[ The room is BRIGHT YELLOW, as all the rooms you will enter are. Black tiles make up the floor, changing to your unit's color when pressure is placed on them. There is a button in the very center of the room standing on a podium; it's slightly smaller than palm-sized.]
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♫]
Hallucinations - Kuzuebiko
You hear the sound of something winding up, and then the clickclickclickclickclickclickclick of gears starting to turn underneath you. Your stage moves too, the elaborate setup of this music box such that you have a preordained path ahead of you: you will dance in a spiral, out to the outskirts of the stage, and then spin back to the center. It's lovely handiwork, picturesque perfect, but—the mallet?
It's clear what it's meant to be for, what you're meant to do with it, when your path begins. One by one, the scenery nearest to you flips like trick panels to show other performers on the stage: your unitmates, then and now, and your loved ones otherwise. Valkyrie, and then Taisho Roman Revolution—even Eichi, Persephone, Anubis, and N. One by one, they show, and one by one, your mallet - perfectly poised - smashes through their porcelain, cracks them open, shattering them with every rotation and leaving the ceramic in the snow and flowers, their somehow-human spilled guts tainting the white. What a sadistic play—you might have thought, once upon a time, but the heart between your ribs is no longer one that beats, cold stone that feels nothing. You don't feel anything as you break them down, over and over and over and over again, and you even break down the scenery itself.
As you wind up close to the edge, you can feel your own form starting to crumble. This is the first and last performance, you realize—your platform slows, your face and therefore your vision cracks, and in your last rotation, you can see your handiwork.
Beyond the carnage, even the very stage is torn up. Your performance, your part to play was perfectly well executed, but it was meant to be one of a kind—the play of your own downfall, your own demise, brought about by your own hands.
The gears finally stop and you face your audience—you hardly recognize them—but there is one person who holds your stage in the palm of his hand, his fingers at the windup key as though to make you perform this again, even though there was no way to do so—even though the stage was already destroyed—and you know his face. He, the one you smashed open already—Tenshouin—smiles with a predatory gaze, as though he might want to swallow you whole right here and now.
Well done, he says, And now?
You know what is expected of you; you cannot defy it. Even if you tried to struggle, you could not stop yourself from bending at the waist, clickclickclickclick as your joints move to give a grandiose bow. Your leg breaks off but you still stand, held up by the other; your arm falls apart, crumbling ceramic at your foot. Even the mallet has slipped out of your hands, the free piece falling off stage.
Even so, Tenshouin Eichi winds up your box up again. Even though that was "your first and last performance", he would have you dance again on a broken stage—when there's nothing left, not even art—and you are helpless to defy it.
So you stand, and dance once more.
Effects
Physical:
> Loss of vision
> Cracked skin until it bleeds
> Porcelain joints and/or skin
Non-Physical:
> The sound of click clicking, the gears grinding won't leave your ears
> Complete Obedience to one person
> Unable to perform, dance, singing, interpret that as you will