First Awareness
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Updates are sporadic, but I’ll try to keep it weekly. I also don’t have an editor or beta so if you read anything that doesn’t make sense, or see any grammatical/spelling errors… no, you don’t ❤️


It starts with confusion.

Ziun comes back from a mission with a nosebleed. It shouldn’t have happened and it doesn’t stop even when he tilts his head back and applies pressure to the bridge of his nose.

“System?” He calls. The sound travels through the room for all that he doesn’t shout or holler. Ziun waits, but after a while there’s only silence to greet him.

Time trickled by, and the amount of blood he was losing was getting to be concerning. Sure, he’d been hurt before, and Ziun really, really wasn’t a stranger to pain; but never in the protection of this hub of his. 

Any injury—self-inflicted or otherwise—had healed the moment he stepped foot inside its domain.

“… System?” Ziun won’t ever admit to being a bit shaken at the lack of a reply, but the silence is deafening enough that it makes him apprehensive. 

Had something happened? Without him even knowing? No. That’s not it. Because when he really thinks about it, the silence has always been there; the tranquility and quietness of solitude from a secluded place. Ziun had been the only person to live here and— it’s wrong.

Where is his family? Didn’t he have parents? Siblings

At that thought, Ziun has to cup his nose. The blood still hasn’t stopped and it seems that thinking too hard has made it worse. 

A rich shade of red seeped into the collar of his shirt, the material soaking up the worst of it. The colour was quite distinct. He doesn’t panic despite seemingly losing so much blood, even when it doesn’t look like he’ll stop bleeding anytime soon. Because if there’s one thing he’s learnt in all of his time here, it’s that he can’t die — no, it’s more like he’s not allowed to die. 

So Ziun instead finds himself calmly walking around the space he’d been calling home for… a long time now, in what he guesses is nostalgia.

He stares up at the ceiling and finds it too easy to get lost in his thoughts. 

Above him is a roof mimicking the cosmos that move with every blink. The floor beneath his feet is wooden and echoes with each step he takes, and encasing the space are three plain, beige walls. A two-seater couch sits in the middle of the room facing a low, narrow coffee table and another two-seater couch; the fourth, singular wall to his left has a bookshelf that makes up the entire length and size of the wall, and opposite that, there’s nothing. No kitchen, no bathroom — no corridors or other rooms. There’s also no decor, no personality to it, which only manages to feed into the lifelessness of it all.

Ziun gets fed up with standing upright and eventually sits on one of the two couches. He wipes a bloody hand on a cushion, mostly out of spite. The “system” can deal with the mess as far as he’s concerned. It’s the consequence of ignoring his calls for assistance.

Though, it’s odd.

Usually the “system” would chime in with a ‘welcome back!’ or at least chide him for, I don’t know, killing some cannon fodder in a world? The whole thing was probably just a shot at normalcy, but when he came back this time there wasn’t so much as a ‘hey’. It was unsettling and left Ziun wondering if he’d always been this helpless. In fact it’s almost startling just how much he’s incapable of— which he shouldn’t be, right?

Something tells him that he’s never been this incompetent before.

Patience waning, Ziun eventually tries to pull up the menu screen in a last ditch effort to contact the System that way; only to see a blaring alert in place of any apps.

[..[SYSTEM UNDER MAINTENANCE. PLEASE REFRAIN FROM USING THE INTERFACE | ESTIMATED UPDATE TIME: 12HRS]..]

“…!!” 

Ziun’s brain almost blanks at the notification. He’d been unceremoniously dumped onto the floor almost as soon as it had sounded throughout the space.

What was he supposed to do in those 12hrs—? All the fucking furniture was gone!!

He can’t help but look around the empty space with a just-as-empty brain. Eventually he snaps out of this daze. Ziun, angrily slapping his palms against the floor, goes to push himself up. Except his arms are weak, and he’s seeing double. His head suddenly feels like it's spinning from a collision he never experienced, with his heart thumping in his chest from labour he hasn’t doneHe’s all too aware at how his own breaths are stuttered, at how he can feel the way his blood thunders throughout his body and rushes towards his ears, and— it’s fear.

