There were voices reverberating throughout the cave, she remembered. Was leave possible, they asked? Well, was it? Is it? What does 'leave' mean; what is it? Unsure of the answer to this, but scared. Certainly scared. The boy, Jonas, sprawled on the ground next to her because of what she'd done.
How could she have known, one voice asks. She should have known, another says. She shakes her head to clear the thoughts from her mind. These aren't helping. None of this is helping. This daze she's in, feeling as if this has all happened in the past and she's simply watching it play out, is not helping. An eerie silence penetrates the air as she tries to decipher the message. Is leave possible?
"What… what do you mean, is leave possible," the girl with the hair like an ocean asks.
"Is. Leave. Possible." three different voices reply. As if it's the simplest thing in the world, as if she simply misheard them and a single repetition will clear it all up.
"I don't-" the girl sighs. "Fine. Sure, leave is possible, whatever! What do you want me to do?"
"Thank. You. Blue hair. Girl." the voices say again. The sound is tinny, as if through an old phone. The girl with blue adorning her head has no time to consider this, however, as the earth beneath her feet begins to seize. The radio in her jacket's pocket screams with interference and static, and the air in front of her very eyes seems to shake, compressing and expanding. Her ears pop repeatedly as the air pressure shifts. Eventually the girl can't take it anymore and blackness consumes her senses.
When she wakes, it is dark. Impeccably so. It feels as if she is lying on a flat surface, as if everything that exists is the flat surface she lies on. She stands. The air, or whatever impossibly black substance takes its place, is crushingly silent; so silent that she hears the blood rush through her ears and a ringing as loud as a jet engine. She yells something. She doesn't know what, but the sound probes into the darkness. Nothing returns, not even an echo. She feels minutes pass. She looks at the watch adorning her wrist but the hands on it have stopped dead. Like everything else here. Dead. More time passes, and it begins to feel that she's spent hours in this barren hell, although there's no way she could know, as nothing moves to indicate time's passing. She longs for Jonas, for Ren, for Nona and Clarissa, even, although Nona was far too quiet to make a difference here and she considered Clarissa a bitch. Then it hits her. Where she stands, she is completely, impossibly alone. She will never see another soul again, here. She will remain trapped with nothing but herself as company. She begins to run.
Long ago, she'd picked a direction and taken off in it. It had been so easy then, an adrenaline-fueled sprint for her life. But now her lungs were ablaze, her legs stabbed from all sides by invisible daggers threatening to make her stop. Even the jacket which she'd grown so accustomed to carrying felt like an anchor on her back. There was no choice. Stop of her own accord or pass out of exhaustion. She chose the former. "Oh, Alex," the girl muttered as she flopped to the ground, "what have we gotten ourselves into now?" It was an old habit that the girl had, talking to herself, but it always calmed her. Settled her nerves. Cleared the panicked thoughts that inevitably made their way in from her mind. The girl, Alex, pulled her knees to her chest and buried her face in them. "How did we get here? Where is here?" Alex poked her head up to look around. From the corner of her eye came a purple light. It was far away still, but approaching quickly. Alex had always been curious, and the thought that the light could be a threat never registered in her mind. It seemed… alive, almost. As if it were a conscious, shifting entity that had also found itself trapped in this place. It slowed as it neared, and Alex recognized it to be a massive group of fireflies.
They drifted in toward Alex and fluttered in circles around her. For a moment, she was a kid again, laughing in pure joy at the wondrous beauty of the swarms of purple rotating an arm's length away. A wall of glowing magenta, twisting like a tornado, surrounded her from head to toe. It soothed her to watch and the aching muscles stopped nagging for a moment. Slowly, the fireflies shifted from their magenta hue to a blue reminiscent of the most beautiful nebulae in the sky. Their swirling slowed and stopped, and they drifted away from Alex. Their numbers began to dwindle, dropping from the thousands that had surrounded her to only a few hundred. What remained created a humanoid form as Alex watched in awe. Once they all fluttered into place, their movement stopped for a moment as they set their tiny feet on something. They curled up and exploded into puffs of blue mist that made Alex scream in actual pain. Was this the nature of this place? To create something unimaginably beautiful only to destroy it before her eyes? Was this hell? What had she done to deserve this fate?
The smoke cleared and there stood something. Alex watched warily as the figure became more defined against the backdrop of black. The entity gave off a blue glow. It was a human, or at least was humanoid with a skin of electric blue and teal hair. The reaction causing the skin to glow settled and it became as black as everything else, but it's hair remained a shining light. The various facial features were also defined, the eyes a light blue where they should have been white and a darker blue at the irises. The mouth was easily identifiable by a small line of blue light shining between the lips. Sparks of blue periodically shot from the ponytail that it's hair was in and arced down the rest of it's body, showing its outline as they did so. Two of these sparks made their way from her hair to illuminate her arms and hands, which she rotated in front of her eyes as if inspecting their quality. It turned to Alex and said in a feminine voice, "It's good to exist again."
