Fresh Start

After that conversation, I…stopped.

At first it was relaxing, relieving, not good for my heart and my worries but good for my body, like coming out from a long illness.

I slept a lot. I vegetated. I tried to budget having three young people living with me, but the numbers didn’t come out well. In the end, I cancelled Netflix, which saved me enough money for about one meal for one kid in one month, and borrowed an amount from parents and friends that was really too much to be okay.

I’d have to reconsider my job too. How could I go back to writing? It was far too reckless. What if the next world I wrote turned out to become real too? I couldn’t just make the next story a utopia, either—it’d never sell, which defied the purpose of doing it for work. And I couldn’t live off royalties; though I was a popular author, I relied on getting four or five advances from publishers a year to keep up my lifestyle. Maybe I should move somewhere rural?

Instead of dealing with any of that, I ignored everything and pushed it down the road.

I didn’t know what I was doing. I didn’t have a goal. Maybe I was depressed?

It was nice to not have a universe to help. To live with my favorite person, now, from that universe, to spend my days showing her and Sai-ee and Lil the modern world, having fun, in a way, with them, to eat my favorite storebought junk for breakfast and spend long afternoons watching pirated TV.

“So I don’t know if you can fix it—I don’t know if you should try.”

“Yo,” Sai-ee said, about seven or eight days into this spiral. “Drive me and Lil to the hospital.”

“Why do you need to go to the hospital?”

“Healing people again.” He said that quickly, like he didn’t want to be argued with or interrupted—maybe argued with or interrupted by his own mind. He didn’t like using his magic for other people, especially not strangers, since he’d been forced to.

“...You want to?” I asked.

“Eh.” He rocked his head from side to side, sending his hair fluttering. “It’s like…”

I waited.

“I’m glad we went to save Lil. Even though it didn’t work right, she’s alive now somehow… and Jayla, when she died—didn’t really…I didn’t really like it. So I think it’s a good idea to save lives.”

“Oh! I mean, definitely. I’ll drive you. I’ll help too.”

Depressed, aimless, amoral for what I thought was my own sake. I’d become like him, without even the trauma to justify it. And now he was in that hospital, fielding away confused, annoyed, and curious doctors as he studied a patient, eyes brighter than I’d seen or written before.

“I liked how you looked back there. Standing in the sun. Taking action.”

And even without that, I still had a responsibility to the world. And to them. Even if I hadn’t created it, it felt like I did. Even if I hadn’t created it, I knew its ins and outs, the politics, and the people, and had modern technology and ideas beyond what was already present there. I could make a good difference there.

And I came up with a decent idea, which I explained to them a week later.

“What if I rewrite it so that we successfully get Lil free, and escape with her and Sai-ee. Jayla doesn’t get shot, and we can see if there’s a way for Sai-ee to remove all his power from Ry’keth—consciously, by doing something—, which would cripple their military. We’ll be safe.”

“We will?” Jayla asked.

She’d been down too, a little awkward around me. Maybe she’d been having regrets about what she’d told me, since it’d had such a strong impact.

“I can’t stay here,” I replied. “If I come along, I can keep trying to fix the other world. Without killing myself in the process, haha…”

I laughed awkwardly, a strained smile, but Jayla, somehow, gave me a real smile back.

*

Another Miracle Healer Visits Vancouver BC Hospital

[...] The woman, later identified by witnesses as local resident Naomi Furukawa—the first one to be identifiable, as well as the first adult—gave the metal plate to hospital doctors and sent several of them a .docx file labeled “worldbuilding notes” as well as two images of a hand-printed dictionary in a language which has not yet been identified.

Almost all the patients she tended to made swift recoveries after her visit.

She was asked to stay, to which she replied “Sorry, but I have other places to go.”

*

EMPEROR KOL DEAD!

His newly appointed consort, Ky’sy’ana, takes the throne [...] This follows on the heels of the disappearance of Ki Sai-ee, who is rumored to have joined a small group of dissidents seeking asylum in Genatyi [...]

*

Dear Mom and Dad,

I’m moving countries. Sorry—I can’t explain it properly, like how I can’t explain why I got shot. I told Priya, but she’s the type to believe anything, and I wasn’t sure that you would.

I don’t know if I’ll see you again, but I do know this: You will live long, happy, and healthy lives. And so will I, and so will our loved ones.

I love you.

Your daughter, Naomi.