An hour passed, and Joshua could walk without stumbling, speak without choking, breathe without wanting to vomit. And the Players were staring at him expectantly, waiting for him to perform a miracle.
"You all have generated enough Imaginative power to resurrect… one Player," said Joshua calmly, as though he did this every day. He'd introduced himself only as Shibuya's Composer, and though Mr. Santos had been squinting at him as though he might have recognized him even in this form, Joshua had pretended never to have met any of the Players, and brushed off any attempts at questioning him. He continued to ignore the winners' cries of protest as he went on. "Congratulations, Sebastien Santos."
"No, you can't!" Mr. Santos argued, backing up, hands held in front of him like shields. "Please, I can't accept that! Mr. Arita has a daughter who needs him, and Kenji is still so young! One of them should be resurrected, not me."
"The prize is non-transferable," Joshua said dryly. "You may choose to forfeit, but in that case, no Players from this week's Game will be resurrected."
"But what will happen to them?" Mr. Santos protested, gesturing towards the others. "I can't leave them behind."
"A good question." Joshua addressed his next sentence to the other winners. "You may choose to play again. You can stay in the Underground as Reapers. Or, if neither of those things appeal to you, erasure is also an option."
Mr. Hanekoma – that liar, he thought, a strange mixture of grief and disbelief surfacing in his chest – had explained it as best he could in the brief time they had before this meeting had to happen. The Game existed to refine Imagination. The product of the Game could be used to resurrect the winners, who would then, through their own creative endeavors, spark Imagination further in this city, creating more raw materials for the Game to then refine. In theory, it could be self-sustaining. Like a power plant. In reality, each resurrection was an investment – or a gamble. As Composer, Joshua sustained himself and his powers through the Imagination that flowed through the city. There wasn't enough for three resurrections. He could have maybe managed two, but only Mr. Santos had shown enough growth in the Games to appear to be a worthy investment. Resurrecting someone who hadn't demonstrated any growth would drain Joshua of strength without generating any new power – leaving him in a vulnerable state and unable to recover from the exhaustion of rewriting reality.
He owed Manako. He'd promised he'd make his rise to power worth her while. And Hanekoma had said it was possible to restore someone from erasure. But she was going to have to wait.
A few weeks passed, and the next Game ended with the victory of the Game Master. Arita Mari, that fateful car accident's lone survivor, was released from the hospital and returned to Hokkaido as an orphan.
A year passed, and Joshua realized he was neither the omnipotent creative power he'd wanted to be, nor the power plant manager he'd thought he was. He was the water wheel.
Oh, sure, he had some freedom. He could redesign the Game however he liked, and he had enjoyed that. Gone were the ghostly white kimonos, the haiku, the free advertising for musical artists he didn't care for. Talismans were replaced by pins – which meant a lot of work for Hanekoma Sanae, but it was work he enjoyed. Smears became Noise – and, interestingly, changed in appearance from inky black to technicolor. According to Hanekoma, their appearance was influenced by the way he subconsciously perceived reality, whatever that meant.
He had changed some of the rules as well. For one, partners were now mandatory. Joshua did not want to admit the effect that Mr. Santos and Manako had had on him – but it was undeniable that it was there. He'd needed to open his world, glimpse reality through someone else's eyes, feel someone else's pain. If he hadn't, he was sure, he never could have opened the floodgates to the rest of Shibuya and thereby won against the Author. And Mr. Santos – the dream he'd given up on, the dream he'd felt a renewed passion for after having to fight for his life – helped Joshua understand what the Reaper's Game was about in a way he might never had, had he merely continued to observe from a distance.
This idea had also been influenced by his own less-than-pleasant experience with losing a partner. He'd survived only through luck – lucky that he'd been so close to Cat Street, luck that Hanekoma cared enough to break the rules and rescue him. If it weren't for those circumstances, unlikely to apply to many other Players in the future, he would have certainly been erased, and in an extraordinarily slow and painful way. There was no need for that – the Game was not about torturing people senselessly.
Another change was the requirement of an entry fee. The biggest obstacle between the average Player and growth, Joshua observed, was preoccupation with life as they had known it. Mr. Santos's employers' children. Manako's school work. How much more could they have grown if those distractions had been removed?
He was working on a new idea, too – an idea he'd had after resurrecting a fashion designer with hopes to open up a boutique in the city. After confirming with Sanae that such a thing would be possible, Joshua had begun laying out plans for a selection of shops for Players to utilize during their Games. There were gains to be made from allowing Players the chance to experience others' passions, he was sure.
So, Joshua kept a little bit of optimism. He had ideas, he had the means to implement them. And he was looking forward to seeing how his city would thrive under his rule. From the top of the 104 building, he stared down at his city with something like fondness, something like vanity.
But it was not the unlimited power he'd envisioned. Of course it wasn't. The more he learned about the Game, the clearer it was how clueless he'd been. He hadn't understood half as well as he'd thought.
Would he have made the same choice if he'd known? He didn't know. But that didn't matter.
He held out a pin in his hand, a pin he'd been holding onto for a year now. A pin that contained Manako's soul. He'd wanted to bring her back, but… it just wasn't going to happen. Every Game, it took too much of his power simply to resurrect the Game's actual winners – usually, one winner was all he could manage. If there were any winners. And the more time that passed, the more difficult it would be to undo Manako's death. If he were to bring her back now, he'd have to rewrite an entire year marked by her absence.
