New Soul

Spoiler:

The dream's theme: Whisper of Hell



...I...

...

...U-uh...

...

...W-wake up...

...W-WAKE U-UP!

The first words the mind of the creature was able to process were those two: "wake up". And the creature wasn't even conscious enough to speak them aloud: they just happened in her strange dream, as if a mysterious instinct inside her was trying to wake her up, to make her escape that nightmare she seemed to be trapped in.
And the creature did wake up, after a while.
It was quite problematic for her to tell apart the white, mysterious space she was dreaming of mere moments before and the intense light that hit her eyes when she tried to open them: she wasn't used to light, it hurt her. It scared her.

She closed her eyes, she tried to open them again: slowly, like a newborn kitten, she was starting to see something. But seeing wasn't helping her at all: from her position she could see the sky, but she had no idea of what it was. nor did she know that what she could see looking down was her body, even if this particular coscience was slowly manifesting in her.
Mostly becaue she could feel a bad sensation radiating from that body, a sensation that was slowly taking over any other, and filling her mind as if it was demanding attention.

...Pain...

Her mind managed to process that word. It was pain what she was feeling. Pain from her whole body, and she didn't know why. On a mere self-preservation instinct she tried to move, to see if she could escape that pain, but her body simply refused to do anything. She couldn't move. She was forced to stay there, any action was impossible.

...Why?

Her mind managed to elaborate that question. But she couldn't find any answer.
And suddenly her vision grew dim again, she could feel her eyes filling up with something, and when she tried to close them she could feel some kind of water running down her cheeks.

...Tears...

Another word processed by her brain. She was crying, and she didn't know why, she didn't know why she was there, she didn't know why she couldn't move, she didn't know anything. She could only lay there and cry.

She had no cognition of time, so she couldn't tell for how long shehad stayed there. Minutes? Years? She didn't know the meaning of either word, so was it really important?
She didn't feel pain anymore. Her body seemed to somehow feel better. She tried to move, and she somehow found herself in a compltely different position.

...I am standing...

This time, her mind had managed to process a whole concept including self-coscience and awareness of having succesfully completed an action. She would have called it a progress, but unfortunately she didn't know what the word "progress" means.
There was something soft under her feet, it gave her a pleasant sensation: looking down, she saw the soft thing was green.

...Grass...

She recognized it, even if that sensation was not familiar to her. Just like another sensation she was feeling was equally unfamiliar to her, a sensation that seemed to radiate from her midsection, specifically from that part she had her hands on in that moment, and that was called "belly", even if she didn't know.

...Hunger...

Once again, her mind had been able to recognize and process something that was not familiar to her. How was that possible? SHe had no idea.
But indeed, she was starving. She needed something, she needed to find something to calm that feeling down, her whole body was demanding that.

...Food...

Her mind suggested her the name of what she needed to look for. But how was she supposed to look for it?
Once again acting on pure instinct, she felt the urge to move. To leave that place, or at least to navigate inside it, to see if she could find what she needed. And her instinct was suggesting her that, in order to move, she needed to put a foot in front on the other, move her body weight from one leg to the other, and then repeat the operation over and over. She didn't know it yet, but that operation was called "walking".
And she attempted it. She honestly gave it her best.
Putting one foot in front of the other wasn't even that difficult, it was moving her body weight from one leg to the other that proved too big of a challenge for her faculties.
She fell forward, and having no experiences about falls, her hands didn't move to protect her face: she landed face-first on the ground, smelling the grass and feeling a huge pain radiating from a spot straight above her nose.

She felt the tears running down her face once again. She even saw them falling on the ground, slowly changing the color of the grass.
Why was that liquid red? She could feel that something was wrong about it...

Phantom had been having a dreadful day so far, and his night before hadn’t truly been much better. Some of the lower members of the Crime Syndicate had utterly messed up a heist which resulted in their arrest. This of course called for him having to go to the jail and pay off their reasonably high bails, to get them out. Which of course got them out of jail but didn’t do anything about their trial that was to take place in a couple of weeks. And what with the new Defense Attorney turned Prosecutor Ray Miller, Lucifer was unsure if there was any defense attorney he could buy that would be able to hold his own against the man that put Doctor Cosmos behind bars. This all is what was running though the mind of the most influential man in Chicago as he made his way down a not so busy road just outside of said city.

It was a path he traveled upon often because the park at the end of the walk had a certain appeal to it that he could not find with other’s it seemed. The aura put off by the surrounding area every time he visited always felt calm and welcoming. When ever gone from there he would find himself wanting to return, if only to sit down for a spell and rest in the open air. It was one of the few true parks left that one would read about in books and the like. It had trees as far as the eye could see, true green grass, park benches, picnic tables and even children throwing Frisbees to dogs in a game of catch. What more could one want when they needed a place to clear their heads and relax? Nothing, that was the answer that came to Lucifer Hermes Mercury’s mind.

