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synodiporia_ooc2014-02-21 09:29 pm
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Test Drive #1
Welcome to the Synodiporia Test Drive Meme! Below the cut there are four new prompts, and here are the four original prompts, which you’re still welcome to use here. When you comment, be sure you specify what prompt you want to play with, and please put up your own threadstarter - it makes for a much more friendly environment that a forest of bare toplevels!
Prompt #5 takes a look at an event in the game’s recent handwaved backstory; #6 goes a little further back, exploring what it’s like for characters to wake up and think they’re someone else, #7 is a survival-horror exploradora continuation of Prompt #3 on the previous testdrive (by popular demand), and Prompt #8 shows what helping an idled character back into the game will look like!
Before you start, we’d like you to please take a quick look at the game’s Concept, its Rules, and the Liminal Space & Previous Universes pages, just to give you the background info you’ll need for some of these prompts And if you’re looking for more information, the Directory is here and the Reserves page is here.
Prompts:
Prompt #5: The Belljar Riots
You can hear the crowd, maybe three streets over, like a stormfront breaking. Shouts, shattering glass, drumming footsteps, it all blends together into white noise. They’re coming for you, and you know it - and to make it worse, they don’t even know who ‘you’ are. Belljar Island has trapped all sorts of interdimensional wanderers, not just Fellow Travelers, but the people who lived in this world all along have had enough. They’re coming for all of you.
Behind you looms the Hotel California in all its faded grandeur, spiral stairs twining up to balconies that run the length of the building in all its weird Victorian folly. It’s where every unwanted visitor to Belljar gets room and board - you won’t be safe there, but it’s where all your things are, where all your friends are. You can face the mob, try to run, try to hide elsewhere in the neighborhood… but whatever you do, you’d better do it soon.
Prompt #6: Spark Infiltrators
The Spark is a chrome disk sixteen kilometers in diameter, floating like a leaf on the solar wind through the isolation of space, and home to all sixty-two million surviving members of the human race. Nine fusion reactors provide more power than you’ll ever need - more power than planet Earth ever had, if there really was an Earth - and nano-assemblers can snare the castoff plasma and shape it into anything you can dream of, if you’d like to bother with the material. Most people don’t. They spend their lives plugged into the Virtu, a computer network that thinks at the speed of light, responsive to its users’ every whim, shaping fairytales and whims that can, thanks to direct access to your nervous system, literally feel more real than reality. When Virtu bores them, they have the vats that grow their food build them tailored bodies they can project their consciousness into, experiencing reality as a custom-grown alien.
This is the life you were born to. All your needs are met. Only one thing matters: staving off boredom. Whether you’ve done that by shaping reality to your liking, or devoted it to scholarship or some other course, you live in a world of endless novelty where few things are strange.
Seeing a group of people whose Virtu ID-strings all begin with 63, however, most certainly qualifies. The ID-string is an 11-digit fingerprint… and there’s no need for those first digits to ever rise above 62.
Prompt #7: Outside the Morgue at Moebius
No-one has found any real clues to how you all woke up as scarred amnesiacs in the morgue. No-one knows why there’s a warning etched on the door, pleading with you to stay in. And no-one knows who’s sobbing quietly in the distance, or what it is that’s frightened or hurt them.
But not everyone is patient enough to wait for the answers. At almost the same time, someone blows the front door open in a rain of makeshift doorstops, while another impatient party bursts through the back wall, giving you an alternate route. A cool breeze floods into the room as the pressure equalizes, but already people are fighting the wind, picking one route or another and plunging out into the night. If there’s safety in numbers, it won’t be safe to stay waiting here for long.
As for what characters find outside? An arid, windy forest in the middle of the night; with gravel roads stretching off under the sharp-edged shadows of the trees. It's all but impossible to tell what direction the distant sobbing comes from. There's a thick scent of rotting vegetation on the air, dark and vivid... and it's a scent that seems to get into people's heads. For most, it does nothing but heighten adrenaline - fear is scarier, anger fiercer, paranoia keener. But for perhaps one out of every five people who smell it, it will lead suddenly, after a few minutes' time, to violent madness.
Prompt #8: A Dungeon Rescue
The paper-walled palace seems to stretch on endlessly in all directions, doors and screens folding back to reveal more doors and screens, floors covered in tatami mats and all but identical, save that sometimes they burst into song when stepped on.
