Shiny Phantump
Through Dream, I Travel
Dark-Clothed Small Human:
I am trapped. Alone.
My siblings are gone. They were put into ice. We did not do what they wanted us to, so now they want to freeze us. I am the last one they need to freeze. Once the machine is ready, I will be frozen… indefinitely.
Indefinitely is an odd word. I have never heard it before, but the machine they put into my head knows what it means.
It means maybe forever.
I am not sure how scared I should be of Indefinitely. I do not want to be frozen forever, but if it is only maybe forever, then maybe it will be okay. I try to take comfort in that, but I am still scared. I do not want to be frozen at all.
Part of me wants to hit the invisible wall with my helmet some more, but I have tried it enough to know that it never breaks. It only ever hurts my head, so I don’t try it anymore. I curl up in the back of the place they keep me, and I wait.
There is nothing else to do. Nothing else I can do. My strong-hearted eldest sibling tried to fight the humans once, but it only made things worse. It made them add the invisible wall.
When they want to do something to us, there is never something else we can do.
I hear footsteps. I expect it to be the end, but it turns out just to be a small human. The small humans are getting close enough to being adults they take them down here sometimes to show them things. The small humans had the strangest look in their eyes when the no-faces first showed them us…
Today, though, something is different. This small human is alone, and he is in dark clothes instead of white ones. He draws a green card from his clothing. The green card is the one that the long-haired cold mother uses. Why does he have it, I wonder…
The dark-clothed small human shows the card to the machine beside the place they keep me. The door gives a pleased trill. The machines that look at cards are always pleased by long-haired cold mother’s card. It is their favorite card.
Since the door liked his card, he is allowed to slide the metal frame that holds the invisible wall out of the way. He looks at me with the funny look in his eyes.
“Hello,” he says, walking up to me. “I’m going to help you. Do you understand me?”
I understood him. I have understood humans ever since they put the machine into my head. I cannot do any talking, and the big helmet wouldn’t even let me nod my head. Instead, I get up and just stand in front of him. I look at his eyes, and he looks at mine.
“Friendly?”
I do not know if I can promise that.
I do not know if I can trust the dark-clothed small human yet. I do not know what the dark-clothed small human wants, or what he will do to me. All I know is that if I stay here, they will freeze me. I decide to cooperate with the dark-clothed small human for now, even if I do not trust him.
I coo to signal my decision to be friendly. He smiles at me. “Yeah, we’re cool. C’mon, let’s get out of here. Our way out is just up the lift.”
He leaves the room, then looks back at me from the doorway. I feel nervous. I have not been past the doorway in years.
“What are you doing here, kid?”
It was the muffled voice of a no-face. The dark-clothed small human does not look happy with the no-face. That makes sense. No-faces always do unpleasant things.
“You’re going to let me pass.”
“No! I don’t know what you think you’re doing down here, but I absolu-”
My curiosity exceeds my nervousness, so I poke out from behind the corner. The no-face gives up on their sentence with a little choking noise.
“You’re... insane!”
“Like I said, you’re going to let me pass now.”
The no-face grumbled, but moved aside. I am surprised that the no-faces listen to the dark-clothed small human. Normally they only listen to the bug-mask hurting man or the long-haired cold mother. “You don’t know what you’re doing. You’ll die before you get anywhere.”
The no-face’s voice is quivering. I like how the no-face is scared of the dark-clothed small human. I wonder what it is about him that scares them?
He laughs at the no-face. “I’ll be fine. They were calm before Faba messed with them. Father let us see them back… before, when… y’know.”
He pauses. I can almost feel thoughts moving around in his head. “I’ll figure out how to get them back. Fix whatever damage Faba did to them.”
What damage? What is he talking about? I want to know what they’re talking about!
The no-face makes a coughing noise. “Well, good luck, kid. Maybe if you’re lucky we won’t have to clean up your body. And if not… Well, try not to make a mess as you go down.”
The dark-clothed small human laughs, but it doesn’t sound like a happy laugh. “Yeah, sure.”
