"I wonder if we're ever going to leave...oh, ignore what I just said. I’m sorry." Leaving. It was a thought that hadn’t crossed her mind for some time. Leila sat at the edge of the now-deformed game-circle that the little lot had formed, with her knees together and arms wrapped around her legs. The pile of blanket that trailed onto the ground as she was, a while ago, dragged along by dissonance, provided a place to lean onto. When were they to leave? When they collect all the items on the list, the queen had said. She rubbed the scratch wounds on her arms and legs left over from the Chaotic Star’s rampage back on the Star Fisher - caused by flying shards of wood and metal. Cuts and gashes that have been taken care of and wrapped in bandages, and smaller scratches that and bruises that have not yet, which were visible on the exposed skin as streaks and blots of red, purple and blue. It was late. Hakuren told a couple of stories about this place called ‘Earth’, this place they called home. Dissonance remained hyped as usual. Yet the activity was not retained for long. Harper had gone to rest, and not long after so did some Nobodies and a few fellow humans. Soon, the air in the room was reduced to the muffled howling of the winds outside of the window and, sparingly, the creaking of wooden planks. Leila was reminded that they first arrived in Nowhere - this realm of splendor and absurdity - with a number of people much larger than that present in the room now. The wounds still hurt, but she did not care as much. The girl curled up back into her place at the lower bunk and wrapped the blanket around herself again - a cool embrace at first, as the night was cold; but over time the thick fabric caught her heat and soon the girl had constructed around herself a layer of comfortable warmth. Leila wondered when the time will come when she could go home. Time. Home. What time was it? She closed her eyes. where was home? * * * * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ILLCWFcEhCw&feature=youtu.be “Little miss.” …huh? “Little miss?” Leila opened her eyes, idly. “Ah, well, you’re awake.” The old man said, “Good morning.” She pushed herself upright from the sloppy leaning pose she assumed when she fell asleep in the cabin and brushed strands of her hair out of her eyes. It took a few blinks for her eyes to adjust. James stood at the side of her bed, a pile of clothing hanging on his arm. A soft yellow light illuminated the interior of the room, which was an interesting mixture of classic furniture and modern, simplistic furnishing. A worn hardcover copy of "The Representation Theory of the Symmetric Groups", apparently brought out from the institute’s library, lay on the wooden nightstand, with a red bookmark roughly halfway through. A breakfast and a cup of tea lay besides the book. Leila’s bedroom was just as it was when she left. The girl remained still, only staring blankly at the room in front of her. The old man simply smiled, knowing all too well that it was perfectly normal for her, and waited patiently for her to draw another one of her conclusions that he could not make sense of. “You’re not real.” she said. "Oh? How is that?" The old man responded. It wasn’t that the housekeeper could always keep up with with her trains of thought, but he somehow felt obligated to follow as far down as he could manage. It was interesting in a way, perhaps. "I feel pretty real. How do you figure that?" A few seconds of silence. "Um, I meant-" the girl struggled to revise her statement, piecing fragments of words and phrases into comprehensible sequences that conveyed the correct notion. "I meant - the statement 'you're not real' can be made with the same validity than the one which states you are." She found that phrasing acceptable. The motion of an object can only be described in relation to another object. No experiment carried from inside an inertial frame of reference can distinguish it from a frame of reference at rest. "Ah, yes, of course. Of course." He sat down besides Leila, who was sitting up at the edge of her bed. “Do you not trust your senses, then?” he then asked. “Why should I?” Leila said, “What my senses feed me is what I perceive. What I’m concerned with is what there really is.” “How do you tell what you see is not what there is?” “I can’t prove it. I can’t prove otherwise, either.” “It would simply be, then,” He said, “a matter of choice.” James smiled: “As we speak, though, what do you wish to do this day?” Leila picked up the book on the nightstand. “To the Library, I assume?” The old man was rather talkative today. * * * * Reality is not merely shaped by the choices you make. Reality itself is a construct of beliefs, and choice is the origin of belief. What harm will do an arbitrary selection of what to be your reality when any possibility is equally valid? “It’s not that it’s bad,” Leila said. Leila was dressed in casual clothing with a windcoat thrown on, the old man himself had also changed into more outdoor attire. The two of