In which various 'somethings' trouble Nemurin...
Something in Nemurin was slipping, sinking away.
The 'what' of that was evading her, even now; but she could feel it with all certainty. It was like the nearing of a deadline as something fleeting yet persistent nagged the back of your mind in a constant loop, asserting over and over that something had been forgotten, all while leaving out the major matter of what it was in the first place. An emptiness drifted and dropped through Nemurin's whole form, the pristine, ethereal glimmer of her Magical Girl form seeming to fade like beauty with age. Her hold over the Dream World, that which once was so firm in her grasp had loosened, slowly trickling like sweat down her fingers, leaving behind the promise that it would dart past the point of her fingertips and into the void, just as her real body had rotted away to nothing and now lay in a grave in Japan. Even if her unseen hands still held onto what she had been given, all for dear life, the precision that Magical Girls were gifted by the game that had once led her here was not as certain anymore. What it was that changed about the world Nemurin knew, she did not quite know, and if she were to admit it, it exhausted her beyond description, even when she tried to turn her thoughts towards something worth a smile and a laugh. A pleasant dream, a wish, a song of joy from the hearts of the fulfilled; none of them could rid her mind of the perpetual nagging, and she had half a mind to declare it even more of an irritation than Fav, whose voice had been silenced. Though she wouldn't voice if he deserved it or not, she would say that she had not found many surprises in her heart when Ripple's dreams one day revealed that he had been broken into pieces by her. It was the least he asked for by not telling them about the fact that they would all die, that he wanted them all to kill each other in the end.
Bittersweet satisfaction flooded her heart once again, as it had many a time since the Magical Girl Raising Project. Strange as it might be, Nemurin was at least glad she lost to the game of Magical Candies as opposed to the game of death, as many of the others had. But...an anvil of guilt still tugged her heart downwards into spirals sometimes. She remembered the girl, the girl who wanted to be a princess. Never did she know that she would be willing to do so much to take a throne...
But nowadays, Nemurin did what she could to think of other things. Here, there was hardly much of anything she could do about what had happened, like it or not, even if she wished there was. And yet, just when she had found her mind coming to a stand-still and bowing in relative acceptance of the events that had happened - two years ago, she believed - here was something else storming in to throw her off her cloud of calmness and into a puddle of tiredness, the type of tiredness that made you want to lie your head atop your pillow and not move off of it for a day or two. Even the clouds, though still a soft pearly white and with cushioning like cotton candy, didn't seem to burst out with as much fluff as she was used to. The bite that they held didn't taste quite as sweet as it exploded against your tongue. A sofa drifted across the plain between dreams and reality now, and there atop of it was Nemurin. Her long blonde and pink twin tails drifted lazily down the surface, hanging above the edge of the boundary's detritus, swinging to the beat of an invisible breeze. The scene behind her was a dull rose and sapphire, the stars that once popped up aglow so cheerily seeming to feel the comparative lack within their ruler. Conflict was something that did not sit well beside her - it never had, and that had not changed now. Despite her telling herself that there was a possibility of this being natural, normal even, and that she was okay with that, there seemed to be part of her that did not quite wish for that.
Working in the Dream World was something she held fondly in her heart, and the fact she got to do it as what was basically her afterlife was a fine enough consolation for her. Her pink eyes sparkled within the light as they gazed out into the distance, her head tilted at the armrest as her body slumped comfortably across her cloud-clad lounger.
It was then that her eyes spotted a flicker within that wide open sky; her chest registering it as distinctly unfamiliar, and not the type where you liked the surprise either. Nemurin leaned over the edge, blinking hard, as if testing to see if what she saw was just a figment of imagination, a remnant of magic that had slipped out of her control, another sign of her potentially weakening power. But sure enough, she could see something that turned her stomach into gears and garters, something unpleasant filling her throat and her heart. A shooting star full of shadows, billowing with an energy evil and foreign, burst and sparked aloud through the boundary, cracking through and tearing its way into an open gate.
Letting out a yawn, Nemurin's sofa faded, its silhouette like a bike now; "Uh-uh. You...you come here!" she called out, her cloud zipping in the air and hot on the shadow's heel.
The closer she got, the more she could feel goosebumps rattle her flesh, cold hands crawling up her spine. A sickly scent twisted her gut, the same scent that she found whenever encountering particularly horrific nightmares, but...somehow worse. Something told Nemurin that this was not like the monsters that terrorized the dreams of young children, which she could shrink into docility with a gentle word. Something told her reasoning with whatever this figure happened to be would be one fight even she in her Dream World could not win, and it took her heart in its hand and squeezed certainty out. Following through the gap, Nemurin took a deep breath, just before it could seal up behind her back. Slowly, she watched as the 'star' made its landing - the shadows dispersed into the black void surrounding them now, revealing not a monster, just as Nemurin had expected; but rather, a figure, one whom she had never seen. Their back was turned to her, but she was sure they knew she stood right behind them - for penumbra framed it all over. All she could make out was a long black coat and that aura of dread.
