Chương 30: Humanity establishes dominance all over the world

"I think we're alive?" he asked out loud.

"Lily, are you alive?"

"Yeah," the girl replied quietly, still shaken from… whatever that was.

"Maybe. Or we're both dead."

"I don't feel dead." He tried to get a feel for himself and their surroundings, just to confirm for a fact that they didn't actually die. Breathing, check. Heartbeat… He couldn't feel his heartbeat. The darkness and the weird aura around them were gone, and the creepy cracks were gone, but the whole room they were in was slightly tinted gray. There were no shadows or sources of illumination, yet he could clearly see everything. The benches, the altar, statues behind it and even a whole-ass organ behind those.

The air was stale and smelt like nothing at the same time, and when he focused on it, on his breathing, he couldn't say for sure if he was actually breathing in anything. He couldn't feel the air touching his nostrils. And he couldn't feel his heartbeat.

"Okay," he said calmly.

"I think we should panic. We're dead." While he was focused on his sensations, Lily started pacing back and forth across the room, getting more and more agitated by the second.

"The colors are muted," she was murmuring.

"We don't actually breathe. There's no shadows, at all. That church aura is gone completely. Where's the air? Why don't I feel the air?!"

"I think that the correct thing to do would be to calm down and assess our situation," he said.

"But then again, I think freaking out is a perfectly reasonable response, so don't hold yourself back on my behalf. I'll freak out in the corner there, meanwhile. My condolences."

"Condolences? Condolences?!"

"For being dead."

"We're not fucking dead! It's not what being dead means!"

"Wanna figure out how to haunt people?"

"No!" Dennis sat on the wooden bench in the far corner of the hall. While he did tell Lily that he was going to freak out quietly, it wasn't exactly true. Just like nothing mattered, this didn't matter that much either. He was mostly making fun of her, and maybe giving her a moment to process whatever the fuck happened. To be honest, this slight gray-scale filter on everything around him was pretty neat. It reflected how he felt about all those things. Meaningless. Was he actually dead?

Thinking about it just a little gave him a conclusion that not really. Not in a way that mattered. He couldn't feel his heartbeat and he had a suspicion that he wasn't actually breathing, just mimicking the motion, but he clearly existed. Honestly, it felt like an upgrade, especially if it just so happens that they didn't need to eat or sleep anymore. Being undead was great. Was he an undead? By definition, maybe. But logically it didn't make any sense, after all, he didn't remember dying.

Dying felt like an important part of undeadness. So what happened? They were right that the stupid church couldn't do anything to them, but those freaky cracks… Okay, they probably should've been more careful about those. What did they do? They felt like a skill, but, well, anything supernatural felt like a skill. Still, he felt that it was a good perspective to use. If those cracks were a skill, then what did it do? Grab things, obviously. Pick up the trash and somehow contain it.

He was pretty sure they weren't aimed at them, but at the church itself. He felt it scream something about removing the false-gods at the very end? Basically, his best guess was that he and Lily just got caught up in the removal process. That meant that they were grabbed. Taken somewhere. And if the way he felt about those cracks were right and they were some sort of garbage man magical eldritch bullshit, there was only one conclusion he could make. They were in a dumpster. Eldritch dumpster.

Okay, he could probably work with that. The kinda-undead thing was probably just a property of the place.

"I think we got teleported into a magical dumpster," he shared his conclusion.

"The cracks were grabby, right? We got grabbed, along with the church." Lily stopped pacing around and looked at him.

"Fuck," she whispered.

"No. Fuck this. It's your fault! You figure it out, I'm not dealing with this shit." She took a deep breath.

"How is it my fault?! There's no way I could have known it's gonna do that!"

"It's okay!" the cheerful girl replied with a gentle smile.

