Shards of a Broken Sun [Megaten/Shugo Chara/Exalted]
- Thread starter Baughn
- Start date
- Crossover
How to Save The World:
Step 1: Give Hotsuin a migraine
Step 2: ???
Step 3: Profit
Step 1: Give Hotsuin a migraine
Step 2: ???
Step 3: Profit
- Location
- Laniakea
Eh, I'd say the system gives a fairly easy way to tell whether the fairy-like creature is benign or malicious.
Namely - does it have a giant X on its forehead? No? Then it's all good!
IMO, personally I feel an X-Chara still counts as a Chara, just one that tends to be highly unpleasant, destructive and comes with a helpful visual aid to point out the fact (to those who can see them, anyway).
......Heck, you could probably even Transform with one for twice the unpleasantness, which is basically how Easter got Death Rebel out of Ikuto. Memory's a bit hazy on whether it was still an X-Egg or an X-Chara that they got him to transform with, but either way it indicates that can definitely be a thing. (EDIT: Actually, Utau already proved that with X-Dia, how could I forget.)
Don't worry, I for one will not be voting to give Hotsuin the Solar Exaltation. My refusal stands firm.
(Yeah, I know you probably meant his reaction to Amu Exalting and not Hotsuin Exalting, but hey it would definitely give him a migraine and have a good chance of sending him on an crazed power-trip!)
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Cool information, though I'm not sure this will ever come up IC kek
I wonder how exactly the last one is supposed to work, it's quite different compared to the rest (and if even the relatively harmless one is outside of Amu's weight class...)
Chara?
Conversely, Ami does not have safety skills now, hopefully we can fix that soon.
You can do that? I wonder if this is a Amu/Utau only thing due to their skills, or if it's otherwise.
According to an earlier QM post:
We can get a limited mental link (ability sharing apparently not included) with characters we have a strong positive intimacy with, for 1 XP and 1 week of training. It'd act like a 2-dot specialty in Mental Range. (Dunno if Baughn's changed their mind now that psi skill specialty costs have been set at 3 XP and 3 weeks in the informational post. Dunno if this would count toward our specialty limit for Mental Range either.)
Speaking of things that I'm not sure whether Baughn has changed their mind on:
One post says Utau is a better telepath than Amu, while another says that she isn't telepathically capable, and Amu does most of the work when they talk mind-to-mind. I'm not sure if this is a matter of nuances, like Utau being better at specific aspects, or if this is Baughn changing their mind.
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Baughn
Healing-type writer
- Location
- Dublin
I have—these no longer count as "specialties", and you can have as many such links as you want. (Within reason. Don't turn Amu into a telephone switchboard.)
They still cost the same though.
Update is coming along fine; would expect that to be done tonight probably.
Drifting definitions of "telepathy"; it originally didn't include, like, words. Because those don't involve telepathy. Or empathy, rather. But I should probably make sure it doesn't look this confusing.
Well, and also I was responding to ShafowAngelBeta and didn't bother to correct the wording.
Utau remains far better than Amu at the actual radio-equivalent, ranged empathy mode of communication. You'll see a demonstration of that shortly, actually…
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Remember, telepathy as a skill/dot is just raw power and range, telepathy as Kana and Amu use it is a combination of skills. At least for Amu, for Kana she probably has one or two skills that cover the whole thing.
Baughn
Healing-type writer
- Location
- Dublin
More accurately, "telepathy" as such just doesn't mechanically exist… so any time I use the term, you need to be careful you understand what I'm going for. And should probably prod me to clarify.
We've got mental range, empathy and mind control, all of which can be used in various combinations to achieve forms of telepathy. If you want to mentally talk then empathy won't do the job — Pyroglyphics aside — but in terms of raw bandwidth, empathy has more of it than simply opening your mouth. It just isn't terribly controllable, which makes it bad for talking.
Neither Amu nor Utau have the range for for telepathy to ever be more useful than simply opening their mouths, but Utau can get across greater nuance and depth of emotion than Amu. Meanwhile, Amu can mentally talk by literally writing into Utau's auditory processing… so long as she's within easy hearing range.
Which one would you say is better at telepathy?
- Location
- Venezuela
I have this weird image of Amu Cloud Storage, giving new meaning to having your head in the clouds.
- Location
- Laniakea
Here's a question - does or can Utau gain knowledge of things that Eru and Iru might have experienced while moving around separately from her, whenever she loads them into herself (i.e. in preparation for Chara-Transforming)?
Amu's inability to know what Miki gets up to with Ami (without asking) seems to indicate the answer is "no", but... that feels a bit odd considering a Chara has basically been described as something of a remote brain extension and loading one is therefore ought to be the equivalent of grafting it back onto the main brain.
Amu's inability to know what Miki gets up to with Ami (without asking) seems to indicate the answer is "no", but... that feels a bit odd considering a Chara has basically been described as something of a remote brain extension and loading one is therefore ought to be the equivalent of grafting it back onto the main brain.
Does Mental Range do anything on its own?
Baughn
Healing-type writer
- Location
- Dublin
It's never shown to happen in the series.
That seems odd, so I'm assuming there's at least a little bleedover. While they are transformed, the combined girl certainly has access to both sets of memories. But it doesn't automatically synchronise them, no; probably that would take months.
See also: Amu remembers Ran's past almost as well as her own, although it hasn't come up; they were almost always together anyway.
Baughn
Healing-type writer
- Location
- Dublin
Yes and no. Nothing you are currently aware of, and nothing purely on its own; you would need to at minimum also spend time making friends.
- Location
- Laniakea
If this is the case, "telepathy" arguably does exist here, in a closer form than just "read-writing brains".
And that's by having one person load/transform with a Chara, think thoughts, unload it and then give it to the other person for them to load/transform with where they can directly experience memories off them - memories of what the first person was thinking while transformed with the Chara.
This Chara-as-a-Conduit-telepathy would require both people to be able to transform with the same Chara and would be hugely taxing on WP and stamina as well as impractically slow for most purposes, as the Chara would have to physically travel between one person and the other.
But in terms of "information fidelity" and accuracy/quality of the thought transfer, you get "actual" telepathy. No mind-writing-errors, no false information, no misinterpretation, you get to know exactly what the other person was thinking and feeling 100%.
In theory, the speed could be improved by using Teleport to move the Chara, though I'm not sure the willpower cost could ever be ameliorated.
So the psionic equivalent of copying files onto a USB drive and plugging it into another computer. I don't think I'd consider that a closer form of telepathy than the other options, but it sounds like it'd work.
Baughn
Healing-type writer
- Location
- Dublin
More or less. Using someone else's Chara is stressful, obviously, and if you're trying to do it in a hurry—repeatedly—there'd be a chance of glitches.
But yes, that should work, although once again "speech" stands as a reasonable counterpoint. It's hard to actually do better than the part of your mind designed for communication can do.
Yeah, but if you don't have enough Speech/Socialise or regular Empathy dots..
- Location
- Laniakea
That assumes distances are short. If Chara-Intermediary-Telepathy counts as telepathy, I'd actually give it to Utau on being the better "telepath" at present.
Her Charas can actually go long distance away from her for extended periods. They did in series and still can here, if Eru babysitting Ami back in Chapter 2.1 was any indication. So if Utau somehow got into trouble far out of shouting range (i.e. kidnapped by Manticore) and needed to "telepathically" contact Amu, she'd be able to send Iru or Eru and then Amu could get 100% accurate communication off them directly through their memories by transforming with them.
That gives her both quality and range over Amu, even if the speed of doing it through this method is horrible. Meanwhile Amu's Charas can't stay apart from her for long anymore (and strain her more while doing it), giving her less range on this technique.
If Utau were kidnapped and driven several cities away, Eru could eventually reach Amu, even if it took a few days. But if Amu were kidnapped and driven several cities away, I don't think Ran or Su would be able to get back to Utau before Amu hit her limit on keeping them out.
I mean, that section of the brain is great yeah, but language, the medium most humans use to communicate, is kinda really low-bandwidth and bad. At least compared to Empathy and Mind-reading.
Baughn
Healing-type writer
- Location
- Dublin
Compared to mind-reading yes, but the sum total of characters who can do that is Amu, Ami and Kana -- and while it hasn't quite come up, mainly because she doesn't want to, Amu isn't as good at mind-reading people who aren't Kana or Utau. Both of whom help with the process.
Empathy is high-bandwidth, but largely uncontrollable. It tells people how you're feeling, potentially in great detail and across a large range, and-- that's it. It's completely useless if you want to lie, which might not seem like a big deal, but it's also useless for transmitting anything that isn't emotionally charged. Which includes the factual elements of sentences that otherwise would be very emotional indeed.
Charas are somewhat people, and would have objections to linking up with someone not their own origin; Dia, Eru and Iru were abberations, and there were (at least in this quest) significant long-term consequences from that. Not terrible ones, given that Amu and Utau are friends, but... okay, for a scenario where Utau needs to tell Amu she's been captured that isn't an issue. Eru is still more likely to just start talking at her when she gets there--any potential chara transform would be saved for the rescue itself.
(And probably not done. Amu chara-transformed with Eru is fairly ineffective.)
Amu's limit on keeping them out is just a limit on how long it feels remotely comfortable, by the way. If they were to force it over a longer period... the charas would be fine.
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- Location
- Laniakea
Eh, the Charas might be fine but in this hypothetical kidnapping scenario the objective is to save the person before their brain starts bleeding. Amu getting an aneurysm before anyone can arrive to save her is, well, kinda sub-optimal.
.....Especially if the Chara in question is Dia. I don't think I want to know what the consequences are for keeping HER out longer than usual. All evidence says "not feeling comfortable" is going to be the least of any concerns with doing that.
Chapter 2.8
Baughn
Healing-type writer
- Location
- Dublin
Amu paused, looking up at Utau, but-
"Amu," said Mom, hesitantly. "Utau-chan has a point. I don't know what you're doing, but can you please take a moment to think about it?"
-there wasn't really time for that, was there? It wasn't that she didn't understand their concerns, but... well. The fox would run away if she left it, it was only her attention that was drawing it to her. That was obvious, though she wasn't quite sure why it was obvious.
"Just... a couple of seconds," she pleaded with them, holding her hand out, regardless of Utau's attempt at pulling her back. The fox was moving closer towards her hand now, cautious and hesitant, but drawing closer regardless. "Just trust me."
It was pitiful. It was beautiful.
There was nothing inside of it—nothing she could speak to or hear or feel or touch—but she thought, or rather imagined, that it had once been a girl of sorts. The pieces were- they weren't very girl-like, but they were not-girl-like in a way that reminded her of Saaya, of how her fragments had felt when they'd been stuck in her mind after her- mishap.
And she was so not thinking about that.
'If you want,' Amu offered the fox-thing tentatively. 'I can gather your pieces back up.'
Not to make them part of her. She didn't think that would work—her mind was Amu-shaped, not fox-shaped, and even if she could get everything together in her head the mismatch meant she'd have to destroy most of the pieces. She couldn't keep them, not and stay herself. But the fox's life was essentially made of pain so even that would be better than letting it live this way, if that was all she could do. She dearly hoped it wasn't.
Amu would have to tear parts off her own mind to make it fit, to make it her and her it and she wasn't doing that, not even to help. She was a bit more flexible than most people, thanks to Ran and Su, but she still wasn't that flexible.
Maybe she could hold on to its pieces without letting them do anything, instead? She'd need some sort of container... and a better idea of what the fox actually was, because she really couldn't think of what else she might do.
The fox flinched back as her hand got close, pulling in on itself in a way that might have been adorable if she couldn't tell how scared it was, and if she wasn't pulling Utau with her. She felt Utau's concern deepen at the sight.
