fearscape

The Scape

I wake up in the brightness of mid-afternoon. As I take in my surroundings, I notice my savior boy is gone. I jump off of the grassy ground and begin to frantically look around. Where is he? Why did he leave? What the he-

"Looking for something?" A voice comes from behind me. I turn towards the voice as fast as lightning, in a fighting position.

He threw his hands up as if surrendering. "Whoa. Calm down, I'm with Chance."

I throw him my best death glare, which probably gave the appearance of difficult bowel movements. "Who's Chance?"

"Tall, Mexican, quiet, ummm....you might think he's hot?" His thin, Asian frame isn't tense, so I take my fists down from their previous ready positions. "You know who I'm talking about? He took you here last night. Right now he's clearing the area of cybes. So, I'm In charge. I'll let Chance tell you all about this jacked up place when he get's back."

"What are cybes?" Whatever those are, they can't be very good if he has to clear them out.

"You'll know when Chance get's here. Oh yeah, um... I'm Dante." He gives me a small salute and beckons for me to follow. I follow him into the dense forest, his lean body moving gracefully over fallen trees and thick underbrush. I, however, stumble and fall while marveling at the sheer beauty of the forest. At the way the sunlight comes down in only occasional green tinted beams. At how there seems to be a separate world writhing beneath my feet. We stop and rest by a babbling brook with clear, sparkling water. I can even see my reflection. The brown eyes, dark hair, and full lips. My tanned skin was slightly sunburned from the long days at the beach with my best friend, Natalia. I remember how she loved to braid my waist length hair down my back. Now that same hair is in limp tangles. As I look at myself in the water, my reflection becomes obscured by small, silver fish.  The voice of the stream seemed to wash away all of the questions that were once screaming to be answered.

"He's here. Hey Chance!" he spoke much too loud and completely took away any peace I once felt. But, at the same time, his voice held a promise. My Savior Boy. Chance jogged over to us, panting something fierce, his black T-shirt sticking to his skin.

"So, Chance, is it story time or not?" Dante asked impatiently. Chance simply nodded and sat across from me.

"Well, first you should know that none of this is real. Dante and I think it's a virtual reality landscape, so likewise, everything in it is fake. Don't trust anyone but us. So, since everything is fake, nothing can hurt you right?" he looked at me and waited for my response. I nodded. "Wrong. That's how it should be. That's how it was at first. But now... Things are changing. Fast. So not only are you able to be hurt now, like in the real world, but also anything is possible. I don't know why we're here, or who put us here, but I think that we're being tested for something. Courage maybe? I don't know. In this... world.... it's like it knows you. Especially your fears. Whatever you're most afraid of, whatever you would rather die than do, you will do it. In every day of our messed up lives here, you will do it in a way just different enough from the last time to shock you as much as it ever did. We've done some experimenting... We don't need to eat here, we don't need to go to the bathroom, it's like... We're not fully human here. There are never any animals here. Never any people. Once every 90 days there is a building that appears, sirens blare, and then it explodes. Every time, poof, there's new people. Most of them don't last more than two weeks, dying from what they were afraid of. Dante and I were the first ones. We came with about seven other people. All of which, eventually...... They didn't make it. You're not the first, and probably not the last. I don't expect you to last any longer than the other ones either." and with that, he walked up and left.

"What was that about? He seemed so..." I won't finish that in fear of offending Chance.

"He's like that. He's got this crazy idea in his head that maybe we can get out of this hell hole. He's so determined to leave, he thinks he has no time for something fun. Not that there are many opportunities for that kind of stuff here anyways. While he hunts cybes, he's the worst. You can't get a word out of him. So I just don't go with him anymore. We used to be tight... but now I can't even talk to him without him droning on about the escape." 

"That word again, Cybes, what does it mean? You said I would find out when chance got here. Well, he's here and I don't know."

"You don't forget easily do you? Good. That's a skill you'll need to survive. As for the cybes, they're like glitches. Chance thinks if he finds a high concentration of them, we can find a way to hack into the control panel. Again, the escape escapade. And when I say hunting for cybes, I don't mean a badass running around killing things in search for them, I mean looking under leaves and everything else on God' s great earth that you can reach without an airplane. Sometimes the people that put us here forget to generate things that don't show from the surface, like under something, and that's a hole in the system we could possibly take advantage of." He talks so fast, it's hard to keep up with him. His dark eyes are bright with something I can't put a finger on. Hope? Excitement? I don't know, but something's there in those deep, dark eyes of his. Something comforting.