Lola sleeps in, she always has and always will. I typically go to bed at a reasonable time, even without our parents telling us when to scurry off to our room, It's not like I have my phone to be up all night on.
When Lola stays up late she draws, more dragons than anything else but also plenty of other real animals. I personally suck at drawing and anything good that I create in that region is digitally edited, Unfortunately, I haven't seen a working computer in almost half a year. Her drawings are beautiful and she's taped a good amount of them up on the walls around our house, covering old family pictures. I don't know who's family it is but they look like good people, sometimes it's difficult just looking at them knowing some of the possibilities of what happened to them.
If feels weird calling this house ours, sure we live in it and at this point, nobody is going to come back lecturing us about using their stuff. But every item in the house and the house itself, whether we found it or it was already here, is laced with the guilt of theft. That's why I and Lola cover all the family pictures with Dragons, the drawings are something guilt-free, something that doesn't feel stolen. As an added bonus, it's dragons, what's not to like about having dragons all around?
A lot of the homes we've found here are pretty weird layout-wise compared to what we've seen back in Ontario, Most are three stories tall with one or two rooms on each floor, Nayan's house above the coffee shop is pretty normal which may explain why he likes the place so much. I've told him he could live with us before, but he is adamant about staying there. Becuase the house has two bedrooms me and Lola could've each had our own bedrooms if we wanted, but the bedroom on the second floor had a bunk bed and we were both more than happy to keep the minor sense of normalcy.
I clamber up the curly metal stairs with an echo emanating from each step, the house is dead quiet apart from Lola's barely audible snores, but here even breathing tends to be loud. I depart the stairs and walk into our room, we decorated it to look as similar to our room back home as possible, something we accomplished better than I imagined we could. With the paint color already the same all we had to do was move stuff around and It looks pretty close. I walk up to our bunk bed, climb up the first wooden step of the ladder, and shake her as violently as I can while still keeping my balance. The faded purple tips of her blonde hair shield her eyes from the grey light of the window.
"Lolaaaaaa, Get up!" I whisper right next to her ear.
"F off," She sleeply mumbles, swatting my head away, "It's too early to be awake."
After staying up late every single night she wants to sleep in every single day. I'm an early bird, getting up... well, I really don't know when, but there is always a little bit of light outside in a way I assume is sunrise. It's not like I have nothing to do but going to Nayan's is a bit of a trek for early in the morning and It's so boring with nobody else is awake.
"C'mon, you said you would go scavenging with me this morning."
"Yeah, but I said that when I was awake," She's talking sure, but her eyelids are still closed and I'm certain she's still mid dream.
"So? You're a little bit awake now."
"No, I'm not."
"If you don't get up I'll go get the cowbell," I sweetly threaten.
She tucks her head underneath her pillow with an exagerated groan, "Ok, ok, I'm getting up."
Back in the good 'ole days when there were mornings before school, I always had a mental alarm clock, Lola didn't so I was tasked with waking her up. More often than not she would mumble on about how she would get up, and of course, she didn't actually do it. So one day after she fell back asleep I found this really loud and annoying cowbell under my bed, and to wake her up I got as close to her ear as I could and let it ring until she was near tackling me.
Fortunately for me, not so much for her, I found another cowbell which I still use when waking up Lola, though the mention of using it is typically enough to get her out of bed nowadays.
Once Lola is actually sitting up and clearly awake, I head back down the curly stairs to the first floor to wait for her. I sit down and grab the biology report from the middle of the table along with a candlestick. The biology report isn't anything interesting, It was probably some kids project for school, but It's the only thing we've ever found written in English which makes it one of the coolest things we've ever found.
When I learned about it I was lying on the couch taking a nap when Lola came bursting through the door, jolting me out of my slumber.
"English!" Is all she shouted and It was more than enough to make me shoot off the couch and run towards her.
"English? What? Where?" It's embarrassing how frantic I was over just hearing the word of a language.
She shoved the report into my hands, "Some kids biology project..." She began droning on about the two lives system.
We read through the report together and some of it still makes me laugh, "We have two lives to ensure that we are the most superior race in the universe," I seriously hope that this was just the kid's words and they weren't all this stuck up. I was in shock to finally learn how I didn't die when I was stabbed, though I am fairly disappointed to know it won't happen next time I get that close to death. Not saying I want to be that close to death again, getting stabbed hurts.
Before I see her I can hear the rhythm of her treading down the stairs.
She rushes in energetically, already fully dressed and ready to go.
"Ready slowpoke?"
I close up the packet and stand up, "I'm the slowpoke?"
She hums a yes before pausing by the table, "Are you reading that again?"
"You make it sound like a bad thing? It's the only thing here in English to read."
We grab our backpacks and make our way out into the abandoned streets. The fog is so dense that we can only travel short distances at risk of being getting lost, I can see just to the end of the deserted block.
"Yeah, but reading sucks, the only good side of being in this hellhole, no English teacher telling us to read old books that make no sense."
I laugh at her, "Really? not even just one book that's actually good?"
"Cassie, say it with me, Books. Are. Awful," She smirks.
