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yumemigaoka2024-07-07 02:09 pm
beautifuldreamermods) wrote in yumemigaoka2024-07-07 02:09 pm
Tanabata Log
YUMEMIGAOKA
As it is every year, Yumemigaoka's annual Tanabata festival is held at the street just outside of the Hikawa Shrine. The street and the shrine itself have been closed off during the day beforehand and despite the absolute rancid weather, the community has come together to get the festival space set up and ready for everyone to enjoy. And somehow, as they usually do, things just seem to come together somehow.
Come seven in the evening, the street opens to pedestrians and the festival finally kicks off. A steady, misty drizzle of rain persists through the entire evening but somehow, it just adds to the dreamy atmosphere. Hanging lanterns twinkle with raindrops and cast a warm glow over the street, paper stars are fluttering gently down from strings strung between lampposts and stalls line the full length of the street with food offerings, festival games and just about everything in between. In the wake of all the chaos over the last few months, isn't it nice that some things are still simple, quiet and unchanged?
For folks looking for games, they can enjoy:
- ⧖ The most popular stalls, the shooting games! Using a gun loaded with paper bullets (so, you know, mostly harmless) the aim of the game is to get a clean hit on one of the prizes along the back of the booth and knock it down! The prizes are mostly candy, snacks or kids' toys but they're deceptively hard to get a good shot at...
⧖ Goldfish scooping, a summertime classic! Using a scooper with a thin sheet of paper for the net, try your best to catch as many goldfish swimming around the water below. Do well enough and you'll win a prize and you might even be able to take your goldfish home - make sure to take good care of it!
⧖ Senbonbiki is basically pure luck - bundles of prizes, usually candies and small toys, are strung up along the top of the stall and you just have to give the corresponding other end of the string a tug. Whichever bundle of snacks comes down is yours! Of course, if you're particularly unlucky then you might get a dud or penalty prize... but surely nobody's luck is THAT bad, right?
⧖ Ring toss! Throw rings onto targets marked "1" through "10", each worth different amounts depending on where they land. Beat the high score and you'll win a prize! Though do you really want to walk around the whole festival with a giant plushie under your arm all night...?
There's also a ton of options for Japanese street food; some traditional, others more modern takes. There's fried stuff, grilled skewers, rice balls, all manner of delicious noodle dishes and mountains of sweets too; taiyaki, chocolate covered bananas, shaved ice, cotton candy, and just about everything and anything else you'd want to spend an evening stuffing your belly with. And naturally there are plenty of drinks available including freshly squeezed fruit juice and tea and some booze for those who feel like playing with fire.
Aside from the rest of the festivities, the main event is really the hanging of wishes - it is Tanabata, after all. A few tables at the top of bottom of the street have been set up to carefully shelter them from the rain and have a whole rainbow of tanzaku for people to write and hang their wishes on the bamboo trees both in the street and in the shrine down below. You can hang as many wishes as you like, if you're feeling particularly greedy, but...
The festival doesn't really reach its peak until darkness falls and, undeterred by the continued drizzle, the Hikawa Shrine lights up the sky with its famous annual fireworks show - it's always pretty spectacular but perhaps out of spite for the nasty weather, it looks even more fantastic than usual this year.
With the fireworks done, the festival begins wrapping up and it's time to head home. But just as with last year, the night's festivities seem to have only just begun and as you drift off to sleep that night, you feel a gentle unmooring as you're carried off to somewhere new...
THE DREAM SPHERE
Most people in Yumemigaoka seem to have known what was coming tonight and sure enough, it's happened again - a week's worth of dreams of a strangely vivid image, an enormous bamboo tree with a wide canopy of leaves under a dazzling night sky, just like last year. And, just like last year, when you fall asleep on Tanabata evening, you find yourself arriving Somewhere Else.
The dream unfolds as an expansive open field, drenched in the silvery light of a magnificently star-spangled sky above and cut through with a river of flowing water that reflects the sky so clearly, it looks to be filled with stars of its own. Just like the real festival, there's a fine rain drizzling down from the sky, filling the air with mist and the sweet fragrance of the hundreds of tiny, bell-shaped flowers swaying lazily in the grass. And at the center of the field, just as it was last time, is the bamboo tree from your dreams. In the year since last Tanabata, it seems to have somehow gotten even taller and even though it's so huge, though, it doesn't seem like a threatening presence at all. Its branches are spread out even wider than before, hanging low enough for you to reach out and touch and this time, they're not just weighed down by tanzaku strips but glass wind chimes, too, that tinkle and sing whenever the breeze rustles the trees.
It seems tht once again, the magic of those two starcrossed lovers has allowed everyone in Yumemigaoka to cross the Dream Sphere tonight, Dreamer or not! The effect will only last until morning, at which point the dream will unravel, so you might as well enjoy it while you're here. Many of the mundane dreamers will find they're able to move differently in the Dream Sphere, running faster and jumping impossibly high and long distances with nary a scratch to show for it; no magic of their own yet, but at least enough to have a little fun while they're here.
There's a little bit of natural magic at play here in the environment, too. If you approach the tree with a wish in mind, there's no need to write it down; it'll appear in pretty, sparkly ink on an appropriately colored tanzaku strip, already tied to the tree. Or if you go to peer at your reflection in the river, you might see it take on a shape that reflects the wish you're carrying in your heart.
... Except...
