@cospoxster liked for a starter!!
Air fills her lungs. Water sates her thirst. Nightmares rule her sleep.
Perhaps these should all be normal things. Things she feels she once took for granted. Things she’s been given a second chance at. Things that certainly don’t feel deserved. Why is she here? What is she here for? Someone else deserves this more than her. Akamatsu knows who she’d pick were the choice hers.
But that’s why… she should make the most of this situation. If she’s alive, she doesn’t have time to waste feeling sorry for herself. She needs to atone for her crimes. Moping and being consumed by her sorrows will get her nowhere. She wills herself to gently pat her face twice, straighten her clothes, brush her hair, and step outside. It’s taken a day or two longer since her arrival to consider exploring her surroundings. And from what she can see from the front doorsteps, there is much to see. It’s a bit dizzying, she thinks.
Where to begin? It’s exciting, in a way. An entire city at her fingertips. People to meet, friends to make, music to discover.
(But a cage is still a cage, even by another name. Even wrapped up and dressed as a beautiful metropolis. That thought lingers in the back of her mind, but like everything else that weighs her down? She buries it underneath an inviting smile.)
Akamatsu intends to let her feet carry her wherever. She’s no detective. She wouldn’t even know where to begin with an investigation of this magnitude. But talking to people and looking around are as good as any kind of beginning. She just don’t get very far. Only one house down, when she sees someone. Perhaps they had a similar idea. It could be any number of reasons, though.
From behind… it looks like… could it be?
She...didn’t expect to find herself alive.
The final class trial had ended. She’d been revealed as the mastermind, and her masterpiece of a season came to an end.
Not in the way she thought it would, but it ended, along with her life. She doesn’t know if everyone else died as well, but if the rules of the killing game were anything to go by, then Kiibo should have killed them all. None of them had voted after all, so they broke the rules. And refusing to vote would result in their deaths after all.
So waking up in this placed had been...a lot to take in to say the least. Tsumugi didn’t expect to wake up after she died, and she didn’t expect to wake up in a city like this. It’s taken a day or two for the former mastermind to get her bearings, but it’s been long enough. She didn’t know what this place was at all after all, and she needed to know. Know what this place was and why she was here. And see what someone like her, a plain old girl hiding a dangerous role was here. After all, she’s well...plain as far as the eye can see.
And that’s how she hopes to stay. A plain girl in this vast city, hiding on the lies that are her character. No one needs to know she’s just a girl in a dress, a girl who’s built herself from nothing but lies and fiction.
(Though this city is much like the cage she built, a place to explore but also a place that isn’t one that would be easy to escape from. If she doesn’t remember how she was brought here, then she probably can’t find out how to escape. Why would she want to when this is a new stage for her?)
So she leaves her apartment, intent on exploring somewhere in this vast city. She doesn’t get too far out of her apartment before hearing someone call her name. She stops at the sound and her eyes widen as no, that’s not possible right? She can’t be hearing that voice, one that died so long ago, one that she made sure was silenced by her own hands (in a way of course)
So she turns, only to be greeted with Kaede Akamatsu of all people. Somewhere in her mind she laughs. If she was alive again, it would make sense for her to be right.
Of course that thought doesn’t show on her face, so carefully neutral until her eyes land on the pianist, only to show (genuine) shock at the sight.
“A-Akamatsu-san?! You’re here as well?”