REAL WORLD: PART THREE Homeward Bound ... - Whoa is (Not)

Dust clouds billowed out as the glass door of the bookshelf was opened, and Neo waved them aside,
coughing. When the dust had sufficiently cleared, he scanned the titles of the books inside, looking for any
that might provide a map of this house. He wasn’t too sure how old this place was – previous owners had
renovated it to make it look newer – but if it was sufficiently old, he figured that there might have been books
written about it.
Behind him in front of the empty fireplace, Ted sat in a comfortable armchair, fast asleep and dreaming of
coftea. His hand hung over the edge of one armrest, the time on his watch 02:37a.m.. The door was closed
to shut off the never-ending darkness: possibly a foolish move if they were hoping to be found, but probably
enough light from the room seeped out the door to let others know they were in here.
Neo closed the shelf door. There didn’t seem to be anything useful in there. He glanced at the sleeping Ted
and thought that perhaps some rest wouldn’t be such a bad idea after all, when a tall, covered object at the
other end of the room caught his eye. Curious, he went over to it, and after some hesitation pulled at the
cloth draped over its front.
It was a mirror; a fairly big one, with a shiny golden frame that had the words: ‘Nisu oc d’nocess desi reforor
rimeh’t’ engraved on it near the top. Neo paid no attention to the words; he was too engrossed in the
strange reflection of the room he saw in the mirror.
Mainly, it was pink.
Which was very strange, Neo thought, because the glass of the mirror was clear and not pink-tinted. But
before he had time to wonder about this, his pink reflection winked at him, conjured a folded sheet of paper
out of thin air, and stuck it in his pink pocket.
Neo jumped in shock as he felt something slide into his own pocket.
Heart beating fast, he gingerly reached in. His fingers closed over the sheet of paper and drew it out;
apprehensively, he unfolded it.
It was a map of the house.
His pink reflection grinned at him in a disturbingly Ted-like manner. Neo draped the cloth back over the
mirror after a muttered thanks, and then settled down in the empty armchair next to Ted to peruse the map.
It wasn’t hard to figure out; for one, it had the words ‘You Are Here’ printed in neat, friendly letters next to an
arrow that pointed to a red dot in the room he was apparently now in.
Neo decided that this merited at least one ‘whoa’.
“Whoa,” he said.
He realised that he should probably be feeling more weirded out than he currently was, but that looked like it
would take quite some effort and so he chose the easier path of just calmly accepting everything.
Somewhere in the midst of plotting the shortest route back to the others, Neo fell asleep.
Chapter Six
Renaken region, The Nexus
It didn’t take Luke too long to realise that the two guys who had just vanished were probably not going to be
reappearing any time soon, and before long he had bid farewell to Jemma and Zeran Laivon, trudged
through a flock of churkeys (“Suri,” said one) and exited the farm.
Back on the road again. He’d been walking for about an hour, perhaps more – you do the maths. Aquintos
lay ahead, but Luke had things other than his destination to occupy his mind as he re-entered the woods of
the Nexus.