them had presumably sat down halfway on the road to the Institute’s Library, as they sometimes did. Interestingly, Leila did not clearly remember doing so. Nor did she remember changing, or throwing on the coat, or walking out of her room. The two of them sat on the wooden bench in the exact positions they did this morning when she first woke up - it was as if they somehow remained stationary and the scene around them was what that changed. The motion of an object can only be described in relation to another object. “It’s just that...I find it rather frustrating.” She said, “An infinite number of possible realities, only one you must chose.” “One world to choose, from countless possible ones.” James said, his breath turning into puffs of mist as it came into contact with the cool morning air, “an infinitesimal amount, what you can see compared to what that can be.” “Though,” he said, “why must one choose? You could always visit all those worlds. Imagination. All those worlds, one by one.” “One by one.” Leila repeated. “It would require an eternity.” She didn’t have an eternity. “Imagine, then,” James smiled, “that you had an eternity.” Or did she? * * * * http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KMeUWlewgeI Leila sat alone. She was not sure where, or what she was sitting on. She was there alone, in the darkness. In the same position she assumed on the morning bench, or at the side of her bed. A mistake the language of mankind has made was to treat darkness as something that was tangible, to speak of it as if it was something physical, something that can be touched, be picked up and thrown around. It was none of those things. Darkness was the absence of light - man had given a name to something that wasn’t there. James was not there with her. She gazed into the void in front of her. The absence of light. Nothing there. Imagination. An infinite number of worlds. An eternity to invest on each and every one of them. There were stars in the darkness. There weren’t before. She continued to sit there, still, watching and thinking about the scenes in front of her. Stars were born and then burnt themselves out, only to power a new generation of them. Heavier elements forming with each iteration of A planet of water. An unstable atmosphere and the emergence of life. An universe that followed the rules she was familiar with. Particles, forces, fields. A different - even only slightly - set of initial conditions produced a much different universe. There was one that would not expand for an eternity and collapsed back upon itself. There was one that expanded so fast heat death was nearly immediate. There were a few where every burnt-out star collapsed into a black hole. Why stop there? An endless amount of possibilities. There could be universes that didn’t follow the same laws of physics. There could be ones where there were no laws at all. Amongst them many would be barely recognizable to the conscious mind as a ‘universe’, yet others strikingly familiar. There was one where burnt-out stars not only collapsed into black holes, they morph into sentient monsters that preyed on any mass that came close. There were ones still with life, with intelligence. There were ones with talking bunnies and mermaids. There were even a few where there’d be trains filled with talking bunnies. There was one where Leila herself boarded that train filled with talking bunnies. And then there was one where she was choking on the icy water of the Siren lake. The water tasted of, well, water, and seaweed, and earth. And rotten flesh. And a few chemicals she was sure didn’t belong. The chilliness gushed down her mouth and nose, down her throat, into her lungs. There was the helplessness as air escaped to make place for water. There were the failed attempts to grab a hold onto something. There was her muscles contracting, making it even harder to try to breathe. There was pain. Then there was silence. * * * * Cough. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qXIWKhzfCzc The world seemed to spin at the speed of a neutron star around her as Leila forced herself to stay crouching on the ground as the remaining lakewater in her system dripped onto the ground. Her eyes still stung and it was hard to keep them open for long enough to make out everything around her, but she could tell there were others there. She recognized the voices of a couple of Nobodies and some fellow humans, although it was still hard to tell how far they were with the pounding of air against her eardrums as the water flowed away. What happened? Her head spun and she had no remaining effort to invest on recalling it. Still alive, she thought. That she was still alive was the only thought she could maintain that still mattered. A few minutes passed, and she felt a bit better. She decided she could sit up and look around as her eyes didn’t hurt as much as before. She saw a man with the head of a fish. "Anyways, welcome to the town of Yonder...uh this is odd, but do you have any questions, perhaps?"