Chapter 7: Dreams? Reality? (Epilogue)
Thank you all for 1 000 views, it means a lot for me that even after not uploading in months people still read my story. I originally wanted to make a book, 120 000 words long, but now I know that my limit is far lower. I have decided to make this book into a trilogy. This first book has finished with this chapter. After I regroup my mind, probably after writing another story, I will return to write the second book.
This chapter shows scenes not for the young. Be advised!
The lights shifted into and out of his field of view. He wondered if that was what it would be like to look at stars. He'd never looked up at a sky. The thought inspired a certain vertigo. A sense of terror of the infinite that was almost pleasant. ThereThe lights shifted into and out of his field of view. He wondered if that was what it would be like to look at stars. He'd never looked up at a sky. The thought inspired a certain vertigo. A sense of terror of the infinite that was almost pleasant. There
-James S.A. Corey (Leviathan Wakes)
Franz was spinning in a dark void, lost in his dreams and memories. Suddenly, he was jerked into a dimension where Hans was standing in front of a big lake, his back to him, holding a gun in his trembling and blood-stained hand. Franz didn't know if that blood belonged to Hans or if it belonged to another person, either way, he didn't want to imagine why. As he was pondering what in the bloody hell happened to Hans, Hans's clothes were ragged and torn, letting Franz see the scars littering his arms and back which concerned Franz a lot, there was a movement in the undergrowth of the forest directly ahead of Hans, he seemed to notice it too as he immediately started firing his gun at the general direction of the movement. It was obvious that he was panicking by the amount of ammunition he had used upon just a movement. Franz called him out, trying to calm his troubled state, but Hans either ignored him or didn't hear him. Franz teleported himself, using light to travel. The light was an incredible thing, travelling both as a wave and as particles, and by focusing on a place, you could use the light's interference in your favour, bending the time-space in the universal spectre and all those nerd-ish facts, in simple terms, light collided with each other, allowing for a super-fast transport between two visible locations. He tried touching Hans's arm, but his hand went right through him. It was like he was on a 3D movie and could only watch.
Franz, who had a keen ear, heard footsteps on his back, he turned around to see 4 people in camouflage, semi-automatic guns raised at Hans. Franz, knowing it was to no avail, threw himself into the path the soldiers were going through, miraculously making the men stop, this gave Franz a boost of confidence as he stood defiantly in the path between the soldiers and Hans. His confidence, however, faded as he saw more soldiers emerge from the bushes at Hans's front some stood back, guns ready, while one soldier handed Hans a note that said:
Hans-Joakim Marsaille
$ 10 000 DeVils offered for his head, either alive or dead.
Accused of joining the resistance against the DeVil occupation of dream N°1430000 and causing terrorist attacks on civilians, if seen then immediately report to the nearest DeVil County high-ranking officer.
Last seen on the Dimsdale County, 12 miles from its capital DeVil Ville at VILle reservoir, presumably poisoning the peoples' water.
This coupon is to be handed to bounty hunters for it is the only way to retrieve the bounty.
After showing Hans the note, the soldier then proceeded to back off and move his hand in a forward motion, which made the entire platoon fire in unison, killing his friend immediately with shots to the heart, lungs and stomach. Franz couldn't do anything but watch as the soldiers watched the bloody body lose much more blood than anyone thought possible. Amidst spasms, Hans seemed to notice Franz, who was standing horrified at the periphery of the circle. He nodded, and Franz, almost breaking into tears, nodded back. Franz's mind started racing with questions, Why was he being persecuted? What had happened to the foundation that helped Franz all the time he was in the dimension? Did he leave the rice in the cooking pot boiling?
