AnimeCrasherz: YAY! I'm glad people enjoyed the first chapter! Thanks for the kind reviews, and I'm sorry it's so late...
After many rewritings and editings, hand cramps and finger pains, I present... chapter two!
Enjoy!
"Oh, crap."
Story Now In Narrator's Point of View:
Chapter 2, COOKIE Witch
"What?" Hinata frantically crawled over beside her bodyguard, "What is it? Why, 'Oh crap'?"
The bodyguard hesitated to speak. What do I tell her? he thought. If she knew the truth... "We're dead." He didn't even flinch, saying it as casually as he could.
"Whaat!?" Dead?? Dead... It's what I've always wanted, isn't it? "What made you think... why... Oh! And all of those people, what happened to them? If.. they were all k-killed, then..." Tears stung Hinata's eyes.
"Where the hell else are you going to find a place like this?" The bodyguard kneeled down and jabbed his finger in the snow. Damn, this is one of the WORST places we could have ended up... Keep up the lie, though, "we're dead." He laughed to himself. The place they were in was far from death.
Hinata kneeled down and took a handful of snow, packing it together into a snowball, "... Disneyland?"
"Who?" he asked, licking some of the pink snow off of his finger. "Sugary..." he mumbled.
"N-nevermind..." Hinata sighed. Is this what it felt like to be dead? Falling to her knees, she took a big bite of the packed ice, letting the -surprisingly- sugary frost melt slowly.
"What are you doing?" Her bodyguard walked over to her and crouched in the snow at her knees.
"What... What are we gonna do now!? Th-This is n-nothing like the 'hell' or 'heaven' I heard a-about... Ow!" Brain freeze.
"Far from it." Her bodyguard laughed, much to her confusion. "Maybe... there might be a way out of here." He grabbed her arm by the elbow and tugged. "Come on, get up."
"Wha -hic- What's your name?" Hinata couldn't believe she'd be spending the rest of eternity with this person, in this pink netherworld. She took another bite of the yummy snowball. Were people able to taste things whent they were dead?
Her bodyguard gave her a sideways glance, evaluating her out of the corner of his eye. She was frightened, vulnerable. After stealing her form her world, the least he could do was tell her his name. "You can call me Sasuke. Just hurry up." He grabbed her wrist and pulled her along, and she felt some sticky, sugary goo drip off of her frozen fingertips.
"Wait... are we g-going?" She wiped her hands on her shirt and picked up her ancient brown book (can't forget the book), keeping a close pace behind Sasuke, stepping in the footprints he left in the snow.
"There has to be a way out of here somewhere." he looked around, as if any direction they went made a difference.
"A-and, we're just gonna have to find it...?" Hinata tripped in one of Sasuke's large footprints, and landed face-first in the snow.
"Hn." he said, waiting for her to get up.
What a gentleman.
They trudged onward, Hinata trembling and clinging to her ever-heavier book, him walking in silence and whacking away branches.
What else could we be but dead? Hinata thought to herself, her final glimmer of hope fading and dying. This place... What about the people back home, would they realize I died, and miss me? What about those passengers on the train? Those poor people!!
And... and what about everything I missed when I was alive! I'm only 13... i-isn't that a little young to die
As the questions flooded her mind, she felt trapped. She had the feeling of wanting to wake up from a conscious nightmare. Claustrophobia, blindness, anxiety... She fought off her worry with her determination to find out what happens next.
"Look." she heard Sasuke's voice, and sensed a hint of excitement and relief. "We're on the top of a hill. This will probably be a good vantage point." he pushed a few braches away, revealing a lush landscape of millions of pink pine trees.
For miles and miles there streched a tundra of pure, unblemished color. Their entire surroundings were the same pastel shade.
Hinata began to feel lightheaded and dizzy- could spirits do that? "Whoa..." she whispered.
The sky was like a heavy ceiling made of something solid like plastic, that could fall at any second. It was like being inside of a transparent seashell.
She surveyed the land, wondering if any religion had ever mentioned anything about a pink world after death... was Nirvana a land of sweet snow?
"Damn! It's empty." Sasuke's voice was flat and heavy with disappointment, "it's just pink snow for miles and miles and miles..."
Hinata felt her heart drop to her stomach, and squinted. Her eye caught something in the distance. Something not pink, but gray.
"H-hey.. Hey! It's not pink!" she pointed.
"That's..." he turned to the direction Hinata was pointing, "Smoke... life! Let's follow it, maybe it'll give us a clue on how to get out of here."
He slid down the steep slope of the hill gracefully, keeping low to the ground and using his hands to support himself. The slope was snowy and rocky, with peaks of ice and boulders jutting out. It screamed extreme danger.
Hinata, glancing down at her exposed legs beneath her knee-length white skirt, then at the rocky ice, then again at her legs, and once again at the ice, gulped down the lump in her throat. She crouched down; now or never...
This is weird... she thought bitterly, hindering away sadness. Not only am I probably dead, but now I have to spend the rest of my afterlife in this place full of sticky frozen water and rocks with this "gentleman" bodyguard of mine! No life, no plants other than those retarted christmas trees...
She continued to rant in her head as she slid. Her hands stung, and her fingertips throbbed in dull pain as they went numb. Soon, her legs began to tingle with pain, too.