He gestures for me to follow and heads towards a room I’ve never been in. In the room, there is a triangle platform. He guides me onto it and presses a button on a machine that chirps in response.
Suddenly, rails spring up around the triangle’s edge, trapping us! I screech in protest and prepare to smash them, but I feel the dark-clothed small human put his hand on my side. It is not a forceful touch. It is a gentle touch. “We’re going to be okay,” he tells me. He has calming words and calming touch. We are going to be okay.
I do not attack the rails. The triangle and its rails move up through a hole in the ceiling and up into a room above.
It takes me a moment to process what has happened. There was a secret second ceiling above the ceiling, and we are now walking on the ceiling like it is the floor.
The dark-clothed small human doesn’t even seem surprised by the ceiling being the new floor, or by the second ceiling. He just keeps going, so I start to follow him. I hope he knows his way around on top of the ceiling, because it’s a very big room.
He takes me to a place where water fills a big gap in the floor that used to be the ceiling. Was there always that much water above me, hidden by the ceiling that is now the floor? It is strange to think that all this has always existed, this world above my head, even when I didn’t know about it.
He leads me towards a little vessel floating in the water. The machine in my head supplies the word boat to label it. It also tells me that boats are used to go places. He shows the card in a terminal beside the boat, and it trills happily in return. He gets onto the boat, then looks at me.
It is a dead end. I do not want to get stuck there, so I do not want to get on. I whimper, but he keeps looking at me. He wants me to get on.
I could stop. He hasn’t forced me to do anything else yet, and he hasn’t tried to force me to do this, either. He took me away from the place they were keeping me and brought me up on top of the ceiling where I am not trapped. I could stop and stay here.
I cannot help but be curious, though. When I decided to be friendly towards him, I had never imagined that he could show me all this. If he can take me more places, I want to come. I want to see all the things he can show me.
This time, I trust him for real when I get onto the boat. Not just because I am scared.
He starts doing things to the boat, and it grumbles at him. He looks to me. “Be back in one second,” he tells me, before hopping back off the boat. He reaches something on the wall and pulls it. The building is not happy about the thing being pulled, so it lights up red flashing lights and screeches at him.
The building yells about “lockdown protocols.” It normally only yells about those when my brave-hearted eldest sibling is breaking things. I think this means that we, too, have broken something, in our own way.
He laughs a very happy laugh and runs back to the boat. When he gets to the controls, he makes the boat grumble louder as it begins to move through the water.
An angry-looking running human sees us moving through the water on the boat. This makes her look even angrier, and they run up to the boat nearest them and show that boat’s terminal her card. She shows the terminal her card over and over again.
The building does not let her have the boat. I suppose it is too distracted by shining the red lights and yelling about lockdown protocols to give out any boats.
The dark-clothed small human shows the angry human one of his fingers as our boat speeds away.
As the boat moves through the water, I stare up at the ceiling. It was dark, covered in twinkly little lights, and so high up that I couldn’t imagine how far away it must be. The machine informs me that this ceiling has a special name. It is the sky.
The sky has its own name because it is a special ceiling. It is a ceiling that goes on through space forever, with no other ceilings above it.
It is strange to think that all that information has been in the machine in my head all along, but I was never able to reach it. It is like I am exploring myself as much as I am exploring the world.
Once we are far away from the place we came from, I decide I feel okay to look at it again. The shining metal that used to make up my whole world now looks as small as the room they kept me in. From this distance, it looks like a place someone could feel trapped in.
I wonder if that’s why the dark-clothed small human wanted to steal a boat with me. Maybe he didn't like living there. Maybe he was trapped there.
The world is fascinating and I still like it but it is also very big. Right now it feels too big. I have found a spot called a bathtub in the place we are staying in. It is small, and the room is a familiar white. I think I will stay here for a while until I feel ready to handle more of the world.
