*Actions/Sounds*
'Thoughts'
"Speech"
[System]
! Trigger Warning: Topic of Suicide !
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In a dark void of space bereft of any bright light source bare a few dots of distant stars flickering in and out of existence. In the void there was a marble statue with a blank face pouring a pitcher of an unknown glowing substance into a pool of light present on the assumed floor of the space that lacks any stars flickering. Reflected into the pool of light is a barely seeable image, as if distorting its image for any onlookers.
From the darkness a white marble arm emerges as if passing through a thin veil or fabric. Fine cracks are seen throughout the marble, the damaged arm reaches toward the pool, its fingers stretched out to touch it before stopping above it. The hand slowly closes into a fist before backing away.
"I… I cannot watch this any longer" a cold toned feminine voice quietly echoes through the space. The damaged arm is seen moving back and upwards back into the dark veil of space before coming back down with a clear drop of unknown liquid on the tip of the index finger. It hovers the finger over a pool of light.
"Where was it again?" the voice mumbles to themself as they mull over something.
*BANG*
The sound of a rather large explosion is heard nearby, startling the entity as the arm flinches, causing the drop of liquid to fly off somewhere random into the pool below. The arm then turns, as if the entity it is connected to has turned around to look behind them to see the source of the explosive sound.
"What in creation are they up to now" the voice mutters before letting out a sigh as there is maniacal laughter heard in the distance after the explosion went off. The entity turns back toward the pool, "I do not know where that imbuement landed, but it matters not," the arm reaches backward and upward once again to reveal another drop of unknown liquid as identical as the one previous one.
"Ah, there it is" the voice finds what it was searching for in the pool below. The damaged hand stretches over a specific spot of the pool before letting the drop of liquid fall straight down into it.
*pling*
The drop, upon making contact with the pool of light, causes a brief ripple to go through the pool and a sound that was a mix between a water drop and the pluck of a harp string to go off. "I hope that this interference will be worth it…be it blessing or curse" the voice says quietly to themselves before the damaged arm waves at the pool of light as if to dismiss it before the arm turns and disappears back into the veil of darkness.
A few moments later, the statue above the pool gestures a respectful nod in the direction the voice was located. It then stops pouring the pitcher it was holding into the pool of light, once the pitcher was lifted the pool of light slowly shrinks into the center of itself before disappearing completely. The statue watches to confirm the pool has completely vanished before spinning with their pitcher and launching themselves upward toward the flickering stars. In the dark void, the statue then explodes into glimmering lights, revealing a constellation now in its place in the void.
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"Ugh" Evelyn rouses awake by the sunbeam aiming for her eyes, covering her face with her right arm. The light shone through the open section of the ruined roof of the building, the room was a part of the facility that Evelyn once worked at. It was located in the above ground part of the facility that had yet to collapse. Evelyn was sleeping on the ground as barely any fabric survived in good condition due to time and environmental conditions, most were crumbling away or crusty, so she'd rather just sleep on the hard ground.
*Sigh*
"Failed again" Evelyn mutters to herself in a pained tone. She gets off the ground with much difficulty due to her left side being almost non-functional to move. She rolls onto her stomach and props herself up using her right arm, and then bends her right leg, so her foot meets the ground. Forcefully pushing off the ground she manages to get onto her feet.
Evelyn begins to walk through the room towards a wall, passing by a toppled over wooden stool and a couple of empty liquor bottles with unreadable labels. Twenty-two tallies lined the wall, with Evelyn adding the twenty-third with a piece of concrete debris. Afterward she shuffles over to a corner that has a long piece of wooden plank propped up against the wall covering something mounted to the wall. She slides the wooden plank to the side, revealing a mirror.
Evelyn's appearance is much worse than it initially was when she first woke up in the cryo-chamber. Her hair is a disheveled tangled mess, her glasses are barely keeping the heavily cracked lens in place and her eyes have long-lost their shine. Even her skin and lips have begun to crack and peel from the lack of moisture and untreated sunburns due to constant direct sunlight. Using her only functioning arm, she removes the rope from around her neck with slight difficulty. The rope marks upon her neck quickly disappearing once the rope was loosened and removed.
The left side of her body is a reminder of her incomplete transformation. The white bandage-like material that covered her boiling skin had hardened into a plaster-like substance that could not be removed no matter what method Evelyn tried. It also caused her to have limited mobility and usage of her left side, as she can barely bend her joints. Her outfit is also not in the best shape as she had not changed, it is all torn up and covered in dirt and grime, as if she climbed out from a grave.
After a few seconds of looking at her reflection, she covers it back up with the board, unable to stand looking at herself any longer. With nothing else to do, she begins her mindless wandering around. She walks toward the city and passes from the silent deadwood forest to the still highway. On the highway she passes by bodies neatly lined on the side of the roadside by side, a similar scene to the beach but without the black body bags.
