If cleaning the yard next to the hidden reptile had been surreal, then standing in line at Burger Queen and ordering lunch was far stranger. Surrounded by completely unaware people, Narissa and Ty ordered a greasy but satisfying lunch and sat down together munching across their respective trays.
"Okay." Ty finally set down his burger, face contorting into confusion. "Are you going to answer questions now?"
"Depends on what they are." She said sarcastically, taking a huge bite from her quarter pounder.
"Like this, for instance, this is messing with my mind. Are you actually this human girl right now? Or are you really you?"
"Yes. Both." She shrugged, taking another bite.
"That doesn't make sense." Ty insisted. "Because if you were really you as in physically really Narissa the lizard lady then you could chow that entire burger with one bite."
This made her pause and her face seemed wounded. "Are you saying I'm fat?" She burst into a giggle and then continued down to the last bite.
Ty snickered in response. "No, you have to answer this!"
"All right." Narissa began, gently wiping her hands on a napkin. "You need to understand that as a 5D being, I'm here and in my home dimension at the same time. Because what I'm actually doing is splitting my being into two places at once. So yes, I'm physically here, and yes, I'm physically there. So to answer the question, I'm here and also here."
"Try again. Use smaller words." Ty said, truly and utterly bewildered.
"I am, in actuality, in no less than three places at once right now. So Narissa is the human girl in your dimension right now. I occupy the physical space of that human girl, I take up the matter of that human girl, I am for all intents and purposes the human girl in the third dimension. But in the fifth dimension, I'm Narissa the lizard and I'm not actually eating a burger with Ty. I'm quite literally both things at the same time. But, if you're a fourth dimensional entity and you're looking at the third dimensional Narissa the human girl, you know that I'm Narissa the lizard. And if you're third dimensional and tuned in to the vibrations of the fourth and fifth dimensions, then you know something is very wrong with Narissa the human girl and you may see a shadow of what I actually am. Because Shadow Narissa is between the third and fourth dimensions as a sort of placeholder to fifth dimensional Narissa." She raised her fries to Ty's gaping mouth without missing a beat. "Want some of my fries?"
"So... is your consciousness here or there?" Ty asked cautiously, trying to comprehend.
"Yes." She smiled.
"Let's try this from now on." Ty said diplomatically. "How about when I ask you a question, you give me a straight answer?"
"We can try that, certainly." She laughed, taking a loud sip from her drink. "So, in your dimension you have one state of being. That state is either alive and conscious or not conscious. Possibly asleep or dead. You experience your consciousness as one entity. I can experience multiple consciousness in multiple bodies at once. But this human girl is not a real person and while she's physically there think of her as a puppet I'm controlling if that helps."
"All right. That I can start to cope with." Ty resumed his burger, picking it up and taking a bite. "So what's fifth dimensional Narissa doing?"
"Actually, that's nice that you ask." She said sweetly. "I'm reading the philosophies of this really clever Arcturian parodist named Solas Par. I meant to get to it a long time ago."
"Why did I ask?" Ty broke into a nervous giggle.
At that point, Narissa put her elbows down on the table and put her head in her hands with a dreamy smile. "It's probably not going to help if I tell you that fifth dimensional Narissa, as in my higher self, doesn't experience linear time and exists outside of it."
Ty sighed heavily and took another bite of his burger. "So, does human Narissa experience time?"
"She experiences it as a third dimensional entity does, yes, in a sort of 'it's 2:30 PM on Saturday' way. But she doesn't age. Because she's a projection into 3D and not a living flesh and blood 3D being like you. Not to mention she's also lizard Narissa and can do weird things because she understands multidimensionality." She paused with a bigger grin. "Unlike you."
"Well, pardon my third dimensionality, you elitist." Ty said in a sarcastically dry seriousness.
"I think I love you." Narissa said matter of factly, sighing happily.
Ty took another bite from his burger, paused, and promptly began coughing as it caught in his throat.
* * *
"So..." Ty began.
"Ah. More questions." Narissa said in mock annoyance. "Wonderful."
Ty paused seriously as they stepped outside the Burger Queen and sighed. "What about the ancient war?"
"We're not going to go there today." She said with equal seriousness. "You've had to come to grips with this ability of yours, your entire life being thrown around, me, and all this craziness I've thrown at you. The other thing is bleak and depressing and if I had my way we would spend the rest of our time together just doing this all the time."
