felinis: ...I wanted to try writing spoopy... But I've actually never done this and I have no idea what i'm doing so... let's just see it how goes...

Something had happened to him- Yuri Lowell- I mean. Something. Just something. The man who helped save the world and the founder of Brave Vesperia an up and coming guild that had taken the world by storm in the past five years was found muttering to himself inanely in a closet screaming at us to stay away.

God, he must have gone crazy from something. It took a lot of effort to wrestle him out and I still have a bruised nose over the matter. Friends kept saying they'd been noticing it for months and were worried, but wasn't much they could do. Said the real tell that something was wrong was when during a sparring match Yuri apparently tried to kill the guild leader Karol. Said he started screaming.

There were other signs too.

"He refuses to go in the bathroom or even get near water." The spearwoman, Judith had said and man was she pretty. Real looker that one. "Actually, he kept yelling at me to replace all the silverware with wood. We did just so he would eat, but he still stayed out of the kitchen."

Yeah, we were noting similar trends too. We had him chained down to a hospital bed with some handcuffs and the guy screamed at us to get him away from the window. Now, really, I'm not sure what the guys deal is but I know that it is, unfortunately, my job to sit down with him and deal with this broken fucker.

Oh yeah, allow me to introduce myself.

Name is Lauralynne Kurchif and I work as well… I guess the closest thing Dahngrest has to an organized police force like the empire's knights. I'm also in charge of specifically dealing with the nut cases. It's annoying really because I never signed up for this shit I just kinda wound up working here after every other job I had gone belly up. Apparently, my ability to just listen and not give a shit ends up being an asset somehow…

I never said we were good at our job.

But here I am looking at Yuri fucking Lowell in the flesh and god is it a creepy ass sight. I dunno, the way he's always talked about you always expect him to look less gangly but I've been told this is new. Or at least since he's started having these issues his body has become pretty gaunt and he's got circles under his eyes that rival my own. I know he's awake and has been all morning, but he won't open his eyes won't even breath in my direction and ya know it's rude.

"So, Yuri, can you tell me what's wrong? Your friends are worried about you ya know?"

He lifts a finger to his lips and shushes me softly as he points subtly at the window. Fucking crazies. There is nothing outside the window, but a goddamn window, but for some reason, this guy keeps acting like there's a monster out there.

"I can't help you if you won't talk to me. You can tell me."

The next thing he said was the only coherent sentence I'd heard from him ever since detaining him a week ago. "Could please just stab my eyes out. It won't fix it, but it'll shut it up long enough for me to tell you."

"Yuri ya don't need ta cause yourself self-harm to fix this kind of problem. You're in control of this." He just broke into sobs after that and tried to gouge his eyes out while the nurses shot him up full of morphine. You see a lot of fucked up fruitcakes in my job, but man this guy took the cake.

Now here's the thing about what I do, I'm not a psychologist. I don't fix people. I look at em long enough for me to write a report to my boss saying things like 'this one needs the looney bin' or 'eh give this guy another chance on the street before we lock them up. It's standard here… Healthcare is actually pretty shitty in this city all around.

So really, I don't need to help fix Yuri Lowell and despite his reputation, I don't really care enough to. I miss blastia. Hell, I was going to be mage before all this shit went down, but now there's no magic and the only job I can seem to manage is this shit gig.

I decided to smoke outside while mulling it over. Could just toss him in a cell and say no hope 'n shit but I doubt that's gonna fly… Not with his reputation. Imagine being the one who locked Yuri Lowell up in the looney bin- uck- my career would be over and most likely fired despite the necessity. I know because that nut case Zagi was actually brought in to be locked up several times, but for some fucking reason the guild threw such a bitch fit I was required to let a psychopath go. No, I gotta actually fix this or at least prove he's worth committing… Which means I gotta hunt down some information that I normally wouldn't bother with.

Interview With Karol Capel

I can never get over how young this kid is. Like this kid is eighteen or whatever and he's already been running a guild for five years. It's fucking wild. When I was eighteen, I was still working in my parent's tannery and this kid runs a guild.

