The Nonstop Bloodshed IX - Round 1: Titan Mart

If she had had the capacity for speech Irabeth might have spent a few minutes cursing profusely, or perhaps more likely just screaming. She was just a hand. The rest of her body had been destroyed, completely obliterated by magics that she really shouldn't have been messing around with. The fact that she had also been snatched away from her world, her life, to fight to the death was at this point a secondary consideration; it had barely even registered against the panic of waking up missing ninety-five percent of her body.

It was difficult to focus on anything other than the incomprehensible loss she had suffered, but the cold of wherever she was was beginning to sting her skin. She tried to open her eyes but remembered that she had no eyes. She could see nothing, she could hear nothing. She lacked the sensory organs necessary to perform those tasks so it wasn't entirely surprising. But on the other hand (so to speak) she could still think and she had no brain, she was still alive without a heart or lungs or any of those other things you need to be alive. There seemed very little point dwelling on the how or the why of it all when the what can I do about it was so much more pressing.

The floor beneath her palm was metal, cold to the touch and just a little damp. Under normal circumstances Irabeth would close her eyes, take a deep breath and calm her mind before attempting kinomancy, as she was obviously no longer capable of the first two of those actions she simply tried to calm herself as best she could and focused her attention into her fingertips until the touch of the cold metal beneath her was the only thing in the world, and then, with a gentle push, she slipped through. She felt her consciousness spread through the floor, into the walls and the machinery humming away behind them, and eventually to the ceiling high above her. She could feel the entirety of the room she was in, and quickly realized she was not in a room but a massive freezer, or actually it was probably a normal sized freezer and she was just that much smaller now.

With a thought Irabeth pushed the freezer door open. Turning the freezer off was trickier, she mentally poked and prodded at the complex machinery until she felt something give and the whole system slowly grind to a halt, though ideally she would be out of here before she was able to feel the benefit of such an action. There was little else she could do with the freezer; it was too bulky with too few moving parts to be coaxed into movement. Out of a sense of might as well she rattled the shelves above her and felt a number of items shift bounce and roll out of her, or um out of the freezer I mean.

Having exhausted her options as an industrial freezer Irabeth retreated to her own body. Awkwardly she used her fingers to shuffle herself around to face the open freezer door and then clumsily, bumping into (comparatively) large plastic containers as she went, she dragged herself forwards until she tumbled out of the freezer. The floor here was smooth linoleum, not especially warm but thankfully not cold either. An attempt at kinomancy was particularly unfruitful, possessing a single sheet of linoleum giving her little idea of the size or contents of the room she was in, and had no movable parts to work with.

Working off a hunch Irabeth spent the next few minutes grappling with a cold plastic tub that she guessed had fallen from the freezer before. It was one of those tubs which is pretty tricky to open anyway, even more so when you don't have another hand to grip the base of the tub, and next to no leverage. Eventually though she managed it somehow, giving her access to the half-melted ice cream contained within. She was distracted for a moment by the thought that she might not ever get to taste ice cream again, that she might not ever get to taste anything again. The thought of all the things she could no longer do as just a hand. It was a long list, and not particularly helpful.

Getting back to work she dabbed one of her fingers into the ice cream and began scrawling a shape on the floor. It was sort of the shape of an eye with a couple of flourishes here and there; it was a scrying sigil; or that was the intention. She really hoped she was remembering it correctly. It took a good few minutes and she had to start again a couple of times when she was certain she'd made a mistake but couldn't see to know exactly where it was, but finally she got it right and for the first time since she had accidentally destroyed the bulk of her body she could see. And even though she could only see straight upwards from the sigil itself it was something.

She was in the freezer aisle of a supermarket but she'd already guessed that much. She could see her hand, her self, stained with chocolate ice cream. She couldn't stop staring at her wrist, healed over, connected to nothing. Somehow such a sight caused that empty feeling in the pit of her stomach even without a stomach to feel it in. There were a few more tubs of ice cream (most of them in plain white packaging, probably the store's own brand) scattered around and out of the corner of her sight she could see a wire shopping trolley. Above her was a sign that read '56: Frozen Desserts', and above that harsh bright lights.

Irabeth didn't know how much time had passed but she figured it had probably been quite a while. She felt exhausted and she had barely accomplished anything. Being a disembodied hand was kind of terrible she concluded. But she was alive and so was still hope. She knew a good deal of magic, there had to be something she could do to fix this shitty situation. It most likely wouldn't be easy, and probably would end up requiring her to mess with magics even more forbidden than that which had got her into this situation, but she didn't figure she had much left to lose any more. Her situation couldn't get that much worse, right?