Exiled to Lunar Lakes - Chapter 4, Part 2 - Broken Memories

Warning, flashing lights in some pictures below.

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Time froze in place as Petre waited in silence. Waited for something to happen, someone to come.
Maybe some more of the ceiling would fall.
At this point, he was damned if he knew.
Shards of glass flew up in the air to form the light bulb again. The light bulb slowly flickered as Petre stared, slack-jawed.
The light brightened as the ceiling pieced itself together again.

Petre knew right in that moment, he had lost his damn mind.
The door swung forward as the hinges creaked against its weight.

Petre stared at as he cursed under his breath.
That damn door was unlocked the whole time? You had to be fucking kidding.
Was this all some twisted show by some lunatic in Lunar Lakes?

Petre sighed. He wouldn’t doubt it.
Petre stared at the chair as he looked at it. For everything else in the room that had oddly pieced itself together, the chair had stayed broken.

He shook his head before talking under his breath. “You’re losing you're damn mind, Petre.” He needed a cigarette. Yes. A cigarette. He looked around in his pockets.

It wasn’t likely the kidnappers would have let him keep them, but the ceiling just pieced itself together so why the fuck not? Petre searched his pocket as he cursed under his breath. 

Damn it. The shock of the situation was starting to wear off as he looked at the chair warily before grabbing a piece of what reminded of it.
He was forgetting something.
His eyes widened as he dropped the piece of the chair as he rushed out the door.
Her bright green eyes in the front of his mind made him remember he wasn’t the only one taken.

The door creaked before shutting close behind him.
No turning back now.

Petre looked around the hallway as the lights flickered above. He stared at the ceiling for a moment to make sure it didn’t start falling apart.

He didn’t want to deal with that shit again.
Petre looked at each of the eight doors down the hallway as he decided what he should do.

He frantically started try to open the first one. The door didn’t budge. His eyebrows furrowed as he debated between forcing the door open or trying the rest of the seven as the hallway lights shut off.
Petre hurried as he tried opening every damn door he could before something happened again.

In another moment of complete silence, a door swung forward on it’s hinges as the light next to it flickered rapidly.

Petre ran to the door as his eyes searched for something. 

No, someone.
He was looking for the woman.
Petre winced as he thought about what he might find.
His eyes landed on a small body curled into a ball.

Her bright hair could still be seen in the darkness.
Petre sat down next to her as adrenaline sped through his body. They needed to get out of here.

He gently shook her shoulder as she hugged her legs tighter and whimpered under her breath.

Petre’s eyes widened in surprise before anger consumed him.
Anger for what they did, anger for what they could have done. What had they done to her?
He pushed it in the back of his mind before speaking. He needed to focus on getting them both out of here. “I don’t know what they did to you, but we have to do go. We’ll kill them later.” The words became a promise of some kind once they left his lips.
The woman uncurled herself as she looked up at him. The defiance in her eyes was nearly gone and he found himself wishing it wasn’t.

Wishing that she was still the same woman from that tried to slap him at a bar for treating death casually. “I promised I would start listening to them.”

Petre stared at her.
They had done something and his want to kill them for causing his day inconvenience was growing more and more out of hatred.
”Does that mean you are not coming?” He said carefully even though he knew her answer to the question. They had done some damage.
The woman looked at the ground as she hesitated before nodding.

Petre looked at her for a long moment before quickly picking her up gently and placing her over his shoulder.
He would get them both out of here, even if it no longer seemed like an option in her mind.

Petre briefly thought about how longer they could have been here and couldn’t shake the feeling that something supernatural was going on with this damn place. How would he know the time?

The woman went silent for a moment as Petre started walking towards the end of the hallway before she started screaming and cursing at him.

Petre shook his head as he looked around for the exit.

He would kill them yet even through it all, they hadn’t managed to kill this woman’s spark.

Chapter 5 - More Than Trust --->

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Exiled to Lunar Lakes - Chapter 4, Part 1 - Broken Memories

The chair snapped as Zoraida began to fall to the ground.

Her eyes widened as her body froze right before it hit the ground. Trying to clench her fists on reflex, she realized just how much she couldn’t move.

She couldn’t move.
Zoraida hated this feeling of vulnerability; a feeling all too familiar.

Her mind clouded over as her she grasped at memories as her mind nudged her away from the.
Don’t do it.
Zoraida being the person she was, frozen in gods’s know what moment, took it as a personal challenge.

If there was something she wasn’t meant to see or couldn’t see, she would see it.
Her mind couldn’t hide what crept in the shadows of it for long. Yet a voice that sounded hauntingly familiar echoed in the back of her mind.

You don’t want to see what you have become.

Oh, but she did indeed. Memories flashed in front of her eyes of the day she had. Two kidnappings, one death, and too many questions with not enough answers. The woman’s words hours before became yet another echo to join Zoraida's troubled mind.

“Stop wasting time looking for answers you don’t need.”
Despite all the warnings her own mind tossed at her, Zoraida pushed forward as a familiar sense of darkness clouded her vision.

For the first time, she finally ended up letting it win without putting up a fight.

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Agony.
Her mind screamed as she woke up in a world that was no longer her’s. Her light hair and dark eyes seemed to make the difference crystal clear.

She had woken up in a world void of color when she had been in one bursting with color moments before.

The warnings, her own mind, the kidnappings...she would take it all back.
She would take it all back.
She wanted it back.
The hospital room was a pale comparison to Lunar Lakes.
The edges of her vision blurred.

Real or not real? She wasn’t sure.

Was this a memory or a nightmare?

Footsteps approached the hospital room as the woman took shaky breaths. 

