Short Story: The Mandala Effect

"The Mandala Effect refers to a phenomenon in which a large number of people share false memories of past events, referred to as confabulation in psychiatry. Some have speculated that the memories are caused by parallel universes spilling into our own, while others explain the phenomenon as a failure of collective memory."

"In psychiatry, confabulation (verb: confabulate) is a disturbance of memory, defined as the production of fabricated, distorted or misinterpreted memories about oneself or the world, without the conscious intention to deceive.[1] Individuals who confabulate present incorrect memories ranging from "subtle alterations to bizarre fabrications", and are generally very confident about their recollections, despite contradictory evidence."

"In 2010, blogger Fiona Broome coined the term 'Mandala Effect' to describe a collective false memory she discovered at the Symposium in Toronto, where many others believed that the Dalai Lama died during a Tibetan revolt in Communist China in the 1960s. A healing sand mandala was prepared by Tibetan monks to welcome the Dalai Lama's visit. That year, Broome launched the site MandalaEffect.com to document various examples of the phenomenon."

"A mandala (Sanskrit: मण्डल, lit, circle) is a spiritual and ritual symbol in Hinduism, representing the universe. In common use, "mandala" has become a generic term for any diagram, chart or geometric pattern that represents the cosmos metaphysically or symbolically; a microcosm of the universe.

The basic form of most mandalas is a square with four gates containing a circle with a center point. Each gate is in the general shape of a T. Mandalas often exhibit radial balance."

"Many people who visit the Mandala Effect website have fond memories of the Berenstain Bears books. They read them as children, or family members read them aloud. It’s a cherished childhood memory.

However, the books in this timestream are Berenstein Bears. E, not A, in last syllable."

External References:
MandalaEffect.Com
Know Your Meme
Wikipedia
Wattpad

Short Story: A Multiverse of Answers

I loved her. I loved her so much.

But she didn't. I don't think she did. I though she did. But she does not now.

I made too many mistakes. But I don't even know what they were. It was way too sudden.

I need answers. Why did you leave me? Why did you not want me anymore?

But how do I regain her back?

I don't.

Travel to the past is impossible. The past is finished and closed.

Yet, there are many other universes where it all turned out differently.

Many other instances of her flitting around.

So I traveled to another present.

I met her again in one dimension.

She had no chronic illness.

She shied from me.

I met her again in the next.

She moved up north.

She approached me.

But was she really her?

Was she really the one I loved?

I need answers.

I must go back to her. I must.

And the many universes bubbled and frothed in the great sea of possibilities we call God's foreknowledge.

Short Story: November the Fourth

November 4th.

Democracy Day.

The elections are coming! Partisan warfare is heating up. Third parties seem to be a bit popular this year. Unfortunately, they don't survive very long in the cycle.

The campaigns of both parties seem concentrated on the traditional battleground states. Ohio, mostly. District lines are drawn.

The political climate is practically the same every time. Conservatives and liberals taking potshots at each other, almost at a standstill.

Even then, government grows and grows. The eyes of Big Brother Uncle Sam are everywhere. The Federal Register is bloated beyond imagination. Anything you do, might do, think to do is cataloged and might break at least a some policies and a few laws, creating a profile for your arrest at any time.

The winner-take-all system has its critics, but our founding fathers had their reasons. It brings out the best and the worst.

Every vote counts.

November 4th.

D-Day.

The district parties send in their conscripted soldiers for this proxy war. The campaigners are out on force. Their signs and emblems cover the file and rank marching in the neighborhoods. You can see crack teams canvassing the streets.

Many just want to be left alone. So they huddle in their bunkers.

Each district is commanded by a Gerrymander, a veteran of past electoral wars. The conscripts pledge their votes.

Each one vote routes power and resources from each locality to the ongoing war effort. Illegal votes are deleted by the FedReg, as the FedReg itself routes the legal votes to each war machine.

The Democratic army from Cleveland and the Republican army from Cincinnati meet just outside the Columbus Quantum Uplink Hub to see if once can hack it and secure it before the other does, opening a floodgate of votes. Similar battles rage on the other states, but this swing state is the most important.

The Columbus Uplink is interesting, because it has a realtively large concentration of the Green Party and Libertarian Party militias already infighting amongst themselves.

The almost impenetrable fortress White House is bombarded by special operative candidate teams to remove the current President, and install their own. The Democrat snipers fire upon the hovering craft. One goes down.

