Sector B, Room 5.
“CLOSE THE DOOR, SARAH!” Elagio yelled at me, as if I wasn’t already racing for it.
But I wasn’t fast enough – Yerelmew was already opening the massive mahogany double doors that lead into the giant ballroom of sorts.
I screamed as his white, furry arm came into view. As well as his… hands. His hands with their deadly heat and black, terrifying claws.
Then everything stopped.
Stopped, like… like the clock that governed the smallest units of time had just broken.
Everything faded to black and white. The foldable chairs that were surrounding me stopped falling down as I pushed them, but, instead, moved as if they were in zero gravity – linearly floating through air.
“Erm…?” I said. The sound I emitted was nothing like ‘Erm.’
It was more like ‘Uh…’ but carrying on for a lifetime. And the sound stayed in place even as I moved.
So… sound didn’t travel like they should… light seemed to be screwed up…
Was time being bent around me?
/\/\/\
Mem. 5 801,202 57 5:34 PM planet side. Mansion 3, Sector C, Room 1.
And then there was only Elagio, standing with his machinations. Even in this situation, I marveled at how skilled he was with mechanics – all three of his robots were sentient and powered with air. They were clones of each other, albeit they were each in a different color scheme. One was red, another was green, and the third was a sort of tan brown.
They, and Elagio, were all that stood between Ramsee and The Heart.
We were in the mansion’s kitchen. Again. Just like that day that it all started, so long ago now. The horrendous mess that had been littered throughout the entire room had mysteriously vanished by this time, and the shelves had been restocked with herbs of all kinds (my mind identified garlic, sage, and dill pickle) as well as vegetables. The fridge, however, had been replaced with a cheese cabinet that was mysteriously empty. And the counters had rearranged themselves into an upside down L formation, each end pointing towards one of the doors of the room.
Ramsee was, per usual, clothed in a black robe that seemed to be a part of him. The clothing completely obscured his face, leaving the only skin visible that of his hands.
Erg. His hands.
They were creepier than Yeremy’s instruments of death (aka his clawed, furred, paws)
They formed sharp spikes instead of normal fingers; they were red like the tomatoes in the cupboard behind him. And his fingernails were long, disturbing protrusions of the sort that gave you nightmares.
He was unkillable.
“Ramsee… why are you doing this?” Elagio yelled at him. I was still lying, stunned, on the ground.
Ramsee had played a tape of what sounded like mathematical equations… and I’d been rendered weaker than a baby.
Seriously, I could barely breathe. Elagio – he’d wanted to help me, but The Heart was more important than either of us.
“Why should I not do anything? Power power power! Power!” Ramsee hung his head, a ghostly trail of laughter escaped from his veil and chilled me to my bones.
“He he he he…” Ramsee said, grasping something within his garb.
“Here’s a gift from… Clara!” He yelled, throwing an invisible force against Elagio and his machinations (they were skinny creations, with steam pipes protruding from every possible place on there bodies. For all that, though, they were humanoid in nature and shape.)
The steambots (as Elagio called them) exploded in showers of superheated dihydrogen monoxide, obscuring my vision, as Elagio flew backwards onto a counter. I heard a yell, and everything began to fade to blackness.
[ERROR: Mem. 5 has become too corrupt after this point to translate accurately. What follows is a rough interpretation.]
[As of 801,204 454, 9:52 PM galaxy wide correspondence, this memory has been REDACTED.]
/\/\/\
Mem. 11 801,202 57 5:36 PM planet side. Mansion 3, Sector C, Room 1.
My steambots exploded as Elagio threw something at us, and their steam exploded outwards in violent force. It clouded my vision as I flew through the air, skidded across one of the marble countertops, and slammed into the window that was right next to the door to The Heart.
The Heart. A mystery wrapped in an enigma coated with intricate designs and puzzles, all part of a grand riddle.
The Heart. My worst enemy… yet something I needed even now. Something we all needed.
“Ela…g…” I heard Sarah’s voice from somewhere to my right.
Then… silence.
The steam was suddenly gone, and so were my steambots. Elagio was no where to be seen, and…
“Sarah?!” I yelled, getting up and wincing in the pain that pierced my back suddenly. “Ergghh…” I whimpered, noticing that nothing… nothing was left of our battle just a few minutes previously.
Where were they? Had Sarah frozen time and abducted Elagio? But… I thought that Elagio had disabled her with some crazy sounding magic spell.
She must have gone out of this room… I thought to myself, realizing the implications.
Her ability came with a limitation – she couldn’t travel outside of the room she was in without severely weakening herself. And if she had already been weakened…
I stumbled through the top door, to find myself in the Grand Hallway – a long corridor that was lit with numerous rather luminescent orbs that floated close to the ceiling and had at least five doors lining it, all labeled with a number followed by a letter followed by another number. It had a red carpet of ambiguous design on the ground, and the walls were painted an off color of white.
If Sarah had taken Elagio somewhere, she would have dragged him through here… and returned in order to not be killed instantly by him. However… that would lead to -
I glanced to my right, only to see Sarah collapsing inwards on herself – trapped in a different time zone for her eternity, yet dissolving to darkness in my time zone.
“No!” I screamed, watching the last portion of her pale face collapsing into that odd shade of blackness that existed only in the absence of everything.
Her blue eyes were the last things I ever saw of her.
/\/\/\
Mem. 13 801,203 376 9:01 PM planet side. Mansion 3, Sector B, Room 3.
“So…” I started, staring at the furry grey mammal that had just fainted in our doorway. He was wearing a red, short sleeved shirt and long blue jeans that (somehow) allowed his long light grey tail to pour out.
He looked similar in physique and attributes to Clarence.
“So what?” Clarence said, like he’d read my mind. Or maybe he was just responding to me.
“So… you’re the smart one. What should we do?” I asked him in a slightly mocking manner.
Clarence was a Wolfen, and proudly displayed this through his covering of red-brown fur, longish snout, and ears. Not to mention his long white mane that stood up from behind his neck all the time, and perky ears that stretched out in reminiscent nostalgia of his wolf ancestry. He seemed to think that swimming trunks were cool; the pair he wore was icy blue, with white… leaf imprints over them. Why he would choose such a design was beyond me, as leaves were so rare and… uncouth. They were nature’s dirty little gift to Reptians like me.
His shirt was a mossy color of green, kind of like the fern leaves of my native habitat yet somehow utterly unlike them.
“Dude. Chill. He’ll awaken soon enough. I think. Tiffers,” He looked over to Tiffers in order to procure confirmation.
Tiffers was a Palatican, and covered in pale blue scales to prove it. She also had the scariest yet most calming ice cold blue eyes that I had ever seen. Her fin stuck out from her currently pink shirt (why, oh why, did everyone else have to wear one of those disgusting things? Always grabbing your body as if it owned it…)
She was rather curvy – curvier than most other Palaticans. Not that I cared…
“Yeah, yeah. He’ll be fine. Must’ve... been shocked.” She said. “Who was that… human out there?” Her humanoid hand (oddly, considering that she’d evolved completely and utterly separately from humans) motioned towards the door that she’d slammed into his face. I had only gotten a glimpse of him but he’d seemed to be black haired, and disgustingly pale, like all humans.
Blegh, humans. The most vile creatures to have ever walked on Earth. Always trying to kill each other or some other innocent creature.
We’d learned about them in history class. Apparently, they’d once dominated the planet that we lived on. But then they’d all left (after, of course, destroying its native life and decimating its atmosphere.) to go colonize some other place, and good riddance.
Some of them stayed behind – no one knew why, but rumors had been running that they’d been conducting research on genetic sequences and modification, in order to combat the world’s climate (and decidedly human-antagonistic animals) through controlled evolution.
Or so the grapevine had said a few days before… I arrived here. What was going on back home? I assumed that this mansion (nightmare) that we’d appeared in was on another planet, hence the lack of my species or humans with us. And the non-lack of burnt up monsters of terrifying death and doom.
But… where had Palaticans come from? Were they aliens from another planet, sent here by whatever cosmic force sent me and everyone else? And Wolfen… where did they come from?
And why was everyone… humanoid? Why could I understand the aliens?
“-ello?” Cut through my frantic thought processes. “Dude. You zoned out. Again.” Clarence had come over to me from his corner in the wall and was attempting to distract me by waving his arm in front of me.
“… You’re still no-“
“WHAT?!” I yelled at him, annoyed that he’d cut off my stream of consciousness. “I was getting closer and closer to the truth behind this annoying hunk of unbreakable wood, idiot.”
“Hey, hey, hey. I know you guys aren’t in love, but no need to kill each other every time you happen to glance at one another in the same second.” Tiffers cut in, standing between us for good measure.
“Right. Right right right,” I said. “Um. We need to work together. That’s right.”
“Yes. How else are we going to escape from these mansions?” Tiffers said, nodding in my direction. She was always trying to be the voice of reason – and she was fairly good at it.
The fact that she could make an army to kill you in about five seconds probably helped too.
Tiffers could bring any object that was smaller that her… to life. The inanimate-animate objects were loyal to her (if not completely bound to follow her orders) and would protect her to death.
You did not want to confront her in a kitchen – sharp knives plus intelligence plus method of movement plus you equals instant death.
“Plus, those humans are always scheming against us – I don’t know how we would have survived without you telling us about the dirty creatures,” Tiffers said just to me.
Meanwhile, whilst this had been happening, the door had been making odd noises, as if it was being hit.
“Clarence, play the tape for this room. Move it to… um… move it to limbo,”
Clarence pulled a palm sized black rectangular prism out of his pocket. It looked rather like one of the ‘cellphone’ things that we were taught about in Human History class – but those were incredibly ineffective. Mass communication teleportation devices (Madies) were far more effective, as they transferred your thoughts and understanding directly to another person, allowing for instant communication and linking of ideals.
He wacked the thing against his leg, causing it to emit a high pitched squeal before saying something like “Function X, X and three minus B Change over X and X, plot point and end function at second point.”
Ginko was… weird. But he was effective.
There was a loud whirring noise and the room shook slightly. Then there was silence.
/\/\/\
Mem. 1 801,203 377 7:05 AM galaxy wide. Mansion?, Sector ?, Room ?.
“Okay…?” I said, trying to wrap my head around what was just said.
Tiffers, with the help of Shikes (the raptor dude) had just finished explaining a bunch of history about humanity to me. I, meanwhile, had been utterly and completely confused. Humans… I used to be human, but…
We hadn’t evacuated Earth, the sun wasn’t slowly blowing up due to failed science experiments, and the galaxy was not populated with humans trying to kill eachother.
It sounded like they’d made up a future for humanity in general.
And where had they come from? A reptile girl – I didn’t think that we had those on Earth – and another reptile guy…
Not to mention the furred beast over there, still on his chair. He was like me, yet had no memories of being human, at least, none that I could see from what he’d told me.
In fact… they seemed pretty racist (speciest?) against humans. This meant that I’d have to keep my human memories a secret, lest they try to murder me in my sleep.
See, I’d decided to stay with them, even if only because they had accepted me as a ‘Wolfen’ as Clarence called us.
Although I didn’t think I was really Wolfen – I had human memories…
But what if whatever or whoever teleported me here… had switched my memories with someone else?
“Right. It’s seven seven, now,” Tiffers said after checking her blue wristwatch (hitherto unnoticed by me) “Or, at least, it is by galaxy wide time. I think… let’s see…” She fiddled with two or three buttons on the side closest to me.
“Mmm… yeah, it’s… woah.” Tiffers said. “PLAY THE TAPE! CLARENCE! MOVE US TO ROOM ZED NOW!” She began screaming.
/\/\/\
Mem. 4, 801,203 377 7:05 AM planet side. Mansion 3, Sector A-B-C-D, Room 0.
“Hehehe…” I giggled to myself, groping the darkness for the glass sphere that I knew was there somewhere.
I had gone to sleep after deducing my location through a few tricks I’d learned during my thousands of years of existence, like feeling the fabric of reality around me, or deducing my location in space and time. Through those methods, I had found myself in Room zero, informally known as The Heart of the mansion.
I had slept like a cockroach in a dumpster for once.
“Yes yes yes… yes.” I muttered to myself, mentally checking the time again.
Seven o’ seven AM planet side. And galaxy wide, too.
The Coincidence had arrived. Which meant…
“Oh!” I said, bumping into the invisible glass orb that was at the exact center of the mansion.
“Hehehe…” I tittered.
This would do nicely.
/\/\/\
Mem. 3, 801,203 377 7:07 AM planet side. Mansion 3, Sector B, Room 1.
I had fled into the next room, afraid that the insane guy in the weird… darkness would break through the door and try to kill me with ‘Squiggles’ or something.
I had found myself in the kitchen (very nice, Japanese style, the L shaped countertop was crafted from bamboo, and the sink was made of hollow bamboo too. All of the bamboo stuff was light brown, and had a stringy texture to it. There was also metal box (most likely a fridge) in the corner near the sink.) and looked around in the fridge (which was empty,) which led me to root around in the numerous cupboards beneath the counter and find quite a few tomatoes.
Tomatoes were disgusting.
I ate them anyways.
Then I went to sleep, only to be awoken by a deep rumbling throughout the entire mansion as… something halted.
A feeling ran through me, one that I couldn’t adequately explain. It was… negative, and kind of like desolation.
I checked the wall clock – a large white circle with a black plastic borderline on it that was mounted on the wall, directly above the door I’d come in from – and it’d said seven o’ seven and thirty seven seconds after.
“Oh dear.” I said, noticing the second hand slowing down and stopping at the forty and three second mark.
“What…?” I asked myself, walking to the door that would take me back to the attic – I had a feeling that the creepy insane man that I’d seen last night had something to do with the rumbling and the loss of power to the clock. Or… clocks.
In fact, it seemed to be slightly colder in here – was the mansion heated? Was all the power fading?
I opened the (bamboo) door to see a swirling back vortex of nothingness at my feet.
I loudly swore and slammed the door shut, stumbling back towards the window.
/\/\/\
Mem. 8, 801,203 377 7:08 AM galaxy wide. Mansion ?, Sector ?, Room ?.
I said a very bad word in order to articulate my anger at having been thwarted.
The Coincidence… why had I forgotten to check an hour ago? I had known it was coming up today and that it began either the end… or the beginning.
And now we were stuck out in… god knows where.
“Tiffers…” Clarence started, hitting another black case against his leg. “It won’t work.”
I looked at him. I looked at the floor.
“There’s… something I should tell you. Well, I should have told you.” I started in a rather sorrowful way.
“Do you remember Aeonic?” I asked him.
“…Who?” Clarence and the new guy – Jake – said at the same time. Shikes simply shook his head and sat down on the floor, next to where Jake was sitting.
“I didn’t think so. He… erased your memories.” I said. “Remember the day we met?”
Clarence smiled, “Yeah, and I tried to kill you in the kitchen?” His laugh trailed off. “Why?”
“Um… we didn’t actually meet that day. I had known you for a few weeks before then. But we met Aeonic, and he… he erased your memories because, apparently, the path we were going down would lead us to destruction. Then he told me that we had to stop someone on The Coincidence… which just happened a few seconds ago. And we didn’t stop anyone.” A sigh escaped my mouth.
“What? I… this sounds made up. Why didn’t you tell us before?” Shikes joined in.
“I couldn’t. He told me that if I told you before The Coincidence, well, you’d be killed.” I sighed again, and looked at my feet. Jake was looking at me with a puzzled expression on his face.
“Was… wait… you had to stop someone?” He asked me.
“Yes. Someone who was immortal and wanted to steal some power or something from the mansion thing we are – well… were – in.” Jake laughed.
