2024-08-31: Who Will Save You?

• Log: 2024-08-31: Who Will Save You?
• Cast: Chise Asukagawa, Goldburn
• Where: Chise's room
• Date: U.C. 0099 08 31
• Summary: The night the world almost broke, a frightened girl dreamed of the friends who had run away to stop it.

And dreamed of a friend who could never fail to be there when needed.

---

In her dreams, their faces are blank. The faint creases of a paper doll's contours the only definition. A classroom of them, boys and girls in crisp, dark uniforms. One teacher at the podium.

She's faced apart and away, silently scratching lines into her pages. The image takes shape slowly, a butterfly-like thing emerging out of half-attentive lines.

In her dreams, time passed. The teacher was gone. The other students were shuffled around, breaking, chatting. Their bustle was noise. Nothing she cared about, and nothing they cared about.

She faced apart and away, pencil digging into the wood of her desk as her butterfly grew and grew.

Then, it all fell away. A light in the sky, drawing near, burning bright. The gang...her new friends...smiling among each other, faced away and towards it.

"Captain Gauma...?" she heard her own voice, trembling.

The light draws nearer, and with arms around each other, they saunter toward it, glowing apparitions of machines erupting as aura around them.

"Yomo? Yume??"

The light erupts, a scream like the death of God, a light beyond imagining.

"Big guy?!"

And washes all away. All but a single, pearl-like stone, resting on obliterated soil.

Then it screams, too, and skeletal hooks fly out of it and towards her.

*

In a too-large room full of too little, a small girl startled awake in a large bed.

Chise Asukagawa planed her hand to her chest, struggling to breathe as the panic of a nightmare's waking surged through her. Her hair hung around her head, the two-tone pigtails gone for sleeping in favor of a shaggy gradient. Breathing slowly coming under control, she cast blue eyes up at the familiar blank white wall across the room.

It was cut through with. Stuff. Wait, is that one of her earbuds? It's the size of a shopping cart! It was into the wall impossibly, like it'd clipped through it in some video game. Next to it was her guitar, which was HUGE, and had one of her boots stuck through it, ALSO huge, and then next to that was her amp set but that was half its usual size, and then there was her funny heart sunglasses bigger than ANY of it and--what? WHAT? "Huh?!"

She heard something cutting through the air, and whipped around just in time to get tackled to the bed by a creature the size of a particularly big pigeon swooping down on her! But it was gold?! And a dragon!? She yelped in surprise as it planted itself firmly on her knees, and then threw open its mouth and fired a beam of golden light across the room!

It hit the piano in the far corner of her room. Which immediately shrunk to the size of a small toy, its accompanying seat stuck into its lid impossibly. Chise squawked and forced herself up, stumbling over to it, picking it up, turning it over in her hands. "No, no, c'mon...!" she yelped, and turned back to the creature, pointing at it. "Hey! Turn this back! Right now!"

It obliged wordlessly, firing a blast of blue light that caused the piano to erupt back to its full proportions...in her hand. She managed to throw herself aside before it crushed her; the noise was impressive. The creature then vomited its blue light one everything else in the room, causing a clatter as objects returned to their normal sizes, became unstuck from the wall, and promptly smashed into the hardwood.

Chise clambered back up to the edge of the bed. She had been up for one minute and today as already too much. But questioning possibilities was silly when a strange beast was near. "You understand me?" she asked. Its eyes were red lenses, like a robot. The whole thing looked mechanical, mostly shining gold with blue panels on its back. It never wavered from her gaze. "...sit," she instructed, and it did.

"Lie down," she said, and it flopped onto its belly immediately. What a beautiful blue the back was.

"...shake?" she tried, and it turned around and offered the back of its tail. She found herself grinning. "Was thinking your paw, but that'll do..." she said, and laughed, and looked up at the creature.

Despite the mechanical-like eyes, she sensed keen intelligence within as it peered over its shoulder and wings, back at her. "You'll need a name," she said, thoughtfully, and her eyes tracked past its hooked nose to the poster for her favorite band on the wall, four members and a logo, a yellow and black circle with a one-toothed grinning face. And a name.

Goldburn.

"I guess it should be awesome," she said to herself, and yesterday's fears seemed a million miles away.