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[ENTER THE PALACE]
[You find yourself with a sensation like floating in water.]
[Above, the sky is dark. You can occasionally see things shifting, like gusts of wind, or perhaps waves of water. Is it…even a sky above you? Or is it some kind of giant ocean? Whatever it is, you can’t make it out very well. All around you, you appear to be floating in what appears to be water. It looks like a great, wide ocean of…space in every direction around you, with stars and lights twinkling in the distance. It looks like water and feels like water, but it doesn’t make you wet. You can reach your hand into it and pull some out, the purple and violet water and the tiny points of light inside it will even rest in your hands if you cup them to carry it, but once you’re not trying to hold it anymore, it’ll flow off of you, not a single drop remaining behind. You feel something similar if you go underneath the surface. The “water” doesn’t touch your eyes, mouth or nose when give the chance, it merely drifts around you, allowing you to breathe and see unabated. And you can see for a great distance, the twinkling stars illuminating the ocean of space all around you. Though perhaps less dark and empty, it feels every bit as vast as the sky above. You feel like you could swim forever and never reach the edge.]
[It’s quiet, here, with little noise around you but the starry ocean’s waves crashing back into its surface. It’s peaceful. In another situation, it might even be comfortable.]
[Above, the sky is dark. You can occasionally see things shifting, like gusts of wind, or perhaps waves of water. Is it…even a sky above you? Or is it some kind of giant ocean? Whatever it is, you can’t make it out very well. All around you, you appear to be floating in what appears to be water. It looks like a great, wide ocean of…space in every direction around you, with stars and lights twinkling in the distance. It looks like water and feels like water, but it doesn’t make you wet. You can reach your hand into it and pull some out, the purple and violet water and the tiny points of light inside it will even rest in your hands if you cup them to carry it, but once you’re not trying to hold it anymore, it’ll flow off of you, not a single drop remaining behind. You feel something similar if you go underneath the surface. The “water” doesn’t touch your eyes, mouth or nose when give the chance, it merely drifts around you, allowing you to breathe and see unabated. And you can see for a great distance, the twinkling stars illuminating the ocean of space all around you. Though perhaps less dark and empty, it feels every bit as vast as the sky above. You feel like you could swim forever and never reach the edge.]
[It’s quiet, here, with little noise around you but the starry ocean’s waves crashing back into its surface. It’s peaceful. In another situation, it might even be comfortable.]
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Well.
Okay. He reaches for the door handle properly, to see if that door will open. ]
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[Your hand is on the handle of the door, pulling it closed. You were in such a hurry to leave the house that you almost forgot to close the door behind you. You take one last look at the cabin as you take a couple steps back from it, then you look at the other similar cabins nearby. Then you turn and run, as fast as your small legs will carry you, your feet kicking up dust on the dirt ground beneath you.]
...
[You’re standing in front of the door to the temple. You swallow once, look down at your hands and then you push the door open, slipping inside. You walk past the wide tables that everybody sits at for meals and up to a curtain dividing the common area from the rest of the temple.]
...
What are you doing here?
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Your hand slowly reaches out for it. Then hesitates. Then hesitates.
Instead of grabbing it, you lightly touch two fingers to the top of it. You feel a pulse coming off of it.
A second later, you’re taking it in your hand and moving the curtain back into place.]
Oh, I get it. She brought you here.
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Too bad for you….
[You’ve pulled yourself into a sitting position. You see her standing above you, her face spread into a wide, sadistic grin. She holds up the weapon in her hand and plunges it down towards you.]
done
[You’re Nessa Houghton, staring up at your cousin as she stabs you in the chest.]
[You’re Minato Arisato, staring up at a white-haired young woman as she stabs you in the stomach.]
[The last thing you see before you lose consciousness is the grin on her face.]
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He's still reeling from the sensory overload of everything he just saw--(felt, experienced?)--and then there's the shooting pain of being stabbed right in the gut.
It's not the first time, which is really saying something about his life, but that doesn't make it any more enjoyable.
