Another water droplet, now quite a bit larger than the first few, floats towards her head. Liss casually uses a bony hand to swat it out of the air, splashing water on the floor. The green crystal float around her, going up and down, left and right in an attempt to hit her with water from different directions. Her connection with the crystal seems to have gained some range, as she can now feel the crystals mirth even when it hovers outside her reach.
You are an active one aren’t you? Almost like a child, with the power to launch water from your body. Are you spitting at me? The last thought brought with it a memory of grossness, before her mind seeps back into calm.
Liss swats another water droplet and tries to reach for the crystal, but it flies further out of her reach. Not that she puts much effort into catching the crystal, she feels no enmity against it. Just the thought of causing harm to the crystal makes her mind shift, like someone poking her to force her focus elsewhere. Putting together the information from the voices talking about a daughter, and the fact that there is nothing else but her and the magically floating crystal in this cave, she assumes the crystal must be this daughter they were talking about.
I’m a moving skeleton, who am I to judge whether a floating crystal can be a living, thinking being.
She might be wrong of course. Maybe somewhere out there is a baby wailing for its chosen “Guardian” to come find her. Maybe the daughter and dungeon are two different things? However, the child like emotions she feels from the crystal makes her think that very unlikely. Somewhere in her foggy memories she seem to remember hearing the term dungeon being mentioned in the context of games, like something to be conquered. Having never been interested in games during her childhood, and never having had the time for them as an adult, she can’t really say she knows much about it.
As if sensing her thoughts are elsewhere, the crystal ceases its water attacks and flies close, snuggling up to her rib cage. Liss looks down at the glowing green crystal, and puts a hand on it, carefully sliding her fingers along its faceted surface. Warmth flows in from every contact point, fixing small nicks and cracks in her skeletal body she hadn’t even noticed.
The warm sensation slowly fades, and she notices a new feeling from the crystal, almost like a hollowness in her now non-existent stomach. Liss wonders if it has maybe used up its energy by giving it to her, or by throwing so much water around. Hunger starts gnawing at her, and given she lacks anything to actually contain food, it is a peculiar sensation.
What does a green glowing crystal eat anyway?
Scraping together a few small rocks with one hand, not a simple task without skin to stop them falling between the bones, she tries putting them next to the crystal. For a while nothing happens, and she feels only curiosity from the crystal, but then a tendril of green smoke stretches out of the crystal and starts prodding the rocks in her hand. The rocks in her hand starts turning to dust, and then flowing back to the crystal, specks of white light mixed in with it.
Growing hunger turns into something like satiation as more and more of the rock dust and white specks gets absorbed by the crystal. Once the rocks are completely gone, and the last of the dust has been absorbed, Liss opens her jaw and attempts to yawns.
Wait, what? I don’t have lungs, why am I yawning?
She closes her jaw and looks down at the crystal, which slowly floats away from her chest and moves to the middle of the room, where it just floats in place. Walking up to it she gives it a few pokes, and only receives feelings of sleepiness and contentment in return.
Ah, so it fell asleep after eating, cute.
Her shoulder blades sink down a bit, releasing some tension she didn’t know she had. Which is also a bit strange, seeing as she has no muscles to tense. Shaking her head and deciding to leave that conundrum for another time, she looks around at the now familiar cave.
No motion can be detected from the crystal as she steps away from it, and starts leisurely walking around. It takes her only a few seconds to walk around the whole cave. One end to the other takes her around 10 steps, and reaching up with her hand she can just barely touch the cave roof with her finger tips.
Trailing her finger bones along the rough surface of the wall, registering only the bumps of bone hitting stone but not the friction, she ends up where she found the crystal. The hole in the wall is still there, only going about a meter in before the regular cave wall continues. There is a imprint in the wall indicating where the crystal used to be, but nothing else stands out. No written manual, no more letters, no magical dust or water.
Taking a step back she almost stumbles over a large rock on the floor, which used to be in the wall. Glaring with empty eye sockets at the piece of rock which crushed her feet when it first fell, a dull sense of irritation, more a memory of the feeling really, flows into her mind. She pulls back her foot and gives the rock a solid kick. The rock, which must have weighed more than her entire skeleton, lifts from the floor and ricochets off the wall with a loud thud. Rock splints and dust flies out in all directions from the impact point.
