Note: Life has been difficult as of late. Sorry for the lack of upload the last few weeks. Anyway, here's track E. Currently working on editing ch2. Hoping it'll be ready when all of CH1's tracks are done. Please enjoy.

Track E: "Intimate" (I wish we could stay like this, in our Eden forever)

One Week

Later

The wastelands came to an end. In their sights, were the bases of mountain ranges. Finally, a change of scenery for the two, the child now known as Yew, and the girl known as Anya. A childlike wonder came over Yew, ecstatic to no longer stare at an endless desert. Perhaps they could find some sense of civilization there. It had been some time since they left Warsaw. By now, the two could agree that it felt like it had been a month, at minimum. They were beginning to waste away. Anya became thinner, and dark circles surrounded her eyes. Yew looked likewise, though was even more emaciated, as they had been trying to give most of their share to her. She would refuse initially but ended up taking what was given to her. This had almost backfired, as once, Yew had lost consciousness at the KLF's helm and nearly flipped it over after jerking it the controls. Since then, they began taking full portions. But, by now, the two had finally run out of their rations. It was meant for only one person to survive on. This was a truly desperate situation.

"Look Anya, look," they said excitedly, "We're finally out of the desert!?"

"That's good," she rasped, "but, I don't think there's going to be anything of use there. It's over."

"Well, what if there is?"

"Well, I hope there is. I don't think either of us can last much longer like this."

What she said was true. Their bodies, already in bad condition, could not take much more malnourishment. They had become fragile. The both of them felt that even a light breeze could snuff out their lives.

"If only, this little one had its lift board. We would have been in a better situation," she said solemnly.

"It will be fine," Yew said, "We will be alright".

She did not respond. Her arms loosened around their waist.

"Anya?"

Again, she did not respond.

"Anya please."

No matter how much they begged, she could not respond.

"Anya… Anya… Anya…," he cried, "AAAAAAAANNNNNNNNYYYYYYYYYAAAAAAA!"

The KLF's Compaq drive resonated with the child's will, and so, the archetype inside the machine and the Trapars responded as well. The half-broken machine began to somewhat patch itself up slightly and used the Trapars to propel itself across the sky. Anya began to open her eyes, and through the monitors, could see the brilliant green waves the particles made.

"Beautiful".

The Monsoon-o flew across the sky, clearing such a large distance that would normally take days to cross, and doing so now in minutes. They were now overhead the mountains, but there was no river.

"It seems there isn't anything here we can use", Anya said sadly, "It seems we wasted your last bit of inspiration".

"We aren't stopping here!"

"What!?"

Sure enough, the KLF did not stop. It kept flying, fast and true. How Yew felt now, they could keep flying forever. However, they caught a glimpse of something. A violet flash of light? A building? A flash of an ancient memory, perhaps not even one that was originally theirs, pin-balled painfully in their head. There was something in the mountains, something there that couldn't be made out exactly through the monitor, but… a ghost of their memory began to fill them in. A cry from the Bird-of-Paradise tore through their ears.

Terror filled their eyes, soul, heart. Yew both recognized it and did not. The memory did not truly come back, but echoed feelings both warm and cold associated with the place as if they had been there before resonated somewhere inside of them.

"What's wrong?" Anya asked worriedly, though not as if she was not surprised, "You look like you've seen a ghost."

Looking at the rear view monitor, she caught a glimpse of what gave Yew so much anguish. She too recognized the place, from a past both distant and not.

"It's… that place… no it can't be," they denied, eyes closed.

However, when they opened their eyes again, whatever was thought to have been seen was not there again. The image of a violet and black, crystalline, avian-drake with many heads had faded from Yew's mind and left only a cancerous dread.

"That's impossible…" Yew said in disbelief.

"What did you see?"

"I, I thought I saw the past given form, my past."

"Your past?" She knew exactly what this meant. It had started again. She felt as though she could never be surprised now. In reality, everything started long, long ago. This is merely another replay of the same broken and chipped vinyl.

At that exchange, a white light appeared in front of them. Emanating from the heavens, it beamed down into a cylindrical or polar form, and then it struck out to them like iridescent lightning. The white light pierced the KLF, then it spread all over it, consuming it like a hungry snake, slowly and violently. The glass monitors and other devices on the KLF's control panel cracked and shut off, as the machine breathed its last.

