<div class="floatright">(http://i127.photobucket.com/albums/p121/Mab_faerie/Elliquiy/b36a2cbe-7ec2-4a0f-83c1-80b5a9177b34_zps94ff6f9e.jpg)</div>The days that followed Aislin and her encounter with the Diary felt... strange, at best. At times they seemed to span what felt like weeks, only to be hours. Other moments passed in the blink of an eye, Monday became Sunday which dragged into Tuesday and hopped to Friday. Nothing felt normal anymore. It was if time as she knew it was distorting and dragging her with it.<br/><br/>Her dreams were filled with ominous visions and nightmares of the kimono-clad woman. The laughter of the eerie female figure always echoing through her dreams, interrupted only by the quiet whispers of memories she swore she'd never had. It felt like that woman was everywhere Aislin went. She could see her out of the corner of her eyes, watching, waiting. And that manor... that manor she'd seen in her dreams...  It was so dark and forlorn. Why did she feel so scared every time she entered it in her sleep? It was just a bad dream... that place wasn't real.... and yet it felt so-<br/><br/>"Aislin, you look exhausted. Are you getting enough rest?" Madelines voice cut through Aislins troubled thoughts, causing her to snap back to focus. Madeline stood, leaning against the door of Aislins office, with a coffee in one hand.<br/>Aislin inhaled a deep breath of air, taking a moment to get her bearings. She was at work, in her office. The kimono woman was nowhere to be seen. The manor was gone. Everything was as it should be.<br/>"Yeah... sorry." She said after a moment, "I'm... I'm just tired. You called it. I'm not getting enough sleep." Aislin forced an apologetic smile, which Madeline seemed to buy easily enough.<br/>"Well, maybe you should take off early today. Go get some dearly needed rest. I can handle it from here." She assured Aislin while taking a few steps into her office to offer her the coffee she'd had.<br/>"Thanks." Aislin accepted the warm beverage and stood, her mind still reeling from the torturous thoughts she'd just had.<br/>"Come on, you're doing it again. You get this weird, intensely worried look on your face and just space out for a while. Go home. Get some rest already." Aislin nodded her consent but her mind was still somewhere else.<br/><br/>Before she knew it, she was back in her apartment, the coffee cup nowhere to be seen and her work bag tossed onto the couch.<br/>Could she even fully recall the trip back home? And when had she stopped to drink the coffee? Why couldn't she remember?!<br/><br/>With a groan, she collapsed onto the couch beside her bag, the room seeming to spin slightly as she did. What was going on? Ever since she found that diary, everything had felt so wrong!<br/><em>I remember you...</em><br/>With a startled and short lived scream, Aislin bolted up, spinning in place to try and find the source of the voice. Where was she?! How did she get here?!<br/>Aislin, like a woman possessed, moved from room to room of her tiny little apartment, trying to find where the sound had come from.<br/><em>"the... tr...ed... to... ke...e... forget..." </em>More words now. Broken up, as if an old record player was repeating them back to Aislin.<br/><em>"...b...ow...could I?" </em>Along with the strange words was another sound, grainy, almost inaudible. Was it chanting?<br/>The longer it went on, the more panicked Aislin became. Where<em>WAS </em>it?<br/><br/>At last, Aislin located the noise. It was coming from the closet beside the bathroom. The closet that was shut and locked.<br/>The closet door had a habit of creaking open on its own due to loose hinges, so Aislin normally kept it locked to avoid bumping into the open door in the middle of the night. Why was there a noise coming from a closet that she hadn't opened in days, possibly weeks? What was in there?<br/><br/>With trembling hands, she unlocked the door, holding it shut for a moment while trying to regain her composure and settle her nerves.<br/>When at last she could wait no longer, she pulled the door open, tensed and ready to face whatever was inside...<br/><br/>Rather anticlimactically, nothing happened.<br/><br/>Exhaling, she looked around, still hearing the staticy, grainy noise from before.  After moving a few sheets and other odds&ends around, she discovered the source.<br/>A small radio sat on the middle shelf, obscured by various household amenities. Pushing those aside, she picked up the tiny radio, hearing the voice much clearer now.<br/>"They wanted me to forget. So I tried my best to forget... I wanted to do what was right. What was<em>needed</em>to be right, at least... It's just that... no matter how hard I try... I remember you..." Shivering, Aislin turned the radio off with a flick of the small, nearly rusted switch on its side. As silence fell, she instantly felt calmer, her thoughts were clearer, she could actually think for a change.<br/>"How did you get here?" She asked herself as she shut the closet, re-locked it and then headed back to her seat on the couch with the radio in hand.<br/><br/>The radio itself looked very, very old. It was comprised of mostly black metal and looked rusted all over. It had strange symbols lining its edges and couldn't have been much larger than breadbox.  It was definitely not something that had ever belonged to her and she'd certainly never seen it before now.<br/>Turning it over in her hands, she looked for where the batteries might be, wondering how old they were and if they posed a risk at leaking at this point.<br/>Confused, she found that there was no battery holder. It didn't even look like it had a plug either. How could the radio have been running without batteries or a charge of any kind? A radio doesn't run on air!<br/><br/>Running her hands over the backside of the radio, she felt a panel that seemed to slide away as she applied pressure to it. Assuming this must be the battery holder, she pushed the bit of old, worn metal aside and looked for the batteries.<br/>Instead of finding batteries however, she found a very pale green stone instead, flickering dimly with an unknown light.<br/><br/>"What... is this?" Reaching in, she grasped the small stone and extracted the tiny jade piece from the radio. Confused, she angled it upwards towards the light so she could examine it up close.<br/>"A stone? Why would there be a stone inside this radio? How did this radio even get here? And that voice... the woman from my dream..."<br/><br/>Aislin shivered, placing the stone beside the radio on the coffee table and standing up nervously. She paced a bit in her living room, wracking her brain in a vain attempt to make sense of the days events in comparison to all the other odd happenings that had been going on as of late.<br/><br/>"That diary... the nightmares... this strange radio with the stone inside it... what's going on? Why does everything feel so... so wrong?"<br/>Casting a glance at the radio one last time, Aislin moved back towards her bedroom, unable to spend a single moment longer in the same room as that radio, let alone the diary, which she had kept in a spot on her bookshelf as of late.<br/><br/>"I don't know what to do anymore... am I... going crazy?" She whispered aloud, tossing herself onto her bed and curling up into a ball. What other crazy occurrence was in store? What other madness would she have to suffer through next? Why couldn't everything just go back to normal again?<br/>Why did she ever pick up that diary in the first place? Why...<br/><br/>