Have a nice 2k word chapter, everybody!


The thing about having friends is that they stick with you, if you find the good ones.

I did.

But the thing about friends is that the longer you both know each other the more ammunition you have to sling around during arguments.

And with that, I guess you can guess what happens next.

Except it didn't, because I had good friends. And because I had good friends, Zack didn't even try to start anything. Nothing, except for this:

"Don't talk to me anymore," Zack said to me when I got back to school. He had been waiting for me by the door of my classroom, crouching on the floor with his hood over his head.

I wanted to ask why.

I didn't bother.

Numb, I nodded once before brushing past him and going to my desk. I slunk down my chair and put my hands over my face. Between my fingers, I saw Zack stand up, swaying for a bit before shuffling off to his class. Or whatever. I didn't see why he even bothered to come to school considering he decided to jump out my goddamn window because of things I couldn't see.

So, my friends were getting those…dreams, too. They were anything but, however. They were real. I knew they were. I know they know that too.

The teacher came in, shut the door, and started shuffling through the papers he'd brought with him when he reached the desk in front.

I looked at Greg sleeping beside me on his desk and wondered how I never caught on to the fact he never breathed right. Always had really short breaths and never let his chest rise in time.

He, simply put, wasn't real. Not like how my friends and I are.

But even they're getting pulled into this too. I looked behind me, knowing Phred's desk would be empty, and Zack never took this class. Smiley was two seats away from me, nearer to the front, hunched over her desk. Her skin was pale, that much I could see, almost a stark contrast to her neon red sweater. She didn't even look up when the teacher tapped his ruler on the board and started the lecture.

Then she looked up. And over to me.

My stomach dropped.

She had heavy bags under her bloodshot eyes, her smile small and tired. She was barely making it through the class, I realized, and raised my hand.

"What is it, Mr. Eggtree?"

"I think Smi—," I stopped myself, "Uh. Shirley's not feeling well."

The teacher glanced over to Smiley, who was shooting me a half-annoyed glare. She was obviously trying to hide whatever was bothering her, but the unimpressed stare I gave back communicated, 'No. You're dying on your feet. Get help. I can mom at you too until you go.'

The teacher clicked his tongue and hoisted Smiley up, thanking me with a short nod. Smiley had a resigned look on her face, and pulled her backpack on before trudging after the teacher.

I counted five steps before a loud thud resounded from the hall and I shot up from my seat. I knew, intellectually, what I would see. I was hoping it wasn't, but I was right. I grabbed my pack and raced to the door before 5 could even peek out, and his desk was closest to it.

Smiley passed out on the floor, blood dripping down the side of her mouth. The teacher was panicking, screaming something on his phone. I didn't really care what he was saying.

Instead, I went over to Smiley, knelt down beside her, bringing a shaky hand over to her neck.

A strong rhythm pulsed under my fingers, and I gave out a long, relieved sigh.

"Do you want me to carry her to the nurse's office, Mr. Sum?" I asked quietly.

Mr. Sum pinched the bridge of his nose, lips pressing together, "…Yes, please. I'll follow you shortly."

And so I picked her up, piggyback style, and I walked us to the nurse's office, leaving behind a mess of an adult and what could have a much worse scene.


Mr. Sum came to the office with good and bad news: one, that she was going to be fine, just had an episode with mild food poisoning, and two, that her parents weren't here.

They never were, I thought, but didn't say so out loud, instead standing by as Mr. Sum decided to blab about something or another. I didn't trust him, or the nurse's diagnosis. How would she know, when she never came in the room in the first place?

Strike one.

"I can take her home, Mr. Sum," I said, "We've had a few sleepovers before, including my other friends."

And Mr. Sum said yes, eyes glazing over with that self-assured satisfaction that a problem was taken out of his hands. I smiled the way Smiley had once, when 5 had once tried to bully her. I looked at him in the eyes, smiled as wide as possible, showing as much teeth as I could, and said, "Thank you."

It creeped 5 out enough he stayed far, far enough away from her and it worked well enough against this adult to sputter out a lame social nicety before leaving. I rolled my eyes, then cast a good look around the room. No changes, just those three, simple beds, stools aligned next to the nurse's table on the far side of the room.

I laid my backpack on the floor and dragged a stool next to Smiley's bed before sitting on it. Come to think of it, this was the same one they put me in before, next to the window.

I thought of Zack and him waking up outside. Though of how he'd just cut me off earlier this morning. Thought of my friends, all of them, wondered if it was going to end like that each time.

I put my head in my arms as I leaned over the edge of Smiley's bed, and closed my eyes.

Opened them again, found a woman staring back at me with long brown hair and sad black eyes.

Smiley.

"You're not real," I groaned out, trying to go back to sleep. She wouldn't let me. An arm lashed out and tried to keep me from dozing off. I frowned at her.

Smiley's older version just shook her head silently, and pointed at the bed.

"No way," I replied, sitting up and crossing my arms, "Absolutely not."

I knew what I'd saw, and I'd seen enough of Smiley's blood to last me several lifetimes.

Then she grabbed my shoulders and shook me.

"What— !" I yelped.

She took my chin and forced me to look to the side. The window was open, curtain flapping inwards from the wind.

Shit.

"Shit," I cursed, wrenching myself away from older Smiley and scrambling to the window. This was on the first floor, thankfully, but…

A squeak.

I looked back.

The older version of Smiley was looking out the window, eyes drooping. She sighed, and I realized I couldn't even hear her breathe. I raised an arm to try and reach out to her but—

Well. Phred wasn't wrong when he said I didn't have good reflexes.

