Epoch of Desolation

Side Character? Division? Rain was left bamboozled for a brief moment, before his frontal lobe suddenly pushed forth to him a memory he had subconsciously concealed.

Wait. Those messages weren’t dreams? His mouth almost went agape, wider than when he’d opened it to help with his breathing. But since attempting that felt like a bunch of needles were being stabbed into his cheeks, Rain kept his lips together.

What he had recalled were the barrages of notifications which had popped up before him while he had still been swaying in the bleak darkness of his mind. And surprisingly even their arrangements, something so forgettable, were still quite vivid in his head, almost like he had a perfect photo of them stored in there.

Rain remained baffled for quite some time. Then a ripple shook that pond of perplexity as a flicker of something both familiar and alien stirred to being within him, arriving like an uninvited spark of a candle’s miniature light in a completely dark room.

Rain froze solid like a mannequin devoid of life as a jolt similar to that of an electric current coursed through his brain and an onslaught of fleeting images ransacked his mind.

He quivered for an instant. Then, as soon as he pulled himself back, reached for those fleeting images. Not caring that they were literally incomplete puzzles meshed together in a chaotic manner, the hands of his psyche reached for them either way, desperate to bring home what were seemingly pieces of himself which had gone astray.

Luckily, he grabbed something. And despite how disoriented his body felt at that moment, Rain was smeared with an unhealthy amount of joy, one he believed was an accumulation of all the past joys he had experienced while engaging in that particular memory he had caught.

They overwhelmed him, by the way, and Rain had to take a moment to calm his rapid breaths because of that. Eventually, he was well stabilized, and the sensation of a certain, small part of himself being patched up—a part which had a hand in the excitement of life—caressed his scrawny body.

A trigger. Rain seemed to have come to an enlightenment as a rush of dopamine was excreted in his brain. The corners of his lips raised into a soft smile instinctively, the needle-like pain in his cheeks almost completely forgotten about.

He focused once again on the mixture of blue and purple hue words before his hazel eyes, while the rest of his fragmented memories escaped once again into the horizon of his mind.

This served as a trigger? I can get back my memories one step at a time through triggers? Cool! Fucking cool! He suddenly paused as his eyes narrowed. Why do I feel like I should have been reprimanded for mentioning that word? That feeling stuck with him for a couple of seconds, but he internally shooed it away not long later. After all, what was the use of dwelling on a feeling that had no trigger to spark his remembrance of it—at least at this moment?

Rain shifted his attention to the words he had seen before awakening, focusing on two in particular: Revelation and Player.

His eyes twitched instinctively. Is this like a game?

Of course, he had zero clarity on what he was talking about. The intricacies of what a ‘game’ actually was remained hazy to him. But from what he could now recall, due to the memory he had caught, the words before his view shared an uncanny resemblance to what might be seen in a game.

That aside, there were three other things in particular that stuck with him more than the others.

One was the ‘Role’ he had gotten. The ‘Side Character’ Role.

If the little he’d recalled about ‘games’ were true, then weren’t Side Characters like… Useless? Bound to die? Or something along that line?

Rain shook his head internally.

Death? Heh. He shouldn’t be thinking about such bad omens. Whatever was happening to him—whatever that Side Character Role was—he could not let it cause negative thoughts to pop up in his head.

‘Negative thoughts beget negative happenings’.

Rain blinked owlishly. He had no recollection of learning that particular sentence.

He moved on to the rest of his worries. The first which was the last of the initial messages: “Releasing player from his pod”. And the second which was the time-length recorded.

His questions came then:

What was this pod? How come he had spent five years inside it? And… Was his memory loss connected to it in some way?

Rain threw his gaze around his scenery again, checking for any more weird things he might have missed, while the pair of messages which had popped up in his view kept up with his eyes’ movement like a homing missile.

He had no idea what this pod looked like, or what exactly he should be keeping an eye out for, and it frustrated him beyond whatever little reasoning he had.

Not having a complete set of memories put a lot of restrictions on what he could understand. Of what he could—

Rain’s eyebrows shot up suddenly as he gasped softly.

He was lying side-faced to the floor; in a hospital shouldn’t he be on a bed?

If he took the term pod literally, and he had been in one all this time, then him having just been released meant that the pod should be…

He strained his neck and tried to look over his shoulder…

…The pod should be behind him.

