Loretta woke from a nightmare, shivering and gasping for air.
It was warm and bright, and her eyes were adjusted still to darkness. She snapped them shut, and when that was not enough she put her hands over her face and moaned.
Somewhere in the pit of her stomach she could still feel the lurching sensation that had woken her, a deep uneasy pain like a corkscrew was being turned through her belly button and extracting her along with it. She pressed her stomach with one hand, while still shielding her eyes with the other and lay where she was, quite incapacitated, for an unknown length of time.
Eventually the light didn't seem so bright, and the pain in her stomach receded as the corkscrew twisted back into place.
A shadow passed between her and the light.
Disturbed, she opened her eyes and looked up. The silhouette of someone standing in the way of the sun was all she could see, and "Oooh," was all she could say, the brightness stinging her retinas.
"You are alive then." A voice said. It didn't have the ominous resonance, or the mimicking nature it had before, but it was definitely the same voice that belonged to the figure of smoke from the dark room she had been in only a few minutes prior.
With the pain her gone, she rolled over and sat up. She had been lying on sand, her clothes and her curls were full of it. After she shook it out of her hair and groaned again, she opened her eyes again.
"Am I, alive?" she said, hovering over the word 'alive'. She wasn't sure whether she was asking herself, or the shadow above her.
"Should I pinch you?"
"No!" she frowned at the shadow. There was a long, awkward silence before she spoke again, "Where am I then?" she asked.
"About five miles outside of Rama,"
"R-rama?" she stumbled over the rolling of the 'R'.
"Yes. Rama, the nearest town."
"Oh," Loretta blinked a few times as her pupils made their final adjustments to the light. "And where is Raaaama?"
"Rrrrrrama," he corrected her again.
"Where is it?" she asked again, bluntly.
"I don't understand the question. It's five miles from where we are right now."
"Well, is it in Africa? Egypt? The freakin' Sahara? Where?" Her thinly veiled composure failed her, because it was obvious she was no longer in London, or even England.
He —the creature—began to laugh. His laugh was just as terrifying as his voice had been in the darkness of the storage room moments ago, and it shook her, but she waited patiently for his response.
"Human, surely you know you are inside the lamp? Where else would I exist? Can you not see the earth you walk on and the colour of the sky which forms the boundaries of our world?" He held his arms wide and lifted his head upward.
Loretta also looked up, away from the sun. "Oh," she said.
He laughed more.
"Oh," she repeated, and fainted.