Chapter Text
"...S-Sayo-ri?" Monika weakly chokes out.
She doesn’t know where she is.
She does her best to look around for landmarks, anything to signal where she is. Moving her head, a sharp, painful sensation halts her efforts to look around or move. From what she can see, Monika knows one thing.
One moment she was in the classroom, small and fake, with Sayori beside her, trying to calm her down as she sobbed. With Sayori distracted, the …person?... who she had entered with had left the clubroom, disappearing down a looping corridor.
And now?
She's nowhere.
There's nothing here.
The maybe-person had left and now she was alone in an unfamiliar and unrealistic environment with no one to help her.
A pitch black darkness surrounds her as Monika …floats? Floats with no water and breathes with no air, lungs heaving nothingness as she somehow lives on.
Colours like sheets of lightning flash in the non existent distance (red, green, blue) with seemingly no pattern or reason. The random lights blind Monika every time they appear, searing her eyeballs with colour and laughing at her all the while. Maybe there is reason to them. Those torturously vibrant colours.
But Monika can't make it out through the droning static, screaming and a feeling she finds herself unable to explain.
It's fuzzy. Painfully so. Similar to hundreds of pins being stuck into her skin at once, both like and unlike pins and needles. Darkness surrounds her body and suffocates it, limiting her movement through shock and pain. The feeling is familiar, a distant memory of a scratchy blanket being forced atop her for unknown reason comes up, probably false but still very unpleasant. Monika does not think she will ever be able to process this feeling, and she certainly isn't given the time to before her body is hit with a sharp pain, contorting and perverting, as her shivering body quakes.
A tearing sensation (a sound?) starts at a molecular level, tearing the fabric of her being into confetti. Atoms slowly separate from each other one by one, each burning with pain, and all Monika can do is squirm and let out a quiet, distorted whimper through an atomized voice box. The particles fully separate, float there in nothingness, bloodlessly bleeding noise and static, feeling tingly and, torturously, still very alive.
The feeling of Monika's body reforming and coming back together should be relieving.
It isn't.
Every part of her slams back together in an instant, the pain of the collision winding her not-yet-formed lungs. Monika's atoms melt together slowly, not really hurting as much as just feeling wrong . Her body, combined incorrectly, is squished and moulded back into normalcy by nothing as the ripping pain melts back into the fuzzy pain from before, bringing Monika no relief. Her newly formed body is stiff and tense, moving jerkily and disregarding any instructions given to it. Bones crack back into place as needles prick Monika's skin and she slowly regains some semblance of control of her body.
Surprisingly unsurprisingly, not long after she's reformed, the process repeats. Over and over and over for an unknown amount of time. Maybe hours, maybe years, maybe minutes, maybe seconds.
It hurts hurts hurts so much and Monika's sure that if this is a punishment whatever actions she might have committed, or possibly will commit, are not bad enough to be met with this.
The pain is so surprising and sudden, over and over and over that she can't scream, can't cry, can't move.
Fuzzy, scratchy, tingly, atomizing, tearing, bloodless, melting, stiff, prickly, torturous, agonizing, wrong.
There's no way she can describe this.
But she tries to anyway.
"I-it's s-so c-cold…"