Chapter 2 - The First Story
When I came back to the room, it was empty. The invisible laptop stood open on the table. It was best to keep it tucked away somewhere even if it had infinite battery life. I walked around the small enclosure and wondered if Lila ventured out into the darkness beyond the wooden cage. I turned the walls see-through for a moment to see if I can spot them, but in turn was overcome by something new. My mind instantly ventured to Rebecca, but it could not be her.
A distant light illuminated in the “sky” the entrance to a cave on the beach. I knew this place. Everything else around was still dark. It was a scene ripped right out of the story, recreated by Lila. I hesitated at the top hatch. Could I get outside and interact with the things created in the blank space? I climbed out onto the sand supported by nothing. The gradient of those tiny grains faded to the dark, as if supported by a black cloud. It allowed my weight, behaving as if it was real sand.
“Lila?” I called out into the scene. The small patch of waves crashed with a gentle sound rather than the heavy slosh of many waves hitting sand. I walked up to the mouth of the cave to find the very dragon I once created in the story. It could not be Ivlin, as Nilvi was not by his side. Atop the purple-to-pink dragon was Lila, snoozing comfortably as the smooth dragon body shifted with every calm breath. She looked so peaceful that I dreaded waking her up.
I sat on a rock nearby, looking beyond the moonlit opening with awe. It was a truly wonderful scene. I could relax here too, but having just imbibed caffeine in the real world, it was just the start of the day. It took a few minutes of quiet reflection until Lila stirred. Without a single thought otherwise, she motioned for the dragon to vanish, and Ivlin blinked out of existence. I was stunned by how she treated things created.
“Hey, Jack,” she said. “The story was cool, but that ending sucks. It made me cry. At the same time that I want a happy ending to that story, I also understand why that ending worked. I think your choice is between who you’d like to pitch it to. If adults have suffered a similar situation, then it’s good, but if you want to appeal to kids, best not to make them cry.
“Yeah, I figured,” I said. “I just gotta figure out how to end it positively. Maybe it doesn’t have to end there. It was a very open ending, but again, sad. Can I ask you something, Lila?”
“Shoot,” she said, but interrupted. “Oh, did you want to know about my version of reproduction?” I shook my head.
“I wanted to ask you about how you use your creationism,” I said. “I see that you form little to no attachment to what you create. You’ve shown that with the way you treat the things you make, the living things. Why is that?” Lila tilted her head in confusion.
“They are things I make,” she said. “That means, I can delete them, doesn’t it?”
“Even if they are smart enough to tell you they don’t want to disappear?”
“I mean, they came from me. Wouldn’t that mean that I can do with them as I please? What’s wrong?”
“Nothing, I mean, something,” I said, trying to formulate the explanation. “I’ve just always attached a higher value to things I’ve created. It got to the point where the created were telling me that they wanted to be free of me. That’s kinda like what Rebecca turned out to be.” Lila waved her hand to vanish the moonlit cave from underneath my feet. I did not expect to be caught by the darkness, instead imagining falling somewhere deep down from where I could not escape. Though gravity went extinct, I remained in empty space, floating in the same spot, but not weightless. The dark surrounding created a surface just underneath my feet that had a gravity component to which I was accustomed.
“Whoa,” I said. “Why don’t we get back inside? Though… I have no idea how to maneuver here.”
“Just think of it, and it will respond to you,” she said, “Don’t tell me you’ve never been inside the untethered space. You have a room floating in here.”
“Untethered space?”
“It’s like, empty space that your thoughts go into when they aren’t inside you,” she said, grimacing at the explanation.
“Oh, so it’s like an imagination,” I said. “My world’s name for it is imagination, but it’s hardly this responsive. While it is hard to create something in your imagination that makes sense and works, it is harder still to bring it out into reality by different media.” Lila’s eyes went wide.
“You can bring it out of here into your reality?”
“Well, in different mediums,” I said. “Like this. I’m currently writing this out on an electronic device. So it’s in a written medium, but if I wanted a physical representation of this room, I’d have to design it and build it so that my real body could be inside it.”
“For me, untethered space is meant for punishment,” she said. “It’s being alone with your thoughts, something they want you to experience for an extended period of time to reflect. No matter what, I can’t bring any of it to my world though.”
“That’s hard to imagine,” I said. “Do you mean that you can’t think and create things in your world? You seem to be quite proficient in making things.”
“No, I mean… It’s hard to explain,” Lila said, with a finger tapping her temple. “It’s like, beyond this, everything already exists.” My mind lingered on the part that sounded insane. Unless she was actually from that space, just had no idea what it was called.
