We live in the old chaos of the Sun. Truth is, it wanted to cave in.
What is humanity? Strip away the ability to speak, to form words with even your hands and any sense of culture. Is it really all it's thought to be, or is there something buried deep inside the mind of a mortal being that has been long forgotten by the seeds of depression that has grown into the postmodern era of posthumous thoughts?
She wasn't really a she. She didn't know what she was, nor who she was. She knew only cause and effect, action and reaction, pain and boredom. Was she truly alive to those that saw her as she appeared from a portal in the moonlit streets of Outworld's city beyond the Coliseum? Were they human?
She scanned the skies for moments with eyes that couldn't trivialize the sight of the purple that stretched like arms and grasped the massive moon in a warm embrace. He held that moon tight, snug, and the clouds beneath it pillowed the weight so that it might not fall down upon her and the city around her.
She had no words no speech and no thoughts that could understand or formulate a meaning behind what she saw. She could only stare, just as the rats that crossed her path in tattered clothes, ragged they come and jagged their swill as ale spilled at her feet and suddenly the smell of the world around he passed through the cloth that masked her deformed figure.
The city had far greater scents that overwhelmed her so she tried to stop that cold involuntarily inhalation, but soon she'd need to breath and absorbed it all over again. What she was used to was the smell of rust, sweat, her own body soured in the damp caverns of Quan Chi's lair, and the piss and filth she spewed in a bucket left for her in the corner of her cell.
This was so much more.
This was too much more.
As her senses focused and her eyes scanned around her, she noticed a few of the beings around her began to stare. there were drips of a darkened liquid that began to stain the stone and earthen street. It reminded her of action and reaction. She could understand Quan Chi, and was taught enough words to understand him, but never to speak it. She knew she had to get this to the woman named Kitana, or else she would possibly never see this sky again, smell these rich odors.
There was a selection of alleys to choose and she chose the thinnest and wiriest of them all to her immediate left. It was dark and connected to several hovels that stretched like a beehive through jagged lines across the city's slum quarter until she hit a dead end.
Here, her new cell away from cell, she would see a small widescreen view of the sky straight above and rest on a cold, broken crate. Beneath her, she found a puddle once flat as she stared at it for a moment to see the moon so small in its reflection, suddenly pinched.
Pinch.
Pinch!
Little ripples shivered across the small, stagnant puddle and her eyes widened like the sky that bled down as though those purple arms had been cut by the sharp edges of the clouds.
The puddle danced and her clothes began to soak and the first taste of clean water stained her lips with empathy. Her tender flesh pursed and stretched, the teeth scraped against one another and dared pull down the blue cloth mask to seek the taste of this rich, clear blood.
Just as it came, the rain swept across the streets and cleaned it as it dragged its wet feet across the land of all the dirt and scum the beings that inhabited this city dropped onto it. The puddle no longer danced and she looked again, to see the moon, to see the sky reflected, but upon closer inspection, could only see teeth that crept out from scars that reached past her full lips.
She stretched her maw wide and the sight of those Tarkatan fangs struck her. She had felt them many times with her fingers, her tongue, the meat Quan Chi would throw in her face, but she had never seen them.
She felt a strange urge to cover them with her hand, to see the eyes and bridge of her nose without the scars of her origin, then she raised her hand to cover her eyes, with only the slightest crack to peer through.
If she could form words, she might have said that the monster below those beautiful eyes looked more like who she felt she was, because a being such as her could never be like those strange beings that inhabited this city.
She had no concept of monstrosity, no understanding of beauty or what normal really was, but she didn't think of herself as one of the people she saw on the streets, nor even like Quan Chi, the only person she had known to this point.
The night was spent in this solitude, eyes to the sky, and down the barrel of the alley she stuffed herself into.
As the harsh light of day slapped itself across the face she reached for the warm flesh and then hid herself from its judgmental gaze. Though the sun was warm and energized her, it's hateful glare pushed her off that crate and she stretched out her free hand to feel the cracks and splinters of the wood and adobe walls as they guided her down the alley, the box in the other arm.
