I'm surprised how little attention this story's gotten thus far. I'm guessing it's the OCs. Oh well, my partner loved this story, and he's my most important reader, so I'll update for him if no one else.
If it helps any though, there will be no pairings in this fanfic. ;)
Disclaimer: I do not own ROTG, only my OCs, and even they're trying to argue the issue.
As much as it pained me to admit it, I almost wanted to believe Brent's theory that this whole ordeal was all just a big hallucination of ours. I wasn't accustomed to the idea of hallucinations, being that just about everything you experience in the fae realm is real no matter how bizarre. And I couldn't fathom how we would have all wound up stuck in the same delusion. But this experience being a hallucination meant that we would all wake up from this eventually. For the first time in my life, I understood the comfort that came with being a skeptic.
The three of us stood on the plain, staring out on an endless desert in all directions. A few minutes prior, we'd been met with lush, rolling hills, and now there was nothing but barren land that was so dry that the soil cracked from there to the horizon.
We now had two suns in the sky for some reason, one purple and one green, and together they emitted more heat than I thought was possible for this kind of place. Granted, I usually avoid deserts during the daytime as it is, but I was pretty sure that this was even hotter than the average desert.
Sweat beaded up on my brow and started rolling down my face. I wiped it off with my sleeve and then pulled up my hood to protect my head, but it didn't help much. I wasn't ever supposed to sweat, being the spirit of winter. Sweat meant that I was starting to melt.
"We have to get to shelter," I said, my breathing starting to become ragged.
"But there is no shelter for miles!" said Brent, and he gestured around us at everything we could see. "For all we know, there might be no shelter anywhere in this world."
He was absolutely right in that possibility, but just being logical wasn't going to save me. "But I can't take this heat."
Amanda jumped up and down like an eager little thing. "Make it snow! Make it snow!"
I shook my head, wiping more sweat off my brow. "I-I can't. Too hot..." The heat finally got to me beyond what I could bear, and I fainted.
The logical next scene for this story to have is wherever I happen to wake up, but as this story is not a logical one to begin with, that is not the next scene in the story.
As soon as my body collapsed, I felt something tear at my being, and I found myself still standing up while looking down at my unconscious body on the ground.
Amanda screamed, but I was too shell shocked to figure out what had happened for several minutes. It was only when Brent plopped down beside my body and started slapping my cheek while shouting, "Jack! Jack! Wake up!" that the gravity of the situation hit me.
Was I dead? I was supposedly immortal, so how could I just suddenly be dead? I waved my hands in front of Amanda and Brent, and tried to poke, kick, and punch to get attention. But nothing worked.
Suddenly, the sinister voice from the operating room was in my head. "You are not dead yet, Jack, but you will be if your friends don't get you to safety in time."
"But where can we find shelter? And how can I tell them what to do in this form?"
The voice just laughed once again. "Well now, isn't that up to you three to figure out?"
My hands clenched into fists, and I desperately wanted to hit the guy, but I couldn't figure out where he was, as his voice emanated from all around me.
"I am closer than you might think, Jack. You may hit me if you wish, but I don't believe you'll be satisfied with the results." Again came the laughter.
I took a rigid stance and turned around several times in an attempt to locate the source of the voice, but I came up with nothing.
"Who the hell are you?" I said. "And why do you insist on tormenting us?"
"Oh, precious little Jack Frost. Spoilers." It almost sounded like the guy was shaking his finger in a reprimanding way. "You will understand everything in time... if you survive."
I threw my arms out in a desperate gesture. "Can't you just tell me something? Anything?"
"Well now," said the voice, "It would be helpful for you to know your enemy, wouldn't it?" He chuckled again, and I gritted my teeth, knowing that he wasn't actually going to tell me who he was if he hadn't done so already.
"Look around," said the voice. "Have you not already referred to my lovely labyrinth as a world of chaos? I am the spirit of this world. I exist in everything and through everything. I am Chaos."
The tension in my fists gradually fizzled out as I processed what this being had said. While he had made it quite clear that he would not reveal his identity to me, he still gave me his name. Why? What was he trying to get at? Was this some sort of trick?
"Assume everything is a trick from now on, Jack Frost." The being called Chaos then allowed his laugh to ricochet through my mind.
I grabbed the sides of my head and clamped my eyes shut tightly. "Get out of my head!" The laughter escalated again, but then faded to an imperceptible level. I then opened my eyes to see Amanda and Brent still puzzling over what to do with me.
"At my house," said Amanda, "whenever it gets too hot upstairs, my mommy just tells me to go downstairs, and it's not so hot anymore. Why don't we just go downstairs?"
"We're not in a building, Amanda," said Brent. "There is no downstairs."
"Uh huh! There's always a downstairs. And it's colder down there!"
As tempting as it was to ignore Amanda's naive little rant, I realized that Chaos had set the three of us up for a reason. Maybe she was onto something. If we were to go downstairs of where we were right now, we'd be underground.
