– II –

The clock hits 8:00pm. Seth feels like he wrote plenty today. This part of writing isn’t his favourite, but it is important to have a proper beginning first to slowly show the premise of the whole story in the middle. The one that makes the reader realise why the story might be very interesting. He has been writing multiple pieces with the similar theme, where the protagonist usually breaks the fourth wall and starts interacting with whatever lays beyond it.

In the story of Author’s Playground you follow the protagonist Joseph that goes through numerous traumatic days, like losing his girlfriend to a car crash or his family being burnt in the house. He starts realizing that he has been a mere narrative for the author of the story. Joseph turns furious as he masters the power of manipulating the pages. He crosses out words, adds new sentences and finally rips apart pages and glues them back together in new places. Joseph finally decided that he wasn’t willing to be played by the author any longer and scraps the narrator completely. That’s why the novel ends abruptly. It makes it a harder read, much to Seth’s intent, because he decided to have the same pages appear multiple times, change fonts and misprint an entire chapter to signify the power of Joseph. Seth felt proud writing it, making meta-narratives a part of his signature style of writing. Unfortunately, he has yet to find success as an author. Having made Author’s Playground his most ambitious project, he would have expected to find more people that would be interested in it, but every book site for his novel show no reviews. Seth has admitted to himself that being a self-published author is making things a lot harder than if he were to reach out to acknowledged publishers, but he thought that he didn’t want to be restricted by any constraints. Either way, his belief is that there is bound to be people that will love his work. It just takes its time.

His stomach rumbles. It has expected to be fed an hour ago and finally files a complaint. Seth raises from his office chair. As he takes a big stretch, raising his arms up above his head, he takes a look around. When he thought about how Aaron’s room is going to look like, he opted to pick the easiest option and go with his own, though it’s less messy than the room of the novel.

“I should wash these clothes tomorrow.”

When he takes a step, his feet push away several crumbled papers. Those have been past ideas that weren’t good enough to put into full form. Around half of them have been for Author’s Playground. He puts ’throwing away the trash’ in his mental to-do list. These ideas aren’t written down on his computer, because he didn’t want to clutter his desktop.

As he reaches for the door handle, small cyan-coloured sparks appear. He panics, pulls his arm away and the sparks stop. Confusion arises.

“What in the…”

He carefully reaches for the handle again. The first spark shows up. His hand moves closer, slowly. The gap grows smaller and the sparks grow bigger. Finally, one of the spark hits his pointer. He yelps and takes a step away from the door. While shaking his hand, he takes a moment to think what might be causing it. Perhaps someone decided to have a prank and somehow made the handle shock the next person. Seth is irritated. It is probably his annoying roommate feeling joyous. He mutters.

“He’s probably dying of laughter beyond this door.”

He spends a couple of minutes figuring out how to open the door. He looks around the room and an idea pops up in his head. He takes a scarf out and hooks the loop to the handle. Sparks reappear, travel along the scarf and shock his hand. The scarf falls off to the ground. Visibly annoyed by now, he yanks the cable out, takes the keyboard in lieu of the scarf and attempts to hit the handle. The keyboard was made out of plastic so there would be no chance for electricity to pass through. Yet, these sparks still travelled through it as if it were copper and shocks both of his hands. This can’t be a prank anymore, it doesn’t make sense. In a span of just a dozen of minutes he witnessed something utterly physics-defying that he stood there, bewildered. In his astonishment he finds irony in this. He lightly chuckles.

“That’s some excuse Aaron would have to not leave the room.”

With nothing working, he picks up his phone and types in the number for the police. The finger taps the first 9. Sparks come out of the symbol. He sighs. Not willing to get zapped again, he throws away that idea.

Seth takes a deep breath and tries to apply logic to it. Everything on earth has been consistent with rules set up by physics, which is why these sparks must have some rules set up too, albeit without applying to the laws of physics. If it weren’t for this, he would randomly attempt to do things until he somehow gets out of here and who knows how long that could take. For now, he brainstorms multiple ways he could get out of this room. Despite the rule of brainstorming stating that you shouldn’t cross out anything, he was not fond of the idea to flush himself down the toilet and quickly disregarded it. This list had ridiculous points, like destroying the door, smashing the walls or digging a hole. Of course, he would only attempt one of them when nothing else worked out.

The first idea was the easiest to try out. He takes a look outside the window. To his demise, the floor in which he lives in is far too high to survive a jump. He binds multiple cloths together for a self-made rope and throws one end out of the window. Seth ties a knot to the bed and walks towards the window. Within a second, sparks increasingly appear from every corner of the frame, filling the empty space in-between. With little surprise that these sparks prevent him from going outside, he pulls part of the rope back into the room – tying a new knot after doing so – and checks for the sparks. The sparks are weaker than before, showing holes in the frame. He keeps switching between these two steps until the sparks don’t appear anymore. After reaching that point, he checks the remaining length of the rope that are still hanging. His mouth reveals a small grin. If he were to try to hold onto the end of that rope right now, he would still be able to reach for the window back inside. This is definitely not enough to survive a fall.

