Being dead was much warmer than Emma had expected it to be.
But one shouldn’t feel hot or cold upon death. And hadn’t she been wearing clothes when she’d died as well? They seemed to have vanished. She certainly stunk less now, but the loss of clothes did come with certain disadvantages, didn’t it?
Evan.
Dead people weren’t supposed to get tears in their eyes. They were very warm on her already hot skin, which seemed to be getting hotter. For a moment she absurdly thought of her crematorium joke with Josie, of flames rising further and further, and feeling every touch of the flames - forever.
The distinct sound of something skittering mercifully broke her out of her nightmare. It sounded like something moving through grass.
Curiosity stirred in her - or maybe that was the knife punctures - and she was filled with the sudden urge to try to open her eyes. But she was frightened: dead people weren’t supposed to open their eyes. Come to think of it, they weren’t supposed to think about opening their eyes, either - or think about anything at all.
That meant, if she tried to open her eyes and succeeded, she was very unprepared for whatever she would see.
I love you
Her eyelids fluttered open. Instead of the flickering lights of the bathroom, she saw a wide-open, ruby red sky open up above her, filled with purple and pink clouds that seemed to glimmer strangely with flecks of darkness. They moved through the sky like snaking rivers in decidedly un-cloudlike fashion.
Next were her arms, which put up quite a bit more of a resistance towards moving. How long had she been laying there, in pain and covered in nothing but a long brown toga (which, really, looked and felt like a glorified potato sack) and loincloth?
Also, why was she wearing a loincloth? She hadn’t worn loincloths since her experimental phase in her freshman year of college. Nevertheless, she clenched her teeth through the pain as she pushed herself up, slowly.
She had been right: she wasn’t prepared for what she’d see.
She was seated in a valley shadowed by black mountains that reached far past the strangely-colored clouds. Black brush dotted the earthy landscape, swaying a little in the hot breeze. The only thing on her body besides the thin pieces of cloth wrapped around her unmentionables was a small, bronze-colored medallion hung around her neck.
Weird, but not as weird as… everything else.
Mingled with the sound of the light wind was the tinkle of water. Emma, suddenly parched, turned from where she was sitting and saw a creek not far off, cutting between the swaying bushes and disappearing around a mountainous bend.
Suddenly forgetting about clothes, clouds, and logic, she half-crawled towards the creek. When she arrived she peered into it for only a moment to check its cleanliness before she stuck her whole head under the water and gulped wantonly as the hot water ran through her hair.
When she came back up - only because she would suffocate otherwise - something bright was staring at her.
“17.87% stamina replenished,” it said.
Emma screamed and lurched back. Something large, round, and bright seemed to be bobbing in the air right next to her. She grabbed around for a sharp rock, rueing being mostly naked for the first time. Failing to find anything to weaponize, she reached automatically into the creek bed and closed her fist over the first hard thing she felt.
“River pebble,” said the thing in a tinny voice, “useful to distract enemies, or as a quick -”
Emma hurled the river pebble at the thing, which dodged it easily.
“ - weapon when no other viable options are available.”
Still breathing heavily, Emma tried to focus. She blinked at the thing several times, as though something were coating her eyes and preventing her from seeing what was really there. But no: an orb of light nearly the size of a beach ball really was floating in front of her. Whatever it was had no body, no means of suspending itself in the air and, most importantly, no mouth with which it could possibly be speaking words at her.
Emma slowly got to her feet, covering some of her more sensitive bits with one arm out of a sense of habit and poised with her other arm thrust out. She was attempting to mimic a stance she had practiced as a child at a karate class - but that was many, many years ago. She circled around the ball of light, which still bobbed slightly up and down in mid air, heedless of the breeze.
“Who are you?” she managed.
“Invalid input.”
Emma blinked. Well, she didn’t know what she had expected. So was the thing a robot? She supposed stranger technology existed than floating, talking balls. Technology was something she could wrap her head around, at least. The small matter of it apparently defying physics could be resolved later.
