What does it mean to live? To be alive? To reach your purpose in life, whatever that may be? Is purpose something you never touch until the moment your eyes close for the last time, or is it something you have realized within your lifetime?
There is no meaning to life. No inherent purpose that beckons us beyond our carnal desires and needs. No higher power to dictate our paths in the roads we're forced down.
Some of us are really born to die.
If she could fathom the meaning of life, purpose of the human soul, or even the reason to be alive, she couldn't tell you, she had no words.
Silent thoughts without written language plagued her mind as her eyes were pierced by candlelight. A small droplet of wax smacked her cheek and the flame withdrew toward a small wooden table barely big enough to be called one. Next to the flame sat a man, a peasant of flea-bitten bottoms of the city beyond the Palace. She couldn't understand status, she had no status, but he didn't look like Quan Chi, the Naknada, or some of the people, he was clean, but his clothes were worn and too old to wear. Likely to be his only set of clothes, much as she only had what Quan Chi had given her to imitate a woman she never knew.
"Please, get dressed when you're awake, I'll wait outside." He had his back toward her and opened the old wooden door to greet the moon she could barely see peer through the cloth covered window. "I've gotten clothes for you. Go ahead."
She couldn't quite understand what he meant by his words and gesture. Next to her was a stool with pink clothing, new and most likely expensive for a peasant. A shirt, long skirt, even black peasant boots that would meet her knees at the edge.
Beneath two old blankets that covered her on a tiny wooden bad with a worn fabric mat she was completely naked, save for bandages that covered where the Naknada has cut and scraped through flesh. There were no other markings beside the bruises from battle, but she couldn't grasp that.
She tore the blankets from her flesh and jolted to her feet.
The gift was missing!
He could hear the rustle and panic in the room, but did not enter. He stood at the window, back to it and responded as she began to tear the hovel apart for it.
"Under the bed."
She dropped to her knees and with her Tarkatan strength, lifted the side near clean up the whole length of her arm and found the burlap sack and box were unopened and tucked neatly under the bed.
"Are you dressed?" She didn't understand modesty and as he entered to find her in full form, looked into her eyes to find an animal had entered his home. His flesh reddened, but his eyes pierced hers like a father to a child unable to clean their space. "Here."
The man, in his early thirties, at least in appearance, looked much different to Quan Chi to her. His flesh was tanned from work in the sun, and had short hair with grey streaks that indicated a hard life. He wore cloth wraps around his wrists and hands, beige shirt and breeches and low ankle shoes that all needed to be replaced years ago.
He passed her with little glance at her bare form to pick up the shirt and handed it to her.
"Put this on. Then the pants, then the boots. I'll get you some food."
This was very different from how she had experienced human interaction to this point. Quan Chi had beaten her as often as he could. He was not strong and usually left mild bruises, but the power he held and the magic he utilized to increase his damage output on her flesh was enough to rival the Naknada.
This man was taller than her, however tall she was, she wasn't really sure. She was just slightly shorter than Quan Chi, and vastly shorter than the Naknada that had attacked her.
"Maybe this will begin to make things right." He re-entered and she still hadn't put the shirt on.
He assisted her as he would his own child. Clearly she was not from Outworld, or much of any world if this woman did not know how to put on her own clothes.
On that table, warmed by the candle, were two small bowls of bone broth. Once she was comfortably dressed for him to get a good look at her, he remarked about the scars at her cheeks, the teeth reminiscent of the Tarkatan bloodline, and offered her a bowl.
"I've not seen anything like you before. Humans don't normally breed with the Tarkatans."
She didn't know how to respond, even if she could. Her lips curled and spilled the soup through those jagged fangs until he offered the ladle.
"Who are you?"
She shook her head in a gesture he construed as a 'no'.
"No name?"
What a strange sight to find a young woman nearly into adulthood with no voice, no language, no name, no history. It simply didn't exist in his world, at least in Outworld and Edenia. Everyone had an identity, even if it was scum, homeless, filth, thief, king, queen, Goddess. Everyone was someone, or something.
She tried to imitate his speech. To ask who he was, but it was garbled, her voice rolled violently over the crags of her teeth. He understood.
"I'm nobody. These days." He gave himself a smirk after the last sip of broth. "Call me whatever you want. I fought in the war to liberate Outworld from Shao Kahn." He added as she noticed the displaced weapons scattered among them from her previous panic. "I'm going to teach you to fight. You have raw strength, but clearly lack focus. Identity."
Near him, a single-handed sword had been displaced and he picked it up, point first, and held it out for her.
"You can keep it. You'll need it if the Naknada are after you."
As she gripped the handle and glanced down the flat of the blade, she had a strange urge to pierce it through him, but that impulse was squashed and her eyes closed tight as the blade fell from her hands. She could taste the blood on the floor that would spill from him, that she would tear out of his chest with her bare teeth.
"We'll start slow then. Hand-to-hand. Tomorrow morning." He could see the animal in her eyes. This was not a normal woman, but he was not a simple peasant.