Chapter 1 Straw 10

A friend once told me he never gets any rain where he lives. As for me, I can’t imagine life without it. Ever since the day I was born, I’m told there’s never been a day that the downpour would cease, even for a moment. According to my parents, it’s an effect looming along the east and west coasts of a phenomenon from back in the day called “Global Warming”, where irresponsible uses of inefficient energy systems had nearly flooded the entire planet with melted ice… at least, that’s what I’m told. Personally I think it’s gotta be an exaggeration, but either way, this was a result. Rain. Rain rain rain rain rain. Day after day, either a gentle patter on my window, or a raging torrent against my thin, apartment walls. Every so often, a careless cloud eater would fly head first into the window, and every so often, I’d go online and order another can of short lived repellant. I’ve heard the ones you buy in stores are better than the printed kind, but I can’t say I usually have the force of will to leave my abode to make the purchase.
It’s easier this way, to keep away from the city. I’d be lying to say I trust any of the people in this world with something as simple as going about their day without disrupting my own. Machines are more reliable to me, and it’s fine that way. Maybe that implies somewhere that I’m a tad antisocial - I honestly can’t say I know for sure. It’s not like I hate the crowds, or the loud streets, or anything of the sort. It’s just easier when I avoid it all, and keep to myself. I suppose most of the people in Sector One would disagree though. Assuming the info-census is accurate, many of the citizens in Sector One are prospective immigrants, looking to colonize the newest, hottest set of martian territories, simply waiting for their turn among the launches in the adjacent Sector Two. Meanwhile, rather than goals and prospects, I instead filled my life with various collections of figurines and model swords from various games and shows I’d enjoyed over the years. Each on a shelf or hung neatly by my door, as if I’d ever have any guests to show them off to in the first place. Or as if anyone who would come over would be impressed by them in the slightest. I doubt anyone with that mindset could possibly take up as burdensome a burden as colonizing mars.
Not to say I was unhappy in any sort. Perhaps many people, not just colonists, would think that my lifestyle is one led by a man with no determined purpose in life. And perhaps they’d agree that experiences outweigh the value of such material goods. To which I suppose I’d retort that a “purpose” is only realized by those that want to improve their situation. Anyone who’s content with their life should not need a purpose, as their purpose has already been fulfilled. Those that seek adventure should do whatever they can to make their every waking moment a new experience, and people like me - who do not - should not. In fact, I’d be lying if I said I’d ever left Sector One at all. Every day of my life, as far as I can remember, I’ve never seen more than a summer twilight’s worth of light through what’s now been come to be known as Lake Nimbus. (Though I suppose I’ve not a clue what a summer’s twilight truly looks like.) Unfortunately, though it is a calming scene, with that darkness comes crime. I don’t believe any shopkeeper with half a mind would leave their stores unprotected in a city like this, with security systems being as affordable as ever, but just walking around in the dark can be a hazard itself in the city of unending night. Especially with the pathetic excuse of a justice system we were left with when mars became the new hotspot for political happenings, I wouldn’t consider walking down most streets in this city to be a “leisurely stroll”, per se.
Instead, I can just sit here and enjoy the gentle beating of the rain against-
BAM
The sudden noise evicted me from my trance. ‘Damn cloud eaters...’
As my eyes shifted away from my window and back to my current task at hand - making boxed mac and cheese atop my kitchen stove - I realized that in my daze I had forgotten to even turn the heat on. Such a simple task and yet I’d managed to let myself become distracted by something completely unrelated. Brilliant.
I was approaching the end of my waking hours, and in a panic to eat at least something, I racked my brain for an alternative. Anything made atop the stove was out of the question, as I was grasping at the final few straws of my consciousness. I could always order a pizza, but my printer could never get the cheese quite right. Delivery would just make any food I ordered soggy. Even with all their “top of the line” minimum budget waterproofing containers, the rain was coming down far too heavily for any order to arrive without having a few extra dripping ounces added to it on the trip here.
The rain…
I glanced outside at the thought of it, almost unintentionally. It had been weeks since we last had a thunderstorm so big. I believe I stated earlier that it never truly stops raining, but every now and again we get weather that even defies our own standards of common. Last I could remember, it had been nearly five weeks since we last had a storm so heavy that one could hardly see the building across the street. Figuring I’d make the best of it, I haphazardly threw on a heavy jacket of mine and bolted out my door.