“Fine,” Emma said, “what are you?”
“My function is to serve as an informational resource to all inhabitants of Aporia. You may use me to request brief descriptions of items, quests, and details of your Acquisition Sheet.”
As though in demonstration, numbers became discernible along the ball’s glowing surface like the screen of a computer:
Combat: 1
Strength: 1
Stamina: 1
Knowledge: 0
Arcane: 1
“Ah. Thank you for clearing that up.”
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“My pleasure.”
“One more question,” Emma said. “What the fuck?”
“Invalid input,” said the magic ball.
Feeling a little more at ease with the strange thing, though not much, Emma turned from it to survey the landscape. The swaying trees seemed strangely black, and the earth slightly scorched, as though the entire surrounding landscape had been touched briefly by a struck match. And why were the mountains so black? They seemed to be made entirely of obsidian. Was she in a volcanic area?
She looked at the landscape nearer at hand. Strange black bushes seemed to shift of their own accord along the creek, out of sync with the direction of the breeze, with what looked like gray tubules hanging from their branches. They almost looked like long, gray fingers, pointing this way and that as the odd bushes squirmed.
For the first time since waking up, a strange feeling of horror began to grow within her. She shouldn’t be anywhere; she should be dead, her corpse transferred from the hospital as soon as the first unlucky bathroom-goer discovered it laying in a pile of blood on the bleach-scented tiles. Had someone found her body and somehow moved it to this odd landscape? But that didn’t explain the strange talking ball - did it? Had she been kidnapped by some perverted billionaire tech guru who’d hired the woman in the raincoat? But then why try to kill her at work?
More out of the urge to avoid the second, more obvious yet completely impossible possibility, Emma steered her thoughts towards survival.
“Can you tell me where I am?” she asked the light-orb, feeling silly as she did so.
“We’re in the Black Teeth,” the ball replied, its male voice inflectionless, “some three hundred miles from Pandemonium.”
“Naturally.”
No use dawdling, then.
Emma turned away from the floating ball and began to follow the creek around the bend into the rocky hillsides. They sloped into a clearing in the tall, black mountains nearby; perhaps she could find some food there, or a spot to rest. As she walked, she did Kara’s breathing exercises once more and decided to take things one piece of information at a time. That was how she’d survived the last several years of her life.
Bad news, she found, was best confronted straight on, but in manageable bits.
So she thought about what the strange ball had said to her. Hundreds of miles from Pandemonium, was it? The word sounded familiar - not just its usual parlance, but as a word of significance she’d learned in college.
Emma turned to make sure the ball was following her as she walked along the creekside. As she suspected, it was moving behind her, perfectly at ease and at an apparently set distance, as though it were a balloon tied to her by an invisible string.
“Just to confirm, you said Pandemonium?” she asked.
“Yes, some three hundred miles away.”
Emma bit down on her lip, hard. The painful bad habit had long served her as a stopgap diversion when her thoughts began moving too fast. Pandemonium was the city Satan had built for his followers in John Milton’s Paradise Lost. The implications of it -
Luckily, before she could question the situation further, the creek rounded into a bend leading to a small pond and a relatively thick amount of plant life. There were more bushes with tubules and a tree bearing green, triangular fruit shifted a little in the breeze over the pond. She wandered over and ran her fingers along some leaves and a branch. The tree, the odd-shapes fruit notwithstanding, seemed normal enough, which was a relief. The fruit seemed edible, though it was high up.
Emma reached up to the thick, bottommost branch of the tree and pulled a little. It seemed possible to snap it off and use it to whack down some of the fruit.
Emma grabbed the branch with both hands and pulled. The tree cracked and leaned a little towards her. She pulled harder on the branch until the gentle moans turned to sudden cracks and the branch nearly broke from the tree, tethered to it now by only a few strings of wood. She pulled and twisted the branch a few more times and it suddenly snapped free, sending her careening into the pond with a loud splash.
