Initial Orientation

August felt worse than he ever had, even worse than he had when dying, though he himself couldn't even describe why. His stomach flipped over and spun, trying to orient itself, tying itself into knots complex enough to shame a sailor.

His head pounded with each heartbeat, distracting him from even feeling the ground he was lying on. His throat was drier than ever, and hunger stabbed him. Imaginary needles pricked his skin as blood flowed into necrotic limbs.

The body that his soul had been implanted into began to function again. He had risen from the dead, though not by his choice. He shouldn't have been alive, but he was. His entire body hurt in one way or another, teaching him a new lesson: resurrection was not a pleasant process.

Groaning, he tried to move and find out where he was. He expected to be in the ICU, but his eyes revealed nothing. It was dark, and the air was frigid. Hospitals always kept the temperature low to combat infectious diseases, but they never kept it so low as to freeze the patients, and they certainly didn't keep it that low near the patients' beds.

With a sick stomach, August checked the hand he had cut off only to find it still there, though it was not the same hand he had cut off.

'They couldn't have reattached it, so why... This isn't my hand,' he thought.

The hand he was feeling was rough and covered in what he thought to be rutted metal.

'A prosthetic might make sense, but why is it so dark, and where is the bed? Where are the nurses? Where is everything? I can't be in the hospital. I'm lying on gravel in a freezing and humid environment. Where am I, and what's that smell?' the scent of rot and death assaulted him, worsening his already sickened stomach and making him groan.

He began to rise and get a good sense of his surroundings, but a voice beside him startled him, making him fall flat on his back and send gravel flying.

"Hello?" it questioned.

August, discombobulated and scared out of his wits, scrabbled backward and tried to distance himself from the voice. He tried to blink and clear up his sight but had no luck; he was still blind.

"Aren't you dead? Why are you here?" It paused, hoping for a reply. August, however, still terrified and confused, sat in stunned silence. "Well, at least I have a fellow dead with me. I was starting to get lonely," it joked.

In a voice he knew was not his own, August replied, "Wha... A fellow dead? Oh, hell? Heaven? Some other afterlife? That makes sense. I can't imagine where else I could be. Nobody should have found me," he sighed. "I should be dead." August cried again, overwhelmed. He didn't want to live again, not at all.

"No," it refuted. "We shouldn't be in heaven or hell, or at least not the ones I'm familiar with. There's neither apparent torture nor blessings. Nobody told us where we are, either. It could be an afterlife, but it isn't any of the ones I know. It looks like an ordinary, mundane reality, not something designed for an explicit purpose."

Trying to calm himself down and stem the tears, August asked, "So, where are we?"

"I don't know. For all I know, I'm wrong, and we are in hell, just not the one I expected to land in."

Frustrated and emotionally flayed, August snapped and roared, "I get that, dumbass, but where are we!? I can't see jack! Where are you, you f—cking demon; where is the sun; why am I on gravel and stone!? What..." August continued ranting for only a minute before exhausting himself, and his tears poured again.

"Well, if you asked calmly, I would tell you that we're underground somewhere. Listen to my voice, and you should be able to tell where I am. I don't know where we are underground, but what I know is that we're in a colossal circular cavern with a perimeter of several kilometers. It was a battlefield of a massive scale. Judging by the decay of the corpses, it was no longer than a month ago. Being isolated from nature may have slowed the decay, and I could be off, but it shouldn't have been more than two months, even in that case."

August still wanted to ask where they were because that still gave him no answers but stayed silent instead, knowing that he had already been abrasive and because didn't want to anger the voice. With shaky breaths, he calmed down enough to ask, "So, why are we here? What do we do?"

As is always the case in a world without gods, the voice answered, "I don't know. You're asking all the right questions, the same questions I asked, but I still don't know. You could always commit suicide—again—, but there could be another world like this waiting for you."

"'Again'? What do you mean by 'again'?"

"You didn't commit suicide the first time?"

"I did, but how did you know?"

"It was partially a guess and partially a deduction. People who live for something, people who live for a reason, would be glad to be revived and given another chance. You cried like a baby when you were shown the prospect of life, however, so you weren't somebody that lived for a reason. You despise life, don't you?"

"I do. I loathe it! I hate it; I hate it all! It revolts me." He sniffed.

"What's your name," it prodded.

"August."

It knew it was on the right line of questioning now.

"Tell me about your life before this."

"Why?"

"Indulge me. Tell me whatever you want to tell me."

"I don't even know you. Why would I tell you anything before I even know where I am?"

"I'm trying to figure out if we're from the same reality. Tell me anything."

Sullen and uncaring, he acquiesced. "My parents had houses in a few countries, but I was raised in Utah, in the states. Ring a bell?"

"I'm from Europe, so I recognize the country but not the state," it lied. "Keep going."

"My parents were heirs to some powerful people, so I've been taken care of for most of my life. I was eighteen when I died, a senior in high school. I don't know what the equivalent in your country would be, but it's the year just before you go off to higher education. Is that enough?"

