Hi- This is Temilola here. If you're on this page, well I'm glad you guys decided to read my story. Although English was my first language its not my best so if you catch any mistakes please feel free to send me a message or put it in the comment section (I'm not sure how this website works yet :)  Have fun. Any thoughts you have about the story would be appreciated so please be ruthless with your criticism. 

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It was an uneventful day like any other. When I placed the capsules inside the steamer so I could listen to its death call. To let it simmer. They were tiny little things. Those capsules. Golden all over like cute little nuggets. or those fish oil tablets. Yes, precisely like the fish oil tablets. One could, say, make a tiny little mistake. Swallow it. Thinking it was one of those cute little fish tablets. Hell. They could be a little dramatic. Place it in a steamer and run that bad boy to the max. Let the vapor choke out the room. It wouldn't matter anyway. Between the grey rags that were wrung into every open edifice, the speckled mirror that leaned diagonally on the bare ground reflecting the portion of the room cast in the shadow of its misery,  the scattered mail displaced all over the floor and the little ray of light sneaking through the blinds.Nothing mattered anymore. 

I collected what was left of my dwindling wits to draft a final letter. A testament to my name!(A suicide note lol ;) It went as such; This is to rectify that the lifeless body which lays here did not secede from life  for reasons such as an empty purse,  nor did he commit so on the splintered pieces of a broken heart. No. Nothing so grave, or romantic as that. He simply took his life because it was inadequate. This fellow here whose body, I presume lies in the grace of a wilted flower,  is a straggler who almost didn't fail at life. He almost didn't fail school, but merely fazed through absorbing half wisdoms here and there, enough to start a mildly interesting conservation but not enough to maintain one.  He was almost below average height, but not tall enough that the dark clouds that hovered over him constantly, lulled others.  He almost didn't get the job, he almost didn't make friends, but the few he made fell by the wayside of his thin span of life till they were obscured  by the mist of time. hell, he was almost never born. 

Hence, the flagpole of his mediocrity had been set the moment he was born.

This suicide is nothing more than a rejection of this mediocrity. So. to the traveller (EMT) who is reading this. Don't feel too bad. He's done this world a favor. One less middling creature wandering about. He's also done himself a huge favor by taking a leap he would never have dared to his whole life. He went out a lot less mediocre than he came. You should celebrate instead. 

As I placed the pen down I couldn’t ignore how the irony of my words sated my tongue with the taste of gall. There's so much that was untrue here. I couldn’t even write an honest suicide note. I really am/was mediocre. To be honest, my secession or plainly suicide,  is the result of a broken heart. I love life. There. simple. No pretentious irony. I love the sunrise and the sunset. I love the food and the people, I love the way we struggle with each other. And  ourselves. And the world. But, there’s a lot in life that pulls and turns and presses and I’ve reached my  limit struggling with this unfamiliar force.  

I don’t suppose a few capsules would take me away. Maybe it’d put me to sleep for a long while. Maybe I will awaken full of strength like the air that blows after a heavy rain. Maybe I would use this new found strength to pry open the world like a fruit and pull out the pits from the inside. Squeeze the nectar into my mouth as it trickles down my arm. Then consume what's left from the tight grip of my fingers.  Like a child who plucks fruits from stray branches then sinks his crooked teeth inside their flesh. But that’s not how it ends now. I wondered if other people lied in their final letters. Even facing the oppressive force of the unknown they feared an even greater force. What others thought about them. Even in death. How mediocre. Now the little gold fishes swim around my room waiting for me to fall into a deep deep sleep.

And I did sleep.

I would have slept a lot more were it not for the sudden intrusion of strange noises ringing in my ears. The noise was dull at first, but got louder as my consciousness caught up to my senses. I wanted to sleep more. To at least die for a couple more hours. But the damn noise won't let me. Wait what noise. I thought to myself. I'm pretty sure I snuffed out the essence of every audible and visual stream that pooled into my room. Why the noise. I thought. Also the bed didn't feel like my bed. Or a bed. I stretched my hands and it hovered around the patches. Then I dug my fingers in the moist bed. Pulled out a dark lump with brown veins sticking out under and greens limping on top.  It feels like grass. Smells like grass too. And dirt. I pry open my eyes. And a blue steel obelisk rushes past me. More of them sail past but one. It broke off of the group. 

