Chapter 02

The first thing I was aware of was that I was drowning.

I don't know when I had gotten into water, it kind of felt like I had somehow always been in water. It's difficult to explain.

Two  hands suddenly  wrenched me up though, and I was aware  of a ripping sensation as they did. It wasn’t painful, but it wasn’t a good feeling either. 

When my face broke through the surface, I gasped and sputtered, trying to catch my breath. I slowly opened my eyes and was met with a shock stronger than the cold. I had no idea where I was. This wasn’t my bedroom, this wasn’t my house. From the look of the night sky, which was alight with cloudy, thick, nebulae, it wasn’t even my planet.

“Holy shit, I can’t believe that actually worked,” said a voice to my right.

“I knew it! This must have been how they did it, the sneaky bastards…” this person was almost talking right into my face, she was the one who had pulled me out of the water. I think some part of me felt like I should have been grateful, since I thought she had probably just saved me from drowning or something, but the look on her face was one of the most unsettling things I'd ever seen. It was the kind of cruel sneer someone gives you right before they tell you all the ways that you're fucked, now that they know it's too late for you to escape.

But more than that, there was something weirdly unnatural about the way the colors were behaving in her face. Everything seemed to be this washed-out gray and black, but her eyes burned fiercely blue, like a dark blue, and in her hair. It looked like black hair, but you could tell from where the light was hitting it that it was really just a blue so dark it looked black.

The hands she gripped me with were calloused, mean, things, and she was kind of hurting me. She had that thin but strong kind of build going on, like a marathon runner or something. She did not look like a nice person, and I immediately dropped any notion that she had been trying to save me by pulling me out of the water. If anything, it felt more like I was a fish she had caught with her bare hands or something, the way she was looking at me.

“What's happening,” I tried to say and immediately started coughing up water.

“Welcome to the world, precious,” crooned the woman holding me, “let me get a good look at you…”

Then her pupils started dilating to an alarming degree, and I saw that her teeth were pointed, and that was about as much as I could take of her. I shoved her hard, away from me and twisted out of her grip. As I did I saw my hands, which were not at all my own. I'd had short, stubby, fingers all my life, which made me a little self-conscious, but they had been fine for things like changing the oil in my car, or typing out an essay for whatever class I had been in. Kayla had certainly never complained about them, and she had complained about everything. 

These new hands though, they had much longer fingers. Piano playing fingers. They weren't exactly delicate, but they were much more… shaped, then my old fingers. I could see the bones in the backs of my hands, which was a little freaky. They had that same gray quality as this woman's skin, like the light was hitting them in a weird, shimmery, grey, kind of way. 

All of those thoughts shot through my head in the split second that it took to shove her away, stumble, and nearly fall back into the water. Now I could tell it was only waist-high. As I scrambled to catch myself, I got a good look at my reflection.

I was a woman. A bit older than I had been when I had gone to bed the morning before. My skin and eyes and hair were all gray, but the gray of my eyes and hair seemed to ripple various shades of grey, constantly changing from nearly white, to almost black. It was a little mesmerizing to look at.

Or it would've been if it had been happening to someone else.

“What happened to me?!” I demanded, the sound of my voice was higher pitched, more melodic, like I had been taking singing lessons at some point or something. It was vaguely familiar, but I was definitely not focused on that right now. 

“Calm yourself,” said a woman standing on the shore. She had green hair and eyes, and was dressed like a high-ranking soldier or something. She had medals and pins on her uniform that didn’t look like they were from any country I had ever seen.

“I said what happened to me!” I was not calming myself.

“Nothing,” said a softer voice that sounded appropriately alarmed, “like, literally nothing has ever happened to you. You were just born, just now.”

I spun and looked at a messy, unkempt, woman, who was wearing sweats and slippers, and looked very out of place outside. I realized I was standing in a pond.

The pond was sitting in some kind of meadow, and there were trees on the edges. There was about as much light as there would be during a full moon, but most of it was coming from the nebulae in the sky, which was pretty unsettling.

“I wasn’t born just now, I’m 19 years old, I just graduated high school, I go to a community college, my name is Danny Herrara, and I demand to know what the hell is going on here!”

That seemed to hit them like a brick. They all stared at me slack-jawed for a second, even the military woman.

“Oh my God, she thinks she’s Danny.”

I spun around at the sound of someone behind me, to find a fourth woman with pink eyes and hair. She looked like a princess from Mad Max, with a big elegant headdress and bracelets and several necklaces, but all of it was made of bits of metal and various other things that looked salvaged, and held together with leather.

“That’s because I am Danny,” I insisted. The pink-haired woman tried to suppress a chuckle behind her hand, but started cackling uncontrollably.

“Hate, you idiot, I told you this wasn’t how they did it!” she jeered as her laughter started to subside. The pink-haired girl wasn’t talking to me, but to the blue-eyed girl that had pulled me out of the pond. 

“Shut up Greed,” she shouted, “I’m sure it was something similar to this, they probably just found a way to make theirs come to her senses.”

She was splashing towards me, and I tried to back up and tripped over a root in the water, falling on my ass. 

“Listen here, you little worm,” said the blue woman, “You’re not Danny Herrera, that’s where we all live. You-”

“What do you mean, ‘that’s where we all live?’ Danny’s a person not a place.”

“Don’t interrupt me! ‘Danny Herrera’ is the name of this place, where we live. He goes through his life creating memories, which we get to live on, they’re islands like this one. We, the Queens like me and her and her and her, get to decide what Danny does with his life because we’re what he feels. Our subjects, the Thoughts-”

“What, like Inside Out?”

“What the fuck is Inside… Stop interrupting me! Look, the point is, you’re not Danny! You were never Danny! The four of us made you, just now, from the collected waters of all the memories gathered into this sacred spring.”

“What the hell does any of that mean?” I shouted, scrambling back. She kept trying to loom over me. 

“It means you’re not Danny,” called the pink-haired woman, “you only think you are because you’re made entirely out of all his memories.”

I stared at her. There was some dreadful part of me that connected those dots and realized that made a weird sort of sense. It would explain the different body.

“Or, you’re all aliens, you’ve abducted me, and you swapped my body as some kind of weird experiment!” I shouted. That also would explain a lot of things, I thought to myself defiantly.

The purple haired woman hid her face in the crook of her sleeve as she erupted into laughter. The green-haired one also barked a laugh but tried to pretend it was a cough. The blue haired woman stopped following me and a look of pure consternation came over her face for a minute. It was replaced by frustration.

“Okay, you guys are right, this isn’t working. Let’s try something different,” she muttered in defeat.

Then she pulled out a gun. She turned back to her friends, pointed the thing at me, and tried to shoot me in the head. Like with bullets. I would have screamed, but the sound of the gun going off was so loud it gave me immediate tinnitus. I couldn’t hear anything but the ringing. 

At just a few feet away she probably didn’t think she had to aim, which was why she had fired without looking. I had rolled out of the way as soon as I saw the gun in her hand, and she had barely missed me. 

I knew better than to give her a chance to realize her mistake. I leapt out of the pond and was running for the trees before my mind could even think. 

“Oh shit,” I heard the blue woman say as the tinnitus started wearing off. As I ducked into the trees two more bullets zipped past my head. 

“What an embarrassing display,” said the green haired woman distantly. I wasn’t wearing shoes, and my feet were in agony at running across a forest floor, but the adrenaline kept me going until I hit a small foot path. I followed it as fast as I could, hoping it would take me far away from here.