image [https://i.postimg.cc/VN7vVL5B/03.png]
“Honey?”
Ever since I’d snorted pepper to get out of going to school, consequences had been piling up. Multiple arguments between Mom and Dad. I was unable to speak and nearly got pancaked by a car. What was one more?
I imagine that from Mom’s perspective, she was just waking me up for breakfast. But from my perspective, I had just run from the car that nearly hit me and climbed up onto the roof to escape. Having anyone, even Mom, suddenly standing over me and touching me? I jerked awake with a sharp gasp and shoved myself upright, clobbering our heads together in the process. We both cried out in pain and fell away from each other—me towards the couch, and her onto the coffee table.
August 27th had come around again, and with it me waking up on the couch to a special breakfast of bacon and eggs. Unlike the past two times, however, I had not been woken by Mom calling out from the kitchen around a quarter after 7, but rather by her gently shaking me awake with one hand and holding my meal in the other. She cried out in pain for the second time as the back of her head smacked into the table, and the plate she had been holding went flying.
It was ‘egg:25’—or, once the gravity had its way with the chunk of yellowy goodness gracing the VCR’s screen, 7:25—when Dad and Booker rushed out of their rooms.
“What happened?!” Dad barked, furiously scrubbing one eye while rapidly blinking the other.
Stars swimming in my eyes and my hand pressed tight against my head where Mom and I had collided, I opened my mouth to explain, but no words came. Only an exhalation of breath tinged with pain that devolved into a distressed whine when I realized whatever had happened to me yesterday was still affecting me.
“You’re bleeding!” I faintly heard Booker exclaim, sending a thrill of worry through me. Bleeding? “S-Should we call 911?”
Dad swore and exclaimed, “For God’s sake, Ervin!” as he spun around and limped down the hall. My eyes had already been threatening tears from the dull ache spreading through my skull, but that tipped them over the edge, cascading down my cheeks.
“Don’t cry, honey,” Mom said, both her body and voice wobbly as Booker helped her sit up. “Thank you, dear,” she told him before stressing, “It was just an accident. Nobody’s fault.”
“I’m not blaming anybody,” Dad said as he limped back down the hall, having retrieved the first aid kit from under the bathroom sink, “but bills are bills, Lynn. We’ve already got all these scans and specialists and who knows what else coming down the line for Ervin. We have to be careful.”
“Then blame me.” She tentatively probed her head with her fingers, the tips coming away red. I slumped back into the couch with a gurgly huff, the sight made me faint. “I scared him. I didn’t mean to, but it is what it is, Morgan.”
With Mom stable enough to support herself, Booker rushed into the kitchen to wet a washcloth. Dad, meanwhile, fumbled with the kit, arraying the table with patches of white, a small bottle of clear liquid, and a fistful of band-aids. The stars swimming in my vision had mostly faded away, so I dragged my arm over my eyes to clear them and reached out to try. How, I didn’t know, and Dad didn’t either, or more likely didn’t want me anywhere near Mom right then, because he gave me a Look from over her shoulder. Words weren’t necessary; I got the message loud and clear.
Mom mistook my intent and took my hand in hers (The one without blood smeared over it, thankfully!) while Dad took the cloth from Booker and dabbed at the back of her head. She hissed, lip curled back to reveal clenched teeth, and Dad swore a second time. “This is a big split. You need stitches.”
Stitches?
“I know where the urgent care is,” Booker said. “You have work soon. I can miss a class.”
Mom needed stitches.
“You’re sweet, Booker, but no. You go to class,” Mom told him, reaching blindly over her shoulder to try and take the cloth from Dad. “My car’s an automatic. I can drive with one hand.”
Mom needed stitches because of me.
“And get yourself killed in a car accident?” Dad said with a scoff, relinquishing the cloth to her then telling Booker, “Good man. Take care of your mother.”
Dad stood and left for my room, and though Mom put up a token protest, she was too wobbly to do more than that as Booker wrapped her arm over his shoulder and helped her to the door. I stood, the urge to do something overwhelming, but froze when Booker swiped his free hand at me. They vanished outside, leaving me behind.
I was still standing there, helpless and lost, when Dad reemerged. A dark gray shirt over blue jeans, he limped his way to the door like a rain cloud. The heft of his boots, soles thick and steel-toed, made each uneven step of his journey to the door a clap of thunder without lightning. He gripped the knob and turned dark eyes on me, his gaze pinning me in place. He hesitated, a click of his tongue punctuating the silence. Eventually, he settled on, “I know you didn’t mean to… Just be more careful, Ervin,” before vanishing into the bright daylight outside, off to darken the construction site for the day.
