Post by Nichi Mayonakishi on Jun 27, 2019 4:55:08 GMT -4
Dreamstealer
Looming in the dead lights of the alley shadowed by midnight, a figure dressed in black fussed over the oily red screen slab. His phone was covered in skin-oil, smeared with fat from junk food, and hummed faintly and warmly as the dark-red tones popped up. Barely visible text burnt brightly into Nichi's sensitive eyes since he pulled down his reflective sunglasses to look naked at the screen. Squinting, he felt his pupils swelling fiery hot, but it was all worth it.
Selecting a playlist of Jorge Ben Jor’s collected songs, Nichi quickly deactivated the phones screen before plugging his earphones into his ears.
Doubling checking his clothing to the sound of Chove Chuva (1963), he flattened his sleeves and tied down his boots. Stretching the leggings to meet his socks, tightening his belt around his baggy pants, he tied down the boxing tape around his rings and hands. He was diligent to make sure that no skin was exposed, and just as the song finished to the soft tones of “Agoué…”, Nichiho Mayonakishi pushed back his sunglasses to cover his eyes, before closing his hoodie tight around his face. Masking all of his face, save for the bareness of the bridge of his nose.
Now he was ready to bring in the sunshine at 10 at night. But it was 3 in the morning when Nichiho returned home.
With a dorayaki in his hands, the flickering lights of the St. Marta's welcomed Nichi as warmly as any mother. The dark four story orphanage was settled on a lonely street in a wide, verdant valley overlooking the Tokyo Bay, where a handful of farming towns gazed across enviously to the bright, starry spectacle of Tokyo City. A chainlink fence “enclosed” the orphanage and offered modest deterrence against delinquents, but Nichi had a system on hand.
Retrieving a small baggie filled with plastic coins from his pocket, he carefully retrieved one of the coins with his fingers shielding the glass center.
The characters for “Sun” were engraved a dozen times on each side of the plastic coins, which he fashioned from old Pogs.
Nichi grimaced as he bent down to a neglected, crabgrass covered corner of the fence, the light from a street lamp beating down on his back.
Nichi was a Quirker, a little mutant in the heart of Chiba, and so was everyone else in the orphanage. As such, the curfew for the orphanage was 9 p.m., with check-ins at midnight and 3 a.m. But those check-ins didnt worry Nichi, who had an arrangement with one of the guards. As long as he didn't get into too much trouble on the streets, the guard would allow Nichi to venture out during the night. During the day, Nichi was usually confined to within the walls of the orphanage, usually in full-body covering, or isolated in his pitch-black room like a recluse. Magazines and trashy light novels read to the sound of the Dwarves were peaceful nights, but there was a fire in Nichi's blood that rumbled and needed to see the world. So every now and again, he would walk from the Orphanage to the station and explore the alleys and suburbs of the nearby town of Kisarazu, with the jingle of his coins and a spirit of adventure.
The thorny grass seeds stuck to Nichiho’s baggy Jean's as he knelt small into the grass, dampening his pants. A lonely streetlight cast a yellow pall on Nichi's covered form, and it beat down some warmth the exposed areas of his hands. A soft bloom appeared on the knuckles of his hands, like a drunk man's cheeks. In considerable light, that skin would become blistered, and in the intensity of sunlight, Nichi knew instinctively that his knuckles would burst in boiling hot blood and pus. For this was the side-effect of his Quirk, THE SUN, because he felt the incredible boiling, churning, energy in his blood that was released when sunlight touched it. Like solar flares and sun-spouts, his quirk was volatile and dangerous.
Doctors and social workers had helped to define the quirk with him, the Sun was a mutation tied to his albinism. His blood was the main problem, something despicable gene in the deepness of his bone marrow produced some unsavory organic chemical in blood. The cells and plasma were coated in the chemical, which was inert in nature, but on contact with light would refract and absorb it. Thankfully, the chemical had boiled itself away fairly along side the blood it covers. Thankfully as well, Nichi had no pigmentation in his skin, allowing light to easily pass through his skin and eyes. And thankfully, the human body had several liters worth of blood, so there was plenty for Nichi to share.
