Prologue: A Distant Shore
Hi everybody, and welcome to the story! I'm very sorry to have started with Severance-style temporal screwery in the prologue. Um... All the non-italicized parts are more-or-less simultaneous, with every one focusing on a different character. And the italicized bits are happening before, during and, after. Aagh. That wasn't a very helpful explanation, was it? I promise the fic will be structured less confusingly in the future.
Disclaimer: Tokyo Mew Mew and all its canon characters belong to Rei Yoshida and Mia Ikumi. OCs belong to their respective owners, since this a collaborative story, and most of the OCs are not mine. I'll give more specific credit whenever an OC gets introduced for real.
Dedication: This chapter is dedicated to everyone who didn't bug me to get this started. The rest of you? Are kinda jerks. XD Kidding, of course, but seriously, a big thanks to the pressure-free readers.
Now, there is a gash in the sky over Chicago. Most cannot see it, and those who can dismiss it as a strange weather pattern, a mirage, some astrological oddity; but it is there. At times it seems, to those who can see it, to be just another shade of sky, a little more lavender than usual, perhaps, but nothing too out of the ordinary. At others, it is a malignant thing, like a cancerous raincloud, and it stains everything it touches.
o()o
Dr. Ryou Shirogane stared out his window. It was no accident that he was here, not genetic luck that let him see the fog. He didn't dare sleep in this weather, not when the wound in the sky was searching for him and others like him. Running a tired hand through his silver-gold hair, the scientist sat in silent vigil, remembering those (both living and dead) who had borne witness the last time the sky had rent itself asunder and praying for those who would see it this cycle. He would have to do it tomorrow; the hole in the sky was growing. He probably shouldn't even have waited this long.
o()o
Oxygen was a memory, and her life was flashing before her eyes. Every so often, her head broke through the surf, and she took great gasping breaths, pulling in as much water as air, but those were becoming less and less frequent as the surface fell farther away. She tried to swim, to push herself back up toward the sky and life, but her strokes were weak, and she couldn't tell if her failing vision was due to the darkling ocean water or a lack of oxygen to her brain, though her lungs burned from the strain. Her struggles became more pathetic, and she continued her slow descent.
o()o
At night, the tear breathes—or bleeds, for it's as much a wound as it is a mouth—silver mist, invisible even to most of the humans who can see the tear at all. If you were looking outside at just the right moment—if you could see—you would witness a cloud of diamonds descend upon the street and send forth questing tendrils to search the urban night, touching and tasting all that nocturnal Chicago has to offer.
o()o
The room was getting smaller, bit by tiny bit. It wasn't shrinking at a rate that she could perceive, but nonetheless, she knew that the blank walls were slowly closing in on her. There was no door, no indication of how she got into the room in the first place. And that means there was no way out. She glanced suspiciously from wall to wall, her brown eyes darting faster and faster as the breath caught in her lungs. She wanted to scream, but no sound came out when she opened her mouth. The white walls were in closer now, moving faster, as if they were confident that the brown-haired girl couldn't do a thing to stop them. Soon, she barely had a place to stand, and the walls were pressing in like an insistent lover. It felt like all the air had gone out of the world.
o()o
It was lunchtime, and she'd brought soup from home. She unscrewed the lid of her plaid thermos, set it on the table, and poured some chicken 'n' stars into her bowl. Instead of weak yellow broth, though, tiny brown spiders poured from the thermos, overflowing the bowl and scurrying toward her. She screamec and fell backwards out of her chair. The spiders just kept coming from her thermos, far more than the little cylinder should have been able to hold. Throughout the rest of the cafeteria, lunch went on as usual. No one noticed as the ocean of tiny spiders swallowed her up, every inch of her pale skin submerged beneath skittering legs and tiny, hungry jaws.
o()o
Elsewhere in the city, people are asleep, of course. Wisps of liquid silver drift in through open windows this warm night, and squeeze between the cracks in the windowsills of those who prefer to separate themselves from the noises of the night-city. The mist comes in, nonetheless, curling around sleeping heads like an inquisitive octopus. In most slumbering minds, it finds nothing that could threaten it, but there are a few that could present real danger. The fog is mindless; it doesn't know how it can tell, or why these minds are a threat, but it reacts nonetheless, in the only way it knows how.
