1-2[βήτα] (Dean) The First Day
“Dean… Dean-Angelo,” Dean-Angelo thinks to himself, reassuring himself of his knowledge of his own name. His friends sometimes call him “D.A.” What a strange thing to think you could of forgotten, Dean ponders to himself, furling his brow as he sits in his bed. Soft overcast light peaks through the lowered blinds of his window, gently falling upon the floor of his bedroom in neat consecutive rows. The cool sounds of pattering rain and a whistling breeze can be heard outside. Dean turns his gaze towards his alarm clock. “1:45pm” it reads in harshly indifferent digital numbering. “Time to get up, I guess,” Dean says, breaking his fugue to drag himself out of bed. Dean has been having strange dreams recently. In which, he catches glimpses of outlandishly different worlds, bizzare creatures, and horrid events. However once Dean wakes up, he can only barely recall any but two of these visions. One is a recurring nightmare in which Dean is assaulted by an indistinguishable shadow figure, but is always cut short before Dean can retaliate. The second is whatever Dean dreamed last night, of which he cannot remember a thing, but left him awaking with an overwhelming sense of loss, and confusion. And nausea, Dean thinks to himself as he brings himself to his feet in the center of the room, the churning feeling of sickness roiling firmly in the pit of his stomach. He makes his way dizzily towards the bathroom.
After a quick shower and cleaning himself up Dean heads towards the living room, his nausea still present. He had stood around in the bathroom for several minutes, waiting to see if he would vomit, hoping to have gotten it over with so he could relieve himself of this troublesome sickness, but it was to no avail. This nausea was the persistent kind, the kind of nausea that sits in your gut like a rock, simmering all day, but never boiling to the top, a constant incessant reminder of discomfort. In fact, the only things Dean had been able to achieve in the bathroom, is that now he had minor headache to accompany his unease. “Mom!” “Buddy!” Dean calls out as he passes an empty kitchen into his empty living room. He was the only one in the apartment “I guess they’re out right now,” Dean says to himself and the sound of the breeze picking up outside. “Good thing I don’t have school or work today, I think I’m getting sick,”
Dean decides to skip breakfast, feeling a mixture of too much discomfort to cook anything, and doubt in his ability to keep food down. Making it just does not seem worth the effort. He sits down on the couch to relax and watch T.V. instead.
“...strange weather patterns have been continuing to exponentially increase in recent months,” reads an anchorman on the television “Experts are at lost as readings continue to diverge, even from normal predictions of global warmi-ksshht,”
“Ugh, News,” Dean sighs as he changes the channel.
“...Cult activity on the rise as more and more fringe religious groups announce radical predict-ksshht,”
“...Scientists warn globe as strange foreign energy readings are discovered above major population centers across the worl-ksshht,”
“...is your local weather. Winds are on a sudden and unpredicted upturn in the greater Sacramento area. It is advised to be on the lookout for storm warni-kssht,”
“Why is it always just News,” Dean complains to himself, as he turns off the T.V. His headache beginning to become a minor nuisance alongside his nausea. The wind outside now begins to howl. “The News has been on a lot lately,” Dean thinks to himself “all kinds of crazy people and weather going on everywhere. I guess the world is just going to Hell,” Dean quietly chuckles to himself before groaning in discomfort. He pulls himself up from the couch to find another distraction.
Before his sickness could get any worse Dean decides he should take some medicine. Popping a couple of Over-the-Counter pills from his medicine cabinet he hopes that his symptoms will soon ease. Dean then walks back to his bedroom deciding to use his computer to distract himself. He begins to browse the internet, but this does not help for very long. Social Media talks about all the same topics as the Television News, and it is equally just as boring. Dean does find some joy however, when he begins chatting with his friends on their online group messaging board. Most of them are offline at the moment, but a couple are there to talk.
“Damn the wind is crazy right now,” Deans friend Matt texts to the group chat. Matt is almost always online, and usually the first to respond when anyone else sends something.
“It really is, I saw some tree branches get blown down,” Dean’s friend David responds.
