Kait slowly lifted her head from Hailey’s body. “Well, I understand what’s happening now.”

Taylor looked uplifted. “Really?! Can you help her?”

“No, I can’t. The only person who can is Hailey.”

“I don’t get it.”

“Have you ever needed to cope with a situation before? To accept it fully before you can move on?”

“I think so.”

“You have at some point, I guarantee you that. Hailey needs to do that, among other things.”

“For what, though? Why would that make her wake up?”

“She’s in a Dream Realm.”

Linne raised her hand. “Dream Realm? Like the place sumnus interact with?”

Everyone looked to her for an explanation.

She was a little intimidated by the attention but continued, “Sumnus are dream mages. They go into people’s dreams and do things. They have a reality show about it where they explore people’s dreams on camera. It’s freaky.”

“That could be it,” Kait said skeptically.

Clera narrowed her eyes. “So all we need to do is call one of them up and have them end her sleep.”

Kait shook her head. “I don’t know how long it will take for you to find one, and that really won’t be necessary. I have no doubt she wakes up in a week at most.”

“So, we just wait?”

“There’s more to it, though. She’s trapped in a realm representing her mind. There is only one way I know of to get her out, and that’s if she walks out on her own.”

“She can just…do that?”

Kait chewed on her cheek. “Not exactly. I don’t know what other trials she will face along the way, but…the intention of the spell I cast was for her to grow as a person. All you can do is wait, and all I can do is talk to her…though I couldn’t even do that properly.”

Taylor nodded. “Because you need a second wristband for that?”

Kait smiled. “Very good! You’re right.”

Abigail frowned with some frustration. “So, could I get an explanation? Who even are you? Are you seriously a witch?”

Kait placed a finger over her mouth, hesitating. “Can you keep it a secret?”

“Sure I can.”

Kait nodded. “I am indeed a witch.”

“L-like, the type of spellcasters who were wiped out centuries ago? That witch?”

Kait nodded. “I’m…I’m the last.”

Taylor elaborated, seeing Abigail’s confusion, “She used magic to…I guess skip through time.”

“So, you mean she’s from…” Linne began, doing the math in her head, “Four hundred years ago?!”

Kait shrugged, “Four hundred and twelve.”

“That’s so cool!”

“No doubt it would be a novelty,” Kait muttered.

“But it is one! I’ve watched a show about this exact thing!” Linne said.

“A show?”

“Yeah, where a witch, the princess to the Terrestrian locale, is time-warped to the modern day and needs to escape an evil organization who wants her secrets!”

Kait laughed, a small smile appearing on her weary face. “I’m going to guess by ‘show’ you mean a movie?”

“Err…a TV show, actually.”

“Hmm…” Kait stood then began toward the stairs. “Unfortunately, I’m completely exhausted. I can help Hailey more after I get some rest, but…again, I can’t magically fix her problems.”

Clera narrowed her eyes as Kait walked up the stairs. “Why can’t you?”

Kait turned to meet Hailey’s mother in the eye. “The spell I cast was…beyond anything I’m normally capable of. A more specialized mage, like one of those sumnus you mentioned, might be able to reverse what I did, but I can’t. I never meant to cause trouble…I’m sorry.” With that, she headed to her room, closed her door, and fell upon her bed like a rock.

No one was sure what to do with themselves once Kait left, so for a minute, they didn’t do much.

Clera finally looked at Taylor after looking something up on her phone. “Sorry to ask you to do this, but,” she grumbled. “Somebody needs to clean it up.”

Taylor crossed his arms. “That’s a really big mess. Why can’t we just leave it as is?”

“Excuse me?! You’re suggesting we just leave that uncleaned?!”

“Hey, it’s Hailey’s room, not mine.”

Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.

Clera sighed. “Taylor…”

“Yes?”

“I was talking about Kait’s barf.”

Taylor kept a poker face and walked upstairs without another complaint.

“Now, you two…”

Abigail leaned against the chair Kait had left, growing stiffer. “Yes, Mrs. Joul?”

“Get cozy, the weather report said the blizzard would last for another three hours, and it just dipped to negative five degrees.”

“My mom said I need to get back home before dark…”

“Well, if you get hypothermia out there, your chilly blood’s still on my hands, so both of you, call your parents. If they say it’s fine, you can leave.”

“Do you have more pudding?” Linne asked as she took out her phone.

“Plenty. You won’t starve under my wing.”

“Yay!”

Hailey saw something peculiar in one of the bubbles that drifted past her. It was her ‘dream journal’ from seventh grade. She’d almost forgotten about it, just like all the other stuff around her, although it was still buried in her dresser’s bottom drawer. After some deliberation, she stood to poke the bubble. It popped, and the journal fell into her hands. She searched for a moment, looking for a pen, until she found that the journal already had a pen attached to its binding. Had it always had that?

She began writing.

{So, I’m trapped in my mind, or something along those lines. Kait decided it’d be really fun to shove me into that fracking nightmare, and now I’m here, in Bubbleland. Though, I guess this is my fault. I regret not going into that green portal when I had the chance.

