Forty

She must choose the door she knows she is truly entitled to: fear or courage?

Which of the two will usher in her new virtual life?

On her fingers and toes she feels something prickly; as if her body knows something she does not.

Either way, she puts both hands together next to the right half of the basement, where the latent fear lies because Luz is scared to death (if she had lied she would find the experience worse, but Luz is the type that loves to let you know she is afraid) and it is not literal at all.

"What do you mean, scared to death is not a literal expression?"

Ignoring the question, a force jerks her to the right and envelops her with the darkness of both halves. Luz despairs not because of the darkness (she is no longer a novice); but because this is a game and she doesn't know what to expect, she just loves her ways.

Her uncertainty only lasts a few seconds, because the darkness uncovers her and she observes that she is flying over several meters high with black wings that get smaller and smaller as the seconds go by.

"You meant I'm going to blow my head off with the door of fear what else could be worse?"

His cheeks flap like little wings and; truth be told, those are the only wings he has left now that the black wings have just disappeared.

There are clouds everywhere, Luz touches one of them hoping it will help her with something and boy does it. She doesn't even have time to complain because the cloud, the one that has stolen her black wings, needs something else from her besides her conscience and a false blood, so to speak.

Before she asks, I will say that birds love the sky and that basement chick is all grown up.

Remember the hens and roosters of the woods at the camp that never got to be camp (or only was for a day)?

Well, all those birds are daughters of the basement chick as well as all the beings that exist in this new virtual world. The great chick has something similar to the blood of each of the beings existing in this new imaginary land.

This new false blood is made up of the trail of red roses that appeared from the red worm rider on the pigeon that was once a chick and is now the great chick.

But returning to the contemporary action, the cloud is seeking to fill it with this false blood and transform it into the character that corresponds to it in order to begin the game of fantastic reality.

It is not only a question of the new blood being manufactured but also of Luz accepting it or she will not stop descending. Some accepted it quite quickly; like the ones she saw bleeding in the forest.

The fierce wind rolls it through the air as if it were a wave that wants to scare humans away from the sea because they have heaven and earth; But they are too foolish to notice.

I mock and judge... I'm critical and funny.

What's so bad about that for me?

Nothing I can tell you right now, I guess Lucifer wants you to find out with our protagonist Luz who keeps complaining when she should be grateful that I'm the one explaining the mechanics of the game and not someone else of dubious pretensions or provenance.

Anyway, dealing with ungrateful people is nothing new for me; so I don't hold grudges at all because the one who gets angry loses and I think that's what Lucifer is looking for but whether he gets it depends only on me.

Going back to Luz's peaceful head crack, she wishes her mother was by her side to give her advice; even if it is to scold her, even if she pulls her cheeks and Luz has to pretend that it hurts before her brothers so that later they do not say that her mother has preferences for her eldest daughter.

And, as they say, with words man overcomes animals and everything she tells you about her mother is the same thing she has said out loud, even with the difficulty of the wind that stirs her cheeks and feels like a whip of rawness on her skin.

To be able to utter a single word in the face of fear means that not even fear can paralyze her imagination, and with this she has always considered herself shielded from the deepest sadness.

Just these clouds are not exactly clouds, nor is this the sky. These clouds eat human words and fulfill desires through the power of words... better to be explained by another....

"Hello? remember me? I'm your virtual guide".

Luz screams with all her might and feels her lungs want to hit something they can't see; as if they were useless boxing gloves because that invisible thing still invades all the organs lying sheltered behind her back.

It reaches her mouth and as the wind wears away the rocks, this invisible being detaches tiny fragments of Luz's teeth because these are the "fairy dust" of the virtual guide.

Yes, the guide is a fairy, but the only thing similar to the Disney fairies is that they both need fairy dust (even if it is white). What scares Luz; besides thinking that she will lose her teeth, is that the fairy has a half split head, wounds on her arms, raccoon eyes and skin paler than a vampire's (maybe I'm exaggerating a little).

"Is she a zombie fairy?"

"Don't talk like I'm not here."

Replies the fairy flashing a smile as forced as it is macabre.

"Whenever you find yourself in trouble down here I'll come to help you.

Yes, I know, what do you mean down here?

This is the land where all the characters of this world are born because you think you keep screaming; you talk and scream, you scream like a baby does at birth." Luz hardly understood and can assimilate some of what the zombie fairy is talking about, or maybe she doesn't want to understand. The horror is consuming her reason; but the fairy's job is precisely that this deterioration of consciousness does not occur.

However, she talks and talks while pulling his cheeks; as a mother does when she sees that her newborn child has too much on that side of the face, because this fairy doesn't have the wings you've seen in the cartoons either; she needs to move her arms around Luz's wings: the cheeks of our protagonist.

Yes, those wings (cheeks) are for both of them in this game. I understand that it may seem that the fairy instead of a help looks like a dead weight, although she is, she's a zombie.

The fairy doesn't answer me because she doesn't want to break the intimate connection she is having with Luz.

I wonder if Luz breaking her head would break their connection because the fairy doesn't seem to care much?

The fairy says they fly but they both seem to fall into unknown territory.

Someone explain to me the logic of this game?

Anyway, continuing with the guide, the wounds on the fairy's head are the ones that receive the tooth fragments or white fairy dust, if you prefer to call it that way; and just as the candle that brings warmth and color to our sight is of an orange tone when it is produced in the dimension of the earth where most humans live, the red wound uses the white dust and creates a pink fire.

This is possible because, although they look like simple wounds; they are not, the fairy on the head has red rays that are some of the branches of the tree in the garden where it rests after acting as dead weight for each new character in the game.

Precisely these wounds or red rays burn with the pink fire they just produced. The same that Luz sees in the form of long pink fingers for each wound on his head. She counts ten wounds...

"Hadn't my mom told me that she dreamt that her fingers had been cut off?"

At that very moment the wounds illuminated by the pink fire move across the fairy's face until they pass through her arms and reach Luz's cheeks like her mother's fingers to awaken her from a deep sleep.

Although a wet dog's breath is more effective to wake up a sleepy girl, don't you think?

Have you ever wondered: Where did the wet dog smell that was tormenting me go?

Separating the wet dog from me has caused her to possess a consciousness, so to speak, on probation because I; representing the sexy and curious inside her, was always the little voice inside her head.

How do Luz and I know that at this very moment?

Because the game has brought us to a place I know too well and the fairy knows that here Luz started to believe that we cats are heroes, we are cunning... we are vampire hunters.