A shorter chapter this time but I hope you enjoy it nonetheless. Author's notes are found after the chapter.
Feel free to leave any comments or feedback below.
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**** Back in reality ****
Ellie was worried. It had been almost a week since Lucian came to school and she hadn’t heard a word from him since that eventful day. The thing was, she admired him greatly and would sometimes secretly sneak a look at him whenever she thought he wasn’t looking. He was quiet, modest, and wanted nothing to do with superficial things like appearance. He came in to school every day, hair messed up (in a cute way she thought), and sat at his desk looking outside of his window, staring into space. His eyes were a dark brown, almost black, and she would always lose herself in those deep, bottomless pits of his eyes whenever she stared at him. He was the exact opposite of her.
However she was sometimes caught in the act and the glare he would give back always sent chills down her spine. What did I do to deserve such hate? She often pondered this question in her head over and over again but could come to no logical conclusion. She frequently believed in how opposites attract, both in magnetism and in humans. Even though Lucian would make her doubt her belief at times, she was determined she would be the one to unravel the complex puzzle that his heart was.
It was strange when he didn’t come into school the next day, especially since he had a perfect attendance and the project was due to be presented that day. When the teacher asked about it, she gave some lame excuse about how they were still working on it and couldn’t give it in. The teacher knew something was up but had to relent when Rock and his group of friends backed her up, saying that Lucian was slacking off and she had to do all the work herself. It wasn’t like that, she kept trying to say, he was the one who did all the work but never got any credit for it.
In truth she knew she was a coward, she wanted to stand up for him but was afraid of rejection, a feeling she knew far too well. In the end, she decided to side with Rock and his friends, succumbing to becoming a superficial person, something she regretted every passing second of her life.
As several days passed, her worry soon became frantic; there was no way he could be out of school with no reason, not even when he was mad at her. He didn’t give her any contact details but she managed to locate his parents’ phone number from the school records after calling in a couple of favors. She decided to phone his parents.
“Hi there, Mrs …?”
“Sykens. Hurry up young lady, I don’t have much time.”
“Mrs Sykens, I was wondering if you could spare me the place details of your son. He’s left his bag in school and I’d like to return it to him.” The lie slid smoothly through her words.
“And you are…?”
“His… girlfriend.” She replied with a blush.
“Ah, young love. Of course. He lives in apartment 251 on the 2nd floor at the end of Matata street. You can’t miss it; it’s a massive apartment complex next to Hakuna plaza.”
“Thank you, Mrs Sykens.”
“No worries, just take care of him for me okay? He usually doesn’t like visitors so it’s strange that he’s found a girlfriend all of a sudden. Ah who am I kidding, he was always the romantic one in our family.”
Romantic? She thought. That was way too dubious to be true.
Ellie quickly gathered her things and ran all the way to Matata Street, not stopping along the way. After all, it was only a 10 minute run from the school. She stopped as soon as she saw the Hakuna apartment complex. It was definitely huge, more than 4 floors to what was surely stacked with around 100 rooms per floor. She stumbled up the stairs and came to his apartment. The door was slightly ajar.
Please tell me nothing bad has happened to him, she thought as she flung open the doors to each room.
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There was a single green light in a sea of darkness in Lucian’s bedroom. It came from a headset that covered half of his face, enveloping the top half of his head in grey dull metal. His face was calmly still as if he was finally relieved of all his problems in the world.
The green speck was in fact an indicator of whether the player was online and Aurora was functioning without any problems. Or so everyone had thought.
In truth, the green light measured the brain activity of all of its users and whether the brains were still alive or not. It was a secret way by the company behind Aurora to find out how many lights had gone out as it had simply meant that the player’s brain had stopped working. A fantastic method, a man thought as he continued monitoring behind a dozen computer screens.
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A beam of light penetrated the dark, growing increasingly wider as Ellie opened the door to Lucian’s bedroom. There she spotted Lucian on his bed with the VR headset around him, the green light indicating that he was online in Aurora. Ellie immediately went to him and started shaking him, desperately trying to wake him up. When that didn’t work, she tried to switch the headset off but to her horror, the green light was still lit and her attempts proved futile, even as she tried to manually remove the headset to find that it was firmly clamped to his head.
