Just a little breakdown...

[tenminutes]

WHO: Accelerator, Kohaku, anyone else who wants to show up?
WHAT: After everything just keeps piling up, Yuri is finally at her breaking point.
WHEN: June 20th, ~7am.
WHERE: Various, due to the Boogie Wonderland event, but starting in the living room of House A.
WARNINGS: Violence against NPCs, psychological breakdown, lack of sleep, shadows, cursing, potentially violence against human-y people too, screaming, potentially crying.

[ Yuri had found her way back to one of the rooms in the safe zone. It wasn't even hers, it was just the living room space of their house. She knew it was theirs because that was the couch that Hinata had slept on, it had a stupid knick in the fabric from when she'd been playing with her knife and accidentally got it. A bullet hole in the back from one of the times that the residents of their house had gotten a little too rough and loud. (One of the many times.) Things in the room were arranged just as they'd left them before things got.. strange.

It'd been days since Yuri'd found any place in the safe zone, and she didn't even know if it still worked because of the glitch. She hadn't actually eaten in days after the first time something went wrong with drinking something on the first day. Yuri sat down on the couch, her knees up to her chest and her gun in front of her. She'd been injured from coming out above some of the trees before, there was crusted blood on her leg where her thigh highs were torn but the injury had healed a while ago. She'd wasted a good number of her bullets fighting an oversized cat that decided she was lunch on her way back to the school area. Then the shadows.. She only had a couple of bullets left, at least until she got the spare box from under the couch cushions.

Somehow she'd even managed to not be able to find anyone real these past few days. Nothing felt real anymore. As she settled in on the couch she let her eyes fall half-shut. She wanted to sleep, even if she couldn't be sure that this 'safe area' was still safe. It felt safe, because it used to be Hinata's, but.. A pang hit her heart again. Honestly, she'd lost a lot of people, but she'd never lost them after they'd found out that she had feelings for them. She hadn't said it out loud, but it was impossible not to know, and after that he'd disappeared..

She wasn't sure if it was her fault, and she was sure that Hinata wouldn't want her to blame herself, but.. if this kept going on, she was going to lose everyone. She didn't even know if she had anyone left. She hadn't seen any, she was probably already alone.

This wasn't her fault, this was his fault. The Programmer's. Everything wrong here was his fault right now, except why she was here. Maybe he had something to do with the people who disappeared in weird circumstances too.

If he was hiding amongst the NPCs, then..

Yuri couldn't remember why she wasn't supposed to kill them. They weren't human. The Programmer was even less human than the NPCs. The NPCs were just shadows with masks on, really. The Programmer was just a human wearing the same mask as an NPC so he didn't get found amongst his monsters. They weren't human. They didn't have emotions, they couldn't hurt like this!

Yuri suddenly started laughing, gripping her gun tighter. If she went out feeling like this, she had no doubt that even the NPCs that hadn't turned yet would start showing their true faces. Her laughter grew, her voice cracking a little. ]

The Programmer can't turn into a shadow!

[ He'll be the only one to drop if she manages to kill him. Then she can make him feel what it's like to lose everything until he fixes it. Yuri wasn't sure she'd stop hurting him then, not after everything, but there was one thing she knew for sure.

That pesky speck of guilt she'd always felt about thinking of the possibility of burying him alive was gone.

Yuri stood up, trying to stop herself from laughing again. She didn't know how close the others were. Maybe they weren't close at all, or maybe they were in their rooms and could hear her and just couldn't get to her. It didn't matter anymore.

Another deep breath and her face went blank. She'd choke the breath out of every last one of them until she found him if she had to. When she reached the door, her hand hesitated, hovering over the doorknob. She didn't know where it'd take her, but she couldn't do this anymore. She'd watch the world burn before that. ]

Comments

[onewayroad]

[Accelerator had had nearly as bad luck during the past few days. There were only NPCs wherever he went. Most food or drink he tried to consume wound up less than palatable, with tastes, textures, and temperatures all wonky and the odd effect occurring now and then. Eventually he'd foregone everything besides canned coffee. About half the time it was safe. (The other half of the time it turned into other beverages which he'd just drink as long as it wasn't completely revolting.) After nearly a week of this, the hunger had devolved into a dull, hook-like ache that never entirely faded away.

