Rika mentions during Massacre that she and Hanyuu had at one point subscribed to the typical belief that the Sonozakis were behind Oyashiro-sama's curse, which indicates that during the initial parts of her looping, Rika was probably unaware of or only fuzzily understood Hinamizawa Syndrome and the Irie Clinic's place in researching it.

June 26th, 2023

The tires of Rika's bike swished a little as she rolled it over the dew-damp grass, the wet, feather-like touch cool and comforting on her bare legs and sandaled feet. She hummed a little, the large glass bottle heavy in its satchel on her hip. Satoko had promised to make a delicious feast to match up to the imported soy sauce the Sonozaki family had, and Rika was sorely in need of something warm and filling.

Mion hadn't felt… right over these past few days. And then, when she'd picked Rika up and shaken her like a rat behind the school, shouting about restitution and things Rika didn't entirely get…

Rika was worried about her. She'd been paying more attention, recently, to Doctor Irie and the people in his clinic –she'd even eavesdropped on her parents a little, this time around– and she'd figured out that there was a virus, a dangerous virus that people in the village had, that made them act erratic and violent when it was triggered.

She had something to do with this virus, something to do with the research to make it better for the people that had it. Rika knew that, but more importantly, the definition of erratic and violent behavior matched certain things that her friends had been doing around the fifth year of the curse and Rika's tenth year of living very well.

And, well, Mion had certainly been acting erratically ever since the Cotton Drifting Festival. Rika had begun to suspect the festival time –it always seemed like the catalyst for one of her friends to go mad. When Keiichi-san had mumbled about her dance and the mistake he hadn't seen, Rika had suspected him –wondered if he was going to hit Mion and Rena with his bat again.

But then, with how strange Mion had been behaving, especially earlier today, when she'd smacked Rika around…

Well, it wasn't hard to make the connections. Rika had been in this type of world-fragment before, a world where Mion went mad, but she had only seen the aftermath, a shattered Rena and a stunned Keiichi-san. She hadn't come to investigate herself, hadn't looked into it in any real way. She knew that Mion went mad, that she attacked and hurt several members of her family, but Rika had been too young to hear about the ghastly details –or so everyone else had said.

So she very well knew that there were probably corpses in the ancient building up ahead.

Rika just wasn't sure what to do about it. Hanyuu was being very nervous about Rika going to the Sonozaki House to confront Mion, but Rika wasn't sure of what else to do. She didn't want to compound her problems by telling Doctor Irie that something was wrong when there wasn't, and there were no other adults that she could go to, that she could trust. Detective Oishi, certainly, was far too belligerent when it came to the Sonozaki Family for Rika to trust him investigating them.

So, as they said, she thus had to take matters into her own hands and investigate things herself.

Leaning her bike against the outside rim of the sun porch, Rika circled around to the wooden steps, climbing up to knock briskly on the door. Her hands felt a little damp, and she wiped them on the front of her green sundress, taking a deep breath. Thinking about what Keiichi had done to Mion and Rena, what Rena had hinted about the last time Rika had been in a world where Mion had roughed her up in the school yard, it was rather nerve-wracking.

Mion's your friend, Rika reminded herself. She wouldn't hurt you.

Mion and Rena had been Keiichi-san's friends, too.

Shion had been Mion's family.

Everyone in the classroom had been Rena's friends.

Rika swallowed thickly, sweat prickling down the back of her neck. This was scary. Directly confronting the problem on her own –Hanyuu had already sunk into a fretful, invisible silence behind her shoulder– was frightening.

Still, it wasn't as though she could back out now. She had already knocked on the door, and Mion…

…where was Mion? The Sonozaki family's maid wouldn't be here this late, but Oryou-san should still be in the house, at least, and so should Mion. As Rika stood on the doorstep and listened, she realized that she couldn't hear anyone.

Rika wrapped her arms around the glass bottle like she was cradling a teddy bear, rolling her lower lip between her teeth. If Mion wasn't here, and the house was silent, then…?

The sky was clear, and the stars were wild and bright. It was easy to see the path towards the underground vault when Rika turned her head, and she nodded once to herself, as though making a resolution. Slinging the bottle back around to her hip, she hopped delicately off the front porch, then began making her way through the shadow-shrouded garden towards the mountainside.

