Prologue - The Way to Mecchen House (cont.)

He slapped himself around. “I’m sitting on the couch. I’m having a dream. Once you know it’s a dream you can change it at will. I want oodles of girls all around me!” He closed his eyes with his fingers on his temple and suddenly opened them.

Nothing had changed. I tried thinking things different as well, with no effect. I gulped and wondered if Nathan was having the dream. What did that make me if this was his dream?

I looked at Nathan. He was watching us. He closed his eyes too and seemed to focus. There were no changes this time either. I let out my breath (I hadn’t realized I’d been holding it).

So we were awake, at least. Where did that leave us? Was it a trick? Some optical illusion? A greenery fun house? I looked around the trees. I blinked a few times. Something was different. The light through them looked strange. Was it dimmer? Yes, but that wasn’t what made it strange. I glanced at the trees. They had something different as well.

I walked closer to one branch. The color looked like someone had painted it. I grabbed a leaf, held it up to the dim light, and examined it. The light shone through it. It looked just like a leaf should. It felt mostly like how a leaf should feel (a little softer than I expected though) but there was something subtly off about it. It was like someone had made a painting of a leaf in three-dimensions.

The leaf shimmered. I flipped it over. It was like a living cel of artwork. It had simplified textures. I pulled on it a little and it split. I handed half to Jamie, keeping my eyes on my part of the leaf. He took it and, a moment later, I heard him say, “So what?”

I turned to look at Jamie and froze. The person standing before me did not look like my roommate, but rather someone’s talented artistic rendering of him. He was looking up at me. His eyes were a vibrant, fluorescent color of blue. His nose looked like a quick dab of a pen. His flesh color was a muddied single tone under the cover of the trees. His mouth was a single, black curve. His hair looked like faded gold in this shade, with spiky projections around his ears and neck.

Despite my terror at that moment, I couldn’t help but wonder which anime character he most resembled. The hairstyle reminded me of Cloud from Final Fantasy 7.

His Superman shirt looked crisp. Even his faded jeans looked really nice now, with a smooth, night-like single tone of black. He wasn’t wearing anything different; it was just rendered differently.

He didn’t seem to yet notice the changes in himself. But his eyes widened, and he let loose a string of expletives which quickly cooled to: “Oh God! What’s going on!? What happened to you guys?!” He was looking at me and behind me. I lifted my hands.

The same hands I’d been holding the strange leaf in looked like someone had painted them. They were a single, flesh-like tone. Skin imperfections and minute lines were gone. My palm had a few lines marking the joints. It was the same on the back, with a slight tone change for the knuckles and a few pen-marks along the fingers. The nails looked nearly transparent. The changes in detail were disconcerting. I noticed a bit of silver around my eyes. I took my glasses off.

They had the same artistic appearance. The lens reflected a stylized ovoid of light through the trees. The world was typically blurry with them off, so I put them back on. I could see through them fine. I looked at Nathan. He was gawking at me as well.

His muscles looked embellished and bulgy. His skin was a deep olive tone like always, but it was quite appealing to look at. I wanted to take a picture of him. I could never draw like that. He looked like a gentle Ryu from Street Fighter. His nose and face were rendered the same way. His features flowed like a living painting while he turned and glanced around in shock.

I looked back to Jamie. He was crouched and hugging his knees. He had his same voice at least. “It’s not real. I’m dreaming. I’m dreaming. Wake up. I’m dreaming.” I half-expected myself to be in the same position as him before long. My flesh looked like someone’s exceptional drawing. A stylized drawing. Like anime.

Surely, I’d conked out while trying to finish a line of coding, and Nathan was about to rouse me in my room. That had to be it. I pulled at my cheek. It looked so bright, so shimmery and pure. It was a work of art, but it was also me. Nathan let out a deep breath. I thought for a moment I saw a little, circular cloud pop out of his mouth. I blinked.

Nathan’s voice was the same too. “I think one of us is dreaming.” It was good to know we were all on the same page.

My voice seemed a little softer than usual when I replied, “We might need to try to wake one another up.” I coughed a few times and my voice seemed to clear up. “Dunno what we should do though.”

Jamie was still curled up in a ball. Nathan took a deep breath and pinched his cheek roughly. He winced, but nothing happened. I gave it a try too. Zippo. Then we both tried pinching me. It hurt as much as I imagined it would, but still had no effect.

