The sea, the icy, bone-chilling wind whipped at her skin and made Adelina shiver in her damp clothes. It was sudden, completely unexpected. Her usual walk with Huey ended with an encounter with the anomalous emergence of a portal that separated her from the spirit and threw her onto an abandoned rocky coastline.
The master was summing something up, but she could no longer concentrate on the words.
She stretched her arms, tried to grasp the scales of her kite through the thickness of the water, not to lose it, not to leave it!.. But only kept sinking until she surfaced on the other side of the portal. And until she met unbearable silence. The whispering of the younger spirits ceased. The reverberation of Huey's magic faded. The silence of the kite screams and the sharp, now so deafening howl of the wind that seemed to rise from the bowels of her heart and soul.
She was alone.
And no attempt to reach that side of the world, the spirits, Huey... All proved futile. Only the bare rocks, the screams of the foolish birds, the winds hitting and the waves crashing against the rocks. And she alone, alone, completely alone, and looked, looked, considered, noticed!
But remained unheard.
The master called her by name, and Adeline, trembling, returned to reality. She had to finish her report.
Okay, here's the rub. A character is randomly teleported to an empty and lifeless shore where magic cannot be used. And my job is to report on the situation (to the Master of the Magical Institute, with whom Adelina on friendly terms by history) and to convey my character's sense of self in such a... problematic situation :/
Adelina is very much afraid of the silence, or rather the lack of ability to hear the spirits, whose whispers she is already used to, because she almost died in such an environment, desperately trying to communicate with his friend - the spirit snake Huey. Sooo... we have this reaction
I've been writing this damn fanfiction for three months now continuously, my hip flask is slightly off. It's just a possible fanfiction scene that was written with emotion.
Warning!: graphic description of scenes of violence and murder, blood, mention of military operations, hallucinations, I also translated my text into English with the help of a translator, since I do not speak it, semantic errors are possible!
If you forgot something, you can write to me.
Пуля просвистела прямо у ее уха, оглушив ее.
Yuu tries to take control of her own mind, stop the panic, but when her gaze falls on Phil, who is stuffing guts into Ari's exploded belly, saying: “Melanie will heal you now, buddy, come on, don't be silent,” she truly begins to believe in God.
Red, red, red. The general feels the red soaking her feet, congealing in unpleasant chunks on the bare skin of her tattered legs. This picture: incredibly realistic and wild, but familiar, makes her freeze in one position and stare.
L o o k.
Ari doesn't move. Ari looks at Yuu with glassy, colorless eyes. His face does not express discomfort from the fact that they are trying to stuff his insides into his belly, but they keep falling out and the process starts all over again. The intestines are already covered with a layer of dust and dirt and have turned rather rusty red, and Phil's hands are up to his elbows in blood.
Phil repeats the phrase like a broken gramophone. With the same intonation, the same emphasis, and the same desperate smile that seemed glued to his face. This painting is surreal and seems to have been pulled out of Yuu's aching head.
Red, red, red.
White. Pain shoots through her shoulder, as if a white-hot iron has been applied to it. Yuu can't scream - if she screams, the Maze will only be happy to give her a fountain of blood and parts of her former squad. Deep down, she knows that this room was meticulously crafted from her memories, designed to finish off someone already lying down, shattering their spine and offering it to some voracious creature.
Yuu feels as though she is utterly defenseless against herself. Ari gazes at her, and in the mirror-like reflection of the doll’s eyes, Yuu beholds her own image, causing her to feel sick.
She's vomiting something viscous and bilious. It burns her esophagus, falls into her lap with a disgusting slippery sound. She doesn't understand what could have come out of her, considering that she's been in Demonophobia for a long time and hasn't eaten anything for a long time. It's something red in color.
Red.Red.Red.
A pall of red mist, like a poisonous gas, obscures her view. The animal cry of the Kunikai weakens and goes somewhere to nowhere, and then drowns in the sounds of teeth clacking from each other. Chunks of flesh tear in her hands, turning her red too.
