As we walked to Ryan's house (which he said was nothing like a castle, but I insisted it was), we crossed paddy fields and banana plantations. There were random white bungalows here and there. As we reached a bit farther, I saw an array of tall buildings. Metros were running in well-organized tracks too. There were bushes and orchards in between all the modern-day buildings. I spotted a big pentagon-shaped building, it was mounting over the whole city space.

This was the perfect example of modernizing as well as preserving nature.

'Now, Karishma, there's so much you need to learn about this place. And we'll do it slowly as we go to different places. You'll need to be accustomed to it.' Ryan said as he opened the door of his 36th-floor apartment. 'We're not many people here actually, just fifty thousand or so btw, so its a pretty small community. Compared to Mumbai.'

'Looking forward to learning about this place.' I nodded as I sat on his plush sofa. The house was like any modern-day apartment in Worli. There were a lot of paintings, actually delicate paintings hanging around although. 'Wait, it must be morning by now, my mom might be searching for me. She'll kill me.'

Ryan just laughed.

Come on it was serious! If I got grounded for real, how would I visit this place? Wait I had been grounded already!

I'm dead! And Ryan's laughing!

Not done!

'Kashi, listen to me. This isn't just any place, it's Etis. And the majority of the things happening in Etis are either mysterious or completely different from what we expect. You'll know as I tell you more about this place.'

He then handed me a plate of rice cake. Ryan cooks well. I know it's pretty young, we're like hardly fifteen, but he's great. The best thing I ever ate from his kitchen was Mutton Biryani.

No one cooks that well.

'When you come to Etis, time stops in context to you on Earth. I know, it's crazy. So when you get back there, you'll start from exactly where you left.' Ryan started as he ate rice cakes. I made a very awkward face I guess, so he just shrugged and continued. 'Until you do get back, your existence is scraped off Earth for that time being, but then when you get back to the exact same point from where you left, everything is normal again. So even if you spend 20 years here in Etis, you can still go back.'

My brain was inching closer to exploding.

'But then problems like age factor arise. You can that is why choose to make it permanent, or even better, weave illusions on earth about your existence, visit often and meanwhile progress in Etis.' Aspen spoke. 'But permanent is always much better.'

'I don't understand how that works. And believe me, I'm a Potterhead.' I snapped. It was really getting on my nerves now. 'You talk about some explicit space science and scraping off existence from the only planet with life, not done. Ryan, I respect what's happening around, I'm loving it too, it was what I always wanted, a new world, different stuff, but I don't like the way it goes. Please guys, be clear. Or else I need to get back home and Ryan has to pretend this drama never happened.'

All three of them looked at me in disbelief. I was probably a privileged one to get to see all this but I couldn't figure out what went wrong. I mean I could but then, yeah, it wasn't how I expected fairytales and magical lands to be. It wasn't supposed to be this confusing. I wanted a change, but not at the cost of my sanity.

But maybe it's how it has to be.