====
Chapter Three
====
This time as Minako opened her eyes, it only took a few seconds before her blurry vision cleared. She found herself staring at what seemed to be a strange, makeshift cloth ceiling. She gradually became aware of a soft beeping noise, a bulky blanket that weighed her extremities down, and a foreign plastic tube in her nose.
Minako blinked heavily, and then turned her head to the side. Her neck felt stiff and rigid, but it did in fact turn on command. She looked all around the room, and realized that she was in some sort of tent designed for medical attention. There were tons of machines and tubes, as well as cabinets stocked full of small pill bottles, syringes, and the like. There was a flap at the front of the tent that was pulled over, and next to it was a cart stacked messily with gauze, bandages, and an assortment of liquids and boxes that she could not make out.
She inhaled deeply, listening to the heart monitor pick up its pace. She wiggled her nose, realizing how weird the plastic tube felt in her nostrils. Slowly Minako was able to twist her arm out from under the covers, and saw that an IV was taped into the crook of her elbow.
"Don't worry, it's the plastic kind of needle. You can bend your elbow if you want," came a deep voice suddenly. Minako rolled her head in that direction again and saw a large male figure standing in the doorway. The sunlight pouring in from behind him was terrifically blinding, and she had to squint just to be able to see him. He stepped into the room, and the tent's flap fell back into place behind him.
"You've been asleep for nearly four days, my dear. Glad you're back with us now," the man repeated, as he came up the side of her bed. He stooped and checked on the machine that recorded her vitals, and quickly made a few notes on a clipboard on top of it.
"How are you feeling?"
Minako stared up at him, trying to figure out if she knew him. He was a relatively tall young man with light brown hair, and a white lab coat. He seemed to have a kind enough face too, with his gentle green eyes and bright smile. And of course, obviously, he was a doctor.
"F-fine." she croaked, her voice squeaking gently. The doctor regarded her with a raised brow.
"Ok. like crap," she corrected herself, and broke into a weak smile. The doctor laughed, brushing some of his hair out of his face.
"That certainly works." He pulled out a chair, and sat down by her bedside. "You know, you're absolutely a miracle case," he said, nudging the thin glasses on the bridge of his nose. Minako just continued to look at him, waiting for an explanation. She knew that she needed quite a lot of them.
"When you woke up the first time, you had been in the morgue tent for nearly two days. When we found you out there in that crater, we were quite sure that you were dead - HAD been dead for a few hours already," he commented gently, and then turned to pick up a tiny plastic bag. Inside of it was a little white tag and string. Minako glanced at it, feeling her heart skip a beat.
"This, of course was your toe tag. You didn't have a pulse, and your pupils were completely unresponsive. We were actually quite certain that you were deceased. So imagine our surprise when we start hearing noises in the morgue tent, and come in to find you fumbling about on the floor. You scared the guard on duty near to death," he smiled at her, and placed the plastic bag in her open hand.
"We don't know how you did it, but after you woke up you were in critical condition, and we were able to bring you back."
Minako nodded, remembering the confusion of that entire moment: the bright lights, the rough hands grabbing her, being unable to walk, and feeling so dry and cracked. She wondered to herself just what had happened. as everything in the recent past was just a blur to her.
"Now of course I don't want to overload you with information, so I'll let you rest for awhile. In the meantime though, can you tell me your name? The whole camp has been calling you Zombie Girl for the past week. It's not flattering of course, but it unfortunately was the wittiest name they could come up with," the doctor recalled with a grin.
Minako somehow did not find this to be amusing, but decided not to comment.
"M-my name is A-aino Minako," she finally got out. The doctor nodded and scribbled it down on a clipboard. He turned it around and held it in front of Minako's face.
"Is this the correct spelling?" he asked. Minako squinted at the kanji that had been scribbled at the top of the record sheet. She blinked though, when she realized that she did not recognize it.
"Uh." she commented, blinking and squinting again. Were these some obscure high-level kanji that she had never seen before? She knew she hadn't been the brightest student in the school, but surely there wasn't a way to spell her name that she didn't know about. "Err. how exactly did you spell it?" she croaked gently, looking up at the doctor with bewildered eyes. The doctor frowned, and looked at the clipboard again to make sure he hadn't messed up.
"You do read Japanese, right?" he asked, readjusting his glasses. "I know you speak it, obviously. we heard you mumbling phrases in Japanese when we fist put you in intensive care."
"O-of course I read it. I just. don't recognize that," she answered, feeling just as confused as she did before. The doctor looked alarmed, and looked at the clipboard again.
