In the evening - instead of sleeping (God, imagine being able to have a blissful night's sleep. If you can...can I borrow your imagination?) - I set sail onto the seas of the many worlds I travel to and have some level of control over. Welcome to another one of my worlds.
Cautiously, I walked across the cornfield towards a factory of some kind - the architecture so modern, outstandingly impressive and very clean. In actuality, the cleanliness of the factory unsettled me. Surely a place making anything but cleaning products would provide some sort of dirt or "ware and tare"? Constantly surveying my surroundings, I approached the door and went to one of the lab coat people because, no matter where you are, the lab coats are somewhere in the hierarchy.
"This place," I quizzed, "is it new?"
Quite creepily, she smiled down at her clipboard, now with a bleeping blue light on it, (as if reading from some sort of script) and, rather mechanically replied "This place was constructed 40 years ago, but has only been publicly distributing their products for one month."
Hairs stood up on the back of my neck. A modern factory: that looks brand new, is 40 years old, in the middle of a cornfield and has only been giving out the products it's making for one month.
"What products?" So many questions; I had to pick wisely.
"Our products revitalise peoples' lives. They aid in giving the people who raised us their youth back." Not once did she look up from her clipboard whilst rattling all of this off.
"And the company you work for, what is it called?" Silence fell between, the pause before her response wasn't awkward at all, it was unnerving.
"WayAway, because we send your troubles WayAway." Flashing a cheesy grin, she turned on her heels and set to walk away.
"Wait, what's going into this miracle substance?" My final question, maybe I can be on my way to figuring out what this place is; it just makes no sense and I can't ponder over it forever.
As the blue light bleeped again she responded: "Our products revitalise peoples' lives. They aid in giving the people who raised us their youth back".
"You don't understand, what's going into the product?"
"Our products revitalise peoples' lives. They aid in giving the people who raised us their youth back".
Battling the urge to scream at her inability to answer my question, I smiled and walked into the factory. My first instinct was to find an office of some kind when the administrative papers might be. Perhaps that would have the possibility of containing some sort of documentation as to what 'WayAway' is and - more importantly - what is in their product?
Twists were followed by turns. Turns were followed by deadends guarded by lab coats. All dead ends had a guard except one. But only one door to go in and out of and no staircase in sight though it was evident this place had at least three floors.
Wait! I thought to myself - in what looked as though to be the centre of the first floor - if there's only one door, and no stairs...why would the lab coat people be guarding dead ends. It doesn't make sense. Unless! Of course, they aren't dead ends after all. Disguised doors? My initial philosophy was that the most important room (or dead end in this particularly strange case) would be guarded the most. However, that made no sense either as the dead ends were guarded by one at most. Eventually, it hit me that perhaps, the most important room wouldn't be guarded at all. Unfortunately, that also meant the rest of the staff, as it were, would be in the room.
It took what seemed like an hour to reach the wall with no one standing in front of it like a brutish machine that had to give up their career as a middleweight boxing champion and settle for being the bouncer. I didn't really know how to progress from here. Carefully inspecting the wall, I strived to find some sort of button, switch, pressure plate when I looked down and saw my right foot had disappeared into the wall. Just walk through it? It's that simple? Bracing for the impact of potentially crushing my face against the stack of brick and cement, I took steps forward and ended up in a room full of bunk beds?
Beds neatly made, not a crease in sight.
Scanning the room, there was a plaque just below a clock. "WayAway boarding school established March 28th 1980".
