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Section 01

The pain from her own scream filled Martta’s soul. It wasn’t like the pain from a cut that just hurt where the cut was.
This pain was so deep and vicious that it hurt her to the deepest recess of her soul. It filled her soul like water filling a balloon. In this case, it was filling the balloon to the bursting point and the balloon was giving way just beginning to rupture.
Martta knew that if the torture did not stop her soul would explode from the pain and there would be nothing left of it but minuscule pieces. It had happened to her before. Every time it did, she did not know if they got all the pieces back together again or if they did it right. She could only believe that they did, so they could make sure it was truly all of her they were torturing completely and that no part of her had escaped her eternal torment in Hell.
Martta could feel the rupturing of her soul. She felt her soul starting to disintegrate into a fine mist. She thought to herself “at least I will get a little respite from the pain.”
But then she felt the mist reforming back into one piece. After Martta reformed, she lay gasping for air, crying from the pain. “Damn it,” she cursed to herself, “only one torturer could pull off that move, Izabar. How did I get on Izabar’s rotation again so soon?”
Martta looked up to see Izabar standing over her. His face held no emotion. He had just used the misting of her soul to get her attention and let her know that he was there.
Izabar was a mystery. He was not sentenced to Hell, nor was he a servant of Hell. One day he had just shown up.
No one had known what to do with him when he first arrived. Since there was no judgment against him, they could not torture and punish him. Since he had no infernal contract of employment, he could not be ordered around.
When he first arrived, he had just stood there, watching. Then, after a while, he started to wander around. He had wandered from one realm to another just watching the workings of Hell. It was the opinion of Hell’s staff that he was just a lost tormented soul.
Eventually, Izabar stopped at the deepest part of the pits and stood there. Some thought he was just a new malformed part of the settings, until he picked up his first knife.
He showed a horrific understanding of torture and its limits. He showed understandings and techniques that terrified even the most experienced torturers, leaving most of them with nightmares. When he tortured, it was with a determination that was disconnected from all emotion.
Now he was torturing Martta again.

Section 03

Hell has two major problems that are not revealed to the living. The first is lack of talent. The second is lack of morale.
Despite what people may believe, there are very few people who have the talent and steadfastness to inflict pain on someone day in and day out for a prolonged period. The misconception is that there is an endless supply of such people.
The reality is there are actually not that many. Because of this, Hell has a shortage of quality tortures. With this shortage, Hell has to rotate the tortures between victims. Also, Hell has to use tortures that are not of as high a quality and professionalism as the others.
This touches on the second problem with Hell, morale.
People talk about an employer from Hell, when they mean a really bad employer. In Hell’s case, the employer is literally Hell itself.
Hell is the poster child for an uncaring and incompetent system. The entities that put the system in place did not fully think about the ramifications of having eternal employees in those types of situations.
The three main contributors to the morale problem are 1) rewards, 2) penalties and 3) lack of change.
In Hell there are no real rewards for doing your job well. You cannot be promoted to Heaven or anything similar. If there are no rewards for outstanding performance, then no one is going to try to be outstanding.
As a result, the employees do just the bare minimum that they have to in order to avoid any disciplinary action. This causes a lack of innovation or new ideas because there is no reward to do so. This attitude is permeated throughout all of Hell, to all employees tortures, workers and bureaucrats alike.
The only way to punish a worker in Hell is to demote them down to a worse menial task. If you are already at the bottom, then there is nothing that can be done, except make you one of the damned and torture you for a while. However, in time, you will be reinstated back because of their lack of personnel.
Hell has also learned its lesson and will not ever again use “inmate” labor to help. As a result, there is no real punishment for an employee that doesn’t do their job.
The last problem is lack of change. Once you are placed doing a job in Hell that is the only thing you will ever be doing, forever. There is no changing of jobs or cross training. That is all you will ever do. Nothing you do will ever change.
This, eventually, creates a complete lethargic view towards doing your job. Doing the same job day in and day out can make you either incredibly incompetent or legendary proficient. If you do the same thing long enough you become calloused to it, whether you are good at it or not.

Section 04

The lack of morale in the employees in Hell causes apathy. As a result, many employees do not always do their jobs as well as they should. This was one of the reasons that the torturer that was supposed to relieve Izabar was not there when he should have been.
The one thing that gave consolation to Martta, after a session of being tortured by Izabar, was the knowledge that Izabar’s replacement never shows up. It would be a few days before the next torture would show. This normally gave Martta time to relax and recuperate. It would be different this time. This time Martta would act on her plan.
After the eight decades of torture, Martta had learned to recuperate faster than she let on. She laid there for several hours recuperating. Then she started acting.
Martta looked at the shackles on her wrists, which held her body and soul to the table. Martta knew she would have to do this carefully or her plan would fail. She brought both hands together, grasping the fist of the right hand in her left hand. She then yanked as hard as she could with her right arm, causing the shackles to sever her right hand at the wrist.
Martta screamed as though her soul was being torn apart, which it was. Normally others might have looked in to see what was going on. However, since Izabar had just been torturing her, everyone thought it was just their session continuing, totally ignoring her screams.
After the initial shock, the pain subsided just enough for Martta to regain some control of her thoughts and body. Using this control, she moved her arm to reconnect the wrist to the hand. But this time her hand was outside of the shackle.
Afterwards, Martta rested for about 15 minutes, long enough for her wrist to heal just enough, so she could repeat the same process on her left hand. Martta then repeated the process on her left hand and then eventually both legs, one at a time.
Having freed her hands and feet from the shackles, Martta now had to work on freeing the rest of her body. Luckily, it would not be so painful or intense.
Martta grabbed the shackles and manipulated them out of the hooks that held them to the table she was strapped to. Once they were free, Martta pulled on one end until she had the cuff in her right hand. From there, she moved the cuff to the bolts holding the first strap.
Martta used the cuff as a wrench and undid the bolts holding the straps in, one at a time. She did this, over and over again, until all the straps holding her down were loose enough for her to wriggle free. Once she was off the table, she stood on her own two feet, one of the few times in nearly 80 years.

