Chapter: 3 TOAAOAA

Helen automatically filtered through Rita's words and concluded... the nurse was a nutter! 

According to her words, it was the era of The Great War! 

And it was just about to end as well!

Helen, or rather Lieutenant Helen, was a medical overseer of one sort or the other. In command of roughly one hundred medical staff... most of 'em died of the flu, only about fifty or so survived. During the last great 'push,' a couple of Imperials managed to ambush her medical unit and she had to actively be part of a firefight... mind you, not her but the former owner of her body, she picked up a Trench Gun and made meat confetti out of them. One little problem though, a woman her size was bound to get shot once or twice at least, mostly in her abdomen. 

'Explains the whole blood loss and hazy memories.'

Helen sighed before glancing up at the chattering nurse,

"Well now, reckon I could trouble you for a bit of shut-eye? I surely do appreciate your company, but truth be told, my body's plumb worn out. Don't you fret, I'll be rarin' to go again soon enough. Just do me a favor, would you? Give me a holler when the Doc comes visitin', alright?"

Rita seemed to have barely heard the raspy tone, but she looked disappointed nonetheless. She walked out of the tent, zipping up the entrance as she did so, leaving Helen half-lying on the bed, glaring at the cloth walls.

*DING*

Great! Now she was hearing bells!

Just how much of Jack's 'homemade recipe' did she smoke?

Still, wouldn't hurt to check around... except it really would hurt if she tried to move around with a half-torn torso. So she opted for the next best thing,

"Anyone there?"

No response and she saw nothing, which meant it was all her imagination and she was high as heaven... and then she saw it, a white screen hanging in the air. 

"Oh."

She rubbed her eyes and yawned, only for it to be stifled as searing hot pain shot through her chest.

The pain was sharp and sudden, causing Helen to gasp involuntarily. She clutched her chest, feeling the bandages pressing against her wounds, but there was something else... something strange. It felt like the pain wasn't just physical; it was as if something was pressing against her mind, trying to claw its way in.

Despite the agony, Helen forced herself to focus on the floating white screen in front of her. It flickered and shimmered, displaying distorted images and fragments of words. She squinted, trying to make sense of it all, but it was like trying to decipher a code in a blizzard.

Then, amidst the chaos, a voice broke through. It was faint at first, like a distant echo, but it steadily grew louder and clearer until it filled her mind.

[CAN YOU HEAR ME!]

The words banged into her head like someone just bludgeoned her over with a sledgehammer... she was speaking from personal experience. 

[HELLO! HELLO! CAN YOU HEAR ME! HELLO!]

Helen groaned,

"Quit shouting!"

[Ah!]

The voice sounded artificial, the kind that's used by automated doors in malls and the sorts. It was neutral... too neutral, 

[Hello, Miss Helen Bacchus, this is the clean-up committee.]

'Clean-up committee?' 

What's that? 

[Well, we are the ones responsible for cleaning the TOAA's mess. You are its latest mess-up.]

"Well, that's just peachy!"

Helen snarled.

If her current situation was someone else's mess, she would very much like to punch the shit out of that certain someone!

[Och, now, hold your horses there. Sure, and it wouldn't be possible at all, at all. You'd be throwin' yer fists like a windmill for the next hundred years, and still wouldn't make a dent! Begorra, 'tis a nonsensical notion altogether.]

'Irish accent?'

[Je peux m'adapter à n'importe quel accent, ma chère.]

"French? really? Stick to English."

[Alright.]

Helen shook her head, she was probably high on a shit ton of weed... maybe that whiskey had something especially hard in it.

[As I was saying, Miss Helen Bacchus, you are currently in a rather peculiar situation. Your very existence in this universe was an accident, your last death was caused by a mistake that made your soul stuck in a temporal anomaly. Voila, you find yourself in an alternate reality with no way home... ever.]

Helen blinked, trying to process what she had just heard. An alternate reality? A temporal anomaly? 

"So, let me get this straight,"

She began, her voice strained from the pain,

"I'm trapped... in a different reality cause of some sort of cosmic mistake?"

