Otherworlde LIN 203 (1): A Sacrifice of Time

Schrecken was excited to start a new class with a new professor – and he liked this new teacher already. Jasper, he had said his name was. Schrecken would try to remember it. But what the new professor was teaching was, in the bogeyman’s mind, even more interesting than the presence of a new professor in the first place. Basic Sacrifice, it was called. It brought to mind images of evil wizards in cheesy pulp fantasy movies, conducting dark rituals in the middle of the night and calling upon dark forgotten gods to rain death and destruction upon the protagonists until the day was saved at the last minute.

The dark forgotten gods were generally actors in rubber suits with bad special effects, but Schrecken still thought the movies were great. It was about what you could imagine, not just about what was shown on screen. You had to really get into it.

Well, at least Schrecken already had a general idea of what he was going to do. He wasn’t going to sacrifice anything to a tree – there wasn’t anything he needed from a tree, as he hadn’t managed to get anything stuck in one recently – but using sacrifice to get something from the shops at Moonseed Lane sounded like a great idea. The shops on Moonseed Lane always seemed to be filled with a lot of interesting things, and Schrecken was always willing to try new things in general. As such, a new thing to try that would presumably let him get more of the cool things for sale at Moonseed Lane was welcomed by the bogeyman with open arms. And the fact that it was an assignment was good, too. That meant that he could pass his classes just by doing this neat new thing that he already wanted to do.

It was a far cry from the complaints that Schrecken had often heard about school from ordinary human children while he was hiding in their closets or under their beds. Ordinary human school was clearly not much like Otherworlde Academy at all.

But what to sacrifice? It was obvious that Schrecken would not be able to sacrifice blood or pain. After all, the bogeyman felt significantly less pain than most people, and his blood had a tendency to turn into thick black smoke as soon as it left his body. That left the possibilities of hair clippings, nail clippings, or simply time.

He decided on time. He liked his fingernails and his thick, messy hair, and didn’t want to lose any part of either.

Schrecken wasn’t sure just how to go about actually sacrificing time, as opposed to merely wasting it, so he decided to just figure it out as he went. Making his way to one of the shops on Moonseed Lane as quickly as he could – he had seen an interesting-looking set of rune stones on display in the window a few days beforehand and noticed that they were still for sale there – he flung open the door of the store and practically leaped to the counter, waving at the shadow creature that appeared to be running the place.

“Hello!” Schrecken shouted. “I am here to make a sacrifice! Hoo hoo hoo. I am. Yes. It will be a very good sacrifice.”

At first, the shadow creature merely turned around, saying nothing, regarding Schrecken with its glowing yellow eyes, staring unblinkingly at him as though either trying to assess the situation – or, perhaps merely trying to determine whether or not Schrecken was a complete and utter lunatic.

Then, with a deep and echoing voice, it finally spoke. “…A sacrifice… of what?”

“Of time!” Schrecken crowed, almost jumping up and down. “I will sacrifice all of the time that I need to get the rune stone things that you have made be for sale! Hoo hoo! They are very good and I want them. Yes. So I am going to sacrifice time!” Schrecken climbed onto the counter to grin in the shadow creature’s face – if the formless creature with glowing eyes could really be considered to have a ‘face’ – much to the shadow creature’s dismay, though it did not visibly react apart from making a slight hissing noise in the bogeyman’s direction. “Hoo hoo hoo! It will be like having a job,” Schrecken continued. “I can deliver things! Like when humans want the pizza deliverer person on the telephone to deliver a pizza, and then they get the pizza! And then when they are not looking, I would steal the pizza because it is a very good pizza. Yes. Hehehehaha. What I would do was, I would hide under the sofa, and then, and then, I would make a noise, and then they would all look away, and then I would--”

“SILENCE,” the shadow creature rumbled. “…You say that you wish to… sacrifice time. This is… acceptable. Although… the sacrifice that I shall accept is… not what you seem to expect.”

For a moment, Schrecken and the shadow creature merely continued to stare at each other. And suddenly, to the bogeyman, it felt as though he was being sucked into a void, his memories and thoughts slipping away more and more the further he traveled. They were simple memories, of scaring children with eerie noises while hiding in their closets, of sitting under beds reading Batman comics in the middle of the night, of various reckless things that Schrecken had done at Otherworlde that he would have probably still done anyway, but those memories slipped away.

It was a sacrifice of time. Not of work, but literally of time. His own personal timestream was being altered in the most subtle of ways, taking bits here and there where they could be taken.

Schrecken woke up on the floor of the shop, with the shadow creature looming over him. “This… is acceptable,” it spoke, handing the bogeyman his set of rune stones. “This… has been… an appropriate sacrifice.”

On a shelf in the shop behind the two, a previously empty hourglass was now filled with swirling black sand.

A sacrifice of time.