Red. Red. Red. Yuu strikes with her bare hands, thrusts her hand into the mouth of some creeping creature and does not allow her to bite it off - she opens the monster like a trap, throws it aside and attacks Sakura's monstrous mother with an animal grin. She sticks a knife into the General like a piece of meat, doing it methodically and purposefully until her neck cracks loudly. Yuu is not afraid of blood: what nonsense is that, when she is a General?
Red. Red. Red.A red room with a white pentagram on the floor. Red always haunted her. It was always a vivid reminder of how fleeting life was when she was human.
Red. The wound on his knee. Ari's blood. Mother's lipstick. Pills from the paramedics. Abrasions after straitjacket. Sister's heels. Sakuri's hairpin.
Yuu looks at the little girl with wide-open eyes, lying on one side. She looks at the empty blue of her eyes, as if through them she can see the convolutions of her brain. He looks at her wounds, bruised legs, shaking arms and shoulders. Kunikai is crying like a child who got lost on the street, hiding in his tortured palms and seems to be whispering apologies.
She's scared.
Yuu barely gets up on his knees. He crawls too slowly and hugs her by the shoulders, although to shelter her from all adversity. It's like he's trying to peel off all the memories that are glued to his bare skin, to let her breathe, as well as her mind.
Sakuri is shaking with hatred. She squeezes Yuu's shoulders with unprecedented force, and there is a dull cracking of bones. The humerus moves strangely, and the joints seem to weaken in an instant, but the General bites his tongue, swallowing blood again, without uttering a squeak.
The girl's gaze is more outspoken than steel. She looks at Yuu with wide-open eyes, and her lips whisper:
and Yu doesn't move. She can't feel her shoulders, but her gaze cuts her eye sockets, and she doesn't want to turn away. She doesn't want to blink because it's not her Sakuri.
It's someone else.
Static fills her ears. Kunikai herself speaks statically, without moving from her place and looking like an artfully sculpted figure. Her face is distorted in a terrifying grimace: a mixture of rage and madness, and it seems to Yuu that this rage is transmitted by airborne droplets.
Red. Red. Red.
The girl pukes red and emits a ferocious roar mixed with static. Then she rushes at the General, without giving her a moment to dodge, bites into the area between the eye socket and the cheekbone. Yuu holds his tongue, but again he is faced with a red-hot pain at the bite site. The horizon is clouded with red.
Exploration has always been in humanity’s instinct. The drive that tickles away at us as a race to always keep looking for more, the push at the back of our minds to try and know what surrounds us. First we ran out of land to explore. The maps that once charted monsters now chart lions and tigers. Coastlines of each continent have been carefully surveyed and documented. Next came the seas. The vast open reaches of water containing anything, fish, sharks, gods and demons. Pirates ruled because they could until that blanket that covers half the earth too was left with no mystery to her. The naval forces patrolled to rule the waves and tame them, all the small islands were found and through that the fear of the sea subsided. For hundreds of years after this, there was nothing until eventually we humans looked up. Maybe we shouldn’t have - they say curiosity killed the cat - but I know we had to and that’s why some people add that satisfaction brought it back. There is no satisfaction here. As I write this, I can only hope that you don’t feel the need to explore and that you can bring yourself to leave and not return. But I know you won’t. Maybe this page has somehow made it back to Earth and everyone reading it is safe, but somehow I know that isn’t the case. Since it isn’t, you had probably better know what this station’s purpose is.
