Arc of Everyday Fragments (Floor 1)
Elia slowly opened her eyes, as if the light was an unbearable weight. She couldn't remember when she had fallen asleep, nor at what point the tears, her faithful companions in despair, had ceased.
The last clear image, burned into the threshold of her memory, was that of an old woman. Her face, furrowed by experience, had leaned towards Elia, offering a hand that seemed made of the same light emanating from the pendant on her chest. A blue glow, almost imperceptible but strangely comforting, had been the final curtain. Everything else was now unraveling, fragments of a story that might well have ended, or perhaps, one that had never found its true beginning.
A creak under her feet brought her back to the present. She was standing. But not on the damp earth she remembered, nor on the cold asphalt of some forgotten city. Beneath her feet stretched a surface of old, creaking wood, exhaling an essence of mold and dust, of memories accumulated with every step she took. It wasn't a forest, nor a busy street, nor even the misty realm of a recurring dream. It was a stage: vast, desolate, formed around her with unsettling precision.
"It's a school hallway," Elia murmured.
The hallways stretched monotonously, an infinite repetition of closed doors and worn walls. Empty classrooms, silently holding memories of laughter and lament. There were windows, yes, but their promise of an exterior was a cruel mockery. Beyond them, no world existed, no sky or earth, only a permanent, uniform, and suffocating gray, as if reality itself was a poorly printed copy, faded and lifeless. The only temporal reference was a clock devoid of hands, a useless circle on the wall that accentuated the sensation of suspended eternity.
"Where... am I?" Elia whispered, and the sound of her own voice seemed alien, a strange vibration that didn't entirely belong to her.
"Because my voice is higher-pitched. What's happening?"
Elia, still inexperienced, didn't understand how scenarios worked. Scenarios aren't about observing and solving puzzles; it's about being the main or secondary character of the story, participating in the events that unfold in the scenario, and achieving an acceptable ending for the tower.
But she received no answer. The silence, however, wasn't empty either. Enveloping her, a familiar and distressing sensation took hold of her body. It was that premonitory chill, the icy breath that precedes a great loss, an inevitable farewell that has not yet spoken its name. The air grew heavy, laden with a sorrow that wasn't hers, but which she recognized in every fiber of her being.
A voiceless voice, disembodied but clear as water, emerged to her left. It was a boy's voice.
"It's your first day of school, isn't it?"
Elia turned her head, searching for the source of the sound. There he was, a young man in a school uniform, identical to the thousands of students who never set foot in these hallways. His straight hair fell over his eyes, hiding part of his expression, but a languid, enigmatic smile curved on his lips. He smiled as if he already knew something that she, in her recent confusion, was still completely unaware of.
"The real question you should be asking yourself isn't what story you're seeing... but why you're here to see it," the boy continued, his voice echoing in the vast emptiness. "You'll be a new student to befriend the bullied girl."
Elia frowned, her brain still grappling with the fog of her recent awakening.
"A... human story?"
The boy nodded with that same strange smile. "Yes. You won't understand it yet. But you must go with the flow of the scenario and make the best decis—" And then, without warning, the scene changed with the abruptness of a switch. Elia didn't move, but the world around her transformed.
The hallways blurred, the walls dissolved into a haze before solidifying again. Now she was in a classroom, but not just any. This was a specific classroom, with desks in order and the dim light filtering through an opaque window.
In the center of the classroom, huddled next to a worn wooden desk, was a girl.
She was crying, her shoulders trembling with every choked sob. Her knees were scraped, her immaculate uniform now stained with mud from a recent fall, and her heart... Elia knew it. Her heart was broken by something that, to the adult world, seemed trivial; but in her small universe, the pain was immense. An open notebook lay on the floor, the pages wrinkled and some childish drawings furiously scribbled over. In the midst of all that chaos, one word stood out, written in crooked, shaky letters, a silent scream lost in the echo of loneliness:
"Why was I born?"
The story wasn't complex. There were no monsters lurking in the shadows, no spells or magic to save her. Just the raw, painful reality of a girl who wanted to stop living because she was being abused, because her small voice was drowning in the vast sea of indifference. It was a fragment of life, a brushstroke of the mundane, now revealed with brutal intensity.
Elia felt something break within her chest, a sharp pain that wasn't an echo but a direct reverberation. She didn't know why the girl's story moved her with such violence.
But she understood it. Painfully. Every fiber of her being resonated with that despair. Because she had been there, in that very place, feeling that same abandonment. Because, at some point in their own lives, everyone had been.