All of those questions, and more, raced through Franz's mind as he watched his friend die, wanting to do something, but still unable to do anything, he stood there. Strangely enough, Hans seemed to blur, come to think of it, everything was blurring, he couldn't even see well, his vision turned white, and started clearing again, this moment, he was in London, specifically at 101st house, Dalmatian Street, Camden, London, England. It was a mouthful, but you could just say "101 Dalmatian Street ''. He inspected around, a young man was entering the house, he had parked a freshly painted Panther DeVil at the front door and was using a scanner on the floor to open the door. The car looked like it had had a new and recent paint job, and it seemed pretty similar to the Panther DeVil that Cruella had. The young man, proudly wearing an American Military Uniform entered the house and was greeted by Dylan and Dolly, both of who had a panicked look on their faces. There was a moment of silence, just like those before something important would happen as the three closed the door. Franz heard it before it happened, it was all in slow motion, the rumbling that shook the earth was so strong it shook the nearby houses to their bases, the light poles ended up falling out from their bases, their lights, broken. The house? Well, it was engulfed in a ball of flames, it first broke the windows with a shock wave, then, a wall of flames burst out of the now non-existent windows, only to extinguish shortly after in the cool winter air. Fire started somewhere inside the house, quickly spreading into the whole house and neighbouring houses. There was no way anyone could've survived inside that living hell. Franz was shocked, he had only 1 question in his mind. What was happening?
He didn't have time to think about it as his vision blurred again and he was transported somewhere else.
There was a big storm raging through Canada's East coast, there was nothing to see more than the general hail of god's wrath coming upon one place, a watchtower, or a lookout, bearing the symbol of one of the world's most known rescuing organization, the PAW Patrol.
A beam of light escaped from atop the structure, rotating as it illuminated the waving sea surrounding the tiny island, connected to the mainland just by a wobbly bridge, in its last years of existence, crumbling down to pieces. There was another source of light, growing brighter by the second and it seemingly moved towards the tower.
Just as Franz noted it, the lighthouse's light pointed towards the object. Then, the light moved down and flickered, as if it had been dropped. There was a beep and then a red light emitting from the top of the base of the tower. Then, a white light started going down from the central cylinder shape. The source of light coming from the sky was coming closer very quickly. It was becoming a distinctive conical shape and, after a flash of lightning perfectly struck so that it could be seen better, Franz knew it was a missile, and by the looks of it, the people in the building knew that too, how else were they trying to escape? Franz calculated that the missile would impact at the top of the lookout. If his calculations, which were done in a matter of 30 seconds, were right, then the people in the elevator had time to survive if the Rocket was to impact atop the tower. Now, judging by the missile's trajectory, it was very likely to happen. The missile was a mere 100 yards, which definitely would give them enough time. The weapon's trajectory was so clear now, it was aiming for the top part of the building.
Franz sighed a sigh of relief, at least this was not going to end in disaster like the 2 other dimensions he had visited.
-Uh, oh - Franz said as he saw the rocket drastically change its trajectory, matching that of the elevator. The rocket's red glare gave off the telltale signs of the PAW Patrol, basking in the glory of light one more time before…
He saw it before he heard it, an explosion, with a diameter of half the tower's height, illuminated the sky of a coastal town, the rumble that followed was so strong as to shake the floor. The PAW Patrol were long gone… and so were the friends that Franz had done with them. It, again, broke his heart into a thousand pieces.
Not believing his heart could be broken more, Franz fell to his knees, tears in his eyes. Even though there was nothing to be worried about because these were alternate dimensions, cherry-picked by Cruella de Vil to bring sadness to him while reforming his mind. As Franz looked down over to his knees in grief, he was surprised to see that he had his armour on, the fine copper-coloured protector of his body, for one cannot survive without the additional protection. Forged with a tungsten/platinum alloy, only capable of forming when a neutron, travelling at 10 times the speed of light crosses paths with the 2 elements close together, triggering a reaction, where the 2 elements would attract themselves creating a new alloy, named tungstainum. With there being an exponentially weaker alloy known to humans. Franz's armour was made of pure tungstainum, which was extremely hard to find, if not impossible to do so, because if during the bonding there was any material separating the 2 elements, then it would make it impure, and less resistant. This armour was crafted in 2014 when there was information on the coming of a neutron from space, just at the speed required. With great effort, calculations were made and a vast void chamber (vacuum chamber) was put in the place that the neutron was going to impact, and the tungsten and platinum ingots were put in it, making it the purest tungstainum ever created, it was then crafted into the armour Franz wore. It was kept away in a pocket watch, having the potential to shrink up to 200 times smaller than the original, it was a valuable asset to have in our daily lives. The mechanism detected when he was in distress and activated the armour. The only way for it to work was by using the power of will, which was faltering on Franz's side, it was shown because the fine decorative carvings in the armour were glowing with a bright bronze colour, meaning that the armour would de-activate when willpower is lost.
