I walked through the stone halls behind Tzera, and Kalief chit-chatted about the food they had made together. Someone called Laxxi shipped the food from a village outside, then Kalief chopped and prepared the food with her scarf while Tzera focused on the cooking and mixing.

We arrived in the mess hall after two minutes. It was a large, open room with about a dozen stone tables spread about and a column keeping the ceiling structurally sound in the middle. The occupied tables were largely filled with six people, but most were empty, the room evidently built to accommodate a much larger number of people.

When I walked in, there was a bit of a mopey mood. Everyone in The Marionettes sat at their tables, talking to each other in muted conversations as they ate soups filled with strange veggies that smelled like chickpeas, meat on sticks, salads of more plants I didn’t recognize, and something that looked like purplish bread.

“Hey, we’re back, you all!” Tzera yelled as he entered, immediately kickstarting conversations about the room. “Where’s Daakyn?”

Kalief pointed to a table, where he sat alone, gazing at his table in a trance.

“Hey, we’re back, you spacey!”

Daakyn shook himself and looked up before speaking in a low but loud tone. “That was quicker than expected. You took fifteen minutes to heal me.”

I followed the couple and sat beside Daakyn when they took seats at the other side of the table. They already had two steaming bowls of soup prepared. “That’s because you flailed around like you thought I was killing you, man!”

“W-wha- I have rather high pain tolerance if you didn’t know!”

Kalief chuckled in disbelief.

“Well,” Tzera said, “I honestly respect you more for it. That you saved Vrazel despite your intense fear of pain really inspired me, you know? You’re the whole reason I joined The Marionettes.”

The robed man just put up his hood and looked down, hiding his embarrassed face.

“Speaking of you, Daakyn,” the green-robed boss(Vrazel, if I remembered correctly) said, standing from his seat at one of the tables. I noticed he looked exactly how I expected him to under the hood; old and assertive. “Did you give her the restrictions?”

Daakyn nodded from beneath his hood and lowly said, “Yeah, I guess so. Told her everything I needed to.”

What were they talking about?

The leader nodded, shrugged, and fell back into his seat. With the chatting at a minimum, I asked Tzera, “Can I have some food too?”

“Oh, could you be a friend and get her a bowl, Kalief?”

Kalief wordlessly walked into a door adjacent to the mess hall, then came out, her scarf holding a bowl of soup, which was slickly deposited in front of me as she sat.

I sipped in silence, watching as Tzera started talking up a storm with people on other tables. Kalief and Daakyn kept silent in the meanwhile, though Daakyn seemed not to have an appetite either. Tzera spoke about what was happening outside of the ruins, while the others gave their opinions on the different groups making their moves to combat the Monster King.

Evidently, everyone in the world was united in that goal, but the countless groups of people, most of whom were in hiding, like The Marionettes, had to be covert in their operation because ‘The Hero’ was cracking down on magic operations he didn’t approve of, trying to create law and order in defense against the threat to humanity. They also seemed to imply that the hero’s group was in hiding as well, which sounded quite strange, considering they were acting like the law.

Honestly, it all sounded quite morally grey. This group had dragged me by the hair into their world, all in the hope that they could control me and force me to fight against the Monster King.

As I kept thinking, I clenched my hand harder and harder, quivering in rage.

It shouldn’t have been so easy to get angry at these people. They all had seen their relatives and friends die, and soon, their whole world might become a hell ruled by the Monster King, or so things seemed to be.

I glared at the faces in the room, each friendly in their own right, yet each one glancing at me with just a shred of worry as I met eye contact. It was so obvious that they were desperate and didn’t want to think about what they had done to me.

They understood exactly what they had done to me, even if some of them didn’t know the details.

I suddenly stood from my seat, alarming the whole room.

“I...” I began, shaking as I tried to hold back my rage at the whole room. “I’m going back...” I paused for a few seconds, then slammed my fist against the stone table. “What’s you all’s problem?” I could see surprise on everyone’s face, and in the corner of my eye, a dumbfounded expression from Daakyn. “You all dragged me from my life, put me in this unfamiliar place, with no way back, made me your goddamn slave, and you’re talking like I’m not here, as if I didn’t just have my life torn from me!” Tears began forming in my eyes, built of raw fear. I soaked one onto my finger and gazed at it before clenching it beneath my fist. “I’m fucking alone. I have a family, I’ve got friends, and now none of that matters! What sort of damned sadists are you people?! Do you even have a way to take me back to my home?”

Nothing. No response, just guilty faces.

I snatched my bowl, not caring for how it spilled onto my sweater, and powerwalked back to my room.

Nobody stopped me as I went to my room.

Nothing really mattered anymore.

I just had to wait.

If I tried to escape, there was probably magic stopping me from trying. I could easily crush my toilet, crawl into the sewer, then run out, but nobody would leave such a ridiculously obvious escape route open without a contingency.

Even if I left, I had nothing to gain. I was powerless, and I’d soon die in whatever world was outside. It didn’t matter anyway because I didn’t want to live in whatever world was out there. I wanted to live in mine.