And then, there's nothing as he falls unconscious. ]
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[…]
[…]
[…]
[CH-THUNK]
[You feel a jolt run through your entire body, jarring you awake and making you take in a sudden, deep breath and sit up straight. Immediately followed by falling back down. You once again feel like you’re floating in water.]
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[Your vision is blurry, but gradually returning to you. If you have glasses, they’re being held out to you. One way or the other, your vision clears up and you can see a woman standing above you, arms crossed, glaring down at you…]
[With a pair of glowing yellow eyes.]
Don’t force yourself to get up too quickly. Your body is still recovering.
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Honestly, he is willing to just lie here until his body stops protesting, but he's still squinting and trying to figure this out. ]
... Nessa-san...?
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That's my name, don't wear it out.
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... Who was that white-haired person...?
... Oh. Thanks for helping me, by the way.
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She's a real peach, ain't she?
[She rubs her head.]
Well, don't thank me too much. I had to work pretty fast and loose for a few minutes there...
[She points at his chest. Whatever he was wearing has been pulled open or outright discarded (well, neatly folded and placed a short distance away). There’s no wound on his chest, but where he was attacked…
…there’s now a small glass sphere, embedded in his chest. Looking at the stars twinkling inside it, it may be a familiar sight to him, but…the one he saw before, in the memory, was purple. This one is a faded white-gray color.]
I have to admit, it was a bit of a rush job, but, well. You were bleeding all over the place, so I skipped the heated seats and the seatbelt covers.
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What... is it?
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Or, at least, it's a facsimile of it.
Normally, the real thing is...
[She pulls down at her collar, revealing a bit of her chest. Right at the same point where the glass bubble is embedded in Minato's chest, there's a hole in hers.]
Right here.
And you just got the lived experience of why that is. The one I put inside you is a copy I managed to cobble together to stabilize you.
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Okay. So far he's following, but also-- ]
What happened to yours, then? Are you okay without it?
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I think your sight should be fully coming back by now. You might want to take a look around.
[By now, Minato's strength will have returned enough that he can start to move and his vision will have returned to the point that he can look around and take in his surroundings. He's floating in a small pool of the starry water...in the middle of the palace's courtyard. Stone floor surrounds the pool he's in and there are paths leading from the center of the courtyard, going off in different directions.]
[And the state of the palace's courtyard is not very good, to say the least. It's badly damaged, pictures and portraits line the walls, but they're torn, faded, turned over. Statues are broken into pieces. The floor, walls and ceiling all have chunks missing, there's scorch marks, blade marks....it looks like a tornado and a bomb got into a fight in here.]
[So that's probably a "no" on the "are you okay" front.]
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... Okay. I see.
What do I have to do to help?
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[That is a...very sudden injection of bitterness into her tone.]
You know what happens when you let a Nightmare run wild and you live in a realm between dreams and reality? This. And every night that moppet has had herself an awful little dream about Esmau has just made her stronger in here and now she’s trying to tear the whole bloody place apart.
You’re the ones who encouraged this nonsense by befriending that fake instead of bringing me back and you only started giving a damn about it when she was the one who started passing out in front of you, so you're damn straight I expect you to help sort this mess out.
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... I'll do everything I can, of course.
But--what do you mean? "That fake"...?
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She's a fake, you dolt. The real me, me, died during one of the Warden's tasks and you all have been having a merry little time with a photocopy while I've been rotting in my own subconscious. Thanks for that.
The exception of course being that time I got to be a skeleton.
[Oh yeah, Nessa mentioned something like that, didn't she....]
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... I think I understand what you mean, but... I thought that the you we've been talking with is your younger self.
Isn't she still you, then...?
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Is that not the case...?
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I can't, with this. You people are all unbearably naïve.
[She reaches a hand in and grabs his arm, helping to pull him out of the pool.]
If I didn't need your help, I'd be punching you in the nose right now. Just get out of there and I'll explain how this works.
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