Typewriter

[VOLUME 1: Laws of Order]

Sometimes, I wonder to myself, if I hadn't picked that thing up, would things be different somehow? Will I get my happy ending too?

I am Fidel Asuncion Lamora, or at least I used to be. I go by the name Inigo now.

One cloudy afternoon, I saw a typewriter lying innocently on the sidewalk on my way home from school.

I couldn't speak for everyone else, but to me, it screamed "abandoned" in every language I've ever known, and I just knew I had to bring it with me, no matter what.

As a wannabe novelist, I had always longed to have a typewriter of my own, but those machines were just so darn expensive. So finding one for free was like hitting the jackpot, right? Well, sadly, no. And you will know why in a bit.

I remember skipping to my house, a wide grin plastered across my face. I was just so happy and excited. I could hardly wait to try it out. The enthusiast in me immediately knew that it was an older model with its bulky metal frame with a large carriage for holding the paper. The keyboard had round, raised keys in a QWERTY layout that made distinctive clicking sounds when pressed.

"You sure that ain't haunted?" my brother humored me as he watched me change the ribbon. Seven days had passed since I brought it home.

"Well, if it's haunted, at least it'll ghostwrite my novel for me."

"Let's hope it's a good editor then."

There was a knock on the door before the knob twisted and the door opened. It was our youngest. He brought a liter of coke and some chips, and hung out in my bedroom too, while I started to type the first chapter of my novel. Had I known what would happen next, I wouldn't have written that story at all. I wouldn't have picked that accursed thing at all. Should have left it there on the sidewalk. It remains my greatest regret to this day.

My first chapter somehow ended up being about a recurring dream that I had for seven consecutive nights. It followed the life of a pitiful slum boy named Inigo. I was like a ghost, unable to interact with anybody. It was a weird experience. Lucid dreaming in an invisible state while forcing me to follow only one character and only showing bits of the world the said character lives in.

In this dream, Inigo had an older sister who was secretly an assassin's apprentice. I wasn't certain yet but she seemed to be missing some of her memories. There were also a few inconsistencies with these two. Like say, they lived in the slums and were rat poor, but somehow, they had expensive pairs of clothes, Inigo was going to a prestigious school, and was acquainted with certain influential families.

It always ended with Inigo having eye-to-eye contact with the criminal who was about to be hanged for the attempted murder of the crown prince, his face obscured by what seemed like a TV static. Strangely, the criminal seemed to be looking directly at me. And every time, I would wake up drenched in sweat.

You could say the dream made quite an impression on me. The world was so detailed, as though crafted by an author with OCD. The characters, the conflicts, everything... It was so detailed, it left me speechless every time. Not that I'd explored it to its totality. After all, I'd only seen bits of them.

I should have been suspicious. I mean, dreaming of the same thing over and over since bringing home a random typewriter was too much to be called a coincidence, don't you think? But I ignored it and brushed it off as some rare psychological phenomenon.

Anyway, while I continued to write, my brothers were playing MLBB1 in the background, trolling their teammates, spamming the recall button... It was unknown when I fell asleep, but the moment I woke up, my brothers were no longer there. No, I think it's more accurate to say that "I" was no longer there instead of them. They never disappeared. It was just me. I was "deleted" out of my own world. The how was unknown.

First, a harsh ray of sunlight hit my face, making me squint. Then my nose was immediately assaulted by this funky, musty smell, like the air in a room that hadn't been aired out for a while, or a pile of unwashed laundry that had been sitting around for way too long.

'How delightful,' I thought, sarcastically. A piercing beam of sunlight combined with the repugnant stench of neglect and laziness. Just what I needed to start my day off right.

It wasn't long until I found these things weird. My room may be small, but it had never smelled this awful before. I made a habit of always cleaning first thing in the morning.

So I immediately opened my eyes and was given the greatest shock of my life.

"This… isn't my room?" I muttered in a shaky voice. I suspected I was kidnapped while I was asleep, but then I discovered the place to be so familiar. Very, very familiar. But I kept denying it inside my head.

A tiny house with a hard, wooden floor with terrible repair patches in multiple spots, too tiny to be called a house at all. Over me was this smelly blanket of some sort, made of random fabric scraps badly sewn together. 

Just as my head started to clear up, the floorboard creaked, indicating that someone was approaching. Reacting quickly, I pushed myself up, tossed the smelly blanket aside, and assumed a lousy fighting stance. I still didn't know how to fight at this point.

My eyes widened as I saw the person walking towards me.

My pupils trembled in disbelief. My mouth opened and closed. "Ar... Arkira?" I blurted out.

She was a woman with dark, long hair, cinnamon-colored eyes, a button nose, and thin lips. Standing at five feet six inches, slightly on the thinner side due to poverty, she was the older sister of Inigo—the exact one in my recurring dreams.

My thoughts trailed off, my mind went blank.

"I… yeah. Work. D-Didn't you have work?" I stammered, squeezing my hands tightly, trembling as my nails nearly dug into the flesh of my palms. It hurt. Alarm bells started ringing inside my head, one by one. "Alone. I—I wanna be alone."

