The Red Thread

[mp3]http://scottworks.nesnotes.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/red-thread.mp3[/mp3]

In the infinite unknown, there exists the Red Thread.

The ultimate purpose of the Red Thread looms in eternal enigma, and its designer amaranthine in their anonimity. The raw road of the Red Thread routinely runs bare, with only a platinum pole piercing it unpredictably to post the passage of the pages in its history. It matters not for those imprisoned in its crimson confines, though, thrown without apparent reason from their homes into the ceaseless corridor. They only desire escape, and their only futile hope is to traverse down the Red Thread...

At the moment, only a young woman named Mika Rio Li walks barefoot down the Red Thread. Her ink silk dress clings close to her curves, and her velvet hair pours over her pale shoulders. Alone, she shuffles.

Alone, until footsteps not of her own echo behind her.

Li spins around to face the stranger.

Far away, the platinum pillar pierces the air and through the Red Thread.

(Non-Story Note: This story should be similar in spirit to the likes of Cube and The Long Walk. While hazards may be faced on the Red Thread, this should primarily be a psychological story between its characters. As usual, writing skill is not a requirement to post here so long as you do your best to write in the spirit laid out in the links noted. I may decide to draw other characters that are introduced, we'll see.)

Who is she? Why is she she here? Is she not but her own reflection in a cracked mirror, an artistic interpretation of Li in a moment of insecurity * ? Or is she the image between the cracks? The walk is long. She's Mika. And she's here to save the world.

*wink*

Days of walking into no horizon. No direction, no orientation, no landmarks. No landmarks. What kind of creature is so vile as to invent a hell without landmarks?

The first week was the worst. No food. No water. The second much the same. And the week after. On her fourth week she learnt she couldn't die.

Mika stops walking. Not because it hurts -- her heels are rubbed to the bones and the pain is her constant companion -- but because she has a reason to celebrate. Her spring watch marks her twenty fourth month on the Red Thread.

Some'd say life's a *****. Mika knows that for a fact. But that doesn't mean that the world doesn't need saving.

She heads back towards no horizon.

And now, this stranger.

She can't quite make out his face... Someone... Familar? Someone she knows? Or maybe someone she once knew?

"How can you save the world," he asks, "if you can not save yourself?"

The tall stranger is dressed in a faded brown tweed suit and a mismatched black top hat. Spectacles perch upon his thin nose, and motorcycle gloves - with the fingers cut out - clothe his hands.

"The world?" Mika echoes. She looks at the endless crimson, before and behind. "If this is the world, I have no desire to save it." She pauses, thoughtful for a moment. "Where did you come from? There's only back and forward."

The stranger's brows knit. "I have always been here."

"No," Mika protests, but then frowns. Slowly memory informs her of his constant presence by her side along this thread. "How... is that possible?"

"You forgot," the stranger says. "Stay here longer, and you'll notice that. Indeed, I have forgotten my own name... if I ever had one."

"So what shall I call you?"

"What you've been calling me," he replies.

Her eyebrows meet. "What have I been calling you?"

He sighs. "I don't remember."

Mika Li hums in thought. She gives the tall stranger a look-over once more.

"Is there a name you wish to be called?" Li asks.

"I wish to be called what you will," the stranger says.

Li crosses her arms. "What I will?"

"Yes."

"Alright, Will it is then."

"My name?" he asks in confusion.

"Will."

The stranger contemplates for a moment, then nods his head.

"And what should I call you?" the stranger, Will, asks.

"Li," she says, her attention locked down towards the horizon of the seemingly infinite Red Thread.

"Well, Li," Will says, "If I cannot persuade you to save the world, let me at least help you save yourself. It is easy to lose oneself here without someone else to help."

Li turns her attention to Will. She stares intently into his eyes in examination as she circles towards his side. Li bares a smile that knows a secret.

"Lead the way--" she starts to say.

"WATCH OUT!"

Will plows Li to the side as a platinum pillar sears towards them from above.

