Suzume Oshino
Original Aoyama ~ Liane's Residence
Time: Near Midnight
Your mind slips away from you.
It was the best way to describe the sensation, reaching out to touch something with your thoughts, to perceive something more tangible than just a "mass," you reach out for the cracked door, the gateway, and are immediately swept away in it's wake.
To describe it in another way, the moment you had attempted to push your way inside, something had grabbed you and pulled you in instead, like the hook of a fisherman snapping it's prey from the water.
It's quick.
It's easy.
Your consciousness just going out with the flip of a switch, your ability to perceive the real world is lost to you, and instead...
You find yourself watching watching fragments of memories.
---
It was certainly a haunted coffee shop.
Following the rumors of a cafe operated by ghosts, that dark-haired girl had decided on a whim to explore the place without her guardian. The coffee shop Master was a strange woman, blonde and energetic, running an entire work shift with little more than the spirits of the dead to keep her company; she was not someone that was very popular, not with normal people anyway, and the girl had been able to tell that from the start.
She had noticed her watching the ghosts, and had asked her about it.
There was a certain sense of loneliness in the woman, other than the spirits, there was simply no one else in the shop.
Meaning to leave more or less immediately now that she had seen it was fine, the girl had nevertheless felt a little bad about the whole thing.
All that person wanted was someone to talk to, and it seemed like, for some reason, she wasn't getting even that.
So she had stayed, if only for a little while. She got coffee for free, as well as loads of advice on the spiritual realm, it was a good trade in many ways.
To just be a soundboard, that was fine.
Later that night, the world freezes over.
The enemy is a wendigo, a spirit of cannibalism and cold led by a boy driven mad by the loss of the children he had looked out for his whole life. It was the sort of fight she had been training for, but strangely, she had frozen up when it appeared, frozen not just because she was afraid...
But because she lacked conviction.
Not knowing what she wanted, unable to take this step forward without her friend at her side, by the time she had shaken it off, that blonde woman had already defeated both the Wendigo and the boy all on her own.
She had collapsed after doing it.
There was something wrong with her, if she strained her body too hard, it seemed to borderline shut down for no observable.
Even so, on hands and knees, that person had asked if she was alright, and-
The scene jumps.
A mass of memories that weren't focusing on anything in particular, you regain yourself only to lose yourself to the flow of memories later on.
That woman had been an exorcist, but she had always called herself a witch.
Introducing herself as a witch, never once calling herself an exorcist, she probably shouldn't have been surprised when her teacher had pulled out a portable house for them to go camping in a haunted forest.
Or well, the woman had called it a portable Atelier, but...
Three stories on the inside, even though it was barely the size of a tent on the outside, with beds and libraries, and a kitchen, it was...
Definitely a house.
Really it was only missing a bathroom.
It was the first show of truly absurd magic she had been shown, using magic (Actually Alchemy, she had said) to sort of bend space-time to fit things into impossible shapes...
It violated several rules of reality, but she had laughed, lit a cigarette (which was then snatched away) and been forced to accept it.
It was better than sleeping out in a forest full of wraiths after all, even though they had come here for the purposes of getting stronger.
Yeah... That's right, stronger...
Because there was a war coming...
It wasn't all fun and games, but...
Well, she had always said it was important to not stress too hard about things.
Picture breaking.
Static rumbling.
Jumping from one thing to the next.
A broken television shows scattered images of an oh so familiar, but far too foreign life.
Humanity wins the war against the Gods.
It was all a divine ritual, something they had called the "Conception" where gods, demons, and humans fight over the right to remake the world as they see fit.
Humans had betrayed the Gods last time, so this time, they hadn't been able to expect anything but bitterness.
Even so, they had won.
Somehow, impossibly, they had won a war against the Divine.
Even with her, barely able to defeat even a Demon...
They had still won.
Those who had needed to pull through had done so.
And thus, the world that had been destroyed had been repaired just as quickly.
The ultimate winner of the War, Liane Cross had put everything back the way it was, restored the world to how it should be, with the help of a Goddess clad in blue.
But she was still worried.
They had won, but there was a fear building in her chest.
Because there was something crawling around under the ground, not a God, not a Demon, but something sickeningly human, a manifest curse, a black mud.
Looking out at the reborn world a few weeks after it's construction, she had felt it then, moving around beneath her feet, had felt it then, when she had tried to talk to Saki and the girl had just started blankly into the nothingness, when Liane had heard a roar in the distance and told her to stay at the shop, had felt it then, when-
"...No-!"
-In the span of a single finger snap, the saved world had eaten itself.
Or to put it more accurately...
The world just reaches it's inevitable conclusion.
Win or lose, the war doesn't matter.
They die to the demons and gods, or they win and are devoured by their own darkness shortly afterwards.
A world without a future, that was what this place was...
And only at the shrieking, screaming end...
Had she met someone who kept it going in spite of that; a certain reporter with whom she had made a deal in order to avert fate, but one who had smiled coldly, laughed sadly, and told her...
That she would grant that wish, but even that sort of effort was pointless.
The world had been so broken by people that it had finally just gotten stuck, it had become a festival without end.
So she should just enjoy her repeated, doomed existence.
Because that was all the world was going to get.
Staring into a reflection.
Thrown out of the sea of memories by a strange force that felt far too much like yourself, like that other you you had met, the eye you had been unconsciously keeping open with your fingers slams itself shut once more, forcing your fingers to comply in a manner that once again resembles the effects of possession...
...Just like that.
You had been told, without words, that those things were something you should not be looking at.
Reply With Quote
