Blues Traveler

Archie woke up in a jolt! He was having that dream again, and this time it was getting more and more vivid! He can recognize the faces of these characters, but it was obvious he had never seen them before. Whatever it was, he hoped that these useless dreams would stop.

He took a good look at his surroundings, where his room was a clutter mess with all the medical textbooks and notebooks scattered everywhere across the floor. He then slowly placed his palm on his chest as his sweat trickled all over his head, sweating profusely from his unusual dream.

Archie checked his watch. "The f***!" Archie yelled to see it was half past seven; he needed to be at the train station at the latest by eight to catch the train that leaves at a quarter past eight. His biochemistry exams will start at nine thirty in the morning!

"F***! F***! F***!" Archie berated himself, as he only had less than half an hour to prepare for his medical practical exams. He felt off his bed and clumsily ran to the showers, inches away from falling on the bathroom sink. He cussed again while straightening his body, grabbed his toothbrush and hastily squeezed a large chunk of toothpaste into his mouth, stuck his toothbrush in his mouth and rushed towards the shower. He then quickly started to bathe, using one hand to scrub his body with shower gel while simultaneously using another to brush his teeth.

As soon as he got dressed, Archie took all his necessities, such as his ID, student ID, stationery, and scientific calculators, and dashed out of the room and went downstairs to exit and catch the train. Upon catching a fleeting sight of him departing, his grandfather let out a piercing cry.

"Breakfast, you Bald buffoon! You can't sit for the exam with an empty stomach!" Grandpa screamed at the top of his lungs, causing him to cough.

"I am running behind schedule, pops! I cannot afford to eat now!" Archie prepared to depart by donning his roller skates. He managed to snag a bag of Chinese buns that had been hurled at his direction with such force, just in time for him to catch them with one hand. He tossed them in his backpack.

"Take these and eat them on the train; there is a bottle of water in there too. Crazy punk, how many times do I have to tell you to go to sleep early?"

"Young people surely never listen, and he is studying to be a doctor, for crying out loud, and about to advise people to take care of their health. What a hypocrite! To think anyone will come and visit this crazy nut!" Grandpa continued to grumble grumpily.

"Ah-huh, ah-huh." Archie nodded in agreement with his grandfather in a perfunctory manner.

He glanced back once more, stared at the ancestral alter from the entrance door, and quickly took a quick bow of respect before he took off.

Archie hastily rollerbladed his way out of the suburbs through traffic to the train station. He felt a surge of energy as he watched a figure similar to himself on rollerblades dash through the city, treating the concrete jungle as his personal racetrack. He was determined to do better as he sprinted across the pavement.

With precision and grace, he weaved through the intricate web of the city as he navigated through the congested traffic; his movements were fluid with deft acceleration and control. Each swish of his blades against the pavement was a testament to his skill, propelling him forward with the kind of velocity that blurred the lines between boldness and recklessness.

The titans of city transportation became mere obstacles in this high-stakes game of agility. The buses and cars were nothing more than roadblocks. Archie dodged between the vehicles with barely a hair's breadth to spare. The symphony of honks and screeches marked his passage.

Traffic officers were furious to catch that hooligan, namely Archie, rollerblading in the middle of the road, disrupting traffic and causing incidents of emergency breaks that narrowly created a chain reaction accident.

The asphalt beneath his wheel was alive with the trail as he raced against time to catch the train a quarter past eight. He sprinted through with great velocity as the surrounding air charged with the electric buzz of his audacious speed.

As he sped past them in the blink of an eye, the pedestrians turned their heads, their expressions mixed with astonishment and consternation. Archie zipped past them in a flash. The urban comet left a trail of awe as he navigated the bustling sidewalks with acrobatic finesse.

The train station loomed ahead; its clock was ticking, counting down to the final leg of his journey. With the finish line in sight, he passed through the automatic ticket gate with a safety vault over it and tapped his MetroCard on the reader to activate it, followed by the beep that allowed him through.

As Archie's rollerblades came to a halt at the edge of the platform, the sight of the train pulling into the station calmed his racing heart. The cacophony of the city faded into the background as the world finally appeared to slow down, and his own heartbeat took its place. The timing was impeccable; his high-speed dash through the city had paid off, allowing him to arrive just as the door slid open with a welcoming hiss.

Archie grinned as if he had gotten away with it again. The relief washed over him was palpable, a mix of triumph and a sweet release of tension as he stepped forward, ready to embark on the familiar journey to his university. The thought of sitting for the exams later made him scowl at the future prospect. He took out his phone to swipe through the notes that he had saved on his device.

However, the moment his foot crossed the threshold of the train, reality twisted into the unimaginable. The mundane scene of the train station dissolved into an ethereal void. Colors and lights swirled around him in a kaleidoscope of magic, the physics of his world unraveling as if pulled apart by unseen forces.

Archie felt as though he was being drawn through a vortex, catapulted from the familiar confines of the train into the vast unknown, followed by a sensation both exhilarating and disorienting, where time and space lost all their definition.

The brilliant, bright lights that encircled him were so intense and glaring that he could barely keep his eyes open against their blinding flicker. His vision blurred, not just from the visual speed of lights but also from the surrounding noise that kept buzzing in his ears, which contributed to his sensory overload. It was a crossover of a magnitude he had never experienced—not that he understood the definition of crossover that was far beyond the scope of any dream, but from the sheer impossibility of what was happening.

"Dream!" Archie thought. "No!"

Then, as suddenly as it all began, the tumultuous whirlwind ceased, and Archie was thrust into a heart-stopping freefall. The ground rose up to meet him from an alien sky. The world below was unfolding like a bizarre and magnificent tapestry. The acceleration was unlike anything he could imagine and far surpassed the adrenaline-fueled race against the city traffic that he had previously encountered.

However, in this moment, there were no brakes to pull, no swift maneuvers to execute—only the relentless pull of gravity as he plummeted towards an unknown fate. He yelled. "F***cccccckkkkkkkk!!!!!" As his tears streamed from the corners of his eyes, wrenched free by the force of the wind that howled past his face,. It was a scream of pure, unadulterated fear and exhilaration that tore from his throat, a primal acknowledgement of his helplessness in the face of this incomprehensible descent.