“Quite so.”  Her hand went up to her hair and began twirling the long ribbon with her fingers.  The girlish behavior was oddly endearing given the heavy conversation.  “There has been a reality fracture so strong – perhaps you might understand given your background – created by a particle that might be capable of creating a new universe, but definitely destroying this one in the process.  It seems like it was a particle like this that indeed created Us,” she seemed to put emphasis on ‘Us’, “but a new one cannot be allowed to exist.  It destroys the very essences of reality, of which I told you the physical plane is a few planes, annihilating everything in a rapidly spreading wave.  This wave is initially only on the base plane, that’s yours, but intertwines all the others in its destruction.  This is so devastating that time fractures backwards to ensure it never happens.”

“Ok, I have no idea what you just said.”  I massaged my eyes a moment.  “I really need to take a walk.  Want to go outside?”

She twirled her ribbon one more time, lowering her hand to the table.  “Sure.”  We stood up, and walked out.  I left a handful of drinks I had paid for but at this point didn’t care.  As we were walking out she continued, “A particle that rips apart reality is created very soon here, and it is so damaging, time fractures backwards to prevent it from occurring.”

“And according to you, I am stuck in this fracture.  Or I mean we all are.”

“Yes, but I am here to help you.”

I didn’t say anything for a while.  I had a lot of thoughts going through my head.  My pink shirt told me there was a good chance I was still crazy.  If this was a trap, she was very committed to it, at the very least she had a pretty crazy story she kept straight.

She claimed no one could see her because if affected something.  Yet here she was in front of me.  I definitely had felt her so on some level she was corporeal.  There was someone walking the other way when I had an idea.

Without any warning I dashed at her, going to shoulder ram her into the guy.  Without even looking at me she took an effortless step back.  Her move left me way off balance and I almost hit the guy myself.

I rapidly turned to her, with perhaps a glare in my eyes.  She had a sly look on before she laughed.  “Nice try.  If you believed what I was saying, you wouldn’t have bothered trying.  I already told you, I can read your upper level thoughts, plus I can see the Chrono lines.  You had two things against you that were impossible to surmount.”

I didn’t respond, feeling a twinge of embarrassment that she outplayed me.

The fact we were able to walk outside at all was a bit reassuring as I thought Proud might be a hologram confined to that bar.  She was quite capable of walking.  There were two options left: she was a thought implant, or everyone was in on some experiment I was the victim of.  Eventually we ended up over by the fence overlooking ReCorp.

It was only after I walked here that I thought about the subconscious draw that brought me back here.  Maybe I was distracted by walking with Proud.  In fact it was almost like having a child with me with how excited and energetic she was at everything.

“The physical plane is really amazing you know that?”  Her crouched form was bent over to a small flower growing out of a crack.  She smelled it, then jumped out of her crouch and trotted over to me with her hands laced behind her back.  “We view it as perhaps the biggest irony that those inhabiting this plane tend to not fully enjoy its pleasures or its extra joy.”  She kept her hand behind her back as she leaned on the balls of her feet next to the fence and was humming something.

“It’s probably natural, it’s all we have known.  We don’t know what we are missing, or how much we have.”

“It’s not all you have known, but your point is close enough.”

“Careful.” I grabbed her shoulder and pulled her back from the thin fence separating her from the massive fall.  “I’d hate to see ‘God’ take an early exit out of here.  So evidently you can influence reality as you dropped that guy’s screen, and you are quite destructive if you want to be, so why don’t you just fly in there and rock out whatever is creating this fracture and everything will be okay?”  This seemed like a pretty logical flaw in her whole story.