-CHAPTER 1: FIRST ENCOUNTERS-
{*First-Person, Main Character*}
Sleepy.
Not the 'not-enough-sleep' sleep, nor was it the 'it's-way-too-early-for-this' sleepy. I just felt plain tired. Like hadn't slept in a few days. Maybe a month or two. Maybe a few years. It was hard to tell, and yet I had just been asleep and I was currently waking up from something very, very deep. My head pounded in rhythm with my heartbeat against my chest and I could briefly sense air moving through my nostrils. There was a tingling at the back of my head, but I couldn't tell what it was. It was like a little pinch at the top of my neck, a tickle that stimulated the nerves around the top of my spine with a relentless fury that I just couldn't place.
Then, for the first time, I smelled. I smelled freshly cut pine in the air around me, wet and woody. I smelled the rainwater that was tapping on the window in the distance, and detected the scent of dust getting washed away with Mother Nature's natural cleaner. I smelled a bit of ash in the air with a bit of burnt candle off somewhere to my right side. I smelled, and I suddenly felt alive again.
And that's when the sharp side of an axe rammed into my skull.
Not literally of course, but there might as well have been, because I'd finally figured out what that tiny buzzing in the back of my mind was. It was a head-splitting headache, and the only thing that was keeping it down was the lure of sleep and the chemicals that made my limbs numb during sleep. But now that I was awake, I could feel the pain slowly reel back and hit me with the force of ten, five-pound bricks to the forehead. I groaned, then tried to move my hand up to massage my temples. I felt a cold, fleshy rod slap against my face, then realized that I couldn't feel anything from my limbs. It was if I had no arms, no legs, no toes or no fingers. Then it occurred to my that the dead weight that slapped me was actually my arm, and I hadn't even realized it.
That scared me. The fact that I couldn't feel my limbs and I was awaking from what felt like a really long sleep scared the piss out of me. I should be thankful that I had been able to move my arm at all, considering the circumstances! What happened to me? What occurred to cause this? Also, on that note, where am I? My room does not smell like newly cut firewood! I'm pretty sure I don't have a candle in my room as well. Who brought me here?
The first thing I wanted to do was open my eyes to try and figure out what was going on, but that was actually easier said than done. My eyelids felt like they were stapled to the bottom rim of my eyes. I huffed with my nostrils, not even able to open up my mouth. This was nuts. Was I drugged? Did someone drug me in my sleep? That would explain all the numbness coming from me. Then, a metaphorical hammer slammed into the back of my head and I took a deep breath in. Turns out that whatever drugs they gave me weren't good enough, because I could still feel the headache that drilled into the back of my skull!
Then, a rushing, tingling sensation flowed through my body starting from the bottom of my chin to the rest of my limbs. It was if I sat on the toilet for too long and the feeling in my leg disappeared just to have it brought back when I stood up from the porcelain seat. Blood started flowing through my veins again and I felt myself regaining my strength slowly but steadily. I tried parting my lips and the dried, red skin stuck together fast before I ripped them open with more mouth muscles. A little bit of pain came from the edges of my mouth. I tried to convince myself pain was good. Pain meant that I was feeling things again. Then my temples throbbed and showed me more about pain then I ever wanted to know. I hissed, and was pleasantly surprised that I could form my tongue in such a manner that allowed me to hiss.
Speaking of tongue, the tasting muscle under my teeth felt like it had been through a cheese grater then stuck in a bag of uncooked rice. The dryness of my mouth was disgusting and I could feel a small trickle of saliva seep underneath my tongue, my brain trying to rectify the problem. Why was my mouth so dry? I never get this dehydrated! Not before I fall asleep. Was I at a party? Did I get drunk? Oh god, did someone drug me, haul me off to a party then got me smashed off my ass? What that it? Jesus Christ I hope not. I was not one for parties, or drinking. None of my friends that I knew would do such a thing. What happened to me? I couldn't remember.
