ACT 1:

NOSTALGIC HATRED

CHAPTER 4:

A/V

Kaneko sits in her room, in front of her computer. This time she has an IBM PC hooked up and running DOS. Running the original DOOM and nearing the end of the game. Final level, final boss, giant head in the wall. She sighs. Just stops, right there in the middle of it. Quits the game. Sits there, quietly, staring at the black and white screen with text from her only previous command still lingering on it. "C:\DOOMdoom". Just stares and thinks about something, though one would be hard-pressed to figure out exactly what her mindset is.

She looks up at the ceiling and spins around in her chair. Her shihakusho that she had mostly taken off falls out. She stares at it mildly and spins back around to the computer, now pretty much nude. She doesn't care. Wouldn't care if anyone barged in, but the darkness of the window above her station shows that everyone should be asleep. Who would interrupt, Kokoro? Maybe, but maybe not. It doesn't matter.

Rather, that's what she believes. Suddenly, an idea. She types "cd asic" and enters, then "asic". A blue screen pops up with a cursor visible. Not a mouse cursor, but one for typing. She slowly starts tapping at it, but seems to become disheartened very quickly. After stating the variables, she makes a new line for the actual batch file, but just quits typing and sits back. A minute passes, she sits forward and tries again. Nothing comes.

She heftily groans, throwing herself back in her chair and spreading out liberally. It's uncomfortable. She sits there silently again. Many long minutes pass.

"Hello?" she calls out into the empty room as she turns around and stares at the usually occupied space. She could hear a pen drop.

She picks up and drops a pen from her desk. Despite the floor being carpet unlike her colleagues', she can hear its thud. A keyboard falls off of her pile of junk. She suddenly realizes that the pile is right next to her bed and might collapse onto it as well.

She discards the thought and stands up, picking the pen up with her toe and raising it, then plucking and placing it onto the desk. She stands there, looking down at the ground, at herself and appearing listless. She feels numb, but takes a step forwards anyways and looks about the room while keeping her hands behind her head leisurely. She ignores the keyboard that had dropped a moment ago and turns towards her dresser and the TV sitting atop it. An old CRT one. Of course, it's mostly useless. Nobody in the Seireitei uses these anymore, and it can't pick up outside world channels. No antenna, nothing. Just the basics and an old VHS tape player sat next to it. On top of that, a Sony Betamax player. SL-5200. Tons of old tapes sitting next to them, all sorted by size, then by her favorites in stacks, then alphabetically within each stack.

She bends over and turns the knob on the TV, switching it to static. It makes little sound, the dead air. It wouldn't matter which channel she tuned it to, it would all be just plain static right now. So she bends over and stares at it, as if into a black void, with the curiosity of a fearless scientist. Gazing into the abyss while it gazes back. She sits back, leaning against the table and boredly staring. Minutes, full minutes pass. Shapes begin to form in the violently shifting black and white specks.

A burning world. A city say on fire, being razed with nobody in sight running away; they had all died. The last man standing, a wandering ronin. The army he had trusted to defend his home failed. They lie slaughtered like stuck pigs in the streets. A beast loom over the burning city, spearing the homes of his past friends like fish in a bucket. Wordlessly, fearlessly, he marches forward into its blazing rage to fight fire with fire.

Slowly, he draws his sword and so screams, "NUE!" as he charges forth at the beast in a blind rage. The flames consume his body, and he would soon find himself confronting his deepest fear.

Kaneko snaps out of her spacing out. She's still staring at the TV, and turning to any other part of the room causes her vision to be taken over by weird spots. She stands up, entire vision going blurry in the process and making her stumble around for a minute. It clears up eventually, and she slowly walks back to her desk. In one drawer she pulls open to the right is a stack of blank paper and several pens aligned in a perfectly geometric manner. With a couple pages and a pen in hand, she returns to her kotatsu and sinks under it, placing the supplies on top and crackling her fingers while she gets comfortable. The static screeches in the background.

She begins; boredly staring down at the paper while making small marks all around it. She thinks, and thinks harder. The scratches eventually become sketches of rising fires. She looks back up at the static and gazes into it once more, returning to her drawing afterwards. The ronin she imagined cae next with simple shapes first. Instead of filling out his details, she skips to the buildings which had been reduced to rubble. Neither does she finish those before moving on to the beast in the background, getting its rough shape down and shading it into a silhouette. Some sort of giant whale-looking thing on six insectoid legs.

