Tainted Gestalt: All Together Now

Try imagining nothing. As in, take the concept of nothing and imagine what it would actually look like. What did you see? A white, empty void? That's not nothing. After all, if it is white then there must be a light source of some kind, and the whiteness must be reflecting off something. The exercise is actually a great deal simpler than that. Not an endless sea of white. Try black. The total absence of colour. Just as a vacuum is the total absence of matter. Space is a big lot of nothing, filled with comparatively tiny baubles of matter and energy right in the middle of it all, so I suppose you could say that the Earth is in the middle of nowhere.

But this place was not nowhere, nor was it remotely near the middle of it. This place was white. What's more, this place had a ground, it had gravity, it had light, it had air. Lelouch knew each of these things in the blink of an eye, simply because… Well, he could immediately perceive each of them. No great deductions required here. Even so. He could see no horizons. He could see nothing. Nothing at all. Save seven other people. Each looking confused, save the one that was lying on the ground completely ****.

"Oh my goodness!" one of them yelped, a boy in a school uniform. A Japanese boy at that. Come to think of it, Lelouch appeared to be the only Britannian here, and several of them were definitely wearing school uniforms. Interesting. The boy ran towards the **** girl in the red silk shirt, turned her over and rested his head upon her chest for… quite a long time as it happened.

"Hey, cut that out!" said the only other girl of the group as she smacked the pervert across the back of the head. Interesting hairstyle.

"Excuse me, but… Is she breathing?" another of the boys asked, this one wearing a pair of glasses. He and two of the others leaned down, surrounding the girl. One checked her pulse, another listened at her mouth while the last examined the top of her head. "She's breathing," he concluded with a sigh of relief.

"Um…" a very small voice said. A boy. Fidgeting very nervously opposite Lelouch. "Excuse me, but… But where are we just now?"

"Good question," Lelouch said, drawing the attention of all six of the others towards himself. "I think it might be a good idea if we introduced ourselves, and then got around to saying just where we were before we arrived here. As I suggested it, I shall begin: My name is Lelouch, and I was - to my shame - skipping school that day to play a game of chess. I was returning home, on a shortcut through Shinjuku ghetto, when all of a sudden I found myself here. Now, how about yourselves?"

The pervert smiled one of those "too big for his mouth to contain" smiles, and spoke quickly. "My name is Ataru, and I was on my way home from school when this happened all of a sudden. Not much else to say, really."

After this, one of the rather normal-looking boys stood up away from the **** pigtailed girl and said, "My name is Tsukune. I'd just arrived at my new school, and the last thing I remember, some girl on a bike crashed into me."

"Lucky guy," the pervert mumbled.

"I'm Usagi, and I was on my way to school," the blonde-haired girl said, sniffing slightly as she spoke. "This whole thing is kinda scary, don't you think? I mean what if we never get home? What if -"

"Now, now, wait a minute," Lelouch said. "That's quite the revealing set of facts! After all, either the timezones we were in are all wildly disparate, or we have all been plucked from different points in time! For that reason, I must ask you all what country you were in when you were taken."

"Japan", all three of them answered at once. Not Area Eleven? Interesting. Lelouch nodded and said, "And myself. Was anyone here elsewhere in the world at the time?" Not a one of them said anything, looking at each other awkwardly. "Very well then, please continue."

"My name is Keitaro and I was visiting my grandmother's hotel," the glasses-wearing boy said, scratching the back of his head nervously. "My parents kicked me out, and I was hoping she'd let me stay with her."

The next boy introduced himself while Lelouch turned this all over in his head. The whole thing was so… Peculiar! What was going on here? "… And I was in the middle of class when this happened. It's kinda funny, really. The girl behind me would've probably loved to see something like this. I wonder what the class makes of me disappearing out of my seat?"

All eyes fell on the last of them to speak up. The rather small boy staring intently at his shoes. Not particularly wanting to talk to the others. Lelouch stepped forward and lay a hand upon the boy's shoulder. "It's alright," Lelouch said. "I don't think any of us intend to harm any of the others. Wherever we are at the moment you are safe, for the time being. Please. Tell us your name and where you were before you came here."

"M-My name is Shinji," the boy said. "And- And I was on the outskirts of Tokyo-3 when I came here. I remember seeing some sort of giant monster, and -"

And all of a sudden the whiteness behind the boy… there's no better word for it but "shifted". A street manifested all around him. The buildings weren't the same kind of design he was used to, but it wasn't like he knew every street in the world. Even so. Tokyo-3? He'd heard of Tokyo, but not Tokyo-2 never mind three! And then it lumbered into view. As tall as a skyscraper. It was the very manifestation of madness to behold. How could a creature so large be powerful enough to move its own body weight? How did it not overheight and die from the mass alone? An ear-splitting scream filled the air, and it took no time at all to realise it came from Usagi. The boys were all staring up at it in shock, paralysed with fear… And then they started to move. Tsukune and Keitaro stopped for the **** (still unidentified) pigtailed girl, picking her up between them while Ataru pulled Usagi away… And then found himself being pulled away when she started to retreat even faster than he! Shinji hadn't moved. All colour had drained from his face, as though he knew what was there without having to look.

