The Last Adventurer

As the Stranger said “wet”, things changed. There was no round room anymore. There were no walls, other than the perfect robin’s egg blue of the sky rounded by the brilliant blue of the water. Instead of a floor, everyone was bobbing in their chairs in the water as waves lapped up their legs. Instead of a ceiling, there was the brightest radiant whitest sun shining on their pale bodies. And for that moment, everything was perfect. It was the most beautiful thing Bart had ever seen.

Then, everything changed. The chairs began to sink. People began to flail in their soggy clothes. Desperate drowning breathing noises crept above the waves. Seagulls with hard eyes began to land in the water next to thrashing limbs. Suddenly, everything was cold. The cold water pushed into every pore and blocked the light from the sun. Bart began to wonder what he would do, because his chair was gone and his clothes were soaked, and he couldn’t swim with one arm holding the pill above the waves.

Then he was back. Everyone was back. Everything was back. Except that it wasn’t and yet it was. There were no orderly rows of chairs any more. Bart himself was seated on the floor. Moisture saturated the air. Some people were still swimming – except that they were on the floor, which was wet. The wall was wet too, with a ring like a giant bathtub. At a glance, the floor appeared to have strange protrusions growing out of it. Bart looked at the lumps curiously. The lumps were seaweed covered chairs, somehow impossibly rooted in the solid linoleum floor. A downpour of drops continued to cascade off of the ceiling, forming lakes and puddles in the floor. Absently, Bart stuck out his tongue. One of the drops splashed into his mouth, overwhelming his mind with fresh brine. Off to the side, the Orderlies were gathering around some of the anchored chairs, pulling half-heartedly while looking suspiciously at their surroundings.

A tap on the shoulder brought Bart’s attention back to the Stranger.

“Can I have that pill now?” He said insistently. “If this doesn’t prove it, it doesn’t really matter, because we’re running out of time.”

Bart absently put out the pill. Things had been so much easier, he thought, when the talk had been well, not real. It was easy to solve problems that had to do with purple elephants, which no one had ever seen. Then, Bart realized that no one had probably ever seen a room turned into an ocean either.

“How did you do that?” He asked as the Stranger scooped some water off the ground to swallow the pill with.

Grimacing, the Stranger made an awful face as the mixture traveled down his throat. After a second, there was a visible moment of relief, as his shoulders slumped, and the fire subsided in his eyes.

“I couldn’t explain it even if I wanted to.” He began, and then sensing that Bart might have more questions, quickly continued on. “I guess the best way to explain it is that were more alike then you think. You’re trapped here, physically, and that is probably a burden on you…but at least you don’t have a choice, really, about what you want to do. I’m trapped mentally, because I have a choice, and that burdens me every several hours. That’s why I need these pills – because if I don’t – I don’t know what my mind would make the world.”

Something about that paragraph didn’t seem right to Bart. He was about to say something about it when waves of hysterical scared screaming battered through the door to their round room. Every head turned toward the door, including Bart’s. They couldn’t see through the door to the half-flooded halls with misplaced fish, or to the offices with sodden useless files, or to anything else that had gone wrong in the building. After a few seconds, once everyone realized that they couldn’t see anything, the sounds of terror were just another normal part of everyday life in the building. Bart turned back around, and was about to deliver what he thought were several perceptive and probing questions to the Stranger when he noticed that he was gone. He hadn’t walked off; he wasn’t anywhere in the room; he was just gone. With nothing to do, and nothing to say, Bart sat back down, and began to think.

In the City of Angels, just in time for rush hour, the formerly un-noticed, non-descript building changed as the front doors bulged, and then flew open, pouring a torrent of salt water onto the street, spilling fish and seaweed everywhere.