Hall of Infinite Doors
You gaze up into the beam of the searchlight, over the city, searching for any means of escape. There's nothing. There's no way down. The office door is pounding, preparing to burst open, and you can just imagine the firepower currently trained on you. There's nothing you can do.
No... there's one thing you can do. The last act of a free individual.
You grip the rail in your left hand and peer downwards. A telescope of descending windows frames a tiny square below, all aglitter with red and blue. Beauty and efficiency - they work so well together. You glance at the construct in your right hand and wonder briefly just what you've done, just what this thing is that merits all this attention. Already it's dug its claws into your skin, burrowing in. You close your fingers around it, tuck your hand against your heart, and bounce high over the railing.
Your fingers slip delicately from the railing. For a beautiful moment, you're suspended. Flying, your feet dependent on nothing, your eyes seeing what birds see. And then it all tumbles into insensibility, the drop a blur of futile adrenaline and passing lights. The impact, when it comes, is quick and barely felt.
And the oblivion it brings is... short?
A few seconds later you jolt into wakefulness. You cough out a groan and jiggle your eyes open but see nothing - only dirty blackness. The siren sounds are loud around you, jumbled and confused, and you feel... you feel fine, actually. WRONG somehow, the kind of wrong that comes with having everything breakable in your body broken, but there's no pain at all.
Experimentally, you wring your body quickly upwards, and it responds. It shouldn't - by all dictates of nature and science you shouldn't be doing any moving at all right now, and yet you have. It's no harder than it ever was. You can feel the grind of broken bones realigning, torn muscles struggling to pull at ruptured organs - but somehow, you move. You click your jaw open and closed, roll your bloody eyes around in fractured sockets. The sounds are different now - gasps, shouts, new alarms. Everyone knows. Something's wrong.
Sight fuzzes back into being, and you see the ground beneath you. The concrete is cracked in a thousand hairline ways, sticky and pink with your blood and flesh. Your hand is still clutched beneath you, though your arm is now a wrecked thing, unrecognizeable - but for the star still clutched in your destroyed hand.
It is bent, as wrecked as you are, and the glass bead is broken. But the liquid inside is still visible - moving, acting of its own accord, draining into opened veins and thirsty bones. Every second, you feel better than the one before.
You pull yourself to your knees. You see panic, madness in front of you. Open eyes, white and terrified, features contorted and terrified. You pull yourself to your feet, and madness explodes in front of you like a faulty firework, luminous and entertaining.
No... there's one thing you can do. The last act of a free individual.
You grip the rail in your left hand and peer downwards. A telescope of descending windows frames a tiny square below, all aglitter with red and blue. Beauty and efficiency - they work so well together. You glance at the construct in your right hand and wonder briefly just what you've done, just what this thing is that merits all this attention. Already it's dug its claws into your skin, burrowing in. You close your fingers around it, tuck your hand against your heart, and bounce high over the railing.
Your fingers slip delicately from the railing. For a beautiful moment, you're suspended. Flying, your feet dependent on nothing, your eyes seeing what birds see. And then it all tumbles into insensibility, the drop a blur of futile adrenaline and passing lights. The impact, when it comes, is quick and barely felt.
And the oblivion it brings is... short?
A few seconds later you jolt into wakefulness. You cough out a groan and jiggle your eyes open but see nothing - only dirty blackness. The siren sounds are loud around you, jumbled and confused, and you feel... you feel fine, actually. WRONG somehow, the kind of wrong that comes with having everything breakable in your body broken, but there's no pain at all.
Experimentally, you wring your body quickly upwards, and it responds. It shouldn't - by all dictates of nature and science you shouldn't be doing any moving at all right now, and yet you have. It's no harder than it ever was. You can feel the grind of broken bones realigning, torn muscles struggling to pull at ruptured organs - but somehow, you move. You click your jaw open and closed, roll your bloody eyes around in fractured sockets. The sounds are different now - gasps, shouts, new alarms. Everyone knows. Something's wrong.
Sight fuzzes back into being, and you see the ground beneath you. The concrete is cracked in a thousand hairline ways, sticky and pink with your blood and flesh. Your hand is still clutched beneath you, though your arm is now a wrecked thing, unrecognizeable - but for the star still clutched in your destroyed hand.
It is bent, as wrecked as you are, and the glass bead is broken. But the liquid inside is still visible - moving, acting of its own accord, draining into opened veins and thirsty bones. Every second, you feel better than the one before.
You pull yourself to your knees. You see panic, madness in front of you. Open eyes, white and terrified, features contorted and terrified. You pull yourself to your feet, and madness explodes in front of you like a faulty firework, luminous and entertaining.