I notice black ash coming off me again, and it's carried off by the wind. I forget about that when I see Kuiga staring at me like I'm some oddity. "That was weird, right?" I ask, her, but she just stands there. "I just felt my torso blow to bits before growing back. Has that ever happened to you?" I playfully ask with an awkward chuckle as I know I should be freaking out, but I don't want to scare her away, but she remains silent.
"That was crazy. I mean it's not something you'd expect to happen," I keep saying stuff like that trying to keep myself calm. "The feeling of having your organs grow back is really strange… and alarming. You know what I'm talking about, right?" I ask trying to get a smirk out of her. While keeping me from having to think about what I just went through.
"Why?" Is all she says, quietly, almost timidly.
"Why what?" I respond, right before realizing she must be asking why I saved her.
"Why did you save me?" She asks like I inconvenienced her.
"…Because I didn't want to see you get turned into bits," I blurt out as I find her question ridiculous.
"Liar!" She shrieks at me as her face turns to one of worry and fear. "We just met! You can't care about me! You want to use me! What is it?! What do you want?! You want me to fight for you?! Do you want to steal my organs?! You want to see pures laugh at me?!" She starts tearing up and then runs away.
"No! Don't go!" I shout and chase after her. Kuiga is the only person in this place I've met who doesn't abduct people. "Stop running! I… I don't want to be alone out here!" Seeing her running away feels terrible. I don't want to be left alone out here. I have no idea where I am or what to do.
Hearing me say that causes Kuiga to stop. She's just staring at the ground. She then turns, looks up at me and stares at me for a few moments. She has tears running down her face, and she wipes them away before saying anything.
"Fine," she says, with a trembling voice and she seems so sad that I try to hug her, but she pushes me away.
"Sorry… I misread the mood," is what I awkwardly say as I just ruined the moment.
"You can follow me if you really want to. Just don't expect much from me," she says that like she's apologizing. The two of us start walking together. She doesn't seem like she wants to talk, so I just think and try to figure things out. Going off what Hade said, this place is called Mektra, but he said it as if that could be the name of the planet or the name of a country. I gleam that instead of humans there are krivadels here. Thinking about not being on Earth is making me sick, although, this could be Earth in the future. I could have been sent into through time. I hold my stomach and put a hand over my mouth, worried I might throw up, but I think I'm too hungry to do that. When was the last time I ate?
I watch Kuiga pulling purple pods out of the ground. They're as big as coconuts and have some green speckles on them. She throws them away and walks around, staring at the ground for a moment before stabbing it with her claws and pulling out more pods. These ones have no speckles on them and she starts eating one of them. I see they have a lot of green juice in them.
I start looking around for some of my own, but I'm not sure how she tells where the pods are. I'm so hungry that I start stabbing my claws randomly in the ground, hoping to find some. I then realize that I'm so hungry, because my body just regrew my stomach! Of course I'm starving! I need to eat!
I hit something and pull out some kind of cat sized bug! I scream and throw it away without looking closely at it. I try again and pull out a fuzzy creature with a slimy underbelly. I put it down and it slithers away. I try again and some orange fluid comes out of the ground, getting on my fingers causing an intense burning feeling.
"You're pathetic," Kuiga says as she's been watching me this whole time. She looks at the ground and then pulls out more pods. "Here, just stop trying. It's annoying. Check them for green spots, those are poisonous," she hands me the bunch of pods and she's about to eat her last one, and I see a small green spot on it, that she hasn't noticed! I smack it out of her hand.
"Green spot!" I shout pointing at it. Kuiga just stares at me for a moment and aside from her wide eyes, she's showing no emotion. She picks the pod back up and flicks off the green dirt that was on it. She then stares at me looking like she has something to say, but can't find the words. I don't want to make her feel anymore uncomfortable, so I start eating the pods she gave me.
The taste is awful! It's like the smell of a rotting animal! "You know I'm human, right? That stuff tastes like poison. It could be poison to humans like me," I say, worried for myself.
"Even if it's poisonous to your species, you are going to dry out, starve and die here without it anyway," Kuiga manages to say, and she sounds more casual now.
"Right, it's really hot out here. Way more than a place with grass, trees, and shrubs should be or was a few minutes ago," I look around to see that we've wandered into a wasteland now with grass so short it makes the ground feel fuzzy. I hadn't noticed
"We entered a hotspot. Those are created when the sun, Jevais…" Kuiga points to the red sun with the black ring. "Appears to the lower left side of the sun, Robian…" She points to the large, light blue one. "While the sun, Hueravinon appears off to the right of Robian a little," Kuiga points to the small, white sun.
"Then shouldn't everywhere they're shining be a hotspot?"