"Dead", and in so much pain! What a rip-off.
At first, the rocks were large and easy to slide down on and hold on to. She slid down faster and faster as her anger overtook her head and her mind filled with poison.
It wasn't long before her hand slipped and she fell with a loosened avalanche of snow and rocks.
Sliding and tumbling down faster and faster, accelerating until she had to stand up and run down the side of the hill, she sprinted and scampered faster. Beginning to lean forward and stumble with a speed her body couldn't handle, she tripped and fell foward, landing at the base of the hill, face-first with a mouthful of snow.
Sasuke slid and hopped down gracefully next to her. She was eternally grateful he didn't laugh.
He helped her up thistime.
Hinata coughed and sputtered out cold powder, then whimpered as the backs of her teeth throbbed in icy pain. Her entire front side was covered in a thin layer of pink, and it stung like needles.
"The smoke," Sasuke said, looking up, "was that way." He pointed in some random direction.
Finally, it occured to Hinata to ask him, "S-So... what happened back there... on the trian..." she tripped over her words, "what was that th-thing?"
"That, hime-sama, was a vampire." His hands clenched into fists and he let out a cruel laugh. His laugh had pain in it, "I bet you don't believe in vampires, do you?"
"Well, I guess... I-I guess it's possible." She mulled over the idea in her head. Fairies, vampires, death, what was next? Humans on the moon? "Why... what I don't understand; you knew how to fight it, it's as if you knew it's weaknesses. W-well, some of them."
Hinata remembered how tiny the creature made Sasuke look when they fought. "How?" she asked.
"That was a special breed of animal-like vampire: vicious, but stupid. Much easier to kill than the human-resembling kind. But you can sort of tell, can't you, hime-sama?" Again with the painful sarcasm, and that name.
"Y-You can call me Hinata, b-by the way..." She felt uncomfortable being called Hime-asma(Your Highness); she never really believed she fit into the standards of being Princess.
They passed a couple of more trees, and before Hinata could ask more, there it stood.
A tiny house, brown and perfectly square. It stood out like a splotch of neon orange paint on a black canvas. The only thing that made it seem less out of place was the white trim around the house; it looked like icing and made the house appear like a gingerbread cookie.
But, the house was small and old and had a gnarled chimney jutting out from the side. Gray smoke curled up towards the heavens defiatly against a background of pink.
"It's.. it's adorable!" Hinata could have squealed. The house reminded her of the houses in childrens' picture books.
As they approached the house, a strange realization came to her. The material used to build the house wasn't wood. It wasn't rocks, or mud, or adobe, or anything else she'd ever heard of.
It was gingerbread! Hinata was staring at a real gingerbread house! The windows weren't frosted over with ice: they were made of sugar candy. The doorknob was a golden wrapped chocolate. The walls were made of frosted gingerbread, adorned with green and red candies, holding up a roof made of candy and chocolate shavings "thatched" together.
Layers upon layers upon layers of chocolate and cookies made up a porch, holding up a jutted portion of the roof with red-and-white striped peppermint sticks.(Candy canes...)
They stood in front of the door, shaking with cold and staring like idiots, until Hinata gathered up the courage to knock. Her knock barely made a sound against the chewy cookie door, but when she nervously knocked harder her fist punched a hole clear through. She flinched. Oops.
She heard a rustling sound inside, then tiny footsteps. Had she disturbed whoever was inside? The door was pulled open without even a creka, just the scraping of cookie across the floor. She peeked inside to a very tiny room with a tiny fireplace - made of tamarindo candy. The fire was made out of logs, though. (How would that work in all this candy?)
A decrepit old woman stood in the doorway, looking up at them through thick glasses. "Oh, company!" she shouted. "What brings you two here?"
"Well-" Hinata started, but was rudely interrupted.
"We're lost, and need a place to spend the night. Would you mind providing accomodations for the night?" Sasuke took out a few strange coins from his pocket. "Would this cover it?"
"Oh, don't worry about that!!" the woman clapped her hands and lead them in. "You hear that, Snickerdoodle, guests!"
A sleeping cat stirred on his woollen rug and watched them through half-lidded eyes.
After a strange dinner of ice cream soup, Hinata lay awake in her bed. Hearing no noise coming from the room next door, Sasuke's room, she assumed he had fallen asleep.
Hinata grew more restless by the minute, needing something to seek comfort in. She crawled to the foot of her bed and found her book. Softly getting up and movin next to the fire, she sat down where the light would let her read. When she gently removed the glistening key from her locket, her hands trembled as she jabbed it into the lock. Opening the book, she discovered... it was blank.
Hugging the book, she silently cried herself to sleep.
That morning, upon awakening, she was faced with another dillema: Sasuke and the old woman were gone.
To be continued...?
AnimeCrasherz: I actually went snowboarding, and saw what snow was like. It was... weird. It gets colder here near the Mexican border then it does up in northern Arizona, where it snows... At least I have a better idea of what snow feels like. When I got to the top of the slope, I layed down in the fresh snow and tried to sleep... it was so comfy... but my cousin said get up and go snowboard cuz I was being lazy.
So, tell what you thought of the chapter, good, bad, dull or moving!!! Please review!