The girl sensed the rushing wind moving along her body. Even though her eyes were closed, she could feel it as it touched her skin.
She thought for a moment, considering the wind that she felt. With eyes still closed, she put out a tentative arm, feeling around, touching only the surrounding nothingness. She swung a leg experimentally, and realized for the first time that she was definitely not on solid ground - in fact, it felt like she wasn't even standing on anything at all. With a short twinge of fear, she opened her eyes.
She stared forward, trying to peer through the seemingly endless mist that she found herself in, but the cold fog was only thing she could see. It was the movements of the mist, more than the mist itself, that she had felt - and was still feeling.
Pushing her short hair away from her face and letting it blow behind her, the girl swiveled her head around from left to right, still looking for an opening in the rolling mist as she floated, almost aimlessly, through the ether.
Suddenly, just as the girl had given up hope of finding a way out, the mist suddenly cleared up completely, opening up into an immense space. A blackness settled into her surroundings, pervading the space around her just as the mist had before.
The girl blinked at the sudden change in the environment, finally letting her eyes rest on something at the center of her vision. A curious structure seemed to float in the middle of the darkness, and her eyes were somehow drawn to it.
The structure that she floated toward seemed simple in design, but curiously still gave off an aura of complexity and utmost importance. A flat surface, floating freely in the center, seemed to be the foundation of the structure. It seemed to the girl that the thing had a normal floor, checkered black and white - but then she found, as she observed it, that the individual squares were fading and alternating between the two colors, almost mixing them together. Blacks seemed to fade to whites and back again in a matter of seconds.
It made the girl feel slightly uneasy to look at this after a time, so instead she concentrated on staring at the four columns that seemed to jut out and up from the corners of the room. They seemed to be, from the girl's point of view, to be made of marble, or some other white rock, because they stood out amongst the blackness of the environment like four beacons of bright light stabbing into the darkness. As she peered even closer at the columns, she felt a strange feeling - as if she knew every part of those columns - every imperfection and every fault in the stone seemed familiar to her, without even having to touch the cold rock directly. It was a feeling that the girl found quite exhilerating for some reason.
The girl pondered this strange familiarity she possed for a moment, but her focus soon wandered as she noticed a new detail in the structure - a rapidly growing speck of something in the middle.
Without even squinting, the girl somehow knew that the speck she was floating towards was human. In fact she saw, even though she was still some distance away, that the man was wearing a white suit which was the same shade of white as the columns, that a black dress shirt and a red tie graced his tall figure, and that, most curiously, he was wearing a mask much like the theatre masks that were worn sometimes for musicals or drama. The mask itself seemed to be not well-fitting on the man, and it contrasted sharply with his black hair and eyes.
The girl finally reached the floating structure, and swining herself over over, she landed neatly on the checkered floor. Noticing that the man had not said or done anything, she walked toward him tentatively. The man, however, spoke before the girl could open her mouth.
"Hail, child," he said in an echoing oice. The girl noticed as she heard him speak that the man had a slight English accent. She inclined her head nervously.
"Hi," she said. Her voice seemed infantesimally small compared to the booming voice of the masked man's. "Umm...where is this, anyway?"
"This?" the masked man said in answer. "This...is the inner chamber of the soul." He indicated the structure with a wave of his hand. "The mists you saw on your way to this place are the mists of the self. These mists may hide and obscure this place sometimes...but here it stands, unmoved - even by death itself." The masked man spread his hands in a welcoming manner. "My name is Rijk, and I am the Guide to the Soul, and of the Persona."
"Persona...?" the girl said with a puzzled look on her face.
"Yes," Rijk replied. "A "Persona" is a part of yourself - or something you identify with, consciously, or unconsciously. Everyone has certain kinds of Personas about them, whether they are aware of it or not. Some Personas are gentle and merciful. Others are cruel and unmerciful..."
"Seems like a lot to keep track of," the girl interjected.
Rijk nodded. "It truly is, child. The key to keeping your true self, your Soul, in the midst of these multiple Personas, is to _know your identity_" - the masked man seemed to emphasize these three words as he spoke - "and also to admit that you have all these sides to yourself." Rijk fixed the girl with a penetrating, yet testing, gaze. "Do _you_ know _your_ identity...?"
The girl opened her mouth to answer quickly - after all, what person doesn't know who they are, she thought - but then, curiously, stopped short. She thought it would be the simplest thing in the world to tell the masked man who she was - but her name wavered on the edge of her mind and on the tip of her tongue, just slightly out of reach. She couldn't seem to recall her name, and she struggled outwardly with the effort of remembering.
