The Last Dainv

Toronto Public Library Downsview Branch. Reference section. Monday the following week after classes. Gale almost had a panic attack when Mia wanted to go to the library.

What for? He didn't know. But the thought of seeing the man behind the desk raised his blood pressure by leaps and made his heart thump heavily in his chest.

However, now that Gale sat across from Mia, Jacob, and Andrew at one of the study tables near the back, his heart rate was gradually subsiding. All they wanted to see was the GoPro.

That was it. Just the GoPro, which didn't have anything to do with the man behind the desk.

"Gale, you ok? Why are you sweating?" Andrew asked.

"I'm ok. Definitely ok. Absolutely have nothing to do with the man behind the desk."

"Man behind the desk?" Mia asked.

"Nothing," Gale cleared his throat. "The GoPro, right?"

"Come on, Gale!!! HURRY!" Jacob said in a hushed voice that somehow both sounded loud and quiet in the library.

Reaching into his space storage, Gale materialized the GoPro still attached to the harness. "Here."

Jacob immediately grabbed the GoPro and removed it from the harness. He held it up to the light like it was a sacred artifact.

"Idiot..." Mia mumbled.

"Finally," Jacob whispered. "The moment of truth that will dictate our very future rests in the memory storage of this very technological artifact piece."

"Idiot! Just get on with it!" Mia nudged Jacob.

"Chill, Mia. Let the man have fun," Andrew said.

Jacob then held up the GoPro closer to his face and pressed the small red power button.

For a while, nothing happened. And for another while, nothing happened. He pressed the power button again, only to be met with another nothing happening. Looking up at Gale slowly, he asked, "Uh, Gale. How long were you in that rift for?"

"Three months."

"Three months?!" Jacob's face went pale. "But it's only been 3 weeks! And the battery was rated for three weeks!"

"Wait, weren't you only in that rift for like, what, 2 days?" Mia asked.

"The rift takes forty-five days to Earth's one day," Gale said.

Mia's eyes narrowed. She pulled out her phone and started tapping on the calculator app. "That's... that's like a reverse time dilation thing. That would mean Earth is basically sitting right next to a black hole while the rift is further up the gravity well, which is impossible!"

Gale shrugged. That's a question better asked to Erin rather than him. But she's been stuck by Lily's side the whole time since the affliction.

"Tsk tsk tsk. There's still a lot of things that your mundane science can't comprehend about the wonders of the world," Jacob said.

"Don't 'tsk' me unless you don't want last week's notes."

Andrew nudged Jacob with his elbow. "Just plug in the SD card to the PC already. Let's see what we got."

"Don't get your hopes up," Mia muttered.

Jacob pulled his laptop out of his backpack and set it on the table. He popped open the GoPro's side compartment, extracted the tiny SD card, and slotted it into the laptop's card reader.

The file explorer opened, and videos started to fill the window.

"Holy shit, there's actually footage," Jacob whispered.

He clicked on the first video.

The screen showed Gale and Erin walking through a snowy landscape. Just walking. For minutes. The camera bobbed slightly with each step, capturing nothing but white snow and grey sky.

Jacob fast-forwarded. More walking. He fast-forwarded again. Still walking.

"This is riveting content," Andrew said. "The snowy landscape of an alien world that could be misjudged as Northern Canada. I like that idea."

"Same actually. Only people with tree knowledge would actually tell that those trees are alien. What's with those spirally spindles?" Mia asked.

Jacob skipped to the next video. More walking. The next one. Walking through a forest. The next one. Walking up a mountain path.

Then something appeared on screen. In the video, Gale moved fast, moving forward faster than a car. Trees around him blurred until it opened up to a clearing. A small silhouette of a boy appeared while being chased down by a giant furry long eared rabbit the size of half a garbage truck.

In less than three seconds, the rabbit was sliced into pieces, and its meat disappeared from view.

The next scene played in the video with Erin and Gale trying to talk to the blue haired pale skinned native of the rift. Jacob rewound the video immediately to look at the rabbit that was sliced up once more.

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"What the fuck," Jacob said.

Mia grabbed his arm. "How could you kill such a soft fluffy looking giant rabbit like that?!"

"The meat was tasty though," Gale said. The meat was hard and gamey, just the way he liked it. No salt too, which reminded him that he should really bring seasoning next time he goes to a rift, just in case.

"That's not the point!"

"I still have some, actually." Gale materialized several strips of red meat, setting them casually on the library table, blood still dripping and all. "Flanks from the big giant fluffy long eared tasty bunny. Souvenirs!"

Mia gasped. "Put that back right now! In your space bag thing!"

Andrew started laughing, covering his mouth to muffle the sound so the librarian wouldn't come over.

Jacob stared at the meat. "Wait, is that monster meat? Like, actual monster meat?"

"It's not monster meat!" Mia hissed. "It's cute fluffy rabbit meat! Which is worse!"

"It was trying to eat the boy. It's the meat of a violent bunny!" Gale said.

"I don't care! Put it away!"

Gale immediately dematerialized the meat back into his space storage. There has to be some way to eat this. It'd be a waste of a souvenir otherwise.

Jacob held up his hand to his mouth to whisper. "Okay, hear me out. What if we went to a Korean BBQ place and grilled it there?"

Mia turned her glare on him. "Is it even safe to eat? How long has it been since you killed that thing?"

Gale thought about it. "About two and a half months ago? I think."

"Two and a half months?! That meat should be rotten by now!"

"I mean, it looked red and fresh," Andrew said, crossing his arms. "It's probably safe. Pocket dimensions usually operate in different time horizons. The meat was preserved the moment it entered storage."

Everyone looked at him, Gale included. He didn't even know that's how the space storage worked.