The pillar flies past them and disintegrates into thin air, leaving only wind and a near-death experience for the memory of its passing. First Li chuckles. The she laughs full volume, from the heart. And she laughs. And laughs. And laughs. When she's finished, her lips are in a grin. She can't help it. Will doesn't let go. Her muscles tense in Will's strong arms, the inevitable side-effect of adrenaline.

She feels his muscles tense for a different reason altogether.

"You know, Will," she says, stepping aside, "If we put our names together, then it's Will-Li."

Will pauses. The corner of his mouth tugs to the side. He attempts to approach Li once more, but she steps aside once more, waiting for him to pass by in front of her. Resigning the moment, Will takes the lead down the Red Thread, with Li remaining a close but heavy distance by and behind his side.

The two march through the rose road, nearly forgetting each other in the silence. Only the occasional stop by Will to turn to Li, to wait for her to say something only to receive an impatient expectation to resume moving, keep the two from drifting to the deeper silence. It was during this drawn stretch of time that the two notice that sleep escapes them. It is not to say that they cannot sleep, for they can, however uneasy it may be, but rather, that when they wake, it seems as if they had never slept. Li herself only presses on in the hopes of escaping the Red Thread as her sleep seems to do so. For Will, he seems to simply follow that whom he leads.

"Will!"

Li's words shake him out of his stupor, the call shooting the silence, and nearly himself, dead from shock.

"I think I see someone in the distance," she says. Will peers into the distance, uncertain if he can make out anyone.

"Are you sure?" Will asks.

"We should be careful," Li says. It's clear, however, that she is directing the warning only to Will.

Far ahead, unseen by any eye, the distant drop of the platinum pillar is heard.

***

Detective James Roland Jr. crouched by the alleged victim's writing desk, dragged his fingers across the wooden floor, then got on his knees to examine it closer. The two policemen who accompanied him were looking at him with what James hoped was a mix of reverence, fascination, and fear. He guessed that it wasn't every day that they got to go to a crime scene with the Great James Roland Jr. himself.

The detective got back up. It wasn't easy -- at 54, nothing is -- and dusted off his pants. There was no hidden clue on the floorboards, or under Miss Li's desk, or anywhere else in the missing writer's apartment. But it was a crime scene, no doubt about it. He felt it. He knew it in his gut. What he didn't know was what kind of crime it was, or who committed it.

But then again, it was his job to find out.

Miss Mika Rio Li was now the seventh writer to have dissapeared from her flat without a trace, and if he was to retire, he wasn't going to retire a loser. He had to get to the bottom of this. This was the proverbial one last case. Like an old adrenaline junkie, the old hound will press on. And like always, he will solve the case. No doubt about it.

Tense shift is intentional

Li pauses in place as Will rushes to the unknown figure. Instinct tells her not to move on, and fear keeps her from challenging her instinct. Fear of the unknown person ahead, of a growing group, of a growing... shadow?

Before she could react, the behemoth blurs of two silver shears slice the Red Thread between her and the other two. Li grabs onto purchase as her end of the Red Thread seems to fall in the nothingness, while the other is whisked up high in the equal emptiness.

*********

Off of the shores of Ilha Grande, Detective James Roland Jr stood and stared into the rolling black of the sea under the night sky. This had been the last place Li was known to have been, though any evidence of her presence washed away in the ebb and flow, the winds brushing what little of her presence may have been left. In his hand, the detective held her unusually-bound diary, the last thing she had written in before her disappearance. He held it up to his face and thumbed it open to the only page with her writing. Upon it, a single word started the entry.

"Save"

With absent-minded care, the detective pulled its unique bookmark, a red thread, to mark the place in the page before closing the sewing kit-bound diary back closed.

************

When Mika Rio Li regains consciousness, she sees no one else. To one side of her, the Red Thread abruptly stops out in the void, and to the other side of her, it runs off beyond her vision. She stares at the end of the red road.

Li walks the other way.

((I wanted to give this some closure. Perhaps one day, this can be picked up again.))