What sort of things are you really wishing for? The things you won't admit out loud to anyone, or even to yourself? The deepest wishes right in the darkest part of your heart that you want more than anything? Unfortunately for you, this tree seems to be of a mind to grant wishes and once it's gathered enough of everybody's tanzaku, there's a bright flash of light...
And suddenly everyone's secret wishes have been made manifest... though only in the Dream Sphere, of course. These can be anything from silly wishes to something more serious - the important part is that these secret dreams and wishes have been pulled out of your head and put on display for everyone here to see! How on earth are you going to deal with this gracefully?!
Regardless of what you choose to do, the apparitions only last for an hour or so before fading away and the sky lights up with a beautiful meteor shower that seems to go on forever. You're free to stay and watch the meteor shower and enjoy your last moments in the Dream Sphere for as long as you like but eventually, as you're watching the stars streak down from the sky, the dream around you begins to gradually fade away until you find yourself stirring in your own bed. Though it was an exceptionally busy dream, you find you're well rested and... okay, maybe a little embarrassed after all that.
Nobody will be able to return to that strange field or find the dream to stabilize it but... maybe that's fine. Aren't some things all the more special for only happening once a year?
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Well, that melts away when she gets a good look at the vulnerability writ large on his face. She hesitates for a second, and she looks at the two of them playing. "It's dumb, right?" She winces, a little, when he says it. She's quiet for a moment, still, as she processes it. She doesn't have any siblings; she hasn't lost a relative she was close to, yet. In a way, it's hard for her to imagine.
But after a moment, she shakes her head.]
I don't think it's dumb. I don't... think there's some timer on when you have to get over something. Or maybe you never do, and what it means and how you handle it changes. But, either way...
[She shakes her head again.]
It's okay to miss someone.
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Well... it's not like he's dead or anything. [Somewhere, canon Hanako twitches a little bit] I still see him every day, whether I like it or not.
[The "not" stronger on some days compared to others-- it was tough still sharing a room with your twin brother when you were already in middle school, after all! But... that wasn't exactly the point here, was it? It wasn't so much missing the person in question, as it was... missing the experience. Or rather, missing the possibility of what could have been, if he hadn't...]
But... I dunno, there's times I wish he could be a part of all of this, y'know? It was all we ever talked about when we were kids. And Tsukasa... he'd always been more suited to this sort of thing than I was. Everyone's always thought so.
[After all, his brother always had the boundless curiosity and energy that lent itself well to Dreamerhood, along with an innocence that shone through despite his increasingly chaotic gremlin tendencies. Amane, on the other hand...
He tips his head low, his cap obscuring his expression.]
... not that it matters anymore, anyway. I took that away from him a long time ago.
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[She looks awkward for a second. Junna is an only child; when it comes to siblings, she has to try to imagine what it's like. Most days, it's not hard. Sometimes, for things like this, it is. She is quiet for a moment.
But she nods, then, and she looks thoughtful.] I... think I kind of understand that. A little. I try to explain what being a Dreamer is like to my parents -- the good and the bad -- and they... well, they haven't lived it.
I'll wish I could just... show them something important to me, so they'll understand.
[Yes, she absolutely just means Dreamer things and not something else. Absolutely. Certainly.
Anyways.]
I guess... I'm trying to say I understand it a little. [There's a moment's hesitation, though. He took away the chance to be a Dreamer from Tsukasa? But... she tries to think on that, on what it could mean. She realizes she isn't sure.]
Can... I ask what happened? It's okay if you don't want to talk about it.
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It was too much to try to convey all that to Junna, however-- or rather, Amane was too awkward with his own words and feelings to get it across properly, so he opted just to give her a brief nod in response instead. Even if the stuff with her parents wasn't the same sort of loneliness and guilt he felt in regards to Tsukasa, he could still sympathize with it in his own ways, nonetheless.]
Mmm. It's hard getting people to understand something they haven't experienced themselves, huh...?
[Totally talking about Dreamer stuff here! Yup! No other meanings behind that, whatsoever!!!
He grows silent, though, when she finally goes and asks that question, kicking himself for getting ahead of himself and saying too much. Granted, she wasn't the first person he told about it... and after all she'd been through in his Disturbance, she deserved a bit of context. But did he really want to talk about it now, though? Junna did give him an out...
Finally, he sighs, a soft little thing, his posture slumping further as he continues to avoid her eyes.]
... there's not much to say, really. I had a Nightmare one night, Tsukasa jumped in to try to protect me, and then...
He got lost in there. He came back on his own eventually somehow, but... he wasn't the same. And he hasn't been the same since.
[It was a gross oversimplification of things, to say the least, but it was the easiest way to get it out in the open.]
It wasn't deliberate. I know that. But the fact still remains that if I didn't have that Nightmare, then none of this would have happened in the first place.
no subject
[She looks sideways at him. She's not really sure if she understood, still. Or if her experience relates. Or... she doesn't know.
But she did ask. And she does listen.
She quiets down, spotting the way that it was a decision about whether to talk about it at all. Which means she shouldn't interrupt. A lot fits into place, then; why they do this, to stop things like that from happening. And the guilt -- not the sort of guilt she's felt, but she can imagine it. It would be one thing to know it wasn't his fault, intellectually.
It's another, Junna realizes, to be able to feel that. She looks down, quiet for a moment. But then she nods.]
...I'm sorry. I... can't imagine what it's like. I know you... know it wasn't your fault. But...
[She exhales.]
He's still here. And you're still here. [Which, after the surgery and everything else, is a small miracle.] I know that can't make what happened change.
But I think for both of you, it means the future's still wide open, right?