My mouth dropped open.
I must be hearing things.
"What is my task?" I asked just to be sure that what I had heard was exactly what Snow had said before.
"Your first task is to prepare for your travel back in time," Snow said cheerfully. So I wasn't hearing things wrong.
I was about to say something about how ridiculous it sounded when I stopped and closed my mouth.
I had been feeling out of it since I woke up. The feeling of something being different, of something not being right with me, with my surroundings, kept growing while Snow was talking.
I didn't think anything of it at first because I could see and speak to Snow, who was new and not of this world, not of my world.
I had dismissed that feeling because I had an explanation for it already.
Or, at least, I thought I did. But I didn't.
At this very moment, I finally realized that what I was feeling since I saw Snow when I opened my eyes was unfamiliarity masked with familiarity.
I was me, Anna Geyser, a 29-year-old woman who worked with phones even though my wish had been to open my own cafe when I was still in school.
But when I inspected my body, it was all wrong. The tattoos on my arms and ankles, the rings that I never took off my fingers, and my blond hair were gone. My body was also different.
My work was a sitting job and since I was working almost every day I never had time to exercise, not that I even wanted to, and I like to eat which meant I had gained quite a lot of weight by the time I reached 29. But now I was slim, not skinny, I still had a little bit of fat on me, I was just slim.
Like I had been when I was younger.
I looked at Snow, who had become silent, with suspicion.
Was I still in my own body?
"Snow," I said cautiously, "What happened to my body?" My voice cracked a little as I asked.
The light flashed yellow and stayed like that for almost 10 seconds before it turned back to blue and Snow answered, "Your body's time has already been turned back to when you were 16 years old. This is to help you in your preparation."
"Preparation?" I rubbed my arms where I used to have tattoos, feeling naked without them. "What exactly do you want me to do here, Snow? How am I supposed to prepare for something like time travel? It's not like I can take things with me when I go back!" my voice rose to a shout.
"Yes, you can," Snow countered, "You have infinite inventory space to store all the things you wish to store. The inventory is bound to your soul, so anything and everything stored inside the inventory will travel with you to wherever your soul goes."
Snow moved to the side of my head and the light in the middle of it flashed silver. A window opened up in front of me. It looked exactly like the window for inventories in video games.
"Then how do I put things inside?" I asked while trying to touch the screen with my hand, but it just went through it like it wasn't even there.
"You just have to think about wanting to store the item you wish to put in the inventory and it will be put inside automatically."
I explored the inventory a bit with my mind and saw that I could put things in categories and sub-categories. There were other functions I couldn't open yet. I left those alone.
"Everything you put in the inventory will remain in the state they have been put there." Snow's voice brought me back to focus.
"So hot remains hot and cold remains cold?" I asked just to be clear.
"Yes."
There was silence for a full minute until I saw Snow's light flash yellow for a moment and it spoke again, "You are currently in a pocket universe, in the world that is an exact copy of your original world. You are the only living being here and this world repeats the same 24 hours every day."
What?
I was where?
And I was what?
The only living being in this world?
What Snow had just told me stirred something in me and I ran to my mom's room only to find it empty.
I had been living with my mother since I was 18 because of her poor health. And now her room was empty. No mom and no cats that we had either.
I checked the entire apartment.
I was alone.
"Where is my mom?" I asked Snow with a voice coated with panic and anger.
"Your mother is still in her bed, sleeping, in your original world's original timeline."
"Original timeline..." I mumbled
"Yes," Snow came closer to me, its blue light illuminating my face, smoothing my anger, calming my panic. "Once you travel back in time, a new timeline is created. You will have to create new bonds and relationships. You will also have to mind that the people from the new timeline do not know what has happened in the old one."
I sighed. It all sounded logical. Of course it did. Obviously if I was traveling back in time, the people from that timeline wouldn't come with me.
"So," I started, forcing the words out of me, "All I have to do now is to prepare for my new life?"
Snow moved away from me again and the light flashed green, "Yes. I suggest you think about your future worlds as well. You never know where you might end up or which timeline. There are a lot of different worlds out there in the universe.
This pocket universe with this looping world was created for you so you could gather necessary supplies for your travels, without having to use your own money or other resources."
I sighed again, "So it would be a lot easier for me if I ever ended up in a primitive world, to already have a soap and shampoo?"
"That's right," Snow sounded cheery while answering.
I sighed for the third time.