Sirens blare and cars honk as Sora walks down a sunsetting Canal St towards the subway. His left foot grows damp and cold from a puddle he stepped in, his eyes indifferent to this misfortune but also to most everything else. The smell of honey roasted nuts and petrichor waft through the air

He passes through thinning crowds of strangers and pushy arms forcing fliers onto tourists. Pulled along by her mother, a child cries — gaze unfixed from a thin veteran and dog sleeping together on a cardboard box. 

Sora sighs, pressing something painful down.

He too was trained in the art of indifference, he thinks to himself. 

Ever since he was a child, each time he passed a homeless person on the street, Sora felt a pulse of pity, anxiety, fear, sadness, gratitude, but over time, the length of that pulse just grew shorter and shorter, until the complexity of those feelings were hardly detectable anymore. All the same feelings were always there, but they passed far too quickly to register concern within him any more. This was the essence of the art, he knew.

He pulls out his phone to look at the time and blinks. The numbers flicker. The colors blink, and he rubs his eyes. Then, a sudden screeching rings through his ears. Wincing, the ringing decays away the moment his eyes flicker open, and Sora finds himself staring at a man 20 meters away.

If he had paused and stepped back, he might have noticed the unusual clothes worn by this man. Or perhaps that the woman he had cornered was wearing a tail. This might have led him to notice that he was no longer where he once was. He might then have realized that he was clearly no longer in Manhattan, and then after some questioning of his sanity, that he was in fact no longer in the world he knew. But none of this occurred, because Sora’s first encounter with this world was with its magic.

Sora’s heart creaks and cringes. His body wafts with a splash of curling disgust and a sharp slash of rage from the light funneled into his pupils.

A man—sleezy—had a woman—small—pinned. Against a wall. Arm dangling. Over shoulder. Leaning. Leaning. Closely, donning, gross, smile. Sora's words—no, his thoughts—they were, scrambled and fragments. Scrambled fragments under the pressure of something.

Sora’s eyebrows curl up and press in, chapped lips purse and curl down. Upset by it. He is upset. His eyes pierce sharply from a distance.

His brain takes one stride of heroic ideation.

 

And if that single stride could be summarized into a wish, it would be for the man before him to be crushed under contempt and stripped of the power of his presence. Made back into nothing.

At the completion of this single stride, the wave of emotions swirling within him crash and snuff out like a candle under the automatic conditioning of that art of indifference.

A flutter of unease passes Sora’s heart, and a puzzled expression settles onto his face. He is surprised and confused by the intensity of his emotions, and moreso by the sharp and disturbing clarity with which they passed before his consciousness.

Such a scene wasn’t entirely unfamiliar to him, and yet the force of the emotional burst within him was unlike him.

It was as if time slow down and he could sharply feel the contours of his inner world evolve like a movie reel ticking by slowly, one scene at a time. 

But he did not have time to dwell on this. So much was happening that he could only continue to watch as the film unrolled before him, as he was swept away by another sequence of interior changes.

First, a rush of fear electrifies through his limbs. Stunned confusion. Then a fog. Apathetic. Pathetic. Apathetic.

It developed this way:

The fear first arose in his gut, through his heart and outward along his limbs, encircling down his forearms, numbing his muscles, and finally piercing outward through his fingertips, sending a shiver up his spine. It was like someone pressed a leech onto his chest to drain him of...well, he didn't have a word for it, but he could feel himself losing it. 

The fear itself feels foreign to him. Like it isn't really his own. 

Then, without a moment to breathe, the fear ramps into a confusion so absolute, that his head drops to the floor, eyes wide and shaking at the ground, and his body quickly follows.

Sora unconsciously wraps his arms around himself in the dirt. His body grows hot, and he shivers as his nervous system scrambles to respond to this first-time threat—as if it had never encountered such a threat over the course of its millions of years and generations of evolution.

It was wrong. And it was not over. 

Another foreign intrusion settles upon him. A fog. And that uneasy feeling again.

Time begins to move again. He is shook and shaking, as his gaze returns to his surroundings, and at last, fate's final promise is delivered.

His heart drops to the floor.

No longer does he hear sirens and screeching. 

No longer does he smell honey roasted nuts and petricore. 

And no longer is he surrounded by tourists.

Sora's mental faculties freeze, and he spirals into a form of shock that the modern doctor would not be able to recognize.