sinking down, down

[facultwist]

Death is a drop into a blackness that swallows you. You feel the movement of not air but shadow across your face as you plummet, and there is no bottom. No crash.

If there is another side, you do not reach it.

It is neither the light of heaven or the fires of hell that greets you when you wake. And wake you do, to the buzz and flicker of old fluorescent lights.

You are laid out beside a full-size competitive swimming pool, half-filled with stagnant water. The doors out are blocked off by locked doors covered in caution tape. The locker rooms are long since emptied, paint peeling from the humidity. The only signs of habitation are a few pieces of scattered graffiti.

Welcome to your new home. There's no sunlight, no indication of time passing. Just you and each other and your thoughts. the stagnant water bubbles a little occasionally, but there's nothing in it.

Before long you'll realize that you no longer need to eat or drink. You might notice your hand go through something if you don't focus. You're a ghost now. What's that they say about unfinished business?

Comments

[rosewitch]

Why would I tell you that?

[sweetsynergy]

Because it might be relevant to whatever the hell is going on here. I'm not twisting your damn arm.

[rosewitch]

I told Thomasin and Dagr about my dream. If they think it's relevant, they can bring it up themselves.

Please understand. You've given me no reason whatsoever to want to cooperate with you, in fact have exclusively insulted me since I arrived, and yet you expect me to trust you with personal information. Trust is earned.

[sweetsynergy]

[Don't start shit, don't start shit, do not start shit-]

So you were dreaming about getting hot and heavy with someone, got it.

[Dammit.]

Fine, knowing you had one is enough, I guess.

[rosewitch]

[just because everything in utena is secretly a penis doesn't mean vanity is technically right. probably.]

[Anthy doesn't roll her eyes, but she has to work really hard not to. It kind of hurts her optical nerve.]

I'm not sure the content of the dream is what matters. It felt like being pushed closer to something I had never experienced but also knew every moment of. And the Interim Headmistress has been increasingly stressed about time. The dreams always happen after a murder and an execution, so they're either a marker of those or of a looming deadline.

[sweetsynergy]

Called it. The witch is breathing down her neck, I think.

[rosewitch]

Definitely. I'm just not sure why. Whatever this is, it's highly organized. If it's the witch's ritual, she should know that it will take a while unless someone commits a mass murder or something.

[cough]

What's the point in breathing down the neck of someone getting expected results?

[sweetsynergy]

[Thinking-]

She didn't interfere directly until the execution.

[She'd said it, after Mafuyu died. There was something weird about the executions.]

Maybe it's the attempt at escaping that's important? And the headmistress- well, like I said. It can be hard killing people.

[rosewitch]

. . . you have to try to run away.

Like in the story and in the dream. She ran, and then she died. The execution is a reenactment.

[sweetsynergy]

[Thinking. Connecting some pieces.]

FUCK, if I actually had done it that probably would have been just what she- GOD DAMMIT-

[rosewitch]

It is interesting.

[just. ignoring the outburst.]

Yours was the only execution whose directions were to go up, not run away.

[sweetsynergy]

And even that was still an attempt to escape.

[More connecting-]

Or I was supposed to think it was, dammit.

[the headmistress and her boss sink ever lower- higher?- gain more importance on her shitlist]

[rosewitch]

[Why was "up" an escape for Vanity specifically? Anthy wonders, and then doesn't because in the end it's kind of obvious. And embarrassing. Oh, well.]

Yours was the only execution with any other . . . figures. Beings? The mannequins. [the abominations] Is that personally significant? If not, it might mean something.

[sweetsynergy]

Not beyond their choice in weaponry.

[Was that the only reason they were there? If she were more willing to be introspective she might think it was some elaborate commentary on her treatment of other people as set pieces or tokens on a board, reducing those around her to faceless puppets to be maneuvered.]

[As it is she's mostly just annoyed she wasn't given a blade of her own to try fighting back.]

If I've got some deep personal connection to crash test dummies in my past it's not one I'm aware of.