Another year, another chapter. How consistent of me. Writing this chapter brought back memories of playing Fragile Dreams a year ago, how nostalgic.
Disclaimer: Namco, tri-Crescendo, Xseed Games, Rising Star Games, and Kentaro Kawashima all own a slice of Fragile Dreams: Farewell Ruins of the Moon. I'm just borrowing some play toys from them.
Cat and Mouse
CHAPTER TWO
Days after meeting Crow, the eccentrically dressed boy already felt like something Seto's exhausted mind had dreamt up. If not for the silver ring's weight in his pocket, he would've believed that he had hallucinated the whole thing. His bone-weary fatigue and the constant threat of danger leeched away his memories, making days stretch into years in his mind. The world held a whole myriad of deadly experiences vying for his attention, which made it dangerous to let his mind drifty away from the present. What kept him going, the only memory he allowed himself to cherish, was his driving desire to meet her, the silver-haired girl.
He spent hungry days and cold nights wandering through the wooded paths behind the amusement park. When his wanderings brought him to a dilapidated building hidden in the woods, Seto excitedly picked up his pace. Maybe he would find her here, or at least another survivor.
He entered the Kurato Kankou Hotel with hope in his heart, and while his prayers weren't exactly answered, he did make a new friend.
Within one of the many unkempt guest rooms, he met a friendly ghost. Her glowing, translucent skin was an intricate collage of gauze wrappings and surgical black dashed lines. Even in death, her body was a doctor's memo. She carefully rearranged her bangs to further hide her eye patch, and peered out at him shyly from her good eye. Hovering awkwardly over her dead body, which looked to be asleep in a halo of bandages and pills, the ghost girl smiled shakily and said, "I wish you hadn't seen…me like that, but I guess it's too late now. It's nice to meet you anyway, my name's Sai. Who are you?"
Not wanting to be rude, Seto tried to avoid gawking at her corpse as she talked, although its silent presence made him very uncomfortable. He tried for a smile and said, "I'm Seto. It's nice to meet you too."
Sai hovered worriedly over Seto, who was leaning tiredly against one of the hotel's dirty walls. Paint chips drift to the floor every time he shifted his position. "Are you okay, Seto?" she asked him. "We can rest for a while if you need it. There's plenty of daylight left."
"I'm fine, Sai," he stated gently, although his fatigued stance belayed his words. "I don't need rest, I need to get Chiyo's moon so that we can get into that room."
"Seto...maybe your silver-haired girl's not even in that room. Maybe she never went there in the first place. Chiyo might be toying with you."
"No," Seto protested forcefully, surprising both Sai and himself with his outburst. In a softer voice, he said hopefully, "No, she can't be. We both saw the cat drawings outside of that door. Even if she's not there now, she was there before. We might be able to find a clue as to where she's headed next if we can search the room."
Sai held up her hands defensively; Seto could see her appeasing expression through her translucent palms. The visual overlap always disoriented Seto. It was like putting together two pieces of thin paper with drawings on them, and then holding them up to the sunlight to get a nonsensical picture. He often forgot that she was dead because of her warmth and human habits, but little details like that would always shock him into remembering.
Drawing him out of his sad reverie, Sai wheedled, "I'm not saying we should give up. I'm just trying to prepare you for a letdown. Chiyo seems like the ghost of a spoiled little girl who has no one left to boss. Children like that'll tell you anything to get you to do what they want. I mean, don't you find it a little ridiculous that she makes you fetch a star and moon? She's sending you on wild goose chases."
"They only seem pointless because they aren't your precious objects." His hand unconsciously sought out his locket resting on his chest as he said those words.
Sai looked at those delicate fingers resting on the locket, and her gaze softened. She tried to reason gently, "When you gave her the star, she didn't thank you. She got disappointed and huffy that you had succeeded. What kind of person gets angry when someone succeeds at helping them out?"
"Some people just have a funny way of showing gratitude. That's all."
She let the subject drop, and instead asked, "Where do you think her moon is?"
Without hesitation, Seto said, "At the nearby carnival. I remember seeing it on one of the rides or signs. The sooner we get it, the sooner we can find her."
