1 Waking Up

Posted on Mon Aug 14th, 2023 @ 1:52am by Dungeon Master Sue Donym
Edited on on Fri Aug 18th, 2023 @ 1:35am

1,743 words; about a 9 minute read

Mission: Chapter 1 - Strange New World
Location: New New York
Timeline: 2090

Blinking quickly, she tried to get her bearings and take stock of her new surroundings. Had the spell worked? She was certainly alive so that was a small miracle. But where, and most importantly, WHEN was she? And why did her front feel hot and sticky?

As her vision finally cleared, she discovered that she was in some sort of alleyway. As she stared up at the sky far above, she also discovered that the buildings in the place she was in now were exceedingly tall - taller than she had ever conceived of prior. Yet this dizzying fact was secondary to a far more pressing matter. It seemed that the body that she had reincarnated into seemed to have recently passed on.

As the most recent memories from the body came rushing into her mind, she remembered a great deal of distress over money, a feeling of entrapment, a rushing feeling, and then the unmistakable feeling of hitting the ground.

She squinted her eyes and raised a hand to her forehead. She needed to try and at least patch up this body if she hoped to survive. She could, literally, worry about everything else later. With a silent incantation, she tried to summon her magic to her. There was a tiny flicker as a remnant of her former powers came to her, but no more. It seemed that wherever, whenever she was, there was no mana to be had to pull from and she had not recovered any after being reborn so soon.

No matter - she would make do with what she had. The tiny bit that she was able to call upon would have to be enough. With a quick hand gesture with the long, slender fingers she now possessed, she cast her most basic of healing and restoration spells. It wouldn't be enough for battle, but she would be able to walk at the very least.

The lack of magical glow and the flicker in her mind as the spell was cast, however... That was worrying.

It also drained her of what little magic she had been reborn with. Nevertheless, she felt her wounds and injuries closing and she was soon able to sit up and get a better feel for things. The alley she was in was full of trash and debris and many of the things in it were completely foreign to her. She also couldn't identify what the walls of the towers or the ground under her were made of.

Mentally shrugging all this off, she stumbled to her feet and brushed herself off. She was alive and she could feel her heart beating and that counted for a lot right now.

"Ahem..." She cleared her throat and gave the alley one last look around before heading towards the closer end to her. "Let's see what kind of world we are..." As she spoke, the words struggled to come out as the light of the street revealed towers of glass and steel that stretched out towards the sky as far as her eyes could see. Just looking at them, she felt dizzyingly insignificant. Above what looked like the first floor of windows and doors, there were rows of moving paintings and indecipherable images all over.

Some of the memories in her new body filled in the gaps of her knowledge, so she knew that these were infernal constructs called advertisements, but she couldn't pull up any specific information about them other than the fact that they were gaudy, bright, and a constant source of annoyance.

Seeing the large metallic beasts in the street elicited another emotion - envy. Apparently whomever she had been prior had tried to save for one of these hairless, shiny creatures of comfort, but was rarely even able to afford to ride in one that someone else owned.

With a hard blink to try and clear her mind and her vision, she refocused. Some of the few memories rushing back were of a place she could use as a base of operations. She looked around and found a familiar entryway which she now knew led to the domicile in her new memories. Thankfully, the former owner of this body seemed to have jumped out of her own window.

With confidence, she strode into the building beside her, the automatic doors startling her for only a moment before she tried to walk past reception towards the sets of double doors in the back of the foyer.

"I don't remember seeing you leaving, Miss Luna. Is everything ok? You look like you might need some help." The man sitting behind the reception counter dressed in a blue uniform stood up and eyed her suspiciously.

This man obviously recognized her. The question now was, how well did he know her? Could she fake her way through it? She had to - she'd stopped to pause too long already and he looked like he was about to come around that desk of his for whatever reason. On the bright side, at least she understood the language - one of the deeply ingrained memories she had gotten from her new body was definitely reading and writing. "Ah... Yes, I just took a bit of a tumble is all. Out in the alleyway. I just need to go get cleaned up a bit. Nothing to worry about."

The way his face scrunched up, she had obviously failed. "A bit of a tumble? With respect, you don't sound yourself and you look like you've been tossed by the..." Glancing towards the entry doors, he leaned in and whispered his next words "...by the Crimson Cartel." Reaching under his desk, he grabbed a silver sheet and came around his desk to hand it to the woman before him. "I know you do some hard work, miss, but please... At least take some meds and let me make sure you make it back to your apartment, ok?"

At first, she was horrified that she had failed so badly and thought that he might have been in on her body's recent demise. Perhaps she had jumped to too many conclusions. With a smile, she accepted the silver sheet and looked it over. It had a dozen bumps on it, several of which had been popped open for their contents. "Yes, thank you, I will take you up on that offer. After all, who better to secure the place so I don't take another tumble."

"Miss, if you fall out a twenty seven story window and live to ask me that, I feel like I should be calling the clergy," he replied with a concerned look. "Let's just get you home and we can worry about things later. And don't worry, I didn't see you come in or anything."

"Thank you, I really do appreciate it," As he headed towards the strange double doors at the back of the room, she followed him, curious about their operation as they had no handles or latches of any sort. As she wracked her memories, she found no real clues other than standing in a closet for some reason. When he pressed a depression on the wall and one of the doors slid open, realization struck her - this was the closet that frustrated her prior host to no end. It must have been some sort of magical conveyance that travelled up and down inside of this building.

Furrowing her brow, something odd struck her. She still couldn't feel any mana so she was fairly certain it wasn't magic. Wracking her new memories quickly solved her new conundrum though. It was something called tick-know-ledge-eee. The concept and everything about it was a foreign concept to her and rolled about in her head like a strange ball made of lead. As the small closet made its way up the building and the worried man in the blue uniform tried to make small talk with her, she tried to make sense of it all, but it didn't quite match up with anything she had ever come across before in her previous life.

Barely aware of the doors opening, she realized too late that her head was starting to swim again and she had to reach out and catch herself on her new friend before falling. "I guess it took more out of me than I thought. What was your name again?"

"Ryder Solis, miss. I've been your door keeper for a few years. Do you know where you are? Do you remember your name? Do you remember what year it is?" His worry now deeper, he helped her shamble down the narrow hallway to her door and pressed her hand to the ID plate, opening the sliding door for her.

"I'm in a building that reaches towards the sky. My name..." She was definitely suffering from her injuries and not enough healing at this point. She could tell she wasn't going to die, but she definitely needed food and rest. She just needed to talk Ryder into leaving now. "My name is Luna?" She received an encouraging nod from him so she let herself flop onto what counted as a bed in the main area of the tiny apartment and as sleep came over her, she mumbled "Year is today..."

Ryder just shook his head and did his best to make sure she was at least comfortable. Then he noticed that her balcony door was open and when he went to go close it, he noticed something else that shook him to his core. The balcony safety systems and shields were completely offline. Flipping them back online and changing the access code, he came back inside and stared at the woman now sleeping in Aurelia Luna's apartment.

For a long moment he had to wonder if she truly had survived the fall, or if something else had taken over her body. In all the years he'd worked in this building and for as long as he'd known Miss Luna, she had never treated him with so much respect or thanked him. She had always been one of the dead-eyed, over-exploited workers that lived in the building before today. Now she had seemingly survived a fall lethal even on Mars and acted like a completely new person.

Eventually, he just shrugged it off and headed back towards his post. New planet, new ghost stories. Things like this happened on Earth, so why shouldn't they happen here on Mars too?

 

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