Part 19: New Gen Wiki

Part 19 - New Gen Wiki

Warning

The following update contains descriptions of murder/mutilation, as well as discussion of the "Group Dive", "Pregnant Man" and "Staking".

Orgel Seira also appears occasionally.





Delusion Start




"She" scanned the area, ignoring his question. It wasn't a very large room.

There were two clipboards spread out atop the physician's desk, one holding blank white paper, and the other covered with words in a foreign language.

"She" was said to be a demon. Everyone called her that. Even her parents.

"She" no longer cared about whether she had been a demon from the start, or whether she had become that way because it was what everyone called her.



The public was an uproar, calling it madness and what have you, but from her point of view, it wasn't an especially remarkable number.

After all, she was a demon.



"If anything concerns you, please let me know. I'll try to do something about it."

As befitted a psychiatrist, he was very considerate toward his patients.

Amused, "She" opened the bag she'd brought with her. What she slowly took out from within it was--



"Or shall we switch to a larger roo--"

OST: Gradually panic



Picking up on his fear, "She" smiled tenderly.



He wasn't her original target, only a stop along the way.

"She" set her bag down and took a single large, soundless stride toward the physician. She used her momentum to dive toward him, piercing him with her knife.





The knife penetrating his chest slipped past his breastbone and reached his heart.

The physician died with a single stab.

Already reduced to a mere object, he collapsed, toppling toward her. "She" supported him long enough to withdraw the knife, then shoved the "object" away with her elbow.




"She" knelt as she stepped on the doctor's body, then slashed her knife at the nurse.




Fresh blood flew out. It wasn't fatal, but a gaping wound had been carved into the nurse's meek face.



Letting out a howl, the nurse curled up in place, holding her face. Vast amounts of blood overflowed from between the fingers she pressed to her wound.

Ignoring this, "She" continued toward the back of the examination room.

That nurse wasn't supposed to be the tenth. It was an occasion worth celebrating. Her tenth. Two digits.



The other patients and nurses had already started screaming and running away. It was becoming a racket.

Yet their voices failed to reach her ears.




The curtain that surrounded an area about one or two tatami mats in size. There was most likely a bed inside it.

--You must be there.

Her heart palpitated with joy. Her lower abdomen went hot at the thought that she would finally be able to kill him.



--Found you.

She lost all restraint when she saw him.

"She" opened the curtain and stood next to the bed.

"He" was sleeping with a slightly pained expression on his face. "She" twined her fingers in his hair and gently stroked it.

"He" didn't wake up. "She" gripped the knife in both hands.

She raised her arms on high. She was aiming for his heart.

OST End




In ecstasy, "She" lowered the knife with all her might--





Delusion End




I checked my chest.

There weren't any injuries to speak of. No blood emerged. I was.... unhurt.

I looked around. The curtain was closed. It hadn't been torn apart by her knife.

I reached stealthily for the curtain. If I opened it, and Dr. Takashina and Hazuki-san were lying there, covered in blood.... My body broke out in shivers again as I envisioned it.

"It's j, just.... a dream...."

But I couldn't muster the courage to open the curtain.

What if a sea of blood lay beyond it? What if that demon girl was standing there, knife in hand?

These thoughts terrified me into inaction.

But then--



Right in front of my eyes, someone opened the curtain from outside. Shrieking before I could stop myself, I tumbled off the bed.



"Y.... Yes....?"

I fearfully raised my face.

Hazuki-san was looking down at me, her eyes round. There were no traces of red blood on her white uniform, and her face was completely uninjured.

"I'm sorry, I must have startled you...."
"I didn't think you were awake, so...."
"Ah, yes, I mean, no...."

She'd seen me at my most pathetic....

I turned my face aside and reeled to my feet.

My heartbeat still wouldn't settle down. But thank God it had been a dream.... It was like I'd been watching a horror flick.

"Are you really all right?"

Worried, Hazuki-san looked at me more closely. I was too bashful to lift my face. It took my greatest effort to nod jerkily.

"You seemed to be tossing and turning a bit."
"I, ha, had.... a nightmare...."
"I see...."

What time was it? How long had I been asleep?

I decided to ask Hazuki-san. Surprisingly enough, she said it had been three hours. It looked like I was more exhausted than I'd thought.