"Hmm," he said, scribbling more information onto the clipboard. "Well, you go ahead and get some rest. I'll be back to check in on you later." And with that, he replaced the clipboard on top of the heart monitor, checked the level of her IV, and left the tent. Minako was left to ponder her situation, and try to scrape together the remnants of memories that she'd had recently. It was all so much that she caused herself a headache. She decided then to just go back to staring at the tent's ceiling. At least it made sense.
====
Minako grimaced at the plate of food in front of her. She was sitting fully upright in bed, and had a tray of what the doctor called "nourishment for sick bodies" on her lap.
More like nourishment for people who have no taste, she thought to herself with a frown. She purposely held her nose as she scooped some of the yellowish moosh into her mouth with a spoon.
She had been steadily recovering for the past few days, and was quickly beginning to feel like her old self again. She had become friendlier to the doctors and nurses that came in and out of her tent, and had quite nearly turned back into the social butterfly that she was before.
Before what? She suddenly thought to herself. She swallowed the gross lump of food thickly, letting her spoon arm fall to her side. She still wasn't sure of what had happened to her. She glanced down at the cast that she wore on her left arm and sighed.
Of course she had learned quite a lot from her doctor in the past few days. She knew that his name was Doctor White, and that he was a native English speaker. He was one of the only ones at this camp that was literate in and able to speak Japanese as well, and so it made her communications very limited. She was fluent in English too, of course, but when she had tried to speak to him, she found that he kept using words that she did not understand.
That confused her pretty well, and to make it worse, every time he spoke to her in Japanese, he would sprinkle in strange words, verbs, and tenses that she couldn't quite grasp. He would continuously write down words in kanji to see if she recognized them. Of course when she couldn't, he would "hmm" to himself again and scribble something on his clipboard. Minako had become quite fed up with the whole thing.
She knew that she was at a semi-permanent camp that was used for research. Dr. White kept calling it a "Surface Station," and waited to see her reaction. When she just looked at him blankly, he would again "hmm" to himself and scribble on his clipboard. Minako wished desperately that she could read what he was writing because she had a feeling that it would help answer some of her questions.
She shoved another spoonful of lumpy mash into her mouth, grumbling to herself about her situation. When are they gonna get some decent food, anyway? She wondered to herself. You know, like chocolate parfaits, and curry.
Her thoughts were cut short as she accidentally bumped her spoon arm against the bed's rails. The sensation produced burned so badly that she nearly dropped her spoon. She grunted, checking on her arm. The skin was still strawberry red and peeling like crazy. She shook her head, beginning to feel more agitated.
The doctor had explained to her that she had horrific sun poisoning from being out in that crater completely naked for as long as she had been. She also had two broken ribs, a broken arm, and a concussion to boot. If only I could figure out just what the hell happened to me, she thought again, bitterly. She couldn't recall where she had been or what she had been doing prior to waking up in the morgue tent a week ago. The time between the defeat of Chaos and the present was a total blank in her mind, and it really was beginning to cause her large amounts of stress. She couldn't understand the past, and she certainly couldn't understand what was going on now. She quickly pushed her tray of food away, setting her spoon inside of it. She was tired of all the pain that her body felt, she was tired of the constant headaches she had, tired of not understanding what was going on, and tired of being confined to this bed in the same stinky hospital gown day in and day out.
Minako decided quickly, and pushed back the covers on her bed. She then went to swing her legs, and found that they responded rather numbly. She grunted, and used her arms to help her hoist one leg up over the bed railing. She quickly got the other to follow, and used her body weight to get the rest of the way over the railing. She flopped to the floor with a smack, effectively tearing the IV from her right arm. Minako bit her lip until it bled to keep herself from screaming in pain from all the movement on her injuries. She gasped, taking in air. She quickly squirmed towards the side of the tent, using her arms and her half-working legs. The pain was searing as the canvas floor of the tent scraped against her sun burn, but she fought back the tears and kept heading for the wall. I'll make it, she thought to herself as she crawled to the edge of the tent. She sidled up next to it, and gently lifted it up an inch to peek out underneath.
The first thing she encountered was a face full of reddish brown dirt. It had a charred taste, and was seemed to retain an almost uncomfortable amount of heat in it. She coughed it out, and squinted into the sunny air. All that she could see around her were more tents, and a lot more dirt. She guessed that she was in a desert of some sort, and wondered how that possible since she didn't know of any deserts in Japan. She glanced to either side, checking to see if anyone was coming. She began crawling out underneath of the tent, straining with her atrophied leg muscles. Her messy and oily blonde hair dragged along on the ground with her, picking up tons of dirt along the way. She had just gotten her feet out from under the tent when she heard a loud siren pierce into the air.