Somewhere over in England, bordering Scotland and the sea, inside a castle, three people stand before a round table, all with black-and-white hair and all evil smiles.
- Seems like the boy's will is failing, how about we speed up the process? - the female voice, belonging to the person at the centre. - We will make him suffer for all the hardships he has created for us!
She pressed a button, and the image turned to somewhere familiar for everyone. A forest, covered in eucalypts and ashes, and a reddish tinge splashed the night sky. Fire from all sides was closing on one spot, free of trees, but full of dry leaves. The clearing, brimming with live flesh. A truly awful destiny for all the dogs and people taking refuge on it. A figure, standing 6'2" from the ground was watching everything. His eyes, burning with hopelessness, was watching the slow, painful demise of many of his friends, whom he had sworn to protect. The armour surrounding his body was glowing, brighter than ever.
- I… lost - were the only 2 words that escaped the figure's mouth. Being alone, with the screams of agony coming from the clearing. Slowly, but surely, the armour started vanishing in an orange mist.
His vision, vanishing with the telltale white mist that announced a dimension change. The visions started to get faster and faster.
Franz saw his friends die again horrible deaths, he saw how they died of starvation, were forced to fight each other, were burnt alive, poisoned, intoxicated by gas, fell into the abyss, were eaten alive, were torn apart, limb from limb. All of the horrible deaths, but still the dimension loop continued, and was getting faster by the second. Now Franz barely even had time to breathe before he changed dimensions. His vision was blank, the mist and blurriness that indicated a change seemed not to vanish anymore, but the distorted echoes of screams, gunshots and explosions bound together, creating a song, the song of death.
Head spinning, if he hadn't had the training to endure this type of savagery, then he would've probably been turned crazy by now. Even though he was trained, Franz could not endure this torture forever, and when he ceded, he would be put through a semi-permanent extreme memory loss treatment so that he would return to be a puppet for Cruella De Vil.
Speaking of which, Franz was struggling to recall his thoughts and memories now, being that he had been for longer than ever in this phase. He could only recall vaguely his thoughts, albeit being the ones he had a second ago or thoughts he had had since he remembered. His mind was turning blank. Franz had entered the short-term memory loss phase and was going to the third phase at an exponentially fast rate. The third phase was complete memory wiping.
In one of the dimensions, there was a blinding flash of light, it seemed like someone was shining a star through his eyes, even after closing them. Heck, it was even visible when Franz closed his eyes and covered them with his hands. Unbeknownst to him, he had been in the same dimension 2 times already. But he didn't remember anything of it at the time. He, after his eyes gained focus and his pupils contracted as much as they could, basking in the glory of the light.
Now, you as the reader might be wondering: at what moment will Franz change dimensions? The thing is, dear reader, that he hadn't changed dimensions in a while. Fortunately for our dear boy over here, that helped him regather his scattered thoughts from all over his brain and make a sturdy idea of whatever happened to him.
"I must have hit the tight margin in which this is happening, there must be something happening in this dimension stopping time," Franz thought as he opened his eyes once again. "I must find out what is happening!"
