Chapter 246: The peaceful supposed to be night

I walked.

That was mostly what I did for the rest of the afternoon— walked the vine platforms and the rope bridges of the village, soaking wet because the rain wasn’t stopping, my shoes making a soft squelch sound with every step that I had started ignoring somewhere around hour ago.

The village went about its business around me, and I went about the business of having no particular business, which was a strange thing to think, because what’s a no business that’s a business... wow.

I kept arguing with myself about it.

The part of my brain that had been running survival mode since the day we entered the trial kept pointing things out.

We’ve been here too long. We don’t know the region layout yet. The exit is probably somewhere in the western wall and we haven’t covered the distance. We should have been moving yesterday... Well, we can’t since this is a floating island.

Fuck, I wish there’s a massive cruise ship that would just pop out.

I sighed and kept walking.

I want to get out of this trial so badly, I thought, stepping around a group of kids who were building something elaborate and rope-based near the fishing platforms.

I want the real city. I want normal buildings that don’t float. I want to sleep without care, I wanna eat, fuck... I wish I’ve spoiled myself before all of this hadn’t happened... like God damnit I’m probably the richest person in the earth... the real one... not this trial or Jisoo World.

Man... now that I think about it, is Vesper and Ivy still in the real world frozen? Maybe.

I just kept walking.

And also: I looked at the kid who was currently explaining the construction to two others with an urgency of someone presenting engineering plans.

This is kind of cool. Objectively. The chickens and the rope elevators and the leaf boats. cool.

Neither part of my brain was entirely winning the argument. I let them keep going and walked a few more bridges and found the outer platform I’d been to earlier and sat down on it and looked at the water.

The water did what water did. Moved slowly. Reflected nothing interesting... and of course is wet.

Night came while I was sitting there.

I noticed it the way you noticed gradual things— not a moment when it changed but a cumulative dimming that arrived at dark without a definitive transition.

The village adapted to it the same way— lanterns came on, not many, small and practical, positioned at the bridge intersections and the door frames.

Enough to move by, not enough to burn through fuel fast.

The rain was gentler now than it had been, the storm that had driven us in having passed into something quieter, and the sound of it against the vine platforms was a continuous soft noise that my brain had fully recognized as background noise.

I should have been asleep.

I wasn’t asleep.

I sat on the outer platform with my feet hanging off the edge and looked at the rain-grey water below and thought about Jisoo, who was definitely still asleep, because Jisoo slept like someone had switched her off and she’d not been awake for 12 continuous hours anyway.

She was fine.

She was in the room on the actual bed that we had now for reasons.

She was FINE... it’s probably Jisoo Jisoo right now but still asleep.

Well, I was sitting on a wet platform at night for no reason.

Some of the villagers were still out— the fishers, who apparently worked by lantern light, patient shapes on the lower walkways with their handmade spears.

A few of the older kids chasing each other across one of the wider bridge spans, the whole thing swaying, both of them perfectly used to this.

3 people carrying something between them on the far side who I couldn’t identify from here.

Life at night, village-normal, rain and lantern light and the quiet sounds of people doing things.

Maybe this place isn’t so bad. I thought, to nobody specifically.

After sitting there for like 30mins or more, I noticed the rain wasn’t making ripples...

Weird.

Not— all of it. Most of it was fine, rain hitting water the way rain hit water, small circles spreading and overlapping across the surface. But there were patches.

Dark patches where the surface was still, completely still, while everything around them moved with the normal rhythm of the rain.

Not the rain stopping. Not something blocking the water. It’s like something blocking the rain above— absorbing it, or redirecting it, before it could reach the surface.

I looked up.

Fog. Dark clouds. The usual. Nothing.... Of course.

Then a thunder came, that low rolling sound that had been background since we arrived, and the lightning came with it and for about a 0.5sec the whole sky lit white—

Jellyfish.

Above the village.

Not in the water. Above. Dozens of them, maybe a hundred, maybe more— pale and translucent, their bell-shapes just barely visible in the flash, tentacles hanging down in long curtains below them, trailing hundreds of meters through the clouds.

Not swimming.

Not floating the way jellyfish floated. Something else. Something with direction to it, a purposeful drift, the way they were positioned across the sky too even to be random.

Then darkness again.

I sat there.

"...I definitely saw something," I said.

I also did not move.

Okay. That was— that was a thing. There were jellyfish in the sky. That’s notable. I should probably do something about that or at least move somewhere that isn’t directly under them... I uh, I’m being dumb right now... why aren’t I moving... am I coping?

The platform under me was wet and a little cold and my legs had been dangling for a while and honestly the position I was in had achieved something close to comfortable.

I’ll move in a minute.

Thunder.

Lightning.

More jellyfish. Closer this time— no, not closer, just more of them. The ones that had been in the clouds before, I could see now, were just the visible layer.

Behind them, deeper in the cloud cover, more shapes. The lightning showed them for exactly the right amount of time to count and then left me in the dark again with the number still running in my head.

30. 50. More.

Using the rain somehow— not fighting it, not trying to stay above it, but moving with it, the way you could move with a current if you understood which direction it was going. The rain was their medium. The storm was their environment. They weren’t lost up there.

They were here.

Another flash. More.

And then the village behind me erupted.

Not really screaming, they’re just, warning eachother, Shouting here and there.

"INSIDE!" A man’s voice, somewhere behind me, cutting over everything. "EVERYONE INSIDE NOW—"

"The kids—" A woman, sharp and immediate. "Get the children—"

"Boats in, boats IN—"

"Close the shutters, don’t leave the shutters—"

"INSIDE! MOVE!"

"Get inside!!!! Ahhhhh, O M G!!!"

I was on my feet and moving before I’d fully decided to. The platform behind me was suddenly full of people all going the same direction with a coordinated efficiency of a drill done enough times to be reflex.

A kid ran past me going too fast, slipped on the wet planks, went down hard on one knee— I grabbed the back of her jacket before she went over the edge and set her upright and she was running again before I’d let go, no pause, not even a look back... and not even a thanks.

Someone’s father was yelling his son’s name from two platforms over, urgent but not panicked yet, and I could hear the son calling back from further away and the father moving toward the sound.