My friend comes into the room. He is not wearing the dark clothes from before, but this is okay because there is a word for him that works no matter what he is wearing. The machine does not know the word, but the word for him is Gladion. I can think of him as that when he is not wearing the dark clothes, and also when he is.
He runs his hand along my back. It is another form of nice touch, and I trill. I am glad I have him with me. He makes the world more manageable.
“You like it in there?” He laughs and smiles at me. “You want a bath, or are you just there to relax?”
I am here because the world feels smaller here. However, bath is an interesting word. I have not gotten to be in water for years, not since they put the helmet on. The helmet is heavy, so I can’t swim. The bathtub, though, is small enough that I can touch the bottom. I grab the water nozzle, but it doesn’t react.
My friend turns something beside the nozzle, and it starts making water. I put my talon under the stream. The running water is warm. It feels nice in the way that good touch feels nice. It is comforting.
I try to roll over onto my back, but the tub is too small for me to lie comfortably in that way with the helmet and my plume. I just get back on my chest instead.
The bathtub fills up very quickly. I suppose it doesn’t need much water to be full, because there is already a lot of me almost filling it. It isn’t long before the warm water covers everything but my head.
I flick the water with my talon. It splashes. I am satisfied. I trill. He laughs.
In this moment, everything is good in the world.
After the water has escaped the bathtub, I stand up and shake the drippiness in my feathers and fur away. Some of the drips fly far enough to hit my friend, he recoils away. Oops. I whimper in apology.
“I should’ve expected that,” he murmurs.
He brings me a towel and begins to dry my wetness with it. It feels very tickly. The sensation makes me shiver, then I sneeze. He dries me with a lighter touch after that. It’s strange, I think, to have him understand me like that. The no-faces either couldn’t tell what I wanted, or they couldn’t care. He can do both.
Eventually, he decides the towel has drank too much of the water in my fur to keep going, so he drapes it over a bar up above the edge of the tub, and he gets a second one to keep drying me with.
Eventually, he is satisfied with how almost-not-wet I am now, and he guides me out of the white room. He goes to the bag that he was wearing when we took the boat, and digs something fluffy out from under all the wads of rolled-up colourful papers.
I like fluffy things. I reach for the fluffy things, but he gently pushes my talon away.
“These aren’t for you,” he says, laughing. “These are for me.”
He retreats back into the white room and the door swings shut behind him! I try to fiddle with the knob that opens it, but it doesn’t move at all.
“Don’t worry, I’ll be out in a second,” he says, seemingly much less concerned about being stuck in the room than I am. Soon, the knob moves without me touching it, and the door opens again.
My friend has changed clothes again! The fluffy things were clothes, and now that he has put them on, he has become fluffy himself.
He walks to the other side of the room and hits a switch, which takes all the light out of the room! It is darker than even the place they used to keep me now. I do not like this darkness. It makes me feel uncomfortable. I whimper.
I hear my friend’s voice. “Relax, I just turned off the lights.”
He does not sound uncomfortable or nervous. He is very good at being calm. It makes me feel safe, because even when I am confused, he knows what is happening. If he is okay, I will probably be okay, too.
I hear his footsteps as he comes closer, then there is a clicking noise and a smaller, yellow light comes on from a lamp on a table. From there, he climbs up into something that the machine in my head tells me is called a bed even though it doesn’t look like anything I’ve ever used as a bed before.
He burrows into the fabric covering it, then he looks at me. I put one talon up on the bed. He smiles. “Yeah, I guess I won’t make you sleep on the floor.”
It takes me a moment to figure out how to get up onto the bed, but I manage to climb up. He slides a pillow under the pointy parts of my mask, then sits up and reaches over me to turn off the lamp.
Soon, everything is dark and silent, aside from my friend's gentle breathing. I tuck him against my stomach.
I can feel him breathing now, too.
When he was awake, he seemed so different. He was brave and strong and he made me feel safer. As he falls asleep, he seems so soft and vulnerable. I feel like I am protecting him and not the other way around.
I want him to feel safe and happy. The same way he made me feel.
Like friends.
