ACT III: The Pressure

I lied.

Situation not normal.

Situation very not normal.

Another door stabbed itself through the floor and manifested right between us.

Kotomi was scritching away at her notebook when it happened.

The same cold from earlier came up again.

"Souma. I think we should've opened the door earlier. It's clearly upset with us." She frowned.

I didn't like seeing her like that.

I knew that opening the door was practically inevitable at this point.

Screw it.

The world's in shambles anyway.

"I'm not a big fan of this, you know," I said.

I grabbed Kotomi by the hand from around the other side of the door and pulled it open.

Before I could do anything it sucked us in with a strong unnatural force and slammed behind us.

The next thing I saw was indescribable. 

I'll do my best anyway.

Kotomi was already in motion, drawing everything she saw.

I wrote a few words down.

Pillars

Ruins

Floaty bits of land

Shards

Time capsule

Looped moments

All of human history was currently abstractly approximated in moments we couldn't access.

Frozen mid-sentence.

I was also frozen.

It felt much colder than the house.

Much colder than winter.

The walls of this place, the stone.

It would render fully for a moment, textured and ancient and real, then flatten into something approximating stone.

A suggestion of it.

The columns near us looked like someone had described them to an artist who had never seen a column.

Edges where edges shouldn't be.

Surfaces that couldn't decide what they were made of.

I took my glasses off.

Worse.

I put them back on.

The geometry held better with them on despite the cracked lens over my right eye.

I wrote.

glasses = perception anchor?

I underlined it twice.

Something wanted to reach out.

It wasn't a person, it couldn't be. 

It swirled around me and Kotomi.

"Hey!" She blurted out. "That tickles!"

Tickles?

I tried to follow the gusts with my hand. It simply passed through it.

She's right.

It's not a storm.

What is it then?

The wind wrapped itself around us. Not tightly.

Unmaliciously.

That shouldn't be possible but so shouldn't everything else.

Something in the ruins shifted. Not moved. Shifted. 

One moment a collapsed archway was twenty metres ahead of us, and then without transition, without the courtesy of travelling the distance, it was simply closer.

The columns near it went full wireframe for a moment — pure bad render, no surface, no weight — then snapped back.

I decided it was time to address this thing head on.

"Are you the one that's been changing things for us?"

The air pressure dropped rapidly.

My ears popped.

I didn't know if that was agreement or contempt.

"Souma! My ears!"

"It's okay, I felt it too, Kotomi." I placed a hand on her shoulder.

The pressure dropped again. Twice. Quick succession.

I stared into the middle distance where the wind seemed thickest.

"Once for yes," I said carefully. "Twice for no."

Kotomi was still beside me.

A single drop. My ears popped again.

The column closest to me flickered — flat, textureless, — then restored. Whatever this was, communicating seemed so taxing on it.

The world lurched forward, springing closer to us.

"Yeah?" I called out instinctively.

"You're talking to it?" Kotomi asked.

I nodded.

"But you never—"

"I don't want to live in a world where we fall through holes," I started, "and experience a terrible lack of continuity, and also run the risk of getting displaced from each other."

I looked at her.

She looked up at me.

She wanted to cry but quickly ran into me giving me a warm hug.

The world lurched even closer.

The ruins flickered all at once this time — every surface dropping to outlines and bad polygons simultaneously — and then snapped back harder than before, as if reality were overcorrecting.

"It's reacting to us. Talking to it might be the way to get this all to stop." I said into her hair as I rested my head on hers.

'Yes' or 'no' questions were tough to ask this thing because almost every immediate question I thought of was more of a 'why' or a 'how'.

"Are you going to hurt us, windy?"

I felt like sighing.

Of course she named it.

I didn't say anything.

The wind surged twice.

"Why'd you hurl a truck at me?" I narrowed my eyes at a column.

"Souma."

The wind turned warmer.

I felt a tendril of wind on my shoulder.

It was mimicking what I did to Kotomi.

Twice. A flicker at the column.

I took that as an apology.

"Were you always here, windy?"

Twice.

"It must've trapped itself in our reality. There is no way this is the governing force of our universe. Clearly this thing," I pointed at the column, "belongs somewhere else, Kotomi."

