The air was so hot it was scratchy on Mel’s skin. The lines of the amphitheater bowed and twiggled as more people said more words that Mel was somehow meant to hear while swimming in the heat sea breath of summer and other people’s breath.

“Well, welcome.” Said an older person into the microphone, “You have arrived at the final step we ask you to take before adulthood.”

Creatures like cultures need to tag their squiddly bits with different shapes so that other bits know what they are and in knowing one another, know themselves. Smaller creatures like tribes and families have few enough bits that they can touch each other enough to know what they are but what those bits can be is more limited in a smaller creature. This creature used knotted, dyed ropes to signify roles and status. The speaker had some dope ropes with killer knots, signifying they were important or diabetic or something.

“Adulthood is what we call the place where we start really hurting you if you step out of line. You’ll notice that we,” the older person smiled disarmingly and dropped their voice, conspiratorially revealing a bit behind the scenes, “of course I don’t mean ‘me’ in this ‘we’ but ‘we’ as in the noble institutions that have made all this and your life possible. The ‘we’ that we hope you will participate in as you embark into adulthood. That ‘we’ has carefully deprived you of any useful skills. You can barely socialize outside of brand approved hypernormal scripts and you’ve been heavily rewarded for obedience.”

Mel felt beads of sweat begin to build in their armpit. They tried to smoosh them about and prevent them from dripping down their ribs by bringing their arms in close. “Why were these speeches so long and boring?” she thought, “Why are they doing it at the beginning of highschool? Did I make a mistake? This is different. This is a lot.”

“Obedience is the most valuable skill you can have in the world we pretend exists. The world we will punish you for not believing in too.”

Mel shuddered as a fat drop of sour sweat fell from the crease of her arm, cool white on their ribs.

“Like, if you don’t believe there are idiots on this planet that think that killing a bunch of other, usually weaker, creatures (including humans, family even) is the best thing we can be doing with our finite time. For that, we will punish you.”

“I shouldn’t be here.” she thought, her breath beginning to come in shorter, shallower cycles. “I should find a way back.”

Unauthorized reproduction: this story has been taken without approval. Report sightings.

Back was a world that wasn’t like this one. This one was awesome and you totally wanted to be there. Back there was boring and painful and you always feel like something is wrong. Usually, just as things were really sucking in the boring world, the plane of protagxia, a terrible parasite of a plane, would trick you into it by pretending it was a beautiful place where they mattered and were more than an inconvenience that was sometimes yelled at by people with more power than they did.

A zigging line that Mel was pretty sure was the first sign of heat stroke resolved into a bird flying overhead. Mel frowned, wishing that they had the energy to get really mad.

“If that hasn’t been made clear by the rising suicide rates in your peers and parents, whatever weird cancer and microplastic befoulment killed your older relative who you didn’t really understand but you did love them and knew they were supposed to be family so you did your best to understand what loving them meant and now they are dead. When they died, they felt just like you do now except their bodies hurt a lot more.”

Mel had just had a panic-attack and accidentally stepped.

“Maybe those now dead others were grateful and reflective,” admitted the older person, “but plenty of strangers die every day feeling just like you do about the world.”

She didn’t mean to step. Her parents were very scared of her stepping. She was too. “And I probably shouldn’t call it ‘stepping’.” she thought. Protagxia could turn copyright in other planes into poison. It was just that one time she stepped into one of the infinite libraries and found herself on one of the shelves that had an infinite numbers of variations of a book that referred to a thing that it felt like she was doing and called it stepping. But her stepping was not of slightly different versions of whatever planet or city, it was plane walking.

“Life is too short.”

Or Dreamwalking.

“Or too long.”

Some planes called it that.

“It’s tough to say.”

They all called it different things.

“What isn’t up for debate is that there are a lot of people and we generally pretend that there are things like states and offices.”

Sometimes she would end up on a plane that said she was having seizures and vivid hallucinations for half the day and she was slowly spending more and more time unconscious but Mel knew her home plane of Savabien.

“And we animate these ideas with flags and people and ceremonies, rituals.”

Her parents had told her that she might have the gene for dreamwalking. They had warned her that there were parasitic universes that insisted they were the only true plane and all attention must be invested in it.

“And if you don’t respect this game, you might get attacked and thrown in a box.”

That’s what parasite universes feed off of. Well, all universes.

“If you want to change the rules of the game, check out social studies. If you want to mess with the non-play aspects, check out engineering. If you want to participate in the in-game analyzation of the game, check out anthropology. Adjust your player? Psychology. Or weight lifting. Maybe yoga or chemistry.”

A game creates a universe and a game needs attention.

“There are many options. I know we are going to have a wonderful year without anyone dying. Welcome to this magic school.”

And they will do anything to get it.