Chapter 5: 05 → Unbelonging → f(x) = Swap² + Snap

The halls of Oculum in the... uhh... day? (Was it the day?) were drastically different than the halls of Oculum at night. It remained dark in places, with strange shadows still cast every which way... But with the day came the appearance of... the other students. There were so many interesting people — a lot more than Josh had seen on their way here last night — and, go figure, most of them had too many eyes. (Though of differing amounts, of course.) Some of them had other strange features as well... fur, horns, antlers, tentacles, extra limbs, scales, gills, webbed fingers... there were people with tails, people with wings, people with their faces covered completely in a thick veil of smoke...

And, coincidentally, just as the night before, these people, these... uhh... ocumans? They were all staring at him as he was led past, and if he had to be honest, if there was anything that made him not want to be here it was that. It would have been exciting if nobody had cared that he was there. It would have been interesting, a strange experience he’d never have the chance to experience again, most likely. But no, everyone and everything was staring at him — that included the statues and the paintings, after all — and he just wanted it to stop.

Strangely, he found himself missing Ulisa’s room. He may not have fit in that pet bed, but at the very least he actually felt safe there. Safe from prying eyes, and, somehow, safe because she was there.

Maybe it was because she seemed dangerous. Which wouldn’t make sense, except that her dangerous-ness didn’t seem to be something that she’d use against him. It seemed more likely she’d use it to save him.

A loud scream pierced through the air suddenly, and he tripped over his own feet and landed on the ground in shock, all of the other ocumans in the halls around them quickly disappearing into rooms.

“Odd damn it,” Ludi swore. “We’re late. The forecast of tardiness was right.”

Right. Obviously. This was Oculum, of course sudden ear-piercing screams signified the start of class.

Ludi gave Josh a look, but it looked more amused than irritable.

“You don’t seem too upset about being late,” he realised. “But then again, you also seem like the kind of person to be late a lot.”

She stared down at him. “Never before has someone understood me on such a deep level, extraplanar.” She took a step closer, tilting her head as she looked at him with the most fascinated expression, almost as if he was a potato chip shaped like a US president that had three extra eyes. “Incredible,” she said. “How could it be that your mind has not melted, that your limbs have not turned into limp, flailing noodles?” 

Then she grabbed his hand and pulled him back up, humming as they continued on, “Now I’m hungry… I could go for a melt and some noodles for lunch.”

Hmm… that actually did sound good — Josh’s stomach rumbled alongside hers, complaining to him about his lack of breakfast.

Well, not if the thing melted was someone’s mind, though.

“Here we are,” Ludi said, and then jumped from the floor to the ceiling, yanking him with, and catching him just before he would’ve hit his head.

“Did we just...” Josh said, looking up at what used to be the floor, but was now the ceiling. “Nevermind. Perfectly normal.”

“Obviously,” Ludi rolled her eyes. “It’s as if you’ve never seen a flippy floppy field before. Also, we’re here,” she said, sliding up next to the door and putting her ear to it. “Planar Mechanics.”

“…Aren’t we going in?” he asked.

“No way, I don’t want to end up in the dungeon for being late again. We’ll wait out here until Ulisa needs us and then we’ll enter like we planned it the whole time.”

“Wow. That’s kind of genius,” Josh said. “Do you do this kind of thing a lot?”

“Thank you, thank you,” Ludi grinned, flashing him a view of her rows of sharp teeth. “And yes, obviously. The best way of avoiding getting sent to the dungeons is pretending like the random stuff you’re doing is precisely what you’re meant to be doing. Now… let’s see if Ulisa will let me swap an eye with her so I can see what’s happening…”

“Swap… an eye?”

Ludi was silent, every eye closed except her third eye.

And then her left eye opened, and narrowed. Suddenly Josh felt small. That was not Ludi’s eye. That was Ulisa’s. He gave her a nervous wave.

“Wait, I have an idea,” Ludi said suddenly. “Extraplanar, can I swap an eye with you?”

“Uhhh… what?”

“I’ll take that as a maybe and round up to yes,” she grinned, and then, with the vivid feeling of something wet and slimy popping out of somewhere, suddenly Josh was simultaneously looking at her and himself, and also felt a little lightheaded. Why was he looking at two places at once? And more importantly did he really have to see himself? He looked so horrible. Why couldn’t he be a cute eldritch girl with too many eyes? It wasn’t fair.

“Don’t think too hard about it, extraplanar,” Ludi said, showing her teeth again in another grin. That was even more bizarre than seeing multiple perspectives, too… it felt like he was hearing her words from everywhere at once. And also not from his ears.

“What are you even doing, Ludi?” Josh heard, and that was definitely not Ludi. That was… Ulisa?

“I dunno. Something fun, I guess?” she said. “Anyway, trade this eye.”

Ulisa didn’t say anything for a moment, and for some reason Josh almost felt like she was sighing. “Another one? Do I have to?”