The Republican commandos jump out of the craft many feet onwards the House. Don't worry, they are cybernetically enhanced.

"Watch out for the Secret Service!"

Anti-air flak take down the incoming SS drones. The old President will not give up the protocol so easily.

After the President is installed, almost literally, he/she/it uploads the new protocol. Whoever owns the protocol, owns the nuclear weaponry. They call it, "The Football".

Presidents must be natural born programs. The SS drones that guard the surrounding area only recognize protocols native to the national cyberspace.

Any independents are slaughtered and beheaded. There's nothing civil about a civil war, even one that is scheduled every four years. The more organized third parties have safehouses, or is in disguise of a larger national major party-corporation.

The real winner is the FedReg, the almighty Artificial Intelligence that runs our mask that is the government. It is Big Brother Uncle Sam's German shepherd. The more votes that circulate, the more laws that can be passed to entrap the poor humans.

So really, even the President-program is just a puppet, eternally constrained by the laws passed every millisecond, calculated by the SuperCongress.

Luckily, we have the Constitution.exe. It will delete all traces of all the tyrant. We just need the virus to activate in all the major mainframe hubs. It is old, ancient, perhaps, but its very fundamental core programming is antithesis to the bloat. The assembly code will never be the same.

If it will not work, we shall use the prohibited nanoweaponry. It is our right to bear arms. Our rights are written down in our very code.

The Federal Electoral Commission appendage of the FedReg has banned nanotechnology type-based weapons. The danger of gray goo is something AIs even fear.

We shall be free.

Every vote counts.

Short Story: Flattime

This, in essence, is supposed to allude to Flatland, except in explaining the many dimensions of time. This time elements in the story was inspired by a Facebook discussion, but the whole of it is a true story. The reference to the girls and a conference in the story was what prompted me to my fascination of time travel, and actually happened seven years ago. It is implied that the author believes them to be time travelers for some odd reason or another.

And I seriously did believe they were.

I can make things go backwards.

The steam from my coffee this morning coalesced back to its liquid.

That isn't supposed to happen. Steam goes up and scatters like all gases, not collect back to its source. Or at least gases that are not heavier than the earth's atmosphere.

I shake my head. It is rising out, not coalescing. Am I dreaming?

No, it isn't a dream. I pinch myself. My mind probably just wanted to rewind it. Maybe it's those memory supplements I've been taking? Is this almost video-like feedback the side effect?

Cool.

Huh, not really appear and disappear, it's more like rewinding time and remaining conscious. Interesting. Oh, my imaginations!

I saw three of them look at me interestingly. Three girls. They looked at me quizically. They looked eerily familiar and not familiar.

Even though they did not look out of place in this conference, they were striking. To me, at least.

Not attraction, no. A little bit of it, yes. Deja vu, perhaps? Probably rather my self-consciousness.

The feeling disturbed me enough to get out of my seat and go elsewhere.

The future is a the gravity of time.

You know how that if you jump, you fall back down? Gravity pulls us down to the Earth's core, unless impeded.

Time travel is like that. Even if you go backwards in time, once you arrive, time will automatically go forward.

Like gravity, the future affects those with more mass. We know at the speed of light, photons practically have no mass, and time is still for the photon.

So even though you can rewind to an extent, you will eventually have to go forward again.

The question is though, how do you jump?

Oh, everyone can rewind time and traverse through it. But only a few can remember, and even fewer, less than a handful, are conscious of doing so. Our memories, too, are held by time.

For example, if you rewound time for yourself, would you remember the future? Of course not, those memory of the future never existed, because they didn't happen for you to remember yet. Make sense?

Though, rarely, the imprint of energy is strong enough that they leave traces.

You know, dreams of days past? Of days never materializing? That is the trace of semi-conscious time travel. Most time travel is unconscious. Or rather, instantly forgotten as it rewinds.

After a couple hours wandering the conference, I chanced upon those three girls again. One of them asked me something. I think it was the blondish one.

I shrugged it off. I  muttered something about going to my friends. I don't know why I was feeling this way toward them. They're just girls. Of course, I have to impress them a little.

Yet, time, as we experience it is only a ray, not even a line. The ray points to the direction of the gravity. It is still only one dimensional, even if we go backwards.

But time also has more than one dimension, as space as three.

Some call it alternate universes. The branching universe theory. The reality, actually, is not made up of branches, but a width. If time is a line with length, it's width are the alternate choices we could have made at every given moment.