"Every floor..." the boy said, his voice no longer coming from her left, but spreading through the air, weaving the atmosphere. "...is a story of something worth remembering."
And then, his form began to fade. He didn't disintegrate into dust, but into threads of light, thin and delicate, that rose towards the ceiling before disappearing completely, leaving only emptiness and a faint residual glow.
Hours passed, or days, or perhaps just minutes. Elia had no way to measure time in that handless place.
Elia continued, tried to talk to the girl, offer a hand, offer comfort. She wanted to approach, hug her, whisper that she wasn't alone, that the world was bigger than that empty classroom. But the girl's world didn't see her. She was a secondary character who went unnoticed, invisible, condemned to witness a story that had already been written, a destiny already sealed. Elia was barely a shadow, powerless in her desire to intervene.
"You cannot intervene directly," the old woman's voice said, emerging this time from somewhere in the hallways, an incorporeal but firm presence. "You can only exist... and feel. Understand the situation."
Elia clenched her fists, frustration growing within her. "Is that all? Just feel?"
The old woman's voice floated, filling the void with an undeniable truth. "No. That's what makes you real."
The girl in the classroom, with her pain and tears, began to slowly fade, dissolving like an image blurring in the air. And with her, the pain that had saturated the environment, the heavy burden in Elia's chest, began to lighten, though the scar was already etched. However, a new word appeared in the notebook, just before the classroom scene completely blurred, a posthumous addition, a whisper of gratitude.
"Thanks for trying to make me change my mind. But... I'm sorry."
Elia woke up.
This time, the awakening was abrupt, not an ethereal transition, but an impact against reality. The surface under her feet was hard and cold, different from the creaking wood. She was in a different room, one that looked like a dead-end train station, a desolate platform where no train would ever stop. The air was static, charged with the smell of old, rusty metal.
In front of her, floating in the air without any visible support, was a screen. It had no cables, no cold glow of modern technology. Instead, thousands of threads of light intertwined, dancing and moving, forming words that lit up and faded like ephemeral constellations.
FLOOR 1 CLEARED
A phrase shone brightly, like a title, revealing the meaning of what had been experienced:
You have remembered the pain of being powerless.
And below, the consequences, the echo of her journey:
Your existence has adjusted: you can now feel the characters of the next scenario more deeply.
Power granted: Emotional Presence – You will feel the pain of others, even if others do not notice it.
History preserved.
Elia read the words, a mixture of astonishment and strange resignation invading her. "What if the pain of others becomes more than I can bear? To feel more deeply? A power to feel something others don't notice? Is this some kind of bad joke?" Elia exclaimed. Her helplessness echoed throughout the train.
The implication was overwhelming. It meant that her journey on that "Floor" had not just been passive observation, but a transformation. That experience had altered her very essence.
Before the screen vanished in a sigh of light, the old woman's voice emerged again, this time as a direct whisper in Elia's mind, an echo that would resonate long after:
"Remember, Elia... if it doesn't hurt, you don't exist."
And with a final blink, the world around her dissolved into a new blinding light, warm and enveloping. Elia had no time to assimilate the words, to process the magnitude of her new reality. She was absorbed by that luminosity, a whirlwind of energy dragging her forward, into the unknown.
The next floor awaited her. And with it, a new everyday fragment to unravel, new pain to remember, and perhaps, a new part of herself to discover.
The platform dimmed.
A blink was enough for everything to disappear: the screen, the station, the sensation of solid ground under her feet. Suddenly, Elia floated. Or fell. Or simply dissolved in an invisible transit to the next floor. She didn't know. Nothing held her, nothing guided her.
But the pain persisted.
Not physical pain, not stabbing or lacerating, but that other pain that nests deep within, the one that leaves a mark without blood. The girl's pain, her own, the shared pain. An emotional echo reverberating in her chest like a slow drum.
Elia didn't cry. The tears wouldn't come. She only understood, with the harshness of the inevitable, that this Tower would not lead her to glory, nor to clear answers. It would make her walk through stories that the gods forgot, that humans hid, that time tried to bury.
Stories that hurt.
Stories that couldn't be solved with strength or ingenuity, but with presence.
Emotional Presence.
A useless power for battle. Impossible to measure.
And yet, heavier than any sword. Sharper than any truth.
Elia then felt a faint presence behind her. As if another consciousness had begun to walk beside her. It wasn't human. It wasn't spirit. It was perhaps the emotional residue of that girl. A formless shadow. An intangible companion.
She wasn't alone.
Nor completely accompanied.
Just present.
The next floor awaited.
But nothing would ever be the same.