Section 05

After taking a few minutes standing and catching her breath, Martta started to walk around the table to get used to her legs again. Then she started on the next part of her escape plan.
Martta looked around the room and saw all the filth and mess. The room was in a constant state of mess for two reasons. First was that the torturers were always adding to the mess by tossing their victims body parts away in random directions. Second was that no one ever cleaned up the mess.
In the nearly 80 years Martta had been there, she had seen the room cleaned up only two times. Again the lack of moral, lethargy and apathy of the workers of Hell had their effect.
The torturing process released all different body fluids in various sprays and leaks from the tortured. Arterial blood sprays, urination and discarded bowels all littered the room. Cutting, beating and raping weren’t the only tortures used. They used all sorts on her, electrical, fire, water, acid even biological and chemical. If it could be thought of, it was used.
Flesh wasn’t the only thing they tortured. They also tortured her soul, emotions and memories. These too they tormented in various ways, discarding them when they were done.
Literally every part of Martta body, soul, memories and emotions were littering the floor. Because Hell itself regenerated all parts of the victim over time, the torturers could cut away any pieces of her, discarding them repeatedly.
Normally these cast off pieces would degenerate over time and the original would regenerate them back. It had been discovered that if you put two different pieces together it could keep the two pieces healthy, even though the pieces regenerated on the victim. Looking around, Martta guessed that there were enough different pieces of her lying around in various decaying states to have made over 20 copies of herself, which is where she had gotten the idea to make a double of herself, body and soul.
Martta grabbed tools from the around the room and started prying up the flooring while digging in the piles of muck and dirt. She got various small bundles and put them on the table. Once done, Martta said the incantations and watched as the pieces merged until it formed an exact duplicate of her body, memories, emotions and soul.
She secured the double into place and then set about covering up what she had done. She told her double “I need you to hold out as long as you can. Only one torturer will know the difference between you and me, and he just left and won’t be back for months. In the end, they will sterilize this room and you with it. Your pain will end. If I succeed, mine never will.”

Section 06

Heading out of the room, Martta walked with a false calm and certainty down the busy corridor. She hoped, that if she acted right, no one would stop her or delay her. She had done this before, but this time she was weaker because she had not consumed different parts of herself to revive her strength. She had used most of her life force to make her double.
However, Martta knew another way to heal.
Martta walked down the hall and opened one of the doors. She walked into the middle of the room, to where the victim was laying on the table. This room, like her own, had bits and pieces of the victim lying around. She collected some smaller pieces of the victim. They would be useful later.
Martta looked into the corner and saw the female torturer, Chantal, asleep in the corner. Chantal’s victim was screaming from the pain of having part of his soul ripped from him and devoured.
It was in Chantal’s stomach.
Torturers were not supposed to eat parts of the victim’s soul because it would interfere with the soul’s natural regeneration by Hell. It was forbidden. It could cause the torturer to be put on the table themselves for a decade as punishment.
Chantal had developed an addiction to eating souls, just like a drug addict. She would always take a nap after each snack.
Martta knew this, because she had been Chantal’s “snack” many times. People knew about Chantal’s habit, but chose to ignore it as long as she was reasonable about it. If it ever came to light to certain supervisors, Chantal would be punished. Like an addict, Chantal could not stop and was deathly afraid she would be found out. Today, Martta was going to use that to her advantage.
Martta walked up to the table and looked down at the victim. The victim’s scream was starting to quiet down.
Martta grabbed a ceremonial knife and started to carve out some of his flesh and soul. Then without hesitation she started to devour it.
Instantly Martta could feel the warmth inside herself as she regained some of her strength. This was the first time Martta had consumed part of someone else's soul. The forbidden pleasure of eating someone else’s soul felt so good that Martta lost control and wet herself. She could see why Chantal was so addicted to it.
The change in the victim’s scream caused Chantal to stir from her sleep. She looked at Martta, starting to rise and grab a weapon.
Martta gave her a stern look and told her, “Do anything about it and I will tell them about your habit. In my stomach is the proof they need.”
With this revelation, Chantal’s face went a pale white, and she dropped the weapon and sat back down.
“Go back to sleep and I will leave to your rest,” Martta stated as she left the room. She knew Chantal would never raise the alarm, for fear of her own fate.

Section 07

Chantal was not the only “snacker” that Martta knew about. There were over 100, and they went by various group names. Martta had not experienced them all, but she knew about them, thanks to Elana.
Elana was Hell’s gossip torturer. Martta was convinced Elana was physically incapable of keeping her mouth shut and was not able to keep a secret. Elana’s constant prattling often drove Marta to violence, in an attempt to shut her up. It had driven many to try suicide, which in Hell was impossible.
Elana came off as the large, overweight and talkative woman that worked for human resources, who was always trying to make friends with you, even while she was sticking a knife in your back. In Elana’s case it was a real knife, not a figurative one. Also, it wasn’t in your back. It was in all areas of your body. The only torture considered worse than Elana’s unending babbling was what Izabar did.
Martta, unlike others, believed that Elana was actually not incompetent at her job, but instead was legendary like Izabar. She just used different tools to break people.
While Elana would never shut up, she was also an unending fountain of knowledge if you could get her talking on the right topics. It was through Elana’s constant talking that Martta had learned so much about the secrets of Hell and Heaven.
One of the most important things Martta learned about was the side effects of “snacking”. Eating the pieces of other’s souls and bodies would corrupt and dilute hers for the short term. This would help her out as it would make tracking her more difficult, because as she diluted and mixed with others, so would any scent or evidence or hers that could be tracked.
The effects would only last in Hell, once she was back on Earth she was on her own. But, Martta had learned other methods to fool any trackers on Earth.
The problem with this method was that eating too many pieces of others could cause insanity. Martta would have to strike the right balance between not being able to be tracked and being able to move and function without going insane. She would need some multiple personalities later on to get her into certain areas of Hell.
Martta moved to the next room on her list. She would need many pieces of many victims to get healed. Every piece made her feel better and restored some more of her health body, mind and soul. After about 20 victims, she was starting to feel great, better than she had in a long time.
Martta remembered, if she ate too much she would start to glow and that glow would stand out like a firefly in the darkness. Even though it was dreadfully difficult, she started to consume smaller and smaller pieces. After enough victims, she knew it was time for the next step, which was irrevocable.
Martta stepped outside of the compound and into the rest of Hell itself.