The obelisk gently lands on the ground like it wasn’t some  terrifying edifice. A latch turns downwards and the door, slides up. A young fellow in grey khaki overalls on top a striped purple and white tunic emerged from what I assumed is a kind of vehicle. His fingers were rimmed with thin gold, azure bracelets and thick woven fibre knits around his arms. His silver hair sat on his dark skin like fire on burnt  wood and a blue line stretched from his right eye lid all the way to his temple, with a calligraphic inscription at the end.

He looked other worldly. There were others like him peering out of the obelisk. They looked ethereal too. Perhaps this was heaven. I wondered.

This is no heaven. A voice with many voices within, shrieked inside of me.

The stranger crouched next to me and asked. “Are you okay stranger”. “It's funny”. I replied. “You're the stranger as far as I'm concerned”. I said.

“Oh that's a good one. Fair enough. Fair enough. I’m not sure if I need to ask but what are you doing out here on the banks” he asks.  I don't know. Was what I wanted to say. There were a lot of things I wanted to say at that moment. But a wave of hostility washed over me before I could even hammer out an answer to his questions.” Stay away from me” I screamed. It was weird. The nature of my surroundings was quite alien. Definitely. But not so that I would be unnerved. Yet a flashing hot anger rose within me and I fled.

If you come across this story on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen from Royal Road. Please report it.

I fled into the city center I think.  Everyone there shifted their eyes in my direction. They were all so beautiful and well adorned. If this was heaven, I wondered, why did I hate it so much? Tall gleaming towers plastered with decadent holograms cast their indifferent shadows over me and an overwhelming feeling took hold.  This strange place I was in, set a hostile pressure on my being. With every step I took the roads maintained the imprints I left behind. Every wall I braced had the outline of my body in a blue tint. The city I figured was watching me. 

In my effort to rid myself of these strange afflictions. and find a place or respite where I could piece my mind together. Bells rung in my ear. A man trailed my path. He had a visor latched onto his face and a suit decorated with a motif of bells ringing on it. Back and forth. They rang louder the closer he got until they became bright red alarms. “First State your name. Vagrant. Then you tell me  what kingdom you're pledged to. And you'll show me your codex.  Is that clear?” He said in a monotonous voice that had a chill edge to it. 

“No, it's not clear”. I said. Hoping my voice could wade through the siren. “I don't have a name. I'm a ghost”. “Are you messing with me?'' was his reply. His words were laced not with malice but intense suspicion. “Well I assure you I'm not. I could even ask you the same thing. What kind of heaven is this anyway. I don't feel very welcome here. Two stars!!”

“That's it. enough joking around. You'll be coming with me”. What followed this set of words is something I had never seen in my entire life. He summoned a dozen silver pellets from a thick leather pouch and they settled into a slanted orbital ring around his torso. 

With the flick of a wrist he shot one of the silver pellets at my periphery and were it not for the nugget sized crater burrowed into the wall behind. I wouldn’t have noticed.  “Shit that’s not good,” I thought to myself. “That one was a warning” he said “the next one, i promise i won’t miss”, He moved his fingers carefully and another of the pellets escaped from its orbit, hovering menacingly in its own space. Pointed right at me. There was a severe kind of embarrassment that came from one’s life being at the mercy of a lowly half finger sized steel that was faster than a bullet. But, like a spontaneous spark, a voice called out from behind the man. “There will be no next one”, the voice said. “Who goes there?” the officer commanded. It was difficult figuring out if he was looking at me or his rim because his eyes were shielded by his visor but I felt I shouldn't make any sudden movements. Just to be safe.

“You could turn around. Look at my face. I’m standing right here” The voice said. “No can do, i’m keeping my on him” the officer replied with a smile on his face and suddenly my decision to stay still became as sound as a rock. I couldn’t make out the contours of his face since it was mostly hidden under that annoying piece of tech but I couldn't imagine it to be anything but fierce. I don’t blame him though. It makes sense. That heaven's security is tight. And patrolled by zealots. If a person who committed the suicide were to wander past the pearly gates i’d be worried. 

