Tick... Tick...

The End

bzzz... bzzz... bzzz...

"Mr. Petrikov! Please, I don't understand what's happening!"

plop... plop... plop...

"Dorothy!" 

tick... tick... tick...

"Dotty?... Dot!"

tick... tick... tick...

"Betty! Simon?"

tick... tick... tick...

"SIMON!"

...

A white light filled the space around her. Not the blinding and invasive light of a hospital. Not the sharp hue that fills your senses and makes you squint. A white light that reminds you of the sun. A calm day in a field of flowers, the breeze pushing through your hair.

Where is she?

Every second that passed, though she couldn't be sure that the passage of time is in seconds, a piece of a cube fills her vision. She felt a wetness on her cheek, tears, dripping off of her face and onto an unknown surface.

It was so bright...so blindingly white.

Until it wasn't. 

All at once the white vanished and was replaced with yellow, five of six surfaces were hued with the same pale yellow. A giant oblong stripe of pink ran flush across the surface of three of them. The, what she could assume, wall in front of her didn't share the yellow or pink glow. Instead, it showed two people, kneeled in front of a soot pile on a cave floor. There was a stone slab that depicted a stopwatch behind the pile. What stood out to the woman the most was that the two people were crying. Of course, they weren't just any two people... it was her friends Betty and-

"Simon!" 

All at once, the room finished forming, a seemingly random jacuzzi plopped down. Her feet were planted on the ground, a chain drooped from one of her clutched hands. The constant loud ticking died down, and was replaced with the sounds of her breathing. Her throat hurt like she had been screaming and crying for hours. Her face was wet, but her eyes were dried, like she had forgotten why she was crying and simply stopped. She felt like she had been kicked in the head, but the dull pounding was ignored as the pink shadow on the wall screamed.

"Woah! Hey bro, chill!" She doubled over, falling to her knees as her limbs began to feel heavy. An open palm caught her fall, the other still clutching the watch. The watch. She shifted onto her butt and opened her hand. The weight of the small device felt so wrong, but at the same time, felt like she needed it. Like if she let it go, everything would stop.