"You're a murderer."
"No matter what you do to justify it, you're just a scummy killer, who'd do anything to get what he wants."
"You ruthless, callous sociopath!"
"Nobody in this world loves you, because you are pure evil."
As the ringing in my ears slowly subsided, I could hear voices. Strange voices calling out to me.
"What the fuck?" I asked myself, finding myself in a rickety hallway. The glimmer of a light at the end of the pure black hallway nearly blinded me as I looked at it.
Where the fuck was I? I couldn't understand it. I was somewhere important before, but I just couldn't remember wheere, or even what I was doing.
As I continued to walk through the hallway, I realized that it didn't seem to end.
I saw a small red glimmer on the floor, but when I went to pick it up, it dissappeared. Soon, I started to freak out a little.
Instead of walking down the hallway, I ran. Desperately trying to reach the light, I ran with all my strength, but began to feel tired, and eventually collapsed.
"You're sick. You were supposed to make your dad proud. Instead, you became a sicko freak."
"I know who you are. A sociopath. Someone who no longer cares for human life!"
As the many different voices continued to get louder, the ringing in my ear also got louder as well.
Trying to recollect my memories of who I was, I came to realize another thing. I forgot! I completely forgot who I was. The only thing that I seemed to remember in my mind was 2 words.
"Freedom Junkie." What did that mean?
As I tried to piece it together, I became more & more confused. As I walked through the hallways, I realized that there were many mirrors hanging up in the hallway.
As I looked through one of the mirrors, I could see my face. Curly brown hair. Light brown skin, likely of african descent. My eyes were a pretty normal color, but for some reason, I couldn't tell the color on first look. My body was pretty weak looking, not too muscular.
It was skinny.
Was this me? Was this a reflection of me?
As I looked at my body, I realized something more. No facial hair. I was in the body of a kid. A 12 year old kid. But was I 12? I had a feeling that I was way older, but I couldn't put my finger on it.
As I looked at myself, something about my image made me feel sickened, as if I'd done many things that were unforgiveable. But it didn't bother me. I couldn't be bothered.
I was already too tired to care. I was too tired to give a shit about the world.
Some weird notion in my head continued screaming at me, telling me that being good gets you nowhere. You just suffer and suffer, being taken advantage of when you're nice.
Kindness is bullshit.
It's a lie created by people who want you to be as constricted as them. If you feel a sense of duty, of responsibility, or a need to help others, that only holds you back.
I couldn't place my finger on that strange feeling, but it only continued to grow, becoming greater and larger as I walked.
If you are kind, it's just another weakness. Only a person who casts everyone aside can survive. Only a person that stops caring about emotional bonds & connections can get anywhere in life.
Your loved ones will die anyway.
What's the point in trying to save them?
Even if you truly do love them anyway, they can always betray you always take advantage of you. Always hurt you, and even treat you like garbage.
It sickened me!
As a strange feeling in my stomach boiled over, I felt disgusted!
I still couldn't remember everything, but one singular memory pushed itself to the center of my mind. It was a quote, said by me.
As I thought of the quote, I slowly repeated it out loud.
"Good people are fucking suckers!"
As I continued to stare into the reflection, I tried to make out my height, but failed. I looked at my hands to see rugged, calloused over hands. They didn't look pretty at all. They had creases on them, and looked pretty ugly.
As I put my hand up to the mirror, I flew into it at high speeds against my will, my body falling into the mirror world.
"What the fuck!?" I screamed out, a little excited from the rush that I got from falling into the mirror.
My reflection, startled, began to talk. "Woah! What the heck! How'd you get in here!" Startled, I looked around. I was trapped in a mirror. Suddenly, as I continued to walk through the mirror, the world started to warp and change. My reflection, a real person now, came up to me.
It was bizarre.
It was... talking to me?
How was my reflection from a mirror real? It was speaking and conversing with me.
"What's up?" It said, with an energetic tone. "I'm you, but a different version of you." He said, laughing. "I'm the mirror world you. I'm the version of you that you put out into the real world."
What? That didn't make any sense to me at all. He quickly picked up on my confusion & further clarified.
"You see, we all wear masks in life. Every person pretends. They all put on a different face, set up a certain personality, when talking to others. Don't feel bad about it, everyone does it. For example, the real you is addicted to porn, and it's the embarrassing stuff, too."
God damn it! "Shut up!" I shouted out, trying to avoid the conversation.
"You don't wanna admit it, because out in the real world, you'd rather keep your real self hidden. Deep down, you do feel regret for the horrific actions you've done, but to you, it doesn't matter. It's all said and done, and you don't care who you ruin just to get a leg up on the competition."
He laughed, and began to speak once again. "That's all, now. I'm gonna shoot you out of this dream world, and into the next. We'll meet each other some other day, though, I guarantee it. Until then, give her hell!"
