The Six of Us

by Online account

The Fall

Sleep paralysis.

I have always been suffering from sleep paralysis. It was borderline unmanageable when I was a teen, but as I got older, the occurrences were reduced to three to four times per year. On one hand, it was a good thing, because who needed to be stuck for two minutes or so with a little uncanny imp nearby to torment you, waiting to wake up? On the other hand, it was also a vector of problems, since it desensitised me to the occurences.

You could say that at 25 years of age, I was getting quite tranquil with my regular nights of sleep queuing themselves without issues. That peace of mind molded me as an unprepared victim when my nighttime arch nemesis decided to sit on my ribcage seemingly out of nowhere. Guh.

And it was happening again.

Again.

But this time, Mrs. Buttugly (that’s the name I gave to my personal demon) was feeling a little sickly. She was rather different in appearance than she had been these past 10 years.

I was used to an anthropomorphic form of something vaguely suggesting a human. She was skin on bones, arms lengthier than they had any right to be, taking some creative inspirations from Slenderman. The naked figure’s limbs all ended up in mashed up fistulas of bones, erected in singular jagged scythes. The face was pure nightmare fuel. Mrs. Buttugly had a long mop of black unkept hair parted in the middle, going all the way to her oddly bent knees. It paved way for a visage of horrors: No nose, a large opened mouth, and two gouged out eyes. The cavities went nowhere. They were just hollowed in, pale skin covering the back where eyeballs and teeth should’ve been. It’s as if she had an invisible ghoulish bodysuit on her head, vacuum sealed tightly around her every features.

However, what I saw in the corner of my room was pure brain bleach by comparison. It was a tiny horse with forest green fur. Her mane was turquoise and ended in little rolls, the kinds you’d see on the rim of columns from ancient Greece. Very aesthetic. Her irises were red, but not the evil kind of red. If anything, her palette was more Christmas-y than anything. Look, she even had the wings, just like those gingerbread angels my mom used to bake. I could practically feel the holidays coming, hah. Dare I say she was, gasp, cute? Well, the only thing that betrayed the pure goodness emanating from her figure was her mischievous grin. I suppose she could still trample my ribs if she so desired. A demon hardly had any other agenda, no matter the form it took. And to think we were so close to have a semi pleasant sleep paralysis session! I would’ve sighed if my body allowed me to do anything at all.

So, my bedroom was the decor in which the horse and I basked. I was in my bed, and she was by my clothes drawers. But this was merely a mind trick, you see. For I knew I wasn’t home. I vividly remembered falling asleep at... at...

Ah fudge nugget. I done did it. I fell asleep on my desk at work again!

So I was in my office. Door closed. Drooling on my wireless keyboard. If I concentrated hard enough, I could almost feel the coolness of the AC caressing my skin. That alone betrayed the bedroom vision my brain falsely fed me. Busted, defective neurons!

The implications of that were very bad. I remembered crossing the new day threshold when I last looked at the time on the taskbar of my computer monitor. I had pulled eighteen-hour shifts before, and I was militant enough to do it again. Gavin & CO Techs LTD needed the push of a strong employee, and I was the woman to dutifully fill that call. Five years in this box had prepared me so. No way was I going to go limp on a career I was deeply in love with! No, if anything, I absolutely adored these endless work days. It gave me all the purpose I desired out of life. Had I not sufficiently studied to allow myself this sort of lifestyle? I even managed to juggle uni when I started my internship in this renowned high-tech firm. People called me mad; I called them mad for calling me mad. In the end, I rose above expectations, and they were fools for ever doubting me.

Though, maybe their naysaying wasn't completely unfounded, because here I was, snot bubble under my nose. What was I, weak sauce? I needed to wake up from my paralysis already. Sorry demon horse newbie, we’ll make a proper acquaintance next time. Take a number and wait in line. The head mechanical engineer from my department needed my heat monitor PCB prototype, like, yesterday! He’s been under the radar from upper management, having fallen behind on schedule. His stainless-steel parts had been machined at a reduced pace due to an employee shortage at the shop we had a partnership with, and that in turn forced me to postpone the development of the electronics that would be housed within. I wasn’t at the end of the chain of operations, but just like those poor assembly technicians that waited for my electrical baubles, I too was highly dependent on the performance of those who came before me. So, given the increasing impatience from our clients, my superiors, and my friends down in the warehouse below, sleep was an afterthought: Waking up was priority number one.