"Crap," she spat, trying to hustle herself along faster. "I'm busted!" She was quickly corrected however, as she heard a rumbling sound in the distance. Minako paused, feeling the vibrations tremble their way up her arms. Muffled sounds of human yells sounded throughout the camp, followed by far away strange mechanical clicking and whirring. Minako's brow furrowed, wondering just what the hell was going on. Using her non-broken arm as leverage, she slowly flipped herself onto her back. She gasped as she stared at the sky, shaken to the core. Instead of the normal blue sunny daytime she was used to, she found herself staring at an inky black sky sprinkled with glittering stars. But it wasn't nighttime. everything was too bright for that! Plus, the sun itself was burning down from just overhead. Minako's head began to pound, and she felt the familiar wash of confusion overtake her.
Her distress was cut short though, as a huge explosion rocked the camp from overhead. She screamed and covered her face as a brilliant blue flash went off in the sky, and the resounding boom from it shook her roughly. It was rapidly followed by an additional one.
"What the HELL?!" she squealed, her baby blue eyes wide with panic. She flipped herself back over onto her stomach, covering her head with her arms. She panted heavily, her mind racing fast enough to match her pulse. It was then that the rumbling sound resurfaced in the current cacophony, and she peeked out under from her arm to her right. Her jaw nearly hit the ground as she saw a colossal two-legged lizard that bore a striking resemblance to a tyrannosaurus rex moving at full tilt straight towards her, shaking the ground like an earthquake in the process. She froze, watching it in terror. It was at least two stories high, and had bright orange markings all the way up and down its sides and tail. Its teeth were massive, and so were the claws on its feet that were only a few hundred yards away from her. It was also closing in with an unbelievably alarming rate.
Her heart knocked on her ribcage so hard it nearly hurt, and she realized that she needed to move NOW or she would be crushed. She scrabbled at the dirt in a panic, trying to move in a direction-any direction, but was met with her weak legs and a sense of panic so overpowering that it hindered her movement. She finally just curled up into the tightest ball possible, and squeezed her eyes together fiercely. just praying for the best.
Chapter Three
====
This time as Minako opened her eyes, it only took a few seconds before her blurry vision cleared. She found herself staring at what seemed to be a strange, makeshift cloth ceiling. She gradually became aware of a soft beeping noise, a bulky blanket that weighed her extremities down, and a foreign plastic tube in her nose.
Minako blinked heavily, and then turned her head to the side. Her neck felt stiff and rigid, but it did in fact turn on command. She looked all around the room, and realized that she was in some sort of tent designed for medical attention. There were tons of machines and tubes, as well as cabinets stocked full of small pill bottles, syringes, and the like. There was a flap at the front of the tent that was pulled over, and next to it was a cart stacked messily with gauze, bandages, and an assortment of liquids and boxes that she could not make out.
She inhaled deeply, listening to the heart monitor pick up its pace. She wiggled her nose, realizing how weird the plastic tube felt in her nostrils. Slowly Minako was able to twist her arm out from under the covers, and saw that an IV was taped into the crook of her elbow.
"Don't worry, it's the plastic kind of needle. You can bend your elbow if you want," came a deep voice suddenly. Minako rolled her head in that direction again and saw a large male figure standing in the doorway. The sunlight pouring in from behind him was terrifically blinding, and she had to squint just to be able to see him. He stepped into the room, and the tent's flap fell back into place behind him.
"You've been asleep for nearly four days, my dear. Glad you're back with us now," the man repeated, as he came up the side of her bed. He stooped and checked on the machine that recorded her vitals, and quickly made a few notes on a clipboard on top of it.
"How are you feeling?"
Minako stared up at him, trying to figure out if she knew him. He was a relatively tall young man with light brown hair, and a white lab coat. He seemed to have a kind enough face too, with his gentle green eyes and bright smile. And of course, obviously, he was a doctor.
"F-fine." she croaked, her voice squeaking gently. The doctor regarded her with a raised brow.
"Ok. like crap," she corrected herself, and broke into a weak smile. The doctor laughed, brushing some of his hair out of his face.
"That certainly works." He pulled out a chair, and sat down by her bedside. "You know, you're absolutely a miracle case," he said, nudging the thin glasses on the bridge of his nose. Minako just continued to look at him, waiting for an explanation. She knew that she needed quite a lot of them.