“The only reason I’m kind of believing you is because we were teleported here by something or someone and have strange abilities that we use to kill other people. If that wasn’t true… heh, yeah.” Jake said. Clarence nodded in agreement.
Shikes rolled his eyes and said, “So… due to your forgetfulness, we’ve doomed everything or something?”
I laughed in bitterness. “Yeah. I guess. And… I don’t think we can get back to the mansion right now.”
Clarence glared at me in his own special sort of way – peering into my soul and searching for something.
“Right. Heh, you know, you’re not the only one with secrets.” He grabbed the air above him and pulled a head sized, white glass ball that seemed to suck the light of the room into it.
What the?! I hid my surprise well, and apparently so did Shikes. Jake, though, he gasped and sputtered.
“How… what?! Where’d you get that?! How did you… ugh! I give up.” He said, pointing at the thing and hanging his head in frustration.
Clarence snorted and grinned.
“A girl with blue eyes gave this to me two days ago. She told me that I would need it. Then she dissolved into dust. I’d forgotten about it until just now – I had actually thought it to be a dream.” He looked back down at it in his hands. “Actually, I’m not sure that it isn’t a dream still. Pinch me, someone.”
Shikes punched him in the snout.
“OW! Dude! What the hell?!” He fell back onto the ground, spilling the glass orb onto the carpet.
“What? I thought you wanted me to punch you.” He said, winking at me.
“Stop it. STOP IT!” I yelled. “Don’t you understand what is going on? We could be stuck here! You transported us into Limbo, Clarence, and we might not be able to get out again.”
Jake had gotten up and was now at the door. “Limbo?” He opened it up, only to find a solid wall of darkness beyond it. Occasional auric blots of light would appear and then fade to pixilated motes before disappearing completely.
“Woah.” He said, stepping back. “We are stuck.”
Shikes looked guilty for the first time since we’d met. Clarence held his ball close to him and sighed.
“Well… I guess that… um…” I started.
“Shut up, Tiffers. You’re always trying to be democratic. But look what you’ve gotten us into now. And you didn’t even tell us what was going on until just freaking now. I thought that we were a group, that we were here for each other! Yet… I knew I shouldn’t have trusted you.” Shikes walked towards the door and Jake, opened it, and stepped out.
“SHIKES!” I stared at him, waiting for him to fall to his death in the Void of Limbo. He didn’t. He just stood there.
“What? Can’t you guys see this?” He said, motioning towards what he was standing/floating on.
“See… what?” I asked him.
He sighed.
“The floor. What? Do you see, like, a black expanse of nothingness that would kill me if I fell through it? I’m not suicidal, and, although you did mislead us, I don’t think that we should split up. I’m upset, but… well, we’ve been through too much just to break up because of one mistake – no matter how big – on your part.” He sighed again.
“Plus, if you died, I wouldn’t be very happy. Yes, I would care if you died too, Clarence.” He said.
Wow. That was the most I had ever heard him say at once.
And… did he just admit that he and Clarence were kind of friends? Was I dead?
“So… come on, people. We’ve got to see if we can find anything out here to help us. The room will be easy to find again.”
I tentatively took a step towards the door, only to be shoved out of the way by Clarence.
“What are you trying to do here?” He said to Shikes. Jake was slowly edging away from both of them, and Clarence was slowly edging towards Shikes.
“Trying to do… what are you talking about? I’m trying to save us.” He said, leveling his gaze with Clarence.
“Right. Sure you are. You, you… you of all people. You shouldn’t… she… but… she lied to us, you… how?” He stammered, losing steam as he began to realize that he really had nothing to put against Shikes.
“She lied, yeah, but we’re a group. You kept something from us. Does that mean that I should hate you? I mean, I kind of hate you, but you’re part of the group. So I can’t hate you. It’s called putting aside differences for the good of the whole.” He said, looking at the ‘ground.’
Jake was standing beside me. “What the hell is going on?” He whispered to me as Clarence stared at Shikes.
“I… I don’t really know. All that I am sure of is that this room is stuck in Limbo because of me, and we might be able to escape out there, by walking.” I said to him.
Clarence took a tentative step outside of the doorframe, wobbled a bit on the darkness outside, and yelled, “It’s safe, I think.” To us.
/\/\/\
Mem. 18, 801,203 377 7:21 AM galaxy wide. Mansion ?, Sector ?, Room ?.
“Hey. Tiffers. I think… look at this.” I’d been screwing around with my glass orb for a while, as we walked around in Limbo and looked for some way out. We’d really just been slowly spiraling outwards from our room. It was only a few hundred feet away, but barely visible in the gloom, albeit the fact that it was the only source of light for possibly miles in any direction.
The ‘ground’ was soft and spongy beneath me, like I was walking on a spider’s web. It also freaked me out – what if it crumbled beneath me and I began falling for all eternity?
Anyways, I had been fooling around with the sphere (which had actually become a light source in the darkness) when I’d noticed a slight crack in it – so faint that I had to run my fingers over it numerous times in order to make sure that I wasn’t just imagining it.
I held the cube out to Tiffers and had her feel the part where the crack was.
“Woah. What… what do you think that could be?” She said to me.
Jake came up from behind me, and Shikes stood at the front of us impatiently tapping his foot.
“Gimme,” Jake said, forcibly taking it from me – he was freakishly strong, I noticed.
“Hey…! Be careful. It could be a nuclear device.” I said to him as he felt for the crack and poked at it with his claw.
“Huh.” He said, as a small rectangular prism popped out of the side he’d poked. It seemed to be a compartment for… something.
“Give me your… that rectangle black thingy,” He said.
Of course! I thought to myself. Gods, I’m an idiot. Still… why would it accept just that? I pulled it out of my pocket and gave it to him.
The black thing didn’t fit (it was really hard to see in the blackness, too.)
I mean, it was too small.
Jake grinned, put it in, and slammed the compartment shut anyways.
A high pitched whining noise pierced the darkness. “Function X, X and Y minus ACBD Change over X and X, plot point and end function at second point.”
“Wha-“ Jake said, looking at me and disappearing in a flash of white light.
“Oh my go-“ Tiffers – the closest person to him said before disappearing in a flash of white light as well.
Then it was my turn – I began to feel really warm. Until, that is, I suddenly felt very cold as the darkness around me coalesced into… a kitchen. It had counter tops that were made of bamboo and a large metal box (most likely one of those human things – a refreezingerator or something like that.)
There was also one of those disgusting creatures in here as well. A split second after I arrived, I realized that he was the guy that had tried to get into the room we’d been in earlier.
He had really dark hair that was… kind of combed in a sort of… it was like… well, it looked like a spike – kind of. Not really. Not like that ridiculous hair style that some of us Wolfen had were we would grow our hair out and then put it in some sort of unicorn spike thing. More like a straight, neatly combed spike that ran down his head. He also had mismatched eyes – his left one was green and his right one was brown – and thin red lips. He was really muscular for a human, though.
“Er – hi?” He said to me as I backed away.
/\/\/\
Mem. 1, 801,203 377 7:08 AM planet side. Mansion 3, Sector B, Room 1.
I appeared in a bamboo kitchen – like, all of the counters were made of bamboo and organized in an L shape.
And Luke was there too.
“Jake!” He said, running over to me and awkwardly hugging me.
“Erm. Yeah. Hi.” I pried him off with one arm, holding the ball in the other.
“The… there’s blackness… how did you…?” He stuttered.
“I don’t know. This ball did something, though, and teleported me here.”
“Woah – that… that looks like a Mansion Heart. Where’d you get that?” He asked me. “Never mind that – I think… I think someone has broken the Mansion Heart that runs this place – everything has begun to break down and it is beginning to get really cold in here.”
I noticed that he was shivering, now. “Yeah. Um. What is a Mansion Heart and why have I never heard of it before?”
Then the ball in my hand began to vibrate and radiate a bright aura of light then.
“What the heck?” He asked me, looking at it.
The compartment I’d slid the black (tape?) into slowly emerged from the sphere. Then I realized that it was… different.
It looked skinnier, and had a hole at the end of it that was completely black.
Smoke emanated from the hole, and the thing spun around in my hands until I was forced to let it go – but instead of falling, it flew directly towards Luke, passed through him without damaging him, and then phased through the door that had been behind him.
A moment later, the clock on the wall behind Luke began to make a ticking noise, apparently starting up again.
It jerked forwards to seven o’ nine and twelve seconds, then began to run normally.
“Huh.” I said, sitting down on the counter behind me.
“So, what happened?” Luke asked me. And that’s what I was telling him about – at least, until Clarence barged into the room with a flash of light and nearly backed into me in order to not get near the human.
/\/\/\
Mem. 13, 801,203 523 7:30 AM planet side. Mansion 3, Sector A, Room 20.
“Woah.” I said, wobbling a bit as I materialized in a medium sized room with a domed ceiling and a door that was made of glass. It wasn’t a square room, but was, instead, cylindrical. The walls were painted brow-gold, while the ceiling was… well, painted. It was painted with… stars, constellations, galaxies. Whatever you wanted to call them. In fact, there was a metal cylinder that looked an awful lot like a telescope outside of the glass door.
There was an oaken desk that was overflown with numerous large books that were all on astronomy, many of which looked as though they weighed twenty or thirty pounds, and all of which had many yellow note paper things sticking out of them at various points. Next to the desk was an empty bookshelf. Both of them were made of a dark, hard looking wood, and the bookcase had numerous pull out shelves that resembled the ones I had designed for my job, back on Earth.
The floor was tiled with… marble? Yeah, the tiles were yellow marble slabs, and they cut off abruptly in a circular design near the middle of the room, presumably a staircase or something.
I noticed that there was a small pocket book opened on the desk, opened to a page with a green note card instead of a yellow one.
“Huh.” I said to myself, wondering where the hell I was exactly.
Looking at the book, I realized that it was actually a diary and… today was apparently day 523.
“Holy crap,” I said. “That’s… what, a hundred and fifty days…”
“Wait… what? We shouldn’t be here…” Someone said – a girl, most likely. In fact…
I spun around to see Tiffers standing in a halo of light.
“Um. Yeah, so… what do we do now?” I asked her, completely and utterly puzzled.
“Wait,” She said very calmly, before disappearing in a flash of white light. Again.
“Oh for the love of…” I sighed.
Then, thinking better of what she’d just said, I sat down on the desk’s padded wood chair and began to read the diary, beginning on ‘Day 1.’
/\/\/\
Mem. 8, 801,203 377 7:25 AM planet side. Mansion 3, Sector B, Room 1.
I briefly re-assembled myself in a room that was at the top of a spiraling staircase situated in the middle of the place, only to hear Shikes say, from in front of me, “A hundred and fifty days…”
“Wait… what? We shouldn’t be here.” I said to Shikes’ back. Light was still radiating off of me, I expected it to fade quic – oh, wait.
“Man!” I muttered under my breath as Shikes whirled around, relaxing only when he saw that it was me.
“Um. Yeah, so what do we do now?” He asked.
“Wait –“ I said calmly, before dissolving again.
“CRAP!” I yelled at Jake, materializing in front of him.
“Oh. Hi, Tiffers.” He said to me, blinking in surprise.
“Woot!” Someone said (Clarence?) from my right. “I can’t believe you were right, Luke, I think that… mm… let me…” I turned around to find myself in a kitchen that was made of bamboo, with two doors and a large refrigeration unit. Clarence was, indeed, sitting on the bottom part of the countertop (it was in an L shape) and Jake was sitting in the middle of the L, facing me. The human – Luke, I assumed – was to my left and leaning against the wall, half asleep.
“Erm – hi…” I said, wondering about how I could tell them Shikes was in the future. “So, you know how Shikes… like…” Clarence was suddenly at my side.
“Did he die…?” He said solemnly. I shot him a look.
“No, gods no. He’s in the future – like, a hundred and fifty days from now. Day five hundred and twenty or something like that.” I said. Jake tilted his head and gave me a questioning look, just in time for Luke to interrupt.
“Sorry to spoil the drama, but aren’t you going to like – throw me out again? Or at least try to?” Jake shot him another look – not wondering like the one he’d given me, but more like he was threatening him. Luke ignored it and rolled his eyes.
“What? No – actually, let me talk to Tiffers about that.” Clarence said. He put his arm around me and basically dragged me back to the far corner (far as in far from Luke.)
“You know, we would have left here without ever finding you but for Luke, he was all ‘Dude, maybe your friend will show up, cause you showed up after Jake…’ so I was thinking, could we allow him to travel with us?” He asked me. I sighed.
“You know how humans are!”
“Yes – but… well, he seems really nice, if a bit snippy at times.” He said back to me.
“Does it mean much to you?” I asked him.
“Well – he can change the gravity of things around him, which is a rather useful ability to have now that Shikes is gone, and with him, his wall running.” I looked up on the ceiling, recalling Shikes’ interesting ways of fighting.
Apparently, Reptians were trained from birth to fight with swords – just because they feared a human invasion. Shikes was rather good, especially when he was literally running up the walls around you.
“Well… fine. Fine, you win. But one misstep…” I drew my thumb across my throat.
Luke glared at me from the corner.
/\/\/\
Mew.efvs.a,[email protected]$([][?≥£08
I quietly resumed my duties as my Warmth was renewed, making sure that everyone inside was warm, had food, and didn’t get slaughtered by the Derlics outside.
Ahh… nuclear fission was so much better than unreliable bioreactions.
Speaking of which – what happened to that man that had stolen my Heat?
I quickly sorted through my rooms and found his Auric Imprint. It was black, with a small patch of white near his lower back.
He was still holding my Warmth, drawing and teasing something out of it.
Why? What could he do with it? The most he could hope for is to make it explode, as if it were a seventy octillion megaton thermonuclear stellar explosion device.
Or, I clarified for the Memory Transcriptor, an amazingly powerful device that would obliterate the planet, the star, the nearby planets, the nearby stars, and the slightly farther away stars. Perhaps even stars farther away than that.
In other news, I thought to myself, it could power me for just over nine hundred trillion years if I operated at full capacity.
I really hoped he didn’t detonate that thing by accident, but there was nothing I could do but mix the rooms up a little bit more than normal.
/\/\/\
Mem. 2, 801,203 377 8:04 AM planet side. Mansion 2, Sector C, Room 17.
“Oh. Um… I’m really sorry for startlin’ you,” He said to me, perhaps noticing that I was waking up. “I, uh, I was in a room with… these… blue people that were fighting over something… and… where am I?”
I was surrounded by stacks of books on biology, quantum physics, and oceanography. One of them was open right next to my face – I could read the front page of it.
‘…which means that it doesn’t have to exist unless you see it, unless you use mathematics to describe it. Weird, right? Well – it gets weirder. Ever hear of teleportation? Well, it’s theorized tha-‘ and the rest was out of my field of vision. I strained to get into a better position to read the page, but epically failed as my muscles gave out in a fit of bitterness.
“Oh… um… here,” The tall man said to me, propping me up on something that was hard and wooden, but with soft little bits behind the wood.
“Ergh… what the hell happened?” I asked him, moving my jaw as one of the muscles clenched up.
“Well…” He stood over me and looked down. He was taller than I’d thought he’d been. He looked to be… maybe twenty years old. Or nineteen, one of the two. He had a rather looseness of expression that served to tell me that he was kind, accompanied by rather frighteningly pale skin and quite muscular legs and arms. He had blue eyes, and wore his blonde hair in a sort of wild mess of randomness. It came down past his eyes.
Currently, he was wearing a black t-shirt, accompanied by long blue shorts that looked to be made from nylon or polyester – completing his sporty look (aside from his paleness.)