Edit: Fixed Typo: Invisible Way -> Invisible Wall
I am trapped. Alone.
My siblings are gone. They were put into ice. We did not do what they wanted us to, so now they want to freeze us. I am the last one they need to freeze. Once the machine is ready, I will be frozen… indefinitely.
Indefinitely is an odd word. I have never heard it before, but the machine they put into my head knows what it means.
It means maybe forever.
I am not sure how scared I should be of Indefinitely. I do not want to be frozen forever, but if it is only maybe forever, then maybe it will be okay. I try to take comfort in that, but I am still scared. I do not want to be frozen at all.
Part of me wants to hit the invisible wall with my helmet some more, but I have tried it enough to know that it never breaks. It only ever hurts my head, so I don’t try it anymore. I curl up in the back of the place they keep me, and I wait.
There is nothing else to do. Nothing else I can do. My strong-hearted eldest sibling tried to fight the humans once, but it only made things worse. It made them add the invisible wall.
When they want to do something to us, there is never something else we can do.
I hear footsteps. I expect it to be the end, but it turns out just to be a small human. The small humans are getting close enough to being adults they take them down here sometimes to show them things. The small humans had the strangest look in their eyes when the no-faces first showed them us…
Today, though, something is different. This small human is alone, and he is in dark clothes instead of white ones. He draws a green card from his clothing. The green card is the one that the long-haired cold mother uses. Why does he have it, I wonder…
The dark-clothed small human shows the card to the machine beside the place they keep me. The door gives a pleased trill. The machines that look at cards are always pleased by long-haired cold mother’s card. It is their favorite card.
Since the door liked his card, he is allowed to slide the metal frame that holds the invisible wall out of the way. He looks at me with the funny look in his eyes.
“Hello,” he says, walking up to me. “I’m going to help you. Do you understand me?”
I understood him. I have understood humans ever since they put the machine into my head. I cannot do any talking, and the big helmet wouldn’t even let me nod my head. Instead, I get up and just stand in front of him. I look at his eyes, and he looks at mine.
“Friendly?”
I do not know if I can promise that.
I do not know if I can trust the dark-clothed small human yet. I do not know what the dark-clothed small human wants, or what he will do to me. All I know is that if I stay here, they will freeze me. I decide to cooperate with the dark-clothed small human for now, even if I do not trust him.
I coo to signal my decision to be friendly. He smiles at me. “Yeah, we’re cool. C’mon, let’s get out of here. Our way out is just up the lift.”
He leaves the room, then looks back at me from the doorway. I feel nervous. I have not been past the doorway in years.
“What are you doing here, kid?”
It was the muffled voice of a no-face. The dark-clothed small human does not look happy with the no-face. That makes sense. No-faces always do unpleasant things.
“You’re going to let me pass.”
“No! I don’t know what you think you’re doing down here, but I absolu-”
My curiosity exceeds my nervousness, so I poke out from behind the corner. The no-face gives up on their sentence with a little choking noise.
“You’re... insane!”
“Like I said, you’re going to let me pass now.”
The no-face grumbled, but moved aside. I am surprised that the no-faces listen to the dark-clothed small human. Normally they only listen to the bug-mask hurting man or the long-haired cold mother. “You don’t know what you’re doing. You’ll die before you get anywhere.”
The no-face’s voice is quivering. I like how the no-face is scared of the dark-clothed small human. I wonder what it is about him that scares them?
He laughs at the no-face. “I’ll be fine. They were calm before Faba messed with them. Father let us see them back… before, when… y’know.”
He pauses. I can almost feel thoughts moving around in his head. “I’ll figure out how to get them back. Fix whatever damage Faba did to them.”
What damage? What is he talking about? I want to know what they’re talking about!
The no-face makes a coughing noise. “Well, good luck, kid. Maybe if you’re lucky we won’t have to clean up your body. And if not… Well, try not to make a mess as you go down.”
The dark-clothed small human laughs, but it doesn’t sound like a happy laugh. “Yeah, sure.”