Hazuki-san told me in a tone of voice meant to reassure me.

"Well, we can't state definitively that you aren't a somnambulist, as it's also possible that your symptoms simply happened not to appear today."

No, I'm not a sleepwalker. More importantly, I had to ask Dr. Takashina my key question.

But I didn't see him anywhere.

Hazuki-san handed me a one-sheet document. When I accepted it absent-mindedly and skimmed it, it turned out to be formatted as a questionnaire.



"Er, er.... the do, doctor...."
"I'm sorry, he's completely booked with appointments."
"He said to wait until next week, and then come back one more time if you don't experience any improvement."

Well, it's not like he's my personal doctor.... He must have given Hazuki-san various instructions about what to do with me.

This meant there had been no meaning in my coming all the way out to the hospital....



That said, with Hazuki-san looking at me so apologetically, I didn't have the bravery to demand, "Take me to Dr. Takashina."

Helpless, I ended up filling out the checklist she'd handed me.

I'd write about the symptoms that were plaguing me on the back of the page. And I'd come to see him again next week....



"If a statement applies to you, please choose Yes."
"It'll help us as we decide how best to treat you in the future, so please think carefully about your answers."

Hazuki-san went out of her way to explain it to me thoroughly.

Among the items on the sheet were ones so strange that they didn't seem to belong there in the context of a standard hospital.

It really was like a psychological test. Would they actually be able to understand anything based on my answers to questions like this?

"........."

Hazuki-san watched me unwaveringly. She didn't move to leave.

It didn't feel like she had too much time to spare, More like she was observing me--no, watching over me.

My nervousness at being watched made it hard for me to think.... Was this also part of her job as a nurse?

For the time being, I decided to hurry up and get it over with.






I'm going to be real with you: This list affects absolutely nothing. It doesn't affect the story and, as far as I can tell, it doesn't even affect even one line of dialogue or narrative. This doesn't matter in the slightest.

My original plan was to conceal this from you and make you go through a poll to see what we would end up ticking. But then I came to my senses and realized that would be a waste of all our time and it wouldn't even be funny. So instead I wrote this. In the end, I chose to tick the following, sticking broadly in character:

quote:

Your ears occasionally start ringing
You have sensed someone's gaze and then turned around
You have experienced premonitions
You can picture things even without closing your eyes
You believe in the existence of God
You have experienced the loss of parts of your memory

With all that said, time to return to the update proper:




Though I hadn't said anything, Hazuki-san spoke to me at exactly the same time I finished marking the last statement.

I was mortified that she'd watched me the whole time. Maybe, my face had started turning red.



"Now, please stay in the waiting room."
"I'll carry out your medicine."
"Eh? M, medicine....?"

I was getting medicine? Dr. Takashina hadn't said a single word to that effect, but....

"Yes, doctor's orders. It's a weak tranquilizer. It'll help you sleep soundly, and there aren't any side effects."








But the Yamanote line was as packed as always, and though I had to ride only past two stations, this round trip alone wore me out a lot.

It'd be agonizing to take the train any farther, so I got off at Shibuya Station and walked back to my base.

For all that, there were too many people in front of the station. I hate huge crowds. They make my head spin.

Not wanting to stay any longer than I had to, I tried to cross the pedestrian scramble.

But it took a big effort just to walk in a straight line here.

If I swayed even a tiny bit, I'd bump into the people passing me and overtaking me.



Those tissue distributors are a serious hassle. Don't stand smack in the middle of the street like that. Well, but I'd go ahead and take them, since they're free.

The tissue pack I'd taken had come with a flyer, which consisted solely of white letters on a background of red paper.

It was pretty freaky-looking. You don't see this kind of color usage all that often.

I read it nonchalantly as I walked.



I couldn't remember filling out something like that four years ago. Maybe their diagnostic methods changed recently.

Yet for some reason, the checklist seemed familiar.



It made me sick, the fact that my own mind and body wouldn't act the way I wanted them to. I dug through my memory in hopes of somehow being able to pin down the source of this deja vu.



At first they had looked at me in a regular examining room, but when I showed no signs of getting better, they eventually started taking me to another room.

