The shadows quickly rose around him as he continued his journey down.

He was falling to his demise, having been pushed by that idiot jock. A move he had not seen coming.

It was an odd thing that Goodie did not succumb to panic as he descended into the darkness below. In fact, he was not feeling panicked at all. He was not feeling anything, really, except for an unnatural calm that had suffused his being with a general acceptance of his current predicament.

He supposed that this was the moment when his life was meant to flash before his eyes, a trope that he had never really understood as he could not perceive how reviewing one’s life would ever help in such dire circumstances.

But then again, most people probably had a more positive view of their lives than he did and would have probably been comforted as they remembered being surrounded by their loved ones and whatever small victories that they had managed to achieve in life. Lucky them.

However, there was no gag-reel of his few short years playing through his mind, merely a lone thought that kept pressing to the front of his consciousness as he felt the walls around him pass by as his body moved ever downward.

Meat.

He had completely forgotten about it, until now.

He had bought a variety of meats from the ‘Village on the hill that produces corn’ and taking them back to his truck-waggon to experiment upon. He had hoped to find some way to use his powers to cure those meats, warding off the rot that would naturally set in overtime and hopefully saving him a bundle in the process from having to spend less on food and storage.

He had proceeded in covering them with varying amounts of his shadow stuff as well as various other materials to help him discern the effects and differences in the rate of decay of the selection of meats, after which, he had then shoved the lot of them into one of the upstairs cupboards where, presumably, they still lay.

Probably letting off an ungodly stench while attracting a horde of bugs, no doubt.

He was certain that Diane would one day stumble upon them, a realisation that gave him pause.

It was a stupid thought to be concerned over, especially as he was falling to his doom, but as he fell, the thought of Diane one day finding the spoilt mess and wondering why he had let so much good food go to waste irked him immensely, the thought that that would have been Diane's last impression of him disturbed him greatly for some reason.

Goodie sighed as he stared into the darkness before him.

He could see nothing but the endless depth of inky-black shadows, but he could feel everything. He would even say that he felt everything more acutely now that he did not have his vision to distract him.

With his mind clear of excess thought, he knew what he could do to get out of the situation, all he needed to do was get to one of the walls and from there it was merely a matter of climbing up.

He stiffened his body in preparation for what he was about to do next.

Geek, gamer, shut-in, these were the impressions that someone would have had upon meeting Goodie for the first time, someone from Earth that is, and Goodie had never done much to change that impression. Which is why it often shocked people to learn that he could do a hundred squats with relative ease. A lifetime of having to walk to and from home on mostly hilly terrain as well as various half-hearted attempts at exercise had left him in possession of an above-average strength within his legs.

A leg strength that allowed him to direct the sudden burst of gas that he had emitted from his feet downwards, briefly slowing his descent for a glimmer of a second. The substance was a high-intensity burst of the gas-form of his shadow stuff, a move that he had discovered when he had first looked into creating his own form of knockback attack. Unfortunately, the strength of the burst was such that it would have only served to knock him back rather than his enemies and was thus unusable in combat…but to stop his fall, even for a brief moment, it was more than suitable for the task.

Goodie's upper body more than fit the cliché of the typical nerd. A fact that he had forgotten as he let off two bursts from the palms of his hands to direct his trajectory, only to have his arms splay about like two wet noodles caught in a blender. His body whirled about in the air, soon crashing into a hard surface that he assumed was the rocky wall of the cavern that surrounded him.

Through some strange clarity of mind, Goodie reached out and grasped at the unseen wall as he had collided with it, taking hold of a small outcropping of rocks with as much strength as he could muster. But as much as the burst of shadow stuff had neutralised his downward momentum, the pull of gravity combined with his overall body-weight was too much for him to bear, the skin of his hand tearing upon the jagged rocks as he was once again pulled downwards. His palm covered in blood, the pain from his wound sending fire through the nerves running along his arm, Goodie was forced to let go, but not before summoning a wad of tar-like shadow stuff between his hand and the surface of the cavern wall, a thick gooey substance whose viscous and elastic properties had allowed him to trap many a rat back in the overrun sewers of the city. Unfortunately, the substance was little stronger than he was and snapped like an elastic band that had been stretched too far.

Goodie tried doing a wall-crawler, shooting out thick strands of the tar-like substance from his hands, aiming them at an angle so as to avoid them snapping and to allow for the redirection of the force of his downward momentum to swing him to the side where he could, hopefully, latch onto a wall.

However, his inexperience at web-slinging meant that the action only resulted in him slamming his body full force into the rocky walls of the cavern, no doubt leaving bruises and possibly even a broken rib or two before he inevitably continued his descent as his homemade web snapped like before. One could argue that that was a far better outcome than becoming a wet stain on the unseen floor below, but Goodie would have argued that an instant death versus a slow and painful death by internal bleeding both had their downsides.

The argument was for naught as he soon resumed his journey to the sudden stop below as he ceased his poor attempts at wall-crawling, however.

He could no longer waste his efforts on the creation of his mock webbing as he was quickly running out of mana, his body rapidly succumbing to fatigue as confusion slowly overtook his mind, the strain of the loss of his body's energies compromising his mental faculties.

Goodie scraped the furthest corners of his being for ideas on what he could do next.

Balloons.

It was all he could think of, a silly memory from a cartoon that he had seen when he was a kid. They started sprouting from his body, paper-thin balls of ashen-black filled with a gas that was lighter than air. And idiotic attempt to counter the force of gravity's effect on his body.

Truly idiotic, he thought, as he felt the balloons pulling against his clothes, his skin, and hair as the stale air within the cavern washed over him as he passed by.

He summoned more, balloons grew on the surface of the balloons which had grown from his body, another layer appearing upon those new ones soon after, and then another.

This time he was not mimicking the childish antics of a cartoon, but the actions of scientists and engineers, a documentary he had once seen about the landing of probes upon the surface of Mars.

He quickly began enlarging the myriad of pustule like balloons that covered him from head to toe, thickening their skins and filling them with enough gas that they were fit to burst.

Despite the low cost of his powers, he was soon drained as his efforts had left him all but empty of mana.

Have exhausted all his options, Goodie could do nothing but wait for the inevitable.

His mind now free to focus on everything that was now happening to him, whatever had been keeping him calm thus far suddenly vanished, his heart soon began beating with the speed of a high-octane engine with the realisation that he was about to die. The sudden rush of blood to his head combined with his rapid mana loss causing him to slip in and out of consciousness, a small mercy as through some unknown awareness he somehow sensed the approach of the cavern's floor below.

His last thought before blacking out was that he really hoped that Diane would not think too badly of him because of the meat.