“So you’ve seen that story before?”
“That’s the tricky bit, isn’t it? I haven’t seen it. That’s what makes this weird, but I knew what a dragon was, and I was aware of the scenery, and such. I knew the textures of rocks, and sand, and what smooth is of this dragon’s skin. I knew what a chicken egg was, and what disease the mother was dying from. Everything beyond the way it was stitched together was provided. Untethered space is a source space.”
“I think I understand,” I said, trying to figure out how the empty space after Rebecca’s world created something like this. “I gotta go for now, Lila.”
“Wait!” She said, “Can you give me another? Another story. Can you give me another one to read?” I wondered what I could give her. Many things remained “unstitched”, but I figured there was enough about the one Enfirth that I wrote that could fit a story.
“Ok,” I said. “It’s called ‘Bear Witness’, but it’s about magic.”
“Lots of fantasy, huh?”
“Is that bad?”
“No, just feels like entertainment.”
“Yup. Later, Lils.”
break
The following day, I entered the room expecting another scene from the story I left behind, but Lila was not around. Though they would only reflect inside light, I decided to give this floating wooden cage some windows in case she decided to create something else from things I gave her.
“I finished it!” A voice made me jump. Lila stepped out from behind the sofa with two books and a pen. She looked so happy that I smiled as well.
“Finished what?” I asked.
“The stories you gave me, Jack,” she said. “Look.” Lila stepped up while holding the books by one cover each so they opened onto text. I grabbed the book in her right hand and inspected the pages. It started off normal, Nilvi finding her dragon, then progressed past the end into another large section that seemed to include her travels in the world thanks to Ivlin. I took the other from her and inspected past the end I created to find another whole story exploring the adventures the Enfirth would have.
“Why did you do this?” I asked. Anger was swirling in my head, but only because the story was completed by another instead of me. I could not get to everything with my limited time, but Lila had so much time in the dark space, only entertained by my writing.
“I told you, didn’t I?” She asked. “This is the untethered space. The stories already exist here, fully realized, all aspects and secondary character stories, too. I just connected your story to the rest of it. I didn’t write this, Jacky, you did.” I glanced over the pages again. The stories following the short story beginnings did sound like my writing. The style was just like mine, or was it really me? It hurt to think about.
“I- I didn’t write these, Lila,” I said.
“Not yet, Jack, not yet,” she said, furthering the pain in my head I felt in my reality. “Consider this like future writing, it shifts and flexes as you read it in here to become the book you want it to be.”
“But that’s... insane,” I said, looking at the spine. The signature singed-out name was present on both spines, remaining as a solitary “J” that I knew from the first book which needed a heavy rewrite. Even if the books were written in that space, getting them transcribed into my reality would take time and focus I was using to communicate with Lila in the “untethered space.”
“Are you ok?” She asked. “I did like it, you know. ‘Bear Witness’? It was a good story, but had such insanely omitted potential that I had to add to it. It called out to go further. I’m sorry if I overstepped.” I shook my head.
“No, I’m sorry,” I said. “I should be happy. I wanted to write those out as full books. New ideas keep pouring in from the void. I even had one in a dream last night. It was about this world where drinkable water ran out and everyone was living in a world of limited water resources. The coolest part was how the baths turned into these washing machine sort of devices that enclosed one human, connected them to a mask for breathing, and then cleaned them without their assistance.” I looked up to have the very device in the room already.
“Ta-Da!” Lila announced. “Told ya, all things you think about already exist in the untethered space. Care for a spin?” I considered whether it would be as fun as I saw it in the dream. Before I had a chance to reply, Lila aged herself to woman and removed her clothing. I looked away as she climbed inside and closed the lid hatch. I looked at her just once through the clear walls of the tumbler before they went opaque. I did not want him to, but beast shook his cage at the slight nudity.
The tumbler took a few minutes of spinning the naked silhouette in the blue slosh before sucking the liquid out the bottom and pumping in a small amount of water to tumble again. The rinse process repeated three times before the drum stopped turning. When she came out, it was already fully dressed, but still at a mature age. In two more blinks, she was back to her child form, wearing the same clothing only shrunken down to fit.
“That was you, right?” She asked.
“Me what?”
“You insisted I was a grown up before going into the tumbler, right?”
“Oh.”
“I mean, it’s ok,” Lila said. “I just didn’t expect to be a woman inside the tumbler. I figured it would be more fun as a small person, like a hamster on a wheel.”
