Life After You

That morning, Delilah woke from what felt like a very long slumber. The moment she opened her eyes, she found herself staring into an all-too-familiar, plain white ceiling. It was the hospital, and it took her only all of two seconds to realize this. Indeed, Delilah was a frequent guest of the hospital. She had been born weak—in the sense that she fell sick easily, not that she had any inherent illnesses or that she had an eggshell skull. It was nothing like that.

“Delilah, how do you feel today?” came a man’s voice as the curtain around her bed was drawn open. This voice, too, was one that she knew well. It belonged to Otis, one of the nurses in charge of this ward. Clad in blue, Otis was a man a few years Delilah’s senior. The stability of his work ensured that he knew almost every patient on a personal level—the regular ones, at least.

Delilah, of course, was one of them.

“I’m feeling quite…”

Wait.

The girl stopped her own train of thought. She glanced to the side, where her phone lay. She reached for it and pushed a button. The screen lit up, revealing the date and time.

Why do I have a feeling of déjà vu?

Instead of answering, Delilah looked up at the nurse, her gaze filled with confusion. In sharp contrast to her confusion, the nurse, seeing that expression, appeared…relieved.

“So it wasn’t just us,” said Otis, “You came back too.”

Otis Meagher, nurse, had also been brought into the world of Pistevo. There, he was paired with a family doctor with an incredibly calm demeanor named Harriet Johnson. A pairing could only make it out if they chose the same exit. Then, the fact that Otis was here must mean…

“Is Harriet here?” asked Delilah.

“Yes, I gave her a call this morning. We returned to slightly different hours, but it was the same day and the same event—this morning when we woke up. Much like you, actually, if you’ve just come back from that world as well.”

“So we came back to the day we got pulled into his world…” Delilah mumbled thoughtfully, “But some of us with more time than others just because we got up earlier or later on that day. Doesn’t that mean we practically went back to the past?”

The past—before Delilah would discover, in Pistevo’s world, that her family never did have her back.

The past—before anything in Pistevo’s world happened.

Before…

“It seems like time almost never moved at all while we were away,” Otis said in a hushed tone. “But…what about Zeph? He’s not originally from here, and from what you have told me, the time when he should have been ‘alive’, in his backstory—”

“—was around this time.”

Without looking up to meet the nurse’s gaze, Delilah tapped her screen to open the game that had always been on her homescreen: After You. Under normal circumstances, when she opened it, Zeph should be the only character standing…

Delilah blinked.

Seeing her expression, Otis walked a bit closer and peered at her screen.

“Error,” she whispered.

Otis shifted his gaze from her screen to the girl herself, took a breath as if to speak, but then held that breath for a few seconds before releasing it in the form of a sigh.

“You can probably leave later today,” he said.

“I’ll look for him. But…can I tell you something?”

“Of course. Perhaps not here, though.”

Delilah nodded.

“Later, then.”

“Later” was only around two hours afterwards. A checkup later, Delilah and Otis stood a bit away from the more populated areas of the hospital. In a whisper, she told him that she actually “returned” not once, but twice—the first time was into After You, the second, here and now. She told him that she seemed to have met a Zeph from before she ever played the game, and it seemed like the whole world in that game was simply destroyed.

“I was there for two in-game days and I completely destroyed the game,” Delilah said, followed by an exasperated sigh. “But I’m only more confused now.”

Otis nodded. “As am I. Initially, Harriet and I wanted to try looking into Iraneous’s case…this complicates things.”

The two stood in silence for a minute. Then, Otis reminded her that she should probably leave—it was about time he got back to work anyway.

As she remembered it, it was normally her mother who picked her up after a hospital visit—be it for regular checkups or after being abruptly admitted. This day, Delilah stood in the lobby on the ground floor, glancing around near the entrance, not quite yet stepping out.

It’s not like I want to see her yet, not so soon. I haven’t decided what to do about all of that. Half of her hoped to see the woman. As long as her family behaved normally around her—which they always did—there was no real need for her to deal with the truth in a practical manner. The other half of her, however, hoped that her mother would not show up. Though the truth would hurt, at least she would have one thing she could be sure of after days of so many uncertainties.

Just as she was bout to leave on her own, a long, blond ponytail entered her field of vision.

“G-Gilad?!”