Torn: -Can we please show what the fuck is happening to me right now? I feel very lonely.-

Trikko: -Don't feel lonely. I'm right here.-

Torn: -DAMMIT TRIKKO YOU DON'T COUNT. AND I WAS GOING FOR PITY POINTS.-

Me: Why DOES EVERYONE SOUND LIKE THEY WANT TO EAT EACH OTHER?

Dina/Rupert: -silent nope-

Chapter Three: He was Missing

"I can't find them anywhere! Yuka—YUKA! AT LEAST MY LITTLE SISTER—PLEASE!" The voice stirred the two girls with matching hairstyles, one much more alert than the other and responsive to that cry, thus her foot landing on the first's porcelain pink face with as skittish momentum and nearly causing more pain than gain. Ayumi, oh, she knew exactly who that was, and she knew who the higher-pitched male, his voice riddled in fear, was speaking of. Not knowing what else to do at the miraculous sensation, she joined in his cry.

"YUUUUUKAAAAAAA!" Then she thought better of it. "Satoshi—SATOSHI? DO YOU HEAR ME?"

It turned out that he rather did, and after a gasp and a pause of choking breath, the boy even managed to... to respond. "Ayu—AYUMI! OH, GOD, I CAN'T BELIEVE IT! WHERE ARE YOU?" Still his voice felt wispy and ruptured, like they weren't completely in connection, in sync. Weird: they both called out for the same girl and each heard one another, but yet she couldn't feel his presence permeating the practically stale air coiling around her. The only warmth encircling her was the pink-haired girl in a grumpy, rumpled heap. So much for an attempt at sleeping. Ayumi had gotten possessed again—guilt swallowed her, but she couldn't help it and tried to act tough about it—and both decided it might settle their nerves to sleep. To cause less troubles, they'd just fallen onto the hallway floor of tinted purple and thick brown and tried. It more or less helped. Well, at least it meant she would be able to reunite with the adorable brunette she called at now.

"I'm over here—HERE, SATOSHI, HERE!" She even waggled her arms for emphasis, jolting and jumping with a sudden excitement.

But his voice sounded staler the next time he approached with it. "Where—where?! I can't see you! AYUMI, WHERE ARE YOU!"

Panic made a scene and stabbed through her heart, sending chills down her small self and bunching up her yellow and blue clothes. "I... u-um... I'M STILL RIGHT HERE, SATOSHI!"

"Where... wheerrreeee..." And it only grew worse, a dense, dreary fog ensconcing her heart and hanging her head as if from a puppeteer's string or a noose until the unfortunate crack of two skulls colliding sounded from their breaching of noise and she ceased to hear the boy again. The last words were of some ratty boy who sounded just about out of his teens, giggling and scorning her beloved friend. Ayumi fumed at that, about ready to figure out what that kid had to say to poor Satoshi, but the connection simply severed, and there was no chance.

Rosie, an impeccably late bloomer, hatched her head from the floors and sprung up, like she recognized the tone. As it'd died out, her magenta eyes fogged and she shrugged underneath her soft, springy cloths that clutched at her so feebly, relentlessly. "Oh well."

Ayumi bit her lip and nearly told her off; one didn't oh-well it when they'd just heard someone who meant an impeccable bunch to them and they heard the other and it was almost a connection: but it fluttered, fell through, and somehow escaped, like the breath bated on the tip of your tongue in the middle of a snowstorm. Warm for half a second, then driven back into the chill. Like when you held someone you loved in your arms and watched, powerless, as they flat out died there, and you never felt them again. Like... like—countless, wordless scenarios spilled over her, a turmoil-induced wave of agony producing clips of memories she could hardly explain or remember or even begin to understand, and then beneath shone the shorelines and suddenly Rosie spiked up on the spot. "Ayumi! Stop standing there! Shouldn't we be, like, doing something?"

For once, she found herself unfavorably below the pinky in action. Because she was right: why did the uniform-clad girl stiffen on the spot like a sore, stilted human being, when she'd just heard the voice of a tall and cowardly boy calling for his little sister? How did that demand sense? Shaking herself off, feeling like she was peeling away the cold touch of the dead—and for all she knew, she might have been—Ayumi staved from the frost and, plucking Rosie's tepid, not-so-coincidentally rosy fingers and set off in a random direction far away from the first-floor hallway at the north-end, turning back from classrooms 4- and 5-A.

Perhaps they had left fingerprints of clues behind, or if they moved on, the girls could hear the shaken boy again. Though cowardly, he stood up for friends in need and despised to leave his spoiled little sister—Yuka, as he'd called—out of his sight. She was a cute, dainty child and of course Satoshi hated the thought of leaving little fourteen-year-old Yuka behind. He must have been searching for her until... until... that noise happened. What did it even mean? Cold, spilling shivers spluttered down her spine and Ayumi safely decided she'd rather not dwell on it. She instead invoked idle chitchat with the nonstop Rosie to try and calm her senses. It was an oddly relaxing sport.

"So, Rosie... how did you end up here again?"

