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I: Dream or vision? [Solo]
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Post by Katherine Jasso on May 17, 2018 2:53:00 GMT
CHAPTER I: THE DREAM, THE GIRL, AND THE BUNNY
Episode 1: Dream or vision?
Completely paralyzed, with her eyes wide open, and sitting on the edge, Katherine remained to observe the terrible fall that was waiting for her if she moved a couple inches more. She couldn't even see the ground from up there. In the distance, she could see the woods that were surrounding the place, and if she lowered her head, she could see the windows of the tower she was so high above. It was an old, majestic structure that seemed to have been built ages ago. "Katherine!" she heard. "Katherine!" a very deep and grown voice kept calling her. Katherine tried to move and turn around, but somehow she was paralyzed by the size of the fall she almost took part of. "Katherine! we need to go! he's coming!". She managed to turn around to discover the origin of the voice that was talking to her.
A cloud was covering the moon, so Katherine could only see the silhouette of this being. It definitely wasn't human. It was some sort of massive four-legged creature, with gigantic wings and some sort of helmet which let escape the glow of two golden yellow eyes. It was at this moment that Katherine knew she wasn't controlling her own movements, cause she would scream of pure terror if she were. For some reason, Katherine remained calmed, it was like she was okay with this creature being there, even more, it was like she felt protected by it. She still couldn't speak, she still could barely move. She looked down, she was wearing some beautiful colored clothes like she was some sort of princess or warrior from some faraway kingdom. Slowly, she started to recover some more senses. Now she could feel the cold wind of the night blowing against her hair, and she could hear what sounded like something smashing the ground above her. She realized the whole tower was trembling, and it was losing balance with every hit. Where was that coming from? it felt like a massive earthquake was taking place, except it was the product of something hitting the tower from below. She started feeling something wet below her hand, that was placed on the ground to not lose balance completely as the tower kept shaking. Raising her hand and looking at it, she discovered what she was fearing of since she felt that weird moisture: it was blood. Suddenly, Katherine started feeling a crushing pain on her rib, like there was something going through her that shouldn't be there. The pain was almost unbearable, it was devastating. Now that she was feeling it, that all her senses were back, the only thing she could feel was that relentless pain going through her body.
Katherine tried to focus on something else, looking desperately for help. It took her a minute, but her eyes found the gigantic creature that was talking to her before, but due to the pain, she had started losing her senses once again. This creature was trying to tell her something, but she couldn't hear anything, it's mouth was moving but Katherine couldn't perceive any sound. Katherine felt that the tower began to crumble. Was this the end? was she going to die? she tried to scream, but no sound came out. The cloud that was covering the moon was gone, and the light filled up the zone. Then, she noticed. There was someone next to the gigantic creature all along. It was a tall man with a hat that seemed to lose its regular shape on the top. He was smiling. Katherine's eyes began to close, she couldn't take the pain anymore, and the tower was starting to crumble under her. She kept looking at the tall man with the hat. He was talking to her. This time, thanks to the moonlight, she could read his lis, and managed to understand a full sentence of what he said.
J a s s o R e s i d e n c eThe sound of the alarm clock was rumbling across the room. Katherine opened her eyes and immediately raised her body to sit over the bed. That was the most unsettling dream she had ever had. It felt so real, so vivid. She slowly placed her finger over her lips, trying to recreate by motion the last thing she saw. ..."look... for... the... secret...gate...at...Shibuya... River..." |
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Post by Katherine Jasso on May 19, 2018 6:42:35 GMT
"Secret...gate" Katherine mumbled, as she kept shaking that frying pan, making her breakfast and looking at the wall with a blank stare. This would have been a pretty regular morning if it wasn't for that very weird dream Katherine couldn't stop thinking about. Her mother had already left for work, and her father had been in a work tour for over two weeks, so Katherine was all by herself. She didn't have a problem with it, even though she somehow always was bothered by the fact that her parents always paid more attention to work than to her, along the way she got used to being alone, specially since they moved to Shibuya. She had learnt long ago how to be completely independent on daily shores, plus, Katherine liked to do things her way and her way only, so she got pretty upset when somebody did things or made her do things in a different way. She couldn't lie, there was usually happiness in her heart when she smelled that certain 'scent' that she was home alone to get ready for school. Well, at least it would be like that in a regular morning, but this morning all of Katherine's thoughts were on that dream. What did it mean? did it even mean anything? did dreams ever mean anything? right now, the only 'scent' she could smell was the scent of burnt scrambled eggs. "Oh!" the girl squealed as she took the frying pan off the fire and headed to the table to server her breakfast.
