The first time she texts Niko after...after, it's because Crystal walked by a small Japanese bookshop, and one of the books on display had been the next volume to a series Niko had been reading. The sight of the book is like a knife to Crystal's heart, and yet she still takes out her phone and snaps a photo of it anyways.
Crystal spends the next three hours at home contemplating whether she should send it. It's stupid. Niko won't see it, Niko's dead, there's no cell service in the afterlife, Niko's gone gone gone forever. And it was all Crystal's fault.
She hits send and throws her phone across the room, cracking the screen.
An hour later, she adds a second message to the first:
After that first message Crystal realizes she can't stop texting Niko. She's heard about stuff like this before, how people would send text messages and voicemails to dead love ones to cope with the overwhelming loss. Eventually though, they'd get a very confused and very much living person on the other line, a stranger with a new number, and just like that, the last living trace of the dearly departed has been overwritten and erased.
Crystal dreads the day someone answers her back and tells her she has a wrong number.
But in the meantime, she tells Niko about her days, the cases she solves with Charles and Edwin, the friends she makes along the way, the mistakes she's trying so hard to go back and fix. She tells Niko about how one time she caught Edwin watching Scooby-Doo in the window of an electronics store, and how now all three of them take one night out of the week to sit and marathon episodes until Crystal is too tired to keep her eyes open.
One time, Charles trips and falls face first into a pile of ectoplasm on the floor, and Crystal laughs so hard she feels like her sides are splitting open. She can't take a photograph to show Niko, ghosts don't show up on camera after all, but she tries her best to draw a recreation of the event and sends a photo of that instead.
Crystal's still not sure what's going on with her and Charles, or even what's going on with Charles and Edwin, and she tells Niko she wishes she were here to give her opinion on the matter. Things are weird aren't they? Or maybe they're not, and it's all in Crystal's head. Either way, if Niko were here, Crystal would probably feel a little less like a third wheel.
Before she realizes it, Crystal has sent over a hundred unread message to Niko's phone in the span of two months. There's photos of lunches, new manga volumes, and even some flowers scattered in between the paragraphs long updates about her days. No one has answered Crystal back yet. It's a blessing and a curse.
Charles and Edwin don't know what she's doing, but Crystal suspects they know something is up, with how attached Crystal has been to her phone lately. It's a bit morbid really. All the living people in the world, and the only people Crystal talks to are all dead.
One day, she'll stop texting Niko. One day, her phone number will be released, and someone else will answer her texts and gently tell her she has the wrong number, and then Crystal will be forced to accept the fact that Niko's not coming back.
In an different plane of existence, Niko Sasaki holds her phone up to the ceiling of her tiny igloo, and curses when she hears the familiar warning tone from her phone indicating that she has no service.
It's been like this ever since she arrived here with Litty and Kingham. Her phone works just enough to received missed calls and text messages, but not enough to send anything back.
I miss you too! Message not delivered.
omg I can't believe you drew that! ur amazing! Message not delivered.
I promise I'm okay! Don't cry, I'll be back soon! Message not delivered.
[photo attached] Look, the sprites are here too! Message not delivered.
Her phone is low on battery, down to the last 15%, but Niko can't bring herself to turn it off, not when she doesn't know if it'll turn back on again, and she doesn't want to miss a single update from Crystal.
Litty and Kingham come back from yet another scouting mission, complaining that there's nothing but ice and snow for miles. Tomorrow, they'll go out again, and Niko will wait patiently, hoping and praying that they find a way off this icy tundra. She's tired of eating only fish and rabbit for dinner.
Niko texts Crystal one more time, already knowing that the message won't go through, but wanting to tell Crystal she's thinking of her anyways. She turns off the screen and settles in for the night.
I'll be back soon, I promise, the text reads.