“I’ll ask one more time. Who are you? What is your codex”.  The stranger, who I then realized was the man in khakis, sealed his palm into a tight fist and all the pellets dropped to the ground. Including the little menacing one. “He’s a friend of mine,” he said. Moving closer to the officer who finally released me from the prison of his sealed gaze and turned to face the stranger instead.  “Ah my apologies” he said, after staring at the stranger for a few seconds. His visor reflected sifted through images while his face maintained that same distant chill. 

“My apologies,” he said. After his visor returned to normal. “I didn't know who I was talking to. Should have turned around like you asked”, “I got a report of a young male, racing erratically through the downtown area” he said facing me, who was already planning to sneak off. He opened up his palm and a video feed appeared. What was in the crisp clear video feed was a few seconds of me flailing through the crowded city, puking on the shoes of strangers, falling with my back against the wall of a residential building, hugging the street lamp as i struggled to tame the wildness of the new world against my simple physiology. It was only thirty seconds or so, yet it was painful to watch. And the stranger in Khaki seemed almost embarrassed to be related with me. “When I got the report I decided to check the local registry, so who I was dealing with. Perhaps a local pervert, but there was nothing about this fellow in my registry. Even more peculiar, I don’t recognize his kind of codex.”

“So he doesn’t have a codex?” the stranger in khakis asked, but he looked my way, catching me in the midst of another daring escape. “He does, just something we don’t recognize is all, a simple interrogation would do” The officer said. “No, there's no need for that,” The stranger said. “Pardon?”  The officer asked, confusion seeping through his visor. “He’s a subordinate of mine. The reason his codex isn’t registered is because you’re using a municipal network. He’s not from this municipality. He’s from Ife. The badlands to be specific” The stranger said. I didn’t really get what he was saying but I was silently cheering him on.

“Oh, I guess that makes sense,” the officer said. but the confusion on his face was thicker than blood. He faced me, using his visor to scrutinize my very essence. The stranger also looked my way. Cocking an eyebrow. I got the hint. Fall into character.

I erected myself from my scrawny miser posture to that of an elegant rambunctious urchin. Who survives in the margins of society, picks fights wherever but nevertheless has a heart of gold, “Yes, I’m from the badlands” I say as i staggered up to the officer “Boo” I puckered right at his face, then with a smirk on mine “pencil pushers like you won’t survive a day from where I’m from. You know what we do to guys like you?” I threatened “I don’t know, why don’t you show me” he said. His face was as straight as a pillar made of marble. I proceeded to slide an erect thumb across my neck in a makeshift attempt at a threatening gesture. But the stranger in khakis dragged me away before I could embarrass myself any further. 

The adrenaline that hit me earlier started to wear off and the pressure of this strange world that weighed on my head had returned with a vicious cruelty. My nasal bone felt like it was made of lead, I held up my face so it wouldn’t fall off, My hands searched for the elbow of another arm, but my fingers were treacherous like they would pass through anything. My legs collapsed under the weight of my body but I wouldn't let myself fall there. My hand grabbed onto  a facade nearby and I decided to use it to hold myself together. 

My legs won't stand. My hands won't hold. To breathe was like moving a heavy stone. But grabbing on to the facade, I was able to keep track of everything. where they were supposed to be, what they were supposed to do. I pieced it together, pooled whatever was left of any strength or lifeforce I had inside of me and got to my feet. The world tilted a little. The stranger in the khaki overalls had worry spread across his face “are you alright” he asked, then added a ‘friend’ at the end of his question to feign familiarity. “I’m good,” I answered. forcing a smile on my face then added a ‘friend’ at the end, so as to seem familiar. “Good then friend, let's go get something to eat, you look quite pale” He said. He put his right arm across my shoulder then ushered me out of the alleyway. 

I took a brief look at the officer who stood behind us. I could never make out the nature of the eyes he hid under the visor that sat on his face like a crown. All that was clear was the end of his nose down to his pointed jaw. And the motif that danced over his suit. Sirens blaring. Splashing him with a hue of bright and red under a clear day. That was all I could remember. But I knew I would see him again.