"Mm? I have no idea." She coughed. "None at all! I mean, seriously, you'd think that I'd have a reason, but I, like, don't! I was sleeping in my bed, it was late at night. You know, boring, usual stuff. Then suddenly I just... I woke up. I dunno. I'm not one to randomly wake up in the middle of the night—well, I did it a lot when I was like four and kept wetting the bed, but that's water under the bridge." Ew. That it was, Ayumi hoped. "So it was totally unexpected! And I just sat there in the dark, feeling like a complete idiot, debating whether to go find Dino, who's, see, a really big dummy but that's okay, and then the floor split open and now I'm here!"

"Mm... so you didn't use a charm. I've never met someone who came here by means other than the Sachiko Ever-After charm... well... other than the victims..." She mumbled off into her own loophole, leaving Rosie all but completely dry of evidence to what could have been locked in her brain. When the whining persisted, and it became obvious Rosie's curiosity was killing her, Ayumi decided—what the hell, might as well try to make sense with what was picking at her. Her calmer tone rambled out again: "Well... I mean... not all of the corpses here are from just those who heard about the charm to get them stuck in this curse, right? There's bound to be a few that were here from.. the beginning. And they probably were sent here by... oh, who knows what?" Trailing clues hinted at something just behind her flap of memory, drawing in fog and spotting out what she wanted to recall the most, until it remained obvious this wasn't the way to go. The bluenette snorted and, crossing her arms, turned around to face the tottering Rosie again. "You alright with going up some stairs, Rosie?" she called back airily.

The pattering of pink slip-ins on rough wood steadily rose in volume until the heavier, not posh or large but simply more average, heavier girl, in stature, practically cascaded upon her. "Hmm? Ayumi, did you say stairs? Oh boy, oh boy; we haven't gone up these suckers in awhile! Just wandering on the first floor and passing out until just now... heheh, cool." Like a boat, the pinky wobbled and collapsed, shoving both girls spiraling into the floorboard-like sea and forcing Ayumi's Student ID, which had been strapped so tidily and strong to her chest, to rip off with a swatch of sunny yellow fabric and bounce into the stairwell.

"A-ah..." River-blue orbs went stormy. "A-AAAH! NO! NO NO NO NO NO! THIS CAN'T BE! NO NO NO NO—" Impossibly, her morbid screams were hollowed out by the shattering smashes and bleak breaks of an earthquake, tumbling and shuffling and crushing the two girls already contorted together in a furthermore awkward position. Dainty and pale fingers went horribly scrabbling at the intersection of the wooden floorboards as they morphed into stairs and just happened to have that one, stupid hole in there: and it was done. Seamlessly closed. If the memo wasn't obvious enough, her own paper scrap from that charm?

It was just swallowed up into the school.

Her face contorted and paled rapidly. Without the shattering of the earthquake to rattle her out, she tipped her head back and wailed horridly: bleated noes and denies and inabilities, how impossible this had to be: Why her? Why her? Why her? She sobbed and tumbled back and curled up with her knees folded under her arms and sobbed and didn't care when the splinters struck and from her rigorous reactions produced blood from her nose to limply stream down her face. The tears mixed with it and Ayumi became a mess. Just like that.

Through her entire reaction, as it folded into place, Rosie had no idea what to do. She didn't know that her name was so important it had to be stapled onto her chest at all times, didn't get why Ayumi was so upset about it. Heck, she'd gone through worse, for all she knew: that same Dino boy once robbed her of her precious hat and outright refused to return it to her. She'd lost her shoes to him, too, but seeing all of the splinters here had made her grab a pink pair of slip-ins the moment she found one sitting around in this messy little school thing. Prevented so many bruises and cuts and the like. Still feeling stuffy and idiotic, Rosie stared at the malfunctioned Ayumi and felt incredibly threatened to do something but wasn't completely sure what that was. Well... Rosie stopped and thought about it for a moment, clicking her slip-ins on the ground thoughtfully in a small surveillance of their tiny, cramped corridor leading up to a mountainous flight of steps leading further, higher in the school. To a second floor.

It was apparent those stairs couldn't be scaled anytime soon. She still understood nary a thing about this Ayumi weirdo, but with her she felt safer and she seemed to know a lot about this place, almost as if she'd been here a lot of times and was practically—not fully but... practically—a part of this scary place already, and that freaked her out a little bit: no it actually scared her senseless but all she had was Ayumi so she better shut up about it and suck in her breath, lock it in course, and, well, acceptance. They both had lost important things on their persons, but see, Dino probably still had the hat—she hoped—and... that name tag thingy was gone. Squinting, pulling her up, Rosie tried to ignore the cord of blood and lines of snot dripping down the poor, undersized girl's face from the tip of her thin nose and, placing her aside, lying her ripped-clothed back against a nearby wall, bent over and began tugging loosely at the board on the bottom of the stairs.

Pink slip-ins that were admittedly not even her own buckled against the walls as she tugged. Around her, like wisps of clouds, her magenta skirt rippled back and as hard as Rosie tugged, as far in as her porcelain pink fingers could go, it seemed like she was simply unable to open up that stupid hatch. "HEY, YOU!" she screeched, first at no one in particular. "LET US GO! LET US GO! I WANT IN THERE, SO GIVE ME A CHANCE ALREADY! UGH! You turd!" Dino would be so proud of that last insult. As her words spiraled and her struggling increased and she needed, needed to get this done and needed to do this, her words directed toward the school itself, or just the people behind it. "COME ON! COME ON!"

