I can see into your soul. I can touch every part of you, feel every bit of anxious self-righteousness, and caress every deep worry of punishment. I breathe truth, shower in its pure honesty, and revel in its perpetuating justice. It lives and dies within you, simmering till its bursts, escaping through your veins. And I'm here to tell you that sometime's all it's saying is, "Get out while you still can."

Like all things, a soul can be stained, saturated with an ugly top coat of snotty aristocracy and a black smugness of death and pestilence. People aren't as flattering as they'd like to believe themselves to be. No matter how much work they do to the physical, what lies underneath will never ring false. People don't seem to like that very much.

I could latch on to lighter things I find within them, but... it's just so much more amusing to tell people how vile and worthless they are. A darkness like that can only be washed away with a light that you can't find around here. A light so bright, so encasing, and so real,that it doesn't exist within a hundred mile radius of this place. This place. Nothing good exists in this place, anyway.

-\*/-

The city streets were always cluttered at this time of day. Faceless people all marching around in disarray, looking for this and that in a terribly unorganized fashion. What was it about noon that seemed to throw people into a stupid fit of chaos? Bells would chime as bodies piled in and out of shop doors, the sound once categorized as music was more to be considered as a nuisance. Still, they rang, and false greetings of cheer and enthusiasm were exchanged between shopkeeper and customer, never once breaking character to realize their own horrors. They were tangled in a web of lies, trapped in a hopeless game of charades forever, and they let their invisible puppeteers do all the work. It was being human made easy.

But nothing was more sickening than a man paid to tell the truth, yet he was accused of being a liar. All day, every day, it mattered not; for when the cards were laid on the table, it was still the customer who was always right. How sadistic, one young man would think, that his gift of honesty would be brushed off as a rude, cruel attitude, while his clientele would be praised for never being at fault. Perhaps he just didn't understand people. It was more likely, however, that he just didn't understand business.

The Lost Ground. This place was so far gone; it practically died and went to Hell. You have one catastrophic earthquake and then the government damns you as forsaken property. It's an island now - this place - and it thrives on liars and violence. There's no honest work here. If you weren't part of the half-assed team of relief aid that the government sent in, you didn't have a real job. You were a bum - a drifter - and you had nothing going for you. And all of those supplies they so graciously allot to you, well, it just turns out to be the mainland's table scraps. They were just throwing the dogs a bone. One bone. To share amongst a couple thousand people.

Businesses in the area were a constant target for thugs and vandals. If you even looked like you had anything worth wanting, they'd take it from you. What was yours was never yours, and what was theirs was government property. All your money, all your food, all your clothes - gifts from those better off than you. Except they weren't really gifts. How many people have come through here with shoes two times too small for them? Well over a dozen. Today, that is.

You had some luck if you could pack up and move around. Traveling shops were all the rage these days. It didn't look very professional if you drove into some town, opened up your back seat, and started selling off your stuff; it sure got the job done, though. And those a little better off had trailers. They'd hitch them up and turn them into stands. Park somewhere, do a little shuffling around, and pretty soon you had a front desk, a sign, and some merchandise on display. It was interesting to see, almost kind of fancy, and it was definitely popular.

The downside to wonders like that? Unsafe travel. Your odds were pretty good once you were set up somewhere. Stay a few days, sell off some stuff, buy some supplies - it was a good deal. Once you hit the road, though, it's where things got rough. Soon as you exited city limits, you were a moving target for outer city robbers.

The Lost Ground had many towns and mini-cities, but the island as a whole was divided into two sections. You either resided in the "inner" or "outer" land area. If you were in the "inner," you were first up to receive help from the mainland. Not that the help did much good. You had more access to food, clean water, and prospects for shelter. As for those in the "outer," they seemed just as well off. They were takers, so eventually everything got passed around. It wasn't fair, it wasn't clean, and it wasn't nice, but it was reality, and that was something everyone accepted.

People have been trying to leave this place for more than ten years now, but it's damn near impossible. The earthquake, codenamed "The Great Uprising," killed three quarters of the skilled labor force. The other fourth were injured, trapped, or long gone by now. When the mainland finally sent help, they weren't offering to ship people out. No, your only chances of leaving were if you had enough bargaining chips. If you could convince the government that you had something to offer - a medical background, civil engineering experience, or high end connections, for example - then you could barter your way to the mainland. Costs were high, but people did what they thought they had to for a ticket out.

Rumors spread a couple months back saying that there was another way out. Local gossip stated that if you could get in good with H.O.L.D., they'd find a way to extradite you. H.O.L.D. was the mainland's souped-up version of the police force. Once the tremors from the earthquake stopped, H.O.L.D. was immediately sent in to control the unraveling chaos and dysfunctionality. Survivors were thrown into a pit of madness, total and unfathomable maelstrom. Their homes had been destroyed, their loved ones taken from them, their jobs were swallowed whole; they had nothing left. Most were injured, bleeding and bruised, and in need of help. They would wander around for days trying to find medical supplies and food. Some made it while other withered away. Talk about the circle of life in action.

