Sleeping form covered from shoulder to tip-toe in blankets and with her head on a fluffy pillow, Luna was dead to the world, but inside her dreams she wasn’t alone and she remembered the frantic man who appeared before her now, but she didn’t know the room they occupied. It was a place she’d never seen before, not that she could remember. Not on television or the internet.

There were windows, but they were overgrown with ivy on the inside, not the out. A fireplace was lit and Donner paced, muttering to himself, striding from one wall to the other in a few steps. He didn’t even know she was there.

The table in the middle of the room was as long as it could be and covered in open books and parchment with quills and ink. She couldn’t make out the scribbles on the paper at all, the books were full of words that she could sound out but didn’t know the meaning of, and who wrote with a quill anymore? Pens and pencils existed for a reason.

She’d seen quills in part of a historical movie she didn’t finish watching once, but when she tried to use one herself Donner snapped out of his frenzied gait to stop her saying, “Don’t touch a damn thing on this table!”

Slowly she pulled her hand back. He wasn’t done talking yet, in fact, beginning put him in the mood to rant.

“Every book, every paper, every square inch of this table is to be left alone! Do not touch anything. If I find ink spilled on a single corner of parchment, I’ll make you wish your nightmares were reality the way I wish mine were because this is the real nightmare. Oh, I thought I’d had terrors before but they were nothing compared to this! Wandering the doldrums of your mind and you completely unaware, going about your four-year-old day and here I am living it right alongside you without a hint of independence. I haven’t been four for nearly forty years and now I’m here in hell. I thought death was the worst thing that could happen to me, but I was wrong. I was wrong!”

If anything, that seemed to be the biggest issue to Luna because while he threatened her with harm if even a hair touched his precious table, he was knocking it around and throwing things across the room.

Well, she didn’t have anything to say to him if he was going to be throwing temper tantrums. It wasn’t her fault that he was here, she didn’t know how it happened, and while she understood that it would be frustrating to be stuck with a little kid when you were as old as he was, there wasn’t anything she could think to do about it.

Rather than try to reason with him she found a door and made to exit stage left, but he grabbed her from behind and hauled her back.

“Oh, no. You are sitting right here,” put her on a wooden chair, and the room was changed. She knew this kind of place. It was for interrogation. A small, square table separated them now and he turned the single overhead light so that it blinded her. “We are going to figure out how to get me out of your brain.”

“So, are you the bad cop?”

He rubbed his hand across his face and sat heavily across from her. “No. Neither of us is the cop.”

“I want to be a cop! This room is perfect for cops!”

“No!” he shouted, hand slapping down on the table. “There’s no time for games. I’m getting out of here and it’s happening now.”

“It’s clearly not.” Did he think saying it made it real? If that was the case, she would have said that Pink was alive.

“What do you remember after falling out the window?” He talked as if she’d said nothing.

Eyes rolled. He was a single-minded individual. “I came here, well not here because I never saw that room or this one before and I don’t think they were here, but then again, I don’t remember my dreams most of the time and now that I think of it, that started not too long ago when I remembered Ink Pen and being on the train and not letting him win because if he wins, we all lose. So, if you ever see him around tell him he’s shit out of luck and that he might as well stop trying because I’m not going to let him end life, the universe, and everything.” She took a deep breath, “And then I woke up in the hospital.”

He was shaking his head before she finished. “No. You’re forgetting the most important part and I think the way for you to remember is to go back.”

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“Back where?”

“Back to the bridge.”

The table transformed from wood to metal and futuristic. Lights blinked neon and from its top rose an image in three dimensions. A bridge, herself, and-

“Snowman!”

“You died,” Donner said. “And went here. I also died and went there. When you woke up-”

“Hold on,” she shouted, smacking her own hand to the table; the image remained undisturbed. “You’re leaving out the part about how you grabbed me. You keep doing that! Were you a kidnapper before?”