"Amu," said Utau again, more hesitantly this time. "Are you sure you know what you're doing?"
"No," Amu admitted, honestly. "But I want to find out. I need to help. Please trust me."
Utau bit her lip, then nodded, reluctantly relaxing her grip on Amu's wrist and letting go. "I do," the girl told Amu. 'I just worry.'
'I know,' Amu told her back. 'And I'm sorry. Thanks.'
Mom was also concerned, Amu could feel it, but Mom didn't seem to know what she should do. So she was leaving Amu alone. That- wasn't okay, but-
Iru popped her head up, seemingly only to give Amu a smile and a thumbs-up.
⁂
The fox did not like Amu's hand. Not at all. Curiosity or no, it was made of fear—fear and pain, and so essentially anything it could sense drove it to fight, or to bolt. It didn't want to fight her, so 'bolt' it was. But something deeper in the fox, or- or everything, deeper in the fox, drove it to approach her regardless. Her, or Mom or Utau, but mostly her, because they clicked in a way that—that two puzzle pieces that didn't fit at all would click—which was better than being a puzzle piece without a puzzle box to fit in.
But if it had focused on Mom or on Utau it'd notice that their puzzle pieces were all hidden deep inside where it couldn't even get them, and- that would have ended in a fight, but Amu was reaching out towards it with her mind. And-
The fox was on its last legs already. Literally, in a way that made Amu want to hug it and hold it close to her chest so nothing could ever hurt it again, which would have made it fall apart. She wasn't sure what that would do to its pieces. There was something like tar there; something that didn't feel at all like her mind, that was holding it together and keeping it moving even though it was, in essence, already dead.
The fox wasn't smart enough to do much on its own; not really anything other than exist, which meant it was scared and panicked and felt like it wanted to do things, but lacked the capacity to think of things to do. Or to do them. It wasn't really walking, even; that was just how they interpreted the way it moved. Its feet were more of a... blob?
A blob of fear. With glassy black eyes and a soft, shadowy fur—though Amu knew it wasn't actually soft, that was just how she visualised it in her head, and not even real.
The fog pushed on her mind, insistently, but Amu pushed back. Now that she was less, um. Less drunk? Now that she was less drunk, she could tell how it was affecting her. Which is to say that it wasn't, mostly. Her parts wanted to fly off and become part of it, but Amu didn't, and they wanted far more to remain part of her. She liked herself and that made a difference. The fog also wanted her to ignore this, to not notice what was happening, and that she refused to do at all.
She'd have to hold on to this fox's pieces—or core? Core sounded better—without letting them be part of her, and then figure out what to do with them. Which meant she needed something like a container.
"Utau," she said. "Can I borrow the Dumpty Key? Just for a minute. I promise you'll get it back."
Utau didn't immediately say yes—blatantly uneasy at the suggestion—but she pulled it out of her pocket after a moment anyway and held it out.
"Don't lose it," said Utau, with a worried sigh.
"I wouldn't," said Amu, putting her hand around the key and grabbing onto the fox. "Close your eyes," she warned everyone else as the air around her began to sparkle and shine with energy and-
There was a sharp tug on her mind, the Key recognising something like an imprint left by the Lock. She didn't let it do anything with it, though; the Key was just a tool, not an intelligence, and she had more important things to worry about.
Like the fox, which-
Its core wasn't a single object. It wasn't a piece of a thing or a remnant or- whatever it was supposed to be, and it wasnt a mind. It was something like a tangled thread; a few thousand of them, all knotted together in ways that reminded Amu of one of the core parts of her brain, except… wrong.
Lacking in meaning.
Made of pieces that shouldn't be doing that.
The Key seemed worried at the wrongness of it all, or that's how Amu would have put it if she'd focused on the Key, if she'd made any attempt at splitting its observations off from her own.
She had something like a spinneret there, in the corresponding part of herself; a small thing tucked away inside her that spun mental threads to tie herself together with, to keep all of her synchronised and working to the same ends—there were millions of them, more by the moment as she learned and grew—and the fox's core was-
It was a tangle of threads holding fragments of someone's mind, but it had nothing that grew them. Nothing that gave them the space and context to weave themselves together into anything useful, anything more than a tangle of threads that were only connecting because they lacked a better option, tangled into a ball of not-self. Amu realised that right away, as the Key struggled to recognise anything conscious in them, and didn't manage; it was as if the threads and their fragments didn't have memory or identity or soul, but just- existed, without being able to do anything else.
Amu recognised them anyway, because she had met the girl—the child—that they belonged to. She'd held the other end of these same threads in her hand, though she hadn't recognised them for what they were at the time—and unlike the fox, that child had been whole enough to talk to Amu, doze off on her lap, and smile. Though Yui hadn't been allowed to sleep without Kana there to watch over her.
Was this really meant to be part of Yui?
It had to be.
That was why she wanted so badly to hug it.
'Focus,' Amu told herself. She'd promised not to take too long.
There was a part of her that was an administrator. That tugged on those lines in herself, keeping track of who did what and who should be the one making the decisions on a given thing—she used that part when Ran wanted pancakes or when Amu was wondering what to do about her crushes—and she put it to use now, in a way that made mind ache like she was straining it, trying to untangle the threads from each other without snapping them or breaking them entirely. The Key, glowing in her hand, made it easier. It felt...
Dubious, was that the word? Like it wasn't sure if it should let her do this. But it didn't try to stop her, or limit her in any way, and the 'fox' itself lacked an equivalent to her administrator self—so when Amu tugged at the threads, nothing tugged back. It was... dead, that really was the best way she could put it. A collection of reflexes, forever doing the only thing they knew to do, with nothing that could tell them when to stop. Or to react, when she pushed at them outside what passed for their reality.
Nothing to repair them or pull them inside when they broke, nothing to feed them energy, nothing to send instructions from the 'brain' to the 'limbs', not even a brain or limbs to begin with, just-
Threads. Tangles. Tightly wound pieces of something that used to be important parts of a girl.
"Shh," she whispered aloud, soothingly, to no-one at all. "It's okay, we're here to help," she told it—it didn't have ears to hear with or a mind to make sense of sounds with, but the act of speaking settled something in her. She couldn't hear it respond but she felt its fear slowly recede, until she'd soothed it down to-
Nothing. Still nothing. A collection of broken threads and fragments, quiescent. A pool of shadow, to her eyes—she still had eyes—with glassy black eyes staring at her from inside it.
And it took her a moment to realise she had stared at it like that, all tar and silence, for long enough that Utau was getting uneasy. She-
"Almost done," she told Mom.
The fog was- still there. But gone, from a bubble around her. A bubble that included the fox.
'Utau, can you pretend you're someone else?' she asked, pushing a set of impressions and feelings over to her instead of words. She couldn't exactly tell Utau how to do it, not in words, but she had an impression of Yui. If Utau did it, instead of her, maybe she could-
'What?' asked Utau, bemused. 'What is this about?'
'Just do it,' Amu said. 'Trust me.'
'Well...' Utau shrugged. 'Fine,' she told her, her tone exasperated, but with affection underneath. There was a pause. 'Oh,' Utau said, as she parsed what Amu had sent her—impressions and fragments and-
'Utau?'
'That won't fool it for long,' Utau warned her. 'I don't have her memories or- anything. I've never even met her.' She could feel her friend piecing it- Yui together as she spoke, and her concern at how patchwork the 'image' was.
'It just has to work for five seconds,' Amu replied. 'Come on.'
'Fine,' Utau repeated back to her.
Amu nodded, not taking her eyes off the fox; the shadow creature—still in front of them, not having run away or anything—wasn't even looking at her. It was staring at Utau—no, not Utau. At Yui.
Staring at her.
No longer capable of 'doing'.
Despite Utau's fears, Amu didn't think there was much chance it'd realise her ruse. Realisation needed- it needed thinking. The fox hadn't had much to start with, and it had none at all now, so all Utau did was provide an impetus—a suction—that might be weak, but had nothing at all working against it. The fox was already evaporating, black spots and threads moving towards them.
Amu did her own work in the background, drawing out threads of mind-stuff; threading them through the Key. Thread by thread by thread by thread, knotting them together and separating them out, working them into orderly rows while keeping them separate from her own mind, which was shivering now, too busy managing the fox to manage herself. If it had been Yui here instead of herself, she could have tried to piece the threads together how they were supposed to go; but she didn't need a working mind, didn't need anything but a container. And that-
That wasn't too hard, even now that Amu's mind was starting to feel like a cacophony. Just a series of nested boxes that looked like a mind, a group of cubicles that would hold on to remnants of fox without letting it function, to the small degree that it could function. It just also wasn't possible. She decided to go with the 'not that hard'. She was operating on forty percent guesswork, fifty percent hope and fifty percent blind faith in whoever made the Key, but she'd seen the Lock do something similar to Saaya, and...
'Just do your thing,' Utau told her.
Yes- yes, she- she would. She didn't want to risk tangling the fox's threads up with either of their minds, so she pushed the entire construct—all her ideas—into the Key and hoped for the best. The Key was good with minds. Really good with minds. It was like a computer. If Amu were a programmer she might have thought of it differently, but she was Amu and not a programmer so she likened it to the smartest thing she didn't understand.
'Come home,' Amu whispered to the fox—in plural—extending the Key towards it. She dragged Utau's threads through it as well. "You're safe now."
The fox was really staring now. Its glassy black eyes had swivelled up to stare at the key—now emanating Yui—with an expression of pure incomprehension.
"Come home," she repeated again. The fox shook its head—the only movement it had made in all this time—and almost managed to get away before she grabbed onto it with her mind and tugged on it, and...
It completely came apart.
The air shimmered around them as Amu untangled Yui's pieces, one by one, careful not to lose any as she did so. They were fragile things, fraying and easily broken, and Amu felt like a librarian a guardian running her fingers down a line of books, inspecting each one carefully for damage before pulling them out and-
Setting them aside.
The fox made a low whine of distress, but there was no intent behind it. Just pain. Amu watched as its shape shifted, tugging in on itself and... degrading melting burning, for lack of a better word. One fox became two became four and then eight and then sixteen—shadows sliding off itself and pooling on the stairs as they did, like Yaya when she was tired—until it collapsed into a pile of stardust, which shimmered, rising in the mist until the Key absorbed it, the tiniest fraction scattering around it.
A pile of tar remained on the steps above them—tar and ink and things not part of Yui, things that stared in shock at Amu and that she would never, ever be again—which took a few more seconds to evaporate, a burst of relief and external confused contemplation.
And that was that, no more fox.
Amu sat back and stared at the stairs in front of them for a second, processing. Her mind came back together, Ran and Su and Amu and—everyone, everyone who'd helped, without even being told to—all folding back into a single tapestry, into the girl that called herself 'Amu', and… oww.
Her head didn't hurt. It just felt like it should have.
The world drifted into focus, fog still there; back to surrounding her. Stairwell, too. And carpet. …carpet?
She didn't think the stairwell had been carpeted before, but right now she didn't really care. She just felt tired.
"Uh," said Mom, hesitantly. "Well. I'm not sure what you did, Amu-chan, but I suppose it was helpful?"
She nodded.
"Sorry for getting carried away," she told them both, feeling more than a little drained. She stood up; it felt like all the energy had been sucked out of her at once, and she didn't have the power left to move at all—she felt woozy, almost delirious—but at least she wasn't falling over again. "Um," she told Mom and Utau both. "I think-"
Utau caught her as she slumped.
"Oh," said Amu, after a moment, pressing herself into Utau's arms and resting her head against her best friend's chest—Utau's heart not quite in time with her heartbeat, but close.
Mom made a noise like an 'oof' of surprise.
Utau's arms around her tightened, and Amu snuggled closer, closing her eyes. This felt nice. She could deal with this. Her head was still… rather noisy, though that was dying down.
