Mio stared at the ceiling.
Beneath the anitiseptic glare of the fluorescent lamp, everything seemed uncomfortably sharp. The colors in the room oozed into each other, blurring into one incoherent mass that made her head ache. On the other side of the room a clock's hands moved backwards. Or was it sideways?
'I have to snap out of it.'
"Snap out of what?" A small muffled voice came from somewhere underneath the pillow. Mio flipped her pillow and found herself face-to-face with a stuffed toy in the shape of a horse. Its eyes were at an odd angle while its mouth was nowhere to be found. Grotesquely cute, as some might say.
"Great. Now I'm seeing and hearing things." Of all the things that her subconscious projected, this was by far the most incomprehensible hallucination yet.
"How about a cup of tea?" The horse held out an empty hoof. It was soon joined by other empty paws. Beside it, three more stuffed animals materialized out of nowhere; each as strange as their equestrian companion. The chicken looked particularly disturbing. An ugly puppy rolled all over the bed while a pig danced beside it.
Mio fluffed the pillow up and put it over her head. Until the drugs wear off, she would just have to go to sleep. Never mind the high pitched chattering in the background. And the frighteningly real mess that the imaginary animals were making on the bed.
"Can't hear anything...Can't hear anything..."
Two men in white lab coats flipped through a pile of medical charts, deep in thought. The mechanical whir of a centrifuge amplified the silence of the room. The younger of the two men stood up and flipped a switch; in the center of the dimly lit room an old monitor flickered to life.
"She should be fine in an hour."
"Or less." The other man exuded a seniority over the young scientist, too engrossed in a data sheet to even look at him while talking.
"I think we should wait a little longer. Previous research has shown that the rate of brain activity-" The young man's hand hovered over a syringe. His hesitancy distracted the other man from the reading material.
"A little drug withrawal won't kill her, will it?" Seeing as the man stayed motionless, he sighed and hardened his voice. He believed that science has no room for the naive, progress demands sacrifice. Seeing as his colleague remains ignorant of these principles, he decided to teach the man a practical lesson in compromise: his life or theirs.
"Look, they hired us to keep them alive... not comfortable." An unspoken threat lay in his eyes. The young man saw it and plunged the syringe into a vial of cloudy liquid quickly.
"...I understand."
A blonde girl lay motionless on the white sheets of a hospital bed. Her eyes are closed; eyelids shut so tightly that they are quivering.
The images repeated themselves endlessly. A girl lying on the slick floor, gasping for breath. A flash of red. Blood dripping from a hand. Two shadowy figures dragging both her and the girl away. Then darkness.
At first, it all seemed like a bad dream. She awoke on a white bed thinking that someone dragged her to the infirmary. It was only when she saw the restraints on her hands that everythings started to make sense.
Her condition, as her parents called it, was easily controlled so long as she was mentally fit. She poured every effort in maintaining this control, the fragile wall that kept the people around her safe. The wall occasionally cracked, but things got better with time. And music. On particularly bad days, the piano was all that kept the wall from breaking.
Despite all that, the finality of hurting someone never truly dawned on her. Her ability was an additional handicap, a challenge, perhaps even a gift. Now, she saw it for what it truly was.
It was a curse.
For the first time in her life, Kotobuki Tsumugi felt like a monster.