John looked around his store, seeing the destruction. His door laying in the middle of the building, on top of and partially inside of a bookshelf it smashed through. Several of the other bookshelves had toppled over with it, books splayed out on the floor. Some of the books were torn, rent apart from the force.

He was furious. John had done nothing wrong, a child came into his shop. The child wasn't his responsibility. He did what he could to help her and let her on her merry way. Sure, they weren't the girl's real parents, perhaps. But was he supposed to interrogate every single parent of every single child he saw? Was he supposed to rip every child he saw from the people they were with and bring them to the guards for questioning?

It wasn't John's fault that the girl was kidnapped. He had no means of knowing, his mastery was that of space not the mind. A part of him wanted to destroy the town, erase it from existence and all those who inhabited it. But he knew that most were innocent. He would regret that afterwards.

John calmed himself down and teleported back to the man he spoke with previously. He was out of his office now, walking through the courthouse with the woman who had accosted him. When John arrived, he pushed the memory of his store's destruction to the man and woman, both reeling in pain from the surge of emotions.

The man looked at the woman. "I told you to be gentle. Why did you smash his door through his merchandise?" The man asked, a hint of fury betraying his calm exterior.

"He escaped prison. We arrested him and he just left, back to go run his silly bookstore." The woman said.

"Did you tell John that he wasn't allowed to leave when you brought him here?" The man asked her.

"Did I tell him he couldn't leave?" She scoffed. "No. Of course not. I locked him in a fucking cell. Of course he's not allowed to leave. He was in jail. I told him to wait, and he fucking left. Escaped. In what universe am I supposed to be gentle to an escapee? If he didn't want his stupid store destroyed he should have sat down and behaved himself." The woman said, seething with rage.

The man sighed, and turned to John, "Were you aware that you were in prison, and that it was illegal to leave?"

John shook his head. A prison, he thought? Those flimsy metal bars?

"What the hell did you think it was?" The girl screamed.

'Strange design?' John wrote.

The man laughed, putting his hand on the woman's shoulder as he turned to look at her, "See? You weren't clear about the terms. John here didn't escape, he left. There's a difference. I told you to be gentle, I told you to be clear what was happening. You were neither. Return to my office, we will discuss your punishment later."

The woman nodded her head and left, walking back towards the stairs.

"I'm deeply sorry for the damages she caused to your store. I know you had an eccentric product line so I'm not sure if we can replace the books, but we can replace the bookshelves and the door at least. As well as a monetary reimbursement for the damaged books." The man said, turning back to john after the woman was out of earshot.

John thought about it. What was he really upset about anyway? He had a few more of the bookshelves, and they were hardly expensive. He would have to buy a new door but that wouldn't be expensive either. All of the runes on it were done by him anyway so he could replace those. He had a veritable wealth of books to replace the damaged ones with. He wasn't even sure which ones were damaged yet anyway.

He was upset that it happened. More upset than he thought he could be, even. But the result of what happened wasn't all that bad, if he were to have instead worked to fix it instead of come here it would already be resolved. And yet, he didn't feel like that would quell his anger. The rage he felt about what was done.

Did he want revenge? To cause the woman harm? He did, if he was being honest. He wanted to rip her limb from limb and throw her pieces into the depths of space. But would that make him feel better? Probably not. So what did he want, John wondered.

'Its fine' John wrote.

"Are you sure? We would be more than happy to make reparations. It was our own wrongdoing that thrust this upon you, after all." The man said.

John pushed through the confusion he felt about the situation. His inability to understand what he wanted, or how to process the pain he felt. The complete lack of impact anything they could buy him would have to his finances.

"Ah. Well in that case I thank you for your generosity and patience. And I deeply apologize for the pain we've caused you. Rest assured she will not be let off easy for this."

Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.

John teleported back to his bookstore, expecting to feel disappointment and rage again. But he was greeted with a familiar face, a young girl with skin white as snow and eyes red as... something red.

"Dude what happened here? Are you alright?" The half vampire asked as he arrived.

John looked at the girl, she hadn't aged a day and yet felt more confident. More sure of herself, power radiating from her, almost seeming to freeze the air in his store. She must have found a class she liked, John thought.

He formed his spacial voice box, excited to speak with somebody for the first time, "Arrested, apparently." John spoke.

The girl tilted her head and looked to John's side where he was manipulating space, "You can talk now! I think I can handle the telepathy now though if that's easier. Wait, arrested? What do you mean? What happened?"

