Doctor Johnstone had woken up as she did every morning at 5:00 with her "roommate's" legs wrapped around her torso like she was some spider monkey. Although the bedroom technically had two beds, only one bed was ever used, with the other delegated to act as the table to throw the problems that the couple didn't want to solve. Currently, it was piled with unfolded clothes from the laundry yesterday.
Doctor Johnstone looked over to that pile and sighed out loudly. "I'll do it Lisa," her roommate answered softly into her neck, her warm breath caressing her skin with those heavenly words. Lisa Johnstone hated folding clothes.
"Thanks Alice," she sighed out, bringing her arms up around Alice in a hug, leaning down to kiss her short, wavy, blonde hair.
Lisa untangled herself from Alice, making sure to wrap the warm covers over her, watching her snuggle in for a some more sleep, and made her way to the bathroom to take her daily, twenty minute long, hot shower, thankfu
Fire had run through the forest, alighting every bush, shrub, and tree, and creating giant, black plumes of smoke, chocking everything. It fell from the sky, from the clouds like rain, and Red_Two knew, peeled to the shattered cliff edge, that he could not go back. His legs shook and his entire body shivered, too weak to move against the burning stones fell from the community. He was sweating and crying and the dust in his eyes just wouldn't leave him alone. He tried to move away from the cliff edge, crawl at least to the cool of the river, but his body wouldn't listen to him. Hot bile rose from his stomach and Red_Two vomited off to the side.He lay face down on the floor, eyes glued to the upwards, gazing up at the floating city.He just wanted to close his eyes and see that everything was going to be alright. He wanted to wake up from his hellscape dream.He woke up.He woke up again.And again.And again.His name wa
"My name's Alice, and today we're leaving Emmet to sleep off his two all-nighters. We're gonna have breakfast in the kitchen. Then you can go to your daily physio with the one and only Doctor Lisa Johnstone!"The blonde woman held Jasper up as if he were nothing, not even shaking sweating as he was propped up on her shoulder. He could feel the muscle his legs and found himself sweating.She carried him from the medical wing into the heart of the facility. Jasper had only known the route from his bed to Emmet's office, quite literally down the corridor. Jasper was carried through one long corridor, tilting his head, side to side to spy down the long halls and through the windows of the doors he could see.The facility had grey halls, but the halls and ceilings were at least white. The corridor ceilings had lights to illuminate wherever the sun's rays missed, flooding in from the windows at each turn. Jasper saw workroom tables with laptops behind them. They were
Rehab consisted of practising walking and simple exercises and stretched under Doctor Johnstone's watchful eyes, with her strict hands correcting any imperfections with his posture as he moved through his motions. When he was finished for the day, Jasper didn't know what he was supposed to be doing now. Doctor Johnstone was writing up her reports and would be completing whatever research or work she would be doing.Alice would be doing whatever work she was doing and Emmet was asleep on his bed.He could search for his time machine and microchip, but he had no idea where it was, and it was highly likely that he was being watched at all time. He wasn't being trusted yet, and as a stranger who showed up one day who was massively injured.And now three people possibly knew that he didn't know what a mini trident was.Jasper had two viable options: could either make his way back to the common room or his own recovery room where Emmet was. If he went back to t
Jasper had been in the common room for an hour and desperately needed paper and a pen. He thought about breaking into Emmet's office, but the lock conundrum arose again. He had no idea what he was supposed to. There was nothing to do but think and panic.There was nothing to do but look through the giant glass window towards the sea, sitting on a stool, keeping his back stiff. He couldn't sit on the beanbags as it would be bad for his back and Doctor Johnstone would correct him silently, doing her job and without comment, like a blank interface existing to mask the efficient, cold, unjudging code running on the machinery behind the back panel.She was so much like Sýnnefa, only she actually spoke, and didn't hide her face behind technology. She was still following programming. Everybody followed programming. It was natural.But what programming did he follow? A man who had followed Gryaz blindly then put sunglasses on to combat the harsh, grey glares of S
The sand was dry and dusty, too slippery to grip by itself with his shrivelled, wet hands alone, but the grains had become more solid, and rough enough on his bruised, freezing skin to help him grip onto a large, gnarling, tree root. All he could miserably do was hold on, too weak to do more than keep his head above water and breathe. His arms burned and his stomach wailed. He wanted to cry but found that no tears were coming. He tried to make a sound, but nothing but a pathetic cracking noise emerged from his throat.Was it worth pulling himself to shore? Was it worth doing any of this? If he just let go, he would reunite everybody from Gryaz after he made the journey back in the afterlife, when his soul was severed from his useless, beaten body, strong, and ready to trek back to the gorge.And if he just let go, he wouldn't be in this river anymore, freezing cold and burning at the same time, the sensations mixing, overlapping and swirling in his chest, making him si
