rakuen | Round 1 [beta characters here]

Entry tags:

Round 1 [beta characters here]

And then you woke up and it was all a dream.

Or... was it?

You don't know. The details are fading. Some of it seems as clear as if if had happened minutes ago, whilst the rest is as hazy and vague as a long-lost memory. You remember blood and screams; a girl with a bright smile. Need to get rid of you, someone said. For a little while. Sometimes you were running, fighting, facing dark shadows with red eyes and mocking smiles. Sometimes you were hunting yourself, hurting people, feeling the power of your weapon coursing through you as you headed towards your prey. Sometimes you were watching your friends die, or your family, or your enemies.

Your shadow is you, and you are your shadow, and its voice is all around you.

Free us. Free them.

Static. More images, some you will remember and some you will not.

...but, your shadow whispers, the Demon King always returned. Didn't he?

You are outside, and the sky is blood. The towers glow, humming atonally as a star lights up the sky. The campus blazes with its light; the lines of the symbol span the horizon, and a tiger smiles.

Once, the knight despaired and sought a sage...

The tiger smiles, and the world is consumed in fire. You're falling, falling, and the shadow's voice falls with you.

There is a story everybody knows.

Light streams through the windows of your room. In eight different rooms, in four different buildings, thirty-nine students wake up with a start, and find their campus as picturesque and empty as it was the day before.

The day before? What...

A cheery voice breaks through the fog of confusion, loud over the speaker system.

"Good morning, students! Please be at the lobby by midday for the week's announcements."

Threaded | Flat

Reiko stirred from her sleep and stared up at the ceiling, half in shock. She usually didn't remember her dreams, but this one stood out. So vivid... where it wasn't too blurry to remember. So bizarre.

After a few moments, she sat up and put a hand to her head. But... it had just been a dream, right? And yet somehow, she felt apprehensive about "reporting to the lobby".

The moment he wakes from the nightmare, Kotarou scrambles out of bed. It's unfamiliar, and too big, and there are other people in the room. He wants to find somewhere smaller, somewhere darker, to hide for however long it takes to get rid of the screams and the smell of blood; he's looking for a way out, he finds Oichi instead. Suzaku's there too, still sleeping, but Kotarou remembers him dying, somehow, which is strange and upsetting, and he's going to go over to Ichi. He doesn't see death when he sees her, his half-asleep mind associates her only with safety. Dazed, panicking, he climbs onto the end of her bed, and curls up at her feet.

He sleeps there until the announcement.

She'd never woken up from being dead, but if this was what it felt like, she didn't want to do it again. And she wasn't in the 'hideout'. Jerking upright, Huashi glared around the room, at the still-sleeping bodies in the other beds.

Kotarou!

If she was here, he must be... Amusingly enough (and probably good if there was anyone else up early enough to see the monkey girl dash from one dorm building to another) there was an extra full set of uniform in the drawers beside the bed. Her clothes weren't of much use anymore, so she changed, and then dashed out. But not through the corridors, but out the window and clambered down the side; she had no use for corridors and stairs.

Staring in through the window (we shall hope no one in Black 1-A was awake as of yet...) Huashi was relieved to see he was fine. Sleeping, and fine. She grinned at his curled-up little body and then took herself down the side of the building, and took off for the forest. She needed some greenery about her.

She wished daddy was here.

Grenn woke up to the announcement, grabbing at her left shoulder. The arm was still there. She stared down at her perfectly fine, and attached, arm, and felt dizzy. How...

"Remember this when you push replay!" Remember what exactly? Because there was something she'd forgotten. Not something that had been taken away, just something that was eluding her memory (unfortunately, her/her shadow's memory of, uh... accosting... Yuki were perfectly fine, thank you very much not).

Replay? But this didn't seem like any of the days before... Grabbing her head and trying to think, all that came were vague echoes of spattered blood, of Mei hitting the pillar, and the comment she'd made to Koharu about that the girls from the real Utopia should attempt to hack the system.

"A story everybody knows."

Sora stared up at the ceiling, and tried to stop her body from shaking. That dream... Everyone. Tsuki.

Tsuki.

She felt, vaguely, like she was going to throw up. She knew that she should get up, if only to see if Yuki was alright or to find her friends, but her body wouldn't obey her. Instead, she turned her head. There was Yuki, asleep, with a slight frown. Across the room, Tougyu. Russel, Romeo. All alive, all safe. She let her head roll back, and concentrated on breathing.

Fletcher slowly came to, clutching at his bedsheets and staring up at the ceiling as he recalled the dream.

Running, hiding, attacking someone... He'd shot Molly, he'd tried to shoot Russel, and then...

...and then the part that he somehow knew to be the worst part of it all, that was blurry. Pain, so much pain, but why? Where was it coming from? He groaned and sat up. It was just a dream, right? It had to be.

Sherlock snaps awake as though he has just been electrocuted.

He feels better-rested than he can remember being in a long time; the jumbled events of an unusually incoherent nightmare mingle with his memories of the past few days, flashing through his mind all at once; he pulls his left hand out of the blankets and stares at it, searching for the slightest mark that might corroborate that particular narrative.

He remembers dying. Twice. He remembers every sensory detail of every injury he received on that hellish afternoon. He remembers hearing Tony's voice; there is some confusion as to whether he was the one who spoke it. He remembers a slice of coherent light across his visual field and the smell of charred meat.

All of this takes up the space in his head that would otherwise be reserved for panic at this juncture. He gets out of bed sedately enough; no purpose would be served by bolting from the room.

This wasn't real.

This wasn't real.

Kallen woke up, heart rate through the roof, tears running down the side of her face, her hands clutching at the sheets, her own scream still ringing in her ears. Blue eyes scanned the ceiling and the room furiously. Her throat was hoarse from screaming (soundless and the one from when she woke up, definitely audible). She heard the cheery voice summoning all the students to the lobby. That sound like the girl who delivered the message before. The one who started all this.

Her eyes slammed shut. No, she was dead. And if this was some sort of warped dream, she was supposed to wake up in her bed. At home. She wasn't supposed to be here then and wasn't supposed to be here now. All she could think about was the blood she-- no her shadow-- had spilled. People's blood were on her hands. The shadows didn't have blood, but humans... people... they did.

The teenager turned over and attempted to go back to sleep. If she slept again, maybe she could get out of this 'dream'. At least, it was a nice thought.

There was blood everywhere... it had hurt so much... w-why was.. why would he do that? Why?

And then she was awake, safe and sound, in a bed. Mei clutched at her chest, but she found it whole. No blood, no gaping wound that should be there, but the memory remained. Parts of it were a muddle. There had been something about the announcer and then somewhere in it, she had been dragging someone around. Who that had been, it escaped her, but Mei wouldn't be worried by those. When they had gone to save Grenn and... and...

That stood out in her mind's eye, down to the very last detail.

The girl pulled the blankets back over her and curled up under them, trying to muffle her sobbing from the rest of the dorm room. Just thinking about it, she couldn't stop herself from crying. Her dying was too vivid. It hadn't been a dream. It hadn't, but, oh, how she wishes it were, so it could just fade away like the rest.

Threaded | Flat

BLACK 1-B

Black 1-A

no subject

White 1-A

RED 1-A

PALE 1-A

WHITE 1-B

PALE 1-B

RED 1-B