Chapter 3: A helping hand
Theodore awoke in sheer terror, screaming, after which he shot up in his bed.
His breathing was haggard and his heart rate went through the roof.
A tense headache, the pulsing kind, throbbed behind Theodore's emerald green eyes and he grabbed his head.
"Argh... !"
As soon as the groan left his mouth, he felt his bed sheet and noticed how soaked it was.
A slight noise of something powering up, coming from his left side of his room, grabbed his attention.
The noise, oddly enough, did not increase his headache.
"Wait a minute!"
Theodore looked carefully at his left hand. Where just a few moments ago had been just a burned stump, now was a healthy arm!
As if nothing had happened to it at all and he never smashed a burned stump into the ground to try and get up.
He remembered how painful that had been, even the smell of the burned flesh choking the streets still lingered in his memory.
His right hand traced over the skin on his left arm below the elbow. Truly, everything seemed fine.
Overcome with relief he, took a big breath in and out and fell back on his bed.
"Get a grip old buddy! Keep it together man!"
The relief was evident on Theodore's face but it soon took on a stern expression, when he recalled as much of the dream as he could.
It was haunting.
The level of detail and the sensations were so...vivid...so... real.
"Interface up!"
He called up an internal command interface that floated above him. The moment he saw the interface, Theo's eyes became needle points and a shudder went through him.
A string of flashing notifications crowded the screen, several of them announcing "critical" errors in flashes of deep crimson red.
His eyes though, were looking instead at the date and time function, displayed in the top right of his field of view.
"How is this possible?!! What the hell happened??"
He was in utter disbelief at having slept for three days straight! Not only that but he had missed the academies awakening ceremony!
Everyone that was scheduled to attend would be given a precious awakening elixir!
It was designed to strengthen the human body and mind, some people even directly broke through bottlenecks in their cultivation!
"The Principal is going to kill me for real..."
This had been a big deal for Theodore. As an orphan, he had been selected to attend a government-owned academy here on Turia.
His testing scores, age, and cultivation achievements were all factored into this decision.
He still remembered the envy of his old classmates, evident in their eyes.
Although nobody there had said anything to him.
Not like he would have cared anyways, since he was a loner to begin with.
Barely anyone had talked to him at the orphanage.
The quiet and unassuming loner had somehow managed to attend one of the most popular schools of known space.
Everyone wanted to go to Turia for its beauty there.
To many, being able to study at one of these prestigious schools, surrounded by paradise was the best there was.
Theodore had truly beaten the odds, being an orphan, with no family connections or money, he managed to attend and was even approved for the awakening ceremony.
To think he missed it!
"Who in their right mind would miss this chance by sleeping in? There is no way that anybody would be stupid enough for that. There is even less of a chance of someone buying this excuse..."
He would try to salvage this situation as much as he could.
Pushing away thoughts about potential excuses he could use, he turned his attention to the error messages that had stacked up in his interface, manually dismissing them as he read each message.
The more he read the more got scared.
"Injury notifications!? What injuries!? There is no way right!? This was just a dream wasn't it!?"
According to his interface, he had suffered from impact trauma to the head and severe blood loss.
His left forearm was missing below the elbow. All injuries were sustained in a very short amount of time too.
His manifold diagnostics seemed to confirm the injuries and yet there were none.
It was almost as if the manifold was confused about a conflict of data.
It knew that his left arm was healthy but for some strange reason the nanomachines making up the manifold in his left arm were missing below the elbow.
All this only made things worse for Theodore.
He had felt immense relief at the fact that what he had experienced was just a dream.
Now though it seemed that reality tried to tell him otherwise.
A bad shiver went down his back and his heartbeat accelerated.
He kept reading and dismissing the notifications with zeal. As if dismissing them would also rid him of this awful feeling that had begun to appear in his gut and made him nauseous.
The feeling wouldn't go away.
To make things more miserable,the bottom of his stack of notifications contained messages from his classmates asking where he was.
From the doorbell camera records, he could see that someone had even tried to visit him after he didn't show up for his ceremony.
A petite red-headed girl he recognized as Cindy was ringing his doorbell for almost fifteen minutes straight before giving up.
She was the elected class president and Theodore knew she must have been sent by the teacher.
Cindy was an attractive seventeen-year-old girl with a petite frame.
The school uniform did little to hide her figure and she was popular with the other students.
Theodore liked Cindy.
She had been nice to him after his transfer and one of the few to try to strike up a conversation with him.
He did not want to have things go sideways.
This was not good at all.
An occasional absence could have been easily explained but missing class for three days straight and to top it all off, missing the ceremony itself was going to be very difficult to explain.
"Ding Dong"
His thoughts quickly snapped to the sounds of his doorbell.
He could not afford to miss anything anymore so he dashed right to his door without even looking at the screen to see who it was.
He opened the door and looked out, only to see someone he had never met before.
Theodore had assumed it to possibly be Cindy or his class teacher or perhaps his principal.
The river of excuses, he had prepared to shower his guests in, stuttered to a halt, as he gazed at the unfamiliar figure.
In front of Theodore stood an elegantly dressed middle aged man with the bearing of a butler!
The man wore an expensive brand of suit, his attire screaming of money.
There was a mental storm raging here and Theodore's mind was at its center.
'Why was this man here to see him? Why did he have the bearing of a butler? If the man truly was a butler, who's butler, was he? A famous family? Is he from the government?'
Theodore had many questions but chose to start with basics:
"Who are you?"
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