You're in a large underground cavern, lit by glowing yellow and blue flowers. You know this is just the mental space you created to try to reach the deeper levels of the soul you've been told about, but it feels so real, right down to the dry earthlike smell and the trickle of an underground spring creating a small river nearby. Something about it feels like an entryway or lobby. There's huge stone doors in the walls of the cavern around you, each more than four times as tall as you are, but they're all currently closed.
"are you guys around?" you send out in a thought to the other fragments of yourself, of which you're just one.
Some of the others aren't busy.
"who do you want? we're here, but we don't know who you're trying to talk to." they ask you. "do you have news?"
You explain the situation to them. In light of your "almost" promise, you leave out the details, but you tell them enough to explain what you need.
"yes, she's taught me her abilities...shielding, tunneling. but i can't figure out how to use them. apparently i'm supposed to access the deepest part of my soul to use them? but i can't figure out how? with so many of us, when our soul is split between us, who counts as the deepest part of our soul?"
A deep wave of sadness hits you as you get a chorus of automatic replies from many of them, saying roughly the same thing. "you don't want to go to the core."
You feel an intense reluctance from them.
You ask them how to go "there", but they all either don't know, or mentally dodge the question, except for one.
"hold on, i'll come to you," he says.
After a few moments, he appears in front of you in the cave. He's a duplicate of yourself, down to the clothes you're wearing, with your standard blue jacket with white fuzzy trim, except that his bones look healthier, and his eye lights are brighter and more alert than yours.
"you're from a stable timeline, right?" you ask after assessing him.
"yeah, no resets for a year," he confirms.
"lucky you," you comment enviously, but with an edge of cynicism.
"yeah, sure. i'm not what you would call happy, but i'm coping. i've been holding onto lots of the memories for the others."
"do you know where i need to go then?" you ask. "do you know where i can find our core?"
He gives you a thoughtful look.
"you really can't remember at all? i mean, i would expect one of the other me's from a short timeline to not remember much. you don't have a lot of time to think before everything resets. but still...you can't even guess where to start?"
"i've had a rough couple of days," you say dryly, rubbing your brow and scratching at your skull bones absentmindedly with the tips of your phalanges. "give me a break."
He inspects you perceptively for a moment, shakes his head and shrugs, bothered by something you can't quite understand at first.
"guess that's just how it is now. maybe it's another sign?"
"a sign? you mean..." You think rapidly. "maybe something to do with how we're dying? how the cracks in our soul are getting worse?" you guess.
"yeah. maybe it's making things harder to remember," he theorizes. "nothing we can do about it, though. i know where you can start looking, but it's definitely not going to be fun. are you sure you want to go there?"
"not really, but what else can i do? this is the first real chance we've had in awhile. i can't just let you all down right? i don't really want to watch the human girl starve in front of me either."
He gives you a concerned look, but nods. "alrite, other me. here, try this way."
He waves his left hand swiftly upward, and one of the large stone doors moves upward with a grating sound on the other side of the cavern, and disappears into the ceiling above.
"our core is somewhere in that direction. just warning you though, be ready for a fight. one of us is down there, but he doesn't like to be disturbed."
"a fight? why? i just want to talk to him. i need to access our core to be able to use these abilities."
The other you grits his teeth and grins. "he'll hurt you if he can. he's really angry. that's why i usually try to keep other sanses like you away from him. you're from a short timeline, so talking to him will probably just make you really depressed, until you wake up again at time zero and forget most of it."
"he's still us, right? why would he hurt us?" you ask him, puzzled.
"he hates us. don't ask me why. not only that, he's probably stronger than any of us. he owns a large piece of our soul. he might be able to kill you if he wants to, by destroying your soul piece. you should probably get out of there fast if things go bad when you try to talk to him."
"ok," you answer slowly.
"anyway, good luck, other me. let me know how it turns out, alrite?"
"sure," you reply. "thanks for pointing the way. i'll let ya know."
He gives you his unique name so you know who to ask for next time, and bids you farewell, disappearing from the cave. You sense his mental focus shift away from you and back to his normal life on the outside. The others politely left your mental space earlier in the conversation.
You tentatively start walking through the doorway he opened, not knowing what to expect, but nothing immediately attacks you when you're on the other side.
Once you're out of the cavern, the passageway beyond leads downwards in a gradual slope.
After walking for a few minutes through a winding tunnel path, you notice an official looking sign with printed letters posted on the cave wall.
It says,
"DANGER. KEEP OUT."
Scrawled below on the cave wall, in your handwriting, but rushed and shaky, it says
"seriously, there's some things we're better off not knowing. you've been warned."
"that's ominous as hell," you tell yourself. You feel a chill running through your spine and shoulder blades.
You keep going anyway.
After awhile, you have to go down a series of vertical shafts connected by short horizontal tunnels. You teleport down them in short hops, lighting your way down with magic and perching on footholds in the shaft in between hops. The other sanses apparently didn't decide to install elevators here. Or maybe elevators used to be here, and they uninstalled them. You shake your head.
After going down what feels like a mile through the vertical shafts, you reach another long sloping downward path, and follow it for a long time. The path is a lot rougher here. Eventually the path gets hard to travel, being blocked by large boulders and cave-ins.
Out of curiosity, you try out your magical attacks and abilities, and find that fortunately all of them work here. You clear the path by levitating rocks out of your way. Gravity magic is really useful in caves.
Later you move aside a stone wall at what seems to be a dead end, but the path continues on the other side, and you keep walking.
Gravity magic...wait. Maybe you're not the first to use it here. Could that be what caused the cave-ins? You pause and nervously turn around to look back at the stone wall. As you suspected, there's signs that it's been hit hard from this side by something, with traces of explosive damage covering its surface.
It looks like it might be from a particularly large Blaster attack. Was someone trying to run away from here as they were being attacked? Maybe they levitated the stone wall into place and then used gravity magic to cause the cave-ins behind them to protect themselves.
You hear a rumbling in the distance.
At the same time, you feel a wave of vibrating force pass through the rocky floor, making small stones tremble and jump. It passes through your bones up through your feet to your skull, making them rattle, and as you feel it, your first instinct is to run. It could be a cave-in, and if you're knocked unconscious by falling rocks you won't be able to use gravity magic to get yourself out.
As you freeze in indecision, the rumble fades away and you hear another noise. It sounds like a loud rhythmic pounding, like someone is putting everything they have into battering a part of the cave below you every ten seconds or so.
It reminds you of a story you once heard of some human miners who were trapped in a small cave in a vast underground network of natural tunnels. They kept beating against the walls with their tools until they were rescued, in hopes that people would know they were alive. The rescuers finally found them when they heard the sound echoing through the tunnels they were searching.
At the time, it made you think about all the monsters trapped in the underground. You wondered if the humans cared at all whether the monsters were alive or dead, and if they ever came to check for signs of life from the monsters that they imprisoned down there under the mountain with the barrier. Did they ever consider whether they'd been imprisoned and punished for long enough, or did the humans simply forget about them?
In any case, that pounding you're hearing now is a clear sign of life.
Is someone making it because they're trapped down here? You don't like the sound of that. What would it feel like to be trapped and alone down here?
How long have they been making that pounding sound? They're probably either trying to ask for help and let others know they're alive, or trying to get through some kind of wall that's stopping them. Maybe both.
You're very afraid, but your compassion for whoever it is starts to overcome your fear. You decide you're going to find out what's going on here, for its own sake. It doesn't feel right.
The pounding keeps going relentlessly as you listen. The intervals have gotten slightly longer, like they're tiring out a little, but they're still putting a lot of effort behind it.
You hurry forward towards the sound.