Marionette

Oceans, Chapter Twenty Six - Mizu no Sekai [水の世界]

The world around her was on mute.

Right now, there was no other way to describe it.

Cold, submerged in darkness, it was the only thing she could associate with the world's condition.

The world was mute, because she couldn't hear anything.

It was so, because there was nothing around her that could tell her anything at all.

Darkness clouded her vision, rendering her blind, just as the lack of sound made her deaf.

Reaching forward, her fingers groping through the darkness for something to hold onto, her world swirled around, disorientating like the strong currents swirling beneath the surface of the ocean.

She searched for some hint of another soul in the darkness with her.

Repetitively, aimlessly, based purely on instinctive habit.

It was a small set of movements she'd go through every time she woke up in the dark.

When had it all started, though?

That's right ... it was when her mother had been wiped from the earth right before her very eyes.

Yes. It was caused by the one event that sent her life spiraling into chaos, driven by the whims of a man dressed in a white coat.

How long had it been since that day?

No sense of time greeted her, and in fact the memories still haunt her to this day.

Was it still June? Or had so much more time passed since that fateful day?

Inwardly she knew nobody would answer her, and her fingers continued to grope for some hint of anything that would tell her if she was all alone here.

It came in the form of a harsh cold that was familiar in a demoralizing, heart-wrenching manner.

Her fingers finally reached something through the darkness, something tangible that she recognized to be there with her in the darkness.

It was as cold as ice, a hard surface that upon contact with her fingers caused a dull, underwater tapping to echo through the darkness.

She blinked her unseeing eyes, her fingers remaining upon the cold surface that she had found in the black.

And then the world began to come into focus.

Strands of silver white glistened with light, slowly drifting through what she soon recognized to be some kind of water, reflecting light through the water and glistening around her.

The acrid metallic taste was a familiarity that scared her, terrifying in comparison to anything else in her conscious memory.

And yet her little body did nothing but stare forward through the water.

The cold, hard surface her fingers were pressing against soon came to her understanding as her vision cleared, and she found herself unable to see anything, despite the fact that she could feel it.

She was suspended within the inside of a tank scarcely big enough for her to stretch inside, filled to the brim with the acrid water she was terrified of, yet forced to spend great periods of time suspended within.

She was lying on the bottom of the tank, her body resting weightlessly on her left side as she stared blankly forward.

It was the dull feeling of waking up from an induced slumber, where her senses slowly began to return to her.