FSE

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Chapter 4

"So, shall we head out?" The other Thener asks.

"Yeah," I respond and rise rather uncertainly onto all fours.

I take a moment and am about to try and walk when I realize something. Looking down I see four appendages to have to move when all I had been used to was two. Thinking I could probably figure things out on my own I try to walk as I normally would and move one of my hind legs forwards. The large appendage lifts up from my will and begins to slide across the ground and plants itself about half way to the distance of my front limbs.

"Okay, so now what?" I ask myself, staring at my other three options.

"Fire consumes the Tree and sends it into the Sky where it falls back down as Snow to begin again." The Yellow one pipes up cheerfully.

"Huh?" I ask to it using the voice inside my head, feeling slightly embarrassed that I had forgotten these things can apparently read my thoughts.

"It's how you can walk," The Orange one responds before the Yellow one interrupts and continues on what it was doing.

"Here, let me show you!" The Yellow one bounds off and somehow finds a few buckets of paint in this empty room in the middle of my mind.

In his mouth is a little brush and he dips the brush into a bucket of reddish pain and then bounds over to me, the drops of paint flying off the brush to vanish into nothingness. When he reaches me he moves back and goes to my back right leg, the one that had already moved, and begins painting my foot.

"Fire consumes," He states knowingly as he bounds back over and dips it into a second bucket of paint, this one green.

He runs back over to me but this time paints what used to be my right hand. "The Tree and..." He rushes back to the buckets of pain, this time the paint being a light blue. As I guess his next destination would be he begins painting my other foot; saying afterwards, "sends it into the Sky," as he walks back to the buckets and puts the brush down, "where it falls back down as Snow to begin again."

I stand there a moment, completely in shock as to what had happened. If it weren't for the strangeness I was getting used to in this strange room inside my head I would have thought it especially weird to have a small yellow and overly energetic fox come and paint three of my feet.

"So what do I do with this?" I ask, staring at my legs.

"It's simple really, the color represents the object from the line and the order in that sentence is the order you should move your legs to properly walk," the Blue fox speaks up, seeming almost bored with what's going on.

"Fire represents your red leg. The Tree is your green leg. The sky is the blue leg and snow is the unpainted leg. Just keep repeating the sentence and moving your legs in the order it wants and you should do fine."

I take their advice and back in the world outside my mind I lift what had been my right hand and move it and place it down. The sensation of my hand giving and almost gently pressing into the ground was still rather disturbing and I have to fight against the urge to panic again, trying to convince myself once again that this isn't real but some very realistic dream. The headache I am having, however, isn't doing much to help in that regard. I start to almost repeat the statement the little yellow fox had told me like a mantra and start to catch up to where the other Thener is.

"Sorry about making you wait," I apologize.

"No problem, when one lives as long as we do having considerable patience for those in need of it is pretty commonplace."

"How old are you then?" I ask, curious to the fact of age since I have no way of being able to judge his age from his appearance.

"Only eighty-four, so I get to look forward to another two hundred years or so before I finally die," He responds casually, as if there was nothing wrong at all with the question.

The two of us begin walking on again and I give thought to some things, trying my best this time to keep the three standing around in that room in my head from hearing them. Primarily my thoughts were focused on the notion of what had happened to me and in particular the little nuances I was finding about this body. The first thing I am noticing is that even though walking along on all fours still feels much more natural than I would really like it does not feel automatic. It is like this body is built to move on all fours and yet was not told of this fact. And then I realize that this goes even further than just walking. Unlike what I am normally used to, it doesn't seem like this body really has anything designed to delegate resources to thoughtless motion. Instead I find even though I no longer need to say the little mantra as much, I still have to keep thinking about which leg comes next.

Another nuance is even though I can feel my three tails, let alone be able to hear them; I do not seem to have any control over their movement. It is like my control over my body stops a few inches from where my tails start.

"You should probably let your fur out and feed on this light while we are still able. Not to mention it might make you stand out quite a bit if your tails are feeding while you are not," he states calmly.

"How would I go about doing that?" I ask, looking inward to see if the three of them are going to simply pick up the problem and provide a fairly easy explanation as to how to do something.

"We would not be the ones to ask," Blue states rather calmly and for the first time neither Yellow nor Orange seem to be all to eager to explain.

"Well for starters asking your tails for advice would probably be very unhelpful for you." He states.

"How do you know I asked them?" I ask, wondering if maybe this fox thing is in my head again.

