Chapter II

8:00pm. He writes the last sentence of the paragraph. He throws out a big sigh, as though he wants to blow away the stress building up in him. He tries to bend his back; he turns his body far to the left and then he turns far to the right. Somewhat failing in this aspect, as the spinning chair gives leeway and goes along the direction of his back. As per the usual, he reflects on his work for today. He looks for issues like where he might be lacking in exposition. After he finishes, he ponders about how to continue from this point forth. How should the story continue? After reining his thoughts, he writes short bullet points on his paper in form of a To-Do list. His mind ruminates on the same topic. Mainly to be proud of himself for how much he was able to write today. "You did great today, Seth."

The entire document doesn't contain as much as one might guess. With the story at its start, Seth is currently in the process to slowly introduce the reader to his work. He obviously doesn't view it as his favourite part to write but knows that it is fundamental. It needs to be fantastic. Otherwise, no one will be deeply invested in the story as much as Seth hopes for. Even worse, he loses the reader before he could show the actual premise. The part which is supposed to make the reader more excited.

He has written plenty stories before this, although their theme being quite similar. If someone wants to summarise all of them into one short sentence it would be "The protagonist breaking the fourth wall". The reader experiences how the protagonist interacts with whatever lays beyond it. Seth thinks back to his previously finished project.

In the tragic story of Author's Playground, you follow the traumatised protagonist, Joseph. Looking at his dating life, romance playing a big part of the story, it is deeply miserable. It isn't because he isn't able to date anyone, but because his past girlfriends all have died in some kind of accident. He gives up dating, stopping at the fourth partner when he loses her by a car crash. Equally miserable is the situation with his family. His younger brother, for example, dies at the age of 12 when he falls from the second story of the house. A gruesome sight. His throat has been impaled by the spiky fence bordering the front yard and street. Joseph suffers from great mental issues and isolates himself in his room. He has been convinced of an invisible power around him that causes fatal accidents. It was then, when the narrator in the novel unintentionally reveals itself, allowing Joseph to realise that he has been a mere narrative of the story. Joseph's blood boil, with no means to an end. He masters the power of manipulating the pages. He crosses out words, adds new sentences and rips apart pages. In the end, he loses all reasons as he scraps the narrator entirely, unwilling to be played by the author any longer. As such, the novel ends abruptly, without an epilogue.

Due to the way the story plays out, the novel turns out to be a hard read. A reader would have to put in additional effort to understand what's happening, and that is much to Seth's intent. Fully knowing he would alienate many potential readers, Seth allows the same pages to appear multiple times, changes fonts numerous times - at some point being Wingdings - and misprints an entire chapter by slightly rotating the paragraphs. Only through that, he excuses, would it be possible to signify how strong Joseph would be getting.

Seth is still proud of writing it, solidifying meta-narratives as 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 site for his novel lack any reviews. Seth admits 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 believes that he doesn't want to be restricted by any editors. Either way, he is convinced 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 stands up and as he widely stretches, raising his arms up above his head, he looks around. When he thought of how the protagonist's room was going to look like, he opted to pick the easiest option and go with his own, though it's arguably less messy than the room in 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. Around half of them have been for Author's Playground. He adds 'throwing away the trash' to his mental to-do list. These ideas aren't written down on his computer, because he doesn't want to clutter his desktop.

As he reaches for the door handle, small, deep violet sparks appear. They fuzz, sounding more dangerous than a tesla-coil. He panics, pulls his arm away and the sparks stop. Confusion arises. "What in the..."

His hand slowly moves towards the handle for the second time. Sparks reappear as he moves away yet again. Seth sighs to himself as he denies what he sees, calling the sparks a hallucination. It must be the constant daydreaming as a writer that causes this. In an attempt to get over his fear of touching something obviously dangerous, he plans to open the door as fast as possible. Hopefully, he'll be faster than him noticing the sparks. Seth breathes out heavily. As though he were a Kung-Fu fighter, his torso turns. The right arm gets into position to yank the door handle.

In an abrupt move, the right arm launches forward, the flat hand aiming the top of the handle. However, sparks appear sooner than he expects, allowing them to send the shock through his index finger. His right hand first jolts awake, every single centimetre of the skin noticing how the current flows through it. The arm flails, the muscles forcefully contracting from the electricity. The current abruptly disappears, no further than the shoulder. His mind picks up the latent pain. Seth yelps at the stingy pain alike receiving multiple tattoos at the same time. Then, the whole arm turns numb in an attempt to recover from the sensation. Seth's sense of balance is lost. After a couple steps of stumbling, he falls against the wall and rapidly slides alongside of it. His heart struggles to regain a steady rhythm. He slowly calms it with controlled breathing and notices his vision being blocked by illusory blank spots. Undaring to accidentally do something wrong, Seth stays put and waits for everything to mostly recover. After half an hour, he stumbles while standing up and wipes his drool away.

Now that it's over, he instantly starts to wonder what has occurred to him. Flinging his arm softly, as if it would hasten the recovery of its senses, Seth glares at the door. How could this be happening? He walks in a circle, but due to the size of his own room, it's rather a rectangle. Suddenly, he stops in his track and snickers to himself. "He's probably dying of laughter behind this door."