“I think I did it on instinct,” I said. “It just made me a little uneasy. Sorry if it surprised you.” With a wave of her hand, the tumbler blinked out of existence.
“I guess I should explain reproduction to you now,” Lila said. “Of my kind.”
“Sure,” I said. “Is it a long description?”
“Why?”
“I have about twenty minutes left before I have to go,” I said. “Oh, right. Might as well create a real time clock here.” I hesitated on the idea of making it and connecting it to my timeline. That was the first step that ruined what I wanted Rebecca to be. Being aware of the time and what I was doing beyond the untethered space would always bite me in the end. I put an analog circle of time-keeping onto the wall beside the top hatch.
“My world runs on seconds, minutes, and hours,” I said. “They add up to days, weeks, months, and finally years. In my reality, a human lives about eighty years before they expire.”
“Eighty years?!” Lila exclaimed. “That’s… sad. That’s like a tiny blip in my reality.”
“Yes, but the conversion is different,” I corrected. “We call years something that contains a lot of days, but you count them like seconds. So in reality, one day ends up being twenty thousand years to you, meaning one of my years, would be seven million, three-hundred thousand years.”
“That’s still very little, but better,” she said. “So you want to pause here and get back to it in another 20k?”
“I think so,” I said. “Thank you.”
“For what?”
“For writing those books for me. I’ll keep them here until I’m ready to transcribe them into my reality.”
“If you have any other ones, I’d be happy to string them together as well,” Lila said with a smile. “By that I mean I’d love to have some other story to read.”
“Can I give you one in progress?” I asked. “It’s another fantasy, comedy, and a bit of drama and romance.”
“Sure,” she said. “What’s it about?”
“Drayden and Helvara,” I said. “Old warrior friends reconnecting to venture out into the world beyond their little island.”
“Oooo, are they in love?”
“Well, he’s in love with her,” I said and left it there.
“Ohh! Intrigue,” Lila said with a smile. “Gimme it!” I smiled, and tossed a short booklet toward her while disappearing from the darkness.
break
I came back the next day, forgetting to add honey to my morning cup of tea. I created a form without a second thought, but did not see Lila anywhere. I studied the darkness outside of all the windows, but found nothing there. It was unlikely she was anywhere in the vicinity to hear me calling, but I figured I would try anyways before leaving.
“Lila?” I asked the room first. After getting no response, I created a sort of door into the endless dark for just a brief moment. “Lila?”
“Oh, Jack, you’re back,” I heard in response, but there was no way to discern the direction where the voice came from. Before I had a second to go out into the dark and look for her, I heard footsteps on the ceiling. Lila jumped from the edge where I opened the door and grabbed the top frame to swing past me into the room. “Helvara was so funny! Drayden was like a puppy in love. That’s before they left the island. After that, the adventure really took off. They found some other people, got betrayed, but they didn’t lose heart in trusting others or each other. The setting was cool, too. Oh, and Taverna was a real pain in the ass.”
“I take it you created another book from the story,” I said. “I mean, stitched the story together. So, let me ask you something. What if I write the story a bit differently in my reality, will the story here change?” Lila smiled smugly and shook her head slowly.
“That’s the beauty of the untethered space,” she said. “It’s loose ideas that can be stitched together. Something I stitched together will never be exactly the same as what you put together. The mind changes some things. For example, I removed all sexual content from the whole story. Drayden is in love, but there is no need to be explicit. Instead, I made him always hope for more and get so in the end, but after a lot of effort to prove himself. Even then, I glossed over it into family life to avoid the subject since everyone views it differently.”
“Quite modern of you, Lila,” I said. “Which is strange, as your years run seconds here. Is it the same outside of this space?”
“Well, no,” she said. “This is an expedited time. It would be silly otherwise. Out in my world, only a million years pass to one billion years in here. It’s a time-out out of regular time. It still boggles my mind that you only live eighty years.”
“It’s just the same name for a different measure of time,” I said. “Can I have Drayden and Helvara to put them with the other ones?” Lila reached into the back of her pants and pulled out the book. I would question why she would put it there, but there was no point. She appeared human, but she was not one.
“I’d probably have to enter these into a computer eventually, but I do love the old medium,” I said. “My world is currently going through a period of reusing materials so that our planet is not polluted. Anything like that in your world?” Lila put a finger to her chin for a moment, then shook her head.
