Interlude: Emma, Part 3--Of Moonscapes and Monsters
Looking down beneath her, Emma watched the rocky, gray surface of the moon inch ever closer. Hands and legs shaking with the cold January air, she continued to claw her way slowly down the ladder. Taking a moment, she looked up above her, seeing the curve of the Earth above glimmering like a sky full of stars. Seen from this distance, she could almost forget that the world was an ugly place, filled with ugly scenes. She could almost think it was beautiful. Almost.
The rational part of her brain, what little of it hadn't given up already, kept insisting that she shouldn't be able to breathe. She was, after all, up so far into the sky that it had gone black. She could see the curve of the planet beneath her, a blue boundary before an endless expanse of star-dotted emptiness. All she was wearing was her hospital gown and the little paper id bracelets the hospital had put on her. Her hands and feet were starting to feel numbed by the chill, and her arms and legs had grown chafed. Still, she continued to climb down. Still, the lunar surface crawled closer. It was almost relaxing, the steady, paced motion of it. She found herself in a world where all that existed was the sound of her breath and the rasp of the ladder against her skin.
Before she knew it, she was broken out of that by the cold touch of stone against her bare foot. Blinking and shaking her head to try and gain some focus, she climbed off the ladder and looked up, taking in the blue of Earth Bet above. Hundreds of thousands of miles separated her from where she'd set out, yet she couldn't have been climbing for more than an hour. She had zoned out for part of it. There was no way she'd zoned out for
that long, though.
Looking around her, she saw a grand expanse of grey stone, mountains and valleys stretching out to the horizons. Huh. Well, if this was really happening, then she was on the moon. She'd tried jumping, expecting to go flying a ways. She didn't. She put it down to parahuman nonsense. Chewing her lip, she took deep breaths as the memory of when she'd learned just that threatened to make her cry. It was a pain-edged memory, one so sharp that just touching it hurt. Emma and Taylor had been hidden away in one of their rooms, Taylor speaking in a constant, excited stream. Taylor had suggested a power for Emma where she could surround herself in fire, only for Emma to protest she'd not want to burn her costume off herself and be stuck naked in public. Taylor explained that powers didn't work that way, seeing as Eidolon could use all the powers and he never burned his costume off. That had set Emma giggling, which set Taylor off as well. She was gasping, explaining between gulps for air and gales of laughter at the idea of the triumvirate stuck without clothes because of their powers and having to sneak away to get spare costumes.
Putting the bittersweet memory away, Emma focused back on the present. She brushed away the emotion, not sure she could pull herself back together if she let her feelings pull her apart again. The point of the memory? Right. The point of remembering that was that if all this was real, it had to be some kind of parahuman power doing it, didn't it? Why they'd bother, she didn't know. She wasn't anything special. She wasn't strong. She wasn't smart. She was still here in spite of that. But apparently whatever power brought her here let her breathe and kept her from instantly freezing. She tried to think of why someone would want her here. She couldn't. She couldn't think of a reason anyone would want her anywhere. Still, it was somewhere to be and something to do. She didn't deserve the distraction from her own self-loathing, but someone went to some kind of effort to get her here. It'd be rude to just stand there after all of that.
She picked a direction, no real destination in mind, and started walking. Maybe she could find where they'd planted the American flag up here. Assuming it was still around and space hadn't worn it away or something. Didn't the Tinker, the one that wasn't Bonesaw, in the Slaughterhouse Nine have a half-finished base up here? That thought brought an upwelling of bitterness. Maybe Panacea was right, maybe the Nine wanted her for something. Not that that was likely. She didn't have powers. That would've required a form of strength. She was pretty sure they only recruited capes. She'd know if she was a cape, right? She was pretty sure she'd know if she was a cape.