Franz could now see the source of the light. It was a huge whitish orb atop a mountain. Illuminating the area where he was standing. He noticed a path over towards a junkyard where a fight had broken out. It seemed like it was all a movie, a Mexican type of movie: The dusk sky giving it a yellowish tone. The only giveaway that it wasn't was the snow, and you could count that no dry bushes were rollin' around like in the movies too. Upon further exploration, Franz started to think that he was really in a Mexican movie. Something that he should have noticed before was that everyone was frozen, even inanimate objects. Someone had pushed the pause button on the movie in one of the most crucial scenes. Upon the wreckage below him, it seemed like a fight was unfolding. A female pup with a torn police pup uniform and a menacing look was holding a knife while lunging for a German Shepherd, who seemed to be an older form of Chase, fully armed with an FBI suit reading "Barkingburg" who was facing away from her, being half-enveloped in a hug with a 13-year-old boy. Even though the boy was trying to tell older Chase to look out, older Chase seemed not to notice the imminent danger mere inches away, coming from the snout of a female dog like a snake's tongue, yet 100 times sharper and a million times deadlier than it.
As Franz looked up, he could see that there was a helicopter flying overhead, or rather he say… levitating. His memory slowly, but surely came back, this time he was sure he had recognized Chase as the victim of the knife attack, but he didn't recognize any other dog participating in the fight nor did he recall having a memory of the 13-year-old boy, who was scaringly familiar to him. One thing he did remember was the word "Barkingburg '', how could he forget the kingdom he had been part of, for he had been part of the 0-1 council of the Queen, to which he had been a dear friend until his alleged decease because of war.
Franz liked royalty, not fancy royalty, but the kind that oversaw the country and people in it as its employer, those who actually did something to improve the country. Those fancy titles and cars that the fake kings and queens had to show off as a show of and demonstrate the "Class and money" they had, the ones that shifted their decisions because a sick minority wanted to, and prejudiced the majority just to do so. Franz had been a monarch, and a fair one at that, he did what HAD to be done, even when the public didn't like that. After some battling, they accepted his way of ruling and came to accept his ways.
It seemed that nobody was going to unpause the movie anytime soon, so Franz decided to explore the strange orb that levitated lazily over the top of the great mountain.
It was difficult, yet easy to climb the mountain. For starters, the snow was slippery and didn't budge a bit when he stepped on it, making him have problems finding traction on the flat surfaces at the base. With that, he was pleased to know that the debris were handy to climb, even if they were minuscule and were in mid-air. He even used some huge boulders that were in mid-air due to an avalanche to climb some impossible parts.
Now you, dear reader, might be asking: how? How in hell had Franz been able to use them flying boulders to climb the mountains, and how did they levitate, not to mention the minuscule debris he used as grabbing points. Turns out that the answer was simpler than expected. Time was still frozen, and nothing moved, even if you had the strongest force pull on it. Therefore the rock was as still as if it had been nailed to the ground.
Franz spent quite a lot of time trying to get to the top, only for it to, as he got there, reverse time and send him straight to the bottom of the mountain, where he glitched out in the same place he stood when he first arrived at this dimension, watching time go backwards, junk disappear, debris return to their original place, building houses and refugees again, snow returning upwards atop the mountain. People come back from the dead, other people skiing backwards and all sorts of things.
The time finally stopped moving backwards amidst a storm, and a very hard-hitting one at that, to Franz's perspective that's so. In his many thousands of years of life had he seen only 4 storms like this one. 1 in Atlantis (yes it existed, and yes it sunk because of a storm), the second one in Tersol in 2381, simultaneously synchronized with one of the 2 storms in TotUE (Triland of the United East) just before a massive extinction event involving a magnetized 2-kilometre wide meteor which wiped out ⅔ of the population. Franz shuddered as he remembered, the chaos it had ensued, the incredible devastation it left in its wake from Africa to the northeast part of Europe. It had been cause of Franz's curse because he was born 2 years before, and he had to live in that chaos. The last storm was this one, and by experience, something of great importance was about to happen. Partly because time had stopped reversing at this exact time and also because of the storm as said before.
