The Treasure Hunter and The Mirror
Chapter 5

Darkness, that’s all there was nothing but darkness. The darkness seemed empty, it seemed void of everything. Everything but stray thoughts about what had just happened, there was no way really to know what had happened. The white flash had brought this upon them.

The darkness seemed void of everything that was living, everything that existed. And yet thoughts raced around, thinking:

“What just happened?”

The thoughts circled around each other. They spoke to each other as if an echo. The echo was loud and rang throughout the darkness.

“Did I just pass out?”

More thoughts had come from the darkness. The darkness swirled around and began to have forms. The forms were unrecognizable. They looked like dark sand dunes off in the distance, off beyond an unforgiving desert. The desert seemed familiar yet different.

“What is this place?”

More thoughts swirled and echoed around.

“Did I die?”

The thought lingered for a while and it echoed heavily in the darkness. It grew heavy suddenly here in the darkness. It was as if the dark sand around started to engulf the thoughts.

“I have to struggle”

The thoughts swirled, more heaviness swirled around the thoughts. Suffocating heaviness, it was hard to breath in this darkness. Only death awaited those who did not struggle, or so was the war cry of the great Fakir race. The thought that it would not end here swirled.

Through the sand punched a hand of a woman, she quickly used her hand to pull herself up. The woman coughed violently as she pulled herself up out of the sand. She struggled to get out of the sand and when she did, she coughed some more. She spat out mouthful of sand. The woman fell on her back and breathed deeply trying to catch her breath. She looked up and didn’t recognize the sky. It didn’t look like any sky she had seen before.

Around her she felt the sand sink under her weight. But not to the same degree as it was burying her. She coughed some more before she realized something.

“What the hell!?” she said sitting up. “Did I switch with Tonya?”

Walter’s thoughts circled trying to understand what was happening. Somehow, he was in a girl’s body. In the darkness it was barely visible. Walter felt weird trying to pat this girl’s body to see if any of it was familiar. It did seem familiar.

The body was busty, busty. She thought he was somehow switched with Tonya, boy that idea bothered Walter, being in a girl’s body was making him…or her rather feel weird. Even thinking about how she should address herself was bothering her. If she and Tonya had switched bodies somehow that meant somewhere, she would replace Tonya in Walter’s body.

She continued to pat herself as if trying to confirm that she was in Tonya’s body. Tonya was busty, and she was a bit bigger and everything felt right to her as she patted her body, and yet there was something that didn’t feel right. She didn’t think she was in Tonya’s body. Then whose body was it?

She continued to pat her body and around her neck was a set of dog tags like the ones she had when she was Walter. Maybe like those dog tags these would have her name on it. She pulled them up to her face and looked at them. Using the dim moonlight, she saw what it read:

“Willow Ximena Yesenia Zuniga,” she read it out loud. She was surprised by her voice. It confirmed her being a girl. The question was who the heck was this Willow and how did she switch with her?

It was then that Willow remembered what the legend of this mirror said. It claimed that the mirror was a portal to another dimension. But did that mean that when she touched it as Walter it sent her to an alternate dimension, and in this dimension, she was a girl named Willow? Willow tried to wrap her mind around that.

It made sense…well sort of. Willow always thought that that part of the legend was just that, a legend. She remembered that the accounts she had found about this mirror was that the Deva Lord Brahma had used this mirror to transport himself to different dimensions. Per the legend Lord Brahma had helped create the universe and the mirror was a way he went back to check on all his creations. All of that seemed farfetched to Willow at first.

However, now that she was sitting there, in a body of a girl, either she jumped dimensions and switched with her parallel universe counterpart apparently named Willow or she was zapped so hard by the white flash she was hallucinating. Willow didn’t like either option. Willow got up and looked down at herself. She really couldn’t see much given that it was apparently night time in this dimension. She could see she was wearing what looked to be a black dress that went down to above her knees. And it felt like she was wearing tights or something because she felt something weird on her legs.

She thought this whole attire was weird given how it was in the middle of a desert why would she be wearing black? Willow felt all this sand all over and she started dusting herself off, the sand was everywhere it seemed, and it really irritated her. She dusted herself enough that the sand was mostly off her. She strokes sand out of her hair next, she noticed she had dark auburn hair which she thought looked a bit too nice for a girl who had been stuck under sand but hey who cares.

Willow wondered if she would’ve looked attractive to Walter. There was something telling her that despite her looking like she was a bit on the heavy side that she is extremely pretty. Willow thought maybe Walter would be attracted to her because she was pretty. And she had perks, she was very busty after all and there was more to her to love, she kind of justified.