"Don't bother running." Nemurin sighed aloud, holding her pillow in her long sleeve as the cloud disappeared with a pop and a poof. "It really makes things a lot harder...you know, I've not seen Nightmares try and escape a dream just to go somewhere else-"
"You think I'm a Nightmare?" the voice scoffed, his gloved hands pulling his hood down. A male's face, albeit a softer one, turned to gaze back at her; silver hair pointed and framed it, but what caught her attention most was his eyes. They were bright as gold, for that's what they were, but also mad and deep and impossible for her to read. All she could tell was that there was a glint there, a glint of cogs turning in what she felt was an exceptionally twisted machine. His voice remained in almost a monotone, only raising its tone ever so slightly to hint at the smug amusement he got from her assumption. There was a calmness to it, a rationale, yet something about it replaced her goosebumps with subtle nerves that rose, leaving her own sense of personal peace a bit compromised, at least, more than she'd like. It reminded her of people from school, who would saunter up and ask her where she wanted to go in life, and then ramble off how they had known since childhood and how honestly pathetic it was not to.
Suffice to say, these were people Nemurin had preferred to avoid talking to. Yet, here she was.
For a few moments, Nemurin pondered her response to the question. She knew he couldn't be someone dreaming - anybody who dreamed here had little control over their own dreams, never mind enough to pass into the boundary. Nightmares didn't tend to look human, but they weren't impossible. But yet, the behaviour of this was still out of keeping with one.
"It might do you well to remain within your own dreams. After all..." the figure trailed off, a violet-purple circling up from the ground and forming in front of him - before he walked out of her view, he said simply. "With the strength of the Nightmares, you likely won't have many left, will you...? You'll be forced to return to the waking world - where there's nothing for you,"
That rung off a chain of alarm bells loud inside of her head. Whatever this man could do, he had a level of control over some part of the Dream World - enough to feel her soul's ties to it, to know that returning to the waking world was not an option for her. There it was again, that foreign feeling; even though she knew there likely wouldn't be much pain in her case, just like before, that in a world of magic and dreams that something even more wonderful than the world she knew now might await for those who passed on - how she hoped as much for those she once knew as her fellow Magical Girls - but the uncertainty left a deep abyss in her body that could not be filled with any rocky ravine or pouring stream. Whoever this man was, he was somewhat like her, and she was definitive that she didn't like that.
But how could that be!? She had heard words about Magical Girls who were secretly boys, but they appeared as girls. Her mind rewound backwards to the chatrooms, where Fav would speak about the Magical Kingdom, albeit in small doses. Was he an agent of theirs? Something in her instinctive functions instead rang a buzzer to that possibility. They did seem to prefer their distinct little cuddly mascots, as far as she could tell. And...she wouldn't say that some people wouldn't like his face, as she suspected types like the dreams she preferred to duck out of once she caught a glimpse of what she was getting into might make a half-pleasant comment or two about it, moral aspects of the owner of said face be damned into oblivion itself. But she definitely wouldn't say he looked cuddly, but rather the type to stab you in the back. Normally, she would have more reservation when it came to judgements; but the fact he knew of her loss of power, and held one so dark and dangerous and specifically, something by his intentions felt cruel, all of that told her he was not someone she would come to like, nor did she have any reason to, nor would she ever.
Either way, standing here would solve nothing; the Nightmares he spoke of, she had to find them first. Once she did, she could return to her usual leisure. Her cloudy cab returned as she drove it towards the cloudy road as it dipped downwards, an almost heavenly golden gate forming in front of it, a gate she knew like an old friend. A gate of someone's dreams, a place that called her. With an assured dive, Nemurin's body plunged through as they swung open, a great warm light engulfing her; only to turn pitch black. Rather, the more apt way of putting it would be a particularly stormy blue; her pyjamas clung to her skin, soaked through by an unending pool of water; a dream under the sea, yet the night sky above held no starry lanterns to guide her path, and the bottomless blue's end was nowhere near. Her eyes opened without stinging, as she drifted upside down through the sea. Two figures floated beside her, drifting slowly, eyes closed and bodies heavy. Despite the dark abyss they floated in, and the dead silence, an aura of calm filled her heart and supposedly theirs; this was not a nightmare, at least, a nightmare of drowning, yet she placed a hand each on one of the two boys' heads (which, in hindsight looked a tad less sagely than it was probably supposed to, as her long cloud-patterned sleeves passed their foreheads and noses), magic gifting them breath akin to that they found on land - you could never be too careful, and where Nemurin was concerned, never too peaceful in a dream. Yet even without that, they seemed to expect all of it almost, now waiting. And so, Nemurin waited too, allowing her thoughts to walk off to Wonderland in the meantime, her only other company the bubbles that floated and then popped anticlimactically beside her ears every now and again.
