158 Secrets Best Forgotten (1/2)
”Oh, FUUCK! S-shit, I'm sorry about the wall! It was an accident!” said a mysterious young man when barrelled into an apartment not his own. The stranger had broken through the wall that separated the tenant from his fellow neighbor.
It all happened so quickly that neither tenant had been able to comprehend what had just happened. All of a sudden the wall connecting their apartments had come down instant and an odd, highly destructive pair appeared in front of them, covered in drywall dust.
Who was going to pay for the broken wall? Were they going to pay? Who was going to contact the landlord? Why had they—
When Lu'um sneezed, the final remnants of the broken wall came crumbling down and Reed shrugged his shoulders helplessly. He stared at the dumbfounded young lad in front of him and then turned around. An equally astonished girl had a stupid expression on her face as she tried her best to comprehend what had happened.
This situation isn't that bad, all things considered. It's certainly better than the last time. I'll take this over some hellhole of a battlefield any goddamned day.
Hell, if anything I've done this guy a service. Well, that is if he doesn't fuck it all up for himself... Why am I never this lucky? This is some bullshit.
Reed walked up to the bewildered poor mortal, put his arm around his shoulder and said, ”You know what, I think you owe ME. Don't you think it'd be unfair that I go unpaid for my services?”
”....W-What?” The young man stared at Reed with a foolish expression as he tried his hardest to make sense of the situation.
”Yeah, yeah. I think that I deserve a little something for my troubles, given everything I've done for you,” said Reed as he eyed the young man's residence. He continued to inspect the poor fool's room for something to take until his gaze fell upon a black leather jacket on a coat hanger.
The moment Reed laid eyes on it, he knew that was what he wanted. He snapped his fingers and the jacket flew off of the coat hanger and landed in his hands. Reed whistled and said, ”Nice leather jacket, man. You wouldn't mind if I tried it out, right?”
Unbeknownst to either the young man or the girl, Lu'um had raided the girl's fridge in silence. They had been too focused on Reed's antics that they had seemingly forgotten about her. She had already found the exit shard anyway, so they had a bit of time to kill before it would close.
Reed put it on, walked over to the girl's side of the apartment, and stared at his reflection with her mirror.
”...Yeah, this is a pretty nice leather jacket. I can see why you bought it. Really makes you feel like you're some sort of tough-looking, cool dude. I can vibe with that sort of aesthetic.”
He stupidly posed in front of the mirror in an exaggerated manner, as if he trying to emulate some generic holo-film action hero.
They were gone. The mysterious guy, the sneezing girl, and the leather jacket vanished in a flash. Where they had gone off to, neither tenant knew. It was such a surreal experience that both of them would have doubted their own sanity had they not witnessed the same events together...
This entire event was just one of the many misadventures that Reed and Lu'um had gotten into in their journey through the temporal maze. To them though, it was a just way of keeping themselves entertained.
They had returned back into the fissure, only a hundred meters away from the edge of the temporal maze. The finish line was in sight, much to Reed's relief.
”...Still, this is a pretty nice jacket. Shame I won't be able to keep it after we reset the node,” said Reed.
Every alteration that Reed and Lu'um had made over the course of their journey would end up being erased after they reset the node. History would be rebooted from the last stable record kept within the node as Lu'um had explained to Reed after the events that occurred on the battlefield.
Reed had been justifiably upset over what Lu'um had done back in the battlefield, as much as it had contributed to their escape. The destruction of the Human warship and its crew had left him horrified of the possible repercussions it would have on the timeline.
Were it not for Lu'um's reassurance that everything would be wiped clean afterward, Reed would have had an ethical and moral meltdown for the ages. The last thing he wanted to do was fuck up the timeline even further than it already was.
Nevertheless, Reed had not spared Lu'um for what she had done to the Human warship, even if it would all be negated in the end. Although he understood her reasoning and the circumstances of the situation at the time, he did not approve of the wholesale destruction of the Human warship and her crew.