Be prepared: a Matrix-esque twist is in Taina's future. You cannot truthfully say that I didn't warn you.
Disclaimer: If Starbucks were mine, I would be living in a state of eternal bliss. Oh, and I don't own Neal or Joren either. I don't own anything except a couple of CD's.
The Starbucks was fairly deserted when Neal, Joren and I came in at 10am sharp. I ordered a vanilla bean frappaccino (A/N: I don't know how to spell this word and I don't think that it is in the dictionary. If it is wrong, please don't kill me.) for each of us, and we sat down at a small table in the back of the coffee shop.
Neal had been quiet all morning, but after we had gotten on the bus, it turned to silence. When I had asked him if he was tired, he thought for a moment before nodding. It made sense; Joren had mentioned that Neal had stayed up late reading a book the night before. So I kept trying to strike up conversation with the other page, which produced mixed results. I was in the middle of persuading him to try the drink I had bought for him when Corinth came up with hot apple cider and sat down next to me.
"You like the apple cider?" I casually inquired.
"Yup. Do you like the frappaccino?" he coolly replied.
"I love frappaccinos!" With a glare at Joren, I added, "I can't say the same for these guys. He won't even try it."
Corinth shrugged and sipped the cider. "He's new here. You should give him time to adjust."
"You're new here, too."
I had hoped for some answer as to why we were all here, but Corinth just said, "I do what my author writes for me."
"But I never wrote this!" How did I always come back to this? Nothing had changed for him since I had seen him last, but his situation was not prime.
Luckily, he chose not to pursue that topic of conversation any further, but just leaned back in his chair and turned his sad, blue eyes on me as his story began. "I thought that the Isle and Beilglam, Velgia and Barthland and the Erub Strait, I thought all of it was the world. The one and only universe. I never would have guessed that there was a planet called Earth with countries like Russia or Egypt existed. And I'm not so sure that they do even now.
"If one world I've been in isn't real, how can I tell if this one is? What if we are living in a story, and none of us are real?" Corinth raised one eyebrow as he looked at me.
"Neither you or these two are real, I mean, you've been written by somebody. I haven't been; I was born, not invented. I even have a belly button to prove it," I retorted, still not quite sure what he was attempting to say.
"But how do you know that you haven't been written for this story?" he persisted. "Isn't it possible that you are in a story too?"
My skin went cold and I felt like my brain soared out of my body to sit back and watch myself go numb.
Because I figured it must be true. All the stuff that had been happening didn't make sense in the real world. Nobody could know what was going to take place before it actually did. Nobody could be transported between worlds. Nobody who was real.
"So," I felt amazingly calm for someone who had just discovered that they were fake. "What should we do now?"