We both turned to Jamie, and I expressed to Nathan, by process of elimination, it had to be Jamie’s dream. Unless I was imagining that it was Jamie’s dream. Or Nathan was. Still, I found myself somewhat amused that Jamie was dreaming about anime. Was I that much of an influence on him? We each grabbed a side of his cheek and pinched.

Jamie’s cheek stretched out and he flailed around. “Whabba hack!?” He plopped on his back and grunted. He popped up and glared at both of us.

“You weren’t dreaming either?” Nathan’s eyes grew larger. They quite literally grew. They looked normal-sized before, but now, without a doubt, they looked just like how eyes would be drawn on an anime character. Jamie’s eyes were changing too, and I could only assume, from how both of them were staring right at me, that something similar was happening to my eyes as well.

A quiet moment passed. Then Jamie started screaming at the top of his lungs. I put a finger to his mouth. “We need to relax. Something happened, but we’re not gonna figure it out by panicking.”

Jamie huffed. His skin tone turned a brighter shade. “I don’t want to relax! I want to get out of here right now and back where we belong. I know I shouldn’t have gone on this crazy-ass trip outside. I could be munching cheesy balls and listening to music right now. But no, we had to go out.” He flashed a dirty look at Nathan and then gave me one too. “And now I’m a frickin’ toon! Some cartoon bishounen out of one of your shows!” His yelling mouth looked like a pink circle with dark shading.

I was mildly impressed he knew the word, although Carolyn used the word along with ‘yaoi’ fairly often when she was around. Carolyn and Jamie dated for just a week. She still came to anime night for a few months afterward.

I took a long, slow breath and let my hands fall. “Jamie, I know. Despite all good sense, we look like anime right now... I don’t know why, but I do know you’re just gonna pass out like you did that one night after a game of cards if you keep yelling.”

I gestured for him to do like me, and breathe. He begrudgingly, tremblingly took a long, slow breath. I moved closer to him and heard someone giggle behind me. I whipped around.

While the path continued over hill after hill a moment before, now it terminated just ten feet away from us. Peeking at us from around the trees at the end of the path were four cute, anime-drawn girls. They were all wearing schoolgirl uniforms with white sleeves and… a blue, fancy collar thing? I’d seen it on dozens of shows. And there was a pink bow tied at the chest on each.

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They all squeaked and ran off. I watched a wild rainbow of hair colors flutter in the air as they ran. Their mouths were open in ecstatic joy, and their eyes curled into gleeful arches. Some part of me called out that we’d found heaven. The rest was utterly terrified. Nathan seemed even more befuddled. Jamie, on the other hand, seemed somewhat intrigued.

“Those girls are cute…” was all he said before he went ahead and finally passed out like I figured he would. I caught him roughly, and Nathan helped me support him. We carried him to the opening of the path and stopped to look out.

Our town, as we knew it, was gone.

[https://i.imgur.com/IN2PYHd.jpg]

First of all, we were near the sea. I could see glimmering water of a bright, effervescent blue in the distance. The water snaked in strips and bright bands among low-lying buildings and pointy-roofed houses. The land undulated like a roughly-yanked blanket.

Business buildings jutted out like silver and tan adornments across the land. Soft, mottled-green trees filled in the rest of the landscape. The sun shown up above, brilliantly bright, like the purest white in a painter’s palette. It filtered through ivory swells of clouds drifting through the sky like mobile artwork on display. The sky was a refined color of blue. It was a perfect display for the sea to reflect. Yellow and purple streamers, like light through a prism, gleamed off the sun and morphed with every little motion of my head. Even the sidewalk was a work of art.

Someone had gone to the trouble of putting minute cracks in the cement. A young guy, a few years younger than us, passed by. He had spiky black hair and a dark navy uniform on. He had a brown school bag slung over his shoulder. He shot a glance our way but said nothing and continued on and out of sight.

I nudged Jamie. Nathan seemed on the verge of losing it. “What is all this? What happened to the world?” I looked around the landscape and, for just an instant, I noticed something familiar about what I was seeing.

I’d seen a hundred different anime with hundreds of different landscapes. Still, it seemed like there was something innately familiar about all this. I looked all around and marveled at the way even far objects retained a special detail in their renderings. I felt like someone went to a lot of trouble to draw everything and would probably get a hand cramp soon.