It was what you'd call a counseling room, with a sofa and lots of stuffed animals lying around; a space with one goal - to make patients relax.

Without blaming anyone, Dr. Takashina persevered in trying to treat me. He was the only one who noticed that it wasn't that I couldn't speak, it was simply that I chose not to.

My mother talked to me about all kinds of things in a falsely bright voice.

Dr. Takashina always greeted me with a refreshing smile. The nurses were nice to me, too. And--

"Hm....?"




He was always silent, like me, and I'd never so much as heard his voice. At the end I couldn't find out anything about him. His behavior wasn't like those hospitals.

The physicians and atmosphere around him were also different, and he always stood aside by himself, gazing out the window.



"NOZOMI...."

The suit-clad man always wore a small badge on his chest.

The word "NOZOMI" was inscribed there. But since it had the design of a logo, it couldn't have been his name tag.



I'd felt like I'd seen it somewhere before, but now I finally remembered. At last I felt a little refreshed.

That aside, what was this "NOZOMI"? The only certainty was that it must be the name of a corporation.








SFX: Computer Noises



Well, thinking about it normally, Nozomi-san could be the employee who had made the aforementioned checklist, or maybe a salesman who had come to the hospital with his wares, that kind of thing.

And lately they'd finally started to make use of his stuff, including the sheet they'd had me fill out today....





I couldn't go to school, not when it was full of people trying to hurt me. Truthfully, I didn't really want to get my "minimum attendance shift chart" too messed up.... But it wasn't worth dying for.

I stopped running searches about "NOZOMI" and began browsing for interesting-looking threads on @channel.



I completely lost my patience when even the ESO board turned out to have threads like, "Let's try re-enacting the New Gen murders in ESO."






I flinched as the dim eyes of the girl I'd spotted at the scene of the staking murder grazed my brain.

I didn't want to keep remembering it like this, but the second I let my guard down, the ominous memories started to flooding back.

Yeah, I'd seen the criminal's face. I knew who she was. Should I have reported her to the police? But I didn't want to get caught up in it....




Geh, seriously....? That meant I wouldn't be able to jump in on the conversation when we were all chatting.


To be fair, I had mistaken the staked-up body for an object d'art, so if I were forced to put it one way or the other, then yeah, it was quite artistic.







Uuugh.... I don't wanna see it, because it's scary.

I wanted escape from reality where I witnessed the scene of the crime.... With that one goal in mind, I started to block out every piece of New Gen-related news.

By doing so, I'd hoped to convince myself that the gruesome spectacle I'd seen had been an illusion. But....



All the more - I was the closest our guild had to a leader. As the person in charge of everyone's organization, it'd be way too humiliating if I couldn't keep up with their conversations.

I had to avoid that....



The title "New Gen Wiki" was displayed in huge letters on the front page.

Compilation sites like this are an example of a type of Wiki, where an indeterminate number of people post news and information about a specified topic.

A New Gen wiki like this was bound to be fairly fast-moving, with all kinds of people posting stuff related to the New Gen cases.

Unreliable information and flaming were mixed in, although it was convenient because it was much easier to understand the whole picture.

There were a lot of links pasted in, too.




9/7, approximately a month ago, in the middle of the night, at Shibuya's Cornelius Tower. They leapt from the heliport on top of the building and died instantaneously.

Autopsies revealed that each of them had scratch marks and foreign bits of flesh under their fingernails.



There was nothing resembling a will or a suicide note left behind on the roof.



Naturally, it was also locked at the time of the incident. The key to the roof wasn't found among any of the five victims' belongings.

In short, circumstances suggested that the rooftop heliport had been sealed to entry and it remained completely unclear as to how the five students had gotten in.




Early in the morning, a college student going home after karaoke sighted a blood-drenched male corpse in the area near the underside of the Shibuya Station overpass.

The man, Konoe Chizuo (21), was a student of Shibuya area college, and though he had already died by the time his body was discovered, his abdomen had become unnaturally swollen.



A DNA analysis established the fact that the victim and the fetus were not blood relatives. The victim was unmarried and had not been carrying on any relationships with women.



But no one knew who the mother was, where she could be found or what she was doing at present, or even whether she was alive or dead.

Perhaps the police had tracked down her whereabouts, but at the very least, they hadn't announced it to the public.



