Park Gazebo
The first part of Interdimensional Gazebo, started 6/1/2025 and last updated 6/23/2025
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(Note: any real locations depicted in the photos have no bearing on the actual story; they were chosen exclusively for ambience. The entire story takes place in purely fictional locales :)
(Also I'm writing this out on the fly, so the writing is probably going to be garbage sometimes and things might be changed later; I just want to get this story out of my head and out somewhere)
(Also ignore the crappiness of my art and let's pretend it's a style and not just my lack of effort and inability to draw dude-looking dudes lol)
-1-
Autumn was reaching its peak. The air was swept up a light breeze that made the dying foliage all around sing its own requiem and carried the damp smell of a recent rainstorm throughout the entire park.
Ossie noticed none of this, being lost somewhere across time and space in mid-nineteenth-century Italy, engrossed in the words of the book in his hand. The only signs of life he showed were the occasional reaching up to pull his hat back over his ears and the incessant bouncing of his right leg. To any outside observer looking on from a distance, he might have been an incredibly lifelike statue.
For once, he had managed to rip himself away from the online world and do something constructive with his time.
***
When Ossie finally glanced up, for the first time in nearly an hour, it was because someone had started breathing heavily. He dropped the book and scrambled for the earbuds he always kept in his pocket for just such an occassion. The sound of chirping birds, rustling leaves, and that infernal breathing were drowned out by some soothing French jazz, eliminating his urge to rip the hair from his head without breaking up the serene, studious atmosphere he had worked so hard to cultivate.
The unassuming offender, who had been busy walking away, turned back at the sound of the thick, falling paperback. Ossie, who had just seen her, accidentally met her eyes and, panicking, quickly looked away but continued to observe her from where he was sitting. Her hard eyes were in stark contrast to her long, deeply pink hair and light pink cardigan. She looked like the type to have a perfectly pastel well-decorated closet for hiding the bodies of anyone who dared to cross her. This effect was so strong, in fact, that he felt himself shaking as she, eyes still locked upon him, began to approach.
Ossie rushed down to grab his book, wincing at the few bent page corners it had sustained and not having much hope that pretending to be reading could help him avoid the inevitable interaction. If only the stranger could turn around, ignoring him and just go away.
She didn't. She kept coming until she was standing right above him and he had no choice but to look up and acknowledge her. What had he done to make her look that irritated?
"Excuse me?" she asked in a (surprisingly) gentle voice, her eyes suddenly more inquisitive than angry. "You didn't see anything just now, did you?"
Ossie shook his head, struggling to find his voice. "The only thing I've seen for a while is the book, unless you mean seeing you a few seconds ago-"
She sighed loudly, interrupting him. "I don't have time for this right now. Have you seen anything strange or not?"
"Oh, was that what you were asking? N-no, I didn't see anything, sorry."
"Well, thank goodness!" Her face was suddenly bright and cheerful. "Well, have a good day then!"
And with that, the stranger was walking away again, humming a little, and Ossie was finally able to breathe again. As he watched her leave, though, he thought he saw something glowing in her hair.
***
His reading session having been irreversibly disturbed, Ossie took the long walk back to campus. No strange girls could disturb him in his room in the dorms.
Sonya, his cat, was curled up like a shrimp in the middle of his unmade bed, sleeping with a tiny smile on her face.
Ossie flopped down into his desk chair and pulled out his battered old laptop. The fan inside it began to whir violently as soon as he opened a new tab and began releasing the question that had been tying his brain in knots for the last half-hour as a search query.
'Glowing hair gel' produced what one would expect, ads for hair products that could 'make your hair radiant for over 12 hours'. He was convinced that he couldn't have been imagining the large glowing blob of some mystery substance that had been hanging off the end of the strange girl's hair. Unless...
An hour later, now being significantly more knowledgeable about schizophrenia and related disorders, Ossie gave up. He would just have to go back to the gazebo tomorrow and see if anything strange had fallen from the rafters.
***
The next day, in that same gazebo, Ossie, embarrassed by his behavior which, to someone looking in, would probably seem very strange, was looking up at the rafters. So far all he could see were a few spots of mold on the underside of the untreated wood. He was about to give up, deciding that he had just been seeing things after all, when the next strange thing happened.
"Oh, great krakens of the deep!" someone yelled, making Ossie fall back onto one of the benches. When he was able to breathe again, he saw the strange girl from yesterday lying in a heap on the ground in the very center of the gazebo, clutching at a large scratch on her ankle.
Ossie shuddered, but stood there, not quite sure what to do? Did he have any bandages to offer? Where had she even come from, anyway? He hadn't heard anyone walk up...
