And Allan walked in.
The door shut behind him, and his knees finally made the decision to give. He swerved onto his right, bounced, and fell limply onto red carpet. Mouth agape, he lay gasping, the painkillers still numbing him to simplicity as he clutched where his left forearm once belonged. Tears rested undecidedly in his eyes as he struggled against his handicap, mind dumb and alien to his recent dismemberment.
He made one attempt to rise, the thick bandages on his left forearm scraping horribly against the brittle rug. Cheap rug, the floor of an auditorium. There was music playing… a lulling melody. Allan raised his head, found his strength failing, and compromised, resting it sideways on his right arm.
He was in the back of an enormous musical hall, laden with crystalline chandeliers and more than a thousand velvet red seats, absorbing the slow melody from the stage. Allan’s first instinct told him he was alone, but examination showed a blue figure on the stage, not thirty feet from his crumpled form. A blue dress. A woman, of pale skin and red hair, dancing alone on the dais.
If she noticed him, she betrayed no sign of it. She fluttered and moved like breath to the song, a wicked, peculiar thing that tickled the edge of a classical piece. It was synthesized, and worked against expectations, sounding close enough to a lullaby in it’s cellos and violins that it’s electronic aspects only sounded more alien, poking it’s beauty like nails on a bag of sand. If Allan were not scared, broken, and half-unconscious, he may have liked the song. But his focus was coveted by the woman.
She was gorgeous, and moved unlike anyone he had ever seen. She flitted, rolled, shifted and leaped to the music as it’s manifest, her dress an extension of her will. She would spin, and a gust of air would blow her crimson hair to a perfect crown, assemblé, and her dress would billow perfectly to her form. For nearly a minute, Allan watched, and remained entirely enraptured by the miracle, until it became apparent that her dance could not possibly have been natural.
Without his handicap, the dances’ perfection should have demonstrated something impossible to Allan earlier. In his current state, he was shocked when the woman began floating and twirling through the air, billowing silk lines appearing as platforms as she moved between them, eyes closed in effortless concentration. Subtle lights, tricks of the wind, sudden twists of the song all accented her performance, her performance to no one, unaware of the newcomer in the back.
She dove, twinkled like a storybook fairy, swayed, and opened her eyes, seeing Allan.
The song stopped. She fell instantly; the sound of her gasp projected. Time physically froze as Allan reached for her, and she crumpled into the stage as it resumed. Sound pierced Allan’s mind, and instantly, impossibly, the room began to melt.
The light of the chandeliers flashed brick red, the chairs bent into one another like melted chocolate, and the walls sprouted black spots. Everything flashed, the room shuddered, collapsed like a cake in an oven, and Allan fell.
For a moment, Allan drowned in blackness, falling like a ragdoll without any sound of rushing wind.
He crumpled with a timid ‘oomph’ onto a soft, purple moss. Allan choked out a whimper. In less than two seconds, it had seemed his heart had left his chest, and had only just decided to return. For a half minute, Allan half-choked on tears, devoid of shame, childish in his terror and frightened to look up. He drew two rattled breaths, wiped away his tears on his right arm, and lifted his head.
The word ‘hallucinogens’ flashed through his mind, a knee-jerk reaction to the landscape. He was in a forest, perhaps a swamp, covered entirely in dark purple, blue, orange and red hues, thickly enveloping all plants in sight. All trees seemed dead and limbless, bodies swallowed entirely by the fungus. The ground rolled in gentle hills, and Allan lay in a gentle crevice, unable to see further than a dozen feet in any direction… and only then did he realize there was no sky.
In blatant insult to rationality, the ceiling was nearly identical to the ground, an inverted forest with a gravity all to it’s own. A river ran some distance away, but impossibly, halfway down it’s stream, it spit it’s water into the sky and fell to the ground in a stream that seemed perfectly natural. Another forest floor existed to Allan’s right that curved at another angle, another curved in a spiral off to Allan’s left, taunting his sanity in as benign a state as possible. The forest had strange structures within it, a ladder that connected three grounds, a stairway that seemed to warble as he looked at it, and innumerable doors. Wooden doors, metal doors, doors that were small and large and trap doors and doors that were also stairsteps, so many doors, as though the forest was a maze, a labyrinth.
Allan put his head down, gripping his temple as a sharp pain ran through his skull. Such a sight would have physically hurt a healthy brain; Allan was entirely overwhelmed. The pain came in waves, Allan was reduced to a fetal position as his mind tried to vomit back the forest it had just seen, desperately trying to expunge it from his system. A forest without gravity. A dead, ancient forest that smelt like a crypt, with water that bent to insane gravity and a forest floor that spiralled into a darkness Allan could not see, could not imagine…
Allan remained in this state for a minute, until a soft voice sounded in the air, carried as if by a far distance…
“Are you there? Are you there? Are you there? Are you-”
Figures darted between the trees, a flash of red hair, a white jacket…
“Are you there? Are you there?”
The figures were getting closer
“Are you there?”
The voice didn't belong to the figures, it belonged-
Allan blinked.
The forest was gone. He was in a lush dining room, sitting in a wooden chair, separated from the girl in the blue dress by a massive feast.
“Hello.”
Allan sat in dumb silence for a moment. He realized his hand was gripping his chest, let go slowly, and remembered to breathe.
“It’s alright. It’s stable. The room won’t change... for the moment. Relax.”
A grandfather clock ticked reassuringly to the side. The girl played with a grape in her hand, not looking at him as she weaved it through her fingers. She sighed.
“I understand you are confused. It was a... disturbing... way to begin things. And you are both drugged, and only human. Hideous combination.”
She popped the grape into her mouth and reached for another. Allan didn’t take his eyes off her. She didn’t place her eyes on him.
“It’s been quite a trial for you, hasn’t it? All those test chambers, all those decisions, tsk tsk… all to meet me. And here I am,” she spread her arms, “ready to answer your last questions, and you can’t even recognize me.”
Allan was trying to remember something. Something important…
“Shame about your memory. You brought it on yourself, but that doesn’t cha-”
“You’re Omega.” Allan interrupted. His hands began to shake. She finally looked at him, a playful, challenging gaze.
“Yes, I am Omega. Not everyday you get to meet the voice in your head, is it? Though not to confuse you, but in this room, you’re actually in mine…”
A moment of silence. Allan lunged across the table at her, stupidly, angrily, trying to run across the dishes. She raised her hand, flicked her forefinger, and Allan was thrown back into his chair, frozen into submission by large ice crystals.
“Angry? Understandable. But violent? Not like you at all, not like you at all…”
She began peeling a pomegranate. He glared at her, fuming. The distance between the two of them may have crackled, he was so furious. So much pain, such repressed, consistent fear for days…
“We have all kinds of time to discuss your tests. We have such a wonderful abundance of time, and so much to talk about… isn’t that right? Ah… your memories… do you remember your name? That’s often one of the first items to go, something telling in that-”
“My name?”
“Yes, your name, child. Do you remember what your name is?”
He bit his lip. He held the pathetic aura of a man trying to appear decent while drunk, a feigned posture while his body swayed out of his control. Omega sighed again.
“Your name is Allan Yorke.”
