People were lining up all across the courtyard at school. Everyone had a card in their hand with some notes written on them. On closer inspection, I realized that they were written like posts on an anonymous imageboard, addressed to a string of numbers instead of having names on them. People were lining up to have the notes delivered at the campus post office. It occurred to me that this was a world without online social networks and this was the way people were communicating with each other.

I was running up and down the stairs of our house as my uncle was preparing dinner for our Halloween party. I went down to the kitchen to check out how it was going and he showed me his tray of six different types of lasagna. My cousin commented that it might not be enough for tonight. I could hear people still coming in through the front door.

We ran from one building to the next as it suddenly started pouring. I only had a towel to hold above my head until we finally made it to the hotel lobby. When I looked behind us, I saw my friend wrestling with the Wolverine in the entrance. Everyone headed to the breakfast buffet. I got myself some congee with pork floss.

I was using an older version of Windows and their suite of apps included one with a pink icon that was specifically for making webpages. I opened the app to see a site for a webcomic about animals on a farm. The strip told a story about a cow that adopted a cat and they were cuddling under a tree when it suddenly started raining. The cat ran into the house to find the owner but was later shooed out because their bed was too small.

A friend posted a picture of curry udon they made onto Discord.

I was sitting in front of the television and my cousin was sitting next to me on the couch. I was scrolling through tumblr on my phone. Lunchtime was soon.

I was talking about video games with some friends over Discord when I opened someone’s Snapchat story. It was a bunch of drone footage of scenes over the forests on the west coast of the United States. The story went on for a lot longer than I expected and I just realized that it had cut off my Discord call so I closed the app.

I was in a hotel elevator with my brother as we went up to the 9th floor. He was taking me to see room 907, which was complementary due to some kind of special offer with the hotel.

“Having fig?” he asked.

“Fig?” I looked at him with a puzzled expression. I assumed he meant to say “fun” but it didn’t sound very ambiguous and he nodded in confirmation.

“Uhh, sure I guess…” I said, still unsure about what my brother really meant.

The two of us were assigned to investigate a house in the middle of the night. I left my bike on the side of the street as we climbed over the metal gate. Our objective was to find a magic artifact that looked like some kind of watch. We figured that since it was a time piece, it should be somewhere in an office on the upper floors. It was rumored that the owner of the house was responsible for the murders of several children but was never proven guilty. Either way, we didn’t even know if the owner was inside.

I was watching an episode of JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure where Josuke visits his aunt, who also happened to be my friend. They came up with a plan to find the rest of the crew in South Africa and traversing the continent via river. I thought about whether I should continue watching ahead without my friends.