Seventh Heaven [Assumption]
https://lh4.googleusercontent.com/Ah...pslH6Kp2XedH3nhttps://imgur.com/Qf6ADOhhttps://imgur.com/Qf6ADOh
Humans look up to and dream of something beyond the pale blue sky.
They dream of kingdoms filled with spirits and beasts and gods who watch over the world.
Kingdoms of dreams and fantasy and wonder.
These kingdoms of human imagination are known as heavens.
Heavens are places of miracles.
Miracles are impossibilities outside the grasp of mankind.
Mankind wishes for miracles with prayers and songs.
Yet, these kingdoms of miracles lie beyond the grasp of mankind. They are left to toil in worlds of dust beneath the heavens.
There are those that reach for the heavens. Magus, spellcasters, witches, who bend the of the world to their will to create minor miracles known as magecraft. Mankind creates miracles through technology, twisting the of the world into miracles.
All this to achieve heaven on Earth.
Yet still, the heavens remain shut to them.
At least, they did.
A strange incident is taking place. It is spoken of as whispers and rumors. They say that the gates of heaven have opened once more in Japan.
You are Menodora Strauss. The third child of a magus family. Yet you lack any capability of magecraft. A child who stands the furthest from miracles. Your sister, a talented magus, has taken you along with her while she investigates these rumors of the strange miracle known as:
Seventh Heaven
[Assumption]
Prologue: Yokohama
Yokohama II
First Heaven
Beneath the Flowers I
Beneath the Flowers II
Beneath the Flowers III
The Hunter
You Are...
A Little Bit of Bickering
A Beautiful Night for a Question
Such a Heavenly View
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Yokohama, Kanagawa, Japan
January 14th, 2018
Yokohama Royal Park Hotel
5:15pm
https://lh4.googleusercontent.com/Y3...ENbvyKwiDt6QSq
It had been four hours since Elle left the hotel room.
That was four hours of Menodora sitting around this hotel room in a ridiculous schoolgirl uniform, waiting for her to get back so they could finally get lunch. At this point, they’d be eating dinner.
Menodora flopped boredly onto the bed, staring up at the luxurious hundred-dollars-a-night drywall trying to think of why she agreed to go on this trip. Elle had claimed it would be a ‘good bit of sisterly bonding.’ Menodora could smell bullshit from a mile away, but she still agreed.
Some friend had called her, a local and probably a magus. Menodora had no idea what it was about, but Elle had practically skipped out the door, calling over her shoulder that she’d be back soon.
They had very different ideas of what ‘soon’ was.
Menodora sighed.
Nothing else could be expected from her older sister.
Crawling to the edge of the bed, Mennie reached into the nightstand. A box of Lucky Strikes greeted her hand and she shook the box open. A lonely stick rolled into her palm.
“Damn.”
She had brought these from home only two days ago. She had no idea if they sold Lucky Strikes in Japan and she didn’t want to try any new brands.
With a sigh, she slipped the cigarette between her lips, pulled out an old Zippo lighter, and set the tip smouldering. She was 99% sure she wasn’t supposed to be smoking in here, but she couldn’t find the energy to care at the moment. She’d apologize for any inconvenience later. Right now, she needed something to calm her nerves.
Warm smoke filled her mouth with flavors of roasted nuts and cancerous chemicals on her tongue. She breathed deep, letting it fill her lungs with poison, and breathed out, filling the air with the smell of cheap cigarettes.
Menodora sat there for a few minutes, breathing in and out, letting the smoke calm her. By the time she felt her frustration was gone, the cigarette had burnt down to a nub. She flicked the end into a half-empty cup of coffee. Now, the room was filled with smoke and silence.
Mennie glanced at the clock.
5:30pm.
She should probably do something besides sitting around the hotel room. It was supposed to be a fun trip, after all.
First Heaven: Beneath the Flowers
Unknown Location
Unknown Date
Unknown Time
Status: Menodora Strauss
Health: Good
Energy: Medium -> (ate dinner) -> High
Mental State: Stable
https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/Rv...gabFAeCM19DahB
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Where was she?
Menodora bolted upright, panting, twisting around as her last memories snapped back into her mind. The storm, the truck, the light. She frantically patted herself down, searching for any sign of injury and only finding herself as healthy and whole as she ever was.
What was going on?
Rising on shaky knees, Mendora stood up and surveyed the area around her. As far as she could tell, she had awoken in a garden. Vibrant was the best world to describe the place, as if she had been placed inside of avant-garde painting. Flowers cluttered every corner the eye could see from the lowest bush choked with rose to the tree that hung over her head that was draped with purple buds.
Without thinking, Menodora began to walk away from the tree, deeper into the garden. She needed to find an exit or another person to explain where she was and how she got there.
Nothing was adding up. She remembered the crash and the golden light, and the words of the woman she’d seen before she woke up stayed in her head.
You’ve met with a terrible fate, haven’t you?
That had been a dream, yet the words refused to fade away even as she was conscious now. And that didn’t explain the light or why she was suddenly fine.
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The garden grew more beautiful the deeper the girl moved into it. She didn’t have a strong knowledge of botany, so recognizing the plants and trees was beyond her, but knowledge wasn’t necessary to appreciate beauty. It simply radiated from every leaf and stalk and branch directly into her being. Drooping trees with vines of green and yellow and purple buds hanging from the boughs like clothes drying in the sun. Tall grass that tickled her ankles. Even the air was like a strong perfume, almost enough to make her eyes water.
She had never felt such a way before. She figured this was what being inside of a fairy tale was like. Yes, this place was a storybook painted into reality by a hand skilled in the creation of beauity.