The way he breathed that last word with such hope, they both knew exactly whom he meant. Sai tried to squash the petty jealousy that word evoked. She imagined folding that ugly feeling into a tiny paper square, like the notes she used to pass to her friends in middle school, and then tearing it up. She knew it was unfair of her to be jealous of the silver-haired girl simply because no one cared for her the same way.
With determination, Seto pushed himself away from the wall and continued down the hallway. He entered the gloomy hotel lobby and was greeted by its vacant, sinister atmosphere. A few keys dangled uselessly on the hooked board behind the front desk, and a huge, intricate spider web spread across half the mailboxes. Having already read the spray-painted morbid mantras of "No hope" and "Run while you can" that littered the walls, he made his way to the building's exit. His flashlight swept the water-soaked walls and ragged carpet, on high alert for ghosts. The children especially loved playing in the lobby. He tensed as he heard the patter of small feet and gleeful laughter.
Frightened, Sai folded into herself and disappeared, leaving Seto alone to handle the hotel's fiendish occupants. The spoiled children who had terrorized the hotel staff in life now played an eternal game of murderous tag. Seto feared coming into contact with any of the fiendish supernatural, but he especially hated fighting the ghost children. Something twisted painfully in him every time they drug him into their perversion of a children's game. It left a bitter taste in his mouth, to see an innocent game so warped. It made him feel his own childhood slipping farther and farther away.
Even as Seto quickened his pace to leave the room, a fit of giggles echoed through the dark hotel lobby. "Here I cooooome," one of the ghosts drawled in a singsong voice.
Whipping around, Seto shone the light on the approaching figure. Its headless body rushed him, its hands waving blindly. He sidestepped it and slugged it with his lead pipe. It crumpled to the ground, and he violently pounded its writhing chest a few more times before it disappeared with a high-pitch scream of fury. He wiped the sweat off his forehead with the back of his hand, sweeping his flashlight around nervously. There was never just one.
He spotted one in front of him and braced for its charge, which left him open to the icy hands tugging his clothes from behind. Seto tried to shake it off, but the child delivered a swift, powerful kick to his calf before running away, giggling. Cold sweat broke out on his face and torso from the deathly touch even as the injury pumped liquid fire through his leg. Favoring his weakened leg, Seto turned to face his original target. He dodged its charge and delivered a hit to its back, but his weak swing had no impact. It laughed at him and kept running, arms outstretched and hands tilted up like airplane wings.
Knowing he had lost the upper hand, Seto limped out of the lobby to the hotel's entrance before the ghosts could regroup for round two. In the end, it didn't really matter if he fought or ran. His attacks could only dispel them for a few hours, which always made each win a bitter victory.
Besides, he hated the violence. Each time he pummeled one of the children's fragile, headless bodies, he felt sick. He could still remember the pile of small, child-sized skulls that he had found in the first floor janitor closet, rotting flesh still clinging to the bones. They had been stacked carelessly with no effort to hide them, and Seto had nearly vomited from the stench and shock of finding them. The apocalypse had turned many men into monsters, but Seto still shuddered to think about how those skulls had gotten there. Surely those headless ghosts had a reason to hate the living.
What worried Seto was how easily his mind had supplied an explanation for the skulls in the closet, and how detailed and violent his imagination had made it. Seto was sometimes afraid of what kind of person the apocalypse was turning him into.
When he found the silver-haired girl, would she even like him?
As soon as he got out of danger's way, Sai reappeared. She floated over him, sickly even in death. She peered at him with concern and asked, "How does your leg feel?"
She wished she could reach out a hand and help him. She had only met the young boy a week ago, but already she thought of him fondly. His kind and sensitive nature reminded her of how children should act—or at least, how they had acted before the apocalypse. When he said he was fifteen in his high, quiet voice, she wanted to cry and bundle him in her nonexistent arms. He had been born the year the world went to hell. He never knew the taste of ice cream, had never experienced walking down a sidewalk without a weapon and feeling completely safe. He never went to school, never got a chance to charm all his classmates with his gentle nature or have his biggest worry be a wardrobe malfunction.
