Chapter 3: Insanity Catalyst
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Dr. Pete blinked and stared at Lyd. "No, Lyd. You're not crazy. You're here because you're depressed, and you know that."
"Then prove it," Lyd asked of him. "Prove to me that I'm not crazy."
"Well, Lyd, I can't exactly prove that you're not crazy, but I can prove you're not insane."
"Is there a difference?" asked Lyd as Dr. Pete got up and headed out of the room.
"Yes, craziness is often just a temporary case. Insanity is a permanent condition. Now stay here while I go fetch my proof." He left the room. He came back in a few minutes later following a small cat. The cat was yelling at the doctor.
"... This better not be another surprise visit to the vet or-" The cat saw Lyd. "King! What are you doin- Wait, you're not King."
Lyd thought about the kitten's comment for a second. "So you show your dog to all of you're patients?" he said to Dr. Pete.
The kitten looked confused. "Patient?"
"Lyd, Shadow here isn't my patient," the doctor explained. "He's my pet."
"Uh, Hi?"
"Hey," Lyd turned back to Dr. Pete. "How come you didn't have any pictures of him then?"
Shadow turned to his "pictureless" owner.
"We'll talk about it later, Shadow. First you need to talk to Lyd."
"Speaking of which," Lyd interupted, "How is he going to help to prove I'm not insane?"
"Shadow, tell him your story." Shadow turned to Dr. Pete, confused. Dr. Pete continued, "All of it. The
truth."
Shadow had a look of pure shock on his face. "A-Are you sure?" Dr. Pete nodded. "Okay, if you say so," his voice trailed off as he turned back to Lyd.
Shadow began to talk. "Well I suppose it all started when my brother had a crazy dream. He went and got an old book from a bookstore he had seen in his dream. Well it was a spell book and we found a spell called Astral Jump. I didn't believe it would work, I mean who would believe that? So I happily volunteered to be the guinea pig, sitting in the center of a diagram he had drawn.
Well it turns out the spell worked, and I was sent to a different universe, this universe. It was all fine and good until my atoms were slowly pulled back to my universe. Pete saved me though, he turned me into a cat and saved my life. In exchange I agreed to be his pet until he could find his associate to help return me home. It was really weird being a pet, I mean I had lived my entire life as a human and i was suddenly a small kitten."
Lyd was listening intentivly, but still very confused. "Wait, you believe that you were a human? That's outrageous!"
"I suppose it would be hard to believe, but in my universe I was a human and pets didn't walk on two legs and they certainly didn't talk. It was a big shock when I found out how different this universe was. It seemed so weird that pets walked and talked and were intelligent." Shadow looked down at his feet.
Lyd looked at Shadow, still quite confused. "So Dr. Pete here is this magical person?"
Dr. Pete looked down at Shadow with a warning look.
Shadow snapped his head up. "What? No no, a different Pete. But uh, anyways I had to live my life as a pet for just about a week. I really thought it was going to be horrible, but it was actually pretty fun. Everything was going fine, under the circumstances, until I had a weird dream where some guy was talking to me in a forest. The next night I found I had sleeped walked to the forest I had seen in my dreams. I didn't know how to get back home so I continued forward into the forest hoping it would lead me to the voice who said he could help me. I eventually ran into a golden circle, which was the entrance to a cave. Inside the cave I found a unicorn, who changed his shape into a human, a hippie that is. With him and Pete's help, not this Pete, they sent me back to my universe. The only problem was that I had to return as my kitten self, and I had to find someone to change me back to a human. I was given a enchanted ring though which I wore to disguise myself as a human. With it I returned back to the bookstore my brother had described and I found the old man who owned it. It turns out he was a magic user as well, and I learned the truth about everything...." Shadow paused.
Lyd took advantage of Shadow's pause. "And this truth is?"
"He told me that I was originally a kitten from the universe I had just left. He saved me from blizzard and took me to the universe where he had found a young couple that wanted another son but couldn't. He had changed me into a human baby and gave me to them, where I lived a normal human life. After he told me that I went home to my human family and told them everything I told you. They didn't beleive me at first, so I took of my ring and they saw my true form. They believed me then, and I had decided to come back to this universe and live the life I had been born to live. With the universal time differences it wouldn't be hard to visit my human family anyway."
Lyd thought for a second. "Universal Time differences? As in time moves faster in one than the other, right? So that leaves me with just one question, how old are you?"
Shadow had to think for a moment, he knew how old he was as a human, but not his cat self. "Well, I was just about 15 years old as a human... I'm not sure how old I am as a kitten. Maybe like a year old?"
"That sounds about right," interjected Dr. Pete.
"Ok then, if this is all true and the 'other' universe moves slower, say, one week there is one month here, that would make
you older than
me."
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
End of Chapter 3
Well obviously this chapter was highly based off of
Neko's story, in fact, he wrote most of Shadow's speaking parts for me, so I thank him for taking his time to do that, and I suggest you to do he same. And for those few who haven't read Neko's story, you're missing out.