The Last One

by computerneek

Endless

More noises.

Something brushes against her face. It’s… She’s not sure how to describe the unfamiliar sensation, but it feels good all the same.

That’s a bad thing. She doesn’t know, nor understand, why. Only that it… Well, is a bad sign. What for, she hasn’t a clue. She tries opening her lookers for a moment, but only manages to glimpse something white. At least, she thinks it’s white.

A new noise penetrates her conscience. She doesn’t recognize it- but she does know it’s even worse than a voice.

It grows, then stops with another noise. This one, despite grating on her ears… She decides to stop identifying when she encounters new sounds, feelings, and so on that are bad, focusing rather on hunting for any that aren’t.

Like the texture of the grass against her side. That’s neutral.

Like the unfamiliar pains filling her. They’re good, though she can’t fathom why.

Like… She has to think for a little. There’s too much going on right now that’s bad.

Something picks her up. That’s new. She knows nothing has done that before, yet she still can’t remember what they did do.

She feels the motion as she is carried a short distance. She’s not sure if this is a good sign or a bad one.

It puts her down. It’s harder than the ground was. She opens her lookers for a peek, getting a fuzzy image of textured red stuff. She can’t decide what it is.

It moves. There’s some strange, unfamiliar noises to it. There’s also some familiar noises- like that occasional worse-than-a-voice noise. As it moves, it bounces. Painfully. Her head doesn’t- for some reason, that’s resting on- or in- something terribly soft.

She hears that thumping. There isn’t nearly as much of it, but it’s got that four-stroke beat to it again- and this time, it’s not fading at all. She tries opening her lookers a couple times, but only gets glimpses of the same textured red stuff, often with some blue or fluffy white up above it… That is, if her sense of… down is accurate. And if the colors she thinks she sees are the same as the ones she’s actually seeing. She also hears other voices, growing and fading. Probably passing them. Another thing that has never happened before.

More noises, some harder bumps. More voices. She tries her lookers again, but only gets some vague whiteness above the reddish wall. Strange, her vision is getting fuzzier. Even the noises are becoming more muffled, more distant. Perhaps the end is finally upon her.

She feels a muted softness against her entire body as the voices bark on for a second, before that regular thumping resumes, on a different beat. Well, whatever- she’ll probably be gone by the time the terrible begins. She won’t have to experience the terrible.

The softness changes again. She must be just lying on something soft now. A strange beeping begins, kinda erratic- matching the strange, regular thumping she’s been listening to since she became aware. It has lost its regularity by now. The voices seem to respond to the beeping.

“... losing her!”

Drat! Terrible happened! … not that she understands why it’s terrible. But it is nice to understand what they’re saying- maybe she can figure out what’s happening around her during her last minute or so. She feels a sharp, unfamiliar pain somewhere in her… Chest, is it called? At the same time, the thumping suddenly becomes regular, changing its cadence as it does so. The beeping still follows it with precision.

Then it stops completely. The beep, rather than stopping, draws itself out.

“What- Get the crash cart!” Something hard drives into her chest, over and over again. It seems to be trying to mimic the absent thumping. Her senses are fading faster now. She won’t even have a full minute, at this rate.

This goes on for a while. No voices, just that hard thing shoving at her chest and an increasingly labored breathing noise.

She’s only barely holding onto her senses when she picks up another noise. She thinks it sounds like the terrible that had come before the hard red thing, or during it. She’s not sure, though- it’s too vague.

“Finally!”

Even the voice is so vague she can hardly understand it. The hard thing disappears from her chest. She knows she’s a matter of seconds away from her end. But the hard thing is replaced almost instantly with two cold things. Which suddenly spark with vivid pain, bringing her senses back from the precipice of disappearance. That absent thumping returns, once. Whatever those cold things are, they’ve given her an extra half-dozen seconds or so.

She feels something poke her skin. It’s on the only working limb she has left, just above the end of the limb.

The cold things come back with another spark. Another half-dozen seconds.

A third time. Another half-dozen seconds.

Eventually, when her senses are making a steady return, the painful cold things stop coming. She hears tears in the voice. Not the same one as had asked for the crash cart, though.

“She’s… gone.”

She can’t decide what to make of it. It sounds like they think she’s dead- but she’s still thinking, and her senses are still returning. She hears the thumping again, leaving the room slowly. A different thump sounds… moments before the strangely important thumping in her chest decides to make a comeback. It sounds sluggish to her, and is way slower than it should be- but that annoying buzzing instantly went away with a single, sharp beep. It waits a very long time- almost three seconds, by her estimate- to match the next thump with a beep.

This keeps going for a while. As it goes, the thumping builds strength, regularity, and speed, returning to what it had been when she first came aware. Her senses also return- and unless she misses her guess, they return to what they might once have been before she became aware. The sound, while still muffled, is far sharper than before. She can feel the soft under her back… and recognize that, while it might be soft, it’s still uncomfortable.

