rakuen | Round 1 [beta characters here]

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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."

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Whyyy wasn't he going awaaaay and now he was sitting on the bed, what was she going to do?! The prod managed to get a reaction, though a cringe and her further curling away from him probably wasn't what he had hoped for. After that, a long silence is drawn out after his questions.

Bad dreams? Had it been just a bad dream? It had seemed so real. Mei finally pulled the covers back just enough to peek out from them, wide, teary eyes watching him. The kid looked terrified of him, the way she was staring.

"...y-you aren't going to kill me again, are you?"

"Hey, what kind of question is that?" Gino laughed; he kept his tone flippant and his movements slow as he patted her on the head, ruffling her hair slightly. "I wasn't planning on it."

She didn't look reassured. He paused, "What about, let's see... okay, I promise I won't, if you do the same. Sound good? No killing for either of us!"

A fairly good one, considering what happened. Mei cringed at the pat on her head and almost retreated back under the covers, but she stopped when he kept talking. The girl stared a while longer, then blinked.

"A promise?" No killing for either of them. In actuality, that might be hard to keep with the entire school being obsessed with fighting, but right now? It sounded good to Mei. "A-alright..." She looked down. "I'm s-s... sorrryyyyy!" A flurry of motion followed. Mei went from hidden under all those covers to clinging to Gino and just sobbing away into his shirt. Anything she tried to say after the apology was more or less a jumbled mess of words that made no sense with all that crying.

Grenn wasn't sure how to handle this. She wasn't even sure what she'd meant to do by trying to find Gino (he'd already left the dorm) and Mei (where she found both Gino and Mei in her dorm), but she paused in the already-open doorway and felt awkward.

What do you say to your killers? But they hadn't killed her, had they? Her recollections of the 'dream' are muddled at points, especially when she's talking to... to.. that version of herself. The shadow. The twisted, technology-changed shadow version. But any other shadow is kind of layered above the real person. But she also remembered that the ones who were 'real' in her dream didn't have an overlay. It's like programs layered above each other, one corrupted, the other not.

"... Um. Hey. How bad---" What was she even supposed to say? She hesitantly steered into the room and stared at the bundle of blanket-covered Mei clinging to Gino.
"Dreams are sweet, nightmares not so... But no matter which you had this night, and even if were they real for once; breathe easy, child, we all awaken when the moon is low..." She had no idea how the old poem her parents used to tell their children when they came to them woken from nightmares had popped up just then, but it did.

Even more hesitantly, she stretched out a hand and patted Mei's head.

"Oi..." Gino blinked down at Mei, arms lifting away from her until he slumped a little, huffed and brought them back around her and the bundle of blankets both. What was it with the crying? Molly and Tomoko had been in tears too, and Kallen had been, before she'd turned into their room's mother. He'd mostly wanted to put his fist through a wall. Of course, crying would be a little less self-destructive, but he didn't think it'd have the same level of satisfaction.

But when he absently clenched a fist against Mei's back, it was caught and unfolded again by Grenn, who had somehow managed to arrive unnoticed in the commotion of Mei's sobbing. He started, but let her take that hand and gave her a weak grin as a bonus for the successful sneak attack and weird poem.

"What was that? A kids' song?"

The sobbing subsided, tapering off to just sniffling, and then nothing at all. Mei looks towards Grenn. When did she get here? Not that it mattered. It was good to see she was alright, too. "Th-that's nice," she managed an understandable reply to the poem.

Even though the crying has finally come to an end, Gino's going to have the little girl clinging to him for awhile yet. It's comforting, regardless of who it is. She did let go with one hand, to free it up, and wiped the tears off her face with a sleeve.

"...sorry," she mumbles again, voice somber. "It... it's not like anyone really..." But it had seemed so real. How could it just have been a nightmare? "Is everyone else okay?"

Grenn shrugged at Gino, a bit embarrassed to have recited it herself. She hadn't heard it in years (since she was... what, six?) really...
"... My parents used to, um, recite it to us when we woke from nightmares. I don't know where it's from," Grenn said, still feeling distinctly embarrassed that she'd randomly recited poetry.

"Everyone in my room was." Then she paused, grimaced and took the hand on Mei's head away to rub at her left upper arm. "If you want to consider, uh, mental trauma to be 'okay'."

Well, that was fine. He shifted until he was in less danger of toppling back off the bed, and patted her back, a little awkwardly. His own shoulders still ached from ... what? Something. There were no scars or wounds, he'd checked, but that didn't change anything.

"Same here," he tilted his head at Grenn, one shoulder rolling into a semi-shrug. Did she have the same problem with her arm? "But man, everyone's pretty shaken up."

"Um, but... was it even a nightmare? If everyone remembers it?" Mei still wasn't sure what to make of all of that, besides the obvious 'it was horrible, going to have nightmares forever' part. "Though it couldn't have been real if everyone is alright. I think... everyone died. Why would they do something like that?"

Shaking her head, Grenn frowned.

"Shared dreams aren't dreams... I don't think that was a dream, but what it was then, who knows... There was something it said, my shadow... I don't remember what, but I have a feeling it would explain a lot." She shrugged, a bit helplessly. She'd just have to hope something would jog her memory.