She walked for hours, the only sounds the ones she carried with her, the only sensations the brush of light cloth as her gown moved with her and the coarse, gritty feel of the dust and rock beneath her feet. It took longer than she'd have liked to realize that she wasn't cold anymore. It wasn't hot. It wasn't cold. The temperature just…was. Meanwhile, she continued to trek across the dead, scarred surface of the moon, trying to find some landmark of relevance, some change to the scenery. Her frustration had spiked the first time she got to the top of a huge crater's rim only to realize that the point she'd been heading towards prior to that, what she'd thought was a hill in the distance, was probably still a mile or more away, it'd just been larger than she'd realized at first. Groaning in a brief fit of irritation, she took a minute to let the sweat clinging to her dry. She wasn't out of shape, really, she just wasn't exactly an athlete the way Sophia was. She'd exercised to keep her looks and her modeling career, not out of any sense of competition. When she felt suitably rested, she set off again, not looking forward to the inevitable hike up the distant peak.
Emma didn't know how long it took to get to the top of the moon-mountain, but she knew her arms and legs were tired from climbing and her breath was coming raggedly by now. Not even bothering to do what she came up there to do first, the lost girl flopped to the ground to catch her breath and slowly try to massage the soreness out of her calves and her arms without even using the perch to get a good look around. It helped a little. When she finally got back up on shaky legs, she started to check for something, anything that looked like it might tell her how or why she was here. She'd just finished thinking that she'd even settle for anything that looked out of place when she saw it.
Emma stared, blinked, and stared again. It didn't disappear. It sat there, in blatant violation of everything she'd ever been told about the moon. It was impossible. Then again, so was climbing to the moon on a rope ladder. And yet here she was. And there it was. There it remained? Maybe science class knew less about the moon than it thought it did. She wasn't dreaming: she'd scraped her knee climbing down off the ladder, and that still stung, even if it had already stopped slowly oozing blood down her leg and scabbed. Emma didn't take more than a moment to weigh her options. It wasn't as though she really had any of heft to choose between. Everything she'd known said this place was impossible. Apparently everything she'd known had been wrong. Since she didn't see anywhere else to go, Emma Barnes, broken child and architect of suffering, wandered into a forest growing in a crack in the surface of the moon.
The scrape of stone gave way to soft, giving soil as Emma went onward. That bright, almost directionless light that drenched the stony surface was crowded out by interleaving branches above, and she found herself in a dim and dappled dusk. The change was unbelievable. The pitted, cratered surface she'd traveled before had been dry, dusty, and as sterile as the cold, tiled hospital room. This place wasn't. Emma was sure, with a certainty she couldn't explain, that she'd never been in any place even half so alive as this one was. A breeze she couldn't source soughed and sighed through the canopy above her. The air was ever-so-slightly damp, like a spring morning just before everything comes awake and alive.
Maybe that was the connection, where that feeling comes from, her mind offered up.
Somehow, she knew it wasn't. The place felt too patient, too expectant. It felt like a great and gently sleeping beast surrounded her as she trudged through undergrowth with no paths to follow. She was submerged in the rustle and sigh of shifting greenery, her eyes drawn from one impossibly verdant leaf to another. Everything seemed…she wasn't sure she had the right words. The place felt, smelled, looked more…more real than anywhere she'd ever been in her life. If she was honest, the place seemed more real to her in that trek than she herself did. It left her feeling a bit like a ghost of herself, just haunting some place far healthier than she'd ever been.
She only found an anchor for that sense of drifting unseen and unsubstantial when her body took it upon itself to remind her that however much more alive than her the place might feel, she was in fact still living. Of course, it chose to do that by having her stomach grate out a loud protest of its emptiness. It was oddly mortifying, breaking the gentle symphony of that place with a sound so starkly, so abrasively human. It left her feeling like she'd just farted in a cathedral so loudly and so suddenly that every eye was on her. Trying to tamp down the shame she felt at the thought, Emma strove to shake off that image alongside a lingering sense of observation. Was it her imagination that made the shift of undergrowth seem to expect something? Was she imagining more rustling behind her in the undergrowth? Could she afford to be wrong if she wasn't?
Deciding she couldn't, Emma picked up her pace, trying to escape the sounds pursuing her.