The girl moaned at the sight of her breakfast. A pair of toasts, scrambled eggs (just a little burnt) and orange juice. The eggs were fine, her little mind-rambling didn't have that much consequences on them as it could have. Katherine was kind of upset about the fact that she had been living for almost three years on Japan and she still had not got used to the eastern culture gastronomy. Except for 'ramen' that she was pretty used to eating after school and at most nights, even though she had tried, she still wasn't used to eating a regular Japanese breakfast with miso soup, rise or 'tamagoyaki', it was like she couldn't avoid preparing a regular western breakfast with toasts and eggs she got used to eat on her time living in Spain, Italy and Argentina. Plus, she hated fish in almost any presentation, so she was really at a disadvantage on that "eating eastern" fight.
Before even noticing, she was done eating, her overthinking had made her loose time over a very tight schedule, so she was now slightly late for school. She poured some coffee in a thermos, placed it in her bag, went back to her room and started picking stuff from the night table, as she enlisted them to make sure she wasn't missing anything: "Story book: checked, cellphone: checked, earphones: checked, keys: checked" by the end of the table her eyes caught a strange device she had never seen before. It was smaller than a cellphone, had a small screen, pink rubber grips and two up and down buttons with some sort of pad in the middle. Katherine lifted the device, kind of scared of it. After two minutes of deep thinking and remembering she was in a rush, Katherine decided to take it with her. She was about to make some serious inquires.
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Post by Katherine Jasso on May 19, 2018 7:57:59 GMT
Going down the elevator, Katherine was holding the strange device with curiosity, she had never seen something like that in her whole life. Because of the very limited set of buttons, she started discarding the possibility of it to be a cellphone. Also, the screen was too small to be some kind of video player, and it didn't have any port for headphones. It had a very little antenna on the top, so maybe it was a beeper or some sort of tracker. Katherine wasn't too worried about finding out what it was, sooner or later that answer would come, she thought that it shouldn't be that hard getting to decipher what kind of device this was by going into the internet. The real question was: how did it get to Katherine's night table over the night?. As she arrived to the low level, she pulled out her cellphone to text her mom.
"Did you leave something for me over my night table?" she typed, then pressed send, as she went out of the building and headed to the subway station to go to school.
History class seemed endless. It took her over two years to get a handle of it, but currently Katherine had almost a complete dominance of Japanese. Just after her arrival, almost three years ago, she started taking special classes that were taught in English for foreign students, while she took Japanese classes on parallel. Her parents usually said she had a gift for languages since she was little. Her first language was Spanish, from being born in Spain, but then she managed to learn English very quickly when she was only 10 years old, from there, she learnt some Korean from living one and a half year in Seoul, a good amount of Italian from living in Verona, and even some Dutch from living in Amsterdam. This year, she felt ready and decided to take classes on complete Japanese, like any regular student, which was a little hard at first, but she got used to it quickly. Katherine's parents still had trouble with Japanese, so usually Katherine was the one to speak with the neighbors if necessary or translate the occasional letter.
Katherine couldn't stop thinking about the device, and that weird dream was still going over and over through her head. Could they be related? History teacher, Nakamura, kept talking about Japanese poetry and it's impact on history.
-Hey, Jasso! -He said referring to Katherine, with the natural respect suffix. Oh, shoot, Nakamura caught her off guard, he probably noticed she wasn't paying attention at all at what he was saying.
-U..Uh... yes? -Katherine replied, if that could be considered as any sort of reply.
-Would you like to tell me, in 'Haiku', how do poets denote in which season is a poem based?
