96

--The Enclave--

Ba-Dum.

Ba-Dum

Ba-Dum-tak-dum-tak-dum. Ba-dum-tak-dum-tak-dum.

Once again the drums echoed, calling her to what, she didn’t know.

How had she gotten there?

She didn’t know.

Where had she been before this?

She didn’t know.

But she knew where she was. She’d been there so many times — but this time, it was different.

In the dark, vast space, two lights appeared where only one had before; two ends of the tunnel forked out in front of her. One looked naturally bright and airy, the other, a bright, fluorescent white. She remembered traveling down the first, where she had become a girl, bursting out into the light of day, talking to her father, and giving names to animals. The other was new.

Slowly, she walked towards the new path. The drums turned to new sounds — mechanical sounds; beeping and clicking. Muffled voices. A laugh there, a muffled cry there. A chemical smell that made her think of a cross between bleach and chloroform that was overtaking a light flowery scent being circulated through the vents. The air was cool, and dry enough to not feel like a tomb, but still she shivered.

She’d always hated hospitals.

Out from the darkness, she found herself walking at a quicker, more determined pace. Through long seafoam green hallways with white and metal doors she went. High heels clicked against the floor. People without faces starred as she passed. Embers of irritation and anger burned in her heart. She had somewhere to go — and she was going to get there. She would make them pay. All of them.

A pair of white double doors burst opened at her touch, not caring how hard she hit the walls or anyone or anything behind them.

“Where is he?” she called out in a different voice than before. Older. Angrier.

“Miss, please,”A person — a plump woman in a nurse’s coat — tired to stop her, but she was looking for someone. Something.

“Sere!” She called out. “Get out here!”

Doctor Sere. Whoever she was, she knew she was looking for Doctor Sere. She recalled the work ‘sutak’. It echoed in her memories, pulsing with the blood rushing to her head as her vision twisted.

“Miss!” The nurse tried again to stop her, grabbing her arm — but she pulled her arm away.

“Sere!” She cried —

Then the world swam away to the sound of cheerful beeping.

***

Dassah jerked awake. As if the woman’s anger had been hers, her head throbbed, hurting like hell as it pounded against her skull with the same rhythm her heart was beating against her chest. Sweating, breathing heavily, her body shuttered, her mind reeled — and then, nothing.

Confused, she rolled over and hugged her pillow to her face.

She was thirsty — dreadfully thirsty — and her eyes hurt, but she didn’t want to get up. As she started drifting back off, however, her wake-up alarm buzzed again from her watch across the room.

“Screw you…” she went, cursing the clock and pulling the pillow over head. It didn’t do much. If the watch wasn’t across the room, she could have at least given herself a few more minutes, but that was exactly why she had left it there — or at least, she thought that was why until she realized she wasn’t 100% sure how she had gotten to bed. More to the point, she was still in the same clothes she was in the last night.

Groaning, Dassah managed to drag herself out of bed with the usual magical promise of a hot shower and coffee. Bleary eyed and wondering just how drunk she had gotten the night before, she gulped down a large glass of a water. She poured herself another before slumping down into the nearest chair.

She squinted at the clock. 5:30.

Her head falling back onto the back of the chair, she struggled to recall what had happened. It had all started with Jake. Stupid, stupid, stupid! She audibly cursed herself for accepting the date again. It was what it was, but for her, it was at least marginally out of character. Even more out of character for her was going to a bar with Sathuren Sul.

Anxiety filled her as she tried to recall the evening. She wasn’t sure what to make of her choice to go with him. After meeting with Jake, she knew she wasn’t acting like herself. She worried about what Shen had said, and about what she should say or do when she did go out with him. Sticking around Sathuren for a longer than usual amount of time seemed like nothing if it meant the possibility of somehow repairing her relationship with the garuli siblings. In fact, she even enjoyed it once they got there.

And then…

Dassah squeezed her eyes together, trying to recall exactly what had happened. They had been talking. Talking… about stupid things. Food. Culture. The people they dated. There was a lot her being clueless...

Rather disgusted with herself, she washed and dressed and made her own breakfast — a light breakfast, with soup and rice and steamed fish — and let herself space out as she sipped on the warm soup and nibbled at the solids.

What else had they talked about? Could she have done some other stupid thing? Said something she shouldn’t have? It felt like there was something important that she was forgetting.

“Unnnnn!” Dassah groaned, mussing her hair up till it turned into a birds next. Head in her hands, she sighed. What did it matter at this point, anyway? Even if she was horrible to him, what was done was done. When her memory did start coming back to her, she would just have to deal with the consequences. It’s not like she wasn’t already dealing with a couple of angry garuli.