He gestures for me to follow and heads towards a room I’ve never been in. In the room, there is a triangle platform. He guides me onto it and presses a button on a machine that chirps in response.
Suddenly, rails spring up around the triangle’s edge, trapping us! I screech in protest and prepare to smash them, but I feel the dark-clothed small human put his hand on my side. It is not a forceful touch. It is a gentle touch. “We’re going to be okay,” he tells me. He has calming words and calming touch. We are going to be okay.
I do not attack the rails. The triangle and its rails move up through a hole in the ceiling and up into a room above.
It takes me a moment to process what has happened. There was a secret second ceiling above the ceiling, and we are now walking on the ceiling like it is the floor.
The dark-clothed small human doesn’t even seem surprised by the ceiling being the new floor, or by the second ceiling. He just keeps going, so I start to follow him. I hope he knows his way around on top of the ceiling, because it’s a very big room.
He takes me to a place where water fills a big gap in the floor that used to be the ceiling. Was there always that much water above me, hidden by the ceiling that is now the floor? It is strange to think that all this has always existed, this world above my head, even when I didn’t know about it.
He leads me towards a little vessel floating in the water. The machine in my head supplies the word boat to label it. It also tells me that boats are used to go places. He shows the card in a terminal beside the boat, and it trills happily in return. He gets onto the boat, then looks at me.
It is a dead end. I do not want to get stuck there, so I do not want to get on. I whimper, but he keeps looking at me. He wants me to get on.
I could stop. He hasn’t forced me to do anything else yet, and he hasn’t tried to force me to do this, either. He took me away from the place they were keeping me and brought me up on top of the ceiling where I am not trapped. I could stop and stay here.
I cannot help but be curious, though. When I decided to be friendly towards him, I had never imagined that he could show me all this. If he can take me more places, I want to come. I want to see all the things he can show me.
This time, I trust him for real when I get onto the boat. Not just because I am scared.
He starts doing things to the boat, and it grumbles at him. He looks to me. “Be back in one second,” he tells me, before hopping back off the boat. He reaches something on the wall and pulls it. The building is not happy about the thing being pulled, so it lights up red flashing lights and screeches at him.
The building yells about “lockdown protocols.” It normally only yells about those when my brave-hearted eldest sibling is breaking things. I think this means that we, too, have broken something, in our own way.
He laughs a very happy laugh and runs back to the boat. When he gets to the controls, he makes the boat grumble louder as it begins to move through the water.
An angry-looking running human sees us moving through the water on the boat. This makes her look even angrier, and they run up to the boat nearest them and show that boat’s terminal her card. She shows the terminal her card over and over again.
The building does not let her have the boat. I suppose it is too distracted by shining the red lights and yelling about lockdown protocols to give out any boats.
The dark-clothed small human shows the angry human one of his fingers as our boat speeds away.
As the boat moves through the water, I stare up at the ceiling. It was dark, covered in twinkly little lights, and so high up that I couldn’t imagine how far away it must be. The machine informs me that this ceiling has a special name. It is the sky.
The sky has its own name because it is a special ceiling. It is a ceiling that goes on through space forever, with no other ceilings above it.
It is strange to think that all that information has been in the machine in my head all along, but I was never able to reach it. It is like I am exploring myself as much as I am exploring the world.
Once we are far away from the place we came from, I decide I feel okay to look at it again. The shining metal that used to make up my whole world now looks as small as the room they kept me in. From this distance, it looks like a place someone could feel trapped in.
I wonder if that’s why the dark-clothed small human wanted to steal a boat with me. Maybe he didn't like living there. Maybe he was trapped there.
The world is fascinating and I still like it but it is also very big. Right now it feels too big. I have found a spot called a bathtub in the place we are staying in. It is small, and the room is a familiar white. I think I will stay here for a while until I feel ready to handle more of the world.
My friend comes into the room. He is not wearing the dark clothes from before, but this is okay because there is a word for him that works no matter what he is wearing. The machine does not know the word, but the word for him is Gladion. I can think of him as that when he is not wearing the dark clothes, and also when he is.