It’s as disorienting as a house of mirrors. The doors open and shut on their own, and shadows flit behind them, distant lights bobbing crazily and sharply changing the angle and depth of the shade. Sometimes those shadows are nothing. Sometimes, they’re allies, separated by the fragile mobile labyrinth. And of course, sometimes they’re creatures with glittering teeth and cat-pupiled green eyes, attacking with a sound like a rush of wind and flitting away around the nearest corner after a single swipe.
Your whiskers twitch and your ears flutter nervously - everyone has those traits here, as if you were all mice. You try not to think about the tails.
Somewhere, down one of these dim corridors, a lost friend is waiting for you. Once or twice, you’ve had shouted conversations that echoed and shivered down the halls, only to fade into the distance, whether you moved or not.
Ahead of you, the one visible hallway has gone impenetrably black, as if there’s a cloud of ink filling it. But it should be easy enough to sidestep whatever it is but opening a door or simply tearing open a wall.
Prompt #5 takes a look at an event in the game’s recent handwaved backstory; #6 goes a little further back, exploring what it’s like for characters to wake up and think they’re someone else, #7 is a survival-horror exploradora continuation of Prompt #3 on the previous testdrive (by popular demand), and Prompt #8 shows what helping an idled character back into the game will look like!
Before you start, we’d like you to please take a quick look at the game’s Concept, its Rules, and the Liminal Space & Previous Universes pages, just to give you the background info you’ll need for some of these prompts And if you’re looking for more information, the Directory is here and the Reserves page is here.
Prompts:
Prompt #5: The Belljar Riots
You can hear the crowd, maybe three streets over, like a stormfront breaking. Shouts, shattering glass, drumming footsteps, it all blends together into white noise. They’re coming for you, and you know it - and to make it worse, they don’t even know who ‘you’ are. Belljar Island has trapped all sorts of interdimensional wanderers, not just Fellow Travelers, but the people who lived in this world all along have had enough. They’re coming for all of you.
Behind you looms the Hotel California in all its faded grandeur, spiral stairs twining up to balconies that run the length of the building in all its weird Victorian folly. It’s where every unwanted visitor to Belljar gets room and board - you won’t be safe there, but it’s where all your things are, where all your friends are. You can face the mob, try to run, try to hide elsewhere in the neighborhood… but whatever you do, you’d better do it soon.
Prompt #6: Spark Infiltrators
The Spark is a chrome disk sixteen kilometers in diameter, floating like a leaf on the solar wind through the isolation of space, and home to all sixty-two million surviving members of the human race. Nine fusion reactors provide more power than you’ll ever need - more power than planet Earth ever had, if there really was an Earth - and nano-assemblers can snare the castoff plasma and shape it into anything you can dream of, if you’d like to bother with the material. Most people don’t. They spend their lives plugged into the Virtu, a computer network that thinks at the speed of light, responsive to its users’ every whim, shaping fairytales and whims that can, thanks to direct access to your nervous system, literally feel more real than reality. When Virtu bores them, they have the vats that grow their food build them tailored bodies they can project their consciousness into, experiencing reality as a custom-grown alien.
This is the life you were born to. All your needs are met. Only one thing matters: staving off boredom. Whether you’ve done that by shaping reality to your liking, or devoted it to scholarship or some other course, you live in a world of endless novelty where few things are strange.
Seeing a group of people whose Virtu ID-strings all begin with 63, however, most certainly qualifies. The ID-string is an 11-digit fingerprint… and there’s no need for those first digits to ever rise above 62.
Prompt #7: Outside the Morgue at Moebius
No-one has found any real clues to how you all woke up as scarred amnesiacs in the morgue. No-one knows why there’s a warning etched on the door, pleading with you to stay in. And no-one knows who’s sobbing quietly in the distance, or what it is that’s frightened or hurt them.
But not everyone is patient enough to wait for the answers. At almost the same time, someone blows the front door open in a rain of makeshift doorstops, while another impatient party bursts through the back wall, giving you an alternate route. A cool breeze floods into the room as the pressure equalizes, but already people are fighting the wind, picking one route or another and plunging out into the night. If there’s safety in numbers, it won’t be safe to stay waiting here for long.