In the grass, Nichi handled the plastic coin, feeling the placid ridges. His fingers covered the glass pupil in the middle of the coin, so he angled the small coin against the light of the streetlamp. Squished between two curved glass lens, a small amount of Nichiho's blood, only a few millimeters, was the heart of each of the plastic coins he carried. If he was stuck with his “special ability”, he might as well put it to use.
Quickly, he scurried his fingers from the pupil, and a sparkling beam of light smashed into the glass. The coin gently shook between his index finger and thumb, as small bubbles like water in oil became to shimmy and then spin in the pupil of the coin. Underneath the glass, the blood glimmered and glowed for half a second, sending piercing bright rays into Nichi's glazed eyes. Then in half a second of time, a sunbeam, tight and condensed, like laser escaped out of the lens of the pupil, blowing through the links of the fences as he drew it across.
The glass had cracked now, and the dripping molten redness of it fell on the ground. A bubble popped and cinders flew out of the smoking heap of carbonized plastic, Nichi was quick to shove a bootheel into the remains. If his blood was smeared into a thin enough layer, the surface area would allow for the blood to burn itself out fairly quickly. But just to be safe, he made sure to rub his heels clean against the blades of grass.
Through the cooled links, Nichi squeezed himself through large slit in the fence. Steely fingers scratching him softly through his layers gently. In the morning his buddy with the guards would patch it over with some encouragement.
When he reached the double door entrance, Nichiho noticed that all of the hallways were dark. While there was a morbidity always in the halls of St. Marta, as scant incandescent lights shimmered dimly from dropped ceilings in awful corners, it was never pitch black at night, because that was when the night guards conducted their “business.”
Darkness for Nichi, however, was fairly banal. A plus side to his Quirk was that light was picked up more easily in his retinas, as with all humans, a filter of blood vessels laid inside their eyes receiving the light that entered their pupil before being directed around the orb of the eye into their cones and spheres. Though gray and glum and fuzzy, he could spot the faintness of the Orphanage's lobby: a dusty old couch with stains older than Nichi ran along a wall while a melamine desk and an outdated computer faced the door.
He entered with a master key, the guard had given him. Creeping through the hollow sounds of the witching hour, as he made his way through the offices and into the first floor dormitories. Carefully, he peaked through dim windows and around corners, wary of guards he wasn't fond of. There were plenty in the orphanage who had a distaste for the lil’ freak. Most of the guards on the night shift spent the time sleeping in their break room on the second floor, and it took little diligence for the Quirker to make it past them and into his room on the fourth floor. But with the power off, Nichiho figured any of the guards could be awake, searching for any blown fuse or miscreant mutant to blame for the darkness. But knowing the orphanage, it was just the shoddy wiring, they probably housed the wires with old cotton and newspapers.
Creeping up the stairwell, the bellows of his boots echoed through the concrete walls, but his room was the first on the fourth floor from this staircase. His steps grew quicker and louder, as he passed the second floor, then the third floor, before a wrapped hand reached the doorknob.
The door at the top of the stairwell was a heavy steel one, usually locked from the outside-in, yet a small diamond-textured plasticine window let in the view of the hallway.
But all Nichi could see was the white, pale face of a girl, no younger than him. Her gaze was piercing yet her gray eyes looked past Nichi. She couldn’t see him. The doorknob shuttered violently, the whole door was dancing against the sturdy locks. The rattle of the hinges and the creaking of the frame brought Nichiho to stillness.
Her eyes grew blue in the achromatic world, first blue now green now purple now scarlet. It utterly transfixed Nichi. He had never seen love before so written plainly in a persons feature, a tender understanding love. A gentleness in the rainbow shifting irises that beckoned for an eternity staring into them.
But that eternity crumbled as she blinked and then screamed. Two guards were wrestling her to the ground, blindly as Nichiho pressed his face against the window for another glimpse of her beautiful eyes, the two guards felt with their hands around a bag as they fumbled with the quirker. Throwing clumsy fists at the girl, beating her down densely with the bottoms of their fists, hitting each other as well in the frenzy. She was whimpering on the ground now, as the two guards retrieved a burlap sack from one of their tool belts and wrapped it around her face.
