4 Miserable Comedy - 4
[Observer]
The train ride was uneventful. No strange dreams or apparitions past noon. The trip was four hours, and the rough rumbling lulled Seth off to sleep towards the end of the third hour. He would wake back up when it slowed for the only stop it was making on its lonely journey to Ilus.
The other students had apparently already gotten to the school 2 weeks earlier. He was a straggler, mostly due to his late registration, and thus the first day of school would be tomorrow, giving him just enough time to not unpack.
As that thought flashed through his head, an hour into the trip, his mind flashed to his bags for the thousandth time in the past ten minutes. He glanced back over at them.
His packing had been erratic and disorganized. He'd thrown in anything he'd think he wanted. A journal, with a packed pencil case, just in case he wanted to write something old-school. A laptop, of course, about five years old but in working condition. A couple of casual clothes, his most comfortable, but the school mentioned providing a uniform in the dorms, so they were only there to give him something to wear outside of class. Three sets of cards, as if two backup sets were necessary. A set of dice. A handful of coins. A sizable roll of bills, held together by two different color rubber bands, one blue and one light brown. His own toothbrush, so that he could wean himself into the new ones if they felt irritating. That might've been why his suitcases had been so messy, and why he'd brought two.
He'd also brought his old pillow, an old water bottle, a couple of his favorite books, some sunscreen and lotion and lip balm that he'd been trying to get used to using, and two flashlights that he was used to using on trips. Not that most of those would get any use.
He was comfortable with most of these, which was definitely an upside.
Of course, Seth still worried. He didn't know what things were like at Ilus. The chance, to him, was extremely prominent that there would be an unspoken class system in place, and that he'd be forced into becoming either a bully or a footstool. He'd already decided to present himself as brash and unshakeable, but with that kind of plan, if he lost his nerve early, they'd rip him apart. No, he'd need to beat them before they beat him.
"But what if that makes you conspicuous? What if that makes you a target?" a voice in his head cried out.
Thus the war in his mind would start again.
Three hours into Seth's desperate battle with his worries, he drifted off.
- - -
[Observer]
The train doors rattled open. Seth, still half-asleep, walked out slowly, his jacket messy and his clothes wrinkled. His black hair was a bird's nest, and his near-black eyes were reddened more than usual, the backlash from his insomnia too tyrannical for his extra three hours to suppress.
The station looked about the same as the one he'd boarded from. A room with a high ceiling, several wooden benches arranged in a set of lines, and a clock on the wall reading 4:26 PM.
What was missing, he noticed, was the ticket window, vending machine, bathroom, and water fountain. This place was a bare-bones setup to be sure.
Trudging in between the sets of seats, the bright sun outside the open wall indicated that the path to Ilus would be an uphill dirt road. Seth groaned audibly, cursing under his breath faced with this new obstacle.
Then, as he stepped out onto the beginning of a massive trek, he looked up towards the top.
His first thought was, "Holy shit, those are huge."
- - -
[Seth Lee]
Holy shit, those are huge.
Said that when I saw it, and now it's fuckin' echoing in my head. Jesus, Mary, Joseph, and my fucking toes that is one stupid fucking line.
Was almost tempted to say "That's what your mom said to me last night" to myself. Would've been pretty fucking stupid, considering how that works if you just think.
Seriously, though, what the fuck? Why do they need buildings that big? This is a school, not a fuck-off museum.
- - -
[Observer]
This is indeed a school as opposed to a fuck-off museum.
The buildings were divided into two sets of constructions, both massive, joined by a beautiful road lined with trees.
On one end, massive, archaic constructions that looked like holdovers from the roaring 20s stretched to the sky, as old as they were pristine, each painted a different subtle hue.
The other held a billionaire's fantasy for a city of tomorrow, an angular mass of corners and spirals, made of harsh metal, glass, and white stone.
The entire setup wrapped around the face of the mountain, and Seth remarked inwardly that he'd never seen anything that would've shown up on a map more.
The majesty faded quickly, though, and Seth was only more conscious of the long climb to these buildings now. As if insult on injury wasn't enough, this was shaping up to be a two hour climb with sparse tree cover, to the middle of the road leading from the dorms to the school.
He'd be staying in the dark brown building, which had been given no other name for him to christen it, giving him the opportunity to call it the "dark shit building".
"I'm gonna hate this so much," he groaned, already anticipating the soreness of his legs. He could see why the other kids had arrived early.
- - -
[Observer]
He had indeed hated the climb very much.
Now at the road he'd seen in the brochure, he was struck by how empty it was. He'd expected to see at least a couple of students lounging in the shade, having a picnic, but there was nothing.
The trend didn't stop when he worked his way over to his new dorm, where not a single person was in the halls. His room number was on an otherwise featureless ID Card, which carried a small, sleek arrow, his full name, several white lines below it, and "818", meaning the 18th dorm on the 8th floor, on a black background. In his journey there, through the elevator, ground floor, and past 17 other rooms to reach 818, nobody else had been there.
There were no signs of life in his dorm, either. He had even been assigned a specific bunk by the school, which he had tested by pushing on the mattress. Comfy. It was the lower bunk in a one of the rooms, the furthest to the back left on a corridor inside lined with four rooms. Two rooms on the left, two rooms on the right. He was in the second quadrant, and only one other bunk was with him. A simple bedside table with two drawers had been provided for him, with two desks on other walls of the room, lamps and drawers and all. He didn't bother to check his closet, but assumed that clothes would be waiting for him the next morning. Everything there was so bland, new, clean, and white that he figured it would make no sense for them to be anywhere else.
He pulled out his phone from his pocket. He was going to listen to some music, relax a little, but when he pushed the power button, nothing happened.
"Must be dead," he said aloud, filling the silence.
Pulling out a charger cord and adapter, he spent some time searching for an outlet, finding one next to his bunk between it and the wall, giving him an awkward task in placement that required a little work and a lot of frustrated cursing. Plugging it in didn't bring up any indication that it was recovering from low battery, but he figured he would wake up to find it fully charged. He hadn't brought an alarm clock and had intended to use his phone, but he assumed that either his roommates would wake him up, or the sun would.
Talking about waking up, he was getting very tired. The day had taken a lot out of him on top of the little sleep he'd had the previous night, and he felt even more fatigued than he thought he would now that the rush he'd gotten from finishing that climb had fully worn off. After a quick shower, he slumped onto bed, resolving to wait a second longer, to see if anybody else would arrive before he would go to sleep.
As he drifted off to a world of dreams, that resolve vanished.
Bit by bit, he began vanishing as well.
- - -
[Observer]
Almost nobody was on the campus of Ilus Academy. Hawrtfull, Colorado was the highest up collective of people on the entire mountain where the campus was based. The only person there at 8:05 PM was Seth Lee, drooling onto his mattress, two and a half hours into a great nap.
Unbeknownst to him, the entire room around him was flickering. Objects were warping, expanding, and shrinking wildly, as if they were being swallowed by the air around them. Seth's bags rattled, his phone rising into the air from the floor where he'd dropped it.
The world itself was twisting and turning, rising and falling, as light and darkness began to lose meaning in a spiral that was sucking in the space around it, destroying time as well.
Then, everything inside of Seth Lee's room in the 18th dorm on the 8th floor of the dark brown building at Ilus Academy vanished.
A fresh set of furniture, consisting of two bunks, a bedside table, two desks, and two lamps, popped into existence where the old had been. It was exactly identical to the sets in every other room in the dorm, which was exactly identical to every other dorm in the building, which was exactly identical to every building in the dorms.
And now, everything was extra identical, because the one person, the one imperfection there, had disappeared, taking everything he had with him.
