Prince Of Mind Hallucinations

The bathroom mirror never lied, and this morning, it was being an absolute dick.

Raditya stared at his reflection with dead eyes. His hair was a greasy mop despite the fact that he'd just washed it, a ripe pimple sat on his forehead like a volcano ready to blow, and his thick-rimmed glasses kept sliding down the bridge of his oily nose.

"Grungy," he muttered to himself.

The mildewy smell of the leaky bathroom wasn't doing his self-esteem any favors, either.

"Raditya! Hurry up! Stop making out with the showerhead and get ready!" his mom shrieked from the kitchen. Her voice pierced right through the rotting wood of the door.

He sighed, grabbing his backpack by the straps that had been stitched back together one too many times. Surviving as a bottom-tier loser at Merdeka High School wasn't exactly the American Dream, but he’d played the role flawlessly for the last two years. As far as he was concerned, being "invisible" was the best defense mechanism a guy could ask for.

The football field at Merdeka High School felt like a giant oven set to broil. The mandatory back-to-school assembly had only been going on for twenty minutes, but half the student body already looked like dehydrated jerky.

Up on the podium, Principal Higgins—famous for speeches longer than a dragon's breath—was rambling on about discipline and school spirit, sweating so much her blouse was changing color around the collar.

"Dude, is she trying to turn us into human toast or what?" whispered Ben, Raditya’s buddy, safely tucked in the back row—the designated safe zone for the forgotten.

"Tell me about it, bro. And I skipped breakfast. If I pass out, you gotta carry me to the nurse's office, Ben," chimed in Jonny, shifting his heavy weight from one foot to the other.

Raditya didn't reply. His eyes were locked on a single coordinate in the front rows: Clara. She stood perfectly straight, her ponytail swaying in the occasional pathetic breeze. Clara was the center of the school's solar system, while Raditya was just cosmic dust stuck to the bottom of a sneaker.

To survive the blistering heat, Raditya’s mind wandered. It was his only escape. He imagined if this world were an RPG, he’d be the nameless NPC without even a dialogue prompt. But deep down, there was a turbulence he kept buried—a wild, unchecked hormonal drive that frequently hijacked his brain.

His thoughts drifted to Clara. In his head, an R-rated scenario began playing out on autopilot. He imagined Clara turning around, walking straight through the crowd of hundreds of sweating teenagers, and whispering something dirty right into his ear. In his fantasy, the bead of sweat trailing down her elegant neck was nectar fueling his adrenaline. He pictured himself—the school nerd—somehow possessing the magnetic pull to drag a girl like Clara into the empty equipment shed under the bleachers, locking the door, and letting primal instinct take the wheel.

In this hallucination, he could feel the heat of her skin, hear her breath hitch, and smell her expensive perfume mixing with the musk of the sweltering heat. The imagery was so intense he suddenly felt his jeans getting uncomfortably tight. He cursed internally, trying to shake the mental image of his hands exploring the curves hidden beneath that tight white t-shirt.

"Yo, Rad! Earth to Rad! You're drooling over Clara, aren't you? Give it up, man, look at the turf instead," Jonny nudged him, shattering the wild fantasy.

Raditya choked on his own spit. "What? Shut up, no I wasn't."

Right at that moment, the aggressively sunny weather shifted. As if the universe itself was disgusted by his dirty thoughts, thick, pitch-black clouds violently converged over the field in a matter of seconds. The dead, heavy air turned freezing and sharp.

"Huh, where did those clouds come from?" Principal Higgins muttered into the mic, pausing her speech to look up at the sky.

The crowd grew restless. "Rain! It's gonna pour!" yelled some kids from the back.

But this wasn't normal rain. The atmosphere around Raditya suddenly felt unbearably heavy. The fine hairs on the back of his neck stood up. A static charge crept up from the ground, passing right through the worn-out rubber soles of his Converse. His head started buzzing—a high-pitched static piercing his eardrums.

Zinggg!

