"He totally means it," Yakeru said. He and Akira were standing outside the class. It was 3:30 in the afternoon, and most kids had already left. "They are waiting for you by the icecream parlor. You should probably take the back gate and go around the hill if you want to make it back home with your face intact."
Akira slapped his forehead. "This day can't get any worse."
He decided to follow Yakeru's advice and took the back gate to make his exit. Being on the other side of the school, Akira rarely went near the hill. It was not a small hill. Akira could see the top of the forested protrusion all the way from his home. There was a small shrine at the top. The last time Akira had visited that place, his grandma had been alive.
Alive and full of energy, Akira thought and couldn't help smiling. He stared at the massive gate, at the long, winding, stone staircase, and the lush green forest that surrounded it. Now that he has taken the detour, he might as well just go and visit the shrine.
He didn't remember the climb being this long and wearying. There was a small Japanese garden at the top with a small pond that was on the verge of drying out.
Akira looked around. He saw one woman sitting on a bench reading some kind of a novel. Akira scratched his head, wondering what to do next. He decided to go inside the shrine, pay respect to the god, walk around the shrine after that and then probably go and just sit on the bench and just take in nature around him. Akira followed through with his plan. By the time reached back to the bench, the woman with the novel had already left.
Akira sat down and looked at the oranging sky. How much time had passed? He didn't know, and suddenly he had no interest in learning about it. Right now, all he wanted to do was sit down and do nothing. Out of nowhere, a yawn escaped his lips. His eyes felt heavy. He blinked, shut his eyes, and dozed off.
A loud noise startled him awake. "What the... " The sky had gotten really dark, air unpleasantly cold.
"What time is--" He felt it before he saw it: A bolt of red lightning climbing up the sky, a glowing red zigzag against a black backdrop, the lightning so bright that it momentarily cast the whole forest and shrine in bright crimson light.
Akira stood, frozen, nothing knowing if he is dreaming, or did a bolt of red lightning actually climbed up the sky?
It was dark again.
"This is definitely a dream," Akira said to no one in particular.
Come to me...
"Huh..." Did someone just speak, or was there actually a voice in his head?
Come to me. This is your destiny.
Akira started walking towards the source of the voice. What am I doing? he thought. Why won't my leg listen to me?
By this point, he was definitely sure that all this was a dream. Akira wanted it to end. A few minutes later, he reached the edge of a small crater; in the middle of which lay a sphere with a hole in the center. He didn't need anyone to tell him that the spherical thing was either a small ship or some kind of a satellite. A weird piece of rock was floating above it.
Akira slid down the slope of the crater and slowly walked toward the ship and the rock hovering over it.
"What the..."
The rock had weird carvings, and Akira realized that it was actually a broken piece of something. "A statue," he muttered and reached out toward it. He knew it was stupid to grab something that was floating above the ground, but it didn't matter. This was all a dream. He would soon wake up at the beach, drool running down his lips. He would also catch a cold for sleeping outside.
"This is one weird dream," Akira said and grabbed the rock--the world around him melted away. Images, countless of them, were burning past his eyes. But everything was distorted--even his hands and body. He got a glimpse of his grandma, looking in her late fifties or sixties, with a baby in her arms. He saw a man and a woman walking away from her, leaving her alone. He saw clouds rushing past overhead as if someone had pressed the fast forward button. Lush green forests appeared and disappeared. Mountain ranges born, grew tall, and eroded away. Soon he was in space, and before he knew it, he was on a different planet. Then another planet. And another one.
Suddenly, everything stopped moving. Akira found himself floating in deep space. He was not alone. There was something that resembled the shape of a resting woman. She had green lustrous skin and tentacles for hair. She appeared to be having six eyelids(all of the closed at the moment), three on either side of her nose, and it also seemed that she wasn't wearing any clothes. The woman was surrounded by tiny floating orbs of light. Compared to her, they were just the size of dust particles.
They are not dust particles, Akira realized; They are goddamn stars, each the size of the sun if not bigger.
Akira looked at the woman from head to toe. The realization of her real size sent a shiver down his spine.
"That's one enormous, naked, alien woman," Akira said and was not surprised to hear his own voice in empty space.
After all, this was all part of his dream, wasn't it?