Chapter 25
713 Words
Chapter 25
“That’s impossible,” Deppy said with a squeaky voice. We were in her room, I was sitting on a pokemon woolly stool or something like that.
Did I mention she was a nerd? Yeah, I need to emphasise that again.
Her room was filled with nerdy stuff, spaceships, monster toys, muscly men and curvaceous women with swords, superhero movie posters, and of course, a big computer with blinking blue lights and two huge monitors, silent as a whisper.
I pursed my lips and said, “Yeap. 109 minutes, that’s what Prodromos said.”
“Wait. The period is 109 minutes, and she shows up for a minute?”
“Yes, the period is 109 minutes, but no, she shows up for the duration of the last minute. So, 108 minutes after my last episode,” I said presenting the countdown app I had running on my old phone, “She’ll show up again for one minute.”
She held a pillow to her tummy. “So it’s 108 minutes, plus one minute of appearance.”
“Nai. Sure, call it like that,” I surrendered.
“Like Lost. Pushing the button.”
“Wha’?”
“Haven’t you seen it? Lost, where the plane crashed on the island, and-”
I put up a hand, and said, “It sounds boring, so assume I haven’t.”
“Anyway, they find a person who is stuck in a vault somewhere, and he has to press the button every 108 minutes, for four minutes. So he was to schedule his sleep, his food, his whole life around that schedule. He can’t leave the place of course, and he believes something bad will happen if he doesn’t reset the countdown. And it does, but he still goes back-”
“I know it sounds thrilling for you, but this is happening to me right now, so it’s more like horrifying than like, interesting,” I said, and chose my tone of voice specifically to hurt her.
“Sorry. I’m just trying to figure it out. Wait, did Prodromos say the same thing happened to other people?”
I sighed. “Yeah, a couple more. Prodromos didn’t get there in time, that’s why I got contacted so soon.”
“We need to ask your dad about this!”
“No! He won’t know a thing about this, and we are keeping it that way. I don’t want to jeopardise his job, mama will go nuts about it.”
She was thinking out loud. “109 minutes. A prime number… That could mean something.” She got to her desk and unlocked her computer, tapping out stuff as she thought. “It’s so specific, a heuristic could look up at the appearances at a sufficient data set and I could…”
I zoned out. She was mumbling nonsense again. I looked at the movie monsters around me, the video game monsters, the novel monsters. So many monsters. None of them looked like Erinyes. She basically looked like a really pissed of lady, thin, her cheekbones poking out. She was always wearing an Ancient Greek style white cloth on her, a toga, but not the sexy kind we were used to seeing at masquerade. More like the theatre kind. The normalcy ended there, cause she was moving like in thick water, and she had floaty constricting purple hair.
I was feeling claustrophobic.
I stood up and opened the window, and leaned out for fresh air.
Deppy frowned and looked at me with worry. “So how do you handle it?”
I shrugged. “Prodromos said, mind the clock. Stay in open spaces. Avoid crowds, mass transit. Just run away from it for a minute, and then you are fine.”
There was a pause. “How can I help?”
“You already are,” I said and leaned down to hug her. I couldn’t see her expression, but she remained still and didn’t break it off.
I leaned back, towering over her as she sat, her dark eyes on me with worry.
Huh. This is how Billy is experiencing the world, I thought. Overhead.
She jumped up and she startled me. “Oh! I know, wait.” She began shuffling through stuff in the closet, opening boxes and looking into bags.
I turned back to the window and just stared outside.
A lot of shuffling later, she presented me with an old style sports watch, “waterproof up to 30 meters,” it read. She gave it to me and then pulled it back out of my hand, made sure the time was right, set up a countdown alarm, and gave it back again.
“Here. It’s an old gift, and smartphones can be a bother sometimes, batterywise. This is heavy duty. Hope it helps.”
“Thank you,” I said and put it on my wrist. It was bulky and entirely not fitting with my wardrobe, but who cares about that anymore?
- Writer
