A Contest of Angels

So, Kyon's dead-ish, and playing a game – of sorts. Trapped in another reality, he's playing for the greatest stakes that a player's ever played for – wandering around the streets of New York finding food, fashion, and fights in the weirdest game yet.

You could have heard a pin drop. Well, you couldn't, because people don't usually remember the circumstances of which they died. If it could be said, it was the kind of silence that came after a momentous event – the calm before the storm, the retreat before a tsunami, the lack of energeticness of Haruhi – all signs of great calamities. However, the scale of this silence was more of a pregnant pause, a awkward moment in the elevator of the ages. This was not supposed to happen. At least, I didn't think it should.

I haven't given much thought to the afterlife, (keeping in mind my greatly nonspecific denial into a personage that is not Haruhi Suzumiya) but I would have preferred a vast nothingness, or at least a place where no one would disturb you. Unfortunately, the place I was in did not fit the description of that at all. I was sitting down in what appeared to be the largest crosswalk in the world. A naked cowboy was playing some sort of tune on his guitar.

I've recently tried to be optimistic about these things, but a naked cowboy in your afterlife did not predict a sterling afterlife. As I panned around, thousands of people were ambling around this place like a urban jungle. Some of them walked through me. Some of them walked right past me. What they all had in common was that they didn't notice the frogs eating people. Alive and screaming. This was not the pearly gates I was promised.

I started to run.

"That player is soooo-stupid!" A voice veiled in the shadows said.

"Hmm... wait a minute." Another voice said.

"What?" The first voice said.

"That one you mean?" The second voice said.

"Yeah, like, duh, Kiriya. He's one of the only ones left in the square. He's running away from any partners. I'm going to go erase him. That okay with you?" The first voice came out of the shadows. Her hair was pink, her lipstick was pink, and to many players that was the only bit of color in their unlives before they were erased. She was a hard worker, yessir.

"Yeah, that's cool. But..." The second voice trailed off. He didn't like having to talk in the shadows. It made him feel like the barely veiled villain in some stupid comic. In fact, he had that feeling before. He liked talking about it. He watched as Uzuki was ready to make sashimi out of some poor player. Oh well. He liked her anyway. It was one of the only perks of the job.

I was average in a lot of respects, but it was comforting to know that running away wasn't one of them. Unfortunately, this wasn't as helpful when running away from frogs. Big, huge frogs. Frogs with slashy ends. If this was a alternate reality, it was the most strange reality that I've ever seen. Haruhi wouldn't be as artistic as this. If anything, she would try to kill me with wide, metaphysical concepts shaped like my deepest fears. Grand apparitions of mythical description and proportion would dog me with questions that I would answer: "maybe?" or something else.

I ducked into the police station, the eerie sensation of passing through people rippling through my stomach. Trace emotions tumbled through me – fear, anger, hunger, general apathy – but what I did know was that they were not mine. Something was terribly wrong with the world, again. I needed to find my friends, if they still existed. I had this inexorable desire for the abnormal to be normal again. Where are you, Asahina? Nagato? Koizumi? They did not follow me into the place, those frogs. Perhaps only for a moment.

"This is terrible coffee. Seriously!" Hanekoma continued to drink his coffee.

"Why even bother, then?" Joshua stared out of the crosswalk.

"It's the principle of the thing, boss. America is one of the great inheritors of the coffee bean, and it's always a good thing to keep a finger on the pulse that's driving the pulse." Hanekoma finished his drink. "The palette of any concerned gourmet is filled with hundreds of examples of poor food and drink. Otherwise, you wouldn't be able to know."

"Have you met the new recruits?"
"Uh, yeah, boss. Terrible taste in coffee. Have you tasted the stuff that's coming out of the-"

"The new GM is looking promising this week." Joshua idly poked at his salad.

"Uh..." Hanekoma knew that his attempt to skirt the issue had failed. "Yeah, uh, about that, boss..."

"...I have decided to run a game." Joshua drew in the air with a feather.

"Here? But the vibe modulators haven't even come into effect yet!" Hanekoma stood up. "Sir, for your purposes, Shibuya would do just fine. The introduction of Noise in this area could-"

"Mr. H, there will be no need to even the stakes on your part. With or without your help, this little game will continue." Joshua smirked. "Perhaps it would be even a little unfair."

"You mean-"

Neku stretched uncomfortably in his airplane seat. It had been a tiring flight from Japan, and he had grown a little over the spring months. As he mindlessly shifted back and forth as he boarded off the plane, he reached for a well-concealed pocket of pins. He anxiously, and with a bit of trepidation, touched them. They were cool to the touch. He exhaled a sigh of relief. He shouldn't be this stressed, but he was.

The game's over. He thought. The game has been over for you for months. It's a vacation, right? Relax, Neku. Nothing is going to kill you, or betray you, or befriend you today.

Neku picked up his luggage and sat down, exhausted. The airport was a cacophony of foreign sounds, smells, and people. He was content in the fact that although he no longer ignored people, at least he didn't have to get too close every time he met a stranger. As he waved to his friends who were running to him, he thought: After all, it's just another day.

I halted at the wall in the station and I stopped to catch my breath. I looked around and no one was looking at me. It was like I was a ghost. Did Haruhi say anything about ghosts lately? Recently, it's all about the occult. In fact, I remember building a ghost detector out of some dubious instructions off the internet. Regardless of the evidence for and against ghosts, at the moment it seemed like I was a genuine one. This left the following options:

a. I was trapped in some weird space. (Unlikely. There was... something telling me that that was wrong.)

b. I was in some weird parallel universe. (Probably not. I haven't met myself or any of my alternates yet.)

c. I had traveled back in time. (No. I didn't have any sort of mission, or even a memo from my future self.)

d. A weird combination of all of the above. (Who knew? It could be anything, or something new, depending on Haruhi's propensity for novelty. Which was utterly dependable.)

I spotted a box sitting on the counter. a man's entire arm dipping in and out of it. A off-duty cop was chatting with a lively lady at the desk, and didn't notice the existence of me, or the box. I grabbed for it. Amazingly, I could touch it, the box's sides quivering as I overestimated my strength. I looked at it more closely. It had two orange stripes going vertically downward, with a black background. A note sat on top. It said:

PLAY THE GAME

Odd. I opened the box. There was a stylish lady's hat, a box of pins, a steaming hot box of... something, and a really stupid looking gun that looked like it came from a dollar store. You couldn't even scare a kid with this gun. There was a very nice looking wristwatch sitting at the corner of the box, almost if the other objects instinctively shying away from it. It was gold in color, and very tasteful. It also looked very, very, very expensive. A little engraving at the bottom said: Pegaso Atlier. As soon as I touched it, it glowed to life, its display shining with power. A countdown started, with alarmingly red numbers.

My phone rang...