She didn't feel anything. Everything around her was blackness as far as her visual faculty was concerned. That was weird, though. Why did she not see anything, and who was the source of that voice she heard?
The girl still had a form, eyes that opened to nothing, and ears that were working perfectly fine. That was about the sum of it. So she opened her eyes.
With the world around her unfolding like the curtains being drawn back on a grand stage piece, several realizations came to her at once. But they were translated so weirdly that it may as well have taken forever to process them. She wasn't irritated, of course, but she was mildly curious. And barely able to be annoyed. Huh... feelings? Worries? She did not know why she had those any more than she understood what was flooding back to her in spoonfuls, then full cups. Ideas, Memories, stories, People, places, events, dates, and times. Even dreams.
And names. It was as if her thoughts had been blurred by cotton, but then the cotton was quickly being parted. That was nice of them. When the visuals became sharper than she was prepared for, she remembered having two names.
But, she dimly decided to remember, she only remembered having been born with one name. So where did "Kaede Amakatsu" come from? To her confusion she could see two distinct figures in her mind, both the same subject from whose frame of reference passed through two sets of these ideas, these, places, events, dates and times.
One was just an ordinary girl who lived in Japan. Nobody special. She had a family. They were okay with her. She did not think much of them. They ate normal family meals. On occasion, she saw, the mother was prone to infidelity, and the Dad remained oblivious. The daughter knew, but said nothing. The girl lived in a podunk little community of nothing. At School, the teachers were dumb and uninteresting, just as they were uninterested in the children. The kids were average, boring, flat, and somewhat disconnected. They were being groomed to become gears of a cold, noisy machine that the teachers called The System. Go to work, earn your pay, eat, sleep, repeat, then die. This was the life of an ordinary, untalented girl. She felt nothing, and bitter emptiness cradled her like warm fire.
The second one that stood adjacent was a stranger whose life looked like complete fiction. The visuals told the story in ways tiny, wasteful minds could not reproduce by word. A piano at her baby age. In her teens, in her later teen years. She was loved by everybody for her prodigious talents with the ivory. The family loved her and the communities had nothing but nice things to say. There were gifts at the door and giftboxes inside her bedroom. This girl felt like the sun was always beaming down no her, lighting up the way. And whenever she felt gloomy, she could always play her favorite Schubert piece. Or was it Mozart...? It did not matter, because Kaede Amakatsu was kind, loved everybody, and was able to always see through the gloom whenever she tickled the ivory. She made everyone around her feel so much better with her piano playing. Kaede was so much more interesting than the other girl... the "Before Kaede". The Kaede who did not see much point in being in this world.
Strangely, something was inconsistent with both of these Kaedes. First off, she didn't get how they seemed to be leading two different lives if they were the same person. They even lived up to the exact same age. And... was that all? There wasn't anything more? The first girl never seemed to make it past high school. Entrance Exams were tiring. Of course, the prospects for anyone attempting to enroll were fairly low. The other one, Kaede, would have been eager to get her life rolling. There should have at least been some kind of wrap-up epilogue... only there was none. The story of the whatever the girl and the Kaede did with their lives stopped at age 15. The rest is a cold blank nothing. Just like here. Just like now.
They may have been two different characters, real or fake, living either successful lives or boring lives, but what was unshakable was the fact that they died around the same time, and thus, never had a real life. Or a chance at one. Whoever this girl was, this Kaede was, now there was no point to her. She was gone. As if nothing mattered. The world continued to plug on without her.
As if in confirmation of this fact, very distantly, though she could barely make it out or even give it a name, there was a malicious, gleeful cackling that came from far away.
And the person thinking all of this decided that if these two girls were the same but different, real and fake, and she still had their memories anyway, she decided that she had to have been one of them. Meaning of course, logically, that she was them, when they were alive, while she was dead.
That would explain why she felt no pulse. No fear, no moment of agitation, and no grief. Nothing.
But not completely as another annoying something kept nagging her to resolve one last thing. Out of the two, which one was she? It was hard to tell which one was the fake, and which was real. The Boring Girl seemed more real of the two, but the sheer pathetic pointless of the life she lived until made everything she did, thought, or felt, fake.
Kaede Amakatsu's entire life felt more fake than real, but this devastating paleness yielded to how much of a genuine real emotional impact she and her talent had on others. A Fake actually produced something more genuine.
The girl who died and was one of these decided it did not matter anymore. She couldn't tell who out of the two was real and fake, and somehow, it just did not seem all that important to identify herself. But...
She really could not stand the first girl. The Boring Girl who had almost nothing to live for, and was willing to just die quietly. She knew the boring girl's name, but truly? A girl who did not mind going quietly into the darkness of eternity was not one who was worth the breath of bringing her name back of mind. And so, even if sounding more fake than her boring counterpart, Kaede would choose to accept that she was here and she was once Kaede Amakatsu, and not the other girl, the depressed, utterly bitter girl. The girl who saw nothing good in life. Then Kaede's head began to swim again, even if no pain was involved.
"Took you a while to catch up with yourself, didn't it?"
He was dark skinned and dressed like he came from a hospital. Kaede acknowledged his presence. Her eyes went half lidded because in a subtle way, she seemed startled. "Who are you?"
The Stranger smiled. Kaede Amakatsu finally started to notice more about him in detail. Black pants, black shoes. his upper torso was obscured by a hospital gown, sky blue. His right arm was severely bandaged and sitting inside an arm hostler. the left seemed to be fine, just obscured by a darker blue jacket he wore over his shoulders. He looked dark skinned like he came from an overseas nation, but his accent and mannerisms, as she gradually knew, were distinctively proper and detached.
"That is a good question. You are good at asking things."
Kaede was not sure what to make of that statement other than, who would say something in that way? But although he may have sounded adult, the looks were teenager.
