Yuri Worlds
[54] Dead
Misaki, the spirit or whatever she represented now, contained within Yuka’s body, was woozy and sick, even though she didn’t have the apparatus to properly translate those feelings. Yuka staggered backward in trembling shock.
Killed her. She killed her. Oh, dear Goddess, she killed her. She undulated with rocking motions, like she desperately wanted to throw up and wanted to make it happen, but her body refused. And still, the physical Misaki lay there in an awkward heap with her eyes open wide, her mouth in a listless slit, and no real sign she was breathing.
Yuka fought to settle her own breathing into a normal rhythm that wasn’t going to make her collapse as well. Misaki provided steady, even advice on what to do. Hold on to something nearby. Get to your feet and make sure not to lock your knees. Find medical help as soon as possible. She repeated this succinctly and firmly, all while struggling to not freak out about the fact that her body could be dead or dying as the seconds ticked by.
She had no way of knowing if the instructions would get through or if her host would even bother paying attention to them after all the other thoughts and whispers inside her head. All she could do was quietly repeat the same messages with the earnest emphasis that she loved Yuka. If she had to be a quiet passenger, then she would do her best to help. Even though Yuka wouldn’t really be able to feel her words, encouragement, and support, Misaki was determined to do all she could.
Slowly, laboring with each step, Yuka managed to right herself, stabilize the fear, and rush as safely as possible for help. Ayame was the nearest option, but she knew from earlier that the inn had life support equipment and a nurse practitioner on staff. They had to know, and so did Ayame. But the time, the terrible ticking of time marched incessantly and stomped over her hopes. Move move, she had to move now!
Scrambling away from the wall, her legs burned as she ran towards the main office. Of all things, what gripped her most of all was a sudden spell of sleepiness. Running became a dream-like action where she wasn’t certain how or why she was moving. Somehow, she managed to avoid a collision. The front desk was devoid of activity, with just one unsuspecting lady tapping on her keyboard.
Fighting for words to best encapsulate the current, uncertain emergency, Yuka leapt for, "We have a cardiac arrest!" Precious moments slipped away as the lady at the front desk decided finishing her current sentence of typing was more important than pivoting to what was in front of her. Only once that was done did she slip on her confusion and questions. It took several insistent rounds of yelling, verging on screaming, from Yuka till she realized the gravity and rushed to the cabinet for equipment. A few of the lurking maids scrambled aimlessly.
Staggering back through the main hallway to the suites, Yuka passed along a semi-coherent explanation to her moms and Ayame that she couldn’t remember moments after she’d blurted it out. Blasting along the hallway as fast as her throbbing legs would take her, Yuka noticed Ruka standing to the side and scrutinizing the scene. Her attention focused more on the fallen heap of her girlfriend than her elder sister as Yuka attempted to come up with another explanation that made any sort of sense.
When she briefly looked away, Ruka stepped a little too far into the hallway, blocking her sister’s path. Before Yuka could think of dodging out of her way, the two of them collided, as though she happened to catch a wall suddenly in front of her. It spun Yuka around and dropped her, but left Misaki standing as though she missed the contact. She was free! But that wasn’t necessarily an improvement, as she partially overlapped with Haruka.
This crossing felt especially jarring as she caught the faintest glimpse of the elder sister’s interior. It was like flying too close to the sun. She was bathed in a presence that felt like harsh summer heat as brilliant blue and gold light blasted through her. Beyond that, there was an inescapable sadness as desolate as the void of space. She didn’t linger to probe deeper. It felt too personal and too painful, like diving into what Maharu surely retained of her childhood. She had to get back, return to her body before something terrible happened to it.
Rationally, her brain told her that this entire spell had to be some altered state or similar illusion of perception. It was willing to entertain the prospect of bizarre energy phenomena from another world. Misaki shouted the rest of herself down and screamed that she needed to get her soul back into her body. A crowd had already started to gather around where her physical form had last been seen. Namiko dominated the space, with her hands and hopes swarming around the fallen figure. What she could see of her own body looked repulsively pale, with a striking, unnatural grayness setting in.
Did she really have to return to that? Being a spirit didn’t hurt, and her dithering uncertainty was gone. Her perceptions elevated to the level of a striking epiphany she never considered. Yeah, she was probably dead. A floating spirit who attached herself to Yuka because of a strange out-of-body experience. It almost sounded like absurd hyperbole to say that their fun time was so amazing that she left her body. This had to have a better explanation, but that was all that made sense.
The scene contained so many details fluttering about that she both found herself highlighting each and every one as though it were a recording she could manipulate and highlight endlessly and at the same time like a dream that would drift from her as soon as she looked away.
