Era of Madness

Losers

"Come on Tyler, we're gonna be late!"

"Hey, just wait a minute! We're going to be even more late if you make me trip and hurt myself by going to fast!"

Laughing, a young Tyler did his best to catch up to his friend, a teen girl with a simple and dirty white dress.

"Hehe, then should we call you Snailer from now on?"

As she laughed, Tyler finally catch up to her and rubbed his hand in her hair.

"Hey, no, I took time this morning to brush them!"

"Haha, too bad for you then!"

The girl pouted but then she cupped her hands below a nearby drinking foutain and, once she accumulated enough of it, she just threw it all in his face.

"Hey! I'm all wet now!"

He launched her water too. Both looked at each other for a second and then laughed. They took some water in their cupped hands again and started running again, while throwing it, laughing happily.

And then in the next scene... she was...

"Al... Ali... Alicia!" Tyler suddenly screamed as he woke up covered in sweat.

He found himself alone in a room, unable to calm himself as he breathed quickly.

'Did... did I dream? Was all of that, with Erica and John and all this shit, also just all a dream?' he thought.

Afterall, thinking that all of this simply happened, just like this, and in just a day or so, it seemed quite unreal.

He quickly examinated the room he was in. The decoration and installation were quite simple, but it was definitly too spacious, bright and comfy to be in any of the lower sectors, especially sector V.

'Yeah, wasn't a dream after all'

Tyler wondered for an instant if he was happy or not abut this, but he couldn't reflect about it much further as the door of the room opened.

"Tyler, you woke up!" John exclaimed seeing he was up.

"Yeah yeah, I'm up, doesn't mean I like hearing people scream in the damn morning" Tyler replied as he managed to get up despite his battered body.

"It's 3:40PM"

"Yeah yeah, I bet it was also around this hour when you woke me last time"

Tyler looked at himself to see he was wearing azure-colored pajamas.

"At least I'm not wearing just underwear this time, that's a plus compared to yesterday I guess" he said.

"Not yesterday, Tyler" John said. "Don't freak out but you slept for two days straight"

He was expecting the drunkard to be shocked but the latter simply shrugged:

"Meh, I did worse" he said. "Anyway, where is Erica-"

He suddenly remembered what happened and his expression turned to anger:

"THIS BITCH! At the last moment, she turned back..." he said, grinding his teeth.

"Calm down, she had no other choice, Tyler, we couldn't have-"

"Shut the fuck up! We had enough energy left, we could've gone for it, we would've left this damn planet!"

"Tyler, it would've been suicide! With the state of our ship, even assuming we could've gone past the Guardians and crossed the Outergate, we could've never escaped the pursuit! Escaping away was the only option!"