But I set aside admiring and marveling at this new world to offer what I could to Nathan, “Let’s go find somewhere to sit down, so it doesn’t look weird dragging Jamie around like this.” Jamie’s head lolled. It seemed like he was starting to regain consciousness, but then I’d seen him pass out for quite a while. We shuffled over to a bench next to the sidewalk. Thick, colorful grass bloomed in a crack where the bench was rooted.

We set Jamie down first with a plop then both plopped down too. My legs were really tired. I hadn’t been this active since last year’s Anime Expo, but I knew, unless we wanted to take a bus, we’d be walking even more soon. Nathan buried his hands in his face and started to cry. My eyes widened. His eyes were covered with thick streams of pale blue, almost-white water.

“Buddy… You okay?” With Nathan’s bulging muscles, I hardly expected to be the one to console him. I’d done it before, but it presented a problem here because Jamie was wedged between us, his head tilted far back. I scooted around to the other side and maneuvered an arm to put around Nathan as best I could. He sobbed deeply. “I’m so so sorry this happened. It’s all my fault. I should never have asked you two to go on a walk.”

I gave Nathan a careful tap on the shoulder and offered, “We need to take this slow. First, we should probably wake Jamie up before we do anything else.”

An older man with bright, blond hair just happened to walk past at that moment.

He had on a gray suit and wore a worried expression across his face. I adjusted my glasses and gulped. I could imagine how one might construe what I had just said with Nathan crying and Jamie passed out. It wasn’t good, and I especially didn’t want to have to deal with the police force in an anime world. Who knows how crazy they might be? I gave the man a friendly wave, and he hurried off.

I turned to Jamie and gave him a few slaps. Nothing. I shook his head. It just flopped around. I said I was selling his DVD collection. His eyes shot open.

“Over my dead body! …Huh? …NO! The dream is still going!” He smacked himself around a few more times and groaned. “I just need to do something to break the reality of the dream.” A bus horn sounded. A big blue bus turned the corner and came rumbling towards the bus stop. I didn’t like the look Jamie had in his eyes. He jumped off the bench.

“NO! Stop!” I yelled at him. He stretched his arms out and shut his eyes, standing in the middle of the street. A hint of action-lines lingered on the bus. It rumbled closer. I wouldn’t be able to get there soon enough. My heart was thundering in my ears. That fool Jamie. No matter how crazy this all was, it felt too real to be a dream.

I felt Nathan swoop forward from behind me. His tears sparkled as he ran. I’d seen him run sprints before. He had a chance, but it was gonna be close. I felt my throat tighten up. I screamed for Jamie to get out of the way, but the bus horn blotted out my voice.

The world suddenly seemed to freeze. I heard a bell ring in the background. Something swooped around me, too fast to see. It brushed my arm. I turned to look. There was nothing. The sounds of the world suddenly returned.

The bus groaned and slowed to a stop mere feet in front of Jamie. Copious black smoke like pencil-sketched swirls flowed from the front of the vehicle. Nathan tackled Jamie to the curb, panting and yelling at him.

I took a long, deep breath as Jamie flailed against Nathan’s grasp. “Let me go! I know I can end this!”

“I’m not letting go of you until you promise we’re going home together. I’m not letting you die!” Jamie snorted and stretched his arm. “Ow! …ow? …oh…” His face turned white. “This is real…”

Nathan lifted Jamie up, still on top of him, “You’re darn right it’s real, and you would be real dead if that bus hadn’t broken down.” He gestured to the bus, which had a slow stream of people flowing out. The driver jumped out and kicked the front of the vehicle a few times. It didn’t seem to help.

I felt something in my hand. I looked down. It was a crumpled bit of white paper. I smoothed it out. On it was written, in heavy black ink, a series of Japanese characters. By all accounts, I shouldn’t have been able to read them, but as I looked over the paper, I perfectly knew what it said.

It said –

Mecchen House.

Room openings available.

Any may rent.

No recommendations needed.

Just bring this paper.

On the back was a small but expertly-drawn map. To my surprise, it had the bus stop where I was standing circled in red ink. A path with a crimson pen was etched between the black lines. I lowered the paper and traced the path mentally with my eyes. It led to the top of a small hill. Through a grove of trees, I saw a brown roof like a curved hat.

It didn’t seem like much, but it was something. Maybe some answers could be found there.