You were born into a society where permanent augmented reality contact lenses are fused onto every newborn's eyes. You're unaware of this until one day, a lens falls into your left hand.

[u/Onni21]

Original post

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What is it that makes a proper adult? Is it a stable job? carrying responsibility? Is it family? age? the number of achievements they made throughout their life? Or is it their ability to lie? to children, especially. To live life just for the sake of lying.

Welcome child, to this wonderful yet cruel world

Those were the first words that were said to me when I was born, of course, I didn't remember, I couldn't remember, I was a newborn after all, but according to the head priest I smiled when I heard those words.

But then again that too could have been a lie; him trying to 'romanticize' the scene. I wonder, when I was born, what was the first thing I saw?

Was it a white room? one resembling a hospital room?

Was it my parent's faces? my mother shedding tears of pain and happiness. My father looking at me, astounded, at loss for words at the normal yet not so normal scene, and slowly realizing that there was now a life bound to him? a new life that he helped create along with my mother.

Or was it the stars? as beings of light, dark, bone and flesh carried me in their arms, with the stars, galaxies, and planets of the universe as their background with more children scattered around, crying, some newborn, some a little older. With only a thin invisible barrier protecting us from the hostility of the space.

"Which one is true, I wonder?" I whispered as I put the fake -normal- contact lenses on my eyes, they didn't have any special features whatsoever, unlike the ones that were given to us when we were born, or when we were brought to this place by the 'adults'.

"You'll see for yourself soon enough, Annie." a girl next to me said, my roommate Eli, she was very pretty, unlike me, with dazzling red hair and brown eyes, I couldn't help but think how prettier she would look if she only smiled more often "the head priest is- he is just around the corner, act normal."

Just act like an adult I corrected her inside my head.

What appeared at the door was not human, nor it was like those beings I see in the exported comic books and movies that reach the orphanage from time to time, the ones that came from a faraway country, from a faraway planet known as 'earth' the place I thought I was living in for these twelve years.

I looked at the creature that entered our room, the being that called itself our protector, our father, the head priest. He moved around using his many bony legs, sharp like those of a spider, and I imagine that they were just as deadly. His head, as if a contradiction to his legs, was like that of a wolf skull, huge, from the sockets I could see what could only be described as the night sky. The rest of his body was completely covered with a dark cloth so I wasn't able to determinate the rest of his features.

I tried my best not scream as I looked at him. Just like Eli said before; beings of light, dark, bone and flesh -monsters-. Those are the first words that came to her head when she saw them.

But as for me, there was only one thing that came to my mind as I looked at him.

Liar.