Talk:Niwa Sachiri

Sachiri Omake

Ch. 0: Academics 2

"Ahem~"

Scars and gouges still lurking in the shadows of his fur, Kappii cleared his spiritual throat and averted his gaze. With a capybara's herbivore-typical eye position, that meant completely turning around amidst the vague, still crystallizing surroundings of the dream.

"What's the matter? You're just a capybara."

"It's a matter of propriety," he said, likewise repeating his words from a few nights ago.

"It's hard to make me uncomfortable in my own dream," she replied absently as a wall nevertheless sprung up between them. "Though I guess if you were shaped like a person I'd have kicked you out by now."

Kappii found himself immersed in a fountain beneath a vast skylight opening into the night, surrounded by banks of carefully tended plants enclosed by the glass walls of a great conservatory. Through a slightly agape but conveniently obscuring door of warped glass panels, Sachiri's side resolved into a brightly lit library with towering shelves.

"Besides, it's just a dream. It's not like you're actually seeing me in person..." Her voice carried through over the fountain's gentle bubbling, allowing them to continue to converse. Despite her words, clicking heels on granite tiling had replaced the muffled silence of stockings on an indistinct floor. "Really though! At this rate, you might need to give me alone time you know. A girl needs her own room."

"Of course! We're teacher and student! It's not like we have to share the same room all the time," he agreed hastily. "In fact, as a wise sage, I too need time and space to contemplate weighty questions. I expect many a night I'll be too deep in meditation to join you and you'll be in your dream uh… doing whatever it is a healthy teenager does in their dreams."

"You do you and I'll do me."

The two fell into a slightly awkward silence. From the library came the sound of someone settling down onto a couch.

"S-Still!" Kappii said, changing the subject. "You certainly do like books. I think every night I've seen, you're always dreaming of books somehow."

"Not always. Sometimes I'll go explore or do some weird or exciting things. Well, taking the time to do reading makes sense. If you draw something in a dream, you can't take it with you. If you try to learn things like cooking or sports, it won't ever work out the same way in real life. Reading kind of comes with you though. It makes school pretty easy at least."

"I suppose. It must make reviewing easy, though you still have to do all of your readings in the waking world first."

"Nah. Well, I find starting the book helps but for homework... I just fill in the answers in the morning."

Kappii blinked. "What? What do you mean? How can you read in a dream a book you haven't read while awake?"

"I'll read for a bit before bed, then I put in a bookmark and put it under my pillow. Then, once I'm asleep, I pull it off a shelf."

"That's ama- Quite impressive!"

"Is it?"

"Indeed! How long have you been able to do that? Since the defeating the Puppetmaster?"

"No…? Since forever. I mean when I was in bed in the hospital, that was just what I did. They just thought I was a quick reader. Actually I'd probably have had to repeat a year of school otherwise."

"That's highly impressive, Sachiri. Just the fact you can control your dreams with complete freedom is as well but if you think about it, even for someone else with that skill, reading a book you haven't read would be impossible. It must be a manifestation of the great power sleeping within!" He drew himself up even though there was no one to see. "Truly, a promising student!"

Ch. 1: Alertness vs. Search

"So, Sachiri."

"Mmhmm?" she replied, flipping over the grilling bonito in the pan.

"You notice anything off this morning?" Mei asked.

"Off? Not really?" Sachiri blinked. "Is this a test?"

"Maybe."

"Erk."

Sachiri wrinkled her brow, closing her eyes and opening them again. She looked around but, try as she might, she couldn't notice anything. Rather, it seemed like an entirely too open question. What, in a world of spirits, superpowers and mirror worlds, was 'normal' and not 'off'?

"Well that's sort of not really fair isn't it?" she said, trying to nonchalantly turn off the stove. "I've only been living in here for two weeks."

"You've only been in Tokyo for two weeks," Mei agreed, "but that doesn't mean it'll stay safe until you're familiar with the area. Crime's been on the rise and like I said, there's some weird things nobody's comfortable talking about. The first step to staying safe is staying alert! This is the sort of thing they try to teach the first month in police academy you know."

