Even after that. After they helped her recover, they didn’t hesitate.
Kaiya stepped past the walls. Not the time to think about them. The ground beneath her was cracked, but she pressed on. The ember on the floor extinguished under her foot, and she replaced it with another one in her hand, which was brighter. Powered by what, though, was unclear.
The walls kept going, keeping Kaiya boxed in. She could turn, but she didn’t dare to go back. Not to that… awful cell. If she was here, outside of her afterlife… maybe there was hope for her.
Hope that, admittedly, wasn’t too close. The floor began showing more wear as she walked. A few cracks sprawling along it, as Kaiya spotted something. Rather, the absence of that something.
Rather than a wall, or more black shadow in front of her, she stepped onto the edge of the shattered floor to spot the endless void again, mocking her with its endless finality.
Its unforgivably kind velour, yet the true nature seeped through.
The mere sight of it again almost sent Kaiya into a panic, but she looked away and remained calm. The first thing to do was to see… if this was the end.
She grabbed a loose chunk of rock from the wall, aiming it and throwing dead center in front of her. A few seconds…
Thud, the rock echoed across the gap to Kaiya.
There was most certainly something there, and she would need to get to it. She decided first, to throw a flame across. This light served useful, as it showed the mangled hallway ahead. It also showed the jarring emptiness surrounding the free-floating pathway.
Like there was nothing to it, Kaiya stepped on the edge of her own hall, took a deep breath, and pushed forward.
“…”
The lack of gravity was less jarring than she expected, but it still managed to trip her up when she ended up overshooting the hallway by just a bit.
Ice quickly flung up from the hallway roof, and provided a wall for Kaiya to stop. Handholds molded into it, and she managed to get a deep breath in. When she prepared to launch, just before she pushed herself down in hopes of walking along the roof, a sharp snap occurred. The block of ice shifted, and Kaiya pushed down preemptively, which sent her back down, but the ice upwards.
Looking down, a pile of sand rested where the ice was anchored prior. It had a footprint embedded in its top as Kaiya gently landed back down, before setting foot beyond the ice…
It wasn’t too long until she found an issue, being a sharp incline in the hallway, forcing Kaiya to stop. The sheer wall kept her from reasonable climbing, the risk of falling into… nothing… stopped her from trying an ice pillar, but there was no way she could walk back, go inside the hall, then walk back again. The less time I can spend out here, the better, she thought.
The problem quickly solved itself, though, as while she was trying to make some handrails around the pillar, the ice snapped and broke a hole in the ceiling. Whatever works.
Swiftly sliding down the hole, she found a ladder in the hall, extending up through the vertical shaft.
It was shockingly stable, so Kaiya just climbed. Luckily for her, being dead seemed to have gotten rid of whatever exhaustion could have crept up on her by this point.
***
She stepped up. One rung, then another. Kaiya couldn’t see what she was climbing anymore, the already dim lights having burned out completely, pretty far below her.
A piece of paper hit her in the face.
“Gah-”
Another. “What the…” Before her phrase finished, she noticed a light above her. Dim, but it was there. The clean white light reminded her of a lab.
A lab… like theirs.
The ladder creaked as she climbed with increased vigor. She found another paper on a rung, and it had some names listed. At the very end of the list, her own. This didn’t quite stop her, as she kept a steady pace, dropping the paper below her.
As the light got brighter above her, she heard frantic chattering. The only word she made out in all of it was a simple “MISSING-“. She could guess who the voice referred to. It felt like ages still, but she eventually reached the topmost rungs. She peered into the room, but all she saw was a blank room. It was littered with paper, most of which filled with clean handwriting, fresh ink on the bottom, bearing the 10 character name.
Kaiya Glitz stepped up again, but as her hand hit the floor, she just heard an announcement from the speakers.
“ATTENTION: Emergency - Memento mori, report to facility 13.”
The loudspeaker beeped, her now on the floor, and she spared a glance to the door.
A rusted metal label on the door said only, ‘Facility 13.”
