Cosmogyral

Chapter 1: In which various 'somethings' bother Nemurin...

Something in Nemurin was slipping, sinking away.

The 'what' of that was evading her, even now; but she could feel it with all certainty. It was like the nearing of a deadline as something fleeting yet persistent nagged the back of your mind in a constant loop, asserting over and over that something had been forgotten, all while leaving out the major matter of what it was in the first place. An emptiness drifted and dropped through Nemurin's whole form, the pristine, ethereal glimmer of her Magical Girl form seeming to fade like beauty with age. Her hold over the Dream World, that which once was so firm in her grasp had loosened, slowly trickling like sweat down her fingers, leaving behind the promise that it would dart past the point of her fingertips and into the void, just as her real body had rotted away to nothing and now lay in a grave in Japan. Even if her unseen hands still held onto what she had been given, all for dear life, the precision that Magical Girls were gifted by the game that had once led her here was not as certain anymore. What it was that changed about the world Nemurin knew, she did not quite know, and if she were to admit it, it exhausted her beyond description, even when she tried to turn her thoughts towards something worth a smile and a laugh. A pleasant dream, a wish, a song of joy from the hearts of the fulfilled; none of them could rid her mind of the perpetual nagging, and she had half a mind to declare it even more of an irritation than Fav, whose voice had been silenced. Though she wouldn't voice if he deserved it or not, she would say that she had not found many surprises in her heart when Ripple's dreams one day revealed that he had been broken into pieces by her. It was the least he asked for by not telling them about the fact that they would all die, that he wanted them all to kill each other in the end.

Bittersweet satisfaction flooded her heart once again, as it had many a time since the Magical Girl Raising Project. Strange as it might be, Nemurin was at least glad she lost to the game of Magical Candies as opposed to the game of death, as many of the others had. But...an anvil of guilt still tugged her heart downwards into spirals sometimes. She remembered the girl, the girl who wanted to be a princess. Never did she know that she would be willing to do so much to take a throne...

But nowadays, Nemurin did what she could to think of other things. Here, there was hardly much of anything she could do about what had happened, like it or not, even if she wished there was. And yet, just when she had found her mind coming to a stand-still and bowing in relative acceptance of the events that had happened - two years ago, she believed - here was something else storming in to throw her off her cloud of calmness and into a puddle of tiredness, the type of tiredness that made you want to lie your head atop your pillow and not move off of it for a day or two. Even the clouds, though still a soft pearly white and with cushioning like cotton candy, didn't seem to burst out with as much fluff as she was used to. The bite that they held didn't taste quite as sweet as it exploded against your tongue. A sofa drifted across the plain between dreams and reality now, and there atop of it was Nemurin. Her long blonde and pink twin tails drifted lazily down the surface, hanging above the edge of the boundary's detritus, swinging to the beat of an invisible breeze. The scene behind her was a dull rose and sapphire, the stars that once popped up aglow so cheerily seeming to feel the comparative lack within their ruler. Conflict was something that did not sit well beside her - it never had, and that had not changed now. Despite her telling herself that there was a possibility of this being natural, normal even, and that she was okay with that, there seemed to be part of her that did not quite wish for that.

Working in the Dream World was something she held fondly in her heart, and the fact she got to do it as what was basically her afterlife was a fine enough consolation for her. Her pink eyes sparkled within the light as they gazed out into the distance, her head tilted at the armrest as her body slumped comfortably across her cloud-clad lounger.