Tabula Rasa - Part 1

Part 1: Awakening

Though what came before was an uncomfortable blank, the arrival of consciousness was about as fun as being hit in the face with a brick. Or, perhaps more accurately, being over my head in a tank of water.

Whether it was water or not, at the point I started becoming aware of it, I was far more concerned with the fact I was totally immersed in the stuff and reflex pretty much took over. In some odd, detached part of my brain, I knew that I wasn't drowning. There was enough of the stuff inside me already that if that was going to happen, it already would have. Unfortunately, that wasn't the part of me in the driving seat right then.

Distorted by the fluid around me, I could see that there was something in front of me, but my frantic attempts to claw my way toward hit were met with a solid thud as flailing limbs met an unyielding surface. That set me off even more, and pain shot up my arm as I tried to pummel my way through whatever it was that was stopping me from getting to the air I could see was there, agonisingly out of reach.

Every time I hit that invisible wall, the panic inside me built higher and higher, matched only by the burning in my chest as I tried not to inhale something I was sure was going to drown me the moment I let it in. Any hope of thinking my way out was buried under the rising tide of adrenaline and frantic struggling, the fact that my life might be measured in mere moments more burning brightly in my head.

Suddenly, another loud thud rang through the fluid, followed by a rapid gurgling noise - and an even faster dropping sensation in my stomach. Before I had any chance to register any of what was happening, though, my feet hit something solid and unyielding, my legs crumpling with the impact and dropping me face first onto a cold, hard surface. The landing drove whatever was in my lungs out in a rush, and as I lay there with whatever liquid it was washing over me, a flood of it came out of my mouth and left me coughing, retching, and feeling like I'd been turned pretty much inside out.

My hands went to my stomach as, feeling weak and wrung out, I tried to make myself breathe. Every time I tried, another wracking spasm of coughing ripped through me, and I found myself wishing that instead of feeling like I was going to die like I had a few moments before, I could just do it and get it over with.

Slowly, however, it got easier to get air into my lungs, though that did little to ease the rawness of my throat from all the choking coughs that had torn their way out of it. Little by little, I started to become aware of my surroundings. The easiest thing for me to see was the metal grille I was laid on, trickles of the liquid I'd been surrounded by dripping through the gaps as their edges dug into my bare skin. I managed to roll myself onto my back, and saw where I'd been hanging above me. A large tube, not much bigger around than me, the bottom hanging down at one side, making it pretty clear even to my muddled senses that the whole thing had simply flipped open and dropped me out. Which accounted for the less than graceful landing, I thought blearily.

My skin was still wet and slick with liquid, and as I tried to look myself over I could see that it was all that covered me. For some reason, that seemed odd... but I wasn't really given that much chance to ponder it.

"Stand."

The voice was more a collection of clicks and hums than actual words, but I understood it anyway. Rolling myself the right way up was a bit easier this time, and I managed to get a look at who'd spoken to me - and immediately wished I hadn't. A squeak of fear escaped my throat as I tried to scrabble away from the figure towering over me. Almost skeletally thin, there seemed to be little to it but grey skin and corded muscle, seemingly totally sexless and just as clothed as I wasn't. It was the skull-like face looking down at me that really freaked me out, however. My attempts to get away were pretty useless, given that I could barely make my arms and legs move where I wanted them, but they seemed to be enough to provoke a response.

Reaching down, the figure grabbed a handful of my hair and simply lifted me off of the ground. Ignoring my cry of pain and attempts to get free, it set me on my feet with a thump. About the only thing keeping me upright was his - as good a term as any right then - grip on my head, and I quickly tried to straighten my legs to take some of the pressure off of my scalp. Once I'd managed it, the grip shifted, pulling my head back so I was looking straight up into blank, colourless eyes that I could only just make out through the tears welling from the pain.

"You will obey immediately. Is this understood?"

The tone of the creature's voice was totally flat and unemotional, empty of any hint of anything at all. The way he was addressing me like I was little more than an object sent a shiver of anger through me, but I was panicky enough to make it easy to keep from acting on it. The time it took for all that to go through my head, however, was longer than he apparently wanted to wait. His grip tightened and I was sure I could feel hair being pulled from my scalp, dragging an answer out of me that wasn't much more than a sob of pain.

"Y-yes." Steadily increasing pressure told me that hadn't been the answer he wanted. The proper response suddenly popped out of the depths of my memory, though I had no idea where it had come from, and I gasped it out as quickly as I could. "Yes, Kaishaasi."