The thunder had gone, but the lightning was still to come.
----------------------------------------
“I have to go into work,” Mom told me when she called a couple hours later, her head safely secured with three stitches. “Kurt really needs me, especially after I took yesterday—err, Friday, I mean—off.”
I made a short hum of acknowledgment in the back of my throat, hoping she could hear it.
“I called the school to let them know about what happened Friday and that you wouldn’t be in today. I’ll be meeting with the principal tomorrow afternoon to figure out some intermediate accommodations for you until we can hammer out more permanent ones, okay? He was very friendly; you’ll like him. Sent his condolences.”
Her call was adding more questions to the list of things I needed answered. Yesterday, by which I mean the previous iteration of the loop, was apparently ‘Friday,’ but why? Had Mom realized on some level that she couldn’t have taken me to our doctor on a Sunday and self-corrected? Or was the loop itself somehow accounting for that? Was the entire world repeating Monday, August 27th, or was there a point beyond which it was currently Wednesday the 29th? And why were some things carrying over when others didn’t? I woke up on the couch that morning, and yesterday, my book bag had vanished from its spot by the door, but I still couldn’t speak. Why??
“There’s some lunch meat in the fridge and bread on the counter, so you can fix yourself lunch. Be good and stay at home, okay? I haven’t had the chance to explain anything to the neighbors, and you know Mr. Skeates works from home. If he sees you outside, he’ll probably come ask why you aren’t at school, and you won’t be able to tell him why!”
She paused long enough that I hummed again, reassuring her I was still there.
“I’ve got to go, but you can reach me at the office if you need me, okay? Love you, honey bunch. Be good for me, okay? We’ll get this all sorted out soon.”
I made one last hum of acknowledgment and ended the call, dumping the handset onto the coffee table with a hollow plonk, my thoughts already miles away. I’d read a few books with time travel in them, but I couldn’t recall any that functioned like this. Still, a lifetime of walks to the library down the street had ingrained in me the unshakable faith that when I had questions, books held answers. There had to be a book somewhere in the library that could get me on the right track. The only question was: How could I get it? Mom wouldn’t be home for hours, but I had known all of the librarians there for a year minimum—one for a decade! I didn’t understand the logic of the loops yet, but I knew some events carried over; if I marched in there without a plan and I couldn’t speak, I might cause even more harm!
Someone knocked on the front door. Three sharp raps, each as cleanly precise as the rest, the absent lightning strikes from earlier come at last.
I flinched hard, the unexpected sound an instant shock to my system, adrenaline flooding my veins leaving me tense as a rubber band about to snap. It couldn’t be Mom; she was on her way to the office from the urgent care. I didn’t think it was Dad or Booker either, since they were unlikely to come home in the middle of the day. It was only after I had accounted for my family’s whereabouts that a simpler confirmation it wasn’t them occurred: Why, when they all had keys to the house, would any of them be knocking at the door?
Summoned as if by the mere thought of knocking, three more raps occurred, not one of them the slightest bit diminished in their enthusiasm by no one answering. If anything, they were more insistent by having gone unacknowledged, as if the person so insistently striking the door demanded an audience.
Was it Dani’s dad or some other nosy neighbor, come to investigate after noticing some sign that someone was unexpectedly at home? I eyed the long window set into the living room wall along the front of the house, hidden behind long drapes of drab gray, their bodies littered with regular circles in pale filigree and tails overly pooled on the ground. Could I peek outside without being seen?
For a third time, the person at the door rapped three times in succession, and that time, there was no question in my mind that they had knocked with more urgency. Each strike landed like a gavel, a judgment rendered for a trial I hadn’t known I was a part of. Then, unlike the previous times, the person called out through the wood with a deeply resonant but undeniably feminine lilt.
“Hiiii? Errrvin? You in there?”
My heart in my throat, I slowly reached out to pluck the house phone from where I’d dropped it on the coffee table. I was being reminded more and more of some of the horror novels I had read in the past, and that was not a good comparison whatsoever. I may not be able to tell 911 where I was or what was happening, but they were supposed to come if they got a call and no one was on the other end, weren’t they? I couldn’t remember, and even I had been certain, such a poor defense against someone already present was hardly inspiring a feeling of safety.
The person outside said something like, “Didn’t want…” but I couldn’t make out any more than that, the words no longer intended for me obscured by the wood. Then one last lightning bolt struck, the sharp click of the deadbolt as it snapped open without any hint of a key sliding in first.