My eyebrows shot up right then, and I cackled in surprise. Why hadn't I thought of that? The little girl was a genius!
"Brent, get me underground!" I shouted. "It'll be cold enough down there to save my life. Hurry!"
Of course, Brent couldn't hear me, but something seemed to switch on in Amanda's brain. "I think Jack wants to go under the ground."
The light went on in Brent's eyes, and he pulled Amanda into a hug. "You're brilliant! Absolutely brilliant!" He then looked around the landscape. "Now what can we use to dig a hole?"
"Why don't we just take the elevator?" said Amanda. Brent and I turned around to see where she pointed, and sure enough, there was now an elevator there where there wasn't one before.
Brent hesitated for a few seconds, likely uncertain about the safety of an elevator that just spontaneously appears in the midst of a desert. Not that I could blame him. That wasn't logical enough even for me, but it wasn't like staying in place in this strange land was any safer.
It seemed Brent came to the same conclusion, and so he hefted me up and threw my body over his shoulder, then the three of us bolted for the elevator. Amanda hit the down button, and the elevator shot down at rocket speed, sending us flying once it hit ground level.
As soon as the elevator doors opened, Brent raced out into the open to find a cool place to lay my body so I could recover. What he ended up settling on was a little spot next to a fountain filled with multiple streams of water, each enchanted by a different color of light. At first glance, it looked similar to fountains I'd seen in the past, but upon closer inspection I saw that the light in each stream of water was really part of that stream. And as the individual streams fell into the basin below, the lights began to lose their individuality as they danced and merged with other blobs of color, creating new colors entirely.
"Huh, water colors." I shook my head, unable to help but be amused at the sight, even in a dire situation like this.
Brent tore a scrap of fabric off of his jeans, dipped it into the light water, then dabbed it on my head to cool my body down. "Come on, wake up, bud. We can't do this without you." He dipped the cloth again and continued to dab it all over my body.
Suddenly, all the water he'd dabbed onto my body frosted over, which was a good sign because it meant I wasn't dead yet, and I felt myself get grabbed by an invisible force and then get slammed down onto my body.
That had hurt, and now I had such a headache. I wanted to rub at my head, but all my joints were stiff and could barely move. I groaned.
"He's coming to!" said Brent. "Amanda, he's waking up."
"Yeah!" said Amanda, and I could hear her little feet jumping up and down on the stone floor. It was good to be wanted.
After a few minutes of struggling, I finally managed to open my eyes. Everything was a blur, which seemed almost surreal to me considering how crystal clear everything had been while I was still outside of my body.
"Jack!" said Brent. "Are you okay? How many fingers am I holding up?"
I had to concentrate really hard in order to make anything out, but after a few minutes, my world finally came back into focus.
"Three," I said.
Brent breathed a sigh of relief. "Oh thank God. I thought we'd lost you. But you'll be okay now. Just rest."
I was slightly amused at the idea of the skeptic being able to thank God for my survival when he could barely even accept my existence, but I decided not to poke at that. I tried to leave people's religious matters alone. I could still poke at something else though.
"Why do you care so much when I'm just a hallucination to you, huh?"
Brent was flustered, and his erratic body language showed it. "Well, I-that guy just said that I couldn't get out of here without you. That's all."
"Uh huh." I smirked, knowing he was lying, but it seemed little ol' Brent still wanted everyone to think he was tough. I turned to Amanda and I whispered to her that she should tickle the old stick-in-the-mud, a suggestion she wholeheartedly agreed with.
"No... No... NO!" Brent tried to scramble away from Amanda's tickles, but doing so only caused the two of them to topple headlong into the light water. They were both going to be glowing for days at this rate, and I laughed at the thought.
By and by, I was able to sit up again, and I looked around for my staff, but it was nowhere to be seen. "Hey, Brent?" I said, "What happened to my staff?"
"Your-Your staff?" he said, and he scanned the underground room we were in, as though doing so would help unlock his memory.
Then he smacked his face, a gesture I didn't think would mean anything good. "I left it on the surface. I was so frantic to get you down here that I just... forgot."
I pulled my hood tight around my face and did my best to suppress a scream. I couldn't go back up to the surface and face that kind of heat exposure a second time. "But I need that staff! I can't fly without it! And it's harder to control my ice if I don't have it."
Brent's mouth shaped itself into a silent "O", and he quickly said, "but, it's no big deal. I could just run back up to the surface and grab your staff for you and..."
He stopped speaking as I pointed my finger at something. He followed with his gaze to see what I was pointing at, only to say, "Oh."
The elevator had disappeared.
Shorter chapter than I usually do, but I liked where it ended, so meh. Hopefully someone out there liked this. *chuckles* I'll get back to working on Lullabies in the Frost and Imaginary Hellos very soon. Trying to juggle three fanfics at once. Haven't done that in a while.
Anyway, if you're reading this, thank you. A review would be awesome if you're up to it. :) Either way, see you next time!