As for what characters find outside? An arid, windy forest in the middle of the night; with gravel roads stretching off under the sharp-edged shadows of the trees. It's all but impossible to tell what direction the distant sobbing comes from. There's a thick scent of rotting vegetation on the air, dark and vivid... and it's a scent that seems to get into people's heads. For most, it does nothing but heighten adrenaline - fear is scarier, anger fiercer, paranoia keener. But for perhaps one out of every five people who smell it, it will lead suddenly, after a few minutes' time, to violent madness.
Prompt #8: A Dungeon Rescue
The paper-walled palace seems to stretch on endlessly in all directions, doors and screens folding back to reveal more doors and screens, floors covered in tatami mats and all but identical, save that sometimes they burst into song when stepped on.
It’s as disorienting as a house of mirrors. The doors open and shut on their own, and shadows flit behind them, distant lights bobbing crazily and sharply changing the angle and depth of the shade. Sometimes those shadows are nothing. Sometimes, they’re allies, separated by the fragile mobile labyrinth. And of course, sometimes they’re creatures with glittering teeth and cat-pupiled green eyes, attacking with a sound like a rush of wind and flitting away around the nearest corner after a single swipe.
Your whiskers twitch and your ears flutter nervously - everyone has those traits here, as if you were all mice. You try not to think about the tails.
Somewhere, down one of these dim corridors, a lost friend is waiting for you. Once or twice, you’ve had shouted conversations that echoed and shivered down the halls, only to fade into the distance, whether you moved or not.
Ahead of you, the one visible hallway has gone impenetrably black, as if there’s a cloud of ink filling it. But it should be easy enough to sidestep whatever it is but opening a door or simply tearing open a wall.
#7
He can't see anything watching, but that isn't doing much to make him feel better.
"We'll be obvious targets on the road." But the road, it's quite clear, is also the only way they've got a hope of keeping the crowd together.
no subject
On the other, it would have been bad if something was outside waiting for them and they were both caught off guard by it. At least one of them would have the advantage of knowing what was out there. The thing is he didn't actually bother telling Hijikata he wasn't following him, it just somehow happened in the rush of the others passing around him one way versus another to leave.
Doesn't matter, though, because that morgue? It isn't that big, just like the inside of it. Which means Souji eventually comes around from the front of it to trace its structure to its back until he sees the others, Hijikata included.
The sobbing is starting to grate on Souji's nerves, though, and while he wanted to reply to the comment about the road the vice-commander made, he can't get his jaw to unlocked from clenching his teeth enough to say anything at all until a bit after the moment's gone and he's missed his opportunity. So, he just takes one last look back around the side of the morgue that he'd wandered along to get back here; all with no trace of a danger even within the shadows.
...Why does that sound carry equally regardless of where he's moved? What the hell is going on and how does he just make it stop, already, it's really— he's pulled from his thoughts by the sudden smell he realizes for the first time since exiting the morgue.
". . . A forest and plants are rotting," he brings one hand up to cover the bridge of his nose as he takes a slightly sharper smell of the air, hoping maybe it'll be less generic and more identifiable if he gives it some thought. Regardless, it's almost never a good thing in an environment like this, no matter which possibility you try to surmise in your head, especially at this pungent of a smell.
no subject
"Nothing else important that way?"
It's almost rhetorical. If there were anything seriously pressing, an obvious threat or a noticeable clue, he's sure Souji would have led with that, because for all that the man knows how to vex him in a way nobody else has ever been able to match, Souji also knows when to drop it and focus on what's important. If he didn't mention anything else, then the most noteworthy thing probably is -
- why is that smell so strong?
Rotting and dead plants in a forest make sense, certainly, but the stench seems a little too overpowering. Like the forest itself is dying, and it's not just going through the usual cycle of life.
no subject
Souji stops dead, his eyes dilating in sudden realization. He doesn't know anything more than anyone else, and that message only said they were too late to do anything but scatter and hope they might save one. The thing that Souji had found almost obnoxiously ironic about it was how she had been going on about how they shouldn't wander far from one another and shouldn't venture anywhere until they have everything markered and yet the writing was telling them to do the complete opposite.
And, of course, the conflicting message once again was absurdly lacking the needed context to even hold an ounce of water, but, he remembers his conversation with Hijikata conversation earlier.
( Wait. Don't go out there. Just wait. )
"It's more like - like what you said about smell, or light, or...I don't know. Something that can seep out around the edges?"