"I rather not waste an introduction, but I guess I should not drag this out anymore than I have to," said the stranger in a weird tone like he was talking about the weather. But that was kind of moot point and absolutely daft trivia, because the Land of the Dead had a perpetual climate of unabridged stillness.
"Let's go with Mitchell. Mitchell Deces. Ultimate Patient."
Kaede eyes widened in shock at the formality of the introduction. It was familiar for all the wrong reasons.
"I guess you were amidst the last of the Killing Game participants to be involved, I take it."
That was a word that stirred something from memory. Killing Game. The phrase was a surreal juxtaposition, a mocking indulgence of thought. Killing Game.
Killing Game.
When the words persisted to become a string of thoughts, Kaede let it flow through. A bunch of teenagers like Kaede. Talented in a specific field. Friends. Forced to kill. A world that felt like someone else's fiction... and...
The fact that she had played a part in it.
She never noticed the stranger coming close to her face with a small smile. "Ring a bell?"
Kaede could not help but yelp in surprise, then stagger back and then trip over a rough indistinguishable oblong in the unsifted void. The memories came flooding back, but she was only just now realizing where she was, blinking as if to force herself to be aware.
"I imagine you don't need to reinforce the idea of your own situation to yourself. It ain't you were the first or the last," The stranger remarked, rolling his eyes.
"I'm... I'm dead! I'm... I-I'm dead." Surprise and even resignation. But the real shock was hearing her own voice. It felt like forever since she heard herself. It was not a matter of liking or disliking the sound of her own person, but, she never imagined it would have ever come back to matter at all. Her whole body was now reintroduced to familiar sensations, like trembling, worry, and fright. And Horror.
The stranger did not seem to miss a beat, and gently went on to ask, "So... what was it you remembered?"
A very poor choice of words for a very strange question. A lot of what Kaede remembered were not the things she would have wished to remember. But if in obligation to the person she had forsaken long ago, she went ahead and did. "A trial. We were trying to find the Mastermind. We... We didn't. Because in the end... I was the one who killed Rantaro, hold on, who ARE you?" a chill went down her spine. One of the memories that came back was the manner of how she died.
The stranger blinked back, confused. "You actually were not paying attention? Seriously? No, no, it is fine. I am Mitchell Deces. Mitchell is fine," he said, scratching his cheek in a perplexed manner.
Kaede got up, and she did not feel all that tired, and even "Is this the land of the dead...?"
"Well, yeah. it is," Mitchell answered back. "I make it my job to greet everyone who swings on by here. Okay, no, no, no, no, NO, it IS my job to do this. I just get lazy in doing it. Yes, "Kaede", you are dead. You kind of got the short end of the stick."
Kaede stiffened up and knew what he meant. There was no more cotton, because she could remember everything about how she died clearly, but it did not make her feel happy or sad. She was just indifferent to the outcome. But it was hard to be indifferent when it was fairly surreal and brutal how the manner of her death seemed to involved getting hanged before being crushed to death. She could even remember how painful the experience was; she let out a weary laugh.
"I really died." she fell down on her feet. "I ended up killing Rantaro by accident."
"When something in the world of mortals happens, it is usually a chance of fortune or fate at best, but you would be surprised how huge the chasm is between those terms and the word "accident"," said Mitchell, sitting on a smooth abutment nearby. He then drew in a long breath. "But you sound like you are okay with this."
Kaede looked up and nodded. "I gave up my life so that everyone else could survive and get out safely."
Mitchell fell silent, watching her moves with silent detachment.
"I tried to stop the killing game by going after the Mastermind. I-I tried," her voice began to choke, though she hardly felt her body be stifled with any need to gasp for breath at all, "But all I did was play right into Monokuma's hands."
"Hmmmmm... yeah, this is true. But thankfully, Monokuma is just a robot, has no soul and can't exist here. Claimed to be god, but is just a bear stuffed with gadgets and gizmos," Mitchell stated factually.
Kaede buried her face in her hands more. "I can't imagine who would be sadistic enough to make something like that, and force everyone to play that absurd killing game." Kaede scowled. "Or maybe it does not matter anymore."
"Seems like when you die, everything about your life becomes clear. Answers to questions you never had answered. Things you had never imagined to be true finally being revealed to be true. And there is something true as fact. You were played. You were aware of this when you came here."
Kaede looked clueless, completely as lost as if she melted into haze. Mitchell shook his head.
"Don't know what I am talking about? Well, that is just about the cutest thing I have ever seen."
Kaede jumped in surprise at his weird tone. "Huh?! What are you talking about?"
What followed was a long moment of silence, and Mitchell sat in place, unfazed and, as if she was not there, let his own thoughts run about for a bit.
"... You really do not know," he said, rubbing his chin. "Do you?"
"Don't know what?" said Kaede. "Who are you anyway?"
He ignored her question. "I am not doing anything important for a while, you know. The office members take a little bit in filling out all the papers for every single person who comes here. But it still takes an eternity of a while, which gets really annoying. So rather than talk to you for a long period, I could just as easily show you instead," he finally answered, standing up, and walking into the dead empty mist.
"Come with me."
Kaede was not sure how to react to what was happened. And then, as if in a dream, she went after him. "Hey, come back! You can't just leave me here!"
Mitchell casually called back, "Uh, no kidding! It's my job to look after every soul who comes here! Had you stayed in one spot I would have had to drag you forward!... Well, good thing you got legs. Not that you need to worry about them being strong enough to get you going anymore, but... eh," came the lackadaisical response.
Kaede burst out screaming, "I don't understand what you are saying!"
Mitchell guffawed. "No need. But like I said. We have some time. Want to watch some movies? The Matinee over here has the best popcorn. Too bad I can't exactly taste it. You probably can, though."