And then there was the dream.

Leaning back, she circled the rim of her coffee cup with her finger.

She didn’t remember most of it, and what she did remember seemed incomplete — but it was new. Most nights throughout the week her dreams had been recurring. Over and over again, they played like a broken record until each and every scene was burned into her memory.

Seafoam green.

It was a very distinct color; a familiar one. It was the color of the robe of the young girl in her dreams — and it was the color of the robe of The Lady that had appeared to her in-game.

And now it was the color of the walls of a hospital. What had been the name on The Lady’s Robe? ‘The Yidarian International Institute of Healing and Medicine’? Could this place hold some of the answers she sought?

Dassah opened a search window and typed it in.

There was nothing.

Did I get the name wrong? She tried a few combinations of the words, and tired other names she thought may have had a chance to work, but nothing did. Frowning, she tried simply looking up institutes and hospitals. That was a chaotic list of hundreds of thousands of names in hundreds of languages.

So, she tired ‘Doctor Sere’. 500,975 results. Dassah stared blankly at that number. There were more ‘Doctor Sere’s as there were people on The Enclave. The girl asked about sutak… But when she typed in ‘garuli’, any species results ended up mixed in with those who specialized in garuli health care — of which, there were still about fifty thousand. Tapping her fingers on the table, she sighed and put it away.

Why was she taking these dreams so seriously anyway? Did she really think they were real? Did she actually think that The Lady had anything to do with them?

But why was it that she was seeing things in her dreams before she ended up seeing them in the game? They were never exactly the same, of course, but they were near enough that it was a heck of coincidence if they weren’t connected.

Dassah moved through her sparsely furnished living room. Though she lovingly eyed her TheirWorld game equipment that made its home on her cardboard coffee table, she brushed passed it, favoring the curtainless wall of windows that led to her balcony, and the view of the endless sea of The Enclave.

She left the doors open when she stepped out. She took a deep breath of the fresh air, taking in the salty, spicy, scents of the sea breeze as it rolled across the waves. The sun was just starting to rise from behind the vast swath of ocean that cradled the hex shaped platforms making up the floating cities.

Okay, she thought, and took a gulp of her coffee before setting it on the railing in front of her. If she didn’t put the events of last night to bed, she knew she wouldn’t be able to function the rest of the day. Imagining a string pulling her up from her spine, she straightened her posture and set her chin straight. With a deep breath, she looked out over the sea, and, in a soft voice, told herself, “No matter where you are, your life is your own. You are strong. You are a fighter. You will not give up, no matter what stands in your way. Even if it’s Grim or the garuli.”

Taking another deep breath, she closed her eyes and breathed out, letting the air out slowly through a gap between her tongue and the roof of her mouth. 10 seconds. 20 seconds. 30.

At the end, she looked back out onto the water. “Pfft!” she went, laughing, suddenly feeling very silly. “Who do you think you are, Dassah? What rubbish.” She chuckled, and pushed against the railing with a sigh. At the very least, whatever it did, it made her feel better.

Dassah opened her contacts list and opened a message window to Sathuren.

Dassah: Hey

She sent, biting her lip as she tried to keep up her courage.

Dassah: I hope I didn’t make things worse last night…

Almost immediately, she regretted sending that. Quickly, she tried to type a retraction, but no matter what she wrote, it all sounded wrong.

Dassah: … please just ignore that.

She sent, then felt even sillier.

“Ahhh,” she whined, her face burning as she stared at the words she now couldn’t take back. It was written, too. Immortalized. “Why can’t I just leave well enough alone?”

The work alarm on her watch made her jump as it loudly proclaimed it to be the time she had set with the intention of going to breakfast at The Perch.

“Shit!” she went, scrambling to try to hush it. At that volume, it was like to wake any sleeping neighbors, and the last thing she wanted was someone knocking on her door about it.

As if fate understood the struggles of her soul, her elbow hit the coffee cup on the rail. “Shit!” She went again, her hands shooting out to grab it, but only made things worse as she fumbled with it. Covered in coffee, she watched the mug fall six stories to its death.

Before anyone could see who killed it, Dassah scurried back into the living room, slammed the doors shut, and burst out laughing as she collapsed on the floor.

Oh, Dassah, you really can’t live, can you? She laughed to herself, brushing tears from her eyes. She managed to clean herself off a bit before the alarm on her watch starting going off again.

“Oh, shut it!” she told it, slapping her wrist before pulling herself up and stretching again. There was nothing for it.

Alarm aside, she had no intentions of going to The Perch for breakfast. She did have a couple of hours to kill, however. Smirking over at her TheirWorld equipment, she decided.

Dreams and dates be damned. She had errands to run.