Section 08

Leaving the compound, she had been tortured in since getting to Hell, was a new sensation for Martta. She had been in the compound for almost 3 times longer than she had been alive on Earth. It was almost like leaving home for the first time.
Even though Elana’s stories had prepared Martta for what she saw, the sight almost drove Martta insane. The tangled mess of Hell was mind staggering. It was as if all humanity had been put in different cities of all variety, shape, organization and disrepair. All the designs and layouts had been decided by corrupt committees whose decisions had been changed as needed as building and upkeep progressed.
Through it all, the enforcers could be seen going about their daily job. The enforcers were Hell’s police force. Like any police force they had their good, their bad, and those with different levels of dedication and competency. While a lone enforcer was no problem, the enforcers could swarm you. Martta saw swarms happening at different locations. Their results were always messy and viscous.
Martta knew that if her plans were going to succeed, she would not only have to make no major mistakes, but she would also have to be able to adapt to any situation that may arise.
There were too many variables with the people in Hell. While many in Hell were apathetic, like those in any major city, most were looking to improve their situation by any means. This meant everyone was a potential snitch, mugger or thief. She would have to act carefully to not bring any attention to herself. But first she needed to get certain things she would need. The problem was she didn’t own any of them.
Martta knew of one method she could use over and over again if she used it wisely, lateral promotion. Lateral promotion was Hell’s street slang for a mugging. Blatant violent crimes normally drew the attention of the enforcers. But, like most police forces, if you could make it look like a random mugging then they would easily lose interest.
The first thing Martta needed was clothing to blend in. After she got a change of clothes she started to get other tools and equipment she would need. She would change identities, looks and locations frequently. She stayed in one place only as long as necessary to get what she needed and then moved on.
Martta would still occasionally need more pieces of people and their soul, but she learned to take them more covertly and in such small amounts that hell would regenerate the missing pieces before the victims knew anything. In time, she was able to get more specialized supplies that made what she was doing faster.
After a year, Martta was no longer street mugging people. Now she was drugging them in their homes, so they woke up and had no idea what she had done. Along with parts of their body and souls, she was also stealing information from them to make breaking into other places easier.
During this time Hell discovered her duplicate, destroyed it and started to assign teams to track her down. Once she realized this, Martta never left the confines of whatever room she was staying at without being in disguise. Martta realized the disguises would be necessary in Hell because her identity could be easily verified. However, she knew once she got to earth no one there would remember her.
When Martta was ready, she headed for the information vaults.

Section 09

Hell’s information vaults were impressive. They were the one of the few things in Hell that were kept up to date and in good repair. They were also the largest things Martta had ever seen. Like their counterparts in Heaven, they contained all known and recorded information. They did not know everything at every time, just those things that had been recorded or written down.
Most of the information in the vaults came from the angels and devils on everyone’s shoulders. What people didn’t know is that both the angel and the devil on their shoulder constantly watched them, read their mind and filed reports on what the person did, felt and thought.
The rest of the information and items in the vaults came from other records, such as status reports, case studies, observation reports, procedure documents and others, including evidence and samples of body tissue and souls.
The vaults had been setup beautifully when they were made. They were designed like a library and were originally very organized. However, as time passed, they outgrew the original buildings and organizational structure and had to be expanded. They expanded by adding more buildings, more categories in the databases and more numbers to the length of the file names. This caused different vaults to have different categories and different filename lengths.
This method was working OK for a while, as you could tell the age of the files in the vault by looking at how old the vault looked and you could guess what categories and filenames might be in it. But then, some bureaucrat decided to update and standardize the entire system all out once. That is when its organization went straight to hell.
About halfway through the reorganization and upgrade process, the project was abandoned. As a result, to find something now was incredibly complex and time-consuming. If you needed several files that were scattered among different buildings, you could spend an entire lifetime looking for what you wanted. The easiest way to find the files you needed was to check the index vaults. Thanks to Elana’s teaching, Martta was able to find the index vaults she needed in hours instead of months.
Earlier in their history, the vaults were well organized. The few people that went to them could find what they needed quickly and leave. The more complex the vaults became, the more people wandered around them lost. Now there were so many people in the vaults, that it over taxed the security systems. That resulted in the decision to just check access at the vault entrances, exits and certain restricted areas. Otherwise, security would just do random spot checks.
Some information Martta needed was in restricted areas. Illusion and destruction incantations were forbidden in the vaults. Any violation would be quickly and severely dealt with. In order to gain access Martta would have to impersonate people with the access she needed. To do this Martta would need things from them like clothing, blood samples, retina scans, and memories even pieces of their soul amongst other things.

Section 10

Martta spent most of her time in the fugitives sections. This was a duplicate of all the information on an escapee and their current status. She needed this information in order to fulfill her mission, which was to track down all the Hell escapees that were on Earth and send them back to Hell where they belonged.
It took years. However, Martta studied each escapee’s history, their mannerism, their habits and what they had accomplished. She studied their methods, their skill sets and what they had done to be sent to Hell. She was building working profiles for them. In short, she studied everything about them.
Any photos of the escapees from their previous life would be almost useless. When an escapee arrived at Earth they had to reform their bodies, and they could reform them to look how they wanted. Fortunately, this was the only time an escapee could decide what they looked like. Once they chose, they were stuck with the shape and look they took, when they first arrived. They could not change their looks at will, so this would make tracking them down easier, thankfully.
In order to survive long enough on Earth to accomplish the mission she had given herself, Martta would also need to know similar information about the Revenants and the searchers, so she could either avoid them or send them back to Hell.
Each time there was a break out from Hell a Revenant would be called up from the damned souls. The Revenant would be given the task of hunting down that breakout’s escapees and sending them back to Hell.
Because Hell would not make the job easy, the employer was Hell after all, the only information a Revenant had on the escapees was the escapee’s name, which was tattooed on the Revenant’s skin in an ancient demonic symbol language that the Revenant did not understand. When a Revenant succeeds and sent an escapee back to Hell, that escapee’s tattoo would painfully burn itself off Revenant’s skin. Once a Revenant had caught all its escapees, it would be granted a second life on Earth.
In certain cases, a Revenant would become a searcher. The most common way was that the escapees were in a place that they could not be reached. If the escapee was unreachable, the Revenant would have to wait around until they had access to the escapee.
One particular escapee had been put in a block of cement that was then dropped to the bottom of the Mariana trench, another one was at the bottom of the kola super deep borehole. Hell knew their locations because any time an escapee was killed but not sent back to Hell, Hell receives a signal that tells them where that event happened.
Martta also had to make sure not to set off any alarms, because the vaults were the most guarded locations in Hell. She could only use limited incantations in the library because the wrong incantations would set off alarms. As long as you didn’t break one of the rules, you were left alone.

