A/N: Written for the

Diversity Section L, L17 – write a chapter a week until you complete 100k
Epic Masterclass Challenge, #3 – remix tapes
Chapter Set Boot Camp, #008 – 53 chapters
AU Set Boot Camp, #036 - alternate/transposed history! AU (eg. something before canon is changed). So the story behind the Three Angels and Lucemon is quite a bit different to the original canon.
The New Year's Long Haul
Season Rewrite Competition
The Endurance Challenge

And interestingly, the 53 chapters is actually 52 chapters and a special/epilogue. And since there's 52 weeks in a year, I'm hoping I can start posting from January 1 2017 and post the final chapter December 31 2017, and then the special on January 1 2018 to wrap things up (though this time, it won't be along with the new year fireworks in Melbourne :D). Though that means actually posting once every seven days so we'll see how that goes. Wish me luck and enjoy!

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Play of Spirits
Chapter 1 – Call for Players (Kouji)

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The flowers looked fake: colourful and altogether bright but they smelt of water mostly: fresh rain that dotted the grass and he wandered on the lawn after the spring shower. He'd expected the entire place to smell like perfume so he was kind of glad it didn't. Maybe this wouldn't be as awkward as he'd envisioned it being after all.

But there was a young girl at the counter and that promised to be an awkward encounter. To make it worse, she spotted him right away. It helped that there was one of those wind chimes on the door and no other customers.

Too bad it was already too late to reconsider. She rounded the island and came up to him. 'Hi. What's your name?'

'Minamoto Kouji,' Kouji muttered, pretending to be looking for what he wanted and then giving it up as a bad job straight away. There were little cards beneath each vase but he'd never heard of half the flowers there and their colours were so bright, he couldn't imagine how they'd all go together into a bouquet.

'I'm Hanako.' She smiled at him and he wondered if she was the sort of person to smile at every little thing, or she'd perfected the fake smile for her role as a salesperson. Well, it didn't really matter to him. He was just there to buy flowers after all and it was a onetime thing. He was actually pretty good at keeping his temper and not toing over any lines but he'd done exactly that and today was a better day than most to make amends for that.

Even if a part of him balked at the idea of apologising.

Even though another part of him knew she wasn't the one to blame.

He sighed. Hanako-san was still looking at him. 'What sort of flowers are you looking for?' she asked.

He shrugged. 'I'm not a flower person.'

'No,' she agreed, smiling again. 'Definitely not. You look far more straightforward: the sort of person who'd normally let their mouth and their bodies do the talking for them – and yet, there are some things you can't say so frankly… or flowers make good presents. Am I wrong?'

'You're right.' And he was mildly surprised at her insight as well – though the comment towards his body made her wonder just how closely she'd been looking at him. But all she did was smile again and wander a little further away. Giving him some space, and personal space was a commodity in japan but far easier in a double story home with three people and a dog that was probably too hyper-active for its age. 'It's…an apology and an anniversary present.'

'How nice,' the woman hummed. 'Anniversary, huh. How long have your parents been married for?'

Small talk, and asking personal questions to boot but this one didn't really matter, he supposed. 'Three years,' he replied, and ignored the look of surprise on her face. After all, he was far older than three years. But it wasn't her business as to why.

'I see,' said the woman, after a pause and she drifted further down the aisle, selecting flowers from the vases.

Kouji wondered if she really did see, but that didn't really matter either. As long as the bouquet she put together was presentable and reasonably priced –

'You know,' Hanako-san said, 'that flowers are just another way to communicate with people.' When Kouji hummed non-committedly, she gestured. 'Come here. Which of these do you prefer?'

Hanako-san had already collected sunflowers and some sort of daisy and was now gesturing at two different white flowers. Zephyranth said the label on one, and white poppies the other. They looked pretty similar to someone like him who had no interest in flowers but he'd never even heard of zephyranths before. Poppies at least he knew.

He pointed them and the woman smiled. 'White poppies mean dormant affection,' she explained, 'as opposed to the zephyranths which represent gentle affection – gentle but active, I mean. Now, how about these?'