Liss is frozen, completely, staring at her once again broken stump of a leg. Fragments of bone lay around her, and some are even stuck into the rock which continues to roll for a short distance on the floor. Wisps of green smoke seeps out from the break in her leg, fading into the air like food coloring into water.
Am I bleeding? Is this green smoke what is keeping me moving? But I don’t remember this happening when my feet got crushed by the rock, then there was no smoke or anything.
The smoke stops after a few seconds, and the bone looks bare and jagged along the break. Thinking back there was green smoke also when the crystal grabbed the rocks and disintegrated them.
So maybe the green smoke is some kind of force related to the crystal? But then why is my body releasing it? Maybe because I took in the warmth, energy from the crystal? Was the smoke trying to repair the broken bones, or was it simply my leaking out of a wound like blood would.
Using one hand on the wall to keep herself upright while standing on only one rather bony foot, she turns around. Looking up from the broken leg she flinches away as she notices the crystal floating right in front of her face. Either the crystal doesn’t need much sleep, her sense of time is out of whack, or it awoke when she kicked the rock. Her hand slips from the rock wall, and one foot is not enough to keep her standing without support, at least not yet.
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She falls down with a thump on the floor, feeling another icy sensation from her pelvis as brittle bone meets hard floor. It doesn’t seem like she took much damage, but it is felt nonetheless. Her body really is very weak towards blunt force trauma, which kind of makes sense when there is no flesh, muscle or other tissue to dampen the impacts.
The crystal follows her down, and she can almost hear giggling in her mind, a startled and falling one legged skeleton is apparently funny to watch. It floats over to her broken leg, and again the green smoke flows out of the crystal and into her leg. Her leg bones expands and grows, new bones grows out of nothing and moves to their expected locations to create a foot. After a few seconds she is whole again, with complete bones at her leg and foot beneath it. Her pelvis bone also receives some care, an interesting sensation as she feels the bones mend, before going back to dull and unfeeling.
Curious how I can feel the most whenever my bones are healing.
After that exertion of healing energy, some tinges of hunger flow from the crystal again, and Liss gets up and walks over to where the rock landed after her majestic kick. It’s a wonder it didn’t hit either herself or the crystal the way it bounces around in the confined space. She pauses in front of the rock and again do a quick look around, noting the wall where the rock ricocheted didn’t really take much damage, nor did the rock aside from a few splinters. Shouldn’t simple rocks break easier than this?
While I’m not claustrophobic, it is strange that such a small space with no exit or entry isn’t freaking me out.
She shrugs, and focuses her eyeless vision on the rock.
If those small pebbles managed to fill the crystal earlier, then this huge one should last for a while.
She bends down and grips the rock with both hands. Jaw set, and bones shaking with imagined strain, she puts her will into lifting the rock. The rock, encountering the unwavering will of this female human turned skeleton, does what only a rock of this size can. Remain completely unmoved.
So a kick will pulverize my foot and send the rock flying, but I can’t even move it using both arms? Did all the power bones go into my feet? Or is there something I’m missing?
She tries kicking the rock, with quite a bit less force than the first time, but other than small chips of bone breaking off her foot, the rock doesn’t move at all.
It should at least have wobbled if my feet had any strength. So that only leaves something else. Emotion? Mystical energy? Maybe my skeleton is made out of gunpowder?
Thinking back, there was a memory of emotion, irritation or anger, at the moment when she kicked the rock. She tries to bring that to the forefront, to hate the rock on the ground. But all she feel is a dullness, a needle popping a hole in her mind to let all emotions drain away, leaving only placidity.
While Liss is attempting to conjure emotions in her literally empty skull, the crystal floats over to the rock. More green energy flows out from the crystal and into the rock, starting to break down and absorb it. The flashing of white specks of light within the dust shakes Liss out of her highly non-emotional thoughts.