“Well, you fell onto some sort of hard wooden platform and passed out. Then you became really really heavy and started shrinking in on yourself – maybe that’s why you can’t move – while I tried to move you. In fact, you weren’t movable.” He sat down on one of the wider and shorter stacks of books. “Not for a day, at least. Then, finally, I was able to move you away from that place – it didn’t seem very safe, like, it had three doors and those creepy wolf guys would walk in periodically and try to kill me.”
“Oh. Um. I see you’ve been busy –“ I coughed, “Um. Busy researching stuff…”
“Oh. Yeah. I… I was bored. And there’s no fiction in this area of the library, but I was afraid to move you again, just in case you became super heavy or killed yourself again.” He paused, as if waiting for something. It came to me.
“Oh! Yeah – “ I jerked over as I managed to move my arm, toppling down and sliding over some books. “Erm…”
“Yeah.” He re-positioned me, and I told him about my density changing abilities.
I hadn’t known that I could change my own density, though, so that was useful. Although… it was not knowledge that I would’ve wanted to almost die for.
“Yeah. So… my name is Elagio.” He said to me. “You’re the first human I’ve seen since I woke up here four days ago.”
“Yeah – my name is Reese. You’re the first human I’ve seen since… oh, how many months has it been now? Um. Some time, at least. Thanks.” I said to him.
/\/\/\
Mem. 14, 801,203 377 8:03 AM planet side. Mansion 2, Sector D, Room 17.
I was hungry. Again. I briefly considered teleporting myself to the two human males that were conversing quietly right next to myself, or teleporting them to me. Then I considered against it. They were an interesting pair that I had been stalking through sector C for a while now. One – the one that could walk – was wearing a black shirt and some weird looking shorts, while the one that had to be carried was wearing some torn blue pants and a brown sweatshirt with ‘Loltroll’ inscribed on it. They were both pale and disgustingly fleshy… so unnatural. Although, still, it was kind of fun to just observe the human’s behaviors.
It was fun, how I could see ghostly shadows of everyone else in the other sectors of the mansion – things that no one else could see. Oh… the things I could do. I once teleported myself to Sector A whilst being chased by a group of blood thirsty male Wolfen, all of whom I had aggravated when I’d stolen some of there food.
Then I’d teleported a large box right in the middle of their pathway, one from my sector, and trapped them there.
Speaking of which… could I teleport objects from other sectors to my sector?
I looked through (literally, as it was see-through) the standing man’s backpack, located a pack of sardines, and teleported it out.
Yes! Success! That knowledge would sure help me out in the future when I wanted to eat.
The air that had been putting pressure on the space suddenly rushed in and made a loud bang in the other sector – one that I chose to not hear, as was not relevant. I simply enjoyed the sardines I’d procured as the guy that could walk jumped up and whirled around to see… nothing. Nothing aside from his backpack now toppled over and barfing its contents up over the floor – gears, pistons, miniature levers, pipes, screws, cogs, all the works were down there.
“Man…!” He said. I could hear him because I chose to.
The other man said, “What? What happened?” And slowly rose off of the ground. Now, what human had I seen do that before?
“I don’t know… did you hear that bang? Like someone fired a gun?” The black shirt said to the brown sweatshirt.
“Yeah – but… huh. That’s strange.”
I giggled and sat down, next to the floating brown sweatshirt man, priming my repertoire of pranks that I could pull on them.
Oh! I had it.
“Hello. Please press zero if you want to contact Customer Services. If you have a problem and you want to contact a different branch, press one. If you would like to speak to a director, press two. If you want to report yet another UFO sighting, press one-oh-one.” And I teleported the sound waves into their sector.
I had to suppress my giggles as they both jerked at the same time.
“What the heck?!” The brown sweatshirt said, trying to stand up and succeeding. Ah. So that’s why he was floating himself.
“I am sorry, but ‘What the heck’ is an invalid statement. Please press nine to reset now. Or, if you want to escape, press ten now.” I said. My god… this was funny.
“Okay… should we go with it?” The red shirt said to the brown sweatshirt when he heard me.
“Sure. Why not,” The brown sweatshirt said to him. “The worst that could happen is that we die horribly as someone randomly decides to target us for some reason or another, like for the fact that we are in a building full of psychomaniacal wolf humans that all seem to want to kill humans or something for food!” He said with a fake smile on his face.
Ah, human sarcasm. How beautiful.
“I am sorry, but sarcasm is an unacceptable form of payment. Please press nine to reset now. Or, if you want to escape, press ten now.” I said again. Trying not to giggle at their boggling eyes.
“What. The. [Transcriptor has censored this word.]” The black shirt said to the brown sweatshirt. Wait, didn’t they just introduce themselves? Crap – what where their names again?
Flajio and… and… Jesus or something like that.
“I am sorry, but swearing is an unacceptable form of payment. Please press nine to reset now. Or, if you want to escape, press ten now.”
“TEN!” The brown sweatshirt said. I giggled.
“I am sorry, but there is no number ten on the number pad. Please wait as – error. Error. Error.” I said, then made explosion noises.
“What…?” The brown sweatshirt, I mean Jess, said.
“Hello. You have – oh, never mind. This is getting boring.” I said, teleporting them to my sector, without their books.
/\/\/\
Mem. 15, 801,203 377 10:52 AM planet side. Mansion 3, Sector D, Room 16.
I almost cackled to myself when I came across the wires. I was in one of the warehouses, most likely the third one, as it said ‘Section Three’
The fact that I didn’t really know brought me back to the unpleasant knowledge that I had no idea of where I was in actuality, just that I had woken up here with memories of my life from before – a high school, a blue truck, and concerts. It was… rather blurry.
And the fact that I had these weird light green scales all over – not to mention weird yellow spikes down my freaking back. I even had a little tail – albeit that it was a stub. And the scales around my stomach/under my tail protrusion thing were almost white. It was so weird.
I was like a crocodile – even my eyes were crocodile themed, with yellow irises and large black pupils.
And the weirdness didn’t stop there. As soon as I had awoken here… I could suddenly understand how electronics work. I knew how to build a quantum computer. I could create a teleportation device. I could write a program to see the freaking future.
But I had no supplies – well… I hadn’t had any supplies.
But then I’d found this warehouse. This warehouse with all of its little wires, monitors, speakers, gates… everything I needed for my electronics.
Everything except for a freaking generator, at least. Too bad I had no idea how to build one of those… why, freaking why couldn’t I figure out how to power my computers and stuff off of air? So much easier, honestly.
Oh well. Electricity would come later. For now…
“Robots!” I yelled, grinning.
/\/\/\
Mem. 17, 801,203 377 8:08 AM. Mansion 1, Sector C, Room 17.
“He-“ I said, waling out of where I had been hiding in the shadows of one of the immense bookcases in this immense library. Then the two humans disappeared. “-y… what… why does this happen to me every ti-“
I found myself curiously weightless, then I weighed a hundred tons, then I was normal and… they were here again, but next to what looked to be a male Wolfen with pure white fur all over (except for the portions of his fur that were covered in light gray dots.) And he had a long, rather fluffy tail that was currently twitching in annoyance.
He was already looking at me, as if he’d known I was there before I’d known I was there, and I could see that his eyes were mismatched – one was blue, and the other was green. His nose, in contrast to his fur, was as dark as space, and so were the small black bands around each of his ears.
“Ah, hello… there.” He said to me, rolling his eyes and motioning for me to follow him.
“GRAH!” One of the humans shouted – I thought his name was Elagio or something like that.
“What?! Oh, yeah, I’m a Wolfen. Don’t worry, I don’t plan on killing you or even being mean to you. I’m not really like that. I’m in it ju-“
“GRAH!” He shouted again, and tried to pull the other one (Reese?) with him. Reese stood still.
“I’m pretty sure that he’s friendly, you know…” He said. I was, by that time, caught up with them.
“Yeah – not all Wolfen are bad, you know. Some of us are very nice….” I said, then remembered that I didn’t look a thing like a Wolfen.
“Erm. I mean, some of them. Sorry – I used to be a Wolfen. I don’t know why I’m a Reptian now.” I said.
All of my life, all seventeen years of it, I had studied human history, always hoping that someday, somewhere, I’d be able to see one and talk to it.
And here were two of them, but they were deathly scared of Wolfen.
“Er- what the hell?” Elagio said, looking at me. “You’re definitely not a Wolfen… more like… a… dinosaur thing. Gods, this place is messed up.”
“Yes. Whatever. The point is, Flajio,” The white Wolfen said, “I want to help you get back to your species’ mansion – which is the third one, I think.” He said, giggling.
“I say this because I want to go there too, but I can’t get there without you two.” He paused to absorb their blank expressions, as well as mine.
“You… none of you know what I’m talking about, do you? Ugh.” He sighed. “Okay, see, there are four distinct species that currently coexist here – I know this because I can see all of the rooms and… well, it’s hard to explain. But, over there, yes, to your right, there is another Reptian. He’s carrying a book and reading it as he paces around. He doesn’t exist here, but he does – like… he’s in a parallel universe. Same spot, but… different dimension, I guess. And I can see them.”
I looked back to where he’d pointed. It was down one of the library’s numerous corridors. I saw nothing.
“When I say I can see them, I mean I can see them. You can’t. And I can teleport him to here right now… but I can’t teleport myself to him, not unless he’s in this mansion… and… Urgh!” He paused and looked at me as if I could help him. “It’s too hard to explain. Just follow me unless you want random Wolfen trying to kill you. I mean, you want to be with your own species again, right?”
Reese said, “But… I’m not really a human. I used to be a Wolfen… but when I came here, I changed.”
“Right, but you look human, so… the Wolfen won’t be able to tell the difference.” Alex said.
Then he went on under his breath, “Always so goddamned speciest against humans for destroying the planet… but it’s just in your nature.”
“Okay! Let’s follow you, but only if you allow me to hold onto you at all time,” Reese said, smiling in a fake sort of way. Ah yes. Human sarcasm, beautiful.
“… Okay…” The Wolfen agreed.
“Really? Oh. Cool. You realize that if I didn’t like what you were doing, I could dissolve you just as suddenly as you could say ‘H-,’ right? So… don’t try anything.”
Dissolve…? What?
Elagio looked at me. “What about the… um… Reptian, what about him?”
I looked at the floor. I really wanted to go to their mansion! I imagined it… dozens of different humans to study and ask questions of.
“I… I really want to come. I studied human history for over five years! I love you guys! Please! I won’t make any trouble… and… uh… I can do this…” I reached out and touched one of the giant bookshelves, concentrated, and aged it a few thousand years.
They watched a one-foot sphere of it decompose into dirt in the span of two seconds.
“Woah. You can… turn things into dirt?” The Wolfen said to me.
“No – I can age them. Or… reverse age them.” I stuck poked the very edge of the pile of dirt and reversed the aging I’d just done. It quickly resumed its position in the bookshelf. Then I reversed it some more, to find it turning into a part of lumber, then a part of a tree with sap in it, then minerals from the soil.
“Holy… wow…” Elagio said. Reese just stood behind him with his mouth hanging wide open. I could picture a fly going in his ear and out of it.
“Um. Yeah. She can come, right wolfy-dude?” Elagio asked the Wolfen.
“Sure. Um. Let’s introduce ourselves…?” He said. “My name is Alex. Call me Alex, okay?”
“Yay! Alex!” I said. “My name is Romeo.”
Elagio’s eyes bugged out of his head as he tried to not laugh.
“Yes, I know that it’s the name of that famous guy in Romeo and Juliet, but it’s a female name. Jeese. Your name isn’t very much better.” I said.
“And how would you know that? You don’t know my name.” He retorted.
“I heard you mention it to Reese there. Elagio… heh, so stupid.” I squinted, then winked.
“I’m joking.”
“Okay… so… come along group, before the Wolfen in this sector – and there are a lot of them – catch our sent and try to murder us.” Alex said, leading us to one of the giant gold gilded double doors of the library. “We need to head to the Heart of the mansion, and, from there, we can travel to The Heart of the third mansion.”
The Heart? What? I mentally questioned.
“Oh, and don’t freak out if you suddenly appear in a slightly different room that still looks kind of similar to the room that you were just in, that would simply be me teleporting you either out of the way of danger, or to an easier route.” Alex said before pushing one of the heavy doors open to reveal the ballroom.
/\/\/\
Mem. 16, 801,203 376 7:54 PM planet side. Mansion 1, Sector A, Room 5.
“So… like, it will switch soon?” I asked Jeremy, one of the humans that had somehow gotten into this building.
“Hah… let me check.” He always loved to show off his mastery of the instruments. So, of course, he materialized a translucent violin (his favorite instrument) from the middle of the air.
We were in the ballroom, numerous metal foldable chairs littered the place, and, along with the fact that the floor was made of yellow marble tiles, it looked like one of my school’s numerous Gathering Areas. In fact, everything except for the five or six balconies that stuck out around the top of the room, everything was the same – down to the wooden stage that was dark red, hard, and sturdy as a planet, with its immovable purple curtains and concrete foundations.
“Grr… why do you always have to do that so extravagantly? It’s not as if it does anything.” I said to Jeremy, growling even though I was not really a Wolfen any more.
Jeremy was a brown haired kid (very long haired, too. Like some sort of ‘hippy’ that I’d had to study in human history class, back when I was Wolfen) with a rather small frame that had little muscle on it, as well as little fat. He had freckles over his face and a rather effeminately small nose. A small amulet that depicted a silver sun with a sword through it hung around his neck, and, to complete his ‘look,’ he wore a white jacket and blue jeans.
“I don’t see you complaining when I end up saving our arses, you know.” He said, pulling a translucent violin bow out of the air and dragging it over the violin and producing a pitch that was almost too high for me to hear.
A rather large, multicolored shimmering wall appeared in front of us. It was a timer made of light or something.
“Right.” I said, look at it. It was counting down from two seconds.
There was a slight shift in the screen, and we both knew that the rooms had shifted again.
“Okay. Let’s go!” Jeremy said, walking towards the giant gilded gold doors that had just appeared.
“Why over here?” I asked him.
“…Because, like I said numerous times, we need to go to the library and meet up with a group that gets created there.” He said.
How he knew these things through just playing instruments… I’d never know.
“Right.” I said, waiting for him to open the massive slab of wood.
/\/\/\
Mem. 16 801,203 377 8:19 AM planet side. Mansion 3, Sector A, Room 17.
“Grr…!” I growled again. “Where are they?” I asked him.
“I… I don’t know. Lets… maybe…” He stumbled through words, for once not being certain of everything he was saying.
“Maybe I got the location incorrect. Um…” He said.
“Whatever. I’m going to go back to the ballroom and see if they’re in there, conveniently awaiting us.” I said to him. And I did.
Jeremy came with me, so I guessed that he wanted to stick together, because, honestly, he relied on my ability when things got messy.
Suddenly, we were in a slightly different version of the ballroom – it was slightly higher, had chandeliers, actual benches lining the walls… and a space in the middle for dancing. The balconies were made with finely sculpted marble fences around them, and the stage was like that of a performer’s stage, red curtains with dark wooden platforms.
“Hello.” A white Wolfen said from in front of me. “I see you have a human following you.”
I looked back to see Jeremy, as well as a girl reptile creature (she looked suspiciously like me, but light green instead of blue, and with numerous spikes down her back instead of one single spike.)
And there were two more of the humans – one was tall and muscular, with mismatched eyes and a black shirt, and the other was limber and had hazel hair, with pale skin (paler even than the first human) and blue eyes. He was wearing what appeared to be a brown jacket.
“Okay… Alex, why…?” The muscular one asked. The white Wolfen responded – making him Alex.
