What is Reality?

What kind of character would I be?

I sat, pondering this dilemna, notepad spread out in front of me, blankly inviting. My pencil tapped rhythmically against my skull.

"Hmm…."

Hair color. Purple is kinda cool, but overdone probably….blue? Green is my favorite, but…I kicked my desk, banishing indecision by scrawling boldly over the page. Purple it is! Just because it'd been done too many times doesn't mean it can't be done right… right?

Glasses were tempting, just for a bit of spice, not to mention true to the original, but seemed rather impractical if my character was going to be seeing combat- which she would. Eventually.

Ink spread smoothly from one letter to the next, quick and sloppy, but beautiful in efficiency and energy.

No Mary Sues!

I underlined it for good measure, and nodded. Of course my character would have the potential to run with the big dogs, eventually, but just like Killua and Gon, she'd need hard work to get there! Not to mention motivation, like Kurapika had. A real emotional investment. I nodded again unconsciously. That was always better and came off more honest. Great power and ability comes from need, not simply from being awesome. Maybe she's a hunter already, but like the Pokkle character, she more or less ended up getting lucky in qualifying.

Background.

Ugh, the worst! Everything is cliche. Somebody died? Poor you! You have to avenge them! And regardless you can't have two Kurapikas in one universe; making an extra, female version would be lame. Assassin? Way too overt, plus totally not 'me' at all. I couldn't harm a fly! Well, at least not for the first two minutes of it buzzing around. After the third I get pissed, and all bets are off.

Purple hair, eyes…? Could make them orange, related to Hisoka somehow…. Would he have molested me or Nen-raped me when I was younger…? too creepy to contemplate.

*yawn*

Hisoka's rape-daughter?

That begs the question of whether Hisoka even has actual sex (not to mention what gender he'd have sex with...). Or does he just kill people and do unmentionable things on or around their corpses? Probably best for one's mental health not to think about it further…

I started chuckling when I imagined someone asking that question of the magician in question. Too bad that dialogue would never make it into the anime.

Way off topic.

A picture starts to form, of a somewhat wide, fine featured face with a pert nose and mouth, and large, bright eyes, with slanted brows and lids that lower to half mast when she's being tricky. Pale peach skin perhaps? I usuallly go for darker or bronze, but pale plus purple might be more striking. Grey eyes? Would probably wash her out too much… maybe brown like Gon's, but a warmer, redder brown, instead of clear amber...

Thus passed a pleasant Friday evening after school, hiding upstairs in my room from my variously noisy and annoying family, buried nose deep in what anyone semi-educated would call otaku nonsense. Was fanfiction more, or less nerdy, I wondered?

Perhaps another question best left unanswered.

Maybe going the Chimera Ant route would be better than anything Hisoka related. After all, there were dozens of squadron leaders and the like that left to parts unknown, currently unaccounted for in the Hunter universe. I always have been partial to the possible 'good side' of Meruem, the hinted potential the Ants had to become more human, more compassionate. Maybe …?

Ahh pleasant thoughts. A smile graced my lips, and settled. And all weekend to dream, and daydream, about them! Forget homework… there was always next week to turn it in, late…

My pen slipped slowly from my grasp, and I let the cooling sensation slide gradually between my fingers, idle. I could stay awake, but who wanted to? When one could dream so much faster than one could write...

I woke up to thunder. No, screaming. Disoriented, I jerked backwards- swearing that I had just dozed off a minute ago, and- wait.

I stared down at my hands. Were they glowing?

Dazed, I kept right on staring, even though there was something distinctly chaotic going on in the background.

It was lovely- light violet light was pouring off my hands in smoky wisps and clumps, almost seeming to react to my attention. It seemed odd though- or rather, the hand beneath the glowing cloud was.

Before I could peer closer, something slammed into me, knocking my breath right out of my lungs and I was sent to the ground, crushed beneath a massive weight.

When my senses stopped reeling quite so much, though my ears were still ringing with a high pitched whine, I realized it wasn't a massive weight- it was a hand, planted on my sternum, and someone was kneeling over me, ostensibly shouting, from the movement of their mouth and the expression on their face, but my ears were still deafened too much to tell.

The look that was briefly angled down at me could only be described as a look one gets from a parental unit, multiplied tenfold. It said:

You are a problem, but I'll deal with you fairly despite that. Somehow.

His lips were forming a string of words, but try as I might I couldn't lip-read, and my ears were still nonfunctional, and above and beyond this I was absolutely and completely confused.

First things first. Drips of scarlet hair hung in myriad strands from a startling face, overpowered by two exceptionally large and intense mauve eyes and lips that were full and large- and still moving. All I could think about was how sad it was this girl didn't know how to pout with those lips- they'd be perfect for it- but something tells me that's not an expression this person has in their repertoire. Or ever will have.

My attention is abruptly redirected by a short pound on my sternum and my semi recovered breath being expelled involuntarily in a 'whoosh.'

"...even paying attention to me? Whatever you're doing here, forget it and focus on your aura. Don't let it keep escaping! How long have you been like this?"