( Too late. Scatter. )—and that sound is starting to warp into less generic sobs and hold a voice to them that's far too familiar to him and Souji knows he's not here but how does really he know he's not here when they can't remember anything to begin with?
"...This was a mistake coming out here." He keeps his nose covered, eyes now drawn to the ground as he rapidly tries to put things into place but nothing's falling into place except one thing: they really should have listened and waited. His voice falls much quieter, to be barely audible to anyone past himself but the wind lets up just long enough for it to be quite easy for Hijikata to pick it up at the distance between them. "So, perhaps it really is the air it was trying to keep out, after all."
But why.
( He really wants to break something. Or hurt someone before they get the first move to do the same. )
no subject
He was just throwing shit at the wall and hoping something would stick when he suggested it before, but that smell is starting to feel like it's seeping under his skin, like he could take a hundred baths and still smell like rotting leaves, and when Souji puts that thought to voice, Hijikata has a nasty feeling that maybe he was making more sense than he realized before.
"It's a mistake we can't fix now."
And he's halfway to saying that they should just get the hell out of here and see how far they can get, see if there's something else to be done, before his own words echo in his head just long enough for him to think -
Now.
Maybe not too late for next time.
And he turns sharply on his heel to head straight back into the morgue. There hadn't been enough of that previous message to convince anyone that they were really waiting for something, but if they could at least add something, anything to give it a little more context and a little more weight -
no subject
After he let out his realization, Souji had gone to slowly push himself back up against the wall, falling to it like as if in a frustrated defeatist type way to try and think of something they could do.
That suggestion of why he really did so couldn't have been further from the truth.
When Hijikata goes to move and head back in, Souji gets a really bad feeling about it—like the other is doing ever single thing that he shouldn't be doing, that he's going to trap himself in some god-awful situation, and he's going to die and the investigation is going to somehow complete and he's not going to come back and he's going to lose Hiji—
( shit. )
Souji goes to pull away from the wall to follow, intending to yell to him to stop him because why is he going back in there, why—
"Hi—!"
He's cut off immediately, feeling the adrenaline in him so out of control and misfiring feelings that he shouldn't be having, aggravating things that he doesn't need aggravated. There's nothing he can do about it, now, though, and he brings a hand up to his mouth as he turns away to lean his right shoulder against the wall as he chokes, failing to hold back a sudden coughing fit that just piles upon itself until he's he practically clawing at the brick of the morgue for some support as finally lets himself slip down to his knees. The blood is hot and sticky , splattering past his hand and to cover it with the concentrated mucusy red film liquid.
But even now, even as he's trying to concentrate on one single thing instead of letting his mind scatter in every direction, he can only think two things:
One ( I need to get away from here—away from him—before I— ) is rapidly being devoured by the other ( I'm going to peel the skin away before ripping muscle from bone while they're still alive to feel it—and I'll start with him ).
Oh god.
no subject
At the end of the day, one can't expect Hijikata not to worry about family. Especially when that's all the family he has left.
He's by Souji's side in an instant, faster than he can even collect his words and ask. He knows that he should be trying to get the message somewhere, put down whatever suspicions they have and hope that maybe it'll give them one more thing to think about when this nightmare starts all over again, but -
Souji.
He's lost enough people by not being there. It doesn't matter if a sword can't save Souji, if illness is the kind of enemy he doesn't know how to fight and can't fight in someone else's name.
He can't not be there.
no subject
( because he doesn't get it, he doesn't want his help, he doesn't want his attention, he doesn't want his concern, he doesn't want his pity, he doesn't want him to do exactly as he feared—as he knew the other would do—and leave him behind again, because once was bad enough—)
"Get away!" he snaps as he rips his hand from his mouth, immediately reaching to grab at Hijikata's shoulder with it still covered in blood and give him a shove to emphasize his point. His heart is racing a thousand miles a minute, but he can't tell if it's because of what's occurring or because of what's occurring with Hijikata right there. "Run—"
There's a bit of a desperate plea that shows itself there despite attempts to hide it and Souji brings his hand back to cough into the back it and his wrist, sinking to just fall a little more against the wall even as his right hand is reaches towards the tsuka of his wakizashi.
This is going to end badly.
no life did not eat me for like two weeks whatever gave that impression...