"I'm sure we can figure it out. Sorry! I don't actually think it was your fault. It was an accident!" He was already carefully constructing an argument about how it was in fact her fault that they got probably-teleported to an eldrich garbage dump, so her sudden reply made him kind of freeze for a moment. That was for sure the fastest he ever saw anyone change their mind about anything. And their mood. He felt a bit robbed from the opportunity to prove that he was right, but he'll take an easy win.

Still, he may be somewhat weird with the whole social interactions thing, but he wasn't completely clueless. This shit was not normal.

"Are you bipolar or something?" he asked, trying to figure out what the hell was wrong with the girl. She giggled.

"No, I'm not!" she replied.

"It doesn't matter. Let's see if we can find another magical thingy to put us back!" Okay, Dennis knew what a misdirection looked like. Did he want to get to the root of this? Nah, it was kinda obvious when he thought about it for a second. She was probably gaslighting herself into being not worried about the situation with her skill. At least, that was the most likely explanation.

If it made her believe that she knew how to pick locks when she used it that way, surely it could make her believe that she had a good mood or something. He focused his newfound magical sensing muscle on her to see if he could sniff something and, yep, while he couldn't discern how exactly she felt, couldn't figure out the meanings because they were too chaotic, he was pretty sure that her skill was active. There was a hum to it, like an electric grid quietly buzzing with power.

Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on Royal Road. Honestly, that was neat. Both the fact that he could sense an active skill use and the way she could just fuck with her own mind. Should he do something about it? Nah. Who cared. He liked it more when she wasn't bitching anyway.

"Sure," he said, getting up from the bench.

"How much does that thing drain your mana? We might need you to taunt enemies later, if there's any cuttable ghosts."

"You figured it out, huh?" she asked with a goofy smile.

"It's fine. I'll tune it down a bit later so I won't run out. You're not mad?"

"Why would I care?"

"You're the best!" She skipped to the exit giddily.

"Let's go!" He followed her back to the exit from the church while carefully trying to notice any changes to the building on the way. Not that he could notice much since he didn't see much of the church before it all happened, and it was shrouded in weird magical darkness at the time. But now, it was just a church. It was pretty big for one, he guessed. Probably one of the really old ones, with deep history and a nice chonky wikipedia page about it. Could that be the reason why it got weird in the first place?

It was as good a guess as any. He wondered if there were any other historical landmarks in the city that had a weird-ass aura around them. To think about it, wasn't the fort one of those landmarks? Why didn't it get weird? Aside from the fact that the world felt a little bit off-color, there wasn't anything noteworthy about the hall they were in. Well, there was one thing, and that was the windows.

While on their own they were not weirdly magical or anything, just some stained glass with saints and angels and shit, it was a bit weird that he couldn't see anything through them. In a way, it was like there wasn't anything behind the windows, just a white nothingness, like an illuminated fog. Though it was also possible that the glass was just that tainted, it wasn't exactly easy to see anything through it in the first place. He moved along. Leaving the church was a way less stressful affair than going in.

Without the weird church-aura it was just… a building. At some point while he was gawking, Lily disappeared behind a corner, eager to leave. Or just eager in general? He still didn't know what exactly she did to calm herself down, so he wasn't sure. He hurried along. He saw her just outside the door, standing in place and looking up. There was nothing around her. It was a weird sight, just a doorway, and the little girl standing behind it, surrounded by pure white.

He walked outside, stopping beside her and looking up.

"Pretty," she whispered.

"I don't think we're in Florida anymore," he shared an observation.

"Mhm." The sky was white. Not blinding, but more like a piece of white paper. He couldn't see any clouds, or stars, or the sun. Just pure whiteness. And people. T-posing. In the air. A lot of them.

"I think that's the pastor," he pointed out at one particular guy floating directly above the church.

"He's got a robe and everything." Instead of stars, the sky was full of people. As far as he could see, it was covered in them, a mass of bodies stretching to the horizon. They were floating, barely drifting in the air about a hundred yards above the ground, with their arms spread and expressions frozen. At least it didn't look like they were awake. All in all, it gave him a strong Hideo Kojima impression. He briefly tried to activate his skill to see if they would count as savable for it, but it didn't work.

