Log: Night Terrors
<Pose Tracker> Seiichi Miyamoto [NWO] has posed.
Seiichi's town home in Tatsumi-shi. Not all that far from the SEES Dorms. Its one of his many places of residence. Some closer to the center of the city. Some futher afield. He keeps at least three at all times, and not all of them are under teh same name. This one however is, and its his primary home at the moment. A modest enough affair for someone who sits on the board of a new and upcoming corporation. Two stories with his office dining room and kitchen on the bottom floor and his bedroom and personal study on the upper floor.
His cats have control of the lower floor. If anyone was wondering.
The decor is simple and tasteful, with very little in the way of personal touches. His personal study holds his collection of egyptian artifacts and other nicknacks that he's collected over the years. The bedroom is similarly clean and sparce on the personal decoration. Only a few little pictures and items. Here though there are weapons hung on the walls almost as decorations. Long swords and short of different periods of history and different locales.
Of course Seiichi has the /real/ weapons hidden around the house. Just in case. He's a paranoid bastard like that.
<Pose Tracker> Eien Seida [D4] has posed.
Dreams come and go. Ethereal scraps of nothing, nonsense tabulated by a busy brain seeking to slough off its daily worries and process all that it has seen and heard, they are inconsequential, whatever sooth-sayers would have one believe. They are the cinema of an unsupervised psyche, disconnected dross, and little more.
They are also easily influenced by external physical events: an alarm, the need to use the bathroom, voices heard in the next room, all of these things can find their way into a sleeping mind and represent themselves within any given dream.
Tonight, it begins with swaying, movement. Thunderous booms heard far-off, rumbling below, as gentle rocking becomes more and more intense. Until it finds its way into his dreams, this intolerable instability: back and forth, back and forth, up and down, it rolls him and presses him into his bed.
He may wake with some relief, but the relief may not last:
Seiichi Miyamoto will roll out of his bed and onto the floor as his bedroom pitches and sways beneath him.
<Pose Tracker> Seiichi Miyamoto [NWO] has posed.
Seiichi's dreams are darker things most times. Ever since he was touched by the Crawling Chaos himself there have been times where he remembers nothing from his feavered dreams but yellow eyes and mocking laughter. He doesn't wish to remember more than that. Those weeks locked in a coma were more than enough memories for a lifetime. He often thought he had gone mad. Those memories had faded, but the echos still haunted him at times kept away only by a brighter thought that did combat with the darkness.
Not even bright thoughts of smiling redheads can see him though this night though. The movement in his dream is disconcerting. He thrashes about enough to tie the sheets into knots before finally thrashing himself right awake. He sits up, his sleep fogged mind fighting for reason as he beginst to take stock of his surroundings only to have the dream manifest in reality.
He hits the ground hard and fetches up against the wall, his eyes sharpening with suprise and a rush of adrenaline to his system.
This was not normal.
He scrambles to his feet, reaching for the blade concealed in the nightstand of his bed before loosing his footing again and ramming his shoulder hard against the wall of his bedroom.
<Pose Tracker> Eien Seida [D4] has posed.
The half-curtained window lets in the fat moonlight of December...but not the yellow lights of the city, oh no. This light is silver: it pours in through the window as coldly as the reflection of light off of the blade in his hand, its grim smile reflecting the room back at itself.
The room continues to pitch and yaw, and the distant thunder he heard makes itself evident again, this time much closer: the sound of the ocean. The sound of waves being driven into hollow rocks, erupting into a fine, misting spray.
The scent of brine is thick in the dark.
As you finish your prayer, you notice an odd glittering card on the ground.
<Pose Tracker> Seiichi Miyamoto [NWO] has posed.
To paraphrase a most articulate man...
THIS IS NOT TRADITIONAL MOONLIGHT!!
Staggering across his bedroom floor he clutches the hitten pannel that conceals the blade. A swift twisting motion pulls the weapon from hiding as he casts his single eye around the expanse of the bedroom. Is this an attack? An assassin sent to confuse him? A persona user seeking to strike him in his sleep? There is nothing there though. Nothing but the roar of the waves and the salty taste of brine on his suddenly dry tounge.
His breath quickens as he grips a corner of his bed to anchor himself in place. He doesn't want to fall again and it is the only action he can do for the moment. There is no target to strike. Nothing to focus his paranoia on but the feel of the waves and the ocean seems real enough. Real enough to worry him.
<Pose Tracker> Eien Seida [D4] has posed.
Nothing happens.
No, that is: things continue to happen the way that they've been happening. The room continues to rock. The sea continues to churn.
Nothing else, however, happens, as he waits and clutches the foot of his bed, save that his apartment creaks in a manner altogether too like the creaking of a ship at sea.
<Pose Tracker> Seiichi Miyamoto [NWO] has posed.
What is happening is plenty.
"Set." Seiichi hisses as he tries to get a handle on this situation. His own persona appears, the Chaotic God casting about for something to hit. Something to help end this madness.
However there is nothing there.
The persna shifts to others, ones to clear the mind and heal the body as Seiichi searches for a way to stop this. As he sifts madly though the cards of his soul he pulls himself along as he attempts to keep his footing. Pushing himself to move against the window as his head whips around madly to make sure nothing is approaching from his blind side.
<Pose Tracker> Eien Seida [D4] has posed.
He is at sea.
