《Falling stars》 Chapter 1: Being stupid together Chapter 1: Being stupid together Did you know how stupid humans were? I know because, well, I am one myself. There is no need to dig out dark secrets to find that out; you just have to look at what I am actually doing right now. Under the beautiful scarlet sky off the sunset, with a beautiful view of mountains and valleys enchanted by the gentle and pure sound of the wind, two dumb-asses, me and my best friend, are actually showing the stupidest side of humanity. "Stop acting as if I owe you anything, you bastard. That was my money, and I do what I want." Actually, he was not wrong; it was his money, but I don''t know why he brought that up. "Why do you act as if you are the boss? , you are just a stupid monkey with a bit of money." He is just a bit better than me on money management, and to be fair, I was not that handsome either. Still, I had to say something, and it was all I could think of. "At least I have a job." Yeah, I just lost my job, but I had a good reason. No, this fight was not about money or anything; I don''t even know how it started; all I know is that I had to win that argument due to pride and rage, which is not very mature of me. "Whatever, I am going home." I lost the argument now I am using an evasion tactic. "We aren''t done yet," He said victoriously, whilst grabbing my arm. "Get your hands off me," I said, slapping his hand off. He grabbed me by the collar; I did the same; I don''t know who started it, but we began to throw punches, kicks and grapple without forgetting some swear words and pretty creative criticism; after sometimes he pinned me on the ground, choking me. Both of us wanted to stop long ago, but we can''t. He knows that if he released the choke, I would beat the crap out of him, and I knew it too. ''I am actually dying for a fight of which I don''t know the beginning,'' and that is why, I said that humans are stupid. By the way, since the beginning of the fight, the sky had darkened a lot, and the view was stunning. If I wasn''t being choked to death, I would have taken a picture. This story originates from a different website. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there. Contemplating my slow and stupid death, I looked at the sky, vast and limitless. I then saw a shooting star; it was off a deep yet bright blue. I found it beautiful. ''I am going to die anyway, so why not make the edgiest wish I can do?'' I thought to myself. ''I wish to be handsome, rich, and maybe immortal. '' Seeing the stupid smile on my face, my soon-to-be murderer softened his grip a bit, allowing me to die even slower. ''Dude, put a little effort on it.'' I looked at the shooting star again; this time it was bigger, and faster, and it continues to increase in speed and size. I then knew that my wishes would probably get cancelled, ''haha''. No seriously, that thing is falling. And it brought friends with it, from One to two, then five, dozens until an unknown number. I am not really a fan of counting. Taken by a sudden surge of adrenaline, I pushed my friend off me. I grabbed his hand and started to run, pointing at the now closer shower of stars. "Ruuunnn" I forgot that we were killing each other; what is important now is to survive. I knew we wouldn''t outrun what was coming. Call it instinct or premonition, I was sure of it, so I ran straight to the nearest shelter from our position, in this case a well, a damn deep well off more than two hundred meters of depth. We used to joke about this well. Nearing the well, I somehow knew we wouldn''t reach it in time, so, summoning strength from I don''t know where, I picked him off the ground like a pro wrestler threw that dumb-ass friend of mine into the well, completely forgetting that he was trying to kill me a few seconds prior. Once I lost sight off him, my legs gave up. I collapsed and rolled a few times before colliding against the well''s mouth. Head down a foot up, I really wished the future archaeologist wouldn''t find me in this awkward position. I was facing the most beautiful thing I have never seen. Something no word or paint could capture the beauty of . The world was on fire; literally, I saw the blast of blue coming towards me; I didn''t hear a sound; I was radiated before the sound reached my position. I only felt pain for less than a fraction of a second; I expected to faint directly, but I somehow managed to feel the fascinating process of being disintegrated. The last thing I saw was a neon blue blast before the lack of anything other than my being turned into dust. ''How the heck am I still conscious?'' On 31 July of the year 20XX, humanity perished, and I was at the front seat watching the show. '' Too bad I didn''t bring popcorn.'' I am still very conscious, though. Chapter 2: Death is boring Chapter 2: Death is boring ¡®Yo, it is still me. I know I kind of get blasted into nothingness, but here I am again.