The fingers of her left arm tingled, as if her brain was having trouble being convinced they were there and were rediscovering the nerves... Shaking her hand, Grenn sighed.

"A mass hallucination?" Gino rubbed the back of his neck, fingers tangling in braids loosened from a night's sleep. He tugged at one of them in thought. "I don't know about that. It can't have been real, 'cause none of it matches up."

"Are those even possible?"

Mass hallucinations. Isn't that what people called things they just couldn't explain? Mei watched Gino fuss with his braids and huffed. "You aren't taking care of them right!" Faced with the thoughts of whether or not them all dying was real, the girl grabbed onto the first distraction to come along.

Gino's hair.

Mei finally let go of him and hopped up to her feet. The movement caused her to cringe and double over a bit, but she steadied herself against the knight. Ghhh, her chest. Breath, breath, alright. She straightened up again and reeeeaaached for the braids.

"So, well, if the weapons can hurt, but aren't real weapons, maybe... maybe it was all fake, too? But in the same way the weapons are?"

Edited 2011-02-06 02:38 (UTC)

Hiding her face behind her eyes for a moment, because she really didn't want to face this, but she wasn't sure it was a good idea to ignore it either, she sighed. Hands sliding to the sides slightly to grip her hair, Grenn looked up.

"... Doesn't match up? Do you, or don't you, both of you, remember saving me and killing my shadow?" She felt bad about bringing that up, but at least that wasn't a immediately horrible part of the recollections.

"Huh. Like a hologram? A game?" Gino frowned. At least before he noticed Mei going for his hair, at which point he huffed another laugh, swung his legs onto the bed and rolled over, so he was lying on his front and the back of his head was significantly lower down.

"Yeah, but it doesn't make sense that I remember killing you twice." Matter-of-fact, cheerful. "What's this about a shadow?"

"Hologram?" Mei had heard that word before, but no one had ever stopped to explain what it was. Oh, good, she can reach the braids now! Laying down was the first mistake, because Mei just sat down on his back to go about fixing his hair. At least she's light.

"I remember that, but everything gets kind of muddled after..." She trailed off, her fingers pausing in their task of picking apart the braids, but only briefly.

Grenn shrugged and looked around the room, rubbing one cheek.

"Could be... And I... well. I don't remember everything either, but." But yes. They didn't need to remember everything, now did they? Even just one instance of 'shared' made it just not possible for it to have been a simple dream. Or nightmare, as the case would be.

"... Shadows... I remmeber mine... It was me, but too unlike me to... To be me." Grenn has to stop, because something twisted in her chest, a not-remembered something. She shook her head. "I remember yours... um... Like shadowed overlay. The real you didn't have that..."

Gino rested his chin on his folded hands and let his gaze drop to the spokes of Grenn's wheelchair. His dream hadn't been clear enough to distinguish between the two Grenns, but if he stopped to think about it, he could just about picture the differences. Huh.

"So, what? We all had the same dream?"

"We must have. There was something else, too, at the end..." Mei carefully unsnarled bits of hair as she took the braids apart, then set about re-braiding the first one out of the three. "Do either of you remember someone trying to say something?"

Here, Grenn had to admit defeat; the very end of the dream was muddled at best, overlayed with another, perfectly 'normal' nightmare at worst.

"No... Or... I don't know. There was a lot of garbled voices at the end..." Grenn said with a shrug. She wondered what Mei was thinking of.

"Something about a knight, wasn't it?" He didn't sound too sure, but he definitely remembered some kind of ... well, who knows. "Just like a dream I had before. Wouldn't shut up about the 'story' then either."

"A story that everybody knows..." It sounded like such a mystery. If it hadn't been for the terrible dying part, this could almost be exciting. She finished Gino's next braid and just as she begun the last, one final recollection from the nightmare came back.

This resulted in the knight's hair getting yanked when she tried to flail in outrage without letting go first.

"The announcer! I put a knife through her head and she just got back up! That cheater!"

Grenn coughed, trying to hide the laugh, because while it had all been horrible, Mei's outrage was kind of funny.

"Umm... Yeah, that's, uh... the least of it? Another snort. But what really annoyed her was the way their 'narration' insisted everybody knew the story it was telling, because that was just a lie.

"Huhn. Says everybody knows that story... I can hardly remember a word said after their narration is done..."

Gino's own laugh was cut off by the yank. He winced, unable to sit up from Meipinning but at least able to reach his neck to nurse his hair when she was done trying to pull it out. He rolled his head sideways, resting it on his remaining wrist, and peered at Grenn through his bangs.

"You're friends with those girls, right? Yuki and Sora and the others. Did they ever talk about it?"

"...if I still had my alkahestry, it would've been a pillar through her head," the tiny girl grumbled and got back to finishing the last braid. "Or a statue. I could have dropped a statue on her. Or blew her up." If it sounded like Mei was holding a grudge, that'd be totally correct. She was.

She finished the braid. "There." Now she could look up and add another curious look at Grenn. "Um, but why would Yuki know about the story?"

Grenn turned to Mei first to give some sort of explanation; that seemed easiest.

"Because they come from a version... or the original version, who knows, of the school," Grenn said with a shrug and then tilted her head in thought. "But no, Yuki's not mentioned anything about it, but then, it didn't really come up..."

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