Doctor Johnstone found Jasper and Emmet curled around each other, that morning. She looked down at them and stared, before quietly leaving.Emmet slowly opened his eyes at the clicking of the doors. He felt warm and surrounded by infinite softness. A warm breath tickled the hairs at the back of neck periodically, every now and then.He craned his head up and saw a tanned hand, loosely wrapped around his own pale one and held to a warm chest.It was Jasper.He was instantly awake, face flushing hot as the memories of the previous night flooded back to him. Doctor Johnstone had evicted him from Jasper's room to let him sleep in his own bed. He had woken up, when lightening flashed outside, and had immediately fled back to Jasper's room, coerced him into bed, and held his hand all night.He gulped and went to gently extract himself and get breakfast, planning explanations in his mind to excuse away his actions and pretend that it hadn't happened. A ha
With all his work finally caught up on, Emmet was free to follow his regular schedule. Jasper, after his morning physiotherapy session joined him after lunch for his lab shift.Emmet wore his white lab coat, white goggles, white mask, and white gloves, all non-disposable to be washed and reused. Jasper didn't wear any of it, just simply perching on his seat in the corner of the room, back straight against the wall. His eyes were narrowed and honed in on the movements of Emmet's hands.The screen behind him lit up with the slides that Emmet placed under the electron microscope. The prepared samples from the day prior showed the buckminsterfullerenes with the antigens placed inside them. The poison had been picked, and the final review of the separate mechanisms and construction of each moving part was due by next week. After, the assembly and the assembly review, testing would formally begin.Emmet was not informed who, but he suspected any prisoners of war and p
Jasper knew that he was beyond repenting. His contributions to the Sýnnefa Empire were made under the treat of death, but it was undeniable that he had played his part well, acting meek, pathetic, twitchy, scared and antisocial. He had given Sýnnefa technology that they could use to quash many other countries, killing millions, if they so choose, repeating the destruction of his community thousands of times on any scale as they so pleased.He remembered.He remembered where the name Sýnnefa came from. In Emmet's arms, enveloped by that soothing golden light, he felt Emmet shiver, as if he was cold, dark, and lonely. Jasper finally remembered then and there where the name Sýnnefa came from, and he had no choice but to hold on tighter to Emmet.Sýnnefa, a tiny, nondescript island off the coast of a no-name country going to some war in some place and being destroyed as a warning. The people of the island, reportedly innocent civil
“Why’re you sleeping on the floor like that? Come on, get up. You’ll hurt your back doing that,” Doctor Marigold chided, dragging all her bits of heavy machinery around the office space to prepare for her demonstration.Behind her, Lila remained still.“I know that you’re not dead. Come, get up already,” she called out, stepping over a few sheets of paper that she had laid out to grab Lila by the shoulder and heave her up into sitting.The stubborn girl just flopped down again, not opening her eyes.“If you get the fuck up, we can move the flight a week forward so you can stop worrying about it,” Lucy Marigold shouted across the room.Like a rubber band, Lila snapped back up and finally opened her eyes.It had been harder to see the bags below them when they had been closed and Doctor Marigold wondered if she should buy the girl some sleep tablets.“I’m awake,” Li
Yolanda seemed to understand that she needed to back off and stop teasing Gretel, when the other woman's eyes suddenly misted over, and it was if she was no longer a part of this world.She kept the bubbling annoyance within her away from her face, putting on instead a mask of concern as she reached out and poked Gretel's arms, trying to maybe prod her out of her stupor and bring her back from the recesses of her mind.Yolanda had never actually seen somebody collapse inwards to a catatonic state over her own actions.It was interesting to see it all happen and fold out in front of her.She poked Gretel again, touching her in the face lightly to see if that would possibly work to pull the other woman out of her mind and back into the world where she was needed proper.It wouldn't reflect well on her if Gretel didn't wake up within the hour.It didn't feel as
When she awoke, she was sat ready to eat and was dressed just like her mother, in a pastel blouse and a lungi down to the floor.Lila looked down at herself and jumped when she heard rattling, noticing the ten, or so, bangles on each arm and the lines of mehndi that ran down all the way to the hems of her sleeves, resting halfway between her shoulders and elbows. A pin held her blouse shut at the top and a quick once over of her hair, with one of her hands, revealed that it had been styled in a simple bun and adorned with flowers.“This is weirdly romantic,” Lila commented, staring at the lit candles nestled in the variously sized candelabrums set around the circular room.There was no door, but a giant window which led to a balcony outside. There was no ceiling but the walls reaching upwards, all the way up, until they formed a dome in the same shade of dull brown that coated the floor and the giant, round table in the centre.The only dishes
