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It smelled like rot. Decayed, dead things. But it was comfortable enough, and it was getting better, and everything was going to be just fine. Sunny hummed to herself as she swept. But I’m Different. A battery powered lantern filled her sewer nook with soft yellow light. She had a bed and a couch; some shelving, plants, books, a table. It looked almost clean. It was almost homey, even.

She stopped and frowned. Gently, she knelt down to the floor. She picked up the rat trap. It was a tube; it was supposed to be neat and humane. The rat entered the enclosure, it tripped the spring, and the door shut behind it. It had air holes. She could’ve released it and let it go on its way.

The rat inside was face up, dead.

Were you sick? Did I do something wrong? Poor thing. I’m sorry. This must’ve been your home once too. The sigh on her breath was ragged and uneven. Gently again, she put it back down. The string lights she got didn’t even work, they had nothing to plug into. She walked to her couch and flopped heavily onto it. She felt sort of tired. It was too early to be up anyways.

Bzzt. Bzzt.

She grabbed her phone. 12%. Would be another coffee shop run to recharge it today. There was nothing to do, except… Torii Gate Appears In Tokyo Bay; Youkai March on City.

Yep, it was time to go.



The air was overly cold. If there was anything positive to say about living in the sewers, it was that it was warm. Sunny sucked in a breath, wrapping herself in her jacket. She was hungry. She should have toast – that was on genre, right? She entertained the thought with a smirk. As it was, she was running toastless. Luckily, or unluckily depending on perspective, her corner of the world was right on the bay. She’d studied the zoning maps for Tokyo’s sewers religiously since she set her sights on her new home; she’d come out just almost at the water. Just a corner to turn, and…

Morning light broke across the bay. Rays refracted into wave; soft white light dispersed. It didn’t match the scene around it. People ran madly. There was no shortage of those things; with backs of turtles, faces of dogs, plenty more things that Sunny did not have the vocabulary to describe, they rampaged across the street. A ship sailed into the bay. A stage dominated the street, with a boy sitting on a throne. Others like her were here to fight. The torii gate jutted into the sky above the bay, breaking through the ice.

She couldn’t just keep staring.

“Ut supra, sic Infra”


The pentagram on her neck burned; for a moment, always, it was too much. It was consumed by flame tipped with blue. It spread, catching her clothes, her hair, her arms, engulfing her. A bystander looked and saw a woman on fire. He recoiled. She looked like a nice girl – so young, and now casualty to the youkai.

Or so it had appeared.

Her clothing burned away. That which replaced it was forged in fire; as the flames cleared, a woman who did not look like Sunny Day emerged. Not so nice. Long leather boots; immodest clothing; overly individualistic makeup; a big sword. The only thing that truly could mark her as the woman she was before was her large grin. Still, she felt more like a girl in a costume than a hero.

But there was work to do. She pitched her heels into the street below, stabbing Joyeuse through the pavement, black ephemera wilting off of the sword onto the ground. Her hands pulled and her feet pushed, and all at once the kinetic energy came to head and she flung herself forward. She soared forward with magical speed, wind whooshing in her ears. The bystander that saw her transform watched in abject confusion as she flew right over his head. He whipped around to follow her movement; Sunny didn’t go much further, instead implanting her sword into the head of an inugami that had very nearly snuck up on the man. Stab and cut. She’d been practicing – it was not a natural motion, but the sword was perfectly balanced in her hand, supernatural strength helping her along. She cleaved down, splitting the demonic dog into two pieces.

“Sorry sir – excuse me, please keep running,” she said to the bystander. He did. She had to keep moving; onto the next – or, no. She repeated the maneuver she did before, flinging herself into the air again. This time, she went further. She closed the distance to the bay, and then hopped again onto the ship. As she suspected, there were other magical... people here.

She grinned at the others assembled, giving a short wave and her best “Howdy," in exaggerated English.

Was that guy naked?



In Skybound 4 yrs ago Forum: Casual Roleplay
In Skybound 4 yrs ago Forum: Casual Roleplay

“You couldn’t have done anything, child.” Nemeos never said it like a reassurance. Though it may or may not have been that; it sounded almost accusatory, now. He didn’t mean it that way, of course, or at least Savannah didn’t think he did, but it kept coming back to her. Couldn’t do anything, couldn’t do anything.

He was right, of course. She was weak.

Her parents were out of town, and fine in the end. They called and came back as soon as the news hit TV, but it didn’t really matter either way to Savannah. In a weird way, the events of the week seemed to just wash over her. Life was mostly the same, besides that school was cancelled, and everything was being rebuilt, and that there were monsters now.

But the big change was those words. Couldn’t do anything.

On her first day off, she took a bath. She still didn’t want to shower. It made her lightheaded, and she could feel her breath quicken, and she just though about passing out and slipping and hitting her head or something. At least her parents didn’t notice; she was happy to keep these quiet little struggles to herself.

