Single character One shot / Drabble { Examples }

{ Akira Kurusu/Ren Amamiya from Persona5 }

     Akira Kurusu had heard about sensory deprivation tanks sometime back in middle-school. He had no intention of ever going to one, but they seemed to elicit some kind of curiosity within him. On a lazy Tuesday night, he did some research.

     Apparently they were pretty popular in Japan, despite Akira never seeing an advertisement for them anywhere online. It made sense, in a way, being that they were better suited for tourists in search of the exotic or business men in search for some de-stressing. No matter the person the attraction was always the same: a salt water chamber, room temperature so you could not feel any difference between water and air, and just salty enough to keep a grown man from sinking. It was supposed to be an isolating experience, an hour of being confined behind a soundproof pod to truly be alone with one’s thoughts. Some people cringed at the thought of it, suffocating and dark, but others claimed it to be quite a transcendent experience. Personal, relaxing. An ocean of quiet, and the closest thing a human being would ever come to experiencing the vessel of their body.

     Back then, Akira had found it appealing.

     Losing the strength in your soul felt eerily similar to his cognition of that experience: his body was weightless yet grounded with the possibility to float up or down— not that Akira could tell the difference in this state. His sense of direction was muted, ripples of nausea turning wave then tsunami. The boy’s whole body was stuffed by cotton that kept him from fully being a man. There was a push and pull of air around him, the shadow’s Garudyne that had separated him from the rest of his teammates. In that eye of the hurricane, Akira tried to move, speak, anything– but failed. His mouth was dry, vision blurry, lights flashing. The sound around him was distant, muffled by those violent enemy winds. Like the wall of a soundproof pod, no noise had permission to course through.

    But a phantom thief did not ask for permission when it came to helping a friend. His teammate's voice persisted, pushing through the hurricane of sensation and into his heart.

     “Akira!” Ann. She was somewhere on the left– no, right side of his body, far, far away.

     “Let me go, damn it!” Ryuji, opposite direction to Ann. He sounded fierce, desperate.

     “You cannot be reckless!” Yusuke. Was he holding back Ryuji? Good, don’t let him near.

     “We need to think this through!” Morgana. Think this through–? No. No, get out of here.

     ‘Get out of here right now…!’ Finally, Akira. His mind trying to convey what he could not say out loud.

     He had failed them, and they had to run. He had failed them, his soul had been drained from energy. He had failed, and he was now unfeeling, a stranger in his own body. This was, by all sense of the words, a form of sensory deprivation– although there was just a single sense that remained:, dizzy, dizzy, dizzy.

    With the rebellious spirit of his friends feeding his resolve, Akira managed to open his mouth, reaching out to those distant cries. “Run!” he roared, or tried to, the mask of Joker slipping through the cracks to reveal what remained of a fragile Akira.

     “We can’t leave him!” Ryuji. Why were they still here?

     “We cannot attack outside of the cognitive world!” Ann. No. Morgana?

     “If we leave him he’ll die!” Who was that? That… was it…  was…

     With horror, Akira realized the voices were fading away, just as fast as he was. The fear of death took his mind prisoner, and he tried to force his mouth open again. Not a sound came out. A weapon, wielded by the shadow’s hand, broke through his blurry vision as it made its way to Akira’s neck. He could feel the pressure of metal against his skin, drawing the faintest drops of blood, but even that was muted too. And the more he tried to fight it, the more the world faded into a state of fervent deprivation. The only thing he could make out clearly were his own thoughts:

     Isolated in his ocean of quiet, Akira Kurusu was going to die.