I took a sharp breath, numb, shaky fingers fumbling with the buttons of the handset. Poor defense or no, the owner of a voice I most certainly did not know was breaking into my home, and I would take whatever meager sense of safety I could muster.
I pressed ‘9’ as the door opened enough to admit an oblong face topped in wispy, chestnut brown hair. A set of cautious eyes nearly the same shade as the short hair above them blinked several times, adjusting to the much dimmer lighting while I took precious seconds to navigate across the number pad and press the ‘1.’ It was impossible to miss when the person in the door picked me out of the gloom, their face lighting up with a kilowatt smile. I pressed ‘1’ again as they stepped inside fully and nearly pressed the large green phone button to dial before two things happened at once, two halves of one greater act.
The person in the door held out a plain box and chirped, “Your tablet!”
I stopped, thumb poised to bring down the insignificant wrath of what would most likely amount to at best a single patrol car of Meckleville’s ‘finest.’ I’m not exactly sure why I stopped. Part of it could have been the genuinely disarming manner in which the home invader had immediately presented a gift, as if to say, “I do so apologize for this horrifying experience I am currently engaged in visiting upon you. Might I offer this complimentary, electronic gadget in the hopes it might brighten what you will otherwise look back upon one day as a truly scarring encounter?” Or perhaps it was because I recognized that unassuming box, its arrival at that moment as unexpected as it had been when it found its way into my life two days prior.
But part of the reason I had stopped, without question, was a missing puzzle piece had settled into place, the mystery of the time loop answered that small bit more than it had been a second ago. The tablet in that box, and I was oddly certain it was the very same one, had only been in my possession for a handful of hours on Monday. The real, two days ago Monday; not the imposter wearing its face like a cheap Halloween mask made of plastic and string. I’d received it from Mom right before dinner, used it to do my homework after abandoning said dinner, and forgot all about it after shoving it in my book bag to bring with me to school.
The urge to laugh came over me hard, and I couldn’t deny an awkward peel of sniggering, one step shy of breaking down into giggles. Just long enough to be remembered, but only after I’d been reminded. Of course.
“Ah, excellent!” the person in the door remarked her already very loud smile managing to eke out a bit more sunshine. “I’m glad to see you’re in good humor despite our current, ah, loopy situation!”
Any lingering doubt I had evaporated beneath the sheer warmth of that smile. It wasn’t that I trusted them; far from it! They had, after all, just broken into my home. But the stress they’d put on that word, loopy… They knew. They knew about the loop, and for the first time in what felt so, so much longer than two days, I was not alone.
They stepped more fully inside, revealing their other hand was holding a small, rectangular item, but they slipped it into their pocket before I got a good look at it. Gesturing with their now free hand at the open door, they asked, “Mind if I close this? We’ve got a lot to discuss, so it’s probably best to not invite extra attention.”
I caressed the ‘dial’ button, the little nub scratching the pad of my thumb. I instinctively tried to ask, “Who are you?” but only managed a sound like, “Haaa?”
Love what you're reading? Discover and support the author on the platform they originally published on.
They blinked, head flopping to the side like an overly large owl, wispy hair flopping everywhere with the motion. “Mmm? Cat got your tongue? Or… mm, I do hope I’m wrong to suspect this, but can you not speak?”
I hesitated a beat before tentatively nodding.
A full body wince consumed their smile, pinching the smattering of freckles on their nose into what almost looked like a mole. “Oooh no, no n-no no nooo… I was afraid of that. The Price for that much power…”
A price. I paled at the thought. I had paid to make this nightmare happen? Yes. Yes, I had. I didn’t know then why I knew it was true (though of course I do now), but once the idea had been raised, it was as if I'd always known. My reservations about letting a stranger in didn’t matter. Whatever info they had about what was going on, I needed to know it immediately. Feeling faint, I beckoned them in, and after taking a moment to shut the door, they obliged.
“Right, introductions first! My name is Roslyn Yorran, your teacher for Computers class. Hellooo!”
The kilowatt bright smile returned in full force as she did a little twirl, one foot lifted just enough for her to spin in place on the toes of her other foot, before dipping into what could generously be described as a curtsy. The hand with my tablet swept over her front in time with her upper body bending nearly 90 degrees at the waist in an over the top bow. Her other hand fanned out to her side, pinky finger extended while the others formed an ‘o’ to pinch her skirt. Except she wasn’t wearing a skirt, but rather a pair of cargo pants, whose many pockets were as variably filled as her collarless jacket’s pockets. Some, like the one she had slipped the rectangular item into, looked a bit weighed down, while others were positively bulging.