Her voice sounded soft, but cut through my skull like a knife.

Aura?

I looked dumbly at my limbs again, and still had that strange feeling of oddness pricking at the backs of my eyes; but instead I focused on the lovely mist-smoke.

"My aura?"

Whatever the girl heard in my tone must not have pleased her, for her eyes narrowed, intensifed, and I was now bearing the full brunt of her stare-down, high above me with her hand still planted on my chest.

Hmm….that should be bothering me more than it is… I noted idly. I felt a little weird. Like this wasn't really my body at all, yet the sensations that occasionally shocked through it told me loudly otherwise.

"FOCUS!"

"Right!" I said hastily, trying to appease her. Even if she and everything else around me was a total non sequitur, this girl clearly meant business.

"Better," she said. "Now, I'm going to let you go, but don't try to get up. Focus on keeping your aura inside your body. Close your eyes. Imagine that the life force that is now escaping from you upward, uncontrolled, is diverted: curving around your head, around your body."

I was listening as best I could, but honestly I was feeling more confused and giddy than ever. Maybe a little light-headed, even. That was probably bad. Something told me it was bad.

Abruptly those unnerving lilac eyes snapped into place in my brain.

Kite. Chimera Ant Kite, as in the ex (current?) Hunter friend of Ging, father of Gon, friend of Killua...etc etc. In front of me, telling me to control my aura, but I was increasingly more lightheaded-

which probably meant that I was going to die, unless I listened to him.

Her?

I shook it off.

"If you don't want to die, you need to do this," Kite was saying flatly. It was really eerie, how strange those eyes were in her face. "What is your name?"

"...I don't know," I whispered, feeling my own eyes widen. I knew this was all unreal, that I had a name back where things were real, but I just then realized that I had no idea what it was.

"Then, I'll call you 'stupid,'" said Kite calmly, and I blinked as I recognized the word 'baka' and 'stupid' simultaneously. We were speaking Japanese?

"You need to keep focusing. If imagining blood inside your body doesn't work, picture something else. Wind, or air through ventilation shafts. Water through a canal. But you need to recognize and control the flow of your aura- from what I can tell you have been emitting life force at a dangerous rate. You need to keep what is left inside your body."

"Okay," I said, in a small voice.

It was harder than it'd looked, back when I was just watching the show. Then again maybe they weren't kidding when they said Gon and Killua were one in ten million talents. But death is a good motivator. Even if I was in some sort of weird dream, I'd rather not experience what it was like to die.

This was more real than any dream, though. I could see everything- feel everything. Feel the warm-cool wisps of my life force as they curled and smoked and made lovely patterns before seeping into the night; see the slightly-odd shapes of Kite's face and the trees, realizing now that the difference was that I was seeing a world in anime form.

Aura. I took a breath. I could feel it; it was soft and sweetly moist, like dew or cool fog. I focused on bringing one curl back towards me, and was totally ignored: it vanished into the night.

"Close your eyes," intervened Kite. "Seeing will only distract you."

Obediently I closed them, fighting against the immediate wave of comfortable exhaustion. Flow, huh? Canals, blood vessels, air ducts… I imagined them, one by one, the endless cycle the blood water and air took through their paths, permanently there, forever recycled. Nothing got away. I suppose that's why they favor blood as the best analogy, since its the most direct mirror.

"Better," the strange voice murmured, above me. "Focus harder."

Harder? How could one focus harder? I could try going crosseyed, if that-

"Focus!"

The sharpness of the tone made me jump, and shattered my both focus and composure before I quickly tried to piece both together. Cycling, recycling, I chanted, picturing the micropyles and diagrams I remembered. Out of the heart, left arm, back, left leg, back, right leg, back, right arm, back. Again and again and again…

I felt like wilting by the time I finally heard Kite speak again, distant. He might've said, "Good," in an almost kind tone. I'm not sure, because I was out again- having just enough time to wonder, semi conscious, where I would wake up.

For kicks and shiggles, but also because I not only just finished HunterxHunter to the last available anime episode, but scanned through endless lists of fanfiction pages til my eyes bled... and found depressingly few readable stories out there. Over eighty percent of writers in this 'dom seem to not know the difference between their and there, much less how to string the rest of the English language together into a story. Not to mention the issue of what these "stories" consist of, generally speaking...

so yea, I'm Hunter starved. And so this is might be considered a pretty cliche and self serving plot choice, taking "yourself" and dumping him/her into the world, but I guess part of me just wants to see it done right. And also a few of the rare readable stories I've found included this form, so I'm more than a little inspired by them at the moment.

My other, more serious HunterX project may never be born; its complex and serious and I want it to be a tribute to the mastermind of the series (if ever I set out to actually make it).

This one's just for fun. So I hope you enjoy it too! And while we out of necessity have to start with the 'OC' if one could call it that, main characters and plot will show up in due time, and take over the story completely.

(Updates not promised. As said, this is for fun only.)

~WanderLost~