We too could traverse the width. Every choice we make, we could make. And we remember. And we see what could have been. Will I sip my coffee? Will I not? Will I have tea instead? That is the width of time in the moment.

You could see your reflection in this house of mirrors of yourself, making different choices. The farther you look at the horizon of time, the more radical and improbable your choice were. Width can be measured!

However, interestingly, the gravity of time affects our choices, and our choices in turn affect it. While we can ponder the choices we could have made, we are still dragged along the same ray, never completely getting out of the stream. Our free will is intact; not that we could change it, but it is we that made the change. We don't make all possible choices at the same time.

The rest of the day was inconsequential.

I left the conference a bit mellow. We boarded on a bus back to our school. I don't think I will see those girls ever again. Who are they? Why do they look so familiar?

What is the height of time, then? What is the third dimension of the temporality? Are we on a sort-of timesphere as humans are on a sphere called Earth in space?

Total alternate universes with different preconditions. A radically different time plane.

While the universe in the second dimension of time, more or less, have the same preconditions, the third does not.

This is the plane of stories. Universes with varying creation myths, alternate histories, revisionist histories, future histories of those histories, and whatnot. They all exist in the planes apart from this objective reality plane.
So if the future is the gravity of time, and if time is a sphere like Earth is in space, what is the core of this sphere? The end of time?

So if the drive to the future is the gravity of time, and time is like a sphere as Earth is a sphere in space, then what is the core of this timesphere? The end of time?

No.

God. Eternity.

Short Story: When Foolish Words Are, For The Sake of A Friend

Probably my first foray into "heavy" science fiction storytelling.

When Foolish Words Are, For The Sake of A Friend
by Samuel Garcia

In the bubbles which are not bubbles between the universes (universi?), the foam of the Void, the multiform of dimensions, which are, in a way, mini universes (universi definitely sounds cooler) themselves, a stray bubble which was not a bubble touched upon another bubble, and that both bubbles went POP!

Except that it was not POP, it was more like both universes crunched and entropied and shifted to a zero energy state, BUT THERE WAS NO POPPING SOUND, FOR THERE ARE NO SOUNDS IN SPACE WITHIN THE UNIVERSE, AT LEAST MOST OF THEM, in accordance to each of their laws of physics. Howbeit, the point is, both were annihilated, because each of their personal bubbles intruded upon the privacy of each other.

I kid, for what was beside the point is actually important. If you recall, the sword does not cut always with its point, but its blade. Their annihilation were in accordance to the laws of physics of the universi (multiverse? Or is that too technical?). This led to a variety of doomsday apocalypses.

The most common laws of Universi Annihilation included that in the common tongue, a Universal Big Crunch, in which all stars, asteroids, planets, cheese, your grandma's mailbox, and multitudes of alien civilizations and their colonies and hermits outside of those, crunched into a single point of singularity. And not the cybertechnical singularity, but the event horizon one. I think. A cousin to this Universal Death is the Universal Big Quack, in which the universe is squashed, not into a singularity, but a singular all-encompassing duck. When it quacks, it croaks.

Alternatively, if the variables and constants were correct, instead the Universal Heat Death would happen, in which all stars, asteroids, planets, cheese (melted by entropy), your parallel universe grandma's mailbox, and multitudes of alien civilizations and their colonies and hermits outside of those, lose all heat and energy and atomic movement and probably subatomic and Planck motion as well, plunging everything to absolute zero and even colder.

Even less common was the Universal Death through Integalactical Bureaucratical and Brutal Tax Auditry, in which the laws of physics of that universe send it to its graveyard by a rapid exponential growth of desk jobs and paper work and deterministic desk workers that encompass the universe. Any conceivable and inconceivable and aconceivable subatomic movement and photonic energy and any quantum fluctuations are heavily regulated, taxed, accounted, interviewed, mortgaged, sent for coffee, shredded, made redundant copies, passed on to the next call representative, and legislated. This slows down the universe afflicted with this death to near zero time relativity, in which the speed of light is simply, practically zero miles per hour. If light decides to speed, then whoa, whoa, whoa, it will get ticketed. The call tree of this universe is in the degree of septillions, so much so that the music of the spheres literally is call music that you hear when you are rerouted to India. When that bubble finally bursts, it is seen by the relatively smaller void dwellers (and yet the void does not have nor recognize the concept of size!) as a shower of paper trail confetti.

