Game for a Memory
Chapter 2

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The mansion was just another vague memory, and in this case it didn't matter because it was no longer there.

Still, staring at the ruins that slowly smouldered, Hachijo Tohya wondered if that wasn't a terribly sad thought to nurture. This had been his home…somewhat. Or not. There was a seed of repulsion in this place as well and he wondered at that. A part of the past that wasn't his, that would never be his and he didn't need to know…

But another part of him was rolling tears, and the only way to understand would be to know.

There was still no headache and no welcome distraction from the clawing thoughts and so he did the only thing he could. He distracted himself, walked into the thickest part of the smoke until he could barely see at all and could barely breathe as well – and because if he couldn't breathe, those uncontrollable litanies couldn't dance with his tongue either.

And he would faint and fall and roll long before he died of smoke inhalation, and would the game world even let him die such a lax death? He remembered gunshots and blood, lots of blood, and he could only assume that was the Rokkenjima murders the dead island had grown so famous for. But most of the specifics were still lost to him. Just bodies, laid out like a procession and the mansion blurring as he ran through each and every room, searching – and finding nothing but another dead body waiting for him. And the faces blurred together until he couldn't work out who he hadn't seen but knew who he had… All the cousins definitely, though for some reason he'd been relieved as well…

Someone ran through the smoke: a small someone with pink baubles in her hair. And then there was only shades of white spelling nothing in particular and Tohya wondered how he could have known those baubles were pink, or indeed they were baubles at all. But the image was too solid in his mind now, and he couldn't doubt it. Another memory from his past that teased him without refrain – and didn't he have enough of those already?

But the little girl wouldn't leave him alone, and it wasn't Maria because Maria had been bigger than that or smaller than that and there'd been a solid six years in between. It was someone else. Someone who was constantly in his shadow, constantly on his mind – and yet still so far away. Why was everybody he knew so far away?

Well, he knew the answer to that question. Hachijo Tohya only knew people aside from Ikuko and Battler Ushiromiya through one or the other of them. And if this was a shadow of Battler Ushiromiya, then the shadow that was far from sight but never far from mind would be…

Ange Ushiromiya, who'd been absent from Rokkenjima in the fateful October of 1986. Not considered a survivor of the tragedy for her absence, but she still bore the weight of it on her shoulders and in her name. A position no-one can envy, he'd thought, except she had money, both old and new, and that was enough cause for many a person.

Ange Ushiromiya… Not the first time he'd remembered her until she slipped away again like the shadow she was. And that was another quarrel with the Battler in his mind, because she was all alone and he was keeping his brother away from her… And yet was it not also true that her brother was dead and he was a perfect stranger who was only now discovering pieces of the truth that could weave as good a forgery as the others. And that was a quarrel he chose to lose, to refuse.

The phantom of Ange Ushiromiya vanished into the smoke and he did not chase her.

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He wandered through the smoke. There had been a mansion here till a few hours earlier and he slowly put it together in his mind. Still there were blank spots everywhere and what stood out the most was the blood. A dead body in almost every room he checked to find – or else the empty rooms just blurred together in his mind. And finally was Natsumi and he just stood there, because there was almost no-one left. Eva, Shannon and Kanon. And the witch of the island is there ever was one.

But at least that part of him had not changed with time. Neither Battler Ushiromiya nor Hachijo Tohya believed in magic and that was the quarrel Ikuko had laughingly made the plot of their novel. A novel that he would never draft for her, and that she perhaps would never even write. Or perhaps she would, in a twisted rendering of his memory and his memories were twisted enough already. Twisted and thorny like a rosebush who tightened his noose the more he struggled in it.

But a dead mansion told him nothing, and when he felt the simmering coals burn his feet, he began to walk again.

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He could hear voices. He followed them and found himself at the wharf and there was a boat heading out to sea. It was a dream elopement on the docks. The man with red hair sweeping the woman with blonde right off her feet. The sorcerer and the witch. But why a sorcerer? And why a witch?

'And what do you know?' said Battler Ushiromiya's amused voice. 'Looks like our minds still work alike.'

'How do you mean?' asked a tired Tohya. 'And what exactly is the purpose of this setting?'

'Haven't you seen?' returned the other. 'This is Rokkenjima of the sixth of October, as you've already surmised. And there is the death of an eternal witch and the birth of a sorcerer.'

Tohya did not understand at all, but still he watched. The boat drifted out to sea with two – and then with a ripple it emptied and there was no-one.

The boat he'd been on that capsized.

The boat Battler Ushiromiya had been on. Except it wasn't upside down and there'd been another, the woman, the witch, on it.

'Beatrice, the eternal witch,' said Battler Ushiromiya.

'Beatrice who claimed responsibility for the murders but who did not truly exist,' replied Tohya. 'But even the witch died, when no-one remembered her. Died until some whisper of the island being cursed arose, and then she resurrected.'

'And so magic is the word of mouth, the cat box that spirals out of control,' surmises Battler. 'Of course it is. It is a construct, after all, and not a true nature unless you yourself are a believer.'

'I am not,' said Hachijo Tohya.

But it was unnecessary to say, because he had once been Battler Ushiromiya and wasn't that the entire basis of this mystery novel?

'Then shall I take Beato's place and prove you wrong?' asked Battler, before shaking his head. 'Ah, but that is not the purpose of this little interim of ours.'

'Interim.' Tohya tasted the word on his tongue.

'But of course,' said the other, 'for I am no longer Battler Ushiromiya as well, but BATTLER, the endless Sorcerer.'

.

The sorcerer was born out at sea, where there was no-one but a dying woman or a dying witch to bear witness to that birth. The origins of Hachijo Tohya are, similarly, a cat-box, and so is the birth of the endless Sorcerer. The tales wrought around the witch and likewise, but that box is being searched for and they may still find it, and when the lid comes off, the truth behind the tragedy of Rokkenjima island will be revealed.

But who would solve the puzzles that centred around Battler Ushiromiya? He was just another of the island's victims, after all. One of so many people and why would he be more or less special than the rest? Only Eva Ushiromiya and only because she somehow escaped that place with her life intact and the world knew it.

But there was the boat and there was Battler Ushiromiya and the golden-haired wish disappearing into the depths.

And how long had it been, since they disappeared into those depths?

If you don't move, the game doesn't start. So the endless Sorcerer had said and so it was, but was the game merely frozen now or was there nothing more to see in this scene save the endless waves.

But though he tried to move away, the waves were always there and always plain, and the ripples never quite faded away.