Katherine wasn't paying attention, but she didn't need to, she knew this. She read about it in an old literature book she found on the library, and then she went to the internet, out of pure curiosity to know more about it. She stood up and answered:
" 'Haiku' poets use Kigo. This is a word used exclusively in the poetry to denote a particular season in which the poem is based. For example, the Kigo for 'Fall' is 'brisk'. Some historians say that Kigo comes from the Meiji Era, where the Emperor used to give bonus for their soldiers every end of season or every end of month. These bonuses had names which apparently were based on how he conceived was that season for his army, and some of the words he used were later used as Kigo."
Nakamura remained silent for a second. -Excellent work, Ms. Jasso, I didn't expect any less. He said, and continued teaching the class.
Sure he expected much less, but he couldn't get her this time. It wasn't the first time Katherine wide general culture saved her from this type of situations. After the class finished, and since she didn't have to clean the classroom today, she headed to the library. She was going to figure this out like she figured out everything in her life up to now: by reading.
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Post by Katherine Jasso on May 21, 2018 1:57:05 GMT
Katherine closed the door behind her giving it a soft bump with her hip, since her hands were completely occupied with books of all sort. "Finally home" she mumbled, placing all of the books on the table. The clock behind her was announcing 4pm. It was one of those very old wall clocks that made some kind of bell-ringing sound every hour. Her mom bought it from Mr. Itou, a local neighbor, at some sort of garage sale he had a couple of months ago, after some bargain that, of course, Katherine had to be a part of, since her mother needed a translator. This bell-ringing, aside from being kind of annoying, made Katherine remember she hadn't had any food since this morning, making her realize she was extremely hungry, definitely her little adventure in the school library took longer than expected, but she had managed to reunite all the books about dreams she could find. She went to the kitchen to prepare some food.
As the water for her instant-soup ramen boiled, Katherine took a seat at the living room table, and started reading the index of the first of a series of seven books she had about dreams. What could've cause these kind of dream on her? and how did it feel so vivid? how could this be explained?. She knew that dreams were only some sort of subconscious representation of memories or thoughts reunited throughout the recent times, but how was it possible for her to have a dream that felt so real about something she had never lived before.
"Dreams tend to be forgotten not long after the person has woken up, and are frequently never fully remembered, existing some missing parts of them the subject can't completely recall" Katherine started reading out loud. "The reason is the subject only recalls those parts of the dream that were somewhat important for their conscious side, and tends to forget those that were not"
Katherine stopped for a while. Was she forgetting anything about her dream? she actually remembered everything she remembered this morning, she didn't forget a single part of it on the whole the day. So was that the real start of the dream? she couldn't think about how did she get to that tower, and most importantly, this wasn't a representation of any thought or experience in her daily life recently, or ever. Her phone ringed inside her backpack. She opened and read her mother's text message. It was pretty typical from her mom to reply to a text message five hours late. "No, what do you mean? I'll be home soon". Katherine had completely forgot, the weird device that appeared on her night table this morning was definitely another thing that was very odd about this day. She opened her bag, it was still there. She grabbed it again, and looked at it in silence. "A toy... maybe?" the girl said in a very low tone. She opened her laptop and typed: "Popular Japanese toys". She could see a pretty wide variety of toys, but none like the one that was next to her. The first result in websites was a popular programming, games and toys company, she started seeing the catalog, and there were definitely some colorful small-gadgets for kids that weren't so different of the one she had, but nothing quite like it. Could this toy be coming from this popular company? could somebody there help her discover what this was?. At the bottom of the page, there was a statement that made the girl jump off her seat.
"Some new models could not be on this catalog". Katherine was feeling energized, she wanted to get to the bottom of this, and she felt discovering what this device was could get her close to where it came from, why it was there, and even to the meaning of that dream. She glanced at the clock. "4:35, I still got time!", she said, putting her laptop inside her backpack. She rushed to the kitchen, turned off the stove, took her cellphone, and went out the door. As she typed on her cellphone looking for the location of this company, the girl mumbled:
"Okay, Overlord Enterprises, let's see if you can give me some answers". Katherine left the apartment, she had to hurry.
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