"I-" She opened her mouth, wanting to protest how she'd spotted the Puppetmaster before being spotted in return on her first full day in the city but then remembered that the full details of that fight had been somewhat glossed over. That was the other thing. Just hiding what she could see but wasn't supposed to see was hard enough without also having to see the 'normal' things that everyone else expected her to notice. Just the thought made her head hurt.

"Look at the clock," her cousin suggested.

"The stove clock?" Sachiri blinked again. "Oh. Well it's not like you can turn the clock back on my phone," she said. "Make sure you turn it back afterwards. I don't know how without the instructions you know."

"I will, don't worry. What about the fridge? You must have opened the fridge while preparing breakfast right?"

"You-" Sachiri opened the fridge. "You turned all your beer upside down... Why would anyone even notice that at the back behind all the proper food?"

"I got the idea from the calling card of one of the weird phantom thief cases they always foist on me. I thought that'd be an easy one though, since I noticed you turned them all rightside up the first evening here," she said, managing only to sound only slightly smug-satisfied as Sachiri laid out breakfast for two. "Remember to stay alert at all times. Especially when you're outside. And- Eh?"

"What now?" Sachiri said. "Oh, the salt shaker? Well, it's only natural right? I mean you have a pepper shaker and those things always come in pairs."

"Mmm mm…" she agreed. "That's actually a clever catch. It's more that I was sure I'd lost it though. Where'd you find it?"

"In the space between the fridge and the counter, hiding behind an empty beer can," she said, putting just enough admonishment to add a bit of a wince to the smug-satisfied. "Really."

"Well it was already empty when it fell in! And I couldn't reach it. Isn't it annoying that that space is always just slightly longer than anyone's arm?"

"Just use anything long next time."

"Wait. I didn't know I had a broom," Mei said suddenly, looking at the red plastic one now standing in the corner by the door."

"You didn't. I only bought that yesterday, but I mean, I just used the rice scoop and then washed it. And it's not the only thing," Sachiri said, placing a near full bottle of shichimi on the table as well. "Here. This was behind the leg of the couch. It's older than the new bottle you've half used so please use it up first."

Ch. 2: Empathy 2

"...iri... ...chiri... Sachiri!"

"What is it?" Sachiri said, in a normal voice despite floating slowly up on her back from underwater.

"What's wrong?" Kappii said in a panic. "Are you having a nightmare?!"

"No...?"

The spirit capybara blinked. "You're not? But this is-"

"The cavern beneath the old school buildings."

With this pronouncement, their surroundings, aside from the water, solidified into a replica of that place, emerging from the vague fog of unscrutinized dreamstuff that surrounds every dream, oddly indeterminate yet never noticeable as strange until given shape. Along with the walls came the pulleys and boxes that had lain in the darkness for centuries; the platform overlooking the well; the deep, dark passages leading out from the sacrificial chamber, and of course...

Sachiri pulled herself up to a sitting position by the wooden bars of the cage enclosing her. She was all in white, in the sacrificial vestments and soaked through.

"What's the matter?"

"I thought you were in trouble!" Kappii replied, turning himself around a full 180 before sitting down. "A-Are you stuck in there? Are you sure this isn't a nightmare?"

"Mmhmm. See?" In an instant, splashes of red coated parts of the outfit. The overlay swapped from right-over-left to the normal left-over-right of the living. "Whoah!"

She gave the cage a swift kick and the wooded cage exploded into a shower of pencils. The platform extended beneath the cage and a powered vent at the top turned on and blew dry her clothes and hair in an instant.

"Ah. I see." Kappii turned his head for an experimental peek. "Uh. As expected, really. But should a healthy teenager really be dreaming about being drowned in a cage as a sacrifice? I mean if you need someone to-"

"I was thinking about the spirits still down in the well under the old school buildings, I guess," Sachiri said, idly toeing some pencils into the now empty and spiritless well. "I was preoccupied. Well, you knocked me out of the mood."

"But that's- This business was all so very unpleasant wasn't it?" Kappii said, turning fully around. "If you could stop a nightmare at any time, why didn't you?"

