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Joyce Blackbird is a bored aspiring writer who just entered her adult years. The world around her frustrates her and disrupts her inspiration to write.
Chase Journey, musician, is the first person she's interested in. Through the cl...
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a/n: this chapter is an important one, so it's all in one shot. hope you don't mind. don't forget to vote!
As much as Joyce wanted to beat around the bush driven by the desire of summer days, she couldn't deny the fact that that day wasn't just chilly and foggy, it was cold.
The wind was blowing on the back of her head as cold as betrayal, her hair flying in front of her face as she stood there alone.
The purple clouds that replaced Chase's body had started to dissipate into the wind, merging with the gray mist. A few stayed on Edysium's ground, dancing around her feet, turning into small tornadoes on the edge of the rooftop before they cascaded onto the city.
"What the hell?" Joyce murmured. The only response was the blowing of the wind, louder than her voice.
She darted across the rooftop, examining every side of it. "What the hell?" her voice was louder this time, but still no response.
It had to be some kind of magic trick, she thought. Chase was, after all, pretty eccentric, so it wouldn't be much of a surprise if he pulled a prank on her.
But the more she ran around Edysium and looked, the more her mind kept contradicting itself. People don't vanish into thin air, of that she was sure. When she was a teenager, she believed in magic. She wanted to see something magical, something paranormal happen in front of her eyes so bad, but it never did. So she stopped believing.
She knew reality was as boring as advertised, as plain as that scenery of gray mist and thick fog surrounding her at that moment.
She knew her only hope to have a more interesting reality was her imagination, so she imagined plenty of things every day. But her imagination had never turned into hallucination.
Joyce had always been able to grasp the line between reality and fiction, between the real world and her imagination. She was a dreamer, she dreamed with both her eyes closed and opened, but she was never schizophrenic.
For her, it wasn't like those movies where dreamy characters have hallucinations that talk to them, and they talk back and they have an entire conversation but somehow nobody around wonders anything. She knew what only existed in her mind had no effect on reality.
But what happened right there, that day, was impossible. She thought, maybe, dreaming so much had finally caught up to her; her mind had started to play tricks on her. She imagined herself leading the life of a mentally ill stuck on pills, trying to banish the hallucinations that invaded her reality. The mere thought of existing without living sent shivers down her spine.
But it couldn't be. She wasn't going mad, she knew it. She was lucid. Her mind was working properly, even though it was confused.
What happened was real. Chase had actually turned into purple smoke and disappeared. Saying it felt even more surreal than seeing it. Chase had been the one smoking— vaping, whatever, not her. If there were any hallucinations involved with inhaling that strange stuff, it could only work on him. Her reality couldn't have been invaded by it.