"What?" Andrew shrugged. "I've been reading a lot of Chinese novels lately. It just kinda makes sense. Right, Jacob?"

"I read only Japanese or Korean, thank you very much," Jacob snorted.

Mia side-eyed Andrew. "There's no way that meat is safe to eat."

From what Gale smelled and tasted of the meat when it came out of his space storage, it was definitely safe to eat. It was actually pretty fresh so Andrew might be on to something with his theory. "We can go out right now and grill it in front of the library. I could make a fire from the nearby tree."

"That'd be so cool!" Jacob's eyes beamed at Gale.

"We're definitely not doing that!" Mia shouted, but not shouted.

Andrew shrugged. "It's only illegal if the cops catch us, though."

Mia pinched the bridge of her nose. "We can go to my place after. There's a park nearby that'll allow us to do that without getting arrested."

"I'm hungry, though," Gale said.

"Deal with it," Mia said as she turned to Jacob and pointed at his laptop. "Just look through the videos first and see if there's anything that's actually usable. Then we can think about grilling monster rabbit meat in public parks."

"Fine, fine." Jacob turned back to the screen and started clicking through videos. And for the next two hours, it was literally just Gale and Erin walking through the snow and traversing the landscape.

Video after video file showed the same thing. Just walking.

"This is literally just a walking simulator," Jacob groaned, rubbing his eyes. "Two hours of footage and it's ninety percent hiking content."

"Told you not to expect anything," Mia chuckled.

"Yeah, but I wanted cool monster fights and magic explosions and stuff."

"There was the rabbit," Andrew said.

"Three seconds of blurry rabbit death does not a YouTube video make," Mia said. "And we can't possibly put that negotiation with that native on YouTube. That looks too real."

"Who's that floating blue girl beside you anyway?" Andrew asked.

"Oh, that's Erin. She's really smart."

"Smart, how?"

"Her title is Grand Researcher Grand General Erin Weber. Really super duper space cosmos smart," Gale said. Aside from being hard to deal with, Erin was definitely the smartest person he knew.

"Does she usually just float like that?"

"Yeah."

"How come she didn't float at one part of the video in the snowfield?"

"That was a sacred snowfield where the world spirit lives. I think."

"World spirits exist?" Andrew's tone rose slightly.

"Apparently."

"Does Earth have one too?" Andrew asked.

"Probably. I don't know," Gale said.

"Wait. What if we lean into the boring?" Jacob spoke up suddenly.

"What?" Mia asked.

"Hear me out." Jacob pulled the laptop closer. "What if we say this is part of the Backrooms? Like, an undiscovered level? The endless snow with the weird trees everywhere. The occasional horrifying creature that wants to kill you. It fits!"

"What the hell are the Backrooms?" Andrew and Mia asked at the same time.

"You know, the Backrooms! Where you noclip out of reality and end up in endless yellow office rooms with fluorescent lights and wet carpet smell and screaming black stick like figure monsters and creepy smiling mouths with eyes in the distance when the lights go off?"

"No idea what you're talking about," Mia said.

"Does that have to do with the man behind the desk?" Gale asked. Office rooms always meant there were men behind the desks.

Andrew and Mia both turned to him.

"What the hell is the man behind the desk?" they asked at the same time, again.

"The man behind the desk is the one that'll get you when you least expect it," Gale explained in a low voice, menacingly, as if it explained everything.

For a couple of seconds, none of his friends talked. They just looked at him, trying to understand what he was saying.

"That... doesn't explain anything," Mia said slowly.

"It's like this and that and then bam he gets you," Gale tried to mimic how he saw Principal Harris denying his high school application.

"Gale, that's not an explanation," Mia said.

"It's self-explanatory."

Mia threw her hands up. "You know what? Forget it. I give up trying to understand either of you." She turned back to Jacob. "Just try the Backrooms angle. Might as well start with something. The footage is already shot, so we work with what we have."

"Yes!" Jacob pumped his fist.

"But," Mia put a hand on her chin. "the problem now is how are we going to get a battery that can last three months?"

"What if we give him multiple batteries?" Andrew asked.

Jacob shook his head. "A GoPro extra battery pack is like a hundred and fifty bucks. And I don't think Gale even knows how to swap one out."

"Wait," Gale said. "This has a battery?"

Everyone stared at him.

"Yes," they said in unison.

Taking the GoPro sitting on the table, he unplugged it from the laptop and held it on top of his palm. "I can just charge it with ether."

"No way that's possible," Mia mumbled.

A thin thread of essence connected to the GoPro, flowing from his core to the connector. He made it as small as possible, like a nanometre thread or even smaller to not overload the charging capacity, just like how Rachel taught him.

And then suddenly, the charging icon appeared on the GoPro.

"Holy shit," Jacob whispered. "That's so cool!"

Andrew leaned forward, his eyes wide. "You have to teach us that. Charging my phone's already so annoying."

Mia, on the other hand, furrowed her brows while staring at the charging GoPro. "Ether's an energy source? Like actual usable energy?"

"Yeah, why not?" Gale asked.

"That you can just... generate? From your body?"

"Yeah...?"

"And transfer into electronic devices?"

"Yeah. That's how it works." Gale nodded confidently.

Mia's voice at this point started rising in tone. "Wouldn't that mean it could solve the energy crisis? Like, all of it? So why isn't Aur trying to use this? Why are we still burning fossil fuels when awakened people can just-"

"Shhhh!"

The librarian, the man, or in this case the woman behind the desk shushed them from across the sections. She was an older woman with grey hair and reading glasses.

Gale's veins once again spiked with adrenaline. His heart rate started hammering again as he was reminded they were still in the presence of the dreaded ones.