[8 YEARS LATER]

  PUEBLO, COLORADO

  JUNE 12, 2180

  Fourteen-year-old Iker waited for Bastian in the boy's bathroom for an annoying amount of time. He no longer needed a hall pass to be there; South Park Elementary's hologram hall monitors no longer noticed students in the hallway. And Iker was thinking about that because he kept thinking he forgot to ask for it when he left the only class he was ever split up from Bastian and Camilo.

  "Where the fuck are you?"

  There was no need to look into the broken mirror that was supposed to be fixed by graduation. Iker already knew he had acne on both of his cheeks. Bastian had jokingly referred to it as a needed debuff. The roof was quite porous, allowing gray skylight to light up whatever was left of the marble inside the stony bathroom. And upon thinking about graduation once more, Iker came to one realization.

  South Park Elementary only went up to grade five, and Iker was supposed to be a freshman in high school. As more memories poured in, Iker remembered he had actually never attended middle school. The recollections, where he was, and what he had been thinking when he gained awareness that he was in South Park Elementary made no coherent sense.

  You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.

  More overwhelming than the horrors that came from these epiphanies was the dilapidated swinging doors that crashed onto the concrete floor, the culprit being the powerful gust that came from the absent hallway. Iker's wide eyes looked past the threshold to discover a smoggy sky above a crumbling suburbia. The hallway he remembered being there was gone.

  While panting Iker asked, "... Bastian?"

  Treading with the utmost fear, his sneakers no longer resounding the empty school unsettled Iker further. As he crept closer to the destroyed threshold it became clear that most or all of the physical school had disappeared too. It seemed the bathroom was all that had remained from the anomaly that caused this.

  And his gut instinct that forced Iker to creep to the threshold was correct to do so because he heard other noises other than the ghastly gust. It was a cacophony of capricious footsteps, cartoony chatter, and the chiming of magical motion. When Iker arrived to the threshold he pulled up the hood on his black hoodie and carefully scanned the raptured suburbia with one shadowed eye peeking out.

  Almost as if these aberrations of hologram and spontaneous flesh from the earthplexus were reacting to Iker's field of vision, fictional and non-fictional characters that either would be affected by legal or social sensitivities were vanishing before Iker could decipher who they were. However, one physical and unconscious being laid among the ruble and yellow grass that once belonged to the destroyed school.

  Among concrete hedges around twenty meters away from a scared Iker, was a sleeping lion cub.