Chapter 12 – Seeing people is… abnormal?
“Mum, Dad, why not let her rest for a bit? I am sure that being out of touch with the world for an entire week has shaken Mia up quite a bit. Maybe resting for a bit will help her calm her mind and remember what she should know.”
Mia just stared at Luke. She had absolutely no clue what he was planning right now. Was he trying to help her? Or did he seriously believe that she would remember this stuff, that shouldn’t even be real, after getting some rest? After she contemplated about what Luke had just said, she noticed him staring back at her. It was like he was trying to convey to her that she should play along with what he had just said.
Mia’s eyes went wide. Maybe he really was simply trying to help her! Then saying all of that naturally made sense! With these thought in mind, Mia closed her eyes and took a deep breath, before turning her head back to her parents and talking to them in the most exhausted voice she could manage “Yea mum, dad… I’m still not really fit yet… I don’t really feel all that well. I think… I may need some more rest before I can think clearly.”
Both of them looked at her for a while, before Adrienne opened her mouth “Now that you say it Luke… Mia really does seem quite exhausted. Maybe we really should let her rest for a while before questioning her like that.” And after a small moment of silence she continued “well that’s that, now off you go and get some rest Mia! This discussion is finished for now. Shoo! Shoo!”
With those words, Mia was driven out of the room by her mother. Not that she resisted it, in fact, she was even glad to finally get a break from the weirdness that had just transpired. She couldn’t wrap her mind around anything that her parents said. It just didn’t make any sense. She was more than just a bit glad to get away from all that.
After she got back to her room, Mia decided to sit on her bed and wait a few minutes for Luke. She was quite sure that he would come in soon. And she was right. Not even 5 minutes after she had entered her room, Luke was knocking on her door “Hey Sis, can I come in?”
“Sure, come on in!” And with these words, her brother entered the room. Mia looked at him curiously, wondering what he would do next, what he would talk about.
“So Mia, I guess you’ve already noticed that something extremely weird is going on right? I mean… our parents, even our neighbours or just about everybody else talks about the Xârækshʼna as if they’ve always been here. As if it was completely normal that those inhumane beings are here…”
“Wait wait wait… just one second Luke! Before you talk about that kind of stuff… could you explain to me what they even are first?”
“Oh yeah right… you wouldn’t know that. Well… I guess they kind of are… Aliens? I mean they did come out from that thing in the sky… I guess you could call it a Spaceship since it practically is one. They came here with it after all”
Mia’s eyes became wide with shock and realization “So it really has been only a week since they arrived on earth and the world has already changed this much?! Just what the hell happened in this short week that I was gone?!”
With a sigh Luke answered “Well in short nothing and everything happened”
Now she was more confused than shocked. “What do you mean?”
“Well I think it’s easier to show you. Come with me. We’re gonna go to the city and you’ll see whats going on”
Without much of a choice, Mia agreed to it. If she wanted to know just what the heck was going on with the world, she had to go to some places and see it for herself. Hopefully all of her questions could be answered if she went out. And hopefully not everything she knew had changed while she was out of touch with the world.
Setting her mind on this, Mia got ready to follow Luke into the city. Before they went out of Mia’s room though, her brother stopped for a second. “Just one second. Before we leave your room, remember that you’re supposed to be resting. Since that is the case, you’ll somehow have to get out without any of our parents noticing. Can you do that Sis?”
After Mia thought about it for a second, she simply responded with a grin and started walking again. As soon as they walked down the stairs that led towards the entrance of their home, she simply concentrated for a bit, until she was walking on the ceiling again. And like this she walked towards the entrance, right above the head of her brother. Her heart stood still for a second when her brother was calling towards their parents “Mum, Dad, I am going out for a bit! Don’t know how long it will take. See you later!”
“Alright Luke, take care!” was all that came from them. And just like that, the two of them went outside. Both of them quickly got into Luke’s car and got on their way to the city. Neither of them said a single word while driving. Mia simply wasn’t in the mood to tease her brother and neither was she in any mood to respond to any teasing and her brother probably knew that.
On their way towards the city, Mia became quite bored, so she decided to take a look at their surroundings, watching out for anything that might be abnormal in her opinion. Though she saw nothing that fit into this category on the way towards Lage, the biggest city near where the two of them were living, as well as the city where Mia’s workplace was.
The absence of abnormal things only lasted until they reached the city though. As soon as they drove into the inner part of the city, Mia noticed how empty the city seemed. Despite this being the busiest part of Lage, there were surprisingly little amounts of people walking in the streets. It even seemed like there were not as much cars around as usually. This definitely was extremely weird. And what was even weirder, was that some of the few people Mia could see were doing things that would normally be impossible for a human to do. One Person for example, was lighting his cigarette with his pinkie finger. And yet another one was stopping a child from crossing a road where some cars were driving. This in itself wouldn’t have been so weird, if not for the fact that the person was quite a few meters away from the child. He had elongated his arm as if it was a rubber band.
Eyes wide, Mia turned to Luke and asked in confused voice “Just… Just what has happened? Just what is going??”
Luke didn’t answer for quite a while. He only started speaking after he parked to car. “well that’s the thing Mia… nothing really happened. In this week you were gone… bit by bit People with strange abilities began to appear. Capable of doing things that would normally be impossible, just like that one man we saw just now. As for the Xârækshʼna… well I don’t think any of us even saw them. But suddenly just about everyone began praising them. Apparently they’re telling governments what they should do and stuff and have apparently done so for a very long time. At least that’s what everybody says… while having a weirdly happy smile on their faces. Honestly it’s extremely disturbing. But I have learned to simply play along with them. You should learn that too I think. There were a few people who loudly voiced their concerns about the current situation, but all of them just suddenly disappeared and seemingly nobody remembers them. As if they never existed in the first place. That’s what I was talking about when I said ‘everything and nothing happened.”
He sounded quite exhaust. So much that Mia began to worry about what kind of things he had experienced while searching for her. Instead of saying anything, she decided to stay quiet and let her brain process all of the things Luke had just told her. Maybe talking a walk around the city would help her a bit with it.
With these things happening out of the blue, who wouldn’t get confused? Just who wouldn’t? Deciding herself to test out what her brother said and walked to a random person walking by “Hey, you there, excuse me… but could you please tell me if anything out of the ordinary happened recently?”
“Huh, what do you mean out of the ordinary? The only thing that normally doesn’t happen to me, is a random girl walking up to me and asking me weird questions! Now could you please back off? I have an appointment to get to!” And with these questions the stranger pushed Mia out of the way and continued to be on his way.
Mia stared at the leaving stranger and couldn’t really believe what had just transpired. Even if she was a stranger and he was in a hurry… treating somebody who asks a question that rudely with no real reason was just… rude.
She was put out of her thoughts when Luke suddenly lay his hand on her shoulder “You see, this isn’t really uncommon… this happens no matter who you talk to. All of them are kind of always in a hurry to get somewhere. It’s like everyone is running on a predetermined program. Completely abnormal… and all of this started a week ago…”
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So a bunch of face-keyboardsmash aliens showed up and presumably mind controlled everyone? How rude.
"face-keyboardsmash aliens"
you know i actually thought quite hard about their name. and yes... how dare they?
@Akumaiya Hey, whenever i see a bunch of unpronounceable letters and accents stuck together my first thought is someone face-keyboarded
@therandompers well you see i wanted it to sound "alien-ish" xD
@Micromia If you ever get around to creating their whole language you could go teach it at a school