For all that you are genuinely exhausted, sleep does not come easy. Thirty-eight thousand years of consciousness (or something approximating it) turns out to be hard to shake. That your life in the hours since you got out of that damned Prison Realm has been utterly chaotic doesn't help your mind to settle either. That beacon in your awareness also doesn't help, especially now that you're in a dark room on a comfy bed without a whole pile of other sensory input to distract from it.
You can see it if you look, like a glow somewhere off in space, a beacon of pure energy that you can see even from here, at a distance that your mind automatically calculates in parsecs, and not some more reasonable distance like--well, like any other possible measure of distance. The implications of such a thing are.
Well, you don't like to think so, but it's staggering. Humbling. You can measure how much power it takes to put out that kind of beacon, and it is orders of magnitude beyond anything that you knew back in your own time. You have to wonder just who--what--it is.
There's something else out there, too, something you can see now that your attention is directed outward, out there, into space, and it's another thing that just wasn't there in the 21st century. Less a beacon, and more a blot of concentrated cursed energy, huge and churning, and again, at a distance so great you really do not at all like the implications of it being so damned visible, even to your Six Eyes.
You're just going to have to ask Elias, you guess. That doesn't mean you won't dwell on it until then, putting yet another obstacle between you and sleep.
Sleep, when it does come, does not come easy. Your dreams are… unsettled.
First come the dreams of your past, of Suguru and Shoko and lazy days in better times. For some strange reason, there is a light over Shoko's head, the entire time.
You're skiving off homework, and smoking her cigarettes together—it's there.
You're underage drinking in your room, all three of you, and there's that light again, like a halo illuminating her.
You're shopping in Shibuya, buying extravagant and unnecessary things for yourself and your friends, and still, it's there, fainter in the dream-sunlight, like the washed out glow of a star against the dawn.
You wake briefly, and you can still see the light, shining like a beacon in the vast distance, and it clicks then that you're seeing a giant burning torch of reverse cursed energy, shining like a lighthouse—
Your next dreams are an old familiar thing, the shift and turn of fractal shapes and patterns, the result of your unconscious mind synthesising new information. You exist in a semi-lucid state in these dreams, forming new connections from the abstractions, generating patterns of your own in dimensions and directions that don't exist in the waking world.
There's something different now, in the old familiar patterns, something that your mind can't quite grab onto—a rather unique experience, waking or dreaming. You reach for it, and fall, tumbling down the depths of a multidimensional Sierpinski gasket, triangles upon triangles upon triangles upon eyes in the dark, all the way into infinity, until your awareness latches on to that lighthouse in space, even in your sleep, and once again, you wake.
It's there, blazing as bright as ever, and you stare at it, part of your mind still rolling through fractal patterns, and wonder.
This time, you don't bother to try and go back to sleep; instead, you meditate, and work on shoring up your mental defences, because if there are things that can reach you in your sleep, that's bad.
"Uugghhhhhh," you groan out loud, as you drag yourself off the nice soft bed, and fold your body into the correct position on the floor, and start shifting your groggy just-woke-up mental state into something more meditative. This is the worst part of being a jujutsu sorcerer, because you can't just brute force your way through the process like you can with literally any-and-everything else.
It's not that it's difficult, just that it's time-consuming, which is annoying, because you could be doing literally anything else, like tipping your students out of bed, and—
Your students are dead. Have been for longer than human civilisation existed in your own time. Grief and bitterness colour your thoughts even as the larger part of your mind sinks into meditation; you are very good at compartmentalisation, at thinking multiple things at once, and it is oddly even easier now than it ever was before. Turns out, sleep is good for you, who knew?
Of course it turns out that your mental defences had eroded somewhat after tens of thousands of years, and you take the time to do what is necessary to get them back up to scratch, and maybe a little better, as a few new ideas occur to you—including a way to make Infinity work for abstract constructions like a human mind.
You implement it immediately of course, and lament the fact that there's no-one around you trust enough to put it to the test. You'll just have to wait and see, you guess.
Meditation done, and mental defences restored, you go through some basic morning physical exercises—crunches, pushups, stretches, anything that doesn't need more space than you have.
