Chapter Text
PART I: ABOARD THE PERFUME YUDA
The very last thing Kassie remembers is falling, falling and crashing. Going to work and getting into the elevator and her heart coming up her throat, a scream lodged in her lungs unable to escape.
Then it’s darkness.
Cold and darkness. Cold and darkness and… nothing.
Nothing.
As though dreaming, floating in the void, but unable to wake up. No body, no movement, no… heartbeat.
She wishes she could say she is scared, terrified out of her mind actually, but she has nothing to feel fear with.
Is she dead?
Oh, God, is she dead?
And yet—
Would that be so bad?
She’s about to settle, to resign herself to her fate when the cold sharpens. Goes from a pleasant autumn breeze to an iced morning after it rains, the temperature biting into her.
Something tightens, contracting around her as if to trap her and give her shape.
Mold her, give her skin. Lungs, stomach and heart.
Pain.
Fuckton of pain, thousands of needles stabbing her everything, chest burning, temples throbbing.
She doesn’t know what it is but she wants it to stop.
To close her eyes and make it stop. Just stop—
Stop.
Stop!
Darkness.
Wait, no, colors. Flicking colors, though everything still hurts. A murmur in the background, a soft and soothing back and forth drag. Something carefully drizzling on her face.
Something cold around her legs, something… wet?
Something solid beneath, firm but shifting. Sand?
There’s a split second between asking herself what is going on and realizing she’s alive, hurting but alive.
Then, it’s panic.
Her heart drops, body bolting upright despite the pain as she gasps and frantically scans her surroundings, wide and terrified eyes barely taking the stormy beach around her before she starts to tremble head to toe.
Where—
When–
What?
No, this can’t be happening. She was in the city, she was going to work, her suit —albeit wet and crusty with sand— is proof of it. How the fuck did she ended up on a beach? A beach that’s empty, by the way. No ships on the horizon and no houses around the treeline behind her. Nothing but the grey sky above her and the freezing cold biting into her limbs.
She gets up, she has to, she has to get help, figure out how she got here.
Although it’s not rational to think so because nature has no such will, the beach takes it all wrong.
As soon as she’s out of reach of the waves, it gets worse. Lightning strikes through the clouds, close enough to startle and force her to drop into a crouch on the sand with a scream, and the boom of the thunder is no better, rattling her bones.
The wind bellows, the sea roars. Up and down, with inflection, as though trying to sing or form words, as though… talking.
Kassandra!
She’s hallucinating, she must be. Whatever happened, the fall and the crash, it must have been a nightmare or maybe it was real and she’s high as a kite in a hospital somewhere.
Kassandra!
“Shut up!” She can’t help but scream, though she can’t even hear herself about the noise.
She needs to find shelter, now. She needs to get out of here.
As though by miracle, just a little ahead of her, she finds her bag. A battered black thing she never got around to change because she barely had enough for rent, groceries and bills. She’s still shaking as she tries to open it, wet fingers struggling to pull at the zipper but eventually succeeding.
No signal, her phone tells her. Not a single bar.
Kassandra!
“Shut up!” She screams again, lump in her throat. “Help! Help!”
The wind shouts.
Only one!
The beach around her softens at the edges, the noise suddenly muffled, though she can still see the trees shaking and the ocean slapping the sand behind her.
You may change only one thing, Kassandra!
“Who are you?” She can’t help but reply, clutching her bag to her chest with trembling fists. “What do you want?”
Only one, Kassandra! Use your chance well!
The storm dissipates, pops away like a balloon, and leaves her still wet and frightened to stare at a clear summer sky.
She’s ashamed to admit she stays on the beach for a little while, leaning against a tree and staring at the waves, just to stop trembling and let numbness take over her limbs until the discomfort forces her to get up. It’s at that movement, when she goes onto her knees to push herself up, that a gasp escapes her as she falls back down onto the sand.
It’s pink.
Her hair is pink.
What the—How the fuck is her hair pink?
Underneath the shock, she vaguely thinks it’s a beautiful color, a deep magenta, and it reminds her of the color she dyed it in college after deciding she better have fun before losing herself to the corporate system. She was right though, her hair has been plain old brown for years.
Thankfully, when she checks the little hand mirror she has in her bag, nothing else has changed. It’s the freckled skin and the same dark eyes, the same bumpy nose and the same round lips, the same chubby composition and the same medium height.