“So, is she finally asleep?” Emmet asked the boy stood behind the counter. He was exceedingly slim for someone surrounded by sugar all day and Emmet could make out the outlines of his spindly elbows through his shirt. His face held a no nonsense, blunt, and almost bored expression. “Yeah, she is. She’s been knocked out on the sofa since I sent her back there,” Kai answered the long haired man in front of him, his hair pulled back by a ribbon matching his eyes before being pulled over his shoulder once more. He looked vain. “Oh good. Don’t tell her that I was involved,” the man asked, putting both his palms up to face Kai. “I’m telling her that you’re a fucking weirdo for that,” was the scowled answer. “No. Seriously, don’t tell her. She doesn’t like me and I don’t like her. She’s known my partner for longer that I’ve known him. She doesn’t trust me with him. Why’re you making that face?” Emmet tried to justify himself before giving up
“Are you sure that you’re getting enough sleep?” Kai asked Lila, watching her sway on her feet and clutching the front counter.“Yes,” she gasped, dropping her head into her hands, elbows on the table.“Go and lie down on the sofa. Go to sleep for a bit. I’ll wake you up when I have to leave for college,” Kai instructed her, tapping her on the shoulders and shepherding her towards the office.“… fine,” she conceded, letting Kai move her along towards the back.“You know that this just proves my point,” Kai pointed out, pushing her through the boundary of the door and closing it behind her.“Fine,” she whispered back to him, talking into the silence of the office.She let herself fall over the sofa, draping her upper body over the arm rest and letting her head be cushioned by the pillows. Shuffling a bit over to put her body entirely on the sofa, Lila f
“One! Two! Three! Four! Five!Now again!One! Two! Three! Four! Five!Now keep on going!”Lila landed each punch, timing her breaths to the count as she moved her fists, dodging underneath the swing that came towards her head, before blocking the second hit that came to her and moving along with the force of the fist that hit her arm.The swinging punching bag forced distance between Lila and Tweedle Dum, and she stepped back to where she was stood before, within the path of the moving bad, to put more distance between him and her.“One! Two! Three! Four! Five!One! Two! Three! Four! Five!”Lila punched the bag once more, landing all of her hits.“Okay, time for a break,” Tweedle Dum announced, grabbing the punching bag and pulling it back to him as Lila moved away from the centre of the room, sitting down on one of the rickety plastic chairs at the side of the room.She took of
“Bitch! Why’d you run off and abandon me like that!?” Lila shouted from behind the counter when Kai finally walked back into the store.She was waving her hands about and wore an apron covered in flour as the single customer in the store, an old man precariously balancing on his cane, slept whilst leaning on the radiator.“I thought that you wanted some bonding time with your family so I left you to do that it private!” Kai answered her, tiptoeing past their unconscious patron, in a combination of whispering and shouting.“They’re hardly my family and you left us in the middle of a public café!” Lila cried, not modulating her voice at all.In the background, the old man began to snore.“But you still talk to them a lot like you do to me, so I let you, and besides, I got about fifty more pages of Good Omens done in Waterstones,” Kai appealed, finally at the counter and opening up the
Gretel and Silver had their fun as he continued to teach her how the interface worked and how he had managed to figure out that the system was an older model from the lack of integration between the screen and the touch pad, and explaining how easily it would potentially be to do so once the technology, as displayed in this device, had been demonstrated and established to work in a functional product."We were working on something like this as well, back in the workshops back home for the company that I was in the research and development department for. We were trying to get our motion sensors to be as small as possible for more commercial and personal use of technology that we could sell to the public and those who couldn't afford the contact computers.We had no idea on how their tech worked, because of trade and company secrets and all, but we managed to piece together a few things by looking at the patents and when we bought a few and m
“Alright, the shop’s free. Why are you actually here?” Lila questioned, crossing her arms and staring down at the tablecloth of Jasper and Emmet’s table.“I’ve got lesson now. I’ll be back in a few hours,” the teenage boy behind Lila announced, picking up a bag that had been hidden behind the counter the entire time and rushing outside.Lila continued to stand there, waiting for a reply.Jasper couldn’t help but notice that she wasn’t meeting either his or Emmet’s eyes.“Are you planning to leave us?” he asked her back.Lila’s fingers dug into the creases of her shirt,” I’m going to be leaving for a trip soon, and I’ll be back as soon as I can. Kai’ll be running the shop and will be looking after things, broadly. He lives here now and I scheduled my leave for when his school term ends so he can take care of things.”“On thi