…

Stress was stood there in the field exactly where he planted his fist into that mascot. The mascot was nowhere to be found, nor was the Urchin or the fairground. It was getting dark by this point so Stress decided to go back to his house and hope that he wouldn’t encounter Ruben and his blood red eyes.

As he walked, he noticed that absolutely nothing of what just happened was left at all, not the stains of pee or the smell of smoke from the mascot’s assault. Except for one thing that was left that Stress caught from the corner of his eye.

The Kinetic Sabre. It was still here despite everything else being missing. Stress took it along with him, checking whether there was still any pee inside of it or on the outside (There was no trace of pee on it).

Once back at his house, he found that it’s missing features from earlier had returned and he could see the living room light on, including the side of his mother’s head looking down at a book. He was at ease.

…

Stress just sat at his desk in his room, not bothering to switch the light on, until it bothered him too much to the point that he just turned it on anyways. It was 19:48pm. He opened up his laptop and got up his internet browser.

He typed in “Kinetic Sabre” into the search engine, however the only thing that came up was information on a rare weapon in an MMO and a cosmetic in a battle royale game.

“What did I expect? Uuuuugh damn I’m too tired for this stuff.” was what he thought to himself before his eyes caught a search result on his monitor, carved out of the bright white in blue text.

It was a link to a forum post on a popular forum website by a person with the user “SanityShadxw1310” with a profile picture of what looked like an original character who was almost pitch-black skin and hair, glowing white eyes and teeth and a single dark devil horn popping out of their head. Not any of that really mattered compared to what they had to say. Their post was made only 3 minutes ago and titled “I found a new kinetic tool!” and it read as follows.

“I found a new kinetic tool! – by SanityShadxw1310.”

“heyo! ^^ more findings from my searches as a shadow in this weird parallel world! If ya’ll have kept up with all my other posts, then you’ll know that i found some REALLY cool stuff so far on my little adventures, but I found this really cool object today at a local shop (I did disguise myself don’t worry!) and the guy who ran the place was SUPER cool! He showed me around the place and showed me all his cool contraptions. (sorry for overuse of cool. YOU WOULD UNDERSTAND IF YOU SAW IT!) He then showed me something awesome. It could turn any material INTO A BLADE! YEAH, IT’S CRAZY! I think he called it a Kinetic Sabre or smth like that and it uses kinetic energy to form the blade from whatever is in its storage container (we cool people call it a conduit) and I get some of ya’ll don’t like the deets but COME ON this is cool as hell!

Anyways… this post is kinda long isn’t it ;P… so I’m gonna stop it here. I return to the shadows again!”

Stress was now intrigued. On one hand, this felt like it was written by a young teen trying to be quirky and living out a fantasy. However, on the other hand, everything this user had said was, in accordance with Stress experience and evidence being the bottle, very much not a lie. The Kinetic Sabre Stress had in his possession matched the description exactly, so he knew they were talking about the same thing or at least something similar.

He started to get even more intrigued, so he decided to look more into this user’s profile and posts to see if he could any more insight on the events he had been experiencing. It turns out they had only three posts on their account, including the one he just looked at. They’d only created their account a week ago. Every post however went along this similar narrative of being a self-proclaimed shadowy being. “No one without seeing that realm would believe any of this to be honest.” thought Stress while looking at their other two posts. Their profile description read as follows.

 “Heyo! I am a shadow being from another world that recently found this website and since I found this world, I am SUPER interested in a lot of its many things that function differently to your world! I just wanna just share my awesome experience in this world with y’all! PS: If any of y’all see me anywhere, do say hi! (I made my face my pfp* btw so you should know what I look like!)”

(*Pfp is an abbreviation of Profile Picture.)

“Wait… that’s what they look like? Yeah, ok I’ll believe some of this but not all of it.” said Stress, palm covering half of his face. “Hold on, could those people in that realm use the internet? If so then this could be a non-human being, especially considering that those people seem to be speaking English so it’s not out of the realm of possibility. They also say that they are from another world, implying that they originate from that world, however judging from their profile picture, I’m unsure of how I’m going to find them. That’s not weird right? They did say to come say hi if you saw them so me looking for them isn’t THAT weird. Anyways…

What even is that world? Who are those people? And what is with the constant mentioning of “Kinetic” or “Kinesis”?

…

Laying on his bed, Stress could not think of anything but that sabre, the Urchin, Pitch Black or anything about what had happened to him. It was overbearing. And thus, he got up and looked at the Kinetic Sabre once more. The straw’s deep blue colour had faded out. Stress held it in his hands like a sword hilt, just like the Urchin did, however he couldn’t find a way to summon the sabre. It was then that he realised that the bottle itself had no water to form the sabre out off, so Stress headed to the bathroom to fill it up with tap water. He opened his bathroom door. He walked to his sink. He opened the bottle…

He was staring down at a scratched metal workbench, bottle still in hand. He sharply carved a deep shadow on the surface.

