All I can confirm about the next dozen or so minutes that followed was that there was a lot of grunting involved. The place where the light had come from was not visible on its own, so the only option I had left was to try to move one of the shelves away. And for reasons (like, my horrible arm strength) that I will not expand on, I soon discarded that idea as well.

Up came the hand, ready to disintegrate the wood into a million little pieces for the crime of blocking my way. But then down went the hand when I realized that I might end up breaking whatever mechanism was causing the loop if I wasn’t careful. Since there was no confirmation of what it even was, it was probably smarter to assume it was as fragile as glass.

“Can’t blast it away. Can’t move it.” I started whispering to myself, hoping that it would lead to some sort of unprecedented breakthrough. “What is behind it? What could possibly be behind it? What if it breaks? What if it doesn’t break? What if…”

What if the blast was smaller than normal?

In the hypothetical situation where I could make the radius of my Magic smaller, I could mitigate the damage. With a smaller hole, it would be possible to at least gain a visual of whatever had created that light. That was the best I could come up with, given my very physical handicaps.

The hand went up once more, as close to the edge of the southern bookshelf as possible. If the damage had to be done, that was the place to do it. The eastern and western shelves contained information that I needed. The southern one, which might as well have been decoration, was expendable wood.

I tried my best to imagine a smaller attack. Focusing on the wooden edges, I imagined them being blown apart by that blue wave. Just those, in that small area. Being completely uneducated despite having read about eight books by now, closing my eyes and hoping was my best bet. It was the only trick I had up my sleeve.

My hands rumbled as the image in my brain became concrete. The edges of my fingers tingled and grew warm, with the feeling spreading to my palm over time. As the heat grew, the thought that I had just thrown my hand on top of a stove began to take over. The warmth was familiar in that way.

And then, the thought grew. The image in my brain collapsed into the darkness you usually find behind closed eyes. It was replaced with my nose sniffing smoke. The heat on my hand got tangible as flames licked my nails, making me almost laugh at how realistic the experience was.

How realistic…

“Oh fuck!”

The moment the fire started to reach my eyelids, I knew that it wasn’t just imagination. My eyes flew open, and finally noticed the fire that had started to spread through the southern shelf. Flames reached up to the ceiling, but did not catch on to the wood on top. They teased the edge of the eastern shelf, but acted as if it were stone. The only thing that burned was the southern shelf.

Exactly as I had wished.

“No, no, no. This is…”

I hopped back and ran out. Through the Innkeeper’s Room and into the corridor, I hurried to the Kitchen. The smell from the fire had reached all the way over here and even made its way through the Lobby. Thankfully, watching Carol earlier in the day had been helpful. Making my way to the exact shelf where the pitchers had been stored, I grabbed two of them and started to fill them from the water barrel.

By the time I finally made it back into the Secret Room, spilling water all over the floor on the way, the fire had devoured two-thirds of the bookshelf already.

The burning books had scattered on the floor, but still refused to let their fire spread. The small pieces of charred, smoldering wood that made it out alive suddenly caught on fire again and continued to burn. Every corner of the room had been filled with the unbreathable smoke of the disaster I had given birth to.

And yet, I did not pay attention to any of that.

The moment I made it back and noticed the corner that I had been wanting to see this entire time, the pitchers of water dramatically fell out of my hand. The water splashed on the floor and seeped into the wood below me. It coated my feed, which then grew hot due to the fire surrounding it. And I couldn’t care less.

At the edge of the room, where the southern and eastern shelves met, was a cube. A smooth metal cube with lines running through its edges, creating geometric patterns. Lines that lit up in a bright magenta, as if they had LEDs inside of them. As if they were being illuminated by an artificial source.

Heartbeat through the roof, I stepped closer. Ash from the books and wood scattered through the air, and turned to dust beneath my feet. The southern bookshelf had all but disappeared due to my involuntary arson. And it had revealed an almost foot-long cube jutting into the Northflame Inn from its very edge.

Holding my hand out, I touched its metal sheen, and the cold material almost hummed back. The magenta lights started to blink at my very first contact. Mechanical sounds of something churning and twisting inside the weird sci-fi cube idiosyncratically placed in this medieval fantasy inn began to echo through the Secret Room. Then –

“Contact made. Laura Mason?”

A strange voice boomed straight into my head. It had no source, no direction, nothing to anchor it to. A voice that was neither male nor female, nor something in between. An indescribable, uncanny valley that felt more like an auditory hallucination than an intelligent being…skipped the usual biological formalities and spoke directly into my head.

