Period Piece

You are the Warrior.

And you stand alone.

Not 'alone' for the absence of others. Certainly, there always shall be another beast or god wandering afoot. No earth could ever truly outsize its population.

But still there is a voice upon your shoulder that whispers it in your ear. Might you be the Last of the Warriors? Is it you alone who now carries the Warrior's strife? No companions, no teachers, only the Beast and You and the very Gods themselves...

...and yet, alone or not, still here you stand.

Your spear is courage, your armor determination. You stand beside yourself, your own Warrior and your own companion. You are never alone.

Leave the future to itself. Trust the past as your own. And face what only matters now, the present, with your spear and your armor.

You stand alone, Warrior. But still you stand.

And in yourself, you are never alone.

She turned her head to one side, glaring into oblivion and running the infuriating sentence she'd just read through her head again, as if she expected it to give her a different reaction this time. It wasn't that the words didn't make sense, or that they were a blatant lie, or even suffered from excessive alliteration...it was just that nothing on the planet was more frustrating than the backhanded slap of a truth you really should have seen coming a mile away.

I mean seriously, Jacqui, she scolded herself as she once more reread the words off the magic page. What the fuck did you expect? Think of how ridiculous the whole "dream" has been up to this point. How could there have been any other outcome? Even without Heqet to emphatically verify this bullshit, it really should've just been fucking obvious...

Her frustrated sigh echoed off the stone walls of her new environment, underscoring the roar of the waterfall at her side. After a brisk morning jaunt through the cheery almost-morning woods, following a small creek had led her out to a small rocky outcrop of a mountain where the creek became a waterfall and splashed fantastically into a small river below. And, like every waterfall should, this one had a convenient little cubby behind it, just big enough to be considered a cave. Perfect for taking a moment to reflect and wonder why the fuck the universe was trolling her so hard tonight.

Up above, the sky had mutated into that intrepid gradient of midnight black fading to the pastel blue of first dawn at the horizon, the air smelled like an expensive laundry detergent with some made-up hippie scent name, and the atmosphere all around was at peak predawn chill, when it would be just cold enough to erect the hairs on Jacqui's arms if not for the thick sleeves of her hoodie. And despite the distant promise of now TWO uncontrolled forest fires eventually encircling and encroaching upon her premises, this dream-nature seemed like altogether not too bad a place for Jacqui to be stuck in.

...of course, now that she'd gone and thought that, her penchant for pessimistic reality would take over like a dick slap to the face.

The words on the page were still laughing at her. There was an undeniable bubbling desire inside her to punt the stupid book right off the cliff she was situated on and into the wilderness below, but the wary voice of reason insisted she hang on to it instead.

After all, it couldn't have just been a coincidence that she'd just happen to bring the Lenticular Bible with her on on her escape from the burning church, only to find such an obvious fucking bullshit truth written inside it just a short while later, right? Video game intuition told her that keeping the book in her inventory was somehow vital to the completion of The Quest, and there weren't a lot of intuitions that could be trusted higher than that one.

She snorted and frowned at the page again, shifting weight from one cheek to the other as she attempted to get comfortable again on the cold hard rock beneath. Unfortunately, video game intuition had also taught her that she could somehow carry Quest Items in an invisible pocket inventory, unaffected by a character's strength or stamina or menstrual status. Lugging a fat magic book all around a forest without a backpack while trying to ignore gut cramps was something video game intuition just left you completely unprepared for.

She swatted another mosquito out of the air and shook her long tangled hair again. Through the miracle of prevalent superstitions, she had become absolutely convinced that one of these times, something - baby mouse, bat, mother spider carrying a sack of hatchable babies on her back - was bound to fall out and into her lap, but so far so good.

"Fuck off, Mother Nature," she grumbled, revealing a specific raised finger to the darkness surrounding her. "Can't even let a girl get a minute of meditation without something trying to bite me, swear to god...".

It was a line she'd never expected to utter aloud. Not because it was weird to directly accost Mother Nature as if "she" were a mom walking in on certain uninterruptible private times, but mostly because, well...meditation? Jacqui? What a weird combination of words that thought made. Unless humming R&B tunes while doing warm-up stretches before whooping Raf's ass at the dojo counted as meditation, the very idea was just something completely foreign to her. Now, though? Way out in the middle of an enchanted forest in a dank rocky cave behind a waterfall inside a dream she couldn't wake up from? Well, now it just seemed the only logical thing left to do...

