My goodness, this is boring, she thought. She gazed at the teacher.
 

Physics. How long had the teacher been talking? 3 minutes? 10 minutes? 30 minutes? 1 hour? She had no idea. Time had become meaningless the second she had stepped into the lab. It was as if the laws of Physics had no power in there. Each and every law Newton had created was useless.
 

She looked at her watch. 10.46 AM. Only 1 minute after the last bell had rung. The last bell only ended the first recess. At 11.00, the lesson would be over and everyone would be able to go for recess. Hold it. One minute??? She had heard of time slowing down, but this was ridiculous!

The teacher’s words were fast fading. She only heard certain words.
 

Oh, man, this was bad. She felt her eyelids closing. This was very bad. If she did not do something about it, she would fall asleep. She tried consoling herself that it must have been at least 3 minutes since she last looked at her watch.
 

She felt like she was dying a painfully slow death. There had to be a way to prevent herself from falling asleep. If she fell asleep one more time, her father was going to make her sleep earlier. She hated sleeping earlier. She quickly racked her mind to keep herself awake.

The teacher’s words faded away. A tune rang in her eardrums. A familiar tune. What had she heard it? From a CD? Yes, from a CD. What was the title? Machine Soldier? Machine what? Machine Soldier? Yes, that was it. Machine Soldier. The unmistakable catchy tune of Machine Soldier echoed as if she was sitting in a room with wall-to-wall amplifiers. It did not have any words, but it hardly mattered to her.
 

The dull blackboard twisted and spiralled. She started to see something else. A face. A blur face. The features gradually sharpened. Short light lavender hair, crimson irises, a face as pale as death accompanied with a murderous smirk. She knew who he was. Who? Di-what? Dilandau, yes, Dilandau.

Ah, yes, her favourite. She did not care if he was considered ugly by others, if he was different, if he had a passion for fire and destruction and all-out chaos. She did not care even if he was two dimensional, an animated character. He was good-looking, and she liked him.
 

Her mind wrote out a story for her latest work. It was about a group of students transported to another world through a computer. She knew it was weird. But weird people should write weird things, she silently reasoned. She was weird, wasn’t she? Her friends had called her weird. She did not mind being weird. It was fun.
 

The music in her ears, the picture she saw, the story in her mind, she melded them all together as one. One work of art produced from the mind. She was having the time of her life. Never had Physics been so fun.

A ringing bell could be heard in the far distance, along with the teacher telling them they could go for recess. Not to mention the students standing up and greeting the teacher. She glanced at her watch.
 

Goodness, that was fast, she said to herself. She slowly picked up her books and walked out of the lab half-dazed. She gazed sideways at her surroundings. Clouds overshadowed the sky; a small streak of light reached the ground. No sun was in sight. Cold wind blew from her right, brushing her hair sideways. Machine Soldier still played in her head, albeit a little softer. Her favourite character’s face slightly blurry but could be still seen.
 

That voice sounded familiar. Who was it? Ashley, or Julia? Maybe Elaine. Or perhaps Locke? Whatever. She did not care; she could hardly care less.
 

I don’t take drugs, and that’s a fact, she scolded silently.
 

The wind was so cooling. The sun was not blinding her for once. His face was still smiling evilly back at her. Machine Soldier looped itself over and over again.
 

Machine Soldier’s volume was turned up to drown the cacophony around her. Her friends would never understand what she liked, what she did. She liked to trap herself in her own fantasy world, and her friends would never understand that. To them, escaping to another world was just the same as taking drugs. It was not drugs. It was the power of the mind; what imagination was capable of doing with the proper concentration.

They would never understand. Right now homework was the last thing on her mind. She would ask later when everything had faded away and she had returned to reality.

The sunlight kept to a minimum, cold breezes comforted her hot and bothered body, Machine Soldier played itself over and over, ‘Dilandau’ was smirking at her, and the story in her mind unravelled twist after plot twist.
 

The day was just getting better.