Shame I was the only soul left on this floor of the skyscraper at this hour. Maybe a janitor or a night guard would see me downed on my desk and shake some sense back into my narcoleptic body? Wishful thinking is practically what paved the way for my electrical engineering career!

At long last, the stars aligned, and I let out a gasp of air intake. My muscles twitched. Finally, finally, consciousness and I reunited. Me and self-sufficiency: We could work together once more. I blinked the gunk out of my eyes and immediately wished for a double espresso.

Alright Roxane, back to work.

Back to work...

Back to...

Where in the blazing layers of hell was I?

Oh no! It was day time already? How long did I sleep for? I saw all around me the gradient of pale blue to orange, and a ball of nuclear fusion by the horizon. The morning sun rising! Cursed be my nap! How could I sleep through a whole night like an unambitious nobody? I was past these rookie mistakes! A whole four to six hours wasted by my needy recovery! How could those who generated my T4s ever forgive me? Next time, I’ll drug myself with four Red Bulls instead of three. My liver became too good at purging the toxins.

As I was shaking myself awake, I saw a moving silhouette a fair distance away. Its shrinking form suggested that the distance between it and I was increasing. I was idle, so the only logical conclusion was that the social distancing came from the unknown object.

The weirdly, oddly shaped object. Wait. Squinting a bit through the misty morning eyes, I could see its features with a bit more clarity. It was... It was my punch-clock demon! The new one, that is. Not Mrs. Buttugly, no no. It was Santa Claus’ Rudolph, in horse form! Her green “skin” sold her out. And she was flapping her wings as well, so that too was irrefutable proof vis-à-vis her identity. Where was she going? Did my bed face scare her off that badly? I was pretty low on the sexy scale, but come on now, that was just plain rude.

Hang on one sixtieth of a minute! What was that equine creature doing out of my subconscious? I didn’t dream this flying critter? She truly was flesh and bones? I guess my opened but not quite awakened eyes picked up on that. But that was... huh? I, what? No, this made no sense. How could this make sense? I was a city girl above all, but I wasn’t completely illiterate on the matter of nature. Horses weren’t green. Horses didn’t have red eyes. Horses COULDN’T FLY! Because then, that’d make her a pegasus, and ah, that sort of balderdash was the stuff of legends. Legends were cute in theory, but legends were oversaturated with plot holes in practice. Legends belonged in books, not meters away from my nose. So I did as anyone worth their wisdom would’ve done and I rejected that reality. I’d rather pass the sight as a bizarre hallucination. One rooted from a severe lack of sleep. It’s with great disgust that I admitted to myself that maybe I overworked a tad... maybe. Maybe? Maybe!

Horse demon was merely a dot by the horizon now. Good, disappear forever, vile mirage! I had some CircuitMaker projects to go back to, after all. Return to the magical land of my severed subconscious. I didn’t need for my boss to file me as clinically insane and discharge me with some forced vacations. I had avoided taking any for the past three years, and I intended to keep my record clean. So begone, sky horse! Begone and never come back! Leave me alone and lose yourself to the infiniteness of the sky!

That’s right, the... sky?

Since when did I install a skylight on the ceiling of my office? I had a prestigious middle-sized room all for myself, but I hadn’t earned that luxury quite yet. Scratch that, I had the fifteenth floor above me! It was Jean-Marc’s R&D lab just above these neon lights! How could I be gazing at the passing clouds while lazing on my back?

Speaking of which, why was I on my back to being with? Did I fall off my chair? Oh, the humiliation! What was I, an effin’ drunk? No way! Last time I ingested anything remotely alcoholic was years ago. Maybe someone spiked the coffee pot in the kitchenette. Would explain the pegasus – my personal version of the pink elephant.

Since I was obviously going completely nuts, might as well question the watery sensation I felt all over my carcass. I must’ve oozed liters worth of sweat. Felt like I just came out of a Finnish sauna. This was almost inconceivable, seeing as I was in the cool open air of the morning. I was still years away from menopause consarn it! Gimme a couple of years before my inner temperature regulator goes kaput!

Okay, okay. Summarise, Roxane.

