A Self-Study Within A Broken Mind

 Of the Explorer from another world Tina is a human being, leading a life of little import among her kind. One things she excels at is folding paper into all manner of shapes. After her fourteenth birthday goes uncelebrated, due to both her parents being busy, she seeks to make some friends in the city she lives thanks to her elusive parents. Tina isn’t a brave girl, having to learn all her lessons from the fact that her parents weren’t there for her, and the woman who was taking care of her already passed away. Tina decides to fold a world for herself, somewhere where she would be regarded as someone important, or at least regarded. She starts with a giant modular piece and names it Modul, the planet of living origami models in the imagined Paper Universe. She decides to fold paper people to populate Modul and soon falls asleep beside the giant modular world. When she wakes, Tina can see a model in her hand, a black unicorn, but has no idea when she folded it, or how to fold one ...

(27k, loosely edited) “…for dark magic tends to save the world more often than the pure kind.” -some old wizard The nails she wore drew me to her first. They were a midnight shade of purple, rimmed with gold, each sporting three small daggers, star-like, gradient of gold to the midnight purple. They entranced me, enticed me, and inhaled my existence. In the end, those nails were the ones who brought me to my supposed life. I wasn’t alive, but not quite dead either. “Half-lifer,” she called me, her crimson lipstick so close to my eyes. “Best come with me.” This isn’t my story. I’m dead. Well, not yet. I’ve died, and she brought me back, but not to life. I can talk, walk, sleep, and pretend I’m human. I don’t decompose, but have no heartbeat. With one foot in the grave, I’m frozen between life and death. I now serve her, Deresanzi, the Queen of Half-life.” “Stop calling me a Queen,” she said. “I’m just another Half-lifer like you. You’re only here because Salzy wanted to bring you ba...