But it seemed like bad memories always followed her here. Steam rose from the hot water, fogged the mirror, and filled the air. The wooden baseboard had started to rot from that time the toilet overflowed and no one noticed, flooding the bathroom. She gingerly stepped into the tub of tepid water, taking a deep breath. This wasn’t as bad, she thought, so she slipped down into it all the way.
The first time that it happened, she had been walking late through suburban streets, night air cool and crisp, and she liked that it felt like the world was all her own at night. It must have been ten or eleven PM, but it was safe, she lived in a good neighborhood and her house was close. It was a little foggy, and the warm orange lights of the dying streetlamps marked her path through the darkness and the fog. She always loved nights like this, and always loved walking in them. She put her earbuds in and listened to sad music, and it actually made her feel uncharacteristically great. That’s what scared her the most about it: there was no rhyme or reason. It should’ve been a good night.

She saw this black cat run across the street, and something in her brain just went wrong. She didn’t know what it was, or what started it, and she didn’t realize it at first, but she was starting to breath fast. Faster and faster, and then she was hyperventilating. Savannah didn’t know what was happening, but there was suddenly some awful primal instinct in her brain telling her that something was very, very wrong. Something was going to kill her, she was in danger, there was something suddenly unreal and disquieting about the entire world around her. None of it felt real, it was like a dream, or more accurately a nightmare, and she had started to run home without really thinking about it. She was running and she was suffocating and she was dying. At the front door she pulled out her keys, but missed the whole once, twice, and thrice until she landed it, turned it, and opened it, went in, closed it, and then collapsed against the door frame, sinking low to the ground, crying and trying to breath, because she was sure that she couldn’t breathe and if she couldn’t breathe she’d die. Eventually, still feeling wrong and dying she turned on the TV and tried to calm herself. She watched something she was comfortable with, that she’d seen many times, but it looked all wrong and while the world outside didn’t feel like it was real, the world inside the TV seemed like it was, and that characters threatened to go outside the bounds and escape the screen with some malicious intent.

She fell asleep, eventually. She never told anyone about the episode; her parents weren’t home to witness it, and she was embarrassed, or scared, or something. She just didn’t want to talk about it. She never wanted to talk about it.

The second time it happened was maybe four or five months later. It was the same as the first, sudden and unexpected. She was eating dinner with her mom and dad, but excused herself and went to her room. When they went to check on her, she was buried under the covers, and they thought she must have been sleeping so they left. She was trying so hard to catch her breath under there, suffocating and dying again. She hated that feeling so much. She didn’t find out what ‘panic attack’ really meant until later, beyond the imprecise terms of TVs and movies, and when she did, she realized that’s what it was. That made sense, she guessed.

The third time, it was in the shower. The third and worst time. She didn’t even realize it was happening. She was looking down the drain and thinking about the water and where it went. She turned off the shower and stepped out, and then she felt really tired. Her muscles and limbs ached. She grabbed her phone, and she was trying to do something, but she couldn’t remember what it was. Savannah was trying to type something on it, but she couldn’t hit the right keys so she just stopped and set it down. Her vision was grainy, and then spotty, and then she realized she couldn’t breathe. She wasn’t hyperventilating this time, just suffocating. This time, she really was convinced she was going to die. Need to lay down, she thought, so she opened the bathroom door and tried to make it down the hall to her bed, still naked and wet, but she couldn’t make it she realized. So tired. She laid down on the ground, for a moment, trying to breathe. The carpet was rough on her skin. The bed, bed, make it to bed. She stood up again, and then tried walking but she was stumbling instead, stomping down the hallway wildly and blindly. Her eyes closed but she still moved, until she felt something hit her head. When she woke up, she was on the ground, collapsed. She fainted trying to open the door, but she didn’t even remember making it that far, and she hit her head against it, but she couldn’t even remember turning the corner to get here. Her head hurt so much. Shoulders hurt too, against the doorframe, and there would be a bruise there for weeks. She fainted. She didn’t think people really fainted like that, especially when they had panic attacks; she’d thought it was just some Hollywood thing that was made up, but it happened to her now. She felt awful and dead, weak, too, like she couldn’t control her own body and that she was some very unhealthy dying person that fainted.

So, she didn’t want to get back in the shower.

She was afraid.

Right, again, of a shower.

But maybe a bath. Maybe a bath was fine. She felt so filthy, and now here in the hot water she was just wishing she could wash it all off and go away. She dipped her head below the line of the water and just let it all envelop her and swallow her up. She always remembered things, here. She felt the most alone in the bath or the shower and the most like herself; it really was a different world of absolute solitude and stillness. The steam rose from the water, and from her skin and her hair, and it was all the bad things rising up and leaving her, friends that were gone, and parents that were away, secrets and tension all wound up so perfectly tight. Most people she had ever decided she’d liked weren’t here now; and somewhere, those things had meaning.