Somehow, when both Yew and Anya woke, they noticed that they were somehow still alive. Their bodies had been restored somewhat, as if nourished from the eldritch light. Leaving the now broken machine, they would see that the KLF had had been transported right next to a large pond at the end of a large river. It looked beautiful, sparkling under the sun like a sea of jewels. As if by a divine intervention, the water was the clearest they could have ever dreamed of. The nearly transparent liquid revealed its bounty, fishes and frogs and who knew what else, all swimming peacefully under the surface. The thirsty adolescents took to it like ravenous animals, putting their full heads under water, wiping their faces, and letting the cool liquid embrace them. Anya, her grim acknowledgment of their situation subsided for the moment, playfully splashed water at Yew, who did not understand why but retaliated in kind. The two played in the water like small children, overjoyed at this semblance of hope. Halfway submerged, the two embraced each other. Yew cried into Anya's chest, relieved that they weren't fated to die, relived that they were allowed to remain alive, together.

At The Same Time

Elsewhere in the Worlde

A young woman with coral pink hair and violet eyes awoke once again, this time to a sea of silence offered by her domain. She had spent a week in this dingy place, this unknown, dimly lit location with the remains of human presence in offices, machinery, words, and structures. Her ability to read the words left behind by humanity gradually appeared as if they were a lingering memory waiting to reappear in her mind, though she could not recall where she had learned their words. During that week surviving in the ruined husk of a once busy place, she had learned it was a former trapar mine control and rest center. Once she had found the kitchen with stores of food still within date and the generator which still functioned, she wasted no time in making the abandoned mine her little slice of paradise. No longer was she cold now that the climate control and heater warmed the many rooms of the underground edifice. No longer did she bare her body against the elements as she took claim to a remaining, baggy uniform of an old miner, solid with pale greyish green with bright reflective green highlights.

Eating a portion of heated tinned ravioli whilst sitting on the sofa she had made her throne in the dingy office of a person once called Presely, she relished all the flavour she could from her meal. She had never had anything quite so tasty before. Granted, she couldn't say she could remember having quite eaten anything before. Once she had finished the soggy pasta that made the main course of her miniscule feast, she tore open two packets of lightly salted saltines, which held two apiece. Using one, she scooped up the leftover tomato sauce from the tin. Finishing her broken fast, she regretted not eating more. While she was satisfied with her meal, she had recently learned that she liked eating. Quite a lot in fact, but decided rather smartly that she knew not how long she would be staying in this gloomspire location and that she should conserve her stores until she did.

Besides, try as she might, the eating only satisfied her biological need to eat. It did nothing to ease the hunger she felt in her soul for companionship. Loneliness had been gnawing at her as much as her starvation did. She passed the time reading, improving her ability and knowledge of man's tongue by reading their leftover tomes and records. She had tired of reading mining logs and shift records and names. Once she had found a book, a children's book about a bear and his friends in a hundred acre forest, and treasured it even more so than her food cache. She had read it over and over in the time she spent here. As if there was much else to do anyway but eat and read. She refused to leave the office, finding solace in the artifices of man rather than whatever lay lurking in the scub coral's embrace outside. Still, she had read that book over a hundred times now, to where she could consider them as real to herself as she was. Her only friends here. But this too did not satisfy her loneliness. It was expanding.

Today she decided to rummage through the belongings in the office desks. Before she felt somewhat strange about breaking into them, loathing in wanting to invade the private spaces of the people who once inhabited these cubicles. However, the combination of the boredom, loneliness, and the rationalisation that she had already done so with the claiming of the uniform and sofa changed her mind easily. They had been locked, but with enough motivation, and the use of a rather heavy stapler and hard pair of scissors, those precious vaults had betrayed their contents. The first desk yielded nothing of interest but expired chocolate candies and a pack of playing cards. She was skeptical about the candies' edibility, and she knew not how to play any of the games for the cards. Yet she found them appealing. The candies had wonderful shapes, one was in the shape of a rotund, snow white person. Another was designed to be an upside J, she believed, striped with red and white. Another desk held a notepad, pens, and a pair of new gloves. She took the gloves handily, a perfect fit. She took a glance at the notepad, it was more mining related information. Well, except the last and most recently dated page, which dated to nearly 17 years ago.

It was scrawled with, "We found something. A young g…". The rest had been eating away at or torn off. This put the girl off in a bad ways.

"Found what?" she thought irritably.