“Because. More humans means more likelihood of getting to the correct mansion. And, if I’m not mistaken, this here is Mash. He can remove atoms from molecules on a massive scale – like, he could make hydrogen and oxygen gas from water.” Alex said.
“What? How did you know that…? And seriously – my name isn’t, well, I don’t go by Mash. I go by M.M.” I said. Honestly, ‘Mash?’ Who the heck calls their son ‘Mash?’
“Ah yes… anyways, shall we continue?” He asked. Jeremy gave me the eye.
“I told you we’d join a group. And now we’re going to join. So, hah!”
“Um… where exactly are we going?” I asked Alex. “By the way – the human back there is Jeremy.”
“Yeah – hi Jeremy. We’re going to get back to the human mansion because I want to get over there and it’s really hard to orient yourself without two of the mansion’s native species with you. So come along now! We’re going to… well, The Heart of this mansion. If we can find it… the downside of having a group of people with me is that it gets harder to see the other sectors and The Heart of the mansion.” He said.
We followed them, with me taking up the end of the line.
/\/\/\
Mem. 9, 801,203 377 9:15 AM planet side. Mansion 4, Sector B, Room 18.
“Why, why, why? Why are we climbing these endless stairs, Rose? Honestly!” I said to the girl with the red hair, red shorts, and red t-shirt in front of me. She was smaller than me – about five feet and five inches – and fairly skinny. She had the endurance of a freaking marathon runner, though.
“Because, Sapphire, we need to get to somewhere relatively inaccessible from the other rooms. Wherever these stairs lead to are probably safer than anywhere else.” She said, not even panting even though we’d been climbing stairs for the past forty minutes.
I’d lost count of the giant gray stone slabs after the seven hundredth one. And my legs burned like heck right now.
The only reason I wasn’t doubled over, gasping for breath was probably because I was buffing myself for plus two hundred percent stamina, but that was going to change to something else in about seven minutes.
“Okay. Come one, let’s stop for a… a little.” I said, trying to not pant and gasping in the middle of it.
Rose slowed down and said, “Fine… fine. Let’s sit down right here, I guess.” I went up to her slab and sat down on it, marveling at the expert craftsmanship of the place. The entire thing was like a tower for stairs – there was a central cylinder that held all of the stair pieces in place, and numerous princess-tower windows circling the outside. Of course, they were filled in with that unbreakable glass.
But still, the view was amazing – I could see for… wow.
“How… whew… how, how high up are we, Rose?” I asked her. She looked at me with her big brown eyes.
“Oh, let me just check my altimeter!” She said. “How the heck should I know, Sapphire? I can guess – seeing as though I can barely see the individual trees from this height, I’m thinking a few thousand feet.”
Erg… Rose could be really annoying at times.
“Right. Um.” I started. “So… how far do you think we have to go? This place looks the same after every step and I’m bored.”
Rose gave me her best ‘Oh my god. Ergh!’ look and told me, “We probably have quite a ways to go.”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah. Right. Um… so, what… what are we going to do once we reach the top?” I asked her.
“I don’t know. Now, obviously, you have recovered enough to make general queries of me, so get up and run more.”
“Ergh,” I groaned as I got up, “Fine.”
We began walking again.
The only reason I stayed with Rose is because she made me want to stay with her through her auric manipulation. If I had my way, she’d be alone for the rest of her stay in hotel Transylvania, or wherever we were. But she always made me want to stay.
So frustrating.
/\/\/\
That's all for now folks! Please give me feedback, as this is for Nanowrimo and I have not reviewed it at all.Oh my god. I cannot edit the top post because my dad restricted it from me. ARGH!!
Anyways, here is TAG as it is now. If anyone wants to resize all of the Mem. Things to size twenty for me, I would appreciate it. Oh! And, if you spoilered it, I would be even mohr happay.
Sorry I can't do that. I am on my phone, and it would take me more time than I have.
Mem. ERROR, ERROR, ERROR, ERROR. ERROR, ERROR, ERROR.
The shimmering through the darkness was all that alerted Him to His existence. The shimmering quickly grew, or perhaps He simply moved closer to it, until it took up His entire vision, up to his peripheries.
After the brief 'emotion' he'd come to label as 'surprise' at this New thing in His domain - or so He believed the darkness was as such - He quickly accepted its twisting pale shapes and multitudes of... bright... things that were somehow different from the darkness around him.
He was entranced, and, eventually, found that He could 'move' the 'picture' around if He really urged it to move.
After an unbelievably long time (classified as thousands of years to a member of the human race,) He noticed something changing.
Now there were larger shapes, similar in the... differentedness to the first shapes. These newer shapes created larger, more convoluted prisms and objects that had clear, shiny... things on the sides of them.
This happened four times, and at the end of the fourth time, the screen exploded.
"Oh dear," He thought to Himself. "Where did all of the pretty shapes go?"
And, after untold millennia of studying His photographic 'memory', he reached an answer. "This will not do at all," He mused to himself, finally mastering the complicated structure that was language. "I need to save those creatures!" Finally arriving at this conclusion, He devised a Plan and thought it. It happened.
He noticed something wrong with his plan after a little while. He thought the correction. It happened.
His last thought was ‘Huh. What is that curious sensation?’
Then he was gone – just another memory in the cosmic ocean of them.
/\/\/\
Mem. 1, 801,203 376 5:53 PM planet side. Mansion 3, sector B, room 19.
“That’s not going to work.” He said for the fourth time in a row. The ‘he’ in question was Luke. He was floating four feet above my unmade bed and wore a skin tight white T-shirt and some black pants, but, as black as they were, his hair was blacker. He had red sneakers (comparable to metal when it’s really hot), and a long, sloping brow led your eyes down to his own mismatched eyes – one green and one brown – and then to his thin red lips. His nose was a little larger than average, but not by much.
“Shut up. I don’t care if it won’t work, I’m still trying.” I had awoken in this mansion fourteen weeks ago. Or maybe it was a castle – I couldn’t tell, the rooms were always switching themselves around. I had found my way to the rather spacious attic – all of it was one room – and had been sleeping in there for the past two nights. Luke was just some sixteen year old who had been following me for the past two and a half weeks. I wasn’t sure why.
“Still, it won’t work. Why don’t you sleep a little, you’ve been trying to do this for, like, the past day. I think. God, why did you have to hole up in a windowless room?” He asked me. I was using a hammer to batter at the wooden wall. "Those things aren't that disturbing."
The attic was crossed with numerous timbers, creating a sort of spider’s web that made it kind of hard to get from one end to the other. Both ends had doors, and, the day before, I’d woken up to see Luke walk through the back door only to come in through the front door. Apparently the same room can be moved so that it was connected to the exact same place or something like that in this forsaken mansion.
How had I even ended up in here, anyways? I’d gone to sleep that night and just awoken in here. The mansion had been a nightmare – the people that were in here with me were prone to be violent. I had no idea why. Maybe it was because of my appearance? For some reason, when I’d been transported to this place, I’d taken the form of a… werewolf? I stood on two legs and kind of resembled a wolf in the fact that I had a muzzle and claws and such. Maybe I simply freaked kids out or something.
Luckily, I had some serious strength and reflexes now that I was this… thing, so I was mostly unharmed by them. And they were deadly. I mean, this one kid could trap you in an alternate dimension just by taking a photograph of you. Her name had been Jekylls and she’d been insane. She’d also been my friend for the first six or seven days in the mansion. Then another one called Jeremy came along and severed her with a recorder – the instrument – just by pointing at her with it and playing it.
Then he had tried to kill me.
I was, of course, able to dodge and lost him through the maze of rooms. “Still, I don’t care. I am sick of this goddamned place. I am sick of waiting for my death. And do you really have to show off your gravity nullification powers? It distracts me.” I said to him, priming the iron hammer for yet another hit on the wall. I heard breathing come suddenly from behind me – sensitive ears – and whirled around, only to find Luke hovering about an inch above the ground and holding my hammer in his hand. He was strong – almost as strong as me.
“Stop wasting your energy. I’ve been here for almost a year.” He sighed and dropped the hammer.
Ugh, I thought to myself; seeing claws and my grey fur coating it still freaked me out.
“I know that there’s no escape aside from death. Right now.” He continued
I sighed as well.
Luke slowly drifted to the ground and walked back to my bed (I’d dragged it up with me,) lying down on his stomach and stretching out after yanking his sneakers off and pulling its white sheets over himself.
I stood there with a grimace. He was right; there was no escape from the prison. Prison. Was that what this place was? A containment building for people who were different? It seemed like everyone I’d met (including myself) had some strange ability or something… else.
Where was this place, anyways? The windows always looked out upon rolling hills somewhere on top of a cliff – you could see the tree coated, precarious drop off in the distance from some of the windows – that was blanketed by forest and jungle. Sometimes, I could see animals out there. Sometimes, they came up to the window. Sometimes, they weren’t animals.
Sometimes, they were blackened shells of humans, with gaping caves for mouths and eyes that glowed red like embers in a dying fire, their curled fingers melding together into some sort of blackened, charred glove that had some small semblance to a hand.
Sometimes they pounded the thin glass that separated them from us. Sometimes they opened their maws and sucked on it. They didn’t breathe – no breath fog ever coated the windows – but they did moan. Or we assumed – we never really heard them.
This lead to some disturbing thoughts – maybe the mansion was here to protect us from the world.
Perhaps it was here to protect the world from us.
Whatever the mansion’s purpose, it was still a prison.
Luke began snoring. It was a rather loud and ever so slightly unpleasant noise – a sort of reverberating cave grumble. Or maybe it was like an earthquake.
I sighed again and sat down, checking my black watch as I did so.
“Grr… three hours until the Change,” I said. “Why does it always take so long?” I stretched out on the cold wood floor and closed my eyes like Luke had suggested.
Unbidden, images flashed through my mind of Clara.
/\/\/\
Mem 2, 801,203 8:50 PM 375 Planet Side. Mansion 2, Sector A, Room 19.
“Twerp.” He said, before I shoved him off of me and through the dark opening that was a doorway on the other side of the room.
“Me: One. You: Zero.” I said to myself, slowly rising to my feet and brushing imaginary dirt off of my red shirt.
The room I was in was technically called the attic, but everyone else in the building simply called it ‘Room 19.’
Apparently, they’d received word from some sort of mystical human with a ‘long mustache’ that ‘The attic shalt be called Room Nineteen. Rabbits. Give me rabbits.’ This intrigued me, as the room had no relation to the number nineteen.
I had awoken in this place only a month ago. The soft light in my canopy top bedroom had slowly filtered itself away to the glaring midday sun that came through the window of this fortress’s observatory. I’d kept mostly to myself since then – I was… different. Everyone else was normal – they were giant wolf like creatures – but I was furless and pale, with only a small bit of hazel colored hair on the top of my head. Plus, I had long and limber limbs that stretched out and had little muscle on them, blue eyes instead of the normal – yellow or green – and, the worst, I had a small triangular protrusion coming out of my face, unlike the normal extension that all Wolfen had. If I was not a Wolfen, why, oh why, did I have the memories of one?
I lived – past tense – in a tall tree house, like every other Wolfen in this Mansion. I remember having a tail, fur, teeth, even my hair was Wolfen in aspect.
So what happened?
“We’ve seen one like you before.” One of the respected Wolfen had told me, before proceeding to say, “He disappeared. Just like you will.”
That was about a week ago. The grey beast had then tried to kill me with incredibly hot hands that had glowed red, then white, while he’d swiped at me.
I’d escaped by making him so dense that he literally collapsed in on himself – not black-hole style, it was instead, to put it nicely, a rather gory sight. Before then, I hadn’t known about my ‘ability’ as the others called them. But I knew about it now.
The Wolfen that had just attacked me had kept muttering things about ‘The group.’ And ‘Kill them all.’ Or something of that sort. I, of course, had activated my power and reduced him to a whimpering mess on the floor. He’d not been as weakened as I’d believed, though, so he’d leapt up at me and shoved me to the ground before I’d been able to decrease his density and hurl him through the door. And he’d called me the twerp! Unbelievable.
The attic was a mess of different assorted bed mattresses, dolls, and floating candles that glowed without fires. What wasn’t covered with one of those things was, instead, covered in broken wooden beams and uprooted beige carpeting.
It was one of the most horrifying rooms I have ever been in – but it had its uses. Like hiding. Or practicing my ability.
“Hey… where am I?” Came from someone to my left all of the sudden.
A robust Wolfen wearing a black T-shirt with some god forsaken band’s logo printed on it crawled out of the door that had just appeared there, collapsing on a red mattress that was conveniently in his way.
As he rolled over the mattress and into better lighting, I could see that he was, in fact, not a Wolfen. He… he looked like me.
“Woah!” I screamed, jumping back and tripping over what I presumed to be a wooden beam. I fell down and hit my head on something hard, passing into the non-blissful realm of unconsciousness.
/\/\/\
Mem 1, 801,203 8:57 PM planet side. Mansion 2, Sector B, Room 19.
“Ergh…” I yawned, slowly awakening from my prolonged nap. Luke was already up and standing on the ceiling, staring up at me.
I jumped up and yelled at him.
“DON’T DO THAT!”
He just calmly… looked down at me. His eyes were still closed, though.
He was obviously sleepwalking or something…
“This can not get any creepier,” I said to him, “Without Kalycko bursting in here or something.” Luke calmly stood there and ‘watched’ me as I moved around. It was… really creepy. I eventually left the attic, hoping that The Change had occurred already.
It had.
The left door led me into a small room that was painted light blue – cyan – all over and had a small iron hatch on the floor. The iron hatch, upon closer investigation, presented itself to be locked with a silvery padlock that required some sort of small key to open it.
I’d never seen the room before, and I’d explored the place inside and out. First sleepwalking (and Uber Creepy) Luke, now this hitherto hidden room – perhaps I was dreaming? Perhaps not.
Although, coming to think of it, the room did seem a little fuzzy. And… was that a shower or a wall?
My eyes snapped open to the sound of Luke snoring gently and dangling his arm about an inch away from my head. He was floating himself three feet above the ground while asleep. Showoff.
My dream had encoded the real world situation into my sleep – how… interesting. I slowly slid back, under his arm and careful to not disturb him, and got up.
Oh gods my back hurts, I thought, stretching my arms above my head and attempting to not groan. My back finally popped and relieved the tension that had built up during my stay on the ground.
“’Morning…” Luke said, awakening at the disturbing sounds my back had made. He twisted himself around and levitated to his feet. “Sleep well?” He asked me, motioning to the floor.
“What do you think?” I asked in reply. “And… why do you follow me, anyways?”
He shrugged.
That was all that I ever got – noncommittal shrugs or grunts. I wasn’t going to push him for an answer. Yet.
“I think it just Changed a few minutes ago,” Luke said to me, motioning to a door on my left. “You know, if you want to get out of the attic or something ridiculous like that.”
I remembered something about a door from my dream. Something about that door – the one Luke had motioned to. Was someone Else trying to tell me something? Was another being trying to influence my thoughts with his ability?
There was no way to know. Perhaps the room behind the door would hold something like the hatch I’d seen – maybe it was a trap.
That, however, was something that I didn’t have to just wonder about, and, so thinking, I calmly walked over to the door and opened it.
“Hello! Glad you could join us!” A starry faced reptile thing in a green dress said to me, pulling me into the room. Everything went black as I fainted.
/\/\/\
Mem. 4 801,203 376 2:33 AM planet side. Mansion 3, Sector A, Room 21.
I awoke in the small room. The roof, as always, was almost as low as my head. The entire area was painted sickly shades of brown that were not all that unlike a dog's diarrhea after, perhaps, some sort of beige paint binge. It wasn't too terribly sickening, though. The smell couldn't have been more unlike a dog's diarrhea - minty and fresh, permeated by occasional pangs of rosemary, and/or cooking jasmine rice.