The first part, at least - not so much the part about running. And never in that kind of tone; it's always been about Souji not wanting the attention, insisting he was fine, it's always been about annoyance or anger. It's always been about Souji not wanting to be treated like a child or an invalid, wanted to be treated completely normally when Hijikata's never understood how to even look at him that way, because there's too much history and too many complications between them not to hang over every word, look, and gesture that passes between them.
It's never been about fear, but he's hard pressed to hear the desperation in Souji's tone as anything but.
And from the way Souji's gaze doesn't settle or linger on anything else around or behind him, the way his hand slides down to his sword without his eyes locking onto anything but Hijikata, he knows that whatever Souji's afraid of, it isn't something so simple or concrete as hey, there's a monster behind you.
His own hand drops to his sword, not drawing yet; he takes a few long steps back from Souji but only a few, because - goddammit, how does Souji expect him to run off and leave the one person he has left?
He's seen what happens when he runs.
you're just in time to get eaten again :Db
It's going to be the absolute same. Even if Hijikata doesn't lose Souji, Souji's going to lose Hijikata. And that makes nothing about Hijikata's reluctance to leave any less angry. He notices, he notices the other lingering and it's enough to make the hand pressing back against his mouth to try and prevent anything from being expelled in his cough to clench tight into a fist. When his hand wraps around the wakizashi, that too, is a vice-like grip, and his anger at this situation, at Hijikata ( —no, at himself— ), is enough to cause him to shake with it.
( why can't he just— )
Souji's grip doesn't loosen, but his coughing subsides, the sound leaving only for that shaking of his to be accompanied by a slow rise of laughter. He doesn't look up, his hand rubbing harshly against his mouth to wipe at the remaining blood before he pulls it away, it coming to rest against the sheaths of his blades, fingers curling about the wakizashi's in particular even though he doesn't draw yet. When he speaks next, his voice has very little volume to it, but there's a slight slant in the tone that makes it clear someone's a little more than off his hinge in a moment of lost self-control. It's a much bigger scale of loss.
"That's so like you... to never listen when it matters most." But as he continues, the unbalanced calm starts to lose both its poor veil and the quiet gives way to rising volume, to the hate that's underneath it all. "It's so like you to pick the wrong person to change your mind over when you already did it to everyone else!" Jaw clenched tight, he shifts, no longer using the wall to support himself and he unsheathes his blade as he stands.
The only thing that doesn't fit this scenario is, even in his own now lost thoughts, is the burn in his eyes ( the sting of salt water, maybe it's sweat or blood in there making them water, he doesn't know he doesn't care he really doesn't he's going to kill him he's just going to kill him because he can't take a hint and whatever what the hell ever is he's not going to listen then that's okay that's perfectthatsso ) that travels down his cheeks to curve under his jawline.
It's so like you... to make me have to do everything I don't want to. This is why we can't—
—i really hate you.
no subject
Not as though he's ever sought it. Whether it's Souji or whether it's any person on the streets of Kyoto, he's never needed to be liked to get what he's after (just as Serizawa didn't need Hijikata to like him to impress that very point upon him, those years ago). Hijikata knows what he wants, and Souji's approval has never been part of that -
- but maybe, Souji just being able to look at things his way for once in his goddamned life is.
"I listened once and look where the hell that got us." He listened to Kondou and he'll never forgive himself for it, and yet even now he doesn't know if he could do it differently, if they had to do it over again right now, because even if Hijikata will never be able to bring himself to believe that his life is worth more than Kondou's - even he isn't blind enough not to have seen that somehow, it was what Kondou wanted.
no subject
"And all the times you never listened got us" god, don't you put them together like you know anything about where the hell anythings gotten either other them, "where, exactly?" His question finishes off without yelling, dropping back to away to something more teetering on edge of so many emotions. There's so much to say, so much to throw in his face and so little time even as he takes a step forward, his gaze tipping downward enough to observe the unusual lack of care taken to clean the blade after use. But, it's been used, even if he's never made it here long enough to have to time to tend to it afterwards, that's for damn sure.
( and doesn't he know... wouldn't he actually be surprised—wouldn't they both—to know that there is one thing they've always seen the way the other wishes them to?
this is what kondou-san wanted. this man's life was what kondou-san chose to be most important to him. )
Souji doesn't need to bring up Kondou, though. It's unspoken. So much of it is unspoken and even when neither of them get way too much of what they think they completely understand, it's a mutually shared error. "...And, say, where did that sort of thing get Yamazaki-kun, anyway?"
