OFF 1.0
They were adrift.
To be more precise, they were adrift in two entirely different ways. The Player, Cheerful Skies, was incorporeal and the edges of her form blurred in the Nothingness. She drifted serenely, without a care, not quite native to the black but not at war with it. She was simply above it,set apart.
The Batter tumbled end over end, flailing in the dark like a frustrated, flightless bird. Cheerful thought that the mare was cursing but she couldn’t tell. Sound was swallowed up in the featureless blackness that surrounded them.
There was no light. There was no up. No down. Nothing anywhere to touch or hold on to. This was the Nothingness and it was complete and it was whole. From above, the Player watched her assigned “puppet,” her charge, flounder in the dark.
Her sight was unusual. It was sight without eyes, with no light for them to see, and yet she saw her Batter and she could see her own spectral legs and her own ghostly wings as she turned her head. It was curious. She couldn’t really feel anything.
“Batter? I don’t like it here.”
The Batter said something but it was swallowed up in the warped strangeness of the space between them.
Rising up all around them—or was it falling? All that had been left behind. There was no up, and there was no down. Those things had been left behind. The Nothingness hadn’t moved on, it had simply never had them, it had no need. Somehow she grasped this all. It came to her in a heartbeat) were voices. Voices out of the solid wall of night, whispering voices like a chorus of school children, high pitched and unruly. It was everywhere and it was centered and it bothered Cheerful Skies that she could not tell the difference between those two words.
“Batter?” she called again.
The mare in question struggled to right herself.
“Batter, there’s a floor if you wish it.”
If the message was received, she couldn’t tell. The fool tumbled and tumbled. Cheerful sighed, and said her piece again. This time, the Batter caught her eye and something shifted.
The mare in the dirty uniform that had once been black and white stood in the void.
From out of Nothing, the stalk of straw was back in her mouth and she chewed at it. Cheerful smiled. Normalcy. Well, normal for her reference, she supposed. All of life had been thirty minutes, after all. Yet, watching, didn’t she feel it had been longer? That she had been alive and well and had known many things? Most things? She had no idea. When she spoke, her voice was not her own, and yet it sounded the same.
She floated right above her Batter and hummed a little tune against the dark.
“Come then,” she said, and felt warm. It was the only feeling. “Come then. Which way is the Zone, do you know? If not, we will walk on.”
The Batter said nothing, but only pointed.
She wondered what it would be like, when they landed in Zone 1. She knew it would be Zone 1, and not some other number. It made sense. It was the way the world had to work—0, 1, 2, 3—marching orders from some nameless code written down and arranged so that things might move and speak and do.
With a smile—if it could be called a smile, now that her body existed only in a certain sense of the word—Cheerful Skies thought that it was strange, how she could think in a way that was alien and know it was alien. She was torn and yet it was pleasant. The Nothingness was strange.
The Zone was an island, and yet it appeared as a node of light in the dark. The Batter approached it and Cheerful waited for the flash to come that she knew would come, and the sense of falling.
They entered.