ACT II: The Nerve

It took Kotomi all of about three minutes to decide we ‘absolutely totally immediately’ must investigate.

This is where we fundamentally disagree.

I was perfectly fine with investigating back here.

Where things made sense.

That door was not auspicious in the slightest. 

Kotomi on the other hand, practically dived headlong into a closed door.

“This is our chance, Souma!” 

“To do what exactly? And you can't say ‘investigate!’” 

“Examine?” 

I stared at her blankly.

“Explore!”

I shook my head.

“Probe?”

“Gross.”

“Look, Souma. I'm going in there. It's my house after all.”

“You're just accepting this as normal, what are you? The student body?”

“Don't rope me in with those fleas. This is a massive anomaly, it's worth checking out.”

“You're nuts.”

“Be a peanut with me, will you?”

“I'm not gonna pretend I know what that means.”

I winced and reached for the doorknob.

Before I could grab it, the door simply went away.

“What?”

“Souma! Why'd you hesitate!?”

I sighed. 

“I don't even need to answer that.” I said, going back to her bedroom.

“Souma It’s only doing this because we noticed it!”

“I'll be here, revising my entries. Feel free to join me. We need to catalogue this.”

“Coming!” 

Good. I've got her to come back. 

Call me nuts, but the last thing I want is to go somewhere that very obviously planted itself there.

Sailors fell for sirens. 

At least the sirens were pretty. 

Doors are not. 

Unless you're a carpenter.

Maybe I am nuts.

A few hours had passed.

Two of which I spent trying to listen to Kotomi rattle off theory after theory. 

By the last hour, Kotomi grew sleepy. 

I didn't dare overstay my welcome.

We weren't like that of course. 

We had said our goodbyes. 

Kotomi made me promise to not scare off the anomalies.

I just nodded.

She's personalized them. 

I'm really in it for the long haul.

Don't get me wrong, I see what she sees, and have just come to terms with that. 

The thing is, I don't feel a natural impertinence for any of this. 

As cliché as this is, I am a cat that doesn't want to be killed by curiosity.

I'd rather it be from old age. 

Or an incoming truck making a beeline right towards me CRAP—

I dived out of the way in time.

I scraped my knees, body and my palms and forearms on the pavement and slid across.

I must've rolled a thousand times like a tumbleweed.

My glasses came off. 

One of the lenses cracked. 

The truck skidded out of the way opposite where I jumped toward and smacked into a telephone pole. 

I laid there for a good five minutes. Not moving.

Simply catching my breath and processing the last five seconds. 

A truck. 

Where's the driver? 

I made an effort to get up.

I looked at my palms with my bare eyes.

No blood. No peeled skin.

I staggered towards my glasses and put them on.

The blood showed up, oozing from the open abrasions.

I took them off.

No blood.

I put them back on. 

Blood and abrasions. 

The truck was idling and dithering like a broken game asset. 

I was bleeding.

Kotomi was nowhere.

I made my way to the truck to make myself known.

To my dismay. 

The truck was unmanned.

The door was locked. 

“Hey! I'm okay! Hurt a bit, but you didn't hit me!” I called out. 

No reply. Instead it just stood there. 

Motor running idle. 

The pole it smacked into was bent and reduced to polygons.

Home was a few more blocks away and I was lucky to be alive. 

I figured I'd get my mom to patch me up.

She wouldn't let me hear the end of it, but it's better than staying here.

I limped the rest of the way there without any other incidents.

It took forever but at this point, I was willing to take whatever discipline was waiting for me. 

I got past my family home’s gate and hobbled up the stairs.

It looks like Mom or Dad was watching from the window because the door opened because it opened up as soon as I got there.

“Souma! You're back! How was Kotomi’s, did you get all your homework done?”

Huh? 

It's like Mom was oblivious to the mess in front of her.

“Uh, fine… you're not mad?”

“Goodness no you were hardly out for any time at all. Come sit, dinner's ready.

It is almost a quarter after nine at night.

“Dinner this late, mom?” I asked. 

“It's precisely when we eat dinner, Souma. Are you feeling alright?”

“No,” I said exasperated, “I got nearly hit by a truck on my way back!” 

“You look fine to me.”

That was strangely out of character.

There's no way mom would react that way. Dad maybe, but mom?

She's a nervous wreck.

Who am I talking to?

I sighed quietly. This was too much for one night. 

I deserve some rest.

I looked in the mirror one last time.

With and without my glasses.

The same logic applied as it did earlier.

Somehow I could toggle between states, but the pain remained regardless.

I took off my glasses and climbed into bed. 

I didn't even change.

None of it seemed to matter.

***

I woke up.

Strangely the brunt of the pain had waned.

I was still very sore, though.

I pulled out my phone, my fingers had tremors that made typing difficult.

I needed to know if Kotomi's hallway door was still gone, or if her whole house had been re-positioned three blocks over.

I typed.

Something happened on the way back last night. I think an anomaly is trying to fix me.