John formed the memory of his arrest, from when the woman first arrived to when he teleported back here and saw the girl again. Worried about a repeat of last time, he removed a lot of the unnecessary frill, keeping it to a simple outline. He pushed it through to the girl.

"Ahhh. So some noble brat ran away and you got screwed by it, eh? That sucks man. But you're good now right? Off the hook?" She asked, pleased when John nodded, "Great! So I need a book about nearby dungeons. I think I'm just about ready for my 124 evolution but I want a three hundred solo kill first. Got any books that might have info on that?"

Level 124 already, John thought. He wasn't sure how long it had been anyway, though. A few years according to the merchant he spoke with but that could be two or it could be five. John wasn't sure. He supposed he could ask the girl, but it wasn't all that important anyway.

He waved his hand, the bookshelves standing back up, books floating to their spot. More books flew out from around John to fill the bookshelf he kept next to his desk. He hoped one might have what the girl was looking for, feeling a fondness for her. A familiarity. And more than a little hope he may one day visit her universe.

The girl browsed through the bookshelf, reading through books about monsters and dungeons that might suit her needs. One in particular she seemed to linger on, bringing it up to John's desk. It was about a frigid dungeon nearby called The Frostbitten Dwelling.

"This one seems good. It fits with the whole cold thing I have going on already. Overcome some big bad cold dude and become even more big bad cold queen? Maybe?" She said, giggling. "So still just one story for the book, right?"

John nodded his head.

"Right. Well I don't know if this is interesting or not, but I told you about computers forever ago, remember? You could play games on them too, not just watch things. You'd use the keyboard/mouse thing I told you about, I think? They plugged into the computer and you could push buttons on them, which would tell the computer to do different things.

"Well, video games were like movies except you could interact with them, moving a character around, making it do things. And then the computer would control the other characters. I think I talked about them before, not sure. But it's like this world except I would be sitting in my room at my computer pressing buttons to make me move, and the computer would be controlling you and everything else to react to what I did.

"One of the games I played released a new boss a while before I got yoinked into this world, and I was spending hours every single day trying to kill it. For weeks, man. Just awful. I don't know why but something about that one was just too much for me. I never did kill it in the end, finding myself here in the forest one day after getting too frustrated with it.

"But I've been thinking recently about how, I dunno, ironic that is, I guess? Cause at the time I felt like that was a huge amount of time I wasted dying over and over to this boss. Weeks of my life gone, with nothing to show for it. And then hours later I'm immortal and my sense of time is completely changed. What's a few weeks when I'll live forever? I just think it's cool how quick that changes for somebody."

John nodded his head, satisfied with the story. The girl picked up the book from the desk, "Thanks again for all the books John, I'll see you around!" She said, heading out the empty doorframe.

Her story had strange implications for John. She compared the world to video games again. Last time, John didn't know what video games were well enough to understand. But this time he had memories of seeing the girl's room, or what he thought was her room anyway. And she explained what they were better.

In the girl's world, his entire existence could be summed up as a video game, a form of entertainment available en masse. Toyed with. It raised the question of what this world was, if it was real or simply a video game the girl got pulled into.

John had memories of almost the entire existence of this universe, but could those have been inserted into him, as he has done to others? It didn't feel like it, but John wasn't an expert mind mage, this wasn't something he could be sure of anymore.

He could access the girl's world, or he could have at least, at one point. It was palpable, and the memory of it would haunt him until he found another way there. So at the very least, even if this world was just a video game then it was just as real as the world the girl came from. Otherwise, how could he have exited.

But then, he realized, he never did exit. He only saw the ability to. Could that have been faked? Just to trick him into believing he was real? And even if this place was just as real as where the girl came from, who's to say that there isn't yet another universe in which the girl's home is a mere video game, and she was a character playing a video game?

There would be no end to it, no conclusion. No matter how high you go there would always be the possibility that all of it was just a simulation of some even higher power.

Did it matter, John wondered. Did this change anything for him? No, he thought. He was as real as he always had been. He ran a bookstore, he met interesting people and learned interesting stories. It didn't matter if there was another world above his, controlling his every action. To John, he acted on his own will. Made his own decisions, and that was that. It was interesting to see a new possibility, however haunting it may be though. And seeing the girl worry about him helped reconcile some of the pain he felt earlier. A pleasant end to the day, John thought.