“Yeah I can hear it right now,” Dean adds as the wind continues to steadily wail on outside. They continue to talk like this for a while, and it is a welcome distraction for Dean. But it does not stop the continuous rolling in his stomach, nor the growing pain in his skull. Dean mentions this sickness to the group chat, as well as the current absence of his mother and godfather, the tediousness of the News, his boredom, and again his discomfort. The three of them discuss these points and then eventually move on to other topics. They reach a point in the conversation is which David is in the middle of typing some rant about a recent game, when suddenly Dean’s cellphone belts out a shockingly loud alarm. The alarm tone rings painfully through Dean’s head, reverberating with the throbbing pulse of his migraine, and sending another wave of nausea up from his stomach. In his discomfort Dean picks up his phone to see what the alarm is about. “WIRELESS EMERGENCY ALERT: EXTREME AND UNPREDICTABLE WEATHER. PLEASE STAY INDOORS,” It reads concerningly.
“Hey Did you guys get that WEA alarm just now?” Dean asks the group chat, as the wind howls inconceivably loud outside. Dean decides takes this moment to raise his blinds and look out his window for the first time today, and he is disturbed to find the cloud formation that is forming overhead; A massive hurricane-esque spiral of dark clouds, beginning to slowly spin inwards above. This massive form is concentrating at its center in the direction of downtown. Just looking at this spectacle seems to cause Dean’s migraine to throb even worse, and his stomach to turn over twice. Even Dean’s limbs are beginning to feel weak.
“Yeah I’m going to have to go,” Dean’s computer dings as Matt responds to the group chat. “My dad wants me to help quickly strap things for down for the storm,”
“Yeah, I should be going to,” David adds.
“Oh… okay. Later guys,” Dean attempts to type back into the chat, but his friends are already gone. Dean is alone once again. His head suffers as if it were being drilled into. His stomach roils in unease like a ship tossed at sea. And his limbs and body feel torrid and heavy as if he were left out to bake in the sweltering sun. He cannot bear it any longer. He rises up in an effort to go find more medicine, but his own two legs no longer have the strength to hold him. His vision blurs. He stumbles as the room spins dizzily around him. His burning fever barely allows him two wobbly steps, before his knees fold underneath him and he comes down. Slapping a hand to the wall, he is lucky to guide his decent, coming to kneel in front of the window, he rests an arm on the sill. From here the wind outside practically screams in Dean’s ears. The screeching sound of ungodly wails rips through the trees and at the walls of Dean’s apartment, as the vortex of clouds in the sky spins rapidly now, like water going down a drain. Rain pelts the side of the building in heavy sheets, as Dean suffers in silence, kneeling in front of this window. His body feels like it’s burning itself away. The world outside continues to cry on, resonating with the pain inside Dean. It too feeling as if it were tearing itself apart, and then suddenly.. It does.
A crack of lightning and roar of thunder wail deafeningly across the land, breaking through all dissonance. This shocks Dean out of balance, as it shakes his whole apartment, forcing him to grasp at the window sill to keep. He gazes painfully out the window at the dark gray sky above as it strangely begins to shift in hue. In the distance he sees the eye of the storm begin to widen as a crimson overtone bleeds out across the heavens. Dean winces in pain as the ground beneath him continues to shake violently. Then he sees it, off in the distance, emerging from the center of the reddening storm, a bulbous shape bulging out from the widen gap in the clouds. Likely miles in diameter, this mysterious shape is incomprehensibly huge. The clouds begin to part, and Dean is struck by a wave of stabbing pain once more as this shape emerges; A humongous glassy sheened dome, fiery amber in color with a deep dark void-black gash of a slit in the center, pushing down from the very heart of this violent vortex. The eye of the storm becomes an actual eye, unnatural, gargantuan, and devilishly reptilian, gazing down at the timid earth beneath it.
Dean, still kneeling, finds himself dumbfounded at the events that have just unfolded. He is unable to comprehend, and his vision begins to fade. His limbs grow even even weaker, the room begins to spin wildly around him, and all of his senses scream in such pain that he is begins to fall numb. Gazing out he sees the massive abhorrent ocular gazing in turn at the ground directly beneath it. Then suddenly, Dean sees the ceiling, as the last of his strength gives out, he falls onto his back in the center of his room. His vision is almost completely dark now.
“Wow, you’d think after this many loops you’d be desensitized to this initial wave of unholy energy by now, but I guess not,” Dean hears out of nowhere, recognizing the familiar voice. Above him he is barely able to make out the faded figure of the young man with the blonde hair.
“C-Chris?... What the fu-,”
Dean blacks out.