At least, if he's to believe his eyes, as he looks out of his bedroom window, that is the case: it's night, but the heavens are smudged by only the faint grey of scarce clouds, and moonlight and starlight together grant him a luminously clear view of the sea as it stretches off toward the flinted horizon. The black waters glisten and gleam like chipped obsidian. The remote peaks sparkle with diamond-like brilliance, while the waves that crash against the side of his...apartment building??...are thick and lacy with hissing foam.
Spray mists the glass.
<Pose Tracker> Seiichi Miyamoto [NWO] has posed.
He has to still be dreaming.
Apartment buildings do not just spontaniously go to sea! Unless you're in a Monty Python movie and Seiichi is fairly sure that he isn't in one of those at all. His jaw drops as he stares at the stary night out on the ocean instead of the familiar setting of Sumaru's nightlife.
His concentration shatters and his Persona goes with it.
One trembling hand reaches up to touch the glass before he unlatches the window and thrusts it open into the spray.
<Pose Tracker> Eien Seida [D4] has posed.
Perhaps the opening of the window ought to shatter the illusion -- all sane and rational thinking no doubt /insists/ that this is not, cannot, be real -- but it doesn't.
As Seiichi flings the window open, a stiff breeze threatens to swing one of the wings of framed glass back inward, and with it comes the cold, marine air of the open ocean. Below -- too far to touch, but close enough to sense the moist upward misting of -- wavelets crash against the apartment building's hull.
Overhead, somewhere -- on the top of the building, perhaps -- is the sound of cloth snapping in the wind.
Sailcloth.
<Pose Tracker> Seiichi Miyamoto [NWO] has posed.
Logic fights with what his senses are telling him is perfect, totally, undoubtedly real. The shiver of the spray, the way the wind sends the windowpane slamming back towards him. The cold air fresh from the ocean. It all slams into his weak grip on reality and shakes it further loose. The blade drops from his hand as he reaches up to grasp at the swinging pane before it shatters with the force of the wind.
His ears hear sounds and his flesh feels sensations that his mind despirtly tells him are false. He's used illusions before. He's used tricks to confound and confuse. This is something all together different. More real. More there. He can see it, taste it, touch it.
The violent whipping sound above him cause his neck to cran upwards, his single eye straining to locate the source of the sound.
<Pose Tracker> Eien Seida [D4] has posed.
The stars in the sky are...wrong, for this time of year. Perhaps slightly wrong altogether, as though this earth and the earth to which he'd grown accustomed shared only a semblance of similarity. Overhead, there isn't any sight of the masts with their creaking ropes and snapping sails -- at least, not from where he's standing.
There is a sound that begins, on the edge of hearing. He feels it in the soles of his feet first: a low, ultrabass rumble, thrumming up from the depths of the ocean (but that's ridiculous, the rest of his apartment is downstairs, and then the ground, the ground in Sumaru).
In the ceaseless, senseless pattern of the waves that march off into the night, Seiichi might begin to detect changes, as though the sea were curiously growing more smooth...
<Pose Tracker> Seiichi Miyamoto [NWO] has posed.
This is wrong. Wrong wrong wrong. The sky is wrong. The stars are wrong. Seiichi's mind is beginning a slow gibbering decent even as he attempts to remain calm in a situation that entirely /isn't/ calming. His apartment building can't be sailing. His loft is not the topdeck of some damn schooner on the ocean. The roof of the building is not hosting a mast of sailcloth and strung rope. That is patentently ridiculus...
And yet every sence he can imagine is telling him that is exactly what is happening. He backs slowly away from the window as the pattern of the waves beging to even out, turning suddenly for his bedroom door. He doesn't care if he's in just his dark green PJ's(with skulls). He is going to get ot the bottom of this...the bottom of the apartment can't be flooded...
Right?
He struggles halfway across the floor before having to catch himself on a dresser to keep himself from falling, bracing himself there with on trembling hand.
<Pose Tracker> Eien Seida [D4] has posed.
As Seiichi turns from the window, the framed wings bang in the wind, the curtains billow with every breeze. The floor continues to rock and move beneath him in the dark -- a nasty trick for the world to play on a man who lacks depth perception -- but at least the movements are rhythmic and regular.
Flinging open his bedroom door...
Everything stops.
The movement. The sounds. The darkness comes crashing back in, tinted orange from the overhead arc-sodiums that march along the neat, orderly streets of Sumaru, lighting the way for evening pedestrians and late traffic alike. Behind him, in his room, the sound of a distant siren can be heard through the open windows.
Downstairs, everything is quiet.
<Pose Tracker> Seiichi Miyamoto [NWO] has posed.
It takes more than a little concentration for Seiichi to make it all the way across the room. No depth perception combined with the adrelinene in his system and the distraction of his mind as it slowly looses its grip on reality combine to make the short journy almost nightmarish. He has to use the wall too keep himself steady. One hand finds the door though and with a growl he flings the door wide...
Silence.
All that meets his ears on the other side of the door is silence. His room stares back at him almost accusingly. The glittering eyes of a cat stare at him from the armrest of a sofa, the feline expression accusing.
Seiichi stares wide eyed and gasping for breath at the darkness and familiar surroundings, surroundings that he no longer fully trusts. He glances back towards the darkness of his bedroom, the open window. Everything quiet once again.
<Pose Tracker> Eien Seida [D4] has posed.
There are droplets of water on his windowpanes.
Even as he watches, they roll down the glass, causing wormy shadows to throw themselves against the far wall...lit up by the street lamps beyond. The streets in the distance are dry -- cold, but dry. It won't be long before the misted moisture on the window freezes, either...
But it will take longer than it otherwise might, because salt water does not easily freeze.