Tiny flying horse. Sleeping someplace that gave me a view of the cloudy heavens. My body damper than a swimsuit. Me on my back, resting on a texture reminiscent of flossy silk. This odd sensation of vertigo I had. How to mash all of this data into one cohesive explanation? I was a lady of the sciences and even this had me stumped.

I decided to do the one and only sensible thing: To get some visual reconnaissance. I was pretty positive that I was in my office still, because where else would I be? I suffered from sleep paralysis, not sleepwalking. Kiiiiind of two opposite disorders. So yeah, finding out where I was, that seemed sound. To that end, I looked around me a bit and-

W-whoa!

Whooooa!

WHAT THE-

I couldn’t believe it myself. I was hanging a third of a kilometer up in the air. In the open sky. Mid skydiving! Actually no, not falling; couldn’t feel the effects of terminal velocity threatening my life. The airflow didn’t feel right, and I couldn’t find any acceleration giving me some G-force jitters. But I was positively hanging in midair; that was just a fact! As if I had been frozen in stasis. I could clearly see the landscape dangling under me. It was greener than gray, so I believed I had been displaced above one of the many provincial parks surrounding Vancouver rather than acting as a human mistletoe leaf over the metropolis itself. There was a forest, and a village, and farmlands, and rolling hills, and a tall spire of a mountain, and an overhanging castle, and, and-

WHY WAS I FLOATING IN THE SKY?

I didn’t care about what was under me, I just cared that there WAS stuff under me! How could I find myself perched all the way up here? This was impossible! Just plain impossible! A factual fallacy that was doing a good job at sending my common sense AWOL. One did not simply fall asleep in front of their e-mails to remerge higher up on the Y axis via some... some sort of witchcraft noclipping!

I touched my body in the search of a harness of any kind. Or a parachute bag. Or a jetpack. Or a tiny set of carrier drones. Or Superman’s arms. None of the sorts! None of it! It was just me, myself, and I, left on my own, hundreds of meters above the ground.

And whoever’s body I just probed; it wasn’t mine – how ‘bout that? It was pale blue, it was cushiony and soft, it was shaped like a teddy bear, and it certainly wasn’t Roxane Dubay!

I tried to back away a bit from this weird puppet that made a mockery of my body. I didn’t expect it to follow along, but it did! It certainly did! Those noodle appendages, they kicked when I kicked. These oddly articulated arms, they thrashed when I thrashed. That turf of rainbow by my “feet,” it followed along when I tried to clear some distance away from it. All of it wouldn’t go away! All of it answered the commands I gave them!

“Get away from me!” I yelled at this pale blue pile of organic matter that tried to mimic a rattled engineer.

Gah!

Oh wow, that was not my voice! What, did I just de-age by ten years? I swore on my mother’s head I would never R&R at work ever again. This wasn’t how HR usually dealt with subpar performances! I had learned my lesson! Lord have mercy on my soul already! Make it stop make it stop make it stop make it stop!

I just wanted to get the heck away from whatever was happening to me. In a fight or flight situation, it was a no brainer for me: I chose flight. And I would keep choosing that option, every single time. Gym was the only class this studious gal consistently failed, after all. It at least made me smart enough to understand battles I had no hope of winning. I grew up with encyclopedias, not with brass knuckles.

Given my predicament, I flopped to my belly, albeit with some great trouble.

When I saw the silky surface I was laying onto, I just completely lost my mind. It was white, it was fluffy, it looked like cotton candy, it was made of condensed water vapor.

It was a small cumulonimbus.

I, Roxane Dubay, was napping on a cloud! On an intangible surface! On a gas form that decided to screw over physics and steal some properties from its cousin, the solids. I couldn’t be on a cloud. I just couldn’t. I was going to fall any moment now. Just like Wile E. Coyote realising he’d been running in midair. All I needed was my “Uh oh!” sign.

“AAAHHHH! JESUS MURPHY, I’M GONNA DIE!” I shouted, my crispy voice echoing into the stratosphere.

Panic had successfully entered my system. I scrambled away to a location even I wasn’t sure about. After fighting with my unresponsive discoloured body like a beetle on its back, I ended up tumbling in a mess of tangled rainbow-colored hair.

Off the “““edge””” of the cloud. As if such things could offer any support to begin with. Ha! Now how silly was that? Almost made me want to laugh! ... Oh God I was going to die.

Boiling poop-sicle, I really was going to die!