Ghostly pale fingers covered hers. Rosie's breath stopped in her throat and she suddenly couldn't breathe. Long, thick strands of black hair fell over her face as some creature in a ragged, red dress sat on her lap and forced herself between Rosie and her target. The little thing's tiny fingers squeezed, and overlapping pinky, enabled the wood to cease to be stubborn and peel open like a banana. Rosie stared, dumbfounded, through the veil of black, whip-like strands of hair. Somewhere behind her, Ayumi's teeth began chattering and she sounded like she was coughing up blood.

The little thing that jumped Rosie didn't even say a word, didn't even breathe. How she held her breath for that long was such a mystery that as the minutes brandished and drew by, Rosie began to wonder if the strange thing even could breathe. Oh—oh gosh, did she know about Dino? Where was he? She had to find him! Chatter drowned out the breathing she should have heard from the little thing. "Oh my gosh, while you're here: please please, please tell me! Do you know where Dino is? I swear I saw him around here somewhere and I'm going crazy not knowi—"

Any questions were drowned out by the sudden crack in her ribcage and the splurt of blood. A silent accusation was asked: Do you want to question me again? that vile little thing seemed to quiz her, over and over and over again. Thankfully, Rosie had enough sense to shut up about it, and once the board tore loose under her fingers, the spirit thingy was gone and all Rosie had to recall of her existence was the loose board limp in her scrawled fingers and a mess of blood and sinew now tearing up the front of her chest. Oh, geez, what hadn't she done to herself? A leg was twisted and crusted in dried blood; she wore shoes meant for little children and they didn't squeeze but still; splinters dominated the circles in her knees; snot and blood crusted under her nose; she was scared out of her mind; and now the rip in her shirt and tank top and the web-like veins spluttered out through that. Her grandpa was going to ask some serious questions when this was all over.

"He-hey... Ayumi..?" Rosie attempted to move and—what do you know—her leg clenched and its wound opened right back up. "A-aah... Ayumi!" Oh, turd it, she'd try a nickname to get her to listen. "AYUU! GET UP ALREADY AND HELP ME! PLEASE! I'M STUCK! AYUU—AYUU—AYUU!" Rosie squirmed beside herself and felt lonely.

Rrrr...rrrrrrip—

A yellow sleeve wrapped about her leg and soon became a secure bonding for her leg. "D-does that... help?" she sniffled through her nose. "R...rose..?" Whispered it, like a question not only for her assistance but her name as well. It seemed they were going to get along a little better now, with their injuries collecting and... well... Rosie'd helped her friend. That meant a little something.

Discarding the loose board to the side for now, gesturing, Rosie smiled a little and smirked. "Yeah, that works well. Thank you... heh... Ayuu." Looks like she'd be calling her that now. It didn't seem like the worst nickname in the world.

"Why did you call me that in the first place..." A question was attempted to be attached to it, but Ayumi could hardly muster a voice as it was. She could hardly believe Rosie had gone through all of that and even let the creepy girl who sat on her and ripped her ribcage open—that girl—and still... to do all of this for the bluenette she hardly even knew.

Rosie stopped, turned back, grinning sheepishly. "Uuuuuum... I was tryyyyying to get your attention, so I thought I'd just shout a shorter version of your name over and over again. Apparently, though, the first one worked. So... that's good... Ah—um, if you don't mind me asking, why is your name tag so important? I get what you mean, see, I have this hat that means a lot to me but Dino stole it an—"

To cut off that girl's endless chatter, Ayumi raised her voice. Somehow, the sobs it encrusted crumbled back enough for her to end Rosie's awkward tangent. "Well, everyone in my group: we did a charm to get here in the first place, and... it sort of keeps me linked to them. We repeated the phrase Sachiko, we beg of you nine times, one for each person, and then ripped this paper doll apart. And my piece was in my ID and without it..." She shook her head, scrubbed at a miffed face cold from the tear stains. "I feel like my only way to find them again is lost... a-and I need to be with them all again! All eight of them! I don't care how weird it is, but I do!" We all have important people, Rosie silently doted. She even had a few. Dino, her grandpa; lots and lots of Dino.

"It's not weird at all, I swear!" a pink-lipped smile comforted her new friend. "We all need to stick together here, and if these are the people you've been trapped here with you... and if you know them all so well... then it's fine." Abruptly then, Rosie shoved her pink porcelain face into the crack under the stairs and screamed something garbled. Ayumi took a nab at her legs and unearthed the smudge-stained girl once more, who coughed dirt and rubbed at her eyes, further smearing it until tears led streaks of cleanliness down to her throat. "I think..." A cough broke free, and she finished in patchy minutes after it ended. "I think that's... where we'll have to go, Ayuu."

She simply retorted with: "Then I suppose we will, Rose," with a scrunched up gleam in her eye. But seeing this pathway to safety again revealed, Ayumi felt hope, and she clenched at the wrinkles in her torn, yellow shirt, one arm missing a sleeve, holes punctured into its chest, splinters on her back: and she believed well enough.

