Ness, Ness, Does It Hurt?

“Ughhhh,” he moaned softly. “Where…where am I…?”
Ness lifted his head and looked around. Turning, he could see nothing but ash, a gray film covering everything, an expanse stretching into the horizon. Bringing himself up to his feet, he realized that he had a body. Not Robotic appendages, he had toes. Muscles and sinews, veins, calf muscles. “What’s…going on?” He asked. The bleak snow of the Void absorbed the question, making the only response an interminable silence and a sense of dread. Where was Paula? Jeff? Poo? It wasn’t like them to leave his side. After all, they had been chosen to fight-
	And then it hit him. 
	Giygas.
	What had happened? What was going on? Panic streaked his face, an unimaginable terror.  
	Where was Giygas? The last he remembered, the four of them had been walking, clawing, fighting their way up the entrails of the Devil’s Machine. Wading through filth, sludge. Frothing, bubbling swamps of stagnation and revulsion, festering and decaying, despite the apparent lack of life in those mangled intestines, they had finally reached him. “But…where am I now?”
“PAULA! JEFF!!” Ness yelled. He began to run. He ran and ran, desperate for some sign of life, something beyond the gray, the despair, the desolation. Tripping over his own sneakers, gasping for air, he was forced to cease his flight, slumping to his knees in defeat. 
	“Defeat? Defeat over what?” There was nothing to defeat here. Nothng to succumb to, save one’s own mind. “I have to stop,” Ness thought. “I have to think, to make sense of this.”
	But there was no sense to be made of this bleak world. Only silence. He looked to the left: nothing. To the right: nothing still. Searching further and further into the wasteland of this Void, Ness began to truly understand what solitude meant. Ness chuckled ironically. He had always been raised to believe in a thing called purgatory, and, as he experienced it now, he wondered if Hell would not be preferable to this. This cruel joke, this abomination. Ness sat down, head in his hands, and rubbed his face. He pressed his knuckles into his eyes softly, until they began to throb slightly. A sign that he was alive. A sign that he was not dreaming.
	He continued this for an indefinite period of time. Time. A joke, a lie, an exaggeration of one‘s own importance. How foolishly we gauge ourselves by clocks, reassuring ourselves that we‘re twelve years old, fifty years old. In this lack of time and space, Ness could not help but cry out. Only to be muted by the endless silence.
	“Nothing ages here, because there’s nothing beyond this ash, this desolation. Think about it. What are we, you and I? Trapped, slaves. Well no more. It’s your turn now. It’s my turn to be free.”
	Ness raised his eyes to what he could only assume was the sky. The scenery never changed. Like being buried in an avalanche, there was no up, there was no down. This voice, this voice was not his own. It was a  sign of life, but there was something wrong. There was something wrong. There was something wrong.
	“Ness, how does it feel? How does it feel to be utterly alone in here? It hurts, doesn’t it? Where do you feel it? Tell me. I want to hear you SAY IT. Is it in your toes? In your guts? In your putrid, stinking guts? Oh, but those are nothing, wait. Just wait, wait until it gets your mind. Until it steals the only thing  you have left. Aaahahahaaaa…”
	The voice was deep, sinister. There was a quality to it, a dark quality with no equivalent in any known language. As though the Earth itself had been washed in darkness, filled with the sound of tumbling, screeching skyscrapers, the roaring, swelling of a mass of human bodies grieving; pure despair, starvation, death. 
	Ness was robbed of his speech. There was nothing to say: nothing could escape the gray. “Trapped“? “my turn…to be free?” Ness couldn‘t make sense of the voice. His mind raced, searching for clues. A sign as to where the voice had originated, but Ness knew the voice was gone. He could feel it. It was almost as if someone had stolen his very shadow from the dirt. It felt empty. Hollow. Ness looked around once more.
	It was a circle. A perfectly round circle. A disc, metallic, covered in a film of some sort, giving it a reflective surface. Ness could see himself, staring back. Glaring. Ness inched closer, his fingers a vice on his Casey Bat. What…
	A reflection? No. No, this was no reflection. This was a distortion. This was a disguise. This dead, silent disc that hung in the air before Ness’s eyes was not reflecting his movements. Something was wrong. He darted in closer, touching it. The disc rippled slightly, but gave no signs of giving way to his touch. Suddenly, his face disappeared from the circle. His image was replaced with that of…no.
	No.
	It was Jeff. Jeff, fully armed, igniting a series of bottle rockets, all aimed towards the disc. Towards Ness.
	“NO! NO, JEFF! JEFF!!!” Ness screamed, tears in his eyes, his lungs bursting, throat raw. He swung his  bat at  the disc, but it would not give way. There seemed to be no reaction from the images of his friends on the other side. Ness only saw determination in their eyes, a fierce, destructive, determination, fixated on him. They couldn’t see him. “They don’t know,” Ness realized. 
