towerofanimus | 1st Spell

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1st Spell

Who: Tara and whoever she happens to stumble across
What: A newcomer tries to find her way out, and instead finds a hell of a lot of trouble along the way.
When: All day
Where: The floors listed below
Format: Commentspam or prose, I'll copy whatever you give me
Warning: T for danger and possible violence

Awareness returns all in a rush. The haze and disorientation that always follow teleporting are a little slower to fade. But the first thing Tara knows is that she's on her back, resting on what feels like a mattress.

Opening her eyes reveals a ceiling. It's not a terribly distinctive ceiling. Tara attempts to turn her head, to see and take in more of the room and maybe get a sense of where she is. And the failure of her body to respond to even that simple command is enough to confirm for her that she can't move.

A few more seconds of increasingly desperate and entirely fruitless attempts to move result, before Tara gives up and relaxes her whipcord tense muscles with a whimper. Actually speaking up takes psyching herself up a bit, but finally she manages it.

"Um...h-hello? Can...c-can someone please help me? Or at least, m-maybe tell me how I got here? I...I don't remember. A-And, I...kind of can't seem to move. At all."

Later on, after the sleep paralysis has worn off, Tara can be found wandering the halls of the second dormitory level. She's fished a change of clothes out of her trunk, as well as - after some hesitation - her knife, and feels a bit more herself in a shirt and pants with the knife hanging off her belt. Both hands are clamped tight around her collar, her pale fingers obviously trying to tug it looser, to find any give in it and failing. Indigo liquid runs through it, marking her as an official resident of the tower, now. Her shoulders are hunched and the girl darts a nervous glance at every door she passes and every person she sees. But anyone who looks back will find Tara hastily looking away, staring fixedly at her feet and trying not to be noticed.

***

Tara is sitting at the top of the staircase, eyeing the perilous way down with wariness and exhaustion. She's bleeding and bruised - blood streams down her arm from what appear to be claw marks in her shoulder, and the back of her shirt is torn, as though something made a grab at her as she fled and just barely missed.

In her efforts to magically urge the skin of her arm to knit a little more quickly, she's not liable to notice anyone else on the staircase right away, or her immediate surroundings at all. Given the poor state of repair it seems to be in, this might not be a very good thing for either of you.

***

After learning even what little she has and seeing even what little she's seen of the tower thus far, Tara is reluctant to relax, even here. The garden that spreads out before her looks lush, beautiful, and peaceful. But there's danger here, and strangeness. She only needs to run her hand along her collar to know that.

But, even so, Tara finds herself wandering out into the garden, drinking in the quiet and letting the scent of flowers soothe her shattered nerves just a bit. She'll stay here, for just a while, wandering the meadow. Every so often, she'll stoop, pick a flower, and weave it into a growing daisy chain she seems to be crafting. But at the slightest sound, the slightest hint of another presence, she goes tense, gaze darting about for signs of danger. If you've just entered the garden, you'll likely feel Tara staring fixedly at you, a half finished daisy chain hanging in her hands, wondering if you're a threat and what she should do if you are.

***

Anyone coming up on the steps leading up on floor twenty two or the steps leading down on floor twenty four are liable to suddenly run into Tara coming the other way. She hurries either up or down the steps with a rather lost expression on her face, to immediately be replaced by one of surprise as she nearly runs into anyone. "O-Oh, my god, I'm so sorry..."

But then, with a frown, she stares up back the way she'd come with an expression of determination. "Not again..."

She turns, as though to start off on the stairs again.

***

Tara is dismayed to find that the staircase seems to simply end, here in the cafeteria. And, after all the walking she's done and the fright she's endured to get down this far, she absolutely refuses to accept it.

So she begins to search. Tara is growing increasingly aware that she's trapped, but refuses to accept it with her last threads of stubbornness. Attempting not to catch the eye of the other people here, Tara begins to pace the perimeter of the room, running her hands along the walls, searching for hidden catches or secret doors. Finding nothing, she examines the floor, seeking signs of trap doors. Finally, in a state of agitation and the in the center of the floor, Tara gives a frustrated growl and stamps her foot. She says a word in Latin that would, under ordinary circumstances, unlock any locked door within her range. But nothing happens, and she knows it, and finally Tara slumps to her knees in defeat. Her stomach feels impossibly empty. Maybe the people who run this madhouse will at least have the decency to feed her.