It's then that you realise that you kind of reek. Sure, you avoided all the nasty battlefield gore, but Infinity doesn't protect you from your own sweat and dead skin cells. Eugh.
The vox is still on your wrist—you never bothered to take it off—so it's a simple matter to dial Elias.
"Gojo?" The man sounds surprised but not concerned when he answers, as though he wasn't expecting you.
"Elias! I have two~ questions," you all but chirp into the vox. "How long was I out? And where can I get some clean clothes?"
"Five hours," Elias replies. "And I anticipated your second question; someone should be waiting outside your room with clothes that should fit."
"What, you have some guy just waiting on me?" Not an unfamiliar scenario, but kind of surprising, all things considered.
"Your guide from this morning has been detached to you on a semi-permanent basis until such time as her services are no longer required," Elias answers, and that explains that. You should probably find out her name.
"Right. I'm going to get clean. After that, we need to talk."
"I quite agree," Elias responds. "Call me when you are ready. I will join you."
"Later, then," you say, and end the call.
You spend and entire minute contemplating the beacon again. For all that your mental defences are stronger than ever, it still catches your attention. You shake it off, though, and go pop your head out the door.
Your guide is waiting there, and is well-trained enough not to jump at your abrupt appearance.
"Sir," she greets you, visibly restraining the impulse to salute. A moment later, she offers you what basically amounts to a future suitcase.
"Thanks," you say, taking it, and ducking back into your suite—before poking your head out again. "Hey, what's your name?"
"Magda Calvara," she replies, and you feel your eyebrows pop up a little.
"Any relation to Calvara-the-psyker?" you ask, and she shakes her head.
"Probably not, sir. Calvara is a common surname on Gheistos. No psykers in myfamily… not that, erm, there's anything wrongwith that, uh…" She stammers a little, and her cheeks flush with embarrassment, probably remembering that you, yourself, are part of that particular demographic.
You just grin, and pat her on the head, before closing the door, and popping the suitcase open on a table, so you can examine your options.
It's all black. The materials seem to be a decent quality, and the construction is solid. Nothing tailored of course, and nothing that will last more than maybe one good fight, but it'll do for now. On a better note, it appears that not much has changed in clothing design in the past few dozen millennia—there are a few magnetic closures, but everything is still snaps, buttons, zippers, and even one shirt with ties at the wrists. You're tempted by the novelty, but you also know that you would not be able to resist messing with the ties, and that's not a good look.
You instead pick things that are basic, practical, and have enough pockets to hold all your junk. Which isn't so much junk anymore as it is ancient relics. (A part of you wonders if any of it is worth anything.)
You lay everything out, and head for the bathroom—bathing chamber, more like, with the toilet properly off in its own cubby—bringing your phone with you. It's charged; no reason notto listen to your tunes, right?
It takes you a few minutes to figure out, but you get the shower working without needing to ask for help, which is almost a shame, because it would have been hilarious to ask Magda.
A shower is.
Well it's just plain amazing after just existing for so long with the extreme lack of sensory input in the Prison Realm, and then the chaos of battle—yeah it's amazing. The glories of hot water must never be undersold. You spend maybe a little too much time in the water, but that's okay, you've had a rough time of it, you deserve a little indulgence.
The hot water never runs out, but your fingers do eventually start to prune, so with a sigh, you get out, and dry yourself off with the provided towels—extra large and very fluffy. Just what you needed. You take extra time toweling your hair, since despite looking, you can't find a future hairdryer anywhere. It leaves you looking a bit fluffy, and less than intimidating, but you're just having a chat with Elias, it's not like you have anyone to impress.
The clothes actually fit. Like something off the rack, but that's more than you could say about most of the clothes you could find in shops back in Japan. Even the socks and underwear are acceptable, and you're picky about those.
You get all of your things stowed away in your new pockets—not as capacious as your normal pockets, but big enough—and reach for the vox.
[] Call Elias right away.
[] Take some time and poke around your suite some more.
[] Teleport somewhere else for a bit, it's not like you gave Elias a timeline on your shower.
-[] Somewhere in the fortress.
-[] Somewhere on the planet.
-[] Somewhere in orbit.
[] Something else? (Write in.)
Also…
[] Blindfold.
[] Glasses.
[] Neither.