[Err... essentially? Yes, essentially. The One Above All, that's the TOAA chap, and we are the TOAA Observation and Administration (TOAAOAA.) Funny? I know. Back to the topic at hand, which involves finding a suitable reality where you can exist without causing further disruptions.]

Great, so she's a piece of loose plywood needing to be stuffed somewhere in the wall!

[More like a grain of sand form a planet of sand from a solar system of sand... yeah, that's about right.]

'So you are hearing my thoughts?'

[More like predicting them, but yeah, that's about right. Anyway, how's your new home!?]

'During the World War 1 era! In a hospital tent! With my stomach shredded open! HOW DO I LIKE MY NEW HOME? I VERY FUCKING MUCH DON'T!'

[Ah, I reckon ye aren't too chuffed about it then. Understandable, but no need to get yer knickers in a twist. We'll sort it out, don't ye worry. We're lookin' into findin' a reality where ye fit snug as a bug in a rug, and then we'll shuffle ye off there. All in a good time.]

'And how long is that supposed to take?'

[Hmm... could be a little while. You see, time's a tricky business. Could be a few centuries, a couple of millennia, maybe a million years or two. Hard to say really, so relax and enjoy the show as your species' history plays out before your very eyes... we'll let ye know when the curtain's ready to fall.]

Helen snorted, or at least she thought she did that. The pain in her chest seemed to have blurred everything together.

'Fantastic, so I'm stuck in a war.'

[Yay, a waiting room! A cosmic lounge! Got you some popcorn?]

'Funny.'

[I try. Anyway, go raise hell! Just don't try to punch through reality again would ya'. We would be watching. Right, I got a gift for ya as well!]

Helen groaned with a mixture of frustration and confusion... trapped in a reality not her own, with no clear way out, and now she had some cosmic entity chatting away in her head. It was a bad joke, a very bad joke, one with no punchline and no escape.

'Alright, what's this 'gift' you're blabbering on about?'

[Patience, Miss Bacchus, patience. Can't rush perfection, can we now?]

Helen rolled her eyes, or at least she tried to. Pain shot through her chest again, a reminder of her very real and very serious injuries.

'Get on with it.'

[Alright, alright. Here's the deal, I've got you a little something. You never wanted to rise through the army's ranks right?]

'What?'

Helen wondered what it was talking about,

[You're gonna have an army of your own!]

'WHAT?'

[Well, not really. You would have to start recruiting from scratch.]

'I'm a woman! During The Great War! Women were medics not Generals! The latter might be true for the twenty-first century, but not now!'

There was silence and then the annoying neutral voice returned,

[Want me to neuter you? If you don't, stop calling me neutral. Anyway, this new world of yours... well it's 'Earth' Earth but not exactly your 'Earth' Earth... does that make any sense?]

'Nope, not a clue.'

[Just like how you don't have a clue about your throat wound that we so generously healed, and how we have been talking in your head for a while now.]

Helen shrugged or tried to shrug at least, but all she could do was give a weak cough,

'I did, just didn't care enough to ask.'

[Cheeky blighter, aren't you? This whole palaver's a bit barmy, isn't it? Seems a strange 'Metroid' caused a right kerfuffle, did it? Changed everything round, seems like. Now we've got womenfolk off to war, out there in the trenches, fighting and dying alongside the lads. Quite the change, wouldn't you say?]

'What?'

[Quit saying that!]

Helen was thoroughly confused, her head spinning from all that information being thrown at her. It seemed like jumbled nonsense to her, 

[So, here's the thing. We've given you the opportunity of a lifetime, mostly to change your fate. You're now in a position of slight power, climb up the ranks. You've got a military command, not as good as your last but it'll do. You can make a mark in this world.]

Helen, still grappling with the pain, managed to scoff,

'Rewrite my story? You mean being stuffed in a strange world?'

[Well, yes. It's a chance to do something extraordinary. To shape the course of history. And, of course, it aligns with our clean-up efforts.]

'Your clean-up efforts, right? Let me guess, you messed up big time, and now I'm your attempt at damage control.'

[More or less... goodbye!]

'Wait!'

And the voice was gone in the blink of an eye, only to be replaced by another one,

{Greetings! I am...}

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