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"Yeah," Minami said. Normally. The incident where their collars swapping and she lost control aside.

"It's sort of a common thing in my universe. Well, not super common, but common enough there's quite a few people where I'm from who can do it. It's not the same for all worlds from what I've been hearing."

Dang this woman is in pain if she can barely speak. Minami kneels down beside her, reaches out a hand to her good shoulder to help steady her.

"You okay with that?"

"Um..."

She isn't, not entirely, but the girl certainly seems certain of herself, and...well, the encounter with the giant orc-like creature just up the stairs was enough for Tara to see that things aren't quite the same here. After chewing worriedly at her lip, she nods.

"...i-it's okay. Th-Thank you. I'm, um, Tara. S-Sorry we had to meet like this."

Of course she's certain of herself. Minami has been doing this for, if her math was right since coming here, over a year now. And this woman needs help. There's no question about it in her mind.

"I'm Minami. Do you mind closing your eyes? The way I summon can disturb people sometimes. Then I'll summon up Titania and she can heal you up."

Tara's first impulse is to say that yes, she does mind closing her eyes. She doesn't quite trust Minami that much and, well, now the girl has her curious. Tara has seen a great many disturbing things in her life, and thinks personally that she'll probably be hard to bother. And now might be a good chance to get a good look at how this place works without it trying to kill her...or, well, so she hopes.

But Tara does know that telling someone she wants to scope out their power would probably raise a few alarm bells, and so she only nods and closes her eyes instead, tensing up in turn just to keep on guard for another attack.

Minami wouldn't have protested if she wanted to see. Just that, well, some people don't take too well to her essentially shooting herself in the head to summon a creature that's all.

Once Tara closes her eye, Minami gives her shoulder a reassuring squeeze. In this place who can blame Tara for being on guard.

She gets up, unholsters her evoker, presses it to her head and fires. The noise would make it obvious what she's doing but in a shower of blue crystals that dissolve in the air out of the other side of her head the green clad Queen of the Fairies dances.

"It's okay to open your eyes now. Titania, could you heal her for me?"

The fairy nods and waves one arm, light flashes around Tara expanding outward, and the flesh begins to knit itself. Not wholly, not fully, but it helps the healing along a great deal. Once the spell is cast, Titania gives a curtsy and fades away herself.

"Feel better?" Minami asks, kneeling down by Tara's side as she holsters her evoker under her jacket again.

The noise is obvious, familiar, and terrifying. Behind Tara's eyes, she sees glass shatter and fragment, and she hunches herself in even more under Minami's hand, pressing a hand to her mouth.

Tara doesn't like guns. For a moment, she thinks she must have been shot, just like Willow said she was in that other world, but the pain is only the pain in her arm and then, at the sound of Minami's voice, she opens her eyes.

...from there, she simply stares at Titania with something like awe, not moving or saying anything. Until the spell is cast - then Tara gives a sigh of utter relief because the pain is brought down to a dull ache rather than the burning, bleeding mess that it was before.

"Y-Yeah," she says, smiling gratefully over at Minami. "Lots. Th-Thank you, Minami."

She looks back at where Titania had been before she'd faded away.

"...Titania a-as in...Oberon and Titania?"

"Yeah. She likes to sing sometimes, too," Minami said with a smile and stood, offering her hand, "Sorry if I scared you. Like I said, my way of summoning my persona isn't very pretty. Which, from what I understand, is kind of the point."

She hesitates a moment before speaking again, because she wants to know. Minami isn't surprised to see her injured, but it never hurts to find out just what happened.

"What managed to get you so hurt in the first place?"

Tara takes the offered assistance gratefully. Her hand is clammy and trembling in Minami's, but besides the fears and bad memories dredged up by the sound of a gun, she's a bit more at ease. Minami seems to be good people.