"What do you mean if you had your way?" Ty scoffed. "That would seem to imply there are others besides you calling the shots."
"I work for a living." She shrugged. "But not in the sense that I'm accountable to anybody, just in the sense that there are others working with me. So, as much as I'd like to phase into actual Narissa and just let you bone me right here, I'm afraid there's other things going on."
"Which begs the question." Ty stopped to sit in a park near a trail leading to the local mall. "What did I agree to?"
"All right." Narissa leaned back and grew closer to Ty, taking him in her arms on the park bench and pulling herself close. "Since you're so inquisitive and asking the right questions, I'll do a very quick summary. You have something very precious and rare, which is the ability to alter the third dimensional realm and the living beings in it with a mere thought. That sort of thing is supposed to be impossible in this reality and even on my end we don't fully understand how it happens, but in your case it's safe to say that somehow your constant child abuse had led you to unlock that ability."
"All right." Ty nodded, breathing a sigh out. "All right, now that makes sense."
"Okay." Narissa nodded back. "What you need to know for right now is that there is a very powerful and very evil occult organization that wants to control planet Earth because it has precious and much needed energy that can be harvested to empower the rulers of that occult organization. We won't say their name just yet, but let's assume they are ultimately headed by fourth dimensional reptilians. Basically, the planet's energy, including all life, is food to them. Because they're starving to death."
"That's..." Ty suddenly stared at the ground and felt sadness materialize in his mind. "Why does that make me feel bad? Like sympathy?"
"You're getting that from me." Narissa admitted, sighing. "They're still part of my species. Like brothers and sisters. We want to save them, but the only way to do that is to force them to die to they have no choice but to cross over to my side."
Ty suddenly shot up straight and blinked wildly. "Are you from 'the other side' then?"
"Yeah." She nodded. "Exactly. We just want our brothers and sisters to come home and live in fucking paradise. Where you don't age, and there's no death, and you don't have to be scared anymore."
"Is there a God?" Ty asked.
"Going a bit off track." Narissa brightened. "But yes. There is a God, but not in the Earthly guy in a robe sense. God, Spirit, Creator, The All, whatever you want to call him or her or it. God is this massive flowing being of pure love and energy. Just this vast incomprehensible thing. So here's a fun fact about that, it turns out that every last molecule or all matter and all life is basically God. See, because God created individual souls to experience, realized experience needs to have a place for things to happen, we in turn made the universes, then the physical body, and so we are all God."
"Whoa." Ty resumed staring at his shoes, taking it all in. "So... why is there evil? Why don't the bad reptilians just go home? Why control everything?"
She shrugged. "Because without negativity there can be no positivity. Ying and yang, polar opposites, the balance, light side and dark side, jedi versus sith. You know."
"Did... did you just make a star wars reference?" Ty said, taken aback and staring at Narissa with startled but welcome surprise.
"Oh, I've seen all of them, it's a tongue in cheek dramatization of the second Lyran War. The original ones, anyway." She waved her hand dismissively. "So to go back to the question, evil exists because good exists. If neither existed there would be no room to attain balance because there would be no point doing anything."
Ty thought for a moment, took a breath, and Narissa cut him off sharply. "The meaning of life is to experience things so your soul can learn about itself and return to the fifth dimension with new insight and knowledge."
"Oh." Ty said.
There was a long pause.
"We're getting this habit of wandering, you and I." Narissa smiled, pulling Ty close again. "So, there's a bunch of fifth dimensionals who got together and said, 'know what, Earth has a lot of sentimental history to us and the humans are getting screwed by the lizards,' right?" She nodded. "Yeah. So there's been this cold war going on for hundreds if not thousands of years now. Fate of the world kind of stuff. One group does something, wins a battle, the other group does something, wins a battle. But we've been fighting for so long I don't think either of us see an end anymore."
"So... me?" Ty blinked worriedly, anxiously. "What's my place?"
"You can change things." She smiled wearily, rising from the bench and taking his hand. "And so there's hope that we might have found our winning weapon, at last."
"Okay." Ty nodded solmenly, rising with Narissa and walking towards the mall.
"And to that end, I think we should go have some fun now." The lizard said, sighing and resuming her normal perky gait. "There's a lot of people in that mall. I'm sure a couple could use some change too."
"Oh?" Ty brightened suddenly. "Are we changing things?"