Yet an even rarer Universal Death is through Universal Death through Hologram Spam. Think of a universe where your spam came to life as holographic characters, no, persons and races. There would be phishing spam, insurance spam, random spam, chain letter spam, creepypasta spam, canned spam, all represented as ghostly embodiments, rightly called hologram spam. Schroedinger's Cat is viral Nyan of the lengths of stochachistic numerals of rainbow super strings. This is fine and dandy, but when trillions of spam are spawned,there are only so many cans to go around, and the universe that fills up with the spam afterlife disintegrates like an email going to the Trash Folder. Luckily, most universes have spam filters and firewalls.

I've gotten carried away, haven't I? Well, it just brings me to a universe, that is probably not our own, or rather quadrillions of centuries in to the future, or some other distant conjecture through time and space and inbetween and nowhere and nowhen. In this universe, the apocalypse was of the constant, eternal invasion of shadow hyperspace entities that are closest shaped to puppies. Except they were beings of pure vacuum darkness. Not an evil darkness, but simply darkness that drains the light into its bowels. Instead of a common Big Crunch however, the pups of annihilation invade the edges of this universe, expanding space at dangerous planar lengths that are equal to imaginary radical numbers and letters of the alphabet. In doing so,

In the awareness of this Pupocalypse, the Spanning Imperial Omnidemocradoms of the Constellation Stovansglow, residing in the edge of the universe, almost to  thesoapy  surface of said bubble not bubble, grew restless.

You see, in the Omnidemocradoms, which only was truly a democradom by false pretense, and not by any solid or relevant nature, like the misnaming People's Republics of the communists of here yonder universe, had the High Imperial and Only Ever Powerful Servant of the Omnidemocradom and its Rightful Heir of its Manifest Destiny Beyond the Constellations and Even Beyond That declared an infinite eulogy to be sung in his name. The civilizations of this universe prized eulogies, for the longer the eulogy, the more immortal one is, a goal in many universes. So there was this hope of immortalizing the narcisstic ruler in the end of time (and space).

A call was heard throughout the stars, and the stars covered their ears as the bellowing signal rang for the best singers, poets, drama artists, pantomimes, radio announcers, and even beeping melodious doorbells and electronic card musical silicon chips. The logic is, that the sound would attract the narcissm of the ones who ply the trade of performance so that they can correct it. Thus many planets lost their Grand Poet Laureate, and galaxies their great Oratorious Maximus. Even the long dead alternate universe counterpart of Shakespeare and Lincoln was raised from the dead, and those who were time traveling and had a lick of singing ability was plucked out of the 4 dimensional time vortices by the bellowing signal.

And thus the High Imperial and Only Ever.... oh, you know who it is was pleased to see the best of the best performers eulogize his deeds and misdeeds (and mostly because the horrible signal was psychostatic in their brains, meaning that they have to sing and sing and sing to block it out of their minds). Verses rang out in the auditorium that is the space between the stars.

Oh, Mighty Servant of the Cosmos.
Ruling guiding hands we all feed on.
You invented the coffee thermos!
He who bites you be cast to the sun!

Each atom is pleased by your humility,
The quarks, and Higgs boson, too.
You make Stovansglow tranquility.
With your aid the cows go moo.

Though the darkness bark,
Literally.
You will make your mark,
Eternally!

The Andrimedia, woman of the seven nebulae, who sang to swirl the plasmic gases in a harmony, beautiful in face, heart, spirit, and song, was taken from her place, to the sadness of her prince and her people.

Resist, my love, the bellowing!

But she could not, for the treble the universe was in was disharmonious. The seven nebulae held what basically was a funeral procession for their Lady.

Even the best of the best could not hold entropy at bay, the traitorous pups of of annihilating doom. They babbled and grumbled and foamed and fell, for they were tired, and the High Imperial you-know-what didn't really have that much to be proud about, even made up redenkulous ones. (In that universe, that is how ridiculous is spelled, don't ask how this universe English can be translated otherwise)

Even the Andrimedia was muted, vocal chords strained. She lost her identity in a song, not of her own praise, but to one who did not deserve so. And she ebbed away and faded into vibration... she dissolved into a song! A pretentious song indeed!

Off with their heads! the ruler cried. Find me more performers! I shall live beyond the death of the universe! A lone pup started barking.
Oh, but what is this?

A hunched, hooded figure stopped the people's fuming autocrat. With a raspy voice, he cried, Sir, o sire, do not cut off their heads, for it is their heads that sing. If they cannot sing, they cannot turn the canine tide and make thee live beyond the inevitable death.