After they left, turning away from the door. Nichiho went to his pitchblack room and slept a dreamless sleep.
###
“Mayonakishi-san!” A pounding burst whatever soapbubbles Nichi could dream of. The banging against the steel doors was a distinct rapping, no hands could make that noise. No doubt it was Kikimura, the guard friend Nichi was fond of. “MayonMaishi Nichiho-san. Open your slot.”
The clock told the time as 7 A.M., which meant it was officially breakfast. It also meant that he was awake in the morning, which meant he was awake way too early, which meant he didn't give a rat's ass.
“Mayonakishi! Open the slot, or I'll open the door.” Kikimura yelled as he tapped again, which was so repetitive that Nichiho's eyes fluttered into sleep again. “Fine.”
The lock on the door clicked opened and a ray of light filtered through. Panicked and now definitely awake, as suddenly a single soft echo of light was felt on his cheek, Nichi slid across the tiles of the floor and struck a heel against the lip of the door. Closing it shut, he grabbed his sunglasses before opening the metal slot in his door.
“What the fuck do you want, Kikimura-sama?” Nichi spat as the orange-filtered world slowly became defined in his greasy eyes.
Kikimura brought a small crab claw up to the slot. He wanted his weekly payment. Of course.
“That’s what you want from me at this time? You woke me the fuck up in the middle of the day, almost killed me cause you want a snack? Between you and the damn bird that keeps building nests in the window. Going kekukekukeku! All night. And it shits everywhere. The stink it's terrible! All this and you wake me up.” Nichiho was quick to shut the slot before retrieving the dorayaki he had bought last night. Quickly he shoved them through the doors of and heard the unwrapping of plastic and an eager breakfast. “There, happy?”
“Satisfied, Mayonakishi. With birds, with waking up early. With life, young man. Appreciate life.” The voice opined through the steel.
“So how about that blackout last night?” Nichi pondered if the events had all just been some fantastical dream.
“Oh, yeah. That happened. You didn't see anything right?” Kikimura concerned himself. “Listen, nobodys supposed to know this but we recently moved in a new girl on this floor. I might cut her the same deal as you.”
“She's in full iso, too?” Nichiho pressed his ear against the door's speaking holes, filtered with foam and cloth.
“Worse.” Kikimura scrambled up closer to the speaking hole to whisper. “No one's allowed to see her face, so she’s got a mask on. Especially her eyes or something, don't look at her eyes.”
“Her quirk? It's a mutant-type quirk?”
“It's either that or she's a belligerent.”
“Or her quirk is useful.”
“Just don't go snooping around her okay? If her quirk is anything the boys wanna use, it'll probably kill you.”
“I'm going to live forever, Kikimura-sama.”
“Stay away from her and maybe you will.”
###
Kikimura would return at a quarter past 1 P.M., rapping his claws against the metal door once more. Yet this time, he was voiceless and impersonal and left the hollow, scratchy thunder to rally Nichiho's thoughts.
He was hypnotized by a loop of Stargazer, when the rattling finally was insufferable. That echoing, booming terror rang past his headset and rattled around his brain. It was so loud, he felt nauseous, there was a heaviness behind his eyes and deep-set in the back of his throat. Rising to his feet, it was almost as if his stomach shot into his throat and he felt that sour acid running up and slipping into his mouth.
His knees were glass and rattled the bones, they cut up and down his muscles and made him bleed. Walking was misery, the drumming thunder nothing but torture. There was a clear and extant source of this punishment, it was Kikimura-san.
That crustacean creep would die today. Nichiho grabbed a handful of coins from underneath a stool, and readied them in his hand.
Half-naked and dressed only in an overly large shirt, he barely cared as he reached the door.
Nichiho would boil the bastard alive and eat him, drink all of his purple blood and throw his empty shell away.
“What do you want?” Nichi said but couldn’t hear the words he spoke. Like a dreaded pantomime, there was no sound now so close to the door yet the boiling, burning pain of a heavy drum rumbled in his brain.
