I'm back.

I won't be able to update as fast as I used to. I have a lot of academic work to do over the next few months.

I won't bore you with explanations of why I've been gone so long. Instead I'll just get straight down to what we're all here for. I hope you enjoy what I've got in store this time.

It feels damn good to be back.

------------------------------------------------

'A Different Place' (Title subject to revision)


>New Game
Continue
Options
Extras

Loading ...

Good luck, Anonymous.

----------------------------------------------


She haunts your dreams. You laughed when you first thought of that way of describing it. So cliché, so trite. You don't laugh much anymore. It's been nearly two years now, but still, every night, without, fail, there she is. At first it was amusing, a reoccurring dream about a beautiful woman? No problem, least of your worries in life. At least you get to see something while you sleep that you'd never have any chance of in reality. Then over time you came to realise it wasn't reoccurring, the dreams were different every night. The differences were small in the beginning. She would have a different expression, move an arm or tilt her head. If anything, the reliability of it became kind of comforting.

The drudgery of life, college, work, loneliness and boredom, carried on, but every night you would lie down and there she would be, waiting for you just beyond the wall of sleep.

She's beautiful. You can't help think that even now. She's so perfect, or near-perfect, that you couldn't think of her as anything but a construct of your own mind. No real person is like that, with everything just so. The way her long hair hangs down her back in a wave of pale gold. The smoothness of her unblemished skin. Her delicate, responsive, intelligent features. The way her eyes seem so alert, so full of mischief and vitality. Her dress, a strange mixture of Western and Eastern, purple and white, hugging her figure down the front but fanning out at the sides. The way she smiled at you for the first time, twirling that parasol over her shoulder. You became more and more captivated as the weeks turned into months.

Then one night, she spoke.
"Hello."
Even her voice, crystal clear and so soft. You could barely reply, even though you knew she was just a dream.
"Who are you?" You asked, all those months ago.
"I'm a monster." She said, giggling behind her hand.
"You don't look like one." You said with near rapture.
"Looks are deceiving." She said, with that amused lilt in her voice you would come to know so well.

She never stopped talking. You tried to cover your ears, to run away, to make her stop as she forced the secrets of the fabric of reality into your too-small skull. But wherever you turned away, she was always there, always a layer of consciousness deeper than the one you just left, speaking of impossible things in her soft, calming voice. Her 'lessons' would always leave you screaming as you awoke, groping for something to stem the bleeding from your nose, ears and eyes. Things running through your head you barely understood, the edges of your vision flickering with the fruits of her teaching. Sleeping pills made no difference, she was inside that chemical oblivion as well. Fighting sleep for days just meant more time with her when you finally gave in.
Begging worked. She would change the nature of her lessons for a short while, teaching you abstract mathematics, biochemistry, quantum physics, things that would have made you rich if you could have made any sense of them upon awakening, if you could somehow fight the ever-present tiredness, the constant bleeding and the headaches.

But she always went back to her principal topic.

"What's your name?" You once asked her. "You tell me everything else, why can't I know about you?"
"You can call me Yukari~" She said, smiling sweetly.

---

Stumbling from your bedroom, reeking with sweat, you make it to the table before you collapse into a chair. You just lie there for a long time, eyes closed, savouring release from sleep once more. Eventually you summon the strength to wipe your face with your sleeve, which comes away covered with the familiar bloodstains. That woman's ... Yukari's latest lesson tugs at your thoughts, threatening to make a wave of nausea rise up inside. You force the ideas away, down inside with the rest of her teaching.

Slowly, achingly, you make yourself some toast. Sitting at the table with a large glass of water, you wait for your digestion to settle before you pop open the tub of pills, extracting a whole bunch of them. Need to keep up iron intake with all the blood you lose every morning. You force them down.
A few birds are singing outside, in the soft morning sunlight, accompanied by the ever-present sound of car engines. This city never sleeps, it doesn't have to. You open the window and take a deep breath, trying to resist the impulse to vomit.

You're probably schizophrenic, at the very least you're seriously disturbed. These days you feel like you're not going to last much longer, even though you long since ...

[ ] Went insane anyway.
[ ] Blocked it out as best you could. It's not real, so you tried to live a normal life.
[ ] Submitted to her teaching. After all, who could resist both her and whatever power she was offering?
[ ] Fought against her. Get out of my mind, Yukari!