Wending down assortments of hallways, none at all that connected, the majority limp and swinging from cracks that assured anyone passing by these were hazardous places missing a few boards, a few more than they could spare, and the pair of similar females both subdued into their fears and depending on each step, each motion onward for their abilities to continue moved slowly, embroidered patchwork up the web of yarn, slow and steady and careful, the clicking of needles—scissors, with all due and realistic respect—not far off in the distance. Dina and her crumbling brain had lost enough of a barrier that all she had left inside of her were the ashes and the flames burning because of the cute, smaller girl—taller than her, all the same—beside her with those, deep, comforting green eyes. They clung to one another for they had no one else to cling to, and each having quite docile and quiet natures, this was a silent and immediately mutually accepted event.

Dina more so held fear ingested to her veins, but the loss of her dear Rupert had eventually smoothed her over to such a rate that she almost appeared calm, like the place she had been tossed into was not such a purgatorial homeland. Her eyes, though, clung to deep, dark rivets of circles below that suggested she was more or less done with her visit to Heavenly Host. And she honestly was. More than anything she had ever wanted before, Dina yearned to find herself back in the Caliosteo Islands again where her nights swarmed with flogging nightmares and Rupert always held onto her, and her five mighty—in their own ways—vivosaurs always rippled into her mind with their telepathic connection—as all species had it—and they spoke with her through the majority of each day. She had Torn and Trikko, and the bird beauty who had tried to stop them, Nyra, but also a brown fuzzball with incredible energy who was small enough on his own to be carried by the name of Aladee and a large, spunky biped with grayscale tone of colors and was blind and deaf, and she was Reyna. Having such a close connection to the vivosaurs, her heart whimsically ached for them.

But she could not go home and simply see them again. No: she lost Rupert and she knew sooner or later, once Mayu and her Shige-nii were reunited, Dina would lose herself. This had become her final purpose; she promised herself that because she could hardly bear to go on as it was. As morbid, as horrid, as pathetic as it sounded, all the little orange-haired girl wanted to do was drop over and die in the coat of the boy she so held dear and see him again. She no longer cared about living: no more. Still, a promise had come a promise, and she would hold on for the sweet, cheerful girl beside her. It looked dangerous to encounter these holes and rifts alone.

When they walked, her mind grew numb with her furthermore-callousing bare feet, sanded away by the scraape, sccraape, ssscrape of feet on broken floors, only repeated, redundant background noise deposited to the very edges of her livid mind. Dina lifted a head and quietly asked the girl: "H-have you s-seen an...any... gh-gho-ghosts... here... Mayu..?"

"I..." She shook her head gently. "I feel like... I have, which is weird, because I thought I've never been here before... but it so feels as if I have... and I can practically see their faces in the back of my head; a-ah... aa...aah..." The girl moving steadily with Dina suddenly stopped and squeezed her eyes shut. "They were in... the infirmary with me... th-the first time I came here... the v-vvery first time. And I... was sc-scared... and I didn't see anyone... so I followed them, y-you know? It's scary here and I hated being all alone." The colorful banter so commonly the tone Mayu used had gone chilly and twitched. Dina combined hands with the shivering younger girl, regret swamping her and even as she tried to convince her otherwise than to continue, her mouth was somehow cut off and she could not continue.

She looked... so afraid. "Then Ayumi and Yoshiki: th-they found me... but those two little girls... looked so sad and they charmed me into their home and I was listening them... and I helped them and when I was thrown out of their enchantment they drew me through the hallways at high-speed... s-superhuman speeds and"—her fingers yanked and dragged Dina to the ground with her, where they fell hard, so hard down a hole that they tumbled and lost the floor around them—"and they killed me." Dina turned up and saw as she slipped and caught only air and Mayu beside her that a pair of little girls had stuck their heads down the puncture in the ground. One of them was missing her head, the other with her short locks of hair tied into two hairpieces and a small, cute face, but then something gloppy hit Dina squarely on the forehead and she saw a stain of red marking one of her eyes and practically the half of her face in a gooey conglomerate quietly telling her the orb was completely missing.

Somewhere within the simmering nexus of floating, connected spaces, this ssssssspPLAT of two females hitting the ground dragged into another space. A boy looked up from the light splayed on the ground with ears twitched at the sudden cry. He surely recognized them each as feminine cries and backed down from the top steps he stood on now at the very edge of the third floor of the school. If he only took a few more paces he would have been led into the bathrooms for the little girls and the little boys of Heavenly Host Elementary School and could have investigated more corpses, perhaps finding another clue. But the screeching beckoned, so he left the flayed body where he'd found it, the glasses perched on the tip of his nose flashing as he set up on his brisk gait down.

Taptaptaptaptaptaptaptap...

