For https://steemit.com/freewrite/@mariannewest/day-402-5-minute-freewrite-monday-prompt-saving

Janice had been saving since she was 8 years old. Her mother had gotten her a bank account and told her that if she saved half of her allowance every week, she'd have enough to buy the video game console she'd be aching about by the end of the year. Well, the end of the year rolled around, and sure enough, she did have enough. In fact, she had more than enough, because by the end of the year that was the OLD video game console. The new one was what she wanted now, and she didn't have enough. It was a lesson in obsolescence.

But Janice, now a practical nine-year-old, went ahead and bought the old one. She played with it alone. She didn't make any friends by having this old console, but that was ok, sh was used to playing video games alone. She didn't have to share screen time that way.

And it was good enough. Good enough. Good enough.

So today, as Janice's father raced down a road surrounded on both sides by a forest full of scary things, urged to keep running by a young woman with real fear in her eyes who couldn't have been much older than his own Janice, who called him mom...

He was in the body of a woman who was far more powerful, in much better shape than the body he was used to, and this little moment of feeling healthy again... it was good enough.

His legs pumped, the breath filled his lungs and they did not burn. And, sure, there was fear, but it was exhilarating.

When at last the young woman began falling behind him, he stopped. They were either safe now or they never would be, he said. Or, rather, "We're either safe now, or we never will be."

She seemed to agree. And she seemed to think this was a thing that her own mother would say in this circumstance. Or, at least, she was tired enough that she didn't argue.

And so they stopped running, and they walked in silence until he could no longer live with the ignorance or the lying by omission.

"Hey kid, I'm not your mom. I'm a man and I just found myself inside this body. I think this is a dream I'm experiencing. Hey, a cat."
For at that moment, out of the forest came a cat. It climbed his leg, curled itself around his shoulder, then it licked its paw before digging its claws into the leather padding his jacket had presumably just for that purpose. Or, since it's a cat, purrpose.

"Muffles seems to disagree," said the kid, "but I hear you man in mom's body. And, as weird as that is, I'm not as shocked as I would have been if you'd told me a week ago. Would you like to know things or just proceed from here?"

"I'd like to know things."

"Of course you would. It would have been strange if you- can we start over? Hi, I'm Lavender. You're in mom's body. And, can I assume that you're from another world? This is Chibera. We're running from my ... I don't know what she is to me. We're running from an elf who up until yesterday I would have called a friend, who also has a personality that is at least half from another world. She's lost that part of herself or something, I guess. I guess I'm leaping to conclusions, but the point is, she's become ferocious and violent towards us, and I'm not sure why."

"Chibera." His voice cracked. "Chibera. Oh holy shit. Oh holy shit. Or, this is still a dream of course. Never mind. Of course it's Chibera. My daughter tells stories about Chibera. Also, if I'm willing to accept the truth of this particular situation, that would not be the most surprising element. Regardless. Chibera, you say? My daughter tells stories about Chibera. I suppose I don't know if this is a big world or a small one. But have you met her?"

The road came abruptly to a stop. There was no more road, it was forest ahead of them.

---

"Janice, I think you're Janice, not Jani. I think you don't quite understand what's happened. I think you don't believe your own experiences. Janice." Chanbun said when she woke up the next morning and things clicked. "Janice. It is me, Chanbun. I am here, in your world. I am not your dad making a game of Chibera. I am a butcher. I ... sigh. I don't know what to do or where to go from here, but I need you to believe me to even think about starting to make some progress."

Janice sat at the table, quiet. Dad had, indeed, not know what to make for breakfast. He was a staunch feeder of people, and Chanbun had simply begun eating bacon today, not bothering to entice Janice with it. This had been strange behavior. Stranger than the other behavior.

