You walk into the theater, shaking snow off your boots, and are greeted by warmth. You take off your coat and scarf and hat, and any other wintry accoutrements, holding them under your arm. You go through the traditional motions: a ticket bought, a turn to the left, an armful of popcorn, another's hand in yours as the two of you open the heavy doors and scramble down a dark, thinly carpeted hallway into a row of empty seats.
This is the third time you've come to see this movie. It has been three months since its Christmas premiere. As you sit there in the darkness holding the hand of your special someone-or-another, sipping away anxiously at your cola, there is a feeling of immense satisfaction with your life choices. You watch as the flickering movie screen proceeds from pathetic local ads to previews to something brighter, something better. Something jolly and happy and full of holiday vigors that touches your heart deep down every time. You hold the other's hand tighter with excitement flowing through your veins.
You watch as three-dimensional, maybe even four-dimensional objects dance around each other, snow-covered and bouncing, jingle bells resounding in the distance. There is an extra bit of magic in this logo. Every musical strike hits home. It fades into a soft gray, as if it's about to transfer into a cloudy winter sky.
That was where the world began. The full picture finally came into view. The camera, if you could call it a camera, was focused so intently on a Christmas tree that the highlights from the ornaments turned into four-pointed stars of jolly light. (To produce a similar effect, squint your teary eyes really hard at a traffic light, but don't be the one driving.) A title card appeared over this tree, the individual symbols curved and refined like someone had spent hours on it slaving away at the cel, and if you could interpret the language, it would probably tell you something about Christmas.
This all was wiped away, and the Christmas tree became a background object as the field of vision expanded. Several teenagers were skating at an indoor ice rink.
"Hey, Kudo, we should all link arms and make a huge line," said Heiji.
"Dude, yeah," said Shinichi.
Naturally, everyone was up for this, and anyone watching from the shadows would take this as a moment of love and affection towards whoever happened to be next to each other. For the torture of these special moment-seeking nitpickers, I will not elaborate on this, but Shinichi was indeed on the end, and if you can't survive not knowing any longer who he was linking arms with, simply try to imagine your favorite pairing for him being the one that connects him to the rest of the line. Regardless, the line of ice skaters went around in a circle, because that was cool. The formation began to go faster.
In a moment of exaggerated comedy, Shinichi accidentally let go of his soulmate and, thanks to the forces of physics, was flung through several walls made out of fake concrete out into the outside world. The ice rink was on the twenty-sixth floor of the building.
The ascent began.