towerofanimus | twenty first staff ♞ da capo

Characters: Sayaka Miki and [your name here].
Setting: Dorm room 1-05, and then the dormitory elevator + ostensibly any floors it goes to.
Format: Written in prose, will match you.
Summary: Over a month ago, Sayaka Miki vanished from the tower without a trace. Today, she shows back up.
Warnings: My usual rambley, angsty-by-nature writing, including a passage of a character being trapped on their dead home world and all the emotional anguish that would entail.

Her vision swims gradually into focus, and it occurs to Sayaka that she is several things she had not expected to be.

The last thing she remembered, here, in this place, was the strappings of reality bleeding away into a skeletal vessel of metal ribbed with violet, just another shape for what was just another soul gem--

--and,

The last thing she remembered at all was the wasteland. The charred purgatory she was always consigned to, when the tower no longer clung onto her soul. She wondered if this was some kind of choice. Maybe something like,

Retain the image of yourself, but remain alone?

Or lose your face, and remain in the tower?

She discarded that theory when her shouts – her eventual screams of, “Take it! Take it! Just take me back!” did absolutely nothing but echo back to her ears. So. She was wrong about it being a test. It was just plain old abandonment in her old, dead world, as per usual.

Telling herself she was used to it was a good delusion. She congratulated herself on the idea, but the execution was quite poor: she didn't feel used to it at all. Her powers of self-deception weren't up to the task, apparently.

Seven hundred and twenty-three hours of solitude later Sayaka began to wonder if the the Thing snuffing out worlds ever came back around for a second go, and if so, if it would notice a singular ghost languishing on a singular planet. Maybe she should build a smoke signal for it.

Six hours later she kicked apart her attempt at creating a pile of flammable debris, a little bit scared of what she'd been thinking.

At the exact amount of hours where time officially becomes meaningless and, in fact, painful to contemplate the existence of, she felt her consciousness forcibly slipping away from her, recognized what the feeling meant, and waited until she could lift her eyelids (eyelids? she had those still?) and let her vision swim gradually into focus--

--and,

Here she was, sitting up in her bed in dormitory room 1-05, wondering if the window had always been on that wall or if someone had decided to rearrange the furniture as a joke. It was something Sayaka was fuzzily sure she would have done, if the idea and free time had struck her.

------->>(elevator, and technically any floor it stops at)

Her brain always acted like a shy slug, when she arrived back from being vanished for a while. She supposed she should be used to that, but it was aggravating, and her only solution for it was to just brute-force past. With that idea in mind, Sayaka made her way to the elevator and pressed the button for a useful-sounding floor (she might've missed and hit a different one, who knows), then retreated away from the doors to wait for them to close. She fit every possible definition of the word 'groggy,' and it showed.

twenty first staff ♞ da capo

cafeteria