Anyone here afraid of space? You know, that gigantic void of black nothingness that houses the entire galaxy? If you are, I think you’d be glad that you didn’t have to experience server maintenance. It’s what you’d expect from bobbing about in space. Just without the stars, without the sun, without any planets… Just nothing. A whole lot of nothing.

Except maybe that huge timer suspended in the air. It had a sort of digital clock-like appearance to it, with the numbers formed out of glowing, white dashes.

230:03:24:40 TILL DISCONNECT

The 40 at the end ticked down to 39 as I watched, then 38, 37, 36... So, 230 days, 3 hours, 24 minutes till whatever this disconnect was?

Well that was ominous.

“Hello?” I called out into the dark void. My voice rang out through the emptiness, reverberating off into the distance. There was no response.

“Anyone there?” I tried again. “Rue? Ghoul of Samhain?”

Again, nothing.

I twisted over from where I was floating in the nothingness, finding that my body had gone back to being the shapeless, red mist that it had been at the very start. It was weird, not having arms and legs to move around with. What even was this? My soul?

I tried to reach out a hand to open my Inventory, but found that I couldn’t, since I had no hands. Using verbal commands did the trick though, and soon, a translucent, green screen opened up in front of me. All my stuff was still there, but without hands, I didn’t seem to be able to equip them.

That was strange. Especially since the game was supposedly under maintenance. Why was I able to open my Inventory, something so inherently built into the game’s system?

“What’s going on here?” I asked aloud. It was more to hear my own voice than anything, to make sure that I was still myself despite all the wacky things that had come crashing down all at once.

I definitely wasn’t expecting anyone to answer.

But an answer was what I got.

“A good question,” came a voice from behind me. “The World of Dreamers is unpredictable.”

I turned (as much as a cloud of smoke could turn), to find a little boy standing behind me, stepping on the nothingness in the void. He was the strangest little kid I’d ever seen.

He looked almost monochrome, his paper white skin standing out starkly against black military clothing and hair. Judging from the helping of baby fat around his cheeks, he could not have been older than 10, but the look in his eyes made me unsure. They were like bottomless pits, like dead fish eyes… They exuded a sense of age, like he’d seen and heard a lot of things and was no longer surprised by any.

I wondered if this was the kid that Marge had been talking about. The god kid that killed Michael and probably trapped us all here. He definitely didn’t look like an ordinary kid.

The boy raised his eyebrows. I realised that I had been staring without saying anything. But that was the plus side of being incorporeal. The boy probably couldn’t tell, and so it wasn’t rude.

“Don’t want to talk?” the boy asked, tilting his military style cap to reveal more of his dead fish eyes. “That’s alright. I’m just passing through. I won’t bother you for much longer.”

Just passing through? Maybe not the god kid then.

“Passing through to where?” I asked. “There’s nothing but space here.”

“Other worlds,” said the boy. “Worlds that aren’t as chaotic as this one.”

“It doesn’t seem that chaotic to me.”

“Oh, but it is,” the boy lifted the vintage looking cane in his right hand, and began jabbing it in seemingly random directions. “See? There’s an offshoot world there. And another over there. And a particularly large one right there.”

“There”, “over there” and “right there” were just different spots of nothingness in the void. I strained to find the “offshoot worlds” he was seeing, but to no avail.

“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“Really?” he frowned. “But you’re a Dreamer, aren’t you? You should be able to see the void between the worlds with your abilities.”

Well, I was definitely seeing a void. Not sure it was due to my abilities though.

“How would you know that I daydream? We just met.”

“Not daydreamer. Dreamer,” the boy scoffed. “No matter. It’s just a name that History made up for the people from your world.”

“I guess…” I glanced back up at the timer shining down on us. “Do you happen to know what that’s about? That timer, I mean.”

The boy looked up.

“It’s a timer.”

“I… I mean, what’s it for?”

“Who knows?” he shrugged. “Probably something the Dreamer of this offshoot world dreamed up.”

“Dreamer of this offshoot— People can own worlds now?”

“Of course,” the boy looked at me like I was stupid. “These offshoot worlds stem from your dreams. Every dream has an owner. Therefore every Dreamer can own offshoot worlds.”

“You’re not making a lot of sense.”

“I think I’m making perfect sense,” the boy said, drawing gestures in the air with his walking stick. He then rattled off a series of explanations filled with jargon and what seemed to be quantum theory, all of which went completely over my head.

“You’re surprisingly eloquent for a kid,” I said after he’d finished. Apparently he didn’t take it too kindly.

“You’re surprisingly passive for a Dreamer.”

“I mean, I’m kind of stuck here,” I gestured with what movement options a cloud of smoke had. “There’s not a lot I could be doing.”

“You’re not stuck anywhere,” the boy said irritably. “None of you are. The Dreamer in charge of this offshoot world is horribly inefficient with their execution. Wide area, thin layers. Terrible waste of power. Just concentrate your magic and poke a hole in the veil.”

“What magic? My Inventory?”

“No,” The boy scowled. “You Dreamers have such easy access to magic, yet none of you seem to want to use your potential.”

“Well if you’re so knowledgeable, why don’t you show me?” I was growing tired of this kid and his holier than thou attitude. “Help all of us get out of here. Send us home.”

“I can’t do that.”

“If you can’t do it, then don’t criticise us for not being able to.”

