The prompt list for these (if anyone in this beyond-dead fandom is interested) is on my tumblr, which has the same penname as I do on here. Sue me. I'm a simple soul. Enjoy and whatnot. Originally I planned to make this a cute little shippy thing about Keiichi being a stage magician and Mion volunteering as his lovely assistant, but then I realized that I haven't written a single horror prompt for this very horror-oriented anime, and that idea…sort've went out the window.

June 5th, 2018

Keiichi Maebara was the greatest magician of his time, in no small part because he was only 17 years old and already at the top of his game.

His specialty was the seeming of bringing his five special puppets to life, making them flit about the stage with a liveliness that belied their porcelain-and-glass flesh.

The smallest one, a girl in a green summer dress with wide violet eyes, he called Rika, and it played with and conjured kittens from out of thin air. But the glassy eyes always seemed solemn and sad, no matter how brightly she chirped or how wide her smile seemingly was.

The other smallest had been scrapped from another magician's vampire doll, and still had one sharp tooth and bright, mischievous red glass eyes. But the small mop of blonde hair was short and fluffy, and it was dressed in a pink sleeveless shirt and jean shorts. He called it Satoko, and it conjured things in and out of the audience's pockets like a tiny dervish until one never knew if one's possessions were coming or going.

The next doll was close to Keiichi in age, an auburn-haired girl with glassy eyes as bright and blue as a cloudless summer sky, clothed in a long white dress. It played as his knife target and partner, and each strike made the audiences gasp for breath, for not one manipulating wire was cut even as sharp knives peppered an outline of the doll onto its wooden target board. She seemed almost alive as she bobbed and flickered behind its master, until more than one critic was ready to swear that she was merely a real girl in doll's clothing.

The last two were identical green-haired female dolls, but dressed differently. He called one Mion and the other Shion, and Mion had a yellow shirt and jeans, and Shion had a white shirt and black skirt, and Mion's hair was tied into a ponytail, while Shion's hung loose except for her bangs, which were pulled back by a yellow ribbon. They served as his troublemakers, causing mayhem on the set and upsetting everything, until he and Rena managed to set all aright at the very end, usually in an explosion and a burst of colored smoke.

As once said in a German opera, however, bad apples ruined whole barrels. A famed critic named Takano Miyo said that Keiichi was a fraud, and that the dolls were all animatronics. People stopped coming to his shows, and his audiences dwindled.

Then Takano Miyo died, strangled to death in her own home, and people found out that she had been funding illicit military operations in third world countries. An investigation was started, but aside from the odd shape of the ligature marks on her neck, there were no clues. No one had seen anyone go into her house, and there was no evidence of anyone on the cameras she had set up all over her property.

People told Keiichi Maebara they were sorry for doubting him, and he had gotten a lucky break, that Takano had died when she had. Keiichi merely smiled awkwardly, scratching his cheek, and said he didn't really pay attention or care about to critics; he much preferred spending time playing with his puppets and creating new magic tricks.

He only noticed a few days later that the Mion doll had cracks in its slim porcelain fingers that he couldn't explain.

Life continued on as normal, and even though Keiichi had taken the Mion doll out of the show for a few weeks, first for repairs, and then because he was quite frankly uneasy, eventually he had to put it back in. The look in those blank teal eyes had somehow seemed accusing whenever he passed it in his dressing room, abandoned and lost, and sometimes the sheen of the glass sometimes looked like the glimmer of tears, when he glimpsed the doll's eyes out of the corner of his gaze. So he put it back in, and it seemed like all the other dolls danced the harder the moment it pitter-pattered onto the stage.

Several weeks later, as he was driving to a larger show with his dolls in the back, Keiichi's car was hit by a drunk driver, and when he got out to help, the man, a notorious local thug named Teppei Hojo, mugged him and ran away. Sympathy poured in to the wounded magician, whose ribs were broken and both eyes blacked, but he only smiled and said he was glad he was the only one hurt, and that he was a man who could take a beating, and there wasn't any permanent damage to anything important, either to himself, his props, or his car. Still, there was public outcry in sympathy, and demands to hunt down the miscreant –and tips on how to do so– poured into the police.

Only days later, the sympathetic public rejoiced when Teppei Hojo's car suffered under a malfunction and he was sent pinwheeling into heavy traffic –miraculously, only he was hurt. In fact, the drunken thug was killed outright in the collision, whereas the other cars only suffered minor damage, and the passengers a few bruises. A short police inspection found that Hojo's engine had almost certainly been tampered with, and a stern lecture was delivered to the public about vigilante justice and taking matters into their own hands.

It was only after Keiichi got out of intensive care, when he was inspecting the dolls for damage, that he noticed motor oil on Satoko's tiny white hands.

Putting his nervous thoughts aside, he didn't take her out of the show as he had Mion –Keiichi cleaned the doll's hands almost timidly, and resolved to throw himself into his performances as though nothing else mattered.

For the next several months, revenue increased as more and more people heard of either the increasingly popular and skilled magician or his troubles in the business, but then, like a black cloud, trouble came again. A hard-eyed man that some people had seen around Takano's house many times in the past began lurking around Keiichi and his shows, glaring, simmering, pacing. People said his given name was Okonogi, but no one was quite sure about what he did for a living or even who he really was. Some said he was a stalker, others said he was Takano Miyo's lover who blamed Keiichi for her death, others still said that he was one of her guns for hire who, yet again, suspected the magician of foul play.