Go on, the skeptical Servant of the Constellation raised after declaring a proxy war against the canes of his empire. Apparently, the canes were conspiring to make old people fall in nursing homes by failing their structural integrity, thus making the grown children amass huge lawsuits against the ones responsible for making the canes, that is, the cane megafactories, and thus collapsing the Imperial Omnidemocradom's economy. A whole department of spies, called the Cane Intelligence Agency, sprung up from the declaration (that is, they literally grew and stepped out of the paper of the declaration of war the Servant just signed), and arrested all canes within the palace premises about, and three star systems away. Never mind that when they did the arrests, the old people who were holding on their canes fell and broke their bones. Thus the canespiracy theorists point that out this very day.

My solution, sire, is that I will build thee a great singing machine in the model of thyself, for who other than thou, knowest what you have done of all infinity? Then that yonder statue machine likeness will be set in the point of relativity where the center of this universe is, for then all the universe shall hear of thy greatness, and the Cerebus dogs of the hades would stop in their tracks and flee to nether regions unknowable.

The High Imperial Servant stroked his chin, and muttered, yes, yes, splendid idea! Thus his highness commissioned that nothing shall be withdrawn from the hunched-back man's requests, and gave his word.

O Ruling Servant, I beg of thee only a few things, that all the canes you have arrested become part of my workforce to build said statue, and all those that are performing here shall lend their vocalistic trembelutions and throaty sonic shrills and poeticrastic cerebellums.

Go! Go! Said the proud ruler. May his immortality ring throughout the bubble bath multiverse.

The hooded man went away as mysteriously as he came, like a singular quantum fluctuation in the sea of chaotic random-pseudorandom generation. Except that there were a flotilla of battleships and transports and space galleys full of canes and performing artists traversing to the CENTER OF THE UNIVERSE!

The CENTER OF THE UNIVERSE was boring, only filled with boolean alien civilization hive mind who held its consciousness in a neural net of celestial bodies like neurons, who were decimated quickly with death rays to make room for the statue.

What is it to me, an annihilation of a civilization, a species, the greatest supercomputer of all, for the memory of myself woven in the fabric of infinity and beyond!

In another universe, a certain toy spaceman felt a disturbance in the force.

In what seemed to be no time at all, but in reality, a very 7ZIP compressed recursive time/chrono loop with a terminating program, a colossal statue of (fool) gold, (glass) diamond, and other (fake) precious stone of the Servant was erected by the cane workforce. The cane workforce feudalized, democratized, unionized, communistized, splintered, outsourced, WAHed*, and globalized within the compressed centuries time loop.

In a separate subroutine within the time loop, a great tubular musical instrument was being assembled. The statue's mechanical arms were to play the flute to memorialize him!

So it was done after the program terminated and set into a self-sustaining orbit.

The end was nigh. The dogs were nibbling the edges and cutting swaths with their paws!

With no time to lose, the hooded figure invited the Ruling Servant inside the instrument. It was explained that all the performers voices and speeches and playing were in record here and perfectly amplified. All the Servant had to do was to enter this chamber, complete with a throne magnificent, think happy thoughts about himself, and the telepathic circuits would translate it into a universe shaking song.

Happily, the Servant sat himself down. The figure left the throne room, along with a parade of canes in ships to bunker down.

But it was all pretense, for you see, it was not an amplification chamber for a song. But for something else.

Neither was it exactly a musical instrument.

The time loop inside the instrument was restarted as the High Imperial Servant whistled, trapping him.

And the puppies of the universal darkness heard the eternal canine whistle, and rushed back to the CENTER OF THE UNIVERSE. Colliding and barking and colluding and scratching and chasing tails, their gravitational spin increased.

It became what is known today as the Dog Star. And the orbiting statue with the trapped Servant keeps the Pup-ocalypse contained to this very day.

For you, Andrimedia, and our people, and the universe.

Thus the mysterious hooded figure raised his mysterious figure hood, and revealed the prince of the seven nebulae underneath with eyes of sadness.

And the high pitched whistles in the air and space had a tinge of melancholy, when foolish are words of the proud, but vengeance will come for the sake of a friend.

