Chapter Four: “Chocolate Coma” 21. 10. 2016

“Excuse me? Could you spare a moment to-” A sharp slap to the face was Darren's reply knocking him staggering off the footpath. His brain rattled around in his skull as he tried to get his bearings noticing the woman hadn't even slowed her brisk walking pace and continued down the path as though swatting a fly away from her.

Mildly aggrieved but mostly puzzled Darren jogged back up to her and alongside noticing the profoundly glazed look in her unblinking eyes, the pupils seemed to be split into sections. Still wholly intact and functioning but as though the eye had been shattered and glued back together. The colour of both her iris and her long hair were a metallic silver and Darren momentarily questioned the possibility he was talking to a robot. Apart from these oddities she was round faced with sharp small eyes and Darren felt she was surprisingly attractive for someone who had just hit him in the face.

“Sorry, I just need-” Another swift and hard slap rippled across Darren's cheek. He recovered more quickly this time but was losing his temper at the repeated random assaults. He jogged ahead of her again but kept at an arm's length away.

“Look, I get you're busy but-” Her arm swung at him again but only swiped through the air between them. Darren hesitates and exhales in frustration at the persistence of her attacks. “But I'm really lost here, I was in an accident and I dunn-” Having lost track of the woman's intense walking speed or perhaps she closed the distance Darren stumbles into the wall beside them after another clout across his jaw.

Darren immediately stamps back into her view having lost all patience with his attempts at civility. “What the hell is your probl-” Darren trips backwards trying to not fall off the footpath again. He hears the woman audibly exhale in frustration and her eyebrows narrow. Darren staggers back onto the footpath and stops moving. “Will you stop slapping me for fuck's sake?”

The woman pauses inches from colliding with Darren but doesn't raise her arm again. She looks Darren up and down with a confused almost disbelieving expression. She remains planted to the ground but slowly leans to the left staring at him with an analytical squint. Darren watches her equally puzzled as she rights herself and takes a step to the side of him.

“I er, was hoping you could give me some directions.” Darren curls his lips together at the side of his mouth, rather unsettled by the situation but still distinctly annoyed as well. The woman taps the small black pebbles at her temples and the visor somehow vanishes.

“I thought you were a charity advert!” She speaks as though genuinely surprised but her tone is decidedly non-apologetic. Her voice sounds hoarse and gravelly as though from talking too much or too little.

“What?” Darren is only increasingly miffed by her opening statement in the long list of today's events that make no logical sense.

“Why didn't you ping me?”

“What?”

“If you wanted to talk, why didn't you just ping from across the street?” Darren takes a step back and is bumped into by a businessman rushing past. He also doesn't apologise Darren notes.

“I don't know what you're saying. What is a ping?”

“Oh fuck off cuntfamily, everyone knows what ping is.” Darren's eyes widen at the blindingly excessive vitriol in her retort.

“You don't have to be rude, I told you I'm really lost here, wherever here is.”

“Mark Denton.”

“Huh?”

“Mark Denton.”

“No I said where. Where is this?”

“Mark Denton”

“N-Wha...Is English not your first language?”

“Why does that matter?”

“Wha, What do you mean why does that matter? It matters as to whether you can understand what I'm saying.”

“But if I couldn't, I'd just translate it so it's irrelevant.”

“Oh well sorry, we're not all bilingual translation experts.”

“Yeah we are.”

Darren takes a deep breath and tries to compose himself despite being more baffled and aggravated than when he was lost in the pipes. He stares at the woman silently who stares back at him until they are both jostled by another group of hurried pedestrians.

“Look do you actually need something or are you just spongeclouding?” Darren blinks aggressively.

“I dunno if this is a prank or something but yeah I am actually lost and need directions to a phone or train station or something.”

“Pff! what kind of plastic tumour are you?”

“Excuse me?”

“How can anyone need directions to a train station? Just follow the road ya skull fracture.”

“TERRRAAAINN STAYSHUN. TRAYNE! SINCE WHEN DO TRAINS GO ON THE ROAD?”

“Okay we're dead now.” This phrase seemingly signalling the end to the conversation as the woman begins swiftly walking away down the path again. Darren glares at her but his humility is barged back into him by a muscular man pushing past him.