I hit send. The phone didn't register a network error. Instead, it got sent out quickly but the timestamp read: 12:00 AM, Jan 1, 1970.

I sat with that for a moment.

Epoch zero.

I had learned about this when I joined the computer club in first year.

Whatever is changing reality right now predates every system clock on earth.

Crap I gotta stop nerding out. I actually need to write this down.

So much happened all at once.

“Can’t you guys see that!?” I shouted into nothing.

Damnit, now I’m personifying it.

I hurriedly wrote down key words.

The truck, no driver, almost died.

Glasses and blood.

Odd mom.

Unix epoch zero.

I’m not the best drawer; I work with words not pictures. 

That’s more Kotomi’s thing anyway.

I don’t even know what day it is, screw the routine.

Everyone’s an NPC with crappy, broken dialogue lines. 

I had to find Kotomi, this was non-negotiable.

I don’t want her to be that way, or worse.

I ran down the stairs and to the kitchen; my fridge was upside down.

No family in sight.

Like they never existed in the first place.

I almost laughed. Almost. That’s all anybody in my position could do.

If I didn't laugh; I’d surely cry and wallow.

In the face of a crumbling reality, humour’s all I got.

I’ll die on that hill provided the hill doesn’t suddenly reverse the terrain and noclips me.

Fridge.

Another note.

Good lord, I’ve got a lot of writing to do.

The kitchen in all its bleak linoleum glory was now useless to me for now.

I grabbed some snacks I do not remember buying from one of the cabinets and headed outside.

On my travels to Kotomi’s place everything was fine.

'Fine' as in without incident.

'Without incident,' as in, I was walking without anything magnetizing to me.

It put me on edge the whole trek over there. Terribly on the edge.

The one thing that brought me back was seeing Kotomi’s house exactly where it was.

I ran up the stairs and rang her doorbell.

A beat.

The door snapped open.

“Blegh!” Kotomi jumped out at me.

“Gah! Damnit!” I jumped, my glasses nearly sliding off my face. “Don’t do that!” I frowned

She put her hands down.

“Sorry.”

She meant it.

I knew because her eyes were doing that thing where they looked down at nothing.

“You wanna?” She gestured to come in.

I nodded, taking off my shoes and placing them inline with hers.

“Right, sorry for snapping at you. A metric crap tonne has changed.”

This piqued her interest.

“Like what? Did you write any of it down?”

“I noted things down briefly. It all began on the way back home last night… Did you get my text by the way?”

She shook her head ‘no.’

“Interesting. Stick a pin in that for now.” I said, shifting my weight from leg to leg.

I gave Kotomi a play-by-play.

She was mostly silent through my half-remembered spiel, only raising her eyebrows slightly or offering a theory via mumbling.

“If we get another chance to go, would you?”

“Where? To the constant dimension?”

That's the name we'd given what we thought was behind the door. 

The theory was, if things are crazy here, then the inverse must be true for whatever's behind there.

I'll admit, it's not a good one, as it hinges on a metric tonne of what-ifs. It just felt nice between us to act like we'd got it all figured out.

We're far from that point.

“So your glasses,” Kotomi said scritching a drawing into her notebook, “you saw blood and then didn't?”

“When they came off, I didn’t. The opposite is true.” I said adjusting them.

“You look fine to me now though.”

“You sound like my mom.” I sighed.

“Thats not even remotely true, she's the least chilled out person I know. That wasn't your mom.”

I wrote something into my notes.

Skinwalker?

They're approximating humans.

To get close to us... probably...

I told Kotomi to not let the thrill of adventure get to her, we can't let our guard down.

The temperature in the room suddenly dropped down.

My teeth chattered without me wanting to.

Kotomi was also visibly shivering.

“D-d-did you?” she stuttered as she hugged herself tightly.

“No? I was right here.” 

“I c-c-can’t even write anything now.”

Okay, clearly an anomaly thinks we're cold?

Maybe.

I'm still not a fan of this personifying thing.

To me it's just events.

Though the context in which they happen is worth noting. 

Sometimes it feels like warnings, or like they are attempting to… communicate.

That word feels wrong but I'll allow it because I can't think when it's this cold.

Kotomi and I were making our way out to see if the whole house was like this until we both lost our footing. 

We both tumbled into a stairwell that was swapped out at the very nanosecond we stepped out together.

We both screamed as we fell, she instinctively grabbed onto my jacket and hooked onto my shoulder.

It was dark and we were moving fast.

I screamed something akin to ‘this is it.’

It was lost on Kotomi, she was trying not to look or hear anything anymore.

I felt the void taper off and squeeze it until we were flat.

It was painless until it wasn't.

A quick flash and then a snap.

We opened our eyes.

We were sitting across from each other.

Kotomi was catching her breath, eyes wide like saucers.

“What just happened!?” 

I looked around.

The bedroom.

“Did we die?”

“I feel alive, my heart’s beating like crazy, feel.”

She grabbed my hand and pushed it to her chest.

Her heart practically wanted to jump out.

I felt mine.

Situation normal.

Huh.