Entering the city she approaches a large plastic heavy-duty dump cart with rubber tires on the sidewalk. Evelyn grabs it and proceeds to drag it behind her along her wandering. After about an hour of wandering through the desolate city, she stops in front of a rather tall office building built of brick. Evelyn lifelessly looks up and down the building, inspecting its condition. Deeming it stable enough, Evelyn moves to park her cart to the sidewalk next to a withered up tree that was surrounded by a short circle metal fence at the base of it.
Approaching the building's main door, Evelyn reaches to open it to find it locked. Evelyn just stands there looking at the door before tilting her head slightly to look at the first floor windows to the side of her. Seeing that they are broken, she walks towards the closest one and climbs through, not caring that she cut up her exposed skin on her right side and destroying her clothes even more in the process.
Taking a brief glance around her surroundings, the room was full of desk cubicles with all manner of objects tossed around as if a whirlwind blew through. It was most likely ransacked during the fall of the world, looking down at a broken picture frame of a little kid. A painful reminder of what once was, Evelyn gently places the picture from the floor back onto a desk.
Evelyn then left the room, not wishing to linger any longer. Locating the staircase, she ascends to the roof access and emerges on the roof of the building. Evelyn approaches the half-wall barrier of the roof that was closest to the roof access. She climbs up onto it and sits on the wall with her back against the roof access exterior wall and proceeds to lounge on the wall. Her left leg straight along the wall, her right leg bent at the knee with her foot on the wall and her right arm laid upon her stomach as her left arm hung off the edge of the wall.
Lazing on the roof, she turns to look to her left, taking in the sight of the once lively cityscape, now reduced to a quiet remnant of a previous era. Looking over the horizon, all she sees is the midday sun and the endless blue sky. Evelyn has yet to see any clouds of any kind during her time awake, not above her nor in the distance. Even the wind has ceased to blow, like the world was put on pause.
Peering below her, she looks at the street below the ten-story office building she has chosen to climb up to the roof of. She sees cars driving around with car horns going off in the distance. People walking their dogs or chatting to each other on benches waiting for the bus. Even some people running to and fro on the sidewalk trying to get to their own destinations. Evelyn closes her eyes and lets out a long sigh before opening her eyes once more to see the scene below gone. A mere fragmented scene of the ghosts of the past that now haunts her crippled sanity.
*Ding*
The dreaded ding noise sounds off to her right, signaling the arrival of the damned blue box. Evelyn's attention is taken from staring off, onto the blue box. She slowly pans her head to look at it with her listless stare, preparing to reject its offer. Only to be slightly surprised to see that there was now additional text at the bottom, as up till now it has only asked her to continue her transformation.
[The transformation process to suit the admin role has been halted. Would you like to continue the process?]
[Please continue process to bring hope to this world]
[Yes] or [No]
"Ha" Evelyn lets out a loud laugh of disbelief before hunching herself forward and beginning a laughing fit of madness. After a few minutes of straight laughing, she suddenly stops and looks straight at the blue box with an expression that was lacking emotion. "You want me to bring hope to this world? Me? ME?" Evelyn asks the blue box with anger rising in her voice until she shouts at it, pointing at herself with her right hand.
She starts chuckling to herself as she maneuvers herself to standing on top of the half wall, her right arm now bracing herself against the roof access exterior wall. "Bring hope to this world, you say? What hope is there to be had if there isn't anyone or anything to bring hope to in this world. What kind of hope can you expect if the one that is supposed to bring it, has none to offer." Evelyn's chuckles led into a straight answer to the blue box before slowly quieting to a hopeless whisper. "This world is a lost cause. It's better to just let it go, both me and this world…please just let me end this suffering" she pleads to the blue box while an expression of pain and sadness is worn on her face.
A few moments of silence pass as Evelyn just stares at the blue box, almost hoping it would respond back. "…what was I expecting? It never responded to me before. Why would it know?" Evelyn says in an emotionless tone in her voice before using her right arm and forcefully pushing against the wall she was bracing herself against. Pushing herself backwards, off the roof of the building.
The air passes by Evelyn as she falls until…
*Splick*
A horrendous noise rang through the dead world, a mix between wet visceral noise and bone snapping as Evelyn's vision went black as she hit the ground below. Her body now a crumpled, tangled mess of busted viscera and limbs a twisted mess as her bones poke out at some places. The world goes silent, no sound to be heard for a few minutes.
*tick…tock…tick… Tock…TICK…DONG!*
The quiet distant ticking of a clock could be heard, slowly coming closer and more pronounced. A loud chime of a grandfather clock rings out, time seems to freeze for a moment. Then it began, Evelyn's blood that poured onto the cracks of the pavement seemed to revert back to her body and spine-chilling squelching could begin to be heard as Evelyn's body began to revert the damage to her flesh and busted organs.
