It was the most comfortable bed I’d ever been in. Like sleeping among clouds. Very possibly among clouds, like the time before. The time early on when they attacked me.

This time, however, I could open my eyes. I was in some strange, white world. It should have been too bright for me to comprehend, but somehow, I did.

I scrambled to my feet, looking around. “Hello!” I called out.

“Hello, Quinn.”

I gasped as I spun around, arms raised to brace myself from an attack. A man stood there in a black cloak and… tuxedo? I was so confused. I slowly lowered my hands, eyes wide. He was human yet… not. Like someone who had studied human kind and tried to replicate it. He had a deck of cards he was shuffling, making him look like some street performer doing magic tricks.

It was his eyes that drew my attention. That was the thing that made me instantly think he wasn’t actually human. The eyes were the window of the soul, and try as he might, this man could not pretend his eyes to be human. The more I stared, the more nauseous I became. It was like I could see the molecules shifting and churning, changing and falling.

“My sister didn’t let you see us for your own sanity.” The smirk the man wore made her uncomfortable. “I am not nearly as orderly as her. She forces, I let you choose.” I had no idea what he meant by that, but I found myself shaking. “Therefore, the choice is yours. Keep my gaze, lose your sanity. Drop your gaze, keep your sanity.”

The words hit me like a truck. It was an effort to tear my gaze from his, but as soon as I was focused on the white ground below, I found my body was trembling. I was on my knees, holding back the bile that crept up my throat.

“As you wish,” the man said, taking a few steps around the room.

“Where… where…” I couldn’t get the phrase out. Vomit was threatening to exit my mouth.

“Where is my sister? Not here,” the man said.

I closed my eyes, trying to will a semblance of normalcy back into me. I kept my eyes on the ground. I tried not to be afraid, but I had also had never seen my alien overlords. I instantly recognized his voice. And he talked about his sister. I perhaps tried to think of what might happen if I was ever in their presence again, but I never considered how looking at this man had made me loose all function. What could I possibly do?

I couldn’t trust him. He was the one that admitted he could lie. That the only thing keeping him from lying all the time was his sister.

“Oh, not all the time,” the man said, pacing around the white world. “Then that would make me predictable, and I don’t like being predictable. I usually tell the truth, most of the time, unless I find it too delightful to lie and add a little chaos to the world.”

I kept my gaze to the ground, but the trembling in my body did not stop.

“What… what…”

“I know you have questions for me,” the man said as he continued to pace in his strange outfit. He kept shuffling his deck of cards. “And I know you know the answer for all of them.”

Play the game. It wasn’t the answer I wanted, though.

“The answers rarely are what we want,” the man said again, picking up a card and making it disappear. One by one, the deck got smaller. “I only have one question for you.” I didn’t dare turn my head to see him. He didn’t expect me to. “Do you give up?”

I was not prepared for that question. I kept my gaze to the ground, my arms and knees trembling as they kept me up.

“What?” I asked.

“Do you give up?” the man asked again, not bothered by the request to repeat himself. He kept making the cards disappear one by one. I had a feeling that it was not just a sleight of hand trick. I could feel his gaze on me.

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“I… don’t understand…” I was getting a bit of strength back. A billion questions were inside my head, and I did not have the strength to ask them all.

“It is the rules of the game we set up.”

“You… and sister?” I asked.

“Me,” a card disappeared, “my sister,” another one was gone, “and you.” The deck disappeared completely.

Once again, I was confused. I was breathing deeply, staring at his black dress shoes. I seriously did not understand what he was wearing. “Me?”

“Funny thing about losing your memory. You wouldn’t remember it, would you.”

He lies. He admits he lies.

“I… I don’t know… you. Or your sister,” I said. “Are you… god?”

“Nope,” the man said. “We’re older than God. Or, at least, the Gods that rule your planet. And a few other planets. My sister and I have been here longer than the creation of everything. We are the reason creation exists in the first place.”

