Andrew stares at the stranger awkwardly. “You’re not one of the teachers…”

He looks the man over, perhaps he is a parent of one of the students. He seems paler and skinnier than someone his size should be, not starving but certainly doesn’t look like he is eating enough. He has a punk-like style to him, long black jacket, jewellery, black makeup, spiked and coloured hair. His appearance is just not one you would expect to see in a parent. Despite that, he seems to indeed be a parent,  as he has a kid standing next to him.

The kid also seems oddly out of place, his hair blond and long, tied tightly in a ponytail, his clothes stiff, strange and robe-like, almost like a school uniform, though not from any uniformed institution that Andrew knew.

Andrew’s observations on the kid abruptly stop as he quickly turns back to the older man, having realised something about him. He looks back to his face to see that his hair is dyed almost the same colour as his, and not just that, it is styled in the exact same way that he likes to do his! “HEY! Who do you think you are!?” He points accusingly to the man’s face. “Find your own look, this one’s taken!!”

The mysterious man seems unamused by Andrew’s reaction, in fact he looks a little bit embarrassed, not with himself, but with Andrew. “Andrew—” 

Andrew quickly interrupts him. “Sin! It’s Sin! Don’t call me Andr—” he stops mid sentence upon realising something. “How do you know my name?!”

The man sighs at the response, a little flustered by it as he awkwardly begins mumbling to himself. “Really? Sin? Already? I didn’t realise how long I’ve been going under that name for…”

Andrew seems a little confused. “Your name… is Sin?”

The man nods his head. “It’s sounds like an edgy name to most, but little does everyone know that it’s short for—”

Andrew starts talking alongside him, the two speaking in unison. “It’s short for Perkasin…” He stares at the man not sure of what to make of him. “Who are you…?”

Sin hesitates, the young boy with the long blond hair that accompanies him giving him an impatient look back. He talks for the first time to ask, “Why haven’t you told him yet?”

Sin looks back to Andrew who is still staring at him, bewildered. “Because it sounds crazy don’t you think?”

“It doesn’t sound crazy to me.”

Sin snaps back at the child. “That’s because—” He stops as he turns back to Andrew, getting back to the task at hand rather than into a pointless argument. “Andrew… I need you to listen to me, I’ve come here to warn you.”

Andrew’s expression becomes even more confused. “What?"

“I’m from the future.”

Andrew distances himself from the man, taking several quickly paced steps back. “Get away from me.” Despite his demands Andrew stares at him unsure, he has to admit, the guy does look like him, even has the same name with the same hidden details, not to mention the way that he speaks, his accent isn’t Canadian like everyone else in the area, and much closer to the mixed way he sounds, if not the same.

As unbelievable a concept this man being from the future is, it is kind of looking like it’s going to turn out true.

Sin continues despite the reluctance his younger self is showing. “I think that you should do as your father tells you… work hard to become a doctor.”

Andrew snaps, of all the things to bring up now. “WHAT?!” He regains his composure, approaching his future self again so that he can argue with him up close and personal. “Why should I?! That’s one of the last things I want to be!!”

“Nothing good will come of you following your hopeless dream!”

Andrew becomes even more insulted. “Hopeless!?”

The blond haired boy that stands beside Sin steps between the two of them holding his hands out to his side, large metal clock hands materialise in both, held as if they were on the face of a clock. Before Andrew is able to question the nonsensical event the world around him changes, the school around him disappears and is replaced with what looks like a busy kitchen of a fast food restaurant.

The smell of fry oil fills the air so thickly it feels like it could soak into your skin, and people all in uniform and hairnets work quickly all around the three intruders, rushing out order after order.

“Perkasin!”

Andrew looks around him upon hearing his last name called out. Usually when someone at the school calls him by his last name it means that he is in trouble, but when a woman walks past him, seemingly the manager of this fast food place, she does so without even glancing at him. Approaching one of the cooks that was currently working at the grill where the burgers are being made, she stands over the worker’s shoulder and speaks in a stern voice. “It’s rush hour and you're holding things up.”

Her employee doesn’t seem impressed with being asked to rush. “Get off my back or I start spitting in the food, and I’ll make sure the customers can see me do it.”

The angered reaction of the manager is drowned out as Andrew stares at the worker, like the stranger that has shown up at his school this man is unmistakably familiar, holding facial features similar to his own. “What is this…” he questions quietly.

Sin explains as the noise fades and the scene around them starts to disappear. “That’s you. As you can see you will fail… you never reach the goal you set out to do, and you live a poor and mundane life of misery jumping from jobs like this. Your family will hate you and you will have no friends, you will be pitiful and alone.”

Andrew stares at the fading image, everything around him growing darker. “Fail…” He quickly turns back to the man behind him that said he is from the future, everything clicking into place. “You’re me?!”

Sin looks less than amused. “You only realised just now—” He stops not pushing further, getting mad at his younger fifteen year old self for being slow would just make the message he is trying to get through to him take longer. “If you’ve realised this then you must also realise that I am not lying. I really have come to warn you about this, to try and get you to change your path.”

Andrew still doesn’t seem convinced with the argument, it, among everything else, not making sense. “Wait a second, if you’re a poor failure then how the hell did you afford… time travel to do this whole ‘warning me beforehand’ thing?”

His future self is annoyed to have his younger half continue to question and waste his time. “Time travel is not something you can buy.”

