Between Here and There, Now and Then

He tapped the phone off and picked himself up from the ground; he felt like he was in a lucid dream. His mind swirling with images and afterthoughts that he couldn't place, what things were where. His body terraformed and his mind seemed to be sinking in the details of the phone call. A series of random waves from a voice. The Professor. Was it the Professor; a GMC come to life? Or had he always been there.

"I'm going mad," he muttered.

"Not really," Suki answered as she returned from a vending machine. She held out a chocolate bar like an offering. "You should eat."

"We eat here?" Dan said.

"We do," she replied with a smile. "You've been around the gaming table long enough to figure that out."

He had been reading psychology books about transcendation and scanning websites about the possibilities of opening doors to other worlds, other realities. That the currently real world he lived in was just a facade of imagery manipulated by his mind to offset his own desires of changes and remorse. He knew that he was either evolving or simply going mad. He preferred evolving since mad men were branded and exiled.

Dan opened the wrapper up and took a bite and it felt like heaven. His taste buds seemed to explode with flavour. Suki smiled.

"That's how I felt once I passed through into your reality," she noted. She sat down on a bench. "It's like being reborn, isn't it? Seeing worlds through fresh eyes and dimensions."

Still, something didn't feel right with Dan. It was like he was here but not here.

Reborned Askew

His brain was on fire and there was nothing he could do about it. He felt like his whole insides were being rearranged, like molecules in a transporter. Maybe this was why Dr. McCoy had refused to constantly be beamed aboard.

"Can't breath," he gasped, his voice raw and forced.

"Liar," Suki replied nonchalantly. "You spoke right there."

He was having difficulty breathing. In fact, he was sure he wasn't breathing at all. "This is strange."

"Tell me about it," Suki said as she helped him up.

She was about to say something when Dan's cellphone began to ring.

Fictionless Truths

Dan's vision had gone blurry, staticky. His vision was trying to focus in on his surroundings. The fluorescent lighting was stabbing through his eyes and into his brain. Pain was white and hot and with the ferocity of Wolverine's claws slashing through his brain.

"What's happening?" Dan asked. He looked at his hands and saw right through them. He could pick up billions of tiny pencils on his skin moving. He felt them drawing on him.

"You're readjusting," Suki said. "Your body is being terraformed to suit this reality."

"Terraformed?" Dan repeated. He sat up and received a mad head rush, vertigo grabbed a hold of him and slammed him down to the ground again.

"Take it easy, Dan," Suki told him. "It might take awhile."