“Wanna see what the entrance to Taverna’s mountain castle looked like?” She asked, entirely ignoring a subject I posed about paper books. I nodded. She was already at the makeshift door, tossing glowing strands into the darkness for a path away from the room. I followed her out, closing the door for the moment, but it disappeared on the surface of the box when closed. When we reached the end of the short path, Lila got still while holding her arms apart. In an instant, she brought her palms together into a loud clap that produced a giant mountain in the distance.
We stood at a large wooden door embedded in the mountains. Smaller rocks littered the floor of the doorway, blocking it from opening. The hinges suggested it would open inward. The wood was frozen stiff, but still visibly brown. The surface had splintered sections, with arrays of arrows stuck in the wood. The metal pieces were frosted over, long unused. The mountains in the distance gave off a sense of fearful awe, but the door was the one thing that suggested a valley of giants. The wood was bent into spirals at the top, slowly twisted while wet to create intricate designs only above the door.
“Wow,” I said. “I never got this far with them. I knew it was going to look amazing, but this is far beyond my own reconstruction.”
“It was really cool,” she said. “The beauty of stitching a story in untethered space is that you can actually witness it happen. It’s something of creation from a god’s point of view.” I met her eyes to come back to what she just said.
“So you have some kind of god in your world,” I said.
“There are a few to choose from,” she said, then sighed. “And all of them come from a preconceived way of living. It’s tiresome to explain.”
“I get it,” I said. “It’s the same in my world. Everyone wants their god worshipped, but not everyone agrees with the teachings they provide. That’s why I think it’s mainly manufactured by the people themselves who can’t see past their lifespans.”
“Huh,” she said. “Maybe you’re right. It’s hard to argue the point unless you’re wielding one’s teachings as a weapon against the others. It’s better to just believe there is no such figure.”
“But then you run into not having a way to define this,” I said, holding up the book of Drayden and Helvara I took with me. “When stitching, you assume the role of god, and though the story proceeds without divine intervention, you do create the issues for characters to solve and withstand. Basically, it’s hard to say there is no god while creating things that you have an opinion about. Your way of seeing something is an act of god in your own mind, to a lower existence in another space like this.”
“Oof,” Lila said. “That’s heavy. So you mean that one of us here is god, and the other is just a character in the story.”
“Well,” I said. “Can’t it just be a congregation of gods in a space void of such things?”
“You already have stuff in this space, somehow locked to it,” she said. “Wouldn’t that make you the god?”
“Then there is you,” I said. “Able to create things in the space that I have not created yet from just an idea, fully functional things, living things. It’s just your perception of life that is warped in my opinion. But that’s ok. I don’t expect you to have my values. You can create beauty, then erase it with a single motion, whereas I create cool things, and never have time for them. Both aren’t perfect examples of how someone should behave, but it depends on our upbringing, not to mention that you’re still young and learning.”
“I’m five billion years old, Jack,” Lila said. “Do that math in your conversion formula. I’ll wait.” She folded her arms with a grimace and kept eye contact as I switched to the calculator app for an estimate.
“So in my terms you’re six-hundred and eighty-five years old,” I said. “Meaning, if I estimate you to be ten years old by your actions and such, one year for you is sixty-seven years for me. You’re as old as eight lifespans in my world put end to end. There has to be some kind of difference in conversion. There is no way it can form like that. Maybe the conversion doesn’t work at all. It’s silly to even try to convert it.”
“Silly, or do you just not want to admit that I’m only in the form of a child because I want to be,” she countered. “I like being small, new, agile. It’s freedom and if my mind is advanced further, that just allows me to do more with the way I am. People in your world can’t change forms like me, can they?”
“Nope, we’re locked to one,” I said. “And it decomposes over the years, resulting in eventual death. Listen, I’d love to continue this, but I have to go for now.”
“Ok, but can I get a story?”
“I’ll give you an idea for one,” I said. “Maybe I can use you to write it while I have no time to. Ok?”
“Ok,” Lila said. “What is it about?”
“A lonely samurai,” I said. “He lost his daughter and wife and now ventures the cold world with nothing except his sword which he can project his soul into for warmth and to cut things precisely.”
“Hmm,” she said. “Ok. Later.”
I created the idea in a booklet and tossed it over while disappearing again.
break
When I returned that Friday morning before work, Lila was on the couch reading a book. It was about a samurai, but I never gave him a name, nor did I give him a reason to keep living past the death of his family. He was a lone master of the sword, seeking to help others because he was not able to help himself. I had to wonder what his name ended up being, but felt a tickle in this untethered space with a semblance that I might already know it.