This all started as a simple exploration mission. We would all be gone for five years, mostly spent in hibernation. The length of the actual project is only two, but the journey is still long and though normally the distance wouldn’t take nearly that wrong there’s something different that happens here. Upon approach to our target our speed slowed down incredible amounts. Time’s passage remained stable and by all measurements there was no difference in gravity but our main pilot, Jenna, remarked that it was like flying through tar. I have to agree and in all my years serving the DSC I never experienced anything like this. They chose me for my experience with strange situations, thinking maybe I’d be able to offer insight while it was happening but I couldn’t. The problematic circumstances I’d found myself in before were rare but had at least had theory behind them. At one point I flew the closest anyone had ever been to a black hole (this was back before we had figured out how to solve the first of the gravity problems, so it was quite remarkable at the time) but I had hundreds of people back on Earth telling me exactly what to do and what would happen. This journey made no sense though. I talked about it with Jenna for weeks as it was happening and neither of us knew what was going on or what could be causing it. The rest of the crew had no idea either. Our mission was to find out what was in this region of space since it was fairly close to Earth and we were told equipment back home was having trouble identifying anything. All that they said they could find out was that there was an unidentified event happening in the region, not a black hole or a planet or an asteroid, but something. We had to know and that was our downfall.
The slowing of the ship was the first sign although we had been warned that that would probably happen. It put us on edge since we didn’t know why but it was the least of our problems. We were woken from hibernation once the ship started slowing down. This was planned, but we had hoped it wouldn’t have been the case: if it hadn’t it would have been a simple expedition setting up a basic outpost stocked with food and fuel for future travellers should they need it in an emergency and had enough credits to pay for it. But after the speed change we knew that wouldn’t be the case. A few days passed after we woke up but it had taken us three just to get everything into order again. We checked all the systems and everything looked fine, it was just us the human element that needed bringing into check. What they don’t tell you about hibernation is that after you wake up it takes time to feel normal again. You wake up starving because getting your nutrients through a tube isn’t good enough, and you can’t open your eyes because they’re glued shut since you haven’t opened them in months then when you do open them you have to make sure you wear sunglasses because otherwise the lights hurt so badly you wish you never got past the glued together part. Your limbs don’t work properly anymore either since you’ve practically been lying in bed the whole time without any exercise and in zero-gravity muscle loses tone even more quickly than when you’re on Earth. The whole thing feels like recovering from the worst hangover of your life. Everyone loses a fair bit of mass too, again because of not eating for so long. The Company sends out extra rations with crew these days just for when they wake up but in the first few years they hadn’t realised how dangerous it could be until several people had died of starvation after coming out of hibernation. Jenna and I had both gone down in bra sizes too which was annoying but she still looked good and after the first week of eating everything was back to normal. It wasn’t until day nine that anything started to happen.
The day began normally, by this point we’d all adjusted into our normal sleeping patterns. The only person asleep was Ashim, our archaeologist, since he’s on the latest sleep shift. The shifts work out so that we’re never all asleep at the same time but there are still at least three hours when we’re all awake since without that it can make it hard to live with people. After a routine check of the ship’s course in the pilot room, someone called me in to look at something bizarre. We hadn’t changed direction but in the two hours that had passed since the last check of what was happening outside, a massive blue orb had appeared. It didn’t look real, it seemed as if it was computer generated, giving an impression of being smooth down to an atomic level. I couldn’t know that of course, but I wanted to know more about it, I wanted to reach out and touch it and feel what something like that felt like. I stared at it and I felt like it was friendly, I felt like I just had to know more about it, I had to touch it, I had to experience it and know it. The big blue sphere in front of me filling the empty black space that had been there only hours before. The amazing glow around it was so enticing, it was part of the orb but at the same time separate, like flames on a log. I could have watched it for hours and hours.
I woke up in the infirmary. I don’t remember how I got there, but Louis, one of our two engineers, told me that I’d gone into some kind of comatose state staring out the front of the ship. Nobody knew what I was staring at, or why I was staring, but I know what I saw. I know someone else saw it too because they called me in but I don’t remember who it was. It could have been any of the other five but they must have been embarrassed to admit that it was their fault or something. I went back to check on the orb later once they had checked I was back to normal, but it wasn’t there. I knew now that one of them must have been conspiring against me.