Once.

The world inched back a bit, giving us breathing room.

We sat down on what I assumed was ground. It held our weight, which was good enough for me.

Kotomi had her knees pulled up to her chest, notebook balanced against them, still drawing.

I don't even know how she still had any pages left.

I was trying to think in systems.

Which was hard. Because nothing about this was systematic.

"Windy," Kotomi said, tapping her pen against her chin, "how long have you been stuck?"

The pressure dropped once.

Then kept dropping.

And dropping.

My ears popped so many times I lost count. 

Kotomi winced and folded her ears with her palms.

The ruins around us flickered in pulses. It then stopped.

We looked at each other.

"A long time," Kotomi said quietly.

Once.

I wrote.

predates time. predates our street. predates what?

I underlined the last two words.

"Were you trying to communicate before us?" I asked.

Once.

"Did anyone else notice?"

A long pause.

Twice.

That sat heavy.

Windy had been in the margins of reality, desperately trying to make itself known, and we were apparently the first two people to write it down instead of looking away.

Because that's what people do.

They look away.

They decide they misremembered. 

They call it a trick of the light and go back to their dinner and their linear entertainment.

Kotomi and I went to rooftops to disappear.

Turns out that made us very easy to find.

"Do you know what you are?" I asked.

The wind stilled completely.

Everything went still.

It didn't feel like the calm that precedes something bad.

It was more like that question in particular gave it something to think about.

The ruins held their breath. A surface somewhere rendered halfway and stopped, caught between states, it wasn't stone or wireframe.

Twice.

"That's okay," Kotomi said immediately, like it was nothing, like she told lost cosmic entities it was okay every day of her life. "We didn't know what we were either until recently."

The warmth came back gradually.

I adjusted my glasses.

I scritched something into my notebook.

doesn't know its own nature. only knows it doesn't belong here. same as us, different problem.

"Can you go back on your own?" I asked.

Twice.

"Do you know why not?"

The wind picked up.

It was agitated. Not at us.

It moved through the ruins like it was looking for a way to show us, stirring dust from surfaces that maybe had never had dust before.

It swirled around a section of wall that was fully rendered, textured stone, and touched it.

The stone immediately dropped to flat grey. No texture. No weight.

Just a plane with a colour assigned to it.

It let go.

The stone came back.

I stared at it.

"Every time you interact with something in our reality," I said slowly, "it loses resolution."

Once.

"Because you don't belong there.”

Once. A flicker.

"You've been degrading our reality every time you tried to reach us."

Once.

"And you couldn't stop because you needed us to see you?"

The longest pause yet.

Once.

Kotomi had stopped drawing. She was just looking at the space where the wind was thickest, her pen loose in her hand.

"It couldn't stop," she said. "That was the only language it had."

I nodded.

We sat with that for a while.

The looped moments drifted past us. The bicycle wheel. A person walking to nowhere. A door opening onto nothing, forever. All these fragments of a world that had passed through here and left residue.

The constant dimension.

And this thing, this patient impossible thing, had been here with all of it.

No wonder it threw a truck at me.

"Okay," I said finally. "We want to help you get out."

Once.

It felt emphatic.

Every surface in the ruins lit up simultaneously, full resolution, sharp and heavy and real, and then dropped back down. The equivalent, I thought, of someone grabbing you by both shoulders.

"We have notebooks," Kotomi said, following the same thread I was pulling. "Everything we saw, we wrote down. We documented it."

She paused.

"Is that part of why you can't leave? Because we made it real? Because we pinned it down?"

The pressure dropped once.

Then the temperature dropped with it. It wasn't the harsh cold from before.

I wrote.

observation as anchor. documentation as trap. we catalogued it and therefore soft-locked it.

I crossed it out.

I looked at my notebook.

Kotomi looked at hers.

The same thought arrived in both of us at the same time the way thoughts do when you've been spending too much time with someone.

"If we burn them," she started.

"It stops being observed," I finished.

"It stops being pinned down."

"It stops being here."

The wind circled us slowly.

Waiting.

But I wasn't finished thinking yet.

"That's not enough on its own," I said.

