I Am Fictional Real

Chapter 11: Kill A Man Like You Always Do

        Rantorm agreed to our plan almost immediately, and Alinak drove on into the dark without his lights on. Which was dangerous. He seemed to know what he was doing, so I just listened to the conversation in the car. Two was talking to Rantorm too much, but Rantorm would answer in the best way he could. Abruptly. And I stared into the right rear view mirror to see the eyes of Rantorm's monsters, the silhouettes of their bodies falling together like a large wall.
     And then Alinak stopped the car in the middle of nowhere, the engine cutting off and the monsters all around seemingly confused. For a moment, we sat in the car like nothing was going on, and then Alinak opened the car door. We all stepped out, not seeing anything immediately ahead of, and it seemed to make us all unsettled.
     "It's ahead," Alinak said. "Trust me."
     "I wasn't doubting you," Two smiled.
     "I know you weren't, you idiot, but I'm just telling you. No side conversations during this, you understand?"
     Two nodded in silence, and we began our walk to the wall. Surrounded by monsters, I wondered. Would this really work? We had to give it a try anyhow.
     Rantorm ran forward almost frantically, and the rest of us walked in our slow way. Alinak figured we wouldn't have to catch up to him. We kept on walking until there were lined torches staked in the dirt, and it felt like we were trespassing onto some forbidden land. Lucky for us, though, this was what we came here for. They weren't real torches, just electronic recreations, so they seemed to glow even dimmer than real fire. Alinak pointed upwards to the shadow of a wall.
     "Center of town..." Two mumbled.
      Rantorm jumped from a top the wall, the ground shaking as his feet landed ungracefully. The monsters are around the wall," he announced. "As far as we can see, the city is asleep. Vacant, really."
     "Good," Alinak smiled.
      But maybe it wasn't. I wanted to bring it up to Alinak, but he was already guiding us towards the entrance. There were no guards here at all, and the ones farther beyond were strewn around obscure corners that weren't even looking at us. This wasn't right. We snuck around the wall where no one was, and we kept going in.
      "This is stupid," I heard one of the guards sigh dramatically to another. "What is with this skeleton ass crew?"
     "You wanna ask him?" the other spat. "Dude's in a mood right now."
     "Isn't he always like that?"
     Rantorm swiftly knocked them both out before the conversation could continue, their bodies crumpled behind some crates of water bottles. I shivered in the cooled air, but no one seemed to hold the same sentiment as me. We continued on, oblivious to emptiness and decay.
      "Fuck, I feel rain," one of the soldiers cried. "We have to go."
     The soldier tried to run off, but Rantorm grabbed him by the collar of his shirt and hit his head hard enough to make him unconscious. The man seemed to stutter before going limp, and I wondered why this felt so off. Alinak commanded that we let him lie and go, but I grabbed his arm before he could get out of reach.
     "What?" he spat.
     "This isn't weird to you?" I glared. "The vacancy? The lack of care? Akalirng doesn't seem like this kind of person."
     Two nodded. "It doesn't feel right."
     Before Alinak could protest, I got to my knees to examine the body. Immediately,. I felt the chill of what I wanted to assume as a dead body, but the chest rose and fell. I pushed the man on his back and noticed the panel on his neck that seemed almost hard to feel. It belonged to him. It was a part of him, like some twisted ingrained brain of a machine. I turned to everyone else and felt my face go numb as I suspected what Akalirng was doing to us.
     "All of these soldiers are robots," I exclaimed, getting to my feet. "The real ones aren't here."
     "What does that mean?" Two asked.
     "He's not here. He's got to be... at home," Alinak assumed, face tightening. "We have to get back to the car. Now."
     And we ran back from the walls into something far worse than anything I had seen yet.  Rantorm screeched out in horror as he stepped in blood. Monster bodies were strewn carelessly across the earth, heads decapitated and bodies absolutely mangled, and all of us were caught frozen by the stench of it.
     "Wow, I cannot believe we're in the presence of the LACEI."
     I stiffened as four shadows came into the fake torch light. With my fear, the torches flickered a few times. Akalirng stepped over a large body pointing his sword at us. At me.
     "Doctor Kresh," I bowed. "You looked sickly." He was covered in blood, and I knew that he had gone to our city. Our home.
      "I suppose I should be asking you why you're trespassing, but you have the monster behind you."
     Two wasn't understanding any of this, which I was glad because we were so close to them figuring out who I was. Alinak stepped forward and had his gun ready to take him.
     "How many?" Alinak asked.
      "I destroyed every single Phenomenon. Except you three." More shadows began appearing behind him like a wall of eyes and knives. "Maybe that can change."
     The shadows pointed their guns at us, and Akalirng lifted his hand.
     "Prepare to die."
     And then his hand went down.
     But nothing happened. I must've screamed loudly, and the guns stopped working. Except... they stopped completely. All of them were frozen, even Akalirng, and a part of me felt as if this was someone else. And I turned back, staring at Two who had cowered with his hands in the air, and there was this energy coming from his palms.
     "Two?" I asked.
     Two's eyes opened, and they were glowing red. Alinak seemed dumbfounded. "You're a Phenomenon."
      "I was hiding it," Two told us. "W... We're in a time bubble."
     "A time... bubble?" I asked.
     He stood, his hands still glowing as he seemed to hold on to the bubble.
     "I know what you're going to say," he sighed. "but we're not in time right now. Even they are out of time, though they can't feel the effects. We're safe here."
     "So... what does that mean?"
      "We're safe as long as I don't move from this spot. Right now, time can't hurt us."
     "Can we... affect anything?" Rantorm asked. "Like... them?"
     "Maybe. I told you I couldn't move, so I never had the chance to do anything."
      Rantorm was already on the move to take their weapons and gear, even going so far as to kill them. I didn't watch. Alinak joined him in that endeavor, and I watched Two ever so carefully.
     "So... are you always doing this without us knowing? Pausing the world at your leisure?" I asked him.
     He crossed his arms. "Even I need that extra time."
     "Must be nice. To have time like that." All the time in the world, and no one could interfere unless they were here too. Everything was paused but yourself in this bubble.
     "Do you not like being LACEI?"
     I paused. My body stiffened even if I didn't want it to because I had not revealed LACEI to him. Obviously, the assumption was that he would die like Bellieka.
     "I know," he sighed. "Would it not be for the manipulation of time, I would have suffered death."
     Rantorm had approached at this point, listening in. "You are the gifted writer of our time?"
     I crossed my arms. "You flatter the dead author, you realize. I am Esinna Valunett."
     "Are they not one and the same?" Two asked, crossing his arms.
     "No." My immediate response shocked them both. "LACEI was an idealist, a woman holding a mask over her face as she wrote her thoughts into fiction. And I... Well, Esinna was a woman who just wanted to save her sister from Hell."
     Alinak dropped a stolen gun onto the ground. "And who are you?"
    "I... am the girl with the power to stop all electricity."
     I was the one that killed Attin.