“Yeah...?” I replied in an almost trance-like state before shaking my head and waking myself up. “I mean, no! Who are you? What the hell is this?”

“Laura Mason? Yes or no? Is English not your preferred language?”

“No, uh…what?”

“¿Sería mejor el español? Ou le français? Deutsch? それとも，日本語が話せますか?”

“N-no! English is fine. English is great. Who are you?”

“Perfect. Thank you for your quick response. To answer your question, I am a representative of the system you find yourself in the jurisdiction of. It is great to finally make contact with someone after all this time.”

“All this time? Is…is it weird if I don’t understand what’s going on? Am I supposed to be keeping up with all of this? Look, I am just a little, teensy bit confused.”

The voice let out a small, unnerving laugh before returning to its usual monotonous, corporate tone.

“Your confusion is understandable. Let me put it in simple, chronological terms. The space-time rip this building is stuck in is under our control. We have been investigating it ever since it appeared, and trying to get these people back where they came from. That, however, has been impossible for multiple reasons until now.”

“Yeah, right. Of course.” I nodded, gulping as I kept my hand on the cube. I did not know if taking it off would end this strange little conversation, so I let it stay. “We’re in space. I mean, yes. I knew that. I was…aware of the fact that we’re in space. It tracks that there are aliens, then. Of course, there are aliens. You’re aliens, right? Or you could be humans, too. Are you humans?”

“Your lack of coherence is understandable. But I would request you to please calm down before we continue this conversation. There is a lot to share, and I would like us to be on the same page.”

“Look, you…you robot-ass alien replier!” I suddenly cried out. “Either explain yourself like this, or shut up. You cannot be serious right now. What is going on!?”

“Please refrain from using such rude language, Miss Mason. I am only trying to help you. Will you please try to work with us here?”

“N-no! I will speak as I please. I will use whatever words I want, and I’ll…I’ll swear. I’ll swear all I want. Fuc-”

“I swear…that’s it.” The voice in my head suddenly snapped and gained a very audible female tone. “Screw protocols. I’m bringing you in.”

“Wha-”

The cold feel of the cube vanished, and the world turned black. As black as black could possibly be. It was either that, or I had died. Not a single bit of light hit my eyes for the next few seconds, and I lost all physical sense of the rest of my body. For that small amount of time, it was like I stopped existing.

Moments after that, I reappeared. My feet touched solid ground again, and my eyes fluttered open.

“No.”

That was all I could conjure. The only word my overloaded brain could muster up as the view before me sank in.

Whatever the voice was, it had brought me out. It had taken me out of the inn itself and put me in a box. A small, almost transparent glass box with barely any space to move. Outside the box….was all the space ever. The black expanse stretched forever on every side I could see, with stars sprinkled in like before.

Below me, right under the box, was the Northflame Inn. Contained in a relatively small space, the wooden building looked meaningless in the grand scheme of everything around it. Floating right in the middle of a blue swirl of some sort, it was as if the entire thing was paused in time.

“Laura Mason.” The voice returned all of a sudden, interrupting my stargazing session. “Do you understand what is going on?”

“I…I’m sorry. I really am.”

The fear from before had clearly caused me to act out of character. The sheer confusion of this development had led to some rather rude lines. But now, that was not the case. Now, it was better. Calming myself down and grounding myself as much as I could in a glass box in space, I took a deep breath.

“Good. This is a container reserved for intergalactic prisoners, so I would rather not use it on you. Are you ready to go back?”

“Go back? No! No, why go back? You can clearly get us out of here, so do it! What are you waiting for!?”

“Well, I’m sending you back. Calm down, and we can talk properly.”

“Ok, not ag-”

My hand was back on the cube. The familiar warmth of the Northflame Inn surrounded me, and so did the ash from the fire. An event that already felt like a distant memory. Despite all of that, my heart had not lost itself just yet. It was calm. It was resting, waiting for answers.

“Twenty-three years ago, the Northflame Inn popped into our jurisdiction out of nowhere.” The voice, now very explicitly that of a woman, came back. “During the travel between its original location and here, however, it was infiltrated by a parasite that started to feed on its primitive structure.”

“The mold?”

Parasite? Yeah, that made sense. That made way more sense than I cared to admit.

“Yes. That is what you might call it. Its properties are not that far from a fungus. But I digress. The parasite is important because it somehow gained the ability to get a physical form. Using these physical forms, it started to attack the people inside the building. And since you are in our territory, we could not bear to see this destruction. Thus, we trapped the Northflame Inn in a temporal loop.”