As he shot me out of the mirror, I landed back into the hallway. In the corner of my eye, I saw the red glint again, but couldn't make any real sense of it. I began to ignore it, and looked around. I continued to hear the voices, calling out, judging me.
"You killed so many innocent people. You've killed over 10,000 people, and you don't even feel guilty."
"You're just edgy. Was that comment about her boobs really worth it? You just murdered her!"
"You hurt so many people, and all this because you have a little more power than most others."
"Be grateful. Without your powers, you'd be nothing. You wouldn't be able to do the things you do now."
As I looked around, hearing the voices, I looked at one of the mirrors again.
All of a sudden, the horrifying realization hit me! The mirrors. Every time I passed a mirror, my reflection would appear, and my reflection would say something about me.
Those voices! They were my reflection.
As I passed by another mirror, my reflection burst out in anger. "You're pathetic. You desperately yearn for romantic love, yet you kill anyone you feel like. You don't deserve a lover."
That one hit right in the heart, but I chose to take it in stride.
I began to speak out loud, trying to regulate my thoughts.
"Okay. According to these reflections, my name is the Freedom Junkie, and I killed tens of thousands of people. Apparently, i'm a sociopath who is killing for a greater purpose. But why? Why am I here? Doing this? Where am I?" I said out loud, wishing for a response from someone. Anyone.
But unfortunately, that response never came. Instead, the endless barrage of hate from my reflections continued to grow louder & more demanding.
As I said it, though, more & more memories actually came back to me. It seems like thinking about myself in depth can trigger my memories to return. I seem to remember even more about myself, but still, I didn't remember how I got here.
As I looked to one reflection, I began to ask him, "Where am I?"
It laughed, and only shook his head. "Even we don't know that. We don't know anything that you don't know. We're you, after all. Some of us, are different versions of you, though. Versions from the past, versions from the future, versions that exemplify only 1 aspect of your personality, and versions that represent a specific part of you. There are a nearly infinite different versions of you, so there are an equally infinite amount of mirrors, each with a different version of you."
Great! This just made the situation all the more complicated. I couldn't really tell what was going on, but that same red sliver kept on nagging at me. I saw a red string in the corner of my eye.
"What... the hell is that?"
It was some kind of red glint, that led to the end of the hallway. I didn't know what it was, but decided to follow it.
When following closely behind, I felt a tap on my shoulder.
"What!?" I screamed out in horror.
To my surprise, it was a woman. She had white hair, but seemed to only be in her 20s. Her skin was flaky, almost like she had some sort of condition that would make it peel off.
"Who are you?" I asked, perplexed.
She laughed, and began to speak. "I see you don't remember me. I'm the woman who told you about the Red Thread of Fate. And in return, you told me your true dream."
What? I didn't recall any of this. Either way, it seemed like she knew something that I didn't.
"So, what's your name?" I asked, trying to find out some more information.
She smiled, and told me right away. "I'm Lake. Nice to meet you! Ever since I first met you, I wanted to become friends with you. I know, deep down, you're not all bad!"
She was very excitable. It was almost like she was meeting a celebrity for the first time after thinking of them night after night.
To be frank, it was a bit creepy, and the thing that made it even creepier was that I had no goddamn clue what was going on! I was like a naked idiot in the middle of a fucking jungle, using a match as a torch to keep the animals away.
Put simply, I was entirely out of my element, and felt incredibly unsafe in this mysterious place that I had no knowledge about.
Lake only looked at me in awe, and, annoyed, I asked her why. Her response annoyed me even more.
"Why, you ask? Because you're my hero! You've lived a truly horrible life, and yet you still have something to live for. To think that you'd go on to kill so many people. But, regardless, you're a good person. I believe it in my heart, I really do!"
Her response only pissed me off even more!
"You think i'm a fucking chump, you fat bitch?" I screamed in annoyance. She wasn't fat, but I couldn't find any better insults.
"Fuck you, you stupid fuck! Ugly, bald freak!" I continued to shout out insults that weren't accurate at all, and she only smiled.
"The truth is, I wasn't that into you at first. But when I discovered your life, and all the events that got you to this point, I developed a bit of a crush on you!", she stated, smiling.
I stopped insulting her for a second, before thinking to myself.
She had a crush on me? That was perfect!
I could use her to do stuff for me, and when she outlived her usefulness, I could just kill her. The troubling part, however, was the power that she had over me. If she was the one that put me here, in this mysterious place, then I would really need to fight for my freedom in an impossible situation. I'd essentially be powerless in front of a god that was only letting me live based off of a loose crush. If that was the case, I might already be screwed.