...especially without my peppy transdimensional frog goddess around to guide me.

The words in her lap had once again changed after she'd shifted position, forcing her to delicately rotate the book again until tapping back into the sweet spot she'd had before. When those accursed words resurfaced, her mind provided a snide, nasally voice to re-reread them in.

It should have been obvious. Hell, it should have been a featured article under the Wikipedia page for "obvious". And it was something Heqet really should've known. At least on some level. Trivia, random factoid, whatever, it should have been an intrinsic part of Heqet's religious repertoire, or she should have realized it through the magic of her mythological deductivism. And she should've fucking told me.

Then again, knowing Heqet, she probably would've made me guess it for myself anyway, and served it up as some vague crock lesson about the magic of learning the answer through your struggles or some asinine nonsense like that...

Admit it or not, she did feel a subtle pang of longing for that stupid optimistic frog just then...

Jacqui brushed the thought aside with a deep breath and tried again - seriously this time - to make a proper "ohm" sound, just like the funny people in the cartoons. The vocalization was apparently a necessary one too; she'd actually seen it written in the book, taken directly from a documented religion apparently, stylized here as "AUM", caps and all. The best she could glean from ten minutes of leafing through the pages was that AUM-ing at just the right pitch would put her in touch with the cosmic vibrations of Life itself, channeling the very building blocks of the universe. Additional Sherlocking and hopeful speculation led her to presume a nice, smooth AUM might potentially open a comm line with the Great Will of the Macrocosmic Universe itself, and that Jacqui might beg it to send Heqet back to finish the quest after it got done laughing at her pathetic and desperate last-resort plan.

...that, or it could unravel the entire dream world altogether.

Not that she had much choice, or even anything to lose, really. Without a Position Arrow or a Loquacious But Knowledgeable Frog Spirit to guide her, she may as well have failed the quest anyway. And since the dream session or simulation or whatever it was seemed to have stopped responding to plot advancement - not a creature was stirring, not even a Specter - the only logical option to progress any further at this point was to "open up the console", so to speak.

...alright Jacqui, she exhaled slowly, pushing away all the other mental voices but her own. Let's try this again. All you gotta do is clear your mind, right? A process said to take years of mastery by extremely dedicated monks who live atop the peaks of the world's highest mountains and never speak or watch cartoons or have sex, ever...so for a numbskull like you, that should only take, what, five minutes? Six?

Drawing in another breath of laundry-fresh cave air, she began silently shutting off her senses one by one, to bond with nature on the most uncomfortably intimate level possible. Her eyelids slowly fused together, blocking out the light of the imminent sunrise. Her breath slowed, pacing itself against the splash and roar of the waterfall before her. She felt the gentle pulse of the earth itself, its molten heart beating miles below, drumming out the rhythm of life for her to follow. The rhythm was alive, she could really feel it pressing beneath her...

...or it could have just been the loose pebble digging angrily into her bottom. And the laundry smell was actually TOO fresh; it smelled very accurately like a cave, full of damp moss and fungus spores. And the relaxing splash of the waterfall reminded her of the shower, prompting her bladder to make its usual, pressing demands. And not wanting to be left out, the rest of the body also followed suit, stomach growling, leg itching, bra chafing...

...and, all the while, the unforgiving spike-knuckle punch going on in the uterine neighborhood.

"AUMMMMMmmmmmy god this is fucking impossible!" she shouted aloud to nobody, plucking the pebble out from beneath her. "Whoever invented this New Age hippie shit can suck my dick. How the fuck can anyone concentrate on nature with all this nature around?"

Instinct insisted she get up and kick the wall, throw a huge rock into the stream, do SOME kind of semi-destructive useless physical activity to channel her overflowing frustration...but she couldn't bring herself to stand up. She didn't want to deal with the stabbing cramps. She didn't want to stoop to avoid hitting her head on the ceiling. But really she just didn't want to lose her place in the book again.

Why not, though? She frowned and glared down at the page, expecting an answer to appear. It's not like I suddenly give a shit about the subject material. I don't even WANNA know about this shit. I don't care about the fucking rhythm of life. I don't care about religion at all. I haven't given a single fuck about any of it since The Accident...

With no one else around to bear witness to her private fears, memories began to flare up for the first time in years.

She remembered the setup. It was an awfully gaudy church, nowhere near as gaudy as the one she'd just helped set fire to, but absurdly superfluous nonetheless. It had the same velvety pews and everything.