I rose from my uncomfortable position on the carpet and yawned.
"Good morning, world!" I said, mentally sighing to see that I was, in fact, still alive. "I wonder what pointless BS you'll do today!"
I looked back at the miniature oak door - it was a little smaller than me. It was, like everything else, a repulsive shade of beige. Where would it lead to today? Only one way to find out.
I crept over to the small frame so that anyone who was possibly on the other side wouldn’t know I was there until it was too late. The door swung open on well-oiled hinges to reveal the mansion's pantry. Joy.
At least there was no one trying to kill me right now. Not that they'd succeed; it was immortality’s only upside.
The pantry was filled with numerous, wide shelves - all of which were painted white and stacked high with cardboard boxes of various labels. Many of the boxes labeled 'Ramen' had been ripped apart half a year ago, leaving the marble floor covered in large brown swaths of cardboard and smaller plastic wrappings filled with multicolored labels and drawings of noodle bowls.
I bent down to study a smaller cardboard box that was stationed underneath one of the shelves. It was labeled only with the word, 'CAUTION' and nothing else.
"Caution what?" I said aloud to myself. Flaunting my immortality like some idiot god, I opened the package by turning it upside down and removing the clear pieces of tape on the (now) top flaps of the box.
A blackness dropped out and ate my foot.
/\/\/\
Mem. 1 801,203 377 5:43 AM galaxy wide. Mansion ?, Sector ?, Room ?.
"Nghh..." I groaned and forced my eyes open to see a large room that was filled with people. Well - not a lot of people, and none of them were 'human.'
"Good morning." A feminine voice said to me. "Welcome to... our group."
They were… humanoids, like me. That doesn’t mean that they were humans, though.
One was like a reptile - he reminded me of a raptor (the dinosaur kind) mixed with a human. Not surprisingly, he had no hair. He also had no protruding ears, at least not that I could see. He was, instead, covered in green scales and had bright red spikes down his back.
These were easily visible due to the fact that he wore no shirt.
Or pants.
Instead, he was wearing a small... leather loincloth? Ugh. It was brown and tied around his back, just above his tail.
The scales over his stomach were milky white – perhaps reflecting their softness? And he had some sort of… marking in the middle of it. The marking was kind of like half of a heart mixed with half of a dagger and smeared ever so slightly. Perhaps it was a tattoo?
Sitting on one of the room's two blue chairs was a guy covered in red-brown fur.
Just like me.
He glanced over at me as I stared at him. Contrary to the reptile/dinosaur/human thing, he had a lot of detail evident on him. His eyes were yellow, yellow like dandelions. His hands were long and tapered to the small black nails on the ends of his fingers. He had a long white mane that was reminiscent of a pony’s flock of hair running down the back of his head and underneath his solid leaf green t-shirt. He wore long shorts that were light blue and had white palm leaf imprints over them. It took me a second to realize that they were made out of swimming trunk fabric and were, therefore, most likely a pair of swimming trunks.
“Yo’ dude.” He said to me, bumping his head up a little bit.
I glanced at the probable source of the female voice – the reptile girl thing that had pulled me in. I could tell she was a girl for fairly obvious reasons. Her scales were blue, and, not surprisingly, I suppose, she was wearing an actual shirt – pink – and had some blue jeans on. She didn’t have spikes, but, instead, she had one single giant spike near the top of her back. It was a slightly lighter shade of blue than her regular ‘skin.’ She had crystal blue eyes and an aura of optimism.
“You… uh, you fainted or something.” She said to me, holding her hand out. I hadn’t realized that I was on the ground until then, so I gratefully accepted here hand. She lifted me up with surprising strength for her small frame.
“Um. Erg! It’s really awkward when we integrate new members into this group thing,” she said, looking down at her feet (which were like human’s feet apart for the fact that they were blue, scaly, and had white claws instead of toenails.)
“Sorry, dude, Tiffers gets nervous around new people.” The other wolf guy said to me as I stood there awkwardly looking at ‘Tiffers.’
“Ah. Um… well… what do you want me for?” I asked them, looking around the room (it was painted red and had a yellow carpet. The furniture – two loveseats covered in plush fabric and one long couch coated in leather substitute – was all blue) for Luke. Despite us being unwitting acquaintances, he had been with me for a while.
“Where is that guy that I came in here with?” I asked, screwing my face in a slightly puzzled manner.
“He’s human.” The girl said, snapping her head back up and regarding me with suddenly threateningly cold eyes.
“Humans aren’t allowed here.” She said to me.
I gulped. Surely they hadn’t… killed him, had they?
/\/\/\
Mem. 3, 801,203 376 9:03 PM planet side. Mansion 3, Sector B, Room 19.
“HEY!” I yelled, banging my fists against the door the scaly had just sucked Jake through. Despite my strength, it was no use.
“Gods! And they wondered why I was always such a pessimistic person.” I muttered aloud to myself, slinking down to the bottom of the door and listening to murmurs. The one thing I had actually liked in this place.
No – not ‘thing’ but ‘person,’ and ‘place.’
The one thing that I had wanted for the past three years of my life was to draw furries perfectly. Then I up and appeared in this hellhole. I had thought about committing suicide, but Jake’s serendipitous appearance had prevented that – I had only wanted to have talent in drawing, but a live furry just appeared in the one place that I would have hated but for him.
I didn’t mind that he barely noticed me. He didn’t mind me stalking him.
And now he was gone – vanished into another room with a locked door and…
“That was a scaly.” I said. The thought sunk into my mind.
Holy crap. There are more like him…
A smile began to grace my lips until I realized that Jake was unique and not some trading card that I could mess around with until I got bored of it.
The murmurs stopped in the room behind me; the door swung open.
“Huh,” I said, standing up and looking behind me. The room that was there now was not the room that had been there. It wasn’t really a room at all, actually.
It was just darkness. Oh, and a rather bedraggled zombie-like human.
“Oh. Hi there. Do you want to kill me?” His ragged voice permeated the darkness as I strained to make out the details of his ragged clothing on his ragged body.
/\/\/\
Mem. 4 801,203 9:15 PM planet side. Mansion 3, Sector A-B-C-D Room 0.
“Heh. I guess not.” I said to the man standing in the pool of light outside of the darkness that had eaten me.
It had started with my foot and wound its way up my leg, eventually engulfing my entire lower body. It gave me a strange sense of disconnection. After another minute or so, I was immersed in it and felt a tug in my gut. Then nothing.
Not even an emotion.
Then the man had opened a doorway of light into the space I was in, blinding me enough so that I couldn’t make anything about him out. Maybe it was a girl.
“Erm… hi?” Yes. His voice made me certain that the man was a male human.
“Oh dear. It talks. This cannot be good at all,” I tittered to myself.
“Do you want to talk to Mr. Squiggles? He’s my pet –“ Titter, “- Sandwich. Don’t worry – if you are nice to him, he won’t eat you and regurgitate you for his babies,” I said. “Maybe.”
“Erm.” The man quickly shut the door. I could hear him shoving something onto it.
Good. That would take care of him, I thought to myself, and continued trying to deduce where I was.
/\/\/\
Mem. 5, 801,202 2 12:59 AM planet side. Mansion 3, Sector A, Room 1.
“Okay…” I said, distrustful of Elagio’s ideas.
“No, really! It should shatter the glass and… well, freedom!” He said, smiling. His face was basically a bucket of sunshine mixed with rainbow unicorns and little girls’ birthday cakes.
Okay, not literally. His face was, in reality, simply prone to over exaggerating his emotions. Not that I minded. He was good company, especially in this… this… well, this place we were in.
Elagio was tall for his age, not that someone at his age grew anymore; he was nineteen. And he was the nicest nineteen year old guy that I have ever known.
We had just met yesterday, yet I had already taken a liking to him.
He wore a Mariner’s baseball cap around, as well as a white t-shirt and blue sport’s shorts. He had really muscular legs, and he’d told me that he could do four hundred sit ups in a row. His biceps were bulgy, too, but, surprisingly, he was not tan. He was extremely pale and had blue eyes – definitely not the normal ‘jock stereotype.’
And he wasn’t a jock. He’d never touched a football in his life.
I didn’t know what he did. I didn’t care.
He seemed to enjoy my company.
“You know, I’ve never seen your hair!” I said, giggling as he shrugged and took his hat off to reveal dirty blond hair that stood straight up in a buzz cut sort of way. Then he put his hat back on.
“I got this haircut, like, three days ago…” He trailed off and realized, once again, where he was.
“Do… do you think we’ll ever get out of here?” He asked, shoulders slumped down.
I nodded. “Just fire that… thing up.” I motioned over to the metal device that had so many wires over it that it looked like my hair in the morning. Elagio and I had built it – well, Elagio had told me where to put everything. I really had no idea what it did other than break things.
We’d dragged it into the kitchen today. It had taken two days to build, the first day we were here, and yesterday.
Yesterday, though, we’d awoken to find all of the rooms in the building moved around into different places!
What had led to the bathroom yesterday morning now led to the kitchen. Luckily, we’d slept in the same room as our machine, so we hadn’t lost it in the middle of the night.
I sighed. The kitchen was a wreck – the counters were arranged like a backwards F and had hotdogs and celery out all over them, not to mention buns for the hotdogs, ketchup for the hotdogs, and Ranch dressing for the celery.
The floor was covered in half dried milk that was starting to smell, and the stainless steel, two sided sink had been filled with – get this – potato peelings.
It was not pretty.
The walls were smeared with mashed potatoes (I thought) and burnt garlic hung down from the red ceiling. The ceiling was most likely not naturally red.
We’d come to the conclusion that a seventeen foot tall giant had teleported into this room yesterday and couldn’t teleport out. So he pulled random assorted vegetables and disgusting other things out of the numerous drawers that were now scattered around the floor and smashed them together. Then he’d taken the stainless steel fridge, ripped it out of the wall outlet, and poured everything into his mouth – some of the stuff didn’t make it, though, and he had hated the hotdogs because he was a vegetarian (or something.)
Then he’d escaped by fixing his teleportation device and teleporting out of the room.
A few gremlins came pouring in from the giant oven that was right next to the sink and put the fridge back in its place after taking potatoes out of the drawers and skinning them with their bare claws. They’d found the tomatoes’ hideout and, fearing mutiny from the hidden fruits, smashed them to bits on the ceiling before finally torching the rest of the garlic for conspiring against them with the tomatoes.
They left them hanging on the ceiling in order to deter more vegetable mutiny.
We’d had a good laugh coming up with that little story, actually. We really had no idea what the hell had happened to this place.
I looked back over to Elagio. He was standing stock-still and sweating.
Something moved out of my periphery. I glanced over to see…
“OH MY GOD!” I screamed, ducking down so that I wouldn’t have to see the horrible twisted and burnt remains of some sort of… semi-humanoid creature that was clawing at the window and staring into our souls with its lava-like eyes of death and destruction.
“Um,” Elagio said, finally getting down with me onto the disgusting floor. “I think we should dismantle the machine. That glass seems to be keeping us from being slaughtered right now.” His voice trembled.
/\/\/\
Mem. 5 801,202 5 7:56 PM planet side. Mansion 3, Sector A, Room 19.
The attic.
I sighed.
Elagio looked at me like I was insane. “Are you sure that he won’t be able to get us up here?”
I looked at him in a sideways sort of way.
“…No. But… there’s a good chance that he won’t be able to track us through that twisted path I lead you through,” I said to him. “At the very most, he’ll get to the farmhouse thingy. That river should’ve totally wiped our scents.”
Elagio shuddered.
“That thing… ugh. Half wolf, half man… why? Why are we here?” His usual optimism had diminished to nothingness.
The attic was a large room, stretching across the entire width of the mansion/building – or so we assumed. It had two doors, one at each end. Both of them thick and oaken.
Neither of them with locks.
“We’ll hole up in here for a while. Maybe he’ll be bored with us after some time?” I said to him, sitting down.
/\/\/\
Mem. 5 801,202 8 7:55 PM planet side. Mansion 3, Sector B, Room 5.
“CLOSE THE DOOR, SARAH!” Elagio yelled at me, as if I wasn’t already racing for it.
But I wasn’t fast enough – Yerelmew was already opening the massive mahogany double doors that lead into the giant ballroom of sorts.
I screamed as his white, furry arm came into view. As well as his… hands. His hands with their deadly heat and black, terrifying claws.
Then everything stopped.
Stopped, like… like the clock that governed the smallest units of time had just broken.
Everything faded to black and white. The foldable chairs that were surrounding me stopped falling down as I pushed them, but, instead, moved as if they were in zero gravity – linearly floating through air.
“Erm…?” I said. The sound I emitted was nothing like ‘Erm.’
It was more like ‘Uh…’ but carrying on for a lifetime. And the sound stayed in place even as I moved.
So… sound didn’t travel like they should… light seemed to be screwed up…
Was time being bent around me?
/\/\/\
Mem. 5 801,202 57 5:34 PM planet side. Mansion 3, Sector C, Room 1.
And then there was only Elagio, standing with his machinations. Even in this situation, I marveled at how skilled he was with mechanics – all three of his robots were sentient and powered with air. They were clones of each other, albeit they were each in a different color scheme. One was red, another was green, and the third was a sort of tan brown.
They, and Elagio, were all that stood between Ramsee and The Heart.
We were in the mansion’s kitchen. Again. Just like that day that it all started, so long ago now. The horrendous mess that had been littered throughout the entire room had mysteriously vanished by this time, and the shelves had been restocked with herbs of all kinds (my mind identified garlic, sage, and dill pickle) as well as vegetables. The fridge, however, had been replaced with a cheese cabinet that was mysteriously empty. And the counters had rearranged themselves into an upside down L formation, each end pointing towards one of the doors of the room.
Ramsee was, per usual, clothed in a black robe that seemed to be a part of him. The clothing completely obscured his face, leaving the only skin visible that of his hands.
Erg. His hands.
They were creepier than Yeremy’s instruments of death (aka his clawed, furred, paws)
They formed sharp spikes instead of normal fingers; they were red like the tomatoes in the cupboard behind him. And his fingernails were long, disturbing protrusions of the sort that gave you nightmares.
He was unkillable.
“Ramsee… why are you doing this?” Elagio yelled at him. I was still lying, stunned, on the ground.
Ramsee had played a tape of what sounded like mathematical equations… and I’d been rendered weaker than a baby.
Seriously, I could barely breathe. Elagio – he’d wanted to help me, but The Heart was more important than either of us.
“Why should I not do anything? Power power power! Power!” Ramsee hung his head, a ghostly trail of laughter escaped from his veil and chilled me to my bones.
“He he he he…” Ramsee said, grasping something within his garb.
“Here’s a gift from… Clara!” He yelled, throwing an invisible force against Elagio and his machinations (they were skinny creations, with steam pipes protruding from every possible place on there bodies. For all that, though, they were humanoid in nature and shape.)
The steambots (as Elagio called them) exploded in showers of superheated dihydrogen monoxide, obscuring my vision, as Elagio flew backwards onto a counter. I heard a yell, and everything began to fade to blackness.
[ERROR: Mem. 5 has become too corrupt after this point to translate accurately. What follows is a rough interpretation.]
[As of 801,204 454, 9:52 PM galaxy wide correspondence, this memory has been REDACTED.]
/\/\/\
Mem. 11 801,202 57 5:36 PM planet side. Mansion 3, Sector C, Room 1.
