B2 Chapter 7

Kaori looked down at the furry orange girl extracting herself from the snowdrift she had fallen into. Technically, there wasn’t enough snow reaching the ground beneath the canopy for a snowdrift to form. However, this change was so small that nobody was likely to fault her for it. Kaori then reminded herself that nobody would fault her for this anyway. She watched in bemusement as the girl climbed back up the tree and began looking for nuts.

Back upstairs

Kaori let out a sigh of relief as the moment of danger passed and went back to what she was working on. The basic framework was ready but it had numerous glitches when being tried between the different deities. Kaori could bestow the system on a mortal of her planet just fine but for certain reasons, it didn’t work the same when other deities tried to gift it. That meant that the Alpha copy was a go but the beta-test of the system was a bust.

The biggest issue was that there were only four deities that could work on the programming aspect of this and Kaori had pulled them all in on this project. She was by far the fastest but the extra perspectives were very helpful. It still looked like it was going to be a while before the system was ready to release. The rest of the team of deities was also busy making various skills for the system.

On the planet below

She stood on the branch shivering and eating a few nuts. She had discovered that the white stuff was slippery and turned into water. She had spent a few minutes trying to groom the stuff out of her fur. Every time she got her fingers on the stuff it would turn into water but if she left the water in her fur, it would turn back in a few moments. After trying futilely for those couple minutes she gave up and went about finding breakfast amidst the few remaining red and gold leaves.

As soon as breakfast was over, she climbed down the trunk and went back to walking. At some point, she gave up on trying to run from tree to tree. Her shoulder had stopped hurting but she just couldn’t bring herself to try jumping from one tree to the next all the time. Walking on the ground was slower but it was also less tiring she reminded herself. Now that the trees all had this slippery white snow, she was glad she had stopped trying to jump trees.

She stopped in her tracks and looked at the white dust shifting along the ground in the breeze. “Since when did I know that was called snow?” There was a sudden moment of realization as she came to terms with the fact that she seemed to know things that she couldn’t access in her mind. “And how do I know that’s called amnesia?” The bizarre moment of realization passed; she resumed her trudge.

It was about ten days later that she went to climb a tree and found that her feet didn’t have the strength to hold her. She tried several more times before switching trees, only for the same thing to occur. She sat at the base of the tree and cried while rubbing her cold numb hands and feet to try getting feeling back. Failing to get her hands working right, she decided to keep walking even if she was still hungry. She reminded herself that if she stopped, she would have nightmares and things would try to eat her.

She walked on through the day and once it got dark, she tried to climb a tree again. She was horrified to discover that she still couldn’t get her hands and feet to support her up a tree and would have to sleep on the ground. She pulled a pile of dead, brown leaves up between the roots of the tree and buried herself in them. It was cold and damp but eventually, she managed to drift off to sleep.

The next morning, she awoke to the feeling of her hands and feet stinging like she had slept on them all wrong. The pain wouldn’t go away either. The good news was that she was warmer than she had felt in many, many days. She made a note to herself that she needed to sleep like this at night. When she went to climb the tree, she found that some of her fingers and toes didn’t work right but she had barely enough strength to get up the tree. There weren’t a lot of nuts but she ate all the ones she found.

She got down and began walking again. The days all looked like early morning or late evening now. There was only a little light to be had since the clouds never parted anymore. It also kept getting colder. She just kept walking. At midday or what she guessed was, she tried climbing a tree again and found she couldn’t again. Hungry again, she kept walking.

She stopped for the night and curled up in some leaves at the base of a tree. After a bit, she felt her hands and feet stinging her again. Thinking she knew the meaning of this, she tried and barely managed to climb the tree. There weren’t many nuts to be found though.

The next morning she woke up and barely got up a tree nearby. This one, oddly, had around twice as many nuts on it. Sated for the first time in weeks, she climbed down the tree and began walking again. This pattern continued for a few days but it got even colder.

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One day, she found that no matter how long she huddled in the leaves, shivering with the cold, she just couldn’t get feeling back in her hands and feet. That day, she ate nothing. The next day and the day after were the same. Walking without having anything to eat.

She got up and blearily continued her walking. She wasn’t sure why she was walking anymore. She wasn’t even sure she was getting up and walking but she thought she was. In her delirium, she could have sworn that the trees had gotten green again. She was so tired and the ground felt warm and inviting. She curled up and went back to sleep while coughing. Coughing woke her up but she couldn’t be bothered to open her eyes anymore and drifted back off.

