On the other hand, Ben Allison had entered in a garden. An unusual amount of flowers and shrubs lined up in a pattern. It was the garden in which Ben grew up playing.
Everything was correct until Ben stepped towards a flower and smelled it. There was no fragrance in the flower at all, it had a bright saturated image yet there was no way to admire it's smell.
The lack of smell made it clear for Ben that something was suspicious about the flowers. He quickly tore off a flower and threw it on the ground.
The flower turned into vapor and dissipated into the air, leaving no trace of it's presence. Ben did the same for each flower he saw until the whole garden which once created a vibrant environment was nothing but a bunch of green plants. The portal to the next scenario had opened.
Ben was ignorant of the fact that he had cleared a memory of his past.
[12 Years Ago]
It was a sunny day, cheerful voices ringing in one corner or another. Ben was playing with his father in the garden outside a clearly huge palace. It was a peaceful sight, a kid and his father discussing the fragrance of flowers.
"Dad, what makes flowers emit fragrance?" Ben asked as he sniffed a white flower.
"It is a plant's way of emitting their emotions, a plant's soul has them too."
Ben was mesmerized by those words and developed a special trait towards nature. As he grew older, he realized that his innate powers resembled the nature. The shockwave produced by snapping his fingers was a direct resemblance of formation of earthquakes. It was at age fifteen, he gained the ability to sense life force emitted by people.
It wasn't long before Ben had to leave his place and become an outlaw, suspect of murdering his own father. It was a dark night, Ben was running away from an unknown shadow like figure and three royal guards. The chase continued all the way from his room to the central statue in his city, where he disappeared in an instant leaving no mark.
[Present Day]
"Damn it, not the best stuff "
Daniel sighed at the sight of a golden door as soon as he entered the first memory. It was an uninteresting experience. Daniel slowly moved through the grassy field filled with mud, deep inside a forest, towards the golden door and entered it.
[Swap to Fest's POV]
The second memory of Festor had now taken form. It was the town marketplace, standing stranded among the dozens of shops with variety of items. It was his decision to whether take an item or not.
"The market? It seems that I will have to pick an item to advance, but I can't be so sure."
Fest was completely shook by the situation. There was no clue where to go and what to do.
Festor Linen kept walking forward, the bright morning faded into a cloudy evening. As he kept walking paying no heed to it, the scene slowly turned into a dark night.
A moment of realization and Festor Linen was now even more clueless now that he had achieved nothing while not realizing the scene slowly turn into a night without passage of enough time.
The candles and lanterns lit up around the market. Everything felt so real except the absence of humans in it. The more Fest walked, the more the market extended. It came to no end, the limitless marketplace.
"WHAT AM I DOING!"
A sudden flash of reality hit Fest. It was the realization that he'd been wandering off without achieving a single thing, without a proper goal in his mind.
"I need to find the golden door fast."
A lantern fell down on a part of small, torn, dry cloth, lighting it up. A fire spread from the clothes shop to the nearby items, lighting up wood and creating a huge fire in the entire marketplace.
Festor was immediately reminded of the warning about staying in a single memory world too long. He tried to run away as quick as he could but a blast formed due to pure water contained in a coated and enclosed glass utensil. The fire warmed up the water to a lethal temperature and as soon as the glass started melting, the water turned into vapors which escaped instantly, swaying away the fire along with them and blowing up nearby material creating an even larger disaster.
It became harder to breathe, the fire was spreading through the ropes which supported the hanged lanterns, slowly reaching till the end of Fest's view distance.
What Festor was feeling then wasn't weakness, or hopelessness, it was fear. Fear of getting lost and eventually dying, a burned up corpse.
"I must get out of here, I really am doing stupid stuff. Why am I running away I need to find the door to next memory."
"The first scenario was about self recognition and self acknowledgement. Is it related to the second one in any way? Is it again the realization of something? What am I missing here? What should I do?"
Festor Linen ran away in confusion, although he moved a step closer to conquering the second memory, he now had to figure out the most crucial, the final part to clearing the scenario.
"I had a different goal when I first entered the market, it was to pick an item. It was the first goal I had but I wandered off. I need to remember my intentions, what do I want to do. I want to escape, I want to find the golden door. It isn't in the fiery market, its somewhere far from that, I need to escape the market. Its true that when you have hundreds of things distracting you, you walk into a thousand more. The market is nothing more than just a repetition laying out again and again, if I wait for a while longer then the same explosions will kill me."