It was an accident...

She remembered how furious her mom had been. She remembered the scathing whispers and the sharp glares.

It was an accident, it wasn't my fault!

She'd never gone back to church after that. Mom had stopped going too. Said she was too ashamed to even show her face around there again, and naturally blamed Jacqui for it.

I didn't do it on purpose, it just sort of...happened...it was an accident!

No twelve-year-old pisses all over the pew in their Sunday dress during prayer ON PURPOSE...if Mom would have just let me get up and leave instead of making me sit through that stupid-ass sermon...

She forced herself to pop that memory bubble with a vicious shake of her head. No use revisiting ancient history when she had a missing spirit guide to look for in a wakeless dream about kicking God in the balls.

This whole mess is really all about Heqet, isn't it? She was the one that kickstarted this whole debacle, she's been the one leading me all across the dream-iverse, and now she went and got herself mysteriously poofed right out of existence.

...or maybe that was MY fault.

Well, maybe "fault" is the wrong word? I mean, I didn't INTEND to just vaporize her like that. I wasn't TRYING to...it was an accident…

And now, here I am, stuck without a ride home, trapped in a nightmare dream world full of Bible-thumping weirdos, and the thing that bothers me most is the fact that Heqet's gone? A stupid but admittedly lovable dream frog I only just met hours ago, and somehow, while my mind's been preoccupied with the monthly floodgates of blood - bloodgates, I'm gonna call 'em now - hormones went behind my back and gave me a fresh batch of maternal instincts for a fuckin' frog...

"...god, listen to me yammering to myself over here," Jacqui yammered to herself with a tsk, cutting off the internal voice before it slid any further down the scale of maternal concern. "I sound so wrapped up in my love for a religious spirit that I may as well be just another wackjob in dreamland. Is this how all the others got started? Talkin' out loud to themselves all alone in a cave behind a waterfall? C'mon, Jacqui, what the fuck are you doing with my life?"

...well, my Dream Life, I mean.

She smacked her palm against her forehead in a futile effort to wake herself up. This whole time she hadn't given up fighting the slow, sinking feeling that this adventure might actually NOT be a dream. Dreams might seem deceptively realistic to a brain actively living in one, but no dream should have air this crisp, or period pain this intense...

Maybe there's a way I can force the dream to end...how do brains normally know when a dream's supposed to end? Are they preprogrammed with a list of possible endings and just need to hit one of them? Or are you just at the mercy of your own body snapping you out of it? Is there like, a time limit I can run down? Why does it feel like we know so little about dreams when everybody has them?

But really, the question that burned the brightest was the same question that's always been on every human being's mind, ever since the very first neanderthal human experienced their very first ever dream, and woke up in a shocked state of "what the fuck just happened to my perception of reality"...

...what the fuck does this dream mean?

Jacqui sighed, massaging her temples. She'd been hoping all night for a few moments alone to ask herself that very question, consciously, within the dream, as it was happening - a fact which only raised MORE questions - and now that she HAD that opportunity, she found herself at odds with whether the "dream" had a meaning at all...

Okay, on one hand, if this IS a dream, then it's obviously about whether or not I should believe in God. It's the old "pick a side" debate. And here I am, on this magical la-di-da quest where I'm supposed to figure out who and what God is by learning from the religious beliefs of others, or something. But, thanks to my little shoulder angel and shoulder demon, all I get to see is a bunch of extreme caricatures who want to shove their beliefs up my ass. Then my demon insists God is real, but I can't kick him in the cajones because he also isn't real. So I solve the riddle by realizing God is just a CONCEPT, and IDEA, and then my angel fucking disappears in a cloud of smoke and I'm left alone to simmer in my sins.

Them's the facts, right?

...so if I figured it out, then why the fuck am I still here? Why is the dream still going?

She smacked her lips and adjusted her glasses.

So then there's the other hand...Heqet suggested this all might be a simulation, right? That'd be like living in someone else's dream. Someone else calling the shots. Writing my story. But that can't be right, can it? I totally have control over my own actions right now. I'm forging my own destiny here...aren't I?

...or I guess maybe this could all be real and I really am sitting in a dirty-ass cave behind a probably-polluted waterfall out in the boonies of bumfuck Indiana, on the very cusp of sunrise, getting my pants all muddy.

She glanced down at the Lenticular Bible in her hands, still open to its place, and hummed uncertainly.