After the shock passes and she pushes the panic away, she takes stock of the little she has. Surely there is a city or village nearby, she just has to find it, but she doesn’t know how long that will take, so she has to make do with what she has.
Except for the caramel protein bar she had planned to have as a snack and her luckily half-full water bottle, everything else is useless—some tissues, too many receipts she never threw into the trash, the keys to her flat, her favorite lipstick, a hairband, a sanitary pad, her earphones. Maybe she could use her mirror to start a fire since the sun is still out but that would imply staying where she is and although it’s the most logical course to wait for someone to rescue her, she’d rather take her chances finding civilization.
Behind her, she can see the peak of a mountain, grey and imposing, but the height of the trees block her sight so she can’t tell if there’s any kind of settlement there. Besides, she’s not climbing up a mountain when she can tread flat ground, especially since she knows humanity has a tendency to settle near bodies of water.
The beach doesn’t seem to have a clear end, rounding up in both directions, so she ties her hair in a low ponytail and tightens up the laces of her sneakers before sighing and praying this works when going right, simply because she’s right-handed and can’t think of anything else.
It’s hours and hours of walking, walking and sweating and probably getting sunburned all the way to hell, and yet… it's beautiful.
If she ignores the growing panic at not finding a single person or even a sign of civilization and the ache in her legs, she can definitely enjoy the sight. The clear water, soothing as it laps and melts on the shore. The refreshing breeze, cooling her skin. The cleanliness of the air, cleansing her city lungs. The sky, bluer than she ever thought the sky could be.
God, it’s been years since she last visited the beach, must have been one of the last times she spent with her dad before he up and left. Or maybe it was when she went road-tripping with her girlfriend, but that didn’t turn out very well either since they broke up a few weeks later.
A growl coming from her stomach snaps her out of the memories, and she’s been hungry for a while, hoping she didn’t have to eat the one bit of food she has, hoping she would find someone by now, but she’s had no luck.
Well, walking hungry won’t do anyone any favors, so she simply sits down by the shore and munches on half her bar and chases it down with a sip of water. Oh, what she would give for an ice-cold ramazzotti spritz and a parasol to lay under. And a book to top it off, yeah, that would be paradise.
The burn in her legs only gets worse and don’t get her wrong, she does her daily ten thousand steps, but the beach soon stops being a beach and becomes an inclined road up a cliff. Maybe she’s imagining the road, the throbbing headache making her mind play tricks on her, but it’s the last, and frankly the only, hope she has since she still has no signal and can’t exactly turn back.
The sun is quickly going down and her feet are quickly faltering as she starts approaching the top, but no matter how high she climbs, the trees still block her sight of the center of the island. Instead, she glances at the sea and—
A ship.
A ship heading her way!
There’s only a few meters between her and the top of the cliff so she runs up to it, sweating and panting, lungs and legs burning, and takes out her mirror with trembling fingers.
She doesn’t really question the strange shape of the ship —a massive thing with red sails instead of grey with no visible engine— or the massive channel in the middle island the ship seems to be heading into, she simple thanks every deity out there and tries angling her mirror to catch the orange light of the sunset.
“Help!” She shouts despite the painful scratch in the back of throat, even though she doubts she’ll be heard. “Here! Help!”
A startled scream escapes her when something whistles past her from behind, frighteningly closed to her ear, close enough to mess with the few strands that had fallen out of her ponytail.
“State your name and business, intruder, or die!”
She flinches on instinct, quickly turning around, leaving the edge of the cliff behind her and the ocean below, but finding no one.
She opens her mouth to reply, to voice her name or ask for help or beg for mercy, but nothing comes out. She can only try to inhale, to take in air to speak but failing.
Something whistles again through the trees and digs onto the dirt right before her feet, the impact booming in the air and loudly cracking the earth.
She flinches again, instinctively taking a few steps back to—
The last thing Kassie sees before she falls is a woman with a bow and arrow stepping out the trees wearing colorful but incredibly skimpy clothes and a panicked expression on her face.
She screams as loud as she can until she runs out of air, flaying as she flies but there’s nothing to hold on to, nothing to cling to, nothing to stop her from falling and falling and—
Her eyes see the ocean close in on her, with the strange ship just a few meters away from the spot where she’ll splat and die, but she never feels herself crash.
Darkness.