It was more than he could manage, and it was time to acknowledge that. He crushed the pin, releasing from it a shrew-like Noise. She looked at him for a moment, and Joshua wondered how much Noise remembered of their former selves. Then she scampered away.
Two years passed, and Joshua was bored. Bored and - though he never would have admitted it out loud - lonely. Maybe it had been spurred on by watching his former peers move on to high school without him. Maybe two years without anyone to talk to but Sanae would make anyone equally lonely. But this was how a Composer's life was supposed to be, wasn't it? He was certain interacted with no one but Sanae.
Of course, the very notion that he was supposed to maintain perfect solitude was enough to spur him into doing just the opposite.
He decided to visit Mr. Santos - though the man had a new name now, a new identity. That was the simpler kind of resurrection. Sometimes a resurrected Player had their very death undone - including the entire week of their Game. Whatever had killed them would be entirely unwritten. No one would remember the Player had died, and if questioned about the week, would swear the resurrected one had been there all along. This type of resurrection took great effort. It was primarily effective on young Players - those who had died of sudden accidents.
Sebastien Santos had died of a heart attack. It would have been theoretically possible to unwrite that particular heart attack, but unwriting all the causes of his heart problems would be much more difficult, and without doing so it would only be a matter of time before his heart failed again. Besides, Mr. Santos needed a clean break from the family he'd been working for - despite rediscovering his passion during the Game, he hadn't seemed to have developed the heart to say good-bye to his employers.
And so, instead of being given back his former life, he was given a new one. All Joshua had to do was construct a new body - not so difficult as it sounded, with Mr. Hanekoma giving him instructions - and hand him fake documentation and enough money to get his business started.
It had been the right decision. Ramen Don was thriving, a true hit among RGers, Players, and Reapers alike.
"Welcome," called Mr. Santos as Joshua stepped inside to the quiet shop. It wasn't lunch hour yet; there were no other customers. Mr. Santos - in his new face - turned to greet him, and did a double take. But it only lasted a second before his look of shock was replaced with a warm smile. "Sorry. I thought you were someone I knew for a second."
"No worries," said Joshua, taking a seat and a menu.
He knew he wouldn't recognize him. Joshua had taken those memories - another skill Sanae had taught him. Mr. Santos's memory of the Game were necessary for his Imagination's progression, so he'd tried to do it as unobtrusively as possible. Mr. Santos would remember the Game, remember his partners, remember a strange and ambitious young boy, who'd gone off on his own on the last day and never been seen since - he simply wouldn't remember that boy was Joshua.
Was there some trace of his memory still there? Or was it a coincidence? he had said, during the Game, that Joshua reminded him of his employer's son - maybe it was that. He didn't know why, but he hoped it was the former.
"Why should it matter if Mr. Santos knows who I am?" Joshua had argued with Mr. Hanekoma. "It's not like he's going to try to usurp me."
"No, he's not," Sanae had agreed. "But other people might. And you don't know what they might do to get to you. Reapers aren't supposed to hurt the living, but that doesn't mean it never happens."
So the memory wipe had to be done, and if it hadn't worked all the way,thatt was a bad thing.
And yet, Joshua wanted to think his memory existed in him somewhere. Even if only in flickers.
Five years passed. The city thrived, except when it didn't. The Game went smoothly, except when it didn't. And there was something deeply unsatisfying about all of it. When there were no problems, Joshua was redundant. When there were problems, Joshua fixed them and made himself redundant.
He barely had to do anything at all. Of course he didn't – he was the water wheel, he just had to exist and be turned by the current. Now that he had a Conductor (Kitaniji Megumi, a former mayor of Shibuya, whose love for the city was reflected in the reverent way he spoke to Joshua), he was the one who dealt with Players and Reapers; the Reapers handled the rest. Of course, if he actually wanted to do what Kitaniji did, he could have. There was no rule that he had to have a Conductor. But the Conductor's role was no more interesting than his own. He missed, of all things, being a Player – it had at least kept him focused on something, one of the few weeks of his entire life where he was unable to predict what would happen the next day.
His parents were doing fine. He'd stopped in to see them a few times. He wanted to see their grief and regrets, to see them suffer over what they'd done to him. When they stopped grieving so blatantly, he did things to stir them up. He'd dip into the RG to play Pachelbel's Canon on the piano at night, then raise his vibe and disappear when his mother came downstairs. He'd wanted her to know how it felt. He'd wanted her to know he was right.
But even she was starting to move on. It wasn't fair, Joshua thought, that his parents got to move on.
More years passed, and it no longer felt right to compare himself to the water wheel. Instead he felt like he was trapped underneath the water wheel. Like he was trying to climb over it but it would just pull him back under every time he did. And he wanted to just let himself drown.
There was a cost to having a high vibe, a cost to letting the city flow through him. He was losing himself in all that Soul. Being Composer was not supposed to feel like this. He'd craved the feeling of having an audience, of imagining something beautiful and then sitting back to watch as it was carried out. He didn't know that there would be such thin lines between himself and his work, that he would have to literally put his Soul into it, and that the city would be so unwieldy, the people so… well, so much like people that some of those bits of Soul would get torn away and twisted and lost forever. All the selfishness, dullness, conformity, stupidity of the city was now his own just as much as it was Shibuya's.
Decades passed, and Joshua began to think he would rather die than lose himself that way.