“Huh?”

Stress blinked, then blinked some more, then rubbed his eyes. No change. He looked down at his hands. They were both burning slowly… painfully. The pain had finally set in as Stress was slapped to his right into a large pot as the crimson flames spread further up his arm.

“Oh, why must you be here? None would be foolish enough for trespassing in this day and age.”

From the ceiling, two thin strings of bloody red stalked condescendingly down at the burning body beneath, two strands that Stress could easily identify amidst the flames.

“Ruben Coalut Scarlet.”

Ruben’s head was angled in a way which looked as if he were grinning down on him.

“And you know my name? You truly are caught up to your stuff. Anyways, what may your business be here, and you’d better be quick otherwise you’ll burn to death before you can speak a word.”

He was too focused on the pain of burning skin to respond to him.

“You are ignoring me? I guess you’re quite flammable then, not much resistance at all I see. It really isn’t that painful.”

“Grrgh… AAAAAAAAAAAAAARRRRGH!”

“Of coooooourse this must happen on the same night that Rud-

The door to Stress’s left swung open in a flash.

“You called? I answered!”

That devilish mascot stood in the doorframe, the condescending teasing face, tongue out and eyes that could never fit their sockets. They were unchanging even when staring down at a pile of burning flesh.

“But… I… I… punched you so hard… how are you… completely… fine after that…?”

“You did what to my son?”

“THAT’S YOUR SON?! HE ASSAULTED A CHILD OUT FOR NO REASON! SHOW HIM AT LEAST A BIT OF DISCIPLINE!”

“You know… I’m glad you’re burning alive right now to be perfectly honest. Someone who dares assault my son should be as much as a pile of ashes under my foot.”

“Oh… so that’s… the type of parent… you are? Never believing… ever… that their child… could commit… any wrongdoing… I hate those types… of parents…”

“Don’t lecture me, you pile of ashes.”

Stress’s lungs had finally been hit with the undying flames. He couldn’t breathe anymore. His conscience fading, the mascot spoke towards him.

“What is the flippity flip are you spouting you little dumpster fire? I’ve never seen you before so how in the flippity dippity did you punch me? And I’d never assault a child for fun cause, well, that’s just outright cruel don’t you think?”

Stress burnt out.

…

“What are you doing looking like that? Are you alright?”

He didn’t realise it, but it just so happened to be his mother looking down at him out of concern. He was panting for air like he had just resurfaced after nearly drowning, which was more reason to be concerned from his mother’s end, however the flames he had been engulfed in felt as real as you could imagine. Yet, nothing. No burn marks to be seen on his body. His mother said to him.

“Your Dad was worried about you quite a bit as you came home later than usual today without any notice. Why was that by the way? Round a friend’s house?”

“Yeah, I was at Curio’s today. Wonder would’ve come along however they had other matters; they really did want too though… I still had fun.”

“Well, that’s good, who’s Curio again?”

“Curiosity. It’s an abbreviation.”

“Oooooh I remember him now. It’s nice that you get along so well with him.”

Stress knew that couldn’t bring himself to speak about the weird events recently happening to him, despite the numbers of fake dangers and potential brain rotting, so what he just said was in fact a lie. In telling that lie however, Stress had thought of a decent idea, and he trotted off into his room once again.

…

The blue light shone up onto Stress’s face, bright rectangles reflecting into his eyes while his stared down into his long phone screen. He knew that the issue he had found himself in was, understandably, an issue that needed dealing with. He knew that he couldn’t make sense of it all without some people to balance the discussion and to get differing opinions. That in mind, he decided to message the two people he trusted most to not make him seem like a fool for even bringing this up. Those two went by the names of Curiosity (Curio for short) and Wonder. He knew they'd hear him out.

“Hey. I get this may sound incredibly out of nowhere, but I need to talk about this weird abnormal event that happened to me just a few hours ago. I’ll talk more about it in person because it’d be easier to get the point across, but can we meet up somewhere this Saturday? I really do want to talk about this with both of you because it could be potentially dangerous.”

Stress pressed send. Now it was just a matter of time until they both read it. Stress sat there for about 3 minutes before getting one response. It was from Curio.

“I don’t mind meeting up. I don’t know about Wonder though, but I should be able to meet up on Saturday.”

And then Wonder.

“If I can! If it’s serious then we’d both be glad to hear you out. I also just want to meet up with you anyways so that’ll hopefully be nice. Where should we meet?”

It was decided. He’d be able to gather more opinions on this matter to try to understand more of what was happening (and meeting with friends is just nice). He’d have to get through Friday beforehand as it was currently Thursday, and they’d be meeting on the weekend.

He got into his bed and attempted to go to sleep, however that proved rather difficult with his mind on constant rapid fire conjuring questions. However, despite everything, one feeling still lingered with him through his attempts at sleep.

Pure excitement and intrigue.