3 [audio]
[Light was sleeping when the shockwave hit. It's deep, childlike, just as it always is: the sleep of the innocent, or the truly psychopathic. Except that as the wave creeps over him with tenuous fingers, remaking and rewiring him, out of the corners of his mind scuttle ... spiders. Some tiny, some the size of a fist, on black, spiny legs. Some are larger. There are hundreds of them, then thousands. Tens of thousands. Some are spattered with colours - reds and yellows, blinking in and out of sight as the teeming mass wraps into and over itself. Warning lights. Hazard lights.
But the spiders don't bother Light: why would they? They're part of him. They know him. They've always been his friends. No, what turns this from a somewhat warped dream into something harrowing is the moment the spiders begin to melt through the floor. Each of them is a secret - some essential piece of Light, something he has to keep forever, for himself. And he throws himself into the thousands of vanishing spiders, reaching for them - if he could cling onto just one, perhaps that would save him? He feels as if he's dying, as if things inside him are being switched off without which he'd be ... just like everyone else.
Thrashing in his sleep, he knocks the communicator from his bedside table to the floor. The connection opens with a crash as it hits the ground, and that's what finally wakes him. The scream that comes across the network is high-pitched and terrified and completely unscreened, and Light's in no position to notice that he's transmitting, because he's clinging to his damp sheets and calling out, as if he can ward away the darkness.
Or as if he can drive out some horrific epiphany from his own mind. I was wrong. All those people. I was wrong.]
Oh, shit. Oh, shit. Oh, shit.
[The voice keeps crying out, in between harsh breaths that might be sobs.]
But the spiders don't bother Light: why would they? They're part of him. They know him. They've always been his friends. No, what turns this from a somewhat warped dream into something harrowing is the moment the spiders begin to melt through the floor. Each of them is a secret - some essential piece of Light, something he has to keep forever, for himself. And he throws himself into the thousands of vanishing spiders, reaching for them - if he could cling onto just one, perhaps that would save him? He feels as if he's dying, as if things inside him are being switched off without which he'd be ... just like everyone else.
Thrashing in his sleep, he knocks the communicator from his bedside table to the floor. The connection opens with a crash as it hits the ground, and that's what finally wakes him. The scream that comes across the network is high-pitched and terrified and completely unscreened, and Light's in no position to notice that he's transmitting, because he's clinging to his damp sheets and calling out, as if he can ward away the darkness.
Or as if he can drive out some horrific epiphany from his own mind. I was wrong. All those people. I was wrong.]
Oh, shit. Oh, shit. Oh, shit.
[The voice keeps crying out, in between harsh breaths that might be sobs.]