My arm was still on top of my nose. With another groan I slid it back off of my face and it bounced on some buoyant material beneath me. Curious, I flipped my hand around and gripped the sheets that I was lying on. I was on a bed. Then, pangs of soreness came from my knees. I winced, then tried lifting up my legs. For somewhat reason, my shins were hanging off the bed. Whatever kind of surface I was lying on, it was tiny. I was not that tall! I had to be on a tiny child's bed in order for the end of my legs to hang off the edge like that. Where was I? Where was I going to find myself?
I finally managed to open my eyes and let light onto my pupil. It was dark in the room, save for an orange glow to the right of me. I couldn't focus on anything, so the ceiling stayed a indistinguishable brown blob to me. It almost hurt to look because I knew the ceiling should have more detail but my eyes were incapable of delivering. I blinked once and lifted my head a bit, staring down the blankets that lay on top of me to where my feet were and managed to kick my legs up enough to see the unfocused forms of the edges of my toes. I kicked a few more times, getting a sense of momentum and blinked again. This time, I could see a bit better and tried posting myself on my elbows. I got on one elbow and used my right hand to wipe away the dry tears from my face. My fingers still felt a little numb but I could feel the tiny particles of skin peel off the bottom of my eyes and get jammed between the side of my index finger before falling to the floor.
I opened my eyes wider and tried to get a sense of my surroundings. On top of me was a light blue quilt that draped over the tiny bed that I was on. I was correct about the size of my commemoration, by the way. It was super short! Like, something only a rich 6-year-old would have! It was ridiculous! Who would sleep in this thing. But back to the point, I was in a small bedroom that had a very strange theme to it: Books. There were books all over the walls. Heck, the walls were, in fact, bookshelves, so they were perfect places to house all kinds of books. Books about nature, books about science and books about adventure could probably be found in this miniature library of a room. The only problem was that I couldn't read any of the titles. The scribbles printed along the spines of the various novels scattered through the shelves had to be in some kind of Arabian or something, because it did not look like English at all. I would have loved to have browsed through a few of these if I could actually read some of them.
I blinked. There was something that irked me about all of this. My surrounding seemed a bit off somehow. It was strange. There was a tiny bit of mist in front of my mental eyes that I could not get rid of, but something about the bed I was on, something about the room was terribly suspicious. I couldn't tell what it was, however. The answer evaded me like a forgotten word or moment in your past, something that was right at the tip of my tongue but could not pass the barrier that was the human brain. I tried looking around some more to see if that would help job my head a bit better.
The ceiling had a very unique style to it. It was all wooden and smoothed out to fit the room, as if the bedchamber was carved from a very large tree or something. Swirls of Cinnamon and burnt reds curled up on the upside-down surface and I found myself counting the tiny rings in the wood to see how old the tree was when the material was cut. Either the architects were geniuses or the tree that the oak came from was really, really, really old because the circles never stopped. They just kept going and going and going until they reached the outer wall. For all I knew, the rings didn't even begin to occur in the room, as towards the inside wall there were rings that seemed to slip beyond the bookshelves that marked the boundaries of the room. How old was this place anyways? How old did it have to be to smell like wet tree?
I peered over my bed to see the same smooth cut applied to the floor as the ceiling had. At the far end of the room were several more bookshelves and a wooden chest that sat right against the wall. To my right was a small set of drawers that had a burning candle on top of it, creating a pleasant warmth around the room with the light it provided. Beyond that were a pair of curtains that covered a double window that was arched at the top. The drapes of cotton had a tiny space in-between them, and through it I could barely make out minuscule raindrops sliding down the glass slowly like snails trailing down a damp garden. Everything beyond the windowpane lost me, and I couldn't see past it.
Then, my breath hitched up in my throat. I couldn't believe it. I finally figured out what was wrong with this place. Desperately hoping I was wrong, I looked down at my hands which were gripping the edges of my sky blue quilt. They were pale and pasty, as usual, but it had a few key features missing. The tiny hairs that covered the tops of my fingers were gone and my fingernails were only a simple outline. The rash that usually appears on the top of my wrists were gone too. I flipped my hands over. Details in my palms were completely missing, my lifeline gone in the wind and the creases where the skin folds over itself were absent. My limbs were simplified versions of their past selves, almost as if they had been drawn in a cartoon.