Reaching the end of the twisting staircase and checking out into the halls, the black-clad boy swiveled his head with no luck in sighting a soul that he could recognize, and quietly cursed his jumpy muscles. "Goddammit... at this rate anything I hear will make me think she's been injured..." He had a soft and deep tone, gentle to a degree but if he grew terse he could surely yell if someone or something stepped in his way. Surely not an authoritative presence, but one noticed and a strong one nonetheless, the boy raised his blue-haired head and looked blankly at the device curled within his fingers, radiating a warmth as phones do and displaying that photograph of the body he'd just taken. A strange, dim light let off from the cellular device and left a ring around him, like a holy entity in the midst of a purgatorial embodiment.

Green eyes, dim beneath the sheen of his glasses, even so, flitted about slowly. "No Mayu..." he quietly observed. "Oh... where could she be..." A slurred shake of his head, glasses catching on the light of his phone, and he sighed softly. He wanted to find her. Yes, the others in his heart meant something to him as well but: but Mayu... there was something about her he couldn't shake off, no matter how much he denied it. Seeing his other hand clenching nothing but air and shaking beside itself, he flickered between photographs in his other hand on the thin phone and eventually beep-beeped his way into his first image, what he'd woken up next to.

Red stained the walls in a thick, encircling arc: the first thing one noticed about the strange picture he'd captured forever on the memory card of his slim, silver-colored phone. And Mayu's was silver, too, he recalled, because she'd wanted them to match. Hand shaking, his eyes dove into the scene of morbidly-strewn flesh and blood and gloppy, gooey mess that he could even smell from where he stood, a good walk away as it was. Breathtaking, like the bursting petals of a flower about a shard of a pulpy center, spinning with the same single color, red, that spread off into such an infinity of different tints and hues and shades and pinks, even, that it was impossible to count them all. And he loved it; and he loved this single picture. And he took more of the other bodies he found here. Not a particularly massive number, but there were some.

Somewhere far inside of his soul, in the depths where not even someone as registered as he could notice, he had begun to crack. Little did he know just how much he adored that first photograph. Little did he know that the first photograph meant more than a scene from a stranger. It was no stranger. He didn't recognize or worry about the ground below him, such a charred black it looked like a completely disused facility, like the existences all in this space weren't supposed to even be here. The boy tossed his head back and saw in mild disinterest the gaze of a dead child staring back at him, one with a eye missing. Yes, he was in a dangerous place where the living shouldn't be caught in, and he didn't even know a word of it. He was furthermore trapped than his own friends.

The air was deafeningly cool in this school. Like it wanted to ice off and chip away his entire body and scoop the life out of him with gelid fingertips. Perhaps collect his tongue: many of the interesting dead specimen here surely had that. He quietly shook his stone-faced head and walked onward, quietly slipping past the gloppy mess he'd woken up next to, explaining the slime of red down his back that had dried before he'd woken and thus didn't seen and, gently tapping by that funny-looking corpse of the... the perhaps fin, the silvery and white and black-tinged fin thicker than his entire body and just lying through the room like a sea creature had been killed here, Shige-nii calmly plodded over that through the disconnected region.

On the inside, his mind was being played with by strong forces he should not have been around.

Already he had begun passing by the mangled crafts of corpses of souls that were not quite dead in their own realms, and the more that caught his eye, the further of these actor-like creations that weren't even right over the eerily dark hallways, blackened like ashes and stomped at the foot, none of this was right, and he was caught in the midst of it. And did he think another thought of it? Unless the spiritual anomalies influenced his presence, like he was a fine spiritualist, then no: it was safe to presume he took nothing of it. And should he have? No. Not exceptionally.

Any and all of these notions floated over the glasses-donned boy's head, completely unheard of for such a blinded specimen like him. They say the spirits are always watching, though he was the sort of person who took no note of these things and furthermore found no contempt or serious worry to rouse him. What mattered were the thoughts, pounding, repeating, in his skull, attacking him from within and carrying out his need to continue moving and searching, and find a way out of this death-smelling hole for some monster or another. He personally could shrug off what he found. Unlike the others he knew so well, he could easily pertain to these sorts of things. Having not thought of this until now, the sixteen-year-old blinked dully to himself and continued waving his phone, the bright LCD screen becoming the beacon of his search.

Eventually it caught onto the rosy, magenta face of a creature. The boy saw this and took a stronger, faster gait to examine the corpse before anyone else did. It sat in a curled-up fetal position with its head wrung out and thrust through a window rung along the side of the hallways, its pink face gaping open with breath it couldn't seem to quite catch. As he scrutinized this poor, lost soul, trying to look for what made her lose such precious life, he could see the rest of her pink-clad body dangling from behind her, the fleshy bits of her ice-cold neck sticking into a point on the broken, rough window edge. A thick liquid seeped through the point of puncture. Though her arms were left helpless, scrabbling against nothing but the edge of the window and unanimously unable to stop her ultimate loss of life, they sat limp now, more ropes than once a precious vessel of life sustaining flesh and bone and blood and holding an entire human being in twin limbs that had been so important for life necessities.

The slack jaw held a lolling tongue that gagged inside of her cage of partly-clenched rows of miniscule, white teeth. He found that to be important: the fact that the corpses in this space all had tongues, and it gave off a sense of ill-will, like that was... wrong. It was wrong enough to kill people, but for it to be worse that their tongues remained in piece? He questioned none of it, nevertheless. It was decided he had nothing else of use to do other than stand here and stare at the poor, oh so pink girl. He couldn't help her; she was dead; so dead the entirety of her body heat had dropped away, leaving the icy cold shell of a life left behind, like the rinds in a mug that once held a steaming cup of coffee.