Her eyes observed the scene of the sea; yet aside from her two dreamers, there was nothing but the rock of the waves and the surface.
'Are two people sharing the same dream?' Nemurin wondered to herself. Both people at her side felt real, their faces both clear as crystal - those dreamed up always had a small yet distinct blur to their features, it was a trait she had picked up during her work. It was a rare occurrence; almost an impossibility, but not quite. Only those with the tightest of bonds and minds in sync ever dreamed the same things, and that was still something she had only seen once or twice. Yet, she suspected, like with the man in the black coat, that these two had a drop of magic in them, that this was by design. But the magic in them felt something more familiar; they had no real control over this place they entered, but they had entered with sworn purpose.
Looking downwards, a glittering sound chimed open in her ears as she dove downwards - a golden silhouette, that of a keyhole, had formed on the ocean's bed as if the stars had fallen from the sky to form it. Glints of light filled each corner of her eyes, as a strange key was grasped in the boys' hands. The one in red on her right first, and then, the one in yellow on her left. Light burst out from the tips of their blades like chains to a wall, two as one, forming together at the centre of the keyhole, the starlight turning white as pure snow - a wide, open portal of gold and orange and green and the unknown forming before them now. Golden lights consumed the boys now, pulling them in and taking them to safety. Nemurin felt her lips curve into a soft smile, warmth tipping over in her chest and flooding it.
There was a part of her that just seemed to think, at least for right now, 'They'll be alright.'
'But not for long.'
She felt it again, the same that she did when faced with the man in the black coat. Nemurin turned as the waves crashed upwards, turning from a mighty tide into a puddle of muted white and blue foam. The ground beneath her socks, though still soaked with the seafloor had rounded itself into a round blue basin that her feet stuck to like they had chained her there, though a sigh of relief could be released for the fact the boys hadn't been here for it. Yet they still felt in her reach, which meant that she could save them, but her gut told her that whoever was behind her now could see them too, reach them too, which forced the relief right back down her throat. The boys were dreaming this, and they could see what she did, even if only for a moment.
"I am...I am a Magical Girl of peace. But...anyone who would willingly bring Nightmares to people is not someone I'll ever hand the Dream World over to. I am Magical Girl Nemurin, and..." the blonde-haired girl made her declaration, calling her domain back round to her. "And if I must, I will destroy you...!"
Her domain, it faltered but answered still; good. That meant the Dream World was, as it had been the moment Nemu Sanjou had become Nemurin, still her world, even if her reach of it was being challenged by these enigmatic invaders. Water still droned without relent at each side in a circle, the waves crashing upon the basin and then falling away, the only sound after the silence. Truthfully, conflict was an aspect of life that always weighed her heart downwards, and it was her personal philosophy to try and avoid it when she could. But, she could feel that the choice of reason was nonexistent - whatever this being was, she could sense strong their wish to bring this same darkness to wherever they could find it. Such people were the few Nemurin would willingly raise herself against, at least in the Dream World where she had the genuine means to, and the aftermath always made it easier to enjoy the routine she found herself in once its disruption had been dealt with.
The figure, like the last except dubbed in a brown coat that slumped across their figure - as if a significantly older person wore it, one whose back had begun to give up on them stared at her from nothing. Suddenly, a large wave arose, and Nemurin called upon her powers; she slipped into the floor and through the gate, light burning into her retinas, but in a sort she was grateful for, dodging the possible attack she had felt coming her way. Her small form descended as her hair flew upwards, as did her sleeves and the clouds in her hair, her feet plunging and plunging until they hit a cobbled ground, the coldness of the world she had once been in replaced by bright neons she hadn't the chance to take in yet.
And yet, with all of that, the shadows remained briefly, leaving a sinking stone to fill her soul despite her supposed escape, the threat that they had slipped a trap in without her knowledge, that they wanted her to play the fool's game in trying to find, and they whispered: "This world has been connected."
A/N: Honestly, I forgot these were even a thing, hehe. I wrote this first chapter on something of a whim, and then spent nearly the entire day after writing up an outline for this. I like what I've got so far, and I hope you will too! That's all for now, so enjoy Cosmogyral as it unfolds.