At least, she admitted,
I'm sure there's really something now. The noise had grown as the noise she made had done so. Running now, Emma wove between branches, around the boles of close-together trees, rushing through bushes and saplings. She knew she was making more noise now, but a certainty, a panic had settled in her stomach, and as sure as she'd known she couldn't survive becoming Taylor, oh so long ago, she was certain she'd not survive it if she was caught by whatever creature now chased her.
She had just started to hope she'd escape, when a root reached up and caught her right foot, sending her plowing into the loamy soil with a desperately spluttering shout. Tears finally unstoppered by her fear, Emma struggled to rise, to get her feet under her despite the wind being knocked out of her. When she did, she wished she hadn't, collapsing to the ground at her first attempt to stand on the offending limb. Something had gotten hurt, wrenched by the roots that'd ruined her escape. Looking back and down, she saw she was missing half a toenail and the skin visible beneath her bleeding hangnail was a purplish shade of red and had already started to swell.
This is how I die? Emma couldn't help but feel a little…she didn't have a word for it. Amused despite herself, but not so much so as to think it was really funny.
Everything that's happened and that I've made it through, and I trip and fall and get eaten by…something. In a forest. On the moon. A part of her felt dismay that she'd be dying wearing something as ugly and unstylish as a hospital gown. Another part of her felt nothing but contempt and rage for the first part. Again she faced death or disfigurement. Again her last thoughts were on what she was wearing. She really was shallow, wasn't she?
Well, she resigned herself,
time to face the…mu—sic?
She trailed off, blinking and incredulous. She couldn't help it. She started laughing. And crying. She was only broken out of it by a sudden wet, cold touch against her cheek and the warm snuffle of a breath taken to scent her. Opening her eyes, Emma looked at the dread beast she'd fled. Sighing, she reached out a slow, tentative hand to brush the flank of the doe currently sniffing her coppery hair. Oddly, the animal didn't show any signs of wariness. It only seemed curious. It stiffened a moment under her touch, but when she made no hostile moves, it settled and took a seat beside her, leaning against her.
She couldn't believe it wasn't scared of her. Not that she was a scary person, especially in her current condition. Still, deer were extremely skittish in the wild, especially around humans. Had…had it never seen a person before? Was that why it'd followed her? Curiosity? It blinked rapidly and looked around, its heart rate spiking briefly when another grumble from Emma's empty stomach sounded out, but after a few seconds, it settled again, seemingly content to rest as it idly chewed on the small, delicate leaves of a nearby shrub.
Reminded of her hunger, Emma briefly entertained the thought of trying to subdue and eat the deer. She was close enough to it it'd be easy to reach and wrap her arms around its neck. To hang on until it stopped struggling. Then all she'd have to do is…um, get a fire going? Something she should probably do before dark anyway. Not that she could probably do that right. Still, that wasn't what stopped her. No, a thought bubbled up from the depths of her memories, like water drawn from a deep well.
"Remember," Taylor's mom quoted to the two girls listening, rapt, to her every word, "
it's a sin to kill a mockingbird."
There was something innocent about this animal. Something unspoiled in a way she herself could barely stand to remember. She'd done enough damage already. She'd already killed as many mockingbirds as anyone cared to, so why keep on when there wasn't any point? After a great deal of whimpering and effort, Emma eventually got to her feet and started limping on, careful not to aggravate her injured foot to whatever degree she could avoid it. There was some point to her being here. There had to be. She just…she just needed to find it. Maybe then she could go home.
Eventually, Emma found a cave that led down from the forest. Or should she call it a tunnel? It kept on, branching, splitting, merging, winding, and wandering. She had to admit eventually that she was lost. Or, rather, even more lost. She didn't even begin to recognize the tunnels around her. From the soils of the forest, the ground had given way to stone once more.
OOO
So, as with 2.7 and 2.10, this Interlude continues to expand as I've written it. Next segment will either be the ultimate or penultimate part of it. meanwhile, I need to find a pair of words that start with N to keep up the unintentional naming convention parts 2 and 3 tripped face-first into. 