When he released my hair, it happened so fast that I dropped straight back to my knees, my legs giving out as the support he'd been giving me - agonising as it had been - disappeared. The crash of the ground against my knees dragged another cry out of me, but it had precisely no impact at all on the creature standing in front of me.

"Stand."

I was struggling to my feet almost before he finished speaking, and managed to avoid any 'encouragement' to do as I was told. Once I was up, I concentrated for a few moments on staying that way before looking around me. The room was pretty big, stark white with no kind of decoration at all. The only things in the room were more of the tubes like the one I'd been in, all of them empty, though I caught sight of another of the grey guys heading through a doorway a short distance away. I was pretty sure I saw something, or someone, in front of it, but there wasn't enough of a glimpse to be sure.

A cool hand took hold of my arm, and I felt myself being wordlessly directed toward that same door. One foot in front of the other was something of a challenge, but by the time I passed through the doorway I was able to do it without too much stumbling. Until I got a sight of what lay on the other side, at least...

The new room was smaller than the last, but a great deal fuller. Along one wall, a row of showerheads pumped water down over a dozen or so other beings, all of them humanoid and I was pretty sure that all of them looked female. My brain was numb enough at that moment to have little more reaction than that. There were as many of the grey skeleton males present as well, but they stood by the opposite wall, clear of the falling water as they watched the others clean themselves under the spray. I felt myself being pushed toward the shower, and it was fairly clear what I was supposed to do. The idea of doing it in public like this wasn't fun, but given the other option was finding out what would happen if I didn't, I got to work.

The water was hot, but not uncomfortably so, and foamed as soon as it hit my skin. It was by far the most pleasant experience I'd had since waking, and I found myself revelling in the way the spray massaged my skin. Over the next few minutes, I simply enjoyed the feeling of being clean, washing away the residue of the tank. As I washed myself, I cast surreptitious looks at the other people under the showers. They definitely all looked female, more or less, but their appearances ranged wildly in colour and tone, from something that looked like a six-foot cat to a small lizard-like one a few places further along. One thing I knew was that none of them were the same as me - though what that was, I couldn't say. Working my hands through my hair, and trying to ignore the tenderness of my scalp, I looked at the deep red colour of it. When it fell against me, I could feel it hung a long way down past my shoulders, but I knew that the combination with the pale green eyes I was looking through was somewhat unusual.

What bugged me was that I didn't know how I knew this, just like I didn't know where I was, what was going on, or why the presence of so many different forms of people was making me feel so increasingly uncomfortable. As a matter of fact, I found I was having a great deal of trouble dragging anything at all out of my memory.

I suddenly realised that even with what I was feeling about my situation, I was humming softly to myself as my hands massaged the foamy water over my breasts. It felt nice to be doing that, feeling the way the firm flesh filled my hands and the water dripped from the tight little peaks... but not as much as when one hand moved down my body to skim over the hairless place between my legs. I absently noted that that wasn't right either, and for some reason I'd expected to find hair there, but the pleasant sensation of my fingers distracted me from thinking about it very well indeed.

Before I got too involved in exploring, I felt a presence right behind me and span around. My hands moved to try and cover myself as best as they could, and I felt like I'd been caught doing something I shouldn't, but neither that feeling nor my whimper at the sight of that freakish face seemed to matter. My arm was taken again, and I was led toward another door at the far end of the room. Most of the other females had already left, each with their own escort, and I found myself at the back of the line of those still heading that way. Directly in front of me, the naked form of one of the other females moved with far more grace than I was able to summon at that point, and I found myself almost hypnotised by the way her pale-skinned rear shifted in front of me, slick with the water that had flowed over her body.

This, of course, was not the best thing I could have let myself do. Distracted as I was, I failed to notice the cue to stop, which led to it being delivered more forcefully - the hold on my arm was released, shifting to take a good handful of my hair again. Once more, I found myself being steered by that discomfort, pulled to a halt and turned to face the creature who held me. My head was tilted back again, forcing me to look up at the face that was a good thirty centimetres higher off the ground than my own - which put this guy at not far off two meters tall. Yet more evidence that I was probably very much outclassed on a physical level, as if the ease of how I was manhandled wasn't enough.