My destination was the top floor, where I could properly enjoy the heavy weather. There was a stratagem to follow for maximum enjoyment, and so far I was right on target. I approached the final door in my way, and in my moment of haste accidentally missed a step on the narrow staircase, nearly falling outside onto the pseudo-concrete roof. The door slammed shut behind me with a rather loud metal screech, pulled along by an automated closing mechanism that looked to prevent the inside of the building from becoming too full of water.
I slowly rose to my feet, in time to witness a spectacular bolt of lightning strike the building adjacent to my own. In the brief flash of light, I could swear I saw the silhouette of another person, looking in the same direction as I. They stood close to the apartment’s thin railing, with their head tilted slightly down, as if to peer down through one of the windows on the other structure. Then, as quickly as it arrived, the image vanished, and I was once again left in the city’s darkness.
‘Seriously? There’s already someone up here?!’ I thought quietly to myself. Not to be confused, of course, with thinking loudly to yourself. ‘I guess I should just go… There’s no point in sticking around if I have to worry about other people too… Then again, I’ve never seen anyone up here before. Maybe I just imagi-
“Hello!” The jarring sensation of another voice broke me from my train of thought, and, in a startled motion, I lost my balance and fell backwards onto the pseudo-concrete once again. Such a cliche’d moment may seem fabricated, to a dedicated, seasoned reader such as yourself. Likely it is that to come to the day where you’d grace this novel’s own fine pages with your gaze, you’ve most certainly read countless others that have worn this feeble cliche into the ground. It’s been done, and done again, to the point of exhaustion, yet I can assure you that, were this moment truly fiction, I’d never bother to slight the paper with its presence. Instead, it is the mere idea that nobody in this day and age would use such a tired cliche that proves my recounting to be the truth. In an equal train of thought, how else do cliche moments become the cliches that they are, if they’ve never happened to real people from time to time?
As I landed, I heard the voice speak again.
“Oh, sorry, I didn’t mean to startle you! I just didn’t expect anyone else to be up here at this time!”
At this point, it was clear that this was a girl’s voice. She sounded to be an adult, and her face around five to six feet from my own. Even from that distance, I could hardly make out her figure in the light that hung next to the entrance to the rooftop, yet she had somehow noticed my presence from over fifty feet away, in total darkness. From what little I could tell, she was poorly dressed for the weather, a flimsy rain coat and casual clothes, as if she were expecting milder circumstances. The thin reflection on her eyes revealed to me she was wearing a stylish pair of glasses, whose frames disappeared behind her golden hair.
	“D-” I managed, before my voice got caught on a fierce sensation of underuse. How long had it been since I needed to speak to someone else? Days? Weeks? I read in a comic once about a depressed man who’d gone a whole week in pure isolation, and afterwards, when he went to the store to resupply his newfound shut-in lifestyle, he’d lost his ability to speak to others without putting in a severe effort. I’d thought it to be merely fiction, yet now, once again, the cliches of everyday comedic works had come back to bite me in the ass. “Don-’t… worry… about it…” I barely managed to croak.
“Hey, there’s no need to be so shy! What’s your name,” she chimed in response. She clearly misunderstood the reason for my stuttered speech, and in an attempt to reassure her that I was actually quite the sociable, charismatic individual, I once again stumbled over my words.
“I--- I’m n- o- ot sh- yy!” Pathetic.
“Here, if you won’t tell me then I’ll at least tell you mine. My name is Marceline Attentäter Julianna.” She hadn’t even heard me.
“T- Tha…” I could feel my voice slowly but surely returning to me. “That’s a pretty name.”
‘SUCCESS!’
“Really? Thanks! I don’t think anyone’s ever told me that before. The most I ever get is catcallers yelling ‘hey, nice ass!’ ‘hey girl,-’” she got carried away and started mimicking the various verbal abuse she’s apparently put up with over her life. Eventually though, she stopped and said something that I’ll admit caught me ever so slightly off guard. “Well Rane, do YOU think I have a nice ass?”
‘Rane?’
Ignoring the absurdity of the question she just asked to a total stranger, I quickly replied, “How… Did you know my name?”
“Huh!? W- Uhh, you just told me, don’t you remember?” she quickly retorted.
“Oh… yeah, I guess I did.”
I did not tell her my name.
“Anyway, what are you doing up here in a storm like this? I thought everyone would be inside, away from the lightning,” she changed the subject and we both moved on.
“I came up here to see it, actually.” I replied with reservation. “I’ve always liked storms like this, ever since I was little.” I glanced down as I said this, expecting her to call me crazy, but when I looked back up she was gazing upwards at a passing cloud eater.