Surfaces were a pain in the neck. Gravity was uneven and wouldn't stop fluctuating in strength. The walls dripped to the point of partial melting. When he tried to open windows the proper way to get around the doors' spatial coordinate mismatch issues, the window openings would act the same for him. The only way for him to circumvent it at all was by breaking through the walls themselves. And even that didn't behave as per normal.

And then there was the issue of his powers. An esper's ability only manifested itself when the esper's Personal Reality interfered with the surrounding reality. The instability of the reality around him combined with his recent recovery from NPC programming made for a double-whammy of interference, enough to make his ability of vector transformation anywhere from completely unusable to barely fully under his control.

The laws governing the reality of the afterlife have destabilized, deviated, mutated... It took Accelerator a long time to stabilize his own ability, grasp control of his Personal Reality, and only now was he making any headway on reverse-engineering the aforementioned aberrational laws. Information he needs to include in his algorithms if he wants his powers to work reliably. It hadn't taken long with the #2's Dark Matter, but that had had profound differences from the current situation and a much smaller scope.

He currently has no idea what time it is. He's spent the last few hours at the school swimming pool practicing with water flow control, and now is tired enough to seek out someplace else for a break. This is why he stands in front of the door leading to the boy's locker room and pulls it open, looks in, shuts the door upon deciding he doesn't care for where it leads, and repeats the sequence. For once it'd be nice to get the door to the school roof, so he can get outside through that and head to the town that way.

On about the eighth try he pulls it wide open and finds himself staring at Yuri, the first real person he's seen in what seems like forever. He stands there, an ugly pang in his stomach and a dumbfounded look spreading across his face. Behind her is one of the house's living rooms. Yuri looks like hell.

As for him, his clothes are rumpled, dirty, torn and lightly damp from the water earlier, his hair's a mess like he slept on it wrong, and the bags under his eyes that come and go have returned full force.]

...Yuri?

[violined]

[ The Programmer was doing this shit to weaken them. The no sleeping period had worn them out already, but now not a single moment of recovery was possible anymore. Everything was fucked up and fucked up and more fucked up and Kohaku feels like he should just lay down on the ground and sleep and ignore whatever could happen to him next. But there's no way he can do that. He can't give in to them, the monsters in charge of this place. And more than anything, he can't let himself go out before he knows what had become of this small group, these few people left, who he cared about.

Right now he hardly feels like he cares about anything though. How could he? He is running out of weapons... that was maybe the worst thing, that not even his weapons were reliable anymore. Knifes acting like rubber, bullets turning to flowers... Nothing worked the way it was supposed to work and then, when it did, it was gone to fast. Retrieving thrown knives was hard in this world.
His gun had two bullets left and he had only one last knife that he clutched as if his life depended on it. He hasn't been without weapons in years and the prospect of being unarmed, entirely helpless, has left him twitchy and on edge.

It's a relief when he finds the music room, even if being there now is pointless, entirely pointless. What band... what music... he still doesn't even have his violin back. This is a world without room for music now, making it the worst kind of world he could imagine.

Kohaku leans against the wall and tries to steady his breathing and thoughts as the door opens. Instinctively, he points the knife in its direction. His knuckles are white from his tight grip on it.

When he finally registers who's in the doorway, he can't believe his eyes. Literally. He refuses to believe it's Yuri, it's really Yuri. But if it was an illusion, would she look as beat and horrible as she does now? Probably not... It's hard to make up his mind on any reaction in this state, so Kohaku just waits in silence for whatever she is going to do. ]