¡¯ It has probably been a few hours since I disintegrated, and let me tell you, death is overrated. I didn¡¯t know what to expect when I was alive. Although I have been going to church from my youngest age until my college years, I am not really a devout believer. So I wouldn''t have minded being sent to hell or just disappearing into nothingness. As for going to heaven, my research history or the lack of it in my case, would have stopped me from even thinking about that. There is absolutely nothing here. No sense of touch, sound, or smell, not even colors. I don''t even see blinding light or darkness. Oh! Dear, I would have loved to see those things I know, but I didn''t have those luxuries; it is just a plain empty void. ¡®My brain probably got overwhelmed and put me into comas. That is probably it. Maybe when I fell, I hit my head and passed out. Maybe I just imagined myself getting turned into dust by a meteorite. '' ¡®Nah, what meteorite? It doesn''t make sense if a literal rain of fire had happened; the authority would have warned the people, right? I mean, it can¡¯t be that difficult to track down interstellar rock, right?¡¯ ¡®I probably passed out after Antony choked me, right? Yeah, that must be it¡¯ I spent hours rambling about what possibly happened to me, like maybe this is all a dream or that it is a prank, or maybe I got drugged the night before. I kept making hypotheses again and again; some are realist, some are madness. Near the end, I even tried to believe that I managed to escape the matrix and that someone would make me choose colored pills later. How could I not know? I got incinerated alive, I felt every damn cell of my being got dust, I felt my eyes get blinded, and I felt the overwhelming feelings of injustice when dying. I felt the rage at the idea of disappearing without story, without having done anything about my life. Likewise, I hated the idea of not being able to accomplish any of my dreams, not being able to talk to the girl I liked until the end, not being able to sit, drink my favorite beer, eat my favorite food, or read my favorite novels. This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there. Oh, you don¡¯t know how many times I thought about ending myself, imagining how my close ones would react. I thought about how to make my death more dramatic, like writing a text for all of them. I wanted to know if they would feel pain if I died, and truth to be told, I wanted them to suffer a lot for my absence. But in the face of true death, I was unwilling. I want to live; there is nothing wrong with that. ¡®Why would I have to die? Why can¡¯t I be immortal like those gods of legends? Why am I suffering in the void while the one who tried to kill me probably survived and still has chances to live a happy life?¡¯ ¡®I don¡¯t want to; it is not fair. Why him, not me? I probably should have let that bastard die; maybe I would have survived if I did. I then started to blame my death on Antony. I cursed him for I don''t know how long. Treating him with many undeserved insults. Dark thoughts kept going through my mind, like how I should have let him die or directly pushed him to make him die the same death as me. The more I rambled the more I felt like trash, but I kept cursing at him, at the world, at an unknown god. I just wanted someone to hear my pain, but here in the void, I was alone. No one would listen or care about my suffering, but that also meant no one would care if I said the greatest profanity; I said the worst things I could imagine, and I felt even more trashlike. If I wasn¡¯t already dead, I would have committed suicide for even having those thoughts. At some point I started to call the names of every known gods of every religions I wanted them to pity me. Hearing no answers, I turn to every devils of the ars goetia I could remember, including Baal, Asmodeus, Belzebuth and many other offerings ranging from gold to the souls of children, wishing internally for them to not heed my call. Being unanswered by the ¡®oh so high¡¯ gods and the worst demons of hells put me in a state of rage again. Then I would start to deny reality again, convincing myself that I would wake up from a coma again. People say that the "stages of grief" include denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. But I was not in grief; I was just keeping my head occupied in the void. The rage stopped me from thinking about anything or getting bored as long as I was expressing any form of emotion I keep existing, a twisted form of ¡°I think, so I am,¡± if you want. I don''t know how many times I kept deluding myself, but at some point I just stopped thinking about myself, I was not egocentric enough to think about me for days, yes days, I was here that long. How many days? I am unsure, but I know how long days felt like. I still didn¡¯t understand what happened to me or where I am, but instead of trying to earn pity for myself, I used all my wrath to keep me sane and spit on all the world for putting me in this situation. It was that or being bored. Chapter 3: not so white torture and hallucinations, probably Chapter 3: not so white torture and hallucinations, probably (Narrator POV) Have you ever heard of white torture or white room torture? It is a practice in which someone is put in a fully white-covered room isolated from any form of visual or auditory stimulus. Generally, the victim has to wear a white straitjacket to prevent self-harm, but it is also stooping the victim to do anything that could distract him from boredom. Until this day, sensory deprivation is still considered as one of the most