My steambots exploded as Elagio threw something at us, and their steam exploded outwards in violent force. It clouded my vision as I flew through the air, skidded across one of the marble countertops, and slammed into the window that was right next to the door to The Heart.
The Heart. A mystery wrapped in an enigma coated with intricate designs and puzzles, all part of a grand riddle.
The Heart. My worst enemy… yet something I needed even now. Something we all needed.
“Ela…g…” I heard Sarah’s voice from somewhere to my right.
Then… silence.
The steam was suddenly gone, and so were my steambots. Elagio was no where to be seen, and…
“Sarah?!” I yelled, getting up and wincing in the pain that pierced my back suddenly. “Ergghh…” I whimpered, noticing that nothing… nothing was left of our battle just a few minutes previously.
Where were they? Had Sarah frozen time and abducted Elagio? But… I thought that Elagio had disabled her with some crazy sounding magic spell.
She must have gone out of this room… I thought to myself, realizing the implications.
Her ability came with a limitation – she couldn’t travel outside of the room she was in without severely weakening herself. And if she had already been weakened…
I stumbled through the top door, to find myself in the Grand Hallway – a long corridor that was lit with numerous rather luminescent orbs that floated close to the ceiling and had at least five doors lining it, all labeled with a number followed by a letter followed by another number. It had a red carpet of ambiguous design on the ground, and the walls were painted an off color of white.
If Sarah had taken Elagio somewhere, she would have dragged him through here… and returned in order to not be killed instantly by him. However… that would lead to -
I glanced to my right, only to see Sarah collapsing inwards on herself – trapped in a different time zone for her eternity, yet dissolving to darkness in my time zone.
“No!” I screamed, watching the last portion of her pale face collapsing into that odd shade of blackness that existed only in the absence of everything.
Her blue eyes were the last things I ever saw of her.
/\/\/\
Mem. 13 801,203 376 9:01 PM planet side. Mansion 3, Sector B, Room 3.
“So…” I started, staring at the furry grey mammal that had just fainted in our doorway. He was wearing a red, short sleeved shirt and long blue jeans that (somehow) allowed his long light grey tail to pour out.
He looked similar in physique and attributes to Clarence.
“So what?” Clarence said, like he’d read my mind. Or maybe he was just responding to me.
“So… you’re the smart one. What should we do?” I asked him in a slightly mocking manner.
Clarence was a Wolfen, and proudly displayed this through his covering of red-brown fur, longish snout, and ears. Not to mention his long white mane that stood up from behind his neck all the time, and perky ears that stretched out in reminiscent nostalgia of his wolf ancestry. He seemed to think that swimming trunks were cool; the pair he wore was icy blue, with white… leaf imprints over them. Why he would choose such a design was beyond me, as leaves were so rare and… uncouth. They were nature’s dirty little gift to Reptians like me.
His shirt was a mossy color of green, kind of like the fern leaves of my native habitat yet somehow utterly unlike them.
“Dude. Chill. He’ll awaken soon enough. I think. Tiffers,” He looked over to Tiffers in order to procure confirmation.
Tiffers was a Palatican, and covered in pale blue scales to prove it. She also had the scariest yet most calming ice cold blue eyes that I had ever seen. Her fin stuck out from her currently pink shirt (why, oh why, did everyone else have to wear one of those disgusting things? Always grabbing your body as if it owned it…)
She was rather curvy – curvier than most other Palaticans. Not that I cared…
“Yeah, yeah. He’ll be fine. Must’ve... been shocked.” She said. “Who was that… human out there?” Her humanoid hand (oddly, considering that she’d evolved completely and utterly separately from humans) motioned towards the door that she’d slammed into his face. I had only gotten a glimpse of him but he’d seemed to be black haired, and disgustingly pale, like all humans.
Blegh, humans. The most vile creatures to have ever walked on Earth. Always trying to kill each other or some other innocent creature.
We’d learned about them in history class. Apparently, they’d once dominated the planet that we lived on. But then they’d all left (after, of course, destroying its native life and decimating its atmosphere.) to go colonize some other place, and good riddance.
Some of them stayed behind – no one knew why, but rumors had been running that they’d been conducting research on genetic sequences and modification, in order to combat the world’s climate (and decidedly human-antagonistic animals) through controlled evolution.
Or so the grapevine had said a few days before… I arrived here. What was going on back home? I assumed that this mansion (nightmare) that we’d appeared in was on another planet, hence the lack of my species or humans with us. And the non-lack of burnt up monsters of terrifying death and doom.
But… where had Palaticans come from? Were they aliens from another planet, sent here by whatever cosmic force sent me and everyone else? And Wolfen… where did they come from?
And why was everyone… humanoid? Why could I understand the aliens?
“-ello?” Cut through my frantic thought processes. “Dude. You zoned out. Again.” Clarence had come over to me from his corner in the wall and was attempting to distract me by waving his arm in front of me.
“… You’re still no-“
“WHAT?!” I yelled at him, annoyed that he’d cut off my stream of consciousness. “I was getting closer and closer to the truth behind this annoying hunk of unbreakable wood, idiot.”
“Hey, hey, hey. I know you guys aren’t in love, but no need to kill each other every time you happen to glance at one another in the same second.” Tiffers cut in, standing between us for good measure.
“Right. Right right right,” I said. “Um. We need to work together. That’s right.”
“Yes. How else are we going to escape from these mansions?” Tiffers said, nodding in my direction. She was always trying to be the voice of reason – and she was fairly good at it.
The fact that she could make an army to kill you in about five seconds probably helped too.
Tiffers could bring any object that was smaller that her… to life. The inanimate-animate objects were loyal to her (if not completely bound to follow her orders) and would protect her to death.
You did not want to confront her in a kitchen – sharp knives plus intelligence plus method of movement plus you equals instant death.
“Plus, those humans are always scheming against us – I don’t know how we would have survived without you telling us about the dirty creatures,” Tiffers said just to me.
Meanwhile, whilst this had been happening, the door had been making odd noises, as if it was being hit.
“Clarence, play the tape for this room. Move it to… um… move it to limbo,”
Clarence pulled a palm sized black rectangular prism out of his pocket. It looked rather like one of the ‘cellphone’ things that we were taught about in Human History class – but those were incredibly ineffective. Mass communication teleportation devices (Madies) were far more effective, as they transferred your thoughts and understanding directly to another person, allowing for instant communication and linking of ideals.
He wacked the thing against his leg, causing it to emit a high pitched squeal before saying something like “Function X, X and three minus B Change over X and X, plot point and end function at second point.”
Ginko was… weird. But he was effective.
There was a loud whirring noise and the room shook slightly. Then there was silence.
/\/\/\
Mem. 1 801,203 377 7:05 AM galaxy wide. Mansion?, Sector ?, Room ?.
“Okay…?” I said, trying to wrap my head around what was just said.
Tiffers, with the help of Shikes (the raptor dude) had just finished explaining a bunch of history about humanity to me. I, meanwhile, had been utterly and completely confused. Humans… I used to be human, but…
We hadn’t evacuated Earth, the sun wasn’t slowly blowing up due to failed science experiments, and the galaxy was not populated with humans trying to kill eachother.
It sounded like they’d made up a future for humanity in general.
And where had they come from? A reptile girl – I didn’t think that we had those on Earth – and another reptile guy…
Not to mention the furred beast over there, still on his chair. He was like me, yet had no memories of being human, at least, none that I could see from what he’d told me.
In fact… they seemed pretty racist (speciest?) against humans. This meant that I’d have to keep my human memories a secret, lest they try to murder me in my sleep.
See, I’d decided to stay with them, even if only because they had accepted me as a ‘Wolfen’ as Clarence called us.
Although I didn’t think I was really Wolfen – I had human memories…
But what if whatever or whoever teleported me here… had switched my memories with someone else?
“Right. It’s seven seven, now,” Tiffers said after checking her blue wristwatch (hitherto unnoticed by me) “Or, at least, it is by galaxy wide time. I think… let’s see…” She fiddled with two or three buttons on the side closest to me.
“Mmm… yeah, it’s… woah.” Tiffers said. “PLAY THE TAPE! CLARENCE! MOVE US TO ROOM ZED NOW!” She began screaming.
/\/\/\
Mem. 4, 801,203 377 7:05 AM planet side. Mansion 3, Sector A-B-C-D, Room 0.
“Hehehe…” I giggled to myself, groping the darkness for the glass sphere that I knew was there somewhere.
I had gone to sleep after deducing my location through a few tricks I’d learned during my thousands of years of existence, like feeling the fabric of reality around me, or deducing my location in space and time. Through those methods, I had found myself in Room zero, informally known as The Heart of the mansion.
I had slept like a cockroach in a dumpster for once.
“Yes yes yes… yes.” I muttered to myself, mentally checking the time again.
Seven o’ seven AM planet side. And galaxy wide, too.
The Coincidence had arrived. Which meant…
“Oh!” I said, bumping into the invisible glass orb that was at the exact center of the mansion.
“Hehehe…” I tittered.
This would do nicely.
/\/\/\
Mem. 3, 801,203 377 7:07 AM planet side. Mansion 3, Sector B, Room 1.
I had fled into the next room, afraid that the insane guy in the weird… darkness would break through the door and try to kill me with ‘Squiggles’ or something.
I had found myself in the kitchen (very nice, Japanese style, the L shaped countertop was crafted from bamboo, and the sink was made of hollow bamboo too. All of the bamboo stuff was light brown, and had a stringy texture to it. There was also metal box (most likely a fridge) in the corner near the sink.) and looked around in the fridge (which was empty,) which led me to root around in the numerous cupboards beneath the counter and find quite a few tomatoes.
Tomatoes were disgusting.
I ate them anyways.
Then I went to sleep, only to be awoken by a deep rumbling throughout the entire mansion as… something halted.
A feeling ran through me, one that I couldn’t adequately explain. It was… negative, and kind of like desolation.
I checked the wall clock – a large white circle with a black plastic borderline on it that was mounted on the wall, directly above the door I’d come in from – and it’d said seven o’ seven and thirty seven seconds after.
“Oh dear.” I said, noticing the second hand slowing down and stopping at the forty and three second mark.
“What…?” I asked myself, walking to the door that would take me back to the attic – I had a feeling that the creepy insane man that I’d seen last night had something to do with the rumbling and the loss of power to the clock. Or… clocks.
In fact, it seemed to be slightly colder in here – was the mansion heated? Was all the power fading?
I opened the (bamboo) door to see a swirling back vortex of nothingness at my feet.
I loudly swore and slammed the door shut, stumbling back towards the window.
/\/\/\
Mem. 8, 801,203 377 7:08 AM galaxy wide. Mansion ?, Sector ?, Room ?.
I said a very bad word in order to articulate my anger at having been thwarted.
The Coincidence… why had I forgotten to check an hour ago? I had known it was coming up today and that it began either the end… or the beginning.
And now we were stuck out in… god knows where.
“Tiffers…” Clarence started, hitting another black case against his leg. “It won’t work.”
I looked at him. I looked at the floor.
“There’s… something I should tell you. Well, I should have told you.” I started in a rather sorrowful way.
“Do you remember Aeonic?” I asked him.
“…Who?” Clarence and the new guy – Jake – said at the same time. Shikes simply shook his head and sat down on the floor, next to where Jake was sitting.
“I didn’t think so. He… erased your memories.” I said. “Remember the day we met?”
Clarence smiled, “Yeah, and I tried to kill you in the kitchen?” His laugh trailed off. “Why?”
“Um… we didn’t actually meet that day. I had known you for a few weeks before then. But we met Aeonic, and he… he erased your memories because, apparently, the path we were going down would lead us to destruction. Then he told me that we had to stop someone on The Coincidence… which just happened a few seconds ago. And we didn’t stop anyone.” A sigh escaped my mouth.
“What? I… this sounds made up. Why didn’t you tell us before?” Shikes joined in.
“I couldn’t. He told me that if I told you before The Coincidence, well, you’d be killed.” I sighed again, and looked at my feet. Jake was looking at me with a puzzled expression on his face.
“Was… wait… you had to stop someone?” He asked me.
“Yes. Someone who was immortal and wanted to steal some power or something from the mansion thing we are – well… were – in.” Jake laughed.
“The only reason I’m kind of believing you is because we were teleported here by something or someone and have strange abilities that we use to kill other people. If that wasn’t true… heh, yeah.” Jake said. Clarence nodded in agreement.
Shikes rolled his eyes and said, “So… due to your forgetfulness, we’ve doomed everything or something?”
I laughed in bitterness. “Yeah. I guess. And… I don’t think we can get back to the mansion right now.”
Clarence glared at me in his own special sort of way – peering into my soul and searching for something.
“Right. Heh, you know, you’re not the only one with secrets.” He grabbed the air above him and pulled a head sized, white glass ball that seemed to suck the light of the room into it.
What the?! I hid my surprise well, and apparently so did Shikes. Jake, though, he gasped and sputtered.
“How… what?! Where’d you get that?! How did you… ugh! I give up.” He said, pointing at the thing and hanging his head in frustration.
Clarence snorted and grinned.
“A girl with blue eyes gave this to me two days ago. She told me that I would need it. Then she dissolved into dust. I’d forgotten about it until just now – I had actually thought it to be a dream.” He looked back down at it in his hands. “Actually, I’m not sure that it isn’t a dream still. Pinch me, someone.”
Shikes punched him in the snout.
“OW! Dude! What the hell?!” He fell back onto the ground, spilling the glass orb onto the carpet.
“What? I thought you wanted me to punch you.” He said, winking at me.
“Stop it. STOP IT!” I yelled. “Don’t you understand what is going on? We could be stuck here! You transported us into Limbo, Clarence, and we might not be able to get out again.”
Jake had gotten up and was now at the door. “Limbo?” He opened it up, only to find a solid wall of darkness beyond it. Occasional auric blots of light would appear and then fade to pixilated motes before disappearing completely.
“Woah.” He said, stepping back. “We are stuck.”
Shikes looked guilty for the first time since we’d met. Clarence held his ball close to him and sighed.
“Well… I guess that… um…” I started.
“Shut up, Tiffers. You’re always trying to be democratic. But look what you’ve gotten us into now. And you didn’t even tell us what was going on until just freaking now. I thought that we were a group, that we were here for each other! Yet… I knew I shouldn’t have trusted you.” Shikes walked towards the door and Jake, opened it, and stepped out.
“SHIKES!” I stared at him, waiting for him to fall to his death in the Void of Limbo. He didn’t. He just stood there.
“What? Can’t you guys see this?” He said, motioning towards what he was standing/floating on.
“See… what?” I asked him.
He sighed.
“The floor. What? Do you see, like, a black expanse of nothingness that would kill me if I fell through it? I’m not suicidal, and, although you did mislead us, I don’t think that we should split up. I’m upset, but… well, we’ve been through too much just to break up because of one mistake – no matter how big – on your part.” He sighed again.
“Plus, if you died, I wouldn’t be very happy. Yes, I would care if you died too, Clarence.” He said.
Wow. That was the most I had ever heard him say at once.
And… did he just admit that he and Clarence were kind of friends? Was I dead?
“So… come on, people. We’ve got to see if we can find anything out here to help us. The room will be easy to find again.”
I tentatively took a step towards the door, only to be shoved out of the way by Clarence.
“What are you trying to do here?” He said to Shikes. Jake was slowly edging away from both of them, and Clarence was slowly edging towards Shikes.
“Trying to do… what are you talking about? I’m trying to save us.” He said, leveling his gaze with Clarence.
“Right. Sure you are. You, you… you of all people. You shouldn’t… she… but… she lied to us, you… how?” He stammered, losing steam as he began to realize that he really had nothing to put against Shikes.