Kotomi looked at me.

"Burning the notebooks removes our claim on it. But it's still in the gap. It still doesn't have a way through."

I stood up.

The ground held. Questionably, but it held.

"It needs a door," I said. "A real one. Not one it plants in a hallway. One we open for it."

"We don't have a door."

"We came through one?" I offered.

We both turned around.

Behind us, where nothing had been a moment ago, was the door. The same one from Kotomi's hallway. The seam was still visible. Still trying its best to pretend it had always been there.

It was facing the wrong way.

The handle was on our side.

"It brought us here," Kotomi said.

"And now it needs us to open it from this side," I said. "From inside. So it has something to follow through."

The wind pressed against my back. Not hard. The way a question feels when it's too hopeful to ask outright.

I looked at Kotomi.

She was already tearing pages out of her notebook.

I did the same.

We didn't have a lighter. We didn't have matches.

The wind knew.

"I hate this," Kotomi said.

I laughed once through my nose.

"Yeah."

She opened her notebook.

Months of drawings and entries.

Maybe not literally. Time had become a suggestion at some point. But there were hundreds of pages in there.

Sketches.

The school sign.

The hallway door.

The truck.

The fridge.

Diagrams.

Arrows.

Question marks.

I looked at my own notebook.

Mine was so much uglier.

Walls of text and half-baked theories.

Bad theories and the corrections of those theories.

Corrections to corrections.

My notebook was what I'd say, the word equivalent of grabbing reality by the collar and demanding it explain itself.

I hated how attached I'd become to the thing.

Kotomi carefully tore out the first page.

The sound echoed strangely through the ruins.

The wind approached.

No heat. No spark. No flame.

Nothing happened.

It simply reached out. Then the ink vanished.

I stared blankly at Kotomi.

One moment there was a drawing. The next there wasn't.

Every line disappeared simultaneously.

The wind touched it again and the page eroded completely becoming crude matter.

The texture of the paper collapsed. The fibres flattened. The creases disappeared.

The surface became impossibly smooth.

Not paper anymore.

Just a white shape pretending to be paper.

A low noise passed through the ruins.

Kotomi stared in awe.

The corner of the page darkened.

Not from burning.

From absence.

The darkness spread inward.

The white surface fractured into fine grey particles.

Ash. Except ash implied there had been fire.

This looked more like the page had become uncertain it had ever existed.

The fragments lifted upward and were drawn somewhere else.

Gone.

Nothing remained in Kotomi's hand.

She looked at her fingers.

Then at the empty space where the page should've been.

Then back to the notebook.

"Oh."

That was all she said.

The wind lingered beside her.

I tore out one of my own pages.

A page about the truck.

The page disappeared even faster.

Reality was removing evidence.

I looked over at Kotomi.

She hugged her notebook against her chest.

The wind stilled.

Neither of us moved.

Then, quietly, she said, "We worked really hard on these."

"Yeah."

"I liked your drawings."

"Some of them were even useful."

"Rude."

"A little."

She ran her thumb along the edge of the notebook.

Thinking.

Remembering.

"I'm fine with this, if it means we all get to go back."

The wind took them gently.

Each one losing detail.

Blank sheets became flat approximations.

Approximations becoming grey dust.

Grey dust becoming nothing.

It was cyclical. Therapeutic almost.

Or maybe I found out what my new job was.

An incinerator operator guy.

Thanks, Windy.

I fed my own pages through.

The archive shrank and the wind grew stronger.

I could tell it wanted to get out of here.

Eventually Kotomi and I reached the final page.

The very last archival graphic.

She stared at it for a long time.

I leaned over.

The drawing showed two figures standing beside a doorway.

One had glasses.

One had a bow.

Between them was a gust of wind she had somehow managed to draw despite wind being fundamentally uncooperative as a visual subject.

It was a terrible drawing.

Probably one of my favourites.

Kotomi laughed softly.

"Objectively speaking."

"Yeah?"

"We are going to sound insane."

"Objectively speaking."

The wind nudged her shoulder.

She smiled.

Then fed the page forward.

The drawing disappeared.

The paper followed.

The dust rose.

Gone.

A beat of silence.