Emma thrashed around wildly, her instincts suddenly on fire and joining forces with her pent-up anxiety. It was several long moments before she realized she was laying on her back, only covered by water up to her shoulders.
Emma looked around. The floating ball was bobbing a little, unperturbed.
“Tree branch,” it said, as Emma pushed herself to her knees and held the branch up towards the tree. She swatted at a piece of fruit with it, and it fell from the branches and hit the ground with a thud in front of her. “Useful as fire kindling, a makeshift torch, or a weapon in a bind. Carve it to make a walking stick or low-level spear and increase its attack and stamina bonus.”
“Ah, yes,” Emma said, tired. “Everyone knows that.”
Emma collected the triangular fruit from the ground in front of the pond in which she stood and examined it. It was shiny and rather light, but looked juicy.
“Porphyr fruit +1,” Wilkes said. “Heals a small amount of stamina when eaten.”
Ravenous, Emma took a bite. The fruit was thick and rather tasteless, but it was gone in moments, leaving nothing but sticky seeds clinging to a thin fruit core in her palm. If the fruit restored her stamina at all, it was so slight as to be imagined, but it did fill her belly just enough to quiet its hungry protests a little.
Emma leveraged the stick to help her up out of the pond and began to wring her hair.
“Pond leech, level one,” said the ball. “Applies poison over time.”
Emma looked down and stifled yet another scream. Clamped onto her right knee was a sagging, glistening green leech the size of a fist. It was then that she noticed, for the first time, the sharp pain emanating from the circumference of its bite.
“Get off!” Emma yelled. She brought the sharp edge of the stick where it had severed from the tree down on the leech. It was clamped on too tightly and the branch practically slid off its body. She smacked it again, but it only emitted a strange growl and didn’t move a centimeter.
She hit it, again and again, growing more desperate. It tugged at her knee skin with each blow, increasing the pain as the tiny needle-like teeth sunk further into the folds of her knee. It didn’t budge, but wiggled uncomfortably as though filled with maggots as the growl intensified. What the Hell is this thing? Feeling a little woozy - was that the poison the ball had mentioned? Or was it… everything else? - Emma decided to try a different tactic. She fell to her knees, squishing the giant leech.
“Bite off more than you can chew?” Emma said, and she pushed her knee against the rocky ground as hard as she could. The pain became sharper, but she pushed even more, tears in her eyes as she grit her teeth. Emma laughed deliriously, which she had always been wont to do in aggressive moments of great tension. That thrill of adrenaline climaxed when the leech began to wriggle under the weight of her body. Then it exploded, its green insides coating the nearby brush like a popped balloon filled with slime.
Emma lifted up her knee and examined where the giant leech had bitten her. The row of teeth (were leeches even supposed to have teeth?) was a perfect circle of punctures, and beads of blood began to puddle around some of the bite marks as she looked. Then something else caught her eye.
The sludge-remains of the leech began to glow. Emma backed up, fearing some kind of posthumous attack. Then the glow lifted from the leech’s remains. In a moment, the light of the glow was levitating a few inches above the ground. Emma watched, speechless, as the light began to take the precise form and size of the slain leech, squirming gently in the air as though it were still in its corporeal body and napping quietly in a pond, never having been disturbed by the shrieking human interloper.
Despite her better judgment, Emma reached out and prodded the bobbing, glowing leech smoke with her finger. It dispersed, the strings of glow breaking apart like disturbed smoke. As Emma was withdrawing her hand, the smoke suddenly lurched for her body. She snapped her arm back and began to back up, her attack-stick at the ready, but the smoke traveled up along her skin, up her chest - and into her eyes, where it finally disappeared entirely.
Emma suddenly felt a strange, electric thrill spread from her face to her feet, as though she’d brushed an exposed electrical socket. Something about the sensation that filled her when the buzzing died down was slimy.
“Soul of leech +1,” said the glowing ball.
Emma looked up.
“What the Hell?”