Smiley's arm shot out and hit me squarely at the back of my head. I gagged, falling forward, landing on hands and knees. I started coughing out blood on the floor, feeling my throat tear with each and every one.

Smiley's feet came to stand in front of me, and my head and neck hurt too much to let me look up.

A click. Small, metallic.

I'd heard the sound in movies, video games, everything that I could watch in the safety of my domestic life. I've heard the results in the news, how ugly it got. How much people bled when they were—

…There's a thing that people don't tell you in games. You can always hear flesh being sliced open, and the sound of a body falling to the floor with a heavy thud sounded like livestock being thrown on tiles.

Gore splattered against the floor, the wall, dripped down to where I was keeping my head down. I felt something wet land on the back of my head and I refused to look up.

Smiley's feet swayed, then fell, and the knife clattered near the front of my peripheral vision, along with the sheath it had been placed in. It was shiny, it was large, and it was reflecting my face back to me and I didn't want to look anymore.

Not real, I kept reminding myself, not real. Not real.

But no matter how hard I tried not to concentrate on the stench of copper filling my nose, no matter how still I went, I couldn't…

I wrenched my eyes shut.

The coppery smell of blood wafted away, gradually, like Smiley and everything that made her human dissipated into air.

I opened my eyes again. Nothing. Just the same, dull, and old tiles of the nurse's office.

No big deal.

I turned my head to the left and saw Smiley's face staring at me from under her bed. Her eyes were bloodshot, a hand on the side of her head, the other cradling her neck.

(So that's where you—)

"…hey, Phil," she whispered, and I tried to muster up a smile. It worked, I think.

"Hey, Smiles," I mumbled back.

Smiley closed her eyes and curled up into a ball, "…I think there's something wrong with me."

(I think so too.)

"You're fine, Sunny," I half-grinned at the soft chuckle escaping her previously down-turned lips. It never looked right on her. A frown. It went against her entire character.

"Haven't heard that nickname in years," she whispered out, and it was better, it was more of a quiet voice instead of a a string of words barely held together by fear, "Wasn't it Phred who gave me that one?"

"Phred was the one who made up all our nicknames," I sat down properly on the floor, and if I slouched enough I could see Smiley's half-grin.

"Yeah…" she murmured, then closed her eyes. I stayed quiet too. For a bit of time, only the sound of our breaths were audible in that tiny room, separated from the rest of reality where children went to school and bitched about homework without having to worry about being existential shitshows like we were. I counted to thirty second before opening my mouth.

"The teacher said you could come home with me," I said to no one in particular, the walls almost echoing my sentence back to me. Smiley didn't answer. If I scooted closer a bit, I could hear even breaths coming from her.

Asleep, then. She wasn't going to be able to answer my questions now.

I reached out towards the heavy bags under her eyes and stopped midway. Nope, I wasn't going to pry until she wanted to tell me.

That was the mature thing to do, right?

"I'm sorry," I mumbled out instead, retracting my hand. She didn't even twitch.

I raised a quivering hand over to the bridge of my nose, wrenching my eyes shut, "I'm sorry."


"Start in several hours, Quiz," Viz yawned, one of his arms coming up to cover his mouth, "When the girl is asleep."

"I know, sir," Quiz sighed under his breath. Luckily for him, Viz was already walking away. Quiz shot a quiet curse behind his back, then turned back to the screen. Phillip Eggtree was still sitting beside the bed, watching over his friend. What the boy didn't know, however, was that Smiley wasn't asleep.

"Sleep" after all, wasn't the same as artificially controlling her brain waves to slow down.

Quiz put both his hands on his head and tried to wrack his brain for something, anything to stop the…process.

It had been under beta-testing for a long time – so long that Viz had gotten impatient and decided to pick one of the children to test on, saying 'we only really need one anyway, the rest are disposable.'

That child was Smiley Sundae.

Quiz felt his stomach roll something fierce when he'd activated the time stopper and descended into their reality. He had put on the small, nearly microscopic chip into the base of her neck while she slept on the cot at Eggtree's house. The device would let anyone with access to the controls to spread nanobots into her bloodstream to control her physical actions. The only downside was that they couldn't control small, intricate movements naturally; talking, facial expressions, small gestures.

Or that was what Diz had said to him, after skimming through the piles of progress reports about the machine. Quiz knew that wasn't the only downside though; Sundae wouldn't get rest. She'd be awake, not quite but close enough, during late hours when she should be sleeping. This would mean she wouldn't be getting enough sleep. This would mean fatigue, sickness, general discomfort until she would go into a manic episode or die.

But Viz wouldn't care about that.

Here's the thing: Quiz did. Quiz cared for those four children fiercely. It was why he was extending so much effort to have them live as comfortably as possible, why he often controlled the Mr. Munch puppet to help them, why he was here now: in the control room, hacking into security measures and going against every code he'd learned since stepping foot into the Vizion facility.

But fuck them. They had stupid rules and shit morals so there. Quiz entered the last line of code and watched as information spread across the screen in rapid binary text. He plugged in the alien equivalent of a USB, except this one would never be detectable, not unless the computer manager knew exactly what to find. If they even knew how to, anyway.

(No one in this facility had the same knack with technology like Quiz did.)

Quiz copied the data, erased any trace of his presence, and left.


First of all, I am...honestly amazed. How that review count shot up I have no clue, but thank you all so much!

(Special shout-out to an-ominous reviewer and Mask Guy review for being here since the start XD)