I opened my eyes.

  I was standing in the center of a stone courtyard, with towering arches and battlements surrounding it. The noon light of the sun shone brightly, and I felt a wave of warmth beat down on my cold body, and I shivered momentarily. Just a second before I was standing in a freezing blizzard, waiting for my best friend Michael to answer the door that I had knocked on. I had been bored, so I decided on a whim to go and hang out with Michael. It was Christmas vacation anyway. No work for me.

  As I listened to Michael’s muffled footsteps get louder as he neared the door, I felt a strange feeling wash over me, and I blinked, and then I was here.

  Suddenly, my three layers (a T-shirt, a sweater and a coat, along with gloves) seemed stifling in the grand heat, and I considered taking them off.

  I found it incredibly peculiar that I was not panicking in this situation. I had just suddenly appeared in a foreign place, a supernatural event equivalent to teleportation, and I was simply standing calmly without any nerves.

  I heard someone yell, and I looked towards the source just to see a projectile blur towards me and encompass my entire vision, then a sharp and sudden pang of pain, and the world went black.

  ______

  I opened my eyes.

  I was standing in the same courtyard as before, the sun still blinding and hot. The same battlements stood upon towering stone walls that surrounded me in every direction.

  I felt… confused.

  Then, as if struck by lightning, I suddenly remembered that something fast had stabbed into my skull a second before.

  I opened my mouth, and screamed at the top of my lungs. I crouched down and held my head with both of my hands, pushing my fingers into my skull. I felt a wave of terror roil through me, and I began to cry from the panic.

  Out of the corner of my eye, through the tears and snot, I spotted a bright shine, heard a twang, a thunk, felt a violent and sharp pain explode in my skull, and, once more, the world went black.

  _____

  I opened my eyes.

  Once again, I stood in the stone courtyard surrounded by battlements and towering arches, and I realized that I stood in the equivalent of a medieval castle. I stood there silently, unmoving, my jaw slack and open, drool slipping out past my lips and slowly trailing down towards the floor. It felt like my skull was splitting in two, and my brain was shriveling in on itself. Nauseated, I vomited the contents of my stomach all over the floor, with some of it landing on my coat. I was no longer cold. In fact, I was burning hot, and the blood in my veins pumped faster and faster, and I felt like my heart was about to burst from how much it was pounding.

  I felt my eyes spin chaotically in their sockets as my head heated up into overdrive.

  ‘I… I had been shot in the head with an arrow, twice. I had died, twice! What the fuck! What's going on!?’ I thought, and I hastily spun around in place, nerves and adrenaline causing me to move in a panic. A sudden flash of light distracted me, and I turned towards its source, spotting a fully armored person, who looked like a knight, letting loose an arrow from a huge longbow held in his grip. I watched, as if in slow motion, as the arrow neared my head, and I screamed.

  With a loud thud it stabbed through my skull and imbedded itself into my brain.

  The world turned black.

  _____

  I opened my eyes.

  ‘How could that arrow kill me? It should have skidded off of my head. After all, the skull is a really hard bone, and that archer was shooting from pretty far away. Too far away for the arrow to pierce the skull. Yet it broke past my skull and reached my brain, every time. How?’ I thought in confusion.

  For some reason, I was now eerily calm, as I had been before, when I first opened my eyes.

  ‘What is happening to me? I seem to be weirdly calm, and I keep on dying and coming back to life. Am I stuck in a time loop or something?’ I shook my head. ‘At the moment, that doesn’t matter, as the first thing I have to do is find a way to survive and escape.’

  I turned slowly in place, observing the polished and slick looking walls that surrounded the courtyard I was in, and realized I had no way to escape. If I could not dodge the arrow that the knight would shoot at me, I had nearly no way that I could think of immediately surviving.

  ‘Perhaps I could attempt to negotiate with him?’ I thought.

  That could work.

  Maybe.

  I turned until I spotted his frame, and waved at him in a jolly and relaxed manner. He responded by letting loose the arrow that was lodged in his enormous bow, and standing still as it struck my head, and buried its way into my brain. The world turned black.

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  _____

  I opened my eyes.

  I felt a huge amount of emotions roil through me, and I took a deep breath to calm myself down.

  It seems as if I was stuck in a closed timelike curve, or in simpler terms, a time loop. In the former loop I had been in a state of eerie calm, and that made me rationalize the situation around me. It also made my earlier extreme panic disappear completely from my brain. It was as if I had eaten a pain killer, and it numbed down all of my pain and fears that had formerly controlled me.

  ‘This situation is incredibly crazy, and crazily impossible. Or is it? Quantum teleportation is possible, albeit incredibly difficult to procure, especially on this scale. A closed timelike curve is also possible, though if it did happen, I shouldn't be able to retain any memories of earlier loops at all. Though, if I do think about it more carefully, the closed timelike curve is still only a theory, and has not been proven possible yet, so they could work differently from how we believed them to. Emotion could be pretty easily suppressed using drugs, so that eerie calm is a little less of an impossibi-’ My thought were suddenly cut off, and a sharp pain exploded in my head.

  The world turned black.

  _____

  I opened my eyes.

  ‘This is beginning to become a bit annoying.’ I thought.

  I was back in the state of eerie calm that I had been in two loops before, and now that my train of thought had been cut off, I easily decided to stop trying to figure out the how and why, and focus on the what.

  ‘What do I do now? How do I escape?’

