Thomas stood there clutching the small scroll while a long line of strangers—people who looked like they'd stepped out of a history book or a fantasy novel—stared at him as if he were a living miracle.
"My turn! Let me try! Let me get tested!" The youth behind him had already pivoted back to his own ambitions, shouting with a frantic energy that made Thomas's head throb.
Thomas didn't wait for a second push. He turned to leave, but before he could take a single full stride, his boot clipped something heavy on the ground. He stumbled, looking down, and froze.
"The tree...?"
It was his Bonsai. But like everything else in this world, it had undergone a radical transformation. It looked as though it had been fed by a century of sunlight in a single moment; it had grown at least three times its original size.
The small, delicate pot he once carried effortlessly with one hand was now a substantial vessel. It stood half a meter high and just as wide. To lift it now required a real exertion of strength, a physical strain that sent a new, dull ache through his shoulders.
"Good luck," Thomas said to the youth, the words sounding hollow. "If any of this is even real, that is."
He found a narrow, beaten path winding down the hill. He adjusted his grip, tucking the heavy pot under one arm and clutching the scroll in his other hand.
As he descended, he began to notice the people gathered at the base of the hill—hundreds of them who had apparently already undergone this strange "test." But as he walked, a more personal realisation hit him.
"My suit... where is my suit? And my shoes?"
He stopped dead in his tracks. Gone were the polished Oxfords and the crisp, charcoal-grey wool of his Wall Street attire. In their place were rugged, old-looking boots that felt stiff and smelled of cured hide. His legs were encased in heavy black trousers made of a thick, durable leather.
He shifted the tree to inspect himself further, his detective's eye cataloguing every detail. He was wearing a completely different set of clothes—outdated, handmade, and functional.
He wore a brown leather vest that looked as though it had been stitched together by hand; he could see the thick, uneven threads binding the panels.
The vest was riddled with pockets of various sizes and hung unbuttoned over a shirt made of a coarse, rustic fabric. It was a weave Thomas didn't recognise—something thick and scratchy against his newly sensitive skin.
"Sh*t! I failed!"
The sudden, agonised shout of the youth from the hilltop echoed down the slope. Thomas didn't even turn around.
"As if any of this is real," he whispered to himself. His mind, trained for years to find the "play" in a suspect's story, reached for the most logical conclusion: he had been drugged or hypnotised. This was a vivid, lucid hallucination triggered by that old woman.
It had to be. He could feel pain—real, stinging, throbbing pain. He could feel a chaotic swirl of emotions that should have been impossible for his "broken" mind.
He was in a landscape he had never seen, surrounded by people acting out a superhero fantasy. The sheer realness of it was exactly what made him certain it was fake. To Thomas, the detective, reality was grey and numb. This vibrance was a lie.
He kept trying to recall every hypnotic technique and psychological trigger he had ever studied as he reached the bottom of the hill. But his solitude didn't last long.
"Wow! It's true! The rumour is true!" "You... what kind of superpower did the statue give you?" "Show us! Come on, show us right now!"
A swarm of young faces—none appearing older than seventeen or eighteen—instantly surrounded him. They looked at him with an intensity that bordered on worship, their eyes wide with a hunger for a hero. Thomas felt a surge of social anxiety, a feeling so new and sharp it made him want to bolt.
"It looks so damn real," he muttered, marvelling at the sophistication of his own subconscious. He never expected a hypnotic trance to reach this level of fidelity.
"Easy there, everyone," a deep, resonant voice broke through the chatter.
A large man stepped forward, his presence commanding immediate silence. He was middle-aged, the first face Thomas had seen that possessed the weathered lines of true experience.
The youths stepped back respectfully as the man stopped in front of Thomas, studying him with a calm, observant gaze.
"You all know superpowers don't manifest just by taking the test," the man said to the crowd. "Let our boy catch his breath. Let him have his moment."
The man turned back to Thomas and offered a small, knowing smile. "I'm Oliver, the leader of the Dante settlement." He extended a hand in greeting.
Thomas looked down at his own hands—one occupied by a heavy tree, the other by a scroll—and then back up at Oliver.
"Ah, sorry. I'm just a bit over-excited to finally have a superhero discovered in our settlement," Oliver laughed, retracting his hand without any hint of offence. "Don't worry, son.
Everything you're feeling right now—the confusion, the weight of it—it's normal. Just go over there, take a rest, and let it all sink in. Absorb the reality of it, and prepare yourself for the glory ahead."
"Ok..." Thomas replied. He decided to play along with the dream's logic. He nodded to Oliver and began walking toward a quiet patch of grass away from the throng.
Yet, even as he moved away, he could feel the weight of a hundred pairs of eyes. They followed his every step, watching the "superhero" carry his oversized tree into the unknown.
"Don't forget, you have to go to a town with that scroll!" Oliver's voice carried over the murmurs of the crowd, ringing with a sense of duty that Thomas found strangely comforting. "Open it and see where that place is, and I'll take you personally to the train station."
"Thanks," Thomas shouted back, his voice sounding raspy and unfamiliar to his own ears. "At least there are trains here."