So when chatter started coming about that H.O.L.D. could be persuaded, their building got flooded. Their small branches were practically taken over; people stormed those buildings and cornered the officers inside. Their headquarters had to be put on lockdown for two weeks while civilians patrolled the building. They just wanted in, just wanted to talk, but it was all too much. Quite frankly - it was done all wrong.

Once the "takeover" failed, and the people scattered, a new branch of H.O.L.D. called H.O.L.Y. was formed. These guys were the best of the best; they were smart, they were fast, they were strong, and, most importantly, they were fierce. They laid down the law almost instantaneously, quickly startling the disorderly disaster victims. They herded people like sheep into these now created towns and areas. They played by a whole different set of rules and most were convinced that they acted illegally. That's all washed up news for another day, though.

The point of all this is that getting off this island was supposedly still possible. Even with H.O.L.Y. in place, people could still see those in charge. They were pretty specific about the things they wanted in exchange for your escape, but... people were desperate, and as far as they were concerned, beggars couldn't be choosers. They said that women were subject to pretty much the same treatment. If you were attractive enough, you could pass yourself around to a few officers and get a ticket out. The problem was that sometimes they liked you a little too much. If you were too good with your services, it was suspected that you would be locked away for further use.

Other women were different. If you were more on the plain side, or, to be really harsh, if you were just unsightly, you would either be ridiculed or put into servitude. To save the government some money, they'd say that they hired some "help" from the Lost Ground. The truth was that no one was actually paid for their work; it was you paying to leave. That's just how these sort of things worked.

As for men, it was pretty hit or miss. If you had certain desirable traits or talents, they could be exploited. If you were strong enough, they would use you for manual labor. Some people volunteered to be lab rats for the mainland's doctors, exposing themselves to experimental drugs and treatments. It wasn't safe, to say the least, but it happened quite regularly, apparently.

But words and banter like this were mildly unhelpful to a cynical young man in Barthome. He sat rigid in his seat, eye-to-eye with yet another unsatisfied customer. He worked as a master of parlor tricks in a rundown trinket shop on the edge of town. His fortune telling abilities were supposed to draw in more business, but all it seemed to be really doing was pissing people off.

"What do you mean my future looks bleak and lonely? I won't spend the rest of my life alone!" It was the ravings of yet another vain town witch who thought that she would have everything handed to her. "I'm beautiful!" they'd say. "My family was very important around these parts!" they'd swear. "I've got a great personality!" He was done listening to their self defense and obvious denial. Shouldn't people go to people like him with an open mind? You might not always like what you hear; or was he the only one to consider that?

He took a glance back to the shopkeeper only to receive a menacing look. This would be the third customer this week that he'd drove away. The gig was set up so that the happy customer with their lovely good fortune would make a purchase. No happy customer meant no sale. No sale meant no paycheck. So the imperial-haired man put on a foul smile and made nice on his part. "Terribly sorry ma'am, the Eternity Eight must be a little cloudy at the moment. Could it be the fact that you're so high strung? Tension usually blocks the clearer picture."

Even with the sweetest lie, a dissatisfied customer will remain repugnant. Not a single sale was made.

The Eternity Eight - a set of eight mossy orbs controlled by forces yet to be explored. If you could control them, they could do wondrous things. They could be arranged in a manner that shaped them into a sword, a bow, a shield - just to name a few. Instead, these mystical, and highly questionable, items were used to read souls. They lined up against a person's major extremities. In order to get the best reading, the balls would line up against one's forehead, over the heart, both glenohumeral joints, both anterior faces of the feet, and one at the cervical and lumbar spine. Once properly aligned, it is believed that the Eternity Eight feed off of thermal energy, computing it and turning it into readable data. Once the data is processed, a message of sorts is sent to the user in the form of their fortune. Sometimes the message was as vague as, "good luck will come your way." to as specific as, "the one you love will fall for someone else. Peril and misery await you soon."

The user had no control on how detailed the information would be, but if they could relax the customer, they had the ability to delve deeper. The harder you pressed, the more that was revealed to you. Fortune telling and future reading almost went hand-in-hand, so it was important to be able to deliver meaningful context. Still, this was a poor man's job and he was seldom ever paid honestly for his work.

"There goes another one, Tachibana. If you keep this up, I ain't gonna have no business at all. How you expect to get paid if 'm not, huh?" The shop owner growled in frustration, silently wondering why he even bothered to keep the young kid around. He used to be good for business, he was exciting and fresh, but now... now he was more like business deterrent.

"You pay me to tell people's fortunes. What's the point in doing so if I don't tell the truth?"

This was only the beginning for Asuka Tachibana.

Authors Note: 01/19/2014

Glenohumeral joints - shoulder joints

Anterior - front

Cervical - neck

Lumbar - lower back

This is the prologue of what I hope to make out to be a great AU s-CRY-ed fic. Please continue reading for further plot.