Chapter 3 (1/2)

I let out a tired groan as I opened my bag and started rummaging through its pockets. I was hungry, parched and the early afternoon twilight made finding my keys harder than strictly necessary. If that didn't make it abundantly clear, taking off like that turned out to be one of my less brilliant ideas.

For a start, it took me a good five minutes after separating from Joshua to realize I had no idea where I was. Since going back to him and asking for directions would have been awkward (not to mention there was no guarantee he was still standing around in that alley for me to find him) I decided to ask some passersby. That was another less than stellar idea, as most of them just locked up with thousand-yard stares the moment I tried to get any information out of them. If I didn't stumble upon a public park that had some information boards with a map I probably would have still been wandering the streets.

I finally found the key and unlocked the door with a satisfying click. I threw it wide open and rushed inside without even bothering to take off my outdoor shoes. The living room was in the exact same condition as I left it, down to the still lightly damp towel on the arm of the sofa. My alleged parents obviously hadn't come home yet. If they existed in the first place, that is. I only spared a glance at the clock on the wall, which told me that it was a little after five pm, and then I immediately headed towards the kitchen.

After concluding my raid of the fridge I returned to the living room with the spoils; a carton of milk in one hand and a hastily thrown-together ham sandwich in the other. I dropped my posterior onto the sofa and sighed in relief. It felt good to sit down at last. I took one last gulp from the milk-box before I placed it onto the table, after which I stretched my limbs. My legs all but sighed with respite. After limbering back up a little, I leaned back and rested the rear of my head on the backrest of the sofa, staring at the ceiling in a moment of absent-minded lethargy. It felt good to just relax and not think about anything in particular.

I only allowed myself the luxury for a couple of minutes though. Unfortunately, I had things to think about. Weird, confusing, and sometimes downright terrifying things. In a twisted sense, it was lucky that I got lost in town, as wandering around allowed the revelation to sink in a little and blunted the worst of the existential crisis, though I would be lying if I said it wasn't still lurking somewhere deep in my gut. I mean, it is not every day someone realizes he wasn't real.

...

Okay, to be fair, it was also possible that it was the world that wasn't real. Not that said possibility made things any less complicated or scary. It was at this point that I lurched forward to sit straight again. I was getting ahead of myself. I should start from the beginning and think things through properly before jumping to conclusions.

I stood up, grabbed hold of my discarded bag, and fished out a pen from a side pocket before grabbing one of the spiral notebooks. It didn't matter which one, they were all empty. I cleaned up the table, piling the documents I collected in the morning into a neat stack in one corner before I sat down again with my writing implements in front of me. It was fairly clear what I had to do.

First I needed to collect data. I inadvertently did a lot of that today, but tomorrow I would have to make a conscious effort and continue with this specific goal in mind. Then I had to collect and organize the information so that I could either prove or disprove my hypotheses. Finally, using the data and my research assembled in the first two points, I had to figure out just what the bloody hell was going on. Easy-peasy. But then I was getting ahead of myself again. Let's see my current hypothesis at first.

I hit up the notebook and wrote ‘This isn't reality and/or I am part of some sort of constructed world' onto the top of the page. I paused and rubbed my cheek. Yeah, thinking about it and actually putting it to paper was very different, but I wasn't considering something this crazy lightly.

Under the title, I wrote up a new heading: ‘Observations'.

First off, my own situation. As far as I could tell, I was a fairly tall but otherwise average male caucasian high-schooler living in a large house without any parental oversight. I was also a transfer student in a Japanese-style school, but not necessarily in Japan, I had a friend called Joshua, and I apparently knew a girl called Angeline, who was his childhood friend. I was probably on friendly terms with her too.

I also had amnesia, which was another tell-tale sign. I think it's supposed to make me a... what was the word... audience-surrogate, I think? I decided I should look the term up later. I was fairly sure there was a site out there that cataloged these kinds of things...

But back to the topic at hand: These tidbits more-or-less designated me as a protagonist. I was only missing three things: an annoying but sweet little sister, a female childhood friend, and a male idiot friend. I paused and, though he didn't really seem to fit the bill at the moment, I wrote ‘Joshua' over the idiot friend entry in my book. I frowned at my handiwork and, after some hesitation, I added a large question mark after his name.

Moving on. I wrote up ‘Environment' onto my list and paused again. I had already noted how everything was clean, but on second thought I had to change my description to ‘new'. The longer I watched my surroundings the more it felt like I was on a set of a sitcom or soap opera that was only supposed to convincingly mimic reality under stage lighting.