efficient and evil forms of torture. Our hero is in a worse condition than those victims because, unlike a human-made white prison, here there is no light or darkness, no breathing sound, no heart pulse, not the smell of air, not the feeling of the fabric, not even the taste of his own saliva. Unlike the victims, he could not scream, see shadows, walk around the room, roll on the ground like a dog, or even plead for help. It was a total sensory deprivation, a kind that is unheard of in humanity. He had to deal with the mix of sleep paralysis and lack of stimulation together; something like that would have freaked out anyone in the first few minutes and drove them to despair in the hours that followed. Yet, our hero is actually occupied passing and refining his ¡°Venting loop¡± for days now. At the start, it was just the rambling of a distressed man, but by the time he started to repeat the process in his mind, he started to add new words and new versions, sometimes mimicking famous actors in the speech, sometimes adding imaginary anime sound in the background, or even translating it in different languages. What was once his cry for help is now one of the few things that he can do, so he used it as much as he could. The fact that in his current state, thinking is incredibly slow as if he was running a new generation game on an old computer also helps him a lot in wasting time, It may not be apparent by the way he express himself and he himself may not even sense it but his thinking capacity is a least 3 time slower than what he was used to so an hour for him may be actually be three or two and half hours, it is difficult to know the time without watches. Still, even with his abnormal mind and slow computation, after days or maybe a week, even he starts to feel some side effects of the ¡°white¡± tortures. His already bad time deduction adds up with his impatience, making him lose sense of time, his mind asking for stimulus to start to make stimulus for itself. It started with some imaginary silhouette that faded in the moment of notice, sounds that followed his thinking like a chorus, then the illusions became more and more real; sometimes they got as far as mimicking the appearance of his loved ones. Support the creativity of authors by visiting Royal Road for this novel and more. Strangely enough, the hallucinations had minimal effect on him, not because he was some sort of hyper-realistic person or that he has strong mental fortitude, although his mental fortitude is actually excellent compared most people of his ages, it is doubtful that it would match that of a trained soldier that at the end of the day would still yield after days of white torture .the hallucinations is just his own mind doing it stuff and in actuality, he was overjoyed by the novelty of this defense system of the mind. Yeah, our hero is a strange man. At some point, he was even longing for his next hallucinations, sometimes actively trying to feel them and at some point, with the consumption of a lot of willpower and sanity he somehow managed to make his own ¡°hallucination¡± and even control it the only downside is that the ¡°hallucinations¡± he creates are too real to be mere hallucination. Unbeknownst to him, strange visual and auditory phenomena are happening around him, and all he could feel was that creating ¡°hallucination¡± is tiring, but the more he does it, the easier it becomes. If, at the start, he created the image of a stickman and moved it with difficulties, he now can make a swarm of ethereal butterflies fly around him for hours before getting tired. It was a novel feeling for him. He felt like a painter that created animated imagery in the blank Canvas of his world. In his life, he never considered himself as an artistic person and had a very basic idea of the concept of beauty, but if you spend hours doing something, there is a high chance that you will better yourself. So even if at the beginning his selfmade hallucination was crude, at best he slowly refined it; the once crude contours became fine lines, the once clumsy moves became graceful... So he now spent his time mulling over his situation or observing some dotes in the background, eagerly waiting for his next great illusory ¡°performance.¡± Those dots in the background appeared a week after the disaster. Those dots were strange; some were moving, others were stationary, some were big and bright, others were smaller. Their colors change from time to time, sometimes a hungry red or a lazy blue, but strangely enough, they were never the same. They do not disappear like normal hallucinations did, but just go out of his range of perception and disappear or get consumed by other dots. Once he even saw a very big, bright dot getting close to him during one of his performances before getting away. Sadly, he just attributes it to him going insane. After a few weeks of stimulus deprivation, he finally felt that he was not alone in this ¡°Void.