{Run.}

"Hey Akane. Your skirt's flipping."

"Hm?" She performs a perfect pirouette. "Enjoying the view, brother dearest?"

{Run, Akane.}

Her wireless earpiece temporarily mutes a longsuffering sigh. "You're not wearing any underwear."

She laughs. "And you're about to send me out onto the battlefield, Haruka. Panties should be the least of your concerns."


{RUN!}

Akane snaps awake. Her bottom doesn't press against the mattress and she instinctively curls into a defensive ball - she's zero-gravitied herself into unexpected places before, like the bathroom or the grand hall or, once last summer, out the window and into the castle moat. Only when she doesn't impact anything gross or hard or sharp or wet does she dare to squeeze an eye open.

Good, still in her bedroom. Is this another breakout? Her superpower doesn't feel like it's out of control… Honestly she doesn't even feel like she's activating it. She cautiously recalibrates her gravitational pull until she alights upon solid ground again.

{They're coming!}

She jumps, trips over her bed, and tumbles head over heels. Her head thuds against the wall and stars burst across her vision, obscuring a fuzzy image that had blipped into her mind the moment she'd made contact with the floor: a naked young girl with flowing purple hair floating in the darkness of space.

Shiori?

Ow, that hurt… Hands wrapped around the pulsing bump, she rolls onto her side and catches a glimpse of the clock across the room.

Crap! Late for class again!

Pants-now she's a university student, she'll never wear a school uniform skirt again, not if she can help it. Random shirt. Light jacket. Kitchen for a poptart. Fashionable pumps at the front door-not walking wear, but the only walk she'll do today is from the door of her classroom to the nearest available desk. Ski goggles. Finally, her keys.

The moment her apartment door is locked, she blasts off from the balcony into the skies above Castle Town.

So focused Akane is on getting to her university before class begins that she almost doesn't notice the obstacle until she nearly collides with it. The ski goggles keep small things - mostly insects - out of her eyes, and she's traveled this path enough to memorize the big things to avoid, like street signs and lights. But this obstacle… this is different. It's a cell phone.

A floating cell phone.

She turns on a dime and skids to a stop before the curiosity. How is it doing that? And so high off the ground too…

A flash of light catches her eye - the reflection of the morning sun off another floating phone. A little farther beyond is a tube of lipstick. A pack of tissues. A fork. A smattering of 100-yen coins. Dozens of tiny items all around her, rising slowly but steadily into the sky. But… how?

She grounds herself in a relatively isolated location as soon as possible. The whispered wonderments of a thousand citizens crushes her the moment she lands and she wants to cry, This isn't me! I can't do this! But the words die in her throat as their eyes burn holes through her back, so she pulls out her cell phone instead.

Mom's phone goes to voicemail. So does Aoi's. Her eyes sting with nervous tears while she dials in Shu's line. He may be busy training to become Castle Town's future king but he's always had a soft spot for her. Maybe he'll…

The number you have dialed is no longer in service.

"Princess Akane…" a nervous boy stammers behind her. She yelps and almost drops her phone. "Could you maybe-"

"I don't know!" she cries. "I-I-I don't know what's wrong! B-But…" She takes a moment to catch her breath. "But as your loyal princess Akane, I promise you I will find out who's doing this and fix it!"

Without waiting for an answer, she rockets straight into the sky, all the way until she's cleared the shortest of skyscrapers, up and up until she's out of earshot of a thousand accusing lips, out of sight of a hundred thousand glares. She alights upon the nearest tower with her phone already dialing Kanade, but in the whispers of the wind she thinks she hears that purple-haired girl again.

{Run.}


Author's Rant

Yo! Inkbender here. I'm mostly on Archive of Our Own (AO3) nowadays; their tagging system is VERY cool. However, AO3 currently doesn't have a Castle Town Dandelion fandom, so back to FFN it is! For the first time in years.

The fandom isn't very large here either, so it's almost a shame I'm about to tarnish such a cute, funny, slice-of-life anime with some pretty dark material. The really intense stuff I'm saving for AO3, since AO3 actually has an Explicit rating in its filters. But WARNINGS for major character death here. No happy endings either. Proceed at your own risk.

This will probably be updated every day. When I've completed the entire story, I'll post it over at AO3 as a one-shot, but include it within a series so I can add all that dirty explicit stuff.