The Awakened Leader

In the endless corners of the cosmos, lies several pathways to unanticipated things. The universe has things that exist beyond one's imagination as bodies of interplanetary kind continue to linger; the world alone arouses beings that speaks diversity.

The world, Ephraim considers, is as vast as one's mind.

However, the universe is beyond what one can ever be.

Ephraim had these recurring thoughts when he would find his mind drifting somewhere else, whilst his physical body paid no heed to discussions. He would play with his pen while glancing outside the window as he submerges to another hypothetical. It mostly revolved around rhetorical questions, and things that cannot be answered by a quantifiable yes or no.

Ephraim was the type to remember things that meant nothing at first, but when time passes, these things he had kept in the back of his mind would reappear like an archive lying beneath the depths of his mind dug up with the sole purpose to haunt and teach him a lesson. Or in rather rare and pleasant occasions, remind him something that would conjure a smile from his face.

He was a daydreamer who loved hypotheticals. This is why he liked studying the pasts. It enables him to study the present also. The present after all will become the past. And the future also will become the present and past. It was a cycle Ephraim liked to associate in times he was feeling like he was in an inescapable moment.

Such as this dreary lesson paired with Professor Oswald's lackluster teaching.

But then again Ephraim found himself looking back at the familiar scene. Lucian yawning, some students sleeping, and others taking notes whilst the professor reads the topic from the book in such monotonous tone.

Everything was unusually bright, like the room itself was bathing in soft light. He hears the shuffling of pages, and the au fait all-encompassing scribbles in paper reverberating across the whole room. Ephraim thought it was unusually loud, like Lucian, especially when he was at the Japanese pub the day they graduated.

The day . . . they graduated?

"Oh, Ephraim."

Ephraim lifted his gaze as his eyes met that of his former professor. Wait . . . former professor?

"Professor Oswald," Ephraim answers, his voice evident with a tang of confusion.

Professor Oswald tilted his head, and then smiled. Ephraim looked around and saw his classmates doing the same thing like any other day. Lucian not paying attention, some doodling, some on their phone, and others eagerly trying to listen and take notes. But odd enough, no one paid any attention to the two of them.

"Why are you still here?" Professor Oswald asks.

"What do you mean, Professor?" Ephraim replies.

The former professor's lips curved into a smile. For a second, Ephraim's eyes fixed on the professor. He looked like he aged since he last saw him. He also grew a stubble and he had bags under his eyes now. He still wore a strange lab coat, but this Professor Oswald he was seeing right now looked like he had gone through innumerable things.

"You're dreaming." Professor Oswald says, and then turned his back to him as he proceeded to write at the chalkboard.

"If you don't wake up," says Professor Oswald. "You'll die."

Ephraim opened his eyes only to realize he was yet again in a familiarly peculiar situation.

He was drowning once more.

Ephraim pulled himself back from the water, his glasses still intact. He panted heavily, inhaling the air his lungs were depleted from. Ephraim gasped and coughed, and through his blurry visions he looked upwards to see the light he desperately tried to reach when he fell—

And then his eyes widened.

He reached his hand upwards as a ray reflected to the lens of his spectacles. Soon Ephraim's blurry vision cleared as his eyes meets the blue skies.

The blue sky?

Ephraim blinked, and then half-closing his eyelids, the sunshine passed through his spectacles with a blinding gleam. He looked around, seeing himself in the middle of a low lagoon with the towering trees sheltering him. He sauntered to the low pond until he reached the grassy ground.

Ephraim drew his journal out and started to write and draw what he first has seen. He scribbled and sketched the scenery as he took notes. He was scribbling so clumsily and hastily that he dropped the journal to the ground. Ephraim cursed under his breath.

And as Ephraim knelt down to pick the journal up, a resemblance from another page startled him.

He picked the journal without taking his eyes off to the image. He then lifted his gaze back and forth to the journal and to the scenery to make a comparison. Ephraim blinked.

"This is . . ."

What appeared before Ephraim was the splitting image of a distinct place.

The simulation ground on the laboratory.

Except this one he had landed on had no waterfalls or glowing flowers. But everything is the same nonetheless.

Before Ephraim could even broaden comparing and contrasting, everything sank to him as he again conjured questions which clogged both his thinking and had shallowed his breaths.

"No, calm down." He shushed himself, trying to regulate his breath as he closes his eyes.

First, Ephraim checked his pulse. He's alive. It was an irrational thing to do given the fact he was . . . here. Ephraim started to check for injuries, bite marks, but there were only wounds and bruises and his broken rib from the fight—

Speaking of the fight . . . the fall on the chasm . . . where is his task force?

Ephraim looked around, and soon he realized he's the only one right here.

No monsters. No team members.

Just him.

Were they eaten?

Ephraim started his search, half-running and half-panicking. Where are they? Were they eaten? Were they killed? Why is he alone in the wilderness? Did Anna retrieve him from below? Is he on the upper ground now?

Ephraim didn't want to think of anything. He wanted to assume this was a mere reverie he made upon falling, but the worry, his reverberating heartbeat ringing through his ears, and the pain on his injuries kept pulling him to reality.

This was real.

It took Ephraim several minutes of wandering around and calling the names of his task force before he reached a pathway that seemed to be carved as a road. Ephraim ran and follow the track, ignoring the sting on his rib.

And then as he reached the end of the trail, he saw light.

Light he had desperately tried to reach before he succumbed to the pull of sleep as he plunged to the chasms of the unknown.

But to his surprise, it wasn't just light he saw.

Ephraim's glasses gleamed as his jaw gaped, his eyes widening in sheer bewilderment.

Dead skulls and severed animal ears.

A place with bizarre-looking wares, plants, and edifices.

The scenery you can see in a distinct roleplaying game.

In the middle of somewhere dangerous.

Somewhere?

But where in the world . . .

. . . was he?