Chapter 1 – Old in Age but Young in Mind
Most people wish they could live forever the way they did when they were children. Zita was spoiled as a child even as an adult. When she did bad in school, her parents took her out of it permanently and taught her how to live by themselves. They gave her everything she wanted and more. Her parents were her only friends for most of her life until they died when she was thirty-five years old. She inherited their great wealth and did whatever she wanted.
Inspired by the internet, she played video games, reviewed anime and manga, and generally acted like your average attention whore on the web. To get even more attention, she intentionally put naked pictures of herself across the internet. In addition, she played and reviewed hentai video games, and recorded doing lewd things and put all of this on pornographic websites. All of this gave her the attention she wanted. She felt loved and important. She thought that as long as she did whatever her audience wanted, she would be happy forever.
Zita is forty-years-old now, but still dresses and looks like she’s in her early twenties. With her dressing style and makeup, she hides her age. Even though she’s a bit chubby because she never leaves her apartment, her fans like her because she’s “thicc” and that’s enough for her not to worry about her health. She even uses to entice people to make them think she likes wearing tight clothes even though it’s a bit uncomfortable. Her apartment is mostly a mess hidden by the few clean spots in it that she shows on camera. The rooms with her collections of comics, video games, anime, and movies are all spotless along with the room that she sleeps in that contain her figures. The apartment room smells like a weird mixture of candy and perfume to coat the stink of an unclean room.
Today is a strange day for her. Her front door is locked along with the windows. She can’t break them down nor can she call or text anyone. Her computer mysteriously won’t turn on as well even though she had it upgraded not too long ago.
“I need to think what to do over breakfast,” she says as she looks into the fridge only to find that it’s empty. “I could’ve sworn I bought food, drinks, and ingredients last week.”
Zita’s parents taught her how to breakfast, lunch, and dinner for herself, but she usually orders. Now with nothing to eat, she lays down on her couch, hungry, worried, and confused as to what is happening. This is when a large hand forms out of her wall. It opens its hand to reveal a mouth in the center of its palm.
The hand says to her, “Zita, I am the hand of judgment. You have yet to grow up and take responsibility for your actions.”
“I’m a good girl who doesn’t do anything wrong. What are you talking about?”
“You will see very soon. There’s a hole in your closet. Climb through it and you will escape your room to face your first challenge.”
“Challenge? Do I get a prize at the end?”
“If you win, you will grow up and live a better life. If you lose, you will suffer for all eternity.”
“And if I don’t accept the challenge?”
“You lose automatically, and you’ll have to rot to death in this apartment.”
“I’ll take the first option then.”
When she goes into her room, the hand of judgment follows her by forming out of the ceiling in her room.
“Are you going to be my guide?” Zita asks the hand.
“In a way, but I your choices will determine whether or not you will survive.”
“That’s peachy.”
Zita moves her clothes around and finds a large hole in it.
“You didn’t make the hole this large because you think I’m fat, do you?”
“It’s made with the intention of you going through it. Now go if you have decided to.”
Even though the hole is relatively large, Zita has some trouble going through it. It’s a tight fit that’s difficult to go through. She reaches the end of the tunnel after ten seconds of crawling. The tunnel has led her to a small aquarium with various kinds of fishes in the many tanks. Paintings of the many fishes are drawn swimming through the ocean on the walls. Above her is a curved glass ceiling that shows the night sky even though it was morning when Zita left her apartment.
“Okay, where to now?”
“You must reach the exit of this building while being hunted by a hunter who is modeled after yourself,” the hand tells her. It’s nowhere to be seen but its voice echoes through her mind.
“What’s this challenge supposed to prove?”
“That you’re honest about changing for the better.”
“This’ll be easy then. I’ve played so many hide-and-seek horror games already.”
Using her knowledge of horror games, Zita carefully walks through the aquarium while trying not to make any noise. The entire building is uncomfortably quiet so much so that she can hear the fish swimming in their glass casing. One of the fishes catches her attention. It’s a red Chinese fighting fish that is swimming by the end of the tank looking at her. Back in her youth, Zita wanted to study fish and take care of them, but when her patience for the subject wore out, she left it behind like so many other jobs that interested her. When she gets close to the fish, it hits the glass so hard that the noise reverberates through the building and leaves a crack in the glass. Another crack of glass is heard above Zita, as she looks up to see her monster. It drops from the ceiling and crashes into the floor unscathed.
The monster is huge as it takes up half the hallway. Its skinny pink clothes are so tight that its skin oozes a black liquid. The arms of the creature are thin, and its fingers are as long as Zita’s arms. Black veins pop out from the creature’s skin as well as its bony spine. Its hair is a dirty blond with a thin black bow on it. Pink makeup covers its broken face that has no eyes.
“If this is like those psychological games I played, then I can handle this!” Zita confidently says as she punches the hunchbacked monster in the face to no effect.
It grabs Zita and slams her into the ground multiple times then smashes her into a fish tank and drowns her. She wakes up in her bed and begins to vomit water. The water never stops coming out of her stomach, so she goes to the bathroom and almost fills up the tube with all of the water she vomits. This is the first time in a while that’s she felt any kind of real pain, any kind of defeat. Her appearance is now that of a woman in her late twenties with most of her makeup gone. The damage done to her was immense and is multiplied by the fact that she’s lived a comfortable life for all of it. Her nerves are shot, and her body convulses with panic.
In need of immediate relaxation, she takes out one of her sex toys and tries to use it, but a sharp black spike comes out of it and impales her from her crotch through to her head. Instead of dying immediately, it takes her body a few agonizing minutes of the worst pain to kill her. Again, she wakes up in her bed, but this time she feels completely dead inside. She can’t make herself feel better instantly. She’s died twice already without completing any of her challenges, and now she looks like she’s in her thirties with no makeup at all. Despair has its grips on her, freezing her in thought.
The hand of judgment says, “You will need to grow up if you want to survive this. Get up and try again. If you don’t, then you’ll suffer forever because of your previous actions. Decide.”
The black and whiteness of her choices force her to move out of her bed and back into the aquarium. Zita doesn’t let anything distract her this time. Her monster still jumps down from the ceiling, but this time she runs and hides. The monster cannot smell her, and its vision is very limited, so it focuses more on sound than anything else. It overcomes some of its disabilities by smashing whatever hiding spots that Zita could hide under. Because of this, she is forced to go from hiding spot to hiding spot until she realizes that she’s close to the exit. When she sees it, she makes a break for it and makes it through the exit right before it catches her.
Upon exiting the aquarium, Zita finds herself back in her apartment standing in front of her front door as if she just went through it. She tries opening the door and finds that it’s still locked from the inside. After the challenge, she falls to the floor in tears.
“I don’t know if I can do this,” Zita admits to herself.
“Of course you can. You just made it through the first challenge. That shows me that you have a chance of getting through the rest,” the hand of judgment says with a stern but caring voice. “Now get up. Another challenge awaits you and the main vice that damages you and the people you affect.”
“Oh boy. What fun,” Zita miserably says.
This is the song I found that best matches Zita so far. Wish I Had an Angel by Nightwish.
No comments:
Post a Comment