Crisis Part Five

January 7th, 2015.

"Well, this is different."

Anders stood up, squinting his eyes at the purple haze that shifted and waltzed around him. He wasn't in Kansas anymore. Below his feet was a floating, kaleidoscopic mush of everything he'd ever seen, suspended below through a glass-bottom world. Anders saw the past beget the present, which beget many possible futures, spilling out of the bowl of what was and could have been.

Actually, he thought, scratch the almost. This is surreal.

As he floated in the violet void, the elementary school teachers casually circled through the childhood pets, all mashed together into a single mass of paws, ears, and one compiled face embodying cute friendliness. It was panting at him, and the pants were asking for his math homework.

Anders closed his eyes, and rubbed them.

When he opened them, the panting elementary pup had gone on its way, and he was sitting down. It was a summers day, and the kitchen window was wearing every window-shade and drawstring he'd ever seen on them. A titanic figure, which reminded him of Mom, stood at the stove, stretching infinitely into the sky while still standing below the roof.

She was cooking pancakes.

Somewhere, a voice called out to him, hushed below the fluttering of The Mother's apron.

Anders squinted at the sound. "What?"

"… get… up…"

"What?"

"Get out of this! Get up!"

Before the next "W" could exit his lips, Anders spasmed, and retched. He wasn't in any of those places.

Instead, he was lying on his back, below a finitely stretching white room, terminating in an infinitely stretching white nothing. He coughed, and rolled on his side. His eyes watered at the bright nothing going on forever.

"You stupid, stupid moron. What the hell do you think you're doing."

That sounded familiar. Anders craned his neck up, and saw the man, The Target, kneeling over him, looking equal parts annoyed, concerned, and hungry.

"Who… and, what's the hells going on?" Anders sputtered, oafishly pawing at The Target's blurry form.

"Robert. But that's not important. Something's going on, and I don't know what it is. You probably don't know either, I'm guessing." he stood up, surveying his surroundings. In Ander's vision, he disappeared into another blurry mass among the whiteness.

"I… give me a minute, mom…" Anders coughed, and rose to a sitting position. His face remained trained on the ground.

"Okay so… you'll need a minute, then we'll have to go through… can we go through, though? It's out there, and I've no idea what they are…"

"What's out there?"

Robert paused. "I'll show you."


Crouched behind one of hundreds of windowpanes, the two men looked into a possible past.

Anders spoke first "What are they?"

Before them, many miles away, tearing through a farm that might've been built, had the mortgage worked out and the boy come home, was a terrible, windmill of thread. Silver lighting bounced of its many twisting parts, as they stomped silently through the hopes of some forgotten farmer. Occasionally, a note would sound, not sweet or sour, but there, present, notifying this non-world of its existence.

Robert shook his head. "I've no idea. They might be giants, or they might be something else. Whatever they are, they're not supposed to be here."

Anders looked in closer. "I've never seen anything like it. They're… really big fellahs, aren't they?"

"Biggest things I've ever seen. They just show up, and then they blow everything away."

Anders ears twitched. "Any reason behind the music, or is that just… something they do?"

"I've no idea. Just something it does."

Anders stood up, looking around and stretching. "So, they're a problem for getting around in here, then?"

Robert joined him, and nodded. "Usually, well, awhile ago, I could just come in here and go as I pleased."

Anders nodded, and looked past Robert. "How, uh, did you do that, exactly?"

"I'm not telling you everything. I'd like to be getting away from you lot at the end of this."

"Fine, then. What's the problem with just leaving?"

Robert sighed. "They've got those… tendrils, or tentacles, or branches or whatever, they've got them stretched out to most ways out of the ways. We'd have to find another way to go, if we were to go anywhere."

"So, where are we to go, then?"

"Uhm… I guess we could go through your memories?"

"What?"

"I've mostly traveled through what could've been for me, going through childhood and such. But that's mostly blocked up now, they've got all inside what could've been me. But you're fresh here, they don't know you."

"Can you… explain that in a different way?"

"Basically… this ways works on, uh, the person inside it. It's easy to get access to your own past, use it to make your way to the present. It'd be easier for you, because we can find the ways through most of your past. In my past… it's been infiltrated by these things. As are a lot of folks."

"That's not good, I take it."

"No, it's pretty much the pits."

Anders sniffed, and looked around. "So, where do we start?"

Robert shrugged. "We find a panel that looks familiar, and we hop inside. If we can find an exit from there, we take it, and then we go our separate ways."

"Separate ways. Got it."