Play Me A Song To Set Me Free

[MethodicalSlacker]

Violet Schmidt was terrified.

After fleeing the village she eventually sequestered herself deep in the woods. The sounds of wildlife scuttersputteringing around and the soothing green of the trees helped calm her down from her encounter with the other witches. The leaves provided sheltercover from the rain, which was wonderful because her robe wasn't doing much at all to help her it turned out. Fabric wasn't too good against raindropwater. Violet didn't need to be very smart to know that. Violet thought she was smart, once. She camped out beneath the leaves of a sweet smelling tree, hoping that she wouldn't wake up stickystuck to it by goopy yellow sap.

She woke up to the sound of the announcements, already well underway, just before they got to Kyle. Not only had everyone been able to see what had happened, they had also heard it. Heard Kyle's desperate pleas. Violet had been hoping that somehow, someway, things were drowned out by the sound of the rain, or just didn't work in that temple. Nope. The description of what happened was vague and painted Violet as nothing more than a killer, but she expected that. Nothing more than that. It was never anything more than that. The rest of the deaths made her sad, but she tuned them out. The only thing that mattered was hearing where she could not go, and then just not going there, letting the universe have its way with her and rising to the challenges it tossed her way.

Well, that was the only thing that mattered, before she heard her name a second time.

[Violet Schmidt continued from "...we must try until it kills us."]

Now, she was bumblestumbling with a purpose, moving down a rainmelted path towards oblivion, eyes sightsweeping for bandits and vagabonds hiding on the side of the pathtrail. A smart player would wait just outside the Menagerie area to take what she got. It was hard to see through the rain. How many were following her? How many were just waiting? Her gun was still in her hands. Oftentimes through the rain she heard something moving, and she often pointed her gun in its direction, and often almost fired. It was always just an animal, a critter just trying to make its way to shelter in the rain. Never someone trying to hurt her. To get close enough to.

The moisture in the air made her robe cling to her with sweat. She should have taken off some of her clothes, maybe. Or just the clothrobe. It was keeping heat energy inside when it really needed to be cooled by the raindrops. But she was moving. It was probably midway through the day. Violet had started walking when she heard where she needed to go, but it was a decently long walk from the woods. She circumscribed the village and stayed clear of the manor houses, finding the path later on down the line. Wading through the mist, she eventually saw the silhouette of the zoo buildings, darkening the horizon ominously in the rain. Once she got within a certain distance, she'd be fine. Nobody could touch her. They could shoot her from far away, sure, but then they couldn't get what she had until the next day. And the chicken would have gone bad.

The right building was the aviary. Violet didn't want to even look in the other ones because she was worried they might blow her up if she did. That's what Violet would do. Clear instructions disobeyed was abuse of privilege to wander beyond the veil. Violet would eat her food, get her gift weapon, and leave, and hide, and wait for this all to blowtumble over. She hoped her weapon was bad so she didn't have to use it. She didn't want to use something that she got from killing her friend. It'd probably blow up in her face and maybe even literally. Her teeth chattered in the heat. If she had no choice but to use it, if it was too good, if it somehow invalidated this hunting gun, then she'd do so. Because she didn't want to die. There was a corpse on the ground outside the building. Because she didn't want to die. He looked thin, eaten away by bugs and rain. Because she didn't want to die. Because she didn't want to die.

She entered the ramshackle Aviary building and instantly saw what she was looking for, placed in the center of the first room she saw, in the middle of idols and statues of deities, taunting her from its place amongst the Gods, the Earthly reward for her cosmic sin. Winner winner, chicken dinner. The rain coming through the hole in the ceiling through holes in the sky smelled like fire and steel and death. Something on her back burned. Burning. There were burned parts of the building. Lightly singed. No fires allowed. Was that the reason for the danger zone. She set down her bag by the entrance and took off her hood, panting with strain she hadn't yet let herself feel. She was hungry, and despite some internal resistance, wanted to eat the food.

And as for the weapon, just right next to the chicken?

A repeating crossbow placed just a few inches away.

The first sensation that came to Violet was a feeling of relief. She wouldn't have to use this. She would take it, but the gun was, for the most part, a lot better. Violet let herself chuckle a little. She stood up a little straighter. They gave her a crossbow when she already had a Murder Stick. It was funny. It was hilarious, even. Violet wasn't just chuckling anymore. She was gleeful. She knelt next to the food and dropped her gun and picked up the chicken and shoved it into her mouth, the sweet smell of the mashed potato enticing her to just scoop it up with her bare hands and shove it into her mouth between bouts of giggling. A crossbow!

"I don't fucking need this!" she shouted happily, falling backward onto her hands.

