Alone yet again. Until now, I hadn't really noticed how creepy this whole place was. Soon I began wandering around again, not even paying attention to where I was going.

"I wonder if there's any other living people around here?" I asked myself. The question soon answered itself when I felt myself walk right into someone and fall backwards on the ground.

"Hey!" the person complained as they fell. Looking them over, the person turned out to be from the same school as Yoshiki had been from. It was likely they'd come here together. Or I at least assumed it, considering they had worn identical uniforms.

"Finally! Someone alive," I laughed. After standing, I helped him up. He looked around, almost like he couldn't really see.

"Where are my glasses?"

"Sorry!" Looking around, I quickly found them near my feet. Had I tried to walk, they would definitely have gotten broken. After returning them, it only seemed appropriate that I introduce myself. "I'm Xiao. Who are you?"

"Sakutaro Morishige," he said calmly.

"Are you a friend of Yoshiki's?" I asked, unconsciously tilting my head to the side as Ryou had.

He seemed surprised that I knew that name. "You know Kishinuma?"

"Ran into him awhile ago. He scared off this ghost I was talking to and then just ditched me," I said, realizing too late just how crazy that sounded. "Anyway... I noticed you had the same uniforms, so I assumed you knew him."

"You wouldn't happen to have run into Mayu, have you?"

"Nope." I hadn't really seen much since I'd gotten here. "Sumiko, Yoshiki and Ryou are the only ones I've found since I woke up here. Hey, you didn't happen have done some stupid charm thing right before you ended up here, did you? Sumiko called it the Sapiko or Sokiko Ever After charm or something like that."

"Sachiko?" he suggested. The fact that he knew the name answered my question for me. There was no doubt about it, that charm was what brought us here. Either Sumiko had been mislead about it or we'd screwed up. "If you don't mind, I need to go find Mayu."

As he turned to walk away, I ran up beside him. "I can help you," I offered, walking beside him. It wasn't much fun being here alone. "Maybe I'll run into Sumiko too."

He just shrugged and continued on. For about an hour we walked around, though it felt much longer with nothing but silence and dead bodies all around us.

Tired of all the quiet, I asked the first thing I could think of. "Hey, uh, Sakutaro, right? This girl, Mayu, is she your girlfriend or something?" He stopped immediately and I almost ran into him.

"She's a friend," he said calmly. When he didn't start walking again, I turned my head to see what he was looking at.

As soon as I realized what it was, I hoped that it wasn't who I thought it was. Of course, that was too much to hope for.

"Sumiko..." As much as I didn't want to believe it, here she was. She lay there in a puddle of what I assumed was her blood.

"Stabbed it seems," Sakutaro observed. He seemed far too calm about this, but then again, I probably was too.

"You survived this place once, you said," I mumbled, forgetting that I wasn't alone. "Whatever happened here made you forget everything, but you never let it get you down. Always so happy and full of life. It was quite irritating sometimes. I didn't even think of looking for you. I guess I was just hoping you'd gotten out again. If only I'd known how this place really was, maybe we both could have gotten out together... Hey! What the hell are you doing?" The click of a camera caught my attention. He was taking a picture of her corpse. "Are you insane?"

"I'm using it to keep track of where I've been." Something about this was definitely off. I seriously doubted that he'd been telling the truth, though I'd stuck with him this long, so might as well stick around a bit longer.

"You know, you don't have to lie. Not like you're the weirdest person I know." I started off in a direction I hadn't been yet. "We gonna find your friend or what?"

"I've searched there already," he stated and started to turn another way.

"She could have gotten there after you left," I countered. "The earthquakes can change the things around you, so she could be there by now."

We searched on, finding nothing worthy of being noticed. Not until we found a body splattered across a small section of wall. "It's strange how I seem to always end up back here," Sakutaro said, though it was hard to tell who he was talking to. Looking down, a small object seemed to be poking out from underneath the mass of blood and body parts. As Sakutaro knelt down to pull it out, a small plastic thing caught my eye. While he was busy I quickly pulled it out and wiped away the blood, revealing the victim's student ID. Mayu Suzumoto. Silently I hoped it wasn't the girl he'd been searching so hard for.

Before he could notice, the ID was stuffed in my pocket, just in case it was her. Once he was ready, we set off again.

After a long time of no talking, I had to ask. "Hey, uh... Sakutaro?"

"What?"

"That girl, what was her name?"

"Mayu."

"Yeah, but Mayu what?"

His answer was exactly what I'd feared. To keep him from suspecting anything, I kept silent awhile before asking my next question.

"What if something happened to her?" I was almost too afraid to say it and silently hoped he didn't catch on. In this place, the last thing you'd want to do is tell someone like him that he'd been digging through a mass of human remains that had once been his friend.

"Nothing is going to happen to Mayu."

He was so certain about it, it hurt just knowing that he would never believe anything could possibly happen to her, even though it already did.

After nothing but silence for awhile, I figured I better go my own way. I couldn't keep Mayu's death from him long, so it was best this way. I just didn't have the heart to tell him the truth. "Um... Sakutaro?"

"What now?"

"I'm... I think we should split up... We could find her faster... and... maybe find a way out..."