Chapter 2: Scarred for life
The halls were empty. Completely devoid of any life. At times, the cursed machine was completely silence, any activity as though vaporized in comparison to the blood-chilling events that usually took place there. Creeping, ominous powers were lying in wait, resonating between the halls' wooden walls.
Many souls had fallen here, every single one more unique than the previous. They had been simple human beings, each with their own set of flaws and traits. Yet, this didn't in any way grant you any kind of freedom from the consequence if your ignorance got the better of you.
Loneliness weren't uncommon in these halls either. So many came here, yet loneliness was still present. Why, you ask? Think of it like this.
The core has her own plane of existence within the machine, and then her three engineers each have one of their own. There's nothing that can determine which of these planes of existence you'll end up in after going through with what brought you here in the first place.
The Sachiko Ever After charm, posted and published on the internet by a careless blog owner without a single regard in the aspect of the safety of others. Selfishness, you could call it.
Loneliness, indeed…
The sudden silence was broken by footsteps that, strangely enough, couldn't be heard. They did resonate between the woodworks of the walls, but to the naked ear alone, they were unperceivable.
The footsteps belonged to one of the lost spirits, slowly walking through one of the darkened hallways without any rhyme or reason, without any apparent intent in sight. The spirit itself was a girl, most likely in her late, or somewhat late, teens. It would be hard to make out any prominent features just by looking at her alone.
Her hair was brown, though it may have been hard to determine, and it was nicely done into two curls right below her ears. This one seemed like a recently dead.
-"Where am I even going, anyway?" The spirit said solemnly, her cold lips not quite moving in sync with her words, and her chill voice amplified by the echoing halls. She was facing another of the classrooms, fully aware that there would be nothing in there whatsoever that could be of use to her in this situation.
Like anything could be.
She carried on past the door, like always carrying the pain of her death on her neck with her. She looked like she had been hung with a rope, her neck slightly longer than what it should have been and visible rope marks on the soft skin. The choking sensation she had felt during her last moments in the living life would always be with her, and she knew this.
She reached a staircase, a whole hurricane of thoughts swirling around inside her head and dead mind, like it usually did. She hadn't been hung by any normal means. To anyone, it might have just been a suicide, a hopeless solution of a hopeless problem, but if one would have gone even deeper, like a friend of this deceased person had done, they would surely have found out the truth.
-''I miss you, Naomi…" The ghost whispered, the sound waves effectively fooling her into thinking someone else was talking to her by the echo. She tightly pressed her hand to her chest, where her heart was. Had she still been living, she would have felt its ordinary, regular thumping.
At this stage, she couldn't feel a single thing. It was an eerie, uncomfortable silence that reminded her that she no longer walked among the living.
Without any further words, she continued down the stairs, and like ever since she had passed on to the unsettling afterlife, she had not a single goal in her sight.
The sun was shining like it usually did, though for a certain person, this did not bring anything into her mind that reminded her of open meadows and beautiful roses. If anything, it somehow just reminded her even further of what was now missing in her life.
A friend, so close to her, so loved by her that she couldn't begin to describe it.
This girl was one of the survivors in the horrible incident. She had seen it all, felt the anger and resentment of the previously deceased, yet she had still been lucky to have kept breathing when she finally was able to escape the completely devastating place. And despite this, she had lost one of the two people who really made life worth living.
-''Naomi? Are you okay?" Came a whisper of a soft male voice from somewhere to the girl's left. She snapped her head up, startled at the mention of her first name, and immediately, instinctively, tried to force the sleepy blur out of her eyes. Though she couldn't see that well, she immediately recognized the voice.
-''Satoshi…" She said, voice sleep-drunken. "What… Happened?" She didn't at once recognize her surroundings, only that it was a large room with white walls and many tables. There was a small rustle in the background, like a lot of people were talking quietly at once. The girl, Naomi, shook her head rapidly, yawning in the progress. She could sense her friend Satoshi's presence a few inches away to her left, and she then realized that she had fallen asleep during class.
-''You feel asleep." Satoshi whispered to her, confirming her suspicions. A silent moan slipped out through her lips as she slowly, progressively made her way up from the pits of sleep she had fallen into previously. She sat up straight, one hand on her aching head and dishevelled short, brown hair.
-''What time is it?" She asked wearily, looking about the walls of the classroom in order to find a clock, but stopped when she remembered that this new teacher had a tendency to take the clock off the wall every lesson so that the student would focus more on the work that were on their hands.
Normally, before the horrible event, Satoshi sat a few desks away from her, but a recent position change by the teacher that had replaced Ms Yui had made the two of them sit next to each other. Naomi often found herself picking up on the cologne he used every morning before he came to school, and the shampoo he used for his hair.
Just as often, Naomi had to snap herself out of this state of being before she was discovered and thoroughly embarrassed.