I was breathing deeply. Did I have anything with mushrooms in it lately? I was seriously worried about my sanity. I picked some mushrooms recently, but I didn’t eat any. Besides, those were the mushrooms in the weird world where I was all by myself farming and cleaning a haunted house. Could I really trust anything I ate?

The man laughed. “See? This is why it’s so much fun to admit I can lie. I adore how much you can’t trust yourself right now. I crave that kind of chaos.” He chuckled again, pulling a hat out of a pocket dimension and placing it on his head. “You have about five minutes to answer my question, or my sister will appear and demand an answer.”

“Who… who…”

“Ah, ah, ah,” the man said, starting to pull out a handkerchief from his pocket. A colorful one with multiple handkerchiefs attached to it. “I’m done with the philosophical discussion. Answer my question. Do you give up? Would you like this experience to become nothing more than a dream? Nothing more then…” he chuckled at his own thought. “Then wondering about the strange mushrooms you might have eaten when you wake up?”

I remained on the ground, breathing deeply. This was more than unsettling. This man, this being, was casually talking about my life like he’d done this before. Taken people on a strange trip into the mind and played some sort of sick game. Maybe not to me, but to others.

The man sat down, crossing his legs. “Only when I get bored,” he whispered. “And I will be the first to admit I get bored way easier than my sister.”

Another chill raced through me.

“Does it comfort you to know that I’m not evil?”

“No,” I said. “You lie.”

“My sister would promise we are nothing but a neutral party.”

I shook my head, the only energy I had. “Leave me alone.”

The man leaned back, the smirk still on his face. “So… do you give up?”

I stared at the ground, trying to steady my breathing. So many things didn’t make sense. It was like I was trying to put a puzzle together, and this man came over and dumped another huge package of puzzle pieces on the table before swearing they were all part of the same puzzle.

I gave his question some thought, but knew I couldn’t do it. I wouldn’t give up. I felt a quiet stubbornness that said if this man wanted me to give up, then I should do the opposite.

“Hint,” I said.

Despite clearly knowing the thoughts in my head, this caused the man to pause, his head cocked to one side in an almost excitement. “Hint?”

“I… need a hint. Where… the furnace… where…”

The man hesitated, then the smirk grew on his face. With a flick of his wrist, the cards appeared all fanned out in his palm. “Pick a card.”

I had no idea what he was getting at, but at this point it was consistent with the entire conversation. My hand trembled as I grabbed a card. I flipped it around to see a perfect replica of the covered back porch. I frowned, flipping the card over just to make sure.

The man clapped his hands, then lifted them up. A deck of cards flew out of his sleeves, and I flinched, scared I’d get sliced by them. The cards flew around. There was no order to their flight. They didn’t follow any sort of rules of physics, nor did they fly around in a pattern.

“Pick another card,” the man said.

I was terrified of putting my hand anywhere near the cards, and yet I was drawn toward one of them. I reached out for it, and it practically flew into my palm. I turned it over, seeing a picture of a broom. A broom I was pretty sure was in the covered back porch.

“Do you know what to do?” the man asked.

I frowned. “Sweep… the back porch?”

The man smiled, winking with his strange eyes. “Don’t tell my sister I told you.” He started chuckling. “Who am I kidding? She already knows.” Then he started to fade from existence. “Remember, Quinn. We are not your enemies.”

My vision started to disappear with him. Things got blurry and dark in this impossibly white room. The shadow of a man kept his terrifying grin. “But remember… we’re not your friends, either.”

His phrase meant as much sense to me as everything else he said. My head was pounding from a headache that I didn’t want to get worse.

With that strange, cryptic meaning, my vision went black.

And I sat up in bed with a gasp, glancing around. It was dark, and I heard rain patter against the window. I scrambled out of bed, shivering. It was morning again. But what day was it?

I entered the kitchen, turning toward the calendar, tracing my finger over the ‘x’s.

Today was the last day of summer. Tonight is when they would attack.

I lost an entire day of my already short timeline.