Love Collector Ch. 7

Right there, hovering in front of Oliver's field of vision, was what looked like a generic user interface screen straight out of one of his games. Another way to put it would be a pop-up text box, but this one had an image instead of text. The box was the size of a small computer monitor, had a blue background with white borders and rounded corners, and almost all of its surface was covered by a simplified, borderline cartoonish map of the massive coastal city of Vista Venus- the name itself sprawled across the top right corner in a white, stylish font.

Various locations across town had circular map markers and text beneath them, labeling them for what they were. Alongside places he was intimately familiar with such as 'Home', 'Mom and Dad's House', 'Payless Foods', and a handful of stores Oliver frequented, most of the city's big landmarks and tourist destinations were marked, too.

Cool.

Oliver wanted to go to work today so he could chat with his cute coworker, but it was looking like he'd probably have to deal with the whole 'suddenly developing schizophrenia' thing instead.

Very cool.

Panicking wouldn't do him any good. There was still a chance he was having a bad trip, or he was actually still asleep, and this was some kind of lucid dream. Oliver tried pinching himself, and when nothing happened, he closed his eyes and rubbed them so vigorously he feared his eyeballs might pop like grapes.

The floating map screen was still there when he opened them.

Oliver panicked.

"Ah!" He yelped in the middle of broad daylight.

The music ringing in his ears shifted from a generic, peaceful melody meant for lounging around home into a track that sounded like an amateur composer's first attempt at making a song for a tense, thrilling, and dramatic scene. It was shit, repetitive, and all of the instruments were very obviously fake, yet it only added to Oliver's horror.

"AH!!" He yelped again, taking a step away from his car. The screen remained floating where it was as if frozen in time.

"Shudda fugg uh!" Yelled a previously unseen homeless man without a shirt who'd been napping off his latest hit in the nearby bushes surrounding the parking lot. Shit. Oliver had accidentally triggered a random encounter, and the hobo was brandishing a liquor bottle like he meant to throw it at him. "Fugg'sa matta wid yoose...?"

"Sorry, sorry! It's just, um, this screen just appeared and... wait, you can see this, right?" Oliver gestured at the screen and then looked back and forth between it and the hobo, who was now giving him a strange, sympathetic look from beneath the dense layer of grime on his face.

"M'bad', m'bad," the man lowered his potential weapon, scratched his needle-pocked right arm, and started walking away. "Ma always tol' me never'a mess widda crazzies fores'a killed 'er. Gobbless."

"Fuck, fuck, fuck...!" Oliver paced around, this time trying to keep his existential terror at a lower volume. The random homeless guy napping in the bushes wasn't exactly the most trustworthy of individuals, but it still wasn't a good sign that he apparently didn't see the floating box that Oliver could.

Jumping to conclusions wasn't going to get him anywhere. He had to think about this rationally. Oliver started searching for explanations and soon wondered if there was something funky up with the gummy he ate last night. He'd heard some horror stories of people developing nasty mental health issues from smoking synthetic marijuana, so maybe it had something to do with the ingredients not being as legit as he thought? It shouldn't have been a concern; this kind of thing was legal and well-regulated now, but the alternative explanation was one he didn't want to consider.

Oliver closed his car door to go back inside and check the bottle, only for the floating screen to disappear simultaneously. Had it all been one of those 'glitch in the Matrix' moments he'd read about online? Opening the door again caused it to reappear, so that possibility was shut down, and back inside, he went.

The results weren't as definitive as he was hoping for.

Oliver compared the list of ingredients in Psionic Strawberry to several other old bottles of gummies from other brands he still had lying around and found the only significant difference between them was food dyes and additives. Nothing he wasn't used to as an American, but he was hoping to find some smoking gun even though, in retrospect, it would've been stupid if a secret, mind-warping ingredient was listed in the first place. He just wanted confirmation that this wasn't the worst-case scenario and was willing to clutch at straws to get it.

"Okay, this isn't the end of the world..." Oliver took a deep breath. "I might be at the age where it first shows signs of cropping up, but no one in my family has schizophrenia. That's a plus, right?" Nobody answered him, which was another good sign.

He checked his phone, seeing that it was now 8:29 AM. Oliver couldn't waste any more time if he intended to go to work today. Calling in was definitely an option. He rarely did it, but it spoke to how much Tessa scared him that he didn't want to risk getting even more on her bad side despite how scary his current situation was.

"This is going to clear up," Oliver attempted to convince himself. "I'm gonna go back down, open my car door, and it won't happen again. The music will probably clear up soon, too. Yeah. It's okay, it's okay."

It wasn't okay.

For the third time, a seemingly magic floating screen popped into existence the second his car door was opened. Oliver was face-to-face with the map of Vista Venus yet again. He was still panicked, but rather than acting on his fear and paranoia, he looked closer and inspected it to see if there were any clues that would get him to the bottom of this mystery.

