DDO Olympics: Storytelling Prelims

Chapter 6: At the End of Myself "You're not real," I repeated five or six times. The barbed wire was cutting deep, and I didn't think I could take the pain anymore. Then the mesh fell away and I rolled into a room that looked nearly identical to mine except that he walls had a different spray of dirt along them. The cuts were gone now. "What the hell?" I asked looking around. The walls were all in tact. No sign of my sister or the wire mesh or the barbed wire. As I scanned the room, I saw The Mad Man standing behind his own arc. "You still don't get it do you?" He asked laughing as he walked around the arc. I couldn't hold myself back. I ran and wrapped my arms tightly around him. I cried into his shoulder and asked, "What's going on?" I heard The Old Man from behind me say, "This is all real. It's happening to you." The Mad Man let go of me - and I say that as if he ever began to hug me, which he didn't - and walked over to the door. He popped it open almost as a demonstration that the lock wasn't real or that it could be changed. He simply said, "But it isn't." "What does that even mean? Don't talk in riddles to me!" I yelled not caring that someone would probably hear me. "This is about you. You've known this the whole time, but you haven't accepted it yet," The Mad Man replied with a sad look in his eyes. "You haven't been listening to us," The Old Man added. Something about their voices made me want to listen to them, but I couldn't understand a word of what they were saying. Then he came in. The nameless mystery man who brought me here. "Get the hell out!" I yelled at him. I backed far enough that The Mad Man and The Old Man were next to me. "He can't," The Mad Man said as if it were a well known fact. "No, he's quite right," that man said. The Dark One. That's who he was. Until I knew his name, I wouldn't think of him as anything else. "Who are you?" I screamed at him. "But we've all told you," he said as if there was something I wasn't getting. He strode toward me and grabbed my face tightly with a large hand and spat the words out more than said them, "It's. About. You." The Old Man pushed him off and said, "She doesn't understand." "What don't I understand?" I asked. "Why won't you tell me?" "You've always pretended I didn't exist," he said pointing an accusing finger at me. "I've always been there, but you never believed I was. You always believed in the old man most!" Then I heard the innocent voice behind me. "Most of all, you pretended I wasn't there." It was Jonathan. He was standing behind us all with his arms limp at his sides. "I had to come here with you so you would know I was with you," he continued in his usual innocent voice. My heart melted. I thought he was dead. Then as if answering my thought he said, "They could never kill me." "How is this possible?" I asked, but I was already starting to realize what everything meant. "It isn't," said The Mad Man stepping next to the Dark One. "But it is," The Old Man added stepping to the other side of the Dark One. The Dark One didn't fight and didn't come toward me. He merely stood there and asked, "Come on. Don't you know it can be both?" Then I blinked and they were gone. I turned to see if Jonathan was still there, and he was. "You're real?" I asked him. "Of course I am," he said like it was a stupid question. "So if this is about me..." I started then grabbed my hair as I thought deeper about it. "They've been saying it wrong," he said tilting his head at me. "This is..." He was cut off by an ear-piercing shot that made me cringe. My hearing took a second to come back, but then there it was. Jonathan rocked on his heel and started to fall backward. A bullet had hit him in the head. I screamed in terror and turned to see who it was. It was the torture expert. He was the man I despised the most. "I'm real too," he said laughing as he lowered his gun and walked into the room. Then he dropped his eyes and said, "We have unfinished business." I turned around and saw Jonathan lying on the ground. His lifeless body was in the same position he would've probably taken if lying down for a nap. Then I felt it. That hypnotic feeling that drew me toward blood. This time was different, though. I didn't want to fight it. "What are you doing?!" The torture expert screamed. I reached down and I put my hand on Jonathan's chest. It was warm, but not the warm you would expect. It felt like it was more than a body, and it obviously was. My hand went into his chest without breaking skin and I reached his heart. When my fingers touched it, I felt a surge of energy flow into my arm. It started to fill my body. All I saw was light for some time. When my vision cleared up, Jonathan was gone. I stood up and turned around to see the torture expert smiling at me. "You can't win this," he growled more than said. He raised my hand at him, and he took a step back. I set my jaw as a final tear rolled down my face, and I ran at him as fast as I could. He hit a wall and I reached to his chest. My hand went straight through it, and my vision started to blur into light. I screamed with all of the energy I had left, and I felt something like sand start to fall around my arm. When I could see, there was a pile of ash in front of me. I looked up at the room and said, "This is me." The world started to fade around me, and I found myself standing in the room where I'd started this. There was no man standing in there. All of this had happened in my head so it wasn't all real, but it was real because it was me. "So that all really happened to you?" Ralph asked me skeptically. I simply nodded and said, "It's probably because of my... Well... Ability, I guess. It's brought me to a place in myself where no one else goes. Especially not like that."