Forty one

Although this place is identical to one I know; for the memory to be formed Luz must put the right pieces together.

By this I mean that I have helped her enough with the correct answer for this first stage of the game; the answer is the memory of when I became a vampire hunter inside her mind... but the question for that answer is what it is up to her to figure out.

What is she doing now?

What she does best: sleeping.

You see, Luz fell into one of the branches of the red-stemmed tree where her fairy guide's family sows slaves, or so they say. The truth is that they hunt all the good friends that their daughter, the fairy guide, makes in the land full of dark clouds.

The fairy guide has the great gift of pink fire and since she does not want to contribute to the kingdom by making her good royal pet Sahara go to earth to change the world; she must at least let her friends come to rebuild hers.

Since humans always have that instinct with which the fairies must create their new pet protector of the other creatures; is that the fairies must capture your kind and absorb the primal instinct... animal instinct.

Luz sleeps because that way she has a better chance of keeping her mother. In the dream she is in the cart to take her father the food with the rich fish. However, all the former friends of the zombie fairy are in the same car with their respective mothers; however, when the bus stops, many daughters will get out but only one mother.

I am narrating from Luz's perspective so let's go back to the dream.

"Why don't you just bite your nails and we pretend you need to go to the psychologist so he can see that I have compelling reasons to separate from him, collaborate or you're going to scratch your stuffed dog's tummy."

Luz doesn't understand why I say she is her mother when that lady looks nothing like her real mother. The woman next to her is whiter, with straight hair and no cleft jaw. In addition she has an air of superiority, so much to raise her face it seems strange to me that her head has not yet run away from her new mother. As you know, nothing is literal here and proof of this is that the neck of the new mother is the green stem of a plant that rises from the threshold of what should be a neck of flesh and bone to her jaw.

The stem has a helical shape and on one of its leaves there is a little ball as transparent as water. Although the woman doesn't seem to realize that her neck isn't human and Luz doesn't think she's the type to keep her cool in the face of a more than abnormal situation.... Luz is already a veteran of abnormalities.

"Dad already gives enough money and you work too, there is enough money."

She can visualize inside the transparent ball the image of the moustachioed father with a suit and more wrinkles than Luz's blouse when her mother decides to do nothing and follow Luz's example, sleeping all day long.

Sometimes children can also be the example of their parents, but whether it is good or bad?

Luz also sees inside the image the mother looking at her husband with mischief before asking him for money.

"Get it in your head that men are put to work and never give them a break because from the hand they go to the ass."

"Mother!"

Somehow Luz feels like she is someone else, she feels embarrassed by her mother's words in front of the people on the bus. Not all the other mothers with their daughters also have the same helical stem neck, some have the tail of an electric eel for a neck and the daughters suffer an electric shock every time their progenitors speak.

With these hairs the poor girls catch the flying fish that jump out of the sea below this flying bus.

Imagine the bus as the very same Barbie's pink car, but without the logo, flying over the sea (or so it seems, here nothing is what it seems) and remember that this is what this virtual world calls heaven.

"It's better to tell the raw truth, I don't want to be a grandmother so young; you'll see who takes care of you and some bastard, don't even think you'll see a penny of my fortune."

Luz wanted to speak, she wanted to answer him; if her real mother had spoken to her like that in front of people she would have answered him without hesitation.

To imagine that is impossible because her mother keeps her manners in front of people, she is ashamed. This woman is similar to Luz in the sense that they both like drama when there are people to watch the show.

Luz is frightened by the idea of being like this woman; she would get the same crow's feet from being so nagging, inflexible (Luz is sometimes too flexible) and greedy (she with money and Luz with food). These are the words you read on the transparent ball and the woman seems to fit that description perfectly.

Luz does not know who this woman's poor daughter will be, but she is sure that these feelings of repression, fear and crackling anger are not of the same proportion as those she has towards her parents.

These feelings belong to someone else, someone in whom, unlike Luz, it is not fear but anger that takes precedence.

"Can we remain silent?"

Now she understands her mother's embarrassment when she would throw the tantrums her sister now does; but Flavia is even more exaggerated than Luz.

