Granted, Rika and other loopers with a limited number of tries can't really do this, but part of me really wants to see a Homura-esque character go to the other end of the "constantly stuck in the same stretch of time" bell curve and instead of becoming deadpan and numb to the world, just start acting absolutely fucking goofy over the course of their time loops. Like, technically there's no consequence for using your meta knowledge to play complicated pranks, or start up completely different relationships with various people just for the hell of it, because soon it'll all go right back to the beginning anyways. So the looper can project a completely different personality for every loop, make friends with your enemies, learn obscene amounts of useless trivia and talents, etc. Fuck around and find out.

June 11th, 2021

Rika didn't always, hadn't always searched desperately for an exit to this endless maze in June.

She'd just been a child the first time it happened, after all, a child who'd been told that she'd died and gone back in time. She'd blissfully babbled to her parents about how they should be super careful in 1981, because they might die to the curse, then gone out to play.

She'd played and she'd played and she'd played, so when Watanagashi happened again, and she lost her parents again, it was a sad shock. But she was young, convinced of her own immortality and of the good in the world, and she'd kept right on playing at the clock ticked closer and closer to that fateful night in June 1983.

The second time she'd died had almost been more shocking than the first. Rika had been young, so young, still believing in miracles and blessings and kindly gods looking down from the heavens, so it had made absolute sense that, having died too soon, too young, and unjustly, someone would turn back time for her so she could live a normal life. Of course it had worked out like that. Why, she was Oyashiro-sama's very own priestess! It would be weirder if she hadn't gotten a little helping hand when the world went wrong for her.

So young, innocent, and so foolish, Rika had wasted this second life of hers in blissful daydreams, eking out a little more fun for herself with the extra knowledge of the future that she had, thinking that her death was just a one-time thing, a freak accident, something that had been fixed already. When she died again, the same way, it had come to her as an incomprehensible shock. Hanyuu had fixed it! Why, how had she died again?

Well, the next time she would be more careful, she had resolved as Hanyuu sent her back to be born again. She would be sure to save herself, next time. She'd make sure that there was no way she could possibly die that June.

Her parents were still taken away from her. She was confronted with an entirely new friend going mad, and died in despair, deep within the bowels of the Sonozaki estate. How, why was this happening? What had turned her boisterous but kind friend into this?

Rika was numb and chilled from hundreds of years of winding back to the same point, but she still remembered how she had started. She remembered how it hadn't been a quick flash of horror, or something creeping up behind her, but a slow, agonizing slide into dread, like she was sinking alone into quicksand. At first it had seemed so simple, so easy to solve, but the more she experienced and the more she learned, the deeper she sunk into the mire that was dragging her down, and the farther away escape became.

She remembered, early on, how towards the very beginning she had simply fled, running and running through the mountains, desperate and desolate. She remembered that when she had crawled into another village, on a day at the very end of June, she'd seen the news of the Great Hinamizawa Disaster plastered all across the newspaper and the television, and sank to her knees in the street, clutching her hair and screaming. She'd thrashed and she'd sobbed and she'd begged, fighting the people who clustered around in concern, trying to help, before she broke free of them and ran straight into the path of a car.

Rika had learned from that, or so she'd thought, and understood that leaving the village was the prelude to disaster. She didn't know, couldn't know, that whether she left alive or left dead was irrelevant: once she was gone, Hinamizawa Syndrome rose in the minds of her fellow villagers, and that terrible Emergency Manual #34 would be put into practice, wiping them all out.

She'd tried saving her friends, one by one as the madness rose within them, but no matter how she tried, she was too small to fight them down, too young to convince them with words that held weight, no matter how much she shouted after them in frustration that they would die if they took this course of action, and couldn't they just listen to her for a moment?!

At first, it had seemed like that poem, that English poem about standing in a yellow wood and looking down two roads, thinking of which one to walk down. Rika had started off on the road less-traveled-by, looking for the answer, the truth, and her escape, but it seemed like every turning in that road took her back to the first one, as the path split and split again, always heading back towards her pitiful demise. It was no longer one fork in the road, it was hundreds, building up a labyrinth of failed endings around her, and worst of all, Rika could no longer find her way back to the beginning, when everything had seemed so clear.

On her darkest nights, she'd stare at the moon with wine dangling from her fingers and wonder if her wasting her of second life, of that first second chance, had brought her to this, before sobbing and hurling the glass at the nearest wall. It didn't matter, anyways, the shards of glass and the broken cup, because she'd be dead and gone far too soon and the wineglass would be fine, would be just as pristine and perfect as though she'd never thrown it.

That, she hated most of all, as time ticked and ticked back to the beginning and she tried to find the fork in the road she'd started from.

9.01 AM, USA Central Time