Good magic people.

"P-Persona? W-What's that?" Then she realizes that she'd just been asked a question, and switches gears. "I-I...I don't know. It was...really big. A-And, um, k-kind of ugly." She stretches her hand over her head, standing up on tiptoes to demonstrate the thing's height. "It's, i-it's skin was all messed up, a-and it had...f-fangs. But, um, n-not like a vampire."

Tara knows what vampire fangs are supposed to look like, after all.

"It's.... sort of like a part of your soul?" Minami says as she gives Tara's trembling hand a reassuring squeeze before letting it go. "I'm sorry, I'm kind of bad at explaining things, but that's more or less what it is: a reflection of who you are. The kind of persona a person can summon depends on the person because they're here thanks to being made up of bits of your soul. That's part of why they can't stick around for long, otherwise they're walking around with something you need to survive."

She hoped that was a decent explanation. She'd honestly barely understood how it worked, just that it did and she, unlike most other persona users, could summon multiple persona instead of just one.

Then to the monster.

"Yeah, that sounds like something that normally lurks around here. The Tower is infested with things at night, but it's safe as long as you stay in your room. They've yet to get into the dorms for some reason."

"Only at night?"

Tara stares back up the stairs, towards the room where she'd fallen...no, not fallen, where she'd been dropped. Tara wasn't the surest on her feet, but a step suddenly hadn't been there that had been before.

"...just like home."

She looks back at Minami, seeming a little stronger for whatever thoughts are running through her mind.

"D-Does anyone fight? I mean, y-yeah, it's safe in the rooms, but...th-this is our home now. We, w-we shouldn't have to hide."

"There's lots of people here who do," Minami reassured her, "I'm actually working on putting together a Night Watch so we can watch each other's backs and be more effective about it. Plus try to get together notes and strategies about all the horrible things in this place."

Minami is barely fifteen and looks it. The only sign she has she's a warrior of any sort is her evoker holstered under her jacket. If she didn't look so confident about getting it together, she probably wouldn't look much like someone who could put together something like that.

Minami doesn't look old enough to drive. She's obviously younger than Dawnie was when Tara left, and so very much a child in Tara's eyes.

That said...she's really about Buffy's size. She has a mastery over herself that even Tara envies. And she somehow manages to balance the utter horror of possessing a gun with being a girl that Tara can genuinely believe is a sweet person.

Tara smiles, feeling more certain of herself than she has in a while.

"C-Can I help?"

"That would be great!" Minami said, clapping her hands together under her chin enthusiastically, eyes completely lit up at the offer.

"What would you like to do? Join in the patrols? Act as support? Help with the research? It's up to you, really."

Decisions, decisions. It's like being picked for a team, and Tara was always lousy at being picked for teams. Mostly because, well, she was always picked last. It doesn't feel that way this time, though.

"I-I don't know," she says, looking a bit embarrassed at her own indecisiveness. And so she hurries on: "I-I could...I-I think I could, um, do anything. I mean, I didn't patrol much, even back home, but...I-I can do magic. I-I could make, um, shields and stuff, and light, a-and I could fight. If...if I really had to." Her hopeful smile widens slightly. "But I'm...I-I, I like research. I did that the most. Figuring out the bad guys and stuff. I was good at it."

The hopeful smile makes her happy, making her own widen even more. This could really make a difference, she realizes, as long as she doesn't mess it up. Even if she did, she could always try again. There's nothing stopping her here.

"You can talk to Willow, then, if research is what you want to do. She's the only person on it right now and I'm sure she could use the help. I think she's already started collecting information on them."

"Willow?"

It can't be the same Willow. Willow is dead. But...well, it makes her think back, think about Willow as she was, brilliant and clever and Giles' go-to girl. Even if it's just a coincidence, it's kind of a nice coincidence.

"...just like old times. Um, I-I'll ask. Th-Thanks, Minami."

She's confident she can research. Tara is good at outrunning bad guys and, if worst comes to worst, there's always the flying away option.

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1st Spell

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