Plague Doctor

It was rare for Phecda members to be given holiday much less one as long as a whole week. Wu Siyu decided to return to her hometown of Shen Hai City to rest. It was night time and she was warmly enshrined in her bed, watching the television on the wall. There were different kinds of snacks placed on her bedside table. Beside them was a ‘lucid dream mask’. This was a pirated version that she modelled after the ‘dream mask’ that the organization had, it was a combination of a circuit that followed the eyeball movement and a mini controller. It could detect the user’s eye movement during sleep and then give off LED lights as signals to stimulate the user’s subconscious, to help them enter lucid dreams.

For the past half a year, Wu Siyu had successfully mastered the art of lucid dreaming but that was just a stepping stone to her true goal. Even though Phecda did not approve of it, her eventual destination was the Dreamlands. She had learned a lot about it from the Angell’s Order and she planned to take the next step during this holiday…

When the second phone call came, she noticed that it came from a different number, but from the lack of speaking, it appeared to be the same caller. Her first instinct was to report this to her superior because this situation was quite creepy. However something stopped her, and so she just left it be. A barely discernible breathing sound came from the phone, weirdly enough it felt quite familiar. That familiarity… reminded her of the Ganzfeld training, the voice of her partner’s breathing when she was bombarded with millions of stimuli.

All of a sudden, she felt a saltiness on her lips and then came a jolt of pain like she was cut with a sharp surgical scalpel. Something was making a connection in her mind. ‘What is going on?’ Wu Siyu grabbed the remote to lower the volume of the tv set while her other hand picked up the phone to her ear. The caller was still silent and the breathing rhythm had not changed.

“Dirty-minded Jun?” She voiced out the question in her mind, “Is this you?” The breathing on the other end immediately picked up in intensity!

Wu Siyu instantly switched off the television and sat up in bed. Her heart was pounding and her breathing was catching as well. It’s him, the salty one! Yes, that was the taste that she remembered. ‘Dirty-minded Jun is not dead, he is really not dead and he is back! But why is he not speaking? The situation does not allow for it? And those feelings earlier…’ It hit Wu Siyu that Gu Jun was attempting a telepathic connection so she immediately closed her eyes and tried to open her senses up for ESP transmission…

‘A rabbit?’ For some reason, this image came to her, a cartoon white rabbit with long ears and a despicable smirk. ‘That looks familiar… Wait, isn’t that Snowball from The Secret Life of Pets?’

“You’ve been turned into a rabbit?!” Wu Siyu gasped and suddenly she tasted salted rabbit meat. Then she heard a children’s song and saw a rainbow as well as a kangaroo but she could tell that this was her own synaesthetic reaction. ‘If he has been transformed into a rabbit, no wonder he can’t speak,’ But more images were still coming in. ‘Huh? Cowboy? Dinosaur? Astronaut? What is this?’ Normally she would have given up already but this was too important… Then it hit her. This was another movie, Toy Story! And there appeared to be a connection between the two movies….

It was a secret life! The toys and pets could not allow human beings to know that they were conscious so they worked in secret. ‘Is that what Dirty-minded Jun means? This is some kind of secret operative? He is still alive but he doesn’t want others to know about it.’ Wu Siyu believed she hit it on the nail then, if her call was monitored, then everything would be exposed. Therefore she could not force him to admit anything or else the call would be traced back to him…

“Aiz, look at me.” She purposely yawned and said, “I was lucid-dreaming again… The days have been too peaceful recently that I may have had too much to eat. Maybe I should go out to meet new people, certain things are more easily shared with strangers. Sigh and now I’m missing that dirty-minded Jun again.” While she said that, she kept her attention on the light breathing sound and tried to receive any incoming new information.

The sign for no smoking… and then Snorlax from Pokemon, it was snoring loudly…’What’s the meaning of these?’ Wu Siyu had no idea whether they were messages from Gu Jun or her own mind playing tricks on her. ‘Banning Snorlax? No wait, banning sleep.’ She believed that was the message but why? She widened her eyes and glanced at the lucid dream mask on the bedside table. ‘Banning the action of dreaming? Banning the trip of Dreamlands? Well, it makes sense. If he has returned, then I won’t be able to find him at Dreamlands, so it’s reasonable for him to tell me not to go there.’

“I guess it’s time to go to bed.” Wu Siyu said as a probe. “Hopefully there is no dream tonight, not the lucid kind nor the normal kind, I just want a nice uneventful, empty sleep.”

She probably had it right because she saw the response in the form of a KFC Logo. A gently smiling gentleman, so it must mean that she was correct, do not dream. Wu Siyu continued the connection, she tried to ask him, ‘Is there anything else? Where are you? How are we going to find you?

‘An old lady crossing the street… Hmm, the focus is not on the old lady but the lights turning from green to red… Wait? Wait for him to make contact?’

The breathing was turning heavier and the connection was becoming wispy. She believed this might be the limit for Dirty-minded Jun’s mental power because she was feeling a bit of a headache herself and the transmitter would be under greater pressure than the receiver so she said, “Okay then, that has been a good chat. No talk to you next time?”

The colonel’s smile returned and this time his smile appeared to be brighter. She focused her mind and tried to send back the same image. She had no idea she succeeded or not because the call abruptly ended. Wu Siyu stared at the phone in her hand. A sense of surreality overcame her. ‘That… was Dirty-minded Jun, right?’

She stood up to grab her laptop. She keyed in the two numbers that called her into the directory checker and found out they were both Australian numbers. No wonder she saw a kangaroo earlier but how did Gu Jun end up here? Perhaps he had reincarnated not as a rabbit but as a kangaroo?

“Aiz.” Wu Siyu’s heart wrenched, be it rabbit or kangaroo, he had reincarnated as an animal. God knows the trouble he must have gone through to survive this long until he could make an international call like that. Then something tugged at her mind. She went online again and found out it was legal to consume kangaroo meat in Australia, this meant that Dirty-minded Su was still in danger! ‘This dude is so dumb, if he really wants to reincarnate into an animal, wouldn’t a cat make more sense? At least he’ll have 9 lives.’

‘But perhaps he is still a man?’ This thought comforted her. There had to be a reason for Dirty-minded Jun to keep his return a secret but why? Even if he had returned as a kangaroo, he wouldn’t be taken in as a scientific study, after all he was someone who was awarded the Phecda’s Medal… right?

Wu Siyu had a lot to think that night. She could barely sleep, much less dream. The thought bounced inside her mind like bumper cars and it kept her up all night.

Her phone rang again as the sun came up. She glanced at the caller id and was quite disappointed to find that it was not Dirty-minded Jun.

“Siyu, Ah Jun might still be alive! He has sent an SOS signal to us, it’s a verified one!”