¡± Chapter 4: Dot鈥檚 documentary session Chapter 4: Dot¡¯s documentary session ¡°In a world of darkness, a small white dot is resting near another green, bigger dot.unbeknownst to it, that place is the hunting spot of a red dot that earned the title of little red. " "Little Red may have the size of a french fry, but compared to the white dot, he was two times its girth. ¡° ¡°Little Red lay still, not far from the big green dot. Even when the white dot circled around the big green and got near it, it didn''t dare to move. It was like a bow in tension, ready to unleash the arrow at any moment. Only when the white dot finally settled and rested, the little red finally decided to move.¡± ¡°Like a flash of light, it projected itself to the white one. The latter had no time to react at all and quickly forfeited its right to live.¡± ¡°In the void, once again, a dot disappeared forever, yet no one cared. The little red tyrant triumphs again in the struggle of the dots'' life.¡° ¡°And that concludes today¡¯s dot¡¯s documentary session. If you want to know more about little red daily life, don¡¯t forget to check tomorrow in a few hours or whenever I want it. Thanks.¡± Have you ever heard of the saying ¡°boredom is the mother of creativity¡±? I haven¡¯t. In fact, I don¡¯t even know if such a quote exists, but it sounds cool, and I can relate to it, so I don¡¯t care whether it is a famous quote or just the product of my brain. Anyway, what I want to say is that even though I was unable to move, I managed to get a full schedule to spend my days. I got bored with complaining, so instead I spent those hours making scripts for my animated shows. I stopped calling them ¡°hallucination¡± when I discovered that some of the dotes reacted to them. Or maybe I have gone so mad that I can¡¯t differentiate the real from the illusion. In both cases, I can¡¯t do a thing about it, so I just didn¡¯t bother to overthink. As for how I can explain how I can make them, I have no idea, butt I am pretty sure I died, yet here I am talking to an imaginary public. I compared to that, suddenly gaining the ability to hallucinate was not that strange, and after a few weeks you can get used to pretty much anything. Stolen content alert: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences. Plus, I still have some creepy or depressing hallucinations from time to time, and they felt very different compared to my creation. The hallucinations were like a third-rate movie with very bad CGI. Still interesting, but you are always disappointed in them. It was terrifying the first few times, but after a few weeks, you can get bored with it. After making the script, I have to design it and do all the choreography and all other stuff. I am basically doing the work of an entire studio by myself. Not to mention, those light shows are tiring, so I can spend hours making barely any progress, sometimes spending days preparing for a three-minute show. The only saving grace is that I am still unable to incorporate sounds in it. All of that is fun, but somewhere, between the hallucinations, the useless thoughts and my work as a self-sustaining animation studio, I still have a lot of time to waste, so I spend that time observing those dots that appeared a few weeks ago. Yeah, times pass very fast when you have something to do. Those dots were very few at the beginning. I didn''t even notice them until they became more abundant. At first, I associate them with another one of my dementias. At this point, one or one less doesn¡¯t matter, right, I already managed to convince myself that I am dead, paralyzed in an unknown place, talking to myself, composing a light show, looking at hallucinations as if they were some kind of movie so actually seeing dots moving around were the least of my worries. My fascination for those dots came from many aspects, like the fact that no matter how you look at them or how many of them there are, they are all completely unique. How can I differentiate the dots, you asked? Well, they just felt different. To tell you the truth, calling them dots is completely wrong; they are too big to be qualified as such when you really look. Yet when you don¡¯t specifically peer into them, they are no different from a little dot in a sea of dots. Isn¡¯t that fascinating enough? No? Don¡¯t worry, they also have other fascinating things, like their behaviors. You see, some of them are static, and some others are more active; some dots sharing a few similar characteristics would act similarly or differently, and not randomly but most of the time with a precise, almost like living beings; some even have developed animal-like characteristics like predation. Sadly, they do not dare to go too close to me. At least most of them don''t but the few courageous ones ran away the moment I started the light show. That is when I started to believe that they may actually be real. They were acting too naturally to be fake. Since then, I spend hours every day observing them. Little Red is one of my favorites; he works very hard every day to relieve my boredom. Due to my inability to move, interacting with them is actually limited to me terrorizing them with my imagery, but that is already a big relief compared to being left alone in this place. Today was a good day. I did everything in my planning and made a lot of progress, but what makes it even better is that today, some new dots finally worked out the courage to fly toward me. Chapter 5: mosquitoes fear no gods Chapter 5: mosquitoes fear no gods Do you know what the most dangerous animals in human history