1-UP

Lightning

I continue falling towards a single island in what seems an endless void. I approach the center of the island at a high speed. Before I crash into the island, my fall is slowed down until I land gently on my feet.

I land on a small circle of smooth stone, surrounded by light blue flowers. The rest of the island is grass, soaked from the light rainfall. The rain feels great on my skin, being slightly warm. The sky is a dark shade of gray, casting a glooming light on everything around me. The island isn't very big, with the edge of the stone only being a few yards from the edge. I see lightning flash in the distance, shooting towards the endless void below. I look around to see other islands forming a path into the distance. The path the islands form continue in one direction for as far as I can see, and slopes slightly downward. I walk toward the edge and look down when I reach it. The bottom of the island is shaped like a cone made out of dirt. It points downward, toward the abyss below.

"What is going on here?" I ask myself. I try to remember what happened before I started falling. I can't remember anything. "Some form of Amnesia, I guess," I say to myself. I look towards the path of islands. "I wonder were this goes," I think, "Well, only one way to find out."

The next island is a couple of feet away, and I jump to it. I land softly, bending my knees slightly to lessen the impact. The island is mostly grass, with a few large rocks and some smaller ones scattered around. I walk over to the opposite side and jump to the next island, and am startled when a smooth, diamond-shaped stone as large as me floats into the air and glows white. A small blue sphere the size of my hand floats up and starts rotating around it, casting a blue light on the ground. A circle of grey stone, wet from the rain, stood in front of the floating rock. I walk towards it cautiously, and start inspecting it closer when nothing else happens. The diamond-shaped stone is rotating slightly clockwise, opposite to that of the sphere. Underneath the stone is a circular base that looks like the top half of a sphere that I presume it floated out of. A hole in the top of the base would fit the stone nicely. There are five spheres spaced evenly on the base, with a round hole where the sixth sphere should be. I try grabbing the floating sphere, but it keeps moving at the same speed, pulling me along with it. I also tried pulling out one of the other spheres, but I can't get a grip on the smooth surface. I start wandering around the rest of the island, but I discover nothing other than a few rocks similar to the ones on the previous island.

I wonder what the stone is supposed to do. "But since it isn't obviously doing anything, I should just move on," I think to myself. I start walking towards the edge to jump onto the next island, wondering what this is all supposed to mean.

All the islands I jump to seem almost exactly the same. The size of the islands differ a little, and the size and amount of rocks change from island to island. I continue from island to island until I notice a large spherical boulder floating in the air, about a fifty feet away from the next island. The face of the rock facing me is flat, with a large indent in the center of it. The backside of the rock is round, with a line running horizontally around the middle, starting and ending at the edges of the indent. The entire rock is smooth, and the wet surface reflects a faint light. I stop and sit down to rest from all the jumping. "What is that?" I say to myself, "Well, there's only one way to find out." I start walking toward the next island, and the line around the boulder glows blue and starts to hum. A sphere of glowing blue energy builds up in the indent, and the rock hums louder as it grows. I break into a run toward the next island and leap, a beam of energy shooting past to where I just was, burning the grass. I land on the soft grass, rolling to break the short fall as the boulder charges up again. I scramble behind a large stone, and the beam of energy strikes the stone, sending stone shards up into the air. "So that's what it does."

I wait for the humming to start again, but it never comes. I peek around the corner to see the boulder has stopped glowing. When I start to move out cautiously from behind the stone, the boulder glows blue and starts charging energy again. I quickly duck behind the stone before the beam can shoot me. As stone fragments shower on me, I stand up and run towards the edge of the island. I slip on the wet grass, and barely get my footing again before I reach the edge. I jump, but barely clear the gap and grab onto the edge of the next island. Dirt crumbles beneath my fingers as I struggle to pull myself up. A flash of blue light comes from behind, and a searing pain races up my back. I scream in agony as I am thrown off the edge of the island by the sheer force of the blast. My vision grows dark as I fall, and I think about how I never learned what was going on before I died.