“And you must be Ervin Scrivens!” Roslyn said as she swept herself back upright a moment later, with a tiny hop at the end before settling down onto her feet. She then blinked, adding, “I do apologize for stealing your introduction. I presumed you might not be able to do so yourself, but it occurs now that you could have written it. Or used ASL. Ooo ooo! Or interpretive dance!”
I waved my hands back and forth wildly, eyes wide and worried. An emphatic, No.
“Mmm. I could take that to mean a few things. You may be rejecting my apology, which is your right! You might be illiterate or unfamiliar with ASL and how to sign it or perhaps even morally opposed to interpretive dance.”
Roslyn paused, expectantly. I paused, counting in my head, then raised my hand, four fingers raised before wiggling my hand a little.
“Mmm, not a fan of interpretive dance but not morally opposed? If so, well, you’re allowed to be wrong.” She winked, leaning into it with a grin. “But taking that to mean you do not object to my introduction of you as Ervin Scrivens, that brings us back to the rather pressing issue of the time loop I strongly suspect you’ve invoked.”
She tossed the box in her hand into the air with a little flick to make it flip and spin, and nearly fumbled catching it, not looking the least bit embarrassed for it. “Right, first things first! Communication! Let’s start here, hm? Words have meaning, and that means they have power, so for both our sakes, we should establish a way for you to communicate.”
Roslyn poked her hand into one of the less packed pockets and produced a pen. At first I thought she meant for me to write with it, but then she clicked it open with her thumb before stabbing it into the tap seal, ripping it with a snap of her wrist. Then, apparently unaware of just how violently she had done all that, she clicked the pen closed, stored it, and stepped forward to extend the box out to me.
I hesitantly reached out to take it, made wary by her brief bout of sudden viciousness and also not following where this was going.
“Did you not get the opportunity to explore all the apps on Monday?” She abruptly cackled, the laugh loud and unabashed. “Not today, ‘Monday’; two days ago, Monday! Ah, time loops sure do make things a bit confusing, don’t they?”
I wanted to give her a Look. That was, after all, significantly downplaying the experience. But I didn’t know this woman, not really (not yet), and didn’t feel comfortable being that honest with my expression. Still, Roslyn seemed to get the picture and got back to the point.
“The notes app! You said you can write, right? Left!” She cackled again, easily amused by her own joke. “Pull it on up, and let’s com-mun-i-cate!”
It wasn’t perfect—wasn’t talking—but turning the tablet to show her the message, [So how do we stop this loop?]… It felt like getting back a piece of myself.
----------------------------------------
The first step, apparently, was to go get something to eat.
It had taken a serious leap of faith for me to cram myself into the overflowing mess that was her rickety sedan, a choice born far more from desperation than anything remotely approaching trust, and what little trust I might have had for her after the morning’s events was being seriously tested when I saw our destination.
The Hub & Spoke was the sort of diner you might find a picture of next to the word ‘diner’ in the dictionary. Checker board floors of repeating black and white, the occasional red tile breaking up the flow. A bar with evenly spaced seats with red cushions and a little bar extending up to provide nominal back support. A menu made up of whiteboards arranged in a continuous line, each with loopy but clear handwriting outlining specials that wouldn’t be found in the folding menus provided to us at the door. And of course, back-to-back booths of red cushion crammed around tables with barely any room to spare.
It was after Roslyn had led me to one slightly out of the way table and we had both slipped in that I finally knocked on the table between us and pointed at my tablet, where I had typed out, [Why are we here?]
Before she could answer, a server in casual clothes with a name tag and apron tacked on walked over to us from behind Roslyn, tugging a well used order pad and pen out of his apron. “Welcome to Hub & Spoke. What can I…”
“Sammy!”
“… Roz.” ‘Sammy,’ whose name tag definitely said ‘Samuel,’ switched from ‘cheerful customer service’ to ‘annoyed just from the sight of your face’ energy quicker than a microwave could melt an ice cube. Even his order pad seemed to droop at the sight of Roslyn. “Do you ever come here when it’s not my shift?”
“Why would I do that?”
“For a meal, I would imagine.”
“This guy!” Roslyn said with a broad grin, indicating him with both hands while shooting me a wink. “He’s got jokes. For food! If I wanted food, I’d make it at home or buy it on the Stretch. You go to a restaurant for service!”
