Chapter I – Rude Awakening
Kaito PoV
I awoke to three rather prominent things. A headache, what was revealing itself not to be a very pleasant situation and an extremely satisfying image. The latter of the two however still involved the headache, or rather, migraine. In an effort to see if the pounding ache inside my mind had impaired my movement, I stretched my fingers out. The faint cold sensation of rock was all I could feel to my right, while on the left was a pool of liquid, possibly water, being lightly splashed every time my index finger tapped the surface thanks to an involuntary movement by my screwed up nervous system. I assumed it was screwed up because…
The echo of the groan that escaped me, probably due to overthinking the way the human nervous system operates, quickly bounced around the chamber allowing me to guess the entire room was made out of the same substance as the rocky material to the right. It also brought my attention to the dim sound of a computer fan running somewhere in the background. Slowly, ever so slowly, commanding my body to roll over, the cold feeling I had felt on my fingertips seemingly following me. An echoing drip sound gave me the impression that the small pool of water was a bit larger then I originally believed.
In an awkward fashion, I raised my hand over my shoulder and patted the back of my shirt, finding it drenched in a sticky liquid that was resembling water less and less. Lifting myself up onto my hands and knees, I found the size of the pool significantly larger than my already reassessed version of it, my fingers sinking until nearly submerged in the liquid. At this point, I had been relying only on my sense of touch and sound to put together a picture of my surroundings but that changed when my nostrils finally kicked into gear.
The air reeked of it. That unmistakable metallic smell. Rolling my fingers around in it suddenly gave the liquid name. Blood. I found the bodily fluid's thick make up obvious for some reason the moment I realised it. Even so, I found myself raising my hand up, the sickly revelation needing to be seen in order to be believed.
"Please don't be…" I found myself muttering with a rasping and dry voice before slowly opening one eye. Not only was I greeted with my hand dyed a rich ruby colour but also the sea of red that surrounded me. Leaping backwards in the sheer repulsiveness of it, I slammed my head into a wooden surface, gaining an extra layer of pain to add on top of my migraine. It was in the five minutes after this, when I was trying to avoid my placing my hands still dripping with whomever's blood I had been floundering in against my forehead whilst rolling around on the floor, when that extremely satisfying thought came to me.
Apart from the occasional groan on my behalf, the only sound in the echoic room was the low drone of the fan. I was guessing it was from a computer at this point since it seemed covered or barred in a way. Beside the point this quickly became the most irritating thing in existence, the incessant drone, the unending buzz. Very quickly in the muddle that was my brain, delightful images of innocent, common desktop and household fans being engulfed in flames, or thrown into great piles and then smashed with shovels and rakes and other implements of destruction came to mind. It was due to these small moments of madness, that I managed to haul myself up and clawed my way up the desk I had thrown myself into.
"Right… …I should probably make sense of this situation," I muttered to myself, fighting past the blockade against thought in my head and attempting to recall any detail of what happened to me. Drawing a blank as I pushed myself further up I decided to restart from the basics. "Okay, my name's…"
Brilliant. I couldn't even remember what my own bloody name is. The mere thought of blood made me shudder as I now knelt against the side of the desk, placing my right hand on a stack of papers to steady myself. Between my thumb and index finger on the top page however was a recognisable face. My face.
"Thank god I at least know what I look like." I chuckled, pushing myself forward and grabbing the page out. Unfortunately, my hand had left a rather large crimson shape across the majority of the information leaving only the image and first name. I suppose Kaito was as good a first name as any. Now, understandably, my mind was still a little sluggish at this stage which most likely explains why I hadn't noticed nor freaked out when I finally did notice the lifeless body in the corner.
A few metres away from me, sitting up against some filing cabinets was a light blonde girl, staring at me with dead sapphire eyes. It was from her exploded neck that the blood flowed, her shirt and skirt completely soaked. Placing myself carefully on the floor as to avoid the pool of blood this time, I crawled over to her, still not overly confident with concept of walking. Getting closer, the top most cabinet draw had the remains of what must have been her windpipe plus a clear indent hole splattered across it.
"Good old fashion bullets then…" I commented, feeling that I had to lighten the mood even a little for my own sake and sanity. As I reached her side, the tip of a wallet sitting inside a pocket in her skirt caught my eye. Delicately taking it out and after shaking off the tiny drops of blood which clung to the outside opening, I was at least rewarded with a name for the dead girl from a driver's licence.
"Anri Rune…" I muttered, tossing the wallet aside and finding myself perched up next to her, staring at the ceiling. "At least you get a last name." Shaking off my dizziness and deciding to press forward with my investigation of the area despite my condition, I used the handles of the cabinets to haul myself onto my feet, avoiding the top one though. The next step was to take off my shirt, which was drenched in the poor Rune's blood along the back.
Throwing that aside and rolling my shoulders to loosen them up, I shuffled over to the desk housing the ever contemptible fan, contemptible in its means to gain attention by annoying me to death. Looking back however, I noticed in the blood soaked fabric a golden word printed upon it. Chuckling, I challenged myself to remember my apparent last name by stating it. "Shion, aye? Kaito Shion. I can live with that…" My mind responded with a wave of pain and a complete rejection to recall any meaning in the word, so I shrugged and pressed on.
A few glowing screens, showing mostly calculation and code occupied the desktop, except for one which seemed paused on a video recording. Falling into a large armchair I reached out to press play but paused mid-motion when a few faint crashes sounded off from upstairs. Deciding it was nothing, I pressed play.
