monothea | EARTH, WIND AND FIRE
[tw: plane crash, amputation (sort of, to be safe)]
With a final panicked look, the floor under Madoka’s feet drops out and she’s away, gone from the room, leaving only a gasp of breath and her backpack to show she’d once been present at all. And when the lights flip on and she’s visible once more, Madoka finds herself lying spread-eagled in… the forest.
[✽✽✽]
Birds sing, and the bright, luscious emerald green of the trees and foliage around her are almost blinding in their color. The leaves and grass that the girl’s back rests on are soft, not at all soggy. A steep, winding path through the trees lies before her. Perfect weather for a hike, and the perfect location for a survivalist experienced and trained for scenarios like this, and yet–
Madoka hauls herself to her feet, and even from that it’s obvious that something is amiss. Her legs seem stiff beneath her, unbalanced, and she regards the path she must take not with confidence, but fear. As she begins to walk, too, it becomes clearer and clearer that she’s not… very good at hiking. Even the most slightly-inclined of steps gives her trouble, resulting in the same heavily uneven gait that’d got her caught in the first place. Madoka looks winded, uneasy, as if she’s never walked a day in her life, and she keeps pausing to rub at her left leg, the one she’s been clunkily hauling behind her. Just what kind of survivalist was she?
Not one, she’d think, if she could hear the narration occurring, but all that fills her ears is the all-too-placid silence of the surrounding forest. It’s almost tragic to watch her struggle up the hill, a feeling only made worse by the anticipation that surely, surely something horrible is about to happen to the exhausted girl. And yet… she reaches the top of the hill without any incident aside from swaying dangerously on her feet a couple of times.
A bright, hopeful look fills Madoka’s eyes at the sight of a grassy, sunlit clearing before her– just a few steps! A few steps more, and maybe the worst of her struggles would be done– she lifts her shaking leg, and then–
SNAP!
The sound of crunching metal shatters the pleasantness, accompanied by a shrill yelp from Madoka. Panicked, she glances down to see her left leg crushed and mangled in a bear trap she’d failed completely (and wasn’t that something a survivalist should be aware of?) to check for. Beneath the now-tattered fabric is visible a mess of broken carbon fiber, metal and wires that Madoka stares in horror at– promptly she falls to her other knee, wrenching helplessly at her trapped limb.
And it’s at that moment that something else breaks the silence of the forest. A deep growl. A rustle of the bushes surrounding the clearing Madoka had just stepped into. She halts in fruitlessly pulling at the trap for a moment to stare in fear up at the shadowed, now-ominous forest before her, and promptly bursts into hysterical tears. The rustling continues, seeming to grow closer as Madoka wails and yanks at the vice grip on her leg to no avail. Here she was, about to be devoured by a monster and she couldn’t even do anything and she didn’t want to die and her entire body hurt and she was terrified and she wanted to go home and the thing was getting closer and–
Suddenly, another noise joins the fray. One that makes Madoka freeze entirely, face growing dangerously pale. Her wide-eyed gaze shifts from the dark forest she’d been completely distracted by to the sky above, where… where… a plane, one wing alight, hurtles closer and closer– a danger she hadn’t even noticed in her complete panic.
There’s no time for her to do anything except gasp breathlessly, a sound like a strangled scream trying to escape her mouth before the tops of the trees are breached. There’s the sound of snapping wood, rustling leaves, and Madoka cuts a diminutive figure, dwarfed by everything around her and her own fear in the brief moment before the plane collides with the clearing and erupts into flame.
She’s promptly swallowed up in the resulting maelstrom, a white-hot burst of flame and heated metal erupting outward from the wreckage and consuming her small form. It’s several more moments before things clear, and when they do, the only sign that Madoka Tojo once existed is the echo of her final cry through the idyllic forest and a hunk of melted metal still caught in a bear trap.
This time, it seemed, this time the Lucky Girl’s good fortune had finally run out.
MADOKA TOJO, SHSL SURVIVALIST, HAS BEEN EXECUTED.
(thank you han for the art!)