”Hey, Lils,” I said, but she was too into the text to notice me. While she was reading, I manipulated the area around her just enough so she would not notice it. When I stepped up to nudge her away from the words, she paused reading at the end of a chapter. His name was Dokuto. Or was that some other character. I only got a glance at the text on the page before the book closed.
Lila stood up from the couch now in a snowy environment only as a projected reality onto the room. I could only create within the confines of the room, or was I too afraid to make something without being able to destroy it as easily as she could?
“Whoa!” Lila said, and ran off into the environment. I expected her to bump into a wall or something, but she just kept going. I followed her, finding no wall or other things in the vicinity. My first look of shock was to check if the laptop from Rebecca was still there, invisible on the table, but there was no longer a table. I flipped it to allow Lila room to play. By way of patting around in the snow, I found the machine I made invisible for no reason. When I had it cleaned off, I removed the invisibility to make sure I didn’t forget it existed again. Was I supposed to lose it?
“JACK!” Lila called out from a distance. I looked to her just in time to find a giant snow monster holding her up. It was twenty times the size of her, with hulking arms of packed snow. Lila sat on its shoulder, next to a head only containing eyes. “This is amazing! It’s just like the papa samurai’s world!” I walked up to the creature, looking up to find Lila already using the big body as a slide.
“Papa samurai?” I asked. “Didn’t his family die?”
“Not his daughter,” she said. “She got out before they got a chance. She finds him in the middle, after a few years. After that he's happy again, having something to protect. He teaches her more of his style and they venture to help people together in a time when everyone is out for themselves. That’s where I stopped. I think this one was a bit different than the other ones.” I picked up the coverless book and inspected the spine for the mark of J, but there wasn’t one.
“It’s not mine,” I said. “But it was my idea.”
“That’s the thing about ideas, Jack,” Lila said. “Before there is a voice to the idea, that idea is only a thought in the dark. You gave me the idea, and I stitched it together from the start. You’ll find it’s not written in your writing voice either. That’s the power of untethered space.”
“But then I can’t ever publish this,” I said. “It’s not mine anymore. You wrote it. You took an idea I kept for later and stole it for yourself.”
“Hey, now,” Lila fired back. “I didn’t steal anything. You gave me the idea, and I ran with it. It was like a test. If you don’t want ideas taken from you in this way, now we know what to avoid.”
“Yeah, but the samurai story is gone,” I said. I wanted to keep it for later, once I got educated on the samurai ways, but this was a betrayal. With a wave of my hand, I retracted the environment to just the wooden room, however the monster was not of my creation and remained, packing into the room while burying us in the snow of its body. I flexed a finger to create fire and melt the snow creature, but only ended up filling the room with water to the waist. With another edit, the water drained out the bottom into the nothingness of the untethered space.
“I don’t like that, Lila,” I said, once everything was dry. I looked at her, finding her naked in a mature female body. I turned away to avoid looking, but felt beast roar and shake his cage from within.
“Why do you do that?” She asked. “Do you not like how I look when I’m grown up?” I shook my head, too fearful to look toward her in case she was facing my direction.
“I like it too much,” I said. “But it’s not me. He likes it too much, and beast wants more than to just see it. He has terrible ideas of what to do with that which he finds attractive, and that can never be put into reality. I will never allow it.” When I felt a hand on my shoulder, I decided to leave without saying another word.
break
When I came back after the weekend, Lila was nowhere to be found. Outside the room was a winter landscape, visible under the strange red sun of the story she stole. The snow was white, unaffected by the distant light, almost as if it gave off a glow. The distance stretched into swirling fog in every direction, distant far above the darkness usually there. It was obvious Lila created this, but for what purpose?
I pulled warmer coverings from nowhere to wear. I could just as well float through this ‘scape in ghostly form, but I wanted to feel the elements lacking in my world. It had been a light snow winter where I lived. Though it was coastal, I was worried that humanity was really the cause of the dwindling tundra. On the other hand, the planet had always gone through warm and cold stages in the past. Perhaps the next real cold stage would eradicate most humans when it arrived.
Before I had a chance to venture a guess which direction Lila might have gone to hide, a deer pranced past in the snow. As there was no indication of anything else in the surroundings, I decided to follow the tracks into the mist. That red sun felt so sad in the distance, as if it was dying. If that was a dying star, the years of this world were numbered. Then again, that story was never meant to be on a planet in space. As there was no need for any explanation of what existed above, the story was peacefully ignorant of the doom that might soon befall it.