“She lied, yeah, but we’re a group. You kept something from us. Does that mean that I should hate you? I mean, I kind of hate you, but you’re part of the group. So I can’t hate you. It’s called putting aside differences for the good of the whole.” He said, looking at the ‘ground.’
Jake was standing beside me. “What the hell is going on?” He whispered to me as Clarence stared at Shikes.
“I… I don’t really know. All that I am sure of is that this room is stuck in Limbo because of me, and we might be able to escape out there, by walking.” I said to him.
Clarence took a tentative step outside of the doorframe, wobbled a bit on the darkness outside, and yelled, “It’s safe, I think.” To us.
/\/\/\
Mem. 18, 801,203 377 7:21 AM galaxy wide. Mansion ?, Sector ?, Room ?.
“Hey. Tiffers. I think… look at this.” I’d been screwing around with my glass orb for a while, as we walked around in Limbo and looked for some way out. We’d really just been slowly spiraling outwards from our room. It was only a few hundred feet away, but barely visible in the gloom, albeit the fact that it was the only source of light for possibly miles in any direction.
The ‘ground’ was soft and spongy beneath me, like I was walking on a spider’s web. It also freaked me out – what if it crumbled beneath me and I began falling for all eternity?
Anyways, I had been fooling around with the sphere (which had actually become a light source in the darkness) when I’d noticed a slight crack in it – so faint that I had to run my fingers over it numerous times in order to make sure that I wasn’t just imagining it.
I held the cube out to Tiffers and had her feel the part where the crack was.
“Woah. What… what do you think that could be?” She said to me.
Jake came up from behind me, and Shikes stood at the front of us impatiently tapping his foot.
“Gimme,” Jake said, forcibly taking it from me – he was freakishly strong, I noticed.
“Hey…! Be careful. It could be a nuclear device.” I said to him as he felt for the crack and poked at it with his claw.
“Huh.” He said, as a small rectangular prism popped out of the side he’d poked. It seemed to be a compartment for… something.
“Give me your… that rectangle black thingy,” He said.
Of course! I thought to myself. Gods, I’m an idiot. Still… why would it accept just that? I pulled it out of my pocket and gave it to him.
The black thing didn’t fit (it was really hard to see in the blackness, too.)
I mean, it was too small.
Jake grinned, put it in, and slammed the compartment shut anyways.
A high pitched whining noise pierced the darkness. “Function X, X and Y minus ACBD Change over X and X, plot point and end function at second point.”
“Wha-“ Jake said, looking at me and disappearing in a flash of white light.
“Oh my go-“ Tiffers – the closest person to him said before disappearing in a flash of white light as well.
Then it was my turn – I began to feel really warm. Until, that is, I suddenly felt very cold as the darkness around me coalesced into… a kitchen. It had counter tops that were made of bamboo and a large metal box (most likely one of those human things – a refreezingerator or something like that.)
There was also one of those disgusting creatures in here as well. A split second after I arrived, I realized that he was the guy that had tried to get into the room we’d been in earlier.
He had really dark hair that was… kind of combed in a sort of… it was like… well, it looked like a spike – kind of. Not really. Not like that ridiculous hair style that some of us Wolfen had were we would grow our hair out and then put it in some sort of unicorn spike thing. More like a straight, neatly combed spike that ran down his head. He also had mismatched eyes – his left one was green and his right one was brown – and thin red lips. He was really muscular for a human, though.
“Er – hi?” He said to me as I backed away.
/\/\/\
Mem. 1, 801,203 377 7:08 AM planet side. Mansion 3, Sector B, Room 1.
I appeared in a bamboo kitchen – like, all of the counters were made of bamboo and organized in an L shape.
And Luke was there too.
“Jake!” He said, running over to me and awkwardly hugging me.
“Erm. Yeah. Hi.” I pried him off with one arm, holding the ball in the other.
“The… there’s blackness… how did you…?” He stuttered.
“I don’t know. This ball did something, though, and teleported me here.”
“Woah – that… that looks like a Mansion Heart. Where’d you get that?” He asked me. “Never mind that – I think… I think someone has broken the Mansion Heart that runs this place – everything has begun to break down and it is beginning to get really cold in here.”
I noticed that he was shivering, now. “Yeah. Um. What is a Mansion Heart and why have I never heard of it before?”
Then the ball in my hand began to vibrate and radiate a bright aura of light then.
“What the heck?” He asked me, looking at it.
The compartment I’d slid the black (tape?) into slowly emerged from the sphere. Then I realized that it was… different.
It looked skinnier, and had a hole at the end of it that was completely black.
Smoke emanated from the hole, and the thing spun around in my hands until I was forced to let it go – but instead of falling, it flew directly towards Luke, passed through him without damaging him, and then phased through the door that had been behind him.
A moment later, the clock on the wall behind Luke began to make a ticking noise, apparently starting up again.
It jerked forwards to seven o’ nine and twelve seconds, then began to run normally.
“Huh.” I said, sitting down on the counter behind me.
“So, what happened?” Luke asked me. And that’s what I was telling him about – at least, until Clarence barged into the room with a flash of light and nearly backed into me in order to not get near the human.
/\/\/\
Mem. 13, 801,203 523 7:30 AM planet side. Mansion 3, Sector A, Room 20.
“Woah.” I said, wobbling a bit as I materialized in a medium sized room with a domed ceiling and a door that was made of glass. It wasn’t a square room, but was, instead, cylindrical. The walls were painted brow-gold, while the ceiling was… well, painted. It was painted with… stars, constellations, galaxies. Whatever you wanted to call them. In fact, there was a metal cylinder that looked an awful lot like a telescope outside of the glass door.
There was an oaken desk that was overflown with numerous large books that were all on astronomy, many of which looked as though they weighed twenty or thirty pounds, and all of which had many yellow note paper things sticking out of them at various points. Next to the desk was an empty bookshelf. Both of them were made of a dark, hard looking wood, and the bookcase had numerous pull out shelves that resembled the ones I had designed for my job, back on Earth.
The floor was tiled with… marble? Yeah, the tiles were yellow marble slabs, and they cut off abruptly in a circular design near the middle of the room, presumably a staircase or something.
I noticed that there was a small pocket book opened on the desk, opened to a page with a green note card instead of a yellow one.
“Huh.” I said to myself, wondering where the hell I was exactly.
Looking at the book, I realized that it was actually a diary and… today was apparently day 523.
“Holy crap,” I said. “That’s… what, a hundred and fifty days…”
“Wait… what? We shouldn’t be here…” Someone said – a girl, most likely. In fact…
I spun around to see Tiffers standing in a halo of light.
“Um. Yeah, so… what do we do now?” I asked her, completely and utterly puzzled.
“Wait,” She said very calmly, before disappearing in a flash of white light. Again.
“Oh for the love of…” I sighed.
Then, thinking better of what she’d just said, I sat down on the desk’s padded wood chair and began to read the diary, beginning on ‘Day 1.’
/\/\/\
Mem. 8, 801,203 377 7:25 AM planet side. Mansion 3, Sector B, Room 1.
I briefly re-assembled myself in a room that was at the top of a spiraling staircase situated in the middle of the place, only to hear Shikes say, from in front of me, “A hundred and fifty days…”
“Wait… what? We shouldn’t be here.” I said to Shikes’ back. Light was still radiating off of me, I expected it to fade quic – oh, wait.
“Man!” I muttered under my breath as Shikes whirled around, relaxing only when he saw that it was me.
“Um. Yeah, so what do we do now?” He asked.
“Wait –“ I said calmly, before dissolving again.
“CRAP!” I yelled at Jake, materializing in front of him.
“Oh. Hi, Tiffers.” He said to me, blinking in surprise.
“Woot!” Someone said (Clarence?) from my right. “I can’t believe you were right, Luke, I think that… mm… let me…” I turned around to find myself in a kitchen that was made of bamboo, with two doors and a large refrigeration unit. Clarence was, indeed, sitting on the bottom part of the countertop (it was in an L shape) and Jake was sitting in the middle of the L, facing me. The human – Luke, I assumed – was to my left and leaning against the wall, half asleep.
“Erm – hi…” I said, wondering about how I could tell them Shikes was in the future. “So, you know how Shikes… like…” Clarence was suddenly at my side.
“Did he die…?” He said solemnly. I shot him a look.
“No, gods no. He’s in the future – like, a hundred and fifty days from now. Day five hundred and twenty or something like that.” I said. Jake tilted his head and gave me a questioning look, just in time for Luke to interrupt.
“Sorry to spoil the drama, but aren’t you going to like – throw me out again? Or at least try to?” Jake shot him another look – not wondering like the one he’d given me, but more like he was threatening him. Luke ignored it and rolled his eyes.
“What? No – actually, let me talk to Tiffers about that.” Clarence said. He put his arm around me and basically dragged me back to the far corner (far as in far from Luke.)
“You know, we would have left here without ever finding you but for Luke, he was all ‘Dude, maybe your friend will show up, cause you showed up after Jake…’ so I was thinking, could we allow him to travel with us?” He asked me. I sighed.
“You know how humans are!”
“Yes – but… well, he seems really nice, if a bit snippy at times.” He said back to me.
“Does it mean much to you?” I asked him.
“Well – he can change the gravity of things around him, which is a rather useful ability to have now that Shikes is gone, and with him, his wall running.” I looked up on the ceiling, recalling Shikes’ interesting ways of fighting.
Apparently, Reptians were trained from birth to fight with swords – just because they feared a human invasion. Shikes was rather good, especially when he was literally running up the walls around you.
“Well… fine. Fine, you win. But one misstep…” I drew my thumb across my throat.
Luke glared at me from the corner.
/\/\/\
Mew.efvs.a,[email protected]$([][?≥£08
I quietly resumed my duties as my Warmth was renewed, making sure that everyone inside was warm, had food, and didn’t get slaughtered by the Derlics outside.
Ahh… nuclear fission was so much better than unreliable bioreactions.
Speaking of which – what happened to that man that had stolen my Heat?
I quickly sorted through my rooms and found his Auric Imprint. It was black, with a small patch of white near his lower back.
He was still holding my Warmth, drawing and teasing something out of it.
Why? What could he do with it? The most he could hope for is to make it explode, as if it were a seventy octillion megaton thermonuclear stellar explosion device.
Or, I clarified for the Memory Transcriptor, an amazingly powerful device that would obliterate the planet, the star, the nearby planets, the nearby stars, and the slightly farther away stars. Perhaps even stars farther away than that.
In other news, I thought to myself, it could power me for just over nine hundred trillion years if I operated at full capacity.
I really hoped he didn’t detonate that thing by accident, but there was nothing I could do but mix the rooms up a little bit more than normal.
/\/\/\
Mem. 2, 801,203 377 8:04 AM planet side. Mansion 2, Sector C, Room 17.
“Oh. Um… I’m really sorry for startlin’ you,” He said to me, perhaps noticing that I was waking up. “I, uh, I was in a room with… these… blue people that were fighting over something… and… where am I?”
I was surrounded by stacks of books on biology, quantum physics, and oceanography. One of them was open right next to my face – I could read the front page of it.
‘…which means that it doesn’t have to exist unless you see it, unless you use mathematics to describe it. Weird, right? Well – it gets weirder. Ever hear of teleportation? Well, it’s theorized tha-‘ and the rest was out of my field of vision. I strained to get into a better position to read the page, but epically failed as my muscles gave out in a fit of bitterness.
“Oh… um… here,” The tall man said to me, propping me up on something that was hard and wooden, but with soft little bits behind the wood.
“Ergh… what the hell happened?” I asked him, moving my jaw as one of the muscles clenched up.
“Well…” He stood over me and looked down. He was taller than I’d thought he’d been. He looked to be… maybe twenty years old. Or nineteen, one of the two. He had a rather looseness of expression that served to tell me that he was kind, accompanied by rather frighteningly pale skin and quite muscular legs and arms. He had blue eyes, and wore his blonde hair in a sort of wild mess of randomness. It came down past his eyes.
Currently, he was wearing a black t-shirt, accompanied by long blue shorts that looked to be made from nylon or polyester – completing his sporty look (aside from his paleness.)
“Well, you fell onto some sort of hard wooden platform and passed out. Then you became really really heavy and started shrinking in on yourself – maybe that’s why you can’t move – while I tried to move you. In fact, you weren’t movable.” He sat down on one of the wider and shorter stacks of books. “Not for a day, at least. Then, finally, I was able to move you away from that place – it didn’t seem very safe, like, it had three doors and those creepy wolf guys would walk in periodically and try to kill me.”
“Oh. Um. I see you’ve been busy –“ I coughed, “Um. Busy researching stuff…”
“Oh. Yeah. I… I was bored. And there’s no fiction in this area of the library, but I was afraid to move you again, just in case you became super heavy or killed yourself again.” He paused, as if waiting for something. It came to me.
“Oh! Yeah – “ I jerked over as I managed to move my arm, toppling down and sliding over some books. “Erm…”
“Yeah.” He re-positioned me, and I told him about my density changing abilities.
I hadn’t known that I could change my own density, though, so that was useful. Although… it was not knowledge that I would’ve wanted to almost die for.
“Yeah. So… my name is Elagio.” He said to me. “You’re the first human I’ve seen since I woke up here four days ago.”
“Yeah – my name is Reese. You’re the first human I’ve seen since… oh, how many months has it been now? Um. Some time, at least. Thanks.” I said to him.
/\/\/\
Mem. 14, 801,203 377 8:03 AM planet side. Mansion 2, Sector D, Room 17.
I was hungry. Again. I briefly considered teleporting myself to the two human males that were conversing quietly right next to myself, or teleporting them to me. Then I considered against it. They were an interesting pair that I had been stalking through sector C for a while now. One – the one that could walk – was wearing a black shirt and some weird looking shorts, while the one that had to be carried was wearing some torn blue pants and a brown sweatshirt with ‘Loltroll’ inscribed on it. They were both pale and disgustingly fleshy… so unnatural. Although, still, it was kind of fun to just observe the human’s behaviors.
It was fun, how I could see ghostly shadows of everyone else in the other sectors of the mansion – things that no one else could see. Oh… the things I could do. I once teleported myself to Sector A whilst being chased by a group of blood thirsty male Wolfen, all of whom I had aggravated when I’d stolen some of there food.
Then I’d teleported a large box right in the middle of their pathway, one from my sector, and trapped them there.
Speaking of which… could I teleport objects from other sectors to my sector?
I looked through (literally, as it was see-through) the standing man’s backpack, located a pack of sardines, and teleported it out.
Yes! Success! That knowledge would sure help me out in the future when I wanted to eat.
The air that had been putting pressure on the space suddenly rushed in and made a loud bang in the other sector – one that I chose to not hear, as was not relevant. I simply enjoyed the sardines I’d procured as the guy that could walk jumped up and whirled around to see… nothing. Nothing aside from his backpack now toppled over and barfing its contents up over the floor – gears, pistons, miniature levers, pipes, screws, cogs, all the works were down there.
“Man…!” He said. I could hear him because I chose to.
The other man said, “What? What happened?” And slowly rose off of the ground. Now, what human had I seen do that before?
“I don’t know… did you hear that bang? Like someone fired a gun?” The black shirt said to the brown sweatshirt.
“Yeah – but… huh. That’s strange.”
I giggled and sat down, next to the floating brown sweatshirt man, priming my repertoire of pranks that I could pull on them.
Oh! I had it.
“Hello. Please press zero if you want to contact Customer Services. If you have a problem and you want to contact a different branch, press one. If you would like to speak to a director, press two. If you want to report yet another UFO sighting, press one-oh-one.” And I teleported the sound waves into their sector.
I had to suppress my giggles as they both jerked at the same time.