Currently living as a college student, he would naturally have a roommate to share the apartment with. Seth appreciates him for sticking to the cleaning days, but there is a certain part of him that is nauseating. His roommate likes to play pranks a couple times a month. It's extremely irregular for when it happens, so it is even more unpredictable of Seth to say when his roommate is trying to be annoying again. Normally, the pranks are very harmless, never breaking anything. In many of them, Seth has to get out of his predicament himself, while his roommate amuses himself as he watches him. Once, he placed 100 plastic cups in his room filled with water to the brim.

Thus, his roommate probably rigged the handle to a car battery or something alike. This is way more dangerous though. Perhaps he has too much fun this time and doesn't consider how much it could actually hurt. Seth shouts out of his room. "Ha, ha. Now get on and put the battery away!"

No response. Unsurprised, Seth comes up with a method to touch the handle undisturbed. Taking the scarf out of the wardrobe, he makes a lasso out of it and swings it. But, as though somebody is whispering to him, he slowly stops and lets the scarf hang to his side. Even if he takes distance from the door, it doesn't prevent it from passing the current through the scarf to him. No way he would allow himself to try it, the previous shock almost put him to sleep!

Seth switches his equipment to the keyboard from his desk. Making sure that the impact would be strong enough to bring the door outside its frame, he raises the keyboard above his head. As he takes a swing, the keyboard defies physics and generates cyan sparks. They jump around frantically, travelling through it as if it was copper and eventually shocking Seth for a second time. He drops the keyboard to the ground. Fortunately, it seems to be way weaker this time. He massages his hands. His lips part and the brows tighten; a face that could only appear in utter confusion.

This can't be described as a prank anymore; it doesn't make sense! His feet stand unmoved. His mind churns, desperately trying to find an explanation for this. In a span of just a dozen of minutes he witnessed something utterly physics-defying that he doesn't even know what to feel right now. In the end, he caresses the back of his head and sits down on his bed. He takes his phone and searches. His finger scrolls several meters, unable to find a similar report. After dozens of minutes of researching, he gives up and types in the number for the police. If there is nothing to do, it's better to leave it to outsider's help. The finger taps the first 9. Sparks come out of the symbol. Seth first rubs his glabella in disappointment. Unprompted, he catapults off his bed, opens the window and lays his hands towards the sides of his mouth. He looks at the few drunkards reeling across the street market. The words are unable to move out of his throat, the neck tingling as it prevents him to scream. Seth coughs heavily, instinctively trying to spit out the sparks.

He quickly grabs a sheet of paper, writes down "HELP!", and prepares to throw the crumbled ball out as the whole window fills up with sparks. Before he can react to it, the ball leaves his hand and lights up at the touch of the illusory wall. He panics and retreats from the ball of fire. Briefly, he thought of stomping on it, but the thought of the sparks makes it unappetising. Seth is left without any other choice other than watching it burn. A minute passes, leaving a black and fragile pulp and a scorched floor. It leaves him enough time to calm down, allowing him to realise that he is stuck in his own room, with no way of bypassing these sparks. Like the former sheet of paper, he lays down on the floor and rolls himself into a ball.

It's past midnight, the lamp on the desk dimly illuminating his body. He hasn't been moving for hours, different thoughts occupying his mind. To allow himself to move on, Seth starts to focus on trying to apply logic to the whole phenomenon. He tries to apply logic to this. A scientific approach should be applicable. In the real world, there are specific rules it always follows. A ball falling from 1000m would fall as long as any other place. Therefore, Seth assumes that these sparks also have set rules. If this was not the case, then there will simply be no way of figuring out how to escape his room. He collects everything he learned of in the past hours with these sparks and notes them. For now, it seems as though the location of these sparks are arbitrary. They can prevent Seth from touching something, directly shock him or even be inside of his own body. He gets up and walks towards the win-dow to learn more about them.

To his demise, he lives far too high to simply jump out of it. First, he wants to make sure if all objects are prohibited from exiting. Seth takes an empty pen out of his trash and throws it outside. He doesn't check for any pedestrians, as it's around 3am or 4am. The pen successfully reaches the ground without hitting anyone. Nodding to himself, he binds multiple cloths together to create a self-made rope and then throws one end of it out of the window. The other is secured to the bed. While the rope falls, sparks increasingly appear from every corner of the frame, filling the empty space in-between. It's like when the crumbled paper was thrown. Despite the interesting fact that Seth could touch the rope, unaffected by the sparks, they still prevent him from exiting. He reflects on this matter.

Actually, Seth never really considered climbing down with the shabby self-crafted rope. It could tear apart, accidentally killing himself by the attempt. Still, the sparks seem to understand methods of escaping and interfere in the process. "These sparks are not random, to say the least. They appear as soon as I am able to get out."

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.
c. Sparks keep me within this room, with the goal of not letting myself outside.

After he drafts his last point, Seth realises one major issue... Then, how am I supposed to get out? Reading the notes gives him the feeling that there is no escape at all. These sparks are clearly way stronger than him, and they are always aware of everything he tries to do. Tired, demotivated and depressed, he climbs into his bed. The instinctive fear of never making it out alive creeps up. He strives to shake it off, considering that he should attempt to experiment to see if there are any loopholes. Maybe the sparks need to go to sleep at some point? And with that, he slowly falls asleep.