While the Hub & Spoke was a restaurant by the strictest definition of the word, it was really a diner situated smack dab in the middle of Meckleville, a teeny town off of I-70 just south of the Pennsylvania border that, little more than a loose assortment of neighborhoods branching out from a main road, the ‘Stretch,’ with little to no planning or uniformity. The sort of town that had existed for hundreds of years and whose layout hadn’t really changed beyond building a couple of failing strip malls and a smattering of mildly successful fast food franchises along the spine that unified the community. Enough modernity that it wasn’t a true relic of the colonial era but whose growth had been stunted by its proximity to the far more populous and better situated Hagerstown. It said something, in my opinion, that the Hub & Spoke was pretty much the only notable landmark in town beyond the schools and a handful of churches.
“And who is this?” Samuel asked, eying me with considerable suspicion before turning his dour expression back to Roslyn. “It’s the middle of the school day, Roz. Please tell me you haven’t kidnapped a student?”
“Okay. I haven’t kidnapped a student.”
Samuel’s eye twitched. “… despite your truly confidence inspiring answer, I somehow find myself doubting you. So if anyone at this table doesn’t want to be here…”
He gave me a significant look and paused for several long seconds, clearly inviting me to speak up. In truth, it was a stretch to say I ‘wanted’ to be present, but what mattered in the end was I needed both a solution to the loop and to know how it happened in the first place and could avoid repeat occurrences (Ha! Repeat occurrences!). I gave him the most casual shrug I could manage.
Samuel looked just as convinced by my nonchalance as he was Roslyn’s assurance that she hadn’t kidnapped me, but he nevertheless pressed on. “I’m guessing you want your usual, Roz?”
“Aaay! You know me so well, Sammy. See? Service.”
He rolled his eyes and returned to me. “And for you, definitely not kidnapped child?”
I opened my mouth to order a chicken parmesan sub, which I had enjoyed on the handful of occasions Mom or Dad had gotten a bonus and we had come here as a family to celebrate a bit. Instinctive and thoughtless, all I managed was an, “Aaa?” noise that vaguely sounded like I was unsure.
I flushed, feeling foolish, and Roslyn stepped in, reaching over to tap my menu with a finger and say, “You can just point, Ervin. It’s okay to be shy.”
It was a good cover story, albeit one I hated for purely personal reasons. My blush deepened with frustrated anger, though Samuel probably misinterpreted it as embarrassment, as I pointed out the sub on the menu.
“And to drink?” I flipped the menu over and indicated the Dr. Spice. He made a note on his order pad and tucked it away, collecting the menus. “Okay, I’ll have that right out. And hey, if anybody were to tell me, ‘Stop,’ then I’ll shut this whole thing down, no questions asked. Won’t even be upset if you don’t pay for the food.”
And with that final, remarkably unsubtle hint, he walked off to pass our orders over to the kitchen, pausing along the way when another table flagged him down for something I couldn’t hear. But I didn’t care about that. I knocked on the table again, harder than was strictly necessary, and jabbed a finger at my previous message. [Why are we here?]
“My, but you do have a thirst for knowledge, don’t you!” Roslyn enthused, clapping her hands together with another of her ridiculously bright smiles. “You’re going to be a joy to have in class, I’m sure!”
If sticking pepper up my nose was what bent reality over backwards into a loop-the-loop I couldn’t get off of, then I was about to make it so much worse because I was one step shy of grabbing the old school salt and pepper shakers with the rounded metal caps and shoving them both right up her nose. Fortunately for her and whatever unlucky soul would have to clean up that hypothetical mess, Roslyn finally started to take things seriously.
“One moment,” she said, pulling out the rectangular device she had in hand when she entered our house earlier. I hadn’t recognized it across a dimly lit room, but this up close, I recognized it as a smartphone. It was mostly the richest kids that had them in school last year, but they were becoming more and more popular at that time. Other than the time Mom had let me briefly see the one her job had given her, I had never seen one so close up before.
Roslyn set the phone on the table and pressed a button at the bottom of the screen that made it light up. She then began tapping at an on-screen number pad that took up most of the screen, but my eyes were drawn to the big, bold numbers in stark white above it. 1:15 PM—it was later than I had thought, but not concerning yet. Mom and Dad wouldn’t be done with work until that evening, and Booker’s last class wasn’t much earlier.