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Stumped, Ellie knelt beside him. It was clear that he was trapped in Aurora, a game she had started to despise for making her lose her friend. I gave up on him so many times in the past, but there’s a first time for everything, she thought. It was decided. She would go into Aurora herself and together they would find a way out of the game. Ellie brought out her phone and called her mom.
“Hello?”
“Mom, I need you to come to the Hakuna apartment complex. There’s a boy who’s stuck inside a VR game and no matter what I try to do, he won’t wake up.”
“Hold on a second. A boy? First of all, we’ve gone over this topic many times, I don’t want you going over to any boy’s house unless it’s Rock’s which I’m almost certain it’s not. Secondly, what the hell are you even doing there?”
“He’s… my boyfriend.” Ellie still had trouble consolidating this idea in her head. “Look, mom, please, I really need you to do this for me, just this once.”
There was a massive sigh at the other end of the phone. “There have been reports about similar situations all over the news; you can’t expect me to take in everyone who’s like this. Ellie, I-“
“If you don’t do it for me, I’ll run away from home.” She knew she was being cruel, considering her mom was genuinely afraid of her leaving home since her dad had run away from them when she was very little, however she had to do whatever was necessary.
“Fine. We’ll talk about this later when we get home.”
Her mom hung up. She collapsed against the wall in exhaustion. All she had to do now was wait.
An hour later, Ellie’s mom came by in a family car and together they loaded Lucian’s still body into the passenger seat without a single word. They drove back to the Borealis household in silence, tension oozing between Ellie and her mom. Ellie’s mom was the first to break the silence.
“I’ll hook him up to an IV drip, that way his body will still continue to receive nutrients as if he’s been constantly eating and drinking all this time. That’s the least I can do for him. Just promise me you won’t do anything stupid again, Ellie.”
Ellie just nodded back in response. Her mom was a former nurse so it wasn’t anything unusual for her to have a large amount of medical knowledge and equipment lying around.
As promised, Ellie’s mom hooked Lucian up to an IV drip in the guest room, and she was grateful that he was still alive, being in that state for so long. After that, her mom left the room leaving her and Lucian alone together.
She stared at his face. The way that his brows were furrowed along with the serene expression he had on his face made her smile, a sad, knowing smile. She leaned over slightly and pressed her lips against his. The coldness of his lips made her shiver, in more ways than one.
I’m coming, my prince.
*****
Several hours later, Ellie’s mom came to the guest room to check on the boy’s state to see if he showed any signs of improvement. She found him to be in the same state he was when they had first brought him in. The only difference was that Ellie had disappeared.
“That girl… I tell her not to do anything stupid and she goes running off again.”
As she went to make lunch, she noticed the door to Ellie’s room was shut. Whatever, she was probably still mad at me for earlier, she thought. As she proceeded to make lunch, Ellie’s favorite in fact, she wondered what Ellie could see in that boy that made her like him so much.
“Ellie! Lunch is ready!”
When she got no response, she shouted again. “Ellie, come out of your room, I made your favorite!”
Again, she was rewarded with silence.
“Honestly…”
She made her way to Ellie’s room, carrying the lunch she made for Ellie with her.
“Young lady, if you don’t come out of your room right now, I’m coming in there!”
After the third time she received nothing, Ellie’s mom slammed open the door and went in.
What she saw made her drop the lunch she was carrying, the vibrant colours of the food mixing in with the scarlet red of the carpet as she sunk down on to her knees.
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Author's note: Several hints to the future plot here, you'll know when more chapters are uploaded. I hope my descriptions are on-point ^_^ Anyways, I probably won't be writing about Ellie for a while, though she is an integral part of the story later on.
Also, a cookie to whoever can find the reference I made in the chapter, it's pretty obvious (I ran out of ideas for names).