Her first instinct was not to protect herself, not to jump into action.

Her body froze with fear as her eyes widened.
She was afraid.
The door opened as her vision blurred.

She didn’t want this.
She would take it back; she would listen this time.

Would she though? A voice whispered in the back of her mind.
Her vision faded to black as she fell to the ground.

Chapter 4, Part 2 - Broken Memories --->

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Hey guys! I was playing around with editing and wanted this to flow so...it was split into parts. I hope you enjoyed this (very) short part. =D

SimNoWriMo Word count: 417
SimNoWriMo Picture count: 17
SimNoWriMo Update Count: 2 

Exiled to Lunar Lakes - Chapter 3 - Shattering Light

Following the man to gods know where, Zoraida found herself lagging behind as she tried to keep up. The lights from the crystal lamp posts allowed Zoraida to see two feet ahead of herself. The city itself lit up in pitch black darkness as she tried to stand taller.

She didn’t belong here. The was thought stuck in her head as it slowly twisted and unraveled itself.

The man in front of her signaled for her to stop as Zoraida's hands clenched into fists on reflex.

She looked at everything with distrust in her eyes.

His eyes became wary as a man and woman with crazed eyes stepped out of the shadows. The man walked towards her with his hands clenched into fists. Zoraida stepped away from him as the woman came behind her.
This again? What was with this damn society and trying to kidnap everyone?
She looked around wildly for the man she had been following as the woman grabbed her from behind and placed a rag over her mouth. Zoraida struggled against her as she tried to release herself from her grip.
Zoraida was a caged bird with her wings clipped off still trying to fly. Her vision began to blur as she fought against the woman. In that moment, she realized just exactly how small she was in the grand scheme of things.
The realization was daunting.

She swung her arms impulsively as she lost any control she had before. The woman grunted in pain as Zoraida stopped being able to move, yet it was still her small victory.
Maybe she had broken her nose too.
Her vision slowly turned black as she closed her eyes.

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Zoraida's eyes slowly open as she looked around at where she was. Her head was pounding and the bruise she had received earlier that day didn’t help the matter. She tried to move her hands just as she found that they were tied to the back of a chair with what she assumed was...rope.

Yes, rope.

She rested her head against the rickety wooden chair as the pounding in her head continued to drum. Zoraida tried to move her legs with little success.

It seemed likely they weren’t taking any chances this time. She briefly wondered if she had been kidnapped again because of her reaction to the woman dying at the bar as everyone watched and complained.

If that was the case, she would simply have to tell them all to go to hell and flip them off once her hands were untied.
Screw ten years.
If she couldn’t even last a day without watching somebody die and two kidnappings, what was the point of ten years?

She rocked back and forth in the chair as the only lightbulb in the room began to flicker.

She ignored it.
Back.
The ground had began to tremble.
Forth.
She was imagining it.

Back.
The only thing that mattered was escaping.
Forth.
A large crack formed in the ceiling above her.
The light’s flickering had become more and more frequent.

Back.
Pieces of the ceiling began to fall as Zoraida shut her eyes close.
Her doubts about this being her imagination started to sink in.
Forth.
The eerie silence that followed was more startling than the chaos.
Snap.

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With his hands tied tightly to a chair, Petre Stewart wasn’t exactly sure how he had managed to get himself in this situation.

He had gone to the bar for a few drinks and had stepped outside to smoke a cigarette when he had met her.
The one person who didn’t have any clue about what she was getting into.
She was reactive. She was impulsive. Most of all, she was confused.

He planned on explaining to her what she had most likely left out. How Lunar Lakes functioned, why everyone reacted the way they did. Most were given ten year to live, but death came at any moment. It was just a rough estimate of time collected by those who had come first.
Death was meant to be treated as a normal event.

There was a specific team created for the disposal of bodies in Lunar Lakes, as they quickly built up. The bodies were all burned. If everyone had been buried underground, there would be too many graves and not enough time to bury them. Burning them had proven to be more efficient in recent years. Reactions to the death of somebody just made the whole ordeal worse when it was generally accepted that everyone could drop dead at any moment.
The fact somebody had reacted so strongly to it after everything had been...odd.
There was two truths in Lunar Lakes; Death and crime. If they didn’t fall into that category, they were lies.

There had been rumors that depending on the type of crime associated with the number, the citizen was immediately executed. Other rumors said they had been left to live depending on how she felt about it at the time being. Most of the time if they were allowed to live, they were placed at the end of the social ladder and watched to see when they would screw up.

Luckily for him, that hadn’t happened.
Petre sighed as he turned his head to look at his hands.
Really? They thought a little rope would him? Petre rolled his eyes.
For gods’s sake. Had they not seen him?
The chair creaked against his weight. It was cheap; something that wasn’t durable enough. Sierra’s people wouldn’t have made such a dumb mistake meaning this kidnapping was likely against protocol.
Petre sighed.
That would mean another hanging.
The rules were simple, yet a society filled with citizens that had been known to challenge the rules in what seemed to be another time made everything complicated.
Not that he was a saint himself.
The light above him flickered as he started working on getting out of the chair. The rope came off easily. Petre worked on untying his legs as the ground began to tremble.

He looked up cautiously at the ceiling.
Lunar Lakes didn’t have earthquakes.
Petre worked faster and untied his legs as the trembling began to increase.
The light swung back and forth as the ceiling began to crack.

His eyes widened as he covered his head. Bits and pieces of the ceiling began to fall as Petre dodged them.
The light flicked for the last time as it shattered into pieces and the room went dark.

Chapter 4, Part 1 - Broken Memories --->

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