are? You may think that it was the cave lion that our ancestors once had as a not-so-friendly neighbor, or the great sharks that were depicted in countless movies. If those were your suspects, then you are totally wrong. Humans may not have claws or a powerful bite, but we still managed to speed run the food chain and became the ultimate predators, and no beast is afraid of a weaker beast. In human history, the animals that killed the most of our kind are the fleas and the mosquitoes. With mosquitoes having over seven hundred thousand kills per year. Those little hateful little things do not care about food chains, apex predators, size differences, or eco-friendliness. In fact, they are the least discriminatory species ever made. Whether you are a beggar or a god is none of their business. Anyway, why am I rambling about those little pests that we all hate, you asked? Well, there is a very high possibility that I am being swarmed by them. You see, I have speculated about the lifelike trait of some of the ¡®dots¡¯ for some time now, but it was just that, a speculation. Today I finally have confirmation by reading mosquitoes'' memories. Yes, I said reading memories. To put it simply, a mosquito flew toward me; I absorbed something and got his memories. ¡°That makes no sense.¡± ¡°Okay, let''s take a death breath and start from the beginning. One, two, three. Inhale¡­¡° Oh! I forgot that I had nobody, so I can''t breathe at all. ¡°Okay, seriously, let''s start from the beginning. In the beginning there was the big bang, and after... ¡± No matter how much I tried to get some time to think it through, it just doesn¡¯t make sense. So it all started when a few dots flew toward me. It was a first because the dots generally stay as far from me as possible. Then, when they were close enough, they dived into me and disappeared. It was starting to be strange from then on. After that, other dots did the same, with some just hovering around me, but eventually they all dived inside of me and also disappeared. Unauthorized usage: this narrative is on Amazon without the author''s consent. Report any sightings. A few seconds later, I felt the same thing I felt when I was swallowing something when I had a body, and then, BOOM, I got the mosquitoes memories. In fact, it was pretty easy to explain. What am I even talking about? No matter how I looked at it, It is strange as fuck. It would make more sense to get isekaied by truck San instead; at least in that case, even if it makes no sense, I would be able to understand what happened to me. ¡°Calm down, Calm down¡­¡± I don¡¯t have the slightest idea of how it happened, but I got the mosquitoes'' memory and discovered some pretty interesting facts. The first thing I discovered was that mosquitoes had a damn bad memorization faculty, and in fact it is pretty understandable. They mostly run on the default setting to find food and reproduce, so They do not need the ability to remember the value of ¡°¦Ð.¡± At most, they have a short-term memory that allows them to execute some task before forgetting about it. And that was a very important fact because it is completely useless, but you will never forget about it. The second important fact is that apparently I am a floating green fireball. Well¡­ I don¡¯t know what to say. Imaging living your life as a human and then dying, thinking that you went into some sort of very empty afterlife, and just when you start to feel okay about it, the world sends mosquitoes messengers with a message saying, ¡°By the way, you are a sentient flying green fireball.¡± Welcome to my new identity crisis. Being a fireball in itself is pretty cool, not going to lie, but at least give me a twenty-four hours notice before annihilating the new understanding of the world I live in. Another problem I have with this new identity is being green. Although there was a lot of good stuff associated with the color green, I cannot stop thinking about that grumpy green-furred humanoid being that hates Christmas. I may complain a lot and be grumpy, but at least I have friends, a friend, maybe. Anyway, I would prefer a silvery or blue color if possible. Believe it or not, but that was all I could take from the mosquitoes¡¯ memories. They may have been a swarm, but they had almost lived the same things. They were born, became larvae, ate, grew bigger, ate more, became adults, and then flew to find a wife or husband, but before that they saw a big handsome fireball and decided to commit mass suicide for no reason other than ¡°it was cold outside.