“What the heck?!” The brown sweatshirt said, trying to stand up and succeeding. Ah. So that’s why he was floating himself.
“I am sorry, but ‘What the heck’ is an invalid statement. Please press nine to reset now. Or, if you want to escape, press ten now.” I said. My god… this was funny.
“Okay… should we go with it?” The red shirt said to the brown sweatshirt when he heard me.
“Sure. Why not,” The brown sweatshirt said to him. “The worst that could happen is that we die horribly as someone randomly decides to target us for some reason or another, like for the fact that we are in a building full of psychomaniacal wolf humans that all seem to want to kill humans or something for food!” He said with a fake smile on his face.
Ah, human sarcasm. How beautiful.
“I am sorry, but sarcasm is an unacceptable form of payment. Please press nine to reset now. Or, if you want to escape, press ten now.” I said again. Trying not to giggle at their boggling eyes.
“What. The. [Transcriptor has censored this word.]” The black shirt said to the brown sweatshirt. Wait, didn’t they just introduce themselves? Crap – what where their names again?
Flajio and… and… Jesus or something like that.
“I am sorry, but swearing is an unacceptable form of payment. Please press nine to reset now. Or, if you want to escape, press ten now.”
“TEN!” The brown sweatshirt said. I giggled.
“I am sorry, but there is no number ten on the number pad. Please wait as – error. Error. Error.” I said, then made explosion noises.
“What…?” The brown sweatshirt, I mean Jess, said.
“Hello. You have – oh, never mind. This is getting boring.” I said, teleporting them to my sector, without their books.
/\/\/\
Mem. 15, 801,203 377 10:52 AM planet side. Mansion 3, Sector D, Room 16.
I almost cackled to myself when I came across the wires. I was in one of the warehouses, most likely the third one, as it said ‘Section Three’
The fact that I didn’t really know brought me back to the unpleasant knowledge that I had no idea of where I was in actuality, just that I had woken up here with memories of my life from before – a high school, a blue truck, and concerts. It was… rather blurry.
And the fact that I had these weird light green scales all over – not to mention weird yellow spikes down my freaking back. I even had a little tail – albeit that it was a stub. And the scales around my stomach/under my tail protrusion thing were almost white. It was so weird.
I was like a crocodile – even my eyes were crocodile themed, with yellow irises and large black pupils.
And the weirdness didn’t stop there. As soon as I had awoken here… I could suddenly understand how electronics work. I knew how to build a quantum computer. I could create a teleportation device. I could write a program to see the freaking future.
But I had no supplies – well… I hadn’t had any supplies.
But then I’d found this warehouse. This warehouse with all of its little wires, monitors, speakers, gates… everything I needed for my electronics.
Everything except for a freaking generator, at least. Too bad I had no idea how to build one of those… why, freaking why couldn’t I figure out how to power my computers and stuff off of air? So much easier, honestly.
Oh well. Electricity would come later. For now…
“Robots!” I yelled, grinning.
/\/\/\
Mem. 17, 801,203 377 8:08 AM. Mansion 1, Sector C, Room 17.
“He-“ I said, waling out of where I had been hiding in the shadows of one of the immense bookcases in this immense library. Then the two humans disappeared. “-y… what… why does this happen to me every ti-“
I found myself curiously weightless, then I weighed a hundred tons, then I was normal and… they were here again, but next to what looked to be a male Wolfen with pure white fur all over (except for the portions of his fur that were covered in light gray dots.) And he had a long, rather fluffy tail that was currently twitching in annoyance.
He was already looking at me, as if he’d known I was there before I’d known I was there, and I could see that his eyes were mismatched – one was blue, and the other was green. His nose, in contrast to his fur, was as dark as space, and so were the small black bands around each of his ears.
“Ah, hello… there.” He said to me, rolling his eyes and motioning for me to follow him.
“GRAH!” One of the humans shouted – I thought his name was Elagio or something like that.
“What?! Oh, yeah, I’m a Wolfen. Don’t worry, I don’t plan on killing you or even being mean to you. I’m not really like that. I’m in it ju-“
“GRAH!” He shouted again, and tried to pull the other one (Reese?) with him. Reese stood still.
“I’m pretty sure that he’s friendly, you know…” He said. I was, by that time, caught up with them.
“Yeah – not all Wolfen are bad, you know. Some of us are very nice….” I said, then remembered that I didn’t look a thing like a Wolfen.
“Erm. I mean, some of them. Sorry – I used to be a Wolfen. I don’t know why I’m a Reptian now.” I said.
All of my life, all seventeen years of it, I had studied human history, always hoping that someday, somewhere, I’d be able to see one and talk to it.
And here were two of them, but they were deathly scared of Wolfen.
“Er- what the hell?” Elagio said, looking at me. “You’re definitely not a Wolfen… more like… a… dinosaur thing. Gods, this place is messed up.”
“Yes. Whatever. The point is, Flajio,” The white Wolfen said, “I want to help you get back to your species’ mansion – which is the third one, I think.” He said, giggling.
“I say this because I want to go there too, but I can’t get there without you two.” He paused to absorb their blank expressions, as well as mine.
“You… none of you know what I’m talking about, do you? Ugh.” He sighed. “Okay, see, there are four distinct species that currently coexist here – I know this because I can see all of the rooms and… well, it’s hard to explain. But, over there, yes, to your right, there is another Reptian. He’s carrying a book and reading it as he paces around. He doesn’t exist here, but he does – like… he’s in a parallel universe. Same spot, but… different dimension, I guess. And I can see them.”
I looked back to where he’d pointed. It was down one of the library’s numerous corridors. I saw nothing.
“When I say I can see them, I mean I can see them. You can’t. And I can teleport him to here right now… but I can’t teleport myself to him, not unless he’s in this mansion… and… Urgh!” He paused and looked at me as if I could help him. “It’s too hard to explain. Just follow me unless you want random Wolfen trying to kill you. I mean, you want to be with your own species again, right?”
Reese said, “But… I’m not really a human. I used to be a Wolfen… but when I came here, I changed.”
“Right, but you look human, so… the Wolfen won’t be able to tell the difference.” Alex said.
Then he went on under his breath, “Always so goddamned speciest against humans for destroying the planet… but it’s just in your nature.”
“Okay! Let’s follow you, but only if you allow me to hold onto you at all time,” Reese said, smiling in a fake sort of way. Ah yes. Human sarcasm, beautiful.
“… Okay…” The Wolfen agreed.
“Really? Oh. Cool. You realize that if I didn’t like what you were doing, I could dissolve you just as suddenly as you could say ‘H-,’ right? So… don’t try anything.”
Dissolve…? What?
Elagio looked at me. “What about the… um… Reptian, what about him?”
I looked at the floor. I really wanted to go to their mansion! I imagined it… dozens of different humans to study and ask questions of.
“I… I really want to come. I studied human history for over five years! I love you guys! Please! I won’t make any trouble… and… uh… I can do this…” I reached out and touched one of the giant bookshelves, concentrated, and aged it a few thousand years.
They watched a one-foot sphere of it decompose into dirt in the span of two seconds.
“Woah. You can… turn things into dirt?” The Wolfen said to me.
“No – I can age them. Or… reverse age them.” I stuck poked the very edge of the pile of dirt and reversed the aging I’d just done. It quickly resumed its position in the bookshelf. Then I reversed it some more, to find it turning into a part of lumber, then a part of a tree with sap in it, then minerals from the soil.
“Holy… wow…” Elagio said. Reese just stood behind him with his mouth hanging wide open. I could picture a fly going in his ear and out of it.
“Um. Yeah. She can come, right wolfy-dude?” Elagio asked the Wolfen.
“Sure. Um. Let’s introduce ourselves…?” He said. “My name is Alex. Call me Alex, okay?”
“Yay! Alex!” I said. “My name is Romeo.”
Elagio’s eyes bugged out of his head as he tried to not laugh.
“Yes, I know that it’s the name of that famous guy in Romeo and Juliet, but it’s a female name. Jeese. Your name isn’t very much better.” I said.
“And how would you know that? You don’t know my name.” He retorted.
“I heard you mention it to Reese there. Elagio… heh, so stupid.” I squinted, then winked.
“I’m joking.”
“Okay… so… come along group, before the Wolfen in this sector – and there are a lot of them – catch our sent and try to murder us.” Alex said, leading us to one of the giant gold gilded double doors of the library. “We need to head to the Heart of the mansion, and, from there, we can travel to The Heart of the third mansion.”
The Heart? What? I mentally questioned.
“Oh, and don’t freak out if you suddenly appear in a slightly different room that still looks kind of similar to the room that you were just in, that would simply be me teleporting you either out of the way of danger, or to an easier route.” Alex said before pushing one of the heavy doors open to reveal the ballroom.
/\/\/\
Mem. 16, 801,203 376 7:54 PM planet side. Mansion 1, Sector A, Room 5.
“So… like, it will switch soon?” I asked Jeremy, one of the humans that had somehow gotten into this building.
“Hah… let me check.” He always loved to show off his mastery of the instruments. So, of course, he materialized a translucent violin (his favorite instrument) from the middle of the air.
We were in the ballroom, numerous metal foldable chairs littered the place, and, along with the fact that the floor was made of yellow marble tiles, it looked like one of my school’s numerous Gathering Areas. In fact, everything except for the five or six balconies that stuck out around the top of the room, everything was the same – down to the wooden stage that was dark red, hard, and sturdy as a planet, with its immovable purple curtains and concrete foundations.
“Grr… why do you always have to do that so extravagantly? It’s not as if it does anything.” I said to Jeremy, growling even though I was not really a Wolfen any more.
Jeremy was a brown haired kid (very long haired, too. Like some sort of ‘hippy’ that I’d had to study in human history class, back when I was Wolfen) with a rather small frame that had little muscle on it, as well as little fat. He had freckles over his face and a rather effeminately small nose. A small amulet that depicted a silver sun with a sword through it hung around his neck, and, to complete his ‘look,’ he wore a white jacket and blue jeans.
“I don’t see you complaining when I end up saving our arses, you know.” He said, pulling a translucent violin bow out of the air and dragging it over the violin and producing a pitch that was almost too high for me to hear.
A rather large, multicolored shimmering wall appeared in front of us. It was a timer made of light or something.
“Right.” I said, look at it. It was counting down from two seconds.
There was a slight shift in the screen, and we both knew that the rooms had shifted again.
“Okay. Let’s go!” Jeremy said, walking towards the giant gilded gold doors that had just appeared.
“Why over here?” I asked him.
“…Because, like I said numerous times, we need to go to the library and meet up with a group that gets created there.” He said.
How he knew these things through just playing instruments… I’d never know.
“Right.” I said, waiting for him to open the massive slab of wood.
/\/\/\
Mem. 16 801,203 377 8:19 AM planet side. Mansion 3, Sector A, Room 17.
“Grr…!” I growled again. “Where are they?” I asked him.
“I… I don’t know. Lets… maybe…” He stumbled through words, for once not being certain of everything he was saying.
“Maybe I got the location incorrect. Um…” He said.
“Whatever. I’m going to go back to the ballroom and see if they’re in there, conveniently awaiting us.” I said to him. And I did.
Jeremy came with me, so I guessed that he wanted to stick together, because, honestly, he relied on my ability when things got messy.
Suddenly, we were in a slightly different version of the ballroom – it was slightly higher, had chandeliers, actual benches lining the walls… and a space in the middle for dancing. The balconies were made with finely sculpted marble fences around them, and the stage was like that of a performer’s stage, red curtains with dark wooden platforms.
“Hello.” A white Wolfen said from in front of me. “I see you have a human following you.”
I looked back to see Jeremy, as well as a girl reptile creature (she looked suspiciously like me, but light green instead of blue, and with numerous spikes down her back instead of one single spike.)
And there were two more of the humans – one was tall and muscular, with mismatched eyes and a black shirt, and the other was limber and had hazel hair, with pale skin (paler even than the first human) and blue eyes. He was wearing what appeared to be a brown jacket.
“Okay… Alex, why…?” The muscular one asked. The white Wolfen responded – making him Alex.
“Because. More humans means more likelihood of getting to the correct mansion. And, if I’m not mistaken, this here is Mash. He can remove atoms from molecules on a massive scale – like, he could make hydrogen and oxygen gas from water.” Alex said.
“What? How did you know that…? And seriously – my name isn’t, well, I don’t go by Mash. I go by M.M.” I said. Honestly, ‘Mash?’ Who the heck calls their son ‘Mash?’
“Ah yes… anyways, shall we continue?” He asked. Jeremy gave me the eye.
“I told you we’d join a group. And now we’re going to join. So, hah!”
“Um… where exactly are we going?” I asked Alex. “By the way – the human back there is Jeremy.”
“Yeah – hi Jeremy. We’re going to get back to the human mansion because I want to get over there and it’s really hard to orient yourself without two of the mansion’s native species with you. So come along now! We’re going to… well, The Heart of this mansion. If we can find it… the downside of having a group of people with me is that it gets harder to see the other sectors and The Heart of the mansion.” He said.
We followed them, with me taking up the end of the line.
/\/\/\
Mem. 9, 801,203 377 9:15 AM planet side. Mansion 4, Sector B, Room 18.
“Why, why, why? Why are we climbing these endless stairs, Rose? Honestly!” I said to the girl with the red hair, red shorts, and red t-shirt in front of me. She was smaller than me – about five feet and five inches – and fairly skinny. She had the endurance of a freaking marathon runner, though.
“Because, Sapphire, we need to get to somewhere relatively inaccessible from the other rooms. Wherever these stairs lead to are probably safer than anywhere else.” She said, not even panting even though we’d been climbing stairs for the past forty minutes.
I’d lost count of the giant gray stone slabs after the seven hundredth one. And my legs burned like heck right now.
The only reason I wasn’t doubled over, gasping for breath was probably because I was buffing myself for plus two hundred percent stamina, but that was going to change to something else in about seven minutes.
“Okay. Come one, let’s stop for a… a little.” I said, trying to not pant and gasping in the middle of it.
Rose slowed down and said, “Fine… fine. Let’s sit down right here, I guess.” I went up to her slab and sat down on it, marveling at the expert craftsmanship of the place. The entire thing was like a tower for stairs – there was a central cylinder that held all of the stair pieces in place, and numerous princess-tower windows circling the outside. Of course, they were filled in with that unbreakable glass.
But still, the view was amazing – I could see for… wow.
“How… whew… how, how high up are we, Rose?” I asked her. She looked at me with her big brown eyes.
“Oh, let me just check my altimeter!” She said. “How the heck should I know, Sapphire? I can guess – seeing as though I can barely see the individual trees from this height, I’m thinking a few thousand feet.”
Erg… Rose could be really annoying at times.
“Right. Um.” I started. “So… how far do you think we have to go? This place looks the same after every step and I’m bored.”
Rose gave me her best ‘Oh my god. Ergh!’ look and told me, “We probably have quite a ways to go.”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah. Right. Um… so, what… what are we going to do once we reach the top?” I asked her.
“I don’t know. Now, obviously, you have recovered enough to make general queries of me, so get up and run more.”
“Ergh,” I groaned as I got up, “Fine.”
We began walking again.
The only reason I stayed with Rose is because she made me want to stay with her through her auric manipulation. If I had my way, she’d be alone for the rest of her stay in hotel Transylvania, or wherever we were. But she always made me want to stay.
So frustrating.
/\/\/\
That's all for now folks! Please give me feedback, as this is for Nanowrimo and I have not reviewed it at all.Woops. My phone posted it... A few times.
OnceInALongTime: "You confuse me, Mage. Amazability should be a word so I could describe your words."