Falling-1
Falling
BY S. H. MARPEL
IONCE OUR SHIMMERING stopped, we immediately began to fall upward. Gaining speed at 32 feet per second per second.
Falling toward the sky.
And once we got well up there, we were falling about as fast as we possibly could, owing to air friction. If Sal hadn't thought to put us in a bubble kind of force-shield, we might have run out of breath and died. Because you can't get much air into your lungs at that speed.
Jude, Sal and I were falling up.
And after awhile, some 30,000 feet or so I figured - about the same altitude that a lot of jet planes fly - we started to see the new "down" we were falling toward. A second set of clouds were ahead of us, but these were opposite to the ones we had been through.
Like the big puffy cumulus clouds we'd been falling through, but now in reverse. They got thicker as we fell through them, just as they had gotten thinner when we had fallen up into the earlier sky.
We were also slowing as we went, barely perceptible at this speed..
The new land below us was still racing toward us. It was another landscape entirely. We had first arrived in a city, a crosswalk across a busy city street. Now we were falling toward a rural, even pastoral setting. Past balloons floating in the high atmosphere, where people with breathing masks and insulated suits were pointing at us. For that was all they could do, since we were out of the grasp for any rescue. Even if we had been, the shock of our hitting their balloon would have torn a hole though any fabric and left them to plummet as we already were.
Our force-shield was protecting us and allowing us to breathe. But we were so much like an over-sized round cannon ball to the world around us. Sal was working to keep the birds away from our path, although the bugs tended to accumulate as we got toward the ground, like those that impact on windshields when driving through swarms on a highway. Jude worked her own spells to clear these away so we could keep seeing through the shield - or as she put it, "wouldn't get too grossed-out."
We were also continuing to now obviously slow as we went.
So by the time we nearly hit the ground, it was almost like reaching the end of a bungee cord. A quick deceleration and a smooth stop.
But like that bungee cord, we didn't. We only started falling back up again.
As the ride back and to where we started would take some time, and I wasn't casting spells, I was able to think this through:
• We needed to phase back out when we landed back at the original spot.
• That phasing had to be instantly, and exactly done.
• So the force shield would be swapped for a transportation spell, triggered by touching the ground with our feet.
• The "speller" would have to get all of us at the same time, in that exact instant.
• So my job, as the one human here, was to hang on to the three of us, keeping a grip on each of the two girls so we couldn't be separated, and the spell could work.
Or at least that was the math I'd figured out.
I sent this as thoughts to the two girls, and they nodded that they understood. Because talking was almost impossible with the noise that the wind was making as it whistled around us. The same reason cannon balls whistled through the air before they landed. Too much air resistance. Making it too loud to hardly think, much less have a conversation. Sal and Jude already literally had their hands full with the spells they were already casting.
So I hung on as best I could to each of them and tried to pull them closer to me.
But as the old phrase goes, "Man plans and God laughs."
The next time we hit, the girls were ready and we phased...
IIIN ALL MY HUNDREDS of thousands of years of historical experiences, in all the multi-verses I'd been part of, I'd never personally seen this happen. I'd read about it, and been told tales of it happening.
John, Sal and Jude all came back alive and in one piece. But John had simply collapsed on the floor, as if asleep. He had been holding onto the arms of the girls, but then let go once they all shimmered back in. Well, he actually fell about a foot to the ground.
But that wouldn't have caused any coma.
There was no concussion from his landing, no trauma or broken bones.
While the girls were brave, they were also distraught with worry. We'd lost human guides before, but that was usually through sudden death or longer-lasting disease. We'd just never lost a human soul from their body before.
"Ben, you have to do something. Somewhere in those books there has to be an answer!" Sal was almost screaming at me, her hands clenched around the edge of the gurney we'd gotten John's body onto.
"All these machines only say he's fine. Why won't he wake up?!?" Jude was checking and re-checking all the monitors, the lights, and lines and connections, as if she hadn't helped set them up right. She knew how to set them up, and they were all right.
"We've done all we can for now. Granger is bringing me more books and papers about this as we speak. And she's sent off to our other 'verses connections to get any data that might be applicable. Why don't you two take a break, at least sit and calm down." I looked them both in their eyes and they knew I was right. I'd trained them for all I could, but I couldn't train them for anything like this. Because even I, very rarely, didn't know what I didn't know.
They sat and tried to calm down, taking seats in the stainless chairs available in the Infirmary.
And we all waited.
IIIALONE IN FEATURELESS space.
All my own doing, my own fault.
Because I had thought the one thought no one should think.
And this was the result.
Nothing.
Just me and nothing else.
Probably most people would think this as scary. I've heard and read some stories of people going insane in solitary. But this was much worse than solitary.
It was nothing of nothing.
Imagine no gravity, no air or need to breathe. No heart pumping or body to pump it to.
Nothing of nothing.
Instead of scary, this was peaceful to me. Because I wasn't haunted by my own thoughts, of things I hadn't done, of people I needed to feel complete.
I had nothing that I was missing, nothing to lose.
I'd long ago made my peace with just about everything, just before I decided to turn to writing.
One of those many self-analysis questions I'd read in one of those countless books I'd studied to find the answers I could only give to myself.
This question was one that had changed my life, earned enough financial freedom to be able to do pretty much anything I wanted, let me choose to live in a small writer's cabin in return for managing the livestock at enough profit to keep the farm running.
And that was my answer to that last question: "What do you most need?"
I answered: "Nothing."
Of course, when I got separated from my body, and the physical universe, that answer came back to “haunt” me.
So the multi-verse gave me endless, fathomless, perpetual - nothing.
My first thought after that: "Cool."
A writer's paradise. A writer's job is making something out of nothing. They are re-combiners of everything that is. And can literally build a world out of nothing. So I was existing in a world of my own creation, with endless raw materials to work with.
For a writer, their next question is always - who would I like to share this with? And then: what story would they like to hear me tell?
At that point the typing begins, or the recording in some form or fashion. The “nothing” always comes first, and then the audience. The writer creates the audience.
For me, my closest audience was my two spirit guides.
So: "I love Sal. I love Jude."
"Hey John, is that you?" Sal's thought.
"Sal, John, where are you?" Judy's thought shortly after.
"Oh, wait girls, let me put a setting there." I thought to them both.
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