On the verge of vomiting, I turned my eyes away from the monitor.











Somehow, I managed to stabilize my mental state. I thought about taking the medicine Dr. Takashina had given me, but it looked like I could still succeed in getting by with just Seira-tan.

But it was tough to read about this guro, even for the sake of preserving my reputation as Neidhardt....



Seira-tan!

OST: SEIRA

"If it's that hard on you, you don't have to read it."
"If you're a big fat masochist, I won't stop you."
"But I can't bear to watch you suffer, Takkii."
"Stop it, okay? Let's just have fun."
"I'll even let you fap to me like always."

Uuh, Seira-tan was so kind to me....

Seira-tan was the only one who would stay as my ally. As expected, since she was my wife.

OST End



If I kept an eye on Seira-tan as I read, maybe I would be able to hold out a little longer. I decided to put this into practice without delay.



The "group diving" had initially been treated solely as if the victims had committed suicide. After the "pregnant man" incident, however, people online re-investigated the "group diving," and once they discovered the unnatural circumstances surrounding it, the rumor "Maybe they were killed in such a way so as to make it look like suicide" began to spread around as a new explanation.

The parents and close friends of the five who died in the "group diving" kept saying that there was no way they would ever have committed suicide.

At that point, the mass media seized on the fact that both cases had occurred in "Shibuya," and began using "New Generation Madness" in their sensationalistic headlines.... Which was said to be how this all got started.



Since few days had passed since the case opened, the Wiki site didn't contain a lot of information on it yet.

All that had been made public was that the victim was Outa Hisashi, a 56-year-old college professor, and that the murderer had used stakes to pin his corpse to the concrete wall of an abandoned house.

Residents of the neighborhood where the crime took place reported hearing "A sound of someone hammering," starting at around 8 PM, the time when the murder was estimated to have been committed, and lasting for over an hour.

I'd heard it as well. It had clung to my ears. A nasty sound.



However, since it was the third bizarre incident to happen in the very same Shibuya, people naturally started treating the "staking" murder case as part of the New Gen phenomenon.

The police and the media viewed the three cases as having been the work of different people, but according to online commentary--or, more properly, online expectations--them having been committed by the same criminal or by the same group of people was the most popular explanation.



Two months ago, a magnitude 3.0 earthquake had occurred, with Shibuya at its center. Eight people died, despite the fact that it had been a relatively small-scale event, And as a result, it became a big topic of conversation.

Now that they mentioned it, the New Gen cases had indeed begun after that earthquake.

Thus, the people who supported an occult explanation for New Gen argued that the eight deaths from the earthquake should be counted as the first New Gen incident, which led to fierce debates between them and those who supported the most popular explanation, the same criminal theory.



Either way, net crowds are lusting a fourth incident.



Dammit, those bastards sure have it easy....



Over a week had passed since the "staking," but neither that demon girl nor the police had showed any signs of movement. If they were aware that I'd been in the area, surely the police would've at least come to question me, but at the moment, they didn't seem to be doing anything about it.

Th, thank goodness. Looks like I'm not gonna get dragged into it--



The words Yua had thrust at me passed through my head.

"Because you possessed a piece of image data that can't be explained, unless you happen to have precognitive powers."



The image "Shogun" had transmitted to me. Even now, it lingered inside my PC as data.

What Yua had told me was just the product of her own delusions. It was too incoherent to hold together logically.

I hadn't gotten to ask about it at the hospital today, but it didn't make any sense for me to be acting differently, unbeknownst to myself, during the gaps in my memories.

It had never happened before, not even once.

Which was why that guro pic totally had to be a composite.



OST: SEIRA

Seira again

"All ya gotta do is find proof that it's fake."
"Let's analyze that pic."

B, but, it made me sick, so I didn't want to look at it very much.

"If you prove her wrong, you can go back to your peaceful everyday life without having to be scared of anything, you know?"
"You've gotta do it, right-o!"

True enough.... It's just as you say....

Yua talked about it like I was the perpetrator of the "staking," but that was out of the question.

Because I myself had seen the perp's face. Like I'd let you force guilt for the crime on me....

I sucked in a sharp breath and double-clicked the folder where the image should have been cached--

OST End