To Live a Peaceful Life in Multiple Worlds

Ghost in a Pot 1

In the beginning, there was darkness. Then, she said "Let there Be Light", and light broke through the barriers before her with a bang and tumbling of rocks, a thick shower of dust falling upon her form.

She winced, wishing she could somehow protect her vessel from the downpour, but when she held up her translucent hands to try and protect the mouth at the top, the dust simply fell through, coating the inside layer of her home in grey.

If nothing else, she was glad that the falling rocks hadn't struck her, for she was sure that a single blow from one would have cracked the clay enough that her spirit would have been released before she even got to see much of the world.

After all, she was currently residing in a pot. An ancient pot that was centuries old, to be exact. Around her were the remains of a wooden box long buried in the dirt and decayed to the extent that even she could scarcely believe it had ever been more than layers of sediment conveniently stacked in such a way that her form was shielded from the heavy stones above her ghostly head.

Around a few centuries ago, she had come into being somehow, similar to something she seemed to have heard about in the distant past concerning inanimate objects developing their own sense of self.... Perhaps even those stories she seemed to have memories of were simply figments of her imagination. She did not have any clear idea on how she came into being, she simply knew that one moment she neither thought, felt, or understood, and, in the next moment, everything suddenly was. 

She felt that, unlike those strange stories she recalled from who knows where, she was not truly part of the pot or the representative of the pot at all. Rather, she felt that the pot was her body, an empty shell she had no control over, yet she was also free of it. It was strange, as she had this feeling that the pot was almost inexplicably linked to her existence, but somehow she was a separate existence.

In some ways, she hoped the pot would develop its own personality and thoughts so she could question it on whether or not she was part of it, but she doubted the pot itself would be particularly welcoming at her intrusion.

When she examined herself, she found her spirit's manifestation was a blue wisp that was vaguely girl-shaped, with a long tail that curled around the lip of the pot and into the clay itself. Maybe she was actually haunting the pot or had somehow been baked into the clay... she wasn't really sure.

Although she had the feeling that something was off and that she was forgetting something, she quickly and easily brushed it off in favor of experimentation with her strange form and her environment.

It did not seem like she could touch anything around her or influence it in any way, but her wisp-like shape she could manipulate extensively to make various pretty patterns and illuminate her vessel-pot and surroundings.

When it came down to it, she rather liked her pot, though it was a bit dirty. It appeared to have dark coloration in her faint light, with a lighter pattern that wrapped around the middle in a thick band. Sometimes, she felt the pattern was a ceremony of some sort with people dancing and playing instruments all around it, while other times she felt it was an expression of nature: filled with life, plants, animals, and some strange creatures that were probably from some sort of mythology or ancient religion.

The bright light that was currently illuminating her pot showed her that her pot was, in fact, two shades of brown. The main color was a dark reddish-brown, while the pattern was done in a pale tan-like brown. For some reason, a female voice saying "it's camel!" echoed in her head briefly, causing her to lose her shape on the edges a bit out of shock, but all that soon disappeared as two large gloved hands came down through the hole in the ground and picked her up.

oOo

Author's Note:

Hey guys, sorry for the long disappearance. I had this big dilemma about where I should take this story and how it should go, but I decided that for this one it's probably better to think about it one arc at a time. I already know how I want it to end, but getting there is so difficult.

It's similar with my other story: I know how I want it to go, but the order of things and what should happen first is a bit confused in my head. Well, for the A System's Glorious Everyday Life, I know the immediate next step. I just... don't like how it's going so far. It feels off, you know? It's almost what I want, but not quite, so I think I'm going to wait a bit for inspiration to strike me before I decide I have a finished product there.

In a way, I guess you could say that this one is much easier for me to write, since this one is more... like exploring, while the other one is an adventure.

Anyway, I was going to try to do the thing where I write a whole arc and then publish, but then I realized I don't have enough motivation most of the time to write that much, so you guys'll get to deal with more frequent releases (sort of), rather than what would probably be years of silence with the occasional mass update.