Change || The Promised Neverland

⚜ Chapter Thirty-One: Alive ⚜

<< Why am I alive? >>

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HEY. HEY YOU. LOOK AT THIS. LOOK AT THIS BEAUTY! Kurou_Kumo from Wattpad drew this fanart for me, and I'm just in love with it! Thanks again, ly!

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"User 3 is now online."

Norman nearly jumped out of his skin at the sudden voice in his ear. He'd been in the middle of planning, trying to make something out of the predicament he'd found himself in. Without Smee, things would be a lot harder. Just in case, he'd managed to slip in the earpiece, and activated it using Morse Code on the button.

User 3, huh? So there were more than two people who used this. Norman had been User 1, as the device had greeted him as such when he booted it up. He almost opened his mouth to talk, but then realized that 1) it didn't have a microphone, and 2) he was being recorded.

How does this thing work? he thought irritatedly. Smee never explained anything.

"Who are you?"

Norman stiffened at the mechanical voice that came from his earpiece. It was glitchy and very much gritty, but underneath it, he could barely hear a soft female voice. Nevertheless, it wasn't Vincent who he was talking to.

"I am not Vincent. I'll ask again, who are you? "

How did they-?

"You were saying- Oh," they said, apparently realizing something. "So these devices read our minds, interesting."

"Oh," Norman sighed."I see. I'm..."

He paused for a second. Should he tell them his real name? Norman had no reason to trust them. They could've been the sheepdog, or-

Panicking for a bit, Norman shut out his thoughts. They could hear him right now, couldn't they? Having his thoughts exposed to the world made him feel even more vulnerable than he was in Lambda. At least, he had the privacy of his thoughts then. Now, even that was taken away from him.

The fact that they weren't saying anything was slowly building upon his anxiety. Were they making fun of him? Were they silently judging him? Why weren't they saying anything?

"...You remind me of one of my friends," the person mused. The albino froze when he heard a faint name - his own. "Norman was just like you."

"Who are you?" Norman retorted, suddenly panicked and defensive. His fingers nearly ripped the page with his emotions. He could hear the other person make a small sound of confusion.

"They've become defensive," the person noted, their voice soft. "Why, though?" 

Then, they seemed to realize that he could hear their thoughts too. "Was it my comment about Norman? Why would they get defensive over that? They... couldn't know him, could they?" 

The person kept rambling to themselves in their mind, thinking things over as he had just done. They eliminated possibilities as quickly as they came up with them, trying to figure out who he was and why he knew, well, himself. Norman was a bit amused at how much their mind mirrored his.

"What am I doing, they can hear me right now," the person said irritatedly. Norman heard a long, drawn-out sigh (how could they do that in their mind?), before they spoke at a normal volume once more. "Sorry."