I expected him to say something, but he didn't, letting his grip get the message across for him. After a few seconds, he released me again and pushed me toward where I'd apparently been meant to go in the first place. It was a small chamber, no more than about a meter and a half on a side, though with plenty of head room, one of several that seemed to line the wall of the corridor we were in. Laying on the floor was a length of something that looked like a strip of leather, and it was the only thing in the otherwise stark white space.

"Pick it up."

A simple instruction, and I blinked away the tears the latest assault on my hair had produced as I stooped down to do as I was told. When I had it in my hand, I felt the smooth, flexible texture of it, and could see that it was a braided band about an inch across. This close, it definitely looked like leather, but I could see a glint of something more metallic woven through it as well. What it was, I didn't know, and being forcefully turned back to face my escort meant I had no chance to try and puzzle it out. He took the band from my hand and held it in both of his before wrapping it around my throat. I felt a flash of heat at the back of my neck, stinging against the skin for an instant, and when he took his hands away again the band stayed where it was, a snug fitting collar that, when I checked, wrapped seamlessly around my throat.

"You are now marked as property," the creature intoned, "The collar cannot be removed. Any attempt to do so will result in punishment."

Which was clear enough. So was the bit about my apparent status - and something inside me started screaming at the idea.

"You will remain here until the sale commences."

And that was all he had to say, it seemed. Turning his back on me, he walked away, the way we'd come into the little room sliding closed until I was facing the same kind of blank white wall that surrounded me on every other side.

---

A low layer of dust lies on the ground, nearly the same rust red as the rock itself. All around me, the broken landscape stretches off into the distance underneath a clear sky the colour of rich butterscotch.

As I look out over the empty land, I can feel pinpricks of icy cold on my skin between the heating filaments woven into the suit I'm wearing. Without that tight covering, and the helmet cradling my head, I know it would be a race between the frigid cold and the unbreathable air to see which would end me first.

Another beautiful day for a summer stroll, really.

I'm about to turn toward the others when a glint of light on the horizon catches my eye. Since I know full well that there's nothing that should be over there to do that, it's something that certainly gets my attention.

"Hey, guys? Any of you just see that?"

---

I didn't even realise I'd nodded off until I snapped awake again. A gritty taste in my mouth felt weird, especially as I'd not put anything in it... and a quick check told me there was nothing in there now.

Shaking the feeling off, I looked around me, totally unsurprised to see that there had been no change at all in my blank white surroundings. I wasn't sure if that was a comfort or not. In the time I'd been stuck in here, mostly just sitting on the hard floor, I'd had little to do but think - and that had led me to some things I didn't find comfortable at all.

First of my little realisations was that I hadn't noticed how foggy my mind had been until it started to clear up. That was about the only reason I could think of for not having freaked out completely when Mr. Grey Skeleton had made himself known, let alone been able to make myself take a damned shower with him and his friends there too. Even the other females that had been in there as well would have been enough to get me trying to claw my way out of the room again, I suspected. None of them had looked anything more than mostly humanoid, and just thinking about them made me shiver again.

No, there was very little about all of this that I liked, and it was taking quite a lot of effort to keep myself from doing anything but sit still. Even the collar around my throat was something I didn't want to think about. 'Property', he'd called me, and that made my skin crawl. That label felt so wrong, yet part of me was saying that it was nothing but the truth, so I might as well accept it. Why the conflict, I had no idea... and that was something else that was starting to scare me more and more every time I stumbled over it.

I didn't know. Not where I was, how I'd got here, what was going to happen to me... Most disturbing of all, and something that nearly drove me to tears the moment I realised it, was that I didn't even know who I was. I could picture myself easily enough, at lest roughly, and knew pretty much what I looked like, but that was it. No sense of anything but the surface details, no clue as to what I liked or didn't - apart from practically everything that had happened to me so far falling squarely in the latter column - not even a single hint of what made me anything but a piece of meat that walked, talked and thought. There wasn't even a name.

I wanted to shiver, feeling cold even though the air around me was warm enough that I was totally dry again after the shower. And what I'd done in there... I may not have known much, but I knew that there was no way I should have felt comfortable enough to go playing around like I had. It wasn't just the way my brain had been clouded up that meant I'd done it, there was something else, some other reason it had felt like a perfectly natural thing to do.

There was an honest question in my head as to whether I was out of my mind... or whether this was a dream that I really didn't want to be in.

"Ow!" Glaring down at my leg, I stared at the red mark on my thigh where I'd apparently just pinched myself.

