Author note: This is testing the waters, so to speak. To see if anyone's interested. I have one chapter of this (aside from this prologue) written. Which I'll like as not upload pretty soon. Like I said, just to see how people react. And, uh, anyone who's waiting for the next installment of my Harry Potter
fic...er...yeah, I'm totally still working on that? I just have seriously bad writer's block for that right now. Sorry. Apologies muchly. Really.
Prologue - Premonition
Help us.
Motoko woke with a start, momentarily disoriented by the oddness of her dream. She sat up, her blanket pooling around her waist, and looked around her room. Everything was as it should be, but Motoko could not shake the feeling that something just wasn't right. She closed her eyes, shaking her head once, and then stood. She left her room quietly, the time being well after midnight, and made her way to the balcony where she trained.
As she leaned against the railing, eyes closed and the cool night breeze blowing through her hair, she attempted to piece together the images and fragments of thoughts left behind by the peculiar dream.
She'd been suspended in some sort of multicolored space, seemingly floating in nothingness yet with the sensation of standing firmly on a solid surface. As she looked around, she had been joined by three... "presences". Motoko could think of no other word to describe them. They had been shaped vaguely humanoid, but were definitely feminine, that much had been easy to discern. Their "bodies" gave off and ethereal glow that masked their "faces".
For what seemed like an eternity, the four of them were frozen in place. The three presences in front of Motoko, one directly, and the other two each slightly to either side.
Motoko wanted to speak, to ask what was happening, but could not find her voice to do so. Anything that would be said then, it seemed, would be spoken by the presences. And they did speak, and their voices had been one of the most beautiful things Motoko had ever heard. The words were in a language she could not understand, but she nonetheless knew what was being said.
He needs your help.
All of you.
We need you.
Please...
Help us.
At that point, the glow surrounding their bodies took on individual colors: red in the middle, green to her right, and blue to her left. There had been a flash, and a glimpse of some kind of geometric shape followed by a view of a vast open plain. Then Motoko had awoken.
Now, out on the balcony in her nightlothes in the middle of the night, Motoko was wondering what it meant. Who were those...presences? Who was the "he" that they had mentioned? Keitaro? And why did they, whoever "they" were, need her help?
Motoko shook her head again, The only explanation she could come up with was that maybe she had eaten something odd, or her subonscious was picking up things from watching television or conversations she'd had. Either way, she needed to get back to sleep.
Considering Su was showcasing some kind of new invention in the morning, Motoko figured she was going to need all the sleep she could get.