Ch. 2
A wisp of smoke curled and twisted skywards, the gentle grey streaks slowly forming a ribbon of smoke before being whisked away by the gentle breeze that swept across the lush green plains of tKirnstraadt. Arnold watched in relative indifference as the tenth match extinguished as it burnt down to the last splinter. There were ten small spots of burnt grass where ten matchsticks used to be.
"Well, that ends my break!" He pulled himself to his feet with a great sigh. "Back to the damned machine!"
And he waltzed back through the door, into the small house he called home, a slow pinprick of light trailing after him.
_/_/_/_/_/
Utter nothingness. This was the first sensation the new being felt. It had no concept of heat, nor light, nor touch. It was a new being, something that the world had not seen since it's conception, so it actively rejected the very concept of its existence. The creation of a living being by hands other than the Great Messiah, it was a hideous, blasphemous and shunned idea. Yet, the greatest minds of science and alchemy had strived for that very purpose for centuries and it was on the fourth moon of the year seventeen-eighty-seven, that this dream was finally realized. In the basement of retired Royal-Scientist Arnold Abts, a great light flared into existence and Arnold had to turn his back to it for fear of being blinded. When the light had finally faded, he turned to find the form of a young girl lying in the metal casket of his machine. Her hair was stark white and had a translucent sheen to it, like ice, her skin was pale and smooth like porcelain and her eyes had the coloring of piercing amber.
"I'll be damned" Arnold staggered back, running a gloved hand through his singed brown hair, blue eyes wide in exhilaration, excitement, and shock. "It certainly looks human? Why isn't it moving?"
This was the first time out of his many millions of tries that Arnold had managed to procure a fully-formed human complete with all the organs and body parts, much less a proper human-looking being, though it did not move. No life existed within the corpse, for that was what it was, a body with no breath. Arnold sighed, picking up the corpse and climbing the stairs out of his basement. He picked up his shovel as he kicked open the door to the plains. Thousands of graves greeted him, each marked with a small mound of earth and a plank sticking out of the mound.
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"And to think I finally got it right..." Arnold lay the body to rest in the shallow ditch he had dug before heaping the dirt back onto the body. "I suppose this one is special, so I'll mark it with something else?" He cast his gaze over the field of graves. "Really? I guess I'll just use the shovel then."
A shovel was buried on the top of the mound as Arnold walked back to his home.
_/_/_/_/_/
The rain clouds slowly crept over the plateau of Kirnstraadt, casting dark shadows over the plains as they slowly condensed and formed small droplets of water in their forms. Slowly, very slowly, the gentle pitter-patter of rain against earth began to ring throughout the plateau, slowly becoming louder as the winds raged and the clouds began to heap more and more rain down from the heavens. Soon sparks began to flicker in and out of existence between the sea of clouds and surely enough, a bolt of lightning reached down from the skies, frying the earth solid. Then another arc of lightning split a tree in two, setting it alight. Before long, whole arcs jumped from the sky to the ground, striking the tallest places and leveling them to the ground in a single blow. It was only a matter of time until a bolt of lightning found its way to the shovel standing atop the corpse's grave.
_/_/_/_/_/
A loud sound woke her. Then she felt it, a strange cold feeling dripping onto her body. One by one the being's senses came alive and her eyes flickered open and she realized she was trapped under something and that if she wanted to continue to live she needed to get out. And she knew she wanted to live. So she started to claw at the earth near her hands until he could wriggle her wrists, then her arms were free. A minute later and her hand poked out from above the mound of earth, followed by her leg and finally her whole body. She stood up, surveying the plateau as the morning light shone from beyond the horizon. Her silhouette went unnoticed by the slumbering scientist as she slowly made her way to the light.