Cognitive Dissonance

I woke up with a sharp pain in my head. The scenery that greeted me wasn’t that of the open sky but a moldy ceiling. Bearing the pain, I moved my head to glance around the room. Without the luxury of windows, the solution was a few strategically placed scented candles to provide the minimum of lighting. My concerns about carbon monoxide poisoning dissipated once I felt air flow in the room, so perhaps there were vents hidden in some corner. The room had only a single desk and chair besides the bed I was on. A soldier stared at me from the chair, at least I thought so. A full set of armor covered him from head to toe, and I couldn’t even see his face with his closed helmet in the way.

“Hello? Sir?” I asked, testing the waters. “Where am I?”

The soldier didn’t answer; instead, he just maintained his pose. I gently climbed off the bed, hoping to sneak by unnoticed. For all I knew, this person could be a thug from a kidnapping gang. Or maybe there wasn’t anyone under the set of armor at all, and someone set this up as a sort of scarecrow to deter me from leaving the room.

I turned my gaze back to the armored statue, and a chill struck my heart. The armor shifted a bit; I was sure of it. Was this my imagination? I knew from psychology that confidence doesn’t prove how accurate the memory is. Or maybe this was a trick to mess with me. Was Lyla behind this? She wasn’t the type. I doubted her ability to set up the simplest of jokes.

As my focus locked onto the armor, I could finally notice it drifting off the chair until it crashed onto the floor with a reverberating clank. The armor didn’t shatter into pieces, cluing me in that something was inside the armor, and this something was a person, because soon after the impact, a deep groan spilled out of the gaps of the helmet.

The armor helped itself up, and it faced me directly. I didn’t know why I remained in place while the armor was incapacitated, and that indecision became a seed for regret. The bizarre scene unfolding before my eyes had an inexplicable allure that captivated me.

A raspy voice that sounded centuries old slipped out of the armor. “You saw it, didn’t you?” After exerting his voice, audible panting followed, as if it were a cry for help from a dying lung.

What the hell was this person talking about? The mismatch between his physique and voice was odd enough. He could be a well-built man in his prime, or a geezer on his deathbed. It would even be believable to imagine him as a decaying fossil trapped in oversized armor. I struggled not to laugh as I visualized that conjecture as truth. The existence of magic certainly broadened the range of possibilities, but if I were to stick with the simplest, non-supernatural explanation, his larynx might be injured.

“Saw what?” I answered cautiously, prepared to handle any response.

“You know what!” the ancient prisoner in the armor exclaimed. Then he turned away from me like a teenage girl disclosing who her first crush was, poking his fingers against one another. “You… you saw me fall asleep on the job.”

How could I possibly have seen that? All I could see was a pile of scrap metal. I held back my annoyance.

“Can you tell me where I am?” I calmed down with a breath and changed the topic.

“Please, please, don’t tell anyone I was slacking off. I couldn’t sleep well for a while now.” He continued pouring out his heart to me.

“Mister…” This simple word was taken as a cue for self-introduction.

He lunged forward and grabbed onto my shoulders, bursting through any trace of personal boundaries I had left. “My name is Werly Gould. Nice to meet you!” He was certainly energetic for someone who had insomnia.

“Mister Gould. If you tell me where I am, I don’t see any reason you couldn’t take a quick nap break. I will get off the bed so you can get some rest.”

Werly fell silent. He tilted his head backwards. I couldn’t tell if he was contemplating or if he had fallen asleep again. I tried to take this chance to shake his hand off my shoulder, but his grip was still too tight.

“Hello? Werly? Are you awake?” I asked.

“Of course, I am.” There was almost indignation in his tone.

“I only asked because you didn’t answer.”

“I wasn’t sure whether you were joking.” He could’ve asked me.

“Where am I?” I shifted the focus to reuniting with Lyla.

“The infirmary of a guard station.”

“Then, why are you wearing a full set of armor here?” I couldn’t contain my curiosity. The bulky lump of metal standing here was too distracting, almost comical, for me to maintain a serious conversation.

Werly patted his chest to produce a confident clank. “This way, no one can ambush me.” I was sure that no one would even talk to him. Before I could think of anything more to say, my stomach started growling. My first thought was that the kid remained hungry, and Lyla had failed to feed him, but this hunger felt more personal than before.

