Seconds, minutes, hours later; how, exactly, he ‘gets out’ still eludes him. Nothing about his environment has changed. She’d left him with no visible clues or hints relating to his pending escape, or at least he thought that was the case, but when he shifts and bumps into the shards on the ground— they’re soft. He reaches out a hand to prod and poke at them but they still do no damage.
Ziun had expected them to dig into him, to cut his skin and make him bleed like the ‘Aaron’ of this world loved to do. But they don’t.
It’s a pretty useless clue she’d left him—if it even was one in the first place—but beggars can’t be choosers and the only thing Ziun could do now was to use his brain.
He doesn’t know how long he sits there staring at the ground, at the shards that become duller with time. But it’s enough for his legs to go numb and — he blinks.
‘Where did they go..?’
Before he can even register what he’s doing, Ziun almost falls over face first as his hands restlessly pat the space in front of him.
‘Where did they go?!’
The floor is startlingly flat and empty— which it shouldn’t be. Ziun lets out a frustrated huff. It was annoying because he hadn’t even figured out what the glass was made of or if he could make a use out of it before it had up and vanished.
Ziun sighs. He rubs his thighs over the fabric of his shorts to get his blood flowing again. He stands on his own two feet as soon as feeling fully comes back to his legs, and pushes through the uncomfortable feeling of pins and needles to take a step back away from the crime scene. The glass may not be there anymore, and for some reason he knows that it isn’t going to magically come back, but in the first place it had been odd. Nothing like it had happened when he was last in this World #11, and adding to that same oddness: Ziun had never been able to rid himself of those god awful chains.
Absentmindedly, he rubs his wrist. They’re thin, frail just like the rest of this body of his in this World seemed to be. Ziun was even able to touch his thumb to his pinkie when he wraps his hand around them.
He frowns worriedly at his poor health, but when he lifts his head up — his heart almost stops in his chest.
‘No.’ He gulps, choking on his own scream. Ziun hates how just the back of this man is enough to shake him.
‘No!’
There, ‘Aaron’ stands in all his psychopathic glory. He faces the door while wearing the same clothes, the same shade of silver and style of hair the ‘him’ of this World #11 had donned.
Ziun feels his eyes sting and almost cries in frustration. He spends an embarrassing amount of time just standing there trying to get his shaking under control and gain the courage to move. Because he would have to move eventually. It was inevitable that he would have to face the man who was the only apparent thing standing between him and true freedom.
But.
But.
Ziun is aware of the seconds that pass by, too on edge and taut to not do so; so it only seems clearer to him how off it was that ‘Aaron’ hadn’t moved a single muscle.
It was highly suspicious. How could this man be ignorant of the ongoings right behind him? Ziun doubts that such a disturbance wouldn’t have been noticed by anyone, let alone this scarily observant man. But the man in question, ‘Aaron’, is still as if paused. He’s unmoving and frozen where he stood.
From this angle, Ziun can’t see whether his chest moving or not, and a deep, dark part of him hopes it’s because he’s died. Knowing his luck though, he probably isn’t, and the man is just pretending so as to catch Ziun off guard.
Exhaling a shakey breath, Ziun finally musters up the courage to take those daunting steps forward and closer to his would-be killer. When he walks around his captor's still form and comes to a stop a safe enough distance away from him, there’s… nothing.
"Fucking hell!" Ziun violently curses and takes half a step back the moment he’s met with ‘Aaron’s’ blank face. A lesser person probably would’ve screamed, but as it stands, Ziun is (barely) made of tougher stuff. He makes no noise, shocked into silence of all things, and yet before he even registers what he’s doing, Ziun has raised a hand in front of the man’s face.
Despite there being no expression, nor mouth, nose or any features, really; there’s a single eye swimming about. It doesn’t blink, devoid of life that was never there even before this eldritch horror came about. The pupil doesn’t suddenly dilate nor does it follow the path of Ziun’s hand as he waves it back and forth. Nothing about this.. body.. suggests it’s even aware.
After a few minutes of Ziun messing around and being certain that ‘Aaron’ wouldn’t suddenly just wake up and attack him, he loses interest lets out a relieved sigh. That’s one less obstacle for him to worry about.
Unfortunately though, when he reaches the door, Ziun finds that it doesn’t open. He yanks and pulls with all his strength but it refuses to budge. In a fit of frustration he lets go of the handle and gives it a kick.