o()o
He couldn't see who was standing above him. There was a bright light shining down from the ceiling, so the person—he couldn't even guess a gender—bending over him was just a black silhouette, marred by the occasional flash of silver and red. He was lying in his bed, unrestrained, but he couldn't move, couldn't even cry out as the silhouette ran a knife along the flesh left bare by his t-shirt and boxers. Unbidden, his eyes teared up, but there was nothing he could do about that, either. The pain was searing, and while he couldn't lift his head to see his wounds, the brilliant scarlet that stained his torturer's hands and blade, much starker than it should have been given the lighting, told him everything. He could feel the silhouette smile, somehow, and he knew he was going to bear the scars of this encounter for a long time.
o()o
A blonde-haired girl woke with a start. The hospital was quiet aside from the beeping of machines. She stretched awkwardly, her neck and back sore from falling asleep in an uncomfortable hospital chair. Instinctively, the teen disliked the hospital's smell, cold and antiseptic, nothing like the warm familiarity of her home. Her wide russet eyes blinked once, twice, before the panic set in. She didn't remember coming here, but she knew what being here meant. It took a couple of false starts before her cramped legs let her stand up, but she dashed to the hospital bed as soon as she was able. Her grandmother lay there, looking too thin and too pale. The old woman's eyes flickered open, slowly, and she looked up into her granddaughter's eyes.
"I'm dying," she said quietly, her voice rusty and distant. The blonde girl grabbed her old, veiny hand, crying unashamedly. "I'm dying," the old woman continued, " and it's all your fault." Her eyes closed again, for the last time.
o()o
Ryou's prayers do little good for the handful of teenagers the silver mist has latched onto. Their rooms, to an observer, would be beautiful: shining, shimmering air making the mundane bedrooms into magical fairylands. That's an accurate idea, more or less, but the fair folk aren't kind to the young humans lost in the mist, small silver-tinged outlines breathing steadily on beds.
o()o
For a moment, she wasn't sure why all she could see was other people's legs, before she realized that she was a child. She twisted thick black hair around her finger as she looked back and fourth dazedly, wondering where she was and where her parents were. Suddenly, the sea of legs started surging forward, and the little Hispanic girl was pushed along with the current. She saw, through a forest of pants, flames devouring some sort of building, which was what everyone was staring at. There were cries for help emanating from inside the inferno. The little girl's first instinct was to try to help, so she pushed to the front of the crowd, wanting to race into the building and save whoever's screaming inside, but strong arms held her back. A fireman stood in front of her, forbidding her from entering.
"You don't wanna go in there, honey," he told her, his lips never moving. "There's nothing you can do, anyway." She struggled, but he was much too strong for her. "Stop that, you'll just be in the way," he warned, but no one else was doing anything and the girl had never felt so helpless in her entire life.
o()o
The world was an abyss. There was no light at all, and he couldn't even be sure he still had a body. It felt like he was standing on something solid, but there was no way to tell for sure. "Hello?" he called, uncertain if he wanted to risk being heard by anything that could live in a place like this. But even contact with something scary would be better than this yawning emptiness, this blackness pressing heavily on his open eyes, so he persisted. "Hey! Is anyone there?" He felt movement behind him and whirled around, his heart pounding painfully in his chest. For a moment, he could swear he saw red eyes and a humanoid figure, darker even than the starless night that surrounds him. But the figure disappeared as soon as he saw it. Somehow, the darkness was worse now that he knew that he wasn't alone.
o()o
The fog watches them, eyeless and consciousness, from inside their bodies, as the slow rise and fall of their chests draws itself into them, like they were breathing in smoke. On its own, the fog has no way to interpret the images it finds in their terrified brains, but there are eyes and minds behind it, just as cold and alien, and the fog's masters are pleased by what they see.