Sunflowers in the Dark
Candlelight gets an annoying suicide watch target and ends up quitting his job.
- Main Cast
- Time period
- 2031
- Complete
- Tags
- Area 1, Westavia
Candlelight, a young and eager SPF officer, is assigned his first very-own actual suicide watch target: Sunflower, a middle school girl who paracosms1.
Paracosming is bad. Because it comes in batches: paracosming, imagination, creativity. The very antithesis of material reality. A bourgeoisie pastime. We can't have that nonsense here. Candlelight is tasked with stomping that behavior out of her and have her be normal.
Sunflower could enter her paracosm by flushing herself down a toilet, and exit back to the real world whenever she pulled a door up inside the paracosm. She reminded Candlelight of the time when he himself used to be an imaginative boy.
A Candlelight flashback: he used to doodle in the margins of his textbook. His teachers called him to the office and demanded him to stop, telling him that those stuff weren't real.
Near the end, Sunflower convinced Candlelight to enter her paracosm with her. She then refused to leave. Candlelight yelled at her to open up the door. Sunflower pointed to a tree hole and told him to climb in. He did, got back to the real world, and found Sunflower's corpse in the restroom stall, with a nasty beartrap-like gash on her leg and her head blown off.
Candlelight did not do it, as his gun had not been fired and all the rounds are intact. However, the entire SPF thinks that he did do it and hid the evidence well, applauding him for that. It was their job, after all. He was given a show trial and promptly found not guilty.
But a not-guilty verdict did not ease his guilty heart. He quit his job and went back to the little village he came from.
Right before he left, he bought a sparkly notebook. The cashier asked him whether he bought it for his daughter. Candlelight made a funny face and said "yes." On the train back, he tried recalling his childhood paracosm and writing it down in the notebook, but nothing came to him, and everything he wrote down came out as boring and unimaginative.