- This post is dedicated to toyotami kun. Thanks tami kun, for inspiring my story! * WARNING - This one gets a little sappy -

Bura sat atop the spine of what was once, she was sure, a great structure of some kind. It was toppled over, a huge hollow rectangle, made of steel and glass. Yet it resembled a grey flexed out caterpillar from afar through squinted eyes. She would know, since that’s what it looked like to her when she first saw it from a great distance a year or so back. A strong gust of wind swept buy causing her unnaturally bright blue hair to fly wildly behind her. It was almost the brightest color in the area, “Dead Site #1” is what it was officially called. But she had a different name for it, “The Round House Ruins”.
She stood up and slid off the right side of the devastated building, occasionally hopping over a gaping hole that was once a window or dodging protruding medal rods that had snapped under pressure and now looked like their purpose was for impaling. Bura landed easily beside the building among the rubble from the cracked streets and fallen walls of the depressing dead city. She then started walking, following the jagged yellow lines of a split avenue street until she came to an intersection. To her right was a rather large crater, obviously the impact point of a huge attack that was the cause of the ruin to the city. She had already explored that area, just another big hole in the ground. To her left were more buildings, all affected from the blast in some way, either toppled over on there sides, crushed flat or blown wide open. It was such a mess; she hadn’t been able to see everything in that area yet. She had started to turn left but then stopped.
Her eyes glanced down the road before her. The buildings were smaller on that street but there was one in the middle that was rather huge and it always caught her eye. It had a strange soft skin color with black writing going across the top of it. She could see that it once had a round top although a massive chunk had been blown off on the right. There was something oddly familiar about that building, though she hadn’t worked up the courage to enter it yet. A sudden image of a long hallway with numerous doors on either side popped into her head, someone was rushing past them. Bura shook her head sharply and quickly turned left. She broke out into a run down the street and worked her way through the maze of fallen buildings, occasionally leaping clear over them. She stopped once she couldn’t see the “Round House” anymore and waited to catch her breath leaning against a still standing doorway to a small slanted over structure. The wind picked up again near the floor and caused something to flutter. Bura looked down and noticed a heavily damaged magazine near her left boot, pages flipping rapidly in the wind.

“Paper?” she asked herself aloud, “…there’s something you don’t see everyday”. She gently scooped up the magazine making sure to keep the loose pages together within the binder and leaned against a wall. The outer pages were completely impossible to make out, charred by some fire, but the pages near the middle were in surprising decent condition, just enough to make out some pictures. They were of young people, maybe just a bit older than Bura’s age, and they were all dressed in strange outfits. Some were simple and colorful, a female in a long dark blue kimono with bright white and orange sashes, her black hair tied up in neat buns on the side of her head while strands of it fell beside her face. Others were more elaborate, a male with yellow spiked hair dressed in a series of three different tops, all with different designs contrasting the others and a pair of pants with an over-kill amount of belts shackled around his waist.

“How did they move in this stuff?” Bura chuckled to herself. Despite the effort it looked to actually move in their attire, the people themselves looked like they were having a great time. Bura slowly turned the page and found one picture that she almost recognized. It was of a male affectionately hugging a female from behind, heads nuzzled together and both were smiling happily. The clothes they wore are what seemed familiar to Bura. They seemed like some sort of gender based uniform. The male wore a dark cuffed neck top with long sleeves and matching slacks. The female’s white blouse was of a softer cloth material with a simple stripe falling from both her shoulders and converged at the center of her shirt accompanied by a tied red bow. She also wore a simple dark blue pleated skirt. Bura studied the picture a bit longer,

“Where have I seen such garments?” she thought aloud to herself. She held the magazine securely in both hands and rose slowly in the air.

“It was near a large vehicle attached to a large rectangle cargo…” she had glided over to higher ground, another toppled building, “…that had plowed through the dull red stones of a brick type building…THERE!” She had caught view of the building she was describing to herself and flew in the direction of it.