"To be honest, it's hard for me understand what exactly a nightmare is. I think that time just before I met you was definitely one. The first one, and it was unpleasant. This isn't unpleasant. Well, the thought of it is, and what happened to those girls was horrible, but it's not unpleasant in the same way. I'm not scared or uncomfortable. A dream that is sad isn't the same as a nightmare."

Sachiri sat back down on the platform overlooking the cylindrical drop into darkness, the upper cavern around her revealed not by torches, but the ambient glow of perceivableness of dreams, like an area in a video game with unrealistic but navigable and tidy lighting.

"I wonder what we should do about it. I mean we can't leave all those corpses down there rotting away but- Depending on who we turn to... I guess I just don't know who to trust with it."

"How about Vlad-san's mother?"

"I think it might have to be that way but... I don't think she's an evil person, but she's an adult. Adults don't think like we do so I'm worried."

"We?"

"I?" Sachiri wondered aloud. "I don't know. I'm just afraid they'll all get exorcised before they're truly ready to move on."

Ch. 3: Lucid Dreaming 1

A Certain Hospital
Hida-Takayama

It began with the fuzziest levels of awareness – the sort of incapacity that one could not know without having had a near death experience. The first thing that came were faces. Faces floating all around, void of any detail she could make out except that they were of different people. Different from each other. Different from her. These were other people. She was herself. A person. A girl. And these were people who were not her.

These people were excited.

Why are you all so excited? she wondered.

Without hearing their words, she realized: they were excited because she was awake.

What a strange dream, she thought, waking up.

She woke up and lay down. Lie down? You put your body horizontal, back underneath, face looking upwards. The moment she did, faces began floating around her again. She imagined a few more and more came. She imagined them laughing and crying and they did. Yes, that was how she'd been in that dream, and like another puzzle piece, she fit her newly discovered sense of up, down, front, back and orientation onto that dream.

When she slept, the dream came back. The faces belonged to people. Faces belong to people as a general thing. The bulk of them is basically located under their face. Faces don't float around. Heads. Bodies. Clothes. Ceiling. Lights. Beeping. Voices. Beeping.

Okay.

She woke up again. So she'd been dreaming about lying down, in a bed that must be somewhat like this one: this grand affair of gold, crystal, dark woods and rich vermilion covers. It stood alone in its own little aura of light amidst the darkness, along with a full-length mirror in which she saw herself in a pure white yukata framed by tangled masses of hair as inky black as the darkness all around. Other than that, she was alone. Sensible. Faces just floating around don't make sense. Other people around your own bed don't make sense. It's normal to be alone in and around your bed.

Colour, she thought of her hair. Her hair needed colour, just like how the bed wouldn't be the same without colour. She ran her fingers through her hair, straighting it out into neat streaks of the same hue as the bed until it was vermilion all the way through. The dream had also needed colour. The room she'd been in, the ceiling and even the clothes worn by the people had all been white.

Why would you go to bed in a white place with people and voices and beeps all around you?

When you're dying in a hospital, silly.

Eh?

A surge of panic hit her. Something to do with death.

I need to give this yukata colour right now or I'm in trouble!

She made her yukata vermilion and quickly looked at the mirror again to make sure the change had taken. It had, and the yukata's sides were wrapped the correct way too – left over right - but she couldn't remember which way it'd been when it'd been white just a second ago. Worse, her hair was all tangled and black again.

Oh no, is there not enough?!

She ran her fingers through her hair again as if trying to comb away fear itself. Streaks of vermilion reappeared, but so did splotches of white in her yukata. There just wasn't enough vermilion to go around.

"Okay, this is a bit risque, but..."

Desperate measures were called for. Besides, exactly no one was here to see her state of dress and the hair was too much anyway – it was too long and actively getting underfoot. She took a pair of shears and then, very neatly, lopped off both her hair and the yukata at once down/up to around thigh level. It worked! Clever! Now there was just about enough vermilion to go around for both hair and clothes. She picked up the impromptu roll of white fabric left behind and then shooed away the writhing, inky black tendrils left on the floor off into the darkness.