Except this time upon arriving at the park he spotted something he had never hoped to see in his ‘secret’ sanctuary away from the true facts of life. Someone was in obvious trouble, and not just anyone it was a child not yet into adult hood, falling towards the ground and bleeding profoundly from the face. Tears’ streaming down the poor girl’s face it was somewhat hard to tell whether she was bleeding as bad as it seemed or just a minor bleeding and the tears were making it flow worse. Whichever it was he could not stand by idly watching like some other blundering idiots that were apparently at the park today, and so removing a handkerchief from his suit pocket he made his way over to where the young female laid.

Upon reaching the spot where she lay he knelt down and helped her to sit up, “Here young lady, allow me to wipe your tears and blood away. Are you alright, and where do your parents currently reside?” He asked as he sat her up and wiped the blood off her face and the tears away from her eyes. He knew not who this young one was but it mattered little to Mr. Mercury, children in pain or in harm were not something he could allow to happen while in his presence. Although he was the world’s greatest thief and head of the largest underground criminal organization, children were not something he ever dreamt of harming in all his long thirty-seven years of life. Because of the way he grew up it wasn’t truly feasible. At least that’s how he thought of it all.

After wiping off the blood and most of the tears he put the handkerchief back in his suit pocket. Standing up he held his hand out to her to allow her help up as well, while his other hand rested upon his cane of course. “Now then young lady, are you alright? Do you need me to call your parents if they are indeed not around here? If not I could certainly walk you home to make sure that you arrive at the destination without harming yourself anymore.” He was unsure of whether or not the girl required anymore assistance but Lucifer Hermes Mercury was not going to allow a child who had already been brought down to pain once today to feel anything else. No, that was certainly not on his agenda for the day.

The mind of the creature was still trying to process the data on the fall, in order to understand why her body hadn't been able to move properly, when suddenly she felt a completely new sensation on her shoulder and on the back of her head.
A sudden... Pressure, some kind of force applied in specific spots on her body. She had absolutely no idea of what was going on.
She felt something soft on her face, even if it was a different kind of "soft", compared to the grass under her feet from earlier.
She felt the force gently dragging her back to vertical stance, and she had to rely on it to keep balance and avoid falling again. It was a strange sensation, it was like something was invading her body and her self-coscience, but at the same time there was something reassuring about it, for some reason she wasn't scared by that unfamiliar feeling.

Whatever was the thing that had touched her face, it had cleared her vision. She could now see the creature that was standing in front of her.

... A human being...

She was somehow aware of the fact that what was in front of her was a person, but she was still unsure about how what that meant. It was a completely new and unexpected situation, and she didn't know how to react to it. Was that person responsible for her vision being cleared, for her body being put once again on a vertical basis, for the force, the pressure she had felt a moment ago? Apparently it was so, even if she wasn't sure about it: what she was sure about was the fact that the person was emitting a huge variety of sounds.

...Words...

It took her a while to realize that those sounds where words like the ones her mind was processing since she had woken up, but they seemed so different now! They weren't in her brain, they were getting there from an external source through her hears, an they were so fast, so terribly fast!
She tried to keep up with them but she failed: she wasn't able to understand a single word of what the person said. But suddenly, a small spark of comprehension popped up in her mind.

...He helped me...

The concept of "help" was now perfectly clear to her, even if she had still some problems understanding the "he" part: the concept of personal pronoun included the concept of gender, which was still a mystery for her mind, which was trying its best to process all the new information it was being given.
That person had helped her. Maybe that person would have helped her again.
Managing somehow to elaborate this concept, she focused her attention on her own body, in order to recap what she needed at the moment: the blood wasn't flowing form her forehead anymore, actually she didn't even feel any pain radiating from there anymore... How was that possible? Was that the doing of that person, once again?

Spoiler:

However, she was still hungry. That was her most urgent need. That was what she needed to communicate to that person.
But how was she supposed to communicate? She had absolutely no idea... How could she share something she was feeling from her body with another person, who had another body?

...The sounds...

It suddenly struck her: the sounds! That person had produced a huge variety of sounds in order to express the words, and use them to communicate. If she wanted to let that person know that she was hungry she had to do just the same. She had to produce sounds.
She immediately realized that she would have never been able to succeed in such a difficult task, of which she had no experience whatsoever: there was no way she could produce an amount of sounds even close to what she had just heard from the other...
But she just couldn't surender without trying, she couldn't panick right now: she just felt that letting that person know that she was hungry was immensely important, was the key of her survival. So, the word that expressed was she was feeling was "hunger": to start, she would have tried to produce that specific sound.

...Hu...

So that was the sound of her voice? No, no time to waste on such thoughts. She needed to focus.

...Hu...

It was really hard: what was the proper way of moving the lips? How much was she supposed to open her mouth? What was the role played by the thing she felt inside her mouth, which her mind had yet to process as "tongue"?
She had no choice, she had to keep trying. The "N" sound, which came next in the word, couldn't be that difficult...

... Hu... Hu... Hun...