Today's #flashfiction Limbo

“Now this is a story all about how
My life got flipped, turned upside down...”

Gulliver's Travels* #quote

          Starting tomorrow or at least in the subsequent days, I'll begin creating the art for the characters in the game, to the point of creating the animations. Father has a device that shines a light under a drawing to project it onto the piece of paper above it so creating the various poses of a character after creating on initial drawing will be much, much, much easier. (Since this device allows tracing of my own art). This also means the pieces will be the same size. If I tried using a ruler to replicate I'd possibly be a bit off and even being a little off on things would look really awkward. After all, imagine watching something where the character's head changed size an incredibly small amount every animation frame. Anyway onto the flash fiction!

Limbo

          Ingrid awoke in front of a cliff. Her body still felt like hers but much lighter. When she looked down she noticed that she longer had skin. Or anything else. She was a skeleton. A standing a skeleton. Skeletons like her surrounded her, stretching far back into the distance. They stood as well.

          “New here huh? Welcome to Limbo. Land of the dead,” one of the skeletons said. Ingrid realized the last thing she remembered was getting in a car accident on the drive home from the birth of her granddaughter. “Stay as long as you like, or walk off the cliff if you'd like.”

           Ingrid took a closer look at the cliff and noticed that beyond on it an endless expanse of fog led onward. Forever forward. She saw cloudless sky in the distance, but the ground was a mystery The cliff felt more like a beach, since it extended endlessly in both directions to her sides.

She tried to cry but could only manage the sounds and not the tears. After a long time she managed to at least partially accept her death and then asked the other skeleton, “Why would you want to walk off the cliff?” The part of her soul that didn't accept the death assumed she was in a dream.

         “One of the cavemen said that it leads to the next part of the afterlife,” the other skeleton responded.

          Cavemen?”

         “People arrive here all the time, probably for all of time. Many jump off the cliff. But many stay. Even for that many years. Everything that touches the fog gets sucked in, and we can't dig into the ground to make tunnels to whatever surface, if there even is one, that the fog touches down on.”

Ingrid then asked, “Did the caveman ever say how he know's it leads to the next part of the afterlife? And why doesn't he go?”

         “He said a spirit told him when he first arrived. Considering how old he is, he could just be crazy. Even with the company of other people though, people a sort of cabin fever just standing around in a crowd forever. This place is only endless desert.”

Ingrid, trying to keep this still a dream, though more and more feeling this as reality. “So you can jump off the cliff, stay with everyone, or wander into the desert?”

        “Yeah. So do you believe in heaven and hell, or reincarnation? Are you ready to give it a shot?”

Ingrid, a woman who's lived through some of the toughest of times said, “I'll take the desert. I can always come back if I don't find anything.”

         Ingrid spent more than a hundred years walking the desert, trying to wake from the dream. She eventually returned to cliff. There she found the skeletons of her family. None of them, including her grandson, took the plunge into the fog. Because of the patience of her long walk she managed to reunite with her family and she spent eternity with them. Heaven may have been just a jump into the fog, but this was close enough for her.