A cartoon. This is what this place looked like! A freaking cartoon! It all made sense now! The colours were unnaturally bright, the level of detail in my surroundings was severely lacking and the whole place had its own defined art style! That also meant, to my horrifying conclusion that I had somehow was bent to the rules of this place and my body was changed as well! In a steep well of rising panic, I flung the blankets off of me to see my black pants, shoes and blue shirt on as normal, but without any signs of wear and use on the material. My red sweater was on me too. Now who the heck puts someone in a bed with their clothes on? That makes no sense!
Was I going insane? Maybe those drugs were stronger than I thought and I was just see the butt end of what it does to my vision. Maybe it could have been worse if I had woken up earlier. Maybe not. Either way, I had to be on something, because this… My surroundings did not make any sense at all. Why were all the colours so bright? What could happen to the visible light spectrum to cause all of this? Real life should have much, much more detail in its surroundings! Was I asleep? Was this all a dream? It couldn't be, otherwise I'd never ask the question in the first place, or I'd be aware of my lucid dreaming. If this was a lucid dream, than I'd least be able to change the graphics or get the heck away from this place!
I had enough. But before I swung my legs off of the bed and got out, I noticed that the blue quilt I threw off myself was floating in mid-air to my right and was leaning against a surface that was translucent pink. It looked like some kind of invisible wall or something. Curious, I leaned over and poked the colour with my finger. The surface ripped with energy and made a low hum of a bell. It was completely solid. I tried pushing against it with one hand. It didn't budge. I got to my knees on the bed and tried both hands. All that accomplished were more colours around the area I was putting pressure to. I clenched my fists. What the fuck. What the fuck is this.
I flipped on my back and tried kicking the damn thing. It rang out with a deeper resonance but nothing. I tried getting off the bed, but my feet did not touch the floor. Instead, the pink wall curved inward towards the bed in a steep oval, preventing me from getting anywhere. I lifted my hands up to try and feel for a ceiling. Sure enough, there was a pink forcefield on top of me. No matter where I tried to find a hole, there was something covering it, and despite what it may have looked like, I was trapped in some guest bed on a LSD trip in a library where some bullshit forcefield was blocking my way!
What. The fuck.
I punched the side of the shield. It hurt, but the membrane seemed to flicker and that spurred me onward. I threw another hook and my left knuckles gave very loud and painful feedback. I yelled. Every fist I threw at it just reflected my force and sent my arms backwards. I screamed at the top of my lungs. What the fuck. What the fuck. Where am I. Where have they taken me. I banged on the forcefield with the bottom of my hands, kicking and thrashing out at the object. I hoped that I was doing damage to it. I prayed that I was affecting it somehow, anyhow. I wanted to get out of here so badly.
I threw one last punch as hard as I could. This time, instead of deflecting the damage, the shield solidified and suddenly I found myself in one giant pink crystal. The room looked a large percentage more magenta and the air around the bed seemed to close around on itself. I slowly felt my breath stir up up what oxygen was contained and heat up the area, making it very stuffy within my prison. I searched around wildly for a way out, some kind of hint to let me escape. There was no technology nearby to channel the shield. There was no one tending any kind of controls or power, and if there was someone I couldn't see them.
This is bullshit. Where the fuck am I? Who the fuck put me in here? Why the fuck has my world suddenly gone sci-fi on me? Am I high, am I low, am I just asleep and dreaming? I wish this was a dream, oh I truly do! This is fucking madness! Here I am, stuck in some kind of stupid fucking pink shield prison with no where to go, no one to talk to and no answers? WHO THE FUCK PUT ME IN HERE?
"WHAT THE FUCK!" I screamed, throwing one last punch at my shield.
"WHAT THE FUCK!"