She opens her lookers. It takes a second for her vision to resolve- then, while it’s much sharper than it had been before, it’s still frustratingly blurry.

She’s staring up at a textured white surface hanging above her. At least she can be reasonably certain her sense of down is accurate. She turns her head to the sides- first, the side the beeping is coming from. Even with this vague of an image, she recognizes some of the stuff here- though she doesn’t know where from, and hasn’t a clue what they’re called. She does know nothing has ever used them to look at her before.

Then she turns to the other side. There’s a window, through which she can see a blue sky with something fluffy, white, and sharply defined floating slowly across it. A little bit closer, though, she sees a plastic bag hanging from a metal hook. There’s a little tube trailing down from the bag, hanging down past the edge of her soft thing and coming back up to find its way to the limb they’d poked. Here, she finds the source of the poke, as a metal needle of some kind, piercing her skin. Some part of her mind recognizes it, but she doesn’t know where from. She does know, however, that it’s not doing her any good right now- the bag is empty.

So she reaches over with the matching limb on her other side, the one that had failed her last, and pulls it out. A drop of red forms where it had been, before it stops and disappears.

Finally, she curls herself up, lifting her back off of the uncomfortable soft thing. She lets her two front-most limbs come into contact with the soft in front of her, supporting her while she looks around- and repositions her rear-most limbs, the ones that had failed her first.

It would seem she’s sitting on a bed of some kind. An uncomfortable one, mind. There’s three more, with full sets of strange-yet-familiar equipment surrounding them. There’s one door, closed rather firmly. No mirrors.

So she looks down at herself. Her furry, sky blue self. The front-most and rear-most limbs are fairly nondescript, with a few joints and a single-toed, very solid, end. The two limbs on her back- the ones that had failed instantly- most certainly aren’t made for walking. Rather, these fluffy walls of feathers could only be for flying of some sort… though she doesn’t remember needing wings to fly. She stretches them out, watching as the one on her right side straightens itself out at a point where the other one didn’t bend. Seconds later, the last of the searing, unfamiliar pains goes away.

Something rumbles in her belly someplace. She looks down at it, scowling. What does that mean? Or the unfamiliar ache in the same area?

Probably doesn’t matter. She glances back at the beeping machine; a few spindly things are connecting it to her- like cords of some kind. She pulls them off of herself easily, reducing the machine to the annoying buzzer once again.

She rises to the stance she’d had when she’d first awoken, standing on those four stump-like limbs. This bed isn’t the best thing to stand on, but she manages it. She also manages to stumble her way to the edge, before looking down off of it.

It’s a long drop. She won’t be able to step off of it- and she doesn’t think she can jump. She’s still a little too uncoordinated for that.

She looks back at her… wings, stretching them out. Perhaps they could help? She looks forwards, angling them, and gives them a single, hard stroke.

Well, she made it into the air. Now, how to get down without hurting herself? She quickly locks her wings out, angling them against the ground in an effort to glide.

She fails. She tumbles headfirst out of the air. Her wings do help slow her down, but not enough; she still lands rather painfully on the floor. After bouncing off another bed.

She folds the annoying, feathery appendages. At least she knows they work.

She scrambles back to her… limbs. Legs? Perhaps, but she’s not sure. The pains from her landing are already disappearing- and, in a few seconds, they’ll be gone. She sets about the room- her stumbling is getting better, she notices- to explore.

Comments

[Zapper Frost]

So the doctors think she's dead but she's still alive

[computerneek]

9073305
Yes. I'm not entirely certain, just yet, just how long I want that to last. (We're talking minutes to hours, unfortunately- they're going to have to walk in on/run into her at some point).

[Zapper Frost]

9073546
I'd say a few minutes because she's still in the hospital and people are gonna bump into her
Half an hour at most

[computerneek]

9073850
That's prettymuch what I'm thinking right now- as long as it takes for the next pony to enter the room, possibly a little longer if she manages to be lucky/unlucky by being out of sight at that moment. I'm not sure how much time I want to give her to explore the room before they return for her corpse- or what part of it she should be exploring when they return.

[Zapper Frost]

9073858
Well I can't really give you anything there because that is up for you to decide

[computerneek]

9073859
Yes, yes it is, but I'm always open to suggestions. It's probably the biggest advantage to the publish-immediately approach... which I find, unfortunately, to be vastly outweighed by the disadvantage of critical plot existence failure (Or Conflict Killer Contrived Coincidences down the line. Why can't writing be easy...?

[Zapper Frost]

9073877
Because then we wouldn't learn from our mistakes

[computerneek]

9073882
True, that.

[LostArchivist]

Why would the doctors have left the ... whoever ... alone when it was "dead"?
Normally they stuff you in a bag, right? (I'm not actually sure...)

For that matter, there are wings, but she seems to have healed magically if that bit about straightening the wing means what I think it did...
This might get interesting!