An Incident?

[Summer]

From high above the treeline, the camera flashed. Reds and blue balls of magic that had been filling the air dissipated into nothingness. Burned and beaten, the red-cloaked figure she had been interviewing beat a hasty retreat. Knowing she could always track her down later if she needed to ask any more questions, Hatate wasn’t particularly worried about letting her leave. Still hanging high up in the air, now alone with only herself and the wind, the pink-clad tengu lifted her camera up to eye-level and began sifting through all the pictures she had just taken.

“She lives in the human village,” the journalist muttered half to herself, camera recording her words while she deleted the pictures that didn’t have the subject in them. “But with a collar as tall as that, she’s totally hiding something!” Intrigue sparked in Hatate’s chest. On top of the suspiciously upturned collar, the person had attacked her when the reporter started asking questions. She would definitely have to check this out more in-depth. As she cleared away the last picture without the mysterious subject, ready to take off again and ask her a few more questions, the world opened up around her. With a small yelp of surprise, she snapped a picture of the black enclosing around her. It failed to clear it away, and moments later she was engulfed.

My name is Omni. This is not the world you know.

With a white figure fading into view, the blackness around Hatate eased up a small bit.

This is the Omniverse. You interest me, so I have made you part of it.

The white silhouette spoke, face featureless save for a wide, toothy, and equally white grin. With every fiber of her being, Hatate wanted to scramble for her phone, which was no longer in her hands, to take pictures and ask questions. Like why was she here? Who was he? He had said his name, but it wasn’t a name she knew, and so she knew nothing about him besides that. Yet even with her intense desire to do so, she didn’t even feel like she was struggling. As if her body itself was sleeping.

The Omniverse is a place that reflects the wishes of those who are part of it. But! There are rules. I will explain them only once, so listen carefully.”

These sentences had an air of importance to them. Wishing that she could move so she could write them down, or note them in her camera, the tengu listened carefully. A formless lump emerged from Omni, shimmering with all the colours of the rainbow. The white figure gave that orb a name, Omnilium. A material which made up this world, the Omniverse. With it, you could shape the world. As long as you had it, you would be reborn.

With that said, Omni faded away without so much as a conventional farewell, leaving many, many questions Hatate had unanswered. She figured that he probably wanted her to figure this out by herself. Guiding people through such things could get very boring, after all. The world around her faded away once again, the all-consuming blackness lighting up, and becoming the same featureless white that Omni had been.

Finding that she could move once again, Hatate eased her way to her feet, not sure how her body would react after the sleep-like paralysis she had just emerged from. Looking down at the white ground at her feet, she searched for her camera. The yellow-checkered object was easily found against the dull white background, and the tengu happily stepped over and picked it up off the ground. She flipped it open again and searched through it, seeing if any more pictures had been taken during her abduction.

Hatate let out a small, annoyed sigh. The only picture between her last interview and now had been the pure black photo she had taken in a panic. It was entirely useless, and so she wasted no time in deleting it. Though there were no photos from the transition, that didn’t mean that she shouldn’t take them now.

“Everything’s so white,” she said quietly, taking notes as she looked through the viewfinder. “Despite being empty, it’s kinda noteworthy in that emptiness. A pure emptiness this large is totally suspicious.” Of course, the very fact that it was featureless prevented her from getting a decent shot. With white to all sides, her pictures would simply look overexposed, and no one would believe them.

Dropping her camera hand back to her side, Hatate turned to face the one thing that broke up the infinite white. A large statue of a dragon god, formed out of grey stone, stood inside a pool of water. Raising the viewfinder up to eye-level, the photographer snapped a quick picture of the top half of it. One nice advantage to this featureless white was that she didn’t need to account for the sun. The camera made a small click as it cycled the picture into memory, and Hatate brought it back up. While it was a nice, clear picture, it was only one. She’d take a few more, when she was a bit further away and could get the entire statue in the frame.

Turning her head to gaze back over the endless expanse of white, the tengu thought about where to head to next. Now that she was thinking about it, the endless white wasn’t so endless. Objects dotted the horizon, and while she couldn't discern what they were from this distance, going to see them would be better than staying here and wasting away.