There’s no reason for him to be out here at all. Nothing about this entire event appeals to him. In fact, it would be hard to put something together more perfectly to keep him away. This entire religion they’d put together for this place is funny, really. A world made from the mouths of two goddesses and they speak of what, Life and Reason? What delusional lives the people who wrote such garbage must have been living. And all the more so for a place like this, a seemingly simulated world, filled with the empty and the dead, and completely and utterly unreasonable in every way. Maybe their captors were jokers themselves after all.
Maybe that unreasonableness is why, despite all that, he hadn’t done the reasonable thing and just stay home, let the stupid people convince themselves that they can sustain themselves on bonds. That the world is more than a pointless and cruel farce. Let them celebrate it all with, of all things, flowers. Always flowers. Anything to keep him from dismissing the notion that this place really is a hell designed just for him.
A celebration of life. It’s hilarious. An entire festival meant to rub everything into his face. They couldn’t even leave commercials for it off of TV or banner ads. These stupid, pointless people celebrating something as stupid and pointless as life. He doesn’t understand. He still doesn’t understand.
Nor does he understand why he’s out here. He’s been trying to figure that out all night. Is it morbid curiosity? Then why sit all the way up here, in this empty amphitheater in the mountain. Surely the show is more exciting in the thick of it. But he doesn’t get closer, just sits here, in these empty stands as the night wears on below. What was a manufactured festival in a manufactured city going to show him that he hadn’t already been able to see. He could hear enough, see enough, smell enough from this far away. For everything they’d taken, they’d left him that. It’s enough to make him feel sick, even up here.
He shivers, slightly, against the cold of the late night, the late season, all of it. It’s just enough to pull his focus from the sights and sounds of the town below. He’s been up here alone for what must have been hours, he hadn’t been paying attention. He isn’t, as it turns out, alone anymore. Not that this man couldn’t have materialized right out of thin air, for all Souta knew.
“One day, Uta,” he says, without turning around, “You’ll have to tell me how you even do these things.”
