/jp/ - Otaku Culture

"That sounds like a very poorly thought-out idea." Reimu muttered.

"It was, as a matter of fact." Eirin said, sounding a little annoyed at herself. "I was already in a poor mindset when I devised it. It didn't eliminate the need for sleep. What it actually did was make the brain not feel the need, despite getting weaker and weaker. Do you know what effects sleep deprivation has on the brain?" I certainly knew how I felt when I was tired, but I didn't exactly know for certain. "After twenty-four hours: Difficulty in concentrating, high irritability, tremors, reduced coordination and more. Being what I am, the usual timescale does not apply to me, but it is important for me to explain these symptoms." Eirin looked at Reimu and I intensely, and I got the impression that she was trying to make something very clear to us.

"After forty-eight hours, the body enters extreme sleep deprivation. At this point, your brain will forcibly make you have microsleeps, which are small periods of sleep, up to thirty seconds long. You will experience extreme periods of stress. High anxiety, irritability, and extreme fatigue. But, perhaps most importantly at this stage, you will begin to hallucinate. See things that aren't there; hear things that aren't real. Here, Eirin was beginning to look a little bit like she wasn't entirely present in the room either. Like whatever she was staring at and thinking about, it wasn't in the here and now.

"After seventy-two hours, sleep deprivation begins to have a severe effect on your ability to think, and you will be experiencing depersonalization. At this point, you won't be able to tell what's real and what's a hallucination." This was starting to sound a little horrifying. "By the ninety-sixth hour, reality will no longer make sense. This is called Sleep Deprivation Psychosis." Eirin's eyes weren't so emotionless now. They looked, in fact, a little haunted, in a way that actually made me a bit concerned. "It takes me longer to feel the effects, but I was using that medicine for a long time. Each day, my ability to make good decisions became worse. My inability to recognize what was happening grew. And the medicine prevented me from feeling microsleeps."

Eirin shook her head and squeezed her eyes shut. "It is a miracle of the body that I seemed lucid at all. The medicine kept me from falling into full delirium, but all the other effects crept up on me silently. By the time you," And she looked at both myself and Reimu here, "Confronted me, I was probably no more intelligent than the average new-born youkai." She could have fooled me. "Well - And I don't intend anything offensive - I am extremely intelligent regularly. It takes a long time for me to reach the depths that I did." She looked at Reimu. "Thank you."

"You - Huh?" Reimu blankly replied.

"For fetching Tewi. For having me killed. Udonge might still be upset, but it was a decision that needed to be made. It refreshed me enough to clear the medicine from my system." Eirin had looked far better the next morning, when I'd woken up from being cooked by a Master Spark. "Then, I could understand what was happening properly. The need to sleep kicked in properly."

"Oh. Uh, you're welcome?" Reimu said, looking a little confused. I, however, felt like I was starting to understand better. Eirin had been right about my mistrust of her, but hearing more of her reasoning and the problems that she had been going through was starting to help.

"There was something else." Eirin said, then paused. "I was ashamed, but I was also vain and arrogant. I wanted to do everything myself. Prove that I could. Prove that I could atone for my sins on my own terms." She looked tired again. Really tired, but I supposed that not sleeping for as long as she had probably caused a large backlog. "I'm still hopeful that I can succeed. But now, I hope that I will be able to ask for your help on a more equal ground." Eirin had been careful to dance around some of the more personal parts of what she had confessed to me during our first session, and I imagined that I'd have to dance around Reimu's requests for that information in turn, but it was a start. Strangely, I found that I did feel a bit less mistrustful of Eirin now. Oh, I still didn't want to be alone with her, and I definitely wouldn't forget again, but it was slightly better now.

"Okay, so, uh..." Reimu had her arms crossed and looked more than a little confused. "What now?"

>>22506684
You're asking a lot.

>Your blood test results came in, and everything looks normal except for your oxytocin levels which are very low. I don't see a ring on your hands, do you not have a girlfriend or at least a female friend that you can share skin-on-skin contact with?

How are you going to respond to her?