He runs his hand along my back. It is another form of nice touch, and I trill. I am glad I have him with me. He makes the world more manageable.
“You like it in there?” He laughs and smiles at me. “You want a bath, or are you just there to relax?”
I am here because the world feels smaller here. However, bath is an interesting word. I have not gotten to be in water for years, not since they put the helmet on. The helmet is heavy, so I can’t swim. The bathtub, though, is small enough that I can touch the bottom. I grab the water nozzle, but it doesn’t react.
My friend turns something beside the nozzle, and it starts making water. I put my talon under the stream. The running water is warm. It feels nice in the way that good touch feels nice. It is comforting.
I try to roll over onto my back, but the tub is too small for me to lie comfortably in that way with the helmet and my plume. I just get back on my chest instead.
The bathtub fills up very quickly. I suppose it doesn’t need much water to be full, because there is already a lot of me almost filling it. It isn’t long before the warm water covers everything but my head.
I flick the water with my talon. It splashes. I am satisfied. I trill. He laughs.
In this moment, everything is good in the world.
After the water has escaped the bathtub, I stand up and shake the drippiness in my feathers and fur away. Some of the drips fly far enough to hit my friend, he recoils away. Oops. I whimper in apology.
“I should’ve expected that,” he murmurs.
He brings me a towel and begins to dry my wetness with it. It feels very tickly. The sensation makes me shiver, then I sneeze. He dries me with a lighter touch after that. It’s strange, I think, to have him understand me like that. The no-faces either couldn’t tell what I wanted, or they couldn’t care. He can do both.
Eventually, he decides the towel has drank too much of the water in my fur to keep going, so he drapes it over a bar up above the edge of the tub, and he gets a second one to keep drying me with.
Eventually, he is satisfied with how almost-not-wet I am now, and he guides me out of the white room. He goes to the bag that he was wearing when we took the boat, and digs something fluffy out from under all the wads of rolled-up colourful papers.
I like fluffy things. I reach for the fluffy things, but he gently pushes my talon away.
“These aren’t for you,” he says, laughing. “These are for me.”
He retreats back into the white room and the door swings shut behind him! I try to fiddle with the knob that opens it, but it doesn’t move at all.
“Don’t worry, I’ll be out in a second,” he says, seemingly much less concerned about being stuck in the room than I am. Soon, the knob moves without me touching it, and the door opens again.
My friend has changed clothes again! The fluffy things were clothes, and now that he has put them on, he has become fluffy himself.
He walks to the other side of the room and hits a switch, which takes all the light out of the room! It is darker than even the place they used to keep me now. I do not like this darkness. It makes me feel uncomfortable. I whimper.
I hear my friend’s voice. “Relax, I just turned off the lights.”
He does not sound uncomfortable or nervous. He is very good at being calm. It makes me feel safe, because even when I am confused, he knows what is happening. If he is okay, I will probably be okay, too.
I hear his footsteps as he comes closer, then there is a clicking noise and a smaller, yellow light comes on from a lamp on a table. From there, he climbs up into something that the machine in my head tells me is called a bed even though it doesn’t look like anything I’ve ever used as a bed before.
He burrows into the fabric covering it, then he looks at me. I put one talon up on the bed. He smiles. “Yeah, I guess I won’t make you sleep on the floor.”
It takes me a moment to figure out how to get up onto the bed, but I manage to climb up. He slides a pillow under the pointy parts of my mask, then sits up and reaches over me to turn off the lamp.
Soon, everything is dark and silent, aside from my friend's gentle breathing. I tuck him against my stomach.
I can feel him breathing now, too.
When he was awake, he seemed so different. He was brave and strong and he made me feel safer. As he falls asleep, he seems so soft and vulnerable. I feel like I am protecting him and not the other way around.
I want him to feel safe and happy. The same way he made me feel.
Like friends.
Edit: Fixed Typo: Invisible Way -> Invisible Wall
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