It started when I was training in the gym. The first sign was small, and easily forgotten, but it was still out of place. I was training with a punching bag, and as I hit the bag with a kick, the surroundings flickered, changing into a clearing surrounded in trees with a small cottage. All this I took in in an instant, but it wasn’t until right before the surroundings went back to normal that I noticed the girl. An instant later, it was gone as fast as it had appeared. I, at first, thought it was just a hallucination from over exertion, but then I realized that my leg, frozen due to the surprise, was on the other side of the punching bag, and since the bag was in perfect condition, my leg hadn’t gone through it. It wasn’t until later that I realized that I had actually flickered into another world, and my leg had traveled through the space where the punching bag was while I was over there. Whether or not it was a hallucination, I decided to be done for the day, and went home.
There were other small signs like this every once in a while, but they were all just situated so that I could easily dismiss them as tricks on my mind, optical illusions, or other such stuff. One thing that stayed the same was the girl that had been there in my first imaginary visions, as I eventually called them, though they were nothing of the sort, merely moments where I was teleported across dimensions.
As time passed, they started getting more and more frequent, and I started to get worried. I had heard of one case of what was happening to me happening to someone else, and that person eventually mysteriously disappeared, and no sign of him has been seen since. His name was Mykle Saje, though I still don't know why I remember that name. I guess it just stuck with me.
The largest imaginary vision happened just a couple days before she came. For the first time, I actually interacted with the contents of the vision, and the girl who was always in them actually saw me. It was after a longer than normal run. I had just entered the house after my evening jog, and I lowered my head and closed my eyes to get a moment of rest. I felt a slight cold breeze and lifted up my head to turn around and close the door, but the door wasn’t my door. I spun around and found myself looking at a girl laying down on a bed. She had fiery red blond hair, and the tanned and rough skin of someone who spent most of their time outdoors. I couldn’t tell what her eye color was, as her eyes were closed, but she was beautiful, distracting me from the fact that I had no idea where I was. When I remembered that I gasped, then tried to stop it, as I realized she was sleeping. At my stifled gasp, she groaned and moved to sit up.
“I told you to leave me alone, I wanna sleep,” she mumbled. ”What do you want that's so important that you had to interrupt my recovery rest that you yourself insisted that I take?” She sat up fully, the blanket falling around her waist, revealing that she was wearing a thin nightgown that was not designed to be worn in front of others. I was too shocked to pay attention to the details. I stifled another gasp, but was unable to look away due to the shock of what had happened so far. Hearing the gasp, quiet though it was, she looked up at me, realized I wasn’t whoever she thought she was talking to, and awoke fully.
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She screamed, grabbing the blanket and yanking it up around her chest, covering her rather scanty covering, and I started to heat up in an unnatural way, like I had swallowed fire, which was probably an accurate description, considering what she was trying to do to me at the time.
“Who are you?!” she asked, but before I could respond or react in any way, I was yanked back to my house, covered in more sweat than I had gotten from the run. My sudden appearance startled my mom, whom had just come around the corner, and who promptly started lecturing me on “Never ever scaring your poor mother like that ever again,” but I was still shocked by my sudden vision of a different dimension that held a particularly beautiful girl that was probably really mad at me and wondering what had just happened to her.
Due to this shock, I didn’t hear a word my mom said, and had to ask her to repeat herself once I recovered, which just made her grumble and tell me to go to my room and get a bit of rest because I “Looked like I had just been tied to a string and been used as a play toy for a cat.” I graciously accepted the chance.
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Once in bed, I tried to rest, but my mind was too active to even think of slowing down for rest. I spent the time pondering what had just happened. Could it have been a hallucination, brought on because the run was too long? Could it have been a hologram? Both seemed unlikely, the former because it had seemed too real for me to simply pass it off as a hallucination, like I had the other ones, and the latter, because to my knowledge, we had no such technology in our house, and I didn’t think any such technology existed in the first place anyways.
The lack of answers nearly drove me crazy. Before, when I had a question, I would look it up in a book, ask one of my tutors, or look it up on the internet, if I was desperate, but none of those sources could help me in this case. I had no books that focused on hallucinations, it was a little too, well, private, to share with my tutors, due to the contents of the… vision. I had never had any such desire to see that sort of thing, so unless it was an unconscious desire, I don't know why my brain would put me in that hallucination. I didn’t trust the internet to be able to help me in this matter.
Thankfully, a pleasant relief from the turmoil of thought came in the form of my first tutor of the day. With my focus entirely on school, I managed to push the experience out of the front of my mind for the time being, but I never was able to stop thinking about it completely until my mom delivered news about something much, much worse after my last tutor had left.
“Pack up Eric, you're going to The Starlight Beauty Pageant!” was her world changing announcement.
I nearly fainted. In fact, at the time, I probably wished I had actually fainted, to keep the shock of my mom signing me up for the largest world wide bigender beauty pageant in, well, the world without asking me, or at least warning me. But now I would thank her, if that didn’t mean explaining my cross dimensional adventure, and making her think I was crazy. Because If I hadn’t gone to that event, I wouldn’t have achieved what I have today, and I wouldn’t have met my best friend.