She sighs, placing the pen down and scooting deeper under the kotatsu where it's warm and inviting. Slowly, she sinks and becomes enveloped by its soft orange underlight. Not dozing off, she wanders again into her mind as she caresses the bottom of the table and thinks about everything she had to do to acquire it. She smirks. Her denreishinki vibrates. A text from somebody, a nobody.

"Where do I put the package?"

She closes her eyes in annoyance and replies, "234, 612, -12"

Coordinates to some arbitrary location that she had figured out a while ago. With the mood ruined, she slides out from under the table and lies there for a moment Gets up soon, bangs her head against the table. Bangs her head against the bed behind her. Bangs her head against the wall after standing up. Vision blurs, and music plays in her head. Some sort of psychedelic rock tune with plenty of screeching to go in tune with the television that is now practically roaring. She stomps over to it, growing restless and angry, and nearly rips the dial off with how hard she turns it off. Silence would fill the room, but instead her own mind won't let her rest for even a second.

To sate herself, she starts playing the song that got stuck in her head on the denreishinki, "05. Free Zone". She turns it up enough for it to resonate within the room fairly loudly. It would probably wake up everyone, but she doesn't care. She stands there, setting the phone-like device perfectly beside the TV. As the intensity of the song picks up, her body becomes restless. Hands fidget, eyes dart from place to place, breathing becomes erratic, and she finally begins pacing around the room. Primarly around the kotatsu, then back and forth between the bed and the dresser. Seemingly random in pattern, but actually in a complex tempo.

She doesn't even notice that the song has change twice now. "07. Like a Lizard". An upbeat piano tune, very quick and riling. She can't sit still for even a second, just continues to pace around for another 3 minutes. The song changes once again, this time to a very slow guitar piece. She finally calms down. She stops completely when she notices a slight silhouette on the door. A familiar one. She steps in front of the door but far from it.

The figure stands outside of her door. Has been for the last 10 minutes. Just standing idly with their hand weakly balled up and about to knock on the door. Yet, they stood there that entire time and just listened. It was Yumiko, made obvious by the short ponytail obviously visible from the side. She had stopped upon hearing nothing inside but music and seeing nothing but Kaneko's shadow pacing around the room. Her expression is serious and slightly agitated, but also empathetic to a degree. Enough to stop her. As the music continues, she starts to lower her hand and leans against the door, listening and enjoying it as well.

Kaneko stares at the silhouette. Intently, wondering if she would come through. She knows who it is, but won't say anything. She's completely still.

Yumiko turns to stare as well. Her frown fades, replaced by complacency despite the noise. She knows the girl can see her, so they just stare at each other.

Many minutes pass, many shifts of tune. Lyrics come and go with little attention paid. Yet, it sings...

"Although I must be innocent, now I am punished. I wasn't the one who sewed those seeds, but nevertheless I have to pull up the flowers that bloomed from them."

"I can't say I didn't know about it, but I don't remember taking any part in it. I think my freedom cost me dearly, but I don't remember selling my soul so cheaply."

"Hey Hey Until I die and say farewell... Hey, hey... no one can touch me. You probably don't know the eternal outlaws prowling in the distant night."

"The act wasn't inexcusable but the wounds from it aren't curable. On nights when I almost want to cry, I hold a woman and fly high away from this petty, corrupt world."

"Hey, hey, until I die and say farewell... Hey, hey... no one can touch me. You probably don't know the eternal outlaws prowling in the distant night."

"Although I must be innocent, now I am punished. I think my freedom cost me dearly, but I don't have the guts to sell my soul so cheaply..."

Yumiko nods. She turns, raising a hand and giving a farewell she knows Kaneko can see. Just a quick closed fist hanging slightly in the air, a quiet resolve. Kaneko nods back. She turns the music off shortly after.

And after that, she would gather her clothes up and re-dress to become slightly less unpresentable. She lingers in front of her door, hand prepared at the far side to slide it open at any second. She hesitates. It's been at least half a minute. That girl's probably gone back to her room. She bangs her head against the door. More lingering, more hesitation. More, more, more, more, more...

More. The dark of night would pierce through the light of the room if she were any more still. She backs away. Quietly questioning herself, she falls backwards. She lets her clothes slide off once again. She lies there. Closes her eyes and breathes in and out, deeply and slowly.

