The entire auditorium stands up from their seats and so do Brooke and I. It's our lunch break, which means that training is almost over for the day, thank goodness.
I watch each unique face beam with excitement as they make their way outside. Everybody seems to have a radiant glow to them.
Everyone in the Afterworld for the most part is equally beautiful and equally aged, meaning that personality is the only thing that divides us, at least the stage ones. There's the quiet ones, the weird ones, and the outgoing ones. Brooke is incredibly outgoing, which makes it somewhat easy for the two of us to make friends. I'm not even close to being as talkative as she is, but since I'm her best friend, we're sort of a package deal.
On the contrary, I have more guts than she does. She can't go on roller coasters without having a panic attack and will always pick truth when we play truth or dare.
That's how it was when we were alive anyway. She might not be as timid now that we're dead, because we have nothing to lose. We've lost everything already.
"Do you want to head to the lounge?" Brooke questions as we follow the crowd of people outside of the auditorium.
I shake my head, watching a few people walk through the second set of doors, which leads outside. We never go outside for lunch, and I want to explore as much as possible before going to stage two, which is in an entirely different place. Stage one is basically isolated from every other stage.
"We should follow them." I say.
That group of about ten people want to go to the forest of clouds outside, where anyone can lie around on them like they're beds.
I have no idea how the physics for that works, but it doesn't exactly matter, everyone here is practically invisible, which makes clouds more dense than us.
Or that's what Brooke told me. Nobody knows the actual answer.
Everyone hops onto a cloud, and most of them float about three feet from the ground. Some are higher than others.
"Why are there even clouds this low?" I question as I lie down onto one of them, my body sinking deeper into it. I'm surprised that Brooke and I never explored this part of stage one, it's basically the only interesting thing here to do.
There's a dorm building and a training center and that's about it. There's a few shops for food but nobody goes there. For the most part, stage ones stay in their rooms with their friends and wait for the day they get to leave.
The clouds are like cotton against my skin, except way softer. They're cold and fluffy, at least the cumulus clouds are. Cumulonimbus clouds look the most comfortable to jump on, but they're dangerous. One strike of lightning could send you down to Earth in an instant, and it's pretty much impossible to come back up. I've never heard of anyone who fell down to earth.
"Because stage one is just one big cloud." A voice answers. It came from a tall blonde, who lies not too far from us. I nod in response.
"I've never been to the edge of it. I bet you can see stage two from there." I imagine myself leaving.
The boy shakes his head. "You can't see it. They purposely put stage one far away from all of the other ones. You know stage ones aren't even permanently in the Afterworld yet, so they're not allowed to enter any of the stages beyond."
I sit up a little and look at the man sitting on the cloud next to us. His hair is blonde and smooth. I know his name, I think everybody does. It's Tanner.
"That's weird. You can get kicked out already?" I ask him, to which he nods, but doesn't say anything. I assume he knows as much as I do in terms of the Afterworld. All of us are stage ones after all, we're not supposed to know anything.
"Is this all you can do outside?" Brook inquires.
"I guess so." I remark, looking around. This place really is incredibly empty. "Lame."
She nods. "You'd think they'd give us more to do here, don't you agree? We're here for a month, which doesn't sound long, but it is."
I can hear the man chuckle. "Stage one is supposed to be entirely for recovering from your death, training is useless. But they expect us to get over a traumatic experience while locking us in our rooms and forcing us to go to training every single day."
He's the type to actually pay attention in class. Maybe I'd know that if I cared to listen to what Mr. Conner is saying. "Training feels useless. That's why I don't like going." I add on, though I trust that it will have some sort of impact in the future.
"It is." He says. I don't believe him. How would he know?
With Brooke and I are a few other girls and the most adored guys here, the one who decided to invade our conversation: Tanner.
I'm not entirely sure why he's talking to us, but I don't mind. It's interesting to hear other people's perspectives besides Brooke, because she is the only person I talk to.
The girls are always talking to him, but he seems to brush them off. He could see right through their flirtatious manner and would always send them away. They don't really want love, they want lust. I assume he's smart enough to know that and to stay away from it, like me. If he wanted some of those girls, he would've had them by now.
Other than him, nobody really knows each other here. There's too many of us. Stage one consists of all different types of people who died at around the same time as each other, which seems to bring us closer. It's like we all died together.
Brooke and I lie on a large cloud, looking up at the high cirrus clouds above us. They're wispy and thin, and not at all impressive, but I can't control what they look like. I find myself getting bored incredibly quickly. It's way less impressive than what I thought it would be.
At first, laying on clouds was so absurd for me because they're clouds-- they're just water droplets. But really it's just like laying on a really soft bed.
Everything after death is hard to explain, even emotions. I thought that when I died I would understand everything about the world, but there are things here that nobody can explain. I've only been dead a few weeks and not many of my questions have been answered. The only one that has been satisfied with a response is what happens after death.
At this point, nothing can surprise me because I never understood how I can feel alive and seem alive even after I'm dead. I thought it was all over for me, that my subconscious wouldn't exist after I die, but it does.
I guess it's true that your soul lives past your death.
For some reason, the cirrus clouds above us start to get lower and lower as if they're sinking. I squint to make sure I'm perceiving them correctly.
"Why are they coming down?" Brooke asks, apparently reading my mind.
"I don't know, cirrus clouds are supposed to be high in the air." I think out loud. I examine them further, narrowing my eyebrows to deepen my thoughts.
"Unless..." My voice trails off as I sit up, looking over the edge of the cloud. Brooke peers over next to me.
"We're going up." Brooke says, "Why?" I stand up, peering at Tanner and his friends looking back up at us.
"When cumulus clouds rise..." I begin as gray clouds begin surrounding us, "They turn into cumulonimbus clouds." Brooke looks at me in horror as gray clouds circle around us, one of them rising above ours.
A storm is brewing. And we're in the center of it.