She gestured at two different flowers: one bunch which varied from white with purple stripes to almost entirely purple, and the others little purple bulbs collating on a stem. The latter ones looked a little ridiculous, in his opinion. Fine as a climbing plant, maybe, in some corner of the house, but hardly bouquet material. But if they were fresh, they probably were bouquet material. The others he could at least make sense of and he pointed at them and the woman laughed. 'They actually mean the same thing,' she said. 'Mallows and purple hycanthias. At least in this context. Words can mean different things in different contexts, after all.' She picked a few and shuffled them with the rest. 'Maybe some asters too… Did you want a vase?'

'No thanks.' He left her to go ahead. She hadn't explained what the flowers had actually meant, but he supposed it didn't really matter. He didn't know much about flowers and he doubted Satomi-san did either. His father usually got her roses. Simple red roses and everybody knew what they meant. So it didn't really matter what flowers Hanako-san put together, just as long as they looked decent and their meaning couldn't be mistaken for something it wasn't.

It really was a peace offering and nothing more. And when she called him over to the counter and he took out his wallet, it became even less. Because with the wallet came his mobile phone, and with the phone came a message.

Minamoto Kouji…

And then another one, almost immediately.

Are you willing to play this game?

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Her eyes burned as she sent the first of the messages off. They were the hardest ones, appealing to thousands individually but the ones after were far simpler: the same message sent through every one of those message streams and she didn't need to pay attention to what went where. They needed no guidance than the road she'd already drafted for them.

They only needed to go now, and be read, and obeyed.

The calling that would summon all those children to this world… And, hopefully, amongst them would be the ones to save it.

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It was far too easy to leave the flowers behind. He barely thought of them and that was fine because he'd thought so hard to even get to that point: struggled so and he fell away as soon as something else came along. Because that message was strange and he didn't reasonably know why he was even following it but he wanted to. It was a door in which he wouldn't have to try like he did in reality, because that was what games were. Or weren't. They weren't reality. And only the blind let them take the place of those realities – but there was something in games that called the majority of people there.

He didn't consider himself an avid gamer for the most part, but the idea of being able to jump into an avatar still appealed to him. After all, he could follow the mould of the game and attain victory or mess around and lose, and the losses affected no-one in the end. Not unless he was playing in some competition and he didn't care to do such things. Some people did. Some people built their entire lives around games but if he was going to build his life around anything, it would be something he could never let go of –

And, really, that was why it was so difficult to deal with Satomi-san, because she was taking the place of someone else and that was someone he could never replace in his heart.

The buildings flashed by him now, or rather he flashed by them, on the train. It was packed with kids his age which was unusual at that point in the afternoon. Typically, they were already home or in cram school for another hour and yet they spilled over the seats and near the doors and there were even some interspersed between the adults. And it wasn't even a special day for most of them. No festival or holiday or any big event or sale he knew of. And yet there had to be a reason for all of them and the likelihood of those reasons having nothing to do with each dropped with the more people there were.

The kid across from him was staring at his phone. He pulled his own phone out. The string of messages were still there. Asking him to play. Guiding him into the train… A new message appeared as he stared.

Get off at Shibuya station.

And there was a chorus of beeps and tones that made him wonder if they weren't all receiving the same sort of message. And it was only one train, at that. He wasn't sure if he was more or less curious now, but it did make him wonder. The message had been addressed to him after all. With his name, not his father's and the phone was registered under his father's name. Spam and any advertisement he hadn't signed up for himself would have picked up his father's name, or gone with no name at all.

He frowned to himself as he looked at the overhead monitor. Shibuya station was still a few stops away and it would be a mess of a crowd if everyone was getting off there. He probably shouldn't bother after all. There was no explanation; just instructions and for all he knew, it was leading them right into trouble. After all, which idiot followed instructions that came from no reputable source – or, indeed, any source they could see – just for the sake of curiosity?

Except there were a lot of kids with their noses practically pressed to their phone screens – except the kid across from him, who was grinning at him now.

