There were a lot of things that Perfect did still not understand about his current situation, about himself and about this strange place he found himself in now, many things that he suspected he may never learn, but at least he had gotten some answers in the short time that had passed since his awakening. For starters it had taken him less than an hour - assisted by his most recent surviving memory and the aching redness on his throat - to arrive at the conclusion that he had died, which was disturbing, but ultimately also somewhat encouraging. Though he had no memory that specifically suggested any such thing Perfect did not feel like he was religious or otherwise spiritual, and he was pretty sure that previous to his current predicament he had believed death to simply be the end, past which there was just a big empty nothing. The fact that he had died, yet still remained, meant that death was not the end after all; in fact, this implied a promise that death was never the end, though he was not very keen to test that theory. Who knew what consequences he would face if he died twice? Better not to test his luck; he had died once and 'survived', in a sense. Death had placed him in this place, certainly, and presumably stolen the memories that some part of him in the back of his head kept assuring him were missing... but he still was. Would another death remove him to elsewhere and take away more memories? Or would he just cease to be? Had he died more than once already, but forgotten?
Though each answer brought more questions, Perfect was smart and cunning, with little patience for thinking about things for which answers could not be discovered through pondering alone. He was a predator by nature, one who knew that to claim prey as one's own, one had to go where the prey was, not just sit somewhere and try to conjure it by the power of will alone. He kept thinking about himself and about the things he felt as though he was supposed to know, like who and what he was. His profession, whatever it had been, was lost to him, as were whatever skills he had used to make a livelihood before his death. It was possible that he still possessed the skills without knowing it, but there was no doubt that knowledge had been lost that would make him less effective than he had been before. What he did remember, and what his memories indicated rather clearly, was that he had some unusual hobbies. He was a murderer, a rapist, a child-molester... and he was fine with that. In fact when he tryingly handled the knife he had awoken with on him, heavy for a knife as it was, it had spurred the recollection of sensations in him - the feel of a blade scraping against bone, of warm blood on his hands, malleable flesh under his fingers growing still as life abandoned it - and he had been overcome by a sense of satisfaction.
Yes, he was a psychopath; he remembered the word with a distinct association to himself, though he suspected that it was a diagnose he had come up with himself or handed to him by a victim, since he doubted that he would have been as successful in prowling the world of the living if he was recognized as being the monster he was. Curiously, psychopathy was probably an advantage in his current situation; Perfect did not feel fear as strongly as 'sane' people did, and tolerated stress and unfamiliarity better than those, too. He quite simply lacked the psychological response to this kind of situation and could view it with much greater immediate clarity than most would. He also lacked empathy, of course, which was also convenient. Imagine having to deal with something as pesky as a conscience on everyday basis... intolerable.
Some people might claim that Perfect was immoral or amoral, but both of those accusations would be quite far from the mark. He was in fact an immensely moral man, and had very low tolerance for others violating his moral beliefs. Claiming that his actions were unethical, on the other hand, had a lot more merit. Perfect did not think what he was doing was wrong; society did. He understood this, because the best predator is the one that has no fear in the way of claiming his target, but is capable of walking in the midst of his prey without risk of spooking it, both to prevent them from escaping and to avoid being caught in the inevitable stampede as these lesser beings clamored for safety. Well, in the end he had not been able to avoid the stampede after all, it seemed... but he had done so for a very long time. How many had he killed? He could not remember the number, nor could he recount every kill... from the ones he did remember, he would say that he had claimed at least fourteen lives.
But next he turned his attention outward, and was faced with many more questions than answers. Where was this? His previous conclusions suggested that this world was some kind of afterlife, but that was an exceptionally vague idea at best. Only a few things were immediately discernible, namely that at least the land he was currently in was quite inhospitable, and that not everyone who died ended up here. If every dead person throughout history was put here, after all, this world would have to be unfathomably gargantuan for there to exist an area as large as the one Perfect wandered through now with absolutely nothing in it. One theory he had was that the world might be some manner of personal purgatory that existed only for him and in which he was alone.