In the short time it took Liss to turn her skull, the whole rock has been turned into dust and absorbed into the crystal. Quite a bit of white specks went along with it, and the crystal’s glow is significantly more pronounced, even shading the cave walls green. This event brings to mind the question about how she is able to see. The cave has no light source other than the crystal, yet she can see the entire cave as if the rocks walls and ceiling are emitting their own light. Not even the cracks in the cave walls are hidden from her sight.
The crystal, now giving off a bloated feeling, bumps into her in its uneven floating movement, and then does what Liss can only explain as throwing up. A large amount of green energy is expelled out from all over the crystal, merges into a point in the air above her hands. At that spot a spherical ball of rock is created, and expands as more and more green energy enters it, until the energy outburst ceases.
Liss reaches up to the gravity-defying rock with both hands. From what she can tell with her skinless, and thus nerveless fingers, it is perfectly smooth. Trying to push it just makes it float slightly in the direction she pushed, before stopping and just hanging in the air. She cups the ball with both hands and tries to lift it up.
Just as her hands starts attempting to lift it, gravity seems to remember the existence of the rock. The rocks falls like normal rocks are wont to do, and her hands stuck to it, follow down.
Do the rocks in this cave have a vendetta against me? First the rock falls on my feet, crushing them. Then the rocks pulverizes my foot when I kick it. Now, what I assume is the rock reborn, decides to pulverize both my hands beneath it. If this goes on I will get a rock phobia.
Down on her knees, both hands stuck under the rock, Liss tries to lift and pull. Nothing happens. The rock does not budge, and neither are her hands freed. It seems like this time the hands are still whole enough to be attached to her arms with whatever force binds the individual bones.
She tries to gather some emotion, anger, fear, anything to get the power to lift the rock, with no success. At this rate she will be stuck beneath this rock for a long time. Maybe she could try to head bash the rock, but it seems like a bad idea to risk her head at this point, not knowing what will happen if it’s destroyed.
Having finished its version of projectile -literally- vomiting, the crystal hovers around Liss and the rock. Green tendrils of energy pokes at the rock and Liss, a sense of curiosity emits from it. Seeming to come to a conclusion, the crystal snuggles up to Liss, pushing its energy into her. She feel the energy go down into her hands to fix them, but the energy also do something else, pushing and pulling at something inside her. A strange feeling of something gathering, from all her bones, and flowing down into her hands, arms, and back.
Some of her bones starts to glow with green lines, and suddenly the rock shifts. Putting some effort into lifting her hands, the green glow increases along her arms, going from her hands underneath the rock, and all the way up her arms and over her shoulders. Some of the glowing lines also seems to go down to her legs, but stay only as a soft glow.
The rock raises up with her hands. Liss can feel the weight, but not nearly as much as what she expects with the trouble it has been giving her. Trying to stand up also causes the green lines in her feet to start glowing brighter. Then she is standing up straight, rock held in close to her chest. As the strain of moving the rock and standing up eases up, so does the glow of the lines. Dimming down to soft glow through the bones instead of blinding lightning.
Deciding to give this new power a try, she puts everything into tossing the rock to the other side of the cave. The lines in her arms blazes up in a flash which momentarily turns the entire cave green as she throws it. The rock flies out of her hand like a cannonball, a soft thump vibrating the air. It hits the wall, and sticks, creating some new cracks in the cave wall. Had she been less nerve-deficient in her feet, she would probably have felt the floor shaking slightly at the impact.
Liss takes a long look at her hands. No more glowing lines, but also no broken bones. For the first time, she had actually done something without breaking bones.
Looking up, she notices the crystal is wobbling towards her in the air. She reaches forwards with her hands, thinking to catch the crystal. Suddenly it stops, and a flood of green bursts out towards her. At that point she notices the hole in the far wall, which just a moment ago held her improvised cannonball. A new rock forms, grows into a large ball, and promptly falls into her hands before she can react. Without the glowing green lines flowing through her bones, the rock hits her outstretched hands, and pull them down to the floor. For the second time in what could only have been minutes, she is stuck to the ground, rock over hands.
The crystal flitters around in front of Liss, excitement flooding the link between them.
Great, so now it wants to play catch.