Some curious points she caught were that Ayame dodged around where she was standing as a spirit, although there was clearly no one physically there to avoid. For a split second, she thought that Ruka… Haruka met her gaze before looking beyond her to the chaotic scene. She couldn’t see Grandma Okura, but the sharpened, critical eye laid upon her was still looming somewhere in the background. A strangeness she couldn’t place swarmed around the sense of the old lady. But she soon overlooked that when she noticed Chika bowed over her fallen form, flailing, sobbing, and plaintively begging with everything she had for Misaki to wake up.
"Please no, please no, no nooo. Please wake up. You have to wake up. CPR. Press. Breath in your mouth. Dw… uh Nami. We got to find a pulse…get the pulse. She’s got to have a pulse! My friend, my heart, you mean everything. You’re my best friend. You ARE my sister, my br… my everything. Wake up. You have to wake up!" Through her desperate words, Chika coughed and squeezed her voice to gather as much energy and effort as possible.
Misaki felt a deep and blanketing ease envelop her, like all the noise and confusion were drifting away. People were upset, people were sad, and they were all so preoccupied in this panicked moment. It was nothing to fret so much about—little more than a water cup on a table tipped over and splashed.
Why worry? It was fine. She had regrets; of course, she did. Seeing her friends and those she loved so upset and in such pain made her want to linger and comfort them so much more than her frail efforts to help Yuka from within. But it wasn’t her place. The hallway felt like it was softening, rounding with an unnatural, welcome glow. She curiously turned away from her own face and gazed back at the path.
A shadow loomed behind her, barely contained. It wavered like a star, a dark core at the cusp of a brilliant supernova. She wanted to walk to it and let go. But Haruka met her eyes and leveled her head. The next moment felt like getting kicked in a thousand places all at once. She shattered and fell in the dark, down, down, down into an unimaginable blackness.
Misako‘s arm was exposed and lacking a wristband, but no one seemed to notice that detail. She carefully kept that naked limb behind her, relying on it for support. Her previous headaches and pains returned with a renewed cluster of violence, but they were unmistakable signs of her return to the land of the living. She had something very important to do first. Really, she had several very important things that needed to be done, but most of those thoughts were scattered to the wind, and she only had the strength to cling to one in particular.
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“Yuka. I love you I love you I love you I love you…” She didn’t have the same strength. Her voice felt muffled compared to what she wanted to say and how boldly. It had to be enough.
The girls beside her parted, and even her friends and roommates drifted back to allow her girlfriend to approach. Tears blurred her sight as she reached out. Guilt and uncertainty muted the intensity of their embrace as they more collapsed into each other’s arms and barely kept from toppling over. The craziness and confusion didn’t need to be explained as they scooted towards the nearest wall rather than attempting to get to their feet quite yet. It didn’t take long for a cluster of comforting blankets to appear and swaddle them together.
The inn workers first monitored Misaki‘s vitals for any signs of blips and considered whether to contact EMS. Ayame stepped in and provided her professional opinion that Miss Takano seemed stable. Besides, she understood that the nearest clinic in the area didn’t even have as many medical options as what they were afforded right here, so any further interventions would likely take a long time or an airlift. Misaki felt all of those countless kicks achingly embedded across her surface, but they weren’t anything she couldn’t handle. Still, no one noticed the absence of her wristband. Fortunately, the blankets provided a convenient cover.
It took a gradual migration of several feet for the two of them to make their way back to their regular suite. On the way, Misaki noticed that Naoko and Kosame were standing closer to one another than they typically had since the start of the trip. But the most interesting aspect was that Kosame didn’t have her usual veneer of a gentlemanly prince. Rather, she seemed as much on the verge of shy, flowing tears as Yuka or anyone else weathering the current scare. Misaki understood that all sorts of situations could bring people together and lower their guards toward one another.
In the suite, Chika remained the closest aside from Yuka, carefully monitoring her best friend and, essentially, big sister even as the others started to give them their space. Misaki felt a building sense of disgust and horror as she quietly scrutinized the bands still on Chika and Namiko‘s arms. How easy would it be for the company to take over the minds and actions of those closest to her? She wanted to grab them just as firmly as Yuka grabbed her and rip those awful things loose. Whatever protections they may allegedly offer against the nature of this world or form of identification were not worth the clear backdoor protocols that seemed integrated to censor, control, and manipulate them to the company’s whims like they were tagged animals with advanced shock collars.