The last desk yielded only one item, a carton gift box. Strangely, it looked far newer than all the other items in the compound combined. Not eaten away by moths or insects like any of the unprotected cloths or papers, no dust like any of the other idle items. It seemed to repel time itself. Curiously, she opened it. In it was a photograph of a family. A young man with pale white skin, coal coloured short hair with a weak but genuine smile, a young woman with tan skin and warm face holding a young babe in her arms. The Girl could feel a tear well up within, and a dread of familiarity appeared. She shoved the image back in the gift box. For a second, there was a faint of a memory, suggesting that she knew them.

"No, I don't know them. You don't remember anything!" A voice, was it even her voice, said in the back of her head.

In truth, she didn't know them. At all. But she felt as though she did. How, she could not rationalize it. A similar feeling occurred to her sometime ago. Hours, days, weeks? She could not say when exactly. Time had lost all meaning to her during her stay there. All she knew is that for a brief moment, a momentary flash of a figure of enmity surged within her. As if an old foe had been nearby. She could not sleep for the remainder of that period.

"Someone please, find me!" She pleaded to herself.

But no one would hear it.

A Different Day

The Oasis

Yew sat in the cockpit, trying to get the Monsoon-o to move, but it would not respond. Besides the lack of power in the machine, the archetype itself was unresponsive, and they could not sense it. They wondered if it was sleeping, resting from the miracles it performed for them and Anya.

Speaking of Anya, she was bathing in the pond. They wanted to give her a sort of gift. Yew had found a small shell, pretty in a white-and-pink blended colour. They did not know why they wanted to give it to her, but something inside Yew thought that if they did, she would feel happy. Or, at the very least, appreciate the colour. Their cheeks turned to a similar shade as the shell as the thought became heavy in the mind.

Interrupting their adolescent moment, a pang of hunger brought him to reality. They had satisfied their thirst with this pond, but neither of them knew how to catch or prepare game. They had some luck in catching frogs before, but not so much in the capture of fish. It was not a convenient situation, but they were beginning to put flesh on their once emaciated forms. If the two attempted to follow the river connected to the pond, they could possibly find another town or city, ruined or not, with food.

Yew took a look toward the pond and saw Anya wading in the water and reasoned that she must be enjoying her bath due to being there so long. They wanted to bathe as well; knowing that they were grimy and sweaty from having only the pilot's suit to wear for weeks on end. She had taken it from Yew, telling them that she would clean it for later use. Yew thought that perhaps that is what she was doing. They wanted to be clean. However, Yew was not quite sure how to do so. They had never thought to have needed to bathe before, not having noticed the smell they gave off until Anya had mentioned her desire to clean herself. It was… unpleasant to the senses. All at once, the olfacular toll of the stress and the panic of the last four or so weeks became apparent to the child. Looking for an example, Yew looked toward Anya, to see what she did to bathe.

They were unable to fully understand by watching her, the sight confused the child so, drought with confusion, and a strange, panicky feeling. She would dive under the water, come up for air, and then shrug the water off. They weren't even sure that she was still bathing. Then Yew noticed her staring back, her violet eyes piercing through their soul. Yew was now suddenly afraid but did not know why. It was the same fear they felt when they first locked eyes, when they first met her, when she freed them from their icy prison. Yew was afraid of losing her.

She made a gesture with her arm, extending towards them and pulling back in a wading movement. Yew broke out of their worry with a puzzled look, not knowing what it meant. Did she want them to go over to where she was, or to look away? And why would she make that gesture.

Anya realized that Yew didn't understand what she wanted, and wouldn't get off the KLF just inviting them over with just their arm..

"Yew, come here!" she called sweetly.

Yew, now understanding what she wanted, gave a few gentle pats to the KLF, and jumped out of the cockpit, and off the machine. Their shoulder-length violet hair swayed just the tiniest bit as they walked towards the pond, not more than 30 feet away, and stopped at the small shore.

"Why were you staring at me?" Anya asked calmly.

"Why?" Yew pondered the response for a short while, then initially stammered out, "Well, I-I was curious as to what bathing was, r-really… I did not know what you meant by bathing. I do not know what that is yet. So, I wanted to learn by your example, but I guess I did not learn anything at all."

