Jax stared at the two people whom he was able to see even in the darkness with his eyes wide open.
Jax rubbed his eyes with his palms roughly, and shook his head, as if to clear his mind, as he thought that all this was a result of hallucinations and that he was just imagining things.
However, even after he spent a good five minutes rearranging his thoughts, he was greeted with the same situation when he lifted his head for the second time to glance in front of him.
Before his eyes, were two people, or more precisely two silhouettes of whom he couldn't make out the features quite clearly because of the pitch black darkness that engulfed this entire room.
"Who are you?" Jax asked them, even though he still believed that his eyes were just playing tricks on him.
He believed so because he was too weak to distinguish reality from illusions, as he didn't eat anything for a whole three days straight now.
"You already forgot about us? It had not been very long, right?" spoke one voice, which oddly rang familiar bells in the young man's ears.
"He just couldn't see us clearly, pal," said another tone in a neutral undertone.
However, hearing the second person's words, Jax recalled that one odd encounter of his with two deranged people who spoke nonsense to him in the detention cell, fifteen or so days before.
"You were the people who visited me in the detention room..." Jax spoke rather slowly, so it was hard to decipher whether he was questioning the two people or confirming his own guess.
Thus, the first person spoke immediately after Jax stopped making sounds any further. "That's not what is important now. Don't you feel bored being in this simulated world for so long?"
These people and their rubbish with real and simulated worlds! In their eyes, do they think that he is sick in the head? To believe whatever gibberish they spout in front of him?
Jax felt like his head would explode from all the thoughts that were now invading his brain at the same time. But then again, that very odd thought of relying upon their words assaulted his common sense left and right. It seemed that this very inkling feeling never left his subconscious.
He pushed that thought to the back of his head, as rapidly as it entered his mind and glanced at his recipients coldly, before saying ;
"I've already told you once, if you haven't come to help me, you should get the f*ck out of my face and stop bothering me. Now you should do the same before I do something reckless," Jax warned them in what he thought was a grim tone.
But it was as clear as a day that his tone was anything but grim, as he himself was clearly finding it difficult to even keep his eyes open at this point of time. He was utterly exhausted and all his limbs had already gave up on him. However, he still chose to be stubborn and stood up right, pushing his limits beyond exhaustion.
"Jax, you should leave this simulated world soon. For doing so, you should find the secret portal which led you to this world," said the first man, who was none other than the more buoyant man.
However he didn't get any response from the latter, who seemed to be on the verge of collapsing at any given moment now.
Sensing this, the ignorant man jumped into action and brought Jax to sit upon the stone bed and leaned his body against the hard wall behind him.
Unlike Jax, they could see each other and inside this room perfectly. As if they were in their own dimension, a completely different dimension, which wasn't affected by the conditions of this place where they were now.
"Jax you should remember my words, find the secret portal, the sooner the better," the other man said anxiously.
On the other hand, the man, who helped him to sit down, looked at the half unconscious young man, who was now slowly falling to his side, with a complicated expression. "We can't stay here any longer, its time." He, who had been silent after his comment on Jax's visual limitations in darkness at the beginning, chose this moment to break their own situation to his partner.
His companion reached his hand forward as if he want to shake Jax awake, but retracted it in the next second and afterward, only the ragged breathing of a single human being could be heard in the room.
The two men from earlier disappeared into thin air, and what Jax didn't notice was that their silhouettes glitched slightly before they were pulled back as if something grabbed them and sucked them into a vortex.
Even if the young man was conscious enough, he wouldn't be able to witness this clearly because of his minimized optical power.
Meanwhile, Jax who was shuttling between his conscious and half conscious states, sensed that once again he was alone after the two people vanished from his room.
And when realization dawned upon him that they had not really left through the door like they did the last time, he found himself inclining to believe his earlier suspicions that he was indeed hallucinating.
This was the last conscious thought that appeared in his mind, before he fell unconscious completely this time.
==============
Jax woke up to a constant buzzing near his ears, as if a series of mechanical sounds were deliberately played right into them.
He thought of closing his ears, and out of instinct, when he lifted his hands, pain shot through his left hand before he felt something flowing out of it.
He struggled to open his heavy eye lids, and what greeted his sight was a not so tidy dirty white ceiling, he didn't have time to confirm his whereabouts as his left hand started to hurt like hell. So he turned his head to notice an IV drip attached to the aforementioned left hand, and blood was trickling down from it rapidly.
Sh*t!