//------------------------------// // Chapter Sixty Six, How Low Did She Get?: Six Feet. // Story: Airship Mauled // by Darkonshadows //------------------------------// -???, Jade- I found myself falling into a pile of purple sand or dust and rolled along it, blood spilling from the gash in my chest side, throat and other minor cuts. I had even lost my knife when the bastard bucked me. I was clutching at both my chest and neck as I looked around in a panic, I was on the side of a dune of purple sand and there were no stars in the sky much less the moon. The sky was pitch black and despite the darkness of where I was, I could see the purple silt going off into the horizon in every given direction as if it glowed in the dark. It didn’t, but the fact that there was no light and yet I could see the nose in front of my face was puzzling. That I could still see myself in the middle of all of it made me wonder. -Break, Airship Mauled- “So did you end up in Anugypt?” Daring’s question earned my attention. “Also I still want to see this End of Immortality with my own eyes, I really don’t have much else lined up and I can annoy you for a good while before I find something else to do, I’m tenaciously stubborn like that. I was left for dead when he bucked you in the chest, he could have finished me off. He wasn’t being paid to and figured some wild animal would get me.” “No, it wasn’t Anugypt, but if you’d let me get to it…” I gave Daring a dirty look and Snickers was on my head mimicking my stern gaze. “Also I’m not going to give away what the ‘End of Immortality’ looks like just so you can write about it, that’s just asking for trouble! The best defense it has so far is that absolutely nobody other than Baast or me knows what it really looks like. Nobody can use it unless they know what it is. So I’m not about to let anyone find out, not even Fizzy or Maries!” “Wait… why didn’t you pick up Jade’s Knife?” Mom asked as she produced an old friend, my old knife. “Blade might not remember this, but she found it at the scene.” “Well excuse me if I wasn’t fighting off a predator at the time and running for my life while working the poison out of my system.” Well Daring had a good alibi, which she made even better with her next statement. “Besides, the predator was between me and it, I preferred to climb a tree while mostly paralyzed. Having stiffer legs really helped me out there when it came to holding onto the tree. Heck I’m surprised pirate girl and her entire crew were alright and alive after that whole Saddle Arabia debacle. It’s why I’m still wary of letting myself have friends or partners on my adventures. I almost got people hurt numerous times from the crossfire that my enemies didn’t tend to care about!” “Continue lass, bleeding out on purple sand...” If anyone wanted to know what happened to me medically, it would be Dr. Bones. “Gentle Cruise Line hospital would have really helped, but you’d be surprised by what I’m about to say next.” I was a little more than surprised that I survived it. -End Break- There I lay on the side of a dune with my blood flowing down it, I couldn’t get up and was in too much pain with my life fluids leaking through my hands. I passed out from the pain clutching at myself, but I would soon learn that this wasn’t how it ended for me. For the truth of the matter is this… the assassin accidentally saved my life, but he couldn’t have known that he did. Frankly it took me a while to figure out why I wasn’t dead when I bled out more than half my body’s worth of blood after passing out. -Break, Airship Mauled- “What?!” Half the people around me shouted, this made me flinch. “Nobody of your size can bleed out more than three pints worth of blood and survive, much less half the blood in your body!” That’s where Dr. Bones is wrong, because I did survive that. “Hypovolemic shock would have taken you long before you could even wake up again, heck your brain would have any blood flowing into it. How are you even alive?!” “That’s where you’re wrong Dr. Bones, the place I ended up at had some very unique properties to it.” Which certainly explains my overall survival and why I didn’t die after passing out while bleeding profusely without any medical help on the way. “While I was thankful that those properties allowed me to survive and heal from my wounds, the problem was getting out of that place with at least some of my sanity intact.” “You’ve obviously been through much kitten.” Mom looked at me a bit sadly. “Please, continue.” “You don’t know the half of it mom.” Might as well get it out of the way, because quite frankly a psychiatrist wasn’t going to help me and would likely think the story nothing but mental delusions. Even if I had Baast vouching for me and I could get someone to magically copy my memories for viewing, it wasn’t pretty and I wouldn’t subject my friends or my loved ones to it. I clasped at the ring hanging on a new necklace I put on, Maries and Fizzle made a promise that I was let in on. They didn’t have to let me back into their lives, but they did it anyway. I took a deep breath and continued. -End Break- When the oddities of my survival continued to stack up, it got to the point that you’d have to be a completely braindead to not recognize them. Even if I can’t do the math, I shouldn’t have woken up to see my blood pooling in a puddle that was at least a few inches deep and several feet wide at the bottom of the dune I was laying upon. There was no sun, there was no moon and there still weren’t any stars. I laid there for a while, but it felt like hours and probably was. I was in a place where it seemed like time didn’t move and I was apparently the only being that existed there. It felt like there was no air, yet I could still breathe. My nice shirt was ruined, my yellow shorts were okay and my backpack was mostly untouched. I had quite a few things on me, like fruit and a ragged cloak. My wounds had apparently healed a little and I took off my shirt, neither feeling colder or warmer for it. Another strange thing, it wasn’t cold or hot, for it felt like there was no temperature variance at all. After a while I did the one thing I could do to give myself some semblance as to gauge time. I counted and tallied in the purple sand the time. I was not good at math and never would be, but counting has never been a problem for me. I eventually counted out a full hour in minutes. Every time I got to sixty I put line in the sand with one of my claws. I was still in a relatively large amount of pain, but I was alive. I, however, didn’t get up from my position on the hillside for quite a while. I was still bleeding out, though my bleeding had eventually slowed down to a crawl. I continued to count until I had three hours and no light from a moon or sun reached me. After a time I felt it had been longer than possibly four or five more hours had passed, slowly