Maybe she'd just stay here a minute.
"Amu's just... very tired," Utau explained to Mom. "From... whatever it is she just did."
"Does this happen often?" Mom murmured, frowning a little.
"She does this a lot," Utau said, exasperation clear in her voice. "All the time." Amu opened her mouth to object, but couldn't find the willpower to do so. "Whenever she gets upset at the world," Utau added. "Don't ask me why, I can never figure out what she's trying to do half the time. But trust me when I say that she's all right. Probably."
Amu laughed softly, feeling too exhausted to do anything more. If she'd ever done this before she would have asked Utau to smack her. This time she hadn't had a choice.
"I'll be okay in another minute," she told Utau, sleepily. "Just give me a bit, I'll be good to go. Mom, can you keep going?"
Mom raised an eyebrow at her. "What kind of question is that?" she said, scoffing a little at the notion.
"You feel tired too," Amu pointed out. She'd been careful about not looking too closely at her mom's mind. Not in any way that would let her see details, because—never mind. She didn't need to read her mind to know that Mom was getting tired, or that she'd been scared when Amu had slumped against Utau.
Amu struggled back upright, her tiredness already passing. Not gone. No longer the overwhelming fatigue of before.
"I might be. A little," Mom admitted, ruffling Amu's hair again. "But I'm not the one you should worry about. Are you sure you're okay?"
Amu nodded.
Utau exhaled. "Good," she said. "Because if you weren't, I was going to pick you up and carry you downstairs myself."
Amu flushed bright red; the image of Utau carrying her back home filled her mind—which, well, maybe it was a little appealing, but-
Utau poked her forehead; Amu squeaked, covering the spot with her hands and then glaring up at Utau. Who smirked at her, smirk growing until Amu picked herself up and brushed down her hair.
"-let's just go," she said.
⁂
From the ground floor the staircase leading up had seemed no taller than normal. In Utau's opinion it had looked like a regular staircase, if you put aside the fact that it kept going—the house should have had just two floors—as well as the mist and fog, the occasional dice-fox monstrosity and the fact that the stairs seemed to lead to outer space. She'd been willing to attribute all that to illusion. The fox standing like a sort of morbid guardian, a… chara thing.
But her confidence in the 'illusion' theory was growing threadbare, now they'd taken five minutes just to walk up a single floor.
Utau, quite unnecessarily, helped drag Amu up for part of it. The girl really wasn't all that tired, but they were both shaken. The contact helped, and Midori—thankfully—refrained from commenting. Utau wasn't quite sure what she should have expected, but undead foxes weren't it.
They stopped at the landing, to look around, but-
Amu drew in a breath.
"First time for this?" Midori asked, glaring at the nonsense around them. She had an unreadable expression on her face.
The first floor, which should have been made up of bedrooms, was instead a set of corridors. Grey and featureless, Utau would have said; except they were only grey and featureless in the corners of her eyes, the walls were covered in doors—or smudges of doors—drawn in with what might as well be crayon. Crayon doors that looked solid enough to open, but that didn't budge when Midori stepped over to one and sharply tugged on the handle. Above them was-
More fog. As was customary in this home turned creepy funhouse, its presence felt more like a living, breathing entity than a mere atmospheric phenomenon. Her eyes skittered away from the ceiling, as though they didn't want to see through the fog—not that there was anything to see, but trying made her eyes hurt. The same was true for the staircase. Still its normal height, still just a single rotation down to the lower floor, but if she tried to follow that rotation with her eyes-
Utau flinched, hurriedly looking away.
Everything seemed to shift on occasion. The animals they'd seen from below, not to be outdone by the stairs, had disappeared on one of the many winding circles they'd walked around the staircase. Now that they were up here, they were-
Utau scuffed her shoes on the floor, which was now painted like a fresco painting of frolicking animals. Two-dimensional paintings, static, but every time she moved her eyes they moved. Just never where she could see.
"I don't know if I should call this the first time," said Utau, letting her eyes rest on the—comfortingly solid—eyes of Amu's mom. Much, much better. Midori's hair was drifting upwards into the fog—when Utau blinked it was back around her shoulders, never having changed at all. She'd take it. "But outside a dream? Yes. Definitely."
She felt- concerned. That was a good word. Concerned, because this wasn't how things were meant to go—these sorts of things were supposed to be only in dreams and nightmares.
Fever-dreams, at that. Bloody hell.
Amu stumbled slightly, feet catching on a- something. Utau caught a glimpse of a discomforting, black wave of the floor, but when her eyes fixed on it it went back to being regularly flat. Amu went back to pacing around the landing, in spite of its attempt to eat her.
Bloody hell. It bore repeating.
"You sure you're okay?" the older girl whispered to Amu, catching up and pulling her arm. This wasn't the place to split up, she didn't think—Amu felt like she agreed, and they both kept an eye on her mother.
Utau noted, privately, that Amu had stopped looking so pale. So at least the girl wasn't about to fall over again. Lately she'd been terribly unpredictable like that, and Utau wouldn't put it past her to push herself back into JP's hospital if Utau didn't stop her. Though if Amu drove herself that far twice in two weeks, then her mother would-
-not murder her, as Utau would already have done it.
She liked that phrase, 'bloody hell'. It covered a lot of sins.
Amu would undoubtedly get grounded. Utau didn't feel like that was such a bad idea.
"I'm fine," Amu groaned. "I told you already."
And stopped. Utau bumped into her.
"What?" said Utau, pausing to consider the corridor in front of them—trying to work out what had shocked her so much. The air here was so thick with mist that she felt like she was breathing it in with every breath; the ceiling was obscured entirely by the fog, but-
"I might not be fine," Amu said, a little weakly.
Utau turned around, scanning the corridors. One led off in each direction, at ninety degree angles. One, two, three, and four; and then the stairs, and Amu. One, two, three, four, five- Amu. One, two, three-
Amu.
She rubbed her eyes. It didn't help.
Amu's hand tightened on her arm. Trembling slightly, though the self-doubt and fear that had been there a second ago was, thankfully, gone.
"Okay," said Utau. "Mrs. Hinamori?"
"Yes?"
"Did you bring string? Raisins? Anything we can use to mark our path?"
Midori paused for a moment to check her pockets. "I don't think so," she said after a few moments. "Why?"
"It's-"
She tried explaining it. Midori walked back to them, following Utau's eyes as she tried to demonstrate the-
Something.
Utau stared down one of the corridors again, willing it to make sense. It refused to do so. Instead it attracted her gaze and drew her in; as if Utau's attention was water and the corridor was a sponge. Which made no sense as an impression, but it was what she was getting.
The more she looked, the more she saw, and the more she tried to see, the harder it was to see anything at all. The doors, crayon-like sketches at first glance, began to look like giant red stains on the walls; the ground felt unstable under her feet, the air thinner and mist thicker in her lungs—and all of it had a flavour and smell that seemed not entirely unlike chocolate pudding with cinnamon sprinkled over it once she drew a deeper breath. Cinnamon on chocolate, except somehow disgusting.
"Iru?" Utau muttered, discarding a half formed idea of having Iru pay attention to something to freeze it.
"-finally," the little devil-girl responded.
She felt, more than saw, her chara react. Iru went from a presence in her pocket to a presence in her mind with very little fanfare, and although Utau might have slipped from being simply Utau to being Lunatic Charm—almost comforting, Iru's relative exuberance-
She, uh.
She struggled against the transformation, forcing it inwards and totally refusing to let it show. Because Midori was right here, and-
She wouldn't have stopped it either way-
But once Utau's mind stopped spinning, and she was Utau-plus-Iru for the first time in half a month, the only tell Midori could have noticed was a slight slitted cast to her eyes. Nothing else. The transformation refused to be completely invisible, but the dress she'd thought was the height of rockstar rebellion, at twelve, was-
Amu's slight disappointment, and the faint blush on her cheeks, was punishment enough.
Either way Midori hadn't caught on.
"Utau's going to try something," Amu explained. "Mom, can you get behind me? It shouldn't be dangerous, but it might get a little loud."
'Good thinking, Amu.'
Amu smiled a little bit before stepping out of the way, letting Utau focus on her…
Music.
She pulsed, pushing at the fog with all her might. The same sort of pulse she'd once used to force Amu away; the sort of pulse—rejection-go away-ignore me-stop-—that she'd once tried, and failed, to push her best friend away with. The sort of pulse that had killed a tree, stopped Amu in her tracks, and almost, almost succeeded in ruining her life all over again.
Except this time she aimed it purely at the fog, keeping Amu and Midori safely on the inside.
'Go away, give me back reality,' she scream-sung at it. 'Let me see!'
It…
Helped.
A little bit.
Until it all came crashing down on her.
Utau felt like she'd slammed her hand into a pile of gravel, or thrown a paper airplane at a hurricane, but the fog did recede, crystallising before shattering and fading away. Two, three metres maybe. Not enough to make a difference, or do anything other than prove how deep the mist really was.
They gave up after a couple of seconds, Utau wincing as she massaged her temples and tried not to succumb to the headache already making itself known inside her skull, and- the fog came rushing back.
⁂
This time Utau was the one being fussed over. She sat on the floor, gritting her teeth against the pounding in her head, while Amu and Midori did their best to help her recover. Amu more effectively than Midori, it must be said, though Midori had plucked an alcohol swab from somewhere and was using it to brush the sweat away from her face.
That helped. It was the sort of casual touch that Utau didn't feel okay with, that she wouldn't accept from her adoptive parents even in the best of cases, and that she definitely wouldn't have accepted from Amu's mom—except that her head hurt, and she felt almost broken, and Amu radiating worry in a way that made her not want to reject their comfort, and- she felt too tired to do so in any case, and-
And it felt nice. It actually felt nice.
It also helped that Amu's mom didn't have a motive. She wasn't doing it because she felt guilty, or she thought she had to mother Utau, or because she worried because Utau didn't like touch, she was just- doing it. Because she hurt.
All pretty nice.
'You okay?' Amu asked her privately, holding Utau's back as if to steady her.
'Been better,' she told her. 'This fog is screwing with my mind.'
'Sorry,' Amu replied, sounding chagrined.
'Not your fault,' Utau told her. "Any idea where we should go?"
Amu shook her head.
"So, um, Mom," Amu said. "Kana's house- I mean, this house- has two floors. And a single corridor. Just... straight. Straight to the stairwell. None up here. But this place looks like-"
"An Escher painting?" Midori offered, warily.
"Maybe," Amu allowed, poking at the air with her free hand as if testing its firmness. "Did he paint any that turn around to watch you?"
"I can't recall," Midori confessed, rubbing her forehead with a troubled expression. "Honestly, Amu-chan, I'm not even sure if there's enough floor for this many corridors. Or for those walls." She waved a hand in one direction—the corridors turned at strange angles and disappeared into mist, reacting to her movement. "Look, did you see that?"
Utau did. Iru did. Amu didn't seem to want to, but Utau could feel the tension in her as well. Amu did see it. Which was to say-
"We'll get lost if we keep going," Midori said, stating the obvious. "And Utau-chan is…" She motioned. "What do you two want to do?"
"Can we try?" Amu offered. "I can... feel a tug," she continued after a moment of thought, her expression serious.
Utau pushed herself to her feet, feeling just a little bit groggy.
"My head hurts a little, but it isn't too bad," she agreed. "I'm game."
"And when we want to go back?" Midori folded her arms, sighing in a disappointed manner. "Amu-chan, Utau-chan, this is becoming serious. We should leave. Talk to—well, not to the police, I doubt they would believe us. But maybe we can talk to JPs? If we explain what's happening here..."