“I mean to say that I’m an outsider. I’m in no place to interfere with the business of Dreamers. I can do it. I just won’t.”

Wait. Hold on. I stared. The boy stared back, his dark eyes completely serious. He didn’t seem to be joking. He really had the power to get us out of here. To reverse isekai us back home. Yet something as stupid as “not my place” was stopping him?

“Well, if you actually can do it, prove it,” I tried to challenge him. “Get us out of this offshoot world, or whatever it was called. If there are offshoots, there has to be a main world somewhere right? Send us there.”

Sadly, he did not seem to take the bait.

“Do it yourself. Again, it’s not my place to interfere.”

“Even if you’ll save a lot of people?”

“Yes,” the boy snapped. “By the void, your ignorance is annoying.”

“Then enlighten me,” I chided back. “Make me less ignorant.”

“Fine,” the boy slammed his walking stick down in the air. “Open your eyes.”

It was just a simple command. But it changed everything.

The moment the walking stick hit the hypothetical ground, I felt something well up inside of me. Something that I hadn’t known was there, but felt familiar, a part of me. It was a strange feeling, that felt a bit like a burp coming up your throat. But at the same time slower, warmer, with a consistency like honey.

It also felt a bit like when I was forced to go along with story mode, but this time, it was all me. Me pulling the strings from the outside, an out of body experience. I felt another presence alongside the feeling, probably the kid’s, guiding the feeling up from my sternum. The feeling went into my eyes, and, like a veil being brushed aside, I could see.

I still saw the void, and the timer, yes, but I was also seeing on a different plane of existence. Like a sixth sense, if you will. In this other plane, I was standing on a beach of silver sand, a similarly silvery sea coming in and out with the tide. It’d wash up on the beach and then slide back down, leaving brilliant stars in its wake.

I squinted out across the silver sea to see shapes in the distance. They seemed to be little islands dotting the surface of the ocean. Some were closer, some were farther away. Was this an archipelago of sorts? I couldn’t see how far the series of islands stretched, as they went on into the horizon and beyond.

The beach I was standing on seemed to be a small cape, a section of promontory jutting out into the silver sea. Turning, I could see the mainland behind me, in the form of an island similar to those other ones across the sea. Except something was off about this island. Instead of a smooth beach, it seemed to consist of countless promontories, giving the coastline a sort of sunburst shape.

“Those are the offshoot worlds,” said the boy, all the way in the void plane, pointing at the prongs of the sunburst coastline. “That’s the mainland. The world you came from.”

He pointed at the centre of the island.

The world I came from. Home.

The me on the island plane began to take a step forwards, and another and another, till I was half jogging across the silver sand. The distance I covered was unnatural, the mainland growing closer and closer with each step. My vision in the void plane wavered, and I began to see vague shapes of something. A white ceiling, an IV drip, a big, clunky machine with a bouncing red line down the centre…

Then, at the very edge where the cape smoothed out to join the mainland, I was stopped. I pressed my hands against the air, finding my fingers stopped by a smooth surface. I pounded at the invisible wall, then started to kick it, hoping that it’d give way. The hospital room in my other senses was so close, so vivid, so real. It was like I was below the water and it was above, with nothing but a thin layer separating us. But I couldn’t break through. It just wouldn’t let me.

“That’s enough,” said the boy, and I felt his presence retract. Almost immediately, the feeling began to fade, and along with it my sixth sense. The image of the silver beach on the silver sea crumbled away like sand.

I felt like I was sinking. Away from the image of the hospital room and the IV drip, away from the surface of the water. Down and down. All the way back into the depths.

No, no wait.

I tried to conjure up that feeling again, but to no avail. It refused my call. I just kept sinking, and sinking, and sinking…

Then I was back. There was no silver sea. There was no hospital room. Just me, the void, the timer, and the boy.

“Why did you stop?” I whirled around to face the boy, back to being a cloud of red smoke again. “I was so close!”

“You weren’t close at all,” the boy shook his head. “You’d have to break through to be anywhere near the real world.”

“Then help me break through it. You can do that, can’t you?” I then remembered his thing about not interfering. “Or… at least do the seeing thing again, so I can break through myself.”

The boy said nothing.

“Please.”

To my disappointment, he shook his head.

“I’ve already shown you enough. You should find your own way from now on.”

He turned and began to walk away. With each step, his visage grew blurrier and blurrier, like paint being washed away by the rain.

“Wait!” I called and reached out to hold him back, but having no hands, I couldn’t do that. “WAIT! DAMNIT WAIT!”

The black of his coat melded with the black of the void, and then he was gone.

“ARGHH!” I shouted out into the emptiness, followed by a string of undignified curses. “DAMNIT!”

A way back home. Slipped through my fingers just like that! If I’d grovelled, would he have stayed? And showed me the right way back? Where had he gone, anyway? There was nowhere to go!

I steeled myself.

Fine. If the kid wouldn’t help me, I’d do it myself.

I settled myself as best a cloud of red smoke could, and began to recall the feeling, trying to reproduce what had happened just a moment ago.

I tried, again, and again. At some points, I’d feel as if something was happening, as if that third eye was opening. As if I could see the hospital room again. But then I’d slip, and the vision would fade, leaving me back in the dark.

Again, and again, and again. Sometimes trying on my own, sometimes shouting for the boy who’d taunted me with hope to come back.

But he never returned.