I thrashed my limbs defensively as I awoke. Lashing out in a directionless manner. It was only after this that I opened my eyes and took in the scene around me. I was standing in a field packed full of a variety of wildflowers. The world around me exploded in colour and depth as I began to examine it, stalks of green ending in bright starbursts in a myriad of colours. Bees buzzed diligently through the sky, going about their work. I looked at the before sky and found it a bowl of blue. Without a cloud to mar its perfect surface.
My vision began to swim as two details came back to me with all the gentleness of a freight train. One, I suffered from terrible hayfever and two, that it was night time when I left and none of these flowers was native to Australia.
My vision began to blur as my eyes watered and I stumbled away from the flowers in an allergic haze. Bad move considering that they surrounded me, I tripped and fell over a slight ditch in the field concealed by wild beauty and was sent tumbling into the waist-high flowers.
I hit my head again as I fell and discovered that the wound I had incurred that afternoon stayed with me. Eventually, the surroundings, the implications of them and the carryover of emotional turmoil from the night before had me crawling into a ball on the fields floor. Striving desperately and futilely to shield my nose and mouth from the pollen.
"I'm sorry Eve, but I don't deserve this. Please God, help me." I wailed into the empty void of flowers and bees. Hoping someone would hear my plea and pluck me from this hell of colour and natural splendour.
"Um, am I interrupting something here?" Spoke a criminally unoffensive, androgynous voice. It didn't seem to come from any one direction however but emanated from each and every place simultaneously. If I was asked to describe the cadence of the speech I would do so by saying it was the auditory equivalent of a British queue. At that moment I hated it.
"Go away demon! Let me suffer in peace." I moaned into my hands trusting that the disembodied voice could hear me. Wouldn't have been the strangest thing to happen today.
"Oh you poor thing, here let me help you." The world seemed to swell for a moment before it let out what one could only describe as a cosmic sneeze. After it was complete I found I no longer suffered the effects of last nights drinks, the bruise on my head or my hayfever.
I sat up warily and stared and the field to my left and right in an accusing manner.
"What have you done to me?" I spat toward the voice, no matter the fact that the change had altered me in a positive way and I probably would have asked for something similar later. The being had changed me without permission. It added to my already confrontational mental state.
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"I fixed you, have to give you a fighting chance." I could feel the voice smiling at me with its nonexistent features.
"Fighting chance for what! Where am I?!" I roared into the sky, standing up with a start and kicking several of the flowers in a targetless moment of rage.
"You are in the staging area of the Gods, and if you would let me talk you would already know what you're doing here." The voice said frustratedly. Like a phone salesman after they've been hung up on for the 100th time.
"Don't want to." I sat back down and crossed my arms sobbing quietly at the injustice of my situation.
"I'm sorry, excuse me. You don't want to listen to me. Boy, I am a literal God and you're going to ignore me?" The voice said in the most frustrated voice that I had ever heard. As if it was on the verge of either tearing its hair out or destroying the realm in answer to this insolence.
"What's the point, I'm dreaming anyway," I muttered into my arms before looking up as I heard the crack of thunder. Storm clouds began to billow above me. Lighting scarred across the sky in a patchwork of divine might. It was awe-inspiring and terrifying in equal measure. It was obviously a figment of my imagination. I lowered my head once more, no way this shit was actually happening.
"Listen well child for I will say this but once. You and many others have been chosen to become a sacrifice for your peers. For them to leave in peace and luxury you must suffer and struggle for them, know that the fate of your world and your people lie upon your shoulders." And with that, the voice sent down a bolt of lightning. It struck me straight in the centre of the back.
The pain seared through me as if a stampede of firey buffalo were trampling across the nerves of my entire being. I felt my hair burn away and smelt the char of my flesh. My eyes burst from the heat and within the split second that this happened in I was gone, vaporised of this plane by the power of a god.
"That insolent piece of shit." Swore the god silently as it fumed on the past few events. Sure it was meant to have told the human more about its situation, but it could learn that from others. Or maybe not if its social skills were anything to go by. Either way, it sure was going to be fun to watch. The god bustled its way out of the staging dimension in good order. It wanted to get back to the pantheon and watch the start of the festivities. This species chosen were just about to start their first trials. It wouldn't miss this for the world.