37. The Truth About Lies

The vallen stepped forward and Dax refocused his attention on the enemy.

When the Gem awakens to call a Hero, the world is ill prepared...and its fate is placed in the hands of a 17 year old boy, named Wendell. 

Some will say this is nothing but a tale of fiction.
Let them think as they may. 

After all...I can't fix stupid.

Previously: Using gnome technology, Deloris, Dax and a terrified Lili enter Wendells mind to find and save the young Hero. Problem is, they had to gain Wendells trust by seeing the world through the hero’s own perspective.

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Your life is navigated by the choices you make. Good or bad, right or wrong, each and every choice has consequences.

What no one seems to tell us, is that when we believe a lie our perspective becomes warped. It inevitably becomes impossible to make the right choices until that crooked perspective is made straight.

They plummeted into darkness.

Lili screamed, pushing air and sound from her chest, but no scream was heard. Instead, her body tumbled head over feet, again and again, for what seemed to be an eternity.

Far below them, or maybe it was above them, a dull light glowed. It was then that Lili could see silhouettes of Dax and Deloris tumbling likewise through the…air? No, she soon realized, the light is down, for it was now rising quickly to meet them…and she tried, uselessly, to brace herself for impact.

Without a sound, all three hit hard…sending up mushroom clouds of dirt and dust around them.

“Hey,” Dax squeaked, coughing and trying to wiggle free of the indentation he’d made with his body, “that didn’t hurt.”

Lili and Deloris sat upright, then rolled out of their own craters.

“I think we’re expected,” coughed the gnome.

Lili brushed the dirt from her tunic, “Is that good or bad?”

The gnome pointed to a filing cabinet sticking up crookedly from the ground.. “We’re about to find out.”

The dull light was bright enough to see by, but not enough to lend any comfort. Around them were cavern walls that reached up into the darkness above them, the stone black and jagged. The ground itself looked more like narrow sand dunes. Layers and waves of dirt, formed in ripples. Embedded in each and every one of them was a filing cabinet. Hundreds of them, tilted and buried, large and small, some rusting while others looked new and recently painted in a bland grey or earth tone color.

“Cheery place,” Dax mumbled. “What’s with the cabinets?”

Deloris slide down the embankment to the closest one jutting out from the sand. She read the small plate riveted to the metal drawer. “It says 'Grade School' on it.” It was a small thing, with rust spots all over its surface. “Each of you get to another one, tell me what they say.”