Crickets hummed and chirped pleasantly in the tall grass around her, and Rika's sandals scuffed quietly against the gravel path. There wasn't a fountain in the decorative pond, and so the water was quiet and nearly still, with the occasional ghost-like swirl of black or bone-white or rusty red from the koi swimming around beneath the surface.

It was quiet, and yet it felt like a normal quiet. Not ominous, not too quiet, just… quiet.

Rika knew better, however, and she tried to keep her steps as silent as possible, cradling the bottle close to her side as though she would have the faintest idea of what to do with it if she had to use it as a weapon. It wasn't like her wrists would be up to the task of swinging it around for long, especially against someone who was as much bigger than her as Mion was.

"Rika, we should leave!" Hanyuu hissed worriedly in her ear as they got closer to the rock face, saw the dull gleam of the huge iron doors embedded in the wall of the cliff.

"Do you want answers or not?" Rika responded in as low a whisper as she could manage. "You can't choose which clues will be useful."

She had a point, and they both knew it. Hanyuu subsided into thin air with another fretful, ebbing whine.

Rika seized the ring fixed into one of the doors, and it took a decent amount of her strength to haul it open enough to slip into the cave. The hinges also yielded with a long, grinding creak of metal, and Rika had to flinch as she wiggled her way past the cracked doors and into the dim light of a dangling overhead bulb. If Mion was down here…

Rika had never been in this particular part of the Sonozaki estate before, but she knew the ceremonial layout well enough –and besides, there was only one way forward. She pattered quietly down the thin wooden steps into another chamber, still clutching the empty soy bottle and glancing all around in fear.

The first few rooms that the Sonozaki Family had carved into the rock were empty, but Rika was aware of an odd scent growing in the air as she crept forward. Something crackling and sharp, almost like bacon, almost like the buzz in her nose from a lightning strike that had landed too close to her house. In the damp rock-scented caves, it cut through the air like a drift of warm fog.

Rika was not sure she liked it.

She especially didn't like it as she entered a room that was all too familiar, filled with tools that she knew. But instead of being old wood and dulled steel coated by centuries of dust, these sacrificial tools were all too new… and all too clean. Rika looked at the table, with clamps for human arms and legs, and at the manacles dangling from a wooden crosspiece, and the ominous stains on the linoleum floor, and felt a cold tingle of fear crystalize in her gut.

You cleaned tools after you had used them. That was why the torture instruments in the shrine were dusty, and these were polished and ready for use.

She gulped, and then continued to creep cautiously across the length of the room to enter into the next.

Before too terribly long, she found a honeycombed chamber that soared high above her head, filled with holes in the rock that led to smaller caves, or tunnels, or… were those bars across the entrances?

There was a white figure slumped near the bars of one of these cells, and as Rika cautiously stepped out into the chamber itself to look around, they stirred.

"Hello…?" a familiar voice called, hoarse and low with fear, as the teenage girl with long green hair sat up and wrapped her hand around one of the bars. "Is someone there?"

Before she could really question the wisdom of it, Rika was scuttling forward, and she saw familiar teal eyes widen in the teenager's face as she spotted her.

"Rika-chan!" she gasped, and Rika came to a halt before the bars, looking with worry and despair at the padlock. She didn't know how to pick it, and the bars were far too solid for her to try and dislodge them. "What are you doing here?!"

"I came to get soy sauce, mew." Rika offered, using her sweetest voice as she half-turned to show the bottle in its satchel on her hip. "Are you okay, Shion-san?"

"It's me." the other girl said, pressing her face against the bars. "It's Mion."

Rika's eyes widened.

Oh.

Oh.

"Listen, you have to get out of here." Mion hissed insistently, fear evident in every line of her. Rika had never seen her club leader look so scared, nor so disheveled, dressed only in a nightgown with her hair loose down her back. "Shion's gone nuts, you have to go get help before she comes back-"

Mion's alarmed gasp was the last thing Rika heard, and the cold, double-pronged press of a tazer against the back of her neck was the last thing Rika felt, before the world exploded in blazing arcs of electricity that streaked across the blackness that filled her eyes.

6.39 AM, USA Central Time