I ended up putting the cone of light that illuminated my room underneath my bed and hid underneath the cushions, trying to go to sleep.

I was alone and powerless.

My heart wouldn’t stop beating, pounding in my chest, suffocating me in anxiety. I did everything I could to make it stop, covering every inch of my body with the blanket, stuffing it between my arms and legs to stop the cold feeling of vulnerability that made me writhe and squirm.

But I never did stop squirming.

I heard the door creak open some time later. “Are you in here, Psychi?”

I said nothing.

“Umm, I guess you don’t feel very good, so...if you need anything, my room is to the outside and right of this one.”

Daakyn shut the door.

I didn’t want to get up.

I ‘slept’ for a while, but I wasn’t sure if ‘in a fugue state between thinking and dreaming’ really counted.

When I woke up and couldn’t fall back asleep after an hour of trying, I slowly stood, straightened out my sweater, then walked out of my room.

It was strangely quiet. As I walked through the empty halls, I only heard my footsteps. Nobody was about, presumably because it was night.

I didn’t bother exploring. I just went through the tunnel to the mess hall and kept walking through the hall that continued past it.

I eventually came upon another domed room. Its roof was filled with etching of conflicts between weird, creepy monsters and humans, but no fights between humans.

Slowly, I walked through the room, gazing up at the illustrations, before finally feeling the cold chill of the outside.

I stood on a balcony in front of stairs which led down a mountain. It wasn’t a tall mountain like the one where my plants lived, but the landscape was beautiful nonetheless. It had been a long time since I appreciated that sort of thing.

I sat down on the first stair and looked up at the night sky. There were two moons, one small, one big, but both illuminating the sky from different sides, giving me two shadows under the moonlight. Further down the mountain was a forest, and in it, I could see about a dozen beautiful trees with silver leaves, a few groves filled with bamboolike plants, which grew to the same size as the ordinary trees, and one or two trees that looked like the rest of them but were almost twice the size of any other plant on the horizon.

I felt a strong urge to get a better look, but it was all so far away now.

“Don’t try to leave,” I heard Daakyn say behind me.

I shook my head. “There’s no point. I think you know that,” I said, despondent.

A small metallic ‘ting’ told me he touched the balcony’s metal railing.

I clicked my tongue, letting my anger seep into my voice. “Maybe you just don’t get it. I-”

“I get it. I know what its like to be dragged from your home with nowhere to stay. You don’t have any power. You don’t know if you’ll be forced to live life, unable to accept your new situation. Am I right?”

“Hearing you say that makes me want to puke.”

“D-do you hate me that much?” he asked like he expected me to hate him for some reason. I didn’t hate anyone in The Marionettes, but...I was angry.

“No, I mean hearing someone validate my feelings on this particular subject terrifies me to the point that I want to barf on top of that chipmunk with scissor claws.” I pointed to exactly what I described, which was looking at me from atop a burrow. “It makes me realize that I want to escape this world, and I don’t know how to. Unless some psychic from my own world suddenly develops the ability to create dimensional portals and uses that to save me, I’m probably stuck.”

He chuckled. “Sounds like that’s unlikely, from your tone.”

“It is. Nobody really likes me, anyway.”

“I get it,” he said matter-of-factly.

“Like fuck you do. You’ve got friends you’re willing to die for.”

“I’m more alone than anyone will know.”

“Quit whining. You’re sounding like me when I’m sad. ‘boo-hoo, I’m so alooone.’”

He sighed, a bit frustrated, but maybe not at me. “Well, I guess neither of us understands each other.”

“Yeah. No dip, Sherlock.”

“Putting aside the strange phrase you just said, I’ll give you my personal advice. I always prefer to think about what would make me happy when the worst happens.”

“What would make me happy?” I asked myself. “I dunno, getting home?”

“You don’t want your psychic powers back?”

“No. I mean, I kinda don’t want it, I won’t lie.”

“HA!” he laughed in a short, very loud note that made me put my hands on my ears. “Making yourself not special doesn’t make another person special, you know that, right? If you have power, you ought to keep it.”

“I get it makes me sound like an entitled joke, but there’s a point where power only makes you miserable.” I sighed. “But yeah, you’re obviously right.”

He went silent. For some reason, I got the feeling he was dejected by my response.

“And I mean,” I continued, “That’s why I can’t give it up. Like, yeah, its nice to be able to fly at the speed of sound, to move my house a few inches to make my bro feel like he’s going insane, to read...to have a bunch of cool powers, but that was never important.”

“What’s that even mean?”

“It’s just...I can save so many people. Losing my power would squander lives, and what it means for me means nothing. Every second I’m here, powerless, is a second I’m not spending on saving lives.” That thought paralyzed me for years. It still did. Every second I spent watching TV with my brother was a second wasted, and because of that, I felt like shit, the literal scum of the earth.

...He didn’t respond to me, but I heard him walk away, silent.

Slowly, I splayed myself on the ground on the first stair, just beneath the main floor, and closed my eyes. The cold winterish wind of the mountain drifted over me, and though I felt cold, I didn’t feel vulnerable like I had in my comfortable bed. I felt in pain, and that was much better.