The night's beginning to wind down at Escapade before Mimiru takes center-stage again.  This is her favorite part: just before closing, when the owner wants to calm things down and get people to start leaving.  There were plenty of songs in her repertoire which were effective cures for people who didn't know when to stop the party--she could be downright depressing, when she felt the need--and there weren't many other times she could convince anyone else to play them.  The normally exuberant punk brings a stool up onto the stage and sits down with her guitar across her lap, plucking out a slow, lilting melody...<br/><br/>The lights dim down aside from the one directly over the stage, creating a diffused sort of spotlight effect that makes it hard for her to see out into the audience.  For a moment, she lowers her head and concentrates on working the strings of her guitar, enjoying the way the acoustics of the room echo notes back to her in near-perfect time.  Mimiru's halfway into the lead-in when her fingers strike a chord only to be greeted with a dull *thwang* instead of the amplified reverberation she'd come to expect.  At first worried that her guitar was unplugged, she jerked her head back toward the amp, only to realize that the drumkit and bass had fallen silent as well.<br/><br/>The stool clatters to the ground as Mimiru jerks to her feet, turning to face the stage behind her.  There's no one else there with her, only silently looming coffins set upright where the other musicians had been.  The young guitarist takes a step backward, tripping over the cord of her guitar where it looped around her ankle from the quick turn, ending up on her backside at the stage's edge.  Her head jerks around to stare out into the audience, only to be greeted with a similarly morbid scene: dozens of coffins stand upright, facing in different directions but otherwise largely identical, many of them postured atop puddles of blood from where a patron had spilled a drink.<br/><br/>"What...  what the<em>fuck</em>is this?  WHAT THE FUCK IS THIS SUPPOSED TO BE?!" Mimiru howls out at the top of her lungs to the seemingly empty club, shaking a bit from the combined effort of screaming and her rapidly increasing heart rate.  Her eyes dart back and forth, her state of alertness heightened by the adrenaline that's starting to rush through her body.  This is the only reason she's able to spot it: an inky glob of blackness moving in the shadows cast by the obelisk-like caskets, darting from behind one to the next, rapidly making its way closer to the foot of the stage.<br/><br/>The girl pulls herself up and begins to backpedal again, moving to the center of the stage and changing her grip on the guitar to hold it by the neck with both hands like a club.  She's shaking, and at first her voice puffs out in a whisper between heaves of her chest, "...  c'mon..."  The words grow louder with repetition, her eyes wide and muscles tensing, grip closing white-knuckle tight on the guitar's neck until the strings begin to bite into the palms of her hands.  "C'mon, c'mon, COME ON!"<br/><br/>The flitting shadow finally reaches the coffin closest to the stage, halting for a moment.  Then, with a horrible slowness, it begins to emerge: at first it looks simply like an improbably-cast shadow stretching out toward the light rather than away from it, but as it draws closer it begins to<em>thicken</em>in an entirely impossible way, taking on a third dimension only immediately obvious due to the way it blocks her line of sight to the coffin directly behind it.  A few moments is all it takes for the shadow to grow from a seemingly innocent floor-bound trick of the light into a human-shaped pool of darkness, 'standing' freely with no surface to cast itself on.  A pair of eyes open in the head, the only mar on the otherwise perfect obsidian form.<br/><br/>Mimiru's bravado evaporates in an instant.  The normally headstrong girl's breath catches in her throat in a gasp, and she almost hiccups, practically choking on her own shock.  The ready stance is abandoned as she turns and breaks off into a run, stumbling and nearly falling immediately, but managing to use her forward momentum to continue scrambling until she hits the edge of the stage.  At that point she launches herself off into open air, getting her feet back under her by the time she lands--albeit in a bit of a skidding stagger--and taking off running for the club's exit.  The teen slams into it shoulder-first, bashing open the door hard enough that it seems almost to disgorge her forcibly, leaving her to skid shoulder-first across the floor of Paulownia Mall's plaza.<br/><br/>Mimiru picks herself up again, panting hard, pausing only briefly to stare at the towering fountain of livid red blood that dominates the center of the plaza.  Her head jerks over her shoulder again, looking toward the door to Escapade.  Beyond she can initially see only darkness, making it only that much more surprising when a pair of eyes open in the shadows, seemingly disembodied from the way her umbral pursuer blends in effortlessly with the shade.<em>"Are you going to run away again?  This is where you wanted to be, isn't it?  Besides, where are you going to run to--you can only get more alone than you were on the stage!"</em><br/><br/>The eyes close, making the shadow effectively vanish.  Mimiru doesn't wait around to see what happens next: she takes off running at a clip, straight out the doors of the mall and onto the moonlit streets, her pulse pounding in her ears every step of the way.  Her route is aimless, looking for someone--anyone!--in the dead of the night, but finding only a scant few silent coffins and the silent, sickly glow of the gangrenous moon to keep her company.  As a result, she just runs and runs until her lungs give out, collapsing onto her hands and knees near the station, gasping and heaving uncontrollably to the point that she nearly vomits, sweatdrops beading off her forehead and dripping from her chin.  There's no telling how long she spends there, panting and shaking; she probably wouldn't have even realized that things were back to normal if a car didn't drive by, briefly blinding her with the brightness of its headlights.<br/><br/>Even once things return to normal, Mimiru decides not to chance the streets, making her way to a 24-hour diner to camp out at until the day breaks.  At dawn she finally feels a bit more comfortable venturing the streets again, returning to the dorm around the time everyone else is leaving for school...