Section 11

Martta would use duplication incantations to take the information back to her place in order to memorize all the information. Duplication incantations were allowed in the vaults and you could remove the duplicates. Any attempts to remove the originals resulted in a swift immediate and always brutal response from the guardians.
A common earth misconception about incantations is that incantations will work anywhere. This is not the case. An incantation will only work in its own realm, unless it is authorized by the Grand Compact. This is why mortals can be given incantations from Hell, but they will not work on Earth because they will only work in their own realm. This is true of all realms Hell, Heaven, Earth and Purgatory.
The regular tattoo method worked for the Revenants, because they were sponsored by Hell and it was allowed under the Grand Compact. It would not work for Martta, because she was not an authorized agent of Hell. She would have to use another way to keep the escapee’s information with her when she reached Earth.
Martta knew that when she reached Earth the only thing she would have would be her soul. In order to keep the information on the escapees, she would have to somehow embed it in her soul. The only way to do that would be to tattoo all the information into her soul.
This method would work because the single largest capacity storage device ever created in existence was the human soul. Each soul had near infinite amount of memory capacity that could be stored and retrieved. Because Martta had the memories of over a thousand escapes she needed to keep, she had used parts of their souls when she made her soul tattoos. This would store all the information about the escapee in that escapee’s tattoo, encased in Martta’s soul.
Martta realized that with the soul tattoos, as she sent an escapee back she could release the part of their soul that she had. She could use this as a way to measure her progress and keeping record. An added attraction was that the tattoos would be hidden in her soul, so she would not have any distinguishing marks that could be seen.
In order to have a tattoo seared into your soul, you have to use another piece of soul to do the tattoo with. In her case Martta would use pieces of the escapee’s souls for her ink. To avoid the no removing items from the vault safeguard, she would have to duplicate the pieces of souls she would use. Even then, she still couldn’t remove the copied pieces unless they were covered up by her soul. This meant she had to perform the tattooing on herself in the library.
The tattoo process caused several problems to be dealt with. First, the soul tattooing process was forbidden in Hell. As a result, all information on it had been destroyed. In order to find out how to do it Martta would have to rediscover the process on her own through trial and error. Using gratuitous “lateral promotions” on others, in abandoned places where her victims screams would not be heard, nor they could be found, Martta was able to rediscover and master the process over the course of years. After mastering the soul tattooing and tattoo removal process on others, she was able to start on herself.
The second problem, in the soul tattoo process, Martta had to overcome was that it was incredibly painful to get a soul tattoo, about 100 times more painful than a regular tattoo. For others this would be an unimaginable pain. For Martta this pain was nothing compared to the level of soul torture that she had become used to during her 80 years on the torture table under the efforts of Hell’s most elite torturers. Even with her high tolerance, it would still cause severe screams of pain. To solve this, she used a silence incantation in one of the private research rooms. Because the vaults were libraries, a silence incantation was one of the allowed incantations.
The last major problem, with the soul tattoo process, was that the act of making a soul tattoo released a lot of destructive soul energy, enough to make a large explosion. In order to deal with this, she used a cleaning incantation and placed the soul energy into containers that she would use latter when it was time to leave Hell.
Once Martta had branded all the tattoos, each breakout had its own color and layer; she was ready to move on to the next part of her plan.

Section 12

The goal of Martta’s plan was to return all the escapees to Hell. But, if she didn’t do away with their various means of escape before she left, then the escapes would just continue in a never-ending cycle. She was going to put an end to the cycle once and for all.
In order to do that Martta made additional trips to the archives and various locations in Hell to see how the escapes had happened. She researched what had been done, since their escape, to seal up the holes in the security and what was needed to seal the escape routes forever.
This required more resources that she could manage on her own. In order to get the resources she needed, Martta setup various networks. Some were trade networks. Some were information networks and some were criminal networks.
Martta had to set up the networks quickly but without attracting attention. She had to set up the networks carefully because everyone was a potential snitch or thief, and she could not afford to be turned in to the enforcers. This put her at a disadvantage that could be exploited by others.
Martta would successfully bargain the transfer of ownership of some networks for resources she needed like information, items or money. Some networks she lost to the enforcers who detected the illegal activity and shut them down. A lot of networks she lost to other criminal organizations that took advantage of knowing Martta could not cause too much fuss in defending or enforcing them. However, Martta took a long term and broader view of her networks.
Martta knew that she would not succeed in all of her endeavors and decided to play the numbers game and make as many networks as she could so any losses could be minimal. Some of her failures were almost epic, but she was able to abandon those networks before they became too much of a problem. In the end Martta was creating networks almost as quickly as she lost them. Through all of this, she was able to set up most networks so they didn’t attract the attention of the enforcers.
During it all, Martta had to evade the enforcers. Several times she was almost caught. After one such time, she decided to take steps to help prevent this.
Martta purchased a building with some of her money in a remote, abandoned and rarely visited area of Hell. It was in a location that she knew she would not be disturbed in. There she detoxed all the pieces of others from body and so in the end it was just her once again.
After this had been done, Martta then took samples of her flesh and soul and put them in small containers that she could dispense onto others with. After she had sufficient vials of pure Martta, she started to dilute herself again.
Martta had learned that the enforcers, like bloodhounds, would follow the trail with the strongest purity of her scent. Since she was now diluted again, she could spray someone else with one of the vials and mark them with her scent. Since the vials were pure Martta, the person sprayed with them would have a stronger scent or pure Martta then Martta would and the enforcers would go pursue that person instead of Martta. With these vials she would be able to put the enforcers tracking down someone else and believe it was her.
The plan worked well. In one case she dripped some onto an unknowing vault guardian, who was on his way to work, when she was being swarmed. The results were spectacular. The enforcers started to swarm the guardian who wasn’t too happy about it and that guardian called in other guardians for backup. This led to a vicious cycle of inbound enforcers and guardians fighting each other. By the time a higher bureaucratic authority stepped in all the buildings in a seven-mile radius had been demolished.
The post incident investigation revealed what Martta had done. The bureaucrats passed a policy that the enforcers must verify Martta’s physically before calling in reinforcements against her. However like any bureaucracy the lower downs totally ignored the higher ups new policy as stupid. This resulted in Martta being able to repeatedly use the technique.
One day out of frustration on of the bureaucrats called it another of “Martta’s Traveling Circus.” The nick name stuck and was passed down the ranks and into the general public, who realized that a “Martta’s Traveling Circus” was fun to watch but not fun to be a part of.
Eventually, Martta learned to use the traveling circuses to her advantages. She could use them to clear the enforcers out of areas she needed access to. She could also sell her vials for difficult to get resources.