Speaking of genres made me think of another thing and I quickly wrote up ‘Setting' to the top of the next page. I looked at the word and it somehow made me feel silly. Normally people didn't consider their circumstances part of a ‘setting'. On the other hand, these were anything but normal circumstances.

Anyways, as far as I could tell it was a stereotypical Japanese high-school background with some anachronisms thrown into the mix. That would imply either comedy or romance. Well, the appearance of the delinquents certainly placed the ball in the court of the former, though taken that I largely took myself out of the proceedings of the day, it wasn't impossible that I missed some sort of designated romantic encounter. With my luck, it would have probably been a tsundere girl colliding with me on the street with a half-eaten slice of toast still hanging from her mouth, or something similarly stereotypical.

I paused to take a sip from the milk box and found myself frowning by the time I put it back down. What did I just write here? I scanned the page with my eyes and found the word close to the bottom. ‘Tsundere'. The hell is that?

Somehow I had a hazy mental image of what the word should mean in the form of a short, blonde ponytailed girl yelling at someone while blushing. Was that the name of someone? No, I think it was something along the lines of a... personality? An archetype? Concluding that I should look the word up later I promptly underlined it. I frowned at the page one last time and let out a soft groan.

”So now I am using words I don't even know the meaning of. Should I even be surprised at this point?”

This incident, however, gave me a new idea and I wrote up my next heading to the top of the following page: ‘Anomalies'. I cracked my fingers. Now, this was a meaty subject if I have ever seen one.

First on the list was my amnesia. Thankfully my memories didn't seem to be completely wiped clean, at least if my hazy image of that Angeline girl was any indication, but that was good news in the same way as telling a quadriplegic that they should be happy they still had their head. But then again, it was a start. If nothing else, it showed that some memories could still lurk in my head somewhere... though as I thought about it, maybe the ‘using words I don't know' anomaly that made me start this segment was actually related to my amnesia as well. It was possible that I actually knew these words, but not anymore. I should look into this later, along with the symptoms of retrograde amnesia. It is probably all related.

I paused and nodded to myself. Right, I really should look into them later. What were they again...? Audience-surrogate, tsundere... Then there was that ‘refuge in audacity' thing with Josh; that must have come from somewhere... Oh, and there was that thing that had to do with goldfish, though I can't remember the exact line. It still felt like it made sense in context, but I couldn't remember the exact term, because why would anything be easy today?

Leaving that annoyance aside, here's another one: the issue of those sudden headaches and the strange urge I felt when they struck. They were gone for the moment, but I could never know when they would return. It would be best to figure out what they were about, but at the very least I had to be on guard against them in the future.

Next, I wrote up my arrival to the roof and the short blackout preceding it. According to Joshua, the door leading to the roof should have been closed until noon... so how did I get up there?

”I guess I'll investigate the stairs and the door to the roof tomorrow. There must be some traces there.”

I scratched my head. This was probably the question I had the least clues about, so for now I underlined the question mark and moved on.

Then there were the people. This was arguably the biggest and most glaring anomaly of them all, though the general spotlessness of the world gave it a run for its money. The lack of variety at school, the lack of individual personalities, the glassy stares whenever they encountered something unexpected, and just the general haziness of their existence all pointed in the same direction: there was something seriously wrong with everyone. Well, almost everyone. The only people who actually felt real were Joshua and, to a degree, the three delinquents we met. Oh, and the nurse, but he was a borderline case at best.

In retrospect, Josh made sense if we went with the ‘I'm the protagonist' idea. He was supposed to be my friend and all, but the delinquents didn't really strike me as similarly important. Or maybe that's what made them even more important? For my research purposes, I mean.

I exhaled a sigh and began munching on my sandwich while I considered my points once again. I underlined a few important looking bits, fixed a few typos, decided to refer to any seemingly non-important people as ‘placeholders' for the sake simplicity, and by the time I finished eating I was reasonably sure I got the most important observations down. Now came the hard part; I had to figure out how everything fit together.

I sat straight and stared at the open notebook, scanning the lines one last time. My first idea was a fairly tame one: This was all a dream. I could be sleeping in my bed right now and lucid dreaming this entire scenario. It would explain most, if not all, of the anomalies, except for a single serious flaw: dreams don't tend to stay so consistent for so long. Not to mention I have been awake, unconscious, in pain, hungry, thirsty, and a hundred other things since I woke up this morning, all of which I could remember clearly. That's just not how dreams worked. They are more... volatile and, dare I redundantly say, dreamlike? Also, if I'm aware this is a dream, why didn't I wake up the moment I started writing this sentence? No matter how I looked at it, these facts pointed at me being in something much more stable than your average lucid dream.