George sat still for a long moment after the flower's color returned.
The world around him remained in grayscale—everything except that single red bloom trembling in the breeze. The silence pressed in around him like fog, thick and unnerving.
He needed to move. To think. To make sense of any of this.
He stood, legs weak and unsure beneath him, and stepped out of the bedroom. The door creaked open to reveal a long hallway lined with framed pictures—each one blurred, warped. As if someone had deliberately smudged out the faces.
Of course, he thought bitterly. Even the memories here know I don't belong.
His bare feet padded softly along the cold stone floor. The mansion felt too big. Too clean. Too elegant for someone like him—just a former office drone with average looks, a below-average metabolism, and a talent for blending into the background.
It was like being trapped in someone else's dream.
A dream where he was the extra who accidentally stumbled onto the main stage.
The spiral staircase twisted through the heart of the home, ornate and oppressive.
As he descended to the second floor, he passed a series of locked doors. Offices? Guest rooms? He didn't know. Every time he reached for one, a subtle pressure pushed back from the handle. A warning. Or maybe just his nerves.
He didn't try to open them.
What am I gonna do, anyway? Bargain with haunted doors? "Hi, I'm George, accidental squatter and part-time colorblind telepath."
He snorted under his breath and kept moving.
The first floor opened into a vast, cold space.
A sitting room with untouched cushions. A kitchen with clean dishes, like someone had lived here but never eaten. Shelves lined with thick books in unknown languages. White jars sealed with glowing runes. Nothing personal. Nothing alive.
Just one big, beautiful museum of a life that wasn't his.
And then—he saw it.
A frosted glass door at the end of the hall. Letters etched in shining silver:
GEORGE HELEL, PSY.D. Psychological Consultant – Nivalis District
He stared at the name. His name.
Except it wasn't.
He didn't earn this. He didn't study here. He didn't even know if this world had universities or if you got a doctorate by fighting ghosts in a tournament arc.
But the name stared back anyway. A cosmic joke printed in silver.
He pushed the door open.
The office was immaculate. Minimalist. Too elegant to feel warm. A couch, a leather chair, a narrow desk near a tall window. The city of Nivalis sprawled beyond the glass—skyscrapers like bones, neon bleeding into the gray sky.
On the desk, a display blinked softly.
TODAY – 10:00 AM – CLIENT: LEILAH VOSS
The time read: 9:37 AM.
George rubbed his face with both hands.
Great. Not even a full day in this body and I've already got a client.
What am I supposed to do—ask her about her childhood trauma while I figure out how to read alien psychology files?
He moved behind the desk and sat down slowly. The chair accepted him like it remembered someone else.
There was a strange sense of calm here. A sense of authority.
But it didn't belong to him.
It belonged to the other George. The real one.
George looked at his hands. They were steadier than he felt.
He wasn't a hero. Wasn't a genius. He was the kind of guy who once took a week to assemble an IKEA chair and gave up halfway through because the instructions "felt aggressive."
Now he was supposed to guide people through supernatural trauma?
He closed his eyes.
This wasn't just a new life.
It was a test. And he was wildly underqualified.
But the name on the door wouldn't go away. And the appointment was already on the books.
George opened his eyes and stood.
Whatever this place expected of him,
he'd just have to fake it better than usual.
George sat back down behind the glass desk, staring at the blinking calendar notification as if it might cancel itself if he just looked at it long enough.
Client: Leilah Voss – 10:00 AM.
He had just under twenty minutes to figure out who she was—and more importantly, who he was supposed to be to her.
"Alright," he muttered, cracking his knuckles. "Let's pretend I'm not a fraud."
The desk had no keyboard, no visible interface—just a smooth, mirror-like surface. But the moment he laid both palms flat on the glass, the system pulsed beneath his skin.
A cool blue light shimmered up from the surface, forming a flickering UI in the air above it. It reminded him of those sci-fi movies he used to watch to avoid answering emails.
[FILE ACCESS: VERIFIED]
[PROFILE: GEORGE HELEL – PSY.D.]
Below his name, a dozen files hovered—each labeled with strange symbols that slowly restructured into names he could read. The system, it seemed, adapted to him.
[LEILAH VOSS]
[DUREL, KAIROS]
[NATARA, UNKNOWN] – RED FILE
[INTERNAL: ANOMALY REPORT]
He blinked. "Red file?"
That can't be good. Red never meant good. Red meant run.
Still, he opened the one that mattered now: Leilah Voss.
PATIENT FILE: LEILAH VOSS
Age: 24
Occupation: Analyst, Memory Archive Bureau
Status: Unstable psychic feedback loop
Symptoms: Audio-visual projection anomalies, psychosomatic paralysis during REM states, invasive mental bleed-through
Risk Level: Class C
Notes (Dr. Helel):
Patient exhibits an increasingly fragile psyche due to unresolved ancestral echo.
She believes she is "cursed." Likely an inherited psychic imprint attempting to survive.
Caution advised: triggers linked to smell, repetitive sounds, and direct touch.
George exhaled slowly.
She thinks she's cursed.
And according to this file… she might not be wrong.
He scrolled further. More notes appeared, this time in a kind of shorthand—some of it in symbols, others in metaphors that felt like dreams half-remembered:
"When she speaks, I sometimes hear another voice layered beneath hers."
"The temperature dropped five degrees during our last session."
"Do not allow her to remove her pendant."
George raised an eyebrow. "Yeah. Totally normal therapy stuff. Pendant, voices, temperature ghosts. Standard practice."
He skimmed further, his thoughts growing more uneasy.
There were audio logs embedded in the file. One was labeled simply:
[Session Excerpt 3 – "The One Watching"]
Against his better judgment, he tapped it.
A soft, trembling voice filled the room.
"Sometimes… when I look into mirrors, I see him instead of me. His eyes are… not angry. Not kind. Just... waiting. Like I'm keeping something from him."
Then silence.
Then a strange, mechanical distortion. Something breathing.
George slammed the file shut, his skin crawling.
What kind of therapist was this guy?
The files faded, and the screen dimmed.
George leaned back in the chair, staring at the ceiling. "Alright," he whispered. "Just breathe. You've read weirder things on Reddit. You've survived performance reviews. You can survive one cursed client."
But in the pit of his stomach, the dread was spreading—slow and certain.
He wasn't just dealing with broken minds.
He was stepping into a war between the conscious and the unknowable.
And someone named George Helel had been very good at it.
Now he had less than ten minutes to pretend he was too.