Below the water, it was her own world, another level of separation. The tile insulated her from outside, the water insulated her from the tile, her body, and her skin, and her muscles and the tendons, the bone, it all insulated her mind. She didn’t need to breathe her. She was completely unto herself. She felt sick. Nemeos was out in that tile world above the water, and his words still echoed in her head. He could tell she wasn't feeling well, and he'd known since he got here. Part of him wanted a better host.
Leah | Savannah | Alex

@Lasrever @bubsy 2 @Scribe of Thoth





Savannah was, after a fashion, entirely normal. But she didn’t want to tell people that she was afraid of showering today. She was ashamed of it, to be honest, because she had never been a dirty person. Really, it was the opposite, she had always been very clean and tidy, kept good care of her room, did her dishes as soon as she done was them, and she’d even taken her showers on the long side. In excess of twenty minutes. Very thorough.

But she thought of the last time, and all the blood and the panic, and she didn’t want to do it again.

She’d skipped the last couple of days and felt greasy, especially in her hair, and just wrong all over. She’d been using powder shampoo and washing her hair in the sink, but it just wasn’t the same. But today was the first day of school and she was laying in bed and she knew she had to do it. There was no choice. She rolled over in her bed, and there was a half-yip because she’d woken up Simba, who was sleeping on her chest. Which he insisted was merely a tactic to better blend in as the creature which he was disguised as, and he always said that word ‘creature’ with that venomous emphasis. And her train of thought was interrupted when he said, “My name is not Simba. It is Nemeos.”

“Okay, fine, I just want to sleep,” she said. She didn’t sound happy, didn’t sound awake, it was more of a grumble than a statement.

“You’ll have to get up eventually.”

“And what if I just don’t?”

“You’ll atrophy away and I’ll be left without a human host. So, get up. That is an order.”

She sighed. Deeply, heavily. He was right. And besides, if she wasted away she wouldn’t be able to tell her parents that she just slipped and split her head open anymore because they’d know something was wrong. They already did, really, she knew that they looked at her and just saw something wrong. So she sat up.

Her room was exceedingly plain. She kept no paintings, had no trophies, mementos, collectibles, or anything like that. Her parents had tried, in the past, to give her gifts and things to put in there but they didn’t really interest her. All she thought she needed was a bed, a desk with her computer, and the sofa that she laid on for a lot of days reading. The rest could exist outside of her space. This was how she was comfortable. In fact, she didn’t detest any of the things her parents gave her, they merely found other places in the house to occupy where she was quite happy with them.

There was one other thing in her room, though. One poster. It was of Van Gogh’s The Starry Night. She’d always been a little ashamed of liking it so much because it was just a little too pop, but she still felt good when she saw it. In fact, when she saw it she thought her and Vincent might not have been so different. Because there was this window in Savannah’s room, and she spent a lot of time viewing the world from it. The second-floor view wasn’t so bad. She lived deep in the suburbs, buried there in the houses and neat lawns where children played outside a lot like she used to, people waked dogs, ice cream trucks passed by playing that jingle, but today none of that was happening because it was the first day of school and it was cloudy all over which is how she liked it to be. She liked it when it rained, too, and she wished it was snowing already. She had her own secret names for all the people she saw on the street every day.

She took another deep breath and got up just a few seconds before her alarm would ring, because she hated that noise. She turned it off and went right away to the bathroom, Nemeos following shortly behind. He said, “You know, I can’t imagine being afraid of water. It’s just water.”

“It’s less the water and more the memories. Seems like I always think about things in the shower.”

He didn’t say anything to that. He just sat in the corner of the bathroom, curled up and she thought it was funny because for all his insistence that he wasn’t a dog he acted just like one and wouldn’t stop following her. Reminded her of the clingy old pug she had that would whine if you locked him out of the bathroom.

The bathroom was quiet and clean, the porcelain and tile polished, the light bright and white. It felt like a horrible place to her then, a horrible horrible place. She undressed and turned the shower on hot and her head felt dizzy just hearing the rush of the water and seeing the first wisps of hot steam, and it was so inviting and nice but she just felt all wrong for it. But then again, if she couldn’t do this what could she do?

She stepped in and she was breathing fast. She went through the motions quickly, feeling like she was floating away; shampoo, then condition, and soap, then she turned it off and left and grabbed a towel and started frantically drying herself. Very quickly. She was breathing fast. She almost didn’t know what she was doing anymore because her vision was spotty and she was going to fall over, so instead she just collapsed against the wall and let herself sit down and she tried to focus on her breath just like she read online. One two three four five. There. One two three four five. Nemeos was looking up from the corner, and he came over and sat against her, but didn’t say anything and she wondered if a spirit just wasn’t equipped for such a pointless personal and human struggle.

This was going to be a normal thing now, she supposed. She was having panic attacks in the shower and had absolutely no idea why. They weren’t her first, but this was the first time they’d been reoccurring so regularly.

She sat there for maybe twenty minutes just trying to breath before she knew that she had to get up because she’d timed getting up early, just in case this had happened, but soon her parents would be stirring and she’d have to get ready for school. So, she stood up and still felt like she was floating in nothing. She walked back to her room and put on the clothes she had set aside for today. And then she looked at her poster before going downstairs and getting a bowl of cereal.

Her parents would get up later and wish her a good first day, and she’d just nod.
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