What was that thing the man said? "The key to your true self is admitting you have different sides to yourself", she thought, turning the words of the masked man over and over in her head.
In her mind, she weighed the validity of this statement. It seemed correct, she thought. Many times she had seen people act one way and then another before her very eyes. Some people had different sides to them that only she knew about. Others even said that she herself had these different facets of herself.
With all this evidence before her, the girl found it easier to accept Rijk's statement. As soon as she did this, a barrier seemed to crash down in her mind and soul. A flood of memories came to her, as well as the name which had so escaped her before. "My name....is Laura," she said slowly. "Laura Saotome." This time she said it with more conviction behind her voice.
Rijk's eyes behind the mask seemed to show a smile, even though his mouth was not visible through the mask itself.
"Good," he said. "It is good that you know who you are. Many people in life go through their entire lives without knowing their true self. The fact that you can claim your name and your identity in the midst of all your sides of you shows you are worthy of a gift from the Guide of the Souls."
Rijk raised his hand to Laura as if offering something, with his palm up. At first nothing was occupying the space above his hand, but then it seemed that a mist seemed to gether into that space. It swirled and rolled, but then just as suddenly as it appeared, it began to take shape. Different colors of mist moved in the space, but soon settled as a form began to appear in Rijk's hand. Laura's eyes were wide with awe at the display in Rijk's outstretched hand, and became even wider when the ethereal mist finished with its changing.
In Rijk's hand was a spirit-like manifestation of a young man in a karate stance. His red Chinese shirt and black pants were a great contrast to his pale skin, and his dark blue eyes burned with a determined fire. Laura thought at first that she was not looking at what she thought she was looking at, but then, at a glance at the boy's hair, she knew she wasn't mistaken. The pig-tail that the boy's hair was pulled back in left no doubt.
Laura was staring at an image of Ranma Saotome.
Rijk, seemingly oblivious to Laura's surprise, moved his masked face to looka t the pig-tailed martial artist's form in his hand as his voice took on a musing tone. "The power to call or summon Personas - parts of ourselves that we have within us, or even those outside of us that we share a strong bond with. It is a power rarely realized, and even mroe rarely, given. Some Personas are merciful, and others are cruel, but all come about only with the power of the person who has the gift. Claiming your identity proves that you will be able to manage this gift wisely and properly."
Laura blinked. "So is that the only reason you're giving this "gift" to me? Why me..?"
Rijk's face seemed to darken behind his mask. "A great wrong has been done to upset the delicate balance of the universe. Someone from your world has tried to bridge the gap between the dimensions. He has succeeded, but int he process, opened an alternate route to a third, darker, plane of existence."
"Kind of like a side door?" Laura asked.
"Yes, comparitively like that. The man called Guido Sebec has not only bridged the gap, but also left the door open for the demons and the dark creatures of another dimension to plague both dimensions. It is an act that must be reconciled immediately, for if the door remains open, it could spell disaster for the dimensions involved..." Rijk spoke with an ominous tone in his echoing voice.
"So how do I go about doing this? Any hints?" Laura inquired with a wry grin. She tried to maintain an air of confidence, but inside, seemed a bit afraid of the task that was going to be placed on her.
The masked man shook his head as he spoke. "I cannot give you much to go on. All I know is that Guido's door to the dimensions is called the Deva Yuga, and you must find the source of it and destroy it, somehow."
"And if I don't, or I refuse? This is all well and good..but what if I don't want to do any of this?" Laura asked, raising one eyebrow. She knew it wasn't the right question to ask, but a morbid curiosity had overwhelmed her about the answer.
Rijk's face darkened again behind the mask. "Then truly, there will be no respite from the approaching darkness. Go now...and good luck. The choice...is yours...I will be watching..." At his last words, the chamber and Rijk began to float farther and farther away. Laura seemed to be floating backwards, watching the peculiar structure faced intot he darkness. Then the mist closed about her once more, and Laura fell back into a trance once again....
***
"Laura? Laura!"
Bradster's voice broke through the fog that clouded Laura's consciousness, like a ship lost, but then found again, by the beam of a lighthouse in the mist. In a half-daze, partly from pain and partly from the dream-episode she had just experienced, Laura slowly opened her eyes.
