Afterlife Dream

Theo and Lara waited for me at the entrance of the canteen. Theo was especially frantic once he saw me. He grabbed me on the shoulders and spoke with urgency, "I remember! I remember a lot of things!!!"

"Oh great," I said. "What exactly did you remember?"

Lara looked around us. A lot of students were whispering when they saw us standing around in front of the canteen suspiciously. She cleared her throat and said, "It is a long story. Danny, we need to talk. Two hours a day is not enough to go through the details."

I agreed completely.

"What do you suggest?" I asked.

"Let\'s get some sandwiches and get out of school."

"What?"

"Come on, what\'s the problem?"

"But... my brother, my parents..."

"It is all going to repeat itself," Lara emphasized when she noticed my reluctance. "Have you always been such a good boy? Never skipped school even once?"

Well, that was an insult.

"I did. I skipped two days ago to go to the hospital if you recall."

Lara pursed her lips and waved her hand around.

"I am not talking about the time you faked your illness. I mean skipping school just because you feel like going somewhere to have some fun."

"..."

Lara was a real delinquent. I shook my head regretfully. I hated it to make my family worry, but I really needed time to discuss further action with my two newly found mates in distress.

We grabbed three huge baguettes from the deli and made our way out of the school.

Although I grew up in this town, I had only been to a few places in my life. The places I was most familiar with were my house, the hospital, and lately the high school building. I could not help but feel anxious when Lara led me and Theo to a remote park.

We sat down under a tree, hidden away from curious sight by a row of thick hedges.

"So," Lara started. "Maybe we can tell each other what happened recently in our lives that might bring about this time loop."

"Sure."

"We will start then.

So, Theo and I were raised in an orphanage."

When Lara saw the pity in my eyes, she quickly added, "Not that we were orphans since birth. We were neglected by our parents so we landed in an orphanage.

And one day, the orphanage caught fire. My stupid brother Theo went back into the fire for some reason he could not remember. I had to wade through the flames to drag him out of the burning building."

At this point, Theo decided to speak in his defense.

"I could not remember what I went back for until you mentioned Afterlife Dream yesterday. I played the MMORPG as well! I went back inside the burning building to get my phone, so I could continue playing!"

Lara frowned at Theo and began to chastise him, "Never, never do that again. Do you hear me?"

Theo dismissed her impatiently. "That is not the point. It already happened!"

Under his sister\'s stern glare, Theo finally caved a second later. "Fine, I will never do that again."

So that was it.

I turned to Lara. "I assume you also play?"

"Not as intensely as Theo but yes. I did play."

"So that was the similarity of the three of us. We all played Afterlife Dream on our electronic devices and then we somehow forgot all about it," I concluded.

"Correct," Lara confirmed. "That\'s not all. We could not find our electronic devices at all. In a good or broken state. Can you?"

I shook my head. "Not at all."

Heaven knew how much effort I had spent to find my tablet. I literally turned my bedroom upside down to search for that thing. It was not exactly of a minuscule size, so it made no sense that I could not find it.

"Oh, one more thing. No one in my family remembered that I even possessed a tablet," I added.

"Well, we are not close with anyone in the orphanage so it makes sense if they don\'t remember whether or not we have phones," Lara said.

"So uh, the orphanage sends you to this school? When exactly does the time loop begin for you guys?"

"I am getting to that," Lara explained further. "So the firemen came over and managed to extinguish the fire. There was no victim, our orphanage was just destroyed. Theo and I were supposed to go with other orphan children to the next closest orphanage, around 5 km away from the current one. But then something miraculous happened. Our parents came to pick us up."

Aha.

"Both parents?" I asked.

"Yes. They were reconciled and everything. Said sorry that they abandoned us. Took us back to our original house."

"Um, congratulations? I assumed that it was a good thing?"

"It was. The best!" Theo prattled. "Mom and Dad showered me with gifts. Mom cooked my favorite dishes every day and Dad took me to play every weekend!"

Lara on the other side did not look as enthusiastic. I could almost say that she looked skeptical, but she did not interrupt her brother at all while he was singing litanies of praises about their parents.

After Theo was done, Lara continued her story. "And then they enrolled us to school and we landed in St. Louis Academy. Our first day was great. Then the day started to repeat."

"Is it also the sixth day for you guys?" I queried.

They both nodded. "Yep, that is correct."

"Okay, so..."

I then told them my side of the story. That I, an eternally sickly kid, recovered miraculously from pneumonia and had since then been living the best life that I could have hoped for.

It did not bring us farther into the investigation, only that it was also the sixth day for me since the time started to repeat itself.

I rummaged inside my bag and took out my notebook. To my greatest dismay, all my scribbles from the previous days had been wiped out clean and I had to start from the beginning. It was going to be annoying once we reach the 10th, 20th day, etc.

"I used to record what happened inside this notebook," I told Lara and Theo. "Unfortunately the record is gone every time the day resets. We will have to rely on our memories instead."

Theo groaned and Lara pulled a face.

"I know, I know, but unfortunately we don\'t have any other choice. How do you guys keep track every day?"

Turned out that they didn\'t. They just tried different things every day and hoped that the time loop would conclude by itself. After meeting each other, we were aware that the situation required more than just a stroke of luck.

"Why don\'t we just compare what we did in the past six days including today?" I suggested.

Maybe we could find something. Or at least know what did not work.

From my side, I had tried :

- waking up at different times

- almost dying in a car accident on the way to school

- eating different lunches every day

- skipping school

- causing Dad to be late for work

- causing Jaden to skip school

- causing Mom to not get the job of her dreams

- reject the chance to be a baseball star

From Theo\'s and Lara\'s side, they had tried :

- causing ruckus at home and school

- skipping school

- eating different meals every time

- skipping extracurricular activities

- running away from home

- speaking to various people in hope of getting more information

"Wait, what did the last one tell you?" I looked up in interest after writing down the last point. "Did you find something interesting?"

Both of them shook their heads.

"Their answers were very generic and carried not much content. It was nothing but lip service."

"Oh. Like what?"

"Well, for example, one day I asked Mrs. Briggs how to end time loops."

Ooh. I was all ears.

"And then she told me to do some research in the library."

"... And did you?"

"I did, actually. You should add that to our list. I found no books about time loops. And then you know what, I asked her about something else. I asked her how to trap rodents. She also told me to go do some research in the library."

Generic. Got it.

I put my notebook in our mid so that all of us could take a look at what I recorded so far.

Well.

It was not much. Unfortunately.

"We are students. Only children. Of course, we cannot change that much," Lara remarked as she leaned backward, supporting her weight on both arms behind her body. "I feel that whatever we did so far had been nothing but small things that did not make much impact."

"Well, we can\'t exactly bomb the school or something."

I did not want to even try that. That was a horrible idea.

"I don\'t mean that we have to do anything criminal," Lara argued. "I just mean something that might have an everlasting effect, you know? Something that can abruptly change things."

"Well..." Theo drawled. He looked at us one by one. "Death changes a lot. And affect many people too."

"I am not going to do the bombing thing," I declared. "That is horrible."

"No, no," Theo quickly said as he waved both hands in front of us. "I mean... our deaths."