  Looking around me, I was standing in the center of a courtyard, with smooth gray stones making up the floor. Surrounding the courtyard were high stone walls covered in arches and battlements, obviously showcasing the fact that I was in some sort of fortress or castle.

  ‘Just not any castle on earth.’ I thought glumly.

  The style of the arches and the fact that they were stacked on top of the walls and battlements proved that I was not on earth, as no castle on earth had architecture like this one. At least, as far as I knew.

  And considering the fact that an arrow released from a longbow could break through the skull of a human from forty meters away with relative ease, I decisively decided that I was most definitely not on Earth any longer. Somehow.

  I heard a clicking sound, and I looked up at the wall in front of me to see the knight with the longbow nock an arrow into the string, and raise the bow in my direction.

  Acting on instinct, I jumped to the side and rolled on the floor, barely managing to dodge the arrow as I heard it thunk beside me. I hastily stood up and looked at the arrow, noting the fact that it had stuck itself into the stone as if it were made of clay.

  ‘Well no wonder it could break through my skull, it has the force of a bullet.’ I thought sarcastically.

  I looked back up at the knight, and was thoroughly surprised to see that he already had another arrow nocked and ready.

  “Do not move, intruder!” he yelled down at me.

  I ignored him and dodged to the side once again, hearing the arrow wizz harmlessly above my left shoulder.

  “You're gonna have to try harder than that, motherfucker!” I yelled back.

  It seemed I had angered him, as he started to commit a rapid fire assault, leading me to sprint away from him as fast as I could.

  Suddenly, the world snapped, and twenty armored men appeared around me with gleaming longswords drawn pointed in my direction.

  Before I could react, the one in front of me stepped forward and slashed sideways, cleanly slicing my head straight off of my shoulders. I stared at my limply standing body as my head fell to the floor, and then the world turned black.

  _____

  I opened my eyes.

  ‘Now they can teleport!?’ I thought angrily.

  This situation was beginning to feel a little hopeless. How could I escape from a courtyard that was enclosed in all directions by tall sleek stone walls, while teleporting psychopaths tried to kill me? Is it even possible?

  I let out a deep sigh of exasperation.

  ‘Alright, think logically. If these guys could teleport, why didn’t the archer guy on the wall do so? He could have simply teleported down to me and killed me in a second. Why shoot from a distance? I will assume that that means that he couldn’t teleport. Considering that fact, why would they build a courtyard in the middle of a large establishment containing soldiers, when only the ones who could teleport would be able to enter it? Alright, let’s just assume that this courtyard is used for training, to keep it simple. In that case, I could assume that it might only be reserved as a training facility for the ones who had the ability to teleport, or fly or whatever. But then, why would a normal soldier stand guard on the wall? Someone with average aim, shooting with a longbow, wouldn’t be able to stop a superhuman teleporting warrior from invading the courtyard. That must mean that the super humans aren’t the only ones who use the courtyard, and that normal soldiers use it for training too. If that is the case, then there has to be a normal entrance and exit in this place. I just have to find it.’

  Looking around, all of the walls looked the same. They were a deep gray, with a sleek, smooth looking surface that had hardly any large indentations apparent within them. The only ones that were easily visible were the crease lines between the stones, and even those were hardly noticeable. So a door would be a shining bright light in the dark, yet I still couldn’t find one.

  ‘What the hell? Is leaving this place some kind of test or something?’ I thought, annoyed.

  Then, out of the corner of my eye, I noticed something. There was a bump on the wall, barely noticeable, that almost seemed to blend in with the rest of the wall, sorta like it was camouflaged.

  ‘Is that… a button?’

  My vision popped, and exploded.

  Then the world turned black.

  _____

  I opened my eyes.

  “Well, that was rude.” I muttered under my breath.

  I was back in the state of deep calm that I had been in two loops prior, and I was beginning to see a pattern. Every two loops or so, I seemed to attain this odd calm, and that meant that the loops were working based on a constant pattern of mathematical changes. That was good to know. Now, onto the current topic.

  ‘Why do they have a nearly invisible button randomly placed in the middle of a wall?’ I thought in confusion.

  Looking around, I managed to spot the button again; it was placed on the wall behind me, and was positioned at the height of the average person back on earth, being about five feet off of the ground.

  ‘Why do I even know that? I must have searched it up at one point due to curiosity.’

  I slowly walked towards it, and as I neared, I noticed some odd details. The button was triangular in shape, and instead of protruding from the wall directly, it seemed to almost have been pushed through the wall, and was more akin to a bump. If not for the slight crease surrounding its circumference, I wouldn't have thought of it as a button at all.

  How weird.

  ‘This adds to the proof that I am no longer on planet Earth.’ I thought glumly.

  I heard a soft click from behind, and knew that the archer had nocked the arrow into his bow. Quickly, I slapped my hand onto the button, feeling it slowly snap down under the force of my hand, and then I felt a sudden and weird vibration course through my body. Surprised, I stepped back from the wall, barely managing to dodge the arrow that flew in front of my face and landed on the floor beside me, and looked down at my hand.

  A bright blue liquid pulsed lightly from underneath my skin, directly where I had clicked the button. As I stared wide eyed at my hand, the world around me seemed to twist and twirl, flowing in wild shapes and pressing down on my brain. I felt my mouth open and my voice scream, yet I heard only silence. The world twisted and warped, and then collapsed in on itself, and with a snap, the world turned black.

  _____