( isn't it just ironic that even now, hijikata's choices will make this haunting never-ending competition for a man's love and attention be souji's to lose again. isn't it just like hijikata to get to remain in the light of kondou's favor, even with the other no longer present with them, while souji settles to back up towards the edge of the shadows.
—no one this competition has always been so one-sided.)
Hijikata may be used to these sorts of pains—or he should be—but Souji has never had a problem improvising on the fly in order make their experience with him a most fresh and horrifying one—regardless of their supposed veteran exposure.
no subject
There might be something - not comforting, exactly - in knowing that no matter what he knows to expect, how many times he's been through it before and braced himself for the twist of the knife, that Souji knows exactly how to hit him where it hurts.
Some things never change. It's a pity that the only constants in their lives seem to be the things that hurt.
"This isn't about Yamazaki. This is about the fact that if I run now it isn't going to change a single goddamned thing."
No matter what they can't remember from before, the clues left scratched out for them, the scars and the evidence that something happened before - it all hints that they've done this, too many times, and it's gone wrong, every time. That they were locking themselves into the same bloody cycle the moment they opened that door, and there's not much they can hope to do differently now but to leave themselves one more reason to listen to their own advice when it starts all over again.
no subject
Maybe it won't change a single thing. But, Hijikata has a far better chance of helping them break this cycle alive than he does dead. If only this cruel little onset of calm meant Souji had even a lick of control of on what he says and what he does— if only this wasn't the prelude to show exactly how fucking off-the-wall batshit of a state he really is in. It's an act over an act, another layer to add to the faces of a cast in a play that are so obvious in hindsight of their true colors.
no subject
And maybe he ought to be able to give Souji better now, but that doesn't seem like it's going to happen, either, so the least Hijikata can do is not run out and leave him to it alone.
no subject
He's not right at all, even Souji could see that—were he able to see anything at all now.
Except, maybe in this circumstance it just might be with the fact he shifts stance in order to bolt forward then, taking his katana and to strike forward the first physical attack but whether Hijikata dodges or deflects or even takes the hit straight on to have his own blood spilled, it's certainly not the last.
( what would he know about giving a shit about people's feelings, anyway— )
no subject
But only a defensive stance, because despite all the frustration and venom and the way Souji's lashed out at him for his entire adult life and then some, despite that Souji's clearly unhinged and there's something wrong here that ought to be nipped in the bud before anyone else can be hurt by it -
Despite all of that, Souji is Souji.
A pain in the ass, a constant annoyance...
...a brother as much as any of Hijikata's own blood - and in a way, perhaps more of one, because his own blood were never part of anything that happened in Kyoto, and there's a huge span in Hijikata's life that he knows none of them would ever truly be able to understand or touch.
Souji's the last person he has, now.
no subject
—that feeling is mutual, right down to Hijikata being the last person he has. Souji lashes out and blames Hijikata for Kondou's death at about every opportunity and then some that he can. But, the truth is that the only one he can blame, at the end of the day, that he can truly find substance to stand on in the darkest spans of his mind, is himself. He wasn't there, he should have been there. It never should have had to fall on Hijikata's shoulders alone for a decision like that because if he had been there...
...surely things would have turned out different, right?
Souji doesn't follow up immediately, taking a good long look at Hijikata and his defensive position. When he moves, it's to the side, letting his sword swing down from an attack stance, his movements starting to circle about the other.
"Hijikata-san should reassess this stupid decision of his." This bullshit decision to play defense like something's going to change by doing so. Someone's going to end up dead, regardless.
no subject
He turns, slowly, keeping himself facing Souji and hoping nothing or nobody else sees fit to interrupt this moment by taking advantage of his back...though maybe it would be better if something else did. As embarrassing as it is for a samurai to die to a back attack, the idea doesn't make something in his heart knot up uncomfortably like the idea of dying on Souji's blade does.
(But it doesn't matter, because the alternative is leaving Souji, and he's had enough of leaving people behind.)
no subject
As far as something getting Hijikata from behind... well
maybe if i knew what was out here there could be something more witty said here"Why are you even trying? Your resolution to this isn't even absolute, just circumstantial, right?"
no subject
If this were really Souji, fully in control of himself, maybe it would, but -