a young woman and her bedroom

Let me tell you a story.

A young woman sits alone in her bedroom. It just so happens that this 22 year old is ready to play a game with her sister, mothers and some friends. But little does she know the curse this game would lay upon everyone she knew. These eleven are saved, while the rest of the world dies in a meteor apocalypse.

A young woman sits startled in her bedroom, as a world she’s unfamiliar with replaces her neighborhood with all the beautiful trees and the park across the way. She exit’s the house and explores this strange new world, not knowing where any of her friends have gone. She finds them eventually, of course, and that’s where the drama begins.

A young woman sits worried in her bedroom. She hasn’t heard from her sister in a very long time. After a while, she gets up to look outside and see a trail of blood leading to her front door, where her sister is barely breathing, unconscious. She carries her all the way back to her land, knowledge of where to go next filling her head in the form of dark voices. She lays her down on a stone bed and stays with her until she draws her seemingly final breath. The next hours become a haze, but she remembers going on a destructive rampage, seeking revenge.

A young woman sits bewildered in her bedroom. The last thing she remembers is being drawn into the void, then seeing a flash of color, and bright, cherry red stone. She wakes up again in an outfit of the same color, with seeming mastery over time. She sees her sister in a new outfit, dark blue, who informs her of her newfound immortality and powers. But the immortality is conditional. Heroic or just, and she would not come back. She doesn’t think much on that for now.

A young woman sits terrified in her bedroom. The final battle is coming on now. It’s a long, arduous battle, and she sees all of her teammates start dying around her. Six of them betray her and her family, and die just deaths for their efforts right away. One, an alien, tries t defend them, apologizing profusely for the rest. His death is heroic. The family is very lucky to last as long as they do against this black beast. The first mother gets struck down unable to fight first, while trying to rip its soul out of its body. The second mother after her, causing massive damage to the monster in her wake. The sister last of all, falling to her knees as the young woman becomes enraged and finally obliterates the monster. A door appears. The final battle is over. She lifts her family and steps through the door into her new universe, where she immediately sees a man directing around large chunks of stone and earth around. She begs him to help her family, but stops fast as a meteor crashes. Her memory goes hazy one last time, as she sees the temple carried on the meteor. She wakes to see it utterly ruined, with forged symbols in the place of the codes that would bring that dreaded game here. When she goes back to her family, it’s too late to save them. She’s only just in time to be with them as they take their true dying breaths. She begs and begs the powers at be for it to be neither Heroic nor Just, but sadly, there is no such luck for her.

A young woman sits utterly crushed in her bedroom. She’s directed the man to bring it through, as well as vast chunks of the four lands of her and her family. Some of these swaths are stitched into the floating island the man was already building, turning it into more of a floating continent. Others, including the one containing her house and the tower that stood ominously over her land, are held on for later. The floating island, and by extension her, the man and the bodies of her family, are taken into another dimension. The man chooses a cave deep at the heart of a mountain to bury the bodies of the fallen - all ten, because the young woman would rather they be remembered. He’s even nice enough to make statues of them to act as grave markers… including one for her. He rips open another pocket dimension and stitches the other bits of land together inside, with the tower dead center, at her command. She has him put her house on top, and he teaches her how to create seals, so no one will ever be able to get in unless they say so. Four items will be used as the keys, each with an ever-lasting time field around it so they will never deteriorate. Once the deed is done, the young woman steps through the rift and it seals shut.

A young woman sits alone in her bedroom, for the next ten thousand years.

A young woman exits her bedroom for the first time in a very long time, upon learning of the world as it is today, and wishing to see it for herself.

Have you guessed who the young woman is yet?

That’s right.

Me.