Sensation struck the newspapers one morning when Okonogi was found dead in Keiichi Maebara's very own dressing room, one of the throwing knives Keiichi used in his act buried in the dead man's back and multiple other stab wounds littering his body. It seemed certain at any moment that the young magician was going to be arrested –until nearly twenty witnesses, and no less than three security cam feeds, gave evidence that Keiichi Maebara was in Tokyo at his father's art exhibition for the entire day leading up to Okonogi's death. Keiichi rushed back to help the police, but other than information about who and how his dressing room could be accessed, the officers in charge of the case needed little from him.

It was only later, when Keiichi opened her locked suitcase for the show, that he noticed the Rena doll had a spot and some speckles of rusty dark red on her otherwise spotless white dress, and her blue eyes seemed wider and somehow less innocent than before.

Crowds now flocked to see Keiichi Maebara and his miraculously lifelike dolls, which pranced about the stage even more believably than before. It hardly seemed as if the magician was guiding them at all, and many people took the after-show opportunities to poke and prod at the amazing props, as if to confirm the fact that they were, really, dolls after all. Keiichi encouraged this behavior with a tight smile and shadows under his eyes, as if he, too, was not entirely sure of the authenticity of his own act.

Despite the fact that no one had ever even remotely proved even a distant connection to Keiichi and the deaths of Takano Miyo, Teppei Hojo, and Okonogi, there were rumors in some of the distant parts of the theater, and whispers on the streets, and chats in online forums, that accused the 17-year-old of being the cause of all three murders. After all, as such an unbelievably skilled stage magician, surely he didn't need to actually be at the scene of the crime when the murder took place. After all, with the consideration for being physically present at the scene removed, there was nothing to prove he hadn't. Some obscure prop could have caused the ligature marks on Takano's neck. Every stage magician had a in-depth knowledge of engine mechanics. And he could have easily set some form of trap for the unsuspecting Okonogi, for, after all, wasn't trickery, misdirection, and traps his forte and the way he made a living?

Enough of this kind of pertinent information made the police take notice, and an old detective named Oishi was assigned to the reopened cases. He followed Keiichi around closely, picked apart nearly every trick he could get at, and even got the magician drunk at one point.

Keiichi had mumbled into his cup that sometimes even he wasn't sure how the dolls did what they did. That he was becoming afraid of them. That sometimes he wondered if they had–

And Oishi wrote it all down in his little black book.

One evening, thick with mist, Keiichi was walking home along the river, with Oishi following behind in his squad car. Keiichi swore to police later that the mist was too thick for him to see anything, but he had heard a smash of glass behind him and a strangled cry from the detective, and had run back to help. He found the windshield shattered and some of the shards of glass bloodied, but neither he nor the inspectors afterwards could account for them. Oishi's car, at most, had been going three or four miles an hour, so as not to overtake the ambling Keiichi. Even if he had stopped as suddenly as his car could, he would, at most, have jerked in his seat, and probably not even then. Another person's footsteps would have been heard on so silent a night.

Keiichi swore later, in court, looking shaken and pale, as to the fact he heard something being dragged away towards the river as he had stared at the car in horror. With cross-questioning, he added that he thought the something must have been large and heavy. He had run down, thinking that Oishi had been attacked and, disoriented, was dragging himself in a direction he thought was safety, but as he broke out onto the river bank, he couldn't see anything. He had searched futilely, following what looked like bloodied drag marks in the gravel, but they ended at the river and he could find nothing else. It was then he had the presence of mind to go back and call for help on Oishi's radio.

Shaking and rambling now, Keiichi had muttered to his parents as they pulled him out of the courtroom that he thought he had seen the Shion doll later in his dressing room with some water weeds tangled in her synthetic hair.

The case seemed open-and-shut to the prosecuting council, especially taking into account what they could read of Oishi's notebook, which they found when they fished his bloated body, as expected, from the river. Keiichi Maebara was suffering from a persecution complex, and delusions as to the incredibly realistic dolls he used as props in his act. It pushed him to murder those he thought most a threat to his rising star and current success.

The verdict was life in prison.

Keiichi had looked stricken as the verdict was announced, but also almost relieved. As though he had taken his delusion so deeply to heart that he was glad for the chance to be away from his so-called animated dolls.

When his parents visited him later in his cell and asked what he wanted them to do with his effects, he looked them in the eyes and said:

"Burn everything but the dolls, and give those to a museum."

Night fell, and Keiichi Maebara got up from his cot to look out the window and see if the mist was rising again. The smoke from the prison kitchen had made him nauseous, and he wanted to clear his head, too. Looking into the thick plexiglass frame, Keiichi expected to see his own mirrored reflection.

Instead he looked into the glassy eyes of a doll.

Kei-chan, are you abandoning me, like you did before, after I took care of that woman for you?

Kei-chan, don't you want to play with us again? I took the man away so he couldn't bother you anymore.

Keiichi-kun, aren't I a good assistant? I stopped that man from rummaging through your things.

Ni-san, aren't I a good little sister? I made sure that man can't hurt you again.

Mew, the museum didn't like us, sir.

And we didn't like them, either.

11.12 PM, USA Central Time