Whatever it was I'd just tried to do, it didn't seem to have had any effect but to hurt, and my scalp was still sore enough after being dragged around by my hair. The last thing I needed right now as more pain, thank you very much.

Clasping my hands firmly together in front of me, I closed my eyes and tried to empty my mind. If nothing I could think of would make me feel any better, then maybe thinking of nothing at all would make me just that little bit less likely to give in to the tears I could feel trying to fight their way out. Unfortunately, it didn't work. All I could manage to do was push away image after image of the things that hadn't scared me at the time, but certainly did now... And things that frankly terrified me to think about when before they'd only provoked fear.

A drip of wetness fell onto my hands, and I didn't need to open my eyes to see what it was. I could feel the tears running down my cheeks as every effort I made to stop them crumbled away, and the queasy feeling in my stomach told me all too clearly that if I'd had anything in it I'd have already been violently sick.

I wished I could make myself think things would get any better.

There was no way to know for sure how long it had been since I'd been put in here, but I figured it was probably a couple of hours. It could have been less... or more, given the way I'd vagued out before. No telling how long that had been. With a bubble of cynical amusement that caught me by surprise, I figured that loosing myself in some weird-ass hallucination was at least a way to pass the time.

The idea of finding some good in the possibility of loosing my mind dragged a snort of something that might have been laughter from my throat, but it turned into a sob with the next breath. I pressed my knuckles to my mouth to try and hold it back, eyes squeezing shut as I forced the feeling away.

If I was going to get out of here, to get anything even close to the answers I wanted about everything I could - and couldn't - remember, I had to keep a grip on myself. Grey Man's words had told me what I needed to know, I was sure. I just needed to think.

Property... That's what he called me. And he didn't seem all that interested in me, other than to get me where he wanted me to be - and be nicely cleaned up by the time I got here. That's the key, I think... Unless I'm totally wrong, I'm going to be sold, which means going somewhere else. Getting out of here...

There'd been no clue about what might happen if I wasn't sold, but I didn't feel any need to find out. Avoiding that meant I needed to make sure I was... but how? Make myself attractive enough an item, sure, but I was missing a few nuggets of knowledge - such as what I was going to be sold for.

Rising to my feet, I started pacing around the confines of my little chamber, muttering to myself as I tried to piece together anything I could pull out of the fragments rattling around in my head. All the others that I'd seen, apart from the skeletons that seemed to be in charge, had been female. I was pretty sure of that. There'd been some effort to make sure they were all neat and clean as well... Add to that the fact that there were some things lurking in my head that I was pretty sure shouldn't have been there, and I had the beginnings of an idea.

There was no way I should have been willing to play about with myself, or at least start to, but it had seemed like the thing to do for some reason. Not only that, but the right way to address the skeletons had been lurking in my mind, ready to come out when the time was right. That was knowledge I shouldn't have had, but did.

All those hints and clues I found led me to a single conclusion: someone had screwed around with my head, not just taking things out, but putting others in. The level of violation that represented made me sick to my stomach again, and I had to swallow hard to keep from painfully retching on an empty stomach. Even as I fought that little battle, anger tore through me, and I wanted to get my hands on one of those grey bastards. The feeling suddenly driving me was savage enough to take me totally by surprise - I didn't want to punch something, I wanted to destroy it. Whatever colour those fuckers bled, I wanted to see it, even to taste it, as I tore them apart.

Gasping, I fell back against the wall, breathing hard as I tried to get myself back under control. The roaring rage scared me almost as much as the corpse-like appearance of the skeletons, especially since it was coming from somewhere deep inside me, a long way further down than anything I could remember ever having felt before.

Grabbing at the leather collar around my neck, I got as good a grip on it as I could, and tried to tear it away. I didn't care about the threat of punishment that had come with it, I just wanted it off of my skin so badly there wasn't any actual thought behind the desire.

I started caring about the consequences very quickly, however, when the collar reacted by tightening sharply. Clawing at the constricting leather, I dropped to my knees and tried to drag air into my lungs. That just made it worse, with every pull at the collar making it tighter. Finally, unable to breathe at all, I went limp as my vision greyed out and I started to loose consciousness. A few moments later, the collar slackened again, returning to it's previous snug fit around my throat.

Laid on the floor, I gulped for air, and finally admitted that had been a strong contender for the single stupidest thing I'd ever done. I'd been warned, but ignored it... and had learned the hard way not to do it again.

"Dammit..." I croaked. "Okay. Rule one, don't get pissy."

Continued in Chapter 2

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