Most people say that planning for the worst case scenario, or planning for failue, is a bad idea, but I didn't have that viewpoint. Planning for failure is only neccessary, and in most cases, a good idea. If you risk it all, and fail, then you'll have nothing to show for it. But if you not only planned out what would happen if you failed, but also planned really meticulously, you'd never technically fail in the first place. I loved planning & trying to outsmart my enemies. Most battles between Chaotic Demons had a lot of strategy behind it. Like the first ever battle I had with that weird metal guy. I couldn't kill him with teleportation, so I dropped a heavy object on him. A lot of Celestial Angels & Chaotic Demons had powers that could only be stopped in specific ways. It was really fun trying to figure out how to stop them.
Thinking of that, I wondered how my teleportation could be stopped. My reaction time wasn't instantaneous, so I assumed that a power that could utilize super speed would be a hard counter to me, since I have a normal human reaction time. Maybe even another teleportation power as well, like portals of the sort.
I even thought that, maybe even a little kid with no powers could kill me in my sleep with a knife. If I wasn't conscious, then I'd probably not be able to teleport out of the way. Normal reaction time means that I could be killed at any moment. A gun to the back of the head could kill me if I didn't know it was coming. Unlike other Chaotic Demons, I had clear weaknesses that could be exploited, and while others had weaknesses too, it was a lot more forgiving to not protect those weaknesses during battle.
Of course, this was all speculation, but it was still fun to think about.
Wait! Teleportation! That's it! Maybe I could-
Lake immediately stopped me, while smiling again. "Don't even try teleporting. It won't work. This world is not like the real world. Your powers won't work in here."
Despite hearing her claims, I immediately tried to teleport out.
"Don't. You're trapped here."
My teleportation failed.
To my surprise, Lake asked me a co.pletely unrelated question. It came completely out of left field, and made no sense why she even asked it. Rather, it wasn't a question, but more like a statement.
"You have teleportation, right? Doesn't that mean that when you have to poop, you can just teleport your body away and not teleport your poop? Or if your poop counts as a part of yourself, does that mean you can teleport your poop? Teleporting poop sounds freaking scary, man."
In anger, I immediately turned around, rage boiling over.
"Let's just go into the next room." I said, asking for an excuse to avoid embarrassment.
"Sure." Lake said, pointing over to another door.
As I continued to look, I once again noticed a red thread across the hallway.
"That door looks ominous, let's go over there."
I wondered for a second. It was a huge, red door that stood out to me. Why haven't I sern that before. Coming from the door was a weird smell. It smelled like the pork I would eat as a kid. The door itself was oddly nostalgic, it seemed to carry the weight of the world on its hinges.
As both of us slowly walked toward it, a small fear creeped through me.
All at once, information rushed at me, and I remembered even more from my past. Before my mother would abuse me. What she did to me.
I collapsed in fear, remembering the traumatic memories all at once. I looked up in fear.
Something about that door... it made me remember.
As if reading my mind, from behind me, Lake said, in a small voice. "This door. It must be the most painful memory you've ever had. Something terrifying is behind it."
As I opened the door, through it, I saw a young man, aged around 18, maybe 19. He was sitting at a hospital bed, watching someone lying on the bedframe. The young man could do nothing but watch. He could do nothing but watch! Like some kinda fucking useless piece of shit!
Instantly, I closed the door, practically slamming it shut. "Let's not go through that one." I said, holding back tears.
"Why?" Lake asked, genuinely curious.
As I responded to her, I yelled. "Jesus fucking christ, lady. Let's just not. I'm glad you're with me, it's nice to have some company, what do you do for fun?" I said, trying to shift and redirect the conversation into something else, but failing miserably, and coming across as scatterbrained.
She looked over to me, and surprisingly answered. "Me?", she asked, inquisitively. "Well... I like lucid dreaming, and astral projection, and I even like aliens, and the supernatural."
As I thought about her hobbies, a horrified look came over my face. "Wait, say that again. You like... what?"
She looked at me, kinda sad. "I like the supernatural."
No. The part about lucid dreaming, and fucking astral projection. That fucking hippie crap!
As I thought that, everything came to me in a rush! I figured out what was going on!
I was dreaming! I was in a dream!
I slowly walked up to her, doing my best to keep calm, and lightly said, out loud, but very direct.
"You...", I said. "I know you aren't here for no reason. Who the fuck are you, really."
She looked at me, surprised, as I slowly walked over to her.
"Earlier, when I asked you about these questions, you lied to me, tried to flatter me, telling me that you had a crush on me, but I know that's a lie. A sociopath like me, someone who killed many without blinking an eye. There are hundreds out there that are just like me, but there's nobody who likes people like me. Not even I like me. So... who the FUCK are you? You FUCKING piece of shit. Who do you think you are?"
Suddenly, even more memories rushed into my head. This woman, I've met her before. She was the woman that told me about S, she was the woman who visited me in my dreams before! Why didn't I recognize her, it really was her! She was the oy one I ever told about my dream to create a perfect world.
At that moment, she saw that I made the connection.
She slowly walked backwards out of fear, but I could tell it in her eyes.
She wasn't scared of me.
It was someone else.
But who?