For a moment, Mathilde felt she had fallen from one acid fueled kaleidoscope to another. Purple and gold filled her vision, dotted with greens and browns. As her brain, suddenly operating again through a network of meat and fat, began to catch up, the colors resolved into dunes of sand, grains of amethyst and citrine, studded with plants that clearly had learned the same lessons of desert survival as had cacti back on Earth, but were clearly not the same.
That this wasn’t Earth was quickly obvious, as she watched three different moons, all larger than Luna would appear from Earth, floating in the sky.
“I should be panicking. Why am I not panicking?”
She muttered to herself, then looked down at her body, touching her skin, looking for any sign of the accident that had killed her. Pulling back her sleeve, she stopped, looking at the plain brown material, a thread and style of knit she was unfamiliar with. Pulling it further back to look at the fabric more closely, she stopped, all thoughts of otherworldly fashion aside, as she beheld her naked, unadorned arm in shock.
“MOTHER FUDGER! MY TATTOOS!”
Looking at what body parts she could quickly proved her fear correct, her skin was unblemished and unadorned entirely, no marks, from the scars of a dozen klutzy incidents, to her tattoos, to the fine scars that once traced the inside of her thighs, once a reminder of darker times and solace taken in the pain of a blade. Stopping at a sudden thought, she ran her hand over the opposite forearm, squeezing, looking for a small lump that was conspicuously lacking.
“MY IMPLANT! Well, okay, it was going to get replaced in a couple months anyways, but I guess that means no casual sex for me.” She chuckled to herself, and made a grand gesture with one hand, waving at the horizon. “Such a shame, and me with SO many potential partners to choose from.”
In reflex, she shook her hand once, and marveled at the lack of a pop, a constant companion since childhood. Narrowing her eyes, she twisted slowly at the waist, raising her right hand to the sky, and brought her left backwards to touch the small of her back. No twinge of pain followed, and she gasped. The shock of a body that just… worked, reset to a pristine base, minus all the damage accumulated over the years, finally jogged loose her last memories, and she found herself falling to her rump as phantom pain, the last moments of her time on Earth, rolled across her.
Eyes shut, tears threatened to flow, and she found herself moving by reflex, legs twisting into a crossed seat, elbows on knees, hands out.
“Breathe Matty, breathe deep. In through the nose,” SNIIIIIIIF “Hold” She counted to ten in her head, “And out through the mouth” PHOOOOOOOOOO.
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Several breaths later, and she started on the second part of the meditation taught to her by a shrink that was very into alternative methods. Of all the crazy things he had her try, this was the only one that stuck, meditating not for quiet or mindfulness, but for organizing thoughts. She let the images fly through her mental landscape, sorting themselves, reliving them as needed, and packing away those that caused her pain. As she did so, focusing on her breathing, she found that she had a mental image of the air, coming into her body, spreading out, and returning to the world a bit dimmer than when it came in, her body having taken energy and… filtered it. The feeling of sight, but not sight, reminded her of the time between, the strange space where she had started to think of herself as a plant. Focusing on this feeling of energy, she saw a concentration of blue breath energy, forming a ball just behind and below her navel.
“Hmm. That’s… that’s where the dantian is supposed to be. If it was a chakra, it would be higher, right?” Memories of charts studied for a certificate in herbal medicine came sliding slowly back. Taking a deeper breath, she focused on guiding the energy of the air to this glowing center, and her mind’s eye complied, strong lines of energy forming across her body, leading to the ball, which glowed brighter with every breath. Suddenly, as if some threshold was reached and stepped past, the blue ball burst into mental flames, purple and gold, like the sands around her. A pulse of power shook her body, muscles twitching and locking up. Two more balls lit up in her mind, one where her heart was, and one in the middle of her forehead. They were wan and pale, flickering, purple in her chest, and gold at her brow, but they were there.
Her muscles released, and she fell backwards, limp and boneless. Long minutes passed before she groaned, sitting up then, to her surprise, rising to her feet without using her hands, previously unknown strength filling her.
Blinking, she looked at her hands, then at her shadow, several feet longer than it had been before she had begun her breathing. Glancing over her shoulder, she saw a large sun, seeming to be striped or made of pieces, before looking away as the glare caught her, the instinctual protection of the eyes against being burned out by looking at the sun. She looked around at the sand, stretching out past her.
“Okay Matty, get it together. This is a desert, even if it's not the Mojave or the Sonoran, you know your dry dusty sand pits. You’re going to die without water.”
Pep talk to herself given, her eyes focused on a spot in the distance, a ridge of more concentrated green than she had yet seen. For a moment, she thought she saw white and blue lines radiating away from the green, like an overlay in a video game. Shaking her head to clear the mirage, she started hiking towards what she hoped would be a river or oasis of some kind.