"Kaito?" A voice, Rune's it appeared to be croaked out of the speaker's placed on either side of the monitors. Leaning in closer, I continued to listen. "I'm making this recording in case anything goes wrong with project." She stated, much more formally. Great, mysterious recordings about projects that I assumed went wrong leaving the recording's maker dead and me with zero memory and suffering from a colossal headache. Naturally, I don't find that a great situation to wake up to.
"Anyway," Rune continued on, "Since there's the possibility you won't remember, we ar- we were friends, probably."
"That doesn't fill me with confidence." I muttered as the video continued regardless.
"From our, calculations there's a chance you might be suffering memory loss, though to what extent neither me nor Kaito could figure out." I raised an eyebrow at the monitor, suddenly figuring out that if I was being referred to, then I suppose this wasn't originally meant for me. Wonder why she called my name out in the beginning? "Though for what it's worth, you did agree willing to the cause of your current predicament. Well actually, maybe not, I don't know." At this point there was some faint banging sounds in the far distance and Rune choked up slightly. Regaining her composer, she stared directly into the camera.
"If you are watching this after discovering Kaito and I dead, then I simply ask you dispose of the vial that looks like this and get out fast," She politely asked showing a vial with a dark blue liquid in it to the screen. "In the event that you were, no offense, stupid enough to drink it, and you are indeed viewing this while suffering from memory loss well…"
"What are you getting at?" I asked the dead corpse behind me, noting that she seemed to be increasingly unsure of herself and distressed in her recording. Those dark sapphire eyes flicked up directly into the camera up on screen.
"I'm sorry, I can't do this anymore. I apologise if you find this, but I'll warn you not to touch anything and to get out of here quick." She sighed, looking far into the corner. "Believe me, what's being created here, I just. No. I have to end this…" With a look of determination in her face, she pulled a keyboard closer to her and then recording abruptly ended.
"Very informative, definitely cleared things up." I commented, the sarcasm and anger evident in my voice. Whoever Rune had been to me, she wasn't someone I would be keeping in my company at this point. In my frustration I had sent the chair I was in spinning and by the time it had completed one full circle, I was surprised to find a simple message being displayed across the multitude of screens.
Cut the hand, answer the call,
As Plague Doctor, you can save them all.
And then with a satisfying whirr, the screens and irritating fan died simultaneously.
After trying to get the system running again to no avail, I decided to at least heed the confusing warning to leave the basement full on puzzles, mystery and an abundance of blood. It was to my great surprise that after eventually proceeding up a flight of stairs, I found myself in the main hall of perfectly ordinary home. An occupied home as it would seem.
"AHHHHHH!"
The scream came as soon as my eyes had fully adjusted to the brighter conditions. To my left, a sudden wave of teal thundered round the corner before smashing into and toppling me over. Following it was what my mind simply decided to describe at the time as 'eww'. The scraggly body of what I assumed had previously been a person shuffled into view, letting out occasional childish giggles.
Seeming as neither the teal mass nor I felt this thing was very friendly, naturally I did what any normal person would do in the moment of fair confusion and in the rush and speed of it all. I tossed the light body that had somehow pushed me to the ground aside and ran straight for it. Sickeningly green eyes with dashes of cream in them lit up as the monstrosity found me charging towards it before I landed a wild punch into its stomach, throwing off balance and into retreat.
"You won't beat it that way!" A slightly detached and feminine voice warned me in my head as I continued to attack the creature unarmed while it on the other hand was growing closer to landing its own defensive attacks every second. My mind was also weighing me down as it sluggishly tried to push past my sudden reactions and comprehend the quick change of pace.
"Worth a shot." I muttered back at it aloud, feeling the thing's hand whisk over my shoulder as it got the closest it had yet.
"No!" The voice yelled again, its tone slightly stronger and less quivering then it had been before. "Try applying a large amount of blunt force to its cranium with an item of furniture!"
"Try what?" I asked it mistakenly. The monster took this moment of confusion to slam its revolting fist into my jaw and sent me flying to the ground, its giggles slowly morphing into a demonic laughter as it realised its victory. A choked gurgle and a fair amount of splintered wood flying out from behind it brought this to an end as its eyes rolled back to into its skull and it fell with a squelched thud beside me. Blinking at the rather blunt end to the conflict, I looked up to the source of the thing's demise.
A small flight of stairs about a foot away had now been occupied by another person, breathing heavily, with a length of silvery hair tied back into a single ponytail which fell just behind her knees, crimson eyes glowing with what seemed a sense of amusement and relief and the fractured remains of chair in her lightly bleeding hands. "Hit it, really hard," She panted in between deep breathes, dropping the chair's remains and straightening up the rolled up sleeves of her jet black shirt, "in the head, with a chair."
"Great, now people can explain the voices in my head better than I can…" I found myself commenting in response, before finding myself being lightly punched in the arm.
"I'm not a voice in your head silly!" The feminine voice giggled before its actual owner bounced into view. It was yet another girl, roughly the same height and build as the one on the stairs, except her own teal eyes danced with a certain sort of fun that was less cruel than that of the albino's. She was in the processing of tying up her tangled mess of equally teal hair into a second side ponytail to match the other one she already had.
Before I could think about anything else, a bright flash startled me as a large, silvery object flew my way. 'Oww', was not the correct definition of pain to use when I found the wickedly sharp knife embedded in my right shoulder a moment later but it was all I could comprehend as I fell to the ground, the tealette's squeal of shock already growing fainter. The albino simply muttered,
"Really, Len? Was that really necessary?" In a rather disinterested tone before my head hit the floor, my headache reigniting in all its blazing glory for a brief moment before I blacked out.
Well, I'm terrible at keeping promises in accordance's with time limit's it seems. Anyway, it's down and stuff, so yeah. Tell me what you think!