¡± Mosquitoes have very short sight, so I have almost no other clues about the outside. Right now, I don''t know what to think about it. On one hand, I am happy to learn something about my situation; on the other hand, there is nothing I can do about it. I am still blind and deaf, paralyzed, and probably insane, so I can¡¯t really do anything about it. I can see the ¡°dots¡± that are apparently living beings, but I can barely interact with them. And by interacting, I mean bullying with light show. And so I did exactly what I could do. New part of daily tasks: harassing the others. Chapter 6: My inner pyromaniac Chapter 6: My inner pyromaniac I always thought of myself as a relatively sane person. I was not particularly obsessed with anything in particular, or ever felt any form of superiority or inferiority toward others. Furthermore, I had many hobbies like reading books, drawing, watching animation, eating and many others, yet in the weeks preceding my death, they were just fleeting thoughts among a myriad of others. Don¡¯t get me wrong, I do miss them. But it is mostly because, in my circumstance, any forms of stimulation, even self-harm, would be relieving. It didn¡¯t really matter in which forms the stimulation presents itself; I would have loved them anyway. That''s why I was enjoying it when I was hallucinating. For me, it was a thing like others. As long as it fills a part with my boring days, I was ready to fully appreciate it. Yet no matter how stressful or terrifying the hallucinations were, no matter how personal they were manifesting, once they lost their aspect of novelty, they quickly got down to the rank of cool entertainment, becoming more and more plain the more repetitive they were. You see, minds are more limited than one may think; they are barely able to generate three dreams per night, and even then they recycle previous dreams and experiences and still make annoying or boring dreams sometimes. Likewise, even for hallucinations and the like, once you see a pattern, it becomes less terrifying. Because of that, after getting bored with hallucinating, I sought a way to make it more entertaining. I started by trying to put suggestions in my head, trying to hypnotize myself into thinking about something else, and it worked in a way, but the differences were minimal. Then, I tried to repeat movie scripts in my head in a loop again and again, but all it did was change the character and eloquence of the beings I was hallucinating about and to tell the truth. Trying that was sickening. The problem was not the amount of ¡°brain power¡± I needed to make it work, but the disgusting part of going through every scene of a movie again and again in my head. Dissecting every detail of a piece of art into a mess of words and images, forsaking its beauty. After others failed experiments, I thought, ¡°Why the fuck am I doing this anyway? No one can control their dreams; even a lucid dream has randomness in it. Why don¡¯t I just let my imagination run wild?¡± The author''s content has been appropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon. Yet I kept trying anyway. Why?. Because imagining something and feeling it are totally different things. Even if both imagination and hallucination are both fake, there is something in the latter that the other cannot replicate, and that is the feeling that comes with it. You can feel hallucinations. I don''t know how to explain it, but they are almost real. You can hear them, you can see them, and you can even touch or taste them. And for the stimulation deprived me, they were as addictive as drugs. So I kept on trying. After failing again and again and doing minimal changes to one of my only sources of entertainment, I just did something very simple. I imagined a point. A zero-dimension geometrical figure. It may be difficult to explain, but I imagined it very ¡°Hard?¡± for lack of a better word. And then it happened. A point manifested before me, and it felt real. Way more real than anything I had felt since my death. At that point, I felt like I was so deep in the madness that I started to blur reality and fiction. The thing is that I was okay with that. For me, all that mattered was that I made something; I could feel anything else was secondary. From that point I made points; from the points I made lines, then forms, then shapes. From a two-dimensional canvas, I made a three-dimensional one. It was like learning how to draw again. It was difficult at the beginning, but I got better, reaching the level of animating my imaginary drawing with simple moves that also improved little by little. At some point, I started to call it ¡°light show¡± or ¡°hallucinatory performance.¡± Soon after, I discover the dots that we now know are living beings. They became the first audience of my show, or victims in some cases because I kept on doing my show very close to them and was even entertained by their attempt to flee from my creations. They sometimes get caught anyway and disappear. At that time, I didn¡¯t really pay attention to that, but now I know that there is a very high chance that I killed them. Then one day, some bold mosquitoes dived right onto me, and I discovered my true form. A god-damn green fireball. And soon I discovered something about my ¡°light show,¡± which was that they were the same color as me and probably as hot, which would explain why the bugs were running away from it and why they died. So if we piece that together, that means that the bugs were victims of a mini green sun spewing fire and launching death rays at them for fun. And you want to know the not so funny part of that? It is that I feel no guilt about it; I even find it kind of amusing. It feels like being some kind of sun god toying with mortals and all. Anyway, though I find it amusing, I would be more mindful about it from now on. I don''t want to be some kind of DND pyromaniac player. At the same time, I should experiment more with my fire. I have nothing better to do anyway.