Section 13

As time went on, the enforcers and bureaucracy kept increasing their efforts and methods to catch Martta. Each time they were getting closer to succeeding. Her escapes were becoming narrower and more difficult. Some of her escapees were easy, some were hard. There was even an accidental one where she was taunting the enforcers and fell off a roof. That was the last time she would be so careless and nonchalant. She also found that she needed to use the “Martta’s Traveling Circus” vials more carefully as the enforcers were starting to develop strategies for dealing with them. Their strategies were not successful ones in catching Martta, but how close they were coming were starting to scare her.
Every day Martta was free, it was seen as a direct defiance to the rulers of Hell. Every time she was seen escaping capture it was viewed as a verification of the incompetence and corruption of the bureaucracy and administration of Hell. Martta became an icon of defiance and resistance against the corrupt system and ruling class of Hell. People started to follow her exploits, escapades and misadventures. A fan base started to grow from those who had been wronged by Hell, those who had unsuccessfully revolted and those who wished for a change for the better. They saw hope for that change in Martta. As a result, Martta’s underground fame grew. Even though her fame and popularity was growing the ruling elite still wanted Martta back on her torture table and Martta still had to proceed with caution.
While the enforcers were not being as big a problem to Martta that they could have been, the mobile tasks forces were a different story. The bureaucrats, every time Martta was spotted, would send in a mobile task force to that spot to help coordinate efforts to catch her. But even they had a limit to the number of task forces that could be deployed. Martta used this to her advantage.
One of the tricks she used was when an area would get too difficult to move around in because of the task forces she would go to a location much farther away, sometime another region, and then intentional be spotted and pursued by enforcers. This would cause a task force to be reallocated to that area. After doing this a few times, she could lessen the presence of task forces in the area she needed to be in.
Just because she had to be cautious didn’t mean she couldn’t flaunt it sometimes. Flash mob block parties in Martta’s honor started to become popular, whether Martta was there or not. The people were using their perception of Martta and her defiance to express some defiance of their own. It even became fashionable, in some circles, to be the one that set off a “Martta’s Traveling Circus.” They even started to become useful tools for someone to wreak havoc on an enemy. This caused the value for Martta’s vials to become astronomical. She learned to sell them for influence. In one rare case, she was able to influence the list and order of candidates for her own potential Revenant!
In her research Martta had found every means of escape that had been previously used. She then spent time researching other possible ways. She came up with plans for what she believed were all the possible ways to escape Hell. Once she had this data, Martta started to formulate plans for the destruction of all the possible escape routes. It took years to put everything in place.
Martta’s existence during all this time was a lonely one. She was pouring everything into her mission and preparation for it. She knew that she would be doing all of this on her own, so she just accepted the state of her isolation and would only go to an occasional party, most of the time to expand or work on one of her networks. While her life running around Hell was a lot more pleasant than being on the torture table, it only served to remind her of the importance of her mission to stop the escapees who were running amok on Earth. She knew she had to stop the escapees because they were up on Earth causing great pain and suffering instead of being in Hell and suffering like they should be.
During this time, it became an ongoing struggle to stay out of the hands of the enforcers. With so many resources being focused on her, Martta decided it was time to make the enforcers deal with other issues.
The enforcers’ main weakness and main strength was communication. They could communicate with each other almost instantly. However, the information they had was too vast, and the bureaucracy members suffered from the apathy of Hell. The bureaucracy just sent whatever data to whatever enforcer they felt at the time.
This was complicated by the fact that the data lines used were a total chaotic mess. When they had first been installed, they were efficient. Now it was a miracle if the right data got to the correct enforcer. As a result, the enforcers would most of the time only catch someone if they stumbled on that person doing something wrong.
Martta decided to use this to her advantage. She set multiple charges on the data nodes and blew them all in a one-week event that came to be known as “Martta’s Kiss.” The resulting loss of data prevented the enforcers from receiving updates, until the data nodes and lines were rebuilt. As a result, a lot of illegal activity blossomed.
Soon enough the data nodes and lines were redesigned and rebuilt. The much-needed upgrades and redesigns had happened and not too soon for Martta.
In fixing the problem the bureaucracy had fixed the communication problems between them and the enforcers. For a very small while the dragnet around Martta slowly tightened, almost catching her.
Then it happened. With the improvement, the enforcers were able to see all the criminals and started to detain them. The problem was they saw all the warrants for all the criminals, all at once. An enforcer couldn’t go a single block without having to perform an apprehension. The enforcers became overwhelmed and couldn’t respond fast enough. With the enforcers' attention now back on others, Martta was able to continue.

Section 14

With the enforcers in chaos, Martta was able to move freely once again. She was able to go into places she otherwise couldn’t, provided she used adequate disguises and didn’t draw attention to herself.
She was able to more easily meet secretly with various groups. One of the most important was the actual designers and builders of Hell. They knew about the hidden flaws because they oversaw the flawed construction of Hell. However, since Hell had been built, no bureaucrat would commit any resources to fix what they felt were non-issues. Because of this, the designers and builders were not only not forbidden from fixing the problems; they were also forbidden from even talking about them. Needless to say, this had caused an epic resentment between them and the bureaucrats. As long as they could hurt or embarrass the bureaucrats and it didn’t lead back to them, the builders were happy.
After Martta shared her plans with the builders, they were only too happy to help her. They realized this could be the only possible time to get the problems fixed, and they would be able to blame it on Martta. She, of course, told them she was more than happy to take any blame, after all in her mind her punishment could never get worse. With this understanding the builders and designers went to work. They were impressed by how many of the flaws she had found and her plans, however they were able to find all the flaws as they had built the system.
The designers and builders were even able to suggest a possible route for her to use to escape to Earth with. But they warned her it would probably not work because all who had tried it before had failed. They cautioned it may not even be a complete route.
Once Martta started working with the builders she found she had her own small army in making the explosive devices and planting them where they needed to be. The devices would be powered by the exploding soul energy from the creation of the soul tattoos that Martta had stored. When the builders saw the energy, she had stored, they became ecstatic. For the first time in Hell’s creation, they were going to be able to blow shit up. The best part was that the blame would all be put on someone else, Martta. As an extra measure, all the devices were contaminated with evidence from Martta.
Earlier when Martta and the builders were analyzing the possible routes one of the builders had asked Martta “Why are you doing all this? You have escaped the torture area and evaded capture for over eight years. If you lie low, they will never find you, ever. You have enough resources to live forever in a comfortable estate in luxury. Why risk it all to hunt down the escapees? It isn’t your problem. Why do you care about the escapees at all?”
“Every last one of us sentenced to Hell knows exactly what we did to deserve to be sent here,” Martta replied, “I know that the escapees running loose on Earth aren’t my problem. But, I acknowledge at the base level it is wrong that they are there. They need to be sent back. I also realize that the Grand Compact limits the ways in which Hell can deal with the escapees. If it didn’t, the tortures would gladly go up in force and bring them all back.”
“But what does the Grand Compact have to do with this?” he asked.
“Well, the Grand Compact does not allow for either Heaven or Hell to reveal its proof of their existence to anyone on Earth who is not their agents. This is why Hell sends the Revenants to hunt the escapees. It has to be a shadow war.” Martta replies.
“But what about you?” he asked.
“I am not sponsored by Hell. I am not working on their behalf. I am not one of Hell’s agents.” She says.
“But won’t that get you into trouble?” he asked.
“What are they going to do to me for it? My sentence is eternal torment by legendary tortures. There is no worse they can make my punishment,” Martta replies, “I am actually surprised that I was not sentenced to my own pit.”
“Then what is your reward? Did they promise you something?” he asked.
“No reward,” she says.
“I don’t understand why Hell doesn’t just say the hell with the Grand Compact and just go get them. It’s not like Hell and Heaven haven’t been at war before,” he says.
“Because if Hell breaks the Grand Compact, Hell won’t be at war with just Heaven. All the other realms will side with Heaven and vanquish Hell,” she replies.
“So your entire reason for doing all this is?” he asks.
“It’s like a worker who becomes frustrated with a problem no one else will fix. I just decided Fuck it, if no one else will fix the problem, then I will,” Martta says.
In the last few weeks before she was to leave, Martta went on a tour of Hell. This one was unlike any other tour of Hell. Those who were helping her showed her parts of Hell that only privileged few had or would ever see. They showed Martta all the wonders and splendors of Hell in a way only an honored guest would be shown and treated.
They were happy to treat Martta this way because they were proud of what she was doing. She was defying the hierarchy and rulers of Hell in ways they could only dream of. They were all unwilling to act against the hierarchy out of either fear or self-doubt. They knew that Martta was causing problems for the bureaucrats to a level that had not been seen for quite some time in Hell. While in public all the citizens of hell paid homage and praised the bureaucrats in private the only ones who like the bureaucrats were the bureaucrats. The bureaucrats were hated by all others.
Some of them even showed her the underground betting pools that had been established, based on what she was doing and what she planned to do. The betting pools of Hell were famous. Hell itself was the end all destination for sinners. It only made sense that with the broken system of Hell’s bureaucracy and enforcement that all sorts of vices would be running rampant in Hell, if you knew where to look.
The last few days Martta spent in quiet contemplation and final preparation. She knew, no matter what, she would never see the outside of the torture compound she had been in ever again. If she was caught, she would be returned to her table. If she succeeded, her fate would still be the same. That was one of the reasons that she decided to do this.
There was literally no penalty for Martta and Hell was not doing enough to fix the problem of the escapees.
On the final day, she started to set off the devices. That day is known as “Hell’s Rape” because of what Martta’s devices did to Hell.