Oliver didn't find anything that stood out to him on the map itself, but he did make an observation that struck him as odd. It looked like a map you would see in a video game, what with the points of interest and the cartoonish style of it all. Purest Love: Azure College Days featured such a map, as did almost every other sandbox-styled dating sim RPG he'd ever played.

An unwise temptation rose from within the deepest depths of his heart. It almost looked as if he could reach out and touch the points on the map. That would be stupid, though... wouldn't it?

Oliver was increasingly unsure.

"It's not going away, so maybe if I..."

His hand drew closer to the screen, pointer finger extended as it inched toward the map marker for Payless Foods. Oliver hovered there for several seconds, tempting fate. It wasn't a good idea to engage with his hallucinations, but at the same time, it called to him in the back of his mind. Buttons were meant to be pushed, after all.

So Oliver pressed the button.

His finger stopped as if hitting a solid object, and then the display changed to a small pop-up window hovering over the first one. This window gave him two distinct options- 'Fast Travel' or 'Manual'.

"Fast travel? Are you kidding me?" Oliver laughed.

It really was like something out of a video game. The idea of fast traveling to his job and saving himself the effort of fighting against the traffic was tempting, but it sounded too good to be true. Then again, he'd already entertained his delusions once. Pressing another button wasn't going to make him more schizophrenic than he already was.

Oliver pressed the 'Fast Travel' button out of nothing more than a sense of simple-minded curiosity, expecting nothing would come of it other than continued confirmation of his needing to call his mom about making a psychiatric appointment. He wasn't entirely wrong, but not for the reason he expected.

Something actually happened.

His vision went dark, and when it returned to him a few seconds later, Oliver was sitting in his car with his hands on the wheel and no memory of having gotten inside the vehicle. That was troubling enough as it was, but then he looked at his surroundings.

Oliver was in the parking lot of Payless Foods.

A thick layer of sweat was trickling down his brow.

"What the fuck," Oliver was hyperventilating, and that was before he saw his dashboard. "What the fuck?!"

8:31 AM.

He somehow arrived at work a full half hour before his shift started. That was strange enough on its own, but it wasn't the concerning part. What worried Oliver was that to accomplish this, he somehow temporally displaced himself to an entirely different part of Vista Venus in only a matter of seconds.

He hadn't driven to Payless Foods so much as he just appeared there.

Even though he was still terrified, the amateur horror BGM accompanying Oliver's life switched to another upbeat melody to fit the change in locale. It was dull, inoffensive, and monotonous to listen to. Elevator music on steroids. Oliver had to appreciate how well it fit his place of work, but the implications were piling up, and it was getting to the point where he could draw a logical conclusion.

"The music, the interactable UI screen, the fast travel... the video game shit keeps on adding up..."

Maybe it was more accurate to call it an illogical conclusion given the circumstances, but it was what it was.

At this point, Oliver was reasonably sure he wasn't having a bad trip. He probably would've realized by now if he was having a lucid dream, too. He didn't like what that meant as far as explanations went. Either all of this was real, and his life was inexplicably turning into a video game, or none of it was real, and he'd just lost big time at the mental health roulette table.

What was he supposed to do?

Thanks to his nerves, Oliver was still sweating like he was in a sauna, so he decided to step out of his car and fill his lungs with that sweet, polluted, asthma-attack-inducing Californian air. One of the nice parts about living in Vista Venus was the nearly year-round sixty-degree weather, and all jokes aside, the brisk breeze felt good on his skin. He leaned against his car and exhaled for several seconds.

"There has to be a reason for... whatever the fuck is happening to me..."

His intuition reminded him; schizophrenia.

"There has to be a reason besides that."

Oliver did a quick internet search on early symptoms, just to be safe. He found an article detailing a bunch of early warning signs to look out for, and the good news was that he really didn't exhibit many of the symptoms, and for the ones that he did, there were other explanations. He'd always been depressive and socially withdrawn. That wasn't something that started recently, and as far as deteriorating personal hygiene went, that came down to the fact that he was a careless stoner who sometimes had to rush through his morning routine to get to work on time.

No matter how hard he sifted for it, Oliver couldn't make sense of his situation.

So... what now?

He was already at work and wasn't in a hurry to test out the fast travel thing again after how much it freaked him out the first time. Oliver figured he could probably make it through the day as long as nothing else insane cropped up, even if he really didn't want to be here. Aside from answers, he didn't really know what he wanted.

'More questions' was at the very bottom of his list, though, and that's precisely what Stacy gave him.

"What the hell are you doing here so early?" She called out from behind him as she worked her way through the empty parking lot.

Oliver's first instinct upon hearing her voice was to shrink and make himself less visible, but he was already out in the open, and there wasn't much point in that. Instead, he turned to face his least favorite coworker, utterly unprepared for how much more confusing his day was about to become.