I really didn't ask much first time around. Just the usual anything particularly noteworthy kind of questions. Didn't care much since I wasn't actually expecting to be in charge of this matter. Karma's a bitch.

Sitting comfortably in the guild office, I tapped my pen back and forth as we got ready to get the ball rolling.

"What do you wanna know?" He said, clasping his hands together.

"I know it is hard ta say, but when do you think this whole mess started?" I asked, leaning back and watching the gears turn in his head. It was slow and there was an obvious sense of digging in the kid's brain as he looked for the words to describe how it all peaked in what was this mess. I told him not to rush because thoughts like this take time.

Karol kept fidgeting and rubbing his arms before seeming to settle, "Really I should have noticed it sooner and gotten help. I'm not sure when but the signs were there for almost half a year. It was just little things ya know." He decided to busy his hand by gliding his fingers over the grain of the desk.

"You gotta understand Yuri's not the type to ever mention anything is wrong with him till he's half-dead on the ground bleeding internally and also running a 102. The fucking idiot…" From the tone of his voice, I could tell he was actually speaking from experience. "So he'd never tell us and he always makes a point of hiding this stuff cause that's how he is. But, it didn't stop me from noticing that he wasn't sleeping or that for some reason he always ran out of the bathroom. Blacked out all the windows in his apartment…"

"He tried ta kill ya right?"

"Yeah… we- I was afraid to get help. I figured I could handle this along with the rest of the guild. That Yuri's resolve would pull out a miracle for us and we wouldn't have to look at it. I know what we did was irresponsible, but you can understand, right? Dahngrest mental health care is bullshit and the empire's ain't much better!"

"I wanted my brother back. That's all…"

"Why didn't you get help after he tried to kill ya?"

Karol slammed his hands on the desk yanking himself up to look me straight in the eyes inches from my face, "You know why! Yuri didn't mean to hurt me and I know it! It's just part of whatever is making him sick."

I let out a nervous sigh, "Still doesn't mean he didn't do it in the first place. Look tell me about that then let's get back to talking about when you think it started. Like any events you think caused it."

Karol slowly deflated and leaned back in his chair, looking closer to a small child than a young man. Poor kid. "We were play sparing and I think that was three, maybe four months into all this-anyway- we do it all the time and I just remember that I turned around to pull out some water bottles while we took our break and Yuri just started laughing.

He almost cut my head clean off, but thankfully the laughing tipped me off…

If he hadn't been laughing, I wouldn't have realized how fucked his head seemed to be. It was such a weird laugh… like… like he was trying to so hard to keep himself from talking or crying. Like he was fighting his own lips to get them closed."

"Was he moving like Yuri?" I asked and watched Karol scrunch his nose.

"No." He shook his head. "Not in the slightest. Everything about his movements was- it was… it was like- uh, clumsy and his muscles were so tense. Also, I don't think he actually looked at me directly the entire time."

"Directly?"

"He just kept staring at his sword till I knocked it out of his grip. Wouldn't touch it after that. I think that's when he just spiraled out of control. Stopped showing up, and if he did he just looked nervous. Like he was waiting for something to jump out and tackle him to the ground."

"But when do you think this really started?"

It was a long pause before Karol answered. "I'd say probably after the camping trip he had with Flynn. But, that's it."

I thanked him for his time and made a point of asking Yuri about this later. For now, it's been a long and tiring day and I feel like drinking myself stupid on cupcake flavored potato water.

Vodka. I plan on drinking myself to sleep on vodka. In case that wasn't obvious…

I jiggled the door of my shitty apartment on the west side of town and kicked the door shut behind me before going to my cabinet and pulling out one of eight bottles… Hey, everyone has their hobbies. The lights are off the bottle is uncapped and I sit on an old tattered couch waiting to drift to sleep so I can get back to work on figuring out what the hell happened to Yuri Lowell.