Slowly, the glasses-flashed boy stepped away with the gentle sound of his slippers and left the poor thing to fend for herself, not before capturing its picture forever in his memory card. But she was dead, so in all honesty it didn't even matter. Stepping down one of many random, out-of-order hallways, he found it ever the odder that he felt there should have been a dip in the wall here, and a door for a science lab over here, then another entrance for an infirmary further along. But it wasn't so. At the very edge of the long trip there did happen to be a splattering mass of smelly, rancid blood and bone, the place he'd woken up at, but the dip should have been further up, and the hallways weren't supposed to be so numerous and pointed toward every which way. Weird, but he felt like it. Still, the further he roamed, the stranger his struggling road became, the harder it was to fight.

Fight what? That, lonesome Shige-nii didn't know, longing for that name to be called of his again, but he could tell whatever battle this may result in, he was losing. His vision had gone blurry, even through the assistance of his glasses, and red seeped into spots and stayed and... swished, like a breeze was bound to peel it off and carry it away, and the harder the lost, lonely boy struggled, the further it pinpointed him and the darker his surroundings came, until not even the light on his phone's bottomless battery—oh, why wouldn't it die already, like the corpses surrounding him, soon for him to join—could stop him. He curled into a useless heap in front of the flower-like atrocity on the walls and, feeling its organs squish beneath his bent knees and toes, he called out to it. He pleaded for it. He asked for it to show him where Mayu had gone—where any of his friends had gone whatsoever—and how he could even begin to find them again. Thick, coiled, black ink choked him down the throat and began to make him lose his own tone until he could hardly stand it and felt lost in the masses of himself.

Shige-nii confessed that he acted distant to most people, but he claimed he did—he did—open up to eight other souls and they were all in this diabolical mess with him, and he begged, begged for this splatter on the wall to show him the way and reach a heavenly massacred finger and please, just show him what he had to do, and he'd do it. He'd forever listen to the corpse; please, simply let him find them again, he was going crazy and he was losing his mind and it was dark—if nothing else could prove him enough persuasion to get him out, he'd add that in too. And it was. He could hardly see, much less feel, anything around him. He felt cold. He felt aching. He felt so horribly lonely... and so far away from the others...

And nothing happened. His head leaned toward the ground, and the fissures in his soul cracked open. Hell, tears formed like ponds in the smooth skin betwixt his eyes, rubbing and protruding drops of the waters to fall from his gelid cheeks and stain his shirt, dribbling down from his throat and hitting the cuffs and staying there, nestled in his collarbone. No matter what he said, and what he did, the beautiful thing did nothing. He began whispering to it, excited sparks of words that had lost all sanity when—

"You."

It cut off his mind, to hear something else call out to him.

"Your name is Shige-nii, from what I have seen. I know no last name, I know no first name, I know no given name, just a simple charm from a girl I encountered:"

And he said it again.

"Shige-nii.

"The one I hold dear to me has found the one that you hold dear to you." He didn't even deny it as a single name rose up from within him and came out again as a whisper among his lips. "They both... if we wish for them to survive... They do not stand much of a chance alone."

Sitting beside him had proved to be a spirit of light-blue coloring and sad orbs that felt the emotion locked inside the taller boy he sat by. Then again, said spirit was short naturally, and this other boy was of average height. Even still, this soul garnered attention: he, unlike the labeled Shige-nii, had an authoritative presence that others felt and hushed to. It had given him, alongside other things, such of his princely feel and title. His ghostly-white face and locks of soft, once-white hair rose and shook the slightest with the movement, as he watched Shige-nii open up. His dark orbs spilled over from the edge of destruction and he seemed to have regained enough sense to open up his tightly-clenched fists, crawling with blood and maggots from the pile in front of him of what had to be—what had to be a dead version of that girl he was talking about, Mayu, had to be, he recognized the form and he could feel in him that had once been Mayu and now it was Mayu in this strange space, but it was truly not, but Shige-nii recovered from whatever had seized him and raised his head to face the ghost beside him with the gentle, soft tone.

Rupert warmed in his heart when he saw that the boy was not even fazed to be speaking with a spirit this entire time. Perhaps he would have smiled, but Rupert could not remember the last time he had smiled. The day he did... he wanted Dina to be there, at least. "Mayu," he rasped, like he hadn't spoken for a long time, and for all Rupert knew, that might have even been the case; "You speak of Mayu. And... someone else... you would rather keep alive."

"Yes," he chimed softly, "yes." At all costs, he yearned for Dina to live, knowing all the same of the thoughts rotting in her brain, that all the sweet little orange-haired girl with the silvery twist just as he had wanted was to be with him, she could not bear to be without him and already decided that she would soon die from the loss of it. And still, he wanted her to continue breathing... at least a little longer. "They both act... quite similar." Shige-nii smiled at the thought of a second Mayu milling about. She wouldn't be the exact same, but it would be cute to meet a girl similar to the one he held so dearly—a friend like her. "But from this...