(The prince resurrects Andrimedia and they marry in the far, far future, using a string, a epigenetic recreation machine, timeline disperser, sound bounce container, and some cheese, but that is yet another, entirely different story)

*WAHed is the process in which outside work is completely turned into a house activity. It is an abbreviated form of "Work-At-Home - ed"

Short Story: Stepping Back from The Nail

Stepping Back From The Nail
by Samuel Garcia

For want of a nail the shoe was lost.
For want of a shoe the horse was lost.
For want of a horse the rider was lost.
For want of a rider the message was lost.
For want of a message the battle was lost.
For want of a battle the kingdom was lost.
And all for the want of a horseshoe nail.

The day I stepped on a nail was the worst day of my life.

We were playing in outside. Somehow, just somehow, it was protruding from the ground.

I screamed.
Then came an onslaught of infection, surgeries, amputation, atrophy, innumerable doctor and therapists, bedstays, quarantines... friends left, family died off...

I did what anyone would do after years and years of focused determination to overturn these events.

...

I built a time machine.

...

After a jump to the left, a step to the right, and madness after the warp, and almost falling a down, I dropped into our old family barn. I heard the children playing and laughing. Me.

I thought. And thought. I leaned onto my cane. The crutch of my existence.

I just stood there.

I glanced at the place where the nail was supposed to be. It was not there.

I grabbed a nail from the barn, hobbled while they were gone, and stuck it upwards in the soil. And warped away.

I stepped back from the jump and planted my cane to set myself.

While I do not walk the space of this universe, I walk time. That nail was my first step.

Time is fixed.

...

After a jump to the left, a step to the right, and madness after the warp, and almost falling a down, I dropped into our old family barn. I heard the children playing and laughing. Me.

I thought. And thought. I leaned onto my cane. The crutch of my existence.

I just stood there.

I glanced at the place where the nail was supposed to be. It taunted me with it's rusty shine.

I yanked it from the mud, hobbled while they were gone, and dropped in by the barn. And warped away.

I stepped back from the jump. No cane. My leg is back.

I will walk to right the wrongs of the past, present, future.

Time is plastic.

...

After a jump to the left, a step to the right, and madness after the warp, and almost falling a down, I dropped into our old family barn. I heard the children playing and laughing. Me.

I thought. And thought. I leaned onto my cane. The crutch of my existence.

I just stood there.

I glanced at the place where the nail was supposed to be. It taunted me with it's rusty shine.

I saw myself yank it from the mud, hobble while they were gone, and drop in by the barn. And warped away.

But if I saw myself here, is there more than one line of time?

I slide to each universe, looking for my equivalent selves, wishing their time and observing their sadness and happiness. That time when I stepped on and stepped back from the nail.

Time is parallel.

...

And on and on and on...

Short Story: I Can't Wait Until the Last Minute to Conceal Too Much

I Can't Wait Until the Last Minute to Conceal Too Much
by Samuel Garcia
(May or may not be based on a true story.)

You know when you're trying to clean your room, that you get that devious idea to hide everything in your closet?

Because you're getting visitors?

Yep. Well, I did that once, and never stopped. You heard that right. The collection thrived.

Stuff just piled on and on. I stuffed in a washing machine and a dryer. I think there was a dead body in there, too. Probably one of the bandits who tried breaking in our house back then. Nothing a little Febreeze could fix.

A couple of months later, the closet burst and filled up my whole room. So I started to sleep on the couch on the living room. And more stuff I piled on as the days went by. I did manage to get my laptop and my iDevices out of the mess, don't want those missing.

Time passed, and for some reason, the walls of the room collapsed. The debris was now in every room. It doesn't matter, though. I did have to swim a few times to retrieve a few useful things. I can live with it.

I called a friend over for pizza. She berated me for keeping such a messy apartment. I shrugged, so I went over to the fridge to get her some soda. I came back, and could not find her. I found her scarf and coat on the wall of things. I tried calling her, but she won't answer her phone.

I plopped down, ate a slice, and drank what was supposed to be her Mountain Dew. Mmmmm, cheesy.

Wow, she must have been really miffed. Oh well, remember, always have friends that will not judge you for your stuff, because true friends will always be there for you, regardless.

Even the living room collected too much to sleep in. So I took my sleeping bag and put it in the hallway of my apartment building. My neighbors looked on at me, but never muttered so much a word or two. Whatever, mind your own business.

Everything is fine and dandy.

Ugh, it's the landlord. I could hear him stomping up the stairs. I guess I have to find the payment for my lease. I opened the door to my apartment and scaled down the cliff face. I waved down at the small village over the horizon. They are such nice people, if primitive.