My mother was a sweet woman. Bright, outgoing, charitable to a fault. The kind of Goodbody that would go out of their way for a person even if they didn't ask. Few were like her, many looked up to her, and the world lost because of her.
The world didn't take too kindly to her radiance. It took my good mother away in my eleventh year of life.
She'd often tell me that death was a journey you never came back from. A journey where you could see all kinds of places, meet people you never knew lived, and experience things too difficult to put into words. Whenever she did, her hand would rest over her heart, and I knew she was envisioning those things as she spoke. The way her eyes drifted from me to the world over my shoulder. There was where her heart belonged.
It stung in so many ways. I suppose I was jealous.
On television, I'd seen a magic show, where a man tipped a hat to reveal a dove. I often wondered why everyone looked past how lonely the bird must have been under there. Everyone was so focused on the act, they'd lost sight of lost freedom all for the 'magic' of it all. That dove had places it knew to be. In some ways, I could feel that in my mother's expression.
A hat or hypodermics, subservience, or a gown. Those tender young years of mine forgot to mention the difference between those things but, maybe there wasn't. Uncertainty is, for better or worse, a child's first playmate.
I remember the tears when she went on that journey, with a cheerful farewell to my father and me. They weren't tears of regret, but of relief. She looked so caged, that I couldn't bear to see her kept from those sun-filled days.
Now that I had stumbled into my own death into life, I wondered if my mother did as well.
I could remember it all with vivid clarity. But why, why couldn't I remember her name?
It felt a piece of me was missing. A gap so blatantly obvious, it was impossible not to notice. My mother wasn't the only casualty either. So many other segments of my previous life felt disjointed. Faces blent together, times and places lost meaning. When yet another slice was taken from my body, followed by that indescribable tearing sensation, the gravity of the situation dawned on me.
I was my own ego. This shapeless body carried the weight of my entire consciousness. It was weak, that much I knew of the coagulated, jelly-like consistency of my body mass. But never did I expect a threat to my very soul. Those memories, however painful, were the only things I had left of my past self. Without them, I wasn't me.
Unforgivable.
That these bastards would dare take my childhood from me. Whether they were aware of it or not, I couldn't care less. Ignorance meant nothing to me. If I had the power to punish them... oh if I did. I wanted to kill them. Tear them apart. Dismember, gut, and feed their own back to them. An unreasonable, seething rage, something I'd never felt before began to surge from a hateful knot in my heart I never knew existed.
Heart? No, that didn't make sense. I wasn't human anymore.
I couldn't do anything. What could a witless blob, a mere experiment in the hands of men, do? For a moment, I almost let my anger get the best of me. There was too much at stake for irrational thought. Escape. That's all I needed to focus on, was getting as far away from these people and this godforsaken chop-shop as possible. Everything that came afterward was secondary. Even if it meant risking death for a second time.
What am I even saying? Would I rather die than lose those memories?
Yes. I would. That answer came almost too naturally. It felt right. Maybe I wouldn't have thought this way as a human being, but that unreasonable resolution felt cathartic. An unreasonable resolve in an unreasonable world. That, in a way, sounded reasonable.
A lapse in the procedure came, and I was left to lay on the table whilst the wide-eyed monk conferred with the others over the parts of me they harvested. Clearly, they didn't expect their charge to be a sapient creature, so they didn't bother to put me back into my container for safekeeping as they walked some distance away. It was a bit careless, but that disregard afforded a one-in-a-million opportunity.
I had shrunk considerably in size, having extracted a horrifyingly large amount of mass from me. It was to the point that I couldn't tell what memories were missing or not anymore.
That said, the loss didn't mean I couldn't flop around as I did before.
My lightened body landed on the floor with a wet slap. I couldn't hear it unfortunately, as I'd just come to realize. Apparently, without ears, you can't hear anything, but with secret-sauce senses like texture you can at least tell how things might sound. A remarkable discovery indeed.
There was a floor drain, for god knows what sort of deluge they would need it for in a dissection room like this, embedded in the dais where a collecting trough routed drain fluids. I figured that with my reduced size, I could I slip in between the slits, and did with just barely enough leeway to make it through.
And fell. Curiously, the drainage shaft wasn't dark to my senses, although it probably was to any normal person's. Mine weren't normal, so maybe that was where the difference lied. Any guess was probably as good as another, but I suspected they functioned on some different wavelength of light or other principle of this world I wasn't familiar with. Scotopic vision was useful, in any case.
It was a straight shot for a while, with no bottom in sight. I must've been falling for about a twenty seconds before I splashed into the water below. Again, no feeling of cold. I was beginning to miss my old body already. The differences in this one were clashing against my human expectations, which was unpleasant in a multitude of ways. To name an important one, was the fact that I might die of hypothermia without realizing it. Though if I had the good fortune of exclusion from the warm-blooded class of creatures, then maybe I was straining at a non-issue.
The water roared through a series of underground sewers. Beyond that knowledge, my senses were in a haphazard mess. Buffeted this way and that, rolled about and tossed over shallow precipices, there wasn't much time to tell which direction I was going, other than down. Further and further down.
Eventually the torrent of water gave way to a stretch of meandering tunnels, where the flow slowed to a crawl. It no longer looked like I was in a structure anymore. Natural stone faces replaced the gray-brick I'd left behind. Whoever built the drainage system must've had the bright idea of routing it all into these natural tunnels, which meant I was somewhere below, if not far below the basement level.
I let myself float atop the water's surface in a daze. Until some exit magically revealed itself, I wasn't going to get out of this tunnel system any time soon, but that wouldn't happen until the water took me there.
Although I knew how to change the shape of my body, unfortunately I couldn't apply that to swimming. I tried in my tank before, it was simply impossible. Beyond basic flattening, folding, and shifting mass around, I couldn't form paddles or undulate my body as a sea snake would. A limitation of a body with gelatinous consistency instead of rigid conformity to skeletons, no doubt. Maybe it took some sort of ability like the one I got for moving around in the tank, though other than through basic trial and error, I hadn't a clue how to reproduce the one I was awarded before.
[Rudimentary Locomotion].
Things really were like a fantasy game here. It was a bit hard to believe, but so was everything else. Losing memories didn't seem possible, yet that still happened.
On that front, I should make a mental note not to mess with the people of this world. I was, no doubt, a foreign creature, being a human from another world, and also a... thing, which I'm pretty sure only existed in those monk's lab experiments. Admittedly, that might be a hasty conclusion to make, but it was fair to air on the side of caution.
I'm small, half-witted with memory loss, and weak. There was no room for error if my goal was to survive. Besides, I had a reason to be wary, especially of those monks. They took something that belonged to me, and I wasn't about to let that go.
Not ever.