The Defendant thought they were dead. They imagined their flesh being torn asunder by the mirror's metal teeth. "Mirrors can't eat people", they thought [1].
After a brief moment of disorientation, they found themself falling down in the open sky. They screamed with a rather sharp voice. As the hood and cloak got ripped off by the wind, their face and body were revealed to the observers.
Those in the cosmic courtroom could still observe the Defendant. Some gasped. Though the Defendant still had a roughly humanoid shape, it had obvious animal features. But what struck most of the audience was the fact that the Defendant had breasts. Even underneath the clothes, their body was unmistakably female.
"So it's true," one member of the audience back in the Courtroom commented. "She is one of the experiments of that wicked scientist. To think he would taint his own flesh and blood and do those awful things. Yet, to condemn the creation and not the creator feels..."
"Silence. Do not question the Judges unless you wish to taste their wrath," their friend advised. "The matter is settled."
Though both had mixed feelings on the matter, they couldn't defy the Cosmic Judges. They focused back on the projection of a distant world.
The defendant fell. A heavy downpour drenched the poor woman. The world around her was in utter chaos.
Clouds drifted to and fro, some of them in flames. Twisters the size of stadiums moved around at high speeds as they sucked water from the oceans below, spewing it into the high atmosphere and making a perpetual rain. The oceans boiled in some places and froze in others. Scattered and tiny landmasses drifted and sometimes were destroyed by the twisters.
Thunder rumbled and lightning danced between sky and ocean. The water below was muddy and sported odd colors. Scattered rays of sunshine pierced the clouds, a backlight against the incessant electrical discharges. Cyclonical winds buffeted the woman, causing her to spin uncontrollably. The projection shifted and panned out. A wooden crate and the mirror, now without its teeth, followed the drenched woman as she was thrown around like a rag doll, screaming her throat hoarse.
Lightning struck a hundred feet from her, crashing down into the ocean. A great wave spread in all directions, blue flames coursing over the water as the tsunami spread in a ring. Minutes later, the wave crashed upon a small island. A shimmering blue dome sprung out of nowhere covering the island as the enormous wave crashed above and over the spherical shield. The flames burned over the island's defense and then died down. The wave continued past the island, undeterred.
The Defendant was only a few thousand feet from the ocean now. At terminal velocity, she would splatter and die upon contact. The crate broke open with a small explosion, its six square wooden panels being ejected in all perpendicular directions and away from its contents. A wooden canoe, a hang glider made of some reptile skin and metallic bars, and a few opaque spheres tied to the canoe by a long chain.
The winds pushed the hang glider toward the Defendant. Displaying inhuman agility, she turned and grabbed the handlebars, pushing a button that deployed its wings. With a mighty effort, she clung to dear life as she was jerked out of her terminal velocity by the hang glider. It seemed she had some experience with the contraption. The other objects as well as the crate panels fell down and past the gliding woman.
Her arms trembled. Wet and slippery, her hands threatened to betray her and let go of the handlebars. She grunted, no, roared in defiance as she pulled herself up and threw her legs to catch the footrest. Claws appeared on her bare feet, hitting the footrest saddle and latching to it. With this new point of support, she could now kind of direct the hang glider, though she was positioned upside down. A wet hairy tail escaped the back of her clothes and dangled in the rain.
That's when the mirror hit the hang glider square on. The wings unfurled, the structure snapped and the tangled mess of a ruined wing glider, people-eating mirror, and the Defendant plummeted into the ocean.
*
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*
The murky and lukewarm ocean water tasted salty, loamy, and with a metallic tang. It was thick like thin mud and threatened to suck her down into the depths. Despite that, the hang glider metallic structure was hollow and hadn't been breached by the hang glider. It was enough to give the composition buoyancy. She struggled to break free from the glider.
Only when she had a flash of lucidity overcoming her desperation did she remember to retract her claws and let go of the footrest saddle. She broke the surface of the muddy ocean and gasped for breath. Her drenched clothes made swimming difficult. Using the retractable claws on her fingertips, she cut them off and swam naked. The heavy waves washed over her head, the sudden change in water level too fast for her to swim along the surface. She coughed a glob of mud and blood.
Looking around her, she found that the surface of the ocean churned up and down, the waves combining to make ridges and valleys dozens of yards tall and deep. Currents of cold to almost freezing water exchanged places with hot and almost boiling waves, causing her to suffer whiplash from thermal shock. She tried to float for a while, holding her breath whenever a huge wave covered her, trying to recover some stamina.
You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author.
After a few minutes, she waited for the tallest wave to make its way toward her and swam up along with its crest. From that vantage point, she looked around. Though the waves were tall, everything that fell with her was drifting in the same general direction. She spotted the hang glider, the canoe with the spheres on a chain, and the wooden panels of the crate. As she descended, she spotted even the torn rags she once wore and the damned mirror.
That was for some unexplained reason, still on the surface. She shouted a curse that was drowned by the howling winds.
