Amy's Questionnaire

Her mind hurt. Things didn't connect. She didn't know where she was. 

Who was she. 

The nameless woman walked for a long while along the bit of dark ground. It was getting cold. It would keep getting colder. 

How do I know that?

She shakes her head.

I don't have time for that. I can figure out who I am later, when I'm sure there will be a me. 

The woman steps into the woods. 

Her mind is tattered threads of memory, and thought, but she searches desperately. 

How to find shelter. How to hunt. How to make a fire. 

By the time she gets the fire going her fingers are numb. She hold them at the fire. 

Looking around, she takes stock of what is around her. This isn't a large forest. Her memories are tattered but... don't seem to be getting worse.

Can't really do anything about if that is wrong.

She checks her person. She has a knife. A plastic card, and several slips of green fabric. 

Money. She finds the term in a fragment of memory. Her as a young girl. A conversation with a person she can't remember. Then, more clear, her using money to buy a soda at the gas station.

She looks at the plastic card. 

Driver's license. She remembers. It doesn't feel quite right. The name on it is Amelia Rose

That's definitely not right...

The woman thinks for a moment, staying close to the fire, as the night draws on.

"Amy" The woman say aloud. Her voice is hoarse, like she was screaming. "My name is Amy".

Amy stays in the woods for several days. The memories don't come back. But the skills do. She makes more fires. She sets traps, makes a little tent pressed against the mountain.  Uses her rain jacket to setup water collection.

It's not enough for forever, but it's a start. An on the morning of the fourth day Amy could fully remember she walks down the road, looking for people

The closest house to Amy takes half a day of walking to reach. 

When she gets there, her clothes are damp from the accumulated sweat. It is a small farm town. An older man sits on the porch. He looks at her wit concerned eyes.

A flash of rage at being pitied flashes through Amy. She buries it. She needs this. 

She pulls out the cash out of her back pack.

It is a lot. Thousands. 

"I need a car. Do you know someone selling?"

The man looks at her for a long moment. Then nods.

It takes another year and a half before Amy is no longer struggling.

The car isn't a good one, and she needs to frequently pay a visit to her neighbors to get parts of it fix. 

Money is hard to get. She works first as a handy person, skills she didn't know she had being useful. She buys a hunting license, and sells the meat.

Food and water and shelter is easier. She buys an axe, cuts down a few trees, strips and treats the wood, and makes a small hut. She'll need more. She buys books, She works on adding what she can.

Sometimes she considers traveling to a city, but something in her rebels against that. The lights, the flash. The cellphones. They all push against some deep dislike in her. It's wrong. Some part of what happened to here was them. She won't beg society for help. She doesn't need to. She is doing just fine on her own.

Something in the edges of the shattered memories urges her to take action against them. Destroy them. She doesn't know why, but she doesn't know the why for most of her feelings. She will still crush them. Show all of them that she can't be brough low.

To work out the anxiety, she makes more traps around her property. Pit traps, hidden spikes, buried bear traps and punji sticks. 

She can feel something coming in the air. She wants to be ready.

The knowledge came in bits and pieces. In dreams. 

Fragments of memories. The woman Amy used to be talking to the mirror to herself. 

Symbols. Marks of blood. Marks of flame. Words that hurt her mind to hear. 

A way back. In case this happened to her.

Because I knew this could happen to me. I knew people were against me.

Wherever they are, I'm going to find them. I'm going to kill them.

--------
The ritual took several months to get the ingredients for.

The hardest part was the blood. She knew there were tools for it. But they were expensive. 

Knives were cheap. 

When she was ready, her arms and palms were covered in scars. She had bled her lifeblood forming each sigil. Enough to kill her if done all at once.

She was ready. She started the chanting. Words she didn't remember all of. Fragments. Enough to start.

Start and hope that when the memories came back, the rest of the words came back too.

Visions flooded her mind. The day she was betrayed. The people who took everything from her.

Her mother.

Her sister.

Her lover.