Amu shook her head again, a stubborn set to her shoulders that Utau recognised all too well, and Midori did too. She sighed again, crossing her arms and tapping her foot in a nervous gesture.
"We've got no way to help her," said Midori, not angrily. Just tiredly; as if Amu's sheer determination and refusal to give up was a habit that she had accepted a long time ago but couldn't quite learn to live with. "I get it. Trust me, I get it. But we can't keep going if we don't want to lose ourselves in these corridors forever, let alone save Kana-chan."
"But I-" Amu began, stopping short as Utau touched her shoulder and offered her a rueful smile.
"We can always come back," Utau suggested.
"That might be too late," Amu whispered, her voice so quiet it was almost inaudible. "I just-" She stopped. "Give me a second."
"Five, ten even," said Utau. "Take all the time you need."
Amu drew herself inward, a wall coming down between them and her mind going quiet; more still than it usually was, even in her sleep. Utau glanced up at Amu's mom, who had a troubled frown on her face but didn't say anything either—maybe she was being respectful, or maybe she just didn't know what else to do.
She felt a little tired.
"When this is done… can I sleep over tonight?" Utau suggested, tentatively. "I know it'll be difficult. With Miki and everything. But I-"
"Of course you can," Midori told her, a wan smile on her face. "You don't even have to ask me."
Utau nodded.
'Amu?' Utau asked, knocking on the wall lightly. 'You okay?'
'Fine,' Amu told her back, but didn't open up. 'Just experimenting-' She didn't continue for several seconds; when she did, she sounded embarrassed. 'Can you change my hair?'
'...why?'
Amu's embarrassment grew stronger—a little cloud of emotion leaking through the wall she'd built around herself. 'It needs to be a ponytail.'
Utau stared at Amu for a long second; the girl didn't react—still lost in thought, not doing anything other than standing there. 'Are you serious?'
'Please?'
She snorted, and gave a helpless glance to Midori, but complied anyway—running her fingers through Amu's hair until she had it in a simple ponytail. It wasn't even one of Amu's signature styles, just something that was functional—and Amu gave no indication she'd even noticed when Utau was done, which made her suspect there was more to it than just 'I want a ponytail'.
'Thank you,' Amu told her a minute later, flashing Utau a confident smile. Which gave Utau her first suspicion as to what was up.
Amu's eyes were no longer yellow. They'd dimmed, first to an ordinary brown, then to a very familiar auburn. Her hair followed suit, first turning the same chestnut shade as her mother's, then growing a little bit reddish—a subtle thing, but noticeable. Utau knew the colour intimately from experience, because Ran had exactly that shade of orange-red.
But chara transformations didn't change her hair colour.
"Utau," said Amu, before turning her head to her Mom, looking both more focused and more determined than before—at least that was what Utau got from her emotions. "And Mom."
Mrs Hinamori stared at Amu's hair in surprise, before managing to rally and ask: "What are you doing?"
"Making a trail, of course," said Amu, a note of impishness entering her voice. "It's easy!" she explained in a sing-song tone of voice, a tone that was not entirely unlike the one Ran used when she was in an excitable mood. "Like this."
Utau watched as Amu held out a hand; a red ribbon materialised on Amu's palm. Amu stepped forward and drew the ribbon along the ground like a painter laying down the first stroke of a canvas.
She tilted her head to the side afterwards, considering her work with an air of satisfaction, then glanced back at Utau and her mom and giggled.
"If we get lost, you just follow the trail! And, um. Hi, mom." Amu saluted. "I'm Ran! For real, this time."
...
Yep. She'd largely figured.
Utau rubbed her forehead—the headache was returning—and glanced at Mrs Hinamori with a shrug.
"She does this a lot," she told Midori, with a hint of resignation.
"I do not!"
⁂
They followed Ran's lead for five or ten minutes, Ran walking along the corridor in front of them humming softly to herself and drawing out their 'trail' as she went. They'd checked, of course; it stayed put, even when they weren't there. Moreover, it somehow stopped the corridors from changing.
The floor was desolate. She'd been expecting—she didn't know what she'd been expecting, really, but it wasn't just a long corridor of fog that shifted whenever you weren't looking at it and had doors drawn onto its walls in crayon that opened up to reveal nothing, when they opened at all. The further they walked, the more of them did; but there was nothing behind them.
Monsters, maybe? Monsters would have made sense, and been easier to deal with. But there was nothing for her to fight. Just empty fog and weirdness, not even a second of the foxes.
And Ran, skipping along without a care in the world. Seemingly.
'Seemingly' being, of course, right. Utau could very much feel that Amu's emotions were still there, still functioning—if perhaps buried under a mountain of confidence and excitement that didn't quite fit her—but that she was holding them back for some reason. It was as if Ran was consciously trying to remain 'in character', or at least presenting a good imitation of it. Chara Changes weren't normally this complete, but Utau supposed it didn't matter. Whatever they were doing, it was working.
Until finally Ran raised her hand and stopped, bringing Utau and Mrs Hinamori up short behind her.
"Hear that?" Ran's whisper sliced through the silence, an edge of urgency beneath the words.
Utau strained her ears, struggling against the fog, but heard nothing. They could barely see five metres in front of them here, it was so thick—she wouldn't be surprised if they walked right over a cliff.
"Hear what?" Utau asked after a few seconds of silence.
"I don't-" Mrs Hinamori's voice faltered. A moment passed, then another; her lips thinned into a line and Utau felt the concern emanating off her spike as she asked: "What is that?"
Then Utau heard it too; a soft thud against the ground, coming from somewhere ahead of them—once, and then again. A sense of dread settled over her at the sound.
Ran bolted forward, slowing after a couple of steps—probably not wanting to run out of sight of her companions.
They followed.
Carefully.
The corridor started weaving, first losing its straightness and then turning corners. It grew narrower, too; and the fog-ceiling grew closer.
The sound, however, didn't stop, or grow any louder. And they didn't have much choice but to keep going if they didn't want to lose sight of Ran. She would have liked to blame the fog, but she knew that wasn't the reason why she felt reluctant to keep going. Utau stared at Ran's back, wondering just how much Amu was borrowing from Ran's confidence to be so...
Not a good thought to finish on, she decided after only a moment. But really, Amu was always like this. It was-
She grimaced as they turned a final corner. An emotional wave slammed into her, dense and palpable enough that it broke her line of thought and almost brought her to her knees—stopping only because Mrs Hinamori caught her mid-collapse and helped her stand upright. The fear, pain and loneliness coming off whatever was in front of them was overwhelming.
Now the fog was clearing, not because Utau or Ran had done anything to dispel it but because there was a curtain of pain in the air in front of them so thick it could have been cut with a knife, cutting through the fog in the exact same way that-
Ran stopped a couple of metres in front of them-
The door at the end of the corridor looked no different from the ones they'd seen before—crayon drawings of a doorway—but felt deeper, somehow, and there was something at the lower edge of it that she wasn't allowed to see yet, but the crayon was black instead of red, it had been scrawled across the wall in a way that made it seem larger than the rest—maybe just more detailed—though they all had endless detail, so long as she kept looking.
And it dripped, weeping down towards the floor, where the source of the pain was moaning in agony. Almost part of the artwork, then not at all. A child, sobbing loudly enough that it seemed impossible they'd missed her until now.
Ran covered her mouth with a hand. Utau followed suit a second later.
A small girl, etched in perfect clarity. A girl no older than five years old, clad in a dirty red dress. Black hair reaching halfway down her back and tangled by neglect. One of her sleeves was torn off at the shoulder, the other stretched beyond repair and bearing the unsettling imprints of something grabbing hold of it.
Half of a girl. The lower half was a white, smooth blob like a plastic doll's body, though far more organic-looking than any toy Utau had seen. Her legs were... tentacles? No, molten. Shapeless limbs without any identifying features whatsoever, that ended in a dark, oily puddle of shadow. The same darkness dripped from her eyes and her mouth and from beneath her nails, but the rest of her upper half looked completely ordinary—except for the bruises, which she'd missed, and that now were everywhere.
Midori stepped forward with an audible gasp; the child flinched back, whimpering at the noise and burying her face into her hands as she cried—crying until a thin sheet of mist formed over her, thin enough that Utau could see the outlines of her shoulders shaking underneath it. For a moment, it looked normal. Just part of the door, an object, a-
Utau tore the feeling out of herself.
-a girl, eyes shining with unshed tears, and not even desperation.
Then the girl sank into the tar pit, vanishing from sight—but not before Utau caught sight of an expression of utter terror.
Utau dropped to her knees as the mental pressure disappeared. She swallowed hard and tried to catch her breath, taking great gulps of air as her heart pounded in her chest and her nerves jangled with adrenaline. Ran was on the ground next to her in an instant—not Ran, not really, not when she had pink hair instead of brown and her eyes were glittering gold—but Ran nonetheless, though the mask was breaking, a jittery feeling of power reaching out to claw at the door, holding it in place.
Utau clenched her fists around the other girl's hand as she managed to summon enough willpower to whisper: "That was-"
"-Yui," Amu finished for her, looking and feeling equally miserable, like she was on the verge of tears.
Utau yanked her into a hug.
"It'll be fine," she whispered, trying to soothe the guilt in Amu's mind and hold her tight. "We're going to rescue her."
Midori dry-heaved, leaned against the wall. "That was-" she tried, but failed to say anything more.
"Yui," Amu said again, nodding her head. "Some of her."
"That was Yui?" Amu's mother managed after a moment, looking at them in a combination of confusion and horror. "Wasn't she... wasn't she normal, the last time you saw her?"
"She was," said Amu, quietly. She focused for a second. Her hair went brown again.
A loud thud rippled from beyond the door. It wasn't hard to guess what had made the sound.
Midori visibly steeled herself. "Right," she told them, straightening up. "Fine. Let's go."
She looked more shaken than Utau had ever seen her—more shaken than Amu had been when she was in the middle of fighting Hikaru, which was saying something—but she also felt more determined. She hadn't known Yui, not at all, and yet she'd reacted as if she'd seen Amu in that state. Which was also how Utau felt; it was one thing to hear about it, it was another to see it with your own two eyes.
Something thumped against the door. Hard.
Utau jumped. Mrs Hinamori flinched back. Ran momentarily tightened her grip on Utau's hand, then let it go and ran towards the door in a blur of speed.
She tore it open, before Utau could do more than shout: "Wait!"
And there was-
-nothing, on the other side.
No monster knocking on the door; no rooms beyond them filled with children and darkness—just fog and a grey void that sucked at her vision like a black hole. She stepped back, feeling a little faint—in the distance, there was a glint of metal. The door felt like it was sucking them in, even when they didn't move. The blurry darkness shifted inwards at the edges, the slight remaining sheet of mist crystallising into an-
-Abandoned Laboratory-
The words were a title embedded in her mind, ripping into Utau's head with a sensation similar to that of blood, the edges fuzzy and fading like something had torn them out of a ruined book. The edges of the room were hazy with mist and-
-
A bell chimed from somewhere past it, deep inside the room. A gentle sound, like church bells ringing in the distance; the moment it chimed all the hairs on the back of Utau's neck rose up.
Glassware. Beakers and vials and glass tubes running along the floor, some broken and shattered from age or neglect, others looking intact but clouded over with dust and dirt. From the wall came the inconsistent buzz of electrical machinery, powered by God knows what source and seeming to crawl through the apertures. Nothing here could be real. Lights flickered weakly, casting harsh shadows against the floor and walls that danced with every flicker. A green lamp above one of the tables hung from a loose cord that swung in the air with no apparent support, a faint ding audible when it connected with the edge of the desk, and a door led into another room on the right, barely visible through a haze of what might have been smoke or dust or simple age.