A sudden melancholy takes over. She expects to hear the sound of rain battering the roof and and thunder in the distance. Yet, nothing comes. It's the one thing from the outside she misses. Weather didn't seem to exist here. They had kept it out for a long time and let the reaches beyond the Seireitei deal with it. Despite how the sky looked and how the temperature felt, despite being able to see the droplets falling beyond the barrier, it would not fall here. There were no rainy days, no snowy days, nor torrents or catastrophes. She mutters a slight curse to the one who decided to make this a paradise.

The room begins to shrink. As she opens her eyes after many minutes of dozing away, everything seems so much closer. More claustrophobic. The ceiling is far away, but the walls have closed in. What was once a small room is now a hallway, and she's stuck to the wall of it. The furniture is nailed to the walls as well.

She crawls across the lopsided floor towards her bed, dragging her clothes along only until halfway there. She crawls up0 into it and lazily lingers with her legs dangling off of it and touching the floor. It's comfortable. She had gotten a much softer mattress than is standard, and several large quilts on top of that. No pillows, though. She eventually swings them up into the bed and wraps herself in the topmost quilt like a cocoon. Stays like that. Eventually, she rolls off of the bed and wriggles beneath the kotatsu again where she lingers for another half hour in a simple but satisfyingly warm position.

The warmth fades. She sighs into her quilt as she unwraps from it and rises — again, lazily. Finally, she returns to her computer chair again. Restarts the machine. Doesn't seem to feel like hooking up a new one. She wonders in the act, do they feel when you shut them down like that? If you hard-reset the machine, does it feel like being killed? Wonders what it must feel like, if the wafers are the machine's nervous system of sorts. Maybe the semi-conductors are the brain, and the rest of the innards are nerves. The case is the skin, and getting anything on the wafers is like directly touching someone's nerves. She doesn't know what that would feel like, but imagines it would be painful. But maybe that's all wrong.

She can barely stand to wait for the numbers and letters to roll across the screen. There's apparently a lot on it; it takes a while to boot. While waiting for it, she pulls out the latest issue of Seireitei Communication. Actually, it's a month old. There are a huge stack of the magazines to her left, unarranged. She flips through it, looking for a particular page. Finds it in moments: A provocative full-page spread of the entire Shinigami Men's Association, shirtless and posing. Their appeal was not supposed to be the focus of the preceding article, but Kaneko chooses to use it that way. Well, they were shirtless anyways but now they're more shirtless. She grins, then starts poking the page while holding it sideways with one hand. Poking the faces of the members, one by one, with a malicious glare to her eyes. Not just a lustful one, but something else mixed in as well.

The computer had booted up already. Taking notice, she decides to write down a note in it. Starts with the names of each of those people in a list. She puts a number beside each one.

"Ukitake - 70,000 Kan. 3"

"Hisagi - 50,000 Kan."

"Omaeda - 45,000 Kan."

"Akon - 43,000 Kan."

"Iba - 40,000 Kan."

"Kira - 35,000 Kan."

"Ogido - 33,000 Kan."

"Iemura - 25,000 Kan."

She tosses the magazine aside, then continues to write down more names. An hour passes, and soon she has almost every male she can think of in the entire Seireitei on the tip of her tongue written down with a value beside it. With another smirk, she chuckles to herself and kicks back in her chair.

After a few moments of relaxing in front of the list and giving it a think or two, she says aloud, "Didn't really want to go here today, but..."

She pulls out her phone, holds it in her lap, then takes her zanpakuto and whispers to it, "Tower through the sky, Idaina Kenchikka."

The blade disappears, but she still holds onto the handle while two black gloves covered in circuitry envelope her hands. They connect to a device that appears on her head in the form of a black helmet and translucent blue visor that covers her entire upper face. It lights up dimly, and neon teal wires begin to sprout from the gloves whereafter they implant into the Denreishinki itself. The screen goes blank white, and Kaneko almost immediately falls limp. Images begin to flood the visor, making it light up much more brightly. Kaneko smiles, moving the hand the held her phone down, and down, between her legs...

The night goes on, yet ends in silence.

Next chapter: Act 1, Chapter 5 - Forlorn. The hardly touched character of Kakunaka will find her due elaboration, and we will find her in very precarious circumstance. What could have made someone like her?

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