I can’t stop crying, and I’m starting to get sick of it. Can I even run out of tears here?

Also, there shouldn’t be a ‘backward’ or ‘forward’ here, but for some reason, I know which way is which instinctually.

Whatever, I may as well get moving. I feel like a pile of crap just sitting here.}

Hailey shoved the journal into her pocket without thinking. The journal was way too large for her pajama bottom’s pocket, but it seemed to vanish out of existence anyway. Hailey accepted it as perfectly natural, though, and walked forward.

Solemnly, she walked beneath the bubbles. When she saw something interesting inside one of them, she poked it, then pulled out her journal, producing it out of nothing without even noticing.

{It seems like everything in Bubbleland is a thing I’d almost forgotten about. I saw a ridiculous sword from a TV show I’d watched not too long ago and decided to pick it up. It looks absolutely stupid with more pointy bits than I can count, a blade thicker than Abbie’s ego, and a magical glowy aura…Didn’t I watch that show with her?}

She hugged the sword close to her, then slid it in a sheath that hadn’t been there a moment ago. She continued walking, her tears drying as the white all around her tarnished into a deep gray, and the bubbles slowly faded into the distance. She suddenly stopped, feeling as though she was about to reach a new part of her mind. The floor was black, but the sky was gray. She shrugged. “Can’t be too bad.” She stepped forward.

{When I stepped ‘past,’ I saw a memory. Just like the bubbles, it was one I’d almost forgotten. It was when I was in elementary school. I had a friend that was a boy…what was his name…Rye? Well, who cares what his name was. He showed off that trick people do with their armpits to make farting noises, and I got super annoyed at him for repeatedly doing it. It ended with me yelling at him, then running away. Was that when we stopped being friends?}

After that, the memory faded and her world returned exactly as it was before, with Hailey’s foot even in the same spot. Then, the ground fractured. From her foot, cracks of light spread along the ground, through the infinite darkness, then, each segment of the floor, isolated by the light, flashed white. The cracked land rose a step up.

{But that aside, afterward, the ground split into pieces, with light trailing through everything! It looked super cool. Anyway, I get the feeling that if I stepped on one of the memories, I’d need to relive another one.

There’s something I don’t get, though. If these are memories, why can I explore around them like I’m actually there? I’ll do a little experiment with the next memory.}

Hailey pocketed the journal, then stepped atop another crack in the ground.

She appeared in a large, sprawling garden. Around her, tourists were viewing the area, looking at unique and well-tended plants. This was the famous Gradefleua garden, her hometown’s most beloved landmark.

A younger Hailey sat on a bench beside a younger Taylor and took a bite out of a stick of cotton candy.

“Do you like it?” Taylor asked with his hand on her shoulder.

“Yeah, I really do,” Fake Hailey said in her usual scathing, sarcastic voice.

Hailey was well aware she really did like the candy. She had just been a little mean to her brother’s kindness…a pang of sorrow hit her.

She stepped forward with a gloomy look, then tried to grab some of the cotton candy. She’d definitely just pass straight through it, but it was worth a…

She actually managed to grab it, and, with a shrug, put some in her mouth.

Sweet.

“Hey, lady,” her younger self said in an especially annoyed tone. “Why’re you taking my candy. This is mine.”

“Oh, sorry–”

“You might feel hungry, but it’s rare a spirit like me gets the chance to eat something like this for free.”

“I-I’m sorry? What did you just say?”

“You have no idea who I am, do you?”

“No.”

“Well, let me do my part in the play, and don’t steal my food! You got it?”

“Uhh, sure…”

“You better be sure.”

“I’ll make sure never to steal your candy again.”

“Thank you. Ahem.” She looked to Fake Taylor, who had been quietly observing their conversation with a cracked smile.

Fake Hailey continued as if Hailey had never interrupted, talking to Taylor, “You could have tried to, I don’t know, get it to me an hour sooner when I asked for it.”

Hailey processed what had happened as the conversation continued.

Taylor shook his head, fed up. “Oh. Well in that case, excuse me, I guess your food wasn’t free enough. I’m sooo sorry for being nice! Fine, if you’re going to act like that, I’m just going to go with Kiln.”

Hailey stuck her tongue out at Taylor as he walked away.

Fake Hailey turned her head to Hailey. “See you next step,” she said as the memory collapsed.

{This place is so strange! I went into another memory and took a bite out of my younger self’s cotton candy. I thought I’d just phase through it because that’s just the trope, but instead, my younger self got pissy with me and called herself a spirit. Apparently, these memories are like…plays?

Besides that, Taylor seemed a lot more impatient with me back then than he is now. Looking back, though, I feel really guilty about what I said.

And now I’m tearing up again, and I’m not even sure why…this song and dance is getting old.}

When she finished writing in the book, she saw that all the fractures in the ground were raised up another step, while the one she’d just stepped on was one more step above the black ground behind her. She shrugged; she had to climb sometime.