"Because it is what I would have done if I was in your place. As for the reason why they cannot help is that it is a matter that is too complex for them to answer. Though they do control whether or not they are feeding or not, for them it is a simple matter of telling themselves to eat. For you, since you have a lot more complicated body structure, you do not have any automatic switches as they might."

"Then I ask again, what would I need to do to do this?" I ask, slightly frustrated that he didn't simply answer the question.

"You must visualize your body from the inside as you did in finding your inner room. But instead of looking in your mind, feel the skin throughout your body. Just underneath the surface of your skin should be a layer of muscles. All you need to do is get those muscles to relax."

I begin walking a little slower while I try to do this, his steps slowing as well so that I don't have to worry about trying to keep up. I am tempted to try and close my eyes to do this but since he can walk so easily with whatever he's talking about, I should at the very least learn how to trigger whatever it is he wants me to do without needing to close my eyes to focus. I do, however, leave the room in the center of my mind and re-enter that strange hallway that goes to nowhere. I start to think about my skin and how he said it would be beneath it and I find that suddenly a door appears in front of me and the hallway suddenly veers off to the side, as if I had reached a corner in this hallway without moving.

I sort of stare at the door trying to figure out how to open a door without hands when I remember what the orange fox had said, that in this place in my mind, the laws of reality need not apply and touch the door with my nose, the door giving absolutely no resistance. The door opens, but not in any way I would have expected. Instead of swinging in or out or even swinging at all, the door simply fades away, leaving me to stare at what almost looks to be some sort of electronic device. There are a bunch of silvery lever like things all held nearly vertical in front of some artificially green background. I look at the lever things and though each seems completely independent from the others when I look at them I can feel all of the muscles on my skin at one time, which is an odd experience to have a very good sense of touch for a set of muscles you didn't have but by this point in this new body I am no longer really all that amazed by something different.

Not knowing what else to do I focus on the left most of the lever things and will it to do something. Eventually the gears around its edge begin to turn and the lever moves from a vertical position to one that is at an angle and when that happened I could feel part of my neck relaxing. Figuring this to be the right idea I look at the others and sure enough now that I know what to do the others all almost start changing their confirmation on their own, and as my entire body begins to feel as if I'm going into a very relaxed state as all of the levels go to that angled position. And with them now in that relaxed state I start to feel a sort of warmth seeping into my body and though I had no idea what it was it did definitely give the feeling of being refreshed, like the sensation of a nice cold drink when someone's dehydrated.

As I begin moving back to the room in the center of my mind I also take the opportunity to take a look to see if I had actually even done something. What I find is that instead of my fur being primarily white as it had just a moment ago it has adopted a red color, though whether it is cause of some dye or something I don't know. But the other Thener seems content enough with my new appearance so I assume that this must have been what he was talking about in regards to feeding. I also notice as we begin walking again that like everything else in my mind, there doesn't seem to be anything that would allow me to automate the act of keeping that part of my body relaxed though it doesn't seem that hard to focus on. The act of keeping the strange muscles on my skin relaxed seem like a button that is pressed so long as you stay in the room. As I enter the room where my tails are likely still located I have to duck to avoid having my mental self getting hit with a snowball. Also, the strange part of my mind that keeps telling me the location and distance of different people is starting to tell me quite loudly that there are we are getting very close to several others, my headache getting even worse because of which.

"Sorry about that," the Blue fox apologizes for the other two as they continue throwing snowballs at each other. "They get like this some times."

"How are you two even having a snowball fight to begin with? There isn't any snow in my mind last I checked. In fact how are you even throwing them? You don't have any hands to speak of."

"As I said earlier," Orange states as he chucks another snow at Yellow, just barely missing the small fox, "This place exists only in your mind. The rules of reality need not apply. The only limitations for what is possible while in this room is the limit of the imagination of the individual."

As we walk on in silence in what I guess would be considered the real world, I watch the two in my head having a snowball fight, Yellow rather often bouncing off walls that don't exist to dodge the latest barrage. Then some thought strikes me.

"If this place is truly run by the mind and controlled by the mind, wouldn't I theoretically be able to retain my human body, at least in here?"

"I suppose it is possible as nothing here is impossible. It would probably take you a while to perfect the mental image of who you were but it could be done. But I would encourage that you hold off on trying it for the time being seeing as how unfamiliar your body seems to be to you at the moment and to have a different body in the real world from the one in here will only complicate matters even more."

Finally the two of us out where the snow is not an illusion of the mind pass through a few trees and end up in one really large clearing, and in this area is at least a dozen or two more of the fox things that me and my companion are.