He turned away and looked back at his screen – and then blinked. He could have sworn he heard his name… but no. There were people chatting, certainly, but no-one familiar and no-one looking directly at him except that kid and he was sure he'd never seen him before. After all, he'd remember a guy who wore goggles on his hat, if only because of how ridiculous it looked.

He looked back at his phone. No new messages. Not like he'd done what the old one said yet anyway. So long as it didn't turn into a wild goose chase – and, really, what guarantee did he have that it wouldn't?

What is this? He wrote.

You'll find out, was the reply.

And that was it. No explanation. No endorsement. No form of encouragement as well.

But, really, what did he have to lose? Whittling away time was a good thing, considering what awaited him when he returned.

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Almost none of them thought to send a reply. Almost none of them thought to ask or, if they did, they kept those questions in their minds where no-one else could hear them.

This boy though… He texted a reply.

It was a pity she couldn't answer him. It was a pity she had no satisfactory answer… Or, at least, no answer that didn't risk frightening him away instead or else was a blatant lie. Because she knew what she was doing. What she was risking. What she was wasting. All those children and they needed less than ten of them in total and yet they had to test all of them because there was no way to know…

But that boy… He texted a reply. No-one else did. No-one else thought too.

His eyes are bright, she thought. Clearer than the others.

Though she was glad so many were coming. More meant they had a higher chance of finding the right ones, ones that would fit the moulds that awaited them.

But still… That meant nothing, in the end. She didn't choose the moulds and she couldn't chance calling only the people she thought would fit into one of them. So ultimately it didn't matter what she thought of one child over another. Not until they saw how well they fit into those moulds, anyway.

But still, she hoped. And watched. And it was the ones who acted differently from the masses that caught her.

So… the boy who'd texted a reply. She scanned the train again. Who else was there?

A child with goggles on their head when no-one else wore such an accessory.

And another child not even holding a phone but following the messages anyway. How curious.

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Children flocked into Shibuya Station. To the elevators because the message specified that and so the stairs were empty.

Take the elevator to the basement.

Though, if Kouji had found himself at the back of the crowd instead of near the middle, he might have tried the stairs anyway. He was stuck though. Wedged into the crowd and he despised that, but there was little he could do about it. He could only wait impatiently for the elevators, going up and down and carrying ten or twelve kids at a time and slowly thinning the crowd.

And to his annoyance, when he did make it into the elevator, the boy with the goggles was with him. The boy who'd been staring and trying to talk to him before. More successful in an enclosed space with less people now. Though he was, in truth, addressing all of them with his stupid question. 'Are you guys here because of the message?'

There was a chorus of answers and he didn't bother adding his own. They were all the same anyway. 'Of course. 'You too?' 'Don't you look around, dumbass?' And the likes.

He just turned away. Probably a bad move in his part because the guy jabbed him on the shoulder.

'Don't touch me,' he snapped, cursing the fact that he couldn't put any distance between them. He didn't like strangers trying to get close. Those were the people who left marks and then vanished so those marks became ugly scabs that scarred – and he'd had more than enough of letting people into his life only to leave them or be left by them afterwards.

And really, an elevator in the middle of the station was a ridiculous place for a meet and greet.

He was relieved to find that, when the elevator dropped them off at the basement, it was with another message – and one that separated their paths.

It's up to you now. Which one will you choose?

He watched the kids fan out. The one at the furthest seemed to have the least people on it, and probably for that exact reason and so he went there. No-one followed him, and the carriage he got into had no-one there either. A small miracle, considering the number of kids there'd been before. He could only imagine, with a grimace, what some of the other carriages might be looking like. Especially the train closest to the elevator, for those who just wanted to skip ahead to the next stage and didn't care at all who they were saddled with in the interim.

The wheels screeched and the doors slammed and the train began to move without any new additions to his apartment. So it was just him. That was fine. He leaned back on the seat and watched the tunnel streak past until it was just a blur of black.

But who set up the trains? he wondered. And how did they manage so many, and without a single adult in sight?

And where were they going now. The new message on his phone told him nothing at all on that, or anything.

This is your first test.

Just that the game he'd come to check out had already begun, on a canvas of pure black.