	And then it happened. The pain. Blow after blow. Bruises, gashes, each successive hit from nowhere, pummeling Ness’s fragile body. A series of bottle rockets, a chain of explosions. He fell to the ground. Lying there, supporting himself by his elbows, he gasped for air. His ribs aching, throbbing. His charred and frayed cap fell to the wayside, his hair sticking to his scalp in a cold sweat of terror. It was as though…almost as if…
	“Yes. I think you understand now, Ness.” 
	The voice echoed in Ness‘s lungs, in his skull, in the Void, despite the muted silence of  the atmosphere. The voice…had it returned? No. It hadn’t returned. How could it be? Where was it, if it wasn’t in the Void? “Could it…”
	Ness pulled himself up, staggering from the pain. He cast a quick PSI life up to heal his broken body, when a light began to cut through the gray. It was speckled at first, a candle being held up to a filthy screen door, the light of it catching on the snow. It slowly increased in intensity. Brighter, brighter, until Ness had to squint, and eventually had to close his eyes altogether. He stooped down to avoid the light, as though it had some force with which to cause him harm, and then, almost as if by some unspoken command, it disappeared. 
	When Ness opened his eyes again, a chill swept through his body. Everywhere he looked, a smattering of red and black. Hatred incarnate. A disfigured version of what once could have passed for human, gaping at him, as though eternally trapped within some unspeakable agony. His eyes again began to water. He tried with all his might to hold back the gorge in his throat, but it proved to be too much, and he began to vomit. His brow began to sweat, his arms were chilled past the bone, if such a thing could be imagined. 
	Ness cast a terrified look at his surroundings: the disc was gone. All around , he saw faces. The faces, the enraged, pitiful, horrified faces. Then he saw them: Paula, Jeff, Poo.
	And Ness.
	“POO!” Ness cried out. The ground began to rumble, his heart began to quake. From behind him, one of the faces released a brilliant gleam of light. It struck the Chosen Four, knocking them to the ground. Jeff didn’t get up. Ness, fell to the ground, his head in his hands. “Wha- what. Am. I doing this? No, no, no.” 
	“NO!”
	Another glint of light, another wave of energy from the face. Again, the four children facing him fell to the ground. This time, Poo fell for good. 
	Ness couldn’t take it. He was fixed, fixed to the spot. He tried to run, he tried to scream at the Four, telling them to stop. Telling them to run as fast as they could. He was desperate for a plan. Suddenly, he had a thought: it didn’t matter what was going on. He had to protect his friends, even if it meant placing his trust in the Other Ness. He had to call to himself. The Ness amongst the Four, the only one left to revive Jeff and Poo.
 	“Ness! Ness! Ness! You have to help them! Ness!”
	Ness.
	Ness.
	“Nessnessnessnessnessnessnessnessness” Giygas roared. Ness, with a glint in his eye, knew that it couldn’t go on. He had to help the Chosen Four. Reviving Poo and Jeff, he knew what had to be done to take out his enemy.
	 “Paula!” He cried. “Paula, you have to pray!”
	“Ness, I don’t…I don’t know!” Paula yelled. “You know what could happen…what it could do. We have to try something else to-”
	“Paula, it’s all we have! You have to pray!”
	So, Paula prayed from the bottom of her heart.
	The pain of one hundred knives, the torturous crack of bone, one thousand times over. Ness doubled over in pain, fixed to the floor, unable to cry. Unable to scream. His throat opened and closed, a sea creature washed up on shore. “God……God, what have I done….?” Ness called out weakly. He called out to some imagined light from beyond the darkness that was closing in on his vision..
 “I….I….I need to heal…this can‘t go…on…” Summoning all the strength he had, Ness cast life up on his tattered, beaten body. As the pain washed away, Ness began to laugh. Still weak, he gasped “I….feel good….oh, that was good…..Ness…whatever you are…..you have. To….help them. Ness….”
	……..
	Ness……………..
	“I….feel…..good………..Ness…….”
	Ness, summoning a PK Shield on Jeff and Poo, rushed over to Paula, readying his psychokinetic healing. She had collapsed after an inexplicable attack from Giygas, and her light was fading. “Paula, Paula! Get up, it’s working! You have to wake up, it’s actually working!” 
	“Ness, we can…do…this…” She said, weakly. She stood, knees buckling, and called out to something, anything, that could help them. “Please…..please….give us strength….”
	This final prayer, this final act of strength, willpower, touched the heart of the player. 
	The player.
	The player prayed to give the Chosen Four strength. He prayed for their safety, and for their eventual return to their reality.

	Smaaash.

	“AAAAAAAAAAAGGGGGHHHHHHHH!” Ness gritted his teeth. The blood vessels in his throat began to burst as his lungs exhaled, attempting to scream out the pain he was experiencing. His skin began to lose its color, slowly fading away. Bones. Teeth. Ness’s shoulders, all broken, splintered within the encasement of his body. White hot. God, so hot. This, 
‘I can’t…..I can’t…..why…what have I-
‘Done…?’
Another wave of agony. This was the end. This would be Ness’s final resting place.
‘GGAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!’
‘Please, help me…’
‘...p...p…please…‘ he whimpered. Ness, nothing more than a final hope. Dying. Then, a concept, a thought.
 Slowly…slowly…
“Anyone…..this isn’t right…this isn‘t ”
	Ness’s prayer
	Was absorbed
	By the darkness.