Her cackles echoed through the building, her mad mirth shaking her to the very fiber of her being. She almost choked on a green bean, but crawled over towards the door and reached in and washed it down with water from her bag. The cap flew out of her hand and bounced off onto the ground. Violet chugged the rest of the bottle and shuffled back over to wolfing down her food. It tasted delicious. It was the best thing she had ever eaten. It was, she realized as she basked in the shadows of the idols she had purposefully been ignoring this whole time, the nectar of the Gods.

And then mid gooey potato chew, flecks of offyellowwhite food dribbling down the side of her lip, she wondered what it would have been like if this is what she had been given from the start, and her stomach turned upside down.

The crossbow wouldn't have hurt Dante the way she did. It wouldn't have scared off Lorenzo quite as well. It wouldn't have hurt Camila. It wouldn't have been enough to kill Kyle, not as cleanly. She forced down the bit of food she had in her mouth and stood up from the food, turned away, food covered hands brushed off on her jeans. There was a bit of mashed potato hanging off the sleeve on her right arm. Violet started pacing. Memories of Kyle's mashed head smashed potato head mashed squashed splattered memories across her mind like viscous chunks of his face white weathered by time a chewy mess red mashed red all over and

Violet Schmidt was terrified.

and suddenly the food wasn't appetizing anymore because she could barely see it as such it was mashed bone it was burnt stone it was a message from the gods that there were no more pleasures to be found in the flesh there was no more being full as she turned and heaved it all up all pale yellow and orange and green and flecked with red in just occasional bursts, stomach emptied and mind filled with just chunks of his face, burnt hair, a hole in the wooden floor just punched in she was bent over now there was a hole in her stomach where the butterflies should be a deep yawning chasm and empty she felt but strangely stuffed by nothing, sustained off memories, Kyle dead all she needed to see anymore, all she wanted to see, there was nothing left to throw up, nothing.

Nothing.

Nothing.

No.

Violet was standing up, hunched over, her hands on her thighs, above a pile of vomit. Her hair hung in her face. The wound underneath the bandage on her head felt like it was festering. That was it. That was right. She only did it because she needed to. She didn't find it enjoyable. It was the death of her best friend. The other people that killed did so because they wanted to. Violet had no choice. She'd continue to not have any choice because she was now being strung along by fate. That was just it. That would have to do. That was the way. She wasn't fascinated by this at all.

She took a step back from the puddle on the ground and turned to what was left of the food and the crossbow. Violet didn't have an appetite anymore. The smell was starting to get to her. She picked up the crossbow and the bolts that came with it and took them over to her bag. She needed to leave. Violet needed to leave. Her hands were in the middle of unzipping the bag when Violet started coughing. She raised her elbow to her face and coughed into it a few times. It surprised her how high pitched they were. How high pitched her laughs earlier were, too. She almost forgot she was a person, and not some kind of monster. It was important to keep herself human, in her own mind. The crossbow went in the bag and the bag went over her shoulder and the hood went on her head and the door went open and Violet stepped out into the rain again.

But before she left, she saw the body on the ground again. Not quite as destroyed as Kyle, but a little worse for wear. Far less fresh. But he didn't look quite peaceful enough. His soul needed to rest, and it couldn't while his body was like this.

Right?

Her thoughts were a swill-swirly mess, but her will was not. Her will guided her over to the corpse. Her will made her reach out to take his hands. Her will folded his hands over his chest. The feeling of other people's hands was still strange to her. These were cold and stiff. Rigid. Clammy. But they didn't hurt her. They couldn't hurt her. And that's why they were okay to hold.

Right?

And for a while,

for just a short while,

that was all she did.












"Ahem," she coughed.

Violet stood up from the body and looked out into the rain. Her purpose here was fulfilled. Who could say what the next trial would be? The next adversity, placed on her by the Gods? That was what she ought to be primarily concerned with, here. Yes. That's where here thoughts needed to be. On moving forward. On having to move forward, despite on some level earnestly wanting to not move forwards. She'd be required to do this whole thing again, soon. And she'd hate it again. She was deciding that right now, for herself, for forever. She would never enjoy this. Violet wouldn't let herself. No part of this fascinated her. None. She dispelled it from her mind. All that needed to be taken away from this was that she had a new weapon. A less dangerous one. A more precise one. A less powerful one. One that she would not use, because it would not destroy people. She needed to destroy people. She would need to. She didn't want to. That wasn't her thought. It wasn't her fault. No. Fate did this to her. Nothing happened to her. Fate was guiding her here. Where?

To anywhere else.

[Violet Schmidt continued in Sun Giant.]