Luz doesn't talk back to the woman sitting next to her, but to her own mother she does, when she speaks very softly; although Luz also shuts up when her real mother gets too upset.

Is it that she can only have the attitude of a good daughter when she is treated with fear?

"Yes, we will have to be, but first you have to fish because, to my misfortune, you don't have wire hair with the electricity that attracts flying fish so much."

This remark makes Luz see the advantages of not being so abnormal, there are others more abnormal who urgently need help; surely one of those others is this lady's daughter.

"Then what's in the bowl?"

Again fear invades more ground than anyone's anger and she is right.

"What's going to help you when you go down in 3,2..."

Suddenly the seat moves forward and the floor opens up to throw her straight into a transparent tentacle... the sea is a transparent octopus.

Luz is inside a kind of transparent slide and the bowl that is now sliding in front of her slips out of her hands. She tries to keep her attention on it and not get carried away by the claustrophobia and the pressure on all her extremities due to the narrowness of the slide.

Luz slides down and in a matter of seconds reaches the narrowest part of the slide and gets stuck. However, she sees through the transparency of the walls that she is not the only one. In each transparent leg of the octopus there is a son sent to fish by his mother... not necessarily a fish.

She only finds the one on the right the little-known friend of her brother. He is almost all blue and Luz can feel the panic of claustrophobia running through all her feelings. Fear used to be a separate feeling, away from anger and infatuation. Now it is taking over her emotional life as if it were a relentless epidemic.

She wishes she could help Bastiàn's friend, if she still can and believes she can.

Suddenly, however, she begins to look inside the stomach of her brother's friend. The small and large intestine look like an intricate set of tubes put together anyway. Inside the small intestine is dark yellow liquid and inside the large intestine are misshapen brown stones...for the record, I'm being delicate.

After a second the image zooms in and you can see the esophagus, Esteban's friend is about to die. Now she calls her brother Esteban because the pain always brings her back to her real teenage depression.

Luz visualizes what once formed those stones: cakes, donkey meat, hamburgers, etc.

However, this seems bland and disgusting to her. Something inside herself has changed. This new vision cannot be limited to just seeing food as she has always seen it. Here there is a new and excitingly painful sensation.

Now she hears something racing, the red liquid coursing through the veins of her brother's friend. The life blood seems to want to crash against the walls of veins and arteries one last time, one last shot of life.

The melody of death dazzles Luz's ears. She describes it as a winter wind trying to become the whistling of a first love.

Unconsciously Luz runs her tongue over her teeth and feels something sharp.

She preferred to ignore her teeth in the car because no one said anything or looked at her with too much displeasure. Her new mother didn't say anything about her teeth; so she wanted to assume that nothing had happened.

With her tongue she checks all her teeth and finds another one of them pointed. They are two sanded teeth, two pointed teeth, two fangs ready to leak blood.

I know that all the students of the school are supposed to be participants of the game; which makes none of them have real blood... but Luz's new and developed senses tell her that it is real blood and not something created by the algorithm of the game.

Her brother's friend shouldn't have blood either, he too would have to be a vampire and not human.

Can a virtual game turn you into a real creature of the night?

Is the zombie fairy real?

Is this whole game real?

If it isn't because she feels like she's dead?

Everything that comes with being dead, including the stench; which vampires don't have at all, they are spotless from head to toe.

Could it be a type of vampire more closely related to zombies when it comes to smells?

Esteban's friend's hair stands on end, his whole face and body are drenched in sweat, his gaze is paralyzed before the fangs that Luz shows him through the transparent slide.

Esteban's friend tries to move from one side to the other, but only manages to get more trapped in the transparent leg of the octopus.

Although it looks like he is about to lose oxygen, which is true; he is not going to die from suffocation because the beads of sweat stick to the tips of the hairs and fill with the opaque yellow liquid.

Luz observes how the brown stones join together to form a root that runs through the boy's large intestine.

The dark yellow liquid and the root contain all the toxin in Esteban's friend's body, the same toxin he had inside himself when he was alive; the only memories where his guide can keep his soul alive are not pleasant, but...

Is there any other way for our spirit to keep its sanity when there is no choice but to respond to violence with the aggressiveness to which one is so accustomed?

"Light, is it not true that you have always been stuck?"