Something Has Happened!

     Last spotted: A long, long time ago...

     That sign- those 12 words- had been up there for ages. Over a year, Ray was sure of it. Over two years, in fact. As long as he could remember.

     Scratch that. There was something, in the beginning. A memory that Ray held close to himself. It was always there, but lately it had been... fading. Ray feared that he himself was doing the same.

     A user had been standing in front of him. A boy, who was grinning widely and staring down at his new, yellow Pteri. Ray had thought, just then, that things were going to be great. He had a new user, who would care for him like any other neopet. He’d buy him food and toys....

     A few weeks passed after that. Slowly, the user- Ray had found that his name was John- had gotten on less and less. His other neopets- A Uni, a Kougra, and a JubJub- were all sent to the pound, one after the other, until only Ray was left.

     And then the vital day had come. The day that Ray’s life would be changed- For the worse. His owner had waited another week. He could pound a neopet again, and knew- He knew- that it was his turn.

     He waited, shivering, in their small, classic neohome. John had never really gotten around to furnishing it- There was a bamboo table, a slime-covered window, and lastly a peanut bed. Ray himself owned nothing more than a blue ixi plushie and two books that he had read countless times- The Mystery of the Kougra’s Paw, and The Mind of a Lupe. They were sat in a small sack, on top of the bamboo table.

     Days had passed. From the sight of John’s user lookup, 8 days approximately. Ray was beginning to worry. Where was John? Anything would be better than this... constant waiting. Ray felt as if he was walking on thin ice. As if he couldn’t stop walking on thin ice. Was this... his life now? An eternity of waiting, pacing in a neohome?

     The answer, he had figured out by now, was yes. He was still keeping track of the days- Still hoping- and he was sick of it. 1,268 days had passed. Ray, only having read and re-read two books over and over again, wasn’t sure of how long that was. A year, maybe? It seemed logical for a year to be 1,000 days. Or maybe it was a hundred days.

     It couldn’t be a hundred days, could it? No. John’s- Was that his name? - shield wasn’t that old yet. It was still fairly old, though, and not young enough for a year to be a thousand days. 500 sounded about right. Yeah, 500. That... was... probably....

     Sleep came to Ray just then, as it always did when he started thinking about what had happened, and just thinking in general. Actually, Ray had gone to sleep quite a lot lately. Was it a Neopian sickness? Going to sleep a lot? Ray hoped not. Without a user around, Ray could have it forever. Or at least until he disintegrated into a pile of dust or something. He was quite hungry. The few foods that he could find in the neohome when Josh- John? Jacob? Something like that...- had left was gone by now. Even Ray’s blue ixi plushie was starting to go- A tear here, a rip there. Ray was fairly certain that it would vanish into thin air pretty soon, simply because that that was the only logical way for something to go away, apart from him eating it.

     That was how things came to Ray. On rare, rare occasions, a voice would boom: ‘Something has happened!’ and something- food, usually- would appear into the room. Sometimes it was basically useless, or Ray couldn’t see what had happened. Once, he had gotten a lottery ticket that was still lying, useless, in the center of the bamboo table. On occasion, somebody would barge into the neohome and say something about eating Ray’s food when he wasn’t looking, and then leave. He still got the neopoints- small, golden coins that had no purpose other than being stacked and stacked again by a bored Ray.

     Today- the 1,269th day- an event came to Ray. The usual voice boomed its usual words, and suddenly a Robot Grundo Sugar Cookie fell into the room. Ray hurried forwards eagerly- he hadn’t eaten in 23 days- and jumped as another voice rose up behind him.

     “Oh no! Somebody has stolen 34 neopoints from you when you weren’t looking.”

     Ray, one hand still placed protectively over the cookie, turned around. It was true- some of his neopoints were missing. But, honestly, that didn’t matter to Ray. He had food.

     He ate the food slowly, over 3 days. On the third day he ate the candy- Food so sugary sweet that it nearly made him gag. His status (something that flickered meagerly in the corner of his vision) had changed from dying to starving, which Ray didn’t quite understand. Wasn’t that basically the same thing?

     It didn’t matter now, did it? Ray knew that this would be his eternity. Gradually, Ray would gain and lose items, until one day he would disappear into nothing. Then he would be free from this neohome, free to zoom around this-

     A pause as Ray was met, in his thoughts, with an uncomfortable silence. He didn’t know anything about what was outside of this neohome. Actually, that was false. He knew all about a Lupe's mind. And he knew all about strangely shaped Kougra paw prints in mystery books. After that? Nothing. Nothing outside of these four walls, at least.

     True, it was easy to keep Ray entertained. He could stack his neopoints to make a castle, and then have his blue ixi plushie become a monster to knock it all down. He could read the two books that he nearly knew by heart now, or try to look out of the slime-covered window. He used to be able to look out of it, the first few months. The scene stayed, faintly remembered, in Ray’s mind: A long green field, dotted with an occasional weed or flower. As the months went past, though, the window became dirty, covered with even more slime and grime. Now, whenever Ray tried to look at it, all that met his gaze was a large, gray rectangle, covered with slime.

     Ray had once tried to clean the window. Break it open somehow, and free him self from the room. It hadn’t worked- no matter how hard Ray rubbed or banged at it, nothing would change. Nothing would ever change, here in Ray’s room. Everything would always be calm. Quiet. Time wouldn’t reach this room. Nothing but the random events, at least.

     Another random event came on day 1,277. Little did Ray know that this event marked his five hundredth. It was too be a very interesting random event indeed. It came as it usually did, the voice booming whatever was happening in a very obvious way.

     “Something has happened!” The words sounded, and Ray looked up quickly from his book. At first, he could tell that anything was different. The room looked exactly as it always did, and always would.

     That was when the air started to shimmer. That was when a rather large being appeared into the room.

     Ray, naturally, was quite scared, because this thing was not John. It had purple hair and wings and a pink-purple dress. It held a long, shining stick with a big purple ball on it, and Ray was fairly certain that this thing was going to hit him with it.

     Oddly enough for Ray, the thing didn’t hit him with its stick. It smiled down at him, waved its stick in the air, and vanished. This was very odd indeed, because, as it was with the random event, nothing happened at first. Ray, bewildered, looked down at his book again, only to realize that, yes, something was happening.

     Ray was shimmering and sparkling, just as the faerie (Ray’s ‘thing’) had, and several things happened at once.

     The first was that Ray knew in his heart that something very wonderful (or very horrible) was happening.

     The second was that Ray vanished, just as he had predicted so many times ago, out of this room forever. The neohome itself vanished as well, simply because there was no use for it anymore and other homes needed to be built. The third, to Ray, was much unexpected. He reappeared.

     Everything was extremely bright. There were all sorts of whites and blues and pinks and purples, and every other color imaginable. Ray himself was standing on one of the white colors- it felt, under his claws, soft and fluffy. Around him were buildings, taller and grander than anything he could imagine, and what’s more was that there were people. Users. Neopets of every species and every color imaginable. All of them were around Ray, moving and walking and chatting as if this was how life went. That was when the voice came again.

     “Fyora has summoned you to Faerieland!”

The End