Section 15

As the devices exploded, they did insane amounts of damage to Hell. In places where the escapees had tunneled through the clay like substance, it melted the clay and crystallized it to a hardness that would not be able to be penetrated by any known material. In places where they had escaped through a crack in the wall, the explosive force blew the crack and wall apart and left gaping chasms that were also crystallized. The devices destroyed many small towns as they went off and several large cities. A little before the last one went off, Martta had taken her supplies and equipment and started the journey to Earth.
For agents of Hell, the trip would normally be almost instantaneous through one of the portals. Martta was not an agent of Hell, so she would have to make the journey on her own.
She began the route she had been told about with some hope and determination. The first thing she noticed was that Hell seemed to be trying to pull her back. After the first night of sleeping, she noticed she had moved almost one hundred yards back towards the central hub of Hell. From then on she would try to anchor herself or lodge her body so it wouldn’t drift in her sleep.
“No wonder the others had not been successful. If they were ‘killed’ Hell would be able to just pull them back to the area of Hell they had been sentenced to,” Martta thought to herself.
Hell also had a whole range of natural physical dangers that Martta would encounter. There were quicksand pockets, but these didn’t have water they had acid. Martta also encountered imploding pockets of vacuum that could suck the air out of your lungs, luckily she had been on the outer most edge of one and it only made her pass out. She came across body remains at one where the implosion had sucked the person’s organs out of their body.
Martta also came across a large region that had random spikes shooting through the air. It was here she found out that the natural regeneration of Hell still worked on her.
She experienced this when she was struck by a spike in the head and woke up seeing the residue of her brains splattered across a 20-foot-long spray pattern. Luckily she had been tied to her supplies and equipment and the weight was enough to keep her from being pulled back.
Her least favorite of all the natural dangers was the dark lightning. One bolt hit her supplies and incinerated her cart and over half her supplies and equipment.
Martta could see why most people would just give up and go back. Through it all she kept working her way towards her destination. Then she came to the end of the route she had been given. It ended in a huge wall.
Martta could see no end of the wall in any direction, so she tried to climb it to go over it. After three days of climbing she realized the wall was endless and invulnerable. Her route had taken her to a dimensional limit.
Martta was heartbroken to realize the route was a failure! She just sat there and cried in frustration for almost a week. Martta screamed at the wall. She hit it, bit it, scratched it and spit on it. In frustration and despair, she even begged it, with tears streaming from her eyes, to let her through, all to no avail. In the end she realized she had one of two choices, give up or find another way.
Martta climbed down from the wall and just wandered aimlessly for a week. She had no idea what to do next. For the next week she just traveled aimlessly. She even stopped to watch a group of beasts wandering along a stream.
“Well they seem to know where they are going. Too bad I have no idea where I am going,” she told herself.
After thinking for a bit Martta came to the conclusions, “I may not know the way to where I want to go; but, I do know a few things. I know where I definitely don’t want to go. I don’t want to go back and I don’t want to go to the wall. I bet there is another wall opposite this one, so I don’t want to go that direction. That is three out of four directions, so I should probably go the last direction and see what happens.”
So with a new plan, she headed in the last direction.
Martta realized there would be no map or path. She would have to make her own route. Many obstacles had to be overcome or gone around. Some were impassable and new routes had to be taken. Martta would sometimes have to return to a previous point re-enduring all the hardships on the way back. Time and again, she hit dead ends and had to either go back or try new paths.
Most people never saw the variety and wonder of the space between, because they were always expedited to their destination. The things Martta encountered in her journey were beyond description and would leave their memory on her forever. From frozen fire balls, whose pieces she broke off and let melt to start a fire, to vistas that were so beautiful that they brought peace and calm to her soul.
Martta’s supplies ran out after only a couple of months. Then she had to hunt and forage.
The rest of the journey she got the things she needed through trade, barter, theft and violence. The journey tested her in ways she had never thought of. Martta needed all the resourcefulness, determination and diplomacy she could muster.
Somehow she kept making her way. The last part of the journey she made on her pure determination only. When she ran out of tools, she used her bare hands.
The dangers were not only the physical environment. There were also those who lived there. Some were passive, others weren’t. In the space between the worlds there lived creatures. Some were majestic, some were dark and malevolent and some were everything else in between.
Martta would find new enemies and new allies. Some would try to kill her. Some would help her and some just wanted to talk to a stranger and hear stories from other places in exchange for telling her about what they knew.
There were two encounters that Martta would remember forever, the gladiator city and the ancient hermit.
Martta had been out foraging, when she had been captured by a group that sold her to a city whose whole culture was based on gladiatorial combat.
Martta thought she was good at fighting and would do well in any arena. She was dead wrong, literally dead several times. Martta may have been in her share of fights but her hand-to-hand skills were nothing compared to people who had been in combat daily for thousands of years. In the arena they tormented her like a bully tormenting a kitten.
She lost most of the fights she was in for the first few months. Then she started to get better and started to win more than she lost. She knew she had become a fan favorite, and they would never let her go.
It was then she came up with a plan, anger and failure. She managed to challenge one of the champions and enrage her so badly that the champion actually killed Martta instead of just wounding and maiming her. They tossed Martta’s body on the pile of other dead waiting for Hell to heal Martta.
That is when the second part of Martta’s plan happened. She let Hell start pulling her body parts back towards the central hub.
The others realized that they could not prevent Hell from taking Martta and after she had been pulled 5 miles they just gave up and let her go. It would take another 50 miles before Martta was able to stop the progress of her body and get all her body parts back together and heal. When she finally succeeded, she only had the clothes on her back.
The ancient hermit came as a surprise to Martta. She had been walking through a forest when all of a sudden there was a clearing with a small home with a male creature inside. The creature was more surprised than Martta when she approached. It had been over a million years since he had seen anyone.
At first, they had no way to communicate but after a few weeks they were able to bridge the language gap and started to share stories.
The male never told Martta his race. He shared that he had been involved in a great war and that he had been marooned here and made the best of it. Martta felt that she would be safe with him. He taught her many survival skills that she needed. It was a nice time, but in the end they both realized Martta needed to continue on her way.
As Martta hugged him goodbye she said, “Thank you for all you have shared with me Zyloc. I wish you well.”
Zyloc replied, “I wish you a successful journey and resolution to your mission Martta,” as she left.
As Martta got closer to the border between Hell and Earth she encountered another of Hell’s natural hazards to keep people there, the soul pain barrier.
The barrier caused pure torment to her soul. The pain would have been soul breaking and ended her plan right then if she had not endured so much at Izabar’s hands. Others had tried. When their soul broke into pieces, those pieces slowly drifted back down to Hell. In Martta’s case she was able to retain control and keep going. It was one of the few times Martta was actually grateful for all the torture she had endured.
Finally, Martta began to reach the curtain. This was the barrier that separated the realms. As Martta got nearer, she began to fell a sensation she did not recognize. It was then she noticed, the closer she got the less tangible her body was becoming.
Martta then began to realize it was the last protection of the realms. It kept the beings of one realm from going to another realm.
The curtain was striping her of her Hell flesh.