Evelyn comes to mid-repair as she feels the soul-crushing pain of her body being put back into order, her organs shifting and limbs twisting back into their right places. She is unable to cry out, only able to silently scream in her mind. A few agonizing minutes felt like hours to her until she was back into the state she was in before the fall, as if it never happened. No evidence that it occurred besides the new damage to her already beaten up clothes.
A few moments Evelyn just lays there on the pavement, processing her experience and just weeps but no tears are to be shed, as she used them up already days ago. She sits up and looks down through the holes in her clothes to see that the plaster-like substance has moved an inch closer to the right side of her body.
*sigh*
She lets out a low sigh before getting up fully, taking a moment to look at the blue box that had remained open even during her fall and regeneration. She taps onto the [No] option and then walks over to the dump cart she parked nearby earlier. Grabbing its handle, she begins to hobble around the city mindlessly, until she comes across a pair of skeletal remains holding hands. An assumed adult skeleton had a worn out green dress with a smaller skeleton, she can only guess it was a mother and child.
Evelyn looks at the pair for a moment before carefully loading the adult skeleton into the cart, using the clothing the skeletal remains had on as a makeshift bag to hold the bones in. Once in place she does the same with the smaller skeleton. After loading them on she begins to wander about again, coming across more corpses and doing the same actions. After her cart was full she began to walk towards the exit of the city, after a bit she came to the line of corpses on the side of the highway she passed by earlier. She takes the bundle of bones out of her cart and sets them to the side, making sure to keep the ones found next to each together.
It had become the only way she could pass time as she found. Initially she planned to bury them but has yet not found any tools that survived the extreme weathering or were strong enough to break the hard dry ground. She had tried to dig using her hands, but it was not effective enough or would take too much time, even if her fingertips weren't necrotic.
*Pop*
Evelyn freezes in her movement, the one noise she didn't want to hear ever again and the one from her nightmares. The party popper noise that signified the so-called 'Gift', the last one, caused her so much pain and overwhelming grief that it basically drained her to the point of emotionlessness. In instinct, she begins to hug her right side toward her unmoving left side, waiting for the 'Gift' to inflict more pain and closing her eyes shut.
A few minutes passed before she opened her eyes cautiously, nothing had happened to her. Taking the courage, she looks at the newly opened blue box.
[You have gotten a gift from the sender 'E'. They have given no message attached to the gift.]
After blankly staring at the blue box for a while, it just disappears on its own. Leaving Evelyn concerned and confused on what the gift was supposed to be besides a sick joke to trip her into a panic attack. Deciding that it might just be some joke, she begins her wander and body collection once again. The corpses found were odd as they were in two different stages of decay. Most were in the final stage, being dry skeletons with no soft tissue keeping them together, while the others were almost in the final stage and had barely any soft tissue keeping the bones together. The ones in the complete final stage got put in clothing bundles and the other group were carefully placed as intact as they could into the cart with the feet hanging off the back side of the cart.
If they were too stiff to be moved or were in poses that could not fit in the cart, they were left in place to be moved if she had a better method. But after a few of her trips she noticed the sun was going to set soon so she decided to end her excursion and head back to the facility for the night. Not wanting to accidentally lose the only cart with decent condition she could find, she just takes it back with her through the woods.
After reaching the broken glass entrance of the main floor of the facility, she walks into the main lobby with the large but mostly destroyed receptionist desk. Above the desk were large letters 'Flux' stung to the ceiling using heavy-duty wire and the letters 'cor' on the ground as the wires had snapped. Deciding to use some of the remaining daylight, she rummages through the rubble for anything usable and manages to find some beaten up plastic chairs. Grabbing the two best condition ones and placing them in a cart to briefly use to transport to the room she has been staying in. Dragging them from the cart into the middle of the room and leaving the cart out in the hallway, she sets up the chairs as a makeshift bed.
Settling herself in her new set up that was no longer just the floor, she looks up through the hole in the ceiling and just watches the sky turn from red to the dark of night. Calling it for the day, she reaches for a nearby open bottle of liquor she drinks herself to blacking out, hoping she won't have too bad of nightmares tonight.
Evelyn actually had a decent night of no nightmares for once, rousing from slumber with a heavy feeling on her torso. She opens her weary and looks for the source of heaviness to only be met with a head full of light messy brown hair. Instantly, she wakes up fully at this abnormality, opening her eyes to fully see that there is a small child sleeping on top of her. She also feels that there was something placed in her right hand, opening it to find a strip of paper with some text in purple ink that read, 'Live on'.
Chapter 3: The Gift of Life