The roast session lasted until the middle of the afternoon. Yassena finally stood up and decided to go to the market for tonight’s dinner.

  “Wait, Maa, I didn’t finish asking my questions,” said Kazeem precipitously.

  “Nah, that’s too much information at the same time. Don’t worry baby, we live in the same house. Tomorrow we can continue,” she said as she grabbed her purse and left the house.

  He wanted to stop her a second time, but he suddenly felt a headache, stopping him from doing so.

  “Fuck, is that a fixed scene too?” he whispered. After passing the loops, the feeling of fullness seemed to come with a lot more advantages than he thought. It made him more sensitive to the scenes and their types. He identified two types of scenes: minor and major.

  Minor scenes are those where he can change everything without repercussions. For example, it doesn’t matter whether he was running in one loop and walking in the other; he can provoke any type of reaction from people around him or witness any event. As long as he didn’t get any weird feeling, he would put the event into the minor-scene case. In them he could be a protagonist, a background character with little interaction, or even a spectator without the curtains falling on him. But touching them doesn’t impact the loop itself, and although he knew he wouldn’t be punished no matter what he did, the menace of the major scenes was enough to keep him slightly nervous all day.

  Major scenes are those he had to be careful around. He knew that his actions might produce some unwanted reaction on him. However, they are also the scenes he needed to impact to escape the loop and proceed to the next one. After a lot of trial and error he was able to put them in two categories: the open scenes and the fixed scenes. Each one, although both major scenes, has distinct characteristics.

  Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.

  The open scenes were the most important of all. They were the ones he needed to influence. In those scenes he was a background character who needed to modify the plot without getting caught by the “author”.That’s what he called fate, or the entity manipulating those events however it wants, his biggest enemy. He understood he couldn’t fight it… at least for now. All he could do was try to survive and change the plot without it closing on him. In the open scenes, he might receive some kind of warning in his head telling him that it was not the best solution, or his intuition telling him that he shouldn’t make that move. By following it and calmly observing, he was able to crack the scenes one after another with more efficiency as time went by.

  The fixed scenes are different from the rest. Those are scenes that are impossible for him to change…for now at least. They were the scenes where he was either a spectator or the protagonist of the story, meaning he was either stuck to watch the scene or was in the spotlight, directly involved in the plot and obliged to religiously follow the script. In those scenes, any deviation isn’t tolerated. Kazeem wasn’t able to feel those events in advance, and instead of warnings, he was sometimes punished without warning because of it. The only good side about them was that he would fall for it only once. For the next loop he just had to follow the scene as scripted or simple not be there at when it happened.

  The disposition of the scenes was completely random. Most of the time, he just knew they were major scenes, but sometimes it was only after feeling the uneasiness, and he absolutely hated it. The feeling of randomly being put in an invisible cage with electric bars made him feel suffocated. The thought of this cage following him for the rest of his life made his skin crawl. The random pain and punishment, silently waiting for him to let his guard down to pounce on his soul, almost made his mind shatter. This made his hatred of the “author” even stronger. He might have seemed to inherit his dad’s calm, cold demeanor, but his mother’s temperament was quietly awakening inside him, making his head cold but his blood hotter than the sun.

  Maa’s right; I didn’t get all she said, but at least I know that what I’m living is related to the djinn near the vines. But do I really need to suffer like that? Does everyone chasing power have to endure this crap? BUT I DON’T NEED POWER. I just wanted to live my life leisurely, eat, sleep, go scavenging a little bit…then eat and sleep again. Maybe find a wife if it isn’t too much work and THAT’S IT! Why the fuck did I go there? Was it that complicated to follow Paa’s warning? Fuck! I hate it! I hate it! I hate it!

  “Oh, it’s you, little liar,” he suddenly heard an old voice in front of him.

  closing thought: I named the cages; one snapped shut.