"When you woke up the first time, you had been in the morgue tent for nearly two days. When we found you out there in that crater, we were quite sure that you were dead - HAD been dead for a few hours already," he commented gently, and then turned to pick up a tiny plastic bag. Inside of it was a little white tag and string. Minako glanced at it, feeling her heart skip a beat.
"This, of course was your toe tag. You didn't have a pulse, and your pupils were completely unresponsive. We were actually quite certain that you were deceased. So imagine our surprise when we start hearing noises in the morgue tent, and come in to find you fumbling about on the floor. You scared the guard on duty near to death," he smiled at her, and placed the plastic bag in her open hand.
"We don't know how you did it, but after you woke up you were in critical condition, and we were able to bring you back."
Minako nodded, remembering the confusion of that entire moment: the bright lights, the rough hands grabbing her, being unable to walk, and feeling so dry and cracked. She wondered to herself just what had happened. as everything in the recent past was just a blur to her.
"Now of course I don't want to overload you with information, so I'll let you rest for awhile. In the meantime though, can you tell me your name? The whole camp has been calling you Zombie Girl for the past week. It's not flattering of course, but it unfortunately was the wittiest name they could come up with," the doctor recalled with a grin.
Minako somehow did not find this to be amusing, but decided not to comment.
"M-my name is A-aino Minako," she finally got out. The doctor nodded and scribbled it down on a clipboard. He turned it around and held it in front of Minako's face.
"Is this the correct spelling?" he asked. Minako squinted at the kanji that had been scribbled at the top of the record sheet. She blinked though, when she realized that she did not recognize it.
"Uh." she commented, blinking and squinting again. Were these some obscure high-level kanji that she had never seen before? She knew she hadn't been the brightest student in the school, but surely there wasn't a way to spell her name that she didn't know about. "Err. how exactly did you spell it?" she croaked gently, looking up at the doctor with bewildered eyes. The doctor frowned, and looked at the clipboard again to make sure he hadn't messed up.
"You do read Japanese, right?" he asked, readjusting his glasses. "I know you speak it, obviously. we heard you mumbling phrases in Japanese when we fist put you in intensive care."
"O-of course I read it. I just. don't recognize that," she answered, feeling just as confused as she did before. The doctor looked alarmed, and looked at the clipboard again.
"Hmm," he said, scribbling more information onto the clipboard. "Well, you go ahead and get some rest. I'll be back to check in on you later." And with that, he replaced the clipboard on top of the heart monitor, checked the level of her IV, and left the tent. Minako was left to ponder her situation, and try to scrape together the remnants of memories that she'd had recently. It was all so much that she caused herself a headache. She decided then to just go back to staring at the tent's ceiling. At least it made sense.
====
Minako grimaced at the plate of food in front of her. She was sitting fully upright in bed, and had a tray of what the doctor called "nourishment for sick bodies" on her lap.
More like nourishment for people who have no taste, she thought to herself with a frown. She purposely held her nose as she scooped some of the yellowish moosh into her mouth with a spoon.
She had been steadily recovering for the past few days, and was quickly beginning to feel like her old self again. She had become friendlier to the doctors and nurses that came in and out of her tent, and had quite nearly turned back into the social butterfly that she was before.
Before what? She suddenly thought to herself. She swallowed the gross lump of food thickly, letting her spoon arm fall to her side. She still wasn't sure of what had happened to her. She glanced down at the cast that she wore on her left arm and sighed.
Of course she had learned quite a lot from her doctor in the past few days. She knew that his name was Doctor White, and that he was a native English speaker. He was one of the only ones at this camp that was literate in and able to speak Japanese as well, and so it made her communications very limited. She was fluent in English too, of course, but when she had tried to speak to him, she found that he kept using words that she did not understand.
That confused her pretty well, and to make it worse, every time he spoke to her in Japanese, he would sprinkle in strange words, verbs, and tenses that she couldn't quite grasp. He would continuously write down words in kanji to see if she recognized them. Of course when she couldn't, he would "hmm" to himself again and scribble something on his clipboard. Minako had become quite fed up with the whole thing.
She knew that she was at a semi-permanent camp that was used for research. Dr. White kept calling it a "Surface Station," and waited to see her reaction. When she just looked at him blankly, he would again "hmm" to himself and scribble on his clipboard. Minako wished desperately that she could read what he was writing because she had a feeling that it would help answer some of her questions.
She shoved another spoonful of lumpy mash into her mouth, grumbling to herself about her situation. When are they gonna get some decent food, anyway? She wondered to herself. You know, like chocolate parfaits, and curry.
