Excitement spiked.
Terror spiked.
Wonder and curiosity and exploration spiked.
-And then, before she could even turn to meet her shadow, a weight slammed into her back, and a sharp, blinding pain shot through her chest.
+And then, before she could even turn to meet her shadow, a weight slammed into her back and a sharp, blinding pain shot through her chest.
Her breath was forced out of her in a single puff, leaving her lungs emptier than she had ever felt them before. Air was gone from her, it felt. It felt as though she would never breathe again.
All the same, as though to preempt her crying out, a paw reached over her shoulder and clamped down painfully tight on her snout.
“Hush now,” a voice whispered soothingly against her cheek, warm breath tickling fur where it bunched up against her assailant’s fingers. “Just be quiet. Just settle down. I have you. I am with you.”
@@ -58,7 +58,7 @@The week was there. Not quite in as much detail as she would have liked, and certainly not as much as she remembered from sys-side, but it was there.
It washed down over her, crashing through her ears, blanketing her shoulders, robbing her breath and twisting her gut. There was the excitement and terror. There was the wonder and exploration. There was the boredom.
And there was the terror again, the gut-wrenching terror that came with the first stab of the knife.
-She was glad for the gag, as well as the baffling of her paws, as she shrieked at remembered agony. Tears coursed down her cheeks and her breathing came in shallow little sips as the memories of that hot-wire pain piecing her from stem to stem became her entire world. Anguish filled her mind as the memories of terror, of what it might feel like to never again see ma, to destroy Bee so thoroughly, to never grow up clattered raucously against her memories of whispering comforting words and exhortations to quit. Despair at memories of seeing the life drain from her own eyes slammed against memories of vision fading.
+She was glad for the gag to bite down on, as well as the baffling of her paws, as she shrieked at remembered agony. Tears coursed down her cheeks and her breathing came in shallow little sips as the memories of that hot-wire pain piecing her from stem to stem became her entire world. Anguish filled her mind as the memories of terror, of what it might feel like to never again see ma, to destroy Bee so thoroughly, to never grow up clattered raucously against her memories of whispering comforting words and exhortations to quit. Despair at memories of seeing the life drain from her own eyes slammed against memories of vision fading.
She sat there for nearly an hour, just processing and thinking, just wondering curiously as she explored these dichotomies, as she struggled with the new intensity of the fear of death — titillating and alluring as it remained — here in the Rift.
Then, slowly, she pushed herself to her feet, liked up to the sodium fogged night, and forked herself presentable. She had a drink awaiting her. A meal. A bar — quiet but for Ace or the gruff moose, neither of whom would hopefully ask too many questions when a seven year old ordered a tequila shot. Kitsch on the walls, the clack of balls from the pool table, the scent of so much beer and so much love and so much loneliness.
She continued the journey of her scientist, her subject, in a slow trudge down the street.