“You created the loop? Wait, no. Why would you do that? Just destroy the mold. You can destroy it, right?”

“We can destroy the parasite. That is right.” The voice declared. “But it is also illegal to do so. We are bound by intergalactic laws not to interfere with multiversal anomalies like these. So, we did what we could and created a temporal loop to ensure the survival of its lifeforms. Every time a life-ending event occurs, the Cube automatically resets the building back to the condition it was in when it first appeared in front of us. Do you follow up to now, Laura?”

I did. I very much did. I had just heard an alien species explain that they had locked this entire place into an eternal loop…simply because of some laws. They had randomly, all on their own, decided that putting these people in a time loop for twenty-three whole years was a feasible choice.

But if they hadn’t done that, everyone would have been dead.

“I…” I wasn’t sure what I was supposed to follow up with. “We. What are we supposed to do, then?”

That was it. That was the correct question. I could sit here and question this alien about why they didn’t help. I could go off about why laws were stupid if they were clearly ruining lives. I could do all of that and get nothing in return. If they had been doing this for twenty-three years, then one girl was not going to change their mind.

“Good question, Laura.” The voice replied with some cheer. “The Northflame Inn has not changed in any meaningful way in all this time. That changed when you appeared. We have no idea how or why you got here, but we are grateful for it. It has not escaped our attention that you have managed to kill some of the parasite, too. That is good progress.”

“So, I just kill the parasite. Is that it? I kill it. Then what?”

“You will have to figure out how to get back. We have no issues with the building remaining here as long as it needs to. If we could help, we would. As I mentioned, however, intergalactic laws prevent us from doing so. As such, we recommend you work with us in a meaningful capacity to put this building back where it belongs. Can you do that?”

“Well, yeah. Of course. I want to go home. And…I want all of them to go home as well.”

“Perfect! Now, here are the rules. You will loop back if you are on the verge of death. Every time you come back, it is because you essentially died. Unlike the others, however, you keep your memories because the Cube has no knowledge of you. Since you do not exist in its database, it recreates you exactly the same way as it picks you up.”

That was why I was different. That was why Bella, Poltrick, and the rest didn’t remember what had been happening, but I did. To the Cube, which had been looping them, they were the original residents it had been programmed to save. In its attempt to do that, it had forced them into living the same three days over and over.

“Can I not get them out, too? You’re the ones who programmed the Cube, so reprogram it. If I have their help, we…we can figure it out together. I mean, I can’t even read a single book by myself. With their help, I could…”

“Ah, I understand.” The voice spoke over me. “That can be arranged, but not from our side. The Cube is a permanent device that cannot be reprogrammed in any way. The only way to get someone out of its loops is to edit their brain patterns to make them unrecognizable in its code.”

“And that can be done by…?”

“You! If you can harvest enough memories and information about a particular resident, we can recreate their brain patterns on our side and give you a medicine to rewire them. This will cause minimal limitation in their functioning, but effectively make them invisible to the Cube. Is that a fair deal to you, Laura?”

That was it, then. That was what I had to do. These people had trapped the Northflame Inn in a time loop to save it from destruction. All I had to do now was destroy the parasites and find a way to go back with the help of the others. And to do that, I needed to somehow give them information about whoever I wanted to help, so that they could make a specific medicine to exclude them from the Cube.

Easy, right? Very easy.

“I…guess?”

“Very well, then. Thank you for reaching out to us. With your help, we can hopefully get the Northflame Inn back home and get rid of this issue from our side, too. I guess you can get to work, then, Laura!”

“That’s it? I can get to work? You have nothing else to say?”

“Not really. Thank you for reaching out to us. We look forward to working with you and finding a satisfying conclusion to this problem. Feel free to come back if you have any pressing questions, or have collected enough information to free someone from their loops!”

“Uh, yeah?”

“See you soon, Laura Mason!”

See you soon, too. That was really it. They had suddenly appeared, suddenly explained all of this to me, and were now withdrawing. Whoever these people were, they were satisfied with being spectators. We were alive, and that was their victory. That was as far as their power went.

“No, no, wait!” I put both hands on the Cube. “Why do this? Why don’t you just let the inn get destroyed? What do you want out of this?”

“Huh?” Was the reply. “We do not have anything to gain, Laura Mason. Why are we doing this? Because we’re the good guys. That’s about it. See you soon!”

And then, the voice was gone.