Going to school on an almost daily basis was hard enough as it was. Satoshi was now her only real, close friend. Sure, she and the other four survivors of the massacre that was the cursed machine of Heavenly Host Elementary school were now closer to each other than they had ever been before, but the relationship between her and Satoshi was even deeper than that. They had been friends ever since back in kindergarten, where they had first met during a fruit break and sitting next to each other at one of the tables. Ever since that, they had talked almost daily, and as the years passed, they became closer and closer. Sure, they usually joked and messed with each other, not to mention a few… Embarrassingly intimate moments, but now Naomi felt like he was the only person she still had.
As if the blasted machine's curse wasn't enough to begin with, it had one further, horrific cog with a side effect. Any soul that fell in its halls would forever and ever be deleted from all of existence, all traces of their persons simply vaporized into thin air. This had thus happened to the four deceased victims, and the only ones who could remember them were the five who had returned alive from there.
This had taken quite a toll on the young girl Naomi.
She didn't have anyone she could go to for support. Deemed mentally unstable by even her own mother, the death and erasing from existence of her best friend Seiko, another one of the poor souls trapped in those halls, had caused her mind to huddle up and close itself off from much of the outside world. Since no one could remember Seiko but her and the four others, no one believed her when she talked about said deceased soul.
-''Naomi…" Satoshi could only whisper her name, painstakingly aware of the constant pain she was forced to go through every day. It hurt him greatly to see her like this.
-"I'm okay, Satoshi…" Naomi replied to him, rubbing her sleep-deprived eyes sluggishly. She then managed to make herself smile at her friend, doing her best to reassure him that she was doing well.
At the same time, she knew that he probably wasn't buying it. They had known each other for so long that they practically knew how the other one worked. Naomi knew that Satoshi understood what a burden the loss of her best friend Seiko was on her shoulders, and that this gloomy, silent attitude wasn't at all part of her usual demeanour.
Satoshi looked on silently, waiting for her to continue, if she would.
-''But I miss Seiko… So much…" She said, a bit louder than she had intended due to her voice cracking a bit. A nearby student snapped her head up in attention, having heard the name of the supposedly imaginary friend of the girl.
When the group had gone to school the next day, they were limitlessly shocked to see that their deceased friends had been erased from existence. Neither student nor teacher had recognized the names they had mentioned, and they had been effectively deemed as crazy by not only a few of their fellow classmates, but also by people from adjacent classes as well.
-"The crazy bitch is at it again…" Satoshi could pick up the voice of a female student from somewhere behind him, whispering to her friends, and he was about to get up from his seat and tell her to back off, but someone beat him to it.
-''Hey, don't say things like that! Mind your own business!" Another female voice piped up, and Satoshi turned his head to see a fairly short, blue-haired girl glaring daggers at the girl who had just expressed herself with words uncalled for. Though the "culprit", so to speak, was a few good inches taller than the blue-haired girl, it seemed like it was the other way around.
It was their class representative, Ayumi, another survivor of the godforsaken event.
The class representative in question walked over and situated herself in front of the girl she had just addressed. She was soon joined by another student who had apparently overheard the entire thing, and the atmosphere in the classroom had quickly turned from relaxed to fairly nasty.
The newly arrived in the group student was a tall male, with bleached hair and the usual male school uniform, a dark grey jacket which covered a white shirt. Under this, he wore a red t-shirt. His pants were also dark grey, and he didn't look amused.
-''That's enough. Back off." The boy said, trying his best to remain calm. If there was one thing he was sensitive about at this state of mind, it was anyone trying to harass one of his friends. Even though they weren't the closest, this boy definitely considered Naomi his friend.
-''Wow, Kishinuma. Why do you hang out with these losers anyway?" The girl who had first started this was around seventeen, possibly slightly younger, and she was fairly tall for her age, compared to other female students in this class. She had always been quite bashful in her nature, and this was apparently another of those times where she decided to exact this behaviour.
-"That doesn't concern you, Hayamoto. Just stop it." The boy called Kishinuma Yoshiki growled, and the teacher of the classroom who had recently been helping another student with something came over to check on the situation. Naomi had buried her head into her arms, tears threatening to burst out though her eyes due to all the stress.
Thankfully, the situation was quickly cleared up, and Ayumi, the class representative, went back to her seat. Satoshi, who had remained seated down and comforting Naomi, faced the tall boy.
-''Hey, thanks, Yoshiki." He said with a smile that Yosjiki returned.
-''No problem. Is Nakashima okay?" He asked worriedly, Naomi looking up at him upon hearing him say her name.
-''Y-Yeah, I'm good." She said, the lump in her throat hurting her. "Thanks, Kishinuma." He smiled at her before going back to his own seat. Satoshi once again faced her, putting a comforting hand on her shoulder.
-"Everything will be fine. I promise."
(A/N: I might be able to write more tomorrow. Tell me what you think.)