A great shadow cast down at her as four arms formed a barrier at the edge of the alley way and startled her. Its dark bluish green flesh stretched up like a tree toward fangs that parted and grinned at her. A Naknada, though she didn't know what it was, nor that it was likely in league with Quan Chi, she panicked and tried to rush through to the left.
The hulking mass grabbed her and pushed her back. She was just an animal to it and the Naknada grabbed her shoulders and pinned her to the wall with two arms, the others grabbed her hair and covered her mouth.
"Keep this on, you filth." It spoke, some of the words she could understand, but she was in full panic mode. Quan Chi had given her a mission and this creature now threatened that.
Its fingers tasted like metal and salt and so like with any piece of meat, she stretched her maw wider than he had anticipated and clenched down the full width of his hand. Like a shark she jerked her jaw left and right and with her teeth lodged deep in this tender flesh, she could feel the crack of bones and the squelching pop of tendons before a strike knocked her to her knees.
"Animal!" It screamed.
She pulled herself up and her back aligned with the wall, she was at level with his hips and gazed up as he flicked blood from that injured hand in a gesture of pain. Flesh dangled from it like meat over a caged predator. The taste of his blood soaked under her tongue, seeped down her throat, and filled her nostrils with desire for more and much like a shark, she launched straight up and bit into his lower left forearm.
Clenched tight, she would tear his flesh jagged and devour it if she had her way, but he used his free arms to pry her mouth open and rip strands of hair from her head in a wadded bunch within a tightened fist to shove her into the dirt.
Before she could act, he was on top of her. Like a spider, the Naknada pressed his body on and over her. those seemingly useless little arms behind his back reached over like antennae to feel her cheeks and curve the two largest fingers between the edge of her maw and pulls them further apart.
"Can't even use you for pleasure." It remarked, but the meaning fell blank on her, she was not a desirable creature, nor understood the concept.
She tried to bite as he stretched her lips apart, wide enough for the flesh to crack and her own blood to mix with his in her mouth. Her tears fell sideways to pool like the puddle that pinched with each fallen drop.
She felt torture for the first time. Quan Chi would beat her, but she thought that was normal. The pain he caused appeared to her in the form of bruises and welts. It was quick and it was to anger her, to make her lust for the meat he would then give her for having taken the beating. This was a far different kind of pain. Quan Chi may have reveled in it, but she did not know that. To her it was feeding time, but this Naknada visibly reveled as she suffered.
Two scrawny, bony hands stretched her lips apart until she felt like that half of her face would split and then its own teeth and tongue bit and stretched across the human features. The smell of his breath and the feel of his saliva that muddied the river of her tears was too much to bare. She couldn't move, couldn't form words, couldn't understand anything of what this creature intended. It tasted her fear and loved every moment of it.
Like a spider that plucked the string of its web to bounce the trapped fly before it's death, he toyed with her and tried to find her threshold were the scar of her maw would crack and form new ones.
The Naknada's tongue traced down her wet curves until it peeled open her human lips and reached under between teeth to taste inside of her, the blood that spilled down her throat and the screams that he swallowed with vigor. The taste of her breath, the pleasure of her voice stretched across the sky like a body on pulled apart by opposite ropes, he began to bulge and pressed it against her, just as his neck began to bulge as a spear pressed through it. It jerked his head up and his maw widened, fingers slacked, and her teeth clenched.
There was no concept of time she could trace from when her maw was pried from the lifeless face of that vile creature. She had devoured flesh and veins, muscle and cracked through bone before the sudden taste of oxygen rushed her maw like wind over the river of blood down her throat. The head was thrown and above her a man in simple earth tone clothing, much like the other peasants she had seen. His staff had a pointed end and the blood of the Naknada dripped down its length, as his hand dipped down to help her.
She couldn't understand this gesture and went in for the bite, but he recoiled and struck her with the butt end of the spear.
Darkness swallowed the harsh light of day and the lull of conscious escaped her.