“These sparks are not random, to say the least. They appear as soon as I am able to get out.”

Seth puts almost all of the rope outside again. The sparks reappear. He takes a step back and this time, he picks up a piece of crumbled paper off the ground and throws it outside. No sparks appear and the ball falls down landing on the street. He nods to himself in pleasant surprise.

An idea pops up in his head. He takes an empty sheet of paper and writes ‘SOS! I am stuck in this room! Call for help immediately!’ on it. The paper gets crumbled and thrown towards the window. This time, sparks appear and block the paper making it outside the room. Seeing how it aligns with everything that has happened so far, he takes a seat in front of his desk and names a sheet of paper Spark Theory. With this, he writes down everything he knows about the sparks.

“a. Sparks contradict the laws of physics.
“b. Sparks prevent me from going through it, zapping me if I get too close. It causes pain.
“c. Sparks keep myself within this room, with the goal of not letting myself outside.
“d. Sparks grow stronger the closer I am to actually getting out of this room."

He plans to write down how he could solve the problem later on.

Seth opens the chat to a random person. His first message ‘Help!’ was able to be sent through, but when he tried to explain why he needs help, sparks would appear and prevent him to write any more words. It is indeed like trying to use the door handle, calling the police or getting out of the window. He scratches the entire list of escape plans. They all do not work with the current premise of Spark Theory. They are made to not work. Seth feels defeated. He has absolutely no idea how to get out.

– III –

The clock hits 7:00pm. It’s been over a full day since he left the room. He lays in bed, expecting to die of starvation soon enough. Not everything is bad though, the bathroom has yet to prevent him from entering it. The rule of not leaving the room didn’t seem to be this strict. Maybe, it counted both his bedroom and bathroom as one.

Other than thoughts like these, there is nothing to do here. Another set of dirty clothes has been added to the floor and a rainstorm ravaging outside strengthens his current depressing mood. With death looming, he gets up from his bed and turns on his computer. He feels the need to at least continue working on his story when he has nothing else to do anyway. He reveres as he thinks about the life after death. Of course, not from his perspective. He doesn’t care about heaven or hell. It’s about people gossiping about his genius stories! He smirks as he dreams about becoming famous after dying. Everyone might become sad about the fact that they aren’t able to read new stories from him anymore as they claim his meta-narratives are one of the best in the world. Yes, this is why he should write one more short novel.

While Seth waits for his computer to turn on, he looks outside the window. He witnesses a man running along the street. Deja-vu strikes him. That man is running in the rain! Not only that but he is wearing a black-suit and holds a briefcase over his head. His heart sinks. There is no chance this could be happening. This wouldn’t make any sense! His eyes look away from the man and towards the clock. In a very unplausible coincidence, the second-hand of this clock ticks back to the top. His heart jumps a beat. His hands leave traces of sweat on the skin. His whole body becomes heavier as if earth’s gravity turned up a notch. One slow step after another, he takes a look at his screen. His pupils shrink.

“7:04pm…”

Odd. So very odd. This is awfully the same thing. Absolutely the same. His head scans the room. Dirty piles of clothes, the bathroom blocked by them. Crumbled papers that similarly look like used tissues. The sheets on the bed are badly folded. The room is lit only by the monitor. Seth’s legs turn shaky, his body is about to fold. He leans onto the desk with his left arm. The body turns towards the bathroom. It rummages through the clothes, one by one. The bathroom door opens. Puke embarks. Various thoughts rush in. How did this happen? Why to me? Is this really happening? Am I dreaming? He sits down with the back against the bathroom wall. Half an hour passes. He pulls himself back to his feet. For unexplored reasons, he feels encouraged. He starts feeling like there is still more to understand. He motivates himself. There might still be a way of escaping.

His body slams down the chair, tired from moving all the way to here. The computer displays Seth’s half-written story. When Seth has set the computer up months ago, he decided to have his writing program to be opened automatically when he turns it on, since writing is the only thing he does on it. On the list of programs that automatically start up, his browser is one of them, mainly for researching. Seth ponders about his current situation. His life currently matches the one of Aaron. So, if his life is this very story he wrote, then that would mean that every consecutive sentence should also apply to him. A dark thought appears. He could kill himself with just one sentence here and then. Seth shudders. It’s better to not try that out. Instead, he wants to make Aaron leave the room to allow him to leave too. He nods as his self-acclaimed genius brain came up with this idea. The screen shows the last sentence he typed out; it’s Aaron explaining the two types of deaths to his acquaintance. Well, then. There is just one thing to do. He puts his hands on the keyboard and starts typing.