party at my place. haha yeah there’ll be nine of us. no your mum won’t need to pick you up after aha yeah it’s in the nevada desert don’t worry man i’ll sort transport out
A cool two-page advertisement for the original Japanese release of 999: Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors on the Nintendo DS. Taken from the January 2010 issue of Dengeki Games.
one of the better recurring uchikoshi bits is "character loudly expresses they have no clue what the fuck is going on post-insane endgame twist reveal"
Aoi is 13 when he begins to dye his hair, stealing bottles of bleach and toner from the store behind everyone's backs.
Akane watches this with interest, at first; she's only 10, and the idea of getting different colors in her hair is exciting until Aoi warns her not to touch it, and the smell is awful, and he spends hours and hours dying it, and then his roots grow out anyway. She still watches him bleach it once, because he's all she has, even if she's just sitting on the side of the bathtub and listening to him tell her not to steal.
Her brother can steal, but Akane can't; for a reason she can't explain, she thinks that someday she'll commit worse crimes.
Akane watches him move, his reflection in the mirror, and kicks her feet and tries to imagine Aoi with white hair for the rest of his life. Somehow, it fits.
More than that, Akane is happy for this moment. He rarely comes home from work this early, but she's always happy when he does. Already, she's gotten some taste of how little the adults care for the two of them, and the two of them are always alone.
6
As Akane grows into her memories, so does Aoi. One second he's the boy with the blue scarf who Seven will describe 9 years in the future, and the next he's turning into her memory of Santa, with his white hair and hairbands, and eyes that look both unlike her brother as she knew him at 15, and which undeniably will be him, in the future.
Akane is meticulous about appearances. It's habit; everything has to look the same, and then has to work the same. She sees the Nonary Game through a fragmented, child's memory. She and Aoi and the hired engineers are reverse engineering their own future.
Akane starts wearing arm warmers before Aoi does. She starts wearing her hair into half a bun before Aoi puts on his hairbands.
On the tip of her tongue is a request for him to do the same, to play the role he's meant to play before the day comes that he has to be that perfect Santa from her memories; but she can't bring herself to say it. There's over a year left, she reminds herself, and taps the spot on her wrist that will one day carry a bracelet. She should wear that too, someday, practice being June in more than face and voice and expression.
Aoi already knows what his role is, Akane tells herself. She has to trust him.
When they were kids, she trusted him absolutely, let him work himself down in whatever jobs he could get after school, labor laws be damned--and she's grateful for that, she really is. It's not fair for her to not trust her with this, with her entire life. There's no way that Aoi will mess up.
But still, she worries. She looks in the mirror and thinks that something in her has aged past 20, past 21, into a nebulous future she hasn't tried looking for yet.
0
The desert rushes past, and Akane is laughing because it's better than crying. Relief is a strange emotion, bubbling through her body as she realizes she doesn't know what to do now.
She's running from everything she created, just as they decided, but she can't stop herself from looking back at Building Q, that strange, boxy shape behind her.
"You didn't have to remind me to put on my seatbelt," she tells Aoi, still staring behind them.
"Yeah I did. I'm still your brother, you know." He's doing that tone, now--a reminder tone, a tone that says listen to me. And she is listening, finally looking back at him. Aoi is her brother. Even if Santa wasn't June's brother--Akane has to remember that Aoi is her brother.
With him, slowly this day will unwind them back into who they really are; June and Santa will go away for the time being.
But maybe she'll miss having something to look for in the future. She really does feel so empty. Akane's life work has ended, 9 years of desperation trying to make the dominoes fall correctly.
But she hasn't lost everything; while she was shaping herself into the person she'd have to be, Aoi has been supporting her. Every moment, every second, as the sun beats down on the sand and Akane is falling through the hourglass, she can still remember what it felt like to have precious time with him, only having each other.