“•○•°□●•□.” Kikimura mumbled behind the steel door.
“Speak up, eh?” Nichi pressed his ear against the steel door's listening holes.
“•□●■°□○□°■°■●□•□•□○■•■•□●°□●■°□°■•■●■○■○■°■○■○■•°■○■•■°■•■°■°■○■°□•□!” The whiny voice spoke.
Fear gripped his heart, and pumping fast and terrible, Nichi backed away from the door.
Kikimura wasn’t the thing standing in front of his door. Something far worse. The drumming grew more painful and blood seemed to rush into Nichi's eyes, the light was dimming in the pitchblack room.
Instantaneously, there was darkness.
Nichi collapsed, his knees ripped themselves against a table corner as he crushed a stool. Splaying out legs in large, sharp splinters. Three inch thick, three inch deep, they gouged themselves into Nichi's pores. Hot, steamy blood spluttered out of his back like tea from a kettle.
There was never truly darkness for Nichi. He had always seen the world before a strange gray veil, seeing the scant light reflecting in the darkness of rooms. A remnant of a reflection, a ghostly shade of the world. Never had he been deprived of his night vision.
Still he tried to stay, shaking in the pain. He wanted to scream but his teeth couldn't unclench.
A man was sitting on him, that was the only reason he couldn’t breathe. Such was the weight on him now.
The voice began to speak again, rattling out words.
“h●l■ me. Pl●□se. ° n●●d y■°□□h●■p □■●□s●. I ■○■t w□nt t■ di● h●r pl●□s●. H●lp m●. Th●y'r● u°■○□● m●. Pl●□s●. ■○ Quirk ■s c□ll●d Dr●□mst●□l●r!”
The drumming was gone. The room was still and silent now, the wind had calmed. There was no bird chirping from the window of his dorm, because there was no dorm now.
A world beyond a world beyond his dorm. A vacant void, not dark but rather lacking darkness and light, like the color of the world when your eyes are shut not when your eyes are covered.
Yet the mighty steel door remained standing in front of Nichiho.
When it swung open with a heavy, rusty creak.
A girl was sleeping beyond it, on a bare bed on a wire frame. She was a year or so younger than Nichi, he could tell just from the way she looked. She had soft features, a button nose and small lips. Yet they were swollen purple, bruised black, or cut an inflammatory red.
She spoke without moving her lips. She stared at Nichi without seeing.
Unconcious, she said. “My quirk is called Dreamstealer. Mr. Sandman is my slave.”
Her eyes opened, they were a dazzling array of colors. Shifting and blaring, going from mute to vibrant, scaling from the deepest of reds to the faintest of greens. They were irresistible.
“I saw you, last night.” Nichi spoke without speaking. “I think I'm in love with you.”
“Oh god…”
“Hey, I don't just say something like that all willy-nilly. I think I actually feel something for you, I… I know I-”
“You don't, trust me.” She looked like a doll so still in the dreamscape.
Nichiho's mouth was agape.
“Listen closely, you have to get me out of here.”
Offended, he replied. “Oh really? Now why would I do that? Sure, I'm pretty confident in my eternal love and devotion to you. But my skin's my skin.”
“Are your serious? Don't you know what they've been doing to your fellow orphans?”
“Yeah and I don't care. Frankly, I'm even more upset that I'm floating in a void not of my choosing. I'm really reconsidering my feelings for you right now and…”
“The only reason I’m here in the first place is because you saw my eyes. My quirk, DREAMSTEALER, is activated from my eyes. Anyone who sees my eyes, their dreams are invaded by mine. While I cannot choose who is invaded or not, I can relinquish control over their dreams and disembark my mind from theirs.”
“Great. Good news. Lemme guess, that loud bloody sound was your doing. And the darkness and the… every other fucking terrible thing here.”
“You will help me. Or I will make your life a living nightmare.”
“Go ahead, honey. Just try it.”
It was then, he woke up. He barely remembered his dream. But he noticed something quite odd.
He was standing up when he woke. His hands fastened on the large steel door of his dorm. Nichiho was just about to open the door and embrace the light of the hallway, almost naked.
