CH1026 ???’s Perspective

In the void, a person opened their eyes; the nothingness around them only contrasted by the chaos of their thoughts.

They didn’t know where they were, didn’t know what they were, didn’t even know who they were. Every probe of their mind brought with it fragments of memories, pounding at their head that made them grasp at it, giving them their first sight of their arms and made them recoil in horror.

Horrible things, their limbs looked twisted and warped, patches of flesh and scale and feather and chitin, haphazardly tossed together and blending into each other in an unnatural way that made them want to scream, a single word coming to their thoughts and ringing out more than anything else.

Chimera.

A word they barely understood, holding just enough context to feel like it fit the bill. A creature made of separate, unrelated parts, combined by the whims of their maker. A construct of someone else’s design rather than a person.

Or maybe both? They managed to think, lacking too much information to be able to say for sure as they were trapped there alone, with nothing but time to sort themselves out, the few bits of memories they held passing by them in their fears.

She, for enough of those scant scraps of recollection felt female enough to make her consider herself as such, saw flashes, yet nothing more. Smiling faces in one bit, panic and bloodshed in another, scenes where she was surrounded and scenes where she was alone, with few among her memories bearing individuals of the same race as the rest, while the memories of her own body never revealed the same form twice either, painting a picture of a madness she couldn’t deny.

Then, if I don’t know what I am… can I know where I am? She wondered after hours lost in her thoughts, finding no answers within herself, even if outward seemed just as unlikely to yield any either. It truly was a void around her, after all, the seven eyes perceiving her surroundings told her as much, with her four ears picking up no noise, her electro receptors feeling no current, and her opened pores feeling no distant touch for as far as she could perceive. She was alone, and that was the end of it.

With more hours wasted despairing. Trapped as she was, nothing to give her answers, nothing to stimulate her, not even enough of her own memories to pretend she was whole, she could do nothing until doing nothing became too much. Isolated as she was, alone as she was, she didn’t even feel hunger come to drive her, yet still she needed something more, and with that, she began walking.

With movement being an awkward thing, that fact unnoticed until she started. Her five legs were wrong, made mismatched by whatever careless person had formed her, with the sizes all different and the knees a nightmare, with some having more and some having less, and the direction they faced seemingly random too. Such a failure of a body that either she had to have been her maker’s first attempt or else her creator was cruel beyond measure.

Still, as slow as it was, she got somewhat better at it, and as pointless as it felt, walking gave her purpose. Even if she had nowhere to go, the simple act of moving let her think, and in the days that passed, she set a goal for herself. Should she ever be free from that endless plane of nothingness, she wanted to get answers. Answers to who she was, if she’d ever been anything but that. Those grains of memories in her head had to have come from somewhere; she wanted to know. Answers as to the one who’d created her, cursing her with such a form, if they’d been careless or malicious, and answers as to her purpose. If she was made by the whims of some cruel being, then so be it, that was an answer, but if instead she was a failed first attempt then she wanted to know what her warped existence had been meant to lead to, what more successful attempts might have been doing without being abandoned.

Even if nothing was to come of it, just having a goal made it easier to go forward, giving her purpose in the following days until suddenly, there was a change in the distance, bringing her walk to a clumsy run to reach it until, inexplicably, she found a door.

No structure attached to it, the door was all there was. Wooden and beautiful, there was no denying that it had been made with care, but even as she walked around it, she couldn’t see anything else worth investigating. It simply was. Her singular companion in the void that at least lent hope for more. If it could exist and she could exist, then surely more did as well, didn’t it? And it wasn’t like she didn’t have time to find it. In all of her travels, she’d needed neither food nor rest, a fact that felt wrong to her, yet she didn’t have the context to be sure of. Still, she could keep going, keep wandering on her journey until she discovered something more, and she almost left to do exactly that, only a minor tugging at her heart stopped it.

With an unreliable mind, that door was the first thing she’d found since waking up and truly becoming herself. Wouldn’t it at least be right to open it? There may have seemed to be little point, but at the very least she could examine the inside of its frame and along its edges, just to be sure there were no deeper secrets waiting to be discovered, leaving her completely unprepared to see a room beyond.

What?

That was wrong. As little as she might have known, doors didn’t just lead to anything. They were connections between rooms, or from without and within, not portals.

… Right?

As sure as she felt at its wrongness, she also couldn’t deny that she knew too little to say that with any confidence. A gut feeling from someone without any context for the world she found herself in, but with a path to more opened, all she could do was step through, hoping it would give her something more and getting it as the next moment she split, walking into the room but also becoming one of the residents it held, experiencing it through her own senses but also through his.

This book’s true home is on another platform. Check it out there for the real experience.

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A moleman, humble in his life and comfortable in his burrow, could hear the sounds of playing from his chair and got up to see it, his two children having come in at some point while he rested his eyes, their laughter the best thing to wake up to, with that clear enough to have been their goal. The moment he stood, they ran at their father, waiting to be picked up, which he was happy to oblige, feeling the warmth of his family in his arms.

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