"Shinji!" Lelouch yelled, intending to grab the boy's attention so that they could flee this… behemoth! But it became a non-issue. It simply vanished, dissolving away as though it had never been there to begin with. How very strange, but no time to dwell on that for the time being. Gather more evidence. Ask more questions. Then use the pieces to solve this puzzle, then get out of this place. "Shinji… What year is it?"

"Eh? Uh… 2015. Why?"

Suspicion one: Confirmed. The others had all crept back as though ashamed of themselves for running in a situation where it was pretty damned sensible to run. Lelouch turned to them, deep in thought. Alright. "Have any of you heard of the Britannian Empire?"

Blank looks told it all. "I thought so," he said. "How very intersesting. It would appear that we are not only from different times, but different universes as well! Ah, but forgive me for getting ahead of myself. Are any of you familiar with the concept of -"

"Parallel worlds," Usagi said. "Yes, actually. It's a fairly common story device in science fiction."

The others all nodded on agreement, which was a bit of a relief. The last thing he wanted to have to deal with was something that complicated. "Alright then," he said. "Well, it seems as though we've all come from parallel universes for some reason. While we could probably work out the differences between our histories, I don't think that would be particularly constructive right at this moment. Furthermore -"

"You there! Identify yourself!"

Furthermore, he was back in Shinjuku surrounded by dead soldiers and staring up at the wrong end of a very big gun. Well, that was a rather peculiar hallucination… Then again, who knows? But it was over now, so back to business. He'd just use his Geass on the -

Except that all of a sudden there was the most powerful sensation of pain on his neck. Like it had been bitten. The shock **** Lelouch to his knees, screaming and clutching at his neck. What? What was this?

"She bit me!" a voice in his head screamed. After a moment's thought Lelouch recognised it… Tsukune? "That cute girl just bit me and drank my blood!"

"Kinky!" Ataru replied. "But probably a little too much for even my tastes, you know?"

On second thought perhaps it wasn't quite over with yet.

Lelouch was suddenly somewhere else, a tortured landscape atop a cliff overlooking a sickly sea. His body was moving on its own, a frantic flailing as a voice not his own babbled from his lips, “My blood’s been sucked! Out of nowhere I had my blood sucked!” Confusion reigned in his mind and a panic took him. But in moments he’d locked down the emotion and forcefully willed the body to freeze and calm. He didn’t need to look down at his sleeves to know this wasn’t his body. 

“I’m sorry, I’m Moka Akashiya.” A quite beautiful girl was speaking, her face, hair, and manner serving to call Euphemia to mind, “Although I look like this, I’m a vampire.” Despite the declaration, Lelouch detected nothing but innocent school girl from her body language.

Vampires! You mean like the blood-sucking monst-wait! Why aren’t I saying anything? Why can’t I move?

Lelouch felt the boy’s building panic along with his thought, so strongly in fact that it felt like he was the one in distress.

But not just him. There were other voices in there as well.

“Sorry about that everyone, I must have had a neck cramp!” one said, then internally thought “Ugh, this is so weird! What’s going on?”

“Never mind that!” said the sole female voice, accompanied by the sensation of running “I’m so late for school!”

“You know, she doesn’t really look anything like a vampire. Then again, I think I read in one of my biology books that predators often use camouflage to get close to their prey...”

But some of the other voices were a little bit distracted from this issue, and for rather good reason so far as Lelouch could tell. It was rather trying attempting to keep out the thoughts of so many other people at once, and even with his rather brilliant mind he feared he might get lost in the rising mix of identity.

For example, in one ear he heard “Are you Ataru Moroboshi? What are your feelings about this?” while several people that looked like reporters surrounded him on all sides.

In another, he could see a car pulling to a stop and an attractive woman stepping out to offer her hand to him. “Sorry to keep you waiting,” she said, while in the background a military strike hit that same monster as before...

“Oh, my aching head,” said another female voice. Or thought. It was rather hard to tell. “Stupid panda must’ve hit me harder than I thought, even my neck hurts a bit and I swear I’m hearing voices! Hey! Put me down you old fool! I don’t wanna get married, I wanna get cured! I wanna get out of here! I wanna get - ”

And then, he saw it almost like it was through a filter. That same darkly lit room where a wall had recently been destroyed and slightly less recently a whole bunch of soldiers had shot themselves in the head. He saw a woman exiting her knightmare frame with her gun drawn, and felt a hand clutching at his head in confusion. His own hand. Under a power not his own.

“Stay where you are, I will retrieve your identification. No sudden moves! Understand!”

*written by Lumitiel