Looming in the dead lights of the alley shadowed by midnight, a figure dressed in black fussed over the oily red screen slab. His phone was covered in skin-oil, smeared with fat from junk food, and hummed faintly and warmly as the dark-red tones popped up. Barely visible text burnt brightly into Nichi's sensitive eyes since he pulled down his reflective sunglasses to look naked at the screen. Squinting, he felt his pupils swelling fiery hot, but it was all worth it.
Selecting a playlist of Jorge Ben Jor’s collected songs, Nichi quickly deactivated the phones screen before plugging his earphones into his ears.
Doubling checking his clothing to the sound of Chove Chuva (1963), he flattened his sleeves and tied down his boots. Stretching the leggings to meet his socks, tightening his belt around his baggy pants, he tied down the boxing tape around his rings and hands. He was diligent to make sure that no skin was exposed, and just as the song finished to the soft tones of “Agoué…”, Nichiho Mayonakishi pushed back his sunglasses to cover his eyes, before closing his hoodie tight around his face. Masking all of his face, save for the bareness of the bridge of his nose.
Now he was ready to bring in the sunshine at 10 at night. But it was 3 in the morning when Nichiho returned home.
With a dorayaki in his hands, the flickering lights of the St. Marta's welcomed Nichi as warmly as any mother. The dark four story orphanage was settled on a lonely street in a wide, verdant valley overlooking the Tokyo Bay, where a handful of farming towns gazed across enviously to the bright, starry spectacle of Tokyo City. A chainlink fence “enclosed” the orphanage and offered modest deterrence against delinquents, but Nichi had a system on hand.
Retrieving a small baggie filled with plastic coins from his pocket, he carefully retrieved one of the coins with his fingers shielding the glass center.
The characters for “Sun” were engraved a dozen times on each side of the plastic coins, which he fashioned from old Pogs.
Nichi grimaced as he bent down to a neglected, crabgrass covered corner of the fence, the light from a street lamp beating down on his back.
Nichi was a Quirker, a little mutant in the heart of Chiba, and so was everyone else in the orphanage. As such, the curfew for the orphanage was 9 p.m., with check-ins at midnight and 3 a.m. But those check-ins didnt worry Nichi, who had an arrangement with one of the guards. As long as he didn't get into too much trouble on the streets, the guard would allow Nichi to venture out during the night. During the day, Nichi was usually confined to within the walls of the orphanage, usually in full-body covering, or isolated in his pitch-black room like a recluse. Magazines and trashy light novels read to the sound of the Dwarves were peaceful nights, but there was a fire in Nichi's blood that rumbled and needed to see the world. So every now and again, he would walk from the Orphanage to the station and explore the alleys and suburbs of the nearby town of Kisarazu, with the jingle of his coins and a spirit of adventure.
The thorny grass seeds stuck to Nichiho’s baggy Jean's as he knelt small into the grass, dampening his pants. A lonely streetlight cast a yellow pall on Nichi's covered form, and it beat down some warmth the exposed areas of his hands. A soft bloom appeared on the knuckles of his hands, like a drunk man's cheeks. In considerable light, that skin would become blistered, and in the intensity of sunlight, Nichi knew instinctively that his knuckles would burst in boiling hot blood and pus. For this was the side-effect of his Quirk, THE SUN, because he felt the incredible boiling, churning, energy in his blood that was released when sunlight touched it. Like solar flares and sun-spouts, his quirk was volatile and dangerous.
Doctors and social workers had helped to define the quirk with him, the Sun was a mutation tied to his albinism. His blood was the main problem, something despicable gene in the deepness of his bone marrow produced some unsavory organic chemical in blood. The cells and plasma were coated in the chemical, which was inert in nature, but on contact with light would refract and absorb it. Thankfully, the chemical had boiled itself away fairly along side the blood it covers. Thankfully as well, Nichi had no pigmentation in his skin, allowing light to easily pass through his skin and eyes. And thankfully, the human body had several liters worth of blood, so there was plenty for Nichi to share.