Ziun is scared.

The dreaded emotion hits him hard and quickly creeps over his skin, raising goosebumps. That same unadulterated fear seems to cloud his mind as he flops back down and blinks up at the night sky. Abruptly, perhaps due to duress, his head empties. No thoughts filter through, no pain seems to register; it’s almost as if his brain itself is rebooting. But then he chokes out a gasp and— 

He doesn’t know where he is or why he’s not…. wherever he was before. And by that he means before this space was the place he’d just.. taken to calling home when he knew it was anything but. Before the “system” had introduced itself, and long before he started doing missions that knew no end.

It’s startling just how much information has been withheld from him. Ziun barely has a hold on his own identity, but he isn’t… he isn’t stupid. Something had been done to him, this whole thing completely reeked of foul play, but whatever plot—because he seriously doubts there isn’t one—that they’ve conjured up, must rely on his full cooperation. 

Even if he’s not aware of it. 

This, Ziun has garnered from the fact that he still knows enough about things to not become too mentally incapacitated. However, their careful "editing" of his mind is where the fractures must've first appeared.

For example, like how they'd conveniently left basic equations such as 1+1=2 accessible to him. Ziun doesn’t ever remember actually learning how to solve it — one day the problem and solution are just there, and it’s off-putting to not know how that happened. In all the settings he’s been introduced to, all the schools and institutions he had attended—each time with a different identity, of course—he had known this kind of stuff before it was even taught to him. So that begs the question as to where the hell he had learnt it—when he had learnt it—because it sure as hell… wasn’t…

.. here.

Ziun curls in on himself at the pain shooting towards his head. It comes in waves and keeps hitting a blockage in his head. Something fills in the scattered gaps in his memory, batting against that same blockage that stopped Ziun from making sense of anything. Then suddenly the pain recedes and in its wake he distinctly feels something come loose.

If not here then where—?

If not here then where the fuck did he come from.

It hits him all at once. The veil over his eyes is ripped off, and the cold sweat on his back doesn’t feel quite as real as it used to. Ziun is distinctly aware at how his home looks more and more like a prison; the walls purposely painted a dull shade of beige for him to easier overlook — and suddenly the blood is back.

Almost absentmindedly, he wipes his nose with the back of his hand. Ziun doesn’t have the time to spare worrying about the mess, nor does he care about the trail left on his cheek from the thoughtless action. But then he spies the smudged blood on the back of that same hand and blinks. 

Ziun hauls the sullied hand up to his eye-level, waves it across his eyes, and it… lags? There’s blurred motion, of course. That's just his eyes being unable to keep up with the speed at which he moves his hand — but that doesn’t explain his unhinged fingers and parts of said hand that stay still in the air.

The disconnect lasts for a split second, and when he goes to blink again, his hand has already been restored to its previous appearance. 

“… shit.” He sucked in a cold breath. His hand begins to shake where he still holds it at his eye level, and Ziun’s not sure if it's from fright or something like excitement.

‘This is a clue,’ he thinks, almost giddy as he fists his hand before returning it to his side. He can’t stop his eyes from restlessly flitting around the space, wanting to see any more abnormalities were present.

However, he's left sourly disappointed.

‘I need to find more clues.’ 

Determined to search, Ziun takes slow, purposeful steps towards the wall made of books. Unlike the rest of the furniture, it hadn’t just up and disappeared, so it was either suspect or held structural purposes. Just as he goes to pluck a nondescript book off the shelf, at the very moment he slides it out from between the neighbouring books — his fingers slip through its spine.

The book’s pages flutter as it drops to the floor.

Ziun’s heart once again thunders in his chest. He’s on to something. He just knows that he’s painfully close to having an answer for all of these oddities that just keep on piling ontop of one another. But he can’t— something… something’s not connecting. There’s a distinct lack of sense to it all and he doesn’t know—

—why? 