Section 16

The curtain would leave only her soul once she passed through it. This was why spirits wandered the Earth, because they had been stripped of their flesh. Unable to do anything physical due to a lack of a body, the spirits could only talk and advise to those rare individuals who could see them.
Martta realized this was why angels and devils were almost never seen in the flesh, because their flesh had been stripped from them and only their soul still existed. The only times angels and demons were seen in the flesh in the Earth realm were limited circumstances, and they were always on missions authorized under the Grand Compact.
The flesh stripping was the ultimate defense against invasion from other realms. No one could invade another realm if they couldn’t bring their flesh, weapons, amour and incantations with them.
Even though it was just her soul traveling, Martta still had to finish navigating to Earth. The misconception that a person’s soul form is not physical so it could just quickly travel through any material in the way and nothing could stop it was wrong.
Things that are physical may also have soul forms. Beliefs that planets were alive and have a soul were correct. When someone claimed a storm was alive, that a mountain had a soul and was angry, they were correct more times than not. Many times people’s such beliefs were dismissed as superstition or conjecture, so their views would be dismissed.
All the terrain in between was alive and had souls, so even in soul form Martta still had to navigate through the various terrain and its hazards. The terrain had as much varied emotions as anyone else. Some terrain was peaceful and calm, some was angry and some were just plain ornery bitches.
Like any border between countries, the curtain had cities and protector patrols on both side.
The cities and those who lived there surprised Martta. She had experiences a variety of people and cultures when she was alive on Earth, before she was sentenced to Hell. She had also met a variety of souls and creatures in her time in Hell and on the journey to where she was.
Most of the time, the ones Martta met associated only in groups of their own kind. In the cities along the curtain, she saw all sorts of varieties. The surprise was they were generally living in mixed communities.
Martta was able to observe and research, she spent a lot of time in bars and taverns both as a patron and as a servant in between times when she was caught by protector patrol agents and deported to the Hell side. She found one of the major reasons for the cooperative communities was because most people were living there to be closer to their loved ones on the other side.
If Hell was the prison, then the curtain cities were the visiting centers. As with any prison, there would be attempted break outs. Also, like any border there were those who were attempting to cross from one side to the other without approval. This is where the protector patrols came in.
The protector patrols specialized in hunting down unauthorized people. However, like regular cities, there were smugglers and other ways to cross if you were brave or stupid enough to try.
On the earth side the majority of those caught were trying to escape Hell. On the Hell side the majority caught were trying to live with their loved ones. One standard rule for prisons is they generally don’t let family members of the inmates move in and live with the inmates. Prisons are, after all, supposed to be a punishment for individual criminals not government housing for families.
The patrols didn’t stop at the curtain. They went on for a significant distance on either side of the border. The patrols also varied between 1 person walking a beat to special assault squads of 20 members and anything in between. The main functions of the patrols were protection, investigation, apprehension, aid and deportation.
Through experience Martta learned to defeat the ones she could and avoid the ones she couldn’t. She also learned to fight them only as needed. These lessons came about after she pissed the patrols off so much that they “killed” her and threw her different pieces across the border. Martta could tell how much she had upset the particular patrol by how many pieces they cut her up into and how far apart they threw the pieces.
One interesting thing Martta found was that on the Earth side her soul didn’t drift towards the Hell border. If parts were cut off, like an arm or leg, they would just sit there. She theorized this could be a possible way some people or creature were either trapped or stranded.
Generally Martta came to understand if she got caught and just surrendered then they would just walk her across the border to the other side. She even came to have such a good rapport with one patrol agent that he would spot her and point at her then to the border, and she would walk herself to the other side. Through all her time at the curtain cities the hiding and surprise attacking helped to hone her already considerable stalking skills.
Even though she was in soul form, a few things still applied. If you couldn’t do it in physical form, you generally couldn’t do it in soul form. So if you couldn’t fly in physical form than your soul generally couldn’t fly either. While a soul could generally float through physical objects, it couldn’t do the same through soul objects. Because of this Martta would need special soul tools and equipment which cost money.
Martta had to spend such a long time at the curtain cities to earn the money she needed to buy supplies, equipment, favors and information. This money she earned doing various work.
Since money was a physical thing, the money on Hell’s side would disintegrate at the curtain and would not be able to be taken to the Earth side. It worked the same way going from the Earth side to Hell. So Martta also had to buy the only thing that mattered, favors. When she had finally gathered what she needed, Martta began the rest of her trip.
Once Martta got past the border area on the Earth side she had to go through space between the border and Earth. Like the between space for Hell there was grandeur and variety in the terrain and what resided there. She saw ancient societies that had been lost and new creatures that were evolving and being brought to life before her very eyes.
One ancient society she found in an unfortunate event. Martta was digging through a section of interconnecting caves when she dug through the floor. Inconvenient for her she had just broken through the roof of a cavern the size of a small country and plummeted two miles down and crashed into their central shrine. Her soul broke into several large pieces on impact scattering in the process when she was impaled on a statue of Poseidon. The pieces then started to float around aimlessly until the occupants found them all and put them back together. As Martta came to after healing enough, the people tried to communicate. Finally, after trial and error they were able to communicate.
Their leader asked, “Can you understand me?”
Martta replied, “Yes, I finally can.”
“You appear to be mending quite well. We were worried,” he said.
“I think what you did helped me a lot. Thank you,” she told him.
“It was our pleasure and honor. Can you tell us how you came to be here?” he asked.
Martta told them of her travels and where she was going, but not why.
“Earth you say. It has been a long time since any of us have been there,” he said.
“How long?” Martta asked.
“Over 3,000 years.” The leader replied.
As they walked, Martta looked out over the small country. She could easily see it was divided into 10 sections, and the capital city was in the middle where it all joined. The city itself was a series of seven alternating water circular masses with a channel that led out to the small sea it sat on.
“I am curious,” Martta said, “what is the name of your country?”
“We call our home Mu,” The leader said.
“I seem to recall that name, but I am not sure where from.” Martta said.
“We moved here from earth a long time ago, we used the power of earth and fire to move our country. I am sure to others it appeared we were destroyed in the process,” he said.
“An island country that was destroyed by earth and fire thousands of years ago?” Martta pondered out loud. After a few minutes, it hit her. “I am in the lost country of Atlantis.”
They revealed that they had traveled to where they are to escape the pestering or Heaven and Hell in contest for their souls. They had chosen a third option, to remove themselves from the politics and manipulations. To prevent any interference, they had a soul shield in place around their home.
The leader admitted after a thousand years of no contact from outsiders they had turned it off.
“Why was it turned off?” Martta asked.
“Because we believed we were safe and forgotten. But I suppose we will have to turn it back on now. We were definitely not expecting someone come to us by falling through the sky.” He stated. He and Martta both laughed in amusement.
Martta and the Altantians had many talks over the week she was there. One of the talks was about souls and their end destinations and judgment.
“Our souls do not go to Heaven or Hell upon death of the body,” the head priest revealed, “instead each soul is reborn here to begin the journey of life over again.”
“Wow, this is so thought-provoking,” Martta said, “so because you don’t believe in Heaven or Hell you go to neither. The philosophical and religious implications are staggering.”
This revelation explained a lot about what Martta had observed on her trip. Heaven and Hell were destinations and if you left a realm you were destined for then the curtain would separate you from your flesh because it did not belong in the new realm. Also, if you were in the realm of your destination, you would live either forever or be reborn over and over again. In any of those circumstances, the body and soul still needed sustenance to survive.
After the week, Martta bid her farewells and left to continue on her journey.
In one extraordinary circumstance Martta saw a whole herd of creatures evolve from their physical bodies to a pure energy state. The site was so beautiful she wept.
Another time she saw one animal literally break into pieces that would circle around itself in a small swarm. The pieces would smash into each other and merge only to later begin the whole process over again with different pieces. It was like the creature could not make up its mind what it should be or look like.
This part of Martta’s journey taught her to be more of a strategic thinker instead of just using brutal straightforward soldier tactics. She learned this the hard way. Sometimes when she would attack something and it would be a trap. Many times she was left for dead staked out.
Martta eventually learned to not go just head on and to use other tactics. One time she was able to defeat a larger force by using the terrain and framing them for incidents with a rival force, which then attacked the aggressors. When it was done, Martta was able to defeat what was left and gather resources from them. It tested her creativity, patience and adaptability.
Despite her planning and being frugal she still ran out off supplies after another four months. She had to learn to use things in new ways and to be creative in getting things she needed. This caused Martta greatly expanded her researcher and scientist skills.
Martta had spent six years traveling from the central hub of Hell to Earth. Those six years traveling plus the ten years in running loose in Hell made it 16 years from the time she escaped from the torture table until she arrived.
At last, she was finally on Earth.

