The Best Tryouts are Frozen and Empty (Saph)

This was hopeless, but he couldn't stop. There wasn't anywhere to go even if he could. The noise alone was endless, infinite, crushing in on his skull with the implacable barrage of sound his headphones only dreamed of being able to produce. The crowd... there was no describing the crowd, no escaping it, and, he suspected, no forgetting it.

Just a simulation. Nothing but hard light. None of it was real. Nothing was really there.

Reality laughed in his face. He couldn't see the other people in blue, the people he was supposed to be helping. The crowd was in the way. They were only out of sight around a swell of the mob. Right? That was all. The crowd was just growing and shrouding everything else from view. So many people - so much anger - so much violence - so much -

He staggered when the darkness softened into empty white. He opened and closed his hands, devoid of injury or weapons and only as white as they usually were. Everything, every limb, every muscle was heavy and slow, but his sight remained clear. Most of the strain faded with a few breaths, and then it was only the emotional exhaustion weighing down. It wasn't any lighter than the moment of physical weariness and it made it rather harder to take the hand in front of him.

He hoped that was all. He had gone into this expecting things to be fairly straightforward. Qualities and qualifications and all that. If that wasn't the worst, though...

That... that... may not have been the worst was the thought that had him doubting the whole thing. He didn't want to try to imagine what might be next, though he did belatedly recall Saphirus' warning during the Shy Guys. He'd been right. He wouldn't have wanted to know what was coming next. Would he have avoided walking into that room if he had known? Could he have made himself walk into that with full knowledge of what was going to occur? He didn't have the energy to even try to answer that.