“Lila!” I called out into the swirling featherweight snow fog. From far away it looked like suspended water, but it was frozen, snow of such small proportions that it remained on the slight breeze. “Lila, I don’t have time for this!” My feet sank deep into the snow, until the surface was at my knees. The further I got, the more I worried about nature's perception of me in this cold. I was a hefty snack to wildlife. As such, I produced a samurai sword and a short sword to the set. With that, I could blend in while still being protected. When I looked back to the cabin where I arrived, only snow fog swirled in the distance.
I could just fly up and find it, or swipe my hand to clear the fog away, but I deserved this cold shoulder from her. I did the same to her, though she did not understand why. I would endure these conditions and find her. My idea for the story lit inside my mind, no longer about the samurai who lost his wife and daughter, but about a lone warrior traveling the frozen tundras, only to arrive without knowing and freeze to death, just a hill away from salvation. The scene was stark in my mind, a man leaning on a sword stuck into the ground among a blizzard, being caked over with a blanket of white, already gone. Just beyond the hill, lights of a village lit up for the night that came.
It felt as though I killed him. I wrote the short scene in my mind where he kept using his connection to his blade to create heat by using his soul for payment. That was how he managed to get so far, just not far enough. Suddenly wondering whether that caused Lila to create a positive version for the other samurai, I decided to change it. I kept walking until I reached a mound of snow that I knew to be the frozen samurai. I created a few hand movements to channel my soul force into his body with a touch. He stirred, blazing his sword to cast heat in the vicinity.
“Thank you, stranger,” he said. “I was to die in this spot, a disappointing death at the hand of cold, but you brought me back. I am forever in your debt.” He bowed, kneeling, still holding the sword on fire, melting the snow around us.
“Stand,” I said. “Look beyond the hill.” The lights of night lit in the distance, signifying a village close by. “You had already made it, only needed one final push. Go. Seek refuge in the warmth of others in this cold.” His eyes teared up at the light, but no tears fell from the windows of his soul. I walked off in the other direction, much to his dismay.
“Where are you going?!” He called out, but the fog of snow had already swallowed me up.
“Back to the dead,” I said, pretending to be one of the frozen corpses who have attempted to make that journey before only to freeze to death underneath the swirling fog of snow. I could still see him in the distance, glowing fire from his sword just like the sun in the sky before night began. With that corrected, I flew up into the sky as far as it would take me. There was a distant star of red that circled the scene, but that was a lie, too. It was Lila.
When high above the scene created by her, I reached for the world and shook it out of reality until all that remained was the red sun. It stopped moving, aware that the snowy landscape was now gone. She uncurled from her fetal position in the darkness, but still maintained the red glow around her. She looked like a Zaxi in that moment, a living star child, and I wondered if that could be it. Could she be that being locked to untethered space, a darkness where it would be imprisoned. It made sense in billions of years, but Zaxi only lived fifty billion years.
“Lila!” I shouted. She flew closer, crying.
“I’m sorry!” She shouted into the darkness. “I’m sorry I pushed you! I’m sorry I got on your nerves! I’m sorry you hate me!” She covered her face in a sad tantrum, embarrassed of her tears. Each fell into the darkness becoming points of light, like stars spreading out around her. I flew closer with a hand outstretched. When I was close enough, the hand touched down on her forehead.
“I don’t hate you, Lils,” I said. “I was just taken by surprise. It was like that with Rebecca, too. It started off innocently, but she started trying to fix me, getting hurt in the process. I don’t want that for you, Lila. Especially since I didn’t create you, only found you in this untethered space.” Her head tilted up to meet my eyes, a galaxy swirling in each eye.
“It would be different this time, Jack,” she said. “But I don’t want to lose a friend in this place of nothing. I need your ideas, something to keep me from degrading alone. I’m sorry that I wrote a different story on your idea.”
“No, you don’t need to apologize,” I said. “That, I needed to witness. I’ve been writing for my own sadness for far too long. I understand now. I know what you meant and what I need to do. But for now, I have to go to work. Are you ok until next time I stop by?” She nodded and hugged me, unable to wrap her arms around me in the small form.
“See ya, Jack,” she said, parting from the hug. “Oh. Could I get something… new?”
“Of course, princess,” I said, took a bow, and produced a booklet with the unwritten story of Faelight and Brimstoll. It was an idea, but thought out enough to be written in my voice and completed. I knew this one would take her some time. “Until next time, young miss.” I tossed the paper booklet over to her as I left.
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