You know, on second thought, healthbars are a pretty great thing? Getting whittled down, one razor-cut at a time, is certainly not how she wants to spend her afternoon! 

Gosh, has it only been a few hours since she woke up? How did she actually plan to spend her afternoon? Baking, wasn't it? Was that today, or was it baskets today? She doesn't quite recall, and the schedule on her desk has been accumulating dust since she made it an promptly started to ignore it.

Ahem. Not how she wants to spend her afternoon, right? Shock and poison and glass in her eyes and splinters under her fingernails. But the point is, see, that stuff is [i]survivable.[/i] Get a healthbar big enough, and you can endure tons of small hits. 

Down here, it feels like everything around her threatens a one-shot-kill. Oh man, She Is In Danger Now.

She's never felt so alive before.

Fucked up, innit? If this were one of her stories, this is where the heroine would do something clever and subvert everything. Or, you know, fall into a bad end of indeterminate duration, depending on the story, don't judge her. 

But the heroine is always alert and aware and thinking, where here, she feels almost drunk with sensation.

Possibly, that's a neurotoxin in the water. Should probably watch out for that.

But it's true! Her pulse races, her heart threatens to burst in her chest, she's breathing hard, and everything--[i]everything[/i] stands out. Every twitch out of the corner in her eye gets focused on. Every color is bright, vivid, a confusing mess of blurred edges and threat.

She should go up. She should go up. Go up, get away, take the risk. Twenty--no, no, fifteen, 75 percent, remember--fifteen Ceronians cannot hope to match the terrors down here.

And yet she lingers.

Every nerve is lightning, every sense is screaming to get away. Threats from every corner, every direction. Ancient sense of electricity coursing, telling her it's useless to pinpoint the direction of danger, because it's every direction, and up, up, up is the smart.

Colors and lights and glows… How has she always wanted to go find adventure in space, when all this time, it's been here?

She should leave. She should go. Swim up. Swim away. Her hands haven't stopped pressing the ELF on her belt since she got here. Everything is danger. Everything is perfecting themselves, the better to kill her.

But she could no more tear herself away from this--this sense, this wonder, this peril, these colors, this bliss--than she could become a master by wishing for it. It's madness, pure and simple.

And with a thrust of her tail, she sends herself further into it.