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WO, Ch 4- Caught in a Worldslide
🕑 Added 2022-02-27 23:53:56 +0000 UTCI heard the door wing closed behind Nurse Joyce, leaving me alone with the pink marshmallow called Lady Bee. Or Blissey, as the Nurse had said. Half-remembered images bubbled up in my mind, coalescing into memories, only the memories made no sense, not in light of the world around me. How could I remember playing a game on a small hand-held device, a game that seemed to mirror the world around me?
Focusing on keeping my breath slow and steady, I tried to keep from panicking. This could not be real. But it seemed to be real.
I started to giggle, just a tiny bit hysterical, when the content of a lesson sprung to mind, one that even the teacher had joked we would never need in our life. It had been a lesson on the fundamentals of philosophy and the question of how we knew what we actually knew. One of the core-concepts I remembered was that nobody could actually positively prove that the reality we experienced around us was actually real. We simply assumed it was, accepted that we had no way of knowing if that wasn’t the case and proceeded with the earlier assumption.
With that in mind, I could only assume that the world I was seeing was real, not a dream of figment of my imagination. And if it was real, what did that mean about the images I half remembered? Were they part of a dream, or were they a memory that, too, had been real?
Shaking my head, I decided that both could be the case, but that I needed to focus on the present and my present situation.
A stubby, little arm poked me in the side, causing my eyes to fly back open, staring at the marshmallow next to me. The Pokémon. Just the thought made me want to giggle hysterically, but pressing my eyes closed, I pushed it down once more. I needed to keep things together, even if my head and heart started to hurt.
Another poke to my side made me open my eyes again and the marshmallow waved me towards the door, slowly wobbling towards it, once it was certain I was looking. Not quite sure what I was supposed to do, I decided to follow the wobbling marshmallow, getting led out of the room and down the hallway.
Some distance down the hallway, the marshmallow stopped, stepping in front of me to stop me, too. When I did, she started to wave her stubby arms once more, the earlier glow returning though with a slightly different tint and suddenly, I was able to hear voices, crystal clear, as if the speakers were right in front of me.
“... all three, are you certain of it?” the voice of Joyce asked, making me mentally pause and listen closely.
“Yes, I saw the tracks of all three and the readings all but confirm it. The only reason we can’t give it a hundred-percent confidence is lacking data to compare the readings on our part. This is the highest confidence we can give, without actually witnessing them for ourselves.” Cynthia’s voice replied, sounding tense and sterner than I had heard her before.
“The data gathered by the swarm is…” another voice, this one I was quite certain belonged to Lucian, threw in and I could almost see the frustration in his posture, alongside the frown on his handsome face.
“Impossible?” Cynthia’s voice, now with some snarky amusement thrown in, asked. “Looking at the circumstances, I’m not too surprised. Moves involving all three are all but legendary. Even one of them could make waves unlike any we have seen before, but all three?” there was a soft, tired sigh, “We have no real idea what all three could do. Only tales, spun from myth and legend. They hold some truth, but which part are the ones actually true? I don’t know.”
“We have one part of the puzzle.” Joyce’s voice spoke again, somewhat more confident than the other two. “Your emergency, Cynthia. Her p-values are incredible and the potential values of her Charmander are similar, amongst the highest we have measured thus far.” she explained and Lady Bee next to me let out a soft sound that I couldn’t identify. Looking at the marshmallow, there was something off about her, but what, I couldn’t tell.
“Incredible? How incredible?” Lucian asked, suddenly sounding interested.
“Let me put it like this, I’m not sure if Cynthia is currently the person with the highest p-value in the building, or if your emergency is. And unless there’s something weird going on, you’ve got a couple decades on her, old friend.” Joyce’s voice explained, sounding almost smug.
“There is something weird. I’m almost certain that she’s carrying a Poké-Original Dex.” Cynthia quietly threw in.
“That’s impossible.” Lucian’s voice rejected it outright, before betraying his insecurity “Right?”
“Apparently not. I would have agreed with you, but unless my eyes are going bad, it is what I saw. Regardless, we have a young woman in our care and if my guess is correct, she is feeling a lot more confused and insecure than we feel.” Cynthia replied, her voice regaining her earlier vigor.
“Joyce, you took a look, is she alright?” Cynthia asked, and before Joyce could reply, Lady Bee waved her arms again and the glow vanished, before she turned to me, poking me again, somewhat insistently. Getting poked to move, I followed the marshmallow again, back to the room I had been left in, my mind whirling with even more questions than before. maybe that was what I got from listening in on a private conversation, even if it had been about me.
Back in the room, I noticed that Nurse Joyce had placed the ball she had taken off me on the nightstand next to the bed I had been on and picked it back up, the weight acting as a comfort to me.
Closing my eyes, I once again tried to make sense of things. Of the three massive beings I had seen and the foggy memories in my head. Impossible memories, or an impossible reality. Or impossible events, that caused the two seemingly contradictory parts in my mind to line up, even if I couldn’t really reconcile them, even within the privacy of my own mind, not without accepting what I would have called impossible.
But one of those impossible, unreal, facts had to be real and I had no idea which it was.
There was a soft, hissing sound and warm, scaly arms wrapped around me, providing me with some comfort. Without opening my eyes, I knew who was hugging me and without thinking further, I returned the hug, wrapping my arms around my Prince Charming. The cute lizard that had cowered behind me, was now trying his best to comfort me.
The warmth seeped into my chest and I felt the emotions I had pushed down the whole time bubble up, taking away any sense of reason as my body shook under their weight. As I buried my head against the warm scales of my partner, tears started to fall from my eyes. Holding onto the warm body with desperate need, I bawled, the emotions forcing their way out of me and I simply let them out, even as I was shivering with cold, despite the warm coat and the fiery body in my arms.
How long my hysterical crying lasted, I had no idea, I might have dozed off at some point, carefully held by my partner. Just the presence of those small, scaly arms helped me, his scent of burnt cinnamon calmed me. But while I would have loved to simply hold onto him, there was a part of me that pushed me forward, reminding me that I had to keep going, regardless of the path I was taking, I had to keep going forward.
Loosening the death-grip I had on my partner, I straightened my spine and looked around. The only presence with me in the room was the pink marshmallow, keeping a bit of distance but looking at me with wide eyes, radiating compassion.
After a glance at her, I fished a pack of tissues from my pack and wiped off the tears from my cheeks, blew my nose and tried to make myself appear as confident and collected. If nothing else, I had to keep things together. I had to keep going.
Closing my eyes once more, pushing the remnants of emotions down into my chest, so they wouldn’t bubble up for a bit, I gave the marshmallow nod, hoping to communicate my gratitude to her.
Now, I only had to face the people of this place and figure out where I could go from now. Always forward, even if I had no idea where I was headed.