Her thoughts were cut short as she accidentally bumped her spoon arm against the bed's rails. The sensation produced burned so badly that she nearly dropped her spoon. She grunted, checking on her arm. The skin was still strawberry red and peeling like crazy. She shook her head, beginning to feel more agitated.
The doctor had explained to her that she had horrific sun poisoning from being out in that crater completely naked for as long as she had been. She also had two broken ribs, a broken arm, and a concussion to boot. If only I could figure out just what the hell happened to me, she thought again, bitterly. She couldn't recall where she had been or what she had been doing prior to waking up in the morgue tent a week ago. The time between the defeat of Chaos and the present was a total blank in her mind, and it really was beginning to cause her large amounts of stress. She couldn't understand the past, and she certainly couldn't understand what was going on now. She quickly pushed her tray of food away, setting her spoon inside of it. She was tired of all the pain that her body felt, she was tired of the constant headaches she had, tired of not understanding what was going on, and tired of being confined to this bed in the same stinky hospital gown day in and day out.
Minako decided quickly, and pushed back the covers on her bed. She then went to swing her legs, and found that they responded rather numbly. She grunted, and used her arms to help her hoist one leg up over the bed railing. She quickly got the other to follow, and used her body weight to get the rest of the way over the railing. She flopped to the floor with a smack, effectively tearing the IV from her right arm. Minako bit her lip until it bled to keep herself from screaming in pain from all the movement on her injuries. She gasped, taking in air. She quickly squirmed towards the side of the tent, using her arms and her half-working legs. The pain was searing as the canvas floor of the tent scraped against her sun burn, but she fought back the tears and kept heading for the wall. I'll make it, she thought to herself as she crawled to the edge of the tent. She sidled up next to it, and gently lifted it up an inch to peek out underneath.
The first thing she encountered was a face full of reddish brown dirt. It had a charred taste, and was seemed to retain an almost uncomfortable amount of heat in it. She coughed it out, and squinted into the sunny air. All that she could see around her were more tents, and a lot more dirt. She guessed that she was in a desert of some sort, and wondered how that possible since she didn't know of any deserts in Japan. She glanced to either side, checking to see if anyone was coming. She began crawling out underneath of the tent, straining with her atrophied leg muscles. Her messy and oily blonde hair dragged along on the ground with her, picking up tons of dirt along the way. She had just gotten her feet out from under the tent when she heard a loud siren pierce into the air.
"Crap," she spat, trying to hustle herself along faster. "I'm busted!" She was quickly corrected however, as she heard a rumbling sound in the distance. Minako paused, feeling the vibrations tremble their way up her arms. Muffled sounds of human yells sounded throughout the camp, followed by far away strange mechanical clicking and whirring. Minako's brow furrowed, wondering just what the hell was going on. Using her non-broken arm as leverage, she slowly flipped herself onto her back. She gasped as she stared at the sky, shaken to the core. Instead of the normal blue sunny daytime she was used to, she found herself staring at an inky black sky sprinkled with glittering stars. But it wasn't nighttime. everything was too bright for that! Plus, the sun itself was burning down from just overhead. Minako's head began to pound, and she felt the familiar wash of confusion overtake her.
Her distress was cut short though, as a huge explosion rocked the camp from overhead. She screamed and covered her face as a brilliant blue flash went off in the sky, and the resounding boom from it shook her roughly. It was rapidly followed by an additional one.
"What the HELL?!" she squealed, her baby blue eyes wide with panic. She flipped herself back over onto her stomach, covering her head with her arms. She panted heavily, her mind racing fast enough to match her pulse. It was then that the rumbling sound resurfaced in the current cacophony, and she peeked out under from her arm to her right. Her jaw nearly hit the ground as she saw a colossal two-legged lizard that bore a striking resemblance to a tyrannosaurus rex moving at full tilt straight towards her, shaking the ground like an earthquake in the process. She froze, watching it in terror. It was at least two stories high, and had bright orange markings all the way up and down its sides and tail. Its teeth were massive, and so were the claws on its feet that were only a few hundred yards away from her. It was also closing in with an unbelievably alarming rate.
Her heart knocked on her ribcage so hard it nearly hurt, and she realized that she needed to move NOW or she would be crushed. She scrabbled at the dirt in a panic, trying to move in a direction-any direction, but was met with her weak legs and a sense of panic so overpowering that it hindered her movement. She finally just curled up into the tightest ball possible, and squeezed her eyes together fiercely. just praying for the best.