"No, only the areas at the right angles of heistcher mountains are hot spots. We're under the Ulderia mountain range, the minerals in them reflect the heat," she points up into the sky and I see something that's really high up and stationary. If that's a mountain range it's way higher up than those light blue and green clouds.
"Wait, how are mountains in the sky?"
"They're just bits of space matter that got stuck in Mektra's membrane," hearing her say that blows my mind.
"Your planet has a membrane?" So Mektra is the planet. So, how'd I get here?!
"I take it yours doesn't? Above and a little bit of under the membrane is the heistcher territory," she goes on talking, but I don't want to think about any of what she's saying right now. I'm just filled with hopelessness and disbelief while I try to finish these gross pods, struggling to not vomit the whole time or go insane from the situation. Though, that does explain why the suns are blurry since there is membrane in front of them.
"If you really are a human, you probably want to know more about Mektra," Kuiga says while I wasn't paying attention to what she was saying as I'm too devestated to want to talk, not to mention there are dangers all around us.
We're attacked by a pack of wolf-like creatures that have multiple plants that bite like mouths growing all over their bodies! They chase us until we cross four areas that all have different colored and textured dirt, each area only taking five minutes to run through. There are a lot of strange smells coming from the ground, and it seems like they don't like that smell and they run back.
Next, we see masses of dirt spiral around, rising out of the ground, forming forty-foot-tall cones, their spinning pulls the ground near them along with everything on it to be twisted and crushed against them. We move carefully so as not to get caught in that ground like those small flying animals that landed on it.
Whenever the wind picks up, we see flickers of light coming at us. Kuiga gets down on the ground and I follow suit. Looking up I see silver strips of a thin matter, ten inches long blowing in the wind like wispy arrows. Kuiga has no idea where they come from, but they come in on the wind with a smell I recognize as plastic. "They'll stab into a body and worm their way in, they're parasites," she warns me and after that, I am almost eaten by a predatory tree whose branches move like snakes with creepy, demon faces and thin serpent tongues coming out of them.
We've reached a grove where nothings seem to be moving, for the moment. All of that really got my heart going. "Jeez, that's every day life for you?" Kuiga doesn't respond. Anyway, after that, I'm back in the mood for getting answers. "Hey, Kuiga, do you have any idea how I could have gotten here, from Earth?"
"Earth? I've heard of it somewhere before. Shouldn't you already know? Saiten is the one that brought you here," my mind is spiralling into despair and she keeps saying things I don't understand.
"I don't know what that is!" I snap at her, being anxious and frustrated.
"It's one of the five drechion nations. We're in Lorita now and the others are Chuango, Borafore, Jigoshin, and Saiten. Saiten is also the name of the biggest empire in Saiten. It got so big that it became the only empire in the nation. They have more power than everyone else in the world combined, so they get to do whatever they want. Only they have the technology that crosses the dimensional border," now I know where to go to get home, but I don't know where Saiten is.
"How can one nation be stronger than four others?" I ask as that detail really stood out to me. I need to know about these people who are in control of the way home.
"Saiten has agents and officers that are given special things that give them the ability to control reality. The ruling president, Uruma is said to be the greatest leader in history and they have this special energy source, sio. Only they have it because they created it and all this new technology that can only be powered by sio, so no one else can use their advanced vehicles and weapons.
"No one can just recreate that stuff without—No wait. Why does Saiten kidnap humans? Why go through the trouble? Are we really worth it?"
"I hear they use humans for food, entertainment, experimentation, or in your case, they make weapons out of them. Human weapons are called FBWs it stands for a foreign biological weapon. A weapon made from matter of a different dimension. Only Saiten has these weapons which is another reason they're so powerful," Kuiga just stares at me for a moment. "You know every time I see an FBW or video of one, they're always obeying their orders and never talk. You're really strange," after saying that, Kuiga walks up to a smooth, six-foot tree with an extremely reflective surface and no branches.
"Thanks?" I say, hoping she meant that as a compliment. I start thinking about if I'm a weapon, why do I still have free will? There are machines that cross dimensions too. There is so much more to wrap my head around.
She stabs her claws into the side of the tree and tears open a hole. She sticks her hand in and to my dismay rips out a mass of what looks like a hunk of bloody meat that's pulsating, she takes a bite out of it and hands it to me. "Here, this isn't too bad," it's not the taste I worry about as I take it from her. Closing my eyes, I bite into the tree meat and I have to feel the piece I bit off pulsating as I chew it. There is a crunchy part inside, making it feel like chewing hard plastic. It does taste somewhat good, but the texture alone is making me want to puke.
We pass it back and forth until I eat the last bite. Kuiga then continues walking in a seemingly random direction. "Is there any reason we're walking this way?"