I came to recognize the fact that I wasn’t getting hungry, thirsty or dehydrated at all. Also this is fairly important, my pool of blood was still a pool of blood that hadn’t dried up. The blood on my shirt hadn’t done so either, I sat there while figuratively licking my wounds just wondering where I was. My wounds were somewhat coagulating or my skin was slowly knitting itself back together, hard to tell which of the two was happening when time didn’t seem to be moving forwards or backwards. I’m not a biology expert, but I don’t think blood can stay fluid outside the body unless there was no air or oxygen. Yet I still breathed and I actually asked my first question. “Where am I?” My voice carried and echoed throughout this strange plane of existence, I never received in an answer. Even after a few hours here, I was still in shock and was trying to slowly cope with it. Gravity existing seemed to be the only thing that was remotely normal about my situation. I slept and woke up a few times, but days seemed to pass to me even if the blood pool was still there and fluid. It was the only landmark I had and it was my blood and I wasn’t going to leave until I figure out what was going on with me. It eventually clicked for me, since I had nothing much better to do than think and had a hydra scale, I created a clone to bounce my own mind off of with a sustain. I, myself, was my best friend in that time. It was a little bit of a stretch, but 'we' eventually agreed as to what was going on. Given that my clone and I were actually one being, it was about as much companionship as I could get. “So… I’m not in heck… if it really is fire and brimstone or just an ironic punishment in the form of an inescapable lotus eater that slowly changes to keep things painful.” Clone Jade was the one thing I needed more than anything else. “That isn’t quite right as I’m actually healing from my injuries.” I couldn’t tell you why going into the vortex made my clone before this shrunk into a sphere of light and then spontaneously combusted. The magic tether between me and that clone being cut is definitely what caused it. “Well this is definitely not Elysium, Heaven, Yakhalla or any other number of places I could think of.” If this place was some form of punishment for me, it wouldn’t have let me have the respite of having a Clone Jade at all. “None of the religions on Equus would account for this.” All Clone Jade was, logically speaking, was me actively talking to myself in the third person. Anything I see about her, would let me know how I looked at that moment without a mirror. I looked absolutely horrible, rather pale and slightly gaunt from the blood loss. “What if… what if this is the place people go to when their bodies are about to die? Except… our body is not supposed to be here with our soul?” Sitting up at Clone Jade’s words, we looked at each other with the same expression. “Heh, how low can we apparently go?” “Well beyond the depths of hellish and heavenly regions apparently.” I closed my eyes and then spoke verbatim what I thought to be true. “Guess I’m in limbo...” “Yeah, I’m not even sure it’s a good idea to use myself as a form of reassurance here, but… what now?” Clone Jade was thinking with the same brain I had, but this was twice the brain power at work so we could eventually think of something. “We’re obviously going to try and get out of here, alive is definitely happening and the question is how long this will exactly take. If we don’t give up and dying is impossible here, what are our current circumstances me?” “Suppose if you will a person is lying in a hospital bed and their body flatlines, their soul goes to limbo and awaits their body to either be revived or die. In this case… that’s not going to happen.” It certainly wouldn’t and I was trying to keep myself together, I could cry a river. I might eventually do that, but not at this moment in a timeless place. “My body itself is in limbo, if this is indeed limbo, therefore I can’t actually die here as a representation of death doesn’t exist on this plane of existence. Physical life also doesn’t exist in limbo, so this is already an unusual circumstance. I can’t die and this dimension supports my life.” “Yeah, no kidding, I’m likely to go around the bend once or twice just talking to myself.” The Clone Jade had our number. “It is sadly something 'we’re' going to need, but I really don’t think we should do the whole split personality thing. That would inevitably go horribly wrong.” “Right… so what plan of action do we have? Food and water are not an issue here, that’s a godsend as I don’t think I’ll figure a way out of this anytime soon.” Yep, saying ‘we’ was just the start of the madness that was getting to know myself better. “Let’s start with the assumption that this is a soul searching journey, I’m going to bring out every bit of darkness and light on the emotional spectrum that I have in me.” “So, seek enlightenment to complete absurdity?” Nodding to Clone Jade, I idly leaned back against the dune to stare at the still red puddle with my hands behind my head as I crossed my legs. Clone Jade took up a position next to me sitting with her legs crossed beneath her to differentiate herself from me. “It’s the best idea I’ve got to occupy my time, like I don’t have enough of that here if 'we'… I… I don’t age… then I’m going to be here for a ‘long’ time.” Understatement of the century. “With only myself as the only form of company I’ll have.” “That’s a recipe for disaster and I know it.” Clone Jade said flatly. “Yep, how do I start this off?” Looking to my clone for ideas, one came to mind. “Let’s start with the best positive emotions and work my way down to the absolutely worst ones I’ve ever felt.” Clone Jade looked at me with worry. “I’ll then go over our memories of everything I’ve ever been through. We’re' going to rend ourselves dry and then move on to using my imagination to keep myself sane.” “I guess I better get started… love. Maries, the excitement of just figuring out how to make that work.” I sighed and considered myself sitting right next to me without a shirt. “There’s Fizzy, her eyes are brilliant and they draw you into her glowing gaze. The broken horn and scar added character and didn’t take away any of her natural beauty.” “That’s not the only thing I love, there’s mom, food, my friends…” Clone Jade hugged herself. “If I’m stuck here… how will ‘we’ ever see them again?” “I’ve gotten out of scrapes before, but none were as nearly as daunting as an entire dimension.” I looked to the starless sky. “Do you suppose my blood has enough nutrients to grow plants. 'We'... I... have a few seeds and could feasibly brighten up this creepy place.” Discord is a known being of chaos, but he would never know madness quite like I would. For the slowly encroaching madness of limbo beckoned me forth gently, chipping away at me bit by bit.