“No,” he snarled. “I had nothing to do with children of any age and I don’t plan on continuing to be in contact with you either. This is some aberration, a-”

“Glitch in the matrix?!” She liked that movie a lot; the sequels were eh. “Do you need the red pill?”

“I don’t need to take a damn red pill; I was born red-pilled. Society as we know it is structured to keep the masses asleep.”

She heaved a sigh. He was a ranter.

“Foolish and enslaved, they enjoy their daily struggles as it makes them feel important. Labeling themselves, regulating themselves to boxes and content to remain, perhaps adding a new word to their description every now and again, searching for another problem to claim. Create something? Never. Become something? No. Find the errors inside and amplify, never correct. Find the errors in others and scream. Humanity, as a rule, is stupid. They are sheep!”

“If you feel that strongly about it then why do you even want to be alive? You took me on the bridge because you thought you’d be alive again, right? You could have kept walking.”

“And tell me, enlightened one, do you know what happens to those who walk?”

“No...”

“Well neither do I and I wasn’t about to choose the unknown over the irritations of life. I’ve been dealing with them well enough.” He slumped back into the chair and the display disappeared. “I had a plan!”

She eyed him. “A plan that must not have worked because if you were on the bridge then you were dead. How’d you die?”

A flinch. “That’s none of your business.”

“Maybe it should be because it might help find a way to get you out.”

“No. It’s not relevant.”

“Oh yeah? Fine. If you’re stuck here forever because you won’t admit that you messed up then it’s your fault, not mine!” A plate of the cookies made by Ant appeared and she took one along with a swig of apple juice. She knew what those things tasted like and the more food she ate the more she’d be able to put in here. “You should be glad I’m altruistic.”

“How do you even know that word? You’re four.”

“So? I can be four and smart and you can be, like, forty, and stupid. Since it’s true it must be a fact of life.” He didn’t deign to reply so she kept talking. “So, like I was saying before, about Ink Pen, you should keep those quills here and if you ever see a pen hanging around keep an eye on it. I don’t know what Ink Pen does exactly but it can’t be anything good. Then again, I guess he’s not good or bad since when he wins there’s nothing left, not even him, and I don’t know why he can’t be patient and wait because he will win eventually. That’s another fact of life. The fact that everything will end.”

“I’m not here for your philosophical musings.”

“And since it’ll all come to nothing at the end of things, I ask, is there right and wrong? Good and evil? I’ve seen the bridge and even though I don’t know what’s beyond it if we keep walking, I think there must be something. So, even the end of here isn’t the end. Maybe that means Ink Pen doesn’t win. He can’t do anything in that place, I remember now. He was a literal Ink Pen and if he could have taken the bridge he would have. I think he tried to be there and it didn’t work.”

“I don’t care what you think,” massaging his temples.

“If that’s the case, and the end isn’t the end, then maybe right and wrong do matter. But since we can’t know that for sure, how then, should we live?”

“Oh, for fuck’s sake...”

“Doing what we think is right!” She declared, dressed in red and black and gold. “We must not be strung along by fate! We must not be unduly influenced by others, the sheep as you say!”

“If you don’t shut up-”

“But we must do what is right in our own eyes! This is why laws exist! Because if everyone lived this way the world would be in chaos and Ink Pen would win that much sooner, but the rules of man and others keep most of us in line. There are the few, the knowing few, who are called to do more!”

He wondered how long he would be here. How long he would be forced to suffer the existential ramblings of Luna Rysing, a child whom he doubted even knew her own last name. She hardly seemed to recognize it even in her subconscious; he saw it when she got a passing glance at the papers her aunt signed before leaving the hospital.

And somehow that name rang a bell in the most distant way possible.

“Called, indeed, to sacrifice themselves for the greater good or the greater evil, whichever side wants them badly enough-”

Where had he heard that name before?

“-implying that both are sentient beings and I don’t know about all that, but it sounds plausible to me. So, Donner,” she forced his attention. “Which side are you on?”

“My own,” he said dryly.

She smiled a huge, baby-toothed smile, and said, “And that is the only correct answer!”