“Yes.”

And then… schloo-POP! Josh was suddenly no longer looking at himself — thank god. Instead, he was looking at a classroom…

“Ludi!” 

“Hehehe…”

“This is a gross, useless, human eye!”

You are reading story Extra Credit for an Eldritch Horror at novel35.com

“Yep!”

Josh was starting to tune them out, now, though. At that moment he was too interested in the classroom and the person lecturing. He couldn’t help it, there was so much to look at, and Planar Mechanics... that sounded like a class that was very related to his current predicament.

All around him were desks and chairs and tables of different shapes and sizes, not aligned in any sort of pattern or order. It made sense, though... with how varied ocumans were, order was impossible. There was one guy he saw that took up the space of like... four chairs and tables, so...

In the front of the classroom, the older ocuman that was likely the teacher was slumped over onto the desk, snoring. But sitting on the desk, lecturing, was an ocuman with... a lot of eyes. And she looked... familiar. She looked like... Ulisa. Except older, and more mature, with a smile on her face that gave an air of kindness and grace.

“Astia. My... elder sister.” Ulisa’s internal monologue was strained.

“She hates her,” Ludi explained, before Josh even had a chance to ask. (Not that he would have, though. He knew how that would’ve gone.) “Regular old family drama.”

Ulisa didn’t argue.

“Unbelonging,” the woman said, her voice melodious, and she reached a hand into her suit, pulling out a silvery pocket watch. “You already know what it is — you know what it means for extraplanar objects to glow.”

“Astia has tricked the entirety of Oculum into believing that she’s an expert on unbelonging energies, but in actuality she knows as little as the rest of us,” Ulisa said. “Watch. Listen. The things she says will only be the most obvious.”

The woman returned the watch to her suit pocket, and took out instead a large, stretchy band. “These objects of other planes… They don’t belong in ours. Hence, the further they are from the plane they originate, the more they glow, and the greater the pull on them, the pull to return to where they belong.”

Holding either end of the band between her long, thin fingers, she began to pull.

“Planes only align for a short time, as you know,” she hummed, focusing more on the band than on anything else. “So if an object is unbelonging, and the planes drift… the pull increases, and increases…” The band was tight now, the tensile pressure spreading the material over a much longer distance, distance it did not want to be spread over. 

“Do you think she’ll accidentally let go and hurt herself?” Ludi giggled through their silent connection.

“It would serve her right,” Ulisa replied.

Astia looked up from the band, for a moment. “Do any of you know why unbelonging objects sometimes disappear?”

After a moment of silence, she looked back down to the band, starting to stretch it even further than before. “Because eventually… the unbelonging energy is too much. It becomes enough to create a planar tear, and once the object is no longer anchored in the plane…”

SNAP!

The band escaped from her fingers, slamming into her other, open hand. She looked up with a gentle smile on her face, but for some reason… there was something else there.

“‘If they’re all inevitably just going to disappear, why do unbelonging objects even matter, then?’ you might want to ask,” Astia said, giving that friendly smile again which was starting to seem creepier and creepier as time went on.

“I’ve known nearly everything you do about unbelonging energy for at least the past 200 million years... let alone that it ‘matters,’” Ulisa scoffed through our connection. “So... no,” Ulisa growled. “I don’t want to ask that. Instead, I want your  s i l e n c e !”

Ludi laughed. “Here we go, now she’s pissed.”

“As you may know, it takes an immense amount of energy to create a planar tear,” Astia said. “Hence why only the most powerful can manage the feat.” At this, even more eyes opened on her arms and neck, and Josh felt an instinctual spike of fear. 

“Yet, unbelonging objects manage it purely by existing,” the frightening woman hummed. “If one could harvest that power… or if we could even just use them to open planar tears over greater distances on demand...” she said, trailing off with her ‘sweet’ smile the scariest it had yet been.

Ulisa spoke slowly and carefully in our internal connection, saying, “You don’t need that power, Astia.”

“What power does she need, then?” Ludi asked, sweetly.

Ulisa sighed.

“Th-the power of friendship?” Josh wanted to suggest, before he realised he did suggest it, accidentally sharing it over the connection they shared.

Ludi burst into a fit of giggles next to him. “Oh my Odd, extraplanar, you’re something else.”

“I meant that I need that power more than she does. Or any other ocuman, for that matter. You chaos oddlings... You menaces,” Ulisa grumbled.

“You love us, Ulisa,” Ludi teased.

Ulisa sighed again. “Just be quiet, alright?” she said, voice hard. Josh didn’t have to struggle to picture the death glare she’d have been giving them. Partly because he already knew her death glares very well, and partly because she was already giving it to him, with the eyes she’d swapped to Ludi.

And with that death glare piercing into his soul, with those shivers running down his spine, that white-hot adrenaline coursing through his veins... she spoke through their connection one last time.

“It’s time for… ‘show and tell.’”