“Huh?”
Ziun hadn’t put much strength into his kick, but with this frail body of his it wasn’t like he could even if he wanted to.
Still.
His puzzlement is because there's a hole in the door suspiciously in the same place that Ziun had kicked. He takes a step back to see it better, but finds that when he does so, there’s a transparency to the whole wall that Ziun almost thinks he can see the shadow of books.
He rubs his eyes in disbelief because — surely not? Surely this, this dungeon he’s in isn’t his home? No, no. He’s just dehydrated and starving. A delusion or two wouldn’t be too odd a thing to have.
Ziun continues to convince himself of this fact, but for once he hates his attention to detail. It makes him notice a whole host of things that he can’t ignore — like how the dimensions of this damp space are eerily similar to that of his Hub. Ziun had lived in that place too long to not drill every single thing about it into his mind.
Because of that, it seems the longer he stares, the more similarities appear until he's suddenly looking at a fully visible shelf, brimming with books and all. The door is still there, somehow wedged between books and looking so out of place.
Just to be sure he wasn't hallucinating the whole thing, he turns around.
Ziun isn’t.. he doesn’t know what he expected to see but he’s still a little disappointed to find that nothing else had changed.
‘Aaron’ and his scarily blank face still just stood there, un-breathing, unmoving — which is for the best, really. The rest of the walls are still grey and there’s no added furniture from his Hub apart from this entire shelf-wall of books. Ziun still can’t shake the feeling of familiarity he has when he stares at the whole room though, despite the majority of it staying the same.
He frowns. After everything that had happened to him, Ziun had a deep sense of trust in himself and his gut feeling. There was something odd about this room—fake, even. Almost as if it were an…
...an illusion?
Suddenly, the hair on his arms stand on end.
Had… had someone put an illusion over the original? Layered it scarily well atop his home hub? Was that what this was? But, why would they do that? Anyone with a brain could see how much this place had haunted him, so why would—
Ziun’s mind comes to a complete stop before he even finishes that line of thought. His face goes through a drastic change in the next few seconds.
‘…someone wanted me to get wrapped up in this illusion, didn’t they?’
His face stills to a degree that Ziun thinks it’s frozen over. For the life of him, he couldn’t think of some life long enemy that could’ve followed him all his life. Because only someone with a deep vengeance towards him could shadow him like this, right? Know his deepest, darkest fears and bring them to life with such startling detail?
Why else would someone go to all these lengths if not out of hatred? It didn’t make sense otherwise!
‘No,’ he suddenly thinks as his blood begins to boil. ‘There’s one other.. person, who would or could do such a thing.’
That “person” possibly being the System and whatever organisation was behind it.
But.. why? He had treated the System with nothing but civility.
’Perhaps it’s not the System who is doing this but the organisation?’
No matter how he thinks about it, Ziun still can’t understand what he could have possibly done to earn their ire. Except.. he was never supposed to become “aware”, was he?
Ziun’s eyes abruptly widen.
The System suddenly being updated was too abrupt. It had never done that before, and perhaps that was his first clue, his first hint to it all.
Ziun thinks back to the sudden appearance of his mother, how his memories of her had returned at almost the exact moment she had appeared in front of him. Because there was only one person—one entity—capable of affecting him like this. Only one person who was so intricately linked to him that he couldn’t tell where he began and they ended.
”Fuck!” He shouts as all the puzzle pieces finally slot together.
He was such an idiot! By only looking at what was in front of him—of nearly breaking down when faced with ‘Aaron’ and that particularly horrid experience—he was blinded as to whether there was a deeper meaning to it all.
Get out, she had said. But not once had she said where he needed to get out from. Ziun had stupidly thought that she meant here, in ‘Aaron’s’ possession, but maybe—
Ziun crouches down to look at the hole in the door and recklessly shoves his hand into the gap. His fingers disappear along with any sensation to suggest he even still had them, but the area cut off around his knuckles overlap with red, blue and green tones that split apart from each other and oddly layers over his skin. That alone has him grinning like a maniac.
It’s a glitch, an honest to god, literal glitch. Logically, this should make Ziun scared or upset. But he’s had enough of feeling that way. Instead what washes over him is pure, unadulterated anger.
“They’re both fucking fake, aren’t they?!”
After that he can’t remember much. His anger had overtaken him and the next thing he knows is that he’d blacked out once again.
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