It was futile though. The muscles of his neck seemed to be the slowest of his body’s muscles to regain their vitality.

Well, he was tired of waiting for answers. If this pod was connected to his memories somehow—if it would serve as a trigger—then he had to seek it out immediately. He was not going to let things such as stiffened muscles keep him rooted to one spot.

A single push of his body up and the way his whole being protested in return reminded Rain that those stiffened muscles were the whole essence of his existence. The muscles made him.

He clutched a characteristic then and there though. Stubbornness.

With puffed cheeks and widened, reddened eyes full of desperation and anguish, Rain kept raising his overly dehydrated body from the damp and dusty floor he was on.

It was not until after a few seconds of struggle did he find himself in a push-up position. His recalcitrant muscles had had no choice but to succumb to his will at the end of the day.

Rain moved his neck, rather painfully, though, but due to that he was able to catch sight of a lifeline that had always been so close to him.

A hospital bed.

He could lean on that.

As if to punish him for feeling joyous, his body suddenly took away his control over it, forcing him to crash down and his nose to passionately kiss the floor.

Despite the pain, Rain didn’t shout. He just grunted and beared with it, squeezing his hands tightly in return as a single streak of blood came out of his right nostril.

‘Squeezing his hands?’

Rain’s eyes widened, the sting in his nose seemingly forgotten.

I can control my hands now!

It must have been the combination of the shock and pain he had been bombarded with as he fell to the floor, but at least he got a reward out of it. In fact, it was something better than what he could have asked for. He had one section of his body back to him. That was a great start for better things to come.

A grin took his face, one so wide that his nose was pushed up exaggeratedly.

It would be nice to walk, wouldn’t it? Rain pictured the scenario briefly. I should try it…

And he did.

Up into a crouch, he went. It worked. His joints were crying, but it worked. He went further, on his knees this time. Painful, but he succeeded again. Further, his brain bellowed at him, and he went. Before he knew it, he was on his feet. Rather wobbly, but he was standing.

A smile appeared between shaky breaths, and then he moved—toward the hospital bed he had seen. Even though his legs were somewhat his, he still had to rest on something. The pain was so mind boggling that he couldn’t stand for long.

A minute or so later he arrived at the bed stand, and circled around it to the side that faced the window, a muted silver of moonlight coming in through the slit in between its curtains.

As Rain climbed onto the bed, he noticed that the bed sheet, which seemed like it had once been white, was now yellow and rotten.

Although, he accepted it that way regardless.

Considering his situation, he couldn’t even complain. And besides, he was not planning on staying here for long. The bed was just to be a means for him to take in the whole scenery of the room he was in, especially because of ‘the pod’, while serving as a temporary place of comfortable rest until he was able to control his muscles without pain.

As you know, my little stubborn neck, I don’t plan on staying here forever, so I think it’s high time you start responding to me without complaints, don’t you?

Maybe hoping his intimidation would work, Rain squinted his eyes and started to turn the apex of his body around, and to his utmost surprise his head moved without ‘complaint’. The pain was a lot less than what he’d felt a moment ago too.

Mental prowess. Rain was delighted at his brilliance as a better view of his location came into his vision.

The hospital room was somewhat spacious, but it only accommodated a few things—at least, that he could see presently. The bed he was seated on, a chair and a dead monitor and an IV-stand placed beside it, as well as a single plush sofa at a distance across from him. It had the ambience of a private area.

Is this a VIP room? Rain wondered. Was I, like, rich?

A rather fast deduction for the little bit he had been able to make out, since it was not like the room was in any way flashing bright; It was stumbling between a thin division betwixt utter darkness and a murky ray of silver dullness after all.

Undoubtedly, the moon was up in the sky, pouring down its radiant glow. The problem was with what was acting like some sort of veil over night’s source of light? And in that regard, Rain didn’t dwell on any hopes of completely satisfying his curiosity by taking every inch of the whole scenery in.

Besides, his main desire lay with whatever the pod he had been released from was, and the light coming in between the narrow gap of the window’s curtains was sufficient enough for him to—

…Huh?

Rain saw no pod-like thing; no, he’d come to see something else—something that filled him with displeasure and terror. He was staring at death straight in its eyes.

“Oh, you’ve got to be fucking kidding me.”

…He should have been reprimanded for that.