The Last I Remembered

Incursion

Turns out that I only knew another system of writing. I was starting to think that these people were maybe less evolved or perhaps even devolved compared to my original timeline or living conditions. What was I? The question kept plaguing me. It also started to annoy me that I could perfectly understand them, yet they couldn't understand me in any way, save for the most primitive. What an existence. During my musings, Maina entered again. "Hi, sorry for running off on you, but I've only seen symbols like that once... An awfully traumatic event." This woman was getting a bit confusing - she went from cheerful to apologetic to sad in the time of a sentence. Maybe the cracks in her usual charade were showing. Maybe her cheerfulness hid a darker, sadder past. "I gotta say, it's a bit disheartening to see that communicating will be very, very hard.... And the recent failures with the... medicine don't help. Maybe it was all a mistake... Maybe we should've never-" Jarro ran into the room, practically dragging Maina with him, rambling on about all kinds of things. What was this about? I started to take some more inventory of my room. The table I'd lain on for a long time was solid tera cotta, with rust-red stains all around. The ashes on the floor, though moved around more and more recently, seemed to form some sort of pattern. The floor underneath was, in stark contrast to the operating room of sorts where they'd reopened my eyes, a dark kind of wood. This was also the first time I'd really gotten a sense of scale: Maina and Jarro, who were the same size, were actually quite a bit taller than me. After I'd done this mental inventory of the room, I started scribbling some simple words and phrases in the ashes, yet got bored after a while. Before going to sleep, I made sure to erase the writings as to not trigger Maina's traumas again.

A few days went by without anything happening, really. Sometimes Maina would come in and talk to me for a bit. Sometimes I'd see Jarro looking at me from across the room, always lost in thought. I call them days, but have no idea of the actual progression of time - nothing in my room indicated time: there were no clocks, calendars, nor outside windows. Then at one time, Jarro stormed into my room. Something bad was happening outside and we'd need to run. I was not to worry for they had escape routes within the building and it was built to be maze-like. No one would be able to follow us. As he predicted, Maina waited down a corridor, holding open a section of wall that looked identical to everything around it. We ducked inside and she closed it. The first few hundred metres were lit by electric lights overhead, but about two-thirds down the corridor - without seeing the end of it - we halted and Jarro pushed a thick panel of the wall to the side. Behind it was a gaping hole with a ladder leading down. Maina went first, then me and Jarro followed after he closed the wall again. Down the hole was a corridor leading back the way we came. This corridor was hewn out off the rock, and lit by old-fashioned gas lights. We ran and ran until Jarro stopped at a pair of torches. "Grab one," he told Maina while pressing a button, the only sign of recent activity in this area. The gas lights went off. "That should take care of those darn intruders." We started running again, but my body wasn't used to physical activity like this. Up to now, I'd been rushed along by adrenaline but it was starting to wear off. "I'm tired," I told Maina, "can we rest? I don't remember..." My voice trailed off. What I remembered... The last thing I remembered... The last thing... The last...

I woke up in a completely different room, much smaller than my previous one. The one similarity was, once again, I couldn't see the outside world. The only people I'd interacted with for ages were Maina and Jarro, who I could hear fighting in the next room. They were arguing about whose fault it was that "they" invaded. I assumed the referenced "they" were the people we were running from. My waking must've alerted them, and soon Maina came into my room, looking tired. "We're safe here for a while, but soon we must go again. How are you feeling?" Thumbs down, the tried and true method of communication. "I see. Try to rest some." She left the room, "for what it's worth, I'm sorry we pushed you that hard three days ago." I nodded, still sleepy. Then it hit me - I'd been out for three days? Three whole days? That was beyond worrying, especially since anyone mentioning... that... facility of my mind could just shut me off for days at a time? I looked for something to sleep on, and this time they'd given me an actual bed. Just before I fell asleep, I heard Jarro tell Maina that one of them would have to stay awake at all times, to prevent contagion, whatever that meant.