"I fear all three of you are close to becoming just what I have come to." A ghost. Shige-nii quietly observed that this ghost boy with the attractive face—simply from a noticed matter—and glowing eyes, he had been a good person, somewhere deep down inside of him, and that part of him was... a large piece of him he had been forced down from and only opened to that girl of his that was with Mayu now. He could see it. Not as bright and cheery, perhaps, but still soft and cute and huggable and small, the perfect girl for a boy so lost in darkness. And perchance his one way out. Lifting himself out of what he would never know to truly be the ashes of the girl he so loved, Shige-nii followed after the blue-flickering spirit, all he could see in the thickly-dark hallways any longer, and all his gaze could hold onto was this boy whose name he didn't even know, but to whom he had just trusted his entire life unto.

Rupert was most indefinitely correct about his assumptions, as he had glanced upon the jumbled scene prior. In truth, he always, continuously checked over Dina and her new friend and always, continuously worried for their safeties, sensing enough from the feelings locked inside that all the girl, so cute in her sweet little self, had wanted, was to find him again, and free herself from this prison she called life. She... wanted him back. The boy had accepted that what he did was selfish... to die for her... and force her to go on living without him, but in all due honesty: he could not have lived as long as Dina was now if they switched places. Dina had freed him from a cage meshed that forged his cold and distant outer shell and locked in however truly gentle and lonely he was until she tore down that cage and Dina was all that mattered to him, and all that ever would.

A head bound of orange waves and small, thin bangs across her pale-as-death forehead arose first. Her shoulders quaked and the breath in front of her face billowed with shivering cold and fatigue. As she moved, the unstable crunch of broken bones and perhaps other body organs moved with her, and she caught a glimpse of her body, now stained with a thick scarlet she had never seen before. Slowly, gently pushing a shaky hand to the surface, fanned out with cold, empty fingers, the whiff of metallic fluid and sight of blood was staggering enough to send the weak little girl to the ground again. Her head spiraled and stars poked through her eyes, and shivers arced down her spine. The female next to her lifted herself and took intake of what she saw of Dina.

"A-ah..." Mayu was a bit taken aback at the sight of her friend. "D-Dina!" Green eyes set ablaze with concern and determination, the chocolate-haired girl flung herself to her side and, her pink hairpiece twirling, set to assisting the shorter and weaker though older girl up onto her feet. Surprisingly, though her entire body sustained scarlet-stained injuries and she squished when she made move, the richly-red coat with the white stripe down the middle, fitting snug over her tiny body, had no such stains, and had there been any, they looked to have been smeared or wiped off until indistinguishable. Mayu knew the odd girl didn't want to have that coat mussed up, but to see it so clean when the rest of her sent chills down her spine: something had laid a finger on her when they collapsed, she knew it.

The bright Kisaragi girl herself felt a pang of warm but confusing surprise when she glanced upon herself and found that her own body held no such scratches and just a minor set of wounds. Taking sight of what had come over Dina, she gently shredded off pieces of the sleeves on her bright yellow shirt, not even questioning any of it, to secure and bandage as many places as she could, especially the signs of injury on her head and the rip across her face, scaling over her nose like a bridge.

As her lukewarm palm placed upon Dina's cold forehead, she winced and mumbled, "What happened to you if I'm so... unmarked? Who did this to you?"

Like magic, her paper-white skin tackled onto a pink tone that shed upon her like a sunrise. "I... d-did this t-tomy...self. To-t-to... protect you..." She'd landed on top of this poor, tiny girl who barely didn't make it to five feet tall. This girl who must have just become an adult at the youngest, so tiny yet obsolete and childishly stubborn in ways that seemed to harm her but help others: Mayu must have... crushed her.

"Aaaaah! Dina, don't do that! Look what you've done to y-yourself!" Mayu shook her head fiercely, taking Dina by the shoulders and looking into her auburn orbs deeply. "Thank you, but... don't d-die on me..! I want to look after you, too... Next time, please, let me take some of the pain, too." Dina shook her head, but Mayu grunted and, cutely pouting, shook hers back, and Dina dropped her gaze, blush growing thicker. Mayu felt successful enough. "Now why don't we... er..." Turning round, she caught sight of a door—Classroom 4-A—and straight in front of her stood a formidable-looking piece of furnishing. Another door, this one glittering with what had to be copper lining and a strong knob that, when she rushed to turn it and open, didn't budge whatsoever, but gave off an unsettling screech, like it was a monster o-out to get her. Fiercely, staring that the door with a sudden, feverish glint, Mayu pulled again and again with no hope of surging it free but feeling that thing to be so incredibly important for her.

Slowly, the shivering girl pocked with red and injury sauntered up to her. "M-Mayu... w-wewill... h-have to search for a... a key... o-or something." Gently, seeing she would not back down, her cold, pale hands took the semi-larger and warmer ones, leading her away from the brass engraving. "W-we will... figure it out." A secure whisper for someone with such a relentless stutter seeping into her tone. Having no one else to listen to and not a clue what to do, Mayu allowed the girl to hobble her way up and down the halls until they came upon the Classroom 4-A once more and, upon entering, saw something with a purple-esque hue glinting in the background. But try as she might, Mayu couldn't reach it from the doors they'd entered at the back of the class, as too many cluttered desks and holes in the ground left it stuck. She didn't want Dina to have to get up and move all over again so as she sauntered by, holding up a hand for her to stay, and their skirts—beige from a nightdress and a pleated blue—collided in their wakes.

