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The Leaves (7) - With the changing seasons, there are piles of leaves all around Destiny City. It’s a difficult job to try and keep up with them all, and sometimes the allure of these leaf piles is impossible to ignore. Maybe they just need a good kick? Or, who doesn’t want to relive the childish joys of their youth? And no one’s around to see, right? So why not jump into a pile of leaves? Oh–because, when you do, you jump through one pile and come out of another somewhere else across the city. The leaves all seem ordinary, but there are a few odd seconds between when you jump into the leaves and when you jump out; it feels like falling, tumbling, somersaulting through the air. It’s not scary, just odd. You see walls of leaves–brown and orange and yellow and red–and they crunch magnificently. Overall, it doesn’t seem menacing, just a bit of trickster fun. If you try to step into, or jump in a pile of leaves again, you might wind up somewhere else entirely–or right back where you started.
Satori or Sato for short marveled at the fall leaves every year. Yes, they were pretty and full of color, and she did occasionally collect some. Some for her personal seasonal collection, but also for the various creative fall school projects her teacher assigned her class to do. Beyond that, what she liked to do most of all was jumping into them, hear the satisfying crunch, and seeing the leaves fly into the air. Sometimes, these piles were the site for some fun and games with some of her peers. Outside of school, she also enjoyed employing the innumerable pile of leaves as trick traps or pranks. With that being said, recalling these episodes are for another time.
One cool autumn day, one as average as ever, Sato spent a moment stomping on the neat piles of leaves nearby at a park. It was to an extent where it could (if not would) be enough to make any designated park cleaner of the hour sob inwardly and feel rather mortified that this child is undoing their hard work. If there was a rake nearby, it would be good to encourage her to commit to some level of community service and tidy up her unwelcome mess.
Instead of being accosted by a park cleaner, Sato found herself sinking into what felt like a sinkhole or, at least, what a sinkhole may feel like as she herself has never experienced it herself. Still, the sensation of falling into nothing caused her to gasp and yelp in surprise. She felt that she was tumbling and somersaulting into the air, but it wasn’t at all like the roller coasters she and her frightful sister Nemu rode several times at some amusement parks. Instead, it almost felt like she was gently diving and falling into the air, except it was heading or feels like it was in the direction of down and not up.
Rather than landing flat on the ground like an unfortunate pancake-styled accidental splatter, Sato found herself thinking of how this “fall” seemed to last quite a long time. Or no time at all. It was hard to tell, considering the lack of change in the strange scenery. She wondered if her vision had gone bad, but last she checked at the optometrist (eye doctor as she’d state simply), her vision was perfect. And so, for the while, she simply allowed her mind to wander. She imagined of what could happen next, what she’d have for dinner, and what would Dalgona say once she explained her reason why she was late to return home. ‘It wouldn’t do to worry your parents, and goodness, consider Nemu’s worry about you!’ … or something like that. Sato concluded that would be the sort of thing Dalgona would say, apart from appearing cross-eyed in disbelief over her fantastical and nearly unbelievable story.
Eventually, she floated right side up and landed gently on the ground. Sato spent a minute to reorient herself to her surroundings and smoothing out her appearance. Then, she realized that she had landed nearby the entrance of the park. It was the part of the park where it was much tidier and didn’t have nearly as many leaf piles. All of a sudden, the alarm on her phone went off. It was an alarm, reminding her that it was now time to make her way back home for dinner. Would her experience be worth telling Nemu and Dalgona about? Perhaps. Would they believe what she had experienced? Well, now that’s hard to tell. Even Sato found it hard to believe that whatever she experienced was believable at all.
