Nightmares and Duskscapes (Takashi Agera)

Nightmares and Duskscapes (Takashi Agera)
Date of Cutscene:	24 October 2023
Location:	Dusk Zone?
Synopsis:	Takashi wakes up in the distant lands of the Dusk Zone.
Cast of Characters:	Takashi Agera

---

Takashi woke up to the sounds of waves crashing against a shore. His hands gripped the sand underneath him as he staggered to consciousness. Even though there was no moon or sun in the sky, he could see just fine. The whole world was a mess of purples and blues. He knew where he was.

Not exactly where. But he'd been places like this before, woken up here. The Dusk Zone. But not the part of the Dusk Zone that connected to Tokyo directly. Some further away part. Somewhere he'd be hard pressed to return to once he left. He could close his eyes and sense it, far off. Clover Tower, and Obsidian Tower near it. Two points of immense, concentrated power on the other side, that you could use to find yourself in the Dusk Zone, that you could return to the real world with. When he's started finding himself here, now almost a decade ago, Obsidian Tower's energy paled in comparison to Clover Tower's. Now, it matched it. But both points were very far away. He'd have to get a lot closer, if he wanted to return to Tokyo anytime soon. But he didn't, not yet. He slowly got up, grabbing a fistful of the fine, black-grained sand as he did so. Fully standing he opened his hand and let the sand flow through his fingers - the grains falling down in a soft dust, which also has the occasional purple spark rush off it. The sand was black. The water was black. The trees were black, and their leaves were black - both the trees that grew from the ground and the occasional one that seemed to have taken root in a cloud and grown upside down. But while they were black, they were all other colors, too. Black-blue ocean, black-green treetops, black-brown trunks. Colors that you couldn't see outside of the Dusk Zone. Both pitch-black and bright at the same time. Takashi was used to it, but it really threw him for a loop when he was younger.

He did what he always did - he started walking. Today, in a random direction. He used to head right for the energy centers, trying to find his way back to Tokyo as soon as he could. Hiding from the strange creatures until he learned they mostly didn't care about him as long as he didn't stare too long. Once you get close enough to those beacons, you can slip back into Tokyo - it's slipping back anywhere in particular that was hard. Eventually you could figure out how to triangulate things off the two towers - get closer. But it wasn't like teleporting within Tokyo. The two worlds had a non-Euclidean relationship with each other, and standing in one spot a few seconds later would get you a few hundred feet over. Eventually you could pick it out, but it was work.

Where Takashi was walking, currently, where he was? Who knew. It didn't matter if this forest and beach were in Sweden or Italy or America or some other world altogether... You couldn't jump there from here. Or at least, Takashi couldn't. The barriers between the worlds were too thick. There were other places where they were soft, but they lacked the same distinctive energy signatures of Tokyo, so even if you found one, finding your way back was almost a no-go. But it also meant, when he woke up like this, he got to explore places most people would never see. See things nobody else had. The things that existed in the Dusk Zone's farther reaches.

Takashi continued walking along the beach, and eventually the water near him started to recede... as a shadow loomed out of the water. One of those things only seen in the farther reaches of the Dusk Zone. One of those things he wasn't sure anyone else in Obsidian had ever seen.

How many different ones of these had he seen? He didn't know. He could, however, feel the enormous power, a sort of psychic pressure of Dark Energy that the thing radiated. Like it held at least as much energy in its looming, skyscraper-like body as Obsidian's entire Reactor. A humanoid body, but the head had been replaced with a hollow cylinder, above which a sphere of water constantly poured down, causing an endless waterfall to gush out of its 'head' and down its torso towards the craggy cloak that it wore, towards dangling, wrinkled feet that didn't touch the ocean below. Gnarled hands with palms upraised through from which two smaller waterfalls dripped. At least this one was easy to guess - it was obviously connected with water, or oceans... Sometimes they seemed to have more esoteric connections, or defy meaning at all.

Takashi didn't fear the entity himself. He knew it didn't pose a threat to him. But he could also feel that it was immensely, phenomenally powerful, and it was at-odds with the world he spent most of his day in. How? He couldn't tell, but he was sure that if that thing jumped the barrier uncontrolled it would do... something bad. To the water, he guessed.

So many of these giant monstrous entities, lurking around the Dusk Zone. Made Terribads look like kindabads. Or maybe just yappy dogs. The thing seemed to stretch up as tall as Clover Tower itself.

As long as they stayed on this side of the breach, everything would be fine. But if they started to move towards the other side... everything would be decidedly not fine.

He stared up at it for... he didn't know how long, time was hard to gauge in the Dusk Zone. It never breathed, it just loomed, floated. The water was endless, black-blue, flowing.

Eventually Takashi started to head back towards those two beacons of energy. For the last two years he was periodically waking up near one of these. He couldn't help but take it as a warning. These were the kind of things that existed in the universe, in multitudes, in the dark reaches. The kind of thing that could threaten him, his research, Hotaru, Fate, Norie, Hematite and his family, the blonde girl he'd only just met but thought about so much, and everyone else. The things and people that were precious to him. The world that was as precious to him as this one. A warning that he needed to be ready to face things like that, and win.