In the grass, Nichi handled the plastic coin, feeling the placid ridges. His fingers covered the glass pupil in the middle of the coin, so he angled the small coin against the light of the streetlamp. Squished between two curved glass lens, a small amount of Nichiho's blood, only a few millimeters, was the heart of each of the plastic coins he carried. If he was stuck with his “special ability”, he might as well put it to use.
Quickly, he scurried his fingers from the pupil, and a sparkling beam of light smashed into the glass. The coin gently shook between his index finger and thumb, as small bubbles like water in oil became to shimmy and then spin in the pupil of the coin. Underneath the glass, the blood glimmered and glowed for half a second, sending piercing bright rays into Nichi's glazed eyes. Then in half a second of time, a sunbeam, tight and condensed, like laser escaped out of the lens of the pupil, blowing through the links of the fences as he drew it across.
The glass had cracked now, and the dripping molten redness of it fell on the ground. A bubble popped and cinders flew out of the smoking heap of carbonized plastic, Nichi was quick to shove a bootheel into the remains. If his blood was smeared into a thin enough layer, the surface area would allow for the blood to burn itself out fairly quickly. But just to be safe, he made sure to rub his heels clean against the blades of grass.
Through the cooled links, Nichi squeezed himself through large slit in the fence. Steely fingers scratching him softly through his layers gently. In the morning his buddy with the guards would patch it over with some encouragement.
When he reached the double door entrance, Nichiho noticed that all of the hallways were dark. While there was a morbidity always in the halls of St. Marta, as scant incandescent lights shimmered dimly from dropped ceilings in awful corners, it was never pitch black at night, because that was when the night guards conducted their “business.”
Darkness for Nichi, however, was fairly banal. A plus side to his Quirk was that light was picked up more easily in his retinas, as with all humans, a filter of blood vessels laid inside their eyes receiving the light that entered their pupil before being directed around the orb of the eye into their cones and spheres. Though gray and glum and fuzzy, he could spot the faintness of the Orphanage's lobby: a dusty old couch with stains older than Nichi ran along a wall while a melamine desk and an outdated computer faced the door.
He entered with a master key, the guard had given him. Creeping through the hollow sounds of the witching hour, as he made his way through the offices and into the first floor dormitories. Carefully, he peaked through dim windows and around corners, wary of guards he wasn't fond of. There were plenty in the orphanage who had a distaste for the lil’ freak. Most of the guards on the night shift spent the time sleeping in their break room on the second floor, and it took little diligence for the Quirker to make it past them and into his room on the fourth floor. But with the power off, Nichiho figured any of the guards could be awake, searching for any blown fuse or miscreant mutant to blame for the darkness. But knowing the orphanage, it was just the shoddy wiring, they probably housed the wires with old cotton and newspapers.
Creeping up the stairwell, the bellows of his boots echoed through the concrete walls, but his room was the first on the fourth floor from this staircase. His steps grew quicker and louder, as he passed the second floor, then the third floor, before a wrapped hand reached the doorknob.
The door at the top of the stairwell was a heavy steel one, usually locked from the outside-in, yet a small diamond-textured plasticine window let in the view of the hallway.
But all Nichi could see was the white, pale face of a girl, no younger than him. Her gaze was piercing yet her gray eyes looked past Nichi. She couldn’t see him. The doorknob shuttered violently, the whole door was dancing against the sturdy locks. The rattle of the hinges and the creaking of the frame brought Nichiho to stillness.
Her eyes grew blue in the achromatic world, first blue now green now purple now scarlet. It utterly transfixed Nichi. He had never seen love before so written plainly in a persons feature, a tender understanding love. A gentleness in the rainbow shifting irises that beckoned for an eternity staring into them.
But that eternity crumbled as she blinked and then screamed. Two guards were wrestling her to the ground, blindly as Nichiho pressed his face against the window for another glimpse of her beautiful eyes, the two guards felt with their hands around a bag as they fumbled with the quirker. Throwing clumsy fists at the girl, beating her down densely with the bottoms of their fists, hitting each other as well in the frenzy. She was whimpering on the ground now, as the two guards retrieved a burlap sack from one of their tool belts and wrapped it around her face.
