The Witch awoke and was temporarily blinded by the suns rays, she blinked, rubbed her eyes and began to take in her surroundings. On all sides was a vast sea of rocky desert, with large cliffs off to the distance, the ground was hard, cold and coated with a fine sprinkling of reddish dust. The Witch knew she had to get out of the sun, but there was no shade to be seen, she started to claw at the ground beneath her, as her hands were made of diamonds she had no problem digging through the sedimentary rock. The hole she dug was about 5 foot deep before the ground began to give way, the Witch panicked and began to grasp at the sides of her hole, but the ground beneath her crumbled and she fell hard and fast into the darkness below arms flailing like a rotor-copter or a novice ice skater seeking to minimise the impact of a backwards fall.
After 10 minutes falling in the pitch black the Witch resigned herself to the fate that will be hers for the next two decades, simply falling through space. Luckily the Witch wasn’t thirsty and the hunger pangs stopped after the first week, so that negated the need for any kind of sustenance, apart that is for company…
The Witch was always a sociable creature, the centre of attention at society parties, regaling guests with tales of prohibition era Chicago and her part in the development of Pilates as a safe low impact exercise. But now alone in the darkness she had no one to turn to, no one to hold. Around her neck she wore a redundant circuit board from her first Spectrum ZX, a reminder of the innocence of childhood she had thought, now possibly a lifeline from the inevitable decent into insanity. It was difficult to undertake sophisticated robot engineering while falling at terminal velocity in the pitch black, but through her natural cunning the Witch found a way. Using her rudimentary knowledge of bio-tech and robotics she managed to construct a two inch high mechanoid, a mechanoid with a massive capacity for pathos and understanding, the Witch had used a portion of her brain as the main circuit in the machine, this was the portion of her brain that dealt with any aspect of charity. As a result she lost all compassion, but that was more than made up for by her new friend, simply called ‘Robot’.
They would discuss philosophy and art for what seemed like an eternity but in reality was probably more like 13 years, each would have an opposing opinion, with the Witch inevitably straying to the right in any argument.
Then one day in the middle of a heated debate about the impact of Mertz and Schwitters legacy and the cruel irony of dying from an injury sustained at Daisys café in Ambleside after internment and hoboism, they landed with a splash! The Witch’s sense of direction was thrown into disarray, then she remembered her survival training and just kept still hoping that the air in one of her 54 lungs would bring her to the surface, she could not have been that deep because although her hands were made of diamonds her body was flesh and would have crushed at any great depth. She surfaced and gasped for air, her little robot chum had crawled into her mouth seeking protection not unlike a crocodile taking her young to the water for the first time.
The Witch swam to shore, she had known this place in a past life, the familiar greens and browns of the Lakeland fells rising up to meet the deep clear blue of a crisp winters sky. The pulled the robot from her mouth and spoke “ We shall make this place our home, maybe start a business selling boiled sweets and various colourful confectionary” She smiled “ and kids eat for free”, the robot understandably shocked by this sudden show of charity bleeped as he did “bleep bip bip”, “ I know little one” replied the Witch “ I feel much kinder, maybe that fall was just what we needed, now to work!”
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