“Yeah… It’s kinda peaceful, isn’t it?” She lowered gaze to me once more, then started to laugh a rather delicate laugh. “Ha! It’s because your name is Rane, isn’t it! HAHAHA! That’s why you like the rain! But come on now, don’t you know it’s dangerous to be on top of buildings in the middle of a thunderstorm? If you were on the building next to us you’d be dead by now!”
	‘As if you’re one to talk…’ Thoroughly perturbed by the joke she’d made about my name, that I’ve heard a thousand times before, I decided to get revenge.
	“Well it was worth the risk,” I insisted, brushing my fingers through my hair, and flashing a cheesy smile, just for good measure, “if it meant getting to meet such a beautiful girl like you.”
	“...........................”
	‘Ha, silence,’ I jeered to myself. I soaked in the stunned look on her face, and as the moment passed she began to laugh again.
	“Well, I didn’t realize you had such a way with words, Raaaneee. Tell me,” she leaned in close, bringing her face inches from mine. “Do you plan to stand back up any time soon?”
	I still had yet to recover from my most recent fall. Indeed, I say recent in order to fool anyone who was paying attention, but it was, in fact, nearly a full minute that had passed without my any thought of recovery.
	“Ah… so you noticed…”
“I noticed.”
	She noticed.
I half expected her to offer me a hand to help me back to my feet, but it seems she was distracted by… something. She had been gazing around in various directions ever since her comment about the lightning, only ever stopping to look back at me when I said something to catch her attention. Had I not known the pleasure of our conversation just moments ago, I’d assume she was high on some sort of hallucinogen. The way she peered through the curtains of rain, it was as if she could see perfectly, yet when she turned her head away, and I was given momentary vision through her glasses, it was clear that they were doing nothing to assist her in the dark. Until now I’d only assumed she had discovered me through the racket I’d made while stepping outside, but now it was clear that there was something else at play here.
In an instant, her distracted gazes were cut short, as she found something in the night sky to fixate her attention on. She stared at it for a moment, then turned her body to face me again. She reached into her pockets, and from each one removed both a pen and a small waterproof notebook. Archaic as they may be, she began to write something as she spoke.
“Well Rane, it’s been nice meeting you, but I really should be going.” She strode slowly past me and dropped the notepad in my lap. Before I could reply, she continued to speak. “After all, you never know what unfortunate things could happen on such a slippery rooftop.”
Then, without a moment to spare, she vanished down the pseudo-concrete staircase as the door fell shut behind her. I was alone on the rooftop just as I had wished for, but rather than feeling relief, the thought that I should have chased after her reverberated again and again between the walls of my skull.
Regret.
No, that’s not right.
There was something else.
What was it.
This feeling I haven’t felt in so long.
The feeling I isolated myself from for years.
The feeling that grabs ahold of you.
That makes your heart race with excitement.
That makes you quiver with anticipation when the focal point of your inclination is near.
That feeling…
That feeling is…


Fear.
The notepad she’d dropped on me looked, at first glance, to only have a simple set of digits on it: clearly a phone number. It was the bottom left of that paper that caught my attention, though. In the light of the wall lamp, I could barely make out what was inscribed.
Get off the roof. Now.
I took one glance in the direction that Marceline had focused her attention on for just one fleeting instant, and immediately I could distinguish what was causing this sensation. Through the rain, clear as day, two stationary red dots glared at me through the darkness. There was no mistaking it. Something was watching us. Watching me. As I caught its gaze, the lights shifted to the left, as if someone was walking along the roof adjacent to mine. Again, a bolt of lightning pierced the heavens and I could clearly make out their silhouette, just as the lightning met the top of their head. They’d just been struck with 100 million volts of the sky’s wrath yet they didn’t even stutter. Then a second. And a third. One after another lightning rained down upon their skull and they ceased to even flinch. The ear splitting roar of the thunder drowned out any semblance of a thought I could manage to muster inside my befuddled head, as all I could do was sit and watch. For what felt like hours, I was mesmerized in fear by the unreal display, until something else caught my eye. The lightning was a mere distraction from something that slowly rose over the side of the building’s wall to my right.
A hand. Then a head. Then a body. Then a whole person, clad in robes and a mask from the 16th century’s plague doctors. A real showboat if I’ve ever seen one. Their black coat glistened in the light of the thunderstorm, and as they drew closer, my horror grew more intense. At first, they seemed to be shocked that I had even noticed them, but as if a weight were holding me down, I sat motionless. My saving grace came in the form of a lead bullet, and shattered the light next to me. Having glass rain down on my body brought me to my senses, and my fight or flight kicked in. While the entity was distracted with the building behind me, assumed to be the bullet’s origin, I burst through the door at a speed near comparable to sound, and sprinted down flight after flight of steps until I’d reached my apartment door. I threw it open, peeled the glass covered raincoat from my body, and collapsed onto my bed. I was certain I hadn’t been followed. I could tell through the reflections in the staircase windows that I was alone in my retreat. For now, it was time to rest.

