June 18th, 2021

Rika hated summer as a matter of course. Summer was the bloody time, the suffering time, the time when, year after year, something horrible would happen to her, her family, her friends, or her home. Every time the air grew sultry and rich with the scent of growth, and the cicadas hummed and buzzed in the forest, she would look out the window at the verdant green and gnash her teeth, jam her fingers against the wall, dig her nails in and wish, for a moment, that she could just curl up and hide somewhere, somewhere cool, dark, and lonely.

She couldn't, of course. People always came looking for her.

Another, duller hatred was the simple progression of time, and how it was always the same. Rika went through her days in a haze, every day, from the moment she rewound back into a fragment to the moment where her death in June 1983 came. She had been seeing the same people, the same events, for year after year after year, stretching on into a blank and patterned eternity, as mathematically and repetitively precise as a grid, as boring as blank copy paper.

She knew every resident of Hinamizawa by name. She knew their every action upon every day, dreamlike figures that weren't really people anymore moving around her as they followed patterns worn deep by time.

Rika knew that the people around her were real. She knew it. It was just hard to feel that, sometimes, when they all played out the exact same script every time Rika saw them. Chie-sensei taught the same lessons on the same day in the same way, as she'd done for hundreds of years –Rika knew her lessons blind, by now. The same people always waved to her and Satoko in the same way on their way to school. The same chants of defiance were roared at the riot police during the dam protests, the same rocks were thrown, the same injuries bled into the dirt.

What was worse, perhaps, was the fact that there was just enough variation in things that Rika could almost forget that she was stuck in an endless loop that everyone else was unaware of, that the people waving to her weren't automatons and that nothing in the world except herself was real.

Akasaka didn't always come to Hinamizawa to investigate the minister's grandson's disappearance. It was something like a 60-40 chance, Rika figured.

There was the barest, most miniscule chance that Keiichi wouldn't actually move into Hinamizawa. Those worlds were desolate, brittle, and Rika was glad that they ended quickly and almost never came to begin with.

And of course, there was Rule X, the indomitable rule of the fishbowl that she endlessly swam in, the law that governed the madness and destruction that always descended upon one or more of her friends during the June of 1983. Those were variable, so horribly different –but even then, they were still patterns. When Rena began acting strangely, it was always because there were two chopped-up bodies in the dam construction site that she was jittery about, and those fragments always ended in an explosion of gas and flames. When Keiichi began to suspect his friends, it was always Mion and Rena who took the brunt of his bat, always them who were found on the blood-clotted floor of his room as Keiichi perished in a hospital.

When Mion, when Shion, when Satoko, when Rena –always, always, the patterns of self-destruction and madness were the same, and it was only the lead that varied, never the script, nor the parts that they all played. The only miniscule variations came from Rika herself, as she tried to push her friends out of that blood-haloed spotlight and end the murderous plot of the play that her unknowing friends were doomed to perform. Every time, she tried new and old strategies, and every time, she never came close to pulling aside the curtain.

It was why she treasured their club so much.

Here, in the sunny classroom and the bright summer air –here, where Mion's whimsy ran wild and no day was ever the same– here, she could feel like a person, like a human, like the little girl she was supposed to be, playing blissfully with her friends. The games varied, they changed, and never once, in the ordinary days when the club simply gathered to enjoy themselves rather than host events or competitions (competitions that made Rika loathe the sight of dolls, their porcelain eyes staring forward into a future where the Sonozaki basement was stained with blood), never once in those endless days of June 1983 and before, did they ever play the same game in the same way twice.

It was magical.

All Rika's unnatural foresight could do was predict the actions of her friends, memorize the cards and the poker tells on everyone's face –everything else, all the time, she was an ordinary little girl again, someone with no knowledge of the outcome of the game, someone with no foresight, someone who wasn't carrying the crushing weight of the future barreling towards her. She was normal.

Rika had been part of Mion's club for decades, centuries, and yet she had never gotten tired of her beloved friends, not as she had tired so quickly of her own home, of her own family, of the endless, repetitive world she was trapped in. It was for these moments, when she was part of the club, it was for them that she fought so desperately, it was for the joy of a childhood game and the fierce camaraderie of her closest friends, for the easy confidence and calm that they all basked in, light as birds and looking towards a nebulous future that ran in no particular direction, but was always heading towards fun.

Seizing these moments in both hands, fighting to preserve them forever and not merely the year before June 1983 –that, Rika would fight for.

That, Rika would die for.

12.20 PM, USA Central Time