Eye of the Needle: Into the Reikai

Avery IV: Streetlight Prayers

Darker and darker the pieces of the plane became, until Avery was awash in cold and black. For a moment he found total peace in the velvety murk, only to be flung further into the recesses of the Reikai. His path was rough, and when he found footing it merely collapsed again to send him hurtling once more. Something was drawing him towards it, but he knew it wasn't Xanthe. The Old Witch God wasn't as... coarse... with its methods.

His head banged against the insides of an elevator shaft, an overwhelming pain overcoming all senses. Exposed, dead wires caught against his clothing and slowed his descent with their hooked metal. Soon, Avery found himself dangling inches from the bottom of the elevator's dusty shaft in a mess of wires and cables. They were bundled so tightly around his neck he had assumed they were trying to hang him, but with the rough fall it had inadvertently protected him from breaking it. As soon as he began to struggle, the wires immediately untied themselves and he fell the two inch difference onto the concrete below him. Old flecks of paint and sawdust kicked up from the impact, forcing him to scramble outwards past the broken-open doorway and cover his mouth.

It took Avery some time to clear his head and take inventory, he felt as though he'd just gotten off of the worst rollercoaster ride ever. Despite the physically intensive trip, he seemed relatively unharmed besides some lingering throbs. The same couldn't be said for his clothing, which had been torn and pulled too hard for him to consider wearing it in public again. Even the shirt he wore had some cuts in it that might have worked if he liked tacky looks and too much airflow.

He sighed to himself as he stepped on the tile flooring, finally gaining enough bearings to realize where he was. Soft neon lights lit stairwells, open-air plazas, and fountain displays. It definitely wasn't anywhere past the Veil, so he hadn't left the spirit world yet. It actually looked pretty close to a mall, at least the kind Avery had seen sparsely through magazines and shows. They'd never felt homely to him, but somehow the complete lack of people made it unjustly comfortable. Maybe it was the moody lighting, or just the prospect of the shops being unmanned and full of snacks.

He appeared to be in a side aisle of the mall, with some closed down shops blocked off by their scaling metal slide-doors. He wasn't sure what they were called. What alarmed Avery was the sheer number of screens and graphic displays that relentlessly stockaded the walls and columns of the mall. Each wall was a patchwork of flickering glass segments, and each support pillar was dotted with hundreds of screens. They were models anywhere from sleek and plasma to thick and boxed television sets from their first debut. What made it worse was the contents of each one. Avery could pick out a few as normal or tolerable movies and videos, but the rest ranged from tacky to downright deplorable. Slideshows of bombing victims and planes overhead played before transitioning to hardcore, raunchy porn. Avery walked deeper into the complex, driven by morbid curiosity. The videos continued on, only growing in absurdity and questionability.

Avery's sore legs eventually brought him to the center of the mall, a supercenter for all of the content being played. He could see everything here. Suicide by shotgun, burn victims, and scenes straight from Red Room private streams. Avery was apathetic to most, but the audio from some was so undeniably real that it tugged at his heartstrings through the layers of mold he'd grown over them.

Just as he had his fill and decided to leave, one of the decorated support pillars lurched towards Avery. The wires connecting it strained until they snapped and hit the floor, the shape converging towards him as if falling. Its bottom section split loudly into two thin, spidery appendages to catch itself, the top half shifting into a more humanoid shape. The screens began to flex and shift, collecting near the top. One singular, wide display emerged from the mess of glass and tubing to act as a partial face. Plasma and living static leaked from between the wiring, solidifying into an elongated skull whose cheekbones held the rectangular viewport in place. It smiled, though there was no skin or muscle on the body to allow otherwise. Transmissions echoed around the emerging spirit before it stretched and popped its spindly arms into place. All at once, the screens dotting its body like some horrible infection began to flare to life, all of the rest of the mall's lively displays going black as their regularly scheduled programs were sucked away from them. With a metallic snap of the spirit's spindly metal fingers, red headlines amassed and covered the imposing figure in a patchwork cloak of scrolling calamities. It towered over Avery, nearly to the ceiling of the mall and as tall as a radio tower.