Thankfully, he did have a few small bandages hidden away at the bottom of his backpack, though he didn't have anything to disinfect the wound with. "Here, let me help," he said to the girl, who had pushed herself up at this point.
She snatched the bandages he was offering and turned away. "No, thank you, I'll do it myself. Don't worry about it."
He nodded at her before realizing she couldn't see him. "No problem," he mumbled, not sure if she wanted him to leave or if he should stay. "Uhhh, so what happened?" he asked, grabbing his backpack and fidgeting with the straps.
"Just one of those awful three-eyed krak... I mean... I... tripped and fell." She whipped around then, meeting his eyes with a panicked expression. "Yeah, I fell! Nothing strange about that!"
Her little parapraxis immediately set the cogs in Ossie's mind to turning, making him remember why he had come to the gazebo in the first place. "Do the krakens have something to do with the glowing stuff I saw in your hair the other day?"
Her eyes widened, and she visibly startled. This was an unmistakable sign that he was absolutely on to something.
He let out a sigh of relief. "So I wasn't crazy? Thank goodness!"
-2-
Sonya bounded over to Ossie, meowing loudly as he opened the door to his room that evening.
He scratched her on the back. "Sorry Miss Rostova, you haven't had dinner yet, have you? With the cat on his heels, he walked over to refill her bowl. "I was very busy today, though I guess that was an understatement," he said, more to himself than the cat. "You know, I actually made a friend today! The only problem is that, apparently, she's an alien. And a mermaid." He stopped in his tracks, almost pouring out the whole bag of cat food. "It's only now that I stop to think about it that I realize how strange that is."
He had, indeed, been very busy that day.
***
That morning, it had taken nearly three hours for Ossie to hear the whole story about the strange girl from the gazebo.
Right after he mentioned the kraken, the girl had sighed and appeared to give up. "Let's talk about this somewhere else, shall we?"
This was how Ossie found himself at a little local bakery eating quiche with a girl he didn't even know the name of.
"So, I'm assuming you know too much now to leave me alone, huh?" she asked, scraping the filling out of the crust of her slice of quiche with her fork. "How much do you want?"
He stopped, fork almost to his mouth. "How much of what?"
"Hush money, obviously. Clearly that's why you keep asking me questions and won't let it go, right?"
Ossie had been asking her a lot of questions on the way here, but he hadn't considered the prospect of asking her to pay him. "I don't want any money. You don't have to worry about me telling anyone. Nobody would believe me if I did, anyway. I'm just curious about the weird stuff in your hair and how you keep popping up out of nowhere, that's all."
She studied him for a moment, then shrugged. "You seem a lot less shy than you did the other day."
He was surprised by this. "Do I?"
"Yes, you do. All you did was stutter last time, and now you won't leave me alone.
"It was probably because I was reading before you showed up last time," Ossie guessed. "I don't... talk well if I've just been concentrating. It's actually very inconvenient."
She nodded slowly, though the look on her face didn't seem convinced. This was the response people usually gave when he said things like this. "Anyway, I don't think I know your name. If I have to spill all my secrets, I want to at least know who I'm talking to."
"Oh... then I guess I'm Ossie, I'm from _____, and I'm going to the local college for zoology. I have a cat named Sonya Rostova, and I like reading classical literature, listening to music, and baking when I get the chance."
The girl laughed. "You have a script, I see."
He nodded, eager to get the attention off of him. "How about you?"
"In a second. First, what kind of a name is that for a cat?"
"Oh, haha." Ossie rubbed the back of his neck. "It's the name of a character from War and Peace. In the first epilouge of the translation I was reading, she was described as a 'housecat', so I thought it would be a funny name for an actual housecat."
She gave him one of those funny looks he was used to getting when he had said something strange.
"Now what about you?"
She sighed and leaned back. "I'm Suna, but apparently in one of your human languages that means 'duck', so you can just call me Marisol. I'm also at the local college, studying astrophysics because I'm trying to infiltrate NASA. I like crocheting, thrifting, and slaying sea monsters, and my favorite book is War of the Worlds." She smiled. "You're not the only one with a script, though I did make mine a little more honest for you since you found out about the krakens and everything."
Ossie sat there, trying to formulate a proper sentence. "Wait... human languages? And... infiltrating NASA?"
"Yeah, I want to make sure they don't find us. You humans seem to love nothing more than barging into perfectly functional ecosystems and messing them up, and you all seem to be concerningly interested in Mars at the moment, so I want to make sure we're safe."
"Well, I can't exactly argue that we don't do that." Ossie laughed, still trying to work through everything she had said. "But how..."
She took a sip of her tea and leaned back, crossing her arms. "I guess I'm going to have to explain everything, huh?"
Ossie nodded, then realized he probably looked a bit too eager. "Please, tell me everything!"
(to be continued)