"Oh, that's all? Not curious about anything else at all?" Anya said a little disappointedly and then her cheeks began to take on a rosier complexion after she finished that first sentence, "Well, by looking at me, it wouldn't help you much. When I said I was going to take a bath, I hadn't realised that there wasn't any soap or shampoo to wash myself with, I… uh… I, well I tried to wash myself as best I could, and eventually decided to just play, around, in, the water."

She said so with almost a childish demeanour, evidently embarrassed having been caught wading in the water so girlishly.

"Oh, so you were not bathing?" Yew said disappointed as well, and their cheeks also becoming rosier," I want to know how to bathe."

These words came out sheepishly, and Anya began to giggle, smiling. Yew was confused, and felt slightly awkward, yet did not know how to put it into words.

"Did I say something strange?"

"Yes, yes you did. A little, well, normal for you I suppose. But don't worry about it," she giggled out, and then began composing herself, "Sometimes I forget just how new you must feel, how confused you must get. You'll probably have a lot of questions about things along the journey we'll take together. Well, I did promise you that I'd teach you about being human, about being what I once was."

She stood up, revealing the water to only go up to where her belly button was. The water dripped off her pale blue hair and onto her tan and porcelain body, making it shine like a distant star. She walked towards them, the water line lowering and revealing more of her nearly celestial shape. She stopped a few feet away, and held out her hand, wanting Yew to take it.

Somewhere deep inside themself, perhaps in their chest, a budding and unknown feeling attacked Yew, feeling it would consume their form. Yew did not recognize this feeling at all. It felt strange, and yet also slightly familiar. There was a warmth in it, and they wished to be in that warmth forever.

"Come, take my hand", she said and smiled sincerely, whatever sadness there was unrecognisable to Yew, "I'll teach you a great many things, this will just have to be one of those things."

Yew moved their right arm, and took her hand, but still felt a new "something". A feeling that made them feel reluctant to take her hand. A ghostly regret, an imprint of past or future mistakes, Yew could not know which. She guided them a little further, to a point where they could still sit down, and the water would not reach more than navels. She had Yew sit in front of her, facing away.

"If we had some soap, this is where I would begin washing your back," she said tenderly as she cupped water above thier back and then released it so that it would flow against the pale skin, "to wash yourself, you would take some soap and rub it, using your hands, on every part of your body to cleanse yourself of the filth you have gathered up throughout the day."

"I see," Yew said, thankful that she could not see their reddening face.

"But since we don't have any on us, it is a little harder and less effective," she said as she began rubbing from Yew's shoulders down toward their arms, "but nonetheless, we have to work with what we are given with."

She began cupping water again in her hands, this time pouring it over Yew's head so that all of their long, magenta hair was soaked.

"If we had some shampoo, you would use it to scrub your hair," she explained as her thin and tender fingers ran through their hair, "the purpose? To get all the dirt and sweat out, and to leave your hair smelling like strawberries, since that is what your hair colour sometimes reminds me of."

She was teasing them a bit, shaking Yew's hair slightly. Yew was more concerned of what a strawberry was to notice they were blushing profusely. However, that would not be the end of it. She then put her arms around their shoulders and chest, and pulled them closer from behind, so that her chest was pressed against their back. At this point, Yew's insides felt as if they were going to explode from that unknown feeling. They weren't sure if it was happiness, fear, or something else, perhaps it was some concoction of the three. They weren't sure what to call this feeling, but an image came to mind. A very solid image of a plain black book, whose pages were all filled with tiny drawings of caricature hearts.

At this moment, several sky-fish landed on the run-a-down KLF, the Compac Drive inside the KLF began to glow pink, and a violet heart began to shine from the device in repeated intervals. This was the machine's secret work, its last emergency signal sent out to who knows where and who knows whom. Its mission complete and it's time for final rest earned. What sounded like a soft, long breathe came from the machine. The signal broadcast continued, but it was softer, like a dying heartbeat. The machine's only regret, that it could not stay with her love much longer than a month or so. Her death, her affections, unknown to the once frozen child. She preferred it this way. She could not bear to see Yew's grieving face.

While the machine and her love lay there dying, what appeared to be a new love reincarnated in the everspring pool the two sat in.

"Anya," Yew said in a barely audible voice.

"Yes?"

"What is this feeling, that is swelling inside of me?"

"Do you know what love is?" she asked.

"Love?"

She did not respond, and they did not push any further. But Yew thought they had an idea of what "love" meant. So, the two of them stayed together like that, holding each other, until the water became too cold.

TRACK E END