2025-07-04: Post-Midnight Music
- Cutscene: Post-Midnight Music
- Cast: Shinobu Shimizu
- Where: Hirasaka Ward, Sumaru City
- OOC Date: 2025-07-04
- IC Date: 2012-06-04 (Dark Hour)
- Summary: Awake during the Dark Hour, Shinobu practices the guitar and thinks about her living situation.
The Dark Hour has fallen, shedding its sickly green glow across the world as the moon hangs bright in the sky. At this time, the majority of the world sleeps safely within their gleaming coffins - but tonight, the strums of a guitar break the silence, playing a song for the city and its dozing inhabitants. At least until
plonk "Shit."
the song is broken by a discordant note - the wrong string plucked a little too high, a little too harshly - and the quiet swearing of an amateur musician. Shinobu Shimizu looks down at her instrument, inspecting the string. It's intact - the only fault lies with her. Well, that's what practice is for. She's only been learning for a few months, now. She's been interested in music since she was young, but her parents weren't interested in enabling anything that couldn't be spun out into a respectable career. One can imagine their reaction when she became interested in rock.
She hasn't quite gotten up to that level yet now that she's free to her pursue her own hobbies, though. And it's for the best - the equipment is expensive and at this hour, it wouldn't even work. And what better time than now to practice, when there's no one else around to be disturbed by her attempts at bettering her music but the Shadows? She already knows they're after her head. They can deal with it.
She should be asleep now, herself... but Shinobu has long since come to terms with the fact that there will be no sleep for her until the Hour has passed, and that the only thing to do until then is find ways to kill time. Sometimes it's music, as she's attempting now. Sometimes, she conducts her patrols. It's a practical thing, to a degree. One doesn't realise how much one needs something until they don't have it anymore - and for as much as the rickety old thing sometimes stutters in the night or needs a good bit of percussive maintenance, she's become heavily reliant on her fan to sleep. She needs the white noise of the blades, and the feel of cool air(in the summer, she will accept 'any air at all) across her body. She's too alert - without it, she can hear everything go on around her. But it, along with everything else that requires power, ceases to function in the Dark Hour.
...And unfortunately for her, the same problems that make it difficult to sleep at any other hour are even worse after it ticks past midnight. When the world becomes still and the shadows start to grow, it's as if every sound and every fear is magnified. The thin walls of her apartment do nothing to mask the sounds of the liquid shadows that occasionally roam the city streets. She can hear them moving, writhing -
Best to stay awake, then, which brings her to where she is now - seated on the roof of the apartment complex she lives in, secondhand guitar cradled in her lap, her staff resting next to her, and her legs dangling over the edge. It's a tactical vantage point from which she can keep an eye on approaching shadows, as well as allowing her music, as faltering and amateurish as it is, to travel far enough that if someone is awake to hear, they'll know there's another person out there. That they aren't alone in this Hour, which seems purpose-built to cut off connections between people - disabling electrical devices they can use to communicate with each other, limiting them only to whoever is immediately nearby. The least she can do is make things a little easier.
...Of course, if someone does come find her, what they'll find is a somewhat run-down old apartment complex that looks like it could be very haunted in the green light of the Dark Hour and her not-so-friendly face frowning down at them. Not the most reassuring of sights, she thinks - and then doubles back mentally, offering a brief apology to the complex.
It might be old, and the lack of a personal shower means needing to go a block over to the public bath, and the rent's a little higher than she'd like for what she's getting, but there aren't many apartments who'd rent without asking questions to a single woman of her age who stays out to all hours of the night. That's pretty invaluable to her, when supernatural trouble means she can't always be sure when she'll get back home for the night. A part of her wishes they allowed pets, though. ...And yet another part of her wonders if that'd be a good idea even if they did, with how unpredictable her life can be. It's hard enough to take care of herself sometimes. And sometimes she doesn't know if she'll even -
...She frowns a little, at that thought - and then shifts her sitting position, her fingers finding the strings of her guitar once more. Something about the Dark Hour seems to draw those thoughts out of her. That's what happens, she supposes. Well, there's one thing that's always good for chasing her thoughts away.
Her fingers begin to dance across the strings once more - and again, when they stumble for another time and force her to start over. It's a very human sound, at a time when there's so few of those.