"I can agree that old books are awful, but you really wouldn't want a book to pass the time here?"
"No, I truly wouldn't," She pauses to glance around and point at a passing building, "Have we gone in there yet?"
"It's one of the bad ones," I say, reminding me that my throat still hurts.
Between the whole blue eye thing and Lola's immunity to the fog's painful effects, we think that Nayan and I were targeted directly by our relation to this world somehow. But Lola wasn't supposed to be a part of that, she just in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Though I have to admit, I am unbelievably jealous of Lola's immunity to the fog, she can walk into whichever building she wants, and while she can still see the fog It doesn't have any real effect on her. When Lola goes out scavenging by herself she typically goes to the bad places that I and Nayan can't.
"How about this one?" She points to a building that looks so similar to where we live that it sends a shudder down my spine.
"I don't think so."
"Then Let's a' go!" She mimics the Mario bros tune.
I stand a few yards away on the sidewalk to wait, though it's starting to no feel more like a lawn with the number of overgrown plants peeking through cracks.
Lola opens up the door and takes a few steps inside, "Clear."
I follow in after her into the building, most of the houses here are pretty cookie-cutter but even the inside is near identical to ours.
"Do you want to play a game?" She turns to ask me.
"What game?"
"Here's how it works. We each go around looking for stuff like we always do, but today our main objective is to find the coolest thing possible, and whoever finds the best thing in five minutes wins."
"Five minutes? I think you forgot about the whole no working clock thing,"
She begins pulling her backpack off, digging though with a huge smile plastered across her face
She shows me an adorable brown plush bear with an embedded timer, "Surprise! Saying five minutes was a bit of bull because I have no clue what the symbols are-"
She continues explaining the bear and its story but I'm too excited to listen. How could I? Almost nothing here uses batteries and all the batteries we've found are completely useless. This is the first thing we've found that is at least technically an electronic that works.
"-Freaking amazing right?" She finishes, passing me the bear.
"Very!" I squeal childishly, examining the plastic dial that as she said, has nothing in English.
"So your up for the game, right?"
"Yes, Yes, Of course, this sounds way more fun than just grabbing stuff."
The bear makes an awful screeching noise as Lola turns the knob to one of the first few symbols, and when she lets it go the clock begins to tick in a rhythmic clicking.
"Go!"
We quickly start scrambling around looking for anything and everything cool, I open up a few cabinets in the kitchen and living room, all that's in there is tupperware and old magazines, nothing cool. There was also a pretty big knife in the kitchen but those stopped being special after a week or so. I follow Lola's echo up the stairs, in one of the two bedrooms attached to the second floor (So not too much like our house) she's laying on her back under the bed, I continue up the staircase to the third floor.
I get off the staircase and right before I walk into a bedroom that I assume belonged to a little girl based on the obsessive unicorns, but something makes me look twice. The stairs don't stop here. Almost every house here has three one or two-room floors, never have I seen a fourth floor.
I continue up the curly staircase, keeping my hand latched around the dusty center pole. The top stops at a wooden trap door, roof entrance? After a few shoves the trap door creaks open, the ticking timer just a faint hum in the background of my curiosity, I climb up the last few steps but stop dead in my tracks once I catch a glimpse of what's up here.
Can you pass out from being so surprised or shocked? I don't think you can cause I would've been tumbling down the stairs by now. I can't believe my eyes, I must've passed out and this is just a dream, surely that's what happened. No, that isn't it, I'm really here, basking in the warmth of the sun. I carelessly throw myself onto the roof, scrambling to stand up in the clear sky.
A cloud of fog rests at my feet, blowing around on the surface of the flat roof. It takes me a moment to realize it in the midst of shock, but my lungs aren't burning anymore, with the fog at my feet and below me around the building the sky above me is clear, in a way like how you feel when you're above the clouds on an airplane. I relish in being able to see the blue sky for the first time in months, I have to restrain myself from staring at the sun long enough to blind me.
I wipe a stray tear from my cheek and stare out into the open air, How did I take this for granted for so long?
A flicker catches the corner of my eye and I dart around to face it, a pole sticks out from the expanse of clouds, it wouldn't be noticeable if wasn't for the blinking red light on the tip, similar to a cell tower. But as soon as it's there, it's gone, leaving no trace behind, the pole lost in the sea of fog.
I screech from downstairs interrupts my thoughts, the timer which must be rusted from the inside.
"I think I won," Lola shouts from downstairs, "Where are you?"
"Up here!" I yell back, my eyes not daring to glance back at the trap door, still entranced by the sight of open air.
Her footsteps pad up the final steps, "What are you-"
"Are you sure you win?" I ask sarcastically.
"Holy shit," a bowling pin clanks against the roof floor, "Yeah, you win."
We share some words over time but for the most part, we're too entranced by the sight of what almost feels like sitting on clouds to be much of conversation. I try to bring myself back to the red blinking light but it's long gone, Lola even tries to help me find it but after a while, I think she stopped believing I saw it to begin with. We must spend over an hour up here until a breeze starts to take over, an hour that feels like seconds.