...well, whatever it is, it's not funny anymore. And I'm done putting up with shit that isn't funny anymore.

You know what, maybe THAT'S it. Maybe this whole entire rigmarole is just a big fat joke by the Great Will of the Macrocosmic Universe. Everything from Stained Glass God to the Midnight Train to the Coffee Shop Blitz, right down to Heqet and Specter themselves, maybe it's all just an elaborate hoax designed to piss me off because I dared to think I could kick God in the junk.

"...you gotta be fuckin' kidding me," Jacqui huffed again, still staring down at the words on the page.

...no, that was it, wasn't it? It HAD to be a joke. It was too fake to be real, and too real to be a dream, so what else could it be?

If what she'd read on that particular page was true and it really had been that obvious this whole time, then it must have meant The Great Will of the Macrocosmic Universe had a sick sense of humor, and that the entire dream quest was one huge fucking cosmic joke.

It all boiled down to one particular sentence she'd stumbled across in one particular instance of The Lenticular Bible's many, MANY chapters...and she'd kind of found it by accident.

While skimming over the pages for a possible clue on what to do next, without even realizing she was doing it at the time, she'd started subconsciously looking for Heqet's name. Maybe it was out of random curiosity, or maybe it was a kind of deep-seated guilt over making her vanish, or maybe it really was the inexplicable compulsion brought on by the higher calling of that Macrocosmic jackass itself. Whatever the case, Jacqui spent a good hour or so just whisking through religion after religion, breezing through the pages, then tilting the book's position ever so slightly and trying again. And again. And again.

...until finally, she found what she hadn't known she was looking for.

There were times she'd almost given up too, especially after reading about the misspelled deity "Hecate". A "goddess of crossroads" certainly seemed like a plausible applicant for Jacqui's disjointed misadventures, but there didn't seem to be any mention of frogs or arrows shaped like the "female" symbol, or anything like that. No, it definitely wasn't Hecate...

But, a few rotations later, just on the verge of throwing in the towel, the name "Heqet" showed up in an entirely different mythos, "qu" sound and all. And she was NOT a goddess of crossroads and moons and necromancy. No, this Heqet was indeed a frog-headed deity, depicted holding female symbols in either hand, and bore a small but very important role in her given mythology, which, framed against the backdrop of Jacqui's weird-ass dream quest, should have been so fucking obvious this whole time that it may as well have been tattooed on her forehead.

For the ancient goddess Heqet had been worshipped as the goddess of...

...childbirth.

Mother.

Fucking.

Childbirth.

The moment she'd read those words, "she who hastens the birth", as if to drive that point home like the final nail in the coffin of disbelief, the abdominal stabbing sensation returned.

Childbirth...

I should have seen this coming. This whole time, everyone's been weirdly fixated on my suicidal uterus, and I thought it was just because I had cramps on the brain when I knocked myself out, but no. This really IS about a quest for vengeance, isn't it? There's a God out there that invented menstruation as a punishment for all the ladies in the world who don't fuck like rabbits and pop out babies every nine months, and the Great Will of the Macrocosmic Universe wants someone to give him a taste of his own bullshit, so it sent the motherfucking goddess of childbirth herself to go find a warrior who could bash God's balls and complete the quest...

...no, not "quest". It's a fucking joke.

Childbirth...

...but I guess that's why the dream simulation whatever isn't over yet...jokes don't end until you get to the punchline.

...guess I'm fucking stuck here until I figure out the Universe's riddle, huh?

And I have to do it without the Goddess of Childbirth and her super helpful magic Position Arrow...fuck. Where am I even supposed to look? How do you solve a puzzle you don't have all the pieces for?

Besides, there's still one piece of the puzzle that doesn't fit. A piece that probably links the other three together, if I can just figure out which way it's supposed to turn. I've already linked up the others: "picking a side" in the Great Agnostic Debate, God creating menstruation, and the goddess of childbirth...

...now I just need the fourth one...

...and I have no idea where the hell to find it.

And thus, with the exceptional convenience that all dreams and simulations and cosmic jokes are known to eventually provide if you wait long enough, something new finally happened.

Just outside the cave, just above the sound of the gushing waterfall, and just in time for the first rays of blinding morning sunlight to streak across the receding gradients of the dark clouds above, Jacqui heard what she swore sounded like a the tink and clank of a chisel being hammered into solid rock.