"Yes, August, it is. That's plenty. I assume you knew Christine? Your sister was Alexia?"

He did know them. The voice was right; Alexia was his sister, and Christine was his girlfriend.

"Ah, so you're a mind reader? How unexpected."

"I'm not a mind reader, August. I'm you. I know these things because I lived through them. Nobody cared, right? We decided that that would be the end because we couldn't take it anymore, right? Even though we knew it might not be as bad as it seemed, even though we knew we needed help and that something was wrong, we decided that that would be the end."

It paused, waiting for confirmation but receiving none. "I'm right, aren't I? That's us? No, don't tell me. I know I'm right. And so do you."

It was right; that was him. He even let the tapestry of his psychology sit in the daylight, clearly lit up for all to see.

Softly, August admitted, "Yeah. Yeah, that's me."

"Well, August, it's nice to meet you. I'm August."

"I know you are," he whispered.

The first August pondered, "What happened to our body, our original one?"

"You keep asking questions, but I have almost no answers. I don't know. I've been awake for far longer than you have been, but we have so little in the way of facts that everything is guesswork. The possibilities are endless because we are no longer limited by traditional rationality. But, if you couldn't tell, that isn't our body, and I don't have our body, either, so it's either back where we were or in a completely unrelated place that it shouldn't be."

"What if it surprised Christine by popping up in her house? Hehe. What if she gets blamed for our murder? Wouldn't that be great?" His maniacal smile split his face, the flesh around his mouth bleeding. The teeth in his mouth were sharp, like fangs, and now red and black from blood. He knew it was happening; he could taste iron and feel flesh ripping, but he couldn't rid himself of that glee. He was still disturbed inside.

Christine didn't fairly deserve to be accused of murder, but he wanted her to hurt. He wanted everybody to hurt for no better reason than his own misery.

With a bloody smile, August looked up. "We need to become more familiar with our location, hehe." His smile widened, and more flesh ripped. "I still can't see anything. Why can you see? Did you get a better body than me? That's not fair."

"No, my body isn't better than yours by any measure. Once again, we are in a massive underground cavern. Towards the center is a pool of stagnant water with an island in the center. There are corpses, weapons, armor, and debris strewn about from every wall. In some areas, the bodies are in piles, like stores of firewood. All of the corpses are inhuman. They all have the same rough human shape but are certainly inhuman. Your body belongs to one of the predominant races here. You are covered in black stones from head to toe with maroon flesh visible in a few particular areas, normally around the eyes, the mouth, and sometimes at the joints." August remained silent all the while, still enamored with his morbid fantasy.

"You are one of the more scantily covered ones. Your flesh is visible around your joints, at your waist, and on your sides. Your eyes are entirely devoid of stones, with the flesh showing almost until the edge of your orbital cavity, perhaps a bit beyond. There is nothing around your mouth except for your chin. You're uncovered from the edge of your mouth—which appears to have widened—to the back of your cheek."

"Your flesh and that of every other corpse here appears to have rotted and is in advanced decay. I don't know how much longer you can survive like that."

Feeling sick again, August got on his hands and knees to puke, but nothing came out. He retched and retched uninterrupted until stomach acid finally stung his throat. His stomach was long empty.

"The stench must be nauseating."

"Of course it is," August shot back, annoyed.

"There's water on your three o'clock. If you think you'll survive whatever parasites and infectious diseases call it home, then drink it. It's the only option."

August drank, dirtying the water with blood and not succeeding entirely, allowing some of the fetid liquid to escape through his widened mouth.

"Tastes like metal."

"I wonder why."

"Shut up."

He drank again, feeling flesh in his throat sting, partially from dehydration and partially from necrosis. He still felt nauseous, so he was afraid that he might throw the water back up, but he had to hydrate his body so that his bodily functions could begin to work again.

August drank his fill of the frigid and disgusting water before mentally exploring his options. It was not easy to restore a body to working order from death, and they both understood that well. He had no idea where the energy he was using came from, but he would need more later, meaning that he would need food.

As far as he could tell, his options in the way of nutrition here were scarce, so he would need to move somewhere else later. He couldn't leave yet because he needed more information, so he might as well ask, he figured.

"I need food. Any solution to that?"

"There are three options. There's always the obvious: you can eat what's in front of you, the corpses, but disease is even more likely than before if you do that, so I don't recommend it."

"Then why would you recommend it, idiot?"

"You asked for options. You didn't ask for actual recommendations or viable options. The second option is fresh meat. People, likely scavengers, will come in here every once in a while and try to get whatever they can out of here and abscond with it. They'll sometimes come near where we are, but they never come close enough to see us. However, they're the same species as you and have better weapons and armor than you do, so fighting them is not recommended, even when you don't consider the moral repercussions of cannibalism."

"The third option is in the water. The pool is deeper and wider than most small lakes, and everything in it is now dead. There's a massive cavefish near the bank right in front of you. It's a little deep, and the exterior is very much rotten, but the center may harbor meat that hasn't spoiled yet. It's the best option available, so far as I know, but can you swim?"