Either they were all completely fine and chill with just floating around–including that toddler–or he couldn't activate the skill if he didn't actually know how to save the people he would reach, therefore making them non-savable. Or it just couldn't be activated if he didn't have a way to reach them, that was also a possibility. He couldn't actually fly, after all. He lowered his gaze, checking out their surroundings.

Floating people were eye-catching all right, but actually having eyes on the ground first thing should be wise, just to know if they had to deal with something immediately. Like a sudden ghost. Thankfully, there were no ghosts. Their surroundings, barely, mimicked what he remembered, though there were no goblin bodies on the ground anymore. Everything was still a bit off-color, but they were still surrounded by what appeared to be houses. Not houses, what appeared to be them.

Like poorly drawn caricatures, they were almost identical to each other, though in terms of location they were more or less at the same places they were. He got a vague feeling that they were made of cardboard, though he doubted that they actually were. There was a distinct feeling of meaninglessness to them. Everything that made them unique was gone, replaced by 'house here'. No pots of flowers at the windows, no welcome mats at the doors, no random trinkets.

Some of the houses weren't even there, just an empty space where he clearly remembered a building was supposed to be. What decided if the house would be represented in this space or not, he didn't know. He liked that word. Represented. It was like he and Lily were shrunk in size and placed in the small representation of the city, made of little toy-buildings that looked just like each other with none other purpose than hinting that there are houses there.

If he continued to follow that analogy, such mini-towns usually had important landmarks more detailed. Like, a toy-France would definitely have the Eiffel Tower smacked somewhere. He turned around to check out the church, noticing the contrast. The church looked like it was supposed to look. Nothing impressive, he would call it before, but now it looked real. There were cracks in the bricks, the signs of age and history to it.

"I wonder if the church is still actually standing in the real world," he said.

"Did it get teleported here, or did those cracks, like, copy the thing? And if it's a copy, does that mean that we're also a copy?" If he was a clone, he was down to beating up the original. There could only be one true Dennis, and that was him.

"How do we get back?" Lily asked calmly after she was done with staring at the crowd above them.

"Dunno," he said.

"To me, it looks like a classic mirror-world situation. Just without the mirrors. Hmm... We got here through cracks, and cracks are something that could happen to a mirror, so maybe this is still just that, but the magical mirror can't be seen because it's in the fourth dimension or something?" He was for sure sounding very smart, though he wasn't sure if he was spewing bullshit or not. It kind of made sense?

"So, usually, when you get stuck in the mirror-world, you need to find a mirror to use to get back into the normal one. Or! Or you use reflections to spy on yourself in the original world and vaguely threaten them. Like, smile creepily when they are looking into a pond. I think you'll be great at that one. A lot depends on whether we are real or if we're clones. If we are clones, then the first order of business is to establish contact with the originals, and then to find a way to replace them.

I think we can kill them, clones aren't people anyway."

"Didn't you just say that we are the clones?" Lily asked, frowning funnily as she was listening to him.

"Well, with that mindset, maybe you are. I'm sure that I'm the original. It's a gut feeling I have," he shrugged.

"Anyways, I don't think this is exactly a clone situation, just a mirror-world situation. Getting out must be simple. Either we find a reflection and walk into it, or, if that doesn't work, we need to find some place with those cracks again and use those, I bet that will work." Lily pondered his words for some time before giving him a small nod.

"Okay," she said.

"It makes sense. We fell here through cracks, we'll get out of here through cracks. We need to find another church, do we?"

"Probably," he agreed.

"I think it's more about historical significance? I've got a feeling that the fort should have had some. Maybe it's random? Bah! I don't know. Maybe we need to find a museum."

"Well, let's check out the fort," she said.

"Maybe it's different here."