Darren glances up at the man who seems to be suffering from some kind of skull deformity as the bone pushes against the skin of his face. It almost seems to glow and gives a chilling impression even from an angle. Darren nervously scans the streets for another potential good Samaritan. A businessman in a rainbow-coloured suit crawls along the ground panting like a dog, two women on a nearby bench openly pleasure each other with objects looking like egg whisks and another bald man whizzes past on the advanced Heely things before turning and nonchalantly slamming face-first into a brick wall. Unflinching he slowly sinks into the brickwork and is swallowed up by the building. Darren runs to catch back up with the leaving woman.

“Okay look, I think maybe I'm hallucinating or I'm concussed or something but I need some help and what you're saying doesn't make any sense.”

“I'm not giving you any money.”

“I don't want...Oh shit! Do you think I'm homeless is that it?” The woman scoffs. “No I'm serious, just tell me what city this is, are we near Droylsden?”

“I already told you we're at Mark Denton”

“So what, the city is called Mark Denton?”

“Yes! Fuck my skull! Where the hell are you from?”

“Er, Droylsden, just outside Manchester. I work...worked in a chocolate factory there and got pulled into one of the vats, I only just crawled out of the bloody pipes over there.”

The woman stops abruptly and looks deeply into Darren's eyes with a terrifying unseen conviction. Darren tries to maintain eye contact but the focus of the glare is more than a little frightening and yet another group of bustling people soon knock him off his feet. As he regains his balance, he notices the woman has switched her visor back on and makes some swift hand gestures, flicking and pointing and clenching her fists.

She turns back to Darren and grabs his arm, dragging him over to the side of the footpath.
“Okay fine, five minutes for whatever toxic shit you're peddling.” They reach the side of the path by a small cutaway between the buildings left for a pitifully tiny patch of artificial flowers and trees. It's here that Darren stiffens like a pigeon's neck, rapidly and fearfully glancing at all the corners of his eyesight as a cloudy white electronic wall suddenly fizzles into existence and shoots out from the bottom of the pavement to several feet above their heads in a miniature hut shape that in a matter of seconds completely surrounded them. Darren cries out in shock and fear.

“WAEGH!”

The woman looks rather pitifully at Darren who slowly stands back up after ducking for cover crouched to the floor. He stares at the encapsulating walls like they're about to collapse on them or slam together and crush them.

“W-what the flying fuck just happened?”

“Really?”

“Where the hell am I that this can happen?”

“In my personal space.”

“Oh sorry.” Darren instinctively backs away from the woman before pausing and shaking his head. “Wait what?”

The woman sighs and rests against the wall of the floral area.

“Is Trollsden some backwards Luddite community then that you don't know what any of this stuff is?” Darren glances back at the woman but is more interested in the shimmering white forcefield surrounding them. He tentatively puts a hand to it only for it to faze straight through with no texture to grip or feel.

“What is this thing?” Darren looks back at the woman flushed with disbelief, confusion and uncertainty. The woman frowns and rolls her eyes looking to the side, tapping her foot in frustration but also slightly embarrassed and awkward.

“It's a mod right? You make a small section of a public area temporarily private for conversations or whatever. I'd say you must have seen the adverts but clearly they don't even have showers where you're from.” Darren tries to inconspicuously smell his armpit.

“I've put five minutes on the clock but this costs me so don't wank around...And don't go screaming your tits off again I've only got seventy five decibels soundproofing.”

Darren tries to formulate a sentence but is too petrified of his surroundings to control his thoughts. He'd thought this a weird new metropolitan city, a cult gathering or some hidden camera prank scenario but now he was seeing impossible magic forcefields and all the smaller oddities of the place and its people became terrifyingly alien and isolating to him. The woman takes on a slightly different expression. Not enough to be called sympathy but perhaps a lowering of expected intellectual capacity.

“Did you actually come from a chocolate factory or was it a hospital?” Darren realises that this new line of thinking could quickly end with him in whatever bizarre slick building counted for a mental asylum here. He needed to say something clever and convincing that would immediately dissuade the woman of the notion that he was mentally impaired and had escaped from hospital.

“...I'm definitely not a crazy person...”

“Uh-huh.”

“No, I'm really not, honestly it must be fudge poisoning or something.”

“Oh yeah or Dragon Cancer or Fairy Thrush.”

“I'm not making this up! It's everything else I'm seeing that seems made up. Please can't you trust me on this?”

“No.”

“Why not? What can I do to convince you?” The woman sighs again. 

“Fine. Take off all your clothes.” Darren stops talking immediately...