Haru arrived at school that morning in a bit of an emotional muddle. She'd had a very confusing nightmare...dream...sort of thing last night, and as a result she hadn't really gotten back to sleep so much as lain in bed in a half-awake trance state until morning. Her memory of the dream was a complete jumble...or was it the dream that was a jumble and her memory of it was clear? She wasn't sure.
The part of it that leapt immediately to mind was the woman. Haru didn't recognize her, but she was dressed in an outfit like Brittany's: a dress (she thought she recalled Brittany calling it a "kirtle") under an outer dress/jacket sort of thing with an open front, and a belt at the waist with what she thought might be a knife. She definitely wasn't Brittany, though, not even in a dream-logic kind of way; her clothes were finer, and her face was different. The face made a strong impression; the woman wasn't extraordinarily beautiful, but her features were somehow both fine and strong. Haru thought it was a royal kind of face, an idea reinforced by the fact that her outfit was finer and more intricately embroidered than Brittany's.
Still, there was something about the woman that frightened her, mostly because of the events of the dream. The dream was a jumble, with things happening out of order or unrelated bits interrupting, but somehow she'd perceived a coherent narrative out of it, a sense of when things were in relation to everything else. class was still getting started, and she sat and tried to think of how it went.
Haru had gradually become aware that the woman had been standing in a wood, with the Moon looming large overhead. There was a girl nearby, held in the woman's fingers...no, no, what? Wrapped in vines. Vines from...she couldn't see. Like many dreams, there was very little in existence outside a certain distance from the actual focal points, those being the girl and the woman. The woman was saying something to the girl, apologetically, and touched her forehead. Then the trees began to bleed, vivid red human blood, and then (Haru's stomach turned even remembering it) the woman grasped the girl by the ears and yanked. The girl's whole outer body, skin and hair, came off like a wrapper, leaving a featureless mannequin-thing in the vines, which were fingers, somehow, and the woman neatly arranged the skin on a coat-hanger she had suddenly acquired, and took it into a department-store dressing-room that was in one of the tree trunks...
That was the point at which she'd woken up with a muffled shriek. Haru had to stop and calm herself a bit before she could continue to recall the dream. While all this was going on, she had perceived a second scene that kept inter-cutting with the first. It was a wood, but it was a different wood - or was it? It felt the same, but different. But it was day, and the blood on the trees wasn't blood; it was translucent orange slime. Jon was there, sitting on the ground in the middle of the clearing and staring up at the sun, arms raised, murmuring something. She was dressed strangely, wearing some kind of loose, flowing white robes and gold ornaments, with oak leaves and mistletoe sprigs in her hair.
The whole scene seemed to be running in a sort of under-cranked backwards fashion, and the slime on the trees slid down to the ground in reverse, as if it had been crawling up the right way round, and gathered, pooling together until it stood up and was a girl. The girl wasn't a focal point of this dream, though, but she accompanied Jon as they walked backwards together back to a house, which the compressed, inter-cut nature of the dream made it seem was on the edge of the wood. Then Jon was alone and staring up at the sun from the doorway, and the sun was shrinking. It got smaller and smaller, coming ever closer, until it was laying in the palm of the slug-girl's hand...and it was yellow again. Or, considering this was in reverse, "before?"
There were other mini-threads as well. The house on the edge of the wood was actually two houses; one where Jon and the slime-girl were, and another where a group of angels performed...a dance, or something, only it seemed like an awfully suggestive dance for a church...was it a church, or a house? She didn't know, but when they reached the big finish she thought there was a bell ringing. Or was that their sudden burst of song? And despite being the same house as Jon's, this one was running in forward motion. And then there was a thread with glimpses of the wood as it grew and changed in rapid time-compression, with fleeting glimpses of skunks and dinosaurs and squirrels and the Moon...
