Chapter 25: 25 – Autofill

I was getting used to this now. I put my hands on the floating purple thing and tore open a hole in space-time once again.

We shuffled back to my room and I closed the portal behind us.

I stared at the purple floating crack for a few seconds.

Then I remembered, “Oh, right. I wanted to show you this.”

I walked over to my closet, lifted a stack of clothes out of the way, and fished out the piece of paper hiding under them.

“This is the announcement form I talked about. My name on it is really –” I froze up as my eyes brushed over the name.

Just as before, it was a moving garbled mess of symbols, seemingly making no sense at first glance.

Except it was making sense now. Not completely. No, it was as if the meaning consisted of several layers and I only understood one of them.

But… I understood one of them. It was making sense. And I couldn’t help but be completely stunned.

It read “Renee.”

I idly walked to my friends even as my eyes remained glued on the name.

Frank took the paper off me and the two examined it.

“Well… It’s exactly what I expected,” Frank stated, staring at the announcement form. “But also, holy shit what the hell is this?”

“That’s your name? This is even weirder than I thought it would be,” Casey added.

“Trippy, very trippy.”

I finally snapped out of my stupor. “I… Uh, I can actually read part of it now.”

“Wait what? You can read this…” Frank said, before letting out an incomprehensible sound, mimicking the text.

“Well, I couldn’t before. But now… I’m not sure why or how, but I can make out part of it now.” I went silent for a moment, frowning at the name, before raising my head and looking at my friends. “It says… Renee.”

“Oooh-kay then. So that’s why you chose that name?” Frank asked.

I shook my head. “No, before I chose the name, I couldn’t make out anything from this.” I pointed at the paper.

“Well!” Frank threw his hands up. “This is getting too weird for me. I would call bullshit on it, but we’re dealing with magic, aliens, portals, and ESP, after all.” I rolled my eyes at Frank reminding us of his theories. “Are you sure you aren’t imagining things?”

“I don’t know…” I groaned. “Maybe I am. Maybe I’m going insane. I hate this.”

“Hey, it’s okay! We’ll figure it out,” Casey assured me.

I nodded while staring at the floor.

“Okay, so… This announcement form automatically fills in your name, right?”

I nodded.

“Then, if we were to do the same thing with the form, we would also see our names like that?” Casey asked.

“Probably. We can try it out whenever we go into a city.”

“Can’t we just… y’know. Erase this, and try writing something in, ourselves?” Frank asked.

“Uh… yeah? I guess you can?”

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I grimaced, torn on that idea. Part of me didn’t want my name to be erased even if I knew I could easily get it back again.

“Alright then! Let’s get this here…” Frank took the form to my desk, grabbed one of those pens with an ink eraser, and tried erasing my name.

It passed through the jumbled text, clearly causing damage to it, but not leaving a straight empty line as it should. I could still read “Renee” inside it.

“Whoa… Okay, this is even trippier! It’s like it’s dodging the eraser!” I clenched my teeth as Frank tried, again and again, to erase the name, deleting it bit by bit, eventually managing to somehow erase one of the letters from Renee.

“Why don’t you erase the title? Shouldn’t that automatically do it?” Casey suggested.

“Oh yeah, let’s try dealing with non-glitchy text first. Smart idea,” Frank said before erasing the title, and as soon as he did, my name vanished.

“Yeah, that did it!” He grinned even as something inside me silently screamed. “Alriiight, my turn! Sooo, title, title…” He poked his chin with the pen. “Right, I got it!” His grin returned. “The chronicles of the secret fellowship of the interdimensional portals, part one!”

I saw Casey roll her eyes at his antics.

“Oh… uh… huh. It’s my name,” Frank said, confused.

“What?” I said in confusion and looked over his shoulder.

‘Francis Joetin’

Two words, nothing glitchy, nothing moving, nothing unusual. Just normal plain clean text.

All three of us stared for a moment.

“Sooooo, another theory. You are secretly some kind of ancient demon from another dimension with an unpronounceable name.”

His words brought me out of my shock. I took a step back as my eyes widened. What was going on here? Was I really the only one whose name was messed up? Why?

“Let me try this.” Casey took the form and pen off of Frank, erased the title, which also deleted the name, and wrote “Test” into it.

I didn’t dare to look, but I already had an inkling of what would appear in the name.

“Mine’s normal too. Nothing weird about it.”

Of course. I was the only one.

“Here.” Casey gave me back the announcement form. It was empty. “Do it again, maybe we can figure something out.”

“I… alright. Sure.”

I sat down at my desk, picked up the pen, and stared at the form for a second. One deep breath later, I put the pen down and wrote “To the gods” again.

My name crawled into existence right below it. It wriggled and twisted. And all I could think about was that I could still read the part that said Renee.

A moment of silence as we stared at it.

“Well… I guess we’re adding it to the list of weird and unusual things about you.”

Because there weren’t enough of these already…

I sighed.

More and more questions and mysteries. It would be nice to get some answers soon.