The Day of Thunder

[Otaku]

((Tan Weiwei mood music, why not.))

It's dark, somewhere cold and empty and yet echoing with screams and shrieks. The ground is hard under Otaku's knees, and she's alone.

Her skin stings in the chill and her fingers and toes are numb. She knows this is a dream. So what? Dreams are all like this now. Does it matter if it's only a dream when even knowing can't help you escape? Maybe every dream will be like this for everyone, forever, icy and black and violent until the end of the world.

No. She is more than mere endurance.

Otaku's lips part, and she begins to sing.

It's shy at first, thready. She never sings for anyone else except, sometimes, alone with Shinjo and her own little ones. But as her voice fills the emptiness the screams of terror and rage seem to recede further and further away. The soft, insistent lullaby is the same one Otaku's mother sang to her, the one she sang to her three babies in their cradles, the one Shiko will sing to her own daughters some day years from now.

Otaku climbs to her feet. At the distant edges of the blackness around her, the horizon begins to lighten pink and purple and golden. She sings.

All alone, with no one watching her, she sings warmth into the sky and soft, green turf under her feet. She sings shining clouds and stars overhead and her shining armor about her, sings a horse--Tsubame perhaps, or one like him--by her side and leaps astride bareback. She sings the clean wind in her hair and the rolling percussion of hooves on springy sod beneath her, and all the while her voice grows louder, and louder, until it fills the whole world with its power.

Now she is not hiding in the dark, but giving chase, and she sings swiftness under her horse's feet, sings a gleaming sword in her hand, sings fear into the dark shape of her enemy, sings courage into all the warriors at her side. In a shining crescendo of sound, she raises her blade for one perfect, final, strike, fills her lungs to the full, and--

--wakes up, feeling quite at peace with the world.

---

D4 Sleep Event--#1, Will Shapes the Dream. Any social skill = Perform: Song (perform skills are Social) x Willpower. Voice. VP. | 6k5 ⇒ 25 (TN: 25)
Pass, no raises.

D4 Sleep Event--#2, Dream Shapes the Form. Perform: Song/Awareness. Voice. VP. | 6k5 ⇒ 40 (TN: 25)
Pass, no raises.

D4 Sleep Event--#3, Form Shapes the World. Full Attack the Darkness (Kenjutsu/Agi). VP. Utaku R1. FR from step 2 to lower TN | 10k6+7 ⇒ 65 (TN: 35)
Pass.

All rolls succeeded!