Andrew seems confused, if not with time travel then how is a version of himself from the future here? “How did you get back to this time?”

The boy with the long blond hair speaks up, answering the question for him. “Me. Consider it a gift, a chance to change your miserable future.” His tone is rude, as he is probably less than happy at the length of time this conversation is taking.

Andew looks from his future self to the strange boy that was next to him. The boy isn’t normal, that was for sure, he has changed the world around him from his school to some random fast food joint in another time, like a scene change in a movie. “Just who the hell are you?”

The young boy looks to Andrew, giving him a very straight forward answer. “I’m a god, so watch your tone.”

Andrew smirks at the idea, the boy is much younger than him, just a kid. “You’re pretty small for a god don’t you think?”

The boy frowns at the comment. “This is taking too long, so I’m going to explain as simply as I can. The future that lies ahead of you.” He tries to think of a word that would best describe it for someone like Andrew. “It sucks.”

“Why do aliens invade or something?”

The child grows frustrated, Andrew has just seen the vision of him working a dead-end job in his future. “No! You grow to be a miserable, lonely shell of a human being that lives a pointless life and whose death is mourned by no one!”

Andrew is taken aback by the child’s response. “Holy crap! You’re kind of a dick!” He takes a second to think over what the kid has just told him. Andrew looks back to the man that he knows is the older version of himself from the future. “Hold up… you’re saying that I died?” He approaches his future self. “If I’m dead, how is my future time-travelling self here?”

Sin seems not too sure how to explain, as if the answer was hard for him to say. “I’m here, but I’m not here… not physically anyway…”

Andrew reaches out to touch him, but his hand goes right through him as if the man in front of him was nothing but a hologram or a projection. Andrew lets out a blood curdling scream at the realisation that his older self is a ghost, he was talking to his dead self this whole time.

The boy that accompanied his future self volunteers an explanation. “He’s only a spirit whom I took back here to pass on his message, so he could attempt to change his life before death’s reapers escort him into the afterlife. You see, a mistake was made when you met your demise. The god of death took your life before you were scheduled to die.”

Andrew is trying to make sense of all this information being presented to him at once. “God of death?”

The boy continues speaking as if that point was something that should be perfectly understood and not questioned.  “Unfortunately such a mistake cannot be undone even by gods, so as compensation for your early departure you are being allowed to change the way you lived out your life, a second chance so to speak.”

He motions to the split image of Andrew, his older self. “When I asked him if there was one decision he could change about his life. He, or you. Answered this.”

Sin speaks up, finishing the sentence for the boy, as the words had come from him anyway. “There are many things that I would change, but if I have to pick one, I wish I had become a doctor like my father had wanted me to.”

Andrew stares at him, not sure of what to make of something like that. It just doesn’t sound right, and not just because it’s something he could never picture himself doing, it just… doesn’t sound honest. Not quite a lie, but more like when you have several answers to a question, but instead of giving them all as an answer you try to pick out the one that you think sounds the most right.

Sin holds his hand out to the boy dressed in the strange uniform, gesturing to him. “After that, he brought me here to you.”

Andrew glances away from them, staring out into the endless darkness that surrounds them. This all feels… strangely familiar to him. That dream he had last night, there was a boy in it as well, he didn’t look exactly like the kid here with him right now but the uniform absolutely was similar, as was the question that his older self had been presented with.

“If there was one decision you could make to change your life, what do you think it would be?”

Andrew crosses his arms, thinking it over. “What would it be?” He looks at his future self, he doesn’t seem well even if you left aside that he was dead. Though he looks to have hung onto his individuality he looks tired, weak, pitiful, and sad… very sad. “A doctor… is that what you really think you want?”

The boy that brought Sin here speaks up, it was if he was in a hurry and wanted to get this sorted quickly. “You now know what future lies ahead of you, you can continue and stay on the path to accomplishing nothing, or you can change what you do and live differently in the time that you have available to you.”

Andrew thinks it over, they really hadn’t given him any other options to choose from. “I don’t have a choice now do I…? It's either… I become a doctor or nothing…” He shakes his head no, refusing to let this mess up his objectives. “No way! I’m not going to be no doctor!”

“Why not?!” His future self becomes frustrated as he begins arguing with his younger self. “Do you look forward to flipping burgers for a living!?”

Obviously not! “Who would look forward to that?!” He begins to explain. “You’re me in the future aren’t you? That means that at some point you were me right now, and me in the past too!! If you are then you know how important my dream is to me!”

The darkness that had been surrounding them suddenly vanishes, everything around them turns to a bright white. Andrew, his future self and the strange boy all raise their hands to shield their eyes from the light as their eyes start to adjust to it.

Familiar white walls now surround them, Andrew glances about him, they are in a hall that leads to several private rooms. At one end of the hall is the front desk and the waiting room, at the other end another hall that leads to more rooms.

They are in a hospital now, and not just any hospital, a hospital that Andrew has long become familiar with. He walks over to one of the rooms, checking the numbers on the door before entering it.

His future self stares at the door, knowing who the room belongs to without having to check it. “You were not supposed to bring me this far back… I told you that there were moments I would rather not relive.”

The blonde haired boy looks away from him, soon spotting another with them, a boy with wild purple dyed hair wearing the same robed uniform as him. “I’m not the one that did this.”