A theory that was proven false when he found a canyon, at the bottom of which he spotted something, as opposed to the copious amounts of nothing that had dominated the landscape besides at this particular instance. He climbed down to investigate, and found the object he had spotted to be a plant of sorts, a sort of venomously green leafless bush adorned with large thorns. While the existence of the bush itself was enough to call into question the matter of this world being something that existed only for him - plants were alive, after all, which begged the question: did they pass into this world upon death as well? Did animals? Did everything? - the fact that it appeared to have been mauled horrendously was a much clearer indicator than anything. Thorns had broken off and lay scattered around the immediate area, several branches were broken - if not even cut off - and there were marks upon the rock that appeared to come from something sharp being pressed into it. A few feet from the bush were more thorns, though these at closer inspection were dark brown rather than green, and another several steps from there lay what appeared to be two halves of the shell of a fruit, the same color as the thorns removed slightly from the plant. The meat inside was gone, but the way the shell had been split clearly suggested the use of a sharp tool rather than claws or teeth; there were other people here, ones that knew how to survive in this world by the looks of it... presuming that the fruit had not been poisonous, that is.
He turned to inspect the bush more closely, and was rewarded with the discovery of dried blood on one of its branches, and staining the rock beneath it. There was no trail of blood to follow, however, and there were no other tracks to indicate where the person that had harvested this plant had gone, as the stone was not soft enough to leave impressions of feet and the dust, light and eternally in motion as it was, would quickly erase any footprints left in it.
He decided to go in the direction where the shell of the fruit had been left, and follow the canyon; that was what he suspected a normal person would do.
As he went, Perfect tried picking up a few stones on the way, considering using them as potential improvised projectiles or simply as blunt instruments in case this other person proved to be as hostile as the land itself, but quickly discarded that idea. All the stones in this area seemed to be sandstone, which meant that they were not only too light to be very effective as weapons, but also too brittle to try to craft into something more useful.
He steered around some pools of obviously dangerous and rather foul-smelling yellowish liquid, and encountered more of the thorny bushes, and these ones had not been smashed by some merciless forager, probably because they bore no fruits. Perfect was still interested in them, but for something other than sustenance. Carefully, so very carefully, he set about using his knife to shave off the thorns of five branches that were approximately straight, each about as thick as his thumb at their thickest and varying between sixteen and twenty inches in length. He considered leaving some of the thorns on there so that he could perhaps lash with the branches at potential enemies, but decided against it; not only did he remember the blood on the first plant, but there were also the facts that the branches were rather dry and fragile and the thorns were serrated. Not only would any injuries the thorns inflicted to an enemy be superficial, but they would get stuck and the branch would probably snap, meaning they at one or two good swipes in them at most. No, it was better to remove the thorns completely and then use his knife to sharpen their ends to use for stabbing. The sticks would probably still break the first time he used them, but that might be a good thing if he managed to insert them deep into the flesh of his intended target before them doing so. A broken-off piece of stick could make all kinds of ravage inside a person who was trying to move with it stuck in there.
A little later he spotted a bush that still had some of the brown fruits on it, which did indeed have thorns matching the ones he had seen earlier, which was too high up to be easily accessible. He considered trying to throw stones at it to knock off a fruit or two, hoping that they would roll down to him, but then remembered the first bush, how beaten-up it had looked and the cut-marks into the rock behind it. The fruits were probably not that easy to knock off, he deduced, and decided not to waste time on trying. Besides, it occurred to him as he left it behind, the idea of a fruit adorned with three-inch serrated thorns tumbling down the canyon-side, potentially directly towards him, did not seem like a very attractive prospect.
And then, in the distance: something. Not just a small bush or a toxic puddle, but something big. A forest, perhaps, though it did not seem like a typical one of the kind, and not just because of its location. It was dark and dead, and seemed to emanate mist that rose into the air. Perhaps a normal person would find the sight demoralizing, but to Perfect it was an encouragement. Mist meant water, and trees meant shade, even if they really were dead and there was nothing edible left in there.
And on top of everything else there was another something ahead of him in the canyon, between him and the forest but still far away. Movement so slight that he would not have noticed it, had it not been for the sporadic glints of twilight in metal. Someone really was ahead of him. Someone else.
He smiled, clutching his sharpened sticks in his left hand and his knife in his right. He followed.
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