The Real Villian

Year: 4055; Day: 295

{Song of the chapter: Honey - Magic Man}

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A bright green t-shirt hung loosely off my body. I experienced the shock, much like the time I wore the red dress, of witnessing a new color on me. Lake was wearing white-- a clean white, unlike his previous dirt and sweat-stained t-shirt. Sofya also gave us hairbrushes, thank the galaxies, and a few more sets of clothes.

Lake laid on my bed-- we were still in the guest rooms, where else were we supposed to go?-- and held a gramlet in his hand. The off brandish ones, the ones that someone would only find here.

Here, in this foreign, barbaric place. The unknown surroundings are slowly yet surely getting to me head. In the night I often found myself dreaming of a classroom with a green-eyed teacher, an office with an out dated navy blue door, or a white pavement splattered with a child's blood.

With a heaved sigh, I slumped into a black chair beside my bed. Lake lifted his head slightly to glance at me. "Hey."

"Hey, Lake," I mumbled, my attention suddenly preoccupied with something laying in a corner of the room. As cliché as it might've sounded, the thing was unlike anything I had ever seen before. It was about eleven inches tall, six inches wide. An inch thick. It looked like it was made of... paper? I never saw paper often, much less had it available to hold or touch, yet the thing seemed like it was full of paper. Lost in my own curiosity, I mindlessly stood up and walked to the thing.

"Hey," I repeated to Lake. "What's this?" I pointed to the thing on the floor.

He sat up in and loomed over the edge of the bed. His eyebrows were furrowed together as he studied the object. "A book," he stated, relaxing back into his laying position.

I blinked and stared at him blankly. "A book?"

I heard of books, but as far as I knew, there hadn't been the making of one since the early 3000's. And then with Europe's Civil War, the last books were used up to build fires and warmth. They didn't make sense anyway-- what was the point of wasting precious paper on words? Stories? It was a dumb prospect when gramlets or newsgrams could be used for the same purpose.

"Yeah," he mused. His hands were flicking through something on his found gramlet. "Books. Reading material. Stacks of paper."

"What? They don't exist, they were all used up in the Civil War," I told him. He should've known that, he was an instructor!

Lake raised his eyebrows, still keeping his concentration on his gramlet. "That's a lie," he said, shrugging.

"It's not a lie!"

"Sure it is."

I shook my head, my jaw falling slightly. Without bothering to respond I bent over and grabbed the 'book'. Straightening, I observed the book carefully in my hold. The thing was heavy, heavier than any gramlet or newsgram. The first page was unlike the others-- it was significantly harder and more board-like. The whole page was a deep burgundy with the spine of the thing black.

I flipped it open. On the inside was, in fact, paper-- loads of it. One could become rich from all the paper! The first sheet was blank anyway. Who needed this much paper?

"Go to the next page. Books don't start until you're a few pages in," said Lake, as if he were an expert on the topic. I lifted my gaze to him.

"What? How do you know?"

He shrugged again, finally setting down the gramlet onto his stomach. "In the ten days of training for becoming an instructor, we learned what a book was. They said we'd never come in contact with one, but in the case that we did, we were to immediately go to Authorities." He paused for a moment, a look of confusion dawning on his features. "Even though we were Authorities."