After they left, turning away from the door. Nichiho went to his pitchblack room and slept a dreamless sleep.
###
“Mayonakishi-san!” A pounding burst whatever soapbubbles Nichi could dream of. The banging against the steel doors was a distinct rapping, no hands could make that noise. No doubt it was Kikimura, the guard friend Nichi was fond of. “MayonMaishi Nichiho-san. Open your slot.”
The clock told the time as 7 A.M., which meant it was officially breakfast. It also meant that he was awake in the morning, which meant he was awake way too early, which meant he didn't give a rat's ass.
“Mayonakishi! Open the slot, or I'll open the door.” Kikimura yelled as he tapped again, which was so repetitive that Nichiho's eyes fluttered into sleep again. “Fine.”
The lock on the door clicked opened and a ray of light filtered through. Panicked and now definitely awake, as suddenly a single soft echo of light was felt on his cheek, Nichi slid across the tiles of the floor and struck a heel against the lip of the door. Closing it shut, he grabbed his sunglasses before opening the metal slot in his door.
“What the fuck do you want, Kikimura-sama?” Nichi spat as the orange-filtered world slowly became defined in his greasy eyes.
Kikimura brought a small crab claw up to the slot. He wanted his weekly payment. Of course.
“That’s what you want from me at this time? You woke me the fuck up in the middle of the day, almost killed me cause you want a snack? Between you and the damn bird that keeps building nests in the window. Going kekukekukeku! All night. And it shits everywhere. The stink it's terrible! All this and you wake me up.” Nichiho was quick to shut the slot before retrieving the dorayaki he had bought last night. Quickly he shoved them through the doors of and heard the unwrapping of plastic and an eager breakfast. “There, happy?”
“Satisfied, Mayonakishi. With birds, with waking up early. With life, young man. Appreciate life.” The voice opined through the steel.
“So how about that blackout last night?” Nichi pondered if the events had all just been some fantastical dream.
“Oh, yeah. That happened. You didn't see anything right?” Kikimura concerned himself. “Listen, nobodys supposed to know this but we recently moved in a new girl on this floor. I might cut her the same deal as you.”
“She's in full iso, too?” Nichiho pressed his ear against the door's speaking holes, filtered with foam and cloth.
“Worse.” Kikimura scrambled up closer to the speaking hole to whisper. “No one's allowed to see her face, so she’s got a mask on. Especially her eyes or something, don't look at her eyes.”
“Her quirk? It's a mutant-type quirk?”
“It's either that or she's a belligerent.”
“Or her quirk is useful.”
“Just don't go snooping around her okay? If her quirk is anything the boys wanna use, it'll probably kill you.”
“I'm going to live forever, Kikimura-sama.”
“Stay away from her and maybe you will.”
###
Kikimura would return at a quarter past 1 P.M., rapping his claws against the metal door once more. Yet this time, he was voiceless and impersonal and left the hollow, scratchy thunder to rally Nichiho's thoughts.
He was hypnotized by a loop of Stargazer, when the rattling finally was insufferable. That echoing, booming terror rang past his headset and rattled around his brain. It was so loud, he felt nauseous, there was a heaviness behind his eyes and deep-set in the back of his throat. Rising to his feet, it was almost as if his stomach shot into his throat and he felt that sour acid running up and slipping into his mouth.
His knees were glass and rattled the bones, they cut up and down his muscles and made him bleed. Walking was misery, the drumming thunder nothing but torture. There was a clear and extant source of this punishment, it was Kikimura-san.
That crustacean creep would die today. Nichiho grabbed a handful of coins from underneath a stool, and readied them in his hand.
Half-naked and dressed only in an overly large shirt, he barely cared as he reached the door.
Nichiho would boil the bastard alive and eat him, drink all of his purple blood and throw his empty shell away.
“What do you want?” Nichi said but couldn’t hear the words he spoke. Like a dreaded pantomime, there was no sound now so close to the door yet the boiling, burning pain of a heavy drum rumbled in his brain.