His vision blurred. The world around him slowed down to a crawl. He saw Clara turn around, her beautiful eyes widening in sheer terror, staring directly at him. Not out of sudden love, but because there was something directly above him that absolutely shouldn't be there.

"Raditya, move!" Ben screamed, his voice sounding muffled and lightyears away.

Raditya tried to jump, but his feet felt cemented to the turf. He looked up. In the center of the swirling black clouds, a jagged bolt of blinding blue-white plasma tore through the sky at incomprehensible speed. It wasn't just striking nearby; it was aimed dead-center at his skull.

CRAAAAKKKKK! BOOM!

The explosion ruptured eardrums. A colossal flash of light slammed into the Merdeka High School turf exactly where he stood. The shockwave knocked down the surrounding rows of students like bowling pins. Smoke billowed from a perfectly scorched circle of synthetic grass.

Instant panic. Hysterical screams echoed across the field as teachers scrambled to control what looked like a localized apocalypse.

"Call 911! Get the nurse!" yelled Coach Baker, sprinting into the chaos.

In the middle of the smoke, smelling heavily of ozone and burning flesh, Raditya laid completely still. His clothes were shredded, his skin glowing raw red, and his glasses were melted slag beside him. He wasn't breathing right. His chest hitched erratically as residual electricity arced off his fingertips.

The frantic voices around him sounded like he was underwater.

"Raditya! Bro, are you dead?!" Ben's voice shook violently.

"Don't touch him! He might still be live!" Principal Higgins snapped, looking as pale as a ghost.

Raditya felt like his soul was hovering a few feet above his body. He could see the chaos below. He saw Clara covering her mouth with both hands, tears welling in her eyes as she stared at his charred form. For the very first time, the girl of his dreams was paying attention to him, even if it took a tragic freak accident to make it happen.

But then, something much crazier started happening. Through the haze of his unconsciousness, Raditya started hearing things.

Oh crap, did I drop my phone when I ran? a girl's voice echoed directly inside his head. But no one near him was speaking.

Jesus, if a kid dies on campus, the district is slashing our funding for sure, a cynical male voice grumbled. It sounded exactly like Mr. Vance, the Physics teacher.

Is he dead? Man, he literally just let me borrow a pen yesterday, came another random voice.

The thoughts began piling up, overlapping like thousands of radio frequencies crashing into each other inside his brain. He wanted to cover his ears, but his arms wouldn't obey. An excruciating, blinding pain began to map every nerve in his body, starting from his skull and branching out to every inch of flesh.

Then, in one massive, overriding pulse, the pain was flushed out by a freezing sensation washing over him. It felt like every cell in his body was being forcibly dismantled and rebuilt. His bones cracked, his muscles coiled tight, and his face—the face he had always hated—felt like it was submerged in molten iron.

In the absolute silence of his own mind, Raditya felt himself change. The grimy, pathetic layers that had encrusted his existence were being incinerated by the freak lightning.

His vision finally faded to pitch black. Right before he completely passed out, he caught one final, crystal-clear whisper coming from where Clara was standing—even though she was several yards away.

God, that poor nerd... but wait, why does he suddenly look... different?

That was the last sentence his brain processed before shutting down entirely.

Merdeka High School would never be the same after today. A bottom-tier loser had just been "cooked" by the sky, and the most embarrassing, closely guarded secrets of everyone in this school were about to lose their hiding spots. The little apocalypse was just the warm-up act for something way more chaotic, way more beautiful, and infinitely more dangerous than anyone could have predicted.

Raditya's body was hoisted onto a makeshift stretcher by Coach Baker and Ben. None of them realized that beneath his soot-covered skin, a biologically impossible genetic rewrite was firing on all cylinders. And in the middle of the frantic crowd, standing in the shadows of the bleachers, a mysterious girl with a blank stare watched him without blinking.

A new chapter had begun. No longer cosmic dust, he was now the eye of a psychological hurricane that was about to shatter the sanity of Merdeka High School.