Fritz blinked blearily as he moved to rub at his eyes. To be honest he was surprised that he could rub at his eyes. He didn’t expect to wake up again. He gathered that he hadn’t been as successful as he wanted in his endeavor. He couldn’t decide if that was a good thing or not. Now he had to deal with the consequences. Right now he had to be waking up in a hospital and in any moment he would be swarmed by doctors, nurses, and psychiatrists. Who knew? Maybe even his parents would show up, but to be honest he highly doubted that.
Then again, there was something wrong with his theory about waking up in a hospital. He was face down, which wasn’t how he thought people were put in hospital beds. He slowly got to his knees as he finally managed to get his mismatched eyes opened. Looking around showed him in a room with at least four other people, people he didn’t know. His eyes quickly widened in alarm. He was in a room full of strangers wearing a dress! He knew what wearing a dress felt like. Why was he in a dress in a room full of strangers. That was a risk he didn’t want to take! He didn’t mind wearing dresses or skirts or heels or makeup but that was a thing for him and his friends. He needed to figure out if he could salvage this and quickly.
His alarm at his attire was quickly cut off as he finally processed what his hand looked like. It didn’t look like skin. In fact, Fritz almost wanted to say that it looked like porcelain. Parts of his arm were missing, and he sat back on his heels as he raised his other hand to poke at the empty spaces. The young boy bit off a scream as his finger went into his arm. It felt a little strange, but mostly it felt like poking at nothing. What was going on? He was some sort of hollow porcelain thing in a dress in a room full of strangers. Fritz was about two seconds from a full-fledged panic attack.
That was when, well he could only call it a ghost, entered the room and told them to take a seat. At a lost for what else he could do Fritz elected to follow the order. He slowly got to his feet and took a step towards the table only to discover something else strange about him. He was limping. A quick look confirmed that his right leg was shorter than his left one. It looked like the leg had broken off and had been badly matched and glued back together; very badly matched, like a child had done it. Fritz bit back a whimper. What was going on? He forced himself to not think about that and continue on his way to the table.
There were only five seats and two were already taken. He would have to sit next to someone which was not ideal at all. The question was did he want to sit next to the partly see though boy with the open umbrella or the girl in the lab coat? Fritz wasn’t sure. The easiest solution would be to take the seat between them, but that wasn’t happening. In the end, he limped his way around the table to take the seat next to the boy. At least they both looked inhuman. Would the seat he took mean anything to the ghost? This all had to be a dream, right? Or worse.
Fritz found himself asking the near silent room and the ghost in particular,
“Is this hell?”That made sense, in a twisted kind of way. Instead of failing in his plans the boy had succeeded. The only thing wrong with that was this wasn’t like any hell he had ever heard of. He did take a moment to look at what had been in his hands the whole time. He bit back another sob as he saw the brand-new tube of lipstick his sister hand given him mere hours before he had acted. She had given it to him to replace the old one he was out of. It was still in the box. This had to be hell. The memento of his sister was torturing him, leaving him to only guess at the pain he was putting at least Marta though. Why did he have to be so damn stupid? Why did he have to be so reckless?