I needed to get home. I needed to lie down in my bed. I needed this to be . . . normal.

But one can never have it be easy. Because that is not life is all about.

Unfortunately, I could not just be whisked away back home. I had to figure out how to get there with my own two feet in this brave new world. Like an adult.

Moving my astral body to the side, I had my avatar, technically my living breathing body, walk away from the man who I just talked to, and had him traverse to the other side of the planetoid.

Here, on the proverbial dark side of the moon, was a bakery.

Looking at the bakery from my cosmic perch, I saw that it was the quintessential bakery— brick and mortar covered by displays showcasing freshly baked breads and sweets. Intoxicating aromas wafted out from the quint establishment and I moved closer.

In a video game, especially two-dimensional side-scrolling games, when my character got close to an action-trigger, the game would display a button that I would need to press to trigger an event, like talking or doing something to drive the story forward. Here, though, it being real life, no such thing happened; instead, I felt a ringing in my head. Like a stabbing pain, the moment I felt it, I switched it off. I don’t know how I did it, but it was like flipping a switch or pressing a button. Automatic.

Once I reacted to the ringing— which had filled my whole head and mind to the brim with sensation— I felt events flow. My body walked inside— the outside world now fading slightly into the background as the new foreground of the shop opened up— and marched to the counter.

Seeing everything perfectly from my cosmic throne, I nonetheless decided to enter the first person mode, so to speak. So I stared at my weird hoodie and was jarringly whisked back into my body and back into that weird part-dimensional world that wasn’t either 3-D or 2-D.

Why?

“It felt weird. Talking to a person while you are in space leering over them like lizard aliens?” I replied. But I made a mistake. I replied to Felix out loud. Which caused the pretty young woman manning the counter to perk up.

“Excuse me, sir? Can I help you?” the woman asked, the text box popping up even in first person.

I was thrown off immediately and became awkward.

“Oh, nothing. Excuse me. I was talking with someone with a device. Nothing.”

“Oh! Sorry,” she said, but I could tell she wasn’t really buying it. “Well, is there something I can help you with?”

Pausing for just a moment, I stammered. I was looking confused. I needed to stop babbling. In video games, you can take a moment to react to a character talking, but in real life, pausing for even a quarter of a minute is rude; life may now have some video game like aesthetic changes, but that was it, aesthetic.

“I am . . . a stranger. Not learned of the area. Help?” I said.

Smooth move, ex-lax, Felix said, mocking with what I thought might have been moves from an old commercial.

But the woman seemed charmed. This confused me more.

“Oh, how delightful! I LOVE meeting people from foreign lands— and let me just say, it is wonderful, your accent!”

She thinks you speak broken English. What a charmer you must be on dates.

Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.

Shut. Your. Mouth.

“Thank. You.” I said, still in my talking-with-Felix muscle movements. I decided that I should keep up the charade of being foreign to prevent it from becoming awkward; besides, what is the truth, that I have trouble composing myself? “Looking for a domicile? Know where?”

Screeching at a high pitch, she clapped her hands slightly as she became totally bemused by my speech. “Sure! How can I help?”

Through a series of gestures and writing down the address, which I should have done before the wild gestures, perhaps, I managed to communicate to her the position of my apartment. But it was all for naught. She said she never heard of the place since she was from the suburbs.

I shook my head and walked off. How was I going to get home?

~ ~ ~

I chatted with the other three denizens of the tiny little planetoid that I had now come to call “Little Village.”

In Little Village, there was four principal businesses or services.

The first was the bakery: the second was the police station; the third was the gas station; while the fourth and final was the library.

I chatted briefly with the clerks at each store and none of them could tell me where my apartment was . . . all were from out of town. Again, the suburbs.

But, why I expecting them to know where my apartment complex is? I knew where it was but only couldn’t find it due to the perspective shift. Hence, why would they have any better idea? Because you are desperate. I feel for ya, dude.

Leaving the final store, I walked back around the planetoid. It was darker. In first-person mode, I could hear the crickets chirp. It was nice.

But I switched back to cosmic mode. Walking in first person mode was trippy.

Back in space, I saw that a gentle gray cloud had settled over the sky of the planetoid. While in first person, I had no idea of the cloud, nor the coming dusk.

I was on the verge of tears. I just wanted to get home. I wandered aimlessly around the tiny planetoid. By now, store were closing. People were scarce and any time I approached a “person shade,” a shaded out humanoid figure in the environment which faded in and out of my sight as I traveled, they fled. Person Shades were like unimportant NPCs in a video game; although real, living people, they were somehow deemed nonessential to my needs by some divine source? I wasn’t sure who was making these executive decisions on perspective and perception— who was determining why the clerks at the four shopes had full character portrait when they spoke, but these humanoid shades in the background were just shadows filling out the population. Whatever the reason or method, the madness didn’t help me and I was wandering well into the night.

Stumbling back to the tiny grassy field I had awakened in, I felt another stabbing pain. In each shop, I felt a stabbing pain with every . . . ringing sound?— Frequency Trigger, that is what it is called when you feel that ringing; it’s your frequency becoming mature.

It felt good to attach a name to a concept. Frequency Triggers. Cool. Maybe it was because I was happy at having some labels to help order my chaotic universe, but the pain was switched off as soon as I thought of home in my desperation. Again, automatic. I hardly thought of it.

Then, like a smudge on a wet painting, the part of the planetoid next to the library smudged. As if someone wiped their finger across a still drying family portrait and the family’s representation would always be distorted and strange.

Cautiously, I moved myself to the smudge.

As soon as I neared the smudge, I felt another stabbing pain— a frequency trigger?— and like a cheap animation from decades past, the smudge vanished as a weird techno-sound effect rippled out from somewhere, and the smudge itself was curled away in a spinning vortex.

And just like that, my memories were coming back to me. Maybe it was talking to those people, remembering my address as I was chatting with the bakery woman, I dunno, but I remembered. I knew how to get home!

With the smudge gone, I moved closer still. Yet another frequency trigger activated as I entered the space where the smudge had just been, but this time, it was tame. Instead of a stabbing pain, it was merely an annoyance. And in a flash, it was gone, and in a flashy “animation,” although it was simply my own body moving, my body turned about-face and walked toward and past the library.

Like a camera swooshing through the clouds, my perspective in cosmic mode was yanked toward the planetoid as my cosmic perspective switched from observing the whole planet to looking at in deeper detail a part of a single neighborhood; before me now was now the entire planetoid but a row of buildings, some of which were shaded, to indicate unimportance, while others had details. In the background was the skyline of the city rolling off in the distance. But in front of me, a cozy and familiar row of apartment blocks.

Approaching my own building, I sauntered up the dilapidated concrete steps like a solider returning home form the war.

Pain. Pain. Pain.

Each shot of pain was a frequency trigger and each one of a different intensity— and yes, Felix, I didn’t have a splitting headache— but through that short series of triggers, I finally walked back into my apartment.

And that was when I encountered the police.