You. You are tired. The kind of half-sleep that blurs the line between wakefulness and rest, the kind of comfortable that could keep a person in bed through a house fire.
The ground you lay on is warm, hard and smooth, if you manage to part your eyelids it is completely pitch black.
Muffled voices intermingle with your dreams. Somebody's out there.
Where is she?
Where... was she?
Who is she????
She squints her eyes open, sees nothing, and gives up.
Those voices, though—
—ugh, she's so tired...
The voices cannot be made out, they become more distant, and for a few minutes, silence returns. Devoid of distractions, you drift back into slumber.
That is, until the noise puts an end to that. Everything is shaking violently, the sound of heavy machinery and crumbling rock is your whole world.
"Yeegh!!"
She comes awake in a gluey tangle of half-formed dreams, full of questions she doesn't have time to answer, and flails around in a desperate effort to find somewhere less terrifying to be.
In your flailing you find that you don't actually have enough headroom to even sit up straight. The vibration makes it difficult for you to get your bearings, but now that you are looking for it, every surface is curved, the ceiling the floor, the walls, its all just one continuous surface.
Bad! Bad!!!
She scrabbles at the surface of her Terrifying Egg with both hands, everywhere she can reach. Come on, there's got to be something, right? She can't be crushed by falling rock before even managing to remember her own name, right?? Right???
Your desperate scrambling yields nothing but a reassurance that your panic is warranted. There is no way out.
The sound sharpens, as if the distance between it and you was shortening. It gets closer and closer and suddenly...
CRACK!
There is light, which gets brighter when something that looks like a drill moves out of the way of the hole in Ellen's prison.
She squints into the light, shielding her eyes with a trembling hand, and trying her best to get out of the way of that big pointy thing even though it doesn't seem to be killing her quite yet. And is in fact leaving. That's, good, probably???
The light is obscured as an eye peaks in the hole.
"A lady." Says a feminine voice.
"What, are you sure?" This one is a little less audible, male.
The bodies on the other side of the hole shift. "Bleeding... heck." Says the man. "Hello lass, we're gonna get you out of there, alright? Just sit tight, cover your ears and try to stay away from the hole."
He moves away as the sound of scraping metal can be heard, as well as the bickering of the people making use of the heavy machinery.
Clear and simple instructions that seem very reasonable! She will do those things.
The next minute is loud, the hole is intermittently widened as they carefully drill the hole wider. There's more light now, the smooth surface of the inside of this chamber is gleaming mother of pearl. The chamber itself seems to form an egg shape.
Rock and dust fall in, they stop to fish debris out before continuing. Finally wide enough, a man offers Ellen a hand. "Hey lass, you ok?"
"I, uh, well, I'm alive," she says, accepting his hand and trying to climb out of the Terrifying Egg.
Revealed in the light, she proves to be a medium-tall, medium-young, medium-pretty woman in a workmanlike outfit: white shirt, wool vest, beat-up denim trousers, sturdy brown boots. She's a little clumsy at first, but finds her balance quickly.
Ellen is helped onto a wide and rickety metal platform, exiting her prison of rock and lacre. There is so much to look at, the massive egg-shaped vessel to her left, floating in midair; floating rocks like an asteroid belt, the shafts of light peaking from between the masses of stone above, warm on the skin. The metal platform leads to the floating vessel, bordered by a knee-height parody of a safety measure, guard-rails completely inadequate for shielding any of the seven workers here from falling into the pitch black abyss below.
"Ah, lass who-"
"Get her out of the light." A woman with mirrored spectacles says.
"Yes, yes, c'mon lass." The man says, leading Ellen to the vessel.
She is happy to be led to any place with a lower risk of falling into an endless void!
One doesn't appreciate the curvature of a planet insulating them from the vastness of the horizon until it is gone. There must be hundreds of miles between Ellen and what she can see. Hundreds of boulders hanging stationary in the air, each one miles away from each other. Above them the stone field gets denser and denser until something approximating a loose ceiling forms. The light from on high seems omnipresent, as if it didn't have a singular source. Everywhere the light touches, moss, lush fronds, and even trees grow. In the distance there is movement, something vast and long that dips below the ceiling before returning to it.
Below it is dark, there are some landmasses there, but they are far apart.
The workers are all wearing heavy clothes, goggles and hats, a couple of them are hammering at the rock with pickaxes. The lady with mirrored spectacles supervises.
The man beside Ellen leads them inside, the hallways are cramped, metallic and lined with pipes. The clicking of an idling engine echoes throughout. "C'mon, lemme get you something to drink, we can talk."
"...yes. Good. Um, thank you." Wow, she feels extremely discombobulated. This is not actually the most confusing and alarming moment of her life, because that was a short while ago when—they must have been drilling into the egg, and she thought she was in some kind of landslide and about to be crushed inside its shell. But there's a particular kind of discomfort to being totally adrift in a social situation rather than totally adrift in a terrifying convulsion of the physical universe. And she is discovering that on some level she kind of preferred Oh Fuck I'm About To Die over Oh Fuck I'm About To Be Rude To This Stranger.
Well. She'll just have to do her best with what she's got. It's not like she has any other options. Crawling back into the egg seems like it would both get her killed and make her look totally insane, the worst of both worlds.
She can follow the man to wherever he thinks is a reasonable place to talk.
Ellen is led to a small room with a desk, a cot, small shelf with books, a little table with a couple of chairs, and a couple of cabinets. "Here, have a seat, have a seat..." He pulls out a kettle from a cabinet. "Do you like tea? Water? Coffee?"
"...water?" she ventures. It feels wrong to be so uncertain of this. Surely she has beverage preferences. Beverage preferences are a normal thing to have. So are memories. At the moment she seems impoverished in both.
"Right, one sec, I'll be right back." He steps out of the room, with the kettle, leaving Ellen alone. Light shines in from an oddly tinted porthole, and a lamp on the ceiling.
She takes a few seconds to just breathe. A moment alone to appreciate how much she is neither dying nor offending anyone seems like just the thing right—
Okay. Okay. Don't panic. There is a perfectly reasonable explanation for why she woke up inside a ROCK with NO MEMORIES and the second she got a moment to herself afterward her mind was ASSAULTED BY AN INEFFABLE SENSATION OF BEES.
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