Everywhere she looked she saw more detail, the room etched into her vision in detail she couldn't be seeing. The faint trails of dust on the far side of the beakers were plainly visible to her, as well as the pieces of wood and dried-up fabric scattered around the place, tattered by time and decay; in one corner a bucket lay on its side with what looked like old rusty nails sticking out of it—old rags and bloody sheets had been piled on top of it.
None of this was meant to be here. None of it was supposed to exist; none of it belonged here in any sense of the word—none of it belonged in the world—but Utau could see every inch of it with impossible clarity.
Strapped into one of the chairs was a small girl, about five years old at most.
Ran froze, staring at the child's face for a second with a stunned expression, and a rising sense of horror tore through the fringes of Utau's mind as she tried to move, but Utau was transfixed-
-with red-rimmed eyes and an expression that would have looked afraid on an adult, but on a child came across as uncomprehending. Needles and syringes were stabbed into her arms and legs; tubes ran from her body to strange machines lining the wall, or beakers filled with transparent fluid that looked like they might be blood, neither of which had been shown to her a moment before. The girl's long black hair was limp and unkempt; but worst of all, her forehead had been opened up by surgery or claws—a cut running deep into her skull that Utau could only glimpse parts of, and didn't want to see any more than that—the edges ragged with missing flesh, showing signs of infection.
That wasn't an unfamiliar face. It was-
Amu shuddered, taking two stumbling steps backwards and falling over. She'd gone white with shock, Ran recoiling from the sight and leaving Amu exposed again—just in time for Utau to catch her mid-fall.
"Amu!" her mom gasped, bending over and grabbing her daughter's shoulders—her hands were shaking, and Utau felt the horror shift to concern shift to fear in a heartbeat, no longer directed at Amu. Utau followed her line of sight—back to the little girl on the chair—and a rising shadow loomed behind the child's body.
Fog pressed down on the air around them; a presence of sorts that made Utau's teeth rattle. But this time the fog wasn't pressing down on them, but on Yui. She could feel its attention like an invisible hand reaching into her chest and pulling at something deep within her-
-Yui screamed, a small sound that melted the fog from the air surrounding her-
-and the shadow looming behind the child raised a sharp claw to cut through the girl's head in a single motion-
"Yui!" screamed Amu, eyes wide with shock. They had to-
"-get away!" Utau shouted, throwing her hands out in front of them both—drawing on everything she had. More than she had. A kaleidoscope of light and colour burst into existence around them both, blinding and blotting out the fog and the little girl in the same instant. The shadow vanished under her light, and the mist snapped away like a rubber band, retreating a hundred metres down the corridor in the space between two breaths.
The world around them went dark for a moment as Utau sagged back against the wall, her knees buckling under her weight as the world shifted, melting and reforming until it settled on-
The same corridor.
The same door.
A bell tolled in the distance, the sound muffled enough by mist and walls.
The door shook in time to the bell, rattling on its hinges as if something on the other side were trying to break through—though neither Amu nor Utau could tell if it was trying to escape or to drag them back inside. But neither of them could muster up the energy to check; Amu was as white as a sheet, staring at the closed door with wide eyes and shaking hands.
"Is- is that really Yui?" Midori asked, quietly. "The girl from earlier? Why- why is she-" She bit her lip and hugged her daughter tightly, clinging to her with the look—and feel—of someone trying desperately to avoid breaking down entirely. "Oh, Amu."
= = =
Amu isn't good with ghost stories.
You have a few possible choices. "Go home" is technically one of them, and Yui may still be here tomorrow, but none of the three are okay with this. It's an open question, however, what to do about it. Utau has one idea. Amu another. Midori a third.
Perhaps you'll have a fifth?
[ ] Midori: Kill the murderer
- It's the most obvious choice. Someone, or something, is harming a child. Stop them.
- The child might be a ghost of some form.
[ ] Amu: Tear down the place
- Amu has just about had enough.
- Plausibly she can smash it to pieces, maybe without harming what's there of Yui, but what then?
- Maybe she can't. Empathy + Wits + Overgrowth, difficulty 3.
[ ] Utau: That is quite enough
- Utau has just about had enough. This place resonates with a very dark memory she's kept hidden inside, and she thinks she's figured out what she did wrong before
- Similar approach, different character. Same skill check.
[ ] Utau: Ask for help
- This isn't the sort of place to drag a seven-year-old into.
- But Utau is holding the Dumpty Key, and can kind of tell that both Hikaru and Ami are moving in your direction anyway, or at least, if you vote for this then she'll notice.
- Lighting a beacon might be helpful. She'd be less lost then.
- Ami might have ideas.
- Hikaru might as well, even if his resonate with Amu's.
[ ] Write-in
"Amu," said Mom, hesitantly. "Utau-chan has a point. I don't know what you're doing, but can you please take a moment to think about it?"
-there wasn't really time for that, was there? It wasn't that she didn't understand their concerns, but... well. The fox would run away if she left it, it was only her attention that was drawing it to her. That was obvious, though she wasn't quite sure why it was obvious.
"Just... a couple of seconds," she pleaded with them, holding her hand out, regardless of Utau's attempt at pulling her back. The fox was moving closer towards her hand now, cautious and hesitant, but drawing closer regardless. "Just trust me."
It was pitiful. It was beautiful.
There was nothing inside of it—nothing she could speak to or hear or feel or touch—but she thought, or rather imagined, that it had once been a girl of sorts. The pieces were- they weren't very girl-like, but they were not-girl-like in a way that reminded her of Saaya, of how her fragments had felt when they'd been stuck in her mind after her- mishap.
And she was so not thinking about that.
'If you want,' Amu offered the fox-thing tentatively. 'I can gather your pieces back up.'
Not to make them part of her. She didn't think that would work—her mind was Amu-shaped, not fox-shaped, and even if she could get everything together in her head the mismatch meant she'd have to destroy most of the pieces. She couldn't keep them, not and stay herself. But the fox's life was essentially made of pain so even that would be better than letting it live this way, if that was all she could do. She dearly hoped it wasn't.
Amu would have to tear parts off her own mind to make it fit, to make it her and her it and she wasn't doing that, not even to help. She was a bit more flexible than most people, thanks to Ran and Su, but she still wasn't that flexible.
Maybe she could hold on to its pieces without letting them do anything, instead? She'd need some sort of container... and a better idea of what the fox actually was, because she really couldn't think of what else she might do.
The fox flinched back as her hand got close, pulling in on itself in a way that might have been adorable if she couldn't tell how scared it was, and if she wasn't pulling Utau with her. She felt Utau's concern deepen at the sight.
"Amu," said Utau again, more hesitantly this time. "Are you sure you know what you're doing?"
"No," Amu admitted, honestly. "But I want to find out. I need to help. Please trust me."
Utau bit her lip, then nodded, reluctantly relaxing her grip on Amu's wrist and letting go. "I do," the girl told Amu. 'I just worry.'
'I know,' Amu told her back. 'And I'm sorry. Thanks.'
Mom was also concerned, Amu could feel it, but Mom didn't seem to know what she should do. So she was leaving Amu alone. That- wasn't okay, but-
Iru popped her head up, seemingly only to give Amu a smile and a thumbs-up.
⁂
The fox did not like Amu's hand. Not at all. Curiosity or no, it was made of fear—fear and pain, and so essentially anything it could sense drove it to fight, or to bolt. It didn't want to fight her, so 'bolt' it was. But something deeper in the fox, or- or everything, deeper in the fox, drove it to approach her regardless. Her, or Mom or Utau, but mostly her, because they clicked in a way that—that two puzzle pieces that didn't fit at all would click—which was better than being a puzzle piece without a puzzle box to fit in.
But if it had focused on Mom or on Utau it'd notice that their puzzle pieces were all hidden deep inside where it couldn't even get them, and- that would have ended in a fight, but Amu was reaching out towards it with her mind. And-
The fox was on its last legs already. Literally, in a way that made Amu want to hug it and hold it close to her chest so nothing could ever hurt it again, which would have made it fall apart. She wasn't sure what that would do to its pieces. There was something like tar there; something that didn't feel at all like her mind, that was holding it together and keeping it moving even though it was, in essence, already dead.
The fox wasn't smart enough to do much on its own; not really anything other than exist, which meant it was scared and panicked and felt like it wanted to do things, but lacked the capacity to think of things to do. Or to do them. It wasn't really walking, even; that was just how they interpreted the way it moved. Its feet were more of a... blob?
A blob of fear. With glassy black eyes and a soft, shadowy fur—though Amu knew it wasn't actually soft, that was just how she visualised it in her head, and not even real.
The fog pushed on her mind, insistently, but Amu pushed back. Now that she was less, um. Less drunk? Now that she was less drunk, she could tell how it was affecting her. Which is to say that it wasn't, mostly. Her parts wanted to fly off and become part of it, but Amu didn't, and they wanted far more to remain part of her. She liked herself and that made a difference. The fog also wanted her to ignore this, to not notice what was happening, and that she refused to do at all.
She'd have to hold on to this fox's pieces—or core? Core sounded better—without letting them be part of her, and then figure out what to do with them. Which meant she needed something like a container.
"Utau," she said. "Can I borrow the Dumpty Key? Just for a minute. I promise you'll get it back."
Utau didn't immediately say yes—blatantly uneasy at the suggestion—but she pulled it out of her pocket after a moment anyway and held it out.
"Don't lose it," said Utau, with a worried sigh.
"I wouldn't," said Amu, putting her hand around the key and grabbing onto the fox. "Close your eyes," she warned everyone else as the air around her began to sparkle and shine with energy and-
There was a sharp tug on her mind, the Key recognising something like an imprint left by the Lock. She didn't let it do anything with it, though; the Key was just a tool, not an intelligence, and she had more important things to worry about.
Like the fox, which-
Its core wasn't a single object. It wasn't a piece of a thing or a remnant or- whatever it was supposed to be, and it wasnt a mind. It was something like a tangled thread; a few thousand of them, all knotted together in ways that reminded Amu of one of the core parts of her brain, except… wrong.
Lacking in meaning.
Made of pieces that shouldn't be doing that.
The Key seemed worried at the wrongness of it all, or that's how Amu would have put it if she'd focused on the Key, if she'd made any attempt at splitting its observations off from her own.
She had something like a spinneret there, in the corresponding part of herself; a small thing tucked away inside her that spun mental threads to tie herself together with, to keep all of her synchronised and working to the same ends—there were millions of them, more by the moment as she learned and grew—and the fox's core was-
It was a tangle of threads holding fragments of someone's mind, but it had nothing that grew them. Nothing that gave them the space and context to weave themselves together into anything useful, anything more than a tangle of threads that were only connecting because they lacked a better option, tangled into a ball of not-self. Amu realised that right away, as the Key struggled to recognise anything conscious in them, and didn't manage; it was as if the threads and their fragments didn't have memory or identity or soul, but just- existed, without being able to do anything else.
Amu recognised them anyway, because she had met the girl—the child—that they belonged to. She'd held the other end of these same threads in her hand, though she hadn't recognised them for what they were at the time—and unlike the fox, that child had been whole enough to talk to Amu, doze off on her lap, and smile. Though Yui hadn't been allowed to sleep without Kana there to watch over her.
Was this really meant to be part of Yui?
It had to be.
That was why she wanted so badly to hug it.
'Focus,' Amu told herself. She'd promised not to take too long.
There was a part of her that was an administrator. That tugged on those lines in herself, keeping track of who did what and who should be the one making the decisions on a given thing—she used that part when Ran wanted pancakes or when Amu was wondering what to do about her crushes—and she put it to use now, in a way that made mind ache like she was straining it, trying to untangle the threads from each other without snapping them or breaking them entirely. The Key, glowing in her hand, made it easier. It felt...