Willow looked around after feeling that she had spent way too much time thinking about whether she was pretty. She had absolutely no idea where she was. It was clearly somewhere in the desert that surrounded the temple. But which way did she have to go to get back to the temple? Better yet why was she out of the temple?

Maybe she was blasted out by that white flash that had occurred. That at least made a bit of sense to her. Not that anything had made sense at all up this point, but this was making at least a small bit of sense when it rattled in her mind. Willow sighed heavily and decided to head towards the dunes off in the distance. She remembered seeing some dunes not far from the temple when she first found it.

Willow looked up at the stars as if trying to figure out some sort of sense of direction, she could not. Not even close. It was an unknown sky of an unknown world. None of the stars looked familiar to her. Wait did that set of stars just move?

Willow looked curiously at a bunch of stars that were just ahead of her. It looked like for the faintest moment they moved. She looked at the stars carefully, was her mind playing tricks on her? Last thing she needed was to go crazy if she hadn’t already.

There! There it was again!

Willow looked at the set of stars and swore that they had moved once again. From the stars something shifted and changed and came into the clearing. It was a ship. A solid black ship, it had these putrid green lights highlighting some parts of it, but otherwise it was completely black. Perhaps it was due to this she had not seen it at first. The ship was a low hum, it was barely audible but when nothing else was making noise anywhere near her, this was all she was hearing.

The noise was slow and steady and did not sound like any engine she had ever heard of before. It didn’t sound like it had a combustible engine, it didn’t even sound like it had an antigravity engine (people claimed it didn’t make any noise at all, but Willow had been in enough anti-gravity vehicles to know it did make some noise.) This thing however was making a noise different to even that.

A ray of green light came out of the ship and out it appeared a strange sight. It was some sort of gigantic creature in a big silver suit. Willow was reminded about those suits her people used to explore the “hot side” of her planet. It was this big silver suit. On her planet it was completely made of a highly reflective and malleable metal. Just like the suit on her planet it looked like it had a canister of whatever breathing gas on its back.

This was where the similarities ended though. Whoever or whatever was wearing this suit did not look friendly underneath it. From the visor Willow could see this creature stared back at her. It looked terrifying it reminded Willow of a snake. From what she could make out it, she could see this creature had skin covered in these dark-grey scales. It had a wide viper like smile and it look deadly as if it was ready to pounce. The snake-man was wearing what looked like orange goggles underneath the suit the strange goggles had slits in them going horizontally.

What in the world was this thing? Willow wondered. The snake creature picked up this thing he was carrying. It was a massive weapon of some sort. It had a long barrel, at least twice the size of the creature wielding it this was something on its own because the creature was almost twice the height that Willow was. The weapon was solid black like the ship and like the ship it had this putrid green light glowing all over it.

“You… (unknown grunting) travelled (unknown guttural noise) …through… the Zerkalo Aaenna,” the creature said. Willow’s translator was having difficulty translating this creature as it spoke. It was making this hissing and guttural noise as it was speaking. It sounded horrible. It was making Willow feel extremely uneasy.

Even as Walter she had never heard of a race of Snake people, and to see a snake-man there in front of her nearly twice her size wielding something that was nearly twice its size with ease made Willow feel unsafe.

“You… (unknown click noise) worm…. you will answer….” The creature said as her translator was trying to translate it her translator was struggling to decipher this creature’s language. This was making Willow uneasy; her translator could translate over 100 thousand languages. The fact it is having this much difficulty meant it was an unknown language and it was struggling to decipher the language and read it back to her.

Willow was thinking fast, she didn’t understand this creature. It somehow knew that she had traveled through the mirror and ended up here. The question was how? Willow knew that this creature was not going to sit around and let her ask it twenty questions, and it looked like it was getting impatient.

“You…. (unknown hiss) will tell…. (guttural noise) …or I kill…. (unknown hiss)” the creature said as it aimed the weapon straight at Willow. Willow put her hands up and quickly decided that maybe telling the truth would get this creature to leave her alone.

“I…I have no idea,” Willow said holding her hands up. Willow knew that there was a universal recognition that if one had there hands up, that meant they were trying to show that they were not threats. The creature gave her a sinister look when she said this.

“You… (unknown hiss) expect me…. (deep guttural noise) ….to believe?” the creature said the weapon that the creature had started to make a noise that sounded like a plasma riffle charging. “How did you use the mirror?” Willow held her hands up and didn’t know what to say. She suddenly saw the snake-man jump at her and then darkness.