It’s a bird! No, it’s a plane! No, it’s Roxane falling like an anvil to her doom!

25 years of wasted potential. I was born, I studied hard, I kickstarted an amazing career, I made a name for myself, and then I ended as flat as a pancake, fit to be scraped off the pavement!

No no no no!

I flailed like a drowning animal. Everything that I could move from my transmogrified body, I moved. By the love of me, I was going to punch the air if it was the last thing I did. I wasn’t going to go out gracefully, no. I wasn’t going to go limp and merge with the floor with a smile, NO. I was going to be distasteful and embarrassing every centimeter of the way. Until I went splat. I was mad with the world and I was going to show the world! This was my testament to the injustice I had been subjected to. A hate letter sent posthaste to the heavens. Go choke and die, world! I hated you! I hated you!!!

I kicked, I punched, I yelled, I cried, I twisted, I rolled, I stretched my wings-

Waitwhatdoyoumeanwings?

I had wings?

Hahaha, I HAD WINGS!

There was a way out in this whole malarkey! I could be salvaged – and question my sanity later! How did you like that, world? You tried your best, you played a good game, but I rolled a natural 20. Roxane was back with vengeance! This wasn’t the end of my story! I had plot armor by my side. The universe deemed that Gavin & CO still needed their ace player, and I would live to prove it right.

I had the wings, I did. I unquestionably did. It was nothing short of miraculous. The only snag here was to learn how to use them within the few seconds of life I had left as the planet menacingly came closer and closer to me. I tried to flap them like a wet chicken, flexing ball joints on either side of my spine I didn’t even know I had. I stretched newfangled tendons and synapsed muscles around near the base of the wings, and everything responded without protest! As if new biology sprouted out of me overnight. It would be extremely fascinating if I wasn’t in such a terrifying situation.

However, bossing my new wings around in such a disorderly fashion hardly achieved anything. I had no rhythm, let alone any strength to articulate anything correctly. But that green-red avian horse made it look so easy, so natural... It was almost insulting.

Realising that flapping and fluttering with no coordination was a recipe for disaster, I opted for a different stratagem. I simply opened the wings all the way and stretched them to cover as much surface as I could, parallel to the ground. If I couldn’t fly, I could at least try to glide, yes? Lift, drag, and all those beautiful aerodynamic buzzwords: They didn’t hold many secrets from me. I was more on the electromagnetism side of physics, but mechanics had been mandatory classes on my way to my diploma, after all.

My quick thinking was rewarded, and not a moment too soon. I was meters away from reaching the apex of the tallest trees from the woods that surged under me. My vertical descent slowed down to reasonable levels, which was good. The problem was, my horizontal acceleration had picked up the slack. So I wasn’t going to end up as a purée of organs, but as a tumbled mess of broken bones. I picked up involuntary speed, seeing conifers and peaks drift past me at an alarming pace. I had more or less turned into a gliding bullet.

I had but a few seconds left for myself to think this through as my diagonal approach brought me closer and closer to the preserve below. And I used these seconds to realise, I had no answers. I was just stalling for time. Truth was, I was a dead woman standing – gliding, in fact. And there was nothing I could do about it. Because the moment I would try to flap my wings again to reduce my speed or to regain altitude, I would pivot back straight into a ninety-degree fall.

Out of solutions, the obvious became obvious: I was quite effectively cruising to my death.

And it was beautiful.

Gliding at mystifying speeds, flying with total freedom: Every human’s dream. And I was living it. I was living it, and it was going to be the last thing I would ever live. It was almost cathartic, in a way – therapeutic, even. I had been so caged up by my tightly held life at work, and this right here felt like the liberation I didn’t even know I yearned for. Held by merciless and greedy executives, gagged by years of staring at a 2560 per 1440 rectangle of pixels, restrained by unpayable student debts and a mortgage of epic proportions, castrated by days upon days of commuting through endless traffic. But right now? Pure jubilation and elation. The proverbial phoenix rising from its ashes. I burst out of my chrysalis, and stretched my new wings – literally! I just had to accept it. My life wasn’t a crapsack martyrdom; but it was a six by eight meters office. Here? It was the unbounded freedom of the airspace. It was large and grandiose. It was the exploration of a world only a view from my bay window could let me dream of. It was the last bit of dopamine I was allowed to have before the final crash tugged me to my coffin.

