The Placeholder (World Hopping)

1.2 - Biting the Hand that Feeds

Every time you crossed the road, passed under a flower pot, charged a phone, breathed, an invisible die was being cast.

If you won against the reaper, you lived.

If you lost... well, you would find out in time.

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It really hit home that this was a different dimension when she left the safety—if it could be described as such—of the frozen cave. The cave walls gave way to a blackness so dark she'd have thought her eyes were closed were it not for the ice around. Glistening blocks floated here and there, disturbed only by a long, broken icy road which she grudgingly followed. It was beautiful in a very unsettling way, and Ruxin wondered what would happen if she slipped off the path. Was the endless darkness the egress to limbo?

There was no way to measure time, but it didn't feel l

o

n

g

before the road led her into a room. On the ground was a trowel (what the fuck?) and two pots (how did they survive in this cold?). Logic was decisively thrown out the window. Clearly, it would not find a use here.

The pot on the left was labelled [ LOVE ] and held a wilting flower. A species she didn't recognise but then again she was no flower specialist. Atop the very dry and hard soil were light green pellets she assumed were fertilizer (she'd have thought it was animal feed if she hadn't seen something similar before). The other, labelled [ DUTY ], held a wilting, leafy plant knee-deep in soil darkened with moisture.

The only way out was the way she came in, so it was likely the host—as the Voice called them—wanted her to do something here. She tried moving the pots and neither budged so she tried the trowel and voila, it graciously allowed her to pick it up, the handle a strangely snug fit to her hand.

If this and the contrasting contents of the pots are clues...

Tools are made with a purpose in mind. This garden tool is no exception. It took several trips to scoop and transfer the seafoam-colored pellets into the [ DUTY ] pot with the small trowel. The wilting plant looked a little less dull and drooped a little less each time, as though someone pressed a fast forward button. In contrast, the [ LOVE ] flower folded into itself and eventually crumbled.

Ruxin blinked when that happened, and added the broken pieces into the pot of the now healthy plant. What? Wouldn't it have been a waste not to use it as fertilizer?

When the last of the pellets mixed with the damp soil, the weight in her hand vanished and beams of light appeared in the opposite end of the entrance. The brilliant shafts waned and shifted with no apparent sequence, seemingly contained in an invisible cylinder about twice her width.

She stepped into the totally-not-suspicious portal after one last look at the two pots.

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