It was a magnificently normal day in his normal college life. If he recalled – nothing too past, just yesterday – it seemed to be the last normal day of his life.
Of course the symptoms had started roughly a week ago.
Fyn was cooped inside his blanket, stomach flat on the bed, his pillow over his chest, and his eyes fixated on a bundle of books before him. Well, more precisely, they were fixated on his phone that rested on that bundle. Earphones plugged, he was watching a guilty pleasure rom-com series.
And this was the third time recently, when his hand suddenly caught on a strange fire. Now just because it had happened prior two times and he wasn't injured, it wasn't reassuring enough to just let it burn. He shrieked, thrashing his blanket off until the very next moment he caught his own actions.
Don't shriek in the boys hostel, goddamit! Be a man!
Then he pursed his lips tight, and wrapped the blanket around his hand. It didn't stop the fire, and Fyn knew that. But this time he was much calmer compared to his past two experiences. Those experiences were nothing short of horrendous for his life. Though this fire had its own weird timings to begin with and not all blame was on him. Keeping calm in these situations was indeed impossible.
A couple days back, he was walking through the store looking for some quick snacks, in his quiet mood with his hoody stretched overhead. A loud shriek resounded through the fairly quiet – just full of mundane noises – store. A man dressed in his black hoody, fairly tall, could be seen running and shrieking while holding his blazing hand captive.
The scene erupted chaos through the place. Adults watched in horror. A few tried to help while the baby cries intensified – or some creepy ones considered it a fun spectacle.
All in all, the incident was so dramatic that it sealed Fyn's fate of never visiting that resourceful, first-choice supermarket again.
Not to say that he wrecked his brain throughout the day wondering how his hand could catch fire. Of course he could think of nothing sane so he googled. Nothing came up. He called his buddy and made sure he was alive and kicking on the other side of the phone before saying, "...dude, I got burned in the Zendy's today and my hand literally caught fire. I saw it! But it didn't burn. Like what the heck?"
Ultimately the talk spiraled into how aliens existed, or how the ultra rich people were biochemically engineered, etc etc…
They talked on these government conspiracies for a whole three hours, and after that he was just too exasperated. He fell asleep and broke his sleep schedule again, as he woke up at 3 am in the morning. He had slept too damn early, goddamnit!
The second time though was way more creepier – happened a couple days after the first incident.
This time he was up, early in the morning again! He muttered curses under his breath.
He didn't want to get out, but grudgingly he stepped out of the bed in the sleepless morning and entered the bathroom. He was shuffling a hand across his hair when again, unexpectedly, his hand blazed with the strange fire.
This time his hair caught fire too and he screamed in terror. The fire was swiftly walking down and soon it engulfed his face. He was petrified at first, but then his brain turned its gears. He hurriedly opened the tap and drowned his hand under the running tap. Not so surprisingly, the fire was unfazed. It vanished without pain or suffering or any mark within a minute, but was unaffected by the water.
This time, Fyn's face was as pale as a ghost's and he was mute for a couple hours, at least. He didn't attend classes that day. Rather he went straight to his chemistry professor and created a scene around the lab.
He didn't mean to create a scene, but when the professor failed to actually give him any solutions, or even believe his story, Fyn lashed out and called him a baldhead.
I mean… Fyn was nowhere near the right state of mind here.
The professor of course, reasonably crashed out, kicked him out of the lab, and spat out, "Get out and get a therapist, you ****!"
Fairly, Fyn did find the advice – even if ill-willed – helpful. And the very day, he started to take online therapy sessions. The next three days he started to journal his thoughts of those incidents, and the therapist had given him these simple 'exercises' to calm himself down until their next paid session to resume, and make some substantial improvement.
Honestly Fyn did identify it as a waste of time, but this was the last thread that was keeping him sane. The therapist told him that this was a generic problem caused by extreme stress and was curable…
That was all he needed to hear right now.
However, the third time the fire appeared and the experience wasn't the same.
Fyn flexed his tired fingers as he recalled yesterday night again...
The blanket covered his hand but it didn't stop the fire rather the fire had seeped out and over it. Another minute passed, the fire had seeped across the mattress, the bed and everything over it. His books, his phone, his earbuds…
Everything was blazing, including himself and the fire was spreading across the room while running down the bed. It caught on the tiles and glided over them to the cupboard, then to the walls and under a couple minutes the whole room was blazing.
The fire was chittering and it was bright but it never hurt. Fyn had never heard anything of such sort. Watching the phenomena happen across him as some form of reality – something he couldn't comprehend – made him feel feverish. If this wasn't a fever dream, he had no idea how something like this could ever be true. Words were sealed in his mouth, his muscles tensed and his mind became utterly indecisive.
He had been having his own research these days on hallucinations. The therapist was hesitant to diagnose Fyn with something like schizophrenia – or such – without a procedural diagnosis and Fyn was resistant to accept. Who'd ever want to believe the crazy fact that suddenly they're seeing nightmares in real life and this was gonna continue forever?
What a hellish life!
With this crazy experience though, he was ready to believe this. Heck he didn't care what others said, he knew he had to be schizophrenic.
Like what else in the hecking world, could otherwise explain this phenomena!?
His mind felt unclogged all of a sudden, and he felt the itch to do something. Do something to stop this, or run from it.
He didn't move yet because he had no idea on what to do. Were he to make a run for it, out of the room he was sure no one in the dorms could help him. No one in the store could help, and the water couldn't douse these flames. If anything, he was sure they'll just spread further. So he grit his teeth and desperately looked for a different solution. That's when he saw it – a pencil – and his eyes blared open, glaring at it.
Now, college students rarely needed pencils and he was someone who never liked carrying stationery with him – like most college students. He had his laptop and that was enough. But for the exams, he needed a pencil so he had borrowed it from his neighbour.
That pencil had not caught fire while everything around it was harboring this uncanny fire over it. The desk underneath it was burning but not the pencil over it.
Fyn's forehead creased and wrinkled deeply as he muttered, "why the-!?" And his restless hand jumped to catch the pencil.
Even in his hand, it did not burn.
It struck him then that it wasn't his own pencil, he had borrowed it. He let out a delayed and strangled chuckle while ogling it from all angles.
Indeed everything around the room was his own and everything caught fire while the pencil didn't.
A half-smile spread on his tense face at this weird revelation. He wasn't someone well-versed in psychology or something like schizophrenia – or anything related. All he knew was from online sources which he knew were rather unreliable. But there one thing he believed and prided in. His intuition. And it was his intuition, after watching this eerie phenomena, that blared alarms inside his head and he started to believe...
This all wasn't his fever dream. It wasn't schizophrenia either.
A nostalgic ache fluttered across his heart.
Perhaps this was all…
His breath halted as he mulled over the idea, and the idea kept growing over him. His intuition, somehow, approved of it.
That this was all indeed real, and this was all some kind of superpower… perhaps…
His thoughts zoomed faster now and with much clarity as he started connecting ideas. His belief deepened.
Is this a system? He couldn't help but wonder.
And it was then when his normal life reverted forever.
A moment before, he was there and so was his room. The very next moment, nothing was. Neither were there traces of his room, nor were any signs of him being there. It was as if everything that had caught fire was gone – and so was the fire.
A whole room was poofed into thin air from the building, and now what was left in the place of his room was an empty space, and a floating pencil.
The room below Fyn's – whose roof now had miraculously vanished – didn't have students in it yet.
A pencil snapped on its floor and then rolled across its flooring.
***
Fyn was deep in slumber while a message flashed inside his head, though he probably couldn't read it just yet.
[...Dispatching to the realm Hellhound… Testcase #1024…]