The temptation desperately wanted to rise to the surface and free her friends before she started any explanation. However, they deserved explanations and detailed, sincere, and unfiltered efforts to encapsulate as much as possible. She had no idea where to start with any of those explanations or how to piece together her trek to what felt like the cliff’s edge of mortal existence, intrinsically attached and yet separate from Yuka and everything else.
Before she could figure it out, her two friends finally exchanged parting, cautious embraces for the evening, advising that if anything at all came up, then they would come running from a text message immediately. That felt even less confident than anything out of the mouth of Franklin, but it was clear all this had exhausted their energy and they needed to recover as much as Misaki. Even Namiko looked like she was at the end of a wretched forty-hour shift with only two hours of sleep in the middle. They could probably all use a second dip in the therapeutic hot spring, but normal rest would have to suffice.
When it was finally just the two of them again, Misaki looked Yuka in the eyes with pleading heartache. Her girlfriend released a long breath and answered, “I knew that wasn’t you. Welcome back, sweetie. I missed you so much.”
They held each other close but not as intimately as earlier, like nervous young porcupines uncertain of the dangers of one another. Misaki wanted to tell the girl she loved about the crazy trek she’d been on and the wave of emotions and feelings she still carried with her while they persisted with clarity in her mind. Not a trek of the stars but of a single, intimate self. Although Yuka contained glorious multitudes that she desperately wanted to remind her of.
So much that they could say to one another, so much they had to say to another, but so little they wanted to say. It was better to find a comfortable medium where all their worries were washed away. The video file of the show paused on an awkward pose holding the crew in a suggestive combination, as though Lady Kirk wanted to do a trust fall onto one of her crewmates. That brought a faint trace of cathartic laughter before Yuka reached into a pocket, retrieved the wristband, and chucked it across the room like a rotten fish. It didn’t do anything unnatural.
Misaki wished she still had the knife. A serving fork abandoned from Yuka’s moms’ snacks would have to suffice. Wielding the metal implement in a tight fist, Misaki struck at the surface of the wristband as though it were an old cake she wanted to rip to crumbs. Yuka gave a quick gasp of uncertainty and placed a reflexive finger to her nose. Misaki resisted the urge to check on her and instead carefully watched in shock as an undulation of grayish goo from the wristband clung to the tongs and immediately consumed them. The remains of the fork looked like stubby, silvery, wrecked fingers.
Lashing out from the surface, waves of gray, shifting to inky blackness, hungrily probed the air with fuzzy, spindly plumes. Just like that horrifying entity she encountered in her bedroom before the trip. Exactly like it.
Recoiling on every mental and emotional level, Misaki wanted to rip, rend, and tear this alien horror, which she’d let live on her wrist, as though it were a simple, benign piece of plastic and graphene. Yuka watched with an uncertain grimace and nervously motioned for Misaki to get away from the thing. She did the opposite instead.
The closer Misaki got to the chaotic mass, the more it settled down and returned to its normal appearance. Tapping it with her fingers earned another terrified squeak from Yuka, but the material lost all its ferrofluid and animalistic qualities and felt like nothing at all. Pondering this, Misaki searched around for something she could use. The only other thing was some complementary chopsticks in a side drawer. She grabbed a couple and tested them on the surface of the band by jamming it as hard as possible.
The reaction from the band was similar to the forks, as it wrapped around them and started to consume. Unfortunately, the chopstick slipped in her grip, and the rough wooden edge scraped her finger not too far from where she got a cut many days ago, which strangely refused to bleed at the Travel Anywhere office but flowed with blood when they were on the train. Yuka‘s first-aid efforts took care of it.
A swift drip of fresh blood traced along the half-eaten chopstick and splattered in the center of the animated black mass. It immediately went crazy, like it had been doused in acid, and spread back like a tiny, receding tidal wave.
“What the fuck…?” Yuka whispered as she watched. Misaki didn’t say anything but shook her head and carefully aimed her drops of blood to coat and protect the remainder of the chopstick probe. With that, she was able to spread the moving mass aside to examine the interior of the band. Nothing contained within looked at all like internal electronics but rather tiny, shimmering, etheric blue crystals. Etched near the top, as though by a laser, was what appeared to be the manufacturer’s information.
“Made by the Quantum Helix Corporation,” followed by strange, arcane strings of complicated chemical compound percentages that might as well have been written in an entirely different language. But there was one note that caught her eye as Yuka used her phone to take a couple photos of what was happening. Right at the bottom, almost obscured by the retreating organism, were the words, “Contains crystallized RB fragments and sealed, live DEs. Handle with extreme caution for repairs and observe strict regulation 725 protection at all times.”