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Man, I feel like that Shrek meme. 2020, can you stop trying to kill everyone for FIVE MINUTES?!

In plainer speech, for those of y'all that don't already know this, I live in a suburb of Minneapolis and as most people probably know things are going a bit crazy here, with riots and looting and so on stacked on top of the pandemic and our latest outrage of police brutality and racism. I'm doing okay, and feeling a bit sad that I can't go show support with all the other people peacefully protesting, but my parents would FREAK if I went downtown right now. And I will admit that even as a white person, I'm still more than a little freaked myself about police retaliation against any protests I might partake in.

Alas, the only thing I can do is try to lift people's spirits with my preplanned Higurashi content, and announce my wholehearted support for the braver people standing up for justice in my city over this past week.

Black Lives Matter!

June 1st, 2020

Miyo Takano stood on the cusp of a hill and inhaled deeply, slowly, savoringly, tasting each separate aroma wrought on the humid summer air. She wondered if she could taste the virus slowly permeating her very being in the oxygen she breathed, something salty that tasted of fear and despair.

Perhaps there was nothing. Perhaps she was just (stifle a grin) hallucinating.

Miyo Takano knows she is a beautiful woman, and she's used it to her advantage more times than she cares to think about. Her lovely, slender fingers itch with the need to get at the secrets stored away in this remote little corner of Japan, the secrets that her grandpa had worked so hard to unearth and discover, her digits tingling and twitching in the bright summer air.

She walks down the hill, smiling and nodding to the villagers she passes on the way, the very picture of a demure, helpful nurse heading to her brand-new positing in the recently-built clinic. She grins to herself when she thinks of what hides beneath these kindly false faces, wrinkled and sunbrowned from long years of work in the surrounding fields. That grandmotherly woman on the corner, should her Syndrome awaken, what form would it take? Does she have grandchildren that will beg and plead and scream as she hacks at them with a knife, splattering those kindly wrinkles with red red blood? Or perhaps a husband she's loved for many years, and she'll scream decades' worth of insecurities at him as she bludgeons him with a chair, perhaps?

Miyo wants to find out, but alas, it would probably be frowned upon at the facility. Hiring Doctor Irie may have been a mistake, but he was young and eager, full of the want to prove himself, and so hopelessly naïve he may as well be butter in her lovely, manicured hands. Her backers wanted her to have someone in charge, however meaninglessly, and Miyo will take naivete over actual competence, at least for a little while.

Miyo Takano makes her introductions to the village of Hinamizawa, with plans ticking away in the back of her mind, and her smile is that of a snake's, preparing to eat the eggs of the bird its facing.

12.17 AM, USA Central Time