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‘Question One: Who is Marceline, and why was she on top of the apartment’s roof? Question Two: How did she notice anyone was there, and why did she help me? Question Three: What was in the giant bag she was carrying on her back? Question Four: Who were those people, and why did they come for me? Question Five: Who shot out the doorway’s light, and how did they know where to be? Question Six: What in the actual hell just happened?’
I lie awake in bed, pondering these questions until I could make some, if any, sense of them. The notebook that marceline had given me rest in my hand, and as I lifted up the top page, I made the discovery that underneath it was a map. It was no longer time to rest. I ordered some coffee and got to work.
	I ran the map through a reverse image search, and nearly instantly, it came up with a nearby cluster of roads and walkways. The map had a single arrow drawn to a point in the center with some numbers, assumedly the address, next to it. When I looked for the address, it brought me to a little cafe in between other various stores and strip malls. I saved a copy of the directions to my phone, and moved on to the others. First things first, Marceline. A while back, I’d convinced my landlord to let me keep access to the security cameras, and using a smart editor, it was easy to bring color to the otherwise black and white images. Once I found a clear shot of both her face and her backpack, I ran them both through the image search again, but to no avail.
	Next, I tried something dubbed the Vespasianus Smart Search Algorithm, named after the ultra-advanced AI who created it. From this, came two results. The bag was a type of gun tote, known for its versatility in being able to house anything from a small pistol to one of the bulkiest types of handheld railguns.
	‘Was it her who shot the light out?’ It was a possibility, though highly unlikely. It would be a tremendous pain to have to scale an entire building in such a short time just for one quick stunt, but I guess there was no other explanation.
As for Marceline herself, nothing. I had only one option, which was to scan the deep web as well. What a pain. This wasn’t a default option, but with some decent reworking of my web browser of choice, it became fairly easy. The only problem was, the deep web nowadays, for those uneducated on the subject, has nearly trillions of gigabytes more garbage to sift through than the surface net as of last year’s estimates. In turn, the current given wait time was five hours. I tried searching for something else to do, such as analyze the footage of my attackers, but both had evasively remained off camera through the entire exchange.
	The thought then crossed my mind, that if I have time, I should visit whatever Cafe Marceline had pointed me to.
	‘I suppose I could… but I should at least wait for my coffee to finish printing…’ I thought to myself, in a near successful attempt to talk myself out of leaving my apartment for a second time. The suggestion was cut short by the fervent ding from the corner of my room. My coffee had finished. I racked my brain for an excuse, but ultimately I simply submitted to the influence of the map I was given and ventured out once again.
	I passed by the elevators but as it turns out they’d been put out of order by some recent, incredibly violent thunderstorm. I guess that meant I was walking. The rain had let up quite a bit, and the streets were buzzing with passerbys on their ways to work, school, and errands of other sorts. The neon signs glistened with excitement, as if to draw me in out of sheer sympathy for the hard working sign alone. To these signs’ misfortune, I already had a destination, and their enthusiasm would have to wait. Despite this, I couldn’t help but think to myself as I sipped my coffee.
	‘I never realized there were so many small businesses and restaurants around here. I should give them all a try one of these days… They’re probably better than the printed hamburgers and macaroni I’ve been eating for the past few months.’
	Store after store passed me by, with the occasional couple or family at an outdoor table, tossing breadcrumbs to the curious cloud eaters that had landed nearby. The sights caught my attention, and at the time I couldn’t help but wonder if cloud eaters existed in other parts of the world too, or if they were exclusive to Sector One. I’d always heard of these animals called “birds”, that looked a little like cloud eaters, but from what I understood, they ate worms and fruit for energy, instead of sunlight and table scraps, and they ingested their water in its liquid form like most animals, rather than gaseous.
	Before I knew it, I’d reached the cafe, aptly named “The Cafe.” I’d long since finished my coffee, and disposed of the empty cup in the trash bin just outside the double doors to my destination. Through the window, I could spy various different activities taking place: People at work, people sleeping, people enjoying a nice day off and simply relaxing, and finally, Marceline resting on one of the few sofas in the room, with a laptop set in front of her. Without further ado, I took a deep breath, and stepped inside the double doors.