Dubious, was that the word? Like it wasn't sure if it should let her do this. But it didn't try to stop her, or limit her in any way, and the 'fox' itself lacked an equivalent to her administrator self—so when Amu tugged at the threads, nothing tugged back. It was... dead, that really was the best way she could put it. A collection of reflexes, forever doing the only thing they knew to do, with nothing that could tell them when to stop. Or to react, when she pushed at them outside what passed for their reality.
Nothing to repair them or pull them inside when they broke, nothing to feed them energy, nothing to send instructions from the 'brain' to the 'limbs', not even a brain or limbs to begin with, just-
Threads. Tangles. Tightly wound pieces of something that used to be important parts of a girl.
"Shh," she whispered aloud, soothingly, to no-one at all. "It's okay, we're here to help," she told it—it didn't have ears to hear with or a mind to make sense of sounds with, but the act of speaking settled something in her. She couldn't hear it respond but she felt its fear slowly recede, until she'd soothed it down to-
Nothing. Still nothing. A collection of broken threads and fragments, quiescent. A pool of shadow, to her eyes—she still had eyes—with glassy black eyes staring at her from inside it.
And it took her a moment to realise she had stared at it like that, all tar and silence, for long enough that Utau was getting uneasy. She-
"Almost done," she told Mom.
The fog was- still there. But gone, from a bubble around her. A bubble that included the fox.
'Utau, can you pretend you're someone else?' she asked, pushing a set of impressions and feelings over to her instead of words. She couldn't exactly tell Utau how to do it, not in words, but she had an impression of Yui. If Utau did it, instead of her, maybe she could-
'What?' asked Utau, bemused. 'What is this about?'
'Just do it,' Amu said. 'Trust me.'
'Well...' Utau shrugged. 'Fine,' she told her, her tone exasperated, but with affection underneath. There was a pause. 'Oh,' Utau said, as she parsed what Amu had sent her—impressions and fragments and-
'Utau?'
'That won't fool it for long,' Utau warned her. 'I don't have her memories or- anything. I've never even met her.' She could feel her friend piecing it- Yui together as she spoke, and her concern at how patchwork the 'image' was.
'It just has to work for five seconds,' Amu replied. 'Come on.'
'Fine,' Utau repeated back to her.
Amu nodded, not taking her eyes off the fox; the shadow creature—still in front of them, not having run away or anything—wasn't even looking at her. It was staring at Utau—no, not Utau. At Yui.
Staring at her.
No longer capable of 'doing'.
Despite Utau's fears, Amu didn't think there was much chance it'd realise her ruse. Realisation needed- it needed thinking. The fox hadn't had much to start with, and it had none at all now, so all Utau did was provide an impetus—a suction—that might be weak, but had nothing at all working against it. The fox was already evaporating, black spots and threads moving towards them.
Amu did her own work in the background, drawing out threads of mind-stuff; threading them through the Key. Thread by thread by thread by thread, knotting them together and separating them out, working them into orderly rows while keeping them separate from her own mind, which was shivering now, too busy managing the fox to manage herself. If it had been Yui here instead of herself, she could have tried to piece the threads together how they were supposed to go; but she didn't need a working mind, didn't need anything but a container. And that-
That wasn't too hard, even now that Amu's mind was starting to feel like a cacophony. Just a series of nested boxes that looked like a mind, a group of cubicles that would hold on to remnants of fox without letting it function, to the small degree that it could function. It just also wasn't possible. She decided to go with the 'not that hard'. She was operating on forty percent guesswork, fifty percent hope and fifty percent blind faith in whoever made the Key, but she'd seen the Lock do something similar to Saaya, and...
'Just do your thing,' Utau told her.
Yes- yes, she- she would. She didn't want to risk tangling the fox's threads up with either of their minds, so she pushed the entire construct—all her ideas—into the Key and hoped for the best. The Key was good with minds. Really good with minds. It was like a computer. If Amu were a programmer she might have thought of it differently, but she was Amu and not a programmer so she likened it to the smartest thing she didn't understand.
'Come home,' Amu whispered to the fox—in plural—extending the Key towards it. She dragged Utau's threads through it as well. "You're safe now."
The fox was really staring now. Its glassy black eyes had swivelled up to stare at the key—now emanating Yui—with an expression of pure incomprehension.
"Come home," she repeated again. The fox shook its head—the only movement it had made in all this time—and almost managed to get away before she grabbed onto it with her mind and tugged on it, and...
It completely came apart.
The air shimmered around them as Amu untangled Yui's pieces, one by one, careful not to lose any as she did so. They were fragile things, fraying and easily broken, and Amu felt like a librarian a guardian running her fingers down a line of books, inspecting each one carefully for damage before pulling them out and-
Setting them aside.
The fox made a low whine of distress, but there was no intent behind it. Just pain. Amu watched as its shape shifted, tugging in on itself and... degrading melting burning, for lack of a better word. One fox became two became four and then eight and then sixteen—shadows sliding off itself and pooling on the stairs as they did, like Yaya when she was tired—until it collapsed into a pile of stardust, which shimmered, rising in the mist until the Key absorbed it, the tiniest fraction scattering around it.
A pile of tar remained on the steps above them—tar and ink and things not part of Yui, things that stared in shock at Amu and that she would never, ever be again—which took a few more seconds to evaporate, a burst of relief and external confused contemplation.
And that was that, no more fox.
Amu sat back and stared at the stairs in front of them for a second, processing. Her mind came back together, Ran and Su and Amu and—everyone, everyone who'd helped, without even being told to—all folding back into a single tapestry, into the girl that called herself 'Amu', and… oww.
Her head didn't hurt. It just felt like it should have.
The world drifted into focus, fog still there; back to surrounding her. Stairwell, too. And carpet. …carpet?
She didn't think the stairwell had been carpeted before, but right now she didn't really care. She just felt tired.
"Uh," said Mom, hesitantly. "Well. I'm not sure what you did, Amu-chan, but I suppose it was helpful?"
She nodded.
"Sorry for getting carried away," she told them both, feeling more than a little drained. She stood up; it felt like all the energy had been sucked out of her at once, and she didn't have the power left to move at all—she felt woozy, almost delirious—but at least she wasn't falling over again. "Um," she told Mom and Utau both. "I think-"
Utau caught her as she slumped.
"Oh," said Amu, after a moment, pressing herself into Utau's arms and resting her head against her best friend's chest—Utau's heart not quite in time with her heartbeat, but close.
Mom made a noise like an 'oof' of surprise.
Utau's arms around her tightened, and Amu snuggled closer, closing her eyes. This felt nice. She could deal with this. Her head was still… rather noisy, though that was dying down.
Maybe she'd just stay here a minute.
"Amu's just... very tired," Utau explained to Mom. "From... whatever it is she just did."
"Does this happen often?" Mom murmured, frowning a little.
"She does this a lot," Utau said, exasperation clear in her voice. "All the time." Amu opened her mouth to object, but couldn't find the willpower to do so. "Whenever she gets upset at the world," Utau added. "Don't ask me why, I can never figure out what she's trying to do half the time. But trust me when I say that she's all right. Probably."
Amu laughed softly, feeling too exhausted to do anything more. If she'd ever done this before she would have asked Utau to smack her. This time she hadn't had a choice.
"I'll be okay in another minute," she told Utau, sleepily. "Just give me a bit, I'll be good to go. Mom, can you keep going?"
Mom raised an eyebrow at her. "What kind of question is that?" she said, scoffing a little at the notion.
"You feel tired too," Amu pointed out. She'd been careful about not looking too closely at her mom's mind. Not in any way that would let her see details, because—never mind. She didn't need to read her mind to know that Mom was getting tired, or that she'd been scared when Amu had slumped against Utau.
Amu struggled back upright, her tiredness already passing. Not gone. No longer the overwhelming fatigue of before.
"I might be. A little," Mom admitted, ruffling Amu's hair again. "But I'm not the one you should worry about. Are you sure you're okay?"
Amu nodded.
Utau exhaled. "Good," she said. "Because if you weren't, I was going to pick you up and carry you downstairs myself."
Amu flushed bright red; the image of Utau carrying her back home filled her mind—which, well, maybe it was a little appealing, but-
Utau poked her forehead; Amu squeaked, covering the spot with her hands and then glaring up at Utau. Who smirked at her, smirk growing until Amu picked herself up and brushed down her hair.
"-let's just go," she said.
⁂
From the ground floor the staircase leading up had seemed no taller than normal. In Utau's opinion it had looked like a regular staircase, if you put aside the fact that it kept going—the house should have had just two floors—as well as the mist and fog, the occasional dice-fox monstrosity and the fact that the stairs seemed to lead to outer space. She'd been willing to attribute all that to illusion. The fox standing like a sort of morbid guardian, a… chara thing.
But her confidence in the 'illusion' theory was growing threadbare, now they'd taken five minutes just to walk up a single floor.
Utau, quite unnecessarily, helped drag Amu up for part of it. The girl really wasn't all that tired, but they were both shaken. The contact helped, and Midori—thankfully—refrained from commenting. Utau wasn't quite sure what she should have expected, but undead foxes weren't it.
They stopped at the landing, to look around, but-
Amu drew in a breath.
"First time for this?" Midori asked, glaring at the nonsense around them. She had an unreadable expression on her face.
The first floor, which should have been made up of bedrooms, was instead a set of corridors. Grey and featureless, Utau would have said; except they were only grey and featureless in the corners of her eyes, the walls were covered in doors—or smudges of doors—drawn in with what might as well be crayon. Crayon doors that looked solid enough to open, but that didn't budge when Midori stepped over to one and sharply tugged on the handle. Above them was-
More fog. As was customary in this home turned creepy funhouse, its presence felt more like a living, breathing entity than a mere atmospheric phenomenon. Her eyes skittered away from the ceiling, as though they didn't want to see through the fog—not that there was anything to see, but trying made her eyes hurt. The same was true for the staircase. Still its normal height, still just a single rotation down to the lower floor, but if she tried to follow that rotation with her eyes-
Utau flinched, hurriedly looking away.
Everything seemed to shift on occasion. The animals they'd seen from below, not to be outdone by the stairs, had disappeared on one of the many winding circles they'd walked around the staircase. Now that they were up here, they were-
Utau scuffed her shoes on the floor, which was now painted like a fresco painting of frolicking animals. Two-dimensional paintings, static, but every time she moved her eyes they moved. Just never where she could see.
"I don't know if I should call this the first time," said Utau, letting her eyes rest on the—comfortingly solid—eyes of Amu's mom. Much, much better. Midori's hair was drifting upwards into the fog—when Utau blinked it was back around her shoulders, never having changed at all. She'd take it. "But outside a dream? Yes. Definitely."
She felt- concerned. That was a good word. Concerned, because this wasn't how things were meant to go—these sorts of things were supposed to be only in dreams and nightmares.
Fever-dreams, at that. Bloody hell.
Amu stumbled slightly, feet catching on a- something. Utau caught a glimpse of a discomforting, black wave of the floor, but when her eyes fixed on it it went back to being regularly flat. Amu went back to pacing around the landing, in spite of its attempt to eat her.
Bloody hell. It bore repeating.
"You sure you're okay?" the older girl whispered to Amu, catching up and pulling her arm. This wasn't the place to split up, she didn't think—Amu felt like she agreed, and they both kept an eye on her mother.
Utau noted, privately, that Amu had stopped looking so pale. So at least the girl wasn't about to fall over again. Lately she'd been terribly unpredictable like that, and Utau wouldn't put it past her to push herself back into JP's hospital if Utau didn't stop her. Though if Amu drove herself that far twice in two weeks, then her mother would-
-not murder her, as Utau would already have done it.
She liked that phrase, 'bloody hell'. It covered a lot of sins.