Section 17

Even though Martta had finally arrived on the surface of Earth, she still had one problem. She was in soul form with no physical body. This was the same problem all the escapees had. Because they had no physical body, they would have to form one. Most souls in the wrong realm would have never developed the patience, stamina and skill to construct a new body that would last to house their soul. For someone who had been through all that she had, this would be a time-consuming but not impossible. But even then the process was not perfect.
The bodies made did have certain shared flaws. One of them was that the bodies were constantly deteriorating. To resolve this, the escapee had to assign some of their subconscious to the task of constant regeneration of their physical bodies. This was why the escapees would be so hard to kill, because they were always regenerating.
Before she started, Martta had spent weeks just drifting over the Earth looking in wonder at how the cities, vehicles and homes had changed so much in the time she was gone. She was also amazed at how so many other things had stayed the same. She spent time and watched both a beautiful sunrise and also danced in the moonlight.
Martta could see how so many would want to stay here even if in soul form only. In time, she decided to get back to doing what she came here to do. Martta found a nice place in a city park and slowly sank about 7 feet down. She knew she would need to be at least 6 feet underground in order to prevent any wild animals from digging her up.
Once Martta was down far enough in the earth, she began the process to form her cocoon. This would be where she would form her new body.
Since spirits and souls had no physical body, they normally could not affect much in the physical world. They had very limited ability to make any change happen. When they could, it generally took a lot of effort for very little physical affect. This was how ghosts could rattle chains, slam doors, freeze windows and make smoke billow.
Martta used this limited interaction at an even smaller cellular level of change. First she made one cell then another. She first made the cocoon, then filled it with embryonic fluid and finally she started to make and grow her body. The entire process was extremely painful and made Martta scream out more than a few times. However, with 7 feet of dirt over her no one human ever heard the screams. Animals could and sometimes people walking their pets in the park would see the animals suddenly jump and try to get away from the area in fear.
The process of creating her new body would take months. During this time, she could listen to the activity in the park above her.
Martta found that her time in the cocoon was almost always pleasant and happy. It was as if the Earth had opened up and accepted her into its loving womb. Love is exactly what she felt. It felt like nothing she had ever felt before and for the first time she was truly happy. For the first time in her life Martta felt unconditionally loved. She now knew what they meant by Mother Earth’s loving embrace, and she never wanted to leave it.
At some point Martta had to decide on the particulars of her new body. She would be able to make it look however she wanted. This is why the photos of the escapees were almost useless because each escape decided what they looked like when they first made their body. Once the body was made, they were stuck with what they had decided.
Martta knew she could have looked like anyone. But in the end she realized one thing. She was doing this all on her own despite all the odds against her. Martta felt that she would not hide who she was or why she was here. She decided she would look exactly like she had before and made her body accordingly.
Once the body was done, it was time to begin. Martta dug her way to the surface and emerged from the Earth. She emerged covered in mud, embryonic fluid and dirt at night and looked up at the stars and knew three important things immediately.
It was cold, she was very, very naked, and she was wet.