No more than three minutes later, Fen was standing in a dimly lit corridor staring at the outside of a mahogany door. He wasn't an expert on luck, but he was pretty sure his was the epitome of awful - granted, in a world of supernatural entity's and occurrences having your existence forgotten probably wasn't a first, but it's not like there was a manual for navigating this type of situation.
Unsurprisingly, Auntie Iverson had believed his somewhat tall tale of a mysterious curse. He didn't blame her, but was a little hurt, unreasonably so of course, that she had forced him out - he wasn't even able to insist on his payment!
Sighing, Fen moved down the corridor and analysed his next step. It was certainly possible - although very unlikely, that all these cases were not connected - after all a person he barely knew, a madman and a fairly old
woman forgetting him wasn't truly impossible.
He doubted it though. Auntie Iverson didn't seem like a person suffering cognitively, and it the cases seemed to similair and connected to just be a random occurance of fate. Perhaps testing it further was a good idea - after all he didn't know if people he met in the future would remember him, or if he would be immediately forgotten - maybe he could even attempt to fix it.
It also wasn't exactly like Fen was going to lose much. There was probably a dozen, if not less, people on the planet who could've even recognised him before his curse had descended.
"The perks of having no human contact eh?" Fen thought to himself bitterly.
As Fen turned the corner, he felt something was off. It wasn't exactly anything tangible, just a slight feeling.
Only a second later, he knew something was off.
The man was standing there, silently, unmoving.
There was something very wrong with him.
Something very, very wrong.
He didn't know why, or how - Fen couldn't tell anything about him. The most he could perceive was the simple, unconscious assumption his brain had made that it was in fact a man- and even this seemed to be based on some unknown intuition, rather than any logical or cordial understanding.
This unknown intuition was also screaming for his body to move. It didn't matter where, it didn't matter that his legs were seemingly glued to the ground. Fen just needed to get as far away as possible, quickly.
Forcing his seemingly useless legs into
motion, Fen took off into a sprint. Luckily, Fen remembered there was a side exit the opposite direction from his, and the man's position - his situation wasn't completely hopeless.
Adreneline coursing through his body, Fen dragged his legs at an astonishing pace - at least for a mundane human. The man had seemed so dangerous, so repulsive, that his slightly scrawny body had broken through whatever perceived limits his brain had set on it.
Unfortunately, it wasn't enough.
From what Fen's peripheral vision could tell, the man wasn't exactly moving. He was simply… there. Not quite caught up to Fen, but undoubtedly gaining.
Fen crashed down the first of many flights of stairs.
The man gained.
Fen crashed down another, his ankle twisting slightly, causing a gasp of air to escape his already burning lungs.
The man gained.
By now, the man was practically upon Fen. Not quite enough to reach him, if the shadowy figure even could affect him physically, but enough for Fen to know something had to change.
For what seemed to be the hundredth time today, Fen wracked his brains. There was still three stairwells left before he could even think of reaching the exit, there was no chance he would make it. Perhaps he could grab one of the nearby metallic trash cans to use as some kind of barrier? No, it would most likely only slow him down, and besides - something as tangible as a trash can seemed unlikely to affect something as mystical as the man.
Eventually, Fen came to a decision. Out of very few options, there seemed to be only one that had any hope of working - perhaps a little risky, but it wasn't like that was anything new.
Taking one last look back at the shadowy figure practically breathing down his neck at this point, Fen swerved to the right just before the beginning of a stairwell and jumped out the window.