Amu would undoubtedly get grounded. Utau didn't feel like that was such a bad idea.
"I'm fine," Amu groaned. "I told you already."
And stopped. Utau bumped into her.
"What?" said Utau, pausing to consider the corridor in front of them—trying to work out what had shocked her so much. The air here was so thick with mist that she felt like she was breathing it in with every breath; the ceiling was obscured entirely by the fog, but-
"I might not be fine," Amu said, a little weakly.
Utau turned around, scanning the corridors. One led off in each direction, at ninety degree angles. One, two, three, and four; and then the stairs, and Amu. One, two, three, four, five- Amu. One, two, three-
Amu.
She rubbed her eyes. It didn't help.
Amu's hand tightened on her arm. Trembling slightly, though the self-doubt and fear that had been there a second ago was, thankfully, gone.
"Okay," said Utau. "Mrs. Hinamori?"
"Yes?"
"Did you bring string? Raisins? Anything we can use to mark our path?"
Midori paused for a moment to check her pockets. "I don't think so," she said after a few moments. "Why?"
"It's-"
She tried explaining it. Midori walked back to them, following Utau's eyes as she tried to demonstrate the-
Something.
Utau stared down one of the corridors again, willing it to make sense. It refused to do so. Instead it attracted her gaze and drew her in; as if Utau's attention was water and the corridor was a sponge. Which made no sense as an impression, but it was what she was getting.
The more she looked, the more she saw, and the more she tried to see, the harder it was to see anything at all. The doors, crayon-like sketches at first glance, began to look like giant red stains on the walls; the ground felt unstable under her feet, the air thinner and mist thicker in her lungs—and all of it had a flavour and smell that seemed not entirely unlike chocolate pudding with cinnamon sprinkled over it once she drew a deeper breath. Cinnamon on chocolate, except somehow disgusting.
"Iru?" Utau muttered, discarding a half formed idea of having Iru pay attention to something to freeze it.
"-finally," the little devil-girl responded.
She felt, more than saw, her chara react. Iru went from a presence in her pocket to a presence in her mind with very little fanfare, and although Utau might have slipped from being simply Utau to being Lunatic Charm—almost comforting, Iru's relative exuberance-
She, uh.
She struggled against the transformation, forcing it inwards and totally refusing to let it show. Because Midori was right here, and-
She wouldn't have stopped it either way-
But once Utau's mind stopped spinning, and she was Utau-plus-Iru for the first time in half a month, the only tell Midori could have noticed was a slight slitted cast to her eyes. Nothing else. The transformation refused to be completely invisible, but the dress she'd thought was the height of rockstar rebellion, at twelve, was-
Amu's slight disappointment, and the faint blush on her cheeks, was punishment enough.
Either way Midori hadn't caught on.
"Utau's going to try something," Amu explained. "Mom, can you get behind me? It shouldn't be dangerous, but it might get a little loud."
'Good thinking, Amu.'
Amu smiled a little bit before stepping out of the way, letting Utau focus on her…
Music.
She pulsed, pushing at the fog with all her might. The same sort of pulse she'd once used to force Amu away; the sort of pulse—rejection-go away-ignore me-stop-—that she'd once tried, and failed, to push her best friend away with. The sort of pulse that had killed a tree, stopped Amu in her tracks, and almost, almost succeeded in ruining her life all over again.
Except this time she aimed it purely at the fog, keeping Amu and Midori safely on the inside.
'Go away, give me back reality,' she scream-sung at it. 'Let me see!'
It…
Helped.
A little bit.
Until it all came crashing down on her.
Utau felt like she'd slammed her hand into a pile of gravel, or thrown a paper airplane at a hurricane, but the fog did recede, crystallising before shattering and fading away. Two, three metres maybe. Not enough to make a difference, or do anything other than prove how deep the mist really was.
They gave up after a couple of seconds, Utau wincing as she massaged her temples and tried not to succumb to the headache already making itself known inside her skull, and- the fog came rushing back.
⁂
This time Utau was the one being fussed over. She sat on the floor, gritting her teeth against the pounding in her head, while Amu and Midori did their best to help her recover. Amu more effectively than Midori, it must be said, though Midori had plucked an alcohol swab from somewhere and was using it to brush the sweat away from her face.
That helped. It was the sort of casual touch that Utau didn't feel okay with, that she wouldn't accept from her adoptive parents even in the best of cases, and that she definitely wouldn't have accepted from Amu's mom—except that her head hurt, and she felt almost broken, and Amu radiating worry in a way that made her not want to reject their comfort, and- she felt too tired to do so in any case, and-
And it felt nice. It actually felt nice.
It also helped that Amu's mom didn't have a motive. She wasn't doing it because she felt guilty, or she thought she had to mother Utau, or because she worried because Utau didn't like touch, she was just- doing it. Because she hurt.
All pretty nice.
'You okay?' Amu asked her privately, holding Utau's back as if to steady her.
'Been better,' she told her. 'This fog is screwing with my mind.'
'Sorry,' Amu replied, sounding chagrined.
'Not your fault,' Utau told her. "Any idea where we should go?"
Amu shook her head.
"So, um, Mom," Amu said. "Kana's house- I mean, this house- has two floors. And a single corridor. Just... straight. Straight to the stairwell. None up here. But this place looks like-"
"An Escher painting?" Midori offered, warily.
"Maybe," Amu allowed, poking at the air with her free hand as if testing its firmness. "Did he paint any that turn around to watch you?"
"I can't recall," Midori confessed, rubbing her forehead with a troubled expression. "Honestly, Amu-chan, I'm not even sure if there's enough floor for this many corridors. Or for those walls." She waved a hand in one direction—the corridors turned at strange angles and disappeared into mist, reacting to her movement. "Look, did you see that?"
Utau did. Iru did. Amu didn't seem to want to, but Utau could feel the tension in her as well. Amu did see it. Which was to say-
"We'll get lost if we keep going," Midori said, stating the obvious. "And Utau-chan is…" She motioned. "What do you two want to do?"
"Can we try?" Amu offered. "I can... feel a tug," she continued after a moment of thought, her expression serious.
Utau pushed herself to her feet, feeling just a little bit groggy.
"My head hurts a little, but it isn't too bad," she agreed. "I'm game."
"And when we want to go back?" Midori folded her arms, sighing in a disappointed manner. "Amu-chan, Utau-chan, this is becoming serious. We should leave. Talk to—well, not to the police, I doubt they would believe us. But maybe we can talk to JPs? If we explain what's happening here..."
Amu shook her head again, a stubborn set to her shoulders that Utau recognised all too well, and Midori did too. She sighed again, crossing her arms and tapping her foot in a nervous gesture.
"We've got no way to help her," said Midori, not angrily. Just tiredly; as if Amu's sheer determination and refusal to give up was a habit that she had accepted a long time ago but couldn't quite learn to live with. "I get it. Trust me, I get it. But we can't keep going if we don't want to lose ourselves in these corridors forever, let alone save Kana-chan."
"But I-" Amu began, stopping short as Utau touched her shoulder and offered her a rueful smile.
"We can always come back," Utau suggested.
"That might be too late," Amu whispered, her voice so quiet it was almost inaudible. "I just-" She stopped. "Give me a second."
"Five, ten even," said Utau. "Take all the time you need."
Amu drew herself inward, a wall coming down between them and her mind going quiet; more still than it usually was, even in her sleep. Utau glanced up at Amu's mom, who had a troubled frown on her face but didn't say anything either—maybe she was being respectful, or maybe she just didn't know what else to do.
She felt a little tired.
"When this is done… can I sleep over tonight?" Utau suggested, tentatively. "I know it'll be difficult. With Miki and everything. But I-"
"Of course you can," Midori told her, a wan smile on her face. "You don't even have to ask me."
Utau nodded.
'Amu?' Utau asked, knocking on the wall lightly. 'You okay?'
'Fine,' Amu told her back, but didn't open up. 'Just experimenting-' She didn't continue for several seconds; when she did, she sounded embarrassed. 'Can you change my hair?'
'...why?'
Amu's embarrassment grew stronger—a little cloud of emotion leaking through the wall she'd built around herself. 'It needs to be a ponytail.'
Utau stared at Amu for a long second; the girl didn't react—still lost in thought, not doing anything other than standing there. 'Are you serious?'
'Please?'
She snorted, and gave a helpless glance to Midori, but complied anyway—running her fingers through Amu's hair until she had it in a simple ponytail. It wasn't even one of Amu's signature styles, just something that was functional—and Amu gave no indication she'd even noticed when Utau was done, which made her suspect there was more to it than just 'I want a ponytail'.
'Thank you,' Amu told her a minute later, flashing Utau a confident smile. Which gave Utau her first suspicion as to what was up.
Amu's eyes were no longer yellow. They'd dimmed, first to an ordinary brown, then to a very familiar auburn. Her hair followed suit, first turning the same chestnut shade as her mother's, then growing a little bit reddish—a subtle thing, but noticeable. Utau knew the colour intimately from experience, because Ran had exactly that shade of orange-red.
But chara transformations didn't change her hair colour.
"Utau," said Amu, before turning her head to her Mom, looking both more focused and more determined than before—at least that was what Utau got from her emotions. "And Mom."
Mrs Hinamori stared at Amu's hair in surprise, before managing to rally and ask: "What are you doing?"
"Making a trail, of course," said Amu, a note of impishness entering her voice. "It's easy!" she explained in a sing-song tone of voice, a tone that was not entirely unlike the one Ran used when she was in an excitable mood. "Like this."
Utau watched as Amu held out a hand; a red ribbon materialised on Amu's palm. Amu stepped forward and drew the ribbon along the ground like a painter laying down the first stroke of a canvas.
She tilted her head to the side afterwards, considering her work with an air of satisfaction, then glanced back at Utau and her mom and giggled.
"If we get lost, you just follow the trail! And, um. Hi, mom." Amu saluted. "I'm Ran! For real, this time."
...
Yep. She'd largely figured.
Utau rubbed her forehead—the headache was returning—and glanced at Mrs Hinamori with a shrug.
"She does this a lot," she told Midori, with a hint of resignation.
"I do not!"
⁂
They followed Ran's lead for five or ten minutes, Ran walking along the corridor in front of them humming softly to herself and drawing out their 'trail' as she went. They'd checked, of course; it stayed put, even when they weren't there. Moreover, it somehow stopped the corridors from changing.
The floor was desolate. She'd been expecting—she didn't know what she'd been expecting, really, but it wasn't just a long corridor of fog that shifted whenever you weren't looking at it and had doors drawn onto its walls in crayon that opened up to reveal nothing, when they opened at all. The further they walked, the more of them did; but there was nothing behind them.
Monsters, maybe? Monsters would have made sense, and been easier to deal with. But there was nothing for her to fight. Just empty fog and weirdness, not even a second of the foxes.
And Ran, skipping along without a care in the world. Seemingly.
'Seemingly' being, of course, right. Utau could very much feel that Amu's emotions were still there, still functioning—if perhaps buried under a mountain of confidence and excitement that didn't quite fit her—but that she was holding them back for some reason. It was as if Ran was consciously trying to remain 'in character', or at least presenting a good imitation of it. Chara Changes weren't normally this complete, but Utau supposed it didn't matter. Whatever they were doing, it was working.
Until finally Ran raised her hand and stopped, bringing Utau and Mrs Hinamori up short behind her.
"Hear that?" Ran's whisper sliced through the silence, an edge of urgency beneath the words.
Utau strained her ears, struggling against the fog, but heard nothing. They could barely see five metres in front of them here, it was so thick—she wouldn't be surprised if they walked right over a cliff.
"Hear what?" Utau asked after a few seconds of silence.
"I don't-" Mrs Hinamori's voice faltered. A moment passed, then another; her lips thinned into a line and Utau felt the concern emanating off her spike as she asked: "What is that?"