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Menodora clenched her teeth hard enough to hear the squeak against one another.
Something had to have brought her to this place. Something had to have fixed her and left her in this garden, but how and why? Nothing was making sense. Yet, this was all clearly happening. She was certain she hadn't gone crazy. Of course, when nothing made any sense and was all the same reality, then there was one obvious explanation. Anyone else in this situation would have been lost for a solution, running their mind in circles until they burnt out, but she had the great pleasure of knowing the skeleton key to all worldy nonsense.
Magic.
The combination of nonsense and reality.
That meant that this garden, the light, her dream, all of it was likely the result of a magus. The reason and method were unknown, but it made sense. And if she had been taken away without her family's knowledge to this place, then this must have been a kidnapping.
A kidnapping?
It wouldn't be the first kidnapping she'd heard of between magus. They were underhanded and tricky. If there was an enemy of her family, and she knew that they had many, then she would be the perfect target to take. She would've thought her family would've tried to keep their cripple of a daughter out of the eye of the Moonlit World, but who knew? Regardless, she was the weakest link in the chain and Yokohama was a perfect time to take her. It was the first time she'd left the house in two years.
Honestly, it made too much sense and it was a bit of relief to have an answer. She might be wrong, but having a possibilty was better than the unknown. It almost made her relax.
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The young woman frolicked through the grass and the bushes, picking at the leaves and sniffed the petals, softer than feather down and smelling of sweet nectar. A song, a hum tha resonated with her soul, hung on the breeze that brushed her with warm air, setting a buzz across her skin.
Her body was set to move with the song and the breeze, uncaring of anything besides its own satisfaction. Even on clumsy feet that rarely saw more than a step a day, she moved with the grace of a dancer that would dazzle the audience of barked faces and petal covered smiles. She was a vision witin the garden and she knew that insude and out.
The atmosphere of the garden, cozy as the warmth of a fire after the stinging bite of winter, untwisted the knots that rested inside her, replacing them with an alien sensation of comfort that won the sweest of sighs from her. A small smile broke across her lips.
This place. For some reason, this place made her feel ha-
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Menodora froze. Her lips curled back down into a frown.
What was she doing? She had no idea where she was right now. Walking into a garden potentially owned by a magus of an unknown nature was beyond idiotic bordering on suicidal if they wre hostile. She knew that yet she felt the urge to keep moving deeper.
Was it a siren effect, she wondered, meant to lure her in?
Looking around, Menodora couldn’t see any sign of the tree she’d woken up under. She had gone further than she had thought in very little time. That was concerning, especially as she could feel the urge to give into those feelings returning. Perhaps she should go back to that tree, the one she awoke under with the hanging purple flowers. Realistically speaking, it wasn't any safer than anywhere else in this garden, but it made her feel better to be somewhere familiar rather than here. Plus, if that was where she began, it might give a clue on how to get out of here. And anything was better than being lost in a strange forest.
Menodora began making her way back the way she came, at least, where she thought she had come from. Now that she was aware of the effect, she began actively fighting the urges that came to frolic fancifully through the flowers and being very glad her sister wasn’t here to see that. Then she might actually want a truck to hit her.
Now, paying more attention, Menodora started to notice how strange this place really was.
It was beautiful. No matter how much she tried to think otherwise, no matter what flaws she tried to find, Menodora could not consider the garden around her anything but the pinnacle of visual aesthetic. There was nowhere else in the world that could compare to this place. Everything was perfect. The flowers were perfectly symmetrical. The branches grass was the same length all around. She was sure if she had any skill at mathematics, she could measure the angles of the branches and find them to be perfect angles where they bent and curved. There wasn't a petal out of place nor a single fallen leaf.
Even as the concept of perfect beauty bothered her internally, she couldn't bring herself to dislike her surroundings. The beauty of the forest was impossible to deny.
And then there was the singing. A hum that hung on the wind. There were no words to it, yet she understood it all the same. Not a message but a sentiment of comfort and harborage that forced itself into her mind.
Focusing on the song brought on another struggled against the temptation to dance about like a maddened nymph in the forest, but she was able to determine the direction it was coming from, somewhere off to her left and growing quieter as she moved out towards the tree. That might mean there was a person that way. Perhaps the magus that stole her away.
Would it be better to confront them now rather than later? She was helpless anyway, so it didn’t matter what threats they made, she was going to submit regardless. But that might make it more inconvenient for her sister to save her la-
“WAH!”
It was fortunate the grass was so soft around here, otherwise falling face first into it might’ve hurt more. Menodora flipped over to see what she’d tripped over.
A knapsack. Blue and boxy with a long black strap, looking as new as one she might see on an Amazon webpage for far too much money. What was it doing here, sitting in the middle of a magical garden?
Menodora backed away immediately. As a shut-in with little else to do besides consuming media, Menodora liked to think of herself as genre savvy. Anyone with a brain should be able to recognize that seeing objects that are outside the ordinary for an environment spelled some sort of a trap. Was it a bomb? A mimic? A teleportation device? Two of those were unlikely seeing as she just kicked it by accident, but it still called for cauton. It also called for consideration.
If this were a trap laid out by her kidnapper, then there might be a benefit to springing it. She was already helpless and trapped wherever she was. Clearly, if they had healed her injuries, they didn't want her dead or severly harmed. Springing the trap might bring her closer to her kidnapper, taking away the dreadful air of mystery behind this whole thing. Plus, it might help get this over with faster. It was not too different from her idea to find the singer of the song.
Of course, she could be terribly wrong and this trap could, at best, do her severe bodily harm. But she'd fetl plenty of pain before. What was a little more?