Ziun blinks.

"Why... am I even here?" He says aloud as he stares down at the unmoving book he’d left on the floor. The open page that stares up at him is blank. "When I should be.. where?" 

Talking to himself is nothing new. Sometimes his head gets too crowded to think and the only way he can process things is by saying them aloud. 

"No." He suddenly said. "It's really not right after all." And for some reason he doesn’t have the excess energy to think about, his eyes turn upwards. 

The night sky innocently blinks back at him.

… Where the hell is the ceiling—no, the whole goddamn roof?! Ziun begins to panic. Abruptly though, a sound much like a bow harshly scraping against a violin's taut strings manages to break him out of his quickly spiralling mind. 

The noise was loud and grating; giving birth to the imagery that it was instead his bones being played like some morbid fiddle. It penetrated him straight down to his core.

The blinking stars and glittering cosmos started fading in their brightness, and it was with bated breath that Ziun watched as the once beautiful night sky turned into one of horror as it bled down onto the same walls that surrounded him. 

Ziun’s pupils were blown wide as he half-expected giant hands to tear through the melting sky and scoop him out of this lifeless box they’d kept him in. All too quickly he was reminded of how frail and exposed he was— that there was nothing he could do to defend himself if anyone or anything decided they wanted him dead.

Too easily did this raining curtain of stars replace the previously beige walls, staining it anew with its own terrifying darkness. When the walls are eventually fully encased in this inkiness, the stars begin to lose their glitter and instead become dull shards of glass that scraped across any surface it touched as it made its way to the threshold of the floor. 

Ziun’s head spun at the unnatural phenomena. Maybe in another setting the sight would’ve been fascinating to watch had it not been him at its mercy — had it not then continued to frighteningly swallow up the floor he stood on and threaten his whole livelihood.

In the end, Ziun manages to run to.. well, nowhere. Every direction he turned to had already been compromised, every crevice, every nook and cranny was splotched with that same inky darkness he had once found so beautiful. 

Now it was just terrifying—more so at the silence of it all. 

There was no dripping, no sound of glass scraping or breaking as it dragged itself across any available surface— nothing. Ziun was left to stand in an encirclement of wood, the last piece of flooring to be left untouched by the encroaching sky.

Curiously, he tentatively extended his foot and stroked the abyssal ocean before him with the tips of his toes. He tries not to think about how sultry the act is. The midnight sky pulls at him and quickly climbs up from his toes to his ankle before he manages to pull his foot out. 

With little fanfare he got the viscous substance off. Ziun watched as it abruptly sprung back into place, the surface rippling before it stilled — as if it had never been disturbed. His heart jumped to his throat. 

This new.. floor, was obviously made of a different material to what he thought it was, with how it plastered itself to his skin like tar. Ziun is horrified at how invasive it felt, despite the liquid never making it anywhere close to either one of his orifices.

After what felt like a century, he takes a deep breath. Frankly, Ziun knows that what he’s about to do is a very bad, not so good idea. But for the life of him—he just couldn’t figure out what else he was supposed to do in this kind of situation. 

Does he wait? But for what— and who? Besides, it was only a certain amount of time—literal seconds— before he’d lose all footing; what was the harm in doing so earlier? That way at least he had some sort of… initiative over what was to come.

Ha!” The self-deprecating scoff was swallowed almost as soon as it had left his lips. The noise didn’t echo, barely reaching his own ears. There was nothing encaging him anymore, just an endless sea of black. The shards of broken stars that melted from the fake cosmos had fully faded away into nothing.

He couldn’t even see his own hand in front of him, let alone tell if it had broken apart again.

For reasons unknown even to him, Ziun sends a silent prayer up above to where he knows no God lies. It was laughable, actually, how freeing it was to take a step forward into what could only result in his death. Perhaps it was his own illusion, but Ziun could’ve sworn that this was the most in control of his own fate that he had ever been.

It doesn’t matter in the end though, because willingness or not, the abyss doesn’t hesitate to swallow him whole.

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