In a quick sweep of the room with her eyes, Laura took in the entire scene before her. Chairs were overturned, tables were broken, and the walls were cracked or completely broken down in some places. The destruction seemed to center on the place that the black-pinstripe suited man was standing, and then ripple out, like a pebble thrown on a still lake. As for the people in the room, she saw the unconscious forms of many of the people she had seen that night. She looked over and saw Walski being helped up, with Rex on one side and Lori on the other. Bradster, who was kneeling over her, was trying to rouse her by shaking her shoulder, while Emily sat beside him with a worried look on her face.
Walski shrugged off the help after a few steps and moved over to where Laura was sitting up groggily. "Are oyu ok?" he said in a tired voice.
"Yeah...I think," Laura replied, getting up. "Ugh....I feel like I've run a marathon...three times." She swayed a little,a nd supported herself by putting her hand ont he blackened edge of a table.
"Yeah, me too." Walski said. His Marine-trained face betrayed no expression of being tired, but in his eyes was the weight of weariness.
"I just had the strangest dream, though," Laura said. She quickly re-iterated the dream of being in her soul, about the mysterious Rijk, and about the strange things that were told to her by him.
Emily gave her an astonished look as she finished. "That's the exact same dream I had..."
"Same here," Bradster said.
"Make that three of us," said Rex. The others gave similar affirmations.
"The question," Walski said, "...is what does it all mean? For us, and the world, the dimensions, whatever you want to call it..."
"I have no idea," Rex said, "but with all this stuff that happened today - that storm, those things with teeth, masked men telling me we have to sace the world...not exactly your typical day.."
"You can say _that_ again.." said Walski, nodding gravely.
"But surprisingly enough, guys and gals," Rex continued, "_this otaku's curiosity has been piqued. This Rijk guy certainly gave us an interesting spiel.."
"Well, saving the world isn't exactly a boring thing.." Bradster pointed out.
"Oh, that too," replied Rex with a grin. "But I was referring to those instructions he gave us - about finding this Guido guy and setting things straight - and about some weird gift he gave us to help us do it - all that stuff. I'm actually tempted to find out where our mystery masked man's little plan leads us."
"You're not serious, are you?" Lori said with an incredulous lok on her face. "What we should be doing is trying to get ourselves someplace safe, not following some weird dream. We don't even know if it's real or not..."
"Well, I kind of think all that stuff that happened today is probably proof enough," Laura said, still trying to shake off the cobwebs.
"Besides, Lori, and I know this is such a bad cliche," Emily said. "...if don't fulfill this obligation put on us, _no place_ is going to be safe."
"That's another thing," Walski put in. "This whole task we have to do seems to be an obligation. It's like being called to fight for your country - only we're fighting for a much bigger country...we can't ignore it."
"I guess you're right..." said Lori, slowly nodding.
"So are we agreed, then?" Laura asked. "We follow Rijk's instructions...in the hopes of finding out what the hell is going on here..? And do the "save the world" thing while we're at it?"
Walski laughed a bit. "If you could put it that way, then yes, of course.." he grinned. "I've always wanted to do this sort of thing, actually..." The grin faded from Walski's face as a groan of pain was heard audibly in the room.
"Over there!" cried Emily as she pointed toward a large section of wall that was knocked down, revealing the room next door. Under the rubble and chunks of rock was what seemed to be a woman, trapped in the rock.
The groups started over to help her, but then a heavy thudding began at the barred door, accompanied by a chittering of teeth.
"We might not ahve time for that, "murmured Bradster as Emily bent down to uncover the person underneath the rock.
"We have to help her..." replied Emily, grunting witht he effort of moving a particularly large block of wall.
The bar began to break off of the door as the banging continued, louder and with more force. "We can't!" said Bradster urgently. "We can get out through the hole in the wall, let's go!"
"No way!" replied Emily hotly. "She'll die if we leave her here!"
"We'll _all_ be dead if we don't move!" Bradster shouted over the banging. "If there was some way to save her, I would, but we can't!" The bar came off the door as the rest of the group gathered around the rubble. As the banging continued, cracks began to appear as the heavy wooden door began to splinter. Walski's face was stony as he held up his wooden sword. "We have to get out of here..." Bradster said again, with a nervous look towards the door.
"Laura!" Emily appealed to the short-haired girl, "Help me get her out! We can't leave her!" She struggled eith yet another stone as the woman underneath groaned again.
Laura's face showed how torn she was as she tried to make a decision. The choice between saving the one and saving the many seemed at once simple, yet horribly difficult, to make.
But then the door burst open, and the choice was made....
***
End of Chapter three