Chapter Text
At first, she thought maybe she was hallucinating. Maybe she'd been like, way too exhausted after cranking out so many pages in order to keep up with the deadline for that manga competition. But no, she was certain it wasn't the exhaustion. Everything was much more colorful, except the colors were bursting outside the lines and left white spots everywhere like a children's drawing. And she was wearing a school uniform. In bed.
She also couldn't seem to move her body. Just look at that line work. Too rough. It was almost like she wasn't even moving. Then, she realized that she actually wasn't moving. Then suddenly she'd teleport into the spot she was 'moving towards' after a few seconds. It felt like being suddenly swung forward inside a stopping car, except the car was suspended in midair for some reason. This was freaky. This was really really really freaky.
'But I haven't finished my homework! I'm going to be in so much trouble if I don't!' she thought desperately, except that 'if' was a large word that she couldn't comprehend.
Why was she thinking about homework when space and time had decided to take a field trip and left the stove on? Her mind snapped to one thing that might still work properly, and she opened her mouth to try and say something, maybe "Help" or "Hello" or even an "Ahhhhhhhh", or maybe even a guttural scream, even though right now she felt like she was in one of those dreams where you could try and try to make a noise but nothing will come out but she felt like trying anyway.
"Hoough!1"
Okay, that was way worse.
It felt like she said it, but the sound didn’t even come out from her, rather than a random speaker somewhere across the room, which was a mess of what looked like black and brown pixels right now. The sound was echoing all around the room. Her entire body felt like television static made of fabric string. Maybe she was having a stroke or something. Maybe she just died or something.
She looked around at the universe which had totally fallen apart on her this point, and wondered if it had actually broken down into its simpler forms, in which she had ascended(or descended) into a higher plane of reality and could see and all the particles that formed the cellulose of the wood of the walls and now even the largest cosmic structure2 that astronomers has ever discovered was now simply just nothing more than a few crayon scribbles on the back of someone's math worksheet. She couldn't help but laugh for a second, thinking that even space and time themselves would be able to find a more entertaining and efficient way to deal with this situation, except of course that it wasn't really a joke. Why did her body feel more like a speaker when she made sounds now? You really take for granted that your voice vibrates like a bee's buzz rather than a self-contained electronic earthquake. And everything, even her own body, felt like it was on some kind of delayed feedback loop.
Moving was really frustrating, but eventually she figured out there was some way to make it easier. It was less of a task of actually moving and more of...Well. It turned out she could see the place at different points in time, in 0.33 millisecond intervals. She had to reconstruct herself, sort of like an animator drawing in each frame. Technically she'd be moving normally, since she had all the time in the world to create her next body and hop her consciousness over, whatever time meant at this point. She somehow could see herself inside and outside time at the same time, which was really trippy. Eventually she realised she could just teleport anywhere she wanted, once she found out how to zoom out, though going anywhere stopped meaning anything to her since everything looked weird now.
She zoned out a bit, since she had no idea how long she had been there. She also had no idea what she was going to do, exactly.
The first place she teleported to was a mall. She had no idea where she was, but it seemed familiar, and she was pretty sure it was in the US. She didn't know how she knew that, however. There was zero interest in this place, so she scrolled over and recreated herself inside Tokisadame High School. She looked around, but she still couldn't recognize anything. This school didn't look familiar at all, so she just recreated herself inside her own house.
What the hell was wrong with her? This seemed like a really weird dream now. There seemed to be no rules to it, no logic to anything. She still felt really tired though. Maybe she should just sleep. Maybe the solution to everything was to just sleep forever.
Then she noticed something. Which was now weird to her, which wouldn't have been weird to her 'one minute ago', while she was still freaking out, because she could now notice everything at once, so her realising something new shouldn't have happened.
It was a continent on Earth, except there was something more to it. She mentally switched gears and she saw that there was a version of it that existed on another plane of reality. It seemed...Intact. Everything there actually looked sort of normal. The trees actually had branches, and the grass actually had blades. It looked very similar to what the world looked like before, except that all of the humans there were playing some weird ball sport or something.
She decided to pay it a visit.