Using the dregs of stamina she recovered, the Defendant swam toward the hang glider, caught it, and then paddled until she reached the canoe. She was tittering. With one hand on the edge of the canoe, she kicked the water and jumped on board. The Defendant immediately regretted that. The downpour drenched her, washing away the mud even while the howling winds robbed moisture off of her bare skin, leeching the heat out of her body to forcibly evaporate the water.
She shivered. Even though the air temperature was uncomfortably warm, she could still die of hypothermia. But she couldn't stop now. With another herculean effort, she hoisted the hang glider onto the canoe, splashing it onto the puddle of rain and seawater that filled the whole vessel. But even with the combined weight of the water, woman, and glider, it still remained on the surface.
Once she confirmed she was in no danger of going under and that the canoe wouldn't capsize despite the wind and the waves, she slipped under the canoe bench and pulled the wing glider to shield her from the rain. Half-submerged, she took a position where her head would stay above the water, and rested.
*
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*
Floating in the canoe, the defendant reminisced.
Her mind wandered to a long time ago, back in a time when she didn't know what she was, a time when her life was very simple. More than a century ago, when she was still a child.
Her house was under the ground. At that time, she had never left it. She knew the Sun existed because she'd seen it on TV. She remembered a show she used to watch, where creepy colored creatures with the TV on their belly stumbled around an artificial meadow followed by a Sun that for some reason had a baby's face on it.
She had a father. A stereotypical mad scientist, who made her special. That's how she felt at the time. That she was special. She could jump hella high, run hella fast, climb with her claws, keep her balance with her tail, and hear better with her ears. Every test she passed, her father got happier, and that made her happier.
She lived for a decade with her father deep inside the earth, and everything was fine. He homeschooled her, cooked for her, and taught her many life skills. She learned how to glide in the wind tunnel. How to dive in the swimming pool. She could stay underwater for fifteen minutes when she was eight. Lift a hundred pounds at that age too. Run a hundred yards in twelve seconds.
At the age of ten, she could derive and integrate. Recite the laws of thermodynamics from memory. Tell all fifty states and their capitals. The full name of all the 53 elected Presidents, their vice-Presidents, and the first ladies. She always wondered why they were all guys. She could be faster at spelling than the spelling bee kids on TV.
She was happy.
Then the bad men came. They burst into the lab, with their bulletproof coats with three yellow letters she hated. They hurt her father, captured her, and...
She fought them. Her claws tore flesh for the first time. The bad men struck her with shock guns. They called her an abomination. A monster. A violation of God's will. They tied her up with leather bands. Trussed like livestock. Never before had she felt so demeaned. Reduced to a creature. She felt like a lab experiment for the first time.
She was paraded as a freak. Used against her father. Kept locked and hidden in a government facility. They told her she was a clone of her father. It was preposterous. She was her father's daughter! Kin! And yet, they never let her visit her father in jail.
And then, she couldn't visit him in jail anymore. They were reunited in the worst way possible. One day, bad people brought a metal box. They told her it was her father. She was seventeen.
The Defendant shivered in her waterlogged canoe. Her tears joined the vast roiling oceans.
She was not happy.
Not in the present, and definitely not in the past.
They believed she was a monster. She decided to indulge their delusion and make it a reality. If the bad men could put her father in a metal box smaller than the ones she kept her shoes in, then she could repay the favor.
Twelve of her jailers were sent to metal boxes before they could stop her. Her father never hurt her. She didn't care for the law of the land. She was shot but barreled through the pain and gave as good as she took until she passed out because of blood loss.
Her father's final gift revealed itself. Her body pushed the bullets out and fixed itself. She woke up chained to a hospital bed, a demeaning muzzle covering her mouth. Try as she might, she couldn't break solid steel.
They took everything she had. In prison, the only thing she had left was the name her father gave her. Now, the Judges took even that.
They locked her in a room covered in steel. Years passed. Two decades. Three. The food stopped coming. She smelled the other inmates of the prison rot. Hungry, she scratched the door until her claws broke, regrew, and broke again. It took time but eventually, her blood rusted the steel enough that she could break open the door.
The world outside had changed. Most people were dead. She ate the rats that were in turn eating the dead inmates. She left the maximum security penitentiary to find that at least one of the world's religions was right about the end of the world.
She traveled across the land. The Defendant tried to return to the lab but never learned where it was.
Demons and monsters roamed and hunted the few survivors. Eventually, she met some people who gave her directions to a place where she could finally escape this world.
She traveled south, to Florida. There, she found dozens of portals to other worlds in the Bermuda Triangle. She jumped in the first one she found.
Seventy years later, for several crimes against the cosmic balance across many worlds, the most heinous of them existing, she was once again captured. Banished.
It was night already. The canoe drifted and the sea water stayed warm all day. A massive wave moved past the canoe.
Blue light illuminated the ocean. The Defendant rose and looked. She was a few miles away from the island with the blue dome. Even if she wanted to row away, the ocean would still push her toward the island.
Her stomach hurt. She was hungry. Perhaps some of the spheres had food but she knew that if she opened one, the contents would be drenched in muddy ocean water. She detached one of the hang glider's wings and used that to row toward the island.
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[1] – MDW: I felt cheekier than Almudj and its migloo girl combined.