It was all completely baffling. It was a jumble of dream-logic and she was definitely overthinking it by trying to figure it out at all...but she couldn't help it. She wondered where all this had come from; bits came from her daily life, she was sure. The slime-girl might have shown up because she'd seen Zoe Madison around school now and again, or something like that. But where did the woman come from? The outfit might've come from Brittany, but the woman seemed to belong in it too much for a dream-logic coincidence. The forest thing was nonsense...no living tree could possibly be old enough to have been around for the dinosaurs. And what was that thing with Jon and the sun? She wondered, briefly, if her "third eye" perception could dream like her other senses could...
Haru tried to hold the questions back. Right now she just wanted to get through the school day, so she could go out and have a good time with Ken. She didn't want some nonsense dream to interfere with that! She was no longer terrified by this kind of thing like she had been, but she didn't want to get drawn into anything weird or frightening because of it - she just wanted to get on with whatever a "normal" life would be for a boy-turned-three-eyed Chinese girl. Yet the strange visions kept coming, regardless of what she wanted. Part of her wondered if she shouldn't take a risk and ask Jon what it might mean...
David thought she still felt a little weak in the knees. Last night had been...well, frankly, like nothing she had ever experienced before. She didn't know who had started it, but she could still recall how she'd felt...first the shock, the way she'd balked at the very idea of her sisters sharing this with her, trying to figure out how to tell them to stop, then the way her objections had eroded with every touch, like a sandcastle eaten away by the sea...the barrier had come crashing down, and she tentatively began to join in. Not immediately, not with wild abandon...at first she was just reacting to the feelings, then she'd begun to kiss herself, to share that with her sisters...she liked being kissed, she realized, and she could feel them feeling it, as if she were the recipient of her own actions. By the end, she was as involved as any of them, each contributing in their own way...
"Watcha thinking about?" Rachel asked, eyeing her curiously. The angel-girl snapped back to reality, her cheeks getting a bit warm. "Uh, nothing much," she said, a little hurriedly.
The devil-girl shrugged. "Huh," she said. They walked on a bit, towards class, when they approached one of the other members of David's chorus. David recognized Mark's characteristic slouch; she moved like that any time she wasn't dancing. She'd begun to pick up on the little nuances that enabled her to tell her sisters apart without having to ask. As she and Mark passed each other, both looked away, blushing noticeably.
"And what was that about, pray tell?" Rachel asked, in a sing-song voice. David tried to keep from blushing brighter. "N-nothing!"
The devil-girl grinned, curling her tail lightly around David's leg. "You sure?"
"Ah! Y-yes!" the angel-girl stammered. "W-we'd better get to class..."
"Heh, okay," Rachel replied. They walked on, the devil-girl smiling and softly humming a tune to herself.
"♪*...this girl is a woman now...*♬"
"Huh?" David said. "You say something?"
Rachel shook her head. "Oh, nothing."
Kimi looked around her, more worried than ever. As if all of this wasn't bad enough, now she'd have to go through that? But she thought that kind of thing took *days...*and anyway, she didn't want to lose what was left of her own body! She didn't want to die, or to be dragged to another time, or anything! She just wanted to get back to...well, anything, any life, anywhere but here! What if she never saw Lomasi again? And if her connection to magical stuff was severed, would she never be Kiki again? Never be with Farin? So many different emotions welling up within her, so confusing...
She began to cry. This couldn't be happening! She had to stop this...but how? It wasn't like wome could just stop their bleeding, or why would they have it in the first place? But...well, she wasn't sure, but she didn't think it was an ultra-high-pressure kind of thing. Even bleeding from a major artery didn't spurt out so much as just flow freely; she knew that. She did her best to clamp her legs together, tighten things as much as she could...maybe that wouldn't help, and she figured it wouldn't matter if Morgana thought to upend her; gravity would certainly win out in that case. But it was better than nothing...
Still, it probably wasn't going to be good enough. Maybe it would help her stall for time while she came up with something else, but the problem was, she didn't know what else she could possibly come up with. She wasn't a terribly clever person, not after years of getting by with brute force and ruthlessness. If only there were someone here to help her...if only she wasn't so alone...
