#65

Mina sat up. “Wha...?” She was so disoriented. Probably a fusion of exhaustion and the typical effects of being seemingly teleported to Scotland. She looked around and tried to get her bearings straight. However she got here, it wasn't a clean mode of travel. Her shirt and pants were covered in dirt. She remembered that the shirt was a gift from Jacob. It was an Animal Crossing shirt. Crazy Redd was on the front, but she didn't have time to fondly ponder the implications of such a thing for now.

Her ankle still throbbed as she sat. It was getting worse, and maybe whatever had sent her here had exacerbated the damage. Or maybe she was wrong and it was bad to walk so far on it. She wasn't ready to try yet. She had bigger issues at stake; like where she was.

She knew she was in Scotland, somehow. There was a little voice clacking at the back of her head who was telling her that much. She had half-extant memories of something about...faeries? That couldn't be right. She was pretty skeptical when it came to the paranormal, but she did have a fantastic side; and she had seen weird-enough things recently. She tried to think hard about faeries, and what that could mean.

The only image in her mind was one of an overly-happy gibbering vulture.

As she tried to stand up, she indulged the idea that she had been drugged, maybe at a school party, and that none of this was happening. Everyone was still alive. The school was still in one piece. She hadn't wandered off into the woods to have geographically-impossible hallucinations...

Unless maybe she was in the woods right now. Alone, and tripping out of her mind. Possibly in the cold, or in the den of a predator—either animal or human.

She expected that last realization to make her trip go bad, like she had heard could happen. But nothing like that came about; no dragons came galloping out her subconscious, no demons appeared before her. She was still up on the hill, by herself.

She allowed herself a tiny smirk. Welp, she thought. But she didn't know what to think past that.

She stood up, but suddenly her whole body jerked. Too much pressure on the ankle; just like she feared. It probably was broken, now. She was stuck here, left to crawl...where? Presumably there was a town around but she couldn't see. The hill was forested, and it still seemed dark.

She looked over to her right, then, and saw something. It was a glimmer amidst the trees. She briefly thought of faeries but the glint didn't seem to move. It was mystifying, and so she decided to try to move over to it—she was able to dimly hobble, but had to resort to propping herself up on trees to make it all the way.

The journey was a long one, at least to her. Every motion was agony, but the closer she got, the stronger her curiosity became.

It was a metal hatch.

She paused, and sat down next to the tree with her face in her palm, no doubt making some sort of Lewis Carroll joke. Okay. A hatch. Leading downward. Right. She tried not to sigh. This hypothetical sigh would be of many things.

She knew then that this was what she had been brought here to do; to open this hatch, and descend into it. This was her mission, or something. But she didn't want to follow through on it. Today was proving to be too, too much, and her head now hurt alongside her ankle.

If her (benefactors? captors?) had intended her to be some sort of (emissary? heroine?) for them, they would end up with a particular battered emissary?/heroine?. Probably not the sort that most look for, really.

Mina felt her resolve drop a little, but only a little. She turned over and opened the hatch.