Sumida Mental Hospital, Osaka, Japan

It is winter in Osaka; a deep blanket of snow covers everything, temples, homes, housing projects and shopping malls - all is shrouded in glistening white.

For the people themselves, life goes on as it always has. Traditions ingrained over thousands of years, lifestyles and beliefs that predate Western religion, handed down over the ages, generation to generation, father to son, mother to daughter, all were reflected in the attitudes of the Osakans as they dutifully trudged through the slushy mess and went about their business.

The city itself glimmered like a miniature in a snow globe, icy bas relief on stone, frozen in time, the buildings reflecting the bright December morning light, stoically withstanding the weather as they had, in some cases, for thousands and thousands of years.

Modern and ancient architecture, side by side, intricately pieced together with as much an aesthetic as a practical eye, artfully and tastefully appointed within the confines of the landscape rather than in contrast to it. Osaka, to many, was a paradise, to others a home and, to a few, a prison.

Okino Musashi was one of the few.

Her days consisted of a mind numbing monotony, a drudgery of endless repetition, and as days staggered forward into weeks and months, to the staff that had bathed and fed and diapered and cared for the vessel Okino had left behind when her mother in law struck her from behind with a golf club and made a vegetable of her, it seemed almost a mercy that the mind of the young newlywed was far too damaged to have any understanding of what was happening to her. It was enough for them that the Pruitt estate sent regular payments for Okino’s care, but still, the younger nurses could not help but have compassion for the poor young girl. How she got there did not concern them; that she was in need of their ministrations was the only reason they required, and so they did all that they could to treat her with as much dignity as they, in their willful ignorance, believed she was due.

And all the time, from inside her own personal Hell, Okino Musashi burned with white hot hatred for every one of them.

The Slipstream, for all its seeming intangibility, is as “real” a place as the Waking World it parallels, and despite the very unreal feeling it causes in the un-Switched on Sojourner noobs, its effects are equally as real, and just as physically binding, a fact to which many reincarnated Wayward and Sojourner souls could attest.

Okino Musashi, the real Musashi, existed here now, as alive and malevolent and malicious as the Musashi who had been the physical Vessel of the Other in the Waking World, the violent, passionless killer who had been stopped far too short on her path to fulfill her Master’s agenda on Earth. Enraged beyond control, she railed and screamed vile insults at her nurses in a voice she knew only she could hear, lashed out at them from inside the desolate darkness of her own spite, and that they were oblivious to it only caused it it to burn the brighter.

“Get your fucking hands off of me”, she bellowed, her voice rising to a frighteningly inhuman screech, yet wholly genuine in its conceit.

She was, indeed, completely aware that the nurses could not hear her, was, in fact, totally cognizant of what had happened to her from the second the five iron had bashed in the back of her skull in a dreary North Carolina mansion, and all the way through the entire ordeal that had landed her back here in Osaka.

The bitch detective had saved her life. After Pearl Pruitt had ambushed her and hit her with the club while Harvey, Pearl’s son and Okino’s husband (albeit in name only) lay on the bed watching helplessly, the Charlotte detective had wrestled the golf club away from the old woman, handcuffed and secured her, then phoned in the attack.

From there, she checked Harvey on the bed and, determining that he was still among the living, had finally checked Okino and, to her surprise, had found the young Japanese girl still breathing. She got back on her cell phone and called again, this time advising the responders that there was a severely injured party involved.

“Don’t worry, somebody’s coming,” she said as reassuringly as she could, and Okino’s dislike for the young policewoman doubled. Mercy was a weakness. Okino was glad she did not suffer from it.

Inside the Slipstream, Okino remembered how she had quite abruptly come to the realization, naked, covered in her own blood and slumped forward on the dressing table, that she was vividly aware of what was going on around her, though she could tell by Anne Richard’s reaction to her that the detective considered her uncommunicative, so that meant she was conscious, and no one other than she knew it.

She had tried to make a sound, any kind of sound, and move her arms and legs, but quickly determined that she was paralyzed and unable to speak or communicate in any way. She could not even blink her eyes. In her extremis, she had called out for the Other. And was answered with cold, barren silence.

Having never cared for the company of others, Okino had been unprepared for the wave of desperate loneliness that had overwhelmed he. For the first time in her life, Okino Musashi wept, though, in the bitterest of ironies, no tears fell from her almond eyes.

In due course, the paramedics had arrived, accompanied by what surely must have been the entire Charlotte Mecklenburg Police Department, even though the Pruitt estate lay outside the city itself, and, trapped in her own body and unable to make sound or movement, Okino had then endured weeks of testing, physical therapy, MRI’s, CAT scans, EEG’s and any other relevant procedures that the doctors and specialists at Carolina’s Medical Center could recommend. Their eventual diagnosis was that Okino was in a persistent vegetative state and would most likely never recover from it, meaning whatever life she had left would be spent being cared for 24 hours a day.

The unspoken suggestion was to allow her to simply starve to death, that a lifetime of round the clock medical care would be an incredible expense that would amount to nothing, as there was currently no known cure for having your brains bashed in. But that suggestion was swiftly and decidedly put down by the new executor of the Pruitt fortune, one Harvey Pruitt, who, having recovered from his own near death experience at the hands of the very girl he had now decided to spare, was more afraid of Okino in death than were she forever disabled, but still “living”.

So, Harvey signed the papers and, eight months after the events at the Pruitt estate in Charlotte, Okino was shipped back to Japan, to the city she had hated her entire young life, from where she had murdered and made deals with the actual Devil to escape, and it was here she now sat, rotting from the outside in, yet still existing outside of her ruined Vessel, and from that prison inside the Slipstream, Okino’s sentience suffered an immeasurable, frustrated fury she could not quench.

As was the routine, after breakfast, the staff at Sumida placed the patients that could be moved into the common room, a large, white, sterile room furnished with low tables and plastic chairs, where they could be watched and monitored as a group instead of left alone in their rooms. It was normal for Okino to be wheeled over to a row of windows that made up one wall of the room, through which, with unseeing eyes, she watched, drooling, as the world crept by without her.

Sometimes, from the Slipstream, if she concentrated on it, she could see through her Waking World eyes and look through the window, and the view always only fed her anger, knowing that she could not break that glass and release her Vessel from the chains of the Waking World, for, as long as her body remained alive, she would be trapped here in the Slipstream, unable to cross back over into the Void, and from there fold back into the Source to be reborn.

Now, as she looked through her Vessel’s eyes, she noticed a human shaped reflection in the window move toward her and focused more intently on identifying it. As the reflection moved closer, she could see a white nurses uniform detach itself from the back of the room and move to her right side, unusual for this time of day, as she had already taken her meds and been fed breakfast.

Closer to her now, Okino could see the nurse more clearly, and was alarmed to discover she had never seen her here before, but vaguely recognized her nonetheless.

Panic rising in Okino’s heart, the nurse knelt in front of her and looked into her eyes.

“I’m going to help you,” the nurse whispered, and smiled.

Looking out from the Slipstream through her own eyes in the Waking World, Okino instantly recognized the impossibly large, breathtakingly brown eyes smiling back at her, and as the nurse reached out a strong, brown hand towards her, Okino tried her level best to leap from her wheelchair and run for her life.