"This tastes good," I munched down the cookie. The chocolate quickly melted in my mouth. I took hold of the glass of milk and took a sip, allowing the taste of the drink to coat my tongue and lips. "It's been too long since I had one."

"Yeah," my son mumbled between bites. His milk glass was already half empty. So was the plate which now lacked half of the cookies. I was right, I smiled, very much amused. John couldn't keep his hands off them before I came back.

"So you met Mom then?" He suddenly asked me. I stopped chewing the food and looked at him. But John was not looking at me in the eye. Instead he was staring at the wall in front of him.

"I did," I admitted truthfully. "We had a long conversation about what happened to us, then she told me she would begin your studies soon. That it's been too long since you last opened a book." I looked to my right where a bookcase lay, filled with books mostly belonging to his school. "Aren't you excited, John?"

"Not really," but my son replied, taking another cookie from the metal tray and biting onto it. "What's the use? I'm not going to school anyway."

"Who told you that?" I put down the cookie and asked him. "And that doesn't mean who can't study John. You always liked to read, so why stop? Think of this as an extended vacation until your dad figures something out."

"But it wouldn't matter Dad," he protested. "I was the first to wake, remember? Mom told you that, didn't she? So you must know by now that I'm aware of what happened to us and how we ended up here?"

"And how did we end up here?" I couldn't help but ask. Meg had told me she recalled nothing other than blackness after our car crashed. She woke up soon after in the bar, massaging her head lIke she had fallen asleep on the floor, piss poor drunk. But how exactly did she end up here, other than the Dungeon Committee having some part to play in it, I had no other clue.

"It was the man in black," John said, taking in another bite of the cookie. "He came to us after you pushed me out of the burning car. I was bleeding and hurt, so I couldn't see the face properly, but he was the one who talked to you while you were lying on the road, and the next thing I remember, I was waking up here, in this room."

Man in black. I tried to keep my emotions steady and calm, not react too abruptly lest I allowed the dread I was feeling to show. "And what did this man in black look like?"

"He was bald and had sunglasses over his eyes. I remember finding it really weird, seeing someone wearing sunglasses at night, that too when it was raining so hard outside," John took a sip of the milk. "The man wore a black shirt with a tie and I remember him looking at his watch often."

"Okay," It certainly wasn't. I let out a breath, my thoughts running a thousand miles per hour. Was he the cleaner crew the woman told me about? It had to be. Though the description did leave something more to be desired. "Are you sure you aren't confusing that with the movie we watched the week before? A movie with similarly dressed men…"

The look John gave me was much like how my wife would look at me when I said something exceedingly stupid. "Fine, fine," I raised my hands in defeat. "I believe you. But I've to ask the woman more about it. You saw me talking to him, didn't you?"

"I did. It was raining, you were lying on the road when the man took a knee beside you. I saw both of you whispering to each other for a while then…" he shrugged. "I don't remember."

I frowned. It seemed I had failed to ask the woman from the Dungeon Committee some very important questions. I'll remedy that once I return.

So for a while, both of us didn't talk. Busy as we were in our thoughts and cookies. After spending some time with my wife, I had bid her adieu and arrived here. The door which had vanished after I passed through it before, seemingly reappeared as if it had never left me. A knock followed by turning of the doorknob, and here I was sitting on my son's bed, eating cookies and milk.

I looked around.

When I came here for the first time, my memories still eluded me. So I was left feeling quite confused as to whose room it was. But after discovering my Core, most of my memories came back, allowing me to remember that this belonged to my son.

The same white walls I and Meg had painted a couple of years ago. The bookshelves I remember building a month back. The Disney bedsheet I recalled buying online as a gift, because I couldn't take John to Disneyland. The memories were slowly coming back to me, but there were still quite a few holes in them. Like the elusive man in black my son was talking about. I didn't remember ever speaking to such a person. And then there were circumstances surrounding our car after it crashed. What happened next?

"You said I helped you get out of the car?" I asked him, suddenly. John's earlier words brought forth some uncomfortable thoughts in my mind, so I couldn't stop my lips from speaking out. "Where was your mother at that time?" And just as I uttered those words, I blinked, stupefied by my own stupidity. Idiot how could ask this—

"She was still in the car," John said softly. I whipped my head around to look at him. "You were trying to pull open the car doors but they were too dented and you were bleeding. I don't remember hearing Mum's voice while you were at it. I don't remember hearing much of anything really. Just the feel of rain falling on my face and then...blackness."

It took a while before I said anything. The words clogged my throat. So I did the only thing I could do and brought my son closer to my chest and hugged him. John came willingly. God, no wonder he seems so mature. Seeing his Mum and Dad nearly die in front of his eyes would do that to him. "How long were you awake John, after the accident and before your Mum was awake?"

He left the half-eaten cookie on the plate and buried his face deeper into my chest. My son wasn't crying but I could feel his laboured breaths, rise up and fall, against my chest. "A while," his voice was so soft I wouldn't have heard it, if my head wasn't so close to his face. "I thought it was a bad dream when I woke up here, but as I tried to open the door to get out, they wouldn't budge and I knew somehow this wasn't a nightmare, but reality. So after that, I had to wait before Mum finally came here and opened the door," he glanced at the side entrance through which I had left the room before. "After talking to her, I decided to go looking for you."

"Why you? Not that I'm complaining," I quickly amended. "I'm very happy that you did so, but you were away I didn't have my memories. So why John?"

"Because I wanted to see you." And that was all the answer a father needed to feel both happy and miserable at the same time.

As John spoke, I could do nothing but hug him close. There were still a lot of questions I needed the answers to. Like how did both John and Meg know so much about the Dungeon? Who told them all lf that? How did John know where to look for me when I didn't even know my name?

I had so many questions, I didn't have the answers to. But soon after getting my memories, I decided not to ask them. Not my wife or my son. There was a place and time for everything but this wasn't the one. The trauma of it all was still too raw.

So we both sat there in silence, hugging each other, the cookies laid to the side forgotten. I held onto my son like a lifeline, till it was time to leave and return to the Dungeon proper.

I might not have been able to ask Meg and John the questions I desperately wanted the answers to. But the same was not applicable to the woman from the Dungeon Committee. She still had a lot of answering to do

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