“Sounds like you’re hungry,” Werly said softly, “luckily…” He reached under his chest plate and took out a slice of bread. As if it were the most natural thing in the world, he handed the clearly contaminated food to me. I could not hide my grimace.

“You hid the bread in a bag under your chest plate. How considerate of you.” I held out unrealistic hope that some level of hygiene was maintained.

Werly chuckled and shattered my dreams in a single sentence. “Don’t worry about anything. I didn’t stock the bread under my shirt; it was between my shirt and my chest plate.”

“I’m not that hungry.”

“Nonsense. You’re only being considerate.”

“The bread is not clean-”

“I will watch you until you accept my generosity.”

Under the watchful eyes of the Werly, I reluctantly received the bread, dreading the metallic taste and imagining the bacterial colonies that were thriving on its surface. And I took a bite.

The bread tasted normal, which meant it was terribly plain, and the rough texture made it hard to chew. I managed to swallow without spitting it back out, which exceeded my expectations. Whether I could survive the turmoil in my stomach that would surely happen in the upcoming night was another story. That thought alone sent shivers down my spine, so I tried to push away these unnecessary predictions of the future.

“Can I get back to Mr. Topaz’s store?” I wanted to leave this place as soon as possible.

Werly scratched his head (helmet) and shrugged. “Which one are you talking about?”

“He has multiple stores?”

“Are you joking right now? I don’t think that’s how comedy works.”

He didn’t look to be of much help. Talking with him would only drain more of my patience and sanity. The best course of action was to wait quietly for Lyla to come pick me up, like I was a child in a daycare center, and given the state that my body was reduced to, the simile wasn’t that far off from the truth.

I didn’t have to wait long. There was soon a gentle knock on the door.

“Come in,” Werly said. His voice was even less energetic than before, sounding closer to death than before. Maybe I should have asked whether he needed medical help, but I didn’t want to be disrespectful. A real weak person with one foot in the grave wouldn’t be able to move around with such a heavy set of armor, so he should be fine.

The identity of the person outside the door overshadowed my concern for Werly. It was Topaz’s bodyguard. The worst part was his beaming smile, which was incompatible with his imposing presence. His eyes locked on me so intently that he almost forgot to blink; his crossed arms squeezed out his muscles in full display.

“Kid, I’m here for you,” he said in an emotionless voice. That sentence could be interpreted in multiple ways, so I would rather he spoke creepily; then at least I would be sure about his intentions. His employment status under Topaz didn’t give me much confidence at all, since that same employer randomly hired two people he met in the wilderness, one of them a child.

“Who are you?” I said in the best cutesy voice I could muster, trying to play up my innocence.

The bodyguard chuckled. “Did you forget about me already? We met before.” Spoken like a typical scammer.

“I don’t know who you are! Mr. Gould, help me!” I latched onto the metal arm, fully expecting some sort of resistance from Werly. By the time I realized something was amiss, it was too late. My momentum pushed Werly off the chair, and I fell along with him.

There was a resounding bang when the armor crashed on the floor, but no sharp pain expected from the impact came to me. The bodyguard caught me before I hit the ground. I didn’t notice when he got so close. The last time I paid attention to him, he was outside the room. No signs of air currents that should have hit me if he were moving at high speed. He was just here.

The bodyguard let me stand back up. We stared at each other, silence interspersed with the slow breathing that leaked out of Werly’s armor. Then, the bodyguard turned around.

“We’re leaving.” He said. His tone was firmer and less playful.

I stood there, glancing at Werly. “Maybe we should call a doctor.”

“I will tell the guards when we leave. Don’t waste any more time here.”

Well, he saved me from falling, but that didn’t make him less suspicious. “Why isn’t Lyla here?”

“She was taking care of the child you rescued.”

“I’ll wait until she is free.”

The bodyguard glared at me. “You do remember that you are under contract. Do you? This is getting less charming and more troublesome the more you insist on staying here.” I could feel my body telling me to run away, as his mere gaze seemed to strangle me. At this rate, he might take me away by force.

“Fine, let’s go.” I conceded.

Satisfied, the bodyguard led me out of the room, passing a few soldiers on our way. Each of them nodded politely at the bodyguard, which reassured me a little that the person was more trustworthy despite how creepy he looked. The bodyguard told the soldier at the front door about Werly. The soldier reacted with anger rather than concern, so this might be a common occurrence.