Welcome to Gaia! ::

1. Offer the dim your arms as a bartering chip, outstretched as far as they can go because you are not to be outdone. You are tasked with the collection of 1 (one) heart, and you are glad to do it. The door clicks shut. The time ticks onward. The heart thumps in a box somewhere ahead of you.

You enter the dim and it welcomes you, envelops you, cradles you. The dim is a comfort and the dim is a blanket and the dim is a path for you to walk.

You offer your hands to the dim and drag fingers along the wall, and no matter which way you turn you end up at the same destination, a one stop shop for a heart you need to take. Do not offer the dark anything more. Do not give it hope.


2. The crate is a box is a storage device. The object in it is black on red on black and it sticks out in every which way. It is the end of everything. You lay your hands against it and it doesn't give enough to your satisfaction. The Goddess has requested you to do this, and you have scissors and a smile because you live to serve.

The dark beckons and you want to shriek but instead you take the scissors and you plunge them into the crate's contents and you cut and you sever what's within because there is a beating heart (thumpthump, thumpthump) that your Goddess needs, and there's nothing you wouldn't do to see her smile.


3. You grab the contents of the box but then it grabs you, it grabs you and it yells and it's a name and it's familiar but you don't know why they're so upset, you're just taking what they weren't using, you're peeling the skin off their bones, you're saving them the trouble of going to waste. They scream and it's chilling, and you are transported, thrown violently, into a--

4. It would've been so much easier if you'd pretended you'd never seen her. If you'd closed your eyes and blocked out the curl of her hair and the lilt of her voice the jade in her eyes, then maybe she wasn't there. Maybe she wasn't there, with her hair up in a curled ponytail and smile and offering to buy you a drink.

Her husband is to your right. You do not know how you feel.

You cannot forget that you have seen her and you are completely and utterly <********>.

It's not that you're not into women, you're into beautiful, you're into lithe and intelligent and into the way a person moves their hands and the colour of their soul. You're into them. You're into her. You don't know what to do because her husband has a poker face, and she offers to buy you a drink again, and the ring on her hand glitters in the bar's dim lights.

She smiles at you, and says her name is --. You stammer, and you are twenty years old and have been alone in the world for four years and don't know how to accept the invitation, you have only recently lost your virginity, you talk the talk but can you walk the walk?

It's a test. The music plays and it's a jazz refrain, swirling in your ears and you smile and it's a little bit fragile and you say yes, and her husband lays his hand on your back and she leans in close and kisses your cheek and--


5. You drop the scissors. You fumble for them, the heart half chopped out the cavity half exposed and you have offered your arms to the dark but you offer your hands to the heart.


6. You rub the scissors off on yourself and it leaves a streak of red down your chest, and you laugh because you are trimming the fat from the steak, not performing open heart surgery, and you guess you don't want to contaminate the meat.


7. You are almost done, your hands trembling slightly. The crate is slick with red and your fingers/hands/wrists/arms are, too. You don't breathe, because there is a task to finish.


8. As you cut and you cut you realise that this -- was not your train wreck, was not the truck that flattened you, was not your apocalypse, did not cause massive haemorrhaging from a rusty knife. (That -- has yet to come.)


9. The thoughts come unbidden and leave just as fast. You don't linger. You are an efficient tool to be used, you are completing a task, you are finishing the job, you are a cleaner. You are the finale. You are the missing puzzle piece. You are the cog in the machine. You are her servant, pure and simple.


10. "My name is Danica," she says, and the lilt is Eastern-European and later she tells you it is Serbian, and his name is Erik and he is Russian, and she tells you of her childhood and she sings to you in her native tongue and he tells you lullabies. You learn their words in a clumsy way, and the night was young and now the dawn is approaching and-


11. You've only set a few rules to keep yourself from becoming a train that runs off the rails, to keep yourself from falling upon the waiting knives. No kissing at all. You break it, for her.


12. With the most tender of hands, you pull it free, and the memories fade away at the idea of a job well done. The name they used is unfamiliar. You serve Her unquestionably.


13. You pretend you are not covered in red. You hold the heart in your left hand.

Sink or swim/fight or flight/now or never/you or her.

She is strong but you are stronger, and she is nothing but a memory and you have been given life, a sunkissed heart from a sunshine Goddess. You loved her, but the most important part of her is in your possession and your Goddess awaits.

"I'm sorry," you say and you don't know if you mean it because the words sound hollow but your chest feels leaden. "I'm so sorry," you say, and you punctuate it with scissors to her eyes, raised up in one fist, buried deep into the socket of one empty eye as the other eye watches you but your name is Licraesa and nothing else, and you feel the light returning and the water drains and the heart is safe, the heart is precious, the heart was hers and now it is yours.

Survival of the fittest. The weak will be trodden.

Crawling towards the light you cough and sputter and leave a trail of black-goo-spittle, and you clutch the heart to your breast and hold it beneath your pendant and above your heart and you loved her so, so much, your own is bursting with the pain of it, a ruptured organ, a sweet torment, a love that--

You stand and from the corner of your eye you see the ghost of her and the bones of a life you'll never know and a pair of scissors clutched tight in reddened hands and.

Your name is Licraesa and you serve the Goddess.

The goddess, with a lower case g, looks at her like she's meat on a bone. Licraesa doesn't like the way she pets the weapon in her hand, curved and malicious. It reminded her of a coiled serpent, and the goddess of its charmer. She offers Licraesa a dagger and all she sees is poison wrapped into a weapon.

She takes it anyway, and with a weary heart (red is not yellow, she's not the one true Goddess, her heart is full of lies-)

Licraesa moves towards the opening indicated by the embodiment of ruin, dagger clenched in her fist, wary as wary can get.

You are crying harder than you have ever done in your short, grey little life. You turn on your heel and you turn tail and your belly is more yellow than your heart, but discretion is the better part of valour and you want to live.

To your left is a scrap of paper bathed in red, a scrap of paper reading A C E G and you don't know what it means and in the time it's taken for you to read it, the blackness has gotten closer.

[ 40 - 5 = 35 feet ]

It's the paper, again. The red runs down it, and you hate it.

[ 25 - 5 = 20 feet ]

You scream at the top of your lungs, shrill and warbled, but pushing the doors does nothing. Nothing at all.

[ 15 - 5 = 10 feet ]

The monster is close but you're closer, you see paper to your right and it has the key, the numbers click and you punch in zero two four five and the door opens. You are alive. You. Are. Alive.

[ 10 - 5 = 5 feet ]