"It's fine," Seto said, voice a little too tight to be true. "Let's go, I want to make it to the amusement park before sundown. It took me a couple of days to get here in the first place, but I had no clue where I was going. If we take a direct route and keep up a fast pace, it should only take us a couple of hours."
Sai hovering over him, Seto limped out of the sinister hotel. He refused to vocalize his pain, instead exhaling sharply from his nose every time he put too much pressure on his wounded leg. Behind them, the hotel's sagging roof and broken windows leered drunkenly at him, like bloodied boxer with all his teeth smashed in. Leaving the gloomy image behind, they made their way down the dirt path to the carnival. Trees curled over them to create a natural tunnel of soft green light.
As predicted, they reached the amusement park's backdoor entrance after a couple hours of walking at a brisk pace. In red letters was written "Moon Hill Wai-Wai Land property. Authorized personnel only." Ignoring the obsolete warning, Seto jimmied the door until it protestingly creaked open. Stepping through the door, the sight of the park in daylight shocked him. He had only been there before at night. Under the night's gentle administration, the park had seemed pale but whimsical. The faint suggestion of color at night had teased the mind to paint a bold daytime scenery overflowing with vibrant hues. True daylight dispelled that illusion, as the sun had leeched the vibrancy from every color. The rides and tents looked bleached and brittle, like tinder ready to catch fire.
He saw the caved in roof of the battered merry-go-round and, for the first time in days, remembered Crow. The half-wild boy from his memories seemed so unreal, like a fantastic apparition that only belonged to the moonlight. Seto carefully picked his way through the splintered pieces of the carousel's former roof and found the wooden horse he hid behind after Crow's endearing but uncomfortable displays of friendship. He tenderly caressed its chipped gilded gold mane, like an owner with an ailing, old pet. But when his hand brushed up against the other side of the horse's face, he quickly jerked away as a thousand pricks of pain stabbed his hand. Frowning, Seto inspected the horse's other side and realized half its face had been mauled off by something with wicked claws, leaving jagged splinters sticking every which way.
It made him inexplicably sad to see such loving craftsmanship destroyed.
He retraced his steps out of the mess of a merry-go-round and said to the quiet, observing Sai, "Let's go. I think I remember seeing a moon on the daycare center's sign."
As they respectively limped or floated past the rusted bumper cars, Sai asked softly, "Not that I'm complaining, but isn't it kind of creepy that nothing's attacked us yet?"
"You're right. I didn't notice it before, but it really is too quiet. Maybe the ghosts don't want to come out during the day? The last time I came here, it was night."
"I hope so, but please be extra careful. I'm worried something even nastier is making all the small fries go to ground," she said. Seto nodded grimly and drew his iron pipe, looking around warily. They made it to the daycare center without a hitch, which only wound them up tighter. In this world, nothing was ever this easy. Seto used his iron pipe as a crutch to reduce the weight he put on his leg. It already felt much better, but he worried about it acting up if it came to a demanding fight.
They found the moon right where Seto remembered it, nailed to a board advertising the park's daycare services: "So that adults can have fun too!" Seto leaned his iron pipe against the wall and braced his feet on the ground, ready to try to tug the moon off.
"Wait!" Sai said anxiously. "Are you sure you want to try that with your bare hands? It looks like it's nailed down pretty tight, and you'll only stress your injury if you use brute force. Maybe we can find some sort of crowbar to wedge in there and pop it off?"
Even through his exhaustion, Seto gave her a smile—the kind that crinkled up his eyes at the corners, and made her almost feel warm again—and teased, "Have some faith in me. I might be a pipsqueak, but this sign looks like it's on its last limb too."
Seto licked his lips and wrapped his hands firmly around the wooden moon. With a forceful tug, the moon gave up the ghost and broke free from the sign. Smiling triumphantly, he turned to flaunt his vanquished prize, only to hear Sai scream in pain.
Without thinking, he dropped the moon and grabbed his iron pipe. He whirled around with the iron pipe raised above his head, ignoring the stabbing pain in his injured leg. He saw Sai frantically trying to push away a solid black blob, but her hands only went through its form. With the black blob between Seto and Sai, the only part he could see of his ghostly friend was her arms sticking out of the creature's back. The way her insubstantial arms flailed as she tried in vain to push it off gave an air of grotesquerie to the form before him.