I took a deep breath of fresh air. I smelled pine and morning dew. Maybe I panicked and thrashed less than a minute ago, but now? There was that blissful smile I swore I wouldn’t have. I had poured all that I could, and I was proud to have given my 110 all the way to my bitter end.

Goodbye, cruel world!

My feet scratched upon a large spruce tree first. It sent the upper part of my body tumbling sideways, and I was rolling like an uncontrollable torpedo. I slowed down a tad, but not enough to make my landing any less mortal. Then, my ribs attacked the treetops, and this time, instead of ricocheting, I sank through the sea of leaves. Among a noisy ruckus, a large branch hit me on the left side, and I heard a crack that sent white hot pain through the entirety of my body. I even took the time to grit my teeth. My future dead body closed the gap with the humus, soon to turn into a tumbleweed of gore. I saw rocks, stumps, and twigs; all dangerous weapons at the speed I was going.

Miracle number two of my fall occurred precisely then. As I almost scraped the floor, it rebelled and bent down in a steep rocky slope. This lower elevation bought me another second to enjoy life and-

T-the bend! It dug deeper into the soil, because it was part of the perimeter of a lake! And I was on a direct course with the crystal blue water! I had a nanosecond to register this cosmically improbable luck. Maybe I could still, maybe I-

KA-SPLOUCH!

I entered the lake at an almost horizontal angle. I went head first into the clear liquid. It’s as if I pierced the world’s toughest water balloon like a needle. This sincerely felt like someone snapped a giant rubber band directly on my head. Hot dang did the whiplash give me great pain in the neck. A tornado of bubbles surrounded me, as my deceleration finally came to a halt.

For a moment, I just let myself float in suspension in the depth of the lake, so bewildered by how I survived my personal Darwin award. Even within the hypolimnion, it was still unusually warm. I was incubated in peace, in the effervescence of a vat that was placed exactly where it needed to be to save my life. I felt like I was back in the womb; that I had been baptised for a second time. I could’ve closed my eyes and fell asleep in this aquatic heaven. I was floating and protected. Nothing could hurt me anymore. I even smiled at the trout and basses that passed me by. Hi, finned friends!

Here was a toast to water! I loved water! Water was the best! Water prolonged my stay on Earth! Water was the source of life, and the source of saving my life! Water was surprisingly tough to breathe in! Water made me choke for air! Water-

Gack!

I shook my head, my inflated cheeks telling me that I had an urgent rendezvous with the surface. I tried to swim up, and moderately succeeded. This body still felt super weird. I might’ve fared poorly in sports, but swimming was my cup of tea, and I used to be a better swimmer than this for sure. I felt... I dunno, miniaturised? Like my legs weren’t long enough to push me upward. I could see that I was still dyed cyan and deprived of hands and feet – that didn’t change. Why didn’t it?

“GuaaaAAHHHHH!” I inhaled a fistful of air, mouth wide open, as soon as I reached the top of the water.

I was in so much pain. So, so much pain. Was I in pain? Yes! I could only “feel” one of my wings anymore, and I didn’t know why. But to me, that was cause for concern. My life was: Home → car → office → car → home. I was not used to deal with this amount of excruciating pain. That’s the sort of thing action people dealt with, but me? I was more passive than growing mold! Pain was not welcomed in my world!

I tried to swim toward the closest bank I could see, and once again, that felt forced and awkward. My crawl was a sorry excuse of what it once was. As soon as I managed to eject this not-Roxane body out of the water, I was face to the sand, huffing and puffing. I panted for a solid five minutes. I would’ve rejoiced, celebrating my survival, but my everything hurt too much. I looked to my left to see what was throbbing with ache so badly and saw a sky-blue wing. One with mangled feathers. One that used to be straight.

It now looked like a wrecked boomerang.

“... eep!”

My brain took pity, and I passed out.

Comments

[Moonlight Tome]

Well! Nice to see a different point of view, with different priorities in life! It's nice to know that everyone will have different personalities and views on the situation.

[skyway920]

Hey.

Most replaced (other entity's, usually a human taking over a already existing character) story's usually just have one of the six replaced, so it nice to see a fic that does multiples.

This fic was releasing chapters somewhat regularly then it stopped. Are you willing to give us percentage of the next Chapter's completion

[dannny43]

More, I need more!!!