「 𝚃𝚑𝚎 𝙷𝚊𝚕𝚏𝚠𝚊𝚢 𝙷𝚘𝚞𝚜𝚎 」- 𝙻. 𝙻𝚊𝚠𝚕𝚒𝚎𝚝 𝚡 𝚁𝚎𝚊𝚍𝚎𝚛

𝚇𝙸𝙸 - 𝙱𝚊𝚗𝚜𝚑𝚎𝚎

H.H.S.A Guidebook for New Inhabitants
Originally published  in 803 A.D by V. Atticus
Edition 34
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12. As is previously stated, you cannot die, nor sustain serious injury. We heal at a remarkable speed. Fatal injuries repair in a week. Your body is merely a vessel for a soul; it can be replaced. However, if somehow a body is damaged beyond repair, it will Crumble and the Inhabitant will reappear in the 'Alien' Room.
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Trigger warning: graphic descriptions of suicide and self-harm.

I should preface this by saying it's been some time since my last entry. A little over a week ago, two new Inhabitants arrived not only on the same day, but within just five minutes of each other. And to top it off, not only did they both know each other, but they were both murdered by the same man, on the same night.

The first was a girl of eighteen, a trans woman named Gwen who became the victim of a hate crime. She'd gone to a bar with a fake ID and hit it off with an older man. The two got wasted and stumbled back to his place to have sex. He hadn't realised she was transgender, and in her inebriated state she'd forgotten to disclose this fact to him. When they got in bed and the man saw this he, drunk and outraged, strangled her.

The second victim, Caine, was the killer's own seventeen-year-old son. His father was a violently abusive alcoholic, and Caine had the misfortune to have woken up to Gwen's cries for help. He ran into the bedroom and, because he was a witness, was murdered alongside her. Beaten to death.

So, to say their arrival made for a stressful situation for me would be an understatement. I had only just taken Gwen into the next room over when the ground shook yet again, signalling another arrival. She was still in a state of shock, not even close to beginning to process the fact that she had died and woken up in another world, and I had to leave the poor girl and call X for backup.

But without my noticing, Gwen followed me out of the room. She'd seen Caine burst into his father's room as she lay dying, and when she saw him in the hallway she let out a horrified gasp, and then completely fainted. Just collapsed. Seeing this, Caine ripped himself away from X and ran to her, wrought with an uncontrollable wave of emotion and grief.

The situation had become too much to handle, so I called for Rina, the head nurse in our psychiatric ward. X helped her take Gwen downstairs while I stayed with Caine in the room I'd taken Gwen to. Through tears, he told me his story. How he'd always watched his father abuse the women in his life; his late mother and his various girlfriends afterwards, powerless to stop him. So when he woke up to the sounds of struggle and found him strangling her lifeless body, he was overcome with rage and attacked him. But, as he told me, his hands trembling and his face distraught with trauma and grief, his father was both brutal and merciless. In the end, he died from a series of blows to the head, wounds which were now gone, relics of the past.

Eventually I came and put my arms around him, and let him cry into my chest. He grabbed my shirt with his fist, whispering 'dammit, dammit...' through clenched teeth.

It takes some time for people to get all of the initial grief out of them, but eventually there comes a point where your eyes are too swollen to cry anymore and all you can do is curl up into a ball and sit there, staring into nothingness. By then, the only thing that'll help is time and rest. I gave him sleeping pills and stayed with him overnight, reading once he was out. But, it was hard not to think about him and Gwen. There were several times in the night that he cried out in his sleep, for his mother and for God.

Later in the evening, Aleida came to visit me. Gwen had regained consciousness after almost an hour and was getting bed rest. She offered to stay with Caine so I could pay them a visit, which I thanked her for.