With one last tap on the screen, the whole display changed into a grid-like arrangement of icons. I recognized one immediately, and it was that one Roslyn tapped next: The Coder. The application was laid out differently on her much smaller phone screen, but it wasn’t unrecognizable from the version I had used on my tablet. For me, there had been four boxes I could reshape by dragging the border between them; one box each for input and output, another for saved programs, and a final one for resources that hadn’t made any sense to me at the time. Roslyn’s was one box and four tabs along the bottom for switching between the views. Both of our devices had a small gear icon in the bottom right corner as well, which for Roslyn’s phone put it directly in line with the view tabs.
She switched her view to saved programs, tapped one in particular, then pressed the run icon in the top right of that view, the icon changing to a pause symbol once she had. “There we go. That little gem drastically limits how well we can be heard the further sound travels from us. Neato, right? Magic!”
I spun my tablet back around to face me, and Roslyn waited patiently, humming a nonsensical ditty while I tapped out a message. [Magic? That’s real?]
She laughed, the expression not quite reaching the level of her earlier cackling. “We’re reliving August 27th for the third time, and the term ‘magic’ is what gets stuck in your craw?”
I didn’t have a good response to that, so I rolled my finger in a ‘carry on’ gesture with.
“Listen, the first thing you need to learn about all this is there isn’t a lexicon of official terminology or any sort of secret societies to police it. There are some smaller groups that pop up here and there—I know of a couple over in Baltimore—but they’re tiny, typically informal gatherings. Most people stumble into it, and many people don’t really notice exactly what they’ve done, or if they do, they’re like you and don’t understand how they did it in the first place. So when—if—you encounter people who use ‘magic,’ they’re more than likely going to have their own names for what they do. Make sense?”
I had already started typing out my objections to that explanation before she finished, fumbling a bit with tapping out the wrong letters at times and needing to backspace and correct myself. [There’s no big groups at all? Not even on the internet? How can that be if someone can get the world stuck in a loop like me?]
Before Roslyn could respond to my questions, Samuel returned with our drinks. “Your drink, Roz. And yours, mystery child who should be in school.”
He spun on his heel and walked off the moment he’d set the drinks down, uninterested in being anywhere near either of us more than was strictly necessary. Roslyn didn’t seem to think he was acting weird though, so I ignored it, taking a small sip of my Dr. Spice as I gestured at my tablet again.
“Last question first: You’ve got the wrong idea. The Price for getting the entire world stuck in a loop… I can’t imagine!” She shook her head, eyes distant for a moment. “And even if you paid it, something that large-scale? Something bending the normal progression of reality that boldly? You’d attract the attention of something big, something truly mighty like the Avatar of whatever you’ve broken, and they would put a stop to it.
“And that ties neatly into the next thing you need to understand, and this is arguably the most important: Reality doesn’t like being broken.”
Roslyn paused to let that solemn pronouncement hang between us for a moment. Seeing how seriously she took that, after how unrepentantly absurd and silly she had been so far… A shiver ran through me like ice water dumped on my head, trailing goosebumps in its wake.
“I cannot stress that enough, Ervin. Reality doesn’t like being broken. People, animals, objects—they’re all part of a system, and that system has rules all those things are supposed to follow. Gravity attracts, fire burns, people grow old and die… And time? Time moves forward.”
I was starting to get the picture, and I did not like the sound of it. [You mentioned price. My speaking?]
“A+ deduction! Too bad I’m not your detective teacher!” She pointed finger guns at me, making little ‘pew-pew’ noises. I just stared, unimpressed by her attempt to diffuse the tension, and she eventually continued. “If you want to break reality, then you can’t be a part of reality. But if you’re not part of reality, then you’re limited in how you can interact with it.
“Say for example I get one of those big aquariums people own that’s the size of their wall. I can feed my fish. I can add and remove decorations. I can look at them from outside, but I couldn’t survive if I climbed into the aquarium and tried to swim with them, not for long. Same thing with bringing them out into my world, out into the air. We’re part of different worlds, different realities. But way, way back in the day, some fish evolved; they changed enough to go out into the air and survive, to play by the rules of a different reality. But they had to pay a price to do that. The better they got at playing by the rules of living in the air, the worse they got at living in the water, until eventually they could only live in the air.
“We are those fish, Ervin,” Roslyn concluded, pausing to take a long slurp from her drink while leaning back into the seat of her booth. “Not literally. We didn’t evolve like those fish, but we wanted a way to play by a different set of rules. We got power, but to get it, we paid a Price.”
I turned my tablet back to make fun of Roslyn’s choice of metaphor, but when the door to the diner opened behind her, I abruptly found myself with something far more pressing to say.
[My brother is here! Hide me!]