"No," Kuiga says that bluntly and I feel she should be more concerned about where she's going.
"So, you're just hoping to come across civilization?"
"Yes. And stop asking me questions, it annoys me," she does sound annoyed, but I'm still concerned about my situation.
I just groan in response; not like I know where to go. We continue walking for a few more hours until we actually come across a town! Thank goodness since it got dark out here a few minutes ago, but there is plenty of moonlight. The blurriness of the membrane makes each star in the sky flicker like the small flame of a candle. It's amazing how beautfiul it all is.
This town has a twenty-foot stone wall built around it. I can see the buildings over the wall. The buildings are all 5000 square feet and are all either two to five stories tall. The tops are all flat and level. They're made of wood and stone and held together by metal wires that are wrapped around them. I see lights from inside the buildings, reminding me of Earth. There is a large open gate in the middle of the wall with a sign over it with strange markings on it.
"What does that say?"
"It just says the name of the town," that's all she says, nothing about the town or the actual name.
"What's the name?"
"I don't know. I can't read," Kuiga says and we walk through the gate. I'm sad to hear she's illiterate, but so am I now. I want to help her, but I how can I?
I'm on Mektra, home to krivadels and this is what their civilization looks like. Walking down this street makes me think of all the other humans who were taken to this world. They all must have died horribly. I never considered myself lucky, but right now I might be the luckiest human on the planet," that does make me feel a bit better about my situation.
While walking through the streets I see more of these multi-colored krivadels giving me strange looks. My body has been changed, and everyone I care about on Earth will have to worry about me forever because I don't know how to get back. I start feeling light-headed. I reach a hand to brace myself against a wall, but next to me is an open window and I fall in through it.
"Ugh, what is this thing?!" One of the krivadels in this room shouts at me before picking me up by my neck.
"It's so ugly, get it out of here," another one says and before I know it, the one holding my neck starts punching me! I take three of them before he shoves me out the front door and I fall on my back on the ground with Kuiga looking down at me.
"What was that?"
"A social club," she doesn't sound concerned at all about my beating.
"They weren't very sociable," I sit up, holding my face as it throbs from the pain. I start wondering what I'm supposed to do. "Kuiga, I want to get back home to Earth, is there any way I can use Saiten's machine?"
"From what I know of Saiten, they'll probably kill you on the spot. They're ruthless and don't share," hearing her say that sucks all the strength from my body and I fall on my back, lying on the ground. Being trapped in this world isn't something I can accept, even if I am luckiest human here.
"Kuiga, I can't be stuck here. I can't live like this. Are there any other options you may know about that could help? I'll do anything I can for you if you help me," I start to beg, desperate as the bleak despair takes over me.
"Do you want me to kill you?" Kuiga asks and she does sound serious.
"I don't know, maybe," I get up and walk aimlessly. My mind empty as I try not to think about anything. This time it's Kuiga who follows me.
What do I do? I'm not even sure what I am now. Would Cyn or my family even want me back now that I'm this? I mope through this city's streets and notice how all these krivadels look at me as if I'm some freak, which I am.
"Saiten has abused their power for far too long!" I hear someone shout around the corner and I quickly move to see who's talking. "They rule the world, and give us the illusion that we're in control of our own lives! This has gone on for millenniums! I am Bodaka and we are the Doriano Revolution and we're going to take control! Who will join us?!" There is this pale red-skinned male krivadel with long, messy brown hair wearing a loose wife-beater and tattered shorts. This guy looks like a hobo on vacation.
Bodaka is standing on a two-foot raised platform, and there are four people standing behind him. But those are the only people there as everyone is walking by like normal. No one seems to be interested. "What is he talking about?" I ask Kuiga. The things he is saying sound like they could help me.
"It's just another revolution, trying to get recruits. Look over there," Kuiga says and I look to my right and I see another person standing on a small pedestal.
"Join the Grevavi revolution! We have a fifteen-point plan for success in taking control of Saiten!" There are several more people down this road doing and saying the same things. I then look to my left as I hear more shouting.
"The Saiten nation has earned their power by being right and strong! The facts are clear! We need to join and follow Saiten! Please join us and sign! Only 700 more signatures and we can start as lower class citizens!" This guy shouts before being attacked by those passing by.
"Some people want to immigrate to Saiten and they can if they come in groups of one thousand," Kuiga says and it makes me wonder.
"Why don't you join, since they're the best, right?"
"As you saw, some people don't like how they do things. I'm one of them. Besides, they won't allow someone like me," is all she says and she sounds and looks like she'll cry if I ask her why.
Since they'll probably kill me, taking control of Saiten would work out best for me. I muster up my courage and walk up to Bodaka and his friends to see if I can join them.