Franz noticed that this place was awfully cold, as all mountains in the middle of a storm are. Franz was human, and after all, it there is intense cold, then a human dies, easy as that…
He snapped and after an orange hue, there were warm clothes on his body. It was a trick he had learnt from an old wizard that lived atop Mt. Everest. It was simple, it replaced his wet Jeans and T-shirt, which he had worn since his beloved dogs had been kidnapped. He recalled:
It had been about 2 weeks since Chase's group's departure, it was followed by a sense of quietness that haven't been felt for a long time. No insurgents, all had been neutralized during the last raid, neither there was the rattle of 125 pups playing. It seemed like it was dreamland until the inspector, better known as Cruella De Vil came poking at him with the sole purpose of ruining his funds, again, or so he thought when he saw the telltale pointy nose and black and white hair on his door. But this time, this time Cruella had come for something more… more personal, as she had put it while she was aiming a warped at Franz's head. This time she had come for "those-scrawny-pieces-of-precious-furs-that-she-may-or-may-not-be-taking-to-use-them-for-a-1-time-attire-at-her-family's-party-in-7-days-time".
There were 2 things to be explained here, the first one of those was: What in absolute f-ing hell was a warped gun?! Well, De Vil labs had discovered a way to end an immortal's existence, whether it was the cause of an experiment or because of a curse, like Franz's was. It made it so that its very existence was erased from everyone's mind, whether they are time travellers or not. The person who was shot with this gun would immediately wither and die, leaving not any remnants of its existence but a pile of ashes. The second, Cruella's Family Party, once every year, a party of obnoxious riches was held and, for the poor animals that lived in the dimensions at the time of the party, they would get chosen for their furs, for Cruella De Vil always attended each one with a new dress. All of them since the start of the parties in 1890 were made of furs and exotic skins.
Franz remembered that once, much to his surprise, Cruella entered a party with a dress made of human hairs. For him, it was gross, but the spectators, LOVED it… They even took turns touching the wearable fancy dress. It was common for Cruella de Vil to have exotic dresses every year change… but for her to his dimension, or should he say his dream. Franz had been created from a dream that changed depending on the collective minds of people trapped within it. He, at first was a normal person trying to survive in a mad world, chaotic as only it could be: ranking a 2 on Entity Cramming, a 1 on Safety, and a 5 on Chaos, ranking 4.46 on the Basset-Frazier index, making it almost unlivable for a human being. Fortunately, or should he say, sadly, Franz was bound to a curse that impeded his decease. Franz managed to live for 18 years there before being "rescued" by Cruella De Vil and her family. He had been forced to pay Cruella a hefty sum of money as compensation, fueling her never-ending craziness.
Franz took a step towards the source of light he saw before going back in time, only for his body to immediately collapse. Pain soared all through his body as he started to convulse. Not an inch of his body was free of pain, and given that there were no pain receptors on the brain THAT was scientifically impossible. Yet it was happening… Franz's vision began to blur, and a wave of darkness swept over him. Darkening his eyesight for one last time…
-Chase! - Franz heard a name be shouted by a female voice - I found someone! In his state, Franz felt how he was being tugged through the mountain by a sledge. He felt a rush of warm air and he heard the door close. For once in his life, he had no fear, he was experiencing something he had never experienced before, he was in peace and was prepared for…
DEATH.
The lights shifted into and out of his field of view. He wondered if that was what it would be like to look at stars. He'd never looked up at a sky. The thought inspired a certain vertigo. A sense of terror of the infinite that was almost pleasant. There
Heck yeah, my friends, this story comes to an end with the loss of one of my favourite characters. I did not intend for this story to be such trash but that's what you get for not knowing how to describe and write a proper story. I do believe that there is a good part of you that won't be reading this chapter, some of those who were discouraged by my past chapters, but I assure you, I have undergone amazing changes in my writing style and some, hopefully, will help me with my new story "Trollhunters 2: Tobias' Gift". With that, I say goodbye and have a great rest of your lives!
