Starring:
Date: March 14, 2011
Summary:
None given.
"Dreams - Once More Into The Void"
Unknown location
When Kanami was a little girl, she tried to bring her mother back from
the dead. She did not fully understand the jutsu she was using, her Chakra
was not 'trained' well enough, and she did not realize that the ritual of
the Nogakujin was not meant to resurrect the dead — only to obtain their
blessings. She wound up trapping her mind and spirit in complete sensory
deprivation for what felt like centuries. She doubted whether she existed,
she doubted whether she had EVER existed. All she had to tell her she was
real were her thoughts and feelings of despair and isolation. All was void.
At the end, when her friends and family pulled her out of her trance, she
saw… Something. To this day she is unsure what it was. But it BROKE her.
She woke up a different person. She woke up convinced that she was the
Goddess. That the only reality was that of an empty void… Only she truly
existed, and the world around her, and all the sensory input it provided,
was a fabrication of her imagination. This solipsist world view stayed
with her until her 25th year of life.
Relatively recently, just last year infact, she managed to 'fix' herself
to some degree… But only with the aid of Datura. What began as a rather
distant, and possibly even antagonistic relationship had progressed to the
point that Kanami WANTED to be wrong about everyone else being fake…
Because if Datura was real, then that meant she loved a person instead of
a figment of her imagination. Eventually, she came to the conclusion that
whatever happened to her when she was only six years old, the world was as
real as could be hoped for.
And now here she was, in the void again.
This was different though… Here, in this empty place, she COULD feel
things that she could not before. When she became aware she could not
feel, hear, smell, taste, or see anything, she MADE herself able to. Was
this a sign of her increased power? Her Chakra being trained over and over
until it could overwhelm even the void? She could hear the silence. She
could see the darkness. She could feel the impossible frigid temperature
of… Nothingness, trying to leech away the warmth from her body. But it
wasn't really her body, was it? Just a manifestation of her psyche.
Kanami stared into the void, and she called out into the silence, not
expecting her voice to actually be heard, "I do not fear you." She was
rather surprised when her voice echoed. There was no air here to transmit
sound. But then again… This was not a normal place. Something more
disconcerting occurred, however. Kanami became aware that something in the
void had HEARD her. Further, as she struggled to free herself from the
nothingness, suddenly frantic, she could feel a presence rising from the
pitch-black. She looked down. Compared to the total darkness surrounding
her, the blackness she saw made the void look white. It was not darkness.
It was emptiness. The absolute absence of EVERYTHING.
And then Kanami realized what she was looking at. It was an empty eye
socket the size of the entire universe. A universe full of NOTHING.
Kanami sat up swiftly in bed, inhaling deeply, continuously, trying to
replenish lost oxygen. She started coughing, even as she gasped for
breath. It took a few minutes for her to recover as she realized she had
stopped breathing as she lay asleep. A quote came to mind just then. She
whispered it to herself in the darkness of her bedroom. "If you stare long
enough into the void, eventually the void stares back into you."