Arkira gave me a strange look, but eventually shrugged. "Well, if you say so," she told me. "I'll be late tonight. Don't wait for me. Help yourself in the kitchen."

As she closed the door and left, I caught a glimpse of my reflection in the broken piece of mirror on the wall. I stared at it in shock. Instead of my face, it was a young man with dark hair and thick eyebrows that enhanced his sharp, cinnamon-colored eyes. A button nose, thin chapped lips, and a feeble physique. He looked like what Arkira would look like if she were a boy.

Instead of me, the person in the mirror was Inigo.

My shock turned into despair as I slowly came to a realization, finally admitting what I had been denying to myself till this point: I just got transmigrated and I might never get to see my family ever again.

As I realized the predicament I was in, I became disoriented and overwhelmed. I won't go into details about what happened, as I find them unnecessary and cringe, hyperventilating and all. But as I finally calmed down, I noticed a bulge on the blanket I had tossed earlier.

A weird kind of sensation overwhelmed me at that moment. The "bulge" was beckoning me to come close, to come look at it. It was as if a magnetic force was pulling me towards it, like a moth to a flame, unable to resist its allure despite the potential danger.

The attraction pull was so strong I immediately yanked the blanket off of it and was stunned. The bulge was the typewriter I had brought home with me.

In that instance, a distinctive, mechanical sound roared from the typewriter. It started typing on its own!

I fell on my butt in fright and almost wet myself. I was only a normal college student before any of this. I was just a regular person who wanted to write a book and liked to play MLBB with my brothers in my free time.

A faint silver glow seeped out of its bulky, metal body as illusory paper suddenly materialized in the carriage, already inserted into its cylindrical rubber roller. A series of loud, rhythmic clacks and clicks reached my ears as the keys pressed on their own.

- Year 1301, thirteenth day of January, at thirteen hundred and one hours. Fidel transmigrated inside Inigo's body. -

The mechanical sound died as soon as it finished typing the two sentences and the silver glow dissipated. What replaced it was gray smoke as the typewriter disintegrated to the floor, literally. With all the parts, keys and all, fell off at once.

The scene left me completely speechless. It took quite a while before I recovered and gathered all the parts and stuffed them inside the blanket and yeeted it to the corner. 

I didn't want anything to do with that thing but I didn't want it just casually chilling on the floor either.

Inside my head, there seemed to be a tiny voice telling me that the only way I could go back to my world was to fix that thing and manually type my return. It was almost instinctual, it was scary. But if I wanted to return (which I badly did) then I had no choice but to do something about it.

I hated that feeling.

It was as if transmigrating inside Inigo's body was something premeditated by some, by some great existence or something. And the typewriter—that disintegrated into pieces, becoming completely unusable—was the trigger of it all.

The last thing I wanted was to get trapped in Inigo's body for good. I needed to get back to my world, no matter what. My brothers still needed me. My life wasn't bad. I mean, it was bad. But not THAT bad. I was about to graduate. My parent's relationship just started looking good. My grandma, although I didn't really like her much, had started to control her daily nagging since I confronted her about it. My long-time crush started texting me. And I just started working out.

There were countless people who dreamed of transmigration across the globe. It didn't have to be me!

I frantically paced around that tiny house, back and forth, biting on my nails.

And just then, my vision suddenly turned hazy and felt my limbs restricted by some invisible threads. I couldn't move.

The door flung open with a loud bang. A man wearing a brown trench coat over a gray, three piece suit just kicked it flying. He gave me a look. There was something hungry about his "eyes", and I shuddered. To the place where his eyeballs should have been were obsidian crystals in the shape of a roughly-cut diamond.

He only looked at me for around three seconds, and after that, he seemed to lose interest in me as he caught the sight of a bundled blanket in the corner.

I absolutely thought that would be the end of me but somehow, the wall behind me exploded. A man wearing a grinning white mask who seemed to be in his forties blasted the wall with some laser-shooting gun that was actually his arm.

He placed his "real" arm on my shoulder as a large bronze door materialized in front of us. It opened, revealing the blackest black I've ever seen my entire life. It looked like a slime but in gas form, if that made sense. Shiny black glitters swirling about in tiny circles, causing tiny ripples on the surface. And to make it easier for you guys, we shall call it "The Void".

I didn't even have the chance to fully digest what was happening as the man suddenly picked me up by my collar and yeeted me towards it.

Upon contact, the "black" instantly spread throughout my skin, swallowing me whole. Only to realize that I was floating. After that, the man appeared in front of me also.

"Look, I know you're still a little confused with things happening a little too fast but try to keep up with me and I'll explain it to you along the way," he told me, his voice sounding a little tired. "You don't have protection and this place will corrupt you with prolonged exposure, turning anything with a brain into a monster whose goal was only to procreate." 

I didn't know what was happening anymore but I think this peculiar man with a laser gun as an arm just saved me and he was telling me some scary stuff.

Sadly, in order to save me, he didn't have time to retrieve the typewriter anymore.

The man with missing eyeballs probably took it.

Ha! At least I was still alive!