At some point, she felt jostled and later there was some sense of motion but she didn’t have the energy to open her eyes and soon drifted off again. There were brief glimpses of sound and at one point she briefly awoke to coughing up a bitter taste. She had the sensation that she could feel something warm around her and she twitched awake to the sensation of warmth making her hands and feet sting.

Suddenly, her eyes shot open. She had no idea where she was. There was what looked like the inside of a tree above her but in strips. There was something between these strips but she couldn’t tell what. The reason was that it seemed that the sun couldn’t decide if it was rising or setting. The light was coming from the side so she knew it had to be one or the other but it seemed like it would brighten and darken several times every moment.

She tried to move but something heavy and warm was on top of her, pinning her down. She next tried to turn her head to look at what else was in this weird place but found herself too tired. She drifted off back to sleep. While sleeping, she dreamed of a sweet sound almost like the song of a bird but far more lovely. For some reason the sound almost seemed sad but she couldn’t stay awake long enough to figure out why.

When she next awoke, it was dark but at least it was warm and she felt safe. She hadn’t been dreaming of things trying to eat her so she guessed it was okay to just go back to sleep. It took a little bit but she did drift off, even with that odd almost snarling breathing sound near her. She knew she should be bothered by that but just didn’t care right now. Sleep was calling her again.

She awoke to the sound of something rustling like leaves on the ground but softer. This time she managed to open her eyes but only opened them a little. She twitched her ears around and discovered that the sound was coming from her left. Turning her head slightly and slowly to the left, she froze. The thing she saw there was absolutely huge!

The thing she saw was the color of snow in the early evening. Not the pure white of snow during the day. It had two arms, two legs, and a head like hers but it was massive. It had hair but not much and all of it was on its head or strangely between its legs. The hair was the color of a dead leaf and sticking out of the hair were two ears like pointed leaves. Its eyes were the color of the sky on a sunny day and they weren’t looking at her.

The thing was grabbing something that looked as big as it was and moving it around. The thing it held was the color of the richest nuts with a hint of berry coloring. When she focused, she could tell that the held thing was fur. It was all fur and it was the thing that she was trapped under. It really was huge, maybe bigger than the thing holding it even.

The tall thing had long thin arms and legs with no claws. Wait, its claws were flat and on the back of its fingers not the tip. When it finished moving the big heavy fur, it stood up straight. It was terrifyingly tall and it was very thin. Weirdly, its teats were huge. Maybe it had just given birth and was nursing young? It then turned away and grabbed something out of sight behind the wall of fur atop her.

The thing moved very gracefully for something so huge. She couldn’t see what it was doing but it was bending over and straightening a couple of times. Finally, it pulled up something that looked like two leaves made of skin with vine-like things between them.

After the thing had wrestled with the thing it picked up for a few moments, the thing like two leaves of skin was over its teats. The tall thing then picked up something else and that went over the top of the other thing. This looked like a baggy, wrinkly set of skin but was the color of very ripe berries or lighter than that. Maybe it was the color of some flowers that she had seen a long time ago before it started getting cold.

The tall thing then wrestled another thing over that. This last thing was its fur. Weird. She couldn’t take her fur off, or maybe she could and just didn’t know it! The thing then turned back to look directly at her and her heart froze!

Suddenly, its lips parted and it bared its teeth but only briefly. Its eyes squinted slightly and its ears drooped a tiny bit while it looked at her with those sky-colored eyes. Then it started walking toward her and she panicked. She tried to back away under the heavy fur but couldn’t move much.

The tall thing leaned over her and she knew it was going to eat her. She didn’t have the will or strength left to escape and just waited for it to happen. The tall thing, however, stopped it’s face a little above her. It began cooing to her in a beautiful voice that she vaguely remembered from her dreams.

The tall thing stayed that way for a little bit and then rose back to its full height. Seeming to decide something, it turned and walked away to the right above her head. It came around the soft mound of whatever she was on and walked past on her right side where she couldn’t see it for the fur thing on top of her.

Suddenly, there was a strange noise like the sound of a branch swaying in the wind. Speaking of wind, there was a very cold breeze that rushed across her face and she shut her eyes for a moment. After a moment there was a thump like a branch hitting the ground. And the wind stopped as suddenly as it came. She lay there shivering for several moments but the warmth finally let her drift back to sleep under the heavy fur thing.