The black form shifted and Sai screamed again. With a shout of anger, Seto brought down the weapon on the monster's center with all his force. It fell to the ground with a hissing exhale of air. When it stood up again it whirled around to face Seto and become Crow in a billowing black cloak.
Too shocked to react to this sudden change, Seto let Crow tear the iron pipe from his hands. The boy before him was a stranger, wild and angry and nothing like the Crow he knew. There was hardly any recognition in Crow's green eyes as his slitted pupils pierced Seto. The taller boy hurled the pipe away and hissed, "I'm trying to save your fucking life, back off."
"Leave him alone!" Sai shouted angrily with a touch of hysteria, hovering in the air again. Black blood flowed profusely from a wound in her side, dripping sluggishly to the ground and dissipating into nothingness. Fearing for her only friend's safety, she surged forward with the sudden courage anger gave her and lashed out at the stranger. Her eyes widened in surprise as her palm actually made contact with his cheek. Crow's head was forced to the side, and a red welt bloomed angrily on his cheek.
Crow growled and lunged toward her, but Seto held him back and pleaded, "Crow, stop! She's a friend!" When Sai lifted her hand to deliver another slap, anger and pain twisting her face into an ugly hostility, Seto cried to her, "You too, Sai! Stop fighting, I can explain!"
Muscles tensing under Seto's delicate fingers, the dangerous stranger whirled on Seto and forced him against the daycare wall. His accusing finger jabbed into Seto's shoulder and a growl rumbled from his chest. "Then talk! Explain why, when I got back three days ago, the best I could hope for was that you had died painlessly because you weren't there. Explain why you're now consorting with ghosts. Or the logic behind beating a friend with an iron pipe for trying to save your life!"
By the end of his rant, Crow was breathing heavily and looking livid. The fists bunched into Seto's shirt were shaking visibly. Seto was afraid that Crow would punch his lights out, until he noticed the dark bags under the older boy's eyes, and how shiny those emerald cat eyes really were. He realized Crow's blustering anger hid unshed tears, exhaustion, and worry.
Feeling helpless and like a horrible friend, Seto could only shrug and give a small apologetic smile to convey how sorry he was. With this disarming act, it was as if all the fight left Crow. He deflated with a huge sigh and let his lanky frame sag against the smaller boy. When Crow's nose nestled into the niche between Seto's neck and shoulder and his strong arms encircled Seto, Seto did the only thing possible: embrace him back. He saw Sai's pissed off look, and shot her an expression of apologetic helplessness.
Explanation. Later, she mouthed to him, and he nodded back. She cradled her wounded side delicately, black liquid slowly escaping between her fingers. She definitely deserved an explanation, and a good one at that, considering he was now hugging her vicious attacker.
First, though, he had to defuse the more volatile problem currently wrapped around him.
"I'm sorry I made you worry, Crow, I didn't mean to. Last time, you left before I could explain that I had somewhere I needed to be too. I'm sorry we can't stay longer and properly explain what's going on, but we need to deliver this to a friend before nightfall," he said gently as he slipped out of Crow's grasp and leaned down to pick up the discarded moon. He winced as the pain in his leg flared up again. "If you want, we can meet you back here tomorrow morning. We can talk more then, I promise."
"Oh no, you're not getting away that easily. Waiting around for you once was enough. I'm coming with you," the raven-haired boy said determinedly. He shook the dust out of his black cloak and retrieved Seto's pipe from the pond's edge where he had flung it. He shot a dirty look at the ghost girl before ignoring her presence entirely.
Playing the same game, Sai ignored Crow and asked Seto specifically, "Ready to head back, Seto?" Her overly sweet voice told Seto just how much trouble he was in.
"No time like the present," Seto squeaked, gulping nervously and feeling wretched that his only two friends in the world had tried to kill each other only minutes ago.
"Then lead the way, Seto," Crow said, pointedly stressing Seto's name as well.
A shaky truce formed, the trio left the rundown amusement park to its slow feverish death. Seto found himself stuck between two sullen companions, both sending off waves of murderous intent that did not exclude Seto himself. In the distance, a crow cawed in the woods. Seto was sure it was laughing at him.