❝ She does not like to play by the rules, and neither do they. ❞ |
Earth. The year 3000. Featuring ~ 1) A game. 2) Billions, promised better lives, playing to win. 3) Player 690862. A girl who knows too much.
|NOTE: CHAPTERS 3-5 BEING REWRITTEN.|
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I screamed my throat raw.
The wind. The butterflies. The falling. Its not real. Not real. My eyes still widened in horror as I felt the layers of my screams being ripped away by angry winds.
With arms flailing and bare legs fluttering beneath me, I was the Loki falling into a void of darkness. Rather than being banished for violating some magical constitution, I should be having nothing to be afraid of. Nothing here is real. But I can't stop myself from feeling the numbing fear that extended from the feverish drumming of my heartbeat.
It was like being in a train, a steady roaring at intervals, like sliding down a tunnel with its various connections that make a sound when you go through them. But when I reached my hands out then, I couldn't feel anything. There was nothing that could be felt.
I thought about Jason. It's been more than five minutes, I realized.That idiot had it easy.
And then I thought about how those astronauts are out there floating around in space, going to Mars to negotiate with the Martians and something like that, and that they are feeling this peculiar sensation I'm feeling now. 0 g, the perpetual feeling of falling. And I remembered a lot of those people in space are Argent.
No wonder they devised this test.
I tried to calm down. I was spreading my arms out, trying my best to relax them, unclenching my fists. I closed my mouth - there was no one to hear me. I needed to save my breath. I stared upwards so I didn't contemplate what was down there as much. No matter what I did, I will not stop falling until they wanted me to. I need to stop trying (hard as it sounds!)
As I continued plunging downward like Alice down the rabbit hole, I glimpsed a flash of green. Hope tugged at my chest and I gave a yell of joy I couldn't hear.
Spidey senses tingling, I attempted a daring flip, applying pressure to my shoulder blades and using the momentum to turn me facing downward. Just as the chilling cold left my back, I could feel the air digging into my cheeks like knives. Exposed to the biting wind, the slits that were my eyes had their tears ripped away from them as quickly as they came.
Looking down and trying to ignore the sting, my teeth flashed with joy when I saw that what lay below wasn't all a hopeless oblivion.
A green light was embedded in the nothingness, like a jewel.
Holy shit.
There it is. My destination.
Still a few hundred kilometers to fall.
Instead of hating the sensation with every fiber of my being, I focused on letting things take its course. I even tried to tumble faster, by curling up in a fetal position. Appropriately, being there was a little like being a fetus.
I kept my eyes trained on that little strip of brightness. With an idle thought, I realized I was getting used to the zero g.. Maybe the feeling wasn't terrible, just unusual. As I looked at the green light again, I was positive it wasn't some sort of illusion to test my neural reaction to false hope.
It was big, and getting bigger.
No more than one hundred meters.
Squinting, I saw that it wasn't any utopian destination or a glorious little patch of vibrant green things.
It was letters.
No.. Numbers.
19.
I didn't stop. I just kept tumbling past the sign until it was no longer distinguishable. Obviously, this was set to unhinge me. And it had unhinged me.
Shit.
18.
It flashed and disappeared too quickly for me to act.
More letters appeared. I could see increasing specks of green down there. I readied my mind for disappointment.
17.
But that didn't stop me reaching out to grab a letter, a number, anything that can stop the falling and the breathlessness. My hands felt nothing. The words were swept up and out of sight as I continued accelerating.
16.
15.
14.
I screamed in frustration, words lost to the wind.
Numbers zipped past, too fast to anticipate, too slow not to see.
13.
12.
11.
10.
I wrapped my arms around my neck and tried to stop thinking.
9.
8.
7.
6.
5.
4.
3.
2.
An invisible pain ripped through my torso.
As the agony shifted throughout the rest of my body, I felt like I hit a truck.
Vaguely, I realised the fluttering in my stomach gone. I wasn't hopeful. As I glimpsed the flicker of green below, like dim stars, I knew there will be more disappointments.
My mind still refused to compute my surroundings, and my disfocused eyes wandered around the dark canvas in vain. My limbs hung limp, swaying slowly. The fingers reaching downward. And I realised my head, just like those fingers, was hanging downward too.
Like time had suddenly stopped and I was in the middle of falling.