“•○•°□●•□.” Kikimura mumbled behind the steel door.
“Speak up, eh?” Nichi pressed his ear against the steel door's listening holes.
“•□●■°□○□°■°■●□•□•□○■•■•□●°□●■°□°■•■●■○■○■°■○■○■•°■○■•■°■•■°■°■○■°□•□!” The whiny voice spoke.
Fear gripped his heart, and pumping fast and terrible, Nichi backed away from the door.
Kikimura wasn’t the thing standing in front of his door. Something far worse. The drumming grew more painful and blood seemed to rush into Nichi's eyes, the light was dimming in the pitchblack room.
Instantaneously, there was darkness.
Nichi collapsed, his knees ripped themselves against a table corner as he crushed a stool. Splaying out legs in large, sharp splinters. Three inch thick, three inch deep, they gouged themselves into Nichi's pores. Hot, steamy blood spluttered out of his back like tea from a kettle.
There was never truly darkness for Nichi. He had always seen the world before a strange gray veil, seeing the scant light reflecting in the darkness of rooms. A remnant of a reflection, a ghostly shade of the world. Never had he been deprived of his night vision.
Still he tried to stay, shaking in the pain. He wanted to scream but his teeth couldn't unclench.
A man was sitting on him, that was the only reason he couldn’t breathe. Such was the weight on him now.
The voice began to speak again, rattling out words.
“h●l■ me. Pl●□se. ° n●●d y■°□□h●■p □■●□s●. I ■○■t w□nt t■ di● h●r pl●□s●. H●lp m●. Th●y'r● u°■○□● m●. Pl●□s●. ■○ Quirk ■s c□ll●d Dr●□mst●□l●r!”
The drumming was gone. The room was still and silent now, the wind had calmed. There was no bird chirping from the window of his dorm, because there was no dorm now.
A world beyond a world beyond his dorm. A vacant void, not dark but rather lacking darkness and light, like the color of the world when your eyes are shut not when your eyes are covered.
Yet the mighty steel door remained standing in front of Nichiho.
When it swung open with a heavy, rusty creak.
A girl was sleeping beyond it, on a bare bed on a wire frame. She was a year or so younger than Nichi, he could tell just from the way she looked. She had soft features, a button nose and small lips. Yet they were swollen purple, bruised black, or cut an inflammatory red.
She spoke without moving her lips. She stared at Nichi without seeing.
Unconcious, she said. “My quirk is called Dreamstealer. Mr. Sandman is my slave.”
Her eyes opened, they were a dazzling array of colors. Shifting and blaring, going from mute to vibrant, scaling from the deepest of reds to the faintest of greens. They were irresistible.
“I saw you, last night.” Nichi spoke without speaking. “I think I'm in love with you.”
“Oh god…”
“Hey, I don't just say something like that all willy-nilly. I think I actually feel something for you, I… I know I-”
“You don't, trust me.” She looked like a doll so still in the dreamscape.
Nichiho's mouth was agape.
“Listen closely, you have to get me out of here.”
Offended, he replied. “Oh really? Now why would I do that? Sure, I'm pretty confident in my eternal love and devotion to you. But my skin's my skin.”
“Are your serious? Don't you know what they've been doing to your fellow orphans?”
“Yeah and I don't care. Frankly, I'm even more upset that I'm floating in a void not of my choosing. I'm really reconsidering my feelings for you right now and…”
“The only reason I’m here in the first place is because you saw my eyes. My quirk, DREAMSTEALER, is activated from my eyes. Anyone who sees my eyes, their dreams are invaded by mine. While I cannot choose who is invaded or not, I can relinquish control over their dreams and disembark my mind from theirs.”
“Great. Good news. Lemme guess, that loud bloody sound was your doing. And the darkness and the… every other fucking terrible thing here.”
“You will help me. Or I will make your life a living nightmare.”
“Go ahead, honey. Just try it.”
It was then, he woke up. He barely remembered his dream. But he noticed something quite odd.
He was standing up when he woke. His hands fastened on the large steel door of his dorm. Nichiho was just about to open the door and embrace the light of the hallway, almost naked.