"Ok."Janice looked down into her bowl of blueberries, cheerios, and milk. "Ok. ok. ok. ok." She couldn't stop repeating herself. Suddenly she felt like she needed to figure things out. She felt like she'd been following along in her own life for a while and now she needed to take control, but there was no booklet for how to do this thing. She couldn't just look up on the internet, "How do I get my dad's mind back into his body from a fantasy land, and also make my mom be ok, and also I would maybe like to go back to Chibera and help them..."

"Ok."

Chanbun open her arms, and Janice climbed into her dad's embrace, which felt different being administered by Chanbun, even if it was the same body, there was something about how it held her.

Chanbun, for her part, didn't know exactly how to give a hug to this child who was so very different from the Jani she'd met a few days ago. Nothing seemed to be enough. Time kept racing while they embraced. There was no standing still of time, only a conscious internal drip dripping of sands through a mental hourglass.

"What do you know?" Chanbun asked. "What do you know about this thing that's happening to our minds?"

"Nothing, I guess?" Janice spoke into the plaid that was her father's uniform. "I know, hm. I know that when it gets too stressful, sometimes that might be why I go there, but sometimes it doesn't seem like that's why. Oh, I also know that Jan was here at one point, too...And you're here... and mom's in a coma. And... wait. That guy died. That guy, that famous ceo guy died, and that was around the same time as this stuff was happening ... stuff happening. That was around the time that I stuffed dirt into Alexandrite's nostrils and down his throat and murdered him. I did that. Hang on."

And Janice ran to her room, got a laptop, and went ahead and typed into google, "chibera"

There were lots of entries. It wasn't a made up word that only she knew. The internet was full of chibera. Stories of people visiting there and coming back. Not many from before a month earlier. A couple as far back as the beginning of the year... She'd been visiting Chibera her whole life, but it looked like other people were starting to see it too. In fact... there. There was one from a video game friend... he was going to develop a computer game about it. Oh.

Oh.

She'd told him about Chibera. She'd told him in online chat about it one day. Just some of the little bits and pieces. Things about the World Tree and elves. She'd told him about humans and their machines and the mana problems.

And he'd done something about it. He'd started making a video game.

Oh god. It... It was just a month earlier he'd finished an alpha version of his game. That was a day before her mom had had the stroke. The first day she'd been heard by Jan. The day of her SAT. The day that... Oh god. Things were clicking. She wasn't sure what... she wasn't even sure how the internet worked... or, well, that wasn't entirely true. She had a better idea than the average internet user, but this guy, he'd decided to store some of the salient details of the game on...a blockchain. An immutable... well

Something about the magical mystery of complex computer algorithms maybe had crossed over with the complex magic rhythms of mana and started pulling minds into Chibera and vice versa. Across whatever... separated them?

If she could imagine it, it could be.

She called him. His phone returned a modem connecting kind of signal. Then she realized she wasn't holding a phone, she was holding a fang. She didn't know why she'd thought she could call him. She can only call people on the void... the void? She... oh.

She was standing in Chibera. She was standing over a corpse. Not a humanoid corpse, she felt glad to see, over a giant spider-looking-thing corpse. She wasn't Jani, though. She was Janice, but she was definitely in Jan's body. Nearby, she could see something struggling fiercely inside a web cocoon. It was much larger than she was, but she couldn't stand to see something in pain. She strode over. Strode. She clambered over the corpse of the spider-kind-of thing, and up onto the tree from which this cocoon was hanging. With a swift slice from Jan's knife, she split the silken threads that held it aloft. From a small tear in the cocoon, a giant bear head emerged, yowling with fear and desperation. It spied Janice, holding the knife and quieted, but just for a moment, then seeming to realize that this person who looked like Jan wasn't Jan, it bellowed. Janice leaped from the tree, grateful for Jan's agility, and ran the knife delicately along the edge of the cocoon. Not even barely grazing the bear, who, once freed, galloped through the forest on all fours.

Janice surveyed the scene, cursed, and buried her hands in the dirt, hoping for some power that she figured Jan had but hadn't a clue if she had herself.

picture by me.