Kotomi looked down at the empty cover in her hands.

No pages.

No archive.

No proof.

Just a notebook that had forgotten how to be a notebook.

The wind moved around us once.

Warm, gentle and grateful.

I think.

Then the door behind us clicked.

"Ready?" I said.

"Obviously," said Kotomi.

The constant dimension, for the first time since we'd arrived, was just a place.

Old, still, enormous, and silent.

Just before the door swung shut behind whatever had just left, the air in the room shifted one more time. Deliberately. It moved around us both, touched our hair, our shoulders, our faces.

The way you'd hold something you were glad you got to touch.

Then it was gone.

Kotomi stood next to me with her empty hands.

I stood next to her with mine.

***

I came home.

I don't remember much of how I'd actually got here though.

I'd been a while since the door closed first closed behind us and then there were stairs, and then a street I recognized, and then my gate, and then my front door, and then my shoes coming off in the entryway.

The fridge was right side up.

The kitchen was useful.

Mom was making what she always referred to as her “world famous” miso.

Dad was scrolling on his phone.

"You're back late," Mom said peering over her shoulder.

"Sorry," I said.

"How was Kotomi's?"

"Okay."

“Just okay?”

“You sure spend a lot of time there, when will we meet her?”

I sat at the table across from Dad. He set his phone down.

“I'm sure he'll share with us when he's ready, honey. I was his age once when I met you—young, budding, feeling like the wind in his sails could take him anywhere. Be a safe kid, Souma.”

None of this felt real.

None of this felt unreal.

It just felt like dinner, which is all I could ask for at this point.

My plate didn't flip over or hover in midair.

My family was within earshot the whole time.

I went to bed shortly after.

I stared at the ceiling.

I slept, trusting that things would be set in order.

***

Morning.

Mom made rice omelettes. Dad left early to work. I put on my uniform, checked my reflection, and put on my glasses.

They weren't cracked anymore.

The mirror showed one version of things.

I looked fine, if you consider my horrendous bed head fine.

I fixed it in place with a few hundred swipes on the comb.

I put my bag over my shoulder.

It was lighter than usual. No notebook.

It was like noticing a tooth that isn't there anymore.

School was waiting for me, hopefully.

I walked the route I always walked.

The sign was facing the street, the way signs are supposed to face.

I looked at it for a long time.

Then I kept walking.

Everything was where it was supposed to be.

Continuity intact.

No gaps, no drops, no surfaces forgetting what they were.

The world was rendering at full fidelity in every direction and it was aggressively, relentlessly, almost offensively normal.

I didn't know how to feel about that yet.

I arrived at school.

I went to my classes.

I heard words. Some of them were probably important.

At lunch I went to the rooftop.

***

Kotomi was already there.

She had a bento. She had her bow. She did not have her notebook.

She looked up when I came through the door and her expression was the same one I had.

I sat down next to her, offering some of my melon bread.

We ate.

The sky was a muted blue.

"So," Kotomi said.

"So," I said.

The exchange of two people who had screamed together in a tapering hole-ish void.

"If we told anyone," she started.

"There'd be family welfare checks," I said. "Plural."

She nodded sagely and bit into her takoyaki.

I looked out over the school grounds.

Everything is ordinary.

In place.

Moving as it should.

Everyone going about the business of being a person in a world that held together the way it was supposed to.

My phone had re-calibrated away from epoch zero.

It felt nice to be in the now.

I thought about how Kotomi and I came up here to disappear and somehow ended up being the only ones who saw what the world was slowly becoming.

The wind came through then.

Gentle.

It was the kind of wind that moves your hair and ruins a scenic selfie.

We both looked up.

It passed through and kept going, easy and unhurried, the way things move when they're going exactly where they mean to go.

I looked back down.

Kotomi leaned over and kissed me on the cheek. Easy as anything. Like it was just another thing that happened on rooftops.

I stared straight ahead.

My ears were not popping.

That was entirely her.

"What was that for," I asked.

"You paid attention. Even as the world tried squashing us; that makes you remarkably remarkable in my book." She said looking down at her bento.

I had nothing to say to that.

So I didn't say anything.

That's when the wind danced in between us.