Then Utau heard it too; a soft thud against the ground, coming from somewhere ahead of them—once, and then again. A sense of dread settled over her at the sound.
Ran bolted forward, slowing after a couple of steps—probably not wanting to run out of sight of her companions.
They followed.
Carefully.
The corridor started weaving, first losing its straightness and then turning corners. It grew narrower, too; and the fog-ceiling grew closer.
The sound, however, didn't stop, or grow any louder. And they didn't have much choice but to keep going if they didn't want to lose sight of Ran. She would have liked to blame the fog, but she knew that wasn't the reason why she felt reluctant to keep going. Utau stared at Ran's back, wondering just how much Amu was borrowing from Ran's confidence to be so...
Not a good thought to finish on, she decided after only a moment. But really, Amu was always like this. It was-
She grimaced as they turned a final corner. An emotional wave slammed into her, dense and palpable enough that it broke her line of thought and almost brought her to her knees—stopping only because Mrs Hinamori caught her mid-collapse and helped her stand upright. The fear, pain and loneliness coming off whatever was in front of them was overwhelming.
Now the fog was clearing, not because Utau or Ran had done anything to dispel it but because there was a curtain of pain in the air in front of them so thick it could have been cut with a knife, cutting through the fog in the exact same way that-
Ran stopped a couple of metres in front of them-
The door at the end of the corridor looked no different from the ones they'd seen before—crayon drawings of a doorway—but felt deeper, somehow, and there was something at the lower edge of it that she wasn't allowed to see yet, but the crayon was black instead of red, it had been scrawled across the wall in a way that made it seem larger than the rest—maybe just more detailed—though they all had endless detail, so long as she kept looking.
And it dripped, weeping down towards the floor, where the source of the pain was moaning in agony. Almost part of the artwork, then not at all. A child, sobbing loudly enough that it seemed impossible they'd missed her until now.
Ran covered her mouth with a hand. Utau followed suit a second later.
A small girl, etched in perfect clarity. A girl no older than five years old, clad in a dirty red dress. Black hair reaching halfway down her back and tangled by neglect. One of her sleeves was torn off at the shoulder, the other stretched beyond repair and bearing the unsettling imprints of something grabbing hold of it.
Half of a girl. The lower half was a white, smooth blob like a plastic doll's body, though far more organic-looking than any toy Utau had seen. Her legs were... tentacles? No, molten. Shapeless limbs without any identifying features whatsoever, that ended in a dark, oily puddle of shadow. The same darkness dripped from her eyes and her mouth and from beneath her nails, but the rest of her upper half looked completely ordinary—except for the bruises, which she'd missed, and that now were everywhere.
Midori stepped forward with an audible gasp; the child flinched back, whimpering at the noise and burying her face into her hands as she cried—crying until a thin sheet of mist formed over her, thin enough that Utau could see the outlines of her shoulders shaking underneath it. For a moment, it looked normal. Just part of the door, an object, a-
Utau tore the feeling out of herself.
-a girl, eyes shining with unshed tears, and not even desperation.
Then the girl sank into the tar pit, vanishing from sight—but not before Utau caught sight of an expression of utter terror.
Utau dropped to her knees as the mental pressure disappeared. She swallowed hard and tried to catch her breath, taking great gulps of air as her heart pounded in her chest and her nerves jangled with adrenaline. Ran was on the ground next to her in an instant—not Ran, not really, not when she had pink hair instead of brown and her eyes were glittering gold—but Ran nonetheless, though the mask was breaking, a jittery feeling of power reaching out to claw at the door, holding it in place.
Utau clenched her fists around the other girl's hand as she managed to summon enough willpower to whisper: "That was-"
"-Yui," Amu finished for her, looking and feeling equally miserable, like she was on the verge of tears.
Utau yanked her into a hug.
"It'll be fine," she whispered, trying to soothe the guilt in Amu's mind and hold her tight. "We're going to rescue her."
Midori dry-heaved, leaned against the wall. "That was-" she tried, but failed to say anything more.
"Yui," Amu said again, nodding her head. "Some of her."
"That was Yui?" Amu's mother managed after a moment, looking at them in a combination of confusion and horror. "Wasn't she... wasn't she normal, the last time you saw her?"
"She was," said Amu, quietly. She focused for a second. Her hair went brown again.
A loud thud rippled from beyond the door. It wasn't hard to guess what had made the sound.
Midori visibly steeled herself. "Right," she told them, straightening up. "Fine. Let's go."
She looked more shaken than Utau had ever seen her—more shaken than Amu had been when she was in the middle of fighting Hikaru, which was saying something—but she also felt more determined. She hadn't known Yui, not at all, and yet she'd reacted as if she'd seen Amu in that state. Which was also how Utau felt; it was one thing to hear about it, it was another to see it with your own two eyes.
Something thumped against the door. Hard.
Utau jumped. Mrs Hinamori flinched back. Ran momentarily tightened her grip on Utau's hand, then let it go and ran towards the door in a blur of speed.
She tore it open, before Utau could do more than shout: "Wait!"
And there was-
-nothing, on the other side.
No monster knocking on the door; no rooms beyond them filled with children and darkness—just fog and a grey void that sucked at her vision like a black hole. She stepped back, feeling a little faint—in the distance, there was a glint of metal. The door felt like it was sucking them in, even when they didn't move. The blurry darkness shifted inwards at the edges, the slight remaining sheet of mist crystallising into an-
-Abandoned Laboratory-
The words were a title embedded in her mind, ripping into Utau's head with a sensation similar to that of blood, the edges fuzzy and fading like something had torn them out of a ruined book. The edges of the room were hazy with mist and-
-
A bell chimed from somewhere past it, deep inside the room. A gentle sound, like church bells ringing in the distance; the moment it chimed all the hairs on the back of Utau's neck rose up.
Glassware. Beakers and vials and glass tubes running along the floor, some broken and shattered from age or neglect, others looking intact but clouded over with dust and dirt. From the wall came the inconsistent buzz of electrical machinery, powered by God knows what source and seeming to crawl through the apertures. Nothing here could be real. Lights flickered weakly, casting harsh shadows against the floor and walls that danced with every flicker. A green lamp above one of the tables hung from a loose cord that swung in the air with no apparent support, a faint ding audible when it connected with the edge of the desk, and a door led into another room on the right, barely visible through a haze of what might have been smoke or dust or simple age.
Everywhere she looked she saw more detail, the room etched into her vision in detail she couldn't be seeing. The faint trails of dust on the far side of the beakers were plainly visible to her, as well as the pieces of wood and dried-up fabric scattered around the place, tattered by time and decay; in one corner a bucket lay on its side with what looked like old rusty nails sticking out of it—old rags and bloody sheets had been piled on top of it.
None of this was meant to be here. None of it was supposed to exist; none of it belonged here in any sense of the word—none of it belonged in the world—but Utau could see every inch of it with impossible clarity.
Strapped into one of the chairs was a small girl, about five years old at most.
Ran froze, staring at the child's face for a second with a stunned expression, and a rising sense of horror tore through the fringes of Utau's mind as she tried to move, but Utau was transfixed-
-with red-rimmed eyes and an expression that would have looked afraid on an adult, but on a child came across as uncomprehending. Needles and syringes were stabbed into her arms and legs; tubes ran from her body to strange machines lining the wall, or beakers filled with transparent fluid that looked like they might be blood, neither of which had been shown to her a moment before. The girl's long black hair was limp and unkempt; but worst of all, her forehead had been opened up by surgery or claws—a cut running deep into her skull that Utau could only glimpse parts of, and didn't want to see any more than that—the edges ragged with missing flesh, showing signs of infection.
That wasn't an unfamiliar face. It was-
Amu shuddered, taking two stumbling steps backwards and falling over. She'd gone white with shock, Ran recoiling from the sight and leaving Amu exposed again—just in time for Utau to catch her mid-fall.
"Amu!" her mom gasped, bending over and grabbing her daughter's shoulders—her hands were shaking, and Utau felt the horror shift to concern shift to fear in a heartbeat, no longer directed at Amu. Utau followed her line of sight—back to the little girl on the chair—and a rising shadow loomed behind the child's body.
Fog pressed down on the air around them; a presence of sorts that made Utau's teeth rattle. But this time the fog wasn't pressing down on them, but on Yui. She could feel its attention like an invisible hand reaching into her chest and pulling at something deep within her-
-Yui screamed, a small sound that melted the fog from the air surrounding her-
-and the shadow looming behind the child raised a sharp claw to cut through the girl's head in a single motion-
"Yui!" screamed Amu, eyes wide with shock. They had to-
"-get away!" Utau shouted, throwing her hands out in front of them both—drawing on everything she had. More than she had. A kaleidoscope of light and colour burst into existence around them both, blinding and blotting out the fog and the little girl in the same instant. The shadow vanished under her light, and the mist snapped away like a rubber band, retreating a hundred metres down the corridor in the space between two breaths.
The world around them went dark for a moment as Utau sagged back against the wall, her knees buckling under her weight as the world shifted, melting and reforming until it settled on-
The same corridor.
The same door.
A bell tolled in the distance, the sound muffled enough by mist and walls.
The door shook in time to the bell, rattling on its hinges as if something on the other side were trying to break through—though neither Amu nor Utau could tell if it was trying to escape or to drag them back inside. But neither of them could muster up the energy to check; Amu was as white as a sheet, staring at the closed door with wide eyes and shaking hands.
"Is- is that really Yui?" Midori asked, quietly. "The girl from earlier? Why- why is she-" She bit her lip and hugged her daughter tightly, clinging to her with the look—and feel—of someone trying desperately to avoid breaking down entirely. "Oh, Amu."
= = =
Amu isn't good with ghost stories.
You have a few possible choices. "Go home" is technically one of them, and Yui may still be here tomorrow, but none of the three are okay with this. It's an open question, however, what to do about it. Utau has one idea. Amu another. Midori a third.
Perhaps you'll have a fifth?
[ ] Midori: Kill the murderer
- It's the most obvious choice. Someone, or something, is harming a child. Stop them.
- The child might be a ghost of some form.
[ ] Amu: Tear down the place
- Amu has just about had enough.
- Plausibly she can smash it to pieces, maybe without harming what's there of Yui, but what then?
- Maybe she can't. Empathy + Wits + Overgrowth, difficulty 3.
[ ] Utau: That is quite enough
- Utau has just about had enough. This place resonates with a very dark memory she's kept hidden inside, and she thinks she's figured out what she did wrong before
- Similar approach, different character. Same skill check.
[ ] Utau: Ask for help
- This isn't the sort of place to drag a seven-year-old into.
- But Utau is holding the Dumpty Key, and can kind of tell that both Hikaru and Ami are moving in your direction anyway, or at least, if you vote for this then she'll notice.
- Lighting a beacon might be helpful. She'd be less lost then.
- Ami might have ideas.
- Hikaru might as well, even if his resonate with Amu's.
[ ] Write-in
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Baughn
Healing-type writer
- Location
- Dublin
This chapter brought to you by the letters G, O, H, T and S. Thanks go to @ShadowAngelBeta, @Quickshot0, @Nero200 and @kim_bruning.
[X] Utau: Ask for help
Winged One
Not the Simurgh
- Location
- definitely the ground
- Pronouns
- They/Them/It
Yui's Shadow, I presume.
Which would make this action the killing of a mental cognition. Normally a waste of time, but in this case...
That would make this place Yui's nightmares. The skill check is presumably to avoid hurting the whole Yui in the process.
Hm...
[] Midori: Rescue the child, violently.
-[] Killing the one tormenting this image of Yui isn't the main priority in this variant, just an extremely acceptable step in the goal.