The item transported as a shadow of a small girl entered from the other side and it fell right into the dizzied gaze of the feverish Dina, who managed to lope for it and hold it up high. Once Mayu rushed back, she plucked it from tired Dina's hands, whose cheeks were now flushed and she looked to have caught a sickness, making her heart pule from such a sight, and rubbed at the gleam until its core became bright and gleaming as well: a key. She wanted to immediately rush over and try the door, but Dina gently pointed out, through a sneeze, that the door had no keyholes punched into it. This was no trivial matter. Leading her to the front of the room, pushing back a hefty, wood-encased cabinet and pointing at a door she must have seen prior, Dina gently took the key and, fitting it into the lock, smiled. A perfect fit. It fell open and revealed both in the room a strange, wired mechanism and a small note.

Mayu's eyes glanced over it curiously: We know there's no escape from this hell, so we decided our safest fate, after finding one another again, was to die here together. The ghost child with the scissors was around and so were these other horrors, and... to die in each other's arms in sleep seemed like our best be—

Dina was glancing over at it. She quickly pent over and plucked it from the smaller girl's view, mumbling that it was obscene; truly, her mind tied over with that boy she cried over and she knew this would have upset her. Mayu didn't know that Dina was virtually illiterate. Leading back to the mechanism, a purple circle of sorts with plugs and tubes of the same color attaching it to a desk with thin piano wires loaded into it—she suspected that first visit to this place must have told her what these things were and how she knew so well about it—Mayu saw that a key beneath said desk looked to fit inside a hole in the machine, and, pressing into it, set it to work with awkward creaks and stretches.

Blinded with the stuffy nose and headache causing her sickened pain, Dina did not understand much of what happened, but took the bigger and warmer hand offered to her and led her to another room with another locked door, their tag team of two keys befitting each lock in its own places and showing off another machine, opening up other cracks in the ground and allowing a slow passage to and fro until each one appeared to be open, as the little Dina was satisfied, and she took Mayu back to the brass door and fell into a rest at the foot of it.

Her fingers connected with the shining knob, and she tugged.

Nothing whatsoever occurred.

Tears formed in the edges of her dark green orbs.

"Sh-Shige-nii... wh-what must I... d-do... to find you again..?"

Somewhere on the other edge was a space full of wrong ends and horrors not supposed to ever happen, as well as a living boy and a ghost, who led the boy through the darkness nearly shrouding him with black emptiness. But he clung on, and this Darkening didn't come close enough to him to completely corrupt him, as it nigh had. Up winding hallways and down stairs, through floorboards and into holes, until a single door stood out into the midst, gleaming and proving of something... different. As he neared, Shige-nii felt a burst of warmth inside of him, and this place, he saw, was right. Wherever he'd just been of that school: that was a messed up void. This was... more right... than whatever had happened prior. Perhaps... that pink girl wasn't dead. And the splat, too, and all of those corpses, and the thing that was attached to that humungous fin.

His fingers connected with the knob and sent a sudden warmth shocking to Mayu's own fingers, still desperately clinging onto the door. She prattled at the door with a new surge of determination and called out his name; and he heard her soft, squeaking cry full of sunshine and his name. Shige-nii, Sakutaro: whatever she wanted to call him, he let her. Even the elder name of Morishige: his last name, which he felt hadn't been used in quite a time, odd enough.

The tall boy in black met up with the shredded-clothed attire of someone he didn't recognize until he looked up from the rips and tears and saw those deep, thoughtful green orbs in tone with emotion and life in general. Recognition, she saw, sparkled past his glasses and down to the wispy green orbs he had, and they fell into an embrace that seemed unable to release again.

"Mayu—"

"I'm in love with you, Shige-nii!" she sobbed into him; stayed true to her word.

He nigh flinched for a moment, until his heart sprung with warmth and he silently realized, yes... all of the stopped-up denial stopped to matter and after the experience had shaken him so horridly he whispered, tightly clung to her, the shadows adorning his entire visible skin torn and vanished: "And I'm in love with you, Mayu."

Out of everything she could have stirred to, this happened as Dina and her headache lessened, and her eyes broke into silent tears. Nobody noticed her as she backed away and fled, like a wild creature, on all fours and everything, and nobody noticed as the spirit followed her, eventually reducing himself to crawl beside her and search her eyes and ask her to please see him, and no matter how long her ill, dizzy, tear-stained eyes looked wildly about, she saw nothing and she could not hear him.

Rupert: this is so cruel

Me: I know, corpse party does that to you.

Rupert: ...why...

Dina: -still cannot hear him-

Me: ;w;
Oh GEEZ I'M GONNA HAVE A FINE AND DANDY TIME GOING TO SLEEP TONIGHT AFTER REVISING ALL OF THIS.
OVEREMOTIONAL ALERT.