Chapter 33 (Kish)

I wake up in a daze. I don’t know how long it’s been since I collapsed.

I examined my surroundings. I was sitting in a room with no windows, brown walls and uncovered wood floor. In front of me was a wall with posters of “Mulholland Drive” “Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within” and “Josie and the Pussycats”. Below them was a TV which was not mounted or on a stand, and was currently displaying static. To the right of the TV was an office chair which lay on the floor next to several cans of cherry coke, just down from that was a desk with a computer straight out of 2001, surrounded by more empty soda cans. On the floor just in front of me was a bust, some watermelons for some reason, as well as two copies of “Super Smash Bros Melee”, and a translation of the Seraphic Bible. On the left wall there was an open pizza box with pizza inside stuck on the wall for god knows what reason. This wall and the one in front of me were divided by a small corridor which led to the one door in the room.

Somehow this was all familiar, yet I’d never seen it before.

As I came out of my daze I realized I wasn’t tied or anything to the chair I was in. As soon I was up I started inspecting the room further. The door was, unsurprisingly locked. On the right side of the corridor was a bathroom, which weirdly did not have a door, just an opening. I didn’t even realize until that moment how much I actually needed to pee. The bathroom was surprisingly clean, especially in contrast to the other room.

My curiosity about the pizza stuck on the wall got the best of me. I lifted the top and stuck my head inside, and I immediately regretted it. The putrid smell was enough to make me vomit yet again. What kind of person meticulously cleans their bathroom but leaves… a rotten aged pizza on the wall for who knows how long.

After my nausea finally passed I went over to the computer. The thing was a dinosaur that still used Windows XP, with its default green grass and blue sky wallpaper. And of course, there was no internet connection. There was only one desktop icon, a folder called “New Folder”, awkwardly placed off-center. The folder contained eight word documents, labeled “White”, “Black,” “Blue,” “Green,” “Indigo,” “Violet,” “Yellow,” and “Red.” Each of the documents was a list of names and dates. My suspicion about the nature of the lists was confirmed when I found Grayson’s name on the Blue list. Safe to assume the rest of the names were his past lives. All but the Black and White lists were near complete records of each individual, but both of those only listed one name each. Still, whoever made these lists had either meticulously researched and somehow found all of this out… or they were insane and jammed out a bunch of names. It could probably go either way, though I was leaning towards the latter considering the pizza on the wall.

Suddenly it hit me why this room seems familiar. For months when I was 15 I binged a single YouTube channel over and over, watched and rewatched every video. Looking at the room from this angle the memories came flooding back, despite minor changes, this was the same room from those vlogs.

Leigh LeBlanc’s vlogs.

It was then that the door opened, and in came Leigh, the woman I saw before I blacked out, and a tall bearded man I didn’t recognize who had a pistol holstered. They stayed near the door while Leigh walked into the main area in front of me. Leigh bent down and grabbed the copy of the Seraphic Bible, then lifted the office chair back into a proper position, and sat down. “At last, we meet Kish.” They said. I didn’t say anything back, still unsure how to respond to the YouTuber turned apparent conspiracy nut kidnapper. “No doubt you’re wondering what this is all about, why I’ve brought you here and I promise to explain. There’s a lot of things you need to know first though, about the Seraphs, about history, about us, about everything really.”

I don’t plan on staying as long as I can help it, but until I can get a better read on the situation and figure out a way out, I suppose it won’t hurt to listen.

“You see, we have to go back to the beginning, the real beginning, to understand the true history of this Seraphic world.

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