Loretta of the Lamp - The Fallout

Morocco

Loretta groaned. Her head felt like it had been smacked against a gauntlet of hard objects. The world was dark and swimming around her, and she felt sick, the kind of stomach-wrenching sickness that creeps up on you just before you vomit.

She leaned forward just in time to empty her stomach into the darkness and not onto herself. The vomit was disgusting. It burned her throat, but she had nothing to swill out her mouth or wash it away, so she spat several times and then wiped her lips with the back of her hand, flicking the residue away.

Leaning back with a sigh, she discovered something sharp poking into her spine. She reached back behind her to discover that whatever it was she had landed on was actually very spiky and uncomfortable. As she moved
she could now hear the sounds of metal clinking together, small objects tumbling and shifting in the darkness. Her eyes were adjusting to the low light slowly, and the room around her began to define itself. It was small with a low ceiling and walls that were lined with shelves. There were large wooden doors across the one wall, and all the shelves, tables and available surfaces displayed one item.

Lamps.

Loretta had woken in some kind of lamp shop. She stood up as quick as her concussion would let her and turned to observe the room around her. The floor was littered with the lamps that she seemed to have dislodged on her arrival.

On all sides there were lamps. Hundreds, maybe even thousands of them. They were stacked up in carefully balanced displays on the shelves, on the tables, even under the tables and around the edges of the floor.

She walked to the door, and swore when she found that it was locked from the outside. It didn't matter how good she was, there was no way she could pick a lock that was on the outside of a door.

It took a few minutes more for her to realise that the gypsy curse had not taken her home. The room she was locked in looked more or less like the interior of every other market shop she had come across inside the Lamp. But she had felt the gut wrenching, inside-out feeling of being pulled out of the Lamp. It was she same feeling she had experienced coming into the Lamp.

And, Akil.

The memory of him in her mind and the look on his face in the moments after he kissed her made her physically sick again. She had betrayed the one person in her entire life who had fought to save her, all because she thought the best thing was for her to return to her tragic little life on Earth.

Even as she thought the words in her mind, she knew she was right. Telling her own story so candidly to Hess and Akil had awakened new questions in her mind about her life, and what it had been on Earth, and where she was headed.

On Earth.

Was, this Earth?

She spat to clear her mouth and pushed herself back up from the ground. From the light that was peeking through the cracks in the wooden door, it looked like day was coming. Slowly it dawned on her that she had to find the lamp. That at that very moment, the lamp had to be somewhere in the pile of lamps around her.
First she began her search methodically. She started with the lamps on the floor that had tumbled down around her, checking each and every one for the markings and rings that she remembered from when Peter and Stan had first found it. A lot of the lamps had similar inscriptions to what she remembered, some of them even had rings carved into them, but they were not locking rings that moved and notched against each other.

Once she was done with the pile on the floor, her search became more frantic. She searched the first layer of the shelves, the ones she could easily reach, and then she climbed up onto the